Hail Alan Cumming, the national treasure who returned his OBE

It’s said Socrates was the most intelligent person who ever lived, yet his maxim was: “I know that I know nothing.” That lump of jelly between our ears really only works when the software is constantly updated with new ideas. That’s why the old Greek also told people that “the unexamined life is not worth living”.

To stave off intellectual death, you’ve got to keep thinking, evolving. If we don’t, we just become a meme of our parents, mouthing opinions they taught us … which they learned from their parents … who learned from their parents, who … and so the cycle repeats: the "Rule of the Grandparents" where we’re never truly free from the nonsense our forebears believed generations ago.

My own country is an exemplar: Northern Ireland, a place where thousands live with their minds in 1690, fighting battles their ancestors fought. Thousands of others, to quote The Cranberries, just replay “the same old theme, since 1916”.

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The past isn’t just a foreign country, it’s also a country we should strike off our ‘must visit’ list. We need to understand the past – learn from it – but not live in it. In every part of these islands, there are millions of us with a nostalgia needle in our arms. In Scotland, it’s there in misty-eyed romance for some past that never was; an idyll stolen by union. In England, and across much of Britain, many get high huffing empire’s fumes.

The other day, one of Scotland's brightest stars, Alan Cumming, showed himself to be someone both capable of evolving intellectually and taking the past to task by returning his OBE. He put out a statement saying that after the Queen’s death “ensuing conversations about the role of monarchy and especially the way the British Empire profited at the expense (and death) of indigenous peoples across the world really opened my eyes”.

Cumming learned something, reflected on it and acted accordingly. That’s not virtue-signalling; it’s not insulting Britain, or a sign that he’s stupid and should have understood empire anyway. It’s an indicator of mature thinking.

However, there’s more going on here simply than an actor reassessing their views. Cumming strikes at the heart of one of the greatest problems surrounding how Britain understands its past: education. Clearly, Cumming wasn’t taught the truth about empire at school. If he was, he wouldn’t have had this Damascene moment.

Few aged 50 or up learned of the empire’s realities at school. When slavery was mentioned we were broadly told "Britain ended the slave trade". What we weren’t told is that we basically started it too. Slavery was the fault of those horrible racist Americans. You still hear that trotted out today: some issue of Britain’s past arises, some grotesque statue of some long-dead aristocrat steeped in slavery is brought into question, and out comes the "but but but we banned slavery" line. You don’t credit someone as the good guy because they stopped beating hell out of their victim.

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Twisting history deformed Britain. Nobody can fully understand themselves unless they’ve come to terms with their own past. The same is true of countries. It’s the "unexamined life" again.

Why do you think as you do? How has life shaped you? How much of you is you – and how much is the ideas your parents or church forced on you? If you shook off the past – if you’d been raised by another family, walked in the shoes of someone unlike you, experienced other traditions – what might you be like today? People, and countries, are really just the stories we tell ourselves. Those stories often come from our parents, teachers, churches and politicians.

Empire’s defenders trot out lines like "but we brought civilisation to the world". No, we brought our way of life to the world, via guns. When it comes to slavery, they’ll say "but Africans enslaved each other, sold their people to Europeans". They did, and that’s for the people of those countries, with those histories, to come to terms with; it certainly doesn’t excuse what our ancestors did, and what our country once stood for.

Defenders of the British Empire will argue that it brought civilisation to the world – in reality the empire forced its way of life onto the world (Image: Newsquest)

Would the West be such a mess if we’d come to terms with our past, if America truly confronted the great crimes it was built upon, if Britain and France and other imperial nations properly reckoned with empire? Would Russia be as sick as it now is if it had faced its own history – the brutality of serfdom, the horror of the Soviet period?

Instead, Russia now dreams of a new empire as the reality of old empire was never dealt with, nor sins expunged. Maybe that’s why Germany seems relatively stable today, compared to a nation like Italy. Germany stared long into the mirror when it came to its history in the 20th century; Italy didn’t.

But here we are: across the UK, most of us opted for some cheap knock-off version of empire in the suicide note called Brexit. In Scotland, a swathe of both nationalists and unionists cannot face history honestly: one side believes Scotland was a victim of empire rather than an active collaborator, the other believes empire was the best thing the Scots ever did. In Northern Ireland, the blood from the wounds of empire is barely dry on both sides.

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So Cumming did Britain a favour. He showed starkly just how few of us have really thought about what empire means. We pretend we understand our past. We don’t. We’ve watched movies like Zulu or The Great Escape, and we’ve told ourselves we were always noble.

I don’t much go in for national treasures, but Cumming is inching towards the title. He’s wildly entertaining – check his masterpiece of Caledonian Camp in The Traitors USA – and he isn’t scared to speak up, or show that as a man in middle age he’s capable of thinking and changing his opinion. Would that we were all so willing to open our minds.