News

Apart from reading Carol Craig's blog on our recent event you can also read the inspiring speech which Professor Will Storrar gave at the event which went down so well with the audience. 

Speech given by Will Storrar on 2nd December 2004 in Oran Mor to launch A Time of Hope

It is an honor to commend Carol Craig’s magnificent new book to a wider readership. Thank you, Carol, for your contrarian confidence in an exiled Presbyterian to write the Foreword, given that you argue for the deleterious effects of Calvinism on Scotland’s sense of well-being. Having been away in Princeton for the past twenty years, I can only say, “It wisnae me! That big boy John Knox did it and ran away.

From our first meeting to discuss her research, I recognized in Carol a kindred spirit, a fellow generalist thinker who cares deeply about what it means to be human and to be Scottish.

Carol Craig has another kindred spirit in Princeton, the Scots-born economist Angus Deaton. In his book, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, Angus contrasts his adopted country with the Scotland of his childhood: In the United States, the pursuit of happiness is one of the unalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, yet in the Calvinist Scottish village in which I grew up, such a pursuit would have been seen as a serious weakness of

character.

I readily accepted Carol’s invitation to write the Foreword to A Time of Hope not only because of the high regard I have had for her own writings over many years, commending them to others, but also my professional respect and admiration for all that Dr Carol Craig has accomplished as the Chief Executive of the Centre for Confidence and Well-being.

Carol would be the first to say that it was a collaborative venture, reflected in the galaxy of gifted and dedicated Centre colleagues and supporters gathered here this afternoon. And that is true. I congratulate you all. But having run research centres on both sides of the Atlantic, I think Carol’s achievement is exceptional; she has founded, funded, guided, managed, advanced, and with this magnum opus, completed the work of this unique Centre.

As I write in the Foreword, for me the genius of the Centre lies in its humanism, its internationalism, and its generalism, all three of which have Glasgow roots.

Gathered here in the West End, we cannot forget those parts of Glasgow that were once a byword for poverty, ill-health, and slum housing in the Victorian city. In mapping hopeful pathways for such communities today, the work of the Centre for Confidence and Well-being stands in the tradition of James Burn Russell, Glasgow’s first full-time Medical Officer of Health in the last quarter of the 19th Century. In his influential paper, ‘The Children of the City’, Russell anticipated Carol’s concern for the effects of adverse childhood experiences. He correlated high infant mortality rates with poor housing but also imagined what it was like to see your siblings die and be laid out in a crowded single end. Russell used statistics to expose the suffering that was hidden in plain sight among the city’s children. The humane achievement of the Centre was to make such lived experiences central to public policy debate in contemporary Scotland. A Time of Hope tells that story with courage.

Gathered here on that most self-confident boulevard of the Victorian city, Great Western Road, we are reminded of Glasgow’s international contribution to civic notions of well-being. Martin Seligman and Malcolm Gladwell were not the first to cross the Atlantic to engage with Scottish public audiences on such questions. In his book, Portable Utopia, the historian Bernard Aspinwall documented the many links between social reformers in Glasgow and the United States in the 19th century. This city welcomed American campaigners against slavery and champions of women’s suffrage, while urban reformers in cities like Chicago were inspired by Glasgow’s municipal provision of public services. The international achievement of the Centre was to renew such transatlantic exchanges on confidence and well-being. A Time of Hope tells that story with honesty.

Gathered here near the modern home of Glasgow University at Gilmorehill, we are reminded of its greatest luminary, Adam Smith. The Centre’s generalist thinking is rooted in the Glasgow Enlightenment’s marriage of measurement and morality in a common endeavor. Angus Deaton is Carol’s kindred spirit not only because of his natal suspicion of Calvinism but also his radical critique of his own academic discipline of economics. Deaton received the Nobel Prize for his work on measuring poverty. But he has recently argued that without an ethical dimension, economics has lost it way. It has strayed far from the moral philosopher Adam Smith’s understanding of inquiry on the wealth of nations. The intellectual achievement of the Centre was to think like Smith across disciplines on the health of this nation. A Time of Hope tells that story with brilliance.

All of which is to say, Carol, you have not only written the story of Scotland’s Centre for Confidence and Well-being in A Time of Hope; you have written a chapter in Scotland’s story. For me you have told it fundamentally through the experience of Scotland’s children. Hugh MacDiarmid may have given us his epic account of Scotland through the addled eyes of a drunk man looking at the thistle, but you show us what being Scottish really feels like through the frightened eyes of a child looking at the drunk man. And then you show that child the way forward from fear to hope, from cowering to confidence, and from despair to well-being.

As a fellow practitioner in the field of interdisciplinary research over the past quarter century, I am in awe of what Carol and the Centre have accomplished in the same period, now so clearly and compellingly documented in this Tardis of a book. When you step inside its covers, you find yourself in a vast emporium of ideas and events, data and debates, conversations and publications, coherently held together by Carol’s vision and leadership.

To paraphrase MacDiarmid, they canna Scotland see wha yet canna see this book. And Scotland in true scale to it.

Congratulations and godspeed to every concerned citizen who was once a child in Scotland.