On the centenary of George Grant’s birth and 30 years since his passing
By Mark Wegierski
George Parkin Grant (1918-1988) is Canada’s leading traditionalist philosopher. He is a complex, philosophical critic of technology and America.
One of George Parkin Grant’s most popular and more accessible books is, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965). That work has remained almost continuously in print in Canada.
Lament for a Nation mourns what George Grant sees as the end of real Canadian independence in the 1960s. As George Grant tells the story, Canadian Tory Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had refused to accept U.S. nuclear weapons on Canadian soil – with the result that all the instrumentalities of the North American managerial capitalist classes were turned against him, in the crucial 1963 Canadian federal election. Diefenbaker’s lost campaign is characterized in the book as “the last strangled cry of his pre-modern Loyalist ancestors”. (The Tories were already officially called the Progressive Conservative party, having added the adjective in 1942.) The Liberal Lester B. Pearson won the election.
Grant is highly prescient in mourning the passing of a more traditional Canada, although his focus is not exclusively on the impending destruction of what would later come to be called social conservatism. Rather, he is more concerned with the dangers of corporate liberalism, and corporate technocracy, which he sees as emanating from America to undermine a more traditional Canada. Grant’s outlook lies somewhere between that of a traditionalist conservative, and of a “social conservative of the Left”. There are a number of illustrious figures who embrace the latter outlook, notably John Ruskin, William Morris, Jack London, George Orwell, Christopher Lasch, and, in Canada, the noted constitutional scholar and union adviser Eugene Forsey.
Certain sectors of the Canadian Left, including George Grant’s close friend, Gad Horowitz, were greatly impressed with the book, and understood it as a clarion call for the creation of infrastructures of a “more compassionate” society in Canada – their idea of fighting for Canadian nationalism. Gad Horowitz had also, in the 1960s, severely criticized the onset of multiculturalism policies in Canada, arguing that they would undermine the sense of nationhood that he saw as a prerequisite for the flowering of real social democracy in Canada.
George Grant, who sometimes called himself a “Red Tory”, clearly gave that term one of its most positive and philosophical interpretations. As expressed in his major books, including Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969), English-Speaking Justice (1974/1985), and Technology and Justice (1986), Grant took his stand against the encroaching technological dystopia, or “empire of technology” which – as he put it – “speaks with an American accent.” Two other major works of his are Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959), and Time as History (1969). George Grant put forward a thoroughgoing critique of technology – what he called “the spirit of dynamic technique” – which, he said, “makes all local cultures anachronistic”. In such a world, prior notions of the good and the beautiful would become increasingly impossible.
The adoption of the new Canadian flag (the Maple Leaf Pennant, also sometimes dubbed “the Pearson Pennant”) in 1965 pointed to the fact that massive social and cultural change was in the offing. It is a longstanding idea in the study of politics that a change of a country’s flag is a marker of “regime change”.
With the arrival of “Trudeaumania” in 1968, the country was thrust into ever more massive social and cultural change, which continued unabated for the sixteen years that Liberal Pierre Elliott Trudeau held the Prime Ministership. Trudeau’s further success in the elections of 1972, 1974, and 1980, can largely be attributed to the fact that Quebec voters delivered virtually every seat in Quebec to the Liberal Party. Also, importantly, the Liberal minority government of 1972 was supported by the New Democratic Party.
A society that in 1965, was often seen as very socially conservative, was transmogrified into one of the most “progressive” societies on the planet, by 1984 – especially with the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms into the Canadian constitutional structure in 1982. The Charter essentially enshrined virtually the entire Trudeau agenda, as the highest law of the land. The Charter was quickly backed up by an increasingly “activist” Canadian Supreme Court, where one would have been hard-pressed to find even one designated conservative.
The seeming futility of various social conservative efforts since the 1960s, seems to point to the prescience of Grant’s thesis that any more substantive and traditional Canadian nationalism, had been defeated and beaten down, already in 1963.
George Grant embraces outlooks that, in today’s ever-narrowing spectrum of discourse, appear to be contradictory. As a conservative, Grant supported the Canadian Tory party and valorized the British roots of Canada. As a Canadian nationalist, Grant found much to admire about the Canadian Left, and enunciated a nuanced criticism of America and capitalism that is far more subtle than that usually found on the Left. As a Christian, Grant upheld traditional morality and wrote frequently against abortion – which he saw as evil, seeing it as the triumph of a Nietzschean-like exercise of radical will that would have terrible, dystopic consequences for the notion of human dignity.
He also considered that the only possible basis for maintaining the notion of human equality in the future – rather than giving ourselves over to maximizing our own pleasure and power – is the notion that all human beings are seen as equal before God.
Some of Grant’s central themes include a profound critique of the social, cultural, and ecological impacts of technology; a confident patriotism (it is only “by loving our own” that we can come to any further comprehension of a more universal good); a subtle defense of Christianity, seen as one of the last barriers against a technological dystopia; and a genuine compassion for human suffering and the negative effects of war, expressed especially through his reflective pacifism.
He also sees the interconnection between the “right” and “left” of a technological society – “The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor [Herbert] Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.” Grant anticipated the critique that was later made of the so-called managerial-therapeutic regime. A hyper-technological and hypermodern society would make any notions of human ethicality increasingly impossible.
Grant’s main thesis is that the end result of technological corporate and therapeutic liberalism will be an ideationally homogenous, universal, hyper-technological, hypermodern world-state in which all sense of humanity and human ethicality will be lost. It would be a world perhaps similar to that of Aldous Huxley’s antiseptic, gleaming Brave New World – or to the “gritty” dystopias hypothesized in Ridley Scott’s haunting, dark-future movie, Blade Runner, Antony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and generally in the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction.
Nevertheless, Grant’s profound belief in God ultimately gives him a sort of optimism. Because of this belief in an ultimate, unchanging standard of justice, he could say that, whatever horrors technological society has waiting for us, and however hopeless the situation appears, “At all times and in all places, it always matters what we do.” For him, the imperative to act morally remains very real. He certainly never gave up his fight for Canada, which suggests a streak of optimism amidst all the gloom.
Mark Wegierski is a Toronto-based writer and historical researcher.