FIREWORKS have become the latest social pariah in Scotland, it appears.

Surveys show the public seems to hate them, and politicians have jumped on the bandwagon. In the era of party political failure, it’s easy to get a quick win by calling for a ban on fireworks even if you can’t run the NHS or the country properly.

We live in a strange time – a time when cosiness is valued above all else. Risk is a dirty word. Anything troubling, or upsetting, anything which cuts against the grain, gets ostracised and put beyond reach.

Fireworks seem to symbolically represent this tension in society. But we need risk. At times, we need to be troubled.

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This is not an assault on ‘health and safety’. We should do all we can to ensure people aren’t harmed. What worries me is the loss of something very human which the traditions, celebrations and rituals surrounding fireworks represent.

We’ve forgotten the cultural importance of Halloween. At its heart, Halloween is a fire festival, a time of misrule. So too is Bonfire Night. Just like Carnival in southern Europe and Latin America, Halloween, particularly for the Scots and Irish, is a time to upend the order of society, to explore our dark sides, to examine our fears. The festival encourages us quite literally to play with fire. The chaos of Halloween and Bonfire Night brings light into the dark of winter.

Everyday we cut off a little bit more of what it means to be human with our retreat behind screens. We are extinguishing the real world from modern life. Anything messy becomes cast as something ugly when in fact it’s the messiness which makes us human.

We spend our days tied to desks, our mornings and evenings trapped in trains and buses, we eat our lunches in the office, we go home and stare at a screen in the corner of the room or the screen on the phone in our hand, and we ignore the other humans living around us.

Our so-called leaders even dare to seek control of our physical bodies, telling us what we should eat, what we should drink. Parenting us. Taxing and cajoling us if we aren’t the good consumers they want us to be.

Halloween, Bonfire Night, Carnival – these festivals stick two fingers up at everything which saps our humanity. And the firework lies right at the heart of that scrappy rebellion.

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Think of what Halloween is truly about. Just like Carnival, we disguise ourselves, we go masked, we hide our identities. Why? So, we can play with behaviours and experiences denied to us at all other times, in all other places. Behind a mask you can tell your boss to go to hell, you can flout the rules, you can reject everything you are told to do the rest of the year. You can shatter everything that tries to control you.

At Halloween, we also seek to be scared. You may be fearful the rest of the year – fearful over money, love, work, health – but at Halloween you go looking for fear to kill your fears. Halloween is cathartic. Like a great tragedy or comedy, it purges all those negative feelings that have built up inside you.

We also confront danger at Halloween and that’s what the firework represents. In our micro-managed, risk-averse world, it’s becoming increasingly rare for any of us to face real danger. In many ways, that is a wonderful thing, but for one very big reason it should also worry us: danger is the sauce to life, risk reminds us of why life is worth living. Without some element of threat, we can never really understand the joy of being at peace and being happy.

We’re tentative when we approach a firework. We rightly fear it. We respect it because we know it can hurt us, even kill us. When we light it, there’s a thrill, an adrenaline rush. The burning fuse hisses like a snake and we back quickly away. Family and friends hold their breath together, and then gasp as the rocket races into the sky. Its explosion lights up the night.

For our ancient Celtic ancestors, fire and noise at Halloween united them, and kept evil at bay. The nights were filled with all sorts of monsters. Those cultural memories run deep. We need to ward off imagined evils together in the dark winter just as much as our forebears did thousands of years ago. It’s just our evils are very different – theirs were supernatural, ours are the stresses and strains of living life in the alien, and very anti-human, environment of the 21st century.

We need the firework at Halloween, just as much as we need the tree in the living room at Christmas time. That tree represents you bringing nature and rebirth into your home at the end of a gruelling year, just as it has across the continent for many centuries.

In western Europe, we live in an irreligious world, in which God is dead. I’m glad of that. But I am also acutely aware that as humans we need rituals, traditions, and stories which connect us – otherwise we are on the road to spiritual death as a species. Maintaining the traditions of subversive festivals like Halloween keep us connected to each other.

We can retain our messy humanity, and still ensure people’s safety. Enforce the existing laws around fireworks. Don’t allow children to buy them. Anyone who misuses them should be punished. Educate the public about fireworks. Don’t ban them. A ban is the last resort of a politician who’s run out of any decent ideas and just wants their face in the paper.

There are many things in the world which scare me – things which I have seen hurt people who shouldn’t have been hurt. The motorbike for one. I don’t wish to see motorbikes banned, though. I just wish to see the laws around motorbikes enforced so that people can enjoy their dangerous pastime as safely as they can – for both me and them.

It’s about controlling danger. And that’s the true essence of Halloween. That’s what the firework is all about. Harnessing that which scares us – that’s what lies at the very heart of what it means to be human.

Neil Mackay is Scotland’s Columnist of the Year