CULTURALLY, Scotland is becoming a very thin-skinned and nervous country. The mere act, these days, of academics asking questions – which is, after all, what we pay them to do – is increasingly taken as signs and omens of hyper-politicisation underway in education.

The ridiculous kerfuffle, of late, about the Loch Ness Monster apparently being used to indoctrinate children into an anti-British fervour is an exemplar. Here’s the background: Education Scotland prepared guidance for social studies teachers on a cinema course entitled How Others See Us in Film. Essentially, it explores three movies – Brigadoon, Loch Ness and The Da Vinci Code – and asks what each says about ‘Scottish identity’. Mostly, the guidance looks at the doltish tartanisation of Scottish culture as seen from overseas – something which we must take some responsibility for ourselves given we promote Caledonian kitsch rapaciously through our tourist industry.

Some folk reached for the smelling salts, however, over a few sentences extracted from this 16-page guide – such as: “The very idea of a prehistoric monster in a loch affirms the stereotypical idea that Scotland – by contrast to England – is a rural wilderness, perhaps one bypassed by progress. This is a very British idea of Scotland, propagated previously by … upper-class tourists.”

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The guide adds, however, that the way science was used to investigate Nessie represents Scotland as a “fully integrated part of the modern British state”. Nessie’s role as a tourist magnet from the 1930s reveals “a lot about Scotland’s position within the union” – namely, that the myth encouraged travel to remote parts of Scotland by English visitors which in turn created a sense of “unified national community”.

So, the notion this optional lesson indoctrinated some sense of English “domination” is just hyperventilating fantasy.

The problem, however, is that such stupid commentary means much more interesting discussions about Nessie get overlooked because the monster does indeed say some interesting things about Scotland, as do all national myths. That’s why legends exist: they perpetuate stereotypes both by, and about, nations. They’re metaphors, like it or not, for who we are and how people see us. Nessie, as the social studies guide implies, really does reflect the sense that Scotland is a wild place. However, that image isn’t just a fabrication by British aristocrats. It’s a fabrication by ourselves as well.

Scotland, rightly, revels in its rugged beauty. We enjoy our myths of monsters and kelpies. We know – to employ a tired phrase – that it ‘others’ us, by which I mean: it makes us ‘different’. This isn’t the ‘othering’ of words like ‘Jock’, intended as insult; it’s ‘othering’ done by ourselves to make us distinct.

We also cannot moan about the fact that one of our greatest national myths has come to define us in the eyes of others. Ask any tourist to name five things about Scotland and you’re guaranteed to hear ‘Nessie’.

We do the same ourselves to other nations. Try visiting Transylvania and not thinking of ‘vampires’, replete with an implicit fear of ‘the other’. It’s impossible, because the connection is part of our global consciousness.

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We even do it to England. Take London’s east end – most folk will probably think of cockneys, Jack the Ripper, jellied eels, Knees Up Mother Brown and all that twee nonsense which has no connection to the life of the modern east end. And yet, the east end itself plays up those tropes as that’s what visitors want: Jack the Ripper tours, pints and singalongs in phoney east end pubs, selfies with some Pearly Queen.

Although the Arthurian myth is of Welsh and Celtic origin, it’s become closely identified with England – primarily because it was worked over by Norman poets trying to forge an identity myth for a newly conquered kingdom, using the conventions of medieval chivalry as the delivery mechanism. As a result, what does Arthur now say about England? It plays to stereotypes of social hierarchy and aristocracy – of a society more stratified than in Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Is there truth in that? That’s for England to decide.

I’m originally from Northern Ireland, and in some twisted away the national symbol of Ulster – the bloody Red Hand – speaks deeply both to our vision of ourselves and the vision which others have of us. One of the myths associated with the Red Hand is this: the High King has died and his two sons must swim across Lough Neagh to decide who will wear the crown. Whoever reaches the far shore wins. One brother, knowing he’s losing, hacks off his own hand and throws it, bloody, onto the shore so he can claim victory. The story sums up the view which Ulster people have of ourselves – that we’ll never quit – and the view others have of us: that we’re a violent lot who’d cut off our nose to spite our face.

Like the Scots, there’s no such thing as an average Ulster person. How can any ‘identity’ sum up a Nobel Laureate like Seamus Heaney and a killer from the Shankhill Butchers? But each nation lives with the stereotypes it creates, and then has mirrored back by others.

There’s more to Nessie, though, than simply a symbol of rugged, romantic Scotland. The myth was forged when St Columba – an Ulster monk coincidentally – brought Christianity to Scotland. Columba, like all early missionaries, was a grand propagandist, and he needed to show the heathen Picts he had powers just as strong as their pagan magic. So a story was cooked up where the Saint pacified the beast. Nessie is, at its root, a hangover from Scotland’s pagan past.

Modernity did come slow to the Highlands in centuries past – Nessie carries something of that within the myth. Scotland did leap shamelessly on tatty tourism in the early 20th century, Nessie symbolises that too.

And perhaps, lying beneath the surface of the myth - subconsciously - Nessie also represents something rather threatening: the danger Scotland knows it can pose to the once cosy consensus of union, and the unease England feels about Scotland, a sense that England doesn’t quite fully "understand" Scotland, can’t really "see" Scotland properly - like the shiver on the surface of a loch as something unknown passes beneath.