It has taken me a while to finally finish ‘Soil and Soul -people versus corporate power ‘ by Alastair McIntosh.
McIntosh is a Scottish writer, campaigner and fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology. He grew up on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides and draws upon his experience in this simple, tightly knit community to make wider observations about the technologically advanced but spiritually destitute modern world.
He is at pains to stress that this book is not an autobiography although he concedes that at times ,with its parochial style, it may read like one. Rather, the personalised slant is intended to “engage the particular to illustrate the general” ; the particular in this case being the battle to seize control of the Scottish Isle of Eigg (pronounced ‘egg’) from the lairds. The aim of this action was to enable this small community to gain control over its own destiny without fear of corporate intervention.
In the telling of this story, he talks a lot about the need for a kind of poetic interconnection with community, seeing mutual dependency as a healthy alternative to the fragmented, egoistic values of capitalism. Frequent references are made to peoples’ “spiritual poverty” at a time when we are materially richer.
His writing in the book’s first part (‘Indigenous Childhood; Colonial World’) is full of passion, self deprecating humour and the need to inspire hope. The best passages are where he combines philosophical reflections with a shamanic slant on the activist’s role, well exemplified in these lines:
“The great disease of our times is meaningless. If fresh wellsprings of hope are to be found, we must first cut through the collective hallucination that there is no alternative to nihilism. We must dig where we stand. We must get beneath the grassroots of popular culture and down to the eternal taproot. Here new life can grow from ancient stock”
Pretty good stuff, and if he’d continued in this vein I’d have raced through part two in no time.
The trouble is that, in the second part, the philosophical insights are undermined by pseudo-mystical ramblings or else gets bogged down in a tedious blow by blow account of the Eigg campaign.
While making clear his reservations about institutionalised religion McIntosh freely admits to being hugely influenced by the liberation theologian Walter Wink. This prompts a lot of assertions about the need for inner freedom and clarity of mind in combating oppression.
This would be tolerable if it wasn’t accompanied by tortuous sentences like : “We pass back through the flaming sword at the gateway to Eden with which the angel guards the Tree of Life”.
At one point McIntosh quotes a friend who observed that the more excited he becomes, the longer the words get, and it’s obvious that this also means that he occasionally loses the capacity to write in plain English. A more rigorous editor might have helped to keep the worst excesses in check and would also have avoided the need for the reader to endure clunkers like “land comprises the natural nature in which human nature comes to know itself” .
In the concluding chapter McIntosh writes that “In telling this story I have drawn deeply upon spirituality. I have drawn upon the magic inherent in all miracles with which theology concerns itself”.
While I can go along with his ideas of the need for building communal values to counter corporate greed, I part company with him when he maintains that the strength to achieve this “comes not from the ego but from that of God (or the Goddess) within”.
In arguing for a greater awareness of our responsibility to other people he is in effect advocating the need for classic humanistic principles which most definitely do not depend on belief in religious abstractions or reliance on superstition.
