IT IS always a mistake, when setting yourself up for a guid counterblast to one of composer James MacMillan’s anti-indy articles, to listen to his beautiful music first. Immediately, most of your fusillade is disarmed.

For example, look up the wee grade six girl intently playing MacMillan’s Barncleupedie on YouTube. Try to get really angry with him after that.

However, the disarmament is not complete. This week, James decided to write in the pages of the hard-Republican, Trump-fluffing National Review, an American political journal. His target was the scores of artists and scholars that have recently been signing up to the Declaration For Independence.

MacMillan accuses them of “a meek and mild compliance, a pathetic desire to please those in control ... People in the arts, who often pride themselves on being free thinkers and anti-establishment have, in Scotland, become something else”. They (and me; I’ve signed it too) have apparently “bent the knee” to the current SNP-led Scottish Government.

Let the pelters commence – and they have, furiously so on my Thoughtland Twitter account.

But the exact nature of the pelters is genuinely interesting, underneath the ad hominems and mild polemic. How close should artists and intellectuals be to the dominant cultural and political power-structures of their society or nation?

One of the obvious objections to MacMillan’s piece is that he gives the impression that “creatives” have always kept their distance from the national powers-that-be. “Art should not bend the knee to governments or ruling castes. Since when did the artistic desire to shock the establishment become the desire to bend over for them?” Crudely put, maestro. However, James surely knows how historically inaccurate he’s being. Artists and intellectuals actively shaped and substantiated the classic era of 19th and 20th-century nationalisms, whether European or world, whether civic or ethnic.

It’s stirring to see this at its best (and, of course, we know it at its worst). I once stood in Edvard Grieg’s lakeside cottage, near Bergen in Norway, and read the composer’s idealistic quotes about how “nationalism always implies an internationalism”, as his music swirled around me.

Our own great intellectual Tom Nairn has written many thousands of words about this process. For example, this: “The new middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation card had to be written in a language they understood.”

Nairn describes here one of the standard jobs of creatives under conditions of nationality. Indeed, it’s precisely what the various paragraphs of the Declaration are trying to do. And a “invitation card” does not need to read like a Futurist Manifesto.

However, what sits underneath all this is Scotland’s bizarre, belated political condition. Self-evidently a nation – but so ridiculously late to the task of becoming a modern nation-state. This means artists and intellectuals have to keep performing, and returning to, this classic role.

It’s exhausting and often tedious (tell me about it). But there is one blindingly obvious solution to the problem, no? And the post-independence nation that wasn’t capacious enough to love and support a curmudgeonly genius like MacMillan – indeed it already does so, commissioning him generously for last year’s Edinburgh Festival – wouldn’t be a nation worth having.

However, on the way to a 21st-century indy, we need dissensus as much as consensus. Indeed, the latter will be far more authentic and robust if it’s forged (and reforged) out of the energy and contestation of the former.

That’s a major difference from the 19th and 20th-century cultural nationalisms. Nowadays, contemporary media (and its messages) are utterly decentralised, proliferating everywhere – grand cultural figures not required.

And everyone can be a poet (or a meme-maker), communicating for, against, or even just without reference to their society or nation.

SO here’s where I’ll somewhat agree with MacMillan. His piece keeps returning to a line, uttered in an interview, by Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop when she launched the National Cultural Strategy in 2017. “[Artists] don’t have to be close to government,” op said. “They just have to have a common understanding of what the country wants. This is a way of bridging, of helping ambition for the country.”

Klaxon! MacMillan is on full alert: “What about those writers who want to write for readers, rather than ‘the country’? What about composers who don’t care ‘what the country wants’? Art and obligation are very dangerous bedfellows”.

I have experience of these anxieties way beyond the mightily furrowed brow of the Colossus of Cumnock. When the marketing-obsessed head of Creative Scotland, Andrew Dixon, was toppled from his post by revolting artists in 2012, I was asked by Creative Scotland to facilitate a city-by-city “truth and reconciliation” exercise with communities of artists across Scotland. I found myself impressed by the numbers of artists who spoke up against the idea that their job might remotely be to “bridge” or “help ambition” for “the country”. Many of them, indeed, felt the best thing they could do for Scotland, artistically and culturally, was to follow their unique sensibility and instincts. To call out the truth, private or public, as they saw it or revealed it.

And most certainly to keep their distance from the choking tendrils of “Scotland the Brand” or “Team Scotland”. Stylish sentiment

(and available cash) coiling around and inhibiting their responses?

No thanks.

When Richard Holloway handed the Scottish Arts Council over to Creative Scotland, he prophesised correctly (in a 2010 essay called Creative Disloyalty) all of these debates. How to “forward the Government’s agenda for growing the economy by unleashing Scotland’s creativity, without taming the anarchic energy that lies at the heart of the creative act?”

“We will never forget Graham Greene’s admonition,” Holloway wrote, “that disloyalty is the primary virtue of the artist. If we can all learn to live within that tension without trying to resolve it, then Scotland will have become a truly creative nation”.

We’re still learning, it seems. I’m more interested in “Teem, Scotland” than “Team Scotland”. Isn’t there enough space for artists and intellectuals to do their nation-building thing, and for others (or even the same ones) to shoot their X-rays through every inherited or static structure around them?

My column the other week wasn’t about defending artists against government policy – but arraigning them for not having enough policy ambition as artists. Given the crises presented by zero-carbon and automation, and the need for our mainstream lifestyles to radically adapt to these conditions, I urge them to assume a leading and shaping role.

Still, if you’re really looking to support creative disloyalty, you should take yourself to the fundraiser for Bonnie Prince Bob’s Dis-Content channel. Maker of satirical documentaries about Jim Murphy and Jeremy Corbyn, BPB has produced an opening video-salvo which begins with the immortal lines: “This culture is a dead culture … your brain is a post-modern fois gras.”

Bonnie Prince descends (or ascends, according to taste) from there, ripping holes in many of the shibboleths of contemporary Scottish culture and politics. It’s an orgy of critical excess guaranteed to frighten both James MacMillan and Fiona Hyslop to death. Jimmy: be careful what you wish for.

MacMillan’s essay is mainly about the funding and rigour of music education in Scotland; most of this seems addressable under the usual policy headlines. But for me, his request for “creative disloyalty” seems more of a systemic than a funding issue. What levels of unpredictable, invigorating contrariness might come from all of us having new levels of collective security in life, built from new arrangements of housing, working and free time, guaranteed income, cultural rights? If our capacity to experiment with and prototype our own lives is increased, what might we do, say, make, code, sing?

The old James MacMillan – who wrote sonatas dedicated to South American liberation theology and “the preferential option for the poor”, and who didn’t hang around Buck House picking up gongs and titles – would maybe see the value in such a “culture”-based society. Independent (of mind and of state), tolerant, embracing. And all the more welcoming of a great composer’s carnaptiousness, for a’ that.