Reading George Grant in the 21st Century (Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism) 303144888X, 9783031448881

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM SERIES EDITORS: DAVID F. HARDWICK · LESLIE MARSH

Reading George Grant in the 21st Century Edited by Tyler Chamberlain

Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism

Series Editors David F. Hardwick, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Leslie Marsh, Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science, The University of British Columbia, Okanagan, BC, Canada

This series offers a forum to writers concerned that the central presuppositions of the liberal tradition have been severely corroded, neglected, or misappropriated by overly rationalistic and constructivist approaches. The hardest-won achievement of the liberal tradition has been the wrestling of epistemic independence from overwhelming concentrations of power, monopolies and capricious zealotries. The very precondition of knowledge is the exploitation of the epistemic virtues accorded by society’s situated and distributed manifold of spontaneous orders, the DNA of the modern civil condition. With the confluence of interest in situated and distributed liberalism emanating from the Scottish tradition, Austrian and behavioral economics, non-Cartesian philosophy and moral psychology, the editors are soliciting proposals that speak to this multidisciplinary constituency. Sole or joint authorship submissions are welcome as are edited collections, broadly theoretical or topical in nature.

Tyler Chamberlain Editor

Reading George Grant in the 21st Century

Editor Tyler Chamberlain Political Studies and Philosophy Trinity Western University Langley, British Columbia, Canada

ISSN 2662-6470 ISSN 2662-6489 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism ISBN 978-3-031-44888-1 ISBN 978-3-031-44889-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Pattadis Walarput/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

This book is dedicated to Professor Peter C. Emberley (1956–2016) Professor, Supervisor, George Grant scholar Most of all, a great encouragement at the outset of my academic journey

Contents

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Introduction: Why Read George Grant in the 21st Century? Tyler Chamberlain

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Part I Conservatism and Political Philosophy 2

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“Tradition or Progressivism? Edmund Burke and George Grant: Partners in Challenging Imperialism and Modernization?” Brian Thorn

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George Grant and Simone Weil: Amor Fati and Consenting to Otherness Colin Cordner

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Universal Civil War: Grant on Globalism and Nationalism H. D. Forbes

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Technology as Empire: George Grant and Russell Kirk on American Conservatism Jeremy Seth Geddert

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George Grant and Roger Scruton: Scrutinizing Scruton and the New Left Ron Dart

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CONTENTS

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Only (a) God Can Save Us: Grant and Heidegger’s Competing Responses to Technological Nihilism Timothy Berk

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What Are We Lamenting? George Grant’s High Toryism as a Form of Canadian Nationalism Nathan Robert Cockram

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Part II Democracy, Technology, and Global Politics 9

Still Lamenting? Canada, Grantian Conservatism in the Twenty-first Century, and the Paradoxes of Grant’s Conservatism Ben Woodfinden

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George Grant and the Return of the Nation Scott Staring

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The Democratic Recession as Reversal or Fate of Modernity?: Lessons From George Grant Tyler Chamberlain

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199 217

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George Grant’s Reflections on Revolution Nathan Pinkoski

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Does Progress Need Liberalism Anymore? On George Grant’s Critique of Technology Toivo Koivukoski

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George Grant and the Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Triumph of Technology? Mehmet Çiftçi

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Between the Pincers: George Grant and the Crisis of Totalitarianism Ryan Alexander McKinnell

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Timothy Berk is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, where he completed a dissertation on Martin Heidegger and Charles Taylor. He has published articles on Heidegger’s influence on Comparative Political Theory, and on the ethics of nationalism. Tyler Chamberlain lectures in political science and philosophy at various institutions including Trinity Western University, Simon Fraser University, and the University of the Fraser Valley. He has published in the areas of early modern political theory and Canadian political thought. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Carleton University in 2018. Mehmet Çiftçi is an Étienne Gilson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. He completed his D.Phil. in Theology at the University of Oxford. His dissertation sought to interpret and evaluate the Second Vatican Council’s teachings on church-state relations. Nathan Robert Cockram is an independent scholar who was awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy from UBC in 2021. Colin Cordner is a Chaplain at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada), where he completed his Ph.D. at Carleton University in 2016. He is also a writer and researcher on the history of religions and civilizations for the

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Institute of Reading Development. Among other projects, he is updating Maben W. Poirier’s annotated bibliography of Michael Polanyi. Ron Dart is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of the Fraser Valley. H. D. Forbes taught Political Science at the University of Toronto from 1969 to 2011 and is now a retired professor emeritus from that institution. He has published five books, including an anthology of Canadian political thought (OUP, 1985) and a monograph on George Grant’s thought (UTP, 2007). He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Plato and the Politicians. Jeremy Seth Geddert is Associate Professor of Political Science at Assumption University. He has published in Canadian Journal of Political Science, American Review of Canadian Studies, and Review of Politics on religion and politics, responsible sovereignty, and natural rights. Toivo Koivukoski is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Nipissing University. Ryan Alexander McKinnell is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University. He studied political philosophy at Carleton University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Science. He has also taught Carleton University, Concordia University, and Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has published on Ancient, Renaissance, and Contemporary Political Thought. Nathan Pinkoski is a Research Fellow and Director of Academic Programs at the Zephyr Institute. His research and teaching covers twentieth century political thought, early modern political thought, and classical political thought. He holds a B.A. (Hon) from the University of Alberta and an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in Politics: Political Theory, from the University of Oxford. He had held research fellowships and lectureships at Princeton University and the University of Toronto. He recently co-edited Augustine in a Time of Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan Press). Scott Staring is a professor of Liberal Arts at Georgian College.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Brian Thorn teaches in the History and English Departments at Nipissing University. He has published a number of academic studies on conservative and liberal political ideologies, anti-war activism on the “right,” and gender studies. He is currently working on a re-evaluation of Edmund Burke’s influence on Canada politics and society (Position: Service Course Instructor). Ben Woodfinden is a doctoral student and political and constitutional Theorist at McGill University.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Why Read George Grant in the 21st Century? Tyler Chamberlain

In 1996, Arthur Davis asked “Why read George Grant?” He suggests that the value of reading Grant lies in his analysis of what has been lost with the onset of modernity: It remains true that the prevailing doctrines of our time do not support the belief that all human beings should be treated with justice. Grant’s thought was essentially a response to this catastrophic loss of the rational grounds for affirming justice. Most of his work was an attempt to convince others that there was such a loss, to define carefully just what that loss is, and to nurture that awareness of it which must precede a renewal.1

Grant was a careful analyst of modernity who articulated a variety of responses to it.2 Readers who assign to Grant a hopeless pessimism or nostalgic longing for a bygone era miss the mark.3 As Robert C. Sibley

T. Chamberlain (B) Trinity Western University, Langley, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_1

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remarked in 2008, “Grant’s thinking about Canada’s impossibility cannot adequately be understood from psychological or sociological perspectives. To make such an attempt is to miss the philosophic dimension of his lament.”4 Rather than lamenting for lamentation’s sake, he sought to provide intellectual, and perhaps even spiritual,5 aid to all who were aware of what had been lost without naively pretending that history could be reversed.6 As long as we live in a world characterized by technological modernity, Davis’ reasons for reading Grant will be appropriate. To ask, “Why read George Grant in the twenty-first century?” however, is to ask a slightly different question. Political developments in the decades following Grant’s death suggest new possibilities and dangers not immediately evident in the 1980s. This puts today’s readers of Grant in the unique position of being able to reflect on his broader criticisms of modernity from within a slightly different historical articulation of modernity. It is the underlying assumption of this volume that reading Grant from this position will serve two purposes. First, it will help us to better understand the import of Grant’s thoughts decades after his death. His thought transcended disciplinary and partisan classification, but recurring themes include the nature of technological modernity and its implications for local cultures, political freedom and equality, and the public awareness of an objective or transcendent moral order. In response to the inexorable march of modernity, he often found common cause with conservatives who wished to preserve what they could of the classical western heritage—which for Grant was the combination of Platonic philosophy and Biblical revelation. However, his political conservatism was unlike many of his contemporaries’; his philosophical foundation in premodern modes of thought did not line up neatly with either the political left or right of his day. He famously supported whichever political party or movement he thought might best resist the globalizing and dehumanizing tendencies of technological modernity, at one time favouring the New Democratic Party before supporting, and later rejecting, the Progressive Conservative Party.7 Many political developments since his death in 1988 come into contact with his philosophical commitments and political diagnoses. Globalization has come under increasing strain, the benefits of science and technology are being openly questioned, and illiberal political movements are gaining influence. By reading Grant in light of our political situation and highlighting the continuing relevance of his thought in a world faced with problems he did not himself witness but are consequences of the

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modernity he so carefully interpreted, it is hoped that this volume will highlight the continuing relevance of his thought, and potentially help to reinvigorate scholarly interest in it. Second, this book will serve a practical purpose in contributing to current debates at the popular and scholarly levels. Many of the topics dealt with in this volume are of immediate concern to political scientists, philosophers, and policymakers. Grant was a theorist of nationalism, conservatism, and the relation between religion and public life, and therefore can make a meaningful contribution to these debates. Many chapters in this volume explicitly put Grant in conversation with pressing political problems. A particular emphasis of the present volume is Grant’s position viz-à-vis other leading thinkers in the conservative tradition. These chapters will draw attention to what Grant held in common with others, but of equal importance, the uniqueness of his variety of what has been called Red, or High, Toryism.8 The years before and immediately following Grant’s death saw multiple conferences and edited volumes dedicated to clarifying his legacy, the nature of his critique of modernity, and the way in which his reflections on education, religion, politics, philosophy, and literature were related.9 • Larry Schmidt (editor)—George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversation (1978) • Peter C. Emberley (editor)—By Loving Our Own: George Grant and the Legacy of Lament for a Nation (1990) • Yusuf K. Umar (editor)—George Grant and the Future of Canada (1992) • Arthur Davis (editor)—George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education (1996) The first three of these, while reading Grant as a philosopher and political theorist in his own right, pay special attention to the question of Canada in his thought. George Grant in Process, for example, opens with a multi-chapter section on Canadian politics. By Loving Our Own contains a section of four chapters entitled “The Political Independence of Canada.” Editor Peter C. Emberley tells us that the conference for which the chapters were written was meant as a tribute to Grant’s “abiding theoretical and practical concern,” which he describes as “justice, as it demands of us to love our own as the necessary prelude to any human excellence.”10

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The centrality of Canadian nationalism as understood by Grant thus takes a central place in that volume. George Grant and the Future of Canada likewise contains multiple chapters that centre Lament for a Nation—and more broadly, the question of Canada’s place in the Universal Homogenous State—and closes with Barry Cooper’s posing of the question of whether the Canada whose death Grant lamented ever actually existed.11 Something should also be said about Joan O’Donovan’s early study of Grant’s thought, published in 1984. It centres Grant’s moral critique of modernity, by arranging his thought into three phases, beginning with his hopeful Hegelianism and culminating in a Nietzschean “tragicparadoxical” phase.12 I mention this book along with the early edited volumes because Grant himself had high praise for it, noting especially how it “helped me greatly to look at my own thoughts and see their contradictions more clearly.”13 Along with these early edited volumes— and O’Donovan’s well-received study—William Christian’s biography did much to provide a fuller account of Grant’s thought, contextualized within a detailed account of his life.14 Christian’s access to (at the time) unpublished material and private letters, allowed the book to “help others to see more clearly what Grant really meant.”15 George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity, published eight years after Grant’s death, follows O’Donovan by reflecting more broadly on his significance as a critic of modernity, drawing together a multidisciplinary set of perspectives on “art, philosophy, politics, religion, and education,” to directly quote the subtitle. Though this volume admirably expounds Grant’s more general critique of modernity, it is perhaps notable that his concern with and for Canada is not given a prominent place here. Perhaps due to the weakening of the American empire and the growing consensus that the end of history—at least as theorized and predicted by Francis Fukuyama—was not immediately upon us, many discussions of Grant in the new millennium revived the question of the status of Canadian nationalism, and indeed of the possibility of Canada. Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy, and Politics, edited by Ian Angus, Ron Dart, and Randy Peg Peters and published in 2006, opens with sections on “Canadian Toryism” and “Modernity in North America,” signalling a revival of interest in Grant’s role as a thinker of particularistic Canadian import.16 Many discussions of Grant’s politics since 2006 pay attention to the question of whether Canadian nationalism is a plausible or even desirable stance. This was indeed a, if not the, crucial question throughout much of Grant’s work. His critique of

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modernity is unmistakably from the perspective of a Canadian—that is, someone living on the borderlands of empire. It is taken up by some of the contributors to the present volume. 2006 and 2008 saw the publication of two books arguing for the importance of Hegelian idealism in Canadian political philosophy. Robert C. Sibley’s Northern Spirits (2006) investigated Hegel’s influence in John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor. Robert Meynell’s Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom (2008) analysed Grant and Taylor, while C.B. Macpherson took the place of John Watson. On the surface, these books make similar claims, but a lively debate arose between them concerning the desirability of Canadian nationalism. Sibley’s discussion of Grant’s relationship to Hegel revolves around the relationship between necessity and goodness. Grant, according to Sibley, does not dispute Hegel’s claim (interpreted via Kojève) that the Universal Homogenous State is necessary. He simply disagrees about whether it is good, quoting Joan O’Donovan’s characterization of Grant as a “reluctant Hegelian.”17 If Hegel is correct—and Grant thinks he is—then, Sibley concludes, “Grant is correct to pronounce Canada’s impossibility as a sovereign state.”18 Meynell, for his part, thinks that this is an overly pessimistic account that ultimately serves to legitimate Canada’s annexation. In a postscript entitled “In Response to Robert Sibley’s Northern Spirits,” Meynell argues that Sibley “is not interested in finding the value of either Canada or idealism; rather he is co-opting Canadian Idealism to promote globalization and the establishment of a neoliberal world order governed by the United States.”19 Though Meynell and Sibley disagree about aspects of Hegel within Grant’s thought, their disagreement concerns the tenability of Canadian nationalism and the possibility of a Canadian future apart from America. The most recent book-length study of Grant’s thought, William Pinar’s Moving Images of Eternity, explores a different implication of life in the Universal Homogenous State, namely the impact of technological reason on educational practices.20 Questions about Canadian nationalism, the totalizing effect of the Universal Homogenous State, and other important political questions at the heart of Grant’s thought are explored within the context of their effect on modern education. This project hopes to broaden the range and applicability of Grantian and Grant-inspired political philosophy in the twenty-first century. Grant was a great theorist of Canadian nationalism and the prospects of local attachment under technological modernity, but he was not only that.

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His careful engagement with the tradition of western thought led him to interpret the meaning of technology, modernity, conservatism, and a multitude of socio-political themes that, I suggest, help us arrive at a deeper understanding of contemporary currents of thought and action. Reading George Grant in the twenty-first century involves reading him in a political environment somewhat different than the one in which he himself lived, thought, and wrote. The chapters in this volume are guided by the assumption that what Grant wrote in the twentieth century is still worth reflecting on in the twenty-first. The manner in which his writing remains relevant today, however, is worth parsing. It is not the case that his prescriptions, such as they are, can be re-applied without proper contextualization. Consider, for example, his lamentation of the death of Canadian nationalism.21 The sense of Canadian nationhood whose death he lamented was rooted in older Tory traditions of peace, order, and good government. A naïve application of the argument of Lament for a Nation that put it in support of the burgeoning nationalist and anti-globalist sentiments on the contemporary right would be as contrary to Grant’s philosophical and political concerns as would be a call for increasing homogeneity and universality. Since Grant’s nationalism, such as it was, appealed to classical notions of a transcendent moral order “by which we are measured and defined,”22 contemporary iterations of nationalism grounded in freedom and autonomy (from overbearing domestic governments or meddling international forces) are also un-Grantian. A central characteristic of modernity is that man’s essence is his freedom, so a strong case could be made that many of today’s nationalist movements instantiate modernity just as much as the drive for global homogeneity.23 Needless to say, a simple 1:1 application of Grant’s terms and explicit conclusions is liable to confuse more than help. The hermeneutical philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer may offer some help here. Like Grant, Gadamer spilled much ink exposing the pretentions of modernity. Consider his playful suggestion: “there is one prejudice of the Enlightenment that defines its essence: the fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power.”24 Much of Gadamer’s project was the rehabilitation of prejudice, not necessarily as a good in itself but merely as a condition of understanding. He inherited from Nietzsche and Heidegger an ontology of historically situated being, according to which a God’s eye view or philosophical “view from nowhere”25 is impossible. Living in and being shaped by a tradition, or horizon, is an inescapable

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fact of human existence; the Gadamerian question is not how to avoid being shaped by prejudice but rather how to distinguish between “legitimate prejudices” and “the countless others which it is the undeniable task of critical reason to overcome.”26 We are shaped, then, by our horizon. Reading and properly interpreting a text produced from within a different horizon is not simply a matter of shedding the prejudices that constitute our own horizon in order to insert ourselves into the horizon of the original author, for that is impossible. Although true understanding involves empathy and an honest effort to understand the other, when we enter into their horizon, we do so only by bringing ourselves, which includes the prejudices that have helped constitute us and our concerns.27 Gadamer is careful to warn against the dangers of “overhastily assimilating the past to our own expectations of meaning.”28 This is not a subjection of the past to the concerns and prejudices of the present, but a genuine fusion of horizons in which the prejudices of each are mitigated by being put into dialogue with those of the other. “It always involves,” Gadamer insists, “rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other.”29 Without fully committing oneself to Gadamer’s historicist ontology, we can nevertheless recognize something of the everyday experience of reading and interpreting in his description of the hermeneutic situation. The chapters in this book engage in something akin to Gadamer’s fusion of horizons. Although Grant’s life and writing are not of an entirely different period—some of his students and interlocutors are alive at the time of this volume’s publication, for example—the world has changed significantly since his death in 1988. Readers in the twenty-first century bring different concerns to the text than Grant’s original readers might have. We cannot help but bring new questions, worries, and political problems to his writings. As long as we avoid the danger of appropriating his thoughts in light of our contemporary expectations without allowing our own prejudices to be challenged by him, revisiting Grant’s writings today can be a fruitful experience. His work was obviously shaped by the questions of his time, and indeed his own analysis of political problems occurred by way of a fusion of horizons, as he judged modernity in the light of premodern philosophy and religion. Although twenty-first-century concerns bear some similarities to twentieth-century concerns, insofar as both are typical of modernity, they are not entirely identical. For example, whereas Grant’s “horizon” was

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characterized by the consolidation of the American empire, globalization, and the Universal Homogenous State, our world is marked by the rise of illiberal democracy and the backlash against globalism. Whereas Grant warned against the technologization of every aspect of life, there now seems to be a growing reaction to modern technocracy and reliance on experts.30 This is not to downplay the obvious similarities between our world and his concerns, including but not limited to increased access to Medical Assistance in Dying and the West’s tragic disregard for human life at the outposts of empire, for example in the increasing use of drone warfare.31 Nevertheless, bringing our concerns and prejudices to Grant, while allowing his horizon to speak to us, may just bring about the higher universality of which Gadamer spoke. The chapters in this book are organized into two sections. The chapters comprising Part One reflect on Grant’s relationship to the history of political philosophy. Some of these chapters clarify his relationship with familiar interlocutors such as Simone Weil and Martin Heidegger, while others situate him alongside, or in opposition to, contemporary thinkers of the right. Brian Thorn argues that Grant shared some important themes with Edmund Burke, namely an opposition to modernization and imperialism. Claiming that some Canadian conservatives have selectively read Burke by downplaying his liberalism, Thorn offers a broader interpretation of Burke’s writing that accounts for his earlier liberalism as well as his conservative response to the French Revolution. He suggests that such a reading sheds light on the ways in which Burke’s thought can be seen as a forerunner of Grant’s. Colin Cordner explores Simone Weil’s influence on Grant by reflecting on his two common paraphrases of her: “faith is the experience of the intelligence illuminated by love” and “love is consent to otherness.” He argues that these helped Grant (1) understand the relationship between necessity, freedom, and eternity and (2) conceptualize an alternative to the technological quest for mastery over nature. H.D. Forbes’ contribution to this volume contends that too much has been made of the nationalism in Grant’s thinking. His nationalist lamenting, he argues, is perhaps best understood as the sugar coating of some bitter reflections on the nature and sources of technology and the threat it poses to our humanity. Jeremy Seth Geddert puts Grant in conversation with a potential kindred spirit in Russell Kirk. After cataloguing their many similarities,

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both biographical and political, Geddert ultimately concludes that Grant and Kirk offer fundamentally different visions of the relationship between virtue and liberty, and the meaning of conservatism in the modern age. Ron Dart’s chapter situates Grant alongside another potential fellow traveller Roger Scruton. Dart presents Scruton’s conservatism as firstgeneration liberalism, complete with an either–or approach to political ideology that dismissed the concerns of the New Left in a way that Grant’s Toryism did not. Timothy Berk begins with the observation that both Grant and Heidegger took issue with the technological nihilism at the heart of modernity. His chapter delves into the radical differences between the two thinkers’ diagnoses and subsequent prescriptions. Moreover, by relating the discussion to Heidegger’s influence on the contemporary far-right, an opening is created for a Grantian response to some of these contemporary movements. Nathan Robert Cockram takes aim at superficial readings of Grant’s nationalism (particularly that of Michael Ignatieff) that reduce it to mere nostalgia for Canada’s fading connection to Britain. Cockram argues, in contrast, that Grant’s nationalism is more than a wistful longing for a return to imperialism but follows from his Platonist Tory critique of technological liberalism. That Grant’s nationalism flows out of a philosophical encounter between Plato and liberalism gives it an enduring relevance to contemporary debates about and within liberal political theory. All of the chapters in this section bring to light both the depth and nuance of Grant’s conservative vision, if that term still has meaning in the twenty-first century. That Grant learned much from Weil or that he would be ardently opposed to today’s Heideggerian nationalists points to the way in which his conservatism is more complex than a simple appeal to the right–left spectrum permits. Many writers trace a common conservative tradition including, inter alia, Burke, Kirk, and Scruton. A debate emerges in this section over where, or if, Grant belongs in this tradition. Thorn explores some important similarities between Grant and Burke, whereas Geddert and Dart draw our attention to the ways in which Grant can be seen as departing from this lineage—or rather, looking beyond it to an older conservative vision. This is an important question and one which deserves continued treatment. The essays in Part Two consider the continuing relevance of Grant’s thought in the world of the twenty-first century. The issues explored

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include revolution, globalization, nationalism, and democracy; an implication of most chapters is that Grant’s work, written decades ago, provides valuable resources for making sense of today’s politics. Ben Woodfinden opens the second half of the book with a slightly optimistic account of the fate of nationalism. He sees in Grant’s work two distinctive bases of conservatism: the “tory-touch” that is specific to his understanding of Canada, on the one hand, and the general importance placed upon love of one’s own. While Canada itself may indeed have been subsumed into the Universal Homogenous State, thus overcoming the first account of conservatism, Woodfinden argues that love of one’s own, understood as local attachment and belonging, is irrepressible, even in technological civilization. This, writes Woodfinden, offers a basis of hope not explicitly found in Grant’s writings themselves. Scott Staring joins scholarly discussions of the role of the state in the globalized world of the twenty-first century. His chapter critically interrogates some calls for a return of the state as a remedy for neoliberal globalization, subjecting them to a Grantian analysis that finds them as compatible with neoliberalism as the globalization they are meant to replace. He then articulates a non-neoliberal nationalism based on Grantian notions of the common good and love of one’s own community. Tyler Chamberlain’s chapter focuses on Grant’s interpretation of modernity, and what it means for the prospects of liberal democracy. He sees in Grant’s reflections a different conception of the relationship between modernity and democracy than that found in some social scientific accounts. Nathan Pinkoski contributes a study of Grant’s reflections on the permissibility of revolution. Grant’s theological and philosophical defence of the primacy of the Good leads him to support revolutions, but only under regimes that are no longer characterized by constitutionalism or representative government. Analysing the circumstances surrounding Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, Pinkoski concludes it is an example of a modern revolution that satisfies Grant’s criteria for a just revolution. Toivo Koivukoski asks a question that takes us to the heart of Grant’s understanding of technological modernity: “Does progress need liberalism anymore?” He traces the development of Grant’s moral thought, highlighting the way in which Grant’s later critique of modernity’s emphasis on willing sheds light on contemporary crises of liberalism.

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Mehmet Çiftçi offers a Grantian reflection on a particularly salient example of technological reason in the twenty-first century, namely the response/s to the COVID-19 pandemic. Paying attention to the failure to define health in relation to a teleological understanding of human good, Çiftçi concludes that this episode confirms Grant’s suspicions regarding the triumph of technology. This section ends with Ryan Alexander McKinnell’s suggestive argument that Grant is guilty of washing over one of the most important political differences of his century and ours, namely the moral difference between liberal democracy and totalitarianism. In an era when liberal democracy is in decline and authoritarianism and ethnonationalism are on the upswing, McKinnell’s argument is worth paying attention to. There is no single approach to Grant among these chapters. Some authors take an expository or interpretive approach, trying to better understand his intended arguments. Some take his insights and re-situate them alongside contemporary thinkers or problems, and some offer criticisms or new ways of thinking about themes common to his writing. Moreover, true to the breadth and nuance of Grant’s thinking, some of the chapters highlight his sympathies with conservatives whereas some emphasize his affinities with today’s left. However, the reader is encouraged to look beyond these surface resemblances to Grant’s grounding in earlier ways of thinking and the way in which they call into question the ideological patterns of modern thought itself, wherever it is to be found on the spectrum.

Notes 1. Arthur Davis, “Introduction: Why Read George Grant?” in Arthur Davis (ed.) George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996): 7. 2. For what to make of Grant’s multiple responses to modernity, see Zdravko Planinc, “Paradox and Polyphany in Grant’s Critique of Modernity” in Yusuf K. Umar (ed.) George Grant and the Future of Canada (Calgary: University of Calgary Press 1992): 17–45; Joan O’Donovan, George Grant and the Twilight of Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984): 10–11, and Laurence Lampert, “The Uses of Philosophy in George Grant” in Larry Schmidt (ed.) George Grant in Process (Toronto: Anansi 1978): 179–194.

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3. See for example R.K. Crook, “Modernization and Nostalgia: A Note on the Sociology of Pessimism,” Queen’s Quarterly 73:2 (1966), 269–284, and Chapter 8 in this volume. 4. Robert C. Sibley, Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor: Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press 2008): 166. 5. For more on Grant’s spirituality see Harris Athanasiadis, “Waiting at the Foot of the Cross: The Spirituality of George Grant” in Ian Angus, Ron Dart, & Randy Peg Peters (eds.) Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy, and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006): 256–269. 6. For one of the Grant’s many reflections on this theme see Grant’s “A Platitude,” in George Grant, Technology and Empire (Concord: Anansi 1969): 135–143. 7. For more on the deeper consistency underlying Grant’s political shifts, see Arthur Davis, “Did George Grant Change His Politics” in Angus, Dart, & Peters (eds.) Athens and Jerusalem, 62–79. 8. Although the similarities between Grant’s thought and other Red Tories are difficult to ignore, Grant himself resisted applying the label to his thought without qualification. 9. The following is not intended as a comprehensive review of the literature on Grant. Rather, the focus will be on the approach taken by edited volumes. Some recent single-author volumes are discussed where appropriate. 10. Peter C. Emberley, “Preface” in Peter C. Emberley (ed.) By Loving Our Own: George Grant and the Legacy of Lament for a Nation (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1990): xxii. 11. Barry Cooper, “Did George Grant’s Canada Ever Exist?” in Umar, George Grant and the Future of Canada, 151–164. 12. O’Donovan, George Grant and the Twilight of Justice, 10–11. 13. Letter to Joan O’Donovan, 4 January, 1981, in William Christian (ed.) George Grant: Selected Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996): 312. 14. William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993). 15. H.D. Forbes, “Review of George Grant: A Biography, by William Christian” Canadian Journal of Political Science 27:3 (1994), 612–614.

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16. It should be mentioned here that this book was recalled due to plagiarism found in one of the chapters. The approach taken in the present volume has been to treat all chapters except for the offending one as legitimate. 17. Sibley, Northern Spirits, 124. 18. Sibley, Northern Spirits, 280. 19. Robert Meynell, Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom: C.B. Macpherson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008): 215–216. For Sibley’s response to Meynell, see his two chapters in Susan M. Dodd and Neil G. Robertson (eds.) Hegel and Canada: Unity of Opposites (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2018), “Idealism and Empire: John Watson, Michael Ignatieff, and the Moral Warrant for ‘Liberal Imperialism’” (pp. 198–214), and “Grant, Hegel, and the ‘Impossibility of Canada’” (pp. 275–293); Sibley, “Idealism and Empire” from Hegel and Canada; Sibley, “Grant, Hegel, and the Impossibility of Canada” from Hegel and Canada. 20. William F. Pinar, Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 2019). 21. I note here that there is some debate about whether Grant was truly hoping to inspire nationalist sentiments or simply lamenting their impossibility. However, if a true Canadian nationalism were possible, it is reasonable to assume Grant would take it to be a good thing. 22. George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995 [1966]), 93. 23. See Chapter 10 in this volume for an extended reflection on Grant, neostatism, and neoliberalism. 24. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum 2004): 272–273. 25. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press 1986). 26. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 278. 27. Some readers might object to my reliance on Gadamer in this context, given his philosophical inheritance from Heidegger which Grant emphatically did not share (cf. Grant’s critique of historicism in Time as History). On this point I would briefly reply

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28. 29. 30.

31.

that Gadamer succeeds, in my view, in incorporating the undeniable fact that our thinking is shaped by our horizon without thereby giving in to the anti-foundationalism or relativism that troubled Grant. For more extensive treatments of Gadamer that bear this out, see Ryan R. Holston, “Anti-Rationalism, Relativism, and the Metaphysical Tradition: Situating Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics” in Gene Callahan & Kenneth B. MacIntyre (eds.) Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2020): 193–209, and Brice Wachterhauser, “Getting it Right: Relativism, Realism, and Truth,” in Robert J. Dostal (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002): 52–78; Leo Strauss, on the other hand, saw in Gadamer a clearer linkage to Heidegger’s historicism and relativism. See the Strauss-Gadamer correspondence in “Correspondence Concerning Warheit Und Methode,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978), 5–12. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 304. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 304. It is not necessarily the case that this represents a genuine move beyond technological thinking, but the explicit belief that science and technology themselves are not necessarily the answer is nevertheless an important development. It is of course a relevant consideration that anti-technocratic views have spread largely through online, thus technological, platforms. P.W. Singer provides a fascinating, if horrifying, account of the military uses to which contemporary robotics technology is being put in Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: The Penguin Press 2009). See especially pp. 391–396 for a discussion of the ways in which technology allows for further dehumanization of enemy combatants into “target[s]… that need to be serviced” (395).

PART I

Conservatism and Political Philosophy

CHAPTER 2

“Tradition or Progressivism? Edmund Burke and George Grant: Partners in Challenging Imperialism and Modernization?” Brian Thorn

Introduction Writing in 1969, Canadian philosopher George Parkin Grant spoke out against the trend of “immediacy” in contemporary North American culture. Grant argued that a too-narrow focus on contemporary issues led politicians, scientists, and the general public to “comprehend the present only within its own terms.” He stated that a focus on “immediacy” led scientists, especially, to focus solely on “how we can use that present for our most immediate purpose.” Grant also saw the focus on immediacy present among “many of the radical students” who revolted against modern universities’ perceived support for American imperialism. Grant suggested that many radical students pushed for “all thought in the universities be made relevant” to reforming contemporary society or

B. Thorn (B) Nipissing University, North Bay, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_2

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toward a revolution against modern society. In this sense, Grant saw technocratic scientists who supported government policy in the United States and Canada and radical students who opposed these policies as having a similar viewpoint on “immediacy” as an idea.1 In contrast, Grant, using Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings as a guide, proposed looking back at “time as history,” viewing the political and ideological traditions of Western societies as a guide to understanding contemporary problems.2 In earlier writings, Grant had praised Canadian Conservatives such as Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker and Foreign Affairs Minister Howard Green for attempting to maintain Canada’s traditional tie to Britain. Grant viewed the United States as a symbol of liberal, capitalist modernity that acted against Canada’s traditionalist tie to Britain.3 Similarly, Grant viewed the United States, and its’ liberal individualism, as destructive of traditional values in family, church, and local communities. Thus. Grant’s criticisms of scientists and radical students went alongside his traditionalist, pro-British, anti-imperialist views. Grant asserted that Canada could only survive as an independent nation as part of the British Commonwealth.4 We can see Grant’s views reflected in those of English politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, one of the founding fathers of modern ideological conservativism. Although writing centuries earlier, Burke, like Grant, strongly criticized imperialism and war from a pro-British perspective. As a British patriot, Burke argued that imperialism and colonialism had negative effects on Britain itself; specifically, imperialism and colonialism increased despotism at home. In a 1795 letter, addressed to Burke’s son Richard, Edmund Burke condemned British colonialism in Ireland, seeing it as anathema to local rule. Edmund Burke linked British persecution of Irish Catholics with the “Jacobinism” that infected Revolutionary France. Burke offered a strong criticism of British laws that favoured Protestants in Ireland, suggesting that just Irish laws needed to “provide for the different parts according to the various and diversified necessities of the heterogeneous nature of” the Irish people. Burke expressed opposition to modern and conformist laws that attempted to tie all people to one vision of humanity. Where Grant saw the technocracy of the United States as indicative of modernity and conformity, Burke argued that English dominance of Irish Catholics led to conformity and lack of freedom. Moreover, Burke suggested that a return to older, ancient traditions of decentralized authority, “rooted in the law of nature itself,” would offer a solution to British colonialism in Ireland. Burke concluded

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that a return to older “values retraced back to that source” of ancient traditions of Catholics landowners in Ireland was necessary.5 Like Grant, Burke saw imperialism as an element of modernity that threatened older, more legitimate, values.

Argument and Orientation This chapter presents a dialogue between Edmund Burke and George Grant in terms of their views on modernity, liberalism, imperialism, and traditionalism. Burke and Grant both offered criticisms of modernity and imperialism. Both saw the rise of new kinds of state structures, in Burke’s case British colonialism and the French Revolution, and capitalist modernity and liberalism6 , in the case of Grant, as negative. Both Burke and Grant advocated for traditional Christianity, decentralization, and values rooted in tradition, custom, and prudence. Similarly, both Burke and Grant were pro-British, seeing Britain as a model for custom and tradition against modernity and rapid change. Thus, the chapter presents two basic arguments. First, philosophers, historians, and theologians should see Burke’s anti-imperialist, traditionalist values as forerunners to Grant’s similar ideas. As a “Red Tory,”7 Grant, perhaps unknowingly, borrowed from Burke’s ideas surrounding support for Britain and reverence for tradition against rapid change. Second, the chapter argues that some conservative writers on Burke have interpreted Burke’s ideas selectively. Canadian conservatives like Donald Creighton and W.L. Morton focused primarily on Burke’s criticisms of the French Revolution. Creighton and Morton,8 among others, ignored or downplayed Burke’s earlier focus on “liberalism.” This chapter will indicate similarities and differences between Burke and Grant’s writings, seeing Burke as often holding “liberal” views. Grant, in contrast, held more consistent conservative views throughout his life. The chapter concludes by offering the possibility of a new synthesis between Burke’s liberalism and Grant’s conservatism.

Previous Scholarship on Burke and Grant Scholars of many different stripes have written volumes of material concerning Edmund Burke and George Grant. Burke wrote many volumes worth of speeches and personal correspondence with relatives, friends, and parliamentary colleagues, along with published writings.

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Burke also produced many other personal writings not intended for public consumption. A huge amount of scholarly literature exists on Edmund Burke’s life and thought. Burke’s views were diverse and sometimes contradictory. Building on Burke’s writings on America, Ireland, and India, and his opposition to slavery, some scholars see Burke as a “liberal.”9 Others, focusing on Burke’s criticisms of the French Revolution, see Burke as a conservative.10 Still other scholars have attempted to demonstrate the variety present in Burke’s views. Burke argued for an appeal to tradition in his support of the American Revolution, and in his opposition to the French Revolution. Burke presented the American colonists as legitimate warriors who wanted to reclaim their own, sovereign rights, against a British government that unjustly taxed and oppressed them. Similarly, Burke argued that the French revolutionaries attempted to destroy traditional rights and institutions—the monarchy, the clergy, and the aristocracy—through the revolutionaries’ disregard for ancient and local customs. Burke saw tradition and custom as emerging from the specific context of English history.11 In Burke, we have a complex thinker whose ideas can be used to support a variety of innovative thoughts, based on a return to tradition and local self-government. George Grant, too, wrote much—formal books and academic articles, more informal pieces of writing as well as letters and informal writings—during an almost forty-year career as an academic and public intellectual. Scholars have consistently presented Grant as a conservative thinker. An early edited text discussed Grant’s philosophy and politics, and mentioned Grant as Canada’s best-known political philosopher of the time.12 Another early text offers a comparison and contrast on the views of Grant, Harold Innis, and Marshall McLuhan on the influence of technology on Canadian life, clearly showing Grant as a critic of modern technology.13 A number of scholarly writers have focused on Grant’s Canadian nationalism.14 Other writers have looked at Grant’s use of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Leo Strauss, and Alexandre Kojève.15 The only large-scale, academic biography of Grant provides a narrative account of Grant’s life and is clear on Grant’s conservatism, opposition to abortion, and support for Canadian nationalism.16 Still, other scholars focus on Grant’s approach to justice and law in English-speaking societies and emphasize Grant’s Christianity as an important backdrop to his

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views on law and justice.17 Left nationalist thinker Robin Mathews criticizes Grant for de-emphasizing capitalism and imperialism as elements of an attack on Canadian values.18 Harris Athanasiadis focuses on Grant’s “Theology of the Cross,” emphasizing the Christian background to Grant’s thought.19 Most recently, H.D. Forbes has provided a useful guide to many elements of Grant’s philosophy, focusing especially on Grant’s use of earlier thinkers.20 This essay examines Burke and Grant’s ideas from the perspective of a historian of conservatism and liberalism in Canadian studies.

George Grant’s Anti-Imperialist Mindset: Borrowing from Burke? Perhaps counterintuitively, we will start with George Grant. This is done partially because this text has Grant—not Burke—as its primary focus, but also because we can more clearly see Burke’s importance to Grant’s thought when we start with the more recent thinker. In a 1945 pamphlet, Grant set out many perennial themes. Grant discussed what became known as the “bipolar world” with the United States and the Soviet Union leading two power blocks.21 Grant asserted that Canada’s “continued membership in the Commonwealth,” led by Britain, represented the best method of preventing Canada from coming under American domination. Grant feared that Canada risked becoming a “satellite” of the United States. Grant argued that the Commonwealth represented the best way of creating a world order whereby, “peoples all over the world, large and small, should work and live together in harmony and co-operation.” Grant criticized American imperialism while downplaying, if not ignoring, British imperial conquests. Grant saw British imperialism as a method of maintaining law and order, security, and the “development” of colonized peoples. The Commonwealth, Grant implied, offered the possibility of creating a new kind of order where colonial violence and brutality could be contained and “left behind” while a new version of the empire would be one based on “trust” and not on exploitation.22 Grant based his support for the Commonwealth on a certain philosophical vision. He saw Canada as existing in a framework based on “Western Christian civilization,” which developed individual rights as well as the right of humans to seek a “higher,” spiritual destiny. Grant used his view of Canadian history to discuss how Canadians developed political and social rights “organically.” Thus, Grant argued that Canadian political

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traditions of democracy, such as responsible government and Confederation, developed, in part, because of Canada’s British tie. Grant suggested that Canada borrowed from the British preference for “order” and for using the government to effect positive change in the economic lives of its people. Grant used the example of the growth of the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in Canada and implied a link between the CCF, the British Labour Party, and the growth of the modern welfare state. In contrast, Grant argued that the political culture of the United States was based more on freedom and individualism, rather than order. He asserted that Canada needed to choose British values of order and liberty rather than be swallowed up by the U.S.23 Grant’s later writings more fully developed this pro-British theme. Most famously, Grant summed up his views in his text Lament for A Nation. In effect, Lament saw Grant make his case for a kind of British conservatism: one that focused on maintaining law and order, but one that also made space for the primacy of Protestant Christianity. Grant saw the United States as a new force that symbolized individualistic liberalism and secularism,24 along with a version of capitalism that favoured modern warfare and went against traditional values of the nuclear family and Christianity.25 Grant argued that this American ideology went against the welfare of the majority of people in contemporary Canada. Grant used the example of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine as showing how a new kind of “free market” capitalism went against Christian, “producerist” values in modern North America.26 Similarly, Grant weighed in against both modern socialism and capitalism, seeing these both as vehicles for the increase in secular modernity. Grant suggested that socialism—in the form of the modern New Democratic Party (NDP), the successor party to the CCF—should see itself as a fundamentally conservative force, maintaining the traditions of order and statism that had existed in Britain under the Labour Party. Focusing on the 1963 federal election in Canada, when Lester Pearson’s pro-American Liberal Party defeated the, more pro-British, Progressive Conservative Party, Grant saw this election as the final defeat of a pro-British, political culture in Canada. The Americans directly intervened in this election, throwing their support to Pearson’s Liberals over the issue of Diefenbaker and Howard Green refusing to house American nuclear arms on Canadian soil.27 Grant implicitly criticized the “classically liberal” philosophy of Adam Smith and John Locke as encouraging a rapacious vision of capitalism and imperialism. Grant criticized American

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imperialism as leading to the destruction of older visions of Protestant Christianity and rural life and as leading to decadence and depravity. With the failure of Diefenbaker’s conservatism and the undesirability of socialism or social democracy in Canada, the only future for Canada lay with the imperialist, decadent United States.28

Grant, Traditionalism, and Anti-Modernism Grant continued his anti-modern vision in other writings later in his career and life. In his 1969 work, Technology and Empire, Grant explicitly criticized American imperialism and the notion of liberal “progress” through technology and government. Grant saw the Vietnam War as indicative of the violence inherent in American imperialism. Grant remarked that North American culture, especially in the United States, was supposed to stand for “the future of hope, a people of good will bringing liberation of progress to the world.”29 Yet, Grant continued, events like the Vietnam War indicated that the “violence necessary to our empire will increasingly make a mockery of the rhetoric of that dream.” The “liberal idealism” that American, and many Canadian, policymakers espoused belief in began to seem less and less benign with the onset of television, which brought American imperialism in Vietnam into homes in North America.30 Grant criticized thinkers like Herbert Marcuse for seeing modernization and technology as leading to a triumph over nature. Thinkers like Marcuse saw this victory over the natural world as leading to a freer version of human sexuality, whereby the nuclear family could be overthrown and replaced by newer forms of polyamorous sexuality. Grant implicitly critiqued both the mainstream pro-business “right” wing as well as the “New Left” of the 1960s, with the latter’s libertarian focus on overthrowing older visions of society.31 In this way, Grant expressed similar views to the “paleo-conservative” right-wing, symbolized by later figures such as Patrick Buchanan,32 in his critique of imperialism as well as of the “New Left.” In Technology and Empire, Grant critiqued American imperialism in Vietnam and Canada’s complicity in supporting the United States, if not with a formal commitment of troops rather than with military hardware and munitions. Grant called Canadian participation in Vietnam “disgraceful” and that it was “disgusting” that Canada had accumulated profits as a result of selling munitions to the United States during the Vietnam War.33 Grant linked this critique of American imperialism and

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Canadian complicity with an analysis of modern technology. In his examination of the “religion of progress,” Grant used the ideas of philosophers Alexandre Kojève and Leo Strauss to buttress his ideas. Grant undertook a dialogue with Kojève and Strauss, with Grant ultimately agreeing more with Kojève’s position. Grant asserted that Kojève expressed the view that unlimited technological progress for its own sake was superfluous and immoral. Grant suggested that technological progress had to meet genuine human needs and should not be pursued as a goal unto itself.34 In contrast, Strauss, using a Machivellian framework, argued that modern humans pursued technological progress for its own sake and without limits. Strauss implied that the pursuance of technological progress was inevitable, since elites in government and business agreed with the lack of limits.35 In essence, Grant concurred with Kojève’s views and argued for a return to ancient biblical learning and the knowledge of the ancient Greeks. In a 1978 letter, Grant remarked that “Western Christianity” had ceded too much to modern secularism and materialism. He noted that both “Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are going to pay terrible prices, both extrinsic and intrinsic, for the … relation they maintained with that progressive materialism.” Grant expressed his belief in the “truth of Christianity which is just given for me in the perfection of Christ, which to me can only be thought in terms of Trinitarianism.”36 Here, Grant implies that he dislikes the modern focus on the Christian churches on the 1960s-era beliefs in easier divorces, new roles for women, and abortion. Grant expressed his belief in the doctrine of the trinity—the idea that God the father, the son, and holy ghost existed in one form.37 Indeed, toward the end of his life, Grant expressed more openly socially conservative views. Grant was a conservative Anglican but he expressed strong opposition, in particular, to abortion. In a 1982 letter, Grant remarked that “knowing that murder is murder is more important than the necessary subtleties of intellectual formation.” He went on to remark that “in the meantime I rejoice in the American fundamentalist Protestants who won’t give way on this essential.”38 Grant expressed support for the anti-abortion views of conservative Christians in the United States, even if he did not agree with their support for a bellicose vision of American foreign policy. In Grant’s 1971 work, Time as History, he expanded on his critiques of modernity. Grant suggested that the modern, especially post-1945 emphasis on the individual will and individual rights destroyed older value systems inherent in Christianity

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and the views of ancient Greece and Israel. For Grant, this destruction was profoundly negative. In turn, Grant argued that modern society must return to tradition. He asserted that the word “tradition means literally a handing over; or, as it once meant, a surrender.”39 Grant argued that modern North Americans had to return to the knowledge of older Christians as well as ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato.40 We can see Grant’s viewpoint here as being in keeping with his support for the British Commonwealth. Toward the end of Grant’s life, he began to despair over Canada’s increasing integration with the United States. At the same time, he began to long for the return of North American people’s views to those of the Bible and the ancients.

Edmund Burke: A Traditionalist Friend of Grant’s? In Edmund Burke, we have a thinker whose views often prefigured Grant’s. Yet, Burke’s writings also held more of a “liberal” viewpoint than Grant would have been comfortable with. In short, Burke’s later writings often focused on tradition in a way that Grant would have approved. But Burke’s earlier writings and views held more to the “classically liberal” tradition. In a manner similar to Grant, Burke spoke out against untrammelled militarism and large, peacetime armies, which Burke saw as a threat to traditional English liberties, symbolized by the Magna Carta of 1215 and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. In one particular statement, when Burke commented on the American Revolution, Burke remarked that “great bodies of armed men” led to “contempt of popular assemblies” that “subverted” the “great ancient establishments” of the English people. Large armies, thus, led to the “destruction of our freedom here” in Britain.41 Burke expressed support for the American colonists in their fight for freedom against unjust institutions. Burke implied that if the English people had freedom, then the Americans, as “cousins” of the English people, deserved the same. Burke portrayed militarism as an element of modernization, which went against Burke’s support for ancient and established traditions in Britain. Readers can see all of these views as foreshadowing George Grant’s ideas on many issues. In other ways, Burke’s earlier writings and speeches show a different perspective. Burke, especially as a younger man, exemplified the ideology of “classical liberalism,” with its emphasis on individual rights, private property, limited government intervention in the economy and society,

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a veneration for laws, and equality for all citizens.42 In his liberalism, we can see the origin of Burke’s opposition to slavery and his strong criticisms of British imperialism in Ireland and India. In a public speech on taxation in the American colonies in 1774, Burke remarked that monopolies like the East India Company often led to economic ruin. Similarly, Burke suggested that taxes on the American colonists were unfair since similar taxes were not levied on British citizens at home. He asserted that internal and external taxes “crushed” the colonists and went contrary to “every idea of political equity.” Burke argued that the British Constitution, which he upheld as a model of liberty, should be “extended … to every part of the British dominions.” Burke spoke out against the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and other acts that he deemed oppressive toward the American colonists. Burke further remarked in the same speech that high taxes could also lead to increased military domination of political and social life in the colonies and in Britain itself.43 We can also find liberal elements of Burke’s thought and writings in his earlier views. During the 1770s, Burke expressed perspectives that went against the Tory oligarchy in Britain. He suggested that electors should hold power over the wishes of the upper-class. Burke asserted that, through the House of Commons, the electorate had a clear say in how government worked.44 In this sense, Burke represented the wishes of the “Country Party”—groups who represented the electors, believed in increased democracy, and represented those who lived outside of the City of London and its environs—against the “Court Party” of the Royal Family and the aristocracy in London.45 Even toward the end of his life, when Burke was consumed with attempting to reform the abuses of British colonialism in India, he expressed opposition to extreme government power. In particular, Burke argued against corruption and bribery in colonial governance toward India. Burke stated that his goal was to root out all corruption in British policy toward India. Burke singled out a colonial administrator named Paul Benfield, who, Burke charged, was involved with “lewd debauchery,” bribery, and abusing his position to unfairly tax Indian subjects of British rule. Burke argued that Indian farmers were “equal to your substantial English yeomen.” Yet, British administrators too often used “usury and extortion” to unjustly take money and resources from the Indians. He argued that unjust taxation and extortion led to “tyrannous coercion,” in India, which might also result in freedom being taken away in Britain itself.46 Here, too, we can see a typically liberal critique of the Empire: in

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effect, imperialism cost too much and led to inequities toward colonized people and toward British citizens.47 In many of his writings, Burke focused heavily on freedom from arbitrary power. Burke expressed support for Catholic emancipation in Britain and in his birthplace: Ireland. In a letter, Burke remarked that the different laws against Catholics in Britain were unjust. He argued that there was no reason for “the proscription of so large a part of the Kingdom.” The laws that disallowed Catholics from participating in so much political and economic life in Britain and Ireland went against “equality” and “justice.” Burke stated that there was so much fear present against the possibility of a Catholic revolt that the British government “persecutes a million of people.” Anti-Catholicism went against the “common” heritage and “common Christianity” of Catholics and Protestants in Britain and Ireland. This was “bigotry” writ large in Burke’s opinion. Burke further expressed a liberal viewpoint in stating that the power of the government of any nation should be “limited to what is necessary for its existence.” Criminal law should only punish “delinquents” because they are “intolerably wicked.” British anti-Catholic laws had taken law-abiding Roman Catholic citizens and made them into “slaves and beggars,” who were excluded from all of the benefits of citizenship.48 Even in his comments against Revolutionary France, Burke expressed support for a liberal vision of freedom in contrast to the arbitrary power that he believed animated the French Revolution. In a particular passage, Burke contrasted British values against those of Revolutionary France, when he asserted that British diplomacy in past wars represented “masterpieces” of treaty-making in preserving “local civil liberty, united with order to our country.” Similarly, British diplomacy preserved “political liberty, the good, and the independence of nation, united under a natural head.” Burke argued for the positive vision of the sovereign in Britain but suggested that the sovereign power needed to be leavened by the House of Commons and the people. Burke saw this political system as existing in Britain; yet, Burke saw revolutionary France as being too quick to overthrow a legitimate system of government. Revolutionary France was too willing to centralize authority. The French “Jacobins,” according to Burke, opposed not just the monarchy but also private property, the established Church, the aristocracy, and an elected Commons.49 Liberalism, Burke argued, existed because of British values and was inherent in

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British history. Burke, therefore, can be seen both as a “classical liberal,” a British patriot, and a kind of conservative who opposed overly quick changes and an overly strong state.

Conclusion: Can We See Burke and Grant as Ideological “Friends”? What are we to make of the foregoing comparisons and contrasts between George Grant and Edmund Burke? Both thinkers favoured a certain conception of British values and liberties. Burke, especially, saw Britain as a model for good governance and as a guarantor of individual freedom. Both Grant and Burke expressed a belief in holding onto or returning to older kinds of traditions and values. Burke upheld the “Glorious” Revolution of 1688 and the Magna Carta of 1215 as being the bases for British freedom and good governance. Conversely, Grant, in his criticisms of modernity, argued that modern society had lost a belief in the values of ancient Greece and the Bible. Thinkers like Donald Creighton and W.L. Morton have discussed Burke in a selective manner: they focused on his later opposition to the French Revolution and his comments on history and tradition to interpret Burke solely as a conservative.50 While Burke was a kind of conservative, he wished to conserve what he saw as liberal values of individual freedom, low taxes, and local communities. Burke was much more an exemplar of liberalism than Grant. Is there a way that Burke and Grant’s ideas could be united? The answer has to be a qualified “yes.” We might see a vision of “libertarian localism” as a way forward to uniting Burke and Grant’s ideas. By this, I refer to a viewpoint of solving political and social problems— poverty, racism, discrimination, police brutality, war, and imperialism—at the most local level possible. This vision sees democracy at its most effective when it is pursued at the ground level by local people. In this vision of society, different nations could be formed, some being conservative, others being socialist, others being monarchist, and still others being “laissez-faire.” The different nations would ideally trade with each other and avoid war and violence against each other. This localist viewpoint would satisfy followers of Burke with his view of “little platoons”51 and Grant’s anti-imperialist, traditionalist mindset. Arguably, the modern state, with its bureaucracy and support for big government and big business, is a fairly recent development in human history. With this in mind,

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we can see a “libertarian localist” view as a return to an older stage in human history, restoring a vision of society that has been lost with the rise of modern, urban society.52 Both Grant and Burke would most likely approve of restoring older values that modern culture had abandoned. Perhaps Grant might take offence at being associated with a “libertarian” view of the world, since “libertarianism” is often seen as an element of modernity. Yet, as we have seen in this chapter, localism and libertarianism represent aspects of a return to an earlier time in history, when more freedom existed for all in society. The overarching, homogenous state that Grant critiqued also symbolizes an aspect of modernity. In that sense, the “libertarian localist” viewpoint hearkens back to earlier times in history, reflecting elements of a “Grantian” worldview. Similarly, although he did not write great amounts on Burke’s views, Grant did, at times, offer criticisms of Burke, portraying him as too much an exemplar of “modern” liberalism, too much influenced by John Locke’s individualism, and insufficiently conservative.53 With those criticisms in mind, this chapter maintains that Grant was incorrect in his assessment of Burke. The two thinkers had more in common than Grant claimed, especially when we consider both thinkers as advocating aspects of “libertarian localism.” Examining the views of Grant and Burke indicates how ideas of “liberalism” and “conservatism” are not always diametrically opposed. Thus, looking at the views of thinkers like George Parkin Grant and Edmund Burke remains important in the present time as we continue to struggle with social and political issues in contemporary society.

Notes 1. George Grant, Time as History, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 32–33. 2. Ibid, 33–35. 3. George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, 40th Anniversary Edition (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005, orig. 1965), 26–36. 4. A number of texts could be cited here. See especially R. Douglas Francis, “Technology and Empire: The Ideas of Harold A. Innis and George P. Grant,” in Canada and the End of Empire, ed. Phillip Buckner (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), 293–297.

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5. Edmund Burke,”Edmund Burke to Richard Burke, 17 February 1795,” in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, New Edition, 16 vols. (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1812), IX: 466, 472–473, 484–485. 6. In this context, I refer to “liberalism” and “capitalist modernity” as referring to values rooted in valorizing the individual, and individual conscience, over the collective, the rule of law, the separation of church and state, and “sameness” and conformity in the sense that liberalism implied that all humans living in a given area or nation deserved the same rights as individual members of that nation. See Louis Greenspan, “The Unravelling of Liberalism,” in George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity, ed. Arthur Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 202–203. 7. “Red Tory” refers to the use of the state—national and local— for the common good of society, a belief in tradition, inherited beliefs and values, and support for religion and religious belief. In the context of Canada, the term “Red Tory” also suggests support for the British connection. See Ron Dart, The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes (Dewdney, B.C.: Synaxis Press, 1999), 2–10. 8. For background on these two, important, historians see Philip Massolin, Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 6, 8, 217, 245–252; Donald Wright, The Professionalization of History in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 9. John Morley, Edmund Burke: A Historical Study (London: 1867); Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992); Jeff Taylor, Politics on a Human Scale: The American Tradition of Decentralism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013). 10. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1953); Jesse Norman, Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician Prophet (London: HarperCollins, 2013); Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, second ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 105–132. 11. Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015),

2

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

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16–17; See also David Bromwich, The Intellectual Biography of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and the Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); David Dwan and Christopher J. Insole, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Larry Schmidt, ed., George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations (Toronto: Anansi, 1978). Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/ McLuhan/Grant (Montreal, QC: New World Perspectives, 1984). Peter C. Emberley, By Loving Our Own: George Grant and the Legacy of Lament for a Nation (Ottawa, ON: Carleton University Press, 1990). Yusuf K. Umar, ed., George Grant and the Future of Canada (Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press, 1992); A similar, and in some ways more profound, text is Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Religion, and Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). See also T.F. Rigelhof, George Grant: Redefining Canada (Montreal, QC: XYZ Publishing, 2001). Robin Lathangue, “In the Perspective of the Citizen: The Public Philosophy of George Grant,” in George Grant: English-Speaking Justice (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1998), vii-xxiii. Robin Mathews, George Grant’s Betrayal of Canada (Vancouver: R. Mathews Northlands Publications, 2004), 9–12. Harris Athanasiadis, George Grant and the Theology of the Cross: The Christian Foundations of His Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Hugh Donald Forbes, George Grant: A Guide to His Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). George Grant, The Empire: Yes or No? (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1945), 7, 9, 11. Ibid, 19, 23–27, 30–34. See also Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968); Nelson

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24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

Wiseman, In Search of Canadian Political Culture (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008). Somewhat oddly, given the growth of post-1960s Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the United States, which built on earlier evangelical Christian traditions in the United States. See especially Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard, 2014). Grant, Lament for a Nation, 55–57. Ibid, 58. For background, see Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, new ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 2003). R.C. Davidson, “Military Integration and George Grant’s Lament for a Nation,” in George Grant and the Future of Canada, ed. Yusuf K. Umar (Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press, 1992), 132– 133. Ibid, 59–62, 71–73, 94–95. George Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), 27. Ibid, 27–8. On Vietnam, see Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). Ibid, 30–1. Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, updated edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Buchanan served as a chief aide to President Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He later became an outspoken critic of free trade, American imperialism, as well as a spokesperson for culturally conservative positions such as the “pro-life” movement and anti-LGBT rights views. All of these views sum up the “paleo-conservative” viewpoint. Buchanan ran two insurgent, but ultimately unsuccessful, campaigns for the Republican Party nomination for President in 1992 and 1996. He ran for President on the Reform Party ticket in 2000. See Peter Kolozi, Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 169, 179–180.

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33. Grant, Technology and Empire, 77. An examination of Canadian participation in Vietnam can be found in Victor Levant, Quiet Complicity: Canadian Involvement in the Vietnam War (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1987). 34. Ibid, 100–107. 35. Paul Edward Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 36. Grant to Derek Bedson, 2 February 1978 in George Grant: Selected Letters, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 298. 37. See Athanasiadis, George Grant and the Theology of the Cross, esp. pp. 209–214. 38. Grant to Joan O’Donovan, 1982 in George Grant: Selected Letters, 324–325. 39. Grant, Time as History, 59. 40. Ibid, 60–61. 41. Burke, “Speech on American Insurrection, 15 September 1778,” in Works, Vol. IX: 225–226; Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 44–45, 140–143; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Vintage Books, 1968), 84–90. 42. Michel Ducharme and Jean-Francois Constant, “Introduction: A Project of a Rule Called Canada—The Liberal Order Framework and Historical Practice,” in Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution, eds. Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 6–10. 43. Burke, “Speech on Taxation in the American Colonies, 10 October 1774,” in Works Vol. II: 9, 15, 27–28, 35, 47–48, 51. On the anti-monopoly, anti-tax element in liberalism, see Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought, 1914–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 189. 44. Burke, “Speech on Electoral Reform, 4 January 1770,” in Works, Vol. I: 482–483, 503–504. 45. Taylor, Politics on a Human Scale, 26–28. 46. Burke, “Speech on Indian Affairs and Corruption, 5 April 1794,” in Works, Vol. III: 83–84, 92–99, 101–106.

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47. Frederick G. Whelan, “Burke on India,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, eds. David Dwan and Christopher J. Insole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 172–173, 179–180. 48. Burke, “Letter to William Bourke, 15 August 1780,” in Works, Vol. VI: 325–329, 334, 336–338, 340–343; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 , second ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 11–54, 324–333. 49. Burke, “Commentary on Revolutionary France, 26 May 1792,” in Works, Vol. V: 166, 297–301, 305, 308–311. 50. Massolin, Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 8, 246–249. 51. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 40. 52. Bill Kauffman, Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006); Roger Scruton, England and the Need for Nations (London: Civitas, 2004), 33–38; Taylor, Politics on a Human Scale. 53. Grant, English-Speaking Justice, 49–50.

CHAPTER 3

George Grant and Simone Weil: Amor Fati and Consenting to Otherness Colin Cordner

In another and earlier essay, I took up the old challenge of finding a satisfactory manner of validly pigeonholing George Grant as a thinker.1 No easy feat, given what Zdravko Planinc once termed Grant’s “polyphony.” In essence, despite the remarkable coherence of his voice, questions, and faith down the years, any would-be exegete or pigeonholer is faced with a stark obstacle. The initial problem is the sheer breadth of Grant’s own readings (ranging from The Republic and The Critique of Pure Reason to the Bhagavad-Gita) and his general faithfulness to the thinkers with whom he grapples in his own lectures and writings. Always, he does so in seeming partnership with them as primary questions are grappled with and thought.

C. Cordner (B) Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_3

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A pertinent example of this faithful partnering would be his extended commentary on Nietzsche in Time as History. That was certainly a brilliant “collaboration,” accomplished despite Grant’s vocal rejection of Nietzsche’s thought. So too might we point to his commentary upon English contractarianism in English-Speaking Justice, which expands upon and critiques the meaning and implications of the tradition without descending into unreasoned polemics. In short, Grant’s justice and friendliness in dialogue—even with those with whom he profoundly disagreed—often makes it difficult to distinguish his own thoughts. To unravel that conundrum, in that earlier essay, I took the exegetical expedient of isolating various symbols which sustain a presence within Grant’s published works, e.g. necessity and eternity. These I then correlated with similar thoughts on the same symbols (and, naturally, the underlying experiences that engendered them) expressed among the thinkers and traditions to which Grant addressed himself. By this procedure, it was possible to accomplish two feats. One was to winnow down the range of suitors for Grant’s fidelity (resulting in an ejection from the crowd of Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and the Calvinist and Augustinian traditions, for instance). The other feat was to dismiss any opinion of a simple eclecticism or even incoherence on Grant’s part. Whatever else one may think of Grant’s thought, one cannot accuse him of a philodoxer’s preoccupation with mere opinions and ideas. Rather, his concern was clearly and consistently the adequate and true expression and enucleation of primary experiences (e.g. the experience and meaning of transcendence and immanence, being and time). Such experiences, over the long chains of human history, find expression in mythic, philosophic, theological, and mystic symbols. These then must be subjugated to analysis, elaboration, correction, or rejection. To perform such an analysis of symbols, one must then have some adequate knowledge of the primary experience given expression in the symbol. This, at the very least, demands a sympathetic imagination and engaging in the partnership of dialogue with that person or tradition evoking the experience through the symbol. One must also be capable of submitting the substance or fruits of the dialogue to critical investigation, ending wherever it will. We may recognize in this procedure the analogue of the familiar Socratic method of zetema (“questing”), with its accent on dialektikos and elenchus, noesis and dianoesis, and frequent aporia.

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All that is to say that Grant had his good reasons for accepting or rejecting certain symbolizations, along with the thinkers or traditions behind them. At the end of my earlier essay, I necessarily concluded that only Plato and Simone Weil, and a sort of Christian Platonic tradition, were accepted by Grant as being more than simply adequate guides to the challenge of not only enucleating the confusions of our age, but transcending them. I admitted there, though, that it was not precisely clear why Grant was so taken by Weil, in particular, as a thinker, as opposed to simply a figure of religious saintliness. I noted only that the key to understanding his enthusiasm for her thought was suggested by his two oft-repeated paraphrases of her: “faith is the experience of the intelligence illuminated by love” and “love is consent to otherness.” In this essay, I attempt to expand upon that previous work. I do so by relating these two paraphrases and their tacit meaning for Grant. First as a response to the question of the relationship between necessity, freedom, and eternity. Second as suggested a path of overcoming the Western fate of endless and destructive striving for the complete mastery of human and non-human nature which he held led us towards the remaking of the world as a universal and homogenous state (UHS).

Necessity and Freedom in the Thought of Simone Weil and George Grant In the thought of Weil, “necessity” may be said to be two things. Firstly, it may be seen as an expression of the experience of regular, even mathematical laws, contrasted with the meaningful freedom of an ineffable, fully transcendent God. Secondly, however, necessity is the inescapable condition of creation, creation only being possible via God’s withdrawal of His overwhelming essence from the immediate environs of Being.2 “Necessity” is thus, in a sense, necessary, for, in the complete absence of meaningless necessity there is only the option of the fully meaningful presence of God, in which no mere being can stand.3 Necessity, thus, is the veil which God placed between Himself and us in order to allow us the possibility to freely be. Weil’s symbolization of divine creation is radically opposed to any conception of the divine (or freedom) as being power, and of creation as a positive act of power or expansion of power into a void. Rather, Weil presents creation as a form of kenosis —a negative act, an emptying-out, or non-action of withdrawal. Creation, rather than an expansion or overflowing of the divine power,

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was a radical consent to otherness—a self-emptying which is ultimately a perfect love manifesting as attentively allowing the other to be. Analogically, such love and creative non-action is like the very human attentive contemplation of the beauty of a flower, or of a beloved whom we simply wish to be, in and of themselves and no more. Such divine, contemplative love, is thus kenotic in the sense that it presumes and requires a letting go or de-creation of the “I” and its selfish desire to pick the flower or consume the beloved. Such a non-action of intelligence is loving and faithful in so far as it admires and allows the object of contemplation to reveal itself to a naked, receptive mind, relaxed, and ready to know the sense of it.4 While it opens the intelligence, consent to otherness also opens the space for freedom, by, paradoxically, de-creating the self and allowing oneself to let go of all worldly, necessary, and typical physical and egocentric concerns. It is Weil’s conception of ontological necessity that would linger in Grant’s writing long after the Reformed and Hegelian variations were set aside.5 In that conception, God’s love is, paradoxically, demonstrated by quiet withdrawal so that creation can exist—a supreme consent to otherness—and intimations of deprival remain as signs of that divine love. In Weil’s conception of creation, necessity, and grace, God’s withdrawal is the creative activity by which any being can exist other and independent of Himself. This “consent to otherness” is thus understood as the supreme act of love which allows human beings the freedom to choose grace, overcome themselves, and become partners in the ongoing activity of creation. The universe itself, moreover, is let to operate under natural and necessary laws, without miracles, thus making it knowable to the intelligence. Tangentially, Grant himself appears to have squared himself to the radical historical necessity of Nietzsche’s thought by filtering it through Weil. For, in Weil’s thought, the experience, suffering, and contemplation of necessity become a spiritual exercise in the de-creation of the “I.” This de-creation of the “I” thus allows one to open-up to grace, learn attention to the beautiful and the good, and having hollowed oneself out and takenup the weight of the Cross—manifest compassion and the higher virtues. This then is amor fati in Weil’s understanding, and it is this conception of necessity to which Grant was drawn and much sympathetic.

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Exegesis of Grant’s Work At this juncture, the seeming conclusion that extends from this complex web of rejected and adopted symbols would be a metaphysics in which the fate of humanity, as a species, is a by-product of the vicissitudes of historical and ontological necessity. Grant accepted the conceptions of “eternity” and “history” which seemed to be shared by Christianity and Platonic philosophy, but never dismissed the historicism of Nietzsche as a concern in human life. And yet, necessity does not extend into the lives of all souls; Grant’s rejection of Hegelianism and his acceptance of Weil’s thought is an effective indication of his belief that the fate of Man cannot be conceived as the fate of all men. To Grant’s mind, one primal difficulty of every North American’s fate remains that lack of deep traditions of contemplation through which transcendence is pursued. But, the opportunity for the soul’s transcendence of the necessity of historically conditioned Being is held-out as an eternal possibility in Grant’s work and his own experience. In so far as a transcendence of Being is posited as possible, the implicit metaphysical understanding presented in Grant’s writing is compatible with his more explicit self-identifications as a Christian Platonist.6 Indeed, to a degree, Simone Weil’s understanding of transcendence is even compatible with Luther’s theology. This, however, is true only in so far as one is capable of linking and identifying Luther’s naked confrontation with God’s wrath and His periodic absence from his life, with Weil’s radical de-creation of the “I” which is practiced for the purpose of opening a spiritual void which may be filled by His grace. To the extent that Luther’s battle with his libido dominandi, his amor sui, is comparable to Weil’s negation of the “I,” there is similitude and compatibility in their metaphysics. However, lest the compatibility be over-emphasized, it must be recalled that Luther’s Providence also entails the eternal presence of God in the world in the forms of both His wrath and His grace. Luther’s God is thus the God of St. Augustine and Plato— a God who is both totally immanent and totally transcendent.7 He is a different figure indeed from the radically transcendent God of Simone Weil, who is experienced in the world primarily as the presence of an absence and by descents of Grace to the afflicted. There is a greater degree of harmony to be found in the definitions of eternity and history which Grant seems to accept. This is at least true in so far that his refusal to identify the two symbols with each other—an

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identification which he perceived in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Aristotle—is an act compatible with his acceptance of both their radical opposition in Weil’s thought, and with the presence of the eternal in time (and therefor the influence of eternity upon the temporal) which is posited in Christian Platonism, Augustinian theology, Platonic, and neo-Platonic philosophy. To put the matter negatively, “eternity” and “history,” as symbols, can only be reconciled with the rest of Grant’s implicit symbology only if the modern, progressivist interpretations of those symbols are rejected; something which Grant himself does rather explicitly in his 1966 introduction to Philosophy in the Mass Age. The Kojèvian identification of eternity with time, time with history, and history with man, was there tossed aside, something which allowed Grant the hope of reconciling his experience of faith with his reason. What this hope demanded, however, was a turning away from the Hegelian promise of a Science containing, within itself, the sum totality of all historical thought. However, while it is apparent that Grant rejected the core of Hegelian thinking (namely, its self-identification as the pure synthesis of all philosophies and theologies), it appears equally clear that he took seriously its implications. Grant’s inability to simply dismiss Nietzsche, in spite of his apparently profound repulsion,8 is evidenced by his acceptance of the sort of necessity enforced by the historical conditioning of human thought. As Planinc observed, Grant’s intuitive acceptance of Nietzschean historicism—at least in its general form—played itself out in his work in a very particular way; namely, his attempt to bracket and contain Nietzsche’s necessity of thought within Weil’s necessity of Being.9 Indeed, Weil and Nietzsche cannot be easily reconciled in a simple synthesis of symbols which might then be compatible with the rest of Grant’s thought. Rather, Nietzsche would need necessarily to be subordinated to Weil, for Grant could not agree with the former’s identification of eternity and time any more than he could accept the similar identification made by Hegel-Kojève. Neither, however, does he seem to feel comfortable with dismissing “necessity” as a meaningful symbol. What is curious, however, is that Grant seems to have felt obligated to choose between the two most broad and overwhelming understandings of necessity which were available to him. By all appearances, it would seem that the only four apprehensions of necessity which he considered seriously were those of (i) Hegelian thought, (ii) that derived from the Reformed Christian symbol of Providence, (iii) Nietzsche’s conception, and (iv) Weil’s. Having dismissed the first two as candidates by 1966 and

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1957 respectively, it would appear that Grant had left himself with few options. The question then becomes why Grant so limited his options in the first instance, when a less encompassing understanding of the necessary were available to him from within the Christian Platonist, Lutheran, and Platonic traditions—traditions whose authority which he had in fact accepted in other matters. A possible answer is that Grant’s acceptance of Weil’s thought is, in fact, no more comprehensive or total than his acceptance of Nietzsche’s. That is to say that, much as he subordinated Nietzsche’s thoughts on necessity to Weil’s, Grant, in turn, interpreted Weil through a particular lens which tacitly subordinated her thoughts to yet another party. As Andrew’s work on Grant’s interpretation of Celine convincingly demonstrates,10 Grant, no less than most human beings, was prone to seeing the best—and thus, what he wished to see—in others, even to the extent to which he could miss the sometimes profound extent of his disagreement with their actual thoughts and actions. If such a thesis is fair in principle though, the question becomes one of determining which, if any, glasses Grant may have been wearing when he apprehended Weil’s writings on necessity. Given the limited range of obvious choices after Grant’s dismissal of Hegelian thought and Reformed theology, and his subordination of Nietzsche to Weil herself, the list of potential suspects becomes rather brief. Among those schools of thought which are left among Grant’s perennial sources are the Platonic, Aristotelian, Christian Platonic, Scholastic, Lutheran, and liberal. The liberal school, however, had been subordinated to Nietzsche by Grant himself in his early work, for the reason that he perceived the latter’s thoughts to be the fullest expression of the spirit of liberalism. The Aristotelian and Scholastic schools were, moreover, never really taken seriously as sources of authority regarding his own burning questions; at best, they were preferable alternatives to the arid contractualism of liberal thought. The elimination of those three leaves only three others as obvious possibilities. Of these three, the textual evidence provided by Grant’s commentaries on Weil most strongly indicates that he perceived a certain harmony to exist between Weil’s thoughts and those of Plato. In his 1970 Introduction to Simone Weil, Grant makes reference to such a harmonious relationship on five separate occasions, and in four additional instances in his 1988 In Defense of Simone Weil. On these occasions, Weil is referred to as either a student or follower of Plato11 , in either explicit or implicit

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agreement with his thought12 , or an illuminating commentator on his work.13 What is difficult about this position is that there are significant, indeed obvious, reasons to believe that Weil’s thought on necessity was not in accord with that which was expressed in Plato’s dialogues. In particular, it would seem that a glaring indication of this divergence is presented by Grant’s Weil’s reading of the passage at [493c] of the Republic. In that instance, Grant’s Weil’s rendering of the passage14 has the figure of Socrates speak to the brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus of “… an infinite distance separating the good from necessary…” (emphasis added). However, a more accurate rendering speaks not of infinite distance, but of “… the difference between the good and the necessary” (emphasis added).15 While Grant’s Weil’s rendering is more compatible with the understanding of necessity which Grant himself understands her to be presenting, it conflicts sharply with the understanding of the Platonic and Christian Platonist traditions. In contrast with the sharply dualistic interpretation, both of those traditions present the world of seeming and necessity as subsisting in a complex, often dynamic relationship with the Good or God which is mediated through the eternal forms. Based, I think, on Grant’s somewhat muddled reading of Weil, Planinc has suggested that it would thus be more accurate to describe Weil as a Gnostic Platonist than either a Christian Platonist or Platonic philosopher.16 I think that it may be an error to classify Weil as a Gnostic in the sense employed by philosophers such as Eric Voegelin or Hans Jonas: a gnostic there defined as being one who asserts that the creation is bad, the Creator evil or deluded, the True God as being wholly beyond the world, the Incarnation as an illusion, and one’s spiritual destiny to overcome evil through escaping the body and the world. To think of Weil as a gnostic in this sense would be very difficult to square with her ceaseless good works, her concern with the affliction of others, and her reflections on the four forms of love (of neighbour, ritual, beauty, and friendship) as positive paths to the divine within the world and through the world. Weil’s thought was indisputably that of Provencal and Greece, but I think that Grant is hitting the mark in dubbing her a Greek Christian and a theologian of the Cross. Grant himself was quite aware of the traditional Platonic understanding of the relationship between the Good and necessity, and, apparently, was a great expounder of it at times, as evinced by his letter to Rod Crook on

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July 19th, 1965.17 Indeed, even his late writings evince a fairly orthodox reading of Plato from within the Christian tradition. If Grant considered the sharply dualistic interpretation of Plato to be accurate, it is not made clear by the greater body of his work. But, lest it be suggested otherwise, given his open and public character, it would be disingenuous to suggest that Grant was covering up such beliefs under so much esoteric writing. The options for explaining the contradiction therefore seem to be two: either Grant was simply unaware of how heterodox Weil’s Plato was, or his reading of Weil’s Plato was, in a sense, made orthodox by his reading of her through the lens of the tradition. The first position, however, seems untenable given that a comparison of the letter to Crook (dated 1965) against the Introduction to Simone Weil (dated 1970) reveals that he was well aware of the orthodox reading well before his exposition of Weil’s heterodox interpretation. The second position, therefore, would seem to be the likely option. Given Grant’s stressing, in the 1986 essay entitled “Faith and the Multiversity,” of the love of others as a principle of justice which had gone missing in the technological age, it would appear that he did not adopt a too literal understanding of the world as the “blind play of mechanical necessities.”18 However, in that same essay, Grant freely mixed the thoughts of Plato-Socrates with those of Weil’s in such a manner as to leave ambiguous to the reader his final stance regarding the meaning of the symbol “necessity.” At the very most, one could deduce from his writing that it is “necessary” to think within one’s historical horizons, as Grant’s Nietzsche proclaimed, and “necessary” also to bear the causal realities and afflictions of the world, as with Grant’s Weil. However, it is uncertain from his later texts if, in his later years, Grant fully believed in the mediated presence of the Good in all things—necessity included—as posited in the Platonic tradition and in some sense in Weil’s thought (if only when contemplating the supreme beauty of the universe). His refusal to fully retreat from the public world, however, certainly argues against any suggestion that he may have perceived the world of necessities and imperfections as being meaningless and without purpose. It must also be said that this continued deep involvement in the world mirrors Weil’s own. It seems certain that Grant was persuaded by Weil’s exposition of God’s creativity as essentially love expressed as consent to otherness—a withdrawal from a fragment of being so that it may truly live as a being other than God19 . It is also clear that he felt that, among all the thinkers that

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he had thought alongside, only Weil had succeeded in thinking of truth, justice, beauty, and love, as well as creation and the Cross.20 By such a light, the Platonic periagoge or “turning around” would be spurred by either intimations of deprival or “possession by Christ”—an incarnate theophany—experienced as the descent enacted by the divine. In either event, contemplative preparation and practice remained one’s necessary journey and preparation. “Obedience” in Weil’s apparent meaning is nothing so much as a woman or man’s reciprocal act of withdrawal and consent to otherness (of acting through inaction to borrow a Daoist expression)—a manner of being wholly in the world but not of the world.21 In this vein, it is notable that Grant curiously makes no specific reference to the four loves which Weil held to be paths of meditation: love of religious ceremonies, love of the beauty of the world, love of neighbour, and friendship. Weil held that each, properly lived-out, was an implicit and indirect love of God, which, once it flowered, only infinitely strengthened those loves and did not negate or depreciate them. It is somewhat odd that of these four, only love of the beautiful appears to come up for consideration in Grant’s works. Even then, it comes up for consideration not as a mystical or spiritual practice. Rather, to my knowledge, love of beauty only comes up for Grant as a paradox or question after his reading of the works of the French author Céline. These Grant considered to be beautiful, but also bad in the sense of perverse. This experience only provoked to Grant the question of whether there was perhaps a final distinction between the beautiful and the good. Moreover, Grant’s statement in “Two Theological Languages” that “For myself, I would now define ‘freedom’ as the liberty to be indifferent to the good [in keeping with Christianity, Plato, and Augustine]”22 , leaves little obvious room for ambiguity as to how he himself came to define freedom towards the end of his life. However, in the final analysis, that particular statement does little to clear-up the matter of whether, towards the end of his career, Grant agreed with the assertion of SocratesPlato that the Good was present in all things of the world of Being in mediated forms, or whether he stood alongside Weil’s placement of the Good itself completely and totally beyond Being in any conventional sense. Weil’s assertion that “The only choice given to men, as intelligent and free creatures, is to desire obedience or not to desire it”23 , is not clearly

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compatible, for instance, with the myths of final judgement and transmigration of the psyche which are recounted by Socrates in Book X of the Republic or in the Phaedo. For, in both of those cases, choice is presented as an essential factor in deciding one’s lot and fate in life. Wisdom, within this understanding of things, thus entails knowledge of the differences which distinguish a just from an unjust life, but also entails knowledge of one’s ultimate responsibility for one’s own fate and destiny. With respect to Weil’s thought, I believe that the reconciliation with Plato’s Socrates comes from recollecting two points. One is that, for Weil, the spiritual path to truth, love, and the good is one of radical de-creation of the self. The “I” in this sense, and the will to autonomy, are experienced as the fundamental obstacles to one’s receptivity to the transcendent. Every act to attain transcendence (or of self-expression and expansion) is considered by her to be an attempted act of power and imagination—precisely the opposite of the kenotic creativity of the divine through loving withdrawal. Rather, it is to Weil’s mind and experience only by (i) learning to unwind one’s habit of imposing one’s self and imagination upon the world and on others and (ii) learning to give things proper receptive attention, that one begins to analogically imitate the divine. This leads to the second point that the Socratic preparation for periagoge, whatever else that it may entail, always entails practice of aporia, zetema, and elenchus. These are nothing if not a clearing-out of the eidola of the imagination for the sake of apperceiving aletheia (in the dual sense of truth and reality) and the good—whether through contemplation or dialogue. From this perspective, and in this sense, we can thus understand Weil’s insistence upon the need for a kenotic, even Greek Stoic amor fati: obedience is simply the freedom to receptively and attentively love the order of things, i.e. necessity.

Grant in Action Unfortunately, it is not clear from Grant’s writings how, or if, he understood this final (if perhaps only apparent) tension in his beliefs and loyalties. Given the seeming lack of textual evidence regarding his final thoughts regarding “necessity,” one may only judge anecdotally, by making reference to the bare fact of Grant’s continued involvement in the public world, his expansive writing and publication, and his apparent

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hope thereby of freeing the minds of some of his students from the more pernicious aspects of modern thinking. Such acts would seem to fly in the face of a view of the world as a mere mechanism. It might, however, be argued that Grant’s activism was in keeping with Weil’s call to obedience in the sense that it was merely the rote, orthopraxic exercise commanded by his faith. However, such an argument would do no justice to, nor adequately explain, the breadth and character of his works. For surely one cannot explain away Grant’s public analyses of Nietzsche in the Massey Lectures, nor his attempt to salvage the natural-law tradition in English-Speaking Justice, among other activities, as simply being part and parcel of the orthopraxic demands of Christianity. Whatever veil of obscurity may lay over his words on necessity and freedom, his works in the world clearly speak volumes, and one is justified in sustaining, as did Grant on occasion, that “By their fruits you shall know them.” (Matthew 7:15–21). To judge George Grant by the fruits of his labour is to thus judge him as a human being who did not, in fact, see fit to submit to the inescapable, mechanical necessity of the age, nor as one who truly believed in it. For, as in the veins of his faith, “By their works, you shall know them” (Luke 6:44–46), and Grant’s deeds were surely not those of a man obedient to the evils of the world.

Moving Forward Recovery of one’s own dignity, and the possibility of virtue or love of wisdom, is no mean feat in such a vacuum. To use Grant’s language, it requires listening to and grappling with the intimations of deprival present in one’s life, alongside the good fortune of stumbling upon some contemplative path. The paths of contemplative practice laid out by Greek Christian thought, Plato, Weil, and the Hindu and Buddhist traditions are alternately named by Grant as some reliable paths to recovery and recollection of Being (in the sense of Socratic-Platonic anamnesis ). Late in life, Grant remarked to David Cayley that he had spent perhaps too much time enucleating what was wrong with the West.25 He expressed a desire to turn his mind to a more positive path. It is more than suggestive to note that Simone Weil’s thoughts occupied his contemplation so much that he returned to her frequently in the classroom and out, up to the end of his life. One infers from this that he perceived a positive path through her.

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Taken together, the two aphorisms, “Faith is the experience of the intelligence illuminated by love” and “love is consent to otherness” suggest the form and content of the frame of mind and existence which would break free from the endless will to master human and nonhuman nature through the subordination and technical (mis)application of instrumental reasoning. An intelligence that is loving and faithful cannot be merely instrumental and domineering towards the object of its passion. A love that is supremely consent to otherness cannot be other than contemplative, attentive, and admiring. It leads to a forgetfulness of the self and the “giving away of the self” which Grant so admired in Weil’s life and that of other saintly moral figures. Clearly, such an intelligence is not compatible with the drive to mastery which Grant assessed to be the Western destiny and the primal North American drive. This understanding of reason as being ultimately loving attention to what is, certainly is recognizably Platonic and Greek Christian Platonic. Thus, for these reasons, we can comprehend Grant’s interest, given his quest not only to understand by untangling Western fate. The drive to universalize and homogenize the world (Canada, Grant’s homeland, being no exception) loses fuel when the will to master itself is dissipated and reason itself is restored to its proper contemplative function—as a ruler rather than servant of the will and the “I”’s self-glorification and will-to-power. All of this seems clear and comprehensible. What I find less clear in Grant’s writings is a clear idea of a path of practice, or praxis, per se. Certainly, his style of teaching was Socratic and contemplative. The respectful attention he gave even to thoughts which he openly considered heinous, demonstrates in practice the sort of faithful attention that his Weil took as the mark of true and free intelligence. However, one could justly wonder how much of this manner of being can be transmitted tacitly or explicitly outside of the presence of an actual teacher who embodies the principles. I find Grant’s silence on the matter of Weil’s four loves particularly puzzling, since they would seem to be fecund ground for broad practice and self-cultivation. Perhaps for a lifelong university educator, nothing would be as impossible as to suggest or teach openly as how to love the beautiful and how to love one’s neighbour, no matter how much he may have strived to express such love in his own life.

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Notes 1. See Colin Cordner, “George Grant on History, Eternity, and The Universal Homogeneous State” in Canadian Conservative Political Thought (Routledge: March 2023). 2. Simone Weil; Waiting on God (London: Fontana, 1958), 66–68. 3. ibid, 82. 4. “The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be joy and pleasure. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy.” but also “Actively searching is harmful, not only to love but also to the intelligence whose laws imitate love. One must simply wait expectantly for the solution of a geometric problem, or for the sense of a Latin or Greek phrase to arise in one’s mind (spirit). A fortiori [Latin—all the more so] for a new scientific truth or a beautiful verse. Searching leads to error.” Simone Weil, Awaiting God, trans. Brad Jersak (Friesens: Canada, 2012), 25 and 90. 5. See George Grant, “Defense of Simone Weil” in The George Grant Reader, eds. William Christian and Sheila Grant; (University of Toronto Press; Toronto: 1998), 264. Written in 1988, the essay certainly demonstrates Grant’s continued attachment to Weil. A particular demonstration of the serious with which he considered her though is caught in the phrase “How is possible that human beings are given over to the afflictions of necessity? What is it to contemplate Goodness itself in the light of the afflictions of necessity?”. 6. The late Professor Emberley, in comments to a very early draft of this essay, posed the following possibility, “Is it not that he [i.e. Grant] is saying that our public language is dominated by historicism while our souls long for a perfection and beauty which we know, but cannot publicly articulate?” In essence, is Grant struggling with ontological questions, or with political questions, i.e. questions of public reason and language? Is it a language dominated by historicism which is the principle personal and political problem of the age? My premise and contention throughout this essay is that Grant was genuinely grappling with primary experiences of transcendence, their possibility, and adequate articulation—not only with the current limitations of public language, which arise only consequently and secondarily.

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7. In Grant’s late commentary on Weil in interview with David Cayley, Grant affirms Plato to be the Great Western exponent of negative theology—of moving towards the divine or ground of being through negation of world and its forms. In think that in this, Grant is holding to a more dualistic interpretation of Plato’s dialogues than can easily be supported. Can it be squared with the sort of mystical ascents which figure in Politeia, Symposium, or Phaedrus ? I think that it may even be too dualistic an interpretation of Weil, who certainly does not negate love of neighbour, beauty, friend, or ritual as paths of ascent; See George Grant, “Excerpt from Interview with David Cayley” in The Collected Works of George Grant, Volume 4, 1970–1988. (University of Toronto Press: 2009), 867–879. 8. George Grant, Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship’ in Dionysus 3 (December), 5–16 (reprinted in 1986). 9. Zdravko Planinc, Paradox and Polyphony in Grant’s Critique of Modernity, 38, reprinted in Art Davis; Subversions of Modernity. 10. Ed Andrew; “Grant’s Celine”, reprinted in Art Davis, Subversions of Modernity. 11. See George Grant; “Introduction to Simone Weil” (1970); and “In Defense of Simone Weil” (1988); in TGGR, 243, 252, 259. 12. ibid, 249, 248, 258, 263. 13. ibid, 249, 257. 14. Quoted by Grant in his “Introduction to Simone Weil” on page 248 of TGGR. Interestingly, this seems to be a misquote, Weil’s original phrase being “As Plato said, there is a great difference between the essence of the necessary and that of the Good”, which is closer to the original Greek. See Simone Weil, Awaiting God, 94. 15. See Plato’s Republic as translated by Bloom or by Leroux, [493c]. 16. Zdravko Planinc; “Paradox and Polyphony in Grant’s Critique of Modernity”, reprinted in, Art Davis, Subversions of Modernity, 34. 17. George Grant, “Letter to Rod Crook”, in TGGR, 207. 18. Excerpted from Simone Weil; Gravity and Grace (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), 63. 19. This theology of divine love as withdrawal and consent to otherness is, one might remark, a wholly different affair from such theologies which posit God as dynamis —power in the most pregnant

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20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

sense—and activity. It differs also from theologies of glory, and predestinarian creeds glorifying God as Absolute Will. This is a rather large topic to expound upon, too great for this essay. Suffice perhaps to say that, for Weil, the Passion and the Cross are a perfect reflection of the original creation—a supreme act of divine kenosis and therefore consent to otherness, or love. By the same token, that absolute consent to otherness, represented in creation and the Cross, permits the existence of a knowable universe subject only to comprehensible laws—the possibility of pursuing the truth. The eternal and unrestrained giving of grace, and the absolute freedom accept it or not, are the elements of divine, kenotic justice. This understanding of obedience is common both to the Biblical traditions as well as the Hindu tradition of karma yoga as expounded by Krishna to Arjuna in The Bhagavad-Gita, both of which both Weil and Grant drew heavily upon. George Grant, 1988 addendum to “Two Theological Languages”, reprinted in Wayne Whillier; Two Theological Languages by George Grant and Other Essays in Honour of His Work (USA: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 17. Excerpt from Simone Weil; Waiting on God, 71. See “Excerpt from Interview with David Cayley” in The Collected Works of George Grant, Volume 4, 1970 -1988. University of Toronto Press. 2009. The original interview took place in August of 1985 as part of a Canadian Broadcast Corporation Radio series, and was first published in it’s totality in David Cayley’s George Grant in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi 1995).

CHAPTER 4

Universal Civil War: Grant on Globalism and Nationalism H. D. Forbes

For WAR, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time, is to be considered in the nature of war; as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII1

It will soon be sixty years since the publication of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation caused a flutter in the dovecote of Canadian politics with its unsettling account of the intellectual and cultural (as well

H. D. Forbes (B) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_4

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as economic, political, and military) dependence of Canada and Canadians on their worldlier, wealthier, more numerous, and more confident southern cousins. Thirty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, the end of the Cold War, and the influential interpretation of these events by Francis Fukuyama, which introduced a large audience to the strange idea of “the end of history” and to the obscure academic debate, forty years earlier, between two unknowns, Alexandre Koj`eve and Leo Strauss, about “the universal and homogeneous state.”2 Lester Pearson, who for Grant represented Canada’s acquiescence to this political project, expressed this idea in the following manner: We must apply the science and art of politics to the affairs of the international community with the intensity of personal involvement that we give to domestic affairs….We must reach the point where we consider war between countries as civil war….We must cultivate international ideals, develop international policies, strengthen international institutions, above all the United Nations, so that peace and progress can be made secure in the family of man.3

In his Lament, Grant had presented a worldwide egalitarian society as “the pinnacle of political striving” and had claimed that the acceptance of this goal (and of American leadership in pursuit of it) had made Canada “redundant.” His account of “the defeat of Canadian nationalism” remains controversial. Was it true then or is it true now that “our culture floundered on the aspirations of the age of progress”?4 Many readers in the 1960s dismissed Grant’s broad claims about the “defeat” and “disappearance” of Canada as “too pessimistic.” (Some just snorted at Grant’s blatant disregard for elementary common sense. The defeat of Canadian nationalism? The disappearance of Canada? What defeat? What disappearance? What nonsense!) Many today would say that his claims have been falsified by the major events of the past sixty years. The old rivalry between communism and capitalism (or Marxism and liberalism), which during the Cold War overrode all other considerations, has faded away. Differences between Canada and the United States that were hard to see sixty years ago, such as health care and gun laws, are now more often remarked. Canada has doubled its population, shed some of its monarchist trappings, and now displays a celebrated commitment to progressive values. In 1965, Canada adopted a new flag, which was designed to represent all Canadians “without distinction of

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race, language, belief, or opinion,”5 The country has since survived two bruising referenda on Quebec’s independence, and “separatism,” a fantasy which may never disappear altogether, has been eclipsed by more practical challenges. The issues that now dominate the political agenda (such as race, gender, freedom, taxation, vaccination, abortion, and immigration) invite independent policymaking, demonstrating national independence and the complexity (and fluidity) of partisan divisions. Does anyone today worry publicly about the defeat or disappearance of Canada? The problem of world order—the problem of war, primarily—remains a challenge, and some, pondering “the return of history,” would say that it is growing more ominous all the time. The solution seems obvious beyond dispute: at a minimum, establish an international authority of some kind to adjudicate the potentially explosive clashes between independent states. And if that seems too modest a goal, then aim higher—try to bring all of humanity under a common democratic constitution and government with laws that ensure peace and justice for all. Thinkers of the calibre of Dante, Rousseau, and Kant have pointed the way; others have filled in some gaps and spelled out some implications.6 Why has their advice not been heeded? Why are people and their leaders behaving so irrationally? Why, if the solution is so obvious, is so little being done? The mystery is often resolved with a single word, nationalism. It is the magic word for a situation that seems to defy rational explanation. When nationalism takes the stage, reason withdraws, overcome by emotion, it seems.7 Perhaps humans are not, ultimately, rational creatures.8 In fact, there is an immense literature about nationalism that treats it as a “force” that sweeps aside all other political considerations, trumping the reasonable arguments for international law and the peaceful resolution of disputes. In short, nationalism blocks the way to a solution to the problem of war. It is the most noxious form of the conformist tendency of human beings, the most lamentable expression of their herd mentality, and the most dangerous of their political emotions. It may be, at best, only a step on the way to something better.9

Nationalist Lamenting Many today, hearing that George Grant was a nationalist, will wait to hear no more. Others will have read his Lament, but, like teenagers with Lady Chatterley, had eyes only for the naughty bits. In the 1960s, when the book was stirring the passions of Canadians, its reviewers encouraged its

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readers to think of it as a naughty nationalist book. But was it really an expression of Canadian nationalism? Was Grant perhaps lamenting, not the imaginary “defeat” or “disappearance” of Canada, but the real collapse of the British Empire, the decline of Britain’s role in the world, and the diminishing place of people with names like Grant, Massey, and Macdonald in Canadian life?10 Old reviews are not worth disputing, but two substantial introductions to reprints of Grant’s best-known book provide insights into the preoccupations of many of its readers in the recent past. When Lament for a Nation was reprinted in 1990, it included a lengthy Foreword by Peter Emberley, and in 2005, for the 40th Anniversary edition, there was an even longer Introduction by Andrew Potter. Both seem to me to be fixated on “nationalism” and therefore likely to mislead anyone seeking to become acquainted with Grant’s most interesting ideas. Potter’s very long Introduction (60 pages, for a 93-page book) presents the book as one that must be read, even if its arguments are weak and its predictions have been falsified by developments since its publication. Why then, one may wonder, should one bother? Potter has an answer: Grant was “the father of English-speaking Canadian nationalism” and his book “is the sun under which a generation of Canadian nationalists warm themselves.”11 Were Grant to return from the dead, Potter surmises, he would surely be disconcerted by the strength of contemporary Canadian nationalism, “stronger now than it has been in a quarter century”—hands down disproof of his main contention?—although he might be disappointed at its character, “an almost gleefully individualistic and non-deferential hyper-cosmopolitanism”—confirmation of his other main contention? Potter sides with those such as the journalist Richard Gwyn who have celebrated Canada’s emergence as “the world’s first ‘post-modern nation’” (or “postmodern something”), by contrast with “the absolute failure—or refusal—to postmodernize” south of the border.12 Canadians have done better by making themselves “more American than the Americans,” becoming “the yin to the American yang”—thus strengthening their separate national identity? Despite all its deficiencies, then, Grant’s Lament is “more than just a period piece,” Potter concludes, for it rightly suggests that “the most important faultline in Canadian federal politics” is the nationalist one—“the fracture between those who favour an independent Canada and those who desire ever-closer continental integration.”13

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Emberley, writing fifteen years earlier, in the shadow of the Free Trade Agreement of 1988 and in anticipation of the second Quebec referendum in 1995—an easily forgotten fracture?—strikes a more subdued, reflective, even “philosophical” note. He presents “Professor Grant’s book” as a “passionate defense of our Canadian identity” and a “masterpiece of political meditation,” apparently more remarkable for the gloomy emotions it stirs than the thoughts it conveys.14 Without denying the value of such revealing personal reactions to a famous political book, I would suggest a glance at some of Grant’s closely related academic writings. His thinking about politics, philosophy, and religion was not just a reaction to current events. A look at some sources may help to clarify some of his and his readers’ passions.

Koj`eve and Strauss Around 1960, Grant’s thinking underwent a major change, which he sketched in the Introduction he added to his first book, Philosophy in the Mass Age, when it was reprinted in 1966. Previously, he wrote, he had considered Hegel “the greatest of all philosophers” because of his apparent success synthesizing Greek and Christian morality. “It cannot be insisted too often how hard it is for anyone who believes the Western Christian doctrine of providence to avoid reaching the conclusion that Hegel has understood the implications of that doctrine better than any other thinker.”15 In the book he was introducing, Grant explained, he had tried “to write down in non-professional language the substance of the vision that the age of reason was beginning to dawn and first in North America.”16 Since its first publication in 1959, however, he had discovered reasons for doubting the Hegelian synthesis and his own hopes for the coming age: I am much less optimistic about the effects that a society dominated by technology has on the individuals who comprise it. I no longer believe that technology is simply a matter of means which men can use well or badly. As an end in itself, it inhibits the pursuit of other ends in the society it controls. Thus, its effect is debasing our conceptions of human excellence.17

What is Grant saying? Why had his thinking changed? What problems is he alluding to?

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In the same year as this Introduction, Grant published an enthusiastic review of The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul.18 The previous year, Grant had published Lament for a Nation, and the year before that, in an academic journal, a carefully written article, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” that is perhaps of all his writings uniquely important.19 It is a discussion of the debate mentioned earlier, between the influential though littleknown (in the English-speaking academic world) French intellectual and civil servant, Alexandre Koj`eve, and an almost equally unknown Political Scientist at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss. But Grant had somehow gotten wind of their significance, and he was among the first to write anything in English about them.20 In 1948, Strauss published (in an obscure series of Political Science Classics) a very detailed commentary on a short, virtually forgotten ancient dialogue, Hiero, which presents the conversation that its author, Xenophon, imagined between a poet reputed to be wise, Simonides of Ceos, and a Syracusan tyrant, Hiero.21 Strauss sent a copy of the book to his old friend Alexandre Koj`eve, who was one of the two people, he said, who would understand “what he was after.”22 The result was a lengthy article by Koj`eve on “L’Action politique des philosophes.”23 Strauss replied with a “Restatement.” All of this—the dialogue, Strauss’s commentary, Koj`eve’s response (slightly revised and retitled “Tyrannie et sagesse”), and Strauss’s “Restatement” (his “Mise au point”)—was published in book form in French in 1954 and in English in 1963.24 My purpose here is not to spare anyone the trouble of reading Grant’s article, which is reprinted in his 1969 collection, Technology and Empire, nor will I try to guess what Strauss and Koj`eve were saying to each other. My purpose is limited to providing some context and flagging some points that anyone reading the article today should notice. But first, something must be said about the main issue raised in the discussion between Strauss and Koj`eve. Strauss explained that the question underlying his commentary on Xenophon was whether ancient thinkers understood tyranny better than the modern philosophers who have written about politics (such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx). Strauss suggests that the ancients did indeed have a better understanding; he wanted Koj`eve, as a representative of modern philosophical thinking, to respond to this claim. One might expect such a discussion to begin with a definition of tyranny. How is the word being used? What exactly does it denote? Are tyrants simply rulers who have no legitimate claim to ruling authority,

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such as Caesar or Napoleon? Are they rulers whose actions exceed their authority? (Cromwell? George III?) Is the abuse of public office for private gain what distinguishes the tyrant from other rulers? (Are they “kleptocrats”?) Or is their distinctive trait perhaps cruelty? (Caligula? Vlad the Impaler?) Could the problem be any unchecked, unlimited, dictatorial power? What does it mean to understand tyranny? The tyrant’s motivations? The conditions that produce tyranny? The complaints that indicate its presence? Does it make any sense to discuss the causes and effects of tyranny before agreeing on what phenomena we have in view—that is, what we assume “tyranny” denotes? These are not the questions dealt with directly in any of the writings in question here. The three authors show remarkably little interest in questions of definition. Grant shifts attention from Strauss’s puzzling claim about tyranny to a theory about the goal of modern politics that Kojève attributed to Hegel and that he had presented in his response to Strauss’s book. For Strauss, and for the classical tradition, he represents, tyranny is contrary to nature, a violation of the relations that humans know (naturally or instinctively, one might say) should exist between rulers and ruled, as between parents and their children.25 For Strauss and the classical philosophers, tyranny is sought in ignorance and results in suffering; it is a personal and political misfortune, a condition of disorder, and the antithesis of philosophic wisdom. According to Kojève, Hegel saw things more positively: tyrants and philosophers cooperate in advancing practical political knowledge. Philosophers interpret given historical situations; political leaders (and preeminently “tyrants”) act on these interpretations; and the success or failure of their actions can be said to show the strengths and weaknesses of the interpretations in question. For Kojève, tyrants have a function in history: they conduct the biggest and most important political experiments. (Like surgeons testing new surgical techniques by trying them out on their children?) They sometimes reach dead ends, but often enough they find and blaze the paths along which humanity advances towards the realization of the ideals immanent in reasonable human sociability. Without the cooperation of philosophers and tyrants, Kojève maintained, there would be no political progress. Kojève and Strauss disagreed, but not about scholarly questions of textual interpretation. As Grant says, “Kojève never argues with Strauss about his interpretation of Xenophon.”26 Nor did their dispute focus

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on the interpretation of Hegel’s writings—“Strauss does not question that Kojève has interpreted Hegel correctly.”27 Rather they confront a fundamental disagreement about human nature and politics. The ancients thought of mankind as part of nature, with a human nature that included an innate awareness of sacred restraints. Everyone knows that it is simply wrong to treat others tyrannically. And given the assumption that human beings are part of nature, the idea of “conquering nature” makes no sense. “Expel nature with a hayfork, it will always come back,” Horace quipped. The modern understanding, represented by Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Kojève, puts mankind within nature, but without a fixed “nature” of its own, as the “free” or flexible being, spun off from natural necessities, and thus the potential conqueror of both the natural world and its own “human nature.”28 How is this to be understood? It is easy enough to see that human beings find themselves in the midst of natural processes that they can understand and manipulate to their own advantage, at first in small ways, but eventually in much larger ways. Could mankind be on a trajectory from being a plaything of natural forces to gaining complete mastery over them? Could “history” be a story with a happy ending—the process by which human beings eventually achieve a clear enough understanding of their circumstances, including their own inherited dispositions, to “conquer nature,” transforming their existence and making possible the peaceful enjoyment of the fruits of their conquest?29 Will the result be an ideal society, one expressing truly human ideals of freedom and equality? Hegel’s modern understanding of the end or destination of this historical process can apparently be summed up as follows: “the universal and homogenous state is the best social order and … mankind advances to the establishment of such an order.”30 The question that Strauss and Kojève debated was whether “the universal and homogenous state” is really the best social order.31 Strauss denied what Kojève affirmed, the superiority of such a peaceful global egalitarian state to earlier forms of human society. Kojève and Strauss use the rather bombastic term “universal” to mean a world state, one that would govern all of mankind, though not of course the whole of time and space. Fukuyama’s presentation mentioned above popularized a more distracting ambiguity: could an independent “national” state, such as the United States, also be deemed “universal” by virtue of the universal validity of its constitutional principles?32 “Homogeneous” has an ambiguity of its own, adding to the confusion.33

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Strauss and Koj`eve use it to describe a society without “classes.” This means, not a society without any differences or distinctions, but one that has realized a common ideal of democracy—one in which its members, who are assumed to occupy the full range of social roles from the top to the bottom of a complex modern society, meet nonetheless, not as members of upper and lower classes, or as rulers and ruled, or leaders and led, but simply as equal citizens with equal rights. The term describes a society that has eliminated class conflict, not by eliminating differences in wealth, power, or status, but by becoming “a society without classes.”34 A dictionary, however, may define the term as describing something whose distinct parts have been so blended that they can no longer be distinguished and separated, like the milk and cream of homogenized milk. The word can thus suggest a bleak future of oppressive cultural imperialism, suffocating nightmarish conformism, or unending vanilla boredom—at any rate, no diversity, no individuality, no creativity, perhaps not even any agency—the future as imagined by those who think that 1950s sitcom America is “Americanizing” Canada and the world. Grant quotes from a passage in Strauss’s “Restatement” that expressed his doubts about the practicality of Koj`eve’s vision—its chance of ever being realized: The universal state requires universal agreement regarding the fundamentals, and such agreement is possible only on the basis of genuine knowledge or of wisdom. Agreement based on opinion can never become universal agreement. Every faith that lays claim to universality, i.e., to be universally accepted, of necessity provokes a counter-faith which raises the same claim. The diffusion among the unwise of genuine knowledge that was acquired by the wise would be of no help, for through its diffusion or dilution, knowledge inevitably transforms itself into opinion, prejudice, or mere belief. The utmost in the direction of universality that one could expect is, then, an absolute rule of unwise men who control about half of the globe, the other half being ruled by other unwise men. It is not obvious that the extinction of all independent states but two will be a blessing.35

Fear of common enemies might thus drive all independent states into one or the other of two grand alliances, but is there any reason to expect the rival great powers to abandon their (perhaps “ideologically” justified) rivalry and to accept membership in and subordination to a single

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universal state? Until there is a good answer to this troubling question, the promotion of dualistic consolidation may be of very debatable value.36 Suppose, however, that the impractical and utopian were to become realizable. What if, contrary to Strauss’s sardonic suggestions, the leaders of the two greatest powers (and those of quite a few smaller but still big powers as well) could be persuaded, somehow, that not only the survival of the planet and the salvation of the human race demanded the establishment of a world government but that their own ambitious desires for places in History could be best realized by joining in creating such an all-embracing authority, as did the leaders of the Allied powers when they established the United Nations in 1945? What can be said about the desirability of such a possibility, regardless of any doubts one may have about the realism of the dream? First, pro: a universal state would apparently put an end to “the curse of war among nations.” Interstate or international wars would become impossible, there no longer being any states to fight them: only civil wars would remain possible. Using the techniques of modern policing, the universal state would no doubt try to identify and quell its “internal” sources of violent conflict. The known causes could be monitored, weapons collected, and provocative actions quickly put down by the state’s peacekeepers. Nonetheless, a peaceful world, without the discriminatory discriminations (or classifications) that formerly prevented largescale population movements across “national” borders, might present some rather complex ethnic, national, and religious “tensions” requiring immediate, firm, but careful and judicious management. These tensions might be hard to eliminate, particularly if doing so clashed with important policies for the accommodation of cultural diversity adopted by the world authorities to fend off complaints of cultural imperialism. The police might find themselves fighting the bureaucrats committed to ideals of diversity and equality and determined to foster as much cultural authenticity as had been deemed compatible with human rights, rational government, and budgetary constraints. A second potential advantage of global governance would be its ability, in principle, to adopt effective global policies for dealing with global problems such as global warming and global pandemics. In addition, it could, in principle, adopt equalizing policies that would address the generally accepted “root causes” of violent extremism and political instability. A world government would presumably encourage geographical

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and social mobility, including reproductive pairings likely to yield intersectional babies, to strengthen the “social” foundations under its global decision-making machinery, enabling it to withstand the stresses and strains attributable to the lingering loyalties of some citizens to their old “racial” or “cultural” identities. To reduce its internal tensions, such a state might try to shape science and education in its own image, encouraging support for the progressive social policies it was implementing by rewarding and promulgating persuasive depictions of its overall vision, while banning, penalizing, or otherwise discouraging and disrupting the propagation of any problematic, reactionary, anti-social views. What about the disadvantages ? First, the leaders of the new global institutions would be trying to govern with very few guiding conventions—like navigating in uncharted waters. Even if they were able to create “a society without classes” (no small challenge, considering the undeniable differences between global “elites” and global “masses” that might become more visible and more irksome in an allegedly “homogeneous” universal state), they might find it impossible to govern their gargantuan bureaucracy “democratically.” To become a social democracy, the universal state might have to put aside political democracy. The difficulties it would face being democratic hardly need spelling out, but consider the character and credentials of a representative assembly whose members would be speaking for diverse constituencies numbering in the tens of millions. What would their election campaigns look like? Would their online videos show them knocking on doors? Or would they feature mass rallies and battles of twitter and tweet? To get their sluggish partisans off their couches and into the voting booths, would all the candidates not be compelled to fake some alarming news? Post-election, would the coalitions grow from the barrel of a gun? (Would democracy have to be “re-invented,” as one says?) And what about the stability of the new “homogenized” institutions? How would the World President “knock heads together,” when heads needed some knocking? And then what? Grant, having indicated the practical disagreement between Strauss and Koj`eve, poses two questions.37 The first, itself two questions, concerns Strauss’s assertion that “the classical political philosophers considered the possibility of a science that issues in the conquest of nature as ‘unnatural, i.e. as destructive of humanity’ and that therefore they turned their minds away from it.”38 Grant questions first whether Strauss’s claim is

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true as a factual statement about the thought of the classical philosophers. Then, assuming that the “factual” evidence is satisfactory, were the classic philosophers “right in so thinking”? In Grant’s view, the problem requires more consideration: perhaps charity is before thought. Grant follows these questions with a more pointed question: what would it mean today not to be committed to “unlimited technological progress”? What would the implications be for “the economy”? For the alleviation of poverty? For education and defence policy? For relations with other nations? The “third world”? It would express a conservative disposition, now as in the past, Strauss suggests, but practical conservative politicians are not of one mind about these matters. Liberal or progressive politicians are similarly divided among themselves. Can these divisions be resolved by philosophical clarification? What is the proper role of the philosopher in a society governed by a belief in unlimited technological progress? These queries lead to a second major question, having to do with “the history of western thought and in particular … the relationship between the history of philosophy and Biblical religion.”39 Is the pursuit of a universal and homogeneous state the worldly, rational form of Biblical religion? Or of some variety of it? Or is it the atheistic antithesis of religious faith? Grant’s commentary concludes by drawing attention to a lengthy (almost 500-word) paragraph at the very end of Strauss’s “Restatement,” which was omitted when the French text was published in English. From this paragraph, Grant quotes the last sentence in French. In English, it reads as follows: “Both of us appear to turn our attention away from Being and toward tyranny because we saw that those who lacked the courage to face the consequences of tyranny, who, therefore, et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur, were at the same time forced to escape the consequences of Being precisely because they did nothing but speak about Being.”40 Strauss is plainly pointing to Martin Heidegger, but why?

Tyranny and Technology Three years before writing his article on Koj`eve and Strauss, Grant was invited to address a group of scientists connected with the National Research Council of Canada. (The invitation was extended by Keith MacDonald, the head of the pure physics group at the NRC, after

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Grant had interviewed him on the CBC television program Explorations.) Grant’s talk was apparently part of a series of symposia on “Self-Regulation in Living Systems,” and the audience must have included psychologists and neurologists doing experimental studies of “memory and language.” The talk bore the title “Speech: Some General and Incoherent Comments”; it had a challenging tone; and it was not well received. Grant wrote afterwards that he had been “shocked” by the hostility of his audience and that it had “taught [him] more than anything that had happened to [him] for years.”41 Grant’s short talk, starting from a quick synopsis of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, had touched on the difference between braingoverned behaviour and mind-dependent intentional action; the claims of “political philosophy”; the shortcomings of both Cartesian dualism (“an appalling effect on political philosophy”) and philosophical idealism (“a hopeless meta-language”); the universal and homogeneous state (“it will be a tyranny”); and the arias of Pamina and Tamino in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Grant’s sympathetic biographer, William Christian, attributes the hostility of the audience to what Grant said about the universal and homogeneous state, but this may have been just the last straw.42 Grant may have struck the assembled scientific specialists as a pretentious “philosopher” wasting their time, talking through his hat. In the following years, Grant wrote frequently about technology, and two of his books, Technology and Empire and Technology and Justice, have the word in their titles. What Grant emphasized above all in these later writings was the error of thinking of technology as a tool that humans are free to use for good or evil, according to their traditional standards of political and social morality.43 Simple tools fit this description, but technology, as he wrote in his review of Elull’s book, is not such a tool. The most important part of the book is [Ellul’s] account of how technique has become autonomous…. It is the creator of its own morality…. The power and autonomy of technique are so well secured that it … has become the judge of what is moral, the creator of its own morality. Thus, it plays the role of creator of a new civilization as well.44

It would take the talents of a de Tocqueville and the pages of a book to spell out all the features of our civilization that these remarks may suggest. Its new “tools” may make some form of universal state inescapable; its “technology” certainly removes some of the obstacles

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impeding its creation. Technology, as Grant says elsewhere, is a “package deal” involving education and politics as well as religion and culture. This package includes new ways of thinking about all the questions that those who speak of technology as a tool (or collection of tools) are assuming will remain unaffected by its development. Was this what Heidegger alone had fully recognized?

Concluding Thoughts Sixty years have passed since Grant wrote the article we have been considering and then the book that is his best-known work. We appear to be no closer now than we were in the 1960s to the universal and homogeneous state that Kojève anticipated. Without the bipolar division of the Cold War, globalism has advanced on many fronts, and some elements of it, novelties back then, are now taken for granted. But as the nations and peoples of the world have become more intermingled and their societies more “integrated,” have we been drifting towards the supremely dangerous consolidation imagined by Strauss—two colossal empires ruled by unwise men? What about “technology” and its new “tools” that may be of interest to political leaders? Does Grant have anything to say to us in our changed circumstances? When writing “Tyranny and Wisdom,” Grant says that he saw himself as trying to untangle a “tangle of questions” that made up the controversy between Strauss and Kojève. And earlier he posed the question whether “the political teaching of the classics” could be true “in a way that modern political teaching is not.”45 True in what way and about what? A decade later, beginning to write the public lectures that became English-Speaking Justice, Grant drew attention to a fundamental problem in political writing: “if one wants to communicate, it is constantly necessary to use language which cannot express one’s own grasp of reality.”46 The immediate problem he faced was the unquestioning popular acceptance of the view that he thought mistaken, “that the modern liberal account of justice is the best account.”47 How can one question this view without seeming to promote some conventional alternative—the fascist or communist alternatives, for example—which may be even less adequate than the prevailing liberal view? Must one retreat into scholarly obscurity or dabble in science fiction? Grant’s inclination, and his special talent, was to speak plainly to Canadians about the difficult issues that concerned them. He did so

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most notably in Lament for a Nation, which quickly won a large Canadian readership. Grant was suspicious of dispassionate “scholarship,” not just because it reaches a very small audience or because the cowardly pretense of scholarly neutrality can cover over a lot of very questionable partisanship, but perhaps primarily because it is usually powerless to escape the tangles of ordinary language. (Does partisanship not determine the accepted meaning of fundamental terms?) Grant’s thinking is shown in the headnote he wrote for “Tyranny and Wisdom,” to appease the publisher who apparently feared that the article was too academic for most readers, when it was reprinted as a chapter in Technology and Empire. Grant conceded that his article was “festooned with the trappings of scholarship,” and he apologized for this nonexistent fault, but he did not offer to re-write the article, nor did he say anything about how he thought it should have been written.48 And despite its impressive scholarly merits, practically-minded readers can easily see some serious reasons for doubting the Koj`evian vision of a future “universal and homogeneous state”—a world state striving to realize the ideals of socialism and communism. Hegel’s vision, turned right side up (from idealistic metaphysics to scientific materialism) by Marx, and spelled out philosophically (turned over again) by Koj`eve, may have seemed reasonable and thus inevitable to many academic philosophers. But who is to say that their ideas should prevail? Can the practical political consideration of political questions not stand on its own? The confrontation between Strauss and Kojève involved a clash of political visions or projects, demanding practical judgement, but it also involved some more abstruse and elusive questions about philosophy, philosophers, and religion, suggesting that the practical reasoning of political thinkers must sometimes be examined from a more distant and more elevated (more academic?) perspective to be fully understood. What is the connection between these levels or approaches? Do philosophers alone see the meaning of historical situations? Are politicians under an obligation to implement the currently fashionable schemes of the philosophes engagés ? Perhaps philosophers and intellectuals must content themselves with being marginal commentators on the actions of their superiors, who look down on them as childish triflers. Should they perhaps stand back and try to explain the behaviour of the politicians scientifically? What would this mean? Can the tangles ever be untangled? In English-Speaking Justice, Grant subjects the reasoning of some modern judges and academic philosophers to close examination, and his

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analysis opens to questions that are as much theoretical as practical. The same can be said about his discussion of Kojève and Strauss. The best evidence is the important difference between the English and French versions of Strauss’s “Restatement” (or “Mise au point”) mentioned above, which Grant called attention to. Its long final paragraph was silently omitted when an English version was published by Strauss in 1959 in What Is Political Philosophy? (a collection of his articles and reviews) and in 1963 in On Tyranny (the English version of De la tyrannie). Grant noticed this omission and included the last sentence of the paragraph, untranslated (that is, in French), in his article, with the request that the whole paragraph be included in any future printings of the “Restatement.” The paragraph in question is about Martin Heidegger, as the final sentence quoted above makes clear. Grant evidently wanted other readers to see what he had noticed, that is, that Heidegger’s thinking had evidently been important for both Strauss and Koj`eve, but both apparently agreed that his darkly ontological and hermeneutical ruminations had been discredited by his serious practical misjudgements. The paragraph as a whole also makes clear that both had avoided discussing a fundamental difference between them, which may have been simply practical and political or which may have involved some difficult “metaphysical” question within modern German philosophy. “Philosophy, in the strict and classical sense of the term,” Strauss wrote, “is the quest for the eternal order, or for the eternal cause or causes of all things.”49 This quest “assumes,” Strauss wrote, “that there is an eternal and immutable order within which history takes its place, and which remains entirely unaffected by history.”50 Kojève rejected this presupposition—or perhaps one should say that he questioned whether anyone, whatever their philosophical eminence, had ever secured a standpoint outside of space and time for the objective examination of any eternal and immutable reality. Are we not all limited to interpreting our own temporally and spatially bounded experience? How are we to make sense of those who seem to speak to us from beyond such limits? As Strauss reported, Kojève held that “Being creates itself in the course of history,” that “the highest Being is society and history,” and that “eternity is nothing but the totality of historical time, that is to say finite.”51 Where on earth had Kojève obtained such amazing knowledge? These remarks should suffice to show how blinkered is the view of Grant as a disgruntled nationalist confronting a post-national reality.

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Sympathy with nationalism is not the same as blindness to its limitations, and only a little digging is needed to reveal that Grant had much more on his mind, when writing Lament for a Nation, than Diefenbaker and Pearson. His longstanding interest in “technology”—the synthesis of “knowing and making” that changes both—is barely apparent in the book, but it underlies what he says there about the universal and homogeneous state and about the difference between Canadians and Americans. In the 1960s, he was reading Heidegger, particularly “The Question Concerning Technology,” and finding it even more illuminating than Ellul’s book.52 In the 1970s and 1980s, technology became the most distinctive theme of his writing. Finally, this last sentence may throw some light on his earlier suggestion that the ominous emergence of technology in modern Europe must have depended in some obscure way on the theology of Western Christianity. Grant’s writings have naturally lost some of their topical relevance in forty or more years, but they have lost none of their ability to provoke and direct the most basic and most serious reflections of a new generation of readers.

Notes 1. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is available in the public domain at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3207. 2. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, No. 16 (1989), 3–18. Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992), is an expansion of this famous article. 3. Lester Pearson, Peace in the Family of Man (Oxford University Press, 1969), 103–104. 4. George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, 40th Anniversary Edition (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 53–54. The 40th Anniversary Edition (the book was originally published in 1965) includes three supplementary introductions, the two mentioned below as well as Grant’s own “Introduction to the Carleton Library Edition” from 1970, and an Afterword by Sheila Grant. 5. The quoted words are those of the Hon. Maurice Bourget, Speaker of the Senate, on the occasion of the raising of the new flag for the first time.

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6. Dante, De Monarchia (c. 1320), Rousseau, “Projet de paix perpétuelle” (1761); and Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (1795). See also Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Polity, 1995) and Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (Yale University Press, 2002). There is a 60-page draft “Constitution for the Federation of Earth” in Errol E. Harris, One World or None: Prescription for Survival (Humanities Press, 1993). 7. Cf. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians (Macmillan, 1968), 175: “Nationalism, as an emotional stimulus directed at an entire community, can indeed let loose unforeseen powers. History is full of this, called variously chauvinism, racism, jingoism, and all manner of crusades, where right reason and thought are reduced to rudimentary proportions.” 8. Cf. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Latzke (Methuen, 1966), which also disturbed the slumbers of the political class in the mid-1960s. It advanced a naturalistic, evolutionary explanation for nationalist irrationality (the division of the world between mutually antagonistic national “pseudo-species”) as an apparently inescapable consequence of the human genome, thus challenging politicians as well as social scientists to show that national loyalties are “learned” rather than “instinctive.” 9. Cf. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origin and Background (Collier Books, 1944), 576, the final sentence of this long and influential historical study of nationalism: “From Jerusalem and Athens shine also the eternal guiding stars which lift the age of nationalism above itself pointing forward to deeper liberty and to higher forms of integration.” 10. Cf. Michael Ignatieff, True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada (Toronto: Viking, 2009). 11. Potter in Grant, Lament, ix. 12. See Richard Gwyn, Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995). 13. Potter in Grant, Lament, lx–lxiii. 14. For example, Emberley in Grant, Lament, lxxix. 15. Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (Vancouver: Copp Clark, 1966), vii. 16. Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, vii.

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17. Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, vii. 18. In Canadian Dimension, 3:3 and 3:4 (1966), and in Grant, Collected Works, III, 413–418. 19. George P. Grant, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” Social Research 31 (1964), 45–72, reprinted in Grant, Technology and Empire (Anansi, 1969), 82–109, and in Grant, Collected Works, III, 532–557. 20. See Grant’s letter of 21 January 1965 to Leo Strauss, in George Grant: Selected Letters, ed. William Christian (University of Toronto Press, 1996), 226, where Grant credits Emil Fackenheim for first having drawn his attention to Strauss’s work. 21. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon’s Hiero (New York: Political Science Classics, 1948). Hiero ruled Syracuse “tyrannically” for 10 years, from 478 to 467. Simonides, a native of Ceos, lived from about 556 to 468. Xenophon, a follower of Socrates, was a contemporary of Plato (427–347). The dialogue is thought to have been written sometime around 365. 22. “I know of no one besides yourself and [Jacob] Klein who will understand what I am after.” Letter of 22 August 1948 from Strauss to Koj`eve, in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Free Press, 1991), 236. In a later letter (p. 239) Strauss wrote that there might be three people who would understand his intention. 23. Alexandre Koj`eve, “L’Action politique des philosophes,” Critique, 6 (1950), 46–55 and 138–155. 24. Leo Strauss, De la tyrannie (Gallimard, 1954) and Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, Revised and Enlarged (Cornell University Press, 1963). 25. Cf. Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, 35: “It does not belong to the order of being a man to rule other men at one’s whim.” 26. George Grant, Technology and Empire, 84. 27. George Grant, Technology and Empire, 84. 28. Cf. Lee MacLean, The Free Animal: Rousseau on Free Will and Human Nature (University of Toronto Press, 2013)? 29. Grant, Technology and Empire, 88–89: “The universal and homogeneous state remains the dominant ethical ‘ideal’ to which our contemporary society appeals for meaning in its activity. In its terms our society legitimizes itself to itself. Therefore any contemporary man must try to think the truth of this core of political liberalism, if he is to know what it is to live in his world.” [Could “conquest” be a misleading word for what is at issue here? Cf. Francis Bacon, The

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30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

New Organon, I, 129: “For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.” But also: “Only let the human race recover the right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest... the exercise thereof will be governed by sound reason and true religion.”] Grant, Technology and Empire, 86. Grant, Technology and Empire, 91. Fukuyama, The End of History, 66, 200–202, 244. Grant sometimes writes “homogeneous” and sometimes “homogenous.” There seems to be no difference of meaning, either in his use of the words or in that of others. The serious confusion arises from the unwanted cultural blending that a peacefully universal and classless society would make possible and would likely encourage. Grant, Technology and Empire, 87. Cf. Fukuyama, The End of History, 118. Strauss, On Tyranny, 193. See Ioannis D. Evrigenis, Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 2008) for relevant sources and reflections on “negative association” (two united by their common antipathy to a third). Given Grant’s prior political alignments (his wartime pacifism and moderate, CCF-style socialism), it should not be surprising that his challenging questions are directed to Strauss rather than Koj`eve. See Grant, “An Ethic of Community,” in Social Purpose for Canada, ed. Michael Oliver (University of Toronto Press, 1961), 3–26. Grant, Technology and Empire, 97. Grant, Technology and Empire, 103. Biblical religion here evidently means Judaism and Christianity. Although Islam might be squeezed under the “Biblical” umbrella, nothing is said about it. Grant, Technology and Empire, 102, and Strauss, On Tyranny, 212. The Latin quotation is from Livy: “themselves obsequiously subservient while arrogantly lording it over others” (Livy, XXIV, 25, viii). See Grant, Collected Works, III, 111–133, for Grant’s talk and related material. Christian, George Grant, 219. The most characteristic expressions of this point, apart from the review of the book by Ellul mentioned above, are “The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used” (Collected

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44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

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Works, IV, 280–298) and “Thinking about Technology,” in Technology and Justice, 11–34. See also Grant, “Knowing and Making,” Collected Works, IV, 269–279. Grant, Collected Works, III, 414. Grant treated technology as a novel European synthesis of techné and logos (that is, the practical arts and scientific reasoning) or “knowing and making.” Cf. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (Harper, 1977), 33: “The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth, comes to pass [ereignet].” Grant, Technology and Empire, 97 and 92. George Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Anansi, 1974), 8. Grant, English-Speaking Justice, 8. Grant, Technology and Empire, 81. The letter to Dennis Lee is mentioned in Christian, George Grant, 276. Strauss, On Tyranny, 212. Strauss, On Tyranny, 212. Strauss, On Tyranny, 212. “In our discussion the conflict between the two opposing fundamental hypotheses has barely been mentioned.” The quotations allude to Kojeve’s “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in On Tyranny, 151–152. “Grant made Heidegger’s lecture on technology the focus of his graduate seminars in the seventies.” Arthur Davis, “Justice and Freedom: George Grant’s Encounter with Martin Heidegger,” in George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity, ed. Arthur Davis (University of Toronto Press, 1996), 139. William Christian reports that around 1967 Grant had asked a colleague to translate the lecture, and mimeographed copies of the translation were given to his students. Christian, George Grant, 268.

CHAPTER 5

Technology as Empire: George Grant and Russell Kirk on American Conservatism Jeremy Seth Geddert

Social media is no longer simply the locus of public discussion, but also the topic. Commentators Left and Right decry its role in empowering disinformation and “fake news.” Election officials fret about the ability of foreign social media bots to compromise the impartiality of elections. Information technology experts warn about algorithms skewing online news. Psychologists also blame social media for a host of pathologies, from rising anxiety and relational isolation to declining interpersonal skills.1 Online platforms become increasingly addictive, as big data reveals ever-finer user preferences. As one critic put it, “we are all algorithms now.”2

J. S. Geddert (B) Assumption University, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_5

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Grant on Technology and America The contemporary need for a public philosophy of technology directs us to George Grant. Grant’s language of “cybernetics” and “electronic technology” may invite superficial mockery in a scientistic world where computing power has doubled every two years. Yet Grant offers insights to the careful reader that sound prophetic today. In 1965, he foresaw a world, “particularly in America,” where “scientists concern themselves with the control of heredity, the human mind, and society.”3 One might respectively imagine today’s dating apps, social media scrolling, and foreign political bots. Grant further stated that “computers homogenize us by storing information about our psychology and behaviour.”4 Today, Google and Facebook have more information about us than our confessors or therapists, and we blithely “agree to these terms and conditions.” Grant concluded that many people who “only slightly understand the capacity of [electronic devices], have the sense from their daily life that they are being managed by them, and have perhaps an undifferentiated fear about the potential extent of this management.”5 Here Grant requires little contemporary translation. Further, Grant understood the political impact of these technologies. He shot down the breezy visions of a democratic future imagined by Marshall McLuhan, who had suggested that “the new democratic politics will consist in…the regular…registering [of] a plebiscite on a great computer system.”6 While McLuhan anticipated Google’s stated mission to empower ordinary people by democratizing information globally, Grant countered, “Who will decide what are the facts?” Grant went on, “Solitary men living in megalopoloi, not being able to know their leaders, pushing computer buttons, are not free men, nor equal men.”7 He clearly foresaw an age of media control, “alternative facts,” and epistemic crisis. Grant did not merely chronicle and critique these technologies; he sought to identify their sources, and he located them within modernity itself. Such a modernity drives both the early-modern Hobbesian and Lockean versions of liberalism, as well as the late-modern Rousseauian and Hegelian variants. For Grant, either version of modernity is liberal, because each affirms that “our essence is freedom.” Liberalism thus liberates the will from the constraints placed on it by God and nature,

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those pre-modern constraints which Grant—in his conversion to Christianity—identified as the fundamental “recognition that I am not my own.”8 Grant argued that this classical and Christian approach was at least partially present in the formation of Canada. English Canada was shaped by the Loyalist Tories who rejected the American Revolution, opposing John Locke’s liberalism and instead appealing to the older conservatism of Richard Hooker. As a result, Canada developed several features distinct from America. The Canadian character displayed a greater sense of “the common good and of public order”; of “public and personal restraint”; of respect for law and of propriety; and—perhaps most centrally—of loyalty to the state symbolized by the British Crown.9 As a self-described political “red tory,”10 Grant believed that Canada’s explicit connection to Britain (and Quebec’s connection to France) was a necessary (if tenuous) link to the nourishing pre-modern inheritance. As two Grant scholars put it, “the British connection (and in Quebec’s case, the French connection) was vital not because of its specific ethnic characteristic but because it was the only living connection Canadians had with this older European conception of society.”11 Without such a British self-conception, Canada would cease to maintain an identity distinct from modern liberal America, and would be incorporated into the imperial right-Hegelian universal and homogenous state. Canada would not succumb to an advancing army, but instead be seduced by the sirens of American mass technology. Grant foresaw not the blunt club of Orwell’s 1984, but the soft glove of Huxley’s Brave New World.12 It is thus noteworthy that South of the border, another self-styled “Bohemian Tory” articulated similar critiques of technology and the American empire yet disagreed with Grant’s pessimistic conclusion. Russell Kirk pushed back against liberalism in America by arguing that the roots of American order (in the title of his famous book) indeed rested in America’s British culture (in the title of another of his books). Just as Grant’s Lament for a Nation inspired a public nationalism (which Grant saw as misguided), Kirk’s works inspired in 1950s America a “new conservatism” (which Kirk surely saw as mis-styled). Kirk’s conservatism, like Grant’s, pushed back against a rootless and universalistic capitalism, recognized the dangers of American imperialism, and held up the priority of place. Furthermore, Kirk maintained a critical posture toward technology, speaking against the use of computers in education, and memorably describing the automobile as a “mechanical Jacobin.”

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Grant and Kirk’s commonalities regarding technology reflect broader and indeed remarkable parallels between the two men. Both were born in 1918, in the shadow of the Great War. Both studied history and took graduate studies in Britain. Both grew up in homes of low-church Christianity and moved higher: Grant from a secularizing Presbyterianism to the Anglican church, and Kirk from a non-churchgoing Biblical pietism to Catholicism.13 And in an uncanny synchronicity, both protested the increasing technical takeover of humanities education in strikingly identical fashion in the same year: by resigning from their positions as university professors in 1959. Yet Grant and Kirk have scant records of actual dialogue. Putting the two in conversation promises insights into the nature of technology and the nature of America. If Grant sought to push back against the technological impulses of American liberalism, perhaps he might have found more help from within America than he thought. An engagement with Kirk might have provided Grant with a somewhat more nuanced vision of America, and moderated Grant’s fire against the neighbor to the south. Nonetheless, some of Kirk’s distinctively American positions might have (perhaps unintentionally) vindicated and deepened Grant’s perceptions of America. Kirk’s self-definition as a conservative and a British American might have sharpened Grant’s definition of conservatism, and reinforced his belief that America was inhospitable to it. In the end, Kirk’s great efforts to cast America as conservative might have only deepened Grant’s pessimism about the viability of restraining modern American technology, and sustaining a distinct, well-ordered, and sovereign Canada.

Kirk on Technology and America Russell Kirk first came to public renown with his 1953 The Conservative Mind, which sketched out an unbroken (if sometimes forgotten) conservative lineage, through Burke, Adams, Calhoun, Brownson, Disraeli, Adams (again), Babbitt, Santayana, and others.14 Two years later, he founded the famous periodical National Review, which led to the rise of modern conservatism in the United States: likely the first time that a sizable contingent of Americans came to view themselves as conservative. Kirk endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Goldwater’s failed Presidential campaign would lay the foundation for the Reagan revolution. Yet Kirk was never entirely comfortable with the movement he had helped to birth. In 1976, he voted “no to empire” through Democratic anti-war

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insurgent Eugene McCarthy, much as he had earlier voted for Socialist Norman Thomas in 1944. (The echoes of Grant are clear.) Kirk’s conservatism could be encapsulated in the phrase “ordered liberty.” In using the latter of these two terms, Kirk draws on a strong American theme, from Sam Adams’ “Sons of Liberty,” to the putatively self-evident affirmation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” to the Gettysburg Address promising “a new birth of freedom.” What, then, distinguished the American conservative from the liberal heritage? For Kirk, the conservative sees that liberty is not a stand-alone principle. Instead, “order and freedom exist necessarily in a healthy tension.”15 What are the sources of order in America? In another remarkable synchronicity with Grant, Kirk begins with Simone Weil, who then points back to the beginnings of order in the ancient worlds of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.16 These three iconic cities show that religion, and not simply philosophy, is a precondition for ordered liberty. To order liberty is to marry one’s rights to one’s duties, a task overseen—as in literal marriage—by religion. Without religion, people will—in the words of Santayana—seek “freedom from the consequence of freedom.”17 Religion shapes the characteristic mores of a society, mores which remain “even if the religion has been forgotten.”18 Grant clearly echoed many of these sentiments, especially when he identified the secular Protestant Christianity of the Canadian establishment. For Kirk, conservatism is thus more than simply a slow approach to change, because “conservatism needs principles, not just a mood.”19 Kirk took many of his principles from Edmund Burke, who may have rejected “abstraction,” or a priori ideas imposed on political life, but who did not reject “principle” derived from “a knowledge of human nature and of the past.” That past is the “Great Tradition”: “the classical and Christian intellectual patrimony.”20 Kirk, echoing Grant, thus described himself as fighting a “fifty years’ war” against the progressive principles of modernity.21 Kirk also acknowledges that the conservative is not first and foremost concerned with politics, but rather, with the higher goods of life. The conservative prefers “family life, church, literature, good talk, good dinners” to the activity of political intrigue; he is “not made for action.”22 Kirk himself composed a considerable body of fiction and saw himself as fostering the moral imagination more than designing a political program.23 Kirk draws on Burke’s analogy of the conservative as a ruminant, quiet but strong and enduring, in contrast to the liberal

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grasshopper, noisy and radical. Here we see another parallel with Grant, who also drew an insect comparison from an even older British conservative, Jonathan Swift. For Grant, the modern—that is, the liberal—is a spider, busily spinning webs of reality out of his own being.24 Kirk’s emphasis on the past and on the life of reflection combine into an embrace of classical education. Kirk describes the purposes of a university as follows: “To discipline the mind; to give men and women long views, and to instill in them the virtue of prudence; to present a coherent body of knowledge for its own sake; to help the rising generation to make its way toward wisdom and virtue.”25 In short, “Universities were founded to sustain faith by reason.”26 Such a statement likely earned Kirk as much public enmity as did Grant’s (in)famous definition of philosophy as measuring our traditions against the Perfection of God.27 Kirk praises American universities for seeking to produce gentlemen, or “men of culture,” rather than prioritizing practical subjects.28 Nonetheless, Kirk acknowledges that classical education is under threat—specifically from technology. He resists the influence of the information revolution, which seeks to prioritize novel techniques that undermine the transmission of “an integrated and ordered body of knowledge.” Like Grant, Kirk’s critiques are remarkably enduring. Of classroom technology, he complains of being told that “audio-visual aids would supplant the teacher for most purposes,” only to see “most of this hardware soon…locked away in closets, where it reposed until obsolete.” Of students, he describes a “bird-brained generation,” not as an outdated insult, but as a metaphor: “like birds, boys and girls flit from flower to flower, watching the flickering screen, never settling long enough to learn anything important.” (It is as if they are merely Twittering about.) Of freedom, Kirk also pans the alleged liberating powers of technology: “everything depends on how the computers are programmed.”29 Those who simply receive information “from on high” become mechanical. Grant could hardly have said it better. In Kirk’s eyes, the threat of technology extends beyond education. He sees it shaking the entire American order, bringing false promises of escape from basic human problems.30 In particular, Kirk singles out “the coming of new mass media and a ‘mass culture’ that those media feed”: language highly reminiscent of Grant.31 Kirk also sees technology as the greatest threat—save for Marxism—to conservatism worldwide, as “technological and economic and cultural change continue to tear

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apart the cake of custom everywhere.”32 Furthermore, Kirk views neoconservatives (whom Grant might have called “business liberals”) as the spearhead of this mass culture, spreading “cheapness,…monotony and mediocrity.”33 It is hard to imagine Grant disagreeing. Finally, Kirk strongly critiqued imperialism, because the conservative prioritizes his own. As a consequence, Kirk critiqued virtually all major American wars during his lifetime, from WWII to the Gulf War. Kirk asks rhetorically, “Are we Americans fulfilling a manifest destiny, the mission of recasting every nation and every culture in the American image?”34 He sees such an attitude in liberal Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who hoped that “American-style democracy” would be instantly embraced by the Vietnamese.35 After the Cold War, Kirk would critique the placement of American troops in hundreds of foreign military stations.36 Grant, of course, saw Vietnam as a telltale sign of American Empire, and excoriated it in uncompromisingly intemperate terms.

Grant vs. Kirk To this point, Kirk appears as almost a surprising American version of Grant. Hence, Kirk’s very existence seems to suggest that Grant was too hard on the American Empire. Like Grant, Kirk recognizes that modern liberalism, in the guise of America, can indeed pose a threat to indigenous traditions, and he sought to restrain the American threat to other traditions. Yet for all their fundamental similarities, Kirk nonetheless espouses positions that diverge from Grant in subtle but revealing ways. The English Inheritance The first difference between Kirk and Grant lies in their treatment of the English inheritance. Kirk views the English way as a conservative bulwark against French and German liberalism. In his telling, America was founded on the British ethos of the gentleman, rather than the compact theory of Locke, let alone the General Will of the French progressive Rousseau.37 American education was not the technical education of Germany, but the classic liberal arts education of Britain. By contrast, even if Grant were to accept this portrait of America, he would likely reject the portrait of conservatism. Grant argues that even the English tradition cannot ultimately transcend the pervasive influence of modernity, a modernity whose essence is destructive of indigenous traditions.

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Grant seeks to emphasize Canada’s English tradition not simply (or even primarily) because it is English, but because it serves as a link to the premodern past.38 (For this same reason he commends the French tradition in Quebec, which—until the Quiet Revolution—was far more Catholic than France-in-Europe.) Yet while the Englishness of that tradition brings a history of decency and good government, it ultimately remains a liberal tradition. Tellingly, Grant argues that “…one of the graces (if not saving graces) of the United States lies in its legal institutions, and they owe so much to England and to English liberalism.”39 While Grant may be damning America with faint praise, it is only an extension of his belief that the English inheritance alone cannot save Canada either. For this reason, Grant disagrees with Kirk’s inclusion in the conservative conversation of such indelibly modern English thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Walter Bagehot. In regard to the latter, Grant makes much of Bagehot’s Darwinian foundations and his consequent eclipse of transcendence. Thus, when Grant sees Bagehot champion an ostensibly conservative attitude of reverence, he sees Bagehot doing so for political expediency. The object of Bagehot’s reverence extends no higher than the monarchy; he is oblivious of “the eternal order.” Granted, Grant acknowledges in Bagehot an admirable prudence that recognizes the limits of the politically possible. And in this way, Grant’s description of Bagehot is not dramatically different from Kirk’s. But for Grant, to call Bagehot a conservative is “nonsense.”40 Grant thus views these articulate and thoughtful modern “conservatives”—to which Grant adds Disraeli, Innis, and Frye—as modern secularizing Protestants. They may retain some of the best of the Tradition, but they seem to do so in spite of themselves, because they have largely jettisoned the transcendent source of that Tradition. Kirk likewise recognizes that America has forgotten its roots as its Christianity has become secularized. Yet when he recommends returning to the sources of American order, he portrays these modern secular conservatives as part of the solution, rather than symptomatic of the problem. This divergence illustrates how Grant and Kirk can largely agree on the facts and yet come to different evaluations. Kirk judges these thinkers’ modicum of practical conservatism as sufficient to include them in his canon of conservatism; Grant deems the same thinkers’ absence of a theologico-philosophic telos as grounds for exclusion. Why did Grant and Kirk diverge when defining the bounds of conservatism? Perhaps Kirk was simply more political and Grant more philosophical. Kirk praises Bagehot and company for exercising classically

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conservative political judgment; for recognizing that a liberal population can support only a moderately conservative policy; and for thereby aiming at what Aristotle calls the “best practicable” regime. Grant too recognizes these political virtues and yet criticizes these same figures for their incomplete vision of the best regime, a vision only somewhat less liberal than that of their unambiguously liberal contemporaries. It is almost as if Kirk praises thinkers who can design the best policies for the liberal politeia they live in, while Grant critiques them for their incomplete vision of what the politeia itself should be. If Kirk is more practical, perhaps it flows out of his emphasis on Aristotle, the empiricist founder of Political Science. Grant, by contrast, emphasizes the philosophic Plato over the institutionalist Aristotle, and thus views the political order as an inevitable outgrowth of the souls of the politeia. For Grant, it seems, prudent institutions and leadership cannot thus reverse such misdirection of the soul; they can merely stand athwart such a polity saying, “slow down.” If Kirk sees conservatism as more than a “mood,” surely he, too, would have to lament such an outcome. The American Founding It should not be surprising that Grant and Kirk’s divergent evaluations of the English tradition produce diverging evaluations of America. Granted, Kirk is too good a scholar to ignore the genuinely liberal elements in the American founding. For instance, Kirk recognizes that the Massachusetts Bay Puritans set up the kind of polity desired by Richard Hooker’s adversary Thomas Cartwright. Kirk grants that “almost all American politicians” of the Founding era “paid their respects to Locke.”41 He acknowledges that John Adams espoused the moral philosophy of Adam Smith, a modern enlightenment thinker.42 He even acknowledges that the American Revolution expelled Toryism—and indeed some moderate Whiggism—from the Thirteen Colonies. Yet Kirk consistently follows his depiction of dominantly anticonservative forces in America with a counter-conclusion—one that frames his prior admissions as mere qualifications of America’s conservatism. Consider them in turn. Despite the Puritans’ egalitarianism, their greatest writer—John Bunyan—saved America from Hobbesian individualism. Despite Locke’s influence, “the mentality of the Enlightenment scarcely penetrated.”43 Despite Adams’ modern moral psychology, he stands as a conservative luminary. Despite the Revolution’s expulsion of

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the Tories, it was a revolution “not made, but prevented.”44 Grant might conclude that Kirk doth protest too much. Edmund Burke When Kirk portrays the American Revolution as conservative, he echoes the redoubtable Edmund Burke, who likewise endorsed the Patriot cause. When Kirk cites Burke, he professes to appeal to the weightiest of precedential authorities.45 Yet Grant is less impressed by this Burkean endorsement of the American Revolution. This is because Grant places Burke in league with the aforementioned thinkers whom he regards as practically but not philosophically conservative. For Grant, “[Burke] was a whig from first to last. [He] may have disliked Rousseau’s advanced liberalism, but he was essentially a liberal of the Lockean tradition.”46 Elsewhere, Grant implicitly substantiates this claim by noting that Burke is a great defender of the 1689 Revolution. Revolutions are not typically considered conservative, and Grant considers 1689 no exception to that rule. The English Revolution, of course, brought to an end the Stuart Restoration, during which Richard Hooker was the chief guiding spirit.47 Hooker’s primacy would be replaced with that of Locke, whose liberal Second Treatise was written to theorize and advance the Revolution. Politically, the Revolution ejected King James II, the very monarch whose claim to the throne—on the basis of tradition rather than Catholic exclusion—had prompted the formation of the Tory party only years earlier. Correspondingly, the “Liberal” moniker arose to describe those who had opposed James from the beginning. Thus, to Grant, Burke’s support for the 1689 Revolution is more a sign of his liberalism than of his conservatism. One might then infer that Burke’s support for 1776 also betrays the Revolution’s liberalism. Indeed, Kirk argues that there were virtually no Tories among the American colonists, which might only confirm Grant’s evaluation. Nonetheless, the tens of thousands of displaced United Empire Loyalists who sought refuge in Upper Canada and the Maritimes would surely beg to differ—a seeming Kirkian eliding of history to which we will return shortly.

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Capitalism and Conservatism Grant does not simply question Burke’s conservatism in regard to Burke’s endorsement of English-speaking revolutions. Grant also questions Burke’s conservative bona fides because of Burke’s capitalist economic philosophy. Grant sees capitalism as indelibly liberal, because “capitalism was the great dissolvent of the traditional virtues.”48 Contemporary conservatives might take issue with Grant’s conservative critique of the market, but here Kirk actually shows some affinity with it. Kirk characterizes the market worship that dominated the latter half of nineteenth century America as Manchester liberalism.49 Kirk even entitled one of his collections of essays Beyond the Dreams of Avarice. Nonetheless, after critiquing market worship, Kirk quickly clarifies, “It would be an error, however, to suppose that the true conservatives, then or now, stand for the paternalistic state as against a free economy. Such paternalism as conservatives advocate is local, and the product of private duties rather than centralized and governmental.” By contrast, “[The conservative] believes that the only sure reform which a man can effect is the improvement of one human unit, himself.” It seems that Plato’s philosopher-aristocrats need not run for elected office. Kirk sees “collectivism” as the great enemy of traditional society, whether it be undertaken in the name of “communism” or “capitalism” or “social democracy.”50 Presumably, the government should not seek to better order liberty even in a disorderly polity. This may help to explain Kirk’s wholesale dismissal of statist 1960s protestors, where Grant saw in those same radicals an (admittedly oft-misguided) critique of mass society. For Grant, government could and should be an agent of the people, restraining the power of concentrated capital. Ordered Liberty Kirk thus seeks to conserve an American order that has consistently embraced individual liberty. While Grant might agree with the concept of “ordered liberty,” it is doubtful he would endorse Kirk’s particular ordering of the relationship between order and liberty. For Kirk, liberty seems a sine qua non; a deontological precondition. A nation does not earn its liberty inasmuch as its polity is well-ordered; rather, liberty comes first. Order, it would seem, is dangerous if it is not freely chosen. To this end, Kirk cites Aristotle’s definition of a slave as “a being who allows

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others to make his choices for him.” Servile man lacks the dignity of man. Hence, order must come from the person’s free choice to live the examined life, and to orient one’s life toward the Good. Political order will then flow naturally. Restrictions on one’s freedom should not occur, it seems, at the political level, but at the level of the soul. Kirk acknowledges that “the service of God is perfect freedom.” Grant might have pointed out that Kirk’s own Catholic church—unlike that of the Puritan Founders—baptizes infants into this service without their free choice.51 It thus appears that for Kirk (as for Kant), the modality of the state and the modality of the church are disanalogous: the state exists to provide freedom, while the church exists to provide order. Grant, by contrast, sees government as helping to provide social order for polities whose use of individual liberty has compromised that order. Governmental restrictions on individual economic liberty may thus be appropriate. Such restrictions may be particularly useful in restraining modern technology, which does not merely compromise social order, but indeed compromises the order of the soul, as the modern technological co-penetration of knowing and making turns human beings into products.52 Political Ontology Grant, of course, views America as the spearhead of modern techne. For Grant, “The United States is the only society that has no….residual traditions from before the age of progress.” Lacking a brake on modernity, America thus “believes that questions of human good are to be solved by technology.”53 America’s essence is technological. When Kirk surveys contemporary American life, he does not entirely disagree with Grant’s assessment. Yet once again, he interprets the same facts differently. These existing American pathologies are not native; they arise from the invasive species of French liberalism and German progressivism that corrupt a more purely conservative Founding. For Grant, the American essence dwells in the America he sees today, while for Kirk, the American essence is identifiable in the British heritage encapsulated in the Founding. Nonetheless, even if one sets aside Grant’s belief that the American Constitution was already liberal in 1787, one might ask whether Kirk’s phenomenology undermines his own concept of tradition. If everything since the Jefferson presidency—barely a decade after the Founding—is tainted, and yet the true America (i.e. the Founding) is pure, then the last

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two-plus centuries of developing American tradition must presumably be rendered ontologically inadmissible when determining America’s essence. The vast majority of American experience, and indeed the dominant trends of the developing American tradition, cannot count as essentially constitutive of America. Kirk thus appears to understand the American essence as existing at a single point in time, which might suggest in turn— surely to the Kirk’s chagrin—that America exists as an abstraction. Kirk would surely answer this charge of inconsistency by arguing that he treats the Founding not merely as an abstract politeuma, but more deeply as the self-understanding of the American politeia. Yet Kirk still seems to view the true politeia as the one that characterized America at the particular point in time called 1787, and the one that has only existed as a small minority for decades, if not centuries. Grant, by contrast, might argue that if it looks like a liberal, talks like a liberal, and walks like a liberal, perhaps it is a liberal—regardless of what its written constitution might say. The Possibility of Recovery For this reason, when Grant identifies late-modern liberalism in America (and indeed in Canada), he does not suggest that it can be overcome simply by returning to a conservative moment, perhaps driven by an originalist Supreme Court striking down progressivist jurisprudence. Rather, a true return would require the slow reforming of a tradition that has been misguided for centuries. A genuine recovery of Christian political order would require nothing less than repudiating the dominant philosophical trends since Hobbes if not Machiavelli.54 The enormity of this challenge may help to account for Grant’s pessimism (relative to Kirk) about the possibility of recovering the conservative inheritance. Kirk, however, seems more optimistic about the possibilities of a conservative recovery. He seems to view the modern emphasis on liberty as a field that may be re-sown with Christian seeds. While he acknowledges that modernity presents a challenge to classical conservatism, it is not such a challenge that the two could not—with whatever difficulty—work out their differences. Kirk might perhaps charge Grant with a Hegelian historicism which assumes the direction of (modern) history cannot be reversed. One could, of course, attribute the difference in outlook to personality. Grant was dark and brooding, pessimistic and troubled. Born (like Kirk)

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in 1918, the shadow of WWI weighed heavily on the pacifist Grant, and the bombing of WWII contributed to a year-long stress-related convalescence.55 By contrast, Kirk describes himself as “generally cheerful,” and in his early years, “the Depression sat lightly upon me.”56 Kirk notes that despite “being somewhat gloomy by conviction”—unsurprising for a conservative—he is “yet sanguine by temperament.”57 Nonetheless, one might note that these two personalities perhaps exemplify their home nations: Canada, with its ever-present threat from the South, and its national identity ever in crisis, and America, with its energy and optimism that American moxie can crack perennial problems. Yet Grant might well suggest that Kirk’s American optimism is itself a manifestation of modernity. His diagnosis runs as follows. American optimism begins with the Puritans, who believed they could build a fundamentally new society that could solve the perennially intractable problems of politics. The nature of politics could thus be changed: a thoroughgoingly modern hope. This modern hope both followed and reinforced a modern approach to education and knowledge. The Puritans viewed “the old philosophical education, which was intended as a means to the contemplative vision of God” as “largely beside the point. Salvation was one thing; the educational process was another. Thus they came more and more to be held apart.” The perhaps unwitting result was a modern approach to science: “The educational process gradually came to be concerned only with the teaching of techniques, so that Christians could be effective in the world.”58 The practical science combined with the modern hope, producing a will to power that infused even theology: “the Puritan interpretation of the Bible produced more a driving will to righteousness than a hunger and thirst for it.”59 (One can hardly fail to note the echoes of Nietzsche’s “will to truth.”). If Grant is correct, then Kirk might be the implicit Hegelian, attempting through force of will to make himself at home in America. By contrast, Grant’s Lament for a Nation clearly hungered and thirsted for a distinct Canada, one that Grant thought could no longer be found in the modern world (at least short of divine intervention). In this sense, Grant may have demonstrated a Platonic Christian receptiveness that an American might characterize as mere passivity. But this earthly failure directed Grant to hunger and thirst even more for his heavenly home. Grant later acknowledged this motive as the true purpose of Lament for a Nation, visible in his final paragraph, itself drawn (appropriately) from the proto-Tory Richard Hooker.

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American Exceptionalism Where Grant firmly sees the Christian’s home in the hereafter, Kirk portrays America as having a quasi-divine—and seemingly exceptional— mandate. Kirk defines this divine calling as the quest to reconcile liberty with the law in an age of “fantastic schemes,” by which Kirk presumably means socialism or worse.60 Not surprisingly, Kirk self-consciously tries to avoid schemes (presumably written in documents), and he helpfully follows up his “Ten Conservative Principles” with “Ten Conservative Events.” Yet for all his stress on practice over dogma, for all his focus on pre-modern sources, for all his emphasis on unwritten tradition, his first conservative event is, in predictably American fashion—the writing of the American Constitution!61 Kirk does not seem bothered by the fact that a written constitution is nowhere to be found in the British way. For all of Kirk’s seemingly genuine rejection of right-Hegelian liberal idealism, and its potential incarnation as American soft imperialism,62 he still seems to view America not simply as different from—and irreducible to—all other countries, but as fundamentally different from other countries in a way that those countries are not fundamentally different from each other. He does not seem to portray this exceptional mission as America’s contribution to the world, side-by-side with the plentiful contributions of other nations. Rather, he seems to view it as a model—indeed, the model—for the world’s nations as they wrestle with the central political question of how to “reconcile liberty with law.” (Indeed, for all of Kirk’s critiques of German progressivism, this formulation is the very guiding question of German Idealism, the phenomenon largely prompted by Immanuel Kant’s reading of Rousseau.) By contrast, Grant never defended Canada— or indeed any nation—as the world’s best hope. Grant might view Kirk’s very portrayal of America as a model for the world—even in Kirk’s very careful and restrained wording—as containing the very seeds of American imperialism whose growth Kirk sought to squelch. It is prototypically—and not admirably—Canadian to complain about the scant attention paid to Canada by America. One simply cannot expect Kirk to have studied Canada anywhere as closely as Grant did America. Canada depends on America in a way that is not true in the reverse. Yet Kirk’s writings do not simply minimize Canada; they ignore it entirely.63 At one point, Kirk focuses on comparisons among the “great nations,” including America and Britain, and excluding Canada. Yet if Kirk’s philosophy prioritizes local and thus smaller communities, should

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he not then survey those smaller, less putatively great nations whose commitment to localism is actually less corruptible by imperial aspirations to greatness? Furthermore, if America is fundamentally committed to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and the American conservative’s central challenge is bringing order to that liberty, might it not help to examine a geographically and culturally similar country whose fundamental maxim is “peace, order, and good government”? Might it not be worth exploring the polity formed by some of those Tories and moderate Whigs—presumably conservative!—expelled by the American Revolution? Is it not possible that Canada might have conserved some elements of the English heritage that could serve, as a fellow member of the family of English nations, as an example for America? As Grant wrote, “Many of the American Tories….were opposing Locke. They appealed to the older political philosophy of Richard Hooker.” If they were nothing but Lockeans, then “the acts of the Loyalists are deprived of all moral significance.”64 Might Kirk’s lack of interest in Canadian order flow from the fact that in his guiding phrase “ordered liberty,” “ordered” is the adjective and “liberty” is the noun? Might that phrase suggest that liberalism is ontologically primary in Kirk’s framework, and thereby suggest that Kirk is a “conservative liberal”—again noting the relative ordering of the adjective-noun pair? One can hardly blame Kirk, as an appropriately patriotic conservative, for leaving no stone unturned to detect conservatism in his own country. Indeed, Orestes Brownson—one of Kirk’s lodestars—argues that the Founders “built better than they knew.” This argument, which echoes Tocqueville (and later John Courtney Murray), might have been dismissed too summarily by Grant.65 Even Kirk himself failed to appreciate that America’s (limited) capacity for greatness and goodness may rest in “hyper-enthusiastic” and consumeristic American religion, as prototypically characterized by evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, and Mormonism.66 Yet if Brownson and Kirk’s methodology of unconscious conservatism is sound, why not then inquire into whether some of America’s putatively collectivist neighbors—particularly those of English heritage—might also be more conservative than they know, and indeed more conservative than America? One wonders if Grant’s outsider perspective, despite his scant demonstrated knowledge of the American Founding, sees more clearly the late-modern liberalism in America.

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Grant and America Today It is unfortunate that Grant never engaged with Kirk, who could have provided him with an alternative—or at least more nuanced—account of America. At a minimum, Grant would have found a fellow-traveler in his crusade against American technology. Kirk was surely as out of step with his liberal (and indeed conservative) compatriots as much as Grant was with his fellow liberal and conservative Canadians. Kirk’s position may have required as much intellectual courage and fostered as much loneliness as did Grant’s. Kirk, like Grant, charged his conservative contemporaries (such as the National Review circle) of failing to see the liberalism in their own conservatism. Hence, Grant might ostensibly have found some grounds for optimism about America, and for America’s capacity to restrain its technological soft imperialism. Presumably, such an acquaintance would have heartened Grant’s prospects for an independent and distinct Canada. Yet Grant might have ultimately returned from a conversation with Kirk more pessimistic than hopeful about America. Grant would likely lament the fact that the American thinker who moved the furthest out of the mainstream toward traditional conservatism—the thinker who best recognized the liberalism in contemporary American conservatism— nonetheless only embraced a more conservative form of liberalism. Grant would likely bemoan the fact that the contemporary American thinker with the most politically conservative instincts of his time could not recognize liberalism in his own self-consciously anti-liberal conservatism. If Grant were to find common cause anywhere in American conservatism, he might find more obliging interlocutors in the nascent postliberal movement in America. Only there does one find American conservatives who fully reject liberalism, as typified in a work like Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen argues elsewhere that progressivism is sown into the heart of the Constitution itself, and that those who have deep concern over the state of America today must reassess America’s first principles.67 For Deneen, a genuine American conservatism faithful to Kirk’s Six Canons of Conservatism would thus need to look to preFounding America, beginning with those figures who would ultimately form the inaccurately styled Anti-Federalist movement. One might add that fidelity to Kirk’s canons suggests looking even further back to those Tory thinkers in the Thirteen Colonies who fled to Canada upon Independence. Could contemporary American conservatives look North for

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inspiration? Grant might see it as a faint hope. Yet even Grant could not rule out the inscrutable interventions of Providence.68

Notes 1. J. M. Twenge, and W. K. Campbell, “Digital Media Use Is Linked to Lower Psychological Well-Being: Evidence from Three Datasets,” Psychiatric Quarterly 90, 311–331; J. M. Twenge et al., “Increases in Depressive Symptoms, Suicide-Related Outcomes, and Suicide Rates Among U.S. Adolescents After 2010 and Links to Increased New Media Screen Time,” Clinical Psychological Science 6, 3–17. 2. Andrew Sullivan, “We Are All Algorithms Now,” The Weekly Dish, September 18, 2020, Accessed from https://andrewsullivan.sub stack.com/p/we-are-all-algorithms-now. 3. George Grant, Lament For A Nation, in Collected Works of George Grant, Vol. 3, ed. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 314. Hereafter Lament and CW , Vol. 3. 4. Grant, Technology and Justice, in CW , Vol. 4, 23. 5. Grant, Time as History, in Collected Works of George Grant, Vol. 4, ed. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 20. 6. Grant, “The Great Society,” in CW , Vol. 3, 459. 7. Grant, “The Great Society,” in CW , Vol. 3, 459; see Google’s mission statement: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (https://about.google.com). 8. Grant, “Conversation: Intellectual Background,” in George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations, ed. Larry Schmidt (Toronto: Anansi, 1978), 62–63; Arthur Davis and Peter Emberley, “Introduction,” in Collected Works of George Grant, Vol. 1, ed. Arthur Davis and Peter Emberley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), xxiii. 9. Grant, Lament, in CW , Vol. 3, 321, 326–327, 372. 10. “Question [Bornstein]: Do you think the epithet ‘red tory’ is suitable in your case? [Grant:] The epithet’red tory’ can only be used if you look at the practical part of my book and not at the philosophical.” (Grant, “Letter to Stephen Bornstein,” 20 February 1967, in CW , Vol. 3, 376.

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11. David G. Peddle and Neil G. Robertson, “Lamentation and Speculation: George Grant, James Doull And The Possibility Of Canada,” Animus 7 (2002), 112. 12. Grant surely would have noticed how Canada happily hosted the 2022 American Political Science Association meetings. 13. Russell Kirk, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory: Episodes and Reflections of a Vagrant Career (New York: Fleet, 1963), 14–15; H. D. Forbes, “Conservative Minds, Canadian and America: Comparing George Grant and Russell Kirk,” Conference Paper, Canadian Political Science Association, Montreal, 3 June 2010, 3–4. 14. Forbes, 5; Gleaves Whitney, “The Swords of Imagination: Russell Kirk’s Battle With Modernity,” Modern Age, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Fall 2001), 311–313. 15. Kirk, “The Tension of Order and Freedom in the University,” in Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: Essays of a Social Critic (Chicago: Regnery, 1956), 29. Hereafter Beyond Avarice. 16. Kirk, The Roots of American Order (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004), 16–18. 17. Kirk, “Order and Freedom,” in Beyond Avarice, 31–33, 37. The phrase is reminiscent of Grant’s strong language against abortion in his last decade. 18. Kirk, America’s British Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993), 70–71. 19. Kirk, “American Conservative Action,” in Redeeming the Time, ed. Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1996), 58. 20. Kirk, “Introduction,” in The Portable Conservative Reader, ed. Russell Kirk (New York: Penguin, 1982), xviii–xx. 21. Whitney, 311. 22. Kirk, “American Conservative Action,” in Beyond Avarice, 51–52. 23. Whitney, 317–319. 24. Grant, “Dennis Lee – Poetry and Philosophy,” in CW , Vol. 4, 515. See also Ronald S. Dart, George Grant: Spiders & Bees: Collected Essays by Ronald S. Dart, ed. Brad Jersak (Dewdney, BC: Fresh Wind Press, 2008). 25. Kirk, “Humane Learning in the Age of the Computer,” in Redeeming the Time, 117. 26. Kirk, “Order and Freedom,” in Redeeming the Time, 29.

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27. Grant, “Philosophy—Massey Commission Report,” in Collected Works of George Grant, Vol. 2, ed. Arthur Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 4. 28. Kirk, America’s British Culture, 1–2, 76–79. 29. Kirk, “Humane Learning,” in Redeeming the Time, 118–120. 30. Mark G. Malvasi, “Kirk among the Historians: Myth and Meaning in the Writing of American History,” The Political Science Reviewer 35 (2006), 149–150. 31. Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 324. 32. Kirk, “Introduction,” xxxii. 33. Kirk, “Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy,” in Redeeming the Time, 215. 34. Ibid., 212. 35. Kirk, “The American Mission,” in Redeeming the Time, 177. 36. Kirk, “Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy,” in Redeeming the Time, 222. 37. Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 255. 38. Grant, “Introduction to Carleton Library Edition (1970) of Lament for a Nation,” in CW , Vol. 3, 372–373; Peddle & Robertson, 112. 39. Grant, “Review of The Collected Works of Walter Begehot: Volumes V-VIII, The Political Writings, edited by Norman St John-Stevas,” in CW , Vol. 4, 883. 40. Ibid. 41. Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 173–174, 208. 42. Kirk, “Three Pillars of Order,” in Redeeming the Time, 264–265. 43. Kirk, Roots of American Order, 244, 303. 44. Kirk, “Introduction,” xxv. 45. For this reason, Don Forbes argues that because Kirk was more Burkean than Grant, that Kirk is therefore more genuinely conservative. See Forbes, 13. 46. Grant, “Review of Bagehot,” in CW , Vol. 4, 883. 47. Marco Barducci, Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613–1718 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–3. Barducci argues that the Dutchman Grotius was even more influential than Hooker. 48. Grant, Techology and Empire, in CW , Vol. 3, 66. 49. Kirk, “American Conservative Action,” in Beyond Avarice, 53. 50. Ibid., 52–56.

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

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Kirk, “Order and Freedom,” in Redeeming the Time, 31–34, 40. Grant, Technology and Justice, in CW , Vol. 4, 591. Grant, Technology and Empire, in CW , Vol. 3, 71. Grant, Technology and Justice, in CW , Vol. 4, 637; Davis and Emberley, “Introduction,” in CW , Vol. 1, xxiii. Ibid. Kirk, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory, 3, 13. Kirk, “Humane Learning,” in Redeeming the Time, 117. Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, in CW , Vol. 3, 370. See also Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 60n22. Grant, English-Speaking Justice, in CW , Vol. 4, 239. Kirk, “The American Mission,” in Redeeming the Time, 177–180. Kirk, “Ten Conservative Events,” in The Politics of Prudence (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1993), 34. Kirk, “The American Mission,” in Redeeming the Time, 177. In the interests of intellectual charity, it bears noting that Grant also focused somewhat provincially on the threats to Canada, thus turning a remarkably blind eye to the worldwide threat of Communist totalitarianism. (The life of the Soviet Union was almost coterminous with that of Grant, beginning year before his and ending a year later.) It is one thing to identify aspects of empire in America; it is quite another to speak of America and the Soviet Union as merely two species of the same genus of empire, which Grant occasionally seemed to do. Grant, Lament for a Nation, CW , Vol. 3, 321. Grant, “Convocation Address Given at St. John’s College, Winnipeg,” in CW ,Vol 3, 86; Grant, Lament for a Nation, in CW , Vol. 3, 320. Peter Augustine Lawler, “Modernity and our American Heresies,” in The New Atlantis, Summer/Fall 2014, 69–71. Patrick J. Deneen, “The Conservative Case Against the Constitution,” Princeton University, 10 March 2011, 1–3, 21–22. “To think ill of the dominant American tradition must not allow one to forget that which remains straight and clear among Americans themselves. Living next to them, Canadians should know better than most how incomplete are the stereotyped gibes of Europeans. The cranes and the starlings still fly high through their

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skies; sane and wise families grow up; people strive to be good citizens; some men still think. Above all, many Americans have seen with clarity the nature of that which chokes them and seek for ways to live beyond it.” Grant, “From Roosevelt to LBJ,” in CW , Vol. 3, 468.

CHAPTER 6

George Grant and Roger Scruton: Scrutinizing Scruton and the New Left Ron Dart

Introduction George Grant (1918–1988) and Roger Scruton (1944–2020), for different reasons, are understood as being political philosophers of a more conservative bent and tendency. Both men have their legitimate criticisms of liberalism but, ironically enough, Grant’s more classical Toryism makes him more sensitive to the New Left than does Scruton’s version of conservatism (which is a variant of classical sixteenth to seventeenth-century liberalism—of which Grant was most critical). This essay will linger less on the differences between Grant’s High Toryism and Scruton’s liberal conservatism and more on their different attitudes and approaches to the New Left post-WWII. Both men had legitimate criticisms to make of the New Left, but Grant was more sympathetic to the New Left (a sic et non position) whereas Scruton took a decided and definite opposition (root and branch) to the New Left. It is somewhat significant that

R. Dart (B) University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, Canada e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_6

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when Scruton scans the landscape for his versions of conservatism he lingers long on the European, English and American traditions (while ignoring Canada—he could have learned much from Canadian political philosophers), whereas Grant engages the European, English and American traditions but offers a different (more sympathetic) approach to the New Left. I will, in part II of this essay, briefly reflect on how Grant and Scruton drew from different wells in the Western tradition (Scruton more modern than Grant) and the difference it makes in how they engaged the New Left.

Whose Version of Conservatism? The language of Toryism and conservatism is bandied about from a variety of angles, some equating Toryism with conservatism, others noting substantive differences (given certain reads and interpretations of history). I will, for the purpose of this essay, highlight why Grant questioned the conservatism of Locke, Smith, Burke and tribe (who Scruton held high) and turned to those like Plato, Richard Hooker, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (and the unique Canadian Tradition) as a means of defining and understanding (past and present) different things worth conserving, in principle and practice, thought, word and deed than Scruton. But let us briefly sit with Grant on his read of history, then compare and contrast it with Scruton, and by heeding how both men read and interpreted history see how this impacted their attitude to the New Left in ways that are at odds with one another.

Grant and Canadian High Toryism: A Classical Vision I have co-edited, co-written and written a number of books on Grant1 (and a variety of articles on Grant in other books), so this overview will be, at best, cursory and only touching on a few significant station stops on Grant’s philosophical and public journey. Grant published a variety of articles, booklets and book reviews (including poetry) in the late 1940s– 1950s, all included in Volumes 1–2 of The Collected Works of George Grant (that ends in 1959).2 But it is Grant’s first book, Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959) that summarized his thinking on significant religious, political, historic and economic issues, delivered as lectures on CBC.3 The various lectures brought to the fore his analysis of classical thought and

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varieties of the ideology of liberalism (which he thought emerged, in a formal and material way, with the coming to be of the protestant reformation of the sixteenth century). There are three editions of Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959, 1966 & 1995) and each edition makes more inroads into Grant’s thinking. But the point to note in Philosophy in the Mass Age is the way Grant compares and contrasts the way of the ancients (with their mythic way of knowing as articulated, in a more abstract way, via natural law) and the lack of a substantive centre and grounding in the modern notion of liberty and freedom, moral philosophy on front stage in this compact missive. The notion of an eternal Good as understood by the classical way of knowing (and virtue as its corollary as the higher good versus freedom) and the idea of liberty (with the content being relative and plural) when applied to freedom of religion and worship began the fragmenting process in the West. It was this notion of liberty, when applied to the economic sphere that birthed the protestant work ethic, suspicion of the state and laissez-faire economics (Grant was as much indebted to Max Weber as R. H. Tawney in his analysis, perhaps Tawney even more so). It was this notion of liberty-will-choice (Grant even tracked this tendency to the God of the Hebrew canon that was internalized by the Puritans in their notion of a sovereign God electing—choosing some (even double election)) and rejecting others. Is God Good or is God a Being who, at core, is about power, willing and liberty—such was Grant’s drilling as he attempted to understand the deeper historic roots of reformation theology as applied to the sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Dutch-English Calvinists and their founding of the American republic-empire (the ongoing notion of chosenness as a unique and special people). The idea of liberty-willing contra form and structure, when secularized, became a rallying cry for aspects of the enlightenment, science and reason, the notion of progress via human effort central to emerging liberalism and Marxism (both committed to history as progress), with the future being the product of human willing and liberty. Grant reflected on “The limits of Progress” and “American Morality”4 in these lectures, his interest in history applied to contemporary issues in the mass age. It is, in Grant’s thinking, the protestant reformation (Lutheran but more so Calvinist—he does not deal with the Anabaptist-Mennonites) that signals the break with the past and the emergence of the modern project. Grant’s practical application of his theory meant he had some affinities with the leftist tradition of Canadian thought in the Co-operative

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Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and as the CCF was soon to be called the New Democratic Party (NDP), Grant was asked to contribute to a series of essays (Pierre Trudeau, Michael Oliver and other leftist thinkers included) to chart the path forward for the party. Grant’s article “An Ethic of Community” was published in the collection of essays in Social Purpose for Canada (1961) that both offered a solid critique of the market economy, the impact on historic communities and role of state and society in correcting an excessive trend to the right in Canadian thought and life.5 Needless to say, Grant did have his serious differences with the underlying philosophical prejudices of the CCF-NDP, but he took the position that it provided a brake to the liberty driven economic ideology that was having an obvious impact on the working class and the natural world. Grant did not linger long with the NDP. The decision by Tommy Douglas (leader of the NDP) to vote with Lester Pearson (leader of the Liberal Party) to bring down the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker in 1962, the core issue due to Kennedy insisting Canada take warheads for the Bomarc missiles. Grant saw in this coalition of NDP-Liberals an uncritical willingness to doff the cap to the emerging imperial power and New Romans south of the 49th. It was the combination, in Kennedy, of liberty-power that, once secularized, took on such frightening proportions in the United States in the early 1960s. The fact Diefenbaker opposed Kennedy (with his aggressive agenda in Canada and elsewhere) and that variations of the soft left liberalism did not seem to see it at a formal political level (specifically, the NDP and Liberals) turned Grant to the Conservative Party of Diefenbaker. Moreover, it didn’t hurt that Diefenbaker and Howard Green refused to bend the knee to the Canadian acolytes of Kennedy, (Kennedy as mentioned above, being a sort of liberty-power without limits and constraint). It was Grant’s opposition to both Douglas-Pearson and Kennedy and his support of Diefenbaker that, in many ways, clarified a notion of Canadian conservatism that was quite at odds with the republican conservatism of Goldwater in the United States. This came to be called “Red Toryism;” however, Grant was never a “Red Tory” as understood by Gad Horowitz (who pinned the label on him). I have used the language of “High Tory” to describe both Grant and an older conservative tradition within Canada that is substantively different than versions of republican conservatism in the United States. With Lester Pearson winning the Federal election in 1963, Kennedy was pleased with him, and Diefenbaker was

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now the opposition. The result being that warheads were now welcomed in Canada. Grant saw in Diefenbaker’s opposition to Kennedy and PearsonDouglas, although imperfect and erratic, an older version of conservatism that dared to differ from the secularized liberty-loving puritanism of the United States (both at a philosophic and political level). The publication in 1965 of Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism brought to the fore, at the level of history, theory and practice, a notion of Canada (its history and vision) that was quite at odds with the United States—not to mention the Canadian colonials who doffed their caps to such an ideology.6 Needless to say, Grant’s opposition to American imperialism, his leanings in a dovish direction, his critique of corporate capitalism and Mill’s power elite and his challenge to American engagement in the Vietnam War warmed him to the emerging New Left in Canada. Grant saw in the New Left a nobility (albeit naïvely idealistic) that had affinities with Canadian High Toryism (it could be mentioned that Stephen Leacock had many affinities with the New Left at McGill in the 1920s and the birth of the CCF). There are, in short, in the Canadian context, points of concord between Toryism and the left. Leacock thought from such a place as did Grant. The rise of the New Left in Canada in the mid-late 1960s (and remember that this group was often marginalized by the NDP and Liberals) birthed the Waffle movement within the NDP. The assumption was that it was better to waffle to the left than to the right! (Just for a little background, members within the NDP, such as Gad Horowitz (b.1936), James Laxer (1941–2018), Mel Watkins (1932–2020) and tribe, were opposed to David Lewis, the party leader, who was seen to be waffling to the right. Grant was, for the New Left, one of their most eloquent public intellectuals. Grant’s lectures and Teach-Ins at the University of Toronto, “A Critique of the New Left” (1966) and “The Value of Protest” (1966) garnered much attention for him—and how rare was the academic who aligned with the protest and New Left, and rarer still someone who was a Tory.7 The publication of the Watkins Report in 1968 made it abundantly clear that the Liberal Party was, essentially, handing over Canada’s natural resources to corporate and American big business. I remember, quite fondly, a lingering and long lunch with Mel Watkins and Robin Mathews more than a decade ago in which Watkins and Mathews spoke

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fondly of Grant—Grant even bailing Watkins out of prison for some of his protest activities.

Scruton, Conservatism and the New Left Robin Mathews was in Paris in 1968 when the riots, violence and counterculture erupted. Robin collected many posters in Paris, and they are now in the Simon Fraser University Special Collections on the West Coast of Canada, a collection called “The Esther and Robin Mathews May 1968 Paris Poster Collection.” Roger Scruton was also in Paris in May 1968 when violence occurred in the streets and elsewhere. The more populist New Left, its direct street protests—chaos and confusion the inevitable consequence—did much to shape the maturing Scruton. Grant had a different read of the New Left than Scruton and Mathews returned to Canada after 1968 and played a significant role, at a literary, educational and political level as a leader and shaper of the New Left. Why do such observers-participants interpret these events so differently and their lives go in opposite directions as a result of such interpretations? Scruton was both a lecturer and professor at Birkbeck College in London from 1971–1992, and during that time his growing interest in conservatism contra the New Left deepened and took a more thoughtful shape and form. The fact he edited The Salisbury Review from 1982–2001 meant his impact via multiple articles did much to define the new conservatism in England and Anglo-American political and aesthetic thought and culture. There is something quite renaissance about Scruton: his reach going in a variety of creative and insightful directions, his notion of conservatism both interdisciplinary, philosophy, history, music, culture, religion, education and politics ever being touched and massaged by his thoughtful and probing mind. The further Scruton’s political journey, the more, unlike Grant, he opposed conservatism to variations of leftist thought. Is such an either-or approach necessary and imperative when dealing with economic and political thought in word and deed? Does such an oppositional way of thinking and articulating the issues produce the best of fruit? Is conservatism necessarily in opposition to the left? Much hinges, of course, on what we mean and how we define conservatism and variation of leftist liberalism and socialism-communism. But, to Scruton, we turn to his approach to the conservatism-leftist polarization he embodied and perpetuated when alive.

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The publication in 1985 of Scruton’s Thinkers of the New Left set the obvious wheels in motion for an either-or conflict between a certain understanding of conservatism and the New Left.8 The chapters of the book were drawn from The Salisbury Review, and, as can be imagined, were not smiled upon kindly by those at Birkbeck or the broader leftist liberal and New Left clan given the fact Eric Hobsbawm called Birkbeck home for many decades. Longman Publishing was vigorously criticized for daring to publish such a political tract that offended the reigning ideology of the left of the time. A former student of mine is a graduate of Birkbeck, and I have suggested he do his PhD at Birkbeck on Scruton and Hobsbawm, comparing and contrasting their views on the left and conservatism. But there is no doubt Thinkers of the New Left drew together a complex and layered family tree that Scruton identified as belonging to the leftist tribe, their differences there but their affinities more to the cogent point. The fast-moving overview and summary first chapter begins with “What is Left?” (one might ask, aren’t there two obvious ways to interpret such a question?) and concludes with the concluding chapter “What is Right?” (again, aren’t there, equally, two ways to interpret such a question?). Thinkers of the New Left steps beyond, and rightly so, the more crude and populist uprising in Paris in 1968 and enters the more substantive thinking of leftist theorists and activists (of a higher level). The chapters are journalistic but journalism of a probing and thoughtful level—the content often insightful. These were the years of the Thatcher era in England, Reagan in the United States and Mulroney in Canada (and it should be noted that Grant, increasingly so, had serious doubts about Mulroney and his warm friendship with Reagan, not to mention his free trade commitments contra Pierre Trudeau). I might add that Scruton also had his legitimate questions about Thatcher. But it was to the theorists of the New Left, and even the postmodern left, that Scruton turned in Thinkers of the New Left (namely, E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, Michel Foucault, R. D. Laing, Raymond Williams, Rudolf Bahro, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jurgen Habermas, Perry Anderson, György Lukásc, J. K. Galbraith and Jean-Paul Sartre). Needless to say, such a combination of thinkers (many at odds with one another) seemed to Scruton to reflect a tendency that was, obviously, anti-conservative (all of the above shared this ideological position) but the types of New Left and liberal thinking (late modern and postmodern) took them to different places on the social, economic and political

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journey. Thinkers of the New Left, if nothing else, positioned Scruton and The Salisbury Review at the forefront of a more lively, engaging and thoughtful conservatism. The more sheltered aesthetic world and ethos that Scruton had inhabited was, increasingly so, bringing together philosophy, aesthetics and thinkers of the new right (past and present, family tree sketched in name by name, country by country). This was also a period of time in Scruton’s life when he was actively engaged with libertyloving thinkers and activists in Eastern Europe who were still living under the oppressive nature of leftist and communist rule. So, for Scruton, if the ideology of leftist thought (as described in Thinkers of the New Left) led to the situation in Eastern Europe, it was obvious that the theory that justified such political oppression had to be opposed, in thought and deed (Scruton, to his credit, doing both). I might add, at this point, that his conservatism was very much about conserving a notion of liberty that had been negated in the Eastern Bloc states. Grant, like Scruton, would, of course, argue that freedom in such a situation should be held high. But, at a deeper and more philosophic level (theological too), Grant knew that the language of liberty and freedom without content was, at the core, the true essence of liberalism. This essence, when played out to its logical conclusion, has consequences. In this sense, Scruton was naive to not consider how, in time, the “free for” issue in liberalism would inevitably play itself out; that the ideological breaks of the earlier bourgeois founders like Locke, Burke, Smith and Hobbes (who very much had assumptions about which things liberty couldn’t touch) would not be strong enough to oppose the heart and core of liberalism—that thing which merges liberty, will and power. Grant was wise enough to know, long term, that the very language of liberty—like an acid—could be used to eat away at any limits that were placed in front of it, whether moral or economic. It was Scruton’s turn to thinkers like Burke, Locke, Smith and Hegel (the consummate apologist of modern dialectical liberalism) that, at the level of theory and practice, highlights how and why Grant and Scruton are on different paths and their understanding of conservatism does collide with one another.

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Hegel: Scruton and Grant There are a variety of ways of reading and interpreting Hegel, but in a general sort of way, three versions have won the historic way. There is the leftist and Marxist approach to Hegel in which the journey to freedom is turned into an economic dialectic in which the master–slave binary becomes the bourgeois–proletariat binary—the latter, in time, overthrowing the former. Obviously, Scruton and Grant will not take to such a read of Hegel. Grant would have more sympathy for aspects of the Marxist-Hegelian approach for the simple reason that the communal vision of Marx has some affinity with the commonweal (commonwealth) and organic view of history in opposition to the more liberty-driven and individualistic approach of a form of liberalism. There is the right of centre “end of history” read of Hegel that Francis Fukuyama did much to highlight (with his cautions and worries about it).9 Grant and Scruton would oppose such a read of Hegel even though Scruton is often seen on the political right, his read of Hegel being more of a centrist liberal version. The third read of Hegel dwells more in the dialectical centre in which community and individual, society and the state are constantly engaged in tension, with neither side excluding the other. It is significant that Charles Taylor (probably one of the most thoughtful Hegelians of the centre) and Scruton met and had a dialogue at McGill University (in the Religious Studies Department) in April 2014.10 Some of Scruton’s notions of Islam were, perhaps, more on the reactionary right in the dialogue but the bringing together of Scruton and Taylor was a bringing together of two philosophers of the complex Hegelian centre. There can be little doubt that Hegel was one of the most significant philosophical apologists of liberal modernity. His read of the unfolding dialectic of history in terms of the maturing of the consciousness of liberty synthesized, at religious and political levels, his predictions and vision into the future the notion that the liberal version of liberty was ever maturing and waxing. The point to note, though, is that Hegel embodied a notion of liberty that Scruton found convincing. This merging of the classical English phase of liberalism as articulated by Locke, Burke and Smith with Hegel made for a version of liberalism that is often called conservatism these days. It is opposed to notions of liberalism that drive the content into pathways that classical liberals decidedly and defiantly oppose at both state-society level (modern liberals more statist) and questions of human identity, gender, market economy, ecological and, for Scruton, Brexit and

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the European Union. There is a sense that when the individual, local, region or small platoon collides with international organizations, statist authority or trendy liberal issues, Scruton leans into the former contra the latter. In this sense, he has some affinities with Phillip Blond’s Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It (2010), Blond is pilfering the red tory term from the Canadian context in which Gad Horowitz called George Grant a red tory (which Grant denied).11 But it is significant that the New Left in Canada were drawn to Grant in a way they were not drawn to Scruton. Grant suggested, often, though, that there were only two substantive philosophers: Plato (the defender of the classical vision) and Hegel (the sophisticated apologist of liberal modernity). The fact that Scruton was more indebted to Hegel than Grant speaks much about their differing notion of liberalism and the relevance of classical thought in the late modern and postmodern context. A shorthand and abridged way into Grant and Hegel can be found in Grant’s much commented on article “Tyranny and Wisdom” in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969).12 The reflection by Grant delves and dives into a debate of sorts between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève on Strauss’ On Tyranny (1948).13 The debate is, in many ways, paths diverging regarding the ancients and moderns: Kojève heeding and genuflecting to Hegel in regards to the dialectical movement into the universal and homogenous state, and Strauss questioning such a liberal read of history and the implications of it; Grant siding more with Strauss than Hegel-Kojève yet also, given his commitment to Christian thought (Bible and Classical philosophy), questioning Strauss also. Grant attempted to live in the tension of the classical notion of hierarchy with the merging of the Christian vision of equality that, he suggested, once secularized, birthed liberalism. Needless to say, Grant and Scruton massage the hierarchy-equality tightrope but do so in different ways—this takes them down different paths which makes Scruton more opposed to the New Left. I have no doubt that Scruton would definitely oppose Kojève’s read of Hegel but in doing so he would be defending an alternate read of Hegel. Grant would never defend Hegel in the way Scruton would: Grant viewed Hegel as a significant part of the modern problem regarding the soul, society and a read of the meaning of history. I mentioned above the publication of Scruton’s Thinkers of the New Left. The publication of this

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book in 1985 created an intense backlash from the centre and centreleft—it certainly, if nothing else, catapulted Scruton onto front stage as a thoughtful thinker opposed to the dangers of the “Left” and held high the positive possibilities of the “Right.” The fact Kojève is missing in this primer by Scruton and left–right was corrected in his more updated argument contra left, pro right Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015).14 Kojève is targeted again and again in Fools, Frauds and Firebrands for his crude thinking and misread of Hegel. The multiple misreads by the New Left of Hegel is an issue Scruton walks the extra mile to change and remedy in his ongoing opposition to not only the ideological conclusions of the New Left but their seeming inability and consistent misreads of Hegel and many others. There can be no doubt Scruton offers a read of Hegel that is at odds with the New Left and political right but he leans more in the dialectic to the right rather than the left. But, why, even in a thoughtful, measured and probing way, defend Hegel? Strauss and Grant levelled legitimate criticisms against Hegel that highlighted their concerns about liberalism (in its various forms and guises from the sixteenth century onwards). If Scruton is a thoughtful defender of liberalism in its earlier phases versus its later modern phases, he should have asked, how do the principles of liberalism, once unleashed, prepare the way for its later versions? And what will those later versions look like? It was at the level of core principles of liberalism that Strauss and Grant had their questions—they knew that once the liberalism genie was out of the bottle, or Pandora’s box was opened, there would be no meaningful way to properly contain it. In a book review of Scruton’s Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition,15 I have reflected on Scruton’s understanding of conservatism as a variant of sixteenth- to seventeenth-century liberalism, and compared Scruton’s notion of conservatism with Grant’s High Toryism in Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization: Symposium on Roger Scruton’s Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition.16 I did, in my lengthy review, highlight the older and deeper sources from which Grant drew his High Tory vision and affinities with the New Left and show why Scruton’s opposition to the New Left emerges from a certain understanding of liberty and the free individual, often, in opposition to the state and state planning. Needless to say, leftist thought and action can be excessively statist or anarchist (grass roots and voluntarist society and community). Scruton would have some affinities with the organizational element of the left but be steadfastly opposed to the statist

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left. Grant was less opposed to the role of the state (and its necessary role) and in this sense, he drew more from Hooker (who he signals his commitment to in Lament for a Nation) and Plato. This is why Grant had a certain attachment to Disraeli (seeing him and Sir John A. Macdonald as nineteenth-century High Tories). Disraeli certainly walked the extra mile, in thought, word and deed, as well as in his novels, to support the working-class contra the emerging entrepreneurial class. Macdonald had a high view of the state as a necessary agent of law, order and good government. It might also be noted that Scruton had a certain affection for Karl Popper (whose dis-appreciation of the state and anything he smelled as left, was no secret), whereas Grant had no patience for Popper. There is, in short, many an either-or position that Scruton takes, whereas Grant is more willing to engage in a sic et non approach. So, how does Hegel fit into such a dilemma? Grant, as mentioned above, following Strauss opposed Hegel as Hegel was interpreted by Kojève. Scruton questioned, legitimately so, Strauss and Kojève’s read of Hegel and, in doing so, seemed to offer a more centrist, a more conservative, certainly a less leftist (Marxist, democratic socialist or social democratic) read of Hegel. Scruton’s read of Hegel does lean to the right in a way, for example, that Charles Taylor’s read of Hegel17 does not. Why does Grant view Hegel (in his leftist, centrist and rightist reads) as problematic? Much of Grant’s focus (as with many classical and much older conservatives) has to do with Hegel’s dialectic and liberal read of the unfolding and progressive notion of history, the liberal idea of liberty and freedom ever bringing liberal democratic states into a fuller and richer understanding of freedom. Grant argues that this was just window dressing and that liberalism was, once probed, at the core and centre, about liberty and power. Liberal conservatives (Scruton) could do their best to put a brake on the notions of liberty, willing and power, but Grant argued this was a futile activity. In his articles on Liberalism and Tyranny, “The Triumph of the Will” (1988) and Free Trade “The Fate of the Willing” (1988) he made it clear that the rhetoric of pluralist liberalism often obscured the fact of a monistic centre: liberty and willing.18 This combination of liberty and willing was at the core of liberalism and which, Grant argued, we are enfolded in. Grant saw his task as one of enucleating how such enfolding unfolded inevitably within the historic process; and he saw Hegel’s notion of liberal conservatism (which Scruton held to) as being unable to halt the deeper thrust of liberty-willing, techne and technology—all being a

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material outworking of such ideas turned into material form and shape. Grant found in thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger significant philosophers who opposed and deconstructed the Hegelian narrative of history, human longing and a more optimistic attitude to the march of history. Grant did, of course, question Nietzsche and Heidegger (near the end of his all-too-human journey his focus was on Nietzsche and Heidegger), but he merely used Nietzsche-Heidegger’s critique of Hegel to yet deconstruct, in time, both Nietzsche-Heidegger and Hegel. This way of thinking took him back to the “moving image of eternity” as found in Plato and Plato contra Hegel (and his inept read of Plato) and Nietzsche-Heidegger and their problematic caricatures of Socrates and Plato. Grant parted paths with Strauss, also, in his inadequate read of the Athens-Jerusalem tension and its ongoing relevance. It should be mentioned that although Grant did not engage either Taylor or Scruton in their attachment, in a centrist manner, to Hegel, Grant did encounter Hegel in his contemporary James Doull (in some ways an even more sophisticated and leftist read of Hegel than Taylor and Scruton). The early friendship of Doull-Grant, in time, found them parting paths in their reading and application of Hegel to Canadian political life, the friendship seriously strained and never really healed. Neil G. Robertson’s fine article “Freedom and Tradition: George Grant, James Doull, and the Character of Modernity” touches on this.1920

Protestant Anglicanism and the Clash of Civilizations: Proto-Liberalism and the West: Scruton, Said and Grant It is probably significant to note that Scruton’s attachment to liberalism also goes back further than Locke-Burke-Smith and Hegel. There is a sense in which, as he turned (or returned) to the religious roots of his English heritage, he turned his eyes to the Church of England, but, in doing so his focus was more on the English reformation of the sixteenth century (with its lower church and protestant bent) than the fuller and more classical catholic vision of Anglicanism. Such a position is well articulated and thought through in Our Church: A Personal History of The Church of England (2012).21 Such an approach to Anglicanism reflects a version of the Anglican way that tends to prioritize the protestant reformers (liberty held high) and those who follow them such as Locke

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and Burke. Grant saw in the rise of the English reformation (even in its via media form) the early seeds of liberalism being sown. It is in this sense that Grant is more at home with the “Radical Orthodoxy” of John Milbank and company, with their more catholic read of Anglicanism than protestant version of the sixteenth century, that Scruton was more held by—these two versions of Anglicanism, in many ways, differentiate classical Anglicanism (rooted and grounded more in classical Greek and Patristic thought) from more modern protestant Anglicanism (with its greater leaning in a liberal direction). I have discussed these affinities between Grant and Radical Orthodoxy in The North American High Tory Tradition (2016).22 I think it can be strongly argued that Scruton was a first-generation liberal. That being, specifically, a liberal who held to the more sixteenthcentury version of Anglicanism which was held by the liberty-loving likes of Locke, Burke, Smith and Hegel (though, interestingly, for the most part, Scruton overlooks Hooker, whereas Grant does not). Such an approach is aptly summed up in Liberty and Civilization: The Western Heritage (2010) and post-9–11, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (2002).23 There are obvious affinities between this book and Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. The notion that the West and its version of liberty is the bearer of the best form of religious, political and civilizational thought does, once again, place Scruton on the either-or right. Just as Scruton turned on Kojève in Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, he does much the same with Edward Said in the same book.24 Scruton is in both of his books contra the New Left an opponent of Derrida and Foucault. Would Grant have so idealized the West with its notions of liberty, celebrated the West against the rest and turned on Said? Does such an approach reflect a more thoughtful and nuanced notion of conservatism? Grant wrote a thoughtful and engaging review of Said’s The World, The Text and the Critic in the Globe and Mail (May 7 1983).25 The approach is not as dismissive as Scruton’s, nor is it a West versus the rest (Orient) attitude to Said—Grant neither genuflects, as do many to the Said-Chomsky types, nor does he demonize them. The review by Grant of Said reflects a way of engaging legitimate criticism of the West that must be heard by a classical Tory who has as many legitimate criticisms of the imperial West as do thoughtful Orientalists. Let us briefly linger with Grant and Said (Grant also discussed Derrida and Foucault in the review). The review begins by acknowledging that as philosophy and theology

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have increasingly lost their cultural significance, literature has become the purveyor of significant insights and cultural issues. Said’s careful blending of world, text and critic raises some pressing issues of how certain Western texts reflect a worldview that does need to be questioned, a worldview that has often caricatured or ignored non-Western literature. This has led to a condition in which Western literature, if not read in a comparative way, can become a purveyor of Western imperialism. Grant is quick to recognize such a dilemma in a way Scruton does not: Said, being a Palestinian (with Christian Anglican roots) who needs to be heard. Instead, Grant suggests that “It is a source of hope that a person of Edward Said’s high intellect and wide learning should be one of our leading critics.” Said’s distinction between “filiation” and “affiliation” is central to his analysis, the prioritizing of Western literature more a matter of “affiliation” than a fuller comparative approach that recognizes the importance of “filiation.” Grant held many of Said’s essays in the book close, but the one he thought the best was on Derrida and Foucault (opponents of Scruton). The fact that Grant appreciated Said’s deeper understanding of Islam (understandable, given Said’s Middle Eastern upbringing) meant there was an openness to reflect on the dangers of a too-idealized notion of the West that lacked a more substantive understanding of the Middle East and Orient. I was fortunate to do PhD Studies at McMaster University in the Religious Studies Department (which Grant founded in the early 1960s). McMaster became, in Canada, the model for Religious Studies with its breadth and depth in Oriental Religions. The founder of Islamic Studies in Canada was W. C. Smith at McGill University who founded the Department in the 1950s. Grant was a friend of Smith’s and his interest in the dialogue between the Occident and Orient, West and the Rest was never an either-or attitude or approach. Grant ends his review of Said’s with two criticisms: (1) he would have been more than pleased if Said had highlighted how and why Derrida was an epigone of Heidegger (and the way both distort and caricature Plato) and (2) Grant took umbrage with Said’s failure to include Celine in his book–Celine, for Grant, being a must read author. The review ends with a charming quip from the South African poet Roy Campbell: You praise the firm restraint with which they writeI’m with you there, of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where’s the bloody horse.26

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Scruton, given his passion for horses and writing and his approach to literary criticism, would certainly agree with Grant via Campbell–too much of literary criticism is about the snaffle and the curb–indeed, the bloody horse is often missing. I think Grant had a much broader and more ironical vision and approach to the West and the Middle East-Orient than did Scruton, and this meant he was less inclined to idealize the liberal post reformation west in opposition to the Middle East and the Orient in quite the same way Scruton did. This meant Grant had a more curious interest (although not uncritical) in the prolific writings and interpretive approach to Said in a way Roger Scruton did not.

Conclusion: Whose Version of Conservatism? Alex Colville was one of the finest Canadian painters and a close friend of George Grant. In fact, it was Colville who invited Grant to give the lectures that became the book, English Speaking Justice.27 Colville was commissioned to do the Canadian Centennial Coins (1867–1967) and his 50-cent coin was one of a wolf howling into the air in an environment that did not seem to hear or care—Colville compared the wolf to Grant. But, Colville’s 1954 painting, “Horse and Train,” stark though it is, has a great deal of affinity with Grant as well—the horse, on the tracks, charging the oncoming train, just like Grant dared to charge the oncoming train of orthodox liberalism (in all its variations, forms and guises). Roger Scruton, although seen by many as a conservative, was a conservative of the 1st generation liberal way and manner. The fact Scruton, I think, pit, too often, conservatism against the New Left meant that his either-or approach to political ideology missed much. And his tendency to see the first generation of liberalism (conservatism) contra both the New Left form of liberalism and such a form of Western ideology as the standard does raise some nagging questions. Would this be the position of a historic Canadian High Tory of the line and lineage of a George Grant, Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, Marya Fiamengo, Milton Acorn and many others? Such are the questions I have attempted to answer in this essay on Grant, Scruton and the New Left.

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Notes 1. See especially, George P. Grant: Athena’s Aviary (Abbotsford: St Macrina Press, 2018); The North American High Tory Tradition (New York: American Anglican Press, 2016); George P. Grant: Canada’s Lone Wolf: Essays in Political Philosophy (Abbotsford: Fresh Wind Press, 2011); George Grant: Spiders and Bees (Abbotsford: Freshwind Press, 2008); Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy, and Politics, eds. Ian Angus, Ron Dart and Randy Peg Peters (University of Toronto Press, 2006). 2. Arthur Davis and Peter Emberley, eds., Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 1 (1933–1950) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Arthur Davis, ed., Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 2 (1951–1959) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 3. George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 4. Ch. 6 and 7, 62–89, in Philosophy in the Mass Age. 5. Michael Oliver, ed., Social Purpose for Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961). 6. George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, Ontario, 1965). 7. George Grant, “A Critique of the New Left,” in Canada and Radical Change, ed. Dimitrios I. Roussopoulus (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1973), 55–61; Arthur Davis, and Henry Roper, eds., Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 3 (1960–1969) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 8. Roger Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left (UK: Longman Group, 1985). 9. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Perennial, New York, 2002). 10. The event, called “Thinking the Sacred with Roger Scruton,” took place from April 11–13, 2014. 11. Phillip Blond, Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It (London: Faber and Faber, 2010). 12. George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969). See the chapter in this volume by D. H. Forbes for an extended discussion of this essay.

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13. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (New York: Political Science Classics, 1948). 14. Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 15. Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition (New York: All Points Books, 2018). 16. Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization “Symposium on Roger Scruton’s “Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition” 6:3&4 (2019), 59–65. This review was also published in VoegelinView https://voegelinview.com/conser vatism-an-introduction-to-the-great-tradition/. 17. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 18. Arthur Davis, and Henry Roper, eds., Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4 (1970–1988) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 726–735; George Grant, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 151–153. 19. Neil G Robertson “Freedom and Tradition: George Grant, James Doull, and the Character of Modernity,” in Hegel and Canada Unity and Opposites? eds. Susan Dodd and Neil G. Robertson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 243–274. 20. A tome I co-edited, Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy, and Politics (2006) deals with such a clash and tension. I also dealt with the Grant-Taylor concord-discord in my article “George Grant and Charles Taylor: Canadian Owls” in Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right (2019); Grant and Taylor, I might add, hardly turned from the left to the right—both men were too thoughtful and nuanced to make such an uncritical move—titles of books can be deceiving and inaccurate. But, in both articles the issue of how to read and apply Hegel (Doull-Taylor) and the means to deconstruct Hegel by heeding Plato (StraussGrant) is pondered and reflected upon in suggestive depth and detail. 21. Roger Scruton, Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England (London: Atlantic Books, 2012). 22. Ron Dart, The North American High Tory Tradition (New York: American Anglican Press, 2016). 23. Roger Scruton, Liberty and Civilization: The Western Heritage (New York: Encounter Books, 2010); Roger Scruton, The West

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and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2002). Ch. 7 “Culture wars Worldwide: The New Left from Gramsci to Said,” pp. 197–238, in Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. Collected Works of George Grant: Vol. 4, 920–923. Roy Campbell, Roy Campbell: Collected Works. Volumes 1 & II , eds. Peter Alexander, Michael Chapman, and Marcia Leveson (Cape Town: A.D. Donker, 1985), 176. George Grant, English Speaking Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998).

CHAPTER 7

Only (a) God Can Save Us: Grant and Heidegger’s Competing Responses to Technological Nihilism Timothy Berk

George Grant appreciated and attempted to address, both the promise and perils of Martin Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity as an epoch of technological nihilism. This makes him particularly relevant to contemporary readers, as not only Heidegger’s critique of technology but also Grant’s apprehensions and misgivings about said critique, have

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics Graduate Associates Workshop in January 2016, its year-end conference “Deus v. Machina,” and the University of Victoria’s CSPT conference “Nihilism.Hope,” both held in April 2016. I would like to thank Taylor Putnam, Ronald Beiner, and Peyman Vahabzadeh for their generous feedback as discussants. T. Berk (B) University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_7

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proven increasingly prescient. Indeed, leading thinkers of the European, Eurasian, and American New Right have taken seriously Heidegger’s insistence that “only a god can save us” from technological civilization. France’s Alain de Benoist, Russia’s Aleksandr Dugin, and the United States’ Greg Johnson, Collin Cleary, and Jason Reza Jorjani, for example, all take inspiration from Heidegger’s insistence that the return of immanent gods of particular peoples and their homelands are needed to take us beyond the “world night” of liberal modernity.1 Dugin is not relying on metaphor when he boldly claims that Heidegger “occupies the place of the last prophet,” explaining that he. concludes the development of the first stage in philosophy (from Anaximander to Nietzsche), and serves as the transition, the bridge to a new philosophy which he only anticipates in his works. In this case, Heidegger is an eschatological figure… a figure in a religious pantheon, as an ‘envoy of Being itself’, a herald and organizer of the greatest event. In it, the old history of the European world will end and a new one, which has yet to exist, will begin. [original emphasis]2

Nor is Dugin alone in his assessment of Heidegger as the prophet of the far-right; Jorjani proudly declares that his own “work takes its departure from Martin Heidegger’s prophecy of a return of the gods as the future of a poetic reflection on the sciences from beyond the end of Philosophy,” while Cleary advises that “If the neo-pagan movement is to ally itself with any philosopher it should be Heidegger.”3 Grant’s thinking throughout the last two decades of his life increasingly focused on a confrontation with Heidegger—his planned magnum opus, which remained incomplete due to his untimely passing, was to be a defence of Platonism against Heidegger. Precisely because he was so imbued with Heidegger’s critique of technology, Grant was also compelled to find a way to reconcile his concern with the just and eternal with a framework that has space for neither. Whereas Heidegger rejects metaphysics as inherently technological, Grant is insistent that without a resuscitation of metaphysics, and a metaphysics underpinned by a transcendent God or idea of the Good, we are indeed fated to endure the worst technology can throw at us. Hence, he considered the rediscovery of an “authoritative Christianity” through a reinterpretation of the history of metaphysics and Christianity to be imperative, because without an external conception of justice or the good any attempts to move beyond

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technology will likely succumb to its most dangerous impulses.4 Yet, Grant remains a contemporary in recognizing the challenge that both technology and Heideggerian historicism pose for the metaphysics of transcendence, eternity, and the Good. In this chapter, I will argue that despite sharing Heidegger’s concern with the godlessness of the modern epoch, Grant ultimately anticipated the moral and political dangers of Heideggerian attempts to fill this void. I will proceed by using Grant’s writings as a resource to probe and challenge Heidegger’s obscure, but increasingly influential, prophetic appeals to völkisch gods as potential saviours of “authentic” peoples from technological nihilism.5 Grant’s own response—a metaphysical inversion of Heidegger’s deus ex machina, whereby the necessity of God or the Good (rather than the gods) is intimated by the phenomenological experience of deprival in a world marked by their absence—offers a more politically salutary way forward than Heidegger’s, albeit one that is less philosophically suited for a post-metaphysical intellectual landscape. Therein lies either Grant’s more radical freedom from technology or his more hopeless ensnarement within its metaphysics, depending on whose diagnosis of the relation between technology and metaphysics we find more convincing. While I cannot expect to resolve this crucial impasse in the following pages, I hope to join Grant in clarifying it.

Technology as Ontology and Danger We will begin with a brief outline of the congruencies between Heidegger and Grant’s understanding of technology, before turning to their disagreements over the nature of the danger it poses. Both argue that despite our belief that technology is a neutral instrument, we “remain unfree and chained” to it.6 We are mistaken when we think that the essence of technology is the technological itself—that is to say, apparatuses of machine technology. Instead, both claim that technology is a form of revealing—that it has become “the ontology of the age,” meaning the understanding of what “is” that most fundamentally grounds the modern world.7 As Heidegger observes, the German word for technology (die Technik) is derived from the Greek techne, which, as an art, was understood as a form of poiesis —meaning a bringing forth, and therefore a form of revealing (alethia).8 Modern technology, however, does not reveal as

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a form of poiesis in the sense of bringing beings forth from concealment to unconcealment in such a way that lets beings be, but rather as “a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.”9 Grant therefore writes that technological existence consists of “subjects confronting otherness as objects—objects lying as raw material at the disposal of knowing and making subjects.”10 Eventually, these “objects” themselves dissolve into mere standing reserves, meaning resources that are to be constantly ordered and re-ordered so as to be at hand for the use and further ordering by human beings. As technology, techne therefore no longer reveals as a type of poiesis, but as “Enframing” (Ge-stell), meaning “a challenging claim which gathers man thither to order… [the] standing reserve.”11 Ultimately, human beings become akin to a standing reserve themselves as they become perceived as a “human resource” within the apparatus of various systems of technological mass organization, whether industrial, state, or corporate, which exist for no further end than the continual ordering of all beings, whether human or non-human.12 Yet, while Heidegger and Grant are more or less in agreement in their description of the essence of technology, the two differ in (a) the nature of the ultimate danger that technology represents and (b) the historical cause of said danger. Their divergence can be traced to their differing understandings of the history and significance of metaphysics. For Heidegger, the destructive capabilities of machine technology are not the greatest danger posed by the technology. Rather, technology presents us with an ontological disaster. It renders us oblivious to the question of Being, endangers our relationships to ourselves and “to everything that is,” including nature and the gods, while driving out “every other possibility of revealing.”13 In doing so, it undermines the authority of anything that could conceivably provide life with meaning or seriousness, while robbing us of our uniquely human dignity as the “watchers” or “shepherds” of Being. Heidegger attempts to uncover the origins of technological destining by providing a history of Being/metaphysics, meaning an account of the fateful historical unfolding of how Western human beings have interpreted what is. Whereas the question of Being—the mystery behind the fact that beings are—opened itself to the pre-Socratics (marking the inception of the history of Being), this guiding question gradually became concealed and forgotten throughout the subsequent development of Western philosophy. Heidegger locates the decisive moment in Plato,

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whereby the Being of a beings is no longer sought in the way in which it temporally presences and finitely endures, but instead in the way it corresponds to a permanently enduring abstraction within the suprasensory realm of the ideas.14 Being, which is no-thing (das Nichts ) or the abyss (der Ab-grund), becomes conflated with the highest being/s—the ideas for Platonism, and God for its Christian successor—causing the question of Being to be gradually replaced with questions about beings. The shift towards metaphysical thinking has (at least) three main consequences. Firstly, our thinking becomes necessarily shallow because it fails to grapple with the most primordial and essential of questions, namely, questions pertaining to Being. Secondly, by understanding or relating to beings through their correspondence with metaphysical concepts or ideas, we do injustice to the beings themselves. We blow up one aspect pertaining to their being while obscuring the totality of their Being. We therefore superficially engage with beings by failing to consider them within the broader context of their coming to presence. Thirdly, we denigrate earthly Being and beings by subordinating them to an abstract and unworldly realm. This is a result of the tendency since Plato, “or more strictly speaking, since the late Greek and Christian interpretation of Platonic philosophy,” to consider the suprasensory world as “the true and genuinely real world,” in comparison to the “world down here, the changeable, and therefore the merely apparent, unreal world.” Heidegger therefore argues that the history of metaphysics is at the same time a latent history of nihilism and therefore “its unfolding can have nothing but world catastrophe as its consequence.”15 In the metaphysics of modernity, it is now the representing “subject,” rather than the Platonic-Christian ideas or creator God, that provide the stamp of Being upon “objects.”16 As subjects, humans attain in themselves the certainty that was formerly found in “the revelational certainty of salvation.”17 They thereafter emancipate themselves from the Church by becoming their own legislators, obligated only to their own reason and its laws. Eventually, the law of reason undermines itself and we are left with the radical subjectivism of the Nietzschean value-positing will.18 According to this understanding, nihilism is not the result but the cause of the loss of authority of God and reason. Thus Heidegger, echoing Nietzsche, writes, “Metaphysics is history’s open space wherein it becomes a destining that the suprasensory world, the ideas, God, the moral law, the authority of reason, progress… suffer the loss of their constructive force and become void.”19

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Heidegger’s chief concern, however, is not the dissolution of metaphysical idols, but the more originary Hölderlinian “flight of the gods.” The gods flee long before human beings fall into disbelief and Christianity collapses upon itself. Like Being, the gods withdraw when approached by the clumsy hand of metaphysics. They have already flown when God becomes understood as the highest “cause” or “value,” as we see in Scholasticism, or when our relationship to the gods succumbs to the subjectivism of “mere ‘religious experience’” under Protestantism.20 The gods, to be sure, are not beings who permanently exist “out there,” beyond a historical world, waiting to return, whom we can take stock of using metaphysical categories. Instead, the gods are emissaries of Being who attune peoples to different dimensions of Being; they poetically preside over the historical event of the disclosure or revelation of Being and the Being of beings to this or that people, and in doing so ground a particular historical world. Thus, when transformed by what Heidegger calls “ontotheology” into the most general and highest being, God or the gods “lose all that is exalted and holy” about them along with the “mysteriousness” of their distance.21 Hence Heidegger writes, “Whether the god lives or remains dead is not decided by the religiosity of men… whether or not God is God comes disclosingly to pass from out of and within the constellation of Being.”22 We can thus make sense of contemporary Heidegger-inspired far-right neo-pagans like Cleary who writes that “openness to the divine is made possible by a more basic standpoint: openness to the beings of things as such. Here I am drawing upon Heidegger, who saw that our age is one in which we are closed to the being of things, and always forcing some form or some design upon them,” with the consequence that “Modern man is insulated from the awe-full,” and thereby the gods.23 No longer countered by the gods, Heidegger claims that man “everywhere and always encounters himself,” thereby remaining oblivious to his own essence, meaning “his needed belonging to revealing.”24 The historical worlds that gathered around the gods, as manifestations of a people’s particular relation to Being, disintegrate into the homogenous non-worlds (Unwelt ) of technological civilization, uprooting peoples from their homelands and from Being.25 Hence the Rhine, to use a key example for Heidegger, is no longer the site of the poetic gathering of the Germans and their gods amidst the earth and sky of this particular river, but becomes yet another site for technological manipulation— a resource of hydro-power, commercial shipping, and mass tourism.26

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Abandoned by the gods, ensnared by technology, and “deracinated” from authentic historical worlds, technological civilization, according to Heidegger, reduces modern human beings to homelessness precisely because it conceals Being—threatening “that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.”27 ∗ ∗ ∗ Whereas Heidegger is ultimately concerned with the oblivion of Being, Grant is preoccupied with the technological oblivion of eternity and God. While indebted to Heidegger’s critique of technology, he argues that it is insufficient because its destruction of metaphysics, and its substitution of eternity for “history,” means that it is unable to appeal to eternal standards that can orient human beings towards a just or good life. Grant therefore supports Heidegger’s “call to thought…to think beyond technology in this night of the world. But – and what a ‘but’ it is – the ontology he is moving towards excludes the one thing needful – namely justice in its full and demanding purity.” Therefore Heidegger’s “wonderful account… is written within the loss which has come with technology.”28 As a Christian-Platonist, Grant strives towards recognition of an eternal order, whether it be called God or the Good, that imposes obligations on human beings. The modern language of values, however, implies that human beings, as subjects, are the ones who posit standards. These standards lack force, however, because they are by their very nature arbitrary. He explains that. for the ancients ‘good’ meant what something was fitted for. Our modern science does not understand nature in these teleological terms. Knowledge of good cannot be derived from knowledge of nature as objects. When the word ‘good’ was castrated by being cut off from our knowledge of nature, the word value took its place as something we added to nature. But now in our time the emptiness of that substitute becomes apparent.29

Here we see that Grant agrees with Heidegger that the language of values is inherently nihilistic. Yet, whereas Heidegger and his contemporary followers ask peoples, and specifically the German Volk, to become authentic (eigentlich) by “fitting” themselves towards their historical destiny—which is to say, the historical sendings of Being as the “lightning

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flashes” of its gods30 —Grant appropriately worries that a “fitting” that bypasses or foregoes universal and eternal (i.e. transcendent) standards, risks binding us towards evil. Grant learns from Plato and Simone Weil that the beautiful mediates between us and external and transcendent truths, meaning God or the Good. Yet, the beautiful is experienced through “a love of one’s own” and of “otherness,” both of which technology denies.31 It does so by homogenizing local traditions and identity while reducing “otherness” to mere objects or standing reserve. With all beings understood according to “algebraically understood necessity and… [as] resource… the beauty of the world in its primal sense is rarely present for us,” because “anything apprehended as resource cannot be apprehended as beautiful.”32 With the withering of the beauty of the world, we thus lose crucial steppingstones between ourselves and eternity. Whereas Heidegger rejects eternity as a metaphysical construct, which is thereby complicit in the consummation of modern nihilism, Grant argues that neither Platonic nor Christian metaphysics per se are responsible for initiating the historical process of technological nihilism. Instead, he points his finger at Western Christianity, which emerged in the tenth century with an “intense interest in reforming the world.”33 As opposed to the “Mediterranean” or “Greek” interpretation of Christianity, Grant claims that Western Christianity fatally opts for an immanent rather than transcendent interpretation of the faith. According to Grant’s reconstruction of the tradition of transcendence, the essence of God and the Good are beyond knowledge precisely because they are absent from this world. Hence, Grant cites Plato’s understanding of the Good as “beyond being.”34 What knowledge we can attain in this world comes from God’s love which illuminates our intelligence and thus enables us to intuit His truth. Since “the supreme object of our love is absent” and is therefore “ultimately unknowable,” both the Christian and Platonist are compelled to maintain a degree of agnosticism towards the content of the truth which maintains itself as an “ambiguous mystery.”35 Grant argues that Western Christianity betrayed this transcendental heritage, and in doing so initiated the West’s technological destining. This variant of Christianity eventually “simplified the divine love by identifying it too closely with immanent power in the world.”36 For example, the Church used Aristotelianism to make nature point towards “an overriding purpose given for the universe as a whole.”37 In doing so it

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encouraged “the great lie” that providence “is scrutable.”38 As a consequence of its immanentizing of the divine, Western Christianity failed to “recognise the distance between the order of good and the order of necessity.”Emboldened by an impious identification of itself with a knowable good, the Church “became exclusivist and imperialist, arrogant and dynamic,” seeking to secure “a vast extension of the church’s power over the world” rather than “holding forth the mystery of perfection.”39 Thus, whereas Heidegger boldly argues that Christianity “has the greatest share” in the death of God,40 Grant argues instead that it was specifically the Western misinterpretation of it—which betrays the mystery at the heart of the Christian faith—that is ultimately responsible. Western Christianity, in both its Catholic and Protestant forms, would ultimately pay the price for its attachment to progressive materialism in modernity (which had its precedent in the Church’s expansion into the worldly domain). It gave way to its secular offspring, liberalism and Marxism, as the faith of material progress gradually replaced the Christian faith. Accordingly, “the only interpretation of Christianity that technological liberalism would allow to survive publicly would be the part of it… which played the role of flatterer to modernity.”41 Similar to Heidegger’s conclusion that we are living at the end of the history of Being, Grant concluded that we are “living at the end of western Christianity.”42 Grant therefore joins Heidegger in seeing technological nihilism as the root cause of the most important modern ills including environmental destruction, mass extinctions, technologically aided warfare, corporate power, imperialism, the encroachment of cybernetics into various spheres of life,the dissolution of local communities and traditions, and most controversially, abortion and euthanasia. Yet, Grant’s diagnosis diverges by focusing on the loss of the language of justice and the good. Tellingly then, unlike Heidegger, who preferred to remain silent on the Holocaust (or to equivocate it with the devastation wrought upon the earth by mass agriculture) Grant condemned “the final solution” as “the archetypically monstrous event of the twentieth century.”43

The Return of (the) God(s) as Saving Power Neither thinker believes that philosophy as such can solve the problems posed by technology. Indeed, philosophizing in terms of seeking “solutions” for “problems” is itself a technological way of thinking. At best, both attempt to clear a path for the recovery of non-technological modes

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of existence by preparing for the advent of gods or God. Heidegger does so by exposing the inadequacy of, and the damage done by, metaphysical language and thinking in order to prepare the way for a poetical thinking receptive to the gods, and thereby Being. Grant, meanwhile, attempts to re-invigorate the classical metaphysical language of the good by exposing the bankruptcy of both the language of values and Heidegger’s own post-metaphysical language. After Heidegger reaches his tentative conclusion that technology threatens to eclipse all other modes of revealing, he changes course. He recites a stanza from Hölderlin, “But where the danger is, grows/ the saving power also.”44 By recognizing Enframing as a historically conditioned mode of revealing, not only do we realize that Enframing is not the only way of revealing, but we become aware of the extent to which we are always under the sway of revealing itself. Thus, technology holds within it the saving power because precisely through understanding technology as a revealing rather than an instrument man is shown “and enter[s] into the highest dignity of his essence. This dignity lies in keeping watch over the unconcealment—and with it, from the first, the concealment – of all coming to presence on this earth.”45 While this epiphany may represent a freeing claim from technology, Heidegger portends that “we are not yet saved.”46 We come closer to this saving power when we consider that, for the Greeks, techne, as a form of poiesis, also encapsulated the fine arts, which “brought the presences of the gods, brought the dialogue of divine and human destinings, to radiance.”47 As the poetical “thoroughly pervades every art” we are pointed towards poetry as that which may most “expressly foster the growth of the saving power.”48 Since Heidegger believes that “Human activity can never directly counter th[e] danger” of technology and “Human achievement alone can never banish it”49 poetic-thinkers can at best attempt to sow the seeds of a potential civilizational turning. Heidegger elaborates that. philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang ]; for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder.50

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Thus, what is necessary is both a poetic receptivity to the oblivion of Being/flight of the gods in modernity, and a readiness for their return. For it is only when, according to Heidegger, the “self-consummating essence of the modern age,” i.e. of nihilism and the desertification (Verwüstung ) of the world, becomes “self-evident… will the possibility arise of there being a fertile soil for Being to be in question in an original way—a questionableness of Being that will open ample space for the decision as to whether Being will once again become capable of a god, as to whether the essence of the truth of Being will lay claim more primally to the essence of man.”51 The possibility of harbouring new gods then depends on our ability to overcome modernity itself through, as Beiner puts it, a renewal of spiritual-cultural or metaphysical-political energies that emanate from a restored relationship to the mysterious depths of Being.52 Thus, Heidegger tells us that we cannot overcome nihilism by replacing “the Christian God with yet another ideal such as Reason, Progress, political and economic ‘Socialism’, or mere Democracy.”53 Rather, it is only through becoming attuned to wholly unmodern and illiberal cultural/ civilizational horizons that we can be saved from technological nihilism. As Cleary writes, “Only by overcoming that which has robbed us of openness can we hope ever to restore it. It follows that it is necessary to [engage in an all-encompassing] critique [of] modernity—to critique all of our modern ideals, values, ways of thinking, and ways of orienting ourselves in the world.”54 The new god/s will not be a re-incarnation of the universal and moral God of the philosophers meant for humanity as such, but will instead be poetic god/s emanating from the earth and sky of particular homelands of authentically historical, which is to say rooted, people—which even towards the end of his life meant the Germans.55 Heidegger’s concern goes beyond the freeing of individuals from technological thinking, towards grounding “authentic” collective worlds out of the truth of Being as given to a Volk by its god/s. It is necessary to pause here to recognize this as the kernel of Heidegger’s so-called “private” National Socialism that Heidegger affirmed throughout his middle and late periods—part critique of Nazism as it ultimately developed under Hitler, but also part attempt to redeem what he saw to be its core truth.56 Accordingly, 1933 was a potential “event” (Ereignis ) in which the spiritual renewal of the German people, and with it European humanity, was to be decided. By not following Heidegger and Hölderlin, however, in readying themselves for a new revelation of

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Being and the advent of the gods, Heidegger claims that the German Volk failed to live up to their world-historical destiny and botched the West’s best opportunity for spiritual-political rebirth out of the rekindling of the ancient Greek question of Being.57 Heidegger’s project seeks to keep this possibility alive— hence his insistence that WWII did not settle anything metaphysically,58 and his appeal to the contemporary illiberal right. We see this influence most clearly in Dugin: In the 20th century itself, Ereignis did not occur. The decision about transition to another Beginning was not made. It was impossible to make this decision within the framework of the ideologies that openly took an oath for Machenschaft [Machination] (Communism and Liberalism); and in the place where it could have been made, and where certain moments made one hopeful that it would be (the ideology of the Third Way), the decision was passed over (this was expressed in the chasm between the Conservative Revolution and historic National Socialism).59

Accordingly, Heidegger is “the most important thinker” for the New Right (or the so-called “fourth political theory”) because he “is the metaphysical (fundamental-ontological) step from the Third Way [Fascism] toward the Fourth one. The task is to develop the implicit political philosophy of Heidegger into an explicit one, thus creating as a consequence a doctrine of existential politics.”60 In doing so, Dugin believes that we (or in particular, the Russian Volk) will finally be able to inaugurate the twenty-first century by making a “decision… in favor of transition to another Beginning, in favor of Ereignis, in favor of Geviert [the fourfold],” thus “allowing gods (the Last God) to arrive,” and “the sacred”” to “reign again.” 61 ∗ ∗ ∗ As we have seen, Grant’s main objection towards Heidegger is that his ontological thinking eliminates the prospect of our being able to make distinctions between good and evil, or just and unjust actions. Grant therefore warns theologians that their task is not the Heideggerian recovery of ontology against technology, “but a search for an ontology which carries in itself the essence of justice.”62 If we fail to take into account the immediacy of justice, he argues, we will misunderstand technology and only exacerbate its worse tendencies. The task is to find a way to restore the ancient language of the good without being blind to the

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discoveries of modern science and Heideggerian historicity. Grant argues that to be blind to either side, whether the eternal or historical, is to be blind to an essential part of the whole. Grant all-too-presciently observes, meanwhile, that liberal attempts to shirk this problem by carrying on as though “justice” and “rights” still have force—despite their being severed from the Protestant tradition that made them intelligible—is neither intellectually respectable nor practically sufficient, given their vulnerability to attack or disregard by those outside post-Christian moral horizons.63 Grant is not so hubristic as to think that he can achieve this monumental task of establishing a new foundation for justice. Instead, he hopes that by helping us understand what went wrong in Christianity he can play. …a minute part in something that will take centuries—namely the rediscovery of authoritative Christianity. I have no doubt that that will slowly and through very great suffering occur—because Christianity tells the truth about the most important matter—namely the perfection of God and the affliction of human beings, and it has been given that truth in a way no other religion has.64

In other words, technological nihilism cannot be considered an iron-clad fate because it is ultimately unsustainable for human beings to live outside the truth of eternity for so long. While Grant agrees with Heidegger that the way out of technology leads through receptivity rather than willing, he nevertheless maintains that true receptivity to the unconcealment of Being is receptivity to God’s love, and thereby justice. Heidegger’s blindness to this, Grant insists, stems from a crucial misreading of Plato. In focusing on Plato’s account of “being” as “idea,” Grant argues that Heidegger ignores the metaphor of the sun, with its accompanying “metaphor of sight… as love.” Grant writes, When Heidegger defines good as used by Plato simply formally, as that which we are fitted for, he does not give content to that fitting as Socrates does when he says that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it. Heidegger describes Plato’s doctrine of truth so that ‘being’ as ‘idea’ is abstracted from the love of justice in terms of which ‘idea’ can alone be understood as separate… This is why I take even Heidegger’s wonderful

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account of technology as having been written within that loss which has come with ‘technology’. It is in this sense that Heidegger is an historicist, although the most consummate of the historicists.65

In other words, Heidegger’s own ensnarement within technology makes him miss that humans are not simply “fitted” towards that which history sends our way—this would be an empty or formal understanding of Being—but rather towards justice, which we experience when our sight is illuminated by the love that emanates from God or the Good. Grant thereby re-appropriates Heidegger’s secularized quasi-mystical structure of Being, whereby man stands in relation to the mysterious sendings of Being rather than God’s love.66 Western Christianity similarly conceals our receptivity to God’s love when it conceives of faith as a type of willing rather than knowing. Deeply impressed by the works of Simone Weil, Grant upholds instead that “the affirmation of the being of God is a matter of knowing and not of willing—that is, that belief or unbelief is never a matter of choice or commitment, but of intellect and attention” because, “One cannot force faith on oneself. The intellect should be entirety free to go where the necessity of the argument leads it.”67 Faith is a receptivity to the truth of God. It therefore follows that human dignity springs from “the fact that man is a singularly privileged being, and at the same time not the highest being, for his privileged position is not his work but given to him.”68 It is not difficult to see the relationship here to Heidegger’s view of the dignity of man consisting in his relation to Being. Against the technological understanding of man, Grant concludes that “reverence rather than freedom is the matrix of human nobility.”69 The key to Grant’s non-technological interpretation of Christianity is his insistence that any presence of God must go hand in hand with His absence. This helps Grant balance the opposing poles of (a) the need for God to be intelligible enough to guide thought action while (b) inscrutable enough to evade mastery by human calculation. For Grant, the Christian mystery of the Crucifixion—of “the perfectly just man being most hideously put to death,” is an image which perfectly encapsulates the dual “presence but also absence of God.”70 Likewise, Grant draws upon the Creation story, interpreted by Weil, as an example of Christianity’s upholding of the absence of God. As opposed to the Western

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account of Creation, in which God creates through an over-expansion of self (ultimately imitated by Western Christianity and modern technology’s expansion of our earthly powers), Weil claims that God did not create through willing an extension of Himself but instead withdrew, allowing the possibility of otherness.71 Despite our otherness, our souls still participate in God, and it is precisely through love that we are receptive and obedient to Him. Just as Heidegger cannot maintain the Platonic distinction between time and eternity, Grant suspects that the absence of the gods cannot be maintained amidst the polytheistic advent of the gods that Heidegger readies.72 Take the following passage written by Heidegger, The default of God and the divinities is absence. But absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing of the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus.73

At first, this understanding of the gods (which slyly reduces the monotheistic Judeo-Christian God to one of many gods) seems to maintain Grant’s condition of a simultaneous presence and absence. If the gods, however, are emissaries of the untapped spiritual energies that emanate from a fitting relationship to Being, can they maintain their absence once they have come to ground a historical world? If not, we have reason to doubt whether the gods Heidegger invokes could indeed save us, as their “otherness” would collapse into the historicity of mankind, despite his protestations.74 Accordingly, overcoming technology would require the affirmation of transcendence, rather than the abysses of Being. Without the possibility of a transcendent Other, Grant argues that Heidegger above all makes “clear… the impossibility of ethics.”75 Nevertheless, as we have seen, Grant recognizes that receptivity to God or the Good is rendered extremely difficult in technological modernity, where we understand our essence as one of creative freedom conquering chance in an “indifferent world.”76 Furthermore, both the language of values and Heidegger’s own non-metaphysical language bar us from thinking in the language of justice or the Good and thereby prevent us from experiencing them. Grant once again mirrors Heidegger by arguing that we can begin to overcome these barriers by being attentive to “intimations of deprival.” Yet, it is difficult for us to think in terms

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of deprivation because we are stripped of the systems of meaning that make the idea of genuine deprivation itself intelligible. Thus, “any intimations of authentic deprival are precious, because they are the ways through which intimations of the good, unthinkable in the public terms, may yet appear to us,” for “we are never more sure that air is good for animals than when we are grasping for breath.”77 Just as Heidegger leaves us waiting for new gods amidst the abandonment of Being, Grant implores us to listen, watch, or simply wait for “intimations of deprival which might lead us to see the beautiful in the image, in the world, of the good.”78

Conclusion In thinking through the question of technology and justice with Grant, we are forced into questioning whether metaphysical thinking is essentially technological, or whether it can offer a freeing claim with respect to our relationship with technology. Both Heidegger and Grant conceive of technology as a nihilistic destining of Being and therefore no mere tool. As a type of revealing, technology challenges nature to reveal itself as a standing reserve and human beings as the orderer of the standing reserve. Heidegger worries that technology conceals its own essence—that it is a mode of revealing—and thereby marks the consummation of the oblivion of Being. Grant, meanwhile, thinks that technology cuts us off from experiencing authentic otherness and therefore deprives us of our point of contact with God/the Good. Both thinkers agree that the language of values is closely intertwined with the rise of technology and prevents us from thinking beyond its presuppositions. This language presumes human subjectivity to be the centre of reality and consequently closes us off from receptiveness to either Being (and with it the dimension of “the Holy” and the gods) or God/the Good. Thus, the technological landscape is one inhospitable to divinity. For Heidegger, the flight of the gods is a spiritual-cultural crisis in which civilization is cut off from the mysterious depths of Being. For Grant it is a crisis whereby our civilization is without sufficient forms of external obligations, leaving us morally disoriented and estranged from our essence as revering creatures. Aware of both the magnitude of the task before them and the limits of philosophy, both thinkers attempt to prepare the grounds for a future receptivity to the gods or God in whom they believe our hope for a post-technological future lies.

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The disagreement between the two thinkers can be understood in reference to their understanding of the origins of technology. Heidegger claims that technology is the inevitable result of the turn towards metaphysics initiated by Plato and continued by Christianity. Grant, on the other hand, argues instead that the decisive turn towards technology began with Western Christianity, not with Christianity itself. Consequently, he claims, “Christianity did not produce its own gravedigger, but the means to its own purification.”79 Whereas Heidegger’s identification of technology with metaphysics is part of his destruction of traditional metaphysical concepts such as the just, the Good, and the eternal, Grant thinks these concepts can and must be reappropriated for the modern world, and that renewed confrontations with Plato and an “authentic” Christianity can help point us towards such a recovery. Grant ultimately issues the challenge that Heidegger’s very denial of morality suggests that he is still operating within the framework of technological nihilism. Consequently, if we rush towards post-technological ontologies, gods, and politics that have no room for an externally binding conception of justice, we risk merely exacerbating the darkest tendencies of modernity. By preparing for the gods, Grant would warn, we may unwittingly follow Heidegger in summoning the demonic.80 Hence, while Grant shares many of Heidegger and his far-right “identitarian” followers’ concerns over the fate of local political traditions and cultures in an age of globalization,81 he nevertheless maintains that the love of one’s country is a rung on a ladder towards love of the Good or God; that it must ultimately point towards, or be in service of eternal standards of justice rather than the immanent historical Being of an “authentic” Volk and its gods. Grant therefore exposes the political-ethical implications of Heideggerian historicism, as well as the difficulties of sustaining a trans-historically binding ethics without a transcendental-metaphysical grounding. Since he argues it would be uncourageous and intellectually dishonest to “turns one’s face to the wall” so as to escape the challenges posed towards the Good by both technology and Heidegger’s own thought, Grant suggests that the most prudent action may be to wait and pay heed to “intimations of deprival”—intuitions that the modern account is humanly or cosmically insufficient—so as to open a path towards the potential affirmation of the transcendent. Without Grant’s ultimate faith in transcendence (as open to doubt as it was) whether it be in the Good or God, however, we are left unsure whether such intimations offer a lifeboat or are simply

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a mirage. Instead of providing a solution, a renewed engagement with Grant is perhaps most beneficial in illuminating the problems posed by technology, as well as keeping us alert to the dangers and difficulties of corresponding attempts to overcome it.

Notes 1. Alain De Benoist, On Being a Pagan, trans. John Graham, ed. Greg Johnson (Atlanta: Ultra, 2004), 11–13, 15, 18, 168, 178, and Chapter 26 “The Return of the Gods”; Aleksandr Dugin, Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning, trans. Nina Kouprianova (Arlington, VA: Radix, 2014); Collin Cleary, Summoning the Gods: Essays on Paganism in a God-Forsaken World, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd, 2011), Chapters 1–3, and What is a Rune? And other Essays, ed. Greg Johnson (San Fransisco: Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd, 2015), Chapters 2 and 8; Jason Reza Jorjani, Prometheus and Atlas (London: Arktos, 2016), Introduction and Ch. 7; Greg Johnson, “The Gods of the Forest,” Counter-Currents, August 10, 2010, https://counter-currents.com/2020/08/thegods-of-the-forest/ (which draws on Cleary, Summoning the Gods, 25–26) and “Heidegger & Ethnic Nationalism,” CounterCurrents, June 27, 2017, https://counter-currents.com/2017/ 06/heidegger-and-ethnic-nationalism-part-1/, both collected in Johnson, Graduate School with Heidegger (San Francisco: CounterCurrents Publishing Ltd., 2020); see also Johnson’s introductions to Cleary’s Summoning the Gods, and What is a Rune?. For introductions to individual thinkers, see the relevant chapters on Benoist, Dugin, Johnson in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, ed. Mark Sedgwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), as well as James A. McAdams “Making the Case for Difference,” and Ronald Beiner, “The conservative revolution of the 21st Century,” on Benoist and Jorjani respectively, in Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy, eds. James McAdams and Alejandro Castrillon (London: Routledge, 2021). For Heidegger’s influence on the contemporary far-right see Ronald Beiner Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far-Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Julian Göpffarth,

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3.

4.

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“Rethinking the German nation as German Dasein: Intellectuals and Heidegger’s Philosophy in Contemporary German New Right Nationalism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 25:3 (2020), 248– 273. Dugin, Martin Heidegger, 18, see also 185–187. Dugin’s erratic philosophy, it should be noted, sees him oscillating between Heidegger, the occult mysticism of the “traditionalists” (René Guénon and Julius Evola), and Russian Orthodox Christianity. Jorjani, Prometheus and Atlas, xii–xiii; Cleary, Summoning the Gods, 76. Here Cleary is critiquing Benoist’s attempted NietzscheHeidegger synthesis in On Being a Pagan, which, Cleary argues, ultimately leans towards the former by reducing the gods to mere embodied “values” willed by creative Übermenschen. Cleary approvingly notes, however, that Benoist’s approach would later gravitate away from the Nietzschean “will” towards Heideggerian Gelassenheit (releasement, letting-be) (78–79); see Charles Champetier, “On Being a Pagan, Ten Years Later: An Interview with Alain de Benoist,” trans. Elizabeth Griffin, TYR Myth-CultureTradition, 2: (2004), 102–103. For Cleary’s understanding, meanwhile, of the necessary relation between neo-paganism and White Nationalism, see What is a Rune? Ch. 6. George Grant, “George Grant to Derek Bedson, 2 February 1978,” in The George Grant Reader, ed. William Christian and Sheila Grant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 435. Hereafter GGR. This chapter’s emphasis on Heidegger’s teaching of the gods and its contemporary re-politicization distinguishes it from earlier comparisons of the two thinkers; see Ian H. Angus Grant’s Platonic Rejoinder to Heidegger (Lewiston/Queenston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987), and Arthur Davis “Justice and Freedom: George Grant’s Encounter with Martin Heidegger,” in George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity, ed. Arthur Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). Angus appears more sympathetic to Heidegger’s invocation of the gods than Grant’s turn to Christian faith in his brief but suggestive invocation of gods who are “many and strange” and who appear to us “between paganism and atheism” (121, 126, see also 93).

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6. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. and trans. William Lovitt (Toronto: Harper Perennial, 1977), 3. Hereafter QTE. 7. George Grant, “Thinking About Technology,” in Technology & Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi Press Ltd., 1986), 32. 8. Grant meanwhile notes that our English word “technology” adds the key Greek word logos, meaning a reasoned account. The account (logos ) of what is that informs technology is modern science. Technology, as techne and logos is the “co-penetration” of the arts and sciences, or of knowing and making, whereby the arts are penetrated and transformed by the sciences, and vice versa. “Knowing and Making,” in GGR, 412. 9. QTE, 13. 10. “Thinking About Technology,” 32. 11. QTE, 19. 12. QTE, 18. 13. QTE, 27. 14. QTE, 29–31. 15. QTE, 61–2. 16. QTE, 139. 17. QTE, 148. 18. QTE, 81. 19. QTE, 65. 20. QTE, 117. 21. QTE, 26; Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2008), 242; “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 22. QTE, 49. 23. Cleary, Summoning the Gods, 3–4, 7, 30–32; see also Benoist, On Being a Pagan, 194–195; Dugin, Martin Heidegger, 207–209, 222, 241–242, 244–250. 24. QTE, 26–7. 25. Jornani, Prometheus and Atlas, 204; Cleary, Summoning the Gods, 7–11, and What is a Rune?, 146–147, 157; Johnson, “Heidegger & Ethnic Nationalism.” 26. QTE, 16; Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’, trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

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31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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QTE, 28. George Grant, “Justice and Technology,” in GGR, 442. “Knowing and Making,” 414. See Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’, 30. As Davis recognizes, Heidegger does indeed provide “a primordial ethics,” albeit one that Grant found insufficient (“Justice and Freedom”, 147–148, footnote 20). For a discussion of “evil”, not as “that which is merely morally bad” but instead “maliciousness” and “disord14er” within Being—of “fitting” relations between gods, humans, and the holy falling out of joint—see Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘Remembrance’, trans William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 88–89. See Angus’s interesting suggestion that Grant’s use of “one’s own” is a translation of Heidegger’s key word eigentlich (authentic), Grant’s Platonic Rejoinder, p. 130, ff. 4. Grant notes the added difficulty for North American settlers, insofar as that which does manage to shine through as “other” is still not “one’s own”: “That conquering relation to place has left its mark within us. When we go into the Rockies we may have the sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are, and what we did. There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as objects” (“In Defense of North America,” in Technology and Empire (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1969), 17). George Grant, “Faith and the Multiversity,” in Technology and Justice, 51. Henceforth “Multiversity.”. George Grant, “The Technological Society,” in GGR, 398. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 508b. George Grant, “Introduction to Plato,” in GGR, 209; “Multiversity,” 75. “Multiversity,” 76. “Multiversity,” 44. “Multiversity,” 75. “Multiversity,” 76, 58. QTE, 26. George Grant, “Religion and the State,” in Technology and Empire, 44.

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42. Ibid. 43. Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 27; George Grant, “Knowing and Making,” 416. 44. QTE, 28. 45. QTE, 32. 46. QTE, 33. 47. QTE, 34–35. 48. Ibid. 49. QTE, 33. 50. “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1993), 107. For commentaries on this passage from the far-right see Benoist, On Being a Pagan, 193; Dugin, Martin Heidegger, 178–179, 274; Jorjani, Prometheus and Atlas, 204–206; Cleary, Summoning the Gods, 80, footnote 26, and What is a Rune?, 208–9. See also Grant, “Interview on Heidegger,” 301–302, and “The Great Code”, 360, both in GGR. 51. QTE, 153. See Dugin, Martin Heidegger, 319; Jorjani, Prometheus and Atlas, 20, 720–729. 52. See Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Ch. 31, “Heidegger’s Sequel to Nietzsche: The Longing for New Gods,” 402–405, 408. 53. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Volumes One and Two, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperOne, 1991), 179; Dugin, Martin Heidegger, 159–168; Jorjani, Prometheus and Atlas, 203. 54. Cleary, Summoning the Gods, 14. Square brackets from an alternative formulation in 17. 55. “Only a God Can Save Us,” 113; for the politics of rootedness see Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 56. While I welcome Davis’s insistence that Heidegger was and remained a political thinker (“Justice and Freedom,” 157–158), subsequently published texts unfortunately challenge his strong belief that Heidegger did not approve of “anti-Semitism or recommended Genocide.” A lecture series from 1933–4 (Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt [Bloomington:

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59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

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Indiana University Press, 2010], 73) endorses the “total annihilation” of an unnamed internal enemy within Germany (this is not, however, categorical evidence that he would later support the Holocaust), while the more recent publication of the controversial “Black Notebooks” revealed Heidegger’s deeply rooted antisemitism, as well as its intimate connection to his thinking. See Peter Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). “Only a God Can Save Us,” 111–112. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Collins, 2015), 66; See Dugin, Martin Heidegger pp. 274–279, 284; Jorjani, Prometheus and Atlas, 189. Dugin, Martin Heidegger, 276. Dugin, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism (London: Arktos, 2014), 113–114; see also Dugin, Martin Heidegger, 168–75. For more on Heidegger and the “Fourth Political Theory” see Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory (London: Arktos, 2012), 28–29, 41–42, and 96. Dugin, Martin Heidegger, 273–274, 277–278. For Heidegger’s discussion of “the fourfold” (the topography of Being as consisting of the inter-play between “earth,” “sky,” “mortals,” and “gods”) see “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and “The Thing” in Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013). For an overview of Dugin’s reading of Heidegger and the fourfold, as well as a convincing rebuttal of the supposed “chasm” between the “third” and “forth” political theories (or even the Conservative Revolutionary tradition and National Socialism) see “In the Crosshairs of the Fourfold: Critical Thoughts on Aleksandr Dugin’s Heidegger,” Critical Horizons 21.2 (2020), 167–187. “Justice and Technology,” 441. See George Grant, “John Stuart Mill,” in GGR, 130. “George Grant to Derek Bedson,” 435. “Justice and Technology,” 442. See John D. Caputo, “Heidegger and theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 283. George Grant, “Introduction to Simone Weil,” in GGR, 252.

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73. 74.

75.

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“Introduction to Plato,” 210. “Religion and the State,” 43. George Grant, “Interview on Martin Heidegger,” in GGR, 303. “Introduction to Simone Weil,” 252–253. “Interview on Martin Heidegger,” 302–303: “Now, my question is how much the absence of God is maintained in Heidegger, and how much the absence of God is maintained in polytheism. I want to be very careful because the very substance of what I have thought about anything would go if I couldn’t believe in the absence of God. And I’m not sure that this is maintained in Heidegger.” Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 182. It is worth seriously considering, however, Heidegger’s discussion of the “Last God” in Part VII of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela VallegaNeu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), originally published in 1989 after Grant’s death. The last god is a god who fleetingly “passes by” - whose “presence” is a refusal and thereby an “absence”, potentially reconciling two of the three poles that Grant considers necessary for true “Otherness.” Without affirming transcendence, the gods are nevertheless intended to counter a people’s self-idolization by directing them towards Being, the earth, and the world (Sects. 251–2). Nevertheless, for evidence of the susceptibility of Heideggerianism to such self-idolization, see Cleary’s affirmation that “through an ethnic [rather than merely ‘credal’] religion a people worships itself”, precisely on account of the particular ethnic community’s (in this case the Germanic peoples’) elevated capacity to commune with Being through an ek-static relation to their historical landscape via their gods (What is a Rune?, 164); cf. Beiner, Dangerous Minds, 96. For more on the last god, see Mark Wrathall and Morganna Lambeth, “Heidegger’s Last God,” Inquiry 54:2 (2011), 160–182; Dugin, Martin Heidegger, 150–157. George Grant, “Leo Strauss and Political Philosophy,” in Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy and Politics, ed. Ian Angus, Ron Dart, and Randy Peg Peters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 91. George Grant, “A Platitude,” in GGR, 448.

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77. “A Platitude,” 452; Cf. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, Sect. 255: “Whether this call of extreme intimation [des außersten Winkens ],” i.e., the intimation of the coming of “the last god” amidst the devastation of the modern age, “still happens openly… therein is decided the future of humans.” 78. “A Platitude,” 453. 79. “Multiversity,” 77. 80. For an attempt to mitigate the risks of a Heidegger-inspired Homeric polytheism through the cultivation of “meta-poiesis,” or the skill of interpretive prudence, see Hubert Dreyfuss and Sean Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011), 241–243, 250–251, 259–260. 81. Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 46–47, 52–53, 62, 65–67, 94; Dugin, Eurasian Mission, 59, 67; Benoist, “On Identity,” Telos 128 (Summer 2004), 20; Cleary, What is a Rune? Ch 6, Sect. 3; Johnson, “Heidegger & Ethnic Nationalism.”

CHAPTER 8

What Are We Lamenting? George Grant’s High Toryism as a Form of Canadian Nationalism Nathan Robert Cockram

I One of the enduring legacies of George Grant was his insistence that the eclipse of Canada as a nation in the mid-twentieth century is sealed by the ever-advancing tide of modern scientific and technological innovations: [t]he confused strivings of politicians, businessmen and civil servants cannot alone account for Canada’s collapse. This stems from the very character of the modern era.1 Canada has not become a ‘branch plant’ of the United States simply due to party-political reasons such as Liberal party continentalism (though this, according to Grant, played a significant role). Rather, the decline of its national identity and independence is the inevitable consequence of Canada’s sharing the continent of North

N. R. Cockram (B) Independent Scholar, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_8

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America with the most powerful and technically advanced society in the world. While Grant’s insistence that modern technology has fated the death of an independent Canada is well understood, what is less understood, I think, is his argument for this conclusion. On one reading, typified by Ignatieff, the argument is that. Canada had gone from colony to nation to colony, from imperial subservience to Britain to imperial subservience to the United States. In the process, it had lost its identity and its soul. Its disappearance was only a matter of time.2

This gets something right. Grant does think that Canada is now subservient to the United States, and it has lost (or is inexorably losing) its identity and soul. But it also gets something dead wrong, in my view. What it gets wrong is the assumption that Canadian identity is something that only emerged from shedding the connection to Britain, that we went from ‘colony to nation to colony.’ Indeed, while Ignatieff embraces Grant’s Canadian nationalism, he takes Grant’s defense of the British connection to be simply a spasm of unfortunate (and outdated) nostalgia, not something integral to his lament for the nation: [Grant’s]…mistake was to believe that since we had lost the anchorage of Britain, we had lost the feature that distinguished us from the Americans. This had been the illusion of both his grandfather and his father—that Britishness defined who we were as a people. But we had never been just British, our myths of origin are plural, not singular.3

For Ignatieff, the fatal flaw in Grant is his failure to see that Canadian nationalism—and the Canadian nation—is independent of the British political institutions from whence it originated. My goal in this chapter is to argue that instead of seeing Canada as fated by technology to go from ‘colony to nation to colony,’ Grant, contrary to Ignatieff’s reading, sees the impossibility of Canadian nationalism in the mid-twentieth century as inextricably tied to the impossibility of Anglo-Canadian High Tory conservatism in this age. Moreover, I shall also suggest that understanding this point is integral to seeing the deeper philosophical critique of liberal modernity latent in Grant’s writings.

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II The first step on the road to understanding Grant’s understanding of connection between Anglo-Canadian Tory conservatism and Canadian nationalism is to understand the fundaments of Grant’s conservatism. To see that Grant is firmly in the Tory tradition, we need to take a brief look at the basics of Toryism. While there is a great deal of diversity between thinkers regarded as ‘Tory,’ it is my view that the following captures its core commitments.4 At its most basic, Toryism is the view that society is like an organism, and the traditions and institutions found in society are like its organs. These traditions and institutions, therefore, must be sustained in order to keep the organism healthy. This general thesis has further implications. One is a kind of measured traditionalism. Traditions, as the repositories of socially important knowledge forged in the fire of time, must be protected. Another is a kind of political skepticism: as perhaps best articulated by Oakeshott (1974), Tories, while not opposed to gradual, measured change, are opposed to wholesale social reform. Like the organism, social institutions will simply die if radically altered or placed into a completely foreign environment. As a corollary to this, many Tories express a commitment to a strong state able to prevent the mechanisms of free enterprise from generating kinds of inequality antithetical to organic communities. In Chapter VI of Lament for A Nation (1963) (hereafter LFAN ), Grant situates himself firmly in this tradition. In one typically pregnant passage, he suggests that in his view, conservatism is ‘essentially the social doctrine that public order and tradition, in contrast to freedom and experiment, [are] central to the good life’.5 In identifying conservatism with public order and tradition, Grant places himself in the Tory camp. Conservatism is a social doctrine, dedicated to preserving and fostering traditions. Echoing Hooker (1594), this requires a kind of strong state capable of maintaining public order—the organic commonweal—against radical reform, either planned or unplanned. For Grant, however, the defense of tradition through public order is not simply a means to protect accumulated practical knowledge. It has a deeper significance which can only be understood if we understand Grant’s commitment to a kind of political Platonism. Grant belongs to a line of Tory thinkers—extending through Hooker and Cranmer back through the influence of Aquinas to Plato—who have a teleological conception of the Good. Call this High Toryism. On this view, what we know as reality is simply an instantiation

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of eternal Forms, which are themselves sustained by the highest good, which is God. Moreover, humans have the ability to understand their purpose through reason. The proper exercise of reason, however, requires that humans develop these rational capacities within a society which can direct the individual toward the Good. As he puts it in Technology and Empire (1969) (hereafter TaE): Love of the good is Man’s highest end, but it is of the nature of things that we come to know and love what is good by first meeting it in that which is our own—this particular body, this family, these friends, this woman, this part of the world, this set of traditions, this country, this civilization.6

And again: It is true that no particularism can adequately incarnate the good. But is it not also true that only through some particular roots, however partial, can human beings first grasp what is good and it is the juice of such roots which for most men sustain their partaking in a more universal good?7

The importance of social traditions is not exhausted by the tangible benefits of collective forms of practical knowledge. Rather, they have a deeper import: they are ‘roots’ (so to speak) by which humans come to understand the flourishing tree of the Good. There is, for Grant, a discoverable natural order of things, better and worse ways of life, and a moral standard based on this natural order. In short, Grant’s High Toryism blends organicism and political skepticism with a commitment to a theologically-oriented form of natural law—what is just is written in the book of the world.

III In addition to setting out a conception of the Good, and tying our achievement of the good to the preservation of local forms of tradition, the Platonic strand weaving its way through Grant’s Toryism is, as I shall suggest here, central to two well-known themes in Grant’s political writings: his critique of modernity, and his profound pessimism regarding the continued viability of conservatism in Canada. To understand Grant’s critique of modernity, we first need to get a handle on his conception of what ‘modernity’ denotes. To get a clue,

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we can return to the passage from LFAN cited above. While conservatism is ‘essentially the social doctrine that public order and tradition … are central to the good life,’ they—significantly—stand in ‘contrast to freedom and experiment’.8 In explicitly contrasting tradition and public order to freedom and experiment, Grant suggests that they stand in opposition. Freedom and experiment are not traditional social values; rather, he implies that they are specifically modern. What we don’t get from this passage, however, is any indication of what freedom and experiment, as those values constitutive of modernity, actually represent, or why they are worthy of criticism. To see this we must turn elsewhere in Grant’s writings. Begin with freedom. Grant gives us an illuminating passage in TaE: In modern political theory, man’s essence is his freedom. Nothing must stand in the way of our absolute freedom to create the world as we want it. There must be no conceptions of good that put limitation on human action.9

Grant sees freedom as a kind of maximally unfettered liberty for individuals to create their own plan of life, free of any metaphysic of the good. It is shorthand for a modern liberalism which discards all political teleology of the good and instead grounds political authority in a foundation of individual rights. This liberalism goes hand-in-hand with experiment— the modern quest to deploy instrumental reason to dominate both the natural and the social worlds: [In the modern age] The conquest of human and non-human nature becomes the only value … Liberalism is the fitting ideology for a society directed toward these ends. It denies unequivocally that there are any given restraints that might hinder pursuit of dynamic dominance. In political terms, liberalism is now an appeal for “the end of ideology.” This means that we must experiment in shaping society unhindered by any preconceived notions of good.10

Experiment—instrumental reason—is for Grant a companion and servant of liberalism. For it is modern science, with its repudiation of telos, which paves the way for a political ideology of unfettered freedom. For how can individuals be unfettered if constrained by a conception of human nature or human perfectibility? Instrumental rationality and liberalism are thus inexorably intertwined for Grant. It also encourages

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the universalist and progressivist bent often present in liberal thought. If there is no correct theory of the most valuable form of life or telos for humans of the kind advocated, for instance, by ancient Greek or Christian metaphysics11 , then we are no longer in a position to make political prescriptions or arrange our political institutions to aim at the good. In the absence of a higher good, rather, our political institutions must simply place side constraints on individual behavior, leaving them free to pursue what they consider the highest good. In the absence of a higher good, therefore, the state leaves the pursuit of the good an unfettered choice of the individual. The result, for Grant, is a kind of universalist liberalism: each agent is equally unconstrained in her pursuit of value, which is essentially a matter of personal taste and choice. It also fosters a kind of universalism: if we assume, on analogy with modern physical science, that there are no human telos, then we will begin to see those remaining metaphysics of value as instantiating mere local prejudices which will eventually be swept away with the tide of reason.12 Let us now turn to Grant’s critique of modernity. His centerpiece criticism, as I see it, which is articulated in slightly different forms across his published works, is that the underpinnings of modern liberalism (understood as lack of constraints)—the disenchantment of the world through the replacement of ends with efficient causes—leads to a kind of undesirable social nihilism. As he puts it in TaE: …the goal of modern moral striving—the building of free and equal beings—leads inevitably back to trust in the expansion of that very technology we are attempting to judge. The unfolding of modern society has not only required the criticism of all older standards of human excellence, but also at its heart that trust on the overcoming of chance which leads us back to judge every human situation as being solvable in terms of technology. As moderns we have no standards by which to judge particular techniques, except standards welling up in our faith in technical expansion.13

Modernity is a kind of Promethean monster. We moderns have enjoyed freedom and technological development of a kind unthinkable prior to the twentieth century. However, echoing Nietzsche and Weber, Grant suggests that the taming of chance by means of jettisoning the older world of Telos has the paradoxical consequence that we are no longer able to comprehend the ends—which we deploy instrumental reason as a

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means of achieving—in anything but a kind of superficial individual whim. Modernity has discredited all of those thick forms of human value that we could use to ‘judge’ the use of particular techniques: …individualism…becomes the demanded right to one’s idiosyncratic wants taken outside of any obligation to the community which provides them. Buoyed by the restless needs of affluence, our art becomes hectic in its experiments with style and violence. Even the surest accounts of our technomania—the sperm-filled visions of Burroughs—are themselves spoken from the shallowness they describe…nihilism which has no tradition of contemplation to beat against cannot be the occasion for the amazed reappearance of the “what for?”, “Whither?” and “What then?”.14

In the absence of a tradition of contemplation, we cannot even consider the questions which would make human life valuable beyond the satisfaction of desire. We therefore retreat into a world of private desire satisfaction lacking greater purpose. What’s important to emphasize here for my purposes is the form of this critique. Grant is uneasy with modernity because it cuts the individual off from the kinds of theory of value that are required to live a life with a greater meaning than that of simple desire-satisfaction. This has two implications. The first is that it places him in the camp of those who see ‘freedom’ as denoting something other than unfettered choice and requiring conformity to some kind of objective standard. The second is that the critique is essentially High Tory in the sense that Grant sees a ‘tradition of contemplation’ which provides a theory of the Good life—such as his own Christian Platonism—as required for a meaningful or ‘thick’ existence. Grant’s Platonism, and its role in his critique of modernity, also explains another theme in his published thought. That is his insistence that conservatism is impossible in the modern age. It might initially seem as if this claim is clearly false. After all, aren’t there still right-wing political parties in mainstream politics in most, if not all, countries? This is true, but Grant does not equate conservatism with ‘right-wing.’ Conservatism, for Grant, is first and foremost a doctrine that looks to the realm of the unchangeable for political guidance. One can be right-wing while totally eschewing this commitment to the unchanging. The reason that Grant therefore sees conservatism as an impossibility in our time is that it is fundamentally incompatible with the modern commitment to scientific

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and social progress. Progress is restless and reform-oriented. It is opposed to the timeless. So: [Modern conservatives] are not conservative in the sense of being custodians of something that is not subject to change. They are conservatives, generally, in the sense of advocating a certain amount of order so that the demands of technology will not carry the society into chaos.15

Being right-wing isn’t incompatible with a commitment to progress. One can be right-wing and, for instance, wish to regulate and moderate change or liberalize the economy. But we cannot embrace scientific progress at the same time as embracing something static and unchanging. Given the wholehearted embrace of technological progress, therefore, conservatism is no longer historically possible.16

IV With Grant’s Platonic version of Toryism now on the table, I want to return to the question of the interpretation of his Canadian nationalism. According to a currently fashionable reading, perhaps typified best by Ignatieff (2008), Grant’s grand narrative (as articulated in LFAN) of the rise and decline of Canada as a nation-state is insightful but ultimately flawed. While lauding Grant for reinvigorating the question of Canadian identity in LFAN, Ignatieff sees in Grant a figure whose thought is fatally distorted by the twin evils of pessimism and nostalgia. In fact, he suggests that these twin evils infect what he takes to be Grant’s two main theses in LFAN. The first is that the survival of the Canadian nation-state requires the preservation of traditional ties to Britain. The second is that the decline of British influence, and the ascendancy of the United States, means that Canada is fated to lose its identity as swallowed up by the giant south of the border. Regarding the first thesis, Ignatieff, as cited above, says the following: [Grant’s]…mistake was to believe that since we had lost the anchorage of Britain, we had lost the feature that distinguished us from the Americans. This had been the illusion of both his grandfather and his father—that Britishness defined who we were as a people. But we had never been just British, our myths of origin are plural, not singular.17

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Why is it a mistake? Because the real question of Canada, suggests Ignatieff, in the early and mid-twentieth century wasn’t to define our relationship with Britain. It was rather to emancipate ourselves from the imperialist yoke: …whether Canada could emancipate itself from the British Empire and achieve national independence. The answer, given at the Somme, at Vimy, and at Passchendaele, was yes.18

This is a classic expression of what Creighton called the ‘authorized reading of Canadian history,’19 wherein the history of Canada is understood as a Whiggish unfolding of national independence from the grip of a cruel imperialist British Empire (how exactly Canada’s participation in WWI under imperial auspices somehow generates national independence is a question I will leave aside). As to why Grant falls into this mistake, Ignatieff submits his uncle to a rather crude bit of psychoanalysis: …In…the [wake of] death of his beloved mother, the severing of the last link to his ancestors, [and] the perceived sellout of Canada by an old friend [Lester Pearson] and the introduction of American weapons on to Canadian soil, Grant saw what he must do. Over the next year [1965] he composed Lament for a Nation, a ninety-seven page polemic that was, as he put it, “a celebration of… the memory of the tenuous hope which was the principle of my ancestors”. Diefenbaker’s fall was the pretext, but the deeper source of the essays’ extraordinary rhetorical power was his sense that the great tradition of patriotic identification with Canada, central to his being, had been betrayed by those, like Pearson, who he once considered friends.20

According to Ignatieff, the power of Grant’s essay is chiefly the product of the latter’s deep-seated feelings of cultural loss, a nostalgic elegy for a dying way of life. Rather than the articulation of a cogent philosophical position, then, Grant’s ‘patriotic identification’ with Anglo-Canadian culture and institutions is simply the literary expression of an unreconciled sense of grief, a kind of rage against the tide of history. This view of Grant as a kind of tragicomic nostalgist is not isolated to Ignatieff. In a similar manner, historian Philip Massolin says the following about the twentieth-century Canadian Tory tradition:

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The reverence of Massey, Creighton, Farthing, and the others for the Commonwealth and the British political tradition bore a close resemblance to the Anglophilia of the Canadian imperialists. The notion that Canada was, and should remain, a ‘British nation’ was fundamental to both groups of ideologues. The imperialists’ contempt for democracy and their respect for the role of privilege was also passed on to later tory critics. George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, in the words of Berger, was merely a ‘depressing footnote’ to imperialist thought.21

Like Ignatieff, Massolin suggests that Grant’s Lament, like the work of John Farthing and Donald Creighton, boils down to a kind of impotent, yet rhetorically passionate, defense of a bygone era of imperial subjugation and rigid classism. In fact, it’s worse for Grant than simply being guilty of nostalgia. His thesis suggesting the demise of Canada is, for Ignatieff, simply false. In the decade or so after the publication of Lament, Canada has seen, according to the latter, something of a national awakening and renaissance: In the twenty years since [LFAN] was published, Canada staged Expo 67, the most triumphant affirmation of Canadian pride before or since. We had the quiet revolution… we had the promotion of official bilingualism, the modem Canadian welfare state… we had the repatriation the constitution, the next to last symbol of our dependency on the British … and we gave ourselves a national anthem and flag.22

Grant was mistaken because the hallmarks of Canadian nationalism have been creations of the post-1964 attempt to shed ‘our dependency on the British.’ For Ignatieff, Canadian history is a kind of Whiggish narrative, where the past is simply a progressive movement or unfolding away from Colonial servitude. Moreover, it is these post-1964 developments that distinguish us from the Americans, far from guaranteeing our annexation into the American empire: [American and Canada] are both free nations. But our freedom is different: there is no right to bear arms north of the 49th parallel, and no capital punishment either; we believe in collective rights to language and land, and in our rights culture, these can trump individual rights.23

The shape of the 1982 constitution and the vision of Canadian nationalism championed by Pierre Trudeau—federalism, national broadcasting,

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‘rebranding’ of British symbols24 —these, contra Grant, constitute an enduring political legacy and make Canada distinct from the United States. So not only is Grant the old nostalgia mongerer, but his most famous book simply misunderstands the trajectory of history in this country. Canada has morphed into a modern liberal democracy fundamentally distinct from the liberal democracy of our neighbors to the south.

V Ignatieff’s dismissal of Grant represents, I think, a common viewpoint in contemporary Canadian political thought. Discussion of Toryism, if it is discussed at all, often describes it as the last bastion of the romantic Anglo-nationalist, a declining group of people whom history has passed by. But if we really look at Ignatieff’s criticism through the lens of a close reading of Grant’s Platonic Toryism, we can, I argue, see that it is both superficial and misguided. The main thesis advanced by Ignatieff is that in shedding the vestiges of Britishness, Canada has gone from Colonial servitude to a mature nation with its own unique liberal democratic institutions and political culture represented by, for instance, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the CBC, and the Maple Leaf flag. If true, this refutes Grant’s thesis in LFAN that in the absence of a strong Tory tradition, Canada is destined to become simply a ‘branch plant’ society, subsumed within the interests of domestic US policy. The problem with this argument, I submit, is that it completely misses the deeper criticism of liberal modernity contained in Grant’s High Tory vision. What was important about the British connection, according to Grant, wasn’t simply that it distinguished us from the United States per se. Certainly, during the years of Tory rule at the federal level, it did do this. But the connection had a deeper significance. Let us return to a passage from TaE cited above: It is true that no particularism can adequately incarnate the good. But is it not also true that only through some particular roots, however partial, can human beings first grasp what is good and it is the juice of such roots which for most men sustain their partaking in a more universal good?25

For Grant, as we have seen, we make contact with the Good through the particularisms of a tradition. We need to make contact with the Good

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because it is precisely through contact with the natural order of things that we can orient ourselves with what constitutes human flourishing. Grant is a High Tory precisely because he takes the living tree of the long Tory tradition—represented by parliament and the established Anglican Church, and articulated by thinkers such as Hooker—to be such a source of contact.26 In Grantian terms, then, the problem with Ignatieff’s argument that Canadian nationalism has flourished post-1964 is that it is nationalism only in the most superficial sense of the term. We may have gained a new constitution, new forms of institutional nation-building like bilingual national broadcasting, and a new flag. We may have jettisoned what our leaders consider to be anachronistic symbols. But this doesn’t change the fact that the new nationalism of the Liberal party in the 60 s and 70 s was fundamentally a nationalism rooted in the presuppositions of what Grant calls liberal modernity. It embraced technology and scientific techniques as a means of nation-building, and it identifies Britishness as nothing but a barrier to progress. The result, however, is that this new kind of superficial nationalism cannot resist the irresistible pull of value nihilism. It has cut off English Canada from particularisms of British culture, and thus cut it off from the kind of cultural rootedness English Canadians need to have access to the Good. It has embraced modernity, and therefore, whether Pearson and Trudeau understand it or not, has defeated the idea of Canada: Modern civilization makes all local cultures anachronistic. Where modern science has achieved its mastery, there is no place for local cultures. It has often been argued that geography and language caused Canada’s defeat – but behind those there is a necessity that is incomparably more powerful. Our culture floundered on the aspirations of the age of progress.27

Once we embrace technique and the language of rights, the kinds of older institutions that once sustained a culture become merely hindrances. Thus, while Ignatieff criticizes Grant as having advanced a completely flawed thesis in LFAN , if I am correct here, it is Ignatieff who has advanced the incorrect thesis due to completely misunderstanding Grant. We may have a distinct constitution from the United States, or not have a right to bear arms. But this says nothing about Canadian integration into a political order and ideology which leaves no room for contemplation of Ends. Rather than the defeat of Diefenbaker, or the rapid decline of the Progressive Conservative party, it is the loss of this deeper, Platonic form

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of High Toryism which Grant is, in my opinion, really lamenting. For it is this particular form of Anglo-Canadian Nationalism, with its connection to the living tree of a world of Ends which, in his view, shields us, as English-speaking Canadians, from the Weberian Iron Cage that has already engulfed the United States and much of the West: Once it was decided that Canada was to be a branch plant society of American capitalism, the issue of Canadian nationalism had been settled … the society produced by such policies may reap enormous benefits, but it will not be a nation… its culture will become the empire’s to which it belongs.28

It is not the only way to engage with the Good. Indeed, as Grant explains, French-Canadians have their own living tree, represented by Roman Catholic social thought. But it is the only way in which we (Grant is speaking for Anglo-Canadians) can approach the kingdom of Ends. Our culture is to become part of the empire of liberal modernity—an allencompassing monster that, in its ceaseless disenchantment of the world, will eventually turn on the idea of value itself. Expo 67 or a Maple leaf flag will not stop this monster and its ceaseless pull toward the imperial capital—Washington.

VI I want to conclude this essay with some thoughts about the enduring relevance of Grant. One reason why, I think, it is important to challenge the kind of arguments leveled at Grant by thinkers such as Ignatieff is that they threaten to obscure perhaps the most important and substantive element of Grant’s political thought: his critique of modern liberalism. Even if one rejects Grant’s robust Christian Platonism, it is undeniable that his negative diagnosis of what he calls liberal modernity—something which he carried through to its culmination in 1974’s English Speaking Justice—qualifies him, in my view, as a thinker with much to say about current liberal political theory. The negative thesis I am talking about here is his argument that modern liberalism has a problem with value. One of the defining features of certain strands of contemporary liberalism is a commitment to neutrality. While this can be defined and refined in various ways, the basic presumption is that a liberal state, because of its foundational commitment to the moral equality of citizens, cannot

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enact laws that rely on political principles that would not be accepted by all such citizens, as this would violate the moral presumption of impartiality.29 This very presumption, however, presupposes that we should define the moral in terms of the impartial. The problem, to put it in Grantian terms, is that if we so define the moral, we have ruled out, by fiat, the very possibility of understanding the moral bounds of the state in terms of some kind of more substantive set of values, like the Good, or perfecting human capacities. Neutrality starts from a standpoint of what Grant would call individualism in all its myopic focus on neutrality between distinct persons, therefore narrowing—or perhaps stunting—the horizons of human value. Why should we start with neutrality rather say than a thicker conception of the Good? Liberals, it seems, seldom address this question, or even consider it. The point I want to emphasize here is that Grant’s thought still has much to offer. While the explicit political elements of his work are certainly dated, his critique of liberalism, which I have only sketched out here, is certainly not. Indeed, if my reading here is correct, then Grant fits into a long line of theorists who are critical of liberalism and instrumental rationality—Nietzsche, Weber, Strauss, Gray, McIntyre, Taylor. He is not simply an apologist for a bygone era and reading him in this way does his thought a great disservice.30

Notes 1. George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Death of Canadian Nationalism (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1982 [1965]): 52. 2. Michael Ignatieff, True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada (Toronto: Viking Press 2008): 140. 3. Ibid.: 145. 4. For more on this point, see Anthony Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection (London: Faber & Faber, 1978). 5. Grant, Lament, 71. 6. George Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1969): 73. 7. Ibid.: 68–69. 8. Grant, Lament, 71. 9. Grant, Technology and Empire, 56. 10. Grant, Lament, 56.

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11. For instance, in Aristotelian political naturalism, the highest good for humans is capable of being known. Therefore, we have a guide to how to best arrange our political institutions in order to attain this good. 12. Interesting connection here to John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake (London: Routledge Press, 2008). Gray has been a consistent critic of universalist forms of liberalism. I am unclear if Gray read any Grant. I do know, however, that Roger Scruton was aware of Grant (personal conversation). So it is possible. 13. Grant, Technology and Empire, 34. 14. Grant, Technology and Empire, 39. 15. Grant, Lament, 66. 16. For Grant, Diefenbaker is something of a tragic political figure. As Prime Minister he valiantly fought to maintain the British connection precisely at the moment in history when it was becoming a political and historical impossibility. The postwar dominance of American power and the subsequent re-orientation of British interests towards Europe made a return to Commonwealth-oriented trade and defense nothing more than a pipe dream. 17. Ignatieff, True Patriot Love, 165–166. 18. Ibid.: 166–167. 19. Donald Creighton, “Presidential Address to the Canadian Historical Society,” (1957), 4. Accessed from https://cha-shc.ca/_upl oads/4zubgb0ag.pdf 20. Ignatieff, True Patriot Love, 137. 21. Philip Massolin, Canadian intellectuals, the Tory tradition and the challenge of Modernity, 1939–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 240–241. 22. Ignatieff, True Patriot Love, 146. 23. Ibid.: 142. 24. Pierre Trudeau succeeded in removing British symbolism from a variety of Canadian institutions—The Red Ensign was replaced with the maple leaf flag, Royal Mail became Canada Post, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy became part of the Canadian Forces, the BNA act became the Constitution Act, and the British orders system was abolished. For more, see Philip Campion, The Strange Death of British Canada (Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010). 25. Ignatieff, True Patriot Love, 68–69.

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26. For instance see pg. 33 of Grant, Lament: “The British connection had been a source of Canadian nationalism. The east–west pull of trade … provided a counter-thrust of the pull of continentalism. It depended on the existence of a true North American triangle. But the Britishness of Canada was more than economic. It was a tradition that stood in opposition the Jeffersonian liberalism so dominant in the United States.”. 27. Grant, Lament, 54. 28. Grant, Technology and Empire, 141. 29. The classic articulation of this kind of political neutrality is found in the later Rawls, chiefly his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 30. Thanks to Tyler Chamberlain for comments on a draft form of this paper.

PART II

Democracy, Technology, and Global Politics

CHAPTER 9

Still Lamenting? Canada, Grantian Conservatism in the Twenty-first Century, and the Paradoxes of Grant’s Conservatism Ben Woodfinden

The reception and afterlife of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation 1 remains an amusing irony, and it surprised none other than Grant himself. Grant’s Lament became a manifesto for Canadian nationalism, a call to arms for Canadians to resist the dangers of America’s technological empire that threatened to consume and absorb Canada. This is the paradox that perhaps challenges, or at the very least should make us reconsider, Grant’s thesis. By declaring the war over and Canada lost, Grant in some sense brought it back to life. But Grant’s lament for the lost conservative traditions that made Canada possible, and the specific issues he chose to rally around as the last battle in this defeat didn’t serve as a rally cry for a conservative counter-revolution so much as it emboldened an anti-imperialist left. Lament was popular not with conservatives, but

B. Woodfinden (B) McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_9

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with leftists opposed to American imperialism, intervention in Vietnam, and nuclear proliferation. But if we fully understand Grant’s argument, and what he meant by the claim that “The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada”2 then it becomes clear why this revival of Canadian nationalism represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Grant’s argument. Grant’s lament was not a call to arms, it was a lament in the truest sense of the word. It was not simply a eulogy for what was lost, it was a fatalistic account of why Canada was always doomed to disappear. This paper will re-examine and challenge some of Grant’s arguments by contending that there are contradictions at the heart of Grant’s arguments in Lament and in what he subsequently said about it after publication. There are two basic accounts of conservatism present in Grant’s thought that, though related, can still be understood as distinctive accounts. The first of these is the conservatism that lies at the heart of Grant’s conception of Canada and the common intent of Confederation as Grant understands it. This conservatism was built around Grant’s “Tory touch” thesis. This first understanding of conservatism in Grant is also closely tied with his “red toryism,” a label he rejected himself. This red toryism was focused on the preservation of Canada contra a liberal United States which emphasized the role of the state and a kind of socialist method aimed at distinctly Canadian conservative ends. The second kind of conservatism present in Grant’s writing is related to the first, but a more abstract understanding of conservatism that is built around the notion of “love of one’s own.” This is connected with the idea of particularity and how the love of one’s own and being embedded in particular communities and institutions ultimately opens us up to the love of the Good and our highest ends. Liberalism, and technology, are forces of homogenization that dissolve these particularities and cut us off from both the love of one’s own and our highest ends. These two accounts of conservatism are related, and without Canada’s conservative intent the possibility of Canada disappears along with the particularities that make love of one’s own possible. But after writing Lament, Grant rejected the accusations of fatalism that seem apparent in the book and his argument. This paper will challenge this in two ways. First, it will argue that Grant’s fatalism is apparent because his description of Canadian distinctiveness is not nearly as strong as it is sometimes suggested. Canada’s distinct British identity and what Grant later identifies as a kind of

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common settler consciousness make Canada’s anti-American distinctiveness not nearly as strong as it seems. Furthermore, American liberalism and its technological civilization has not just erased Canadian distinctiveness, it has supplanted Britain as the dominant cultural force as well and rendered even Britain a cultural colony. The erosion of Canada’s British identity was as much to do with exogenous factors as it was domestic and internal erosion. The loss of this is why conservatism is impossible in Canada, and why Canada was thus impossible for Grant. So whilst Grant’s pessimism and fatalism on this is undeniable, subsequent developments modify Grant’s thesis somewhat. Whilst the old common intent of Canada is largely dead, the hollow liberal nationalism that replaced it that is incapable of commanding thick loyalties and shared loves has opened up space for more local and regional loyalties. Whilst the old Canada may be dead, love of one’s own is irrepressible even in a technological civilization, and the hope that Grant calls us to may be in these new local and regional particularities instead. Lament for a Nation is part political commentary, part philosophical analysis. The deeply flawed protagonist of the book is of course John Diefenbaker, who Grant offers a vigorous defence of. “Diefenbaker was accused of anti-Americanism, but he was surely being honest to his own past when he said that he thought of his policies as being proCanadian, not anti-American.”3 These “pro-Canadian” policies become a central topic of the book as Grant offers a romanticized account of what the basis of Canada’s distinctiveness is. Grant identifies Diefenbaker’s pro-Canadian instincts as rooted “in a profound, if romantic, sense of historical continuity.” In this Grant identifies our British connections and institutions as “providing a counterthrust to the pull of continentalism.”4 The Britishness of Canada: was more than economic. It was a tradition that stood in firm opposition to the Jeffersonian liberalism so dominant in the United States. By its nature this conservatism was not philosophically explicit, although it had shaped our institutions and had penetrated into the lives of generations of Canadians.5

Again, whilst some interpret it as a manifesto of resistance, Grant saw it as a lament for what was already lost. By 1965 Canada had already disappeared, and the reason Grant could make this claim despite the reaction

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to his book, was because of how he understood nations. Grant understood nations in reference to what he saw as their “guiding intentions.” In a footnote Grant notes that “national articulation is a process through which human beings form and reform themselves into a society to act historically. This process coheres around the intention realised in the action.”6 Nations have an intentionality about them and come together in ways beyond more organic geographic, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, or demographic characteristics. Yes, these things form organic parts of what constitutes a nation, but Grant’s understanding is that nations have an intent beyond these organic characteristics: “a society only articulates itself as a nation through some common intention among its people.”7 Grant’s lament is for the disappearance of the intent that he saw as the foundation of Canada. Grant’s account of Canada’s national founding was as a common partnership between two peoples who possessed “an inchoate desire to build a society with a greater sense of order and restraint than freedom-loving republicanism would allow.”8 This common desire for order, restraint, and the public good brought British and French Canada together, united by a common national intent. Grant overstates the significance of the role and influence of the Loyalists, but it is the Loyalists and French Catholics who possessed two distinctive conservative visions of societies they wished to preserve. This is the intent for a nation that built Canada for Grant. Grant saw it reflected in our founding Constitutional Acts in both 1791 and 1867. Canada is defined in contrast to America but with an intent to preserve something distinct. This is a conservative nationalism. Whilst Grant undoubtedly engaged in some mythologizing in weaving this national narrative together, there’s definitely a lot of truth to it. Canada’s development and history is defined by a different approach to all sorts of questions of social, political, and economic importance that are characterized by this intentionality. Grant claimed for example, “this conservative nationalism expressed itself in the use of public control in the political and economic spheres. Our opening of the West differed from that of the United States, in that the law of the central government was used more extensively, and less reliance was placed on the free settler.”9 Whether or not Grant’s description of Canadian colonization of the West is an accurate portrayal of how it occurred, and undoubtedly it plays down the darker side of this process, the key point here is that our distinct political culture made the Canadian frontier and its settlement different from that of the unrestrained American wild west of popular imagination.

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This first account of Grant’s conservatism is concerned with defending and maintaining this distinct political culture. This is at the core Grant’s distinctive red toryism. Red toryism, a term popularized by in 1966 by political scientist Gad Horowitz, describes a tradition in Canadian conservative thought that blended conservatism and elements of socialism in a distinctly anti-liberal synthesis that rejected radical individualism.10 Grant was in many ways its purest proponent even if he rejected Horowitz’s label. Properly understood it is not an ideological label, it’s a uniquely Canadian tradition because it is intimately tied up with national intent. Grant’s red toryism is also a deeply philosophical tradition, and one perhaps ill suited to be translated into real world practical politics. It’s also why it’s ironic the label today gets used to describe moderate “liberal lite” conservatives in the Canadian context. This national intent is explicitly in opposition to the unrestrained liberal excesses of the American project. But to understand this socialist and conservative blend, it requires understanding the nature of the behemoth red toryism is trying to resist, namely the United States. Whilst Canada’s conservative national intent may have been focused on building a society focused on the common good, order, and restraint contra unrestrained American liberalism, Grant’s anti-Americanism runs much deeper than this. For Grant, the United States is the harbinger of the capitalistic technological civilization that is at the core of Grant’s philosophical thinking. This is Grant’s elucidation of Kojève’s universal and homogenous state (UHS). Grant has a specific name for the force against which he is trying to resist, it is not merely American influence. It is what he calls “continentalism.” This isn’t just about America, and this is where readers of Grant go wrong. Continentalism is inseparable and tied up with modernity, and progress itself. The drive towards the UHS is the end goal of modernity, and liberalism. It is a state in which all contradictions are reconciled and all humans are free and equal with their needs satisfied. It is one in which particularities are erased, and thus a homogenous state. Grant’s distinctive contributions to the debates over the tyranny and wisdom between Strauss and Kojève was to identify America capitalism and technological civilization, what he calls continentalism, as the driving force of this push towards a universal and homogenous state. Continentalism, and America itself, are a part of this process, and continentalism requires nations to be overcome. The essence of continentalism is liberalism in which “democracy has not been interpreted solely

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in a political sense, but has been identified with social equality, contractual human relations, and the society open to all men, regardless of race or creed or class.”11 To oppose this process and the move towards the universal and homogenous state was to be in opposition to inevitable progress, which is what made it so hard to resist. Continentalism is inseparable from the very idea of progress. Grant remarks: “Has it not been in the age of progress that disease and overwork, hunger and poverty, have been drastically reduced? Those who criticise our age must at the same time contemplate pain, infant mortality, crop failures in isolated areas, and the sixteen-hour day.”12 How could anyone be opposed to continentalism if it means progress? And the means by which this liberalism is advanced are ultimately the forces of capitalism and technology, which go hand in hand with liberalism. In Chapter Five of Lament Grant elucidates this further and compares marxism and liberalism. Both see that “man’s essence is his freedom” and seek an emancipation of humanity from restraints, and both see “technological development is a means by which all men will realise this good.” But liberalism is better suited to the UHS because: North-American liberalism expresses the belief in open-ended progress more accurately than Marxism. It understands more fully the implications of man’s essence being his freedom. As liberals become more and more aware of the implications of their own doctrine, they recognize that no appeal to human good, now or in the future, must be allowed to limit their freedom to make the world as they choose. Social order is a man-made convenience, and its only purpose is to increase freedom.13

He further develops this idea and why it is liberalism, not marxism, that is the most natural ideology for the UHS and a progressive world in which man is freed from all restraints: The vaunted freedom of the individual to choose becomes either the necessity of finding one’s role in the public engineering or the necessity of retreating into the privacy of pleasure. Liberalism is the fitting ideology for a society directed toward these ends. It denies unequivocally that there are any given restraints that might hinder pursuit of dynamic dominance. In political terms, liberalism is now an appeal for “the end of ideology.” This means that we must experiment in shaping society unhindered by any preconceived notions of good.14

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And at the core of this endless drive of progress and emancipation was capitalism, the vehicle by which liberalism and technology spread. Grant rightly understood the deeply anti-conservative nature of capitalism, something forgotten by many of today’s supposed conservatives. In “Canadian Fate and Imperialism”15 he remarks that “These days when we are told in North America that capitalism is conservative, we should remember that capitalism was the great dissolvent of the traditional virtues.”16 Capitalism is the most progressive force in human history. It dissolves social norms and mores, it erodes traditional hierarchies and structures. It is a relentless ever expanding pushing its boundaries ever further. Marx’s infamous description of bourgeois capitalism in the Communist Manifesto as a force in which “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”17 would have been one that Grant and other anti-market conservatives would have largely agreed with. Liberalism and capitalism are at the core of America’s technological civilization, such that to resist it meant to in some sense resist capitalism. Understanding this is the key to understanding Grant’s red toryism. In discussing Diefenbaker’s rise and fall, Grant notes that: If Canada was to survive, the cornerstone of its existence was the Great Lakes region. The population in that area was rushing toward cultural and economic integration with the United States. Any hope for a Canadian nation demanded some reversal of the process, and this could only be achieved through concentrated use of Ottawa’s planning and control. After 1940, nationalism had to go hand in hand with some measure of socialism. Only nationalism could provide the political incentive for planning; only planning could restrain the victory of continentalism.18

Thus red toryism is for Grant a necessary wedding of socialism and conservatism to preserve Canada in the face of America’s relentless technological and capitalistic empire. To surrender to capitalism is to surrender Canada itself. Grant’s socialist inclinations are explicitly not marxist or left wing in origins, they are ground in the necessities of Canadian survival. But this first account of conservatism in Canada that we can loosely associate with red toryism is closely connected to the preservation of Canada and Grant’s anti-Americanism. Grant gives examples of

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what this looks like in practice in Lament saying that “Until recently, Canadians have been much more willing than Americans to use governmental control over economic life to protect the public good against private freedom. To repeat, Ontario Hydro, the cnr, and the cbc were all established by Conservative governments.”19 But as Grant famously proclaimed, “the impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada. As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth. The current of modern history was against us.”20 The relentless march of technology and capitalism is a key part of this story, but Grant’s pessimism is not just a pessimism about the march of progress. Grant saw this defeat as inevitable for English speaking people like British North Americans. Whilst there is a tendency to see the death of Canada’s British identity amongst some old tories as a murder perpetrated by Liberals like Pearson and Trudeau who wished to remove Canada from the shackles of its old colonial master, Grant offers a more somber assessment. This distinctive British identity died because Britain itself was essentially absorbed into America’s cultural orbit and become a province of the American empire as well. Writing about the First World War, Grant remarks that “one small result was to destroy Great Britain as an alternative pull in Canadian life.”21 This was because it accelerated Britain’s transformation into an outpost of the American empire: By the twentieth century, its adherents in Britain were helping to make their country an island outpost in the American conquest of Europe. Was British conservatism likely, then, to continue as a force to make Englishspeaking Canada independent? If not, what would? The Laurentian Shield and the Eskimos? British tradition has provided us with certain political and legal institutions, some of which are better than their American counterparts. Our parliamentary and judicial institutions maybe preferable to the American system, but there is no deep division of principle.22

In English Speaking Justice Grant examines the foundations of angloliberalism and what he saw as an admirable tradition corroded and undermined by its own internal drive and towards progress and technological mastery. He writes that “Liberalism in its generic form…is surely something that all decent men accept as good—conservatives included.”23 Specifically what Grant admires is the “noble core” of liberalism: “the

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institutions of the English-speaking world at their best have been much more than a justification of progress in the mastery of human and nonhuman nature. They have affirmed that any regime to be called good, and any progress to be called good, must include liberty and consent.”24 But despite this noble core, liberalism cannot resist the temptation of the imperatives of technological progress. According to Grant: it is in the heartlands of the English-speaking empire that the more fundamental facts appear which put into question the mutual interdependence of technological and liberal reason. The chief of these facts is that the development of technology is now increasingly directed toward the mastery of human beings...technology organises a system which requires a massive apparatus of artisans concerned with the control of human beings.25

The technological drive is irresistible, and in English Speaking Justice Grant identifies liberalism as its ultimate partner and enabler. The liberal language of rights and conceptualization of justice, including that noble core of “liberty and consent” aid technological mastery by reducing human beings and relations to purely contractual ones and by dissolving our particularistic loyalties to tradition, custom, and place. The relationship between technology and liberalism is that as both progress, the view of man and politics that emerges is of a world consisting entirely of self-interested individuals. Any other organic or primordial attachments and sentiments are corroded by this contractual self-interest and politics becomes reduced to the organization of men to enable them to achieve their desires and wants. This is where Grant’s fatalism becomes extremely apparent. The toryism on which British North American distinctiveness rested was not really all that distinct. It was not just doomed to fade at the sun set on the British Empire, built into its very philosophical foundations were its downfall. He hints at this in Lament, remarking “For all the fruitfulness of the British tradition in nineteenth-century Canada, it did not provide any radically different approach to the questions of industrial civilization.”26 In Grant’s post-Lament writings this becomes most clear. As we saw above, in English Speaking Justice he develops an argument for how liberalism and its alliance with technology and the mastery of nature sows the seeds for its own demise. In “Canadian Fate and Imperialism” he develops this pessimistic idea in a different though related way. There’s a separate discussion to be developed here about Grant’s account

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of French Canada, but his account of the Loyalists and English speaking Canada was one in which the Loyalists “were that extraordinary concoction, straight Locke with a dash of Anglicanism.”27 And “though the empire of the English was the chief of the early driving forces towards modernity, many traditions before the age of progress remained alive in parts of English society.” Elsewhere Grant links this tradition back to Hooker whom Grant credits as being the most significant thinker of this old proto-Tory anglo tradition. But as he goes on to remark in the essay, “what is far more important to repeat is that the English empire was a dominant source of modernity.”28 Grant notes elsewhere that technological mastery is why it was the English, and not the French, who ultimately won the battle for mastery over North America and that this rendered French North Americans abandoned before the second wave of modernity took off in France itself. At its core “The early Canadian settlers may have wanted to be different from the Americans in detail, but not in any substantial way which questioned modernity.”29 Grant’s later thought develops this idea as “the moral unity of the English-speaking world.” This is why, as much as the conservative national intent on Canada was what glued it together, it was always bound to fail and be unable to resist the homogenizing forces of American capitalism and technological civilization. Similarly, in the essay “In Defence of North America” Grant has an account of what can be described as “settler consciousness”30 and how this common history shapes both Canada and America and makes us different from the old world. In the arguments he develops in these various essays and lectures after writing Lament, what Grant clarifies is the true essence of a lament. The intent that made Canada distinct and gave it a national articulation was always doomed to fail. Not just as an accident of history and with the collapse of British hegemony, but because in the essence of what made us distinct was the same liberal roots and drives that lead to the progressive emancipation and removal of all restrains that lead to the UHS. What made us different was still, at its core, not all that different. English speaking peoples share a philosophical core that means whilst America has become the most progressive force in history and the key vehicle by which technological civilization and the UHS emerges, the other English speaking peoples were always bound to be the first to dissolve and lose their particularities because of their lack of fundamental philosophical difference with that of American liberalism.

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Despite all this, there is perhaps reason for optimism. In response to the charges of fatalism that many of his critics levelled at him, Grant notes that “regret is not an adequate stance for living and is an impossible stance for philosophy.”31 There is, as the rest of this chapter will argue, an optimism latent in Grant in the second account of conservatism found in his thought. The love of one’s own is irrepressible, and even amongst the seeming global domination and totality of technological civilization and the universal and homogenous state, the love of one’s own endures and appears at times in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Grant recognizes this, even though it is difficult in the modern age. In “Canadian Fate and Imperialism” Grant wrestles with the moral dilemmas of living in the satellite of a violent empire, and makes reference to the Vietnam War which he stridently opposed. Grant states that: These problems may be stated thus. In human life there must always be a place for love of the good and love of one’s own. Love of the good is man’s highest end, but it is of the nature of things that we come to know and to love what is good first by meeting it in that which is our own this particular body, this family, these friends, this woman, this part of the world, this set of traditions, this country, this civilization.32

He goes on to discuss the alienation men feel when they are unmoored from these particularities or unable to love their own. He gives the example of a German in Nazi Germany and the difficulty of loving one’s country knowing it is perpetrating extraordinary evil. Grant feels similarly challenged by the Vietnam War because in some ways Canada is implicated as a satellite of American empire. This creates a real sense of unmooring and alienation that ultimately cuts man off from his highest ends: “man is by nature a political animal and to know that citizenship is an impossibility is to be cut off from one of the highest forms of life.”33 This is ultimately one of the reasons why, as he develops in “Tyranny and Wisdom”34 which is Grant’s most direct interjection into the debate between Strauss and Kojève, the UHS would be a tyrannical state. In homogenizing and removing all particularities from human experience and rendering him truly atomized and merely an aggregated sum of his preferences and subjective desires, man would be fully cut off from his highest ends. This is destructive of humanity itself and will leave no human truly satisfied, but unable to access the realms that will truly leave him satisfied.

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At the core of Grant’s critique of liberalism is that it turns us into an impoverished, atomized, and reductive machine motivated and governed only by self-interest. Contractarianism and the language of rights do not guide us towards virtue or good, they turn us into self-interested and technological vassals. What Kojève called the “reanimalized man.” All loyalties and attachments become superficial subjective preferences, they don’t reflect anything concrete, good, or truly meaningful. We become slaves to our passions, our arbitrary preferences, and our unrestrained whims. But at the core of this is Grant’s foundational belief that it is through the love of one’s own that we become better and discover the good. Love of one’s own for Grant is not some jingoistic rallying cry, it is the mediated gateway between the particular and the universal. We don’t become good or virtuous solely by reasoning our way to abstract principles, we are habituated to it through these particular loyalties and attachments. In comments at a symposium in 1978 Grant remarked that “love of one’s own must ultimately be a means to love of the good.”35 Grant is not saying that these particular attachments and loyalties are the capital-G Good in themselves. But what these attachments and love of one’s own do is provide a sort of bridge by which we can discover the good, “we come to know and to love what is good first by meeting it in that which is our own.”36 It is through a love of the things that are our own; family, community, nation, that we can come to first grasp and see justice and the good. This doesn’t begin with abstract principles, it begins with concrete and habituated attachments. Love of one’s own is an inescapable human impulse, it can be dulled but not eliminated, and for Grant it connects us to the good and the highest forms of life. Politics is built on this inclination. The tragedy of technological civilization is that it cuts us off from and dampens this inclination. Grant returns to the love of one’s own throughout his writing and public commentary. The picture Grant paints is a dark one. He frequently connects the love of one’s own to what he calls “rootedness.” This helps us understand what exactly Grant means by love of one’s own and why it is so crucial. As Leah Bradshaw notes, “Striving for justice for Grant is an ascent from the particular to the universal and not the other way around. Unrootedness, displacement, and lack of belonging were for Grant experiences of impoverishment and desolation not emancipation.”37 Man is a particular creature and thus must be rooted in a particular place.

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This is Grant’s elucidation and insight into the basic Aristotelian insight that man is a political animal. Love of one’s own is not some primitive attachment, it is the beginning of virtue and justice. We are habituated to and guided to these things through our attachments, and are thus able to ascend this narrow contractual self-interest that renders the world soulless and empty. There are echoes of this in all sorts of thinkers, like the late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton who refers to this impulse as “oikophilia.” Nations and national communities are particular embodiments of universal human nature, they mediate us and guide us to something beyond ourselves. They are not the good in themselves, they point us to something else. The love of one’s own, the foundation of politics, stands in contrast and opposition to pure unmediated and unrestrained liberalism that dissolves these particularities and talks about human beings in universal terms living in contractual societies. Bradshaw notes that for Grant “in such a conception, the basic loyalties to the state, loyalties that would make one ready to die for one’s country, seem as inappropriate as the readiness to die for McDonald’s hamburgers.”38 The lack of these kinds of attachments turns us into mere producers and consumers, a “homo-economicus” unable to fully appreciate the attachments in life for which we are ultimately made for and that lead us to higher ends. A world without the love of one’s own is thus for Grant a profoundly miserable and desolate one. But the love of one’s own, being natural to man, is inescapable. Grant himself is pessimistic even on this point. In an interview with Horowitz, Grant noted that “there is in human nature a need to be rooted, but this doesn’t say that technological society cannot destroy human nature, and can’t destroy the need.”39 Technological civilization can destroy this need for Grant, even though it is an inescapable part of human nature. But elsewhere in the interview Grant, perhaps contradicting himself, clarifies that this is not a reason to completely give up: I don’t think you should just view what is going to happen. I think it’s very important to preserve the Canadian nation and we should do everything to preserve it – and I think we have to. If you’re going to be realistic in preserving it, you have to face the kind of dark things I’ve been talking about, that’s all.40

So despite the bleakness of technological civilization, even the pessimistic Grant sees a basis for action, and thus hope. It may perhaps

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be a lost cause, but it is worth acting nonetheless. The final part of this chapter will briefly speculate on what this might mean for the future of Canada. The love of one’s own can, and does, endure. But it may persist in unpredictable and potentially even deformed ways. Thus Grant’s fears about the survival of Canada are well founded, but the future of Canada may not be direct absorption into America. It may instead be fragmentation. As the older British and French-Catholic intents faded in Canada in the postwar era, attempts were made by Canadian nationalists to replace it with a new common identity. The essence of this postwar project was essentially an effort to build a new liberal civic nationalism that could command the allegiance of Canadians but also glue it together. Another word for this might be “constitutional patriotism.” The symbols of this new Canada include the Maple Leaf flag, the patriated Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and institutions like bilingualism and multiculturalism. The strongest argument in favour of this kind of nationalism is that contemporary Canada is an incredibly diverse place, and this kind of nationalism is inclusive enough to incorporate various identities and peoples and hold Canada together. It is a fundamentally small-l liberal understanding of political life rooted in a bedrock belief in and prioritization of the individual. But if we take the Grantian account of love of one’s own and its centrality to political life seriously, we should have serious reason to doubt whether this kind of patriotism could actually hold the country together or command thick loyalties from citizens. Recall that Grant himself saw the demise of British Canada as inevitable. He may have lamented its demise but he did not think it could simply be revived. So something was going to have to replace it, and the liberal nationalist project that Canadian elites embarked on in the postwar era is in many ways a natural and logical fit for what could replace it. Canada’s diversity, not just between anglophones and francophones, but between different cultures and ethnic groups that have settled in Canada through waves of immigration means that Canada’s new national identity will need to be inclusive enough to accommodate this diversity. So perhaps a kind of thin constitutional patriotism makes sense for a country like Canada. The problem, however, is twofold on a Grantian reading. First, this kind of thin nationalism will not be able to command thick allegiances or loyalties that are inseparable from the love of one’s own. It does not provide any kind of real rootedness that can ultimately habituate us and

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point us to transcendent and ultimate goods. It is rooted in the kind of contractual liberal understanding of the world that Grant finds so enervating. Secondly, and even more important on a Grantian reading, this kind of nationalism lacks the “national articulation…through which human beings form and reform themselves into a society to act historically”41 that is at the core of any nation for Grant. The national intent of the old Canada that brought the two founding peoples together, was to be a North American society more conservative and ordered than that of the United States. This new identity lacks any sort of common intent akin to this. There is still a desire to not simply become American, and that latent anti-Americanism remains strong in Canada. But this new constitutional patriotism and liberal nationalism makes it harder to articulate what exactly the common purpose and intent of Canada is. And most fundamentally, this new hollow nationalism cuts us off and alienates us from the love of one’s own and completely is unable to resist the advance of technological civilization. It will simply accelerate our descent into a purely contractual existence. But what has happened in Canada in recent decades might give Grant reason to both hope and lament. The thin liberal nationalism that replaced the old nationalism created a vacuum and opened up new spaces for the love of one’s own to flourish. Specifically, regional and local identities and loyalties in Canada have grown stronger, and new ones have emerged. This of course nearly split the country apart in 1995 when Quebec very narrowly voted to remain part of Canada, but other regional attachments and identities have emerged as well. Western alienation has produced not just discontent and alienation, but an actual identity and sense of Western Canada as being a distinct place and not simply a homogenous part of anglo-Canada. Resurgent Indigenous identities and attachments play an increasingly important role in Canadian politics as demands for reconciliation grow stronger. Quebec nationalism remains an ever present force in Canadian political life. Another interesting example is Newfoundland. The island has a long and rich cultural history connected primarily to Irish, not English, culture and history. Most of the contemporary inhabitants of the island are descended from Irish immigrants, and this unique Newfoundland identity and culture has only gotten stronger since 1949. Whilst traditional, Irish influenced culture is deeply embedded across Newfoundland, the sense of a unified Newfoundland identity and distinctiveness is a more recent development, one aided by both a broader

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Newfoundland cultural renaissance as well as the relative economic weakness of Newfoundland when compared to the rest of Canada. More could be said of this, but in recent decades these local and regional attachments have flourished and suggest that perhaps the love of one’s own will endure and find new ways of expressing itself in a post-national Canada. But what to make of this? Leaving aside the question of Canada itself for a moment, it suggests that the love of one’s own will continue to endure even as technological civilization advances. The resurgence of nationalism around the world in recent decades also suggests that the advance of the UHS will invite particularist backlashes and reactions, even if they do not ultimately produce any viable alternatives. It is also possible that the love of one’s own in the face of technological civilization may produce deformed versions of this love. Cut off from the transcendent horizon that Grant thinks the love of one’s own ultimately helps habituate us to, a deformed and damaged version of this instinct that produces jingoistic movements and reactions that do not cultivate a love of the good. But this love can endure in good ways as well. In the Canadian context, the migration of this love away from a common national identity towards subnational and local identities may paradoxically be the kinds of attachments that Grant encourages and wants us to nourish and protect, but in the process as these attachments grow stronger and the national attachment grows weaker it may ultimately lead to the end of Canadian confederation. If the new liberal nationalism is unable to command a thick loyalty and allows for the growth of these regional loyalties, over time this may simply lead to tensions and conflicts that make fragmentation inevitable. This chapter concludes, deliberately, on an ambiguous and speculative notes. The point is not to make hard predictions about the political future of Canada. It is a theoretical speculation, from a Grantian perspective, about the love of one’s own and what it might mean for the future of Canada. A close reading of Grant’s thought suggests that though he possessed a genuine love of Canada, his nationalism is in some ways an instrumental one. If the account of the love of one’s own here is correct, then Grant’s nationalism was ultimately a rootedness that helped point to a transcendent horizon and capital-G Good. Thus Grant’s love of Canada, though genuine, was not the end in itself. Thus whilst Grant lamented the disappearance of Canada, he lamented its loss because of this deeper and more foundational account about the love of one’s own and the fundamental purpose and goal of political life. Perhaps, if Grant

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were alive today, he might see some reason for hope in the flourishing of these subnational attachments and identities in Canada. Even if Canada is doomed to disappear, perhaps political communities would replace it that would provide citizens a sense of rootedness that is so fundamental for Grant. We cannot know, we can only speculate, but if Grant was indeed serious when he wrote that “regret is not an adequate stance for living and is an impossible stance for philosophy”42 perhaps he would turn his attention to these emerging loyalties. Even more speculatively, perhaps in a strange way these emerging loyalties, though a threat to the survival of Canada, could also be the basis for a new national intent. Surely, in the face of modern technology and American hegemony, there is a kind of strength in numbers. The preservation of these various and distinct identities and loyalties in Canada would be made easier by a common union that despite internal differences recognizes a common cause and interest in coming together to help preserve these distinctive identities. This would still in some sense be a liberal intent, but instead of being a rationalistic and individualistic liberalism that tries to undermine or at best tolerate particularistic loyalties and attachments it would be a pluralism that recognizes the primacy and necessity of such attachments. This would be a national articulation that though different from Canada’s original intent, would be an evolution of it into something still ultimately resisting the same centrifugal forces emanating from the heart of technological civilization in the United States. Canada may not be “conservative” anymore in the way Grant understood it, but it may, accidentally, rediscover a kind of conservative desire to preserve particularity in the face of the UHS through the emergence of these new subnational loyalties. To conclude, Grant’s thought contains these two related though differing accounts of conservatism, one focused on the survival of Canada and the other on the love of one’s own as the basis for political life and an access point to a transcendental horizon. Though he was undoubtedly a pessimistic and perhaps even fatalistic thinker, a proper exploration of the love of one’s own offers a basis for optimism and hope in the face of a relentless and ever expanding technological civilization that dissolves particularities and transforms more and more of human life and relations as it advances. But the love of one’s own can perhaps endure in the face of this, and may offer hope for the survival of Canada in unpredictable ways. This chapter offers a reassessment of Grant’s thought in light of national and international developments in the decades since Grant’s death. His

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thought remains as lucid and relevant as ever, but it is up to those of us who still read Grant to reapply his insights to contemporary political life and demonstrate this continued relevance, and not resort to mere lamentation.

Notes 1. George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). 2. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 67. 3. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 34. 4. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 13. 5. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 34. 6. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 13. 7. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 67. 8. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 68. 9. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 69–70. 10. Gad Horowitz, “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 32:2 (1966), 152–153. 11. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 89. 12. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 92. 13. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 55. 14. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 56. 15. George Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), 53–67. 16. George Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire, 56. 17. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Minneapolis: Lerner Publishing Group, 2018), 13. 18. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 16. 19. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 70. 20. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 67. 21. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 71. 22. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 72. 23. George Grant, English Speaking Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998), 4. 24. George Grant, English Speaking Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998), 5.

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25. George Grant, English Speaking Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998), 9. 26. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 72–73. 27. Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire, 57. 28. Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire, 57. 29. Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire, 58. 30. Grant, “In Defence of North America,” in Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), 6–8. 31. Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire, 58. 32. Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire, 62–63. 33. Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire, 66. 34. Grant, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), 69–99. 35. George Grant, “Conversations with George Grant,” in Collected Works of George Grant 4: 1970–1988 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 356. 36. Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire, 63. 37. Leah Bradshaw, “Loving one’s own: Pathway to justice or retrograde tribalism?” in Polis, Nation, Global Community: The Philosophic Foundations of Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2021), 164. 38. Leah Bradshaw, “Loving one’s own: Pathway to justice or retrograde tribalism?” in Polis, Nation, Global Community: The Philosophic Foundations of Citizenship, 158. 39. George Grant, “Two Televised Conversations between George Grant and Gad Horowitz” in Collected Works of George Grant 3: 1970–1988 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 439. 40. George Grant, “Two Televised Conversations between George Grant and Gad Horowitz” in Collected Works of George Grant 3: 1970–1988 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 440. 41. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 13. 42. Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire, 58.

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Bibliography Grant, George, Henry Roper, and Arthur Davis. Collected Works of George Grant 3: 1960-1969. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Grant, George, Arthur Davis, Henry Roper Roper, and Sheila Grant. Collected Works of George Grant 4: 1970–1988. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Grant, George. English-Speaking Justice. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998. Grant, George Parkin. Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Grant, George. Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969. Horowitz, Gad. “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation.” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 32, no. 2 (1966): 143–171. Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. Minneapolis: Lerner Publishing Group, 2018. Ward, Ann. Polis, Nation, Global Community: The Philosophic Foundations of Citizenship. London: Routledge, 2021.

CHAPTER 10

George Grant and the Return of the Nation Scott Staring

Introduction There has been much talk of the return of the state in recent years, particularly in light of the enormous efforts of national governments in fighting the pandemic. Some observers have gone so far as to dub this the beginning of a new “neostatist” era, at the same time pronouncing the old neoliberal order dead. This paper attempts to cast doubt on the foregoing claim. Drawing on the thought of Canadian political philosopher, George Grant, I argue that a defining feature of our neoliberal age is a subjectivity or conception of the self as something that is freely created in the capitalist marketplace. The forms of statism that many people are advocating today, I suggest, are entirely compatible with this subjectivity and therefore do not represent a fundamental break with neoliberalism. To truly make this break, we need to pursue a different model of statism, one which issues in political commitments that are inescapably experienced as a constraint on our freedom as we experience it in a neoliberal

S. Staring (B) Georgian College, Barrie, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_10

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age. We find a compelling framework for this political project, I conclude, in the tolerant and generous vision of nationalism described by Grant in his writings.

The Neoliberal Subject Neoliberalism consolidated its role as the world’s dominant economic and political paradigm in a moment of western triumphalism following the fall of the Soviet Union. In a sense, it was a moment that George Grant had anticipated decades earlier. As far back as 1965 Grant had predicted that in the great Cold War rivalry between Western liberalism and Soviet Marxism, the future belonged to the former. Marxism, Grant reasoned, still clung to the notion of a final goal of history, a vision of the “human good” which ultimately implied some limitation on our freedom to define our own futures.1 “North American liberalism,” on the other hand, was more consonant with the dominant contemporary self-understanding. It recognized that “man’s essence being his freedom…no appeal to human good, now or in the future, must be allowed to limit their freedom to make the world as they choose.”2 In November 1989, one year after Grant died, the Berlin Wall fell, followed two years later by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For the West, the unexpected collapse of its enemy and the only significant alternative vision of political and economic order helped to seal an ideological consensus around the inescapability of the neoliberal model.3 At the most obvious level, neoliberalism constituted a model of economic and political reform that aimed to shrink the state, or more accurately, limit its role to that of a custodian of the marketplace. Following the lead of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US, governments around the world embarked on a series of reforms that saw markets deregulated, trade barriers dropped, corporate taxes lowered, deficits slashed, social services scaled back, and public institutions privatized. At a less obvious level, however, neoliberalism was about more than transforming the economic order; it was about changing the people within it. In recent years, a growing number of scholars and critics have come to identify neoliberalism with what is variously termed a “governing rationality,” or “subjectivity”4 shared by elites and the rank and file alike. In what follows, I will argue that Grant’s claim that “modern man’s essence is his freedom” anticipates what some contemporary observers now identify with the neoliberal subjectivity. At the most basic level, the assertion that our

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essence is our freedom referred to our perceived “freedom to make the world as [we] choose”; but it was also meant to suggest something more paradoxical: that we ourselves are the result of that free act of making.5 This same belief in the freedom of the individual to construct its very selfhood is also a hallmark of the neoliberal subject.

The Eclipse of the Political The neoliberal subject is symptomatic of an age that has seen the political sphere gradually eclipsed by the economic sphere. In Grant’s understanding, an existence that was properly political necessarily involved commitments that were inconsistent with the idea that individuals constitute themselves by freely choosing their own ends. While much political deliberation and decision-making centres on more mundane affairs of public policy, security, etc., the ultimate horizon of the political, Grant insisted, is the question of “the good.” In its practical expression he believed that this question relates to matters of justice, and is not concerned with what ends I might freely choose for myself, but rather with what duty of care I owe others. For the intellectual architects of neoliberalism, on the other hand, the economic realm represented a space of human freedom that must be protected at all costs from attempts to make it conform to political judgments about what is good or just. Friedrich Hayek, the grandfather of neoliberalism, famously spoke of the modern market as a highly complex “spontaneous order” that operated not according to an overarching plan, but through the uncoerced actions of individuals acting in competition with one another.6 He insisted that no single authority or bureaucracy could possibly plan for human needs and demands as efficiently as innumerable individuals on the ground, freely responding to pricing signals and seeking out limited market opportunities.7 More important, the attempt to impose such a plan necessarily interfered with our freedom: Planning restricted competition between producers, in turn limiting innovation and competitive pricing, and thereby reducing freedom of choice for consumers. It also constrained our freedom as individual producers and distorted the labour market, limiting our choice of trade or job.8 True to Hayek’s vision, the neoliberal era has seen a dramatic reduction of our political horizons and a no less dramatic expansion of the role that the market plays in our lives. At the same time, individuals increasingly appear to identify with the belief, as Grant put it, that our essence is

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found in a freedom that is unconstrained by any appeal to human good. We can chart the transformation by looking at changes that neoliberalism has introduced to the realms of both consumption and production.

The Neoliberal Consumer-Producer One of Grant’s key criticisms of North America’s postwar economic order was that it went hand in hand with the endless expansion of a mass-consumer market. He did not deny that people’s lives had been improved by the availability of affordable factory produced goods like washing machines and cars, but he also recognized that as the market for time and labour saving devices became saturated, corporations would shift their focus away from producing goods that served a more basic material need toward creating and servicing an endlessly proliferating range of new tastes and desires.9 One of his concerns was that this consumerism fed a tendency to see individual choice as the final guide for thought and action, and that it would inevitably erode any sense that there are duties that one does not create for oneself, that we simply experience, for instance, by virtue of belonging to a certain community.10 Grant’s fears about the pervasive influence of consumerism on our lives and relationships seem, if anything, only more relevant in the neoliberal age. By the 1970s western markets had been saturated with the standardized industrial goods of the postwar boom, leading to a worrying slump in consumption. German sociologist, Wolfgang Streeck, explains how businesses found the answer to this crisis in the form of new microelectronic technologies and cheaper overseas labour markets that allowed for shorter production cycles and a greater differentiation in product lines. Goods could now be customized to fit every urge and taste: a different Swatch for every wrist, cars with seemingly unlimited options, wine stores stocking endless varietals instead of mass-marketed plonk.11 The challenge of marketing such non-essential items to the public demanded a new strategy, what Naomi Klein refers to as branding: Customers had to believe they were not simply buying a “product,” but choosing “a way of life, an attitude, a set of values, a look, an idea.”12 All of these trends encouraged a particular sense of self as something that is freely constructed through the act of consumer choice; the marketplace becomes, in the words of Jodi Dean, a “terrain within which my identity, my lifestyle, can be constructed purchased, and made over.”13

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But it is not just our role as consumers today that reinforces the idea that, in Grant’s language, “our essence is our freedom”; this selfconception is also affirmed by our role as producers. The workplaces of the postwar industrial economy were structured around clear hierarchies of power and disciplinary practices that left those labouring on the shop floor or assembly line with little doubt as to where they stood in the pecking order; unions, where they existed, reinforced an awareness that there were limits to what one owed an employer, and that work was accessory to one’s primary commitments within the family and community. Under neoliberalism, however, unions have been in retreat, as has the worker’s consciousness of him or herself as belonging to a separate class with distinct interests from managers and owners. The top-down power structure of the traditional workplace has been obscured by a new ethos that sees employees as “self-responsible” and “self-initiating.”14 Everyone from the gig-worker to the mythical genius-founder of a tech start-up is encouraged to embrace the identity of the entrepreneur. Work is framed less as drudgery that must be endured to provide a modicum of material security outside of one’s job, and more as the field within which one can realize his or her highest freedom and potential. The “illusion prevails,” writes philosopher Byung-Chul Han, “that every person—as a project free to fashion him- or herself at will—is capable of unlimited self-production.”15

Government and the Public Good These developments within the economy were accompanied by changes in the role that government played in people’s lives under neoliberalism. Grant often celebrated the fact that government in Canada had historically served to create a more ordered society than it had in the United States. In clarifying what he meant by this he referred not to the sort of order produced through the state’s coercive apparatuses, but to a certain idea of social harmony or justice. Above all, he meant a society where capitalist greed was not given free reign to disrupt communities, upend lives, and divide the nation into a stark order of winners and losers. “A society must take care of its weak, and this requires some welfare,” he remarked. “A society that exalts the strong is not a society in which I want to live.”16 Grant did not venerate the state as an end in itself, but viewed it as having a practical role to play in an era when many of the older

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traditions, institutions, and ways of life that once mediated social existence were being eroded by new technologies and the pressures of an increasingly international capitalist marketplace. In his nationalist vision, the state would be used to harness, but also constrain these forces in order to address social needs, some of which arose because traditional communal sources of social support were falling away. State provisions like healthcare, public education, public broadcasting, and public utilities would provide a concrete means of instantiating a duty of care for one’s neighbours and fellow citizens. Such interventions ensured that the development of technology would not be abandoned to a capitalist marketplace dedicated to “moving fast and breaking things,”17 but would instead be harnessed to create something like “a socialist society in which the public good takes precedence over the individual right to be free to use the resources they want to build the society they want.”18 Under neoliberalism, however, the state has been reoriented to perform the opposite function: to preserve the market as a sphere of unregulated competition and individual freedom. For neoliberal thinkers like Hayek, terms like the public good (along with “social justice,” “the general interest,” or “the common good”) were anathema.19 Such phrases fed the illusion that it was possible to reinvent the market— an incredibly complex, spontaneously produced order that could not be grasped by a single intelligence—on the model of a vague, quasireligious unifying ideal. Hayek warned that these concepts encouraged the dangerous belief that individuals have a moral duty to “submit to a power which can co-ordinate the efforts of the members of society with the aim of achieving a particular pattern of distribution regarded as just.”20 To invite any authority to encroach on the market in this way, he argued, was to cede the sphere of human freedom itself and welcome its destruction.21 Under neoliberalism the state has come to be seen more and more as the steward of the market and whatever social welfare functions have been retained are increasingly framed in the private-sector language of service provision;22 many such functions have simply been handed over to the marketplace. These reforms have often been carried out in the name of the seemingly neutral end of efficiency, but as the founding thinkers of neoliberalism made clear, the much more urgent justification for small government was the cause of human freedom.23 The state, whose most important role, in Grant’s view, was to affirm and instantiate the individual’s obligation to a much broader community, has been re-cast in the

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neoliberal era as the guarantor of a realm of individual freedom wherein we are only bound to whatever ends we choose for ourself. As the state gradually reduces its function to one of expanding the role of the market in our lives, more and more of our relationships are exposed to the rationality of neoliberalism. The result has been to hasten a process of social decay that Grant had warned of decades earlier. Individual freedom, he insisted, encountered its limits in the duty that we feel toward those who matter to us—friends, family, community—and could not expand endlessly without compromising those relationships. In a neoliberal age, however, freedom has come to be seen as the ground of many of our relationships, resulting in what Streeck describes as, “social bonds and identities that are less restrictive—indeed entirely free from obligation.”24 Whether social bonds that are entirely free from obligation have not, in fact, lost their bonding agent is a fair question, and it points to a contradiction that Grant thought was intrinsic to the modern conception of self as freedom. He referred to the belief that our essence is our freedom as our modern “myth”—a narrative that provided our society with a unifying “account of existence.” Such myths, he insisted, were necessary to any society, offering its members a sense of shared purpose, mutual responsibility, and belonging. But he argued that unlike other myths, our modern belief in the self as freedom was inherently unstable and would ultimately produce its own negation. “As modern people come to believe themselves to be the absolute source of themselves,” Grant asserted, “all systems of order and meaning which appear to human beings as myth become other to them, and so in the very act of their sovereignty they experience the world as empty of meaning.”25

The Collapse of the Myth of Freedom All of this provides a rather dire perspective on our times. Many marxist critics of the neoliberal era identify the massive inequalities of wealth and power that it has produced as a fatal flaw that will eventually lead to its collapse. Grant was clearly no fan of capitalist inequality, but he was doubtful of claims that our society was destined to be upended “by its inner economic contradictions,” that is by the unsustainable class oppositions that it engendered. To begin with, the capitalist system was maintained by institutions that remained tremendously powerful, and by leaders who protected it with a ruthless resolve. But more to the point, individuals from across the class spectrum experienced the capitalist

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marketplace as the sphere wherein the self could realize its most radical freedom. In other words, capitalism did not heighten the awareness of clashing class interests, but provided the enabling framework for our central meaning-making myth, thus informing a monolithic uniformity of purpose across society. Ironically, Grant believed that if our society were to face any sort of upheaval, it would happen because of the triumph of that homogenizing myth—because the triumph of that myth pointed to its own paradoxical overcoming and revealed “the world as empty of meaning.” The consequence would be what Grant described as a widespread sense of “alienation” or “separation from meaning” in society.26 Individuals would still attach themselves to the rhetoric of freedom, but would increasingly “find it difficult to give content and meaning to that freedom.” Unprecedented numbers of people would experience this situation as a “mental health crisis.” Many would simply “surrender to passivity and the pursuit of pleasure as a commodity,”27 and perhaps try to find a measure of stability and reassurance in the growth of an increasingly technocratic bureaucracy. Others would find themselves caught up in “a hectic search for pseudomyths”28 and heterodox movements to fill their lives with direction. Those who experience their separation from meaning most completely would find themselves alternating between despair and rage.29 It would be at once a very restless and a very listless age, filled with anomie, aimlessness, anger, and division.

Populism and the Rise of Neostatism It is hard not to read Grant’s decades-old prognoses without glimpsing in them traces of some of the social pathologies that afflict our contemporary world. The neoliberal order as it exists today is sustained on the one hand by what Michael Lind describes as an international constellation of technocratically organized governments, corporations, non-profits, and their confident managers,30 and on the other, by ordinary people who have given themselves over to the gratifications of unprecedented consumer choice and the entrepreneurial possibilities of an unregulated and protean labour market. At the same time, signs of alienation and revolt are everywhere. The most dramatic manifestation of this is in the populist movements that have become a feature of our political landscape in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown. These have taken multifarious forms: leaderless uprisings like Occupy and les Gilets Jaunes; upstart

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parties like Syriza, Podemos, and the Five Star Movement; avowedly antiestablishment political figures like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US, or Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. In Canada, too, we have seen our own versions of populism emerge in recent years, usually under the mantle of that very American-sounding word, “freedom.” Some commentators have seen the emergence of these populist movements as a sign that neoliberalism’s days are numbered. Sociologist, Paolo Gerbaudo, points out that whatever their differences, both right-wing and left-wing versions of contemporary populism take direct aim at the globalizing vision of neoliberalism and call for a reassertion of the state, whether through a return to hard borders or some form of updated socialism or Keynesianism. He interprets these movements as one among several indications that the neoliberal age is being eclipsed by a nascent era of “neostatism.”31 If we view these developments through the lens of Grant’s thought, however, there is reason to question such an interpretation. A resurgent state does not in itself represent a fundamental challenge to what Grant sees as the most fateful and troubling feature of our age: the ubiquitous conception of the self as freedom. That the new statism is perfectly compatible with a hypertrophic sense of individual freedom is well illustrated by the right-wing populism of Donald Trump. Trump promised to “Make America Great Again” by pushing back against the globalizing tendencies of neoliberalism with a number of measures aimed at restoring state sovereignty, from building border and tariff walls to withdrawing from international treaties and agreements. On the other hand, his campaign for national “greatness” did not rest on a call for personal sacrifice, but instead appealed to a radically unconstrained idea of individual rights and freedoms.32 This appeal was embodied in Trump’s very persona: the undisciplined showman-libertine who indulges every gaudy desire, vocalizes every prejudice, and flouts all rules, while priding himself on not giving back like other tax-paying losers. It was also manifest in the resentment and scorn he directed at the country’s political institutions, politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and scientists. Trump attacked any authority or tradition that suggested a limit to the individual’s ability to determine their own reality, and then offered his followers no common project to fill in the resulting void.33 Absent any goal that transcended their individuality, their restless groping for freedom seized on petty questions of personal convenience. In a way, the attempt to turn resistance to face masks into a world-historical struggle against tyranny perfectly captured the incoherence of freedom when stripped of political purpose.

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A Left-leaning Neostatism There is no reason to believe that a left-leaning statism would necessarily be any less compatible with a radically individualistic, unconstrained conception of freedom. Grant believed that at its best, an interventionist state could promote ideas of fairness and create social programmes that give form to a shared sense of the common good; but he also recognized that government, in its redistributionist capacity, was always at risk of being reduced to an administrative role,34 either delivering services directly to a citizen-client, or offering supports to ensure the latter can access the services they want on the market. Either way, such statist actions further weakened the experience of the political as a realm of obligation, and encouraged a view of it as ministerial to one’s freedom and self-realization. For this same reason, there is reason to doubt claims that the populist challenge can be met through government policies that aim at levelling the economic playing field. Frank Graves and Jeff Smith point out that there is a “relative consensus” within the international literature on populism that the phenomenon is mostly driven by the “economic stagnation and growing hyper-concentration of wealth” of the neoliberal era, and that the solution lies in government policies that directly target these imbalances.35 But state directed redistribution does not in itself represent a rejection of the neoliberal status quo, and has indeed been an important instrument in its preservation. Neoliberal thinkers and politicians have long reckoned with the fact that the ongoing marketization of the economy would produce resistance among those who are left behind, and that one way to diffuse this opposition is through tax credit or benefit systems (an example would be our federal Canada Child Benefit programme, or proposals for a basic income) that transfer wealth from rich to poor without interfering in the market.36 Critics point out that such measures differ from efforts to strengthen one’s position vis-avis an exploitative market order, say through pro-union legislation; they also differ from social programmes like universal healthcare that provide individuals with access to public goods that they therefore do not have to seek out in commodified form within the private market. At best, the sorts of tax and benefits schemes described above aim to palliate the injuries inflicted on the worst-off by a ruthlessly indifferent market society so as to better integrate them within it.

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Conclusion The lesson we can draw from Grant’s thought is that a meaningful response to populism would have to go beyond state-driven initiatives to create policies outside of the market that aim to address the glaring inequalities within the market order. Instead, efforts would need to be made to limit the role of the market and expand the role of the political in the lives of citizens. Grant celebrated the fact that, historically, elements of Canada’s federal and provincial economies—railways, electrical utilities, broadcasting, healthcare, pensions—had been at least partly protected from private ownership. The value that he saw in these public enterprises went well beyond the instrumental ends they served. What mattered just as much for Grant was that they acted as a sort of concrete instantiation of a willingness to prioritize communal over individual goals. There is, however, an obvious practical obstacle standing in the way of Grant’s vision today. Namely, how after four decades of living under neoliberalism, with its emphatic focus on the individual, it is possible to gain support for policies that are meant to instantiate a concern for the “public good” (since obviously it would be counter-productive to promote them in a way that appeals strictly to the self-interest of citizens). The lesson that we can draw from Grant is that it is necessary to make an affective appeal to feelings of nationalism or patriotism within the country. This is a suggestion that will admittedly raise some objections. First, of course, is the inescapable fact that nationalism is a force with a very dark potential which at its worst has found expression in reactionary nostalgia, racism and other forms of exclusionary violence. Grant was well aware of these dangers. But he also believed that there were forms of nationalism which, instead of closing people off from the larger world and promoting xenophobia, could anchor us in the world and provide a foundation for openness to others. He insisted that the capacity to care for others was something that was always educated close to home in our relationships with family, friends, and community, and that these more immediate or local attachments informed our attempts to sympathize with those further afield. He did not eschew the idea of cosmopolitanism, but he was deeply distrustful of those who demonstrated disdain for the local while claiming a concern for “humanity.”37 A second, and not unrelated objection that could be raised is that Grant came from the dominant white settler-colonial culture, and that the

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“nation” that he celebrates is one that was brutally imposed on the original Indigenous inhabitants of this land. It would be dishonest to respond to this criticism without acknowledging the plain fact that Grant’s writing almost completely overlooks the plight of Indigenous communities within Canada. He certainly recognized that the history of European settlement in North America had been experienced as a history of genocide by the continent’s original inhabitants; but he spoke of Indigenous people in a language of almost absolute victimhood, describing them as a population whose physical destruction at the hands of European settlers was all but a fait accompli.38 In doing so, he failed to see them as members of communities with viable cultures to protect and the potential for political agency. It was an attitude that unintentionally played into a longstanding colonial narrative that, in John Ralston Saul words, “dressed up our right to this land, along with our shoddy disrespect for the the treaties, in a heartfelt conviction that the original owners were dying off.”39 In Grant’s defence, he was hardly the only Canadian scholar of his time to ignore the plight of Indigenous people. Endless decades of attempts by the state to exploit, exclude, and assimilate these groups had effectively muted their voices on the public stage and hidden their cause from the broader population. As the economist Mel Watkins remarked during a panel discussion on the legacy of Lament for a Nation, it seems almost certain that were he writing today, Grant would firmly and vocally support Indigenous peoples in their fight for justice and recognition.40 In the same way that he support the demands of Québec nationalists for a more sovereign role within Canada, he likely would have endorsed growing calls for a form of federalism that meaningfully acknowledges claims to Indigenous nationhood.41 He saw Canada as a nation of nations, as Edward Andrew has argued,42 with all of the tensions, complexities, and instabilities such a formulation entailed. The case for an open, tolerant, and generous nationalism is all the stronger today in light of the protests that took place in Ottawa earlier this year. Many of those involved in this event embraced the symbols of Canadian nationhood and tied them to a trivialized and confused conception of rights and freedoms. Predictably, several members of Canada’s political class manoeuvered to exploit the unrest. The loudest voice to emerge instrumentalized the rhetoric of Canadian nationalism in a bid to win these protestors over to a techno-libertarian, anti-statist vision of the country that would almost certainly only deepen their sense of alienation and exclusion. The centrist political establishment has reacted by

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sneering, condemning, and attempting to further exclude these figures from democratic debate, while assiduously ignoring how the neoliberal order they help to sustain has contributed to the populist backlash. Taking the long view, it would surely be more productive to respond to this populist moment by articulating a left-leaning statist alternative to it. Such an alternative would reclaim the symbols of Canadian nationalism and deploy them around policies capable of awakening a sense of the public good. It is unlikely that we will draw the true believers away from the populist right with a left-leaning nationalism of this sort, but it could very conceivably win over many of the sizeable number who, as Chantal Mouffe says, “are attracted to those parties because they feel they are the only ones that care about their problems.”43 Without such an option we can only watch as the populist right continues to grow.

Notes 1. George Grant, Lament for a Nation (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1997), 69. 2. George Grant, Lament for a Nation, 70. The upshot of this analysis, political theorist, Edward Andrew, remarks, was “that the Russian empire was doomed.” Edward Andrew, “George Grant on the Political Economy of Technology,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 23:6 (December 2003), 479–485, 480. 3. Gary Gerstle makes the collapse of the Soviet Union central to his recent account of the rise of neoliberalism: “[T]he consequences of that empire’s fall and the simultaneous defeat of its legitimating ideology were immense. Together they made possible neoliberalism’s American and global triumph.” Gary Gerstle, The Rise and the Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 10. See also François Cusset, How the World Swung to the Right: Fifty Years of Counterrevolution (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018), 37–38. 4. The locus classicus of this approach is Michel Foucault’s celebrated lecture series delivered at the Collège de France in 1978–1979 and published as The Birth of Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2004). Martjin Konings frames the case for a Foucauldian approach in “Against Exceptionalism: The Legitimacy of the Neoliberal

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5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

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Age,” Globalizations 15:7 (2018), 1007–1019, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14747731.2018.1537263. Wendy Brown elaborates on Foucault’s importance for understanding the neoliberal age in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). David Chandler and Julian Reid’s (eds), The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016) is a collection of essays which draw significantly on Foucault while offering a critique of many earlier Foucauldian approaches, especially insofar as they “stoke the neoliberal myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects” (p. 6). In Grant’s words, “we conceive ourselves to be the source of ourselves, the source of our own order.” George Grant, “Value and Technology,” in Collected Works of George Grant 3: 1960– 1969, eds. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 227–244, 231. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume II ), ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 69. Hereafter The Road to Serfdom. The Road to Serfdom, 95. The Road to Serfdom, 126–129. A vivid example of this criticism can be found in Grant’s address to the 1955 Couchiching Conference, “The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age,” in Collected Works of George Grant 2: 1951–1959, ed. Arthur Davies (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2002), 157– 165. Postwar capitalism, Grant argued, had given rise to a new freedom. “The freedom is not only that not only in a high consumption society economy a multitude of new choices and experiences is open to people, but also that in this environment the traditional standards of conduct become less operative.” Ties to institutions like the “family and church become less powerful so that individuals are free to make their own standards,” while the dependency on new “impersonal authorities” such as monopolistic corporations and the technocratic state that enables them, grow. George Grant, “An Ethic of Community” in Collected Works of George Grant 3: 1960–1969, eds. by Arthur Davies and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2005), 20–48, 25ff.

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11. Wolfgang Streeck, “Citizens as Customers: Considerations on the New Politics of Consumption,” New Left Review 76 (July/August 2012), 27–47, 31. 12. Naomi Klein, No Logo (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009), 23. 13. Jodi Dean, “Enjoying Neoliberalism,” Cultural Politics 4:1 (March 2008), 47–72, 62. https://doi.org/10.2752/175174308 X266398. 14. Kaspar Villadsen, “Managing the Employee’s Soul: Foucault Applied to Modern Management Technologies,” Cadernos EBAPE. BR 5.1 (March 2007), 1–10, 1. https://doi.org/10. 1590/S1679-39512007000100002. 15. Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (New York: Verso, 2017), 6. Both Han and Grant describe a similar contradiction in this conception of freedom. Han writes that “the neoliberal regime transforms allo-exploitation into auto-exploitation” (6). Grant, pondering the problem in one of his notebooks, observed that the “idea of the subject is as absolute freedom yet subjection is slavery.” George Grant, “Miscellaneous Notes on Technology, Good, Heidegger, and Other Subjects,” in Collected Works of George Grant 4: 1970–1988, eds. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 313–329, 315. 16. Grant, “Lament for a Nation Revisited: An Interview with George Grant” with Monica V. Halil, International Insights: A Dalhousie Journal on International Affairs 4:1 (1988), 5–9, 8. 17. This update to the phrase, “creative destruction,” which Joseph Schumpeter coined to describe industrial innovation under capitalism was the internal motto of Facebook until 2014. 18. George Grant, “Two Televised Conversations with Gad Horowitz,” in Collected Works of George Grant 3: 1960–1969, eds. by Arthur Davies and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2005), 431–454, 442. Grant described the programme of the Parti Québécois very much in these terms. He characterized their policies promoting the use of French in schools, business, and government as an attempt to give Quebecers “control over the technological life of their country.” George Grant, “No Alternative to Moderation,” in Collected Works of George Grant 4: 1970–1988, eds. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto:

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University of Toronto Press, 2009), 333–339, 336. Such modernizing efforts, Grant claimed, would ultimately weaken the very Catholicism that had provided such a powerful anchor for their culture. Yet, he argued that if the PQ did not take such steps, the province’s development would be left in the hands of an Anglo business class that cared even less for the common good, and the Québécois would find their culture under even greater threat. “We in the West,” Grant remarked, “are in the midst of a destiny which we have given ourselves, which carries us only in one direction. But in the meantime, what are practical people to do? Are they to put up no resistance to the destruction of their culture? Doesn’t a person such as Parizeau say, ‘If I’m not in charge of the Quebec economy, then Lalonde will be, and isn’t it clear that I, Parizeau, care more about the continuance of French society than Lalonde?’” George Grant, “Conversation: Canadian Politics,” in George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations,” ed. Larry Schmidt (Toronto: Anansi, 1978), 13–21, 16. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 100–101. Friedrich Hayek, “‘Social’ or Distributive Justice,” in The Essence of Hayek, eds. Chiaki Nishiyama and Kurt R. Leube, foreword by W. Glenn Campbell (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), 62–100, 64. Hayek, “‘Social’ or Distributive Justice,” 67–68. Hayek allowed that government might still have a role to play “as a service agency,” so long as such services were provided outside of the marketplace, so as not to distort it. This might involve, for instance, providing “security against severe physical privation, the assurance of a given minimum of sustenance for all.” Hayek, like Milton Friedman, for example, supported the idea of a basic minimum income. What could not be countenanced, however, was “the desire to use the powers of government to insure a more even or just distribution of goods.” Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 259. Universal social programmes, for instance, decommodified essential goods and left their administration in the exclusive hands of the state, thus robbing individuals of their ability “to exercise…choice in some of the most important matters of their lives, such as health, employment, housing, and provision for old age.” The Constitution of Liberty, 261.

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23. Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom,’ 86. 24. Streeck, “Citizens as Customers,” 35. One can trace this transformation in many fields of interaction today. Grant predicted that the identification of freedom as our essence would, for instance, give rise to the “commodification of sex.” Ashley Fetters and Kaitlyn Tiffany provide an illuminating window into how online dating apps are introducing a cold market logic in the culture of dating in contemporary society. Ashley Fetters and Kaitlyn Tiffany “The ‘Dating Market’ is Getting Worse,” The Atlantic (February 25, 2020), https://www.theatlantic.com/family/arc hive/2020/02/modern-dating-odds-economy-apps-tinder-math/ 606982/. Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Peterson, in a wideranging discussion of their recent research on workplace culture describe how “community involvement” has become instrumentalized under neoliberalism. They note that participation in civic institutions or volunteer organizations, for instance, once treated as a communal obligation, has been reframed as something “to benefit just you”—a way of demonstrating professional competence or padding one’s resumé. Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Peterson “The Remote Work Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet.” Vox (November 29, 2021), https://www.vox.com/vox-conversat ions-podcast/2021/11/29/22796730/vox-conversations-annehelen-petersen-charlie-warzel-out-of-office. 25. Grant, “Value and Technology,” 231. Elsewhere he wrote: “Such may indeed by the true account of the human situation: an unlimited freedom to make the world as we want in a universe indifferent to what purposes we choose. But if our situation is such, then we do not have a system of meaning.” George Grant, “A Platitude,” in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), 137–143, 138. 26. Grant, “Value and Technology,” 231, 232. 27. Grant “Ethic of Community,” 26. 28. Grant, “Value and Technology,” 233. 29. Grant, “Value and Technology,” 235; “A Platitude,” 142. 30. Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite (Portfolio/Penguin, 2020). 31. Paolo Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic (New York: Verso, 2021).

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32. Trump at times treated the very idea of loyal sacrifice with contempt. During his presidency, reports surfaced claiming that he had described American soldiers buried on the battlefields of France as “losers” and “suckers.” He was reported to have used the same label to describe US Senator John McCain for being captured by enemy forces during the Vietnam War, and former President George Bush for being downed by the Japanese while serving as a Navy pilot in World War II. These claims, along with the counter-claims of Trump and his backers, are discussed by Vox writer, Alex Ward in “Did Trump Call US War Dead ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’? The Controversy, Explained,” Vox (September 4, 2020), https://www.vox.com/2020/9/4/214 22733/atlantic-trump-military-suckers-losers-explained. 33. Hugo Drochon remarks that this contemporary “misarchy” or “hatred of authority” is “dangerous because there’s a kind of nihilism behind it. There’s not really a positive project that comes out of it. It’s just a resounding ‘no’ and it’s not clear what comes next.” Hugo Drochon, “What Nietzsche’s Philosophy Can Tell Us About Why Brexit and Trump Won,” interview with Sean Illing, Vox (June 11, 2017), https://www.vox.com/conversat ions/2016/12/20/13927678/donald-trump-brexit-nietzschedemocracy-europe-populism-hugo-drochon. 34. As Grant put it, in a characteristically Platonic formulation, “When charity is without eros it can become administrative dictate— however necessary the administration.” George Grant, “Faith and the Multiversity,” in Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1986), 35–77, 74. 35. Frank Graves and Jeff Smith, “Northern Populism: Causes and Consequences of the New Ordered Outlook” Canadian Global Affairs Institute, University of Calgary, School of Public Policy Research Paper 13:15, (June 2020): 29, https://d3n8a8pro 7vhmx.cloudfront.net/cdfai/pages/4588/attachments/original/ 1610483508/Northern_Populism_Causes_and_Consequences_ of_the_New_Ordered_Outlook.pdf?1610483508. 36. Peter Sloman, “Redistribution in an Age of Neoliberalism: Market Economics, ‘Poverty Knowledge,’ and the Growth of Working-Age Benefits in Britain, c. 1979–2010,” Political Studies 67:3 (August 2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718800495.

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37. David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi, 1995), 102–103. 38. In a 1968 essay, Grant observed, with a sense of tragedy, that North America was today thoroughly European in character, except for “the community of the children of the slaves and the few Indians we have allowed just to survive.” George Grant, “In Defence of North America,” in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: Anansi, 1969), 15–40, 16. 39. John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada (Toronto: Penguin, 2009), 27. 40. Watkins made the comment in the course of panel discussion on Grant on TVO’s The Agenda: “In the ‘60 s nobody talked about Aboriginal people and Aboriginal rights. Now we have something called the First Nations. Would George have liked them? He would absolutely have liked them. George was always on the side of powerless people.” “Forty-Five Years After George Grant’s ‘Lament for a Nation,’ What is the State of Canadian Nationalism” The Agenda with Steve Paikin (January 17, 2011), 26:00–27:10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XshT34FIGLc&t=5s. 41. See for example, Pamela Palmateer, Indigenous Nationhood: Empowering Grassroots Citizens (Blackpoint, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2015); Thomas J. Courchene, Indigenous Nationals Canadian Citizens: From First Contact to Canada 150 and Beyond, Institute of Governmental Relations, School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, 2018; and Peter H. Russell, Sovereignty: The Biography of a Claim (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2021), especially Chapter 7. 42. Ed Andrew, “Multicultural Taxpayers and Canadian Citizenship: Between the End of History and the Class of Civilizations,” in Citizenship and Multiculturalism in Western Liberal Democracies, eds. by David Edward Tabachnick and Leah Bradshaw (New York: Lexington, 2017), 69–85, 83. 43. Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (New York: Verso, 2018), 22.

CHAPTER 11

The Democratic Recession as Reversal or Fate of Modernity?: Lessons From George Grant Tyler Chamberlain

The future of democracy is not as certain as many once thought it to be. The 2021 and 2022 Freedom House reports on the global state of democracy, titled “Democracy Under Siege” and “The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule,” respectively, paint a sobering picture.1 The 2022 report begins with the alarming observation: “Countries with aggregate [democracy] score declines in Freedom in the World have outnumbered those with gains every year for the past 16 years.”2 As liberal democracy continues to falter in countries from Mali to Hungary to the United States,3 popular and scholarly writing on its prospects proliferates. We have witnessed, two commentators suggest, “the end of the democratic century.”4 Though the Arab Spring gave momentary hope that the democratic spirit, aided in large part by technology and social media, might

T. Chamberlain (B) Trinity Western University, Langley, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_11

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prevail, it could not stem the tide of “the end of the end of history”5 or the return of authoritarianism—itself abetted in large part by social media’s ability to more effectively spread misinformation and disinformation. These developments follow a noticeable democratic wave that began in the 1970s and therefore raise questions about the causes of the rise and fall of democracy and indeed of the very relationship between modernity and democracy. Drawing primarily on George Grant’s 1974 work English-Speaking Justice,6 this chapter will explore the themes of democratization and democratic breakdown from the vantage point of Grant’s interpretation of modernity. I suggest that Grant’s Nietzschean understanding of modernity—and specifically what it entails about the relationship between modernity and liberal democracy—sheds important light on current debates around what scholars call the democratic recession.

Democratic Recession as Reversal This chapter begins with a brief overview of some influential texts in the literature on the rise and fall of democracy. I do not attempt to evaluate the specific claims made about the causes or effects of democratization and its decline. Instead, the purpose of this section is to throw into relief a particular image adopted by many leading scholars of these phenomena. After highlighting this image, the second section will subject it to a Grantian critique, drawing on his interpretation of modernity and its relationship to a politics of freedom and equality. The classic study of democratization in the late twentieth century is Samuel Huntington’s The Third Wave. Huntington defines a democratic wave as a relatively short period of time marked by a high number of democratic transitions. Democratic waves may still see some democracies slide over into non-democratic regime types, but such cases are outnumbered by the democratic transitions. Huntington identifies three democratic waves, the third of which began in 1974 with the overthrow of Marcello Caetano’s regime in Portugal. Thus began a fifteen-year period in which 33 countries moved from authoritarianism to democracy.7 Each of the three democratic waves in the modern period—1828–1926, 1943– 1962, 1974–1990s—was followed by a “reverse wave” that saw a decline in the total number of democracies. Huntington suggests five factors that combine to explain the third wave, including such things as the crisis of legitimacy affecting authoritarian systems, unprecedented economic

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growth, and the “snowball effect,” by which changes in one country can spur similar changes in other countries.8 Huntington was not alone in his optimistic account of the prospects of democracy in the 1990s. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man revived, with substantial modification, Hegel-Kojève’s thesis that the world-historical struggle for recognition was nearing completion now that liberal democracy had emerged from the Cold War as the terminus of ideological development. Whereas Huntington gives equal explanatory weight to material and ideational causes, Fukuyama accentuates ideational factors. Economic motivations themselves cannot explain the human desire for democracy and political equality; that can only be accounted for, he argued, by taking thymos into account, by which he means the desire to be recognized as equal to or greater than one’s peers. History, understood as the process of ideological development toward the recognition of equal political freedom for all, had in principle reached its end with the defeat of fascism and communism in the twentieth century. Contrary to many popular misunderstandings of Fukuyama’s argument, he did not suggest that liberal democracy would be immediately embraced by all or that military conflict would be a thing of the past; however, an important point had been reached, namely that the ideological position most consistent with human nature had been found and had attained global reach. He thus turns our attention away from thinking about the future of democracy in terms of foreign policy—that is, whether democratic states can survive military threats from authoritarian states—toward the question of whether liberal democracy best resolves fundamental social contradictions in a way that makes life “truly satisfying.”9 In 2007, however, Azar Gat announced the “end of the end of history,” noting the return of pre-WW2-style authoritarian capitalist great powers.10 Larry Diamond argued in 2008 that Huntington’s third democratic wave had been replaced by a democratic recession.11 Democratization scholarship continues to highlight the global decline in democracy, as both new and once-consolidated democratic states revert to authoritarianism.12 Even Francis Fukuyama modified his end of history thesis in light of contemporary challenges to democracy. Any democratic progress, he suggests in a 2015 afterward to Political Order and Political Decay, is a function of chance and individual choices, not an automatic historical mechanism.13 My present purpose is not to wade through the specific claims and disagreements in the growing literature on the democratic decline, but

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rather to highlight an unspoken assumption that has influenced the way in which the rise and fall of democracy has been framed.14 Behind both the early optimistic and recent pessimistic accounts of the state of democracy lies an image that can be thought of as quasi-Hegelian, with one major qualification. The specific aspect of Hegel’s system that has been appropriated by the democratic decline literature is the notion of historical development of human freedom that culminates in the liberalconstitutional state. In the introduction to The Philosophy of History, Hegel writes that “[w]orld history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”15 Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel is noteworthy for its emphasis on the political implications of the inexorable march toward man’s consciousness of his freedom, namely what he called the Universal Homogeneous State. The concept of the Universal Homogeneous State has been adopted by Francis Fukuyama, George Grant, and others.16 The central idea is that as Spirit attains greater and greater consciousness of itself as absolute freedom, political arrangements will grant formal equality to more and more men until all are free.17 Hegel, at least according to Kojève, thus sees history as culminating in something like liberal democracy.18 This is the necessary result of a rational historical process. What in this chapter I call the quasi-Hegelian frame of the democratic decline literature omits this inevitability claim.19 Nevertheless, many of these works adopt the image of a single process of political development that, if brought to fruition, culminates in the consolidation of liberal democracy. There are greater and lesser degrees of democratic governance, but liberal democracy is the goal toward which progress, qua progress, moves, and perfect liberal democracy, were it to be reached, would constitute the apex of political development. Thus, any weakening or deconsolidation of democratic institutions is conceptualized as a reversal of the earlier process of development. It is the association between political development and democracy that I have identified as having a Hegelian character. Whether in the optimistic or pessimistic accounts of the future of democracy, there is a shared assumption that democratization is political development in one direction and that democratic breakdown is a reversal. This accounts for why scholars use rollback,20 backsliding,21 recession,22 and similar terms to describe the present state of democracy. In 1991 Huntington spoke of “reverse waves,” by which he meant the period after a democratic wave in which some of the democratic gains

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of the previous wave had been lost.23 Throughout this body of scholarship, there is one process of movement toward democratization, and the problem for policy-makers is to prevent this progress from being lost, reversed, or eroded. This can be clearly seen in Larry Diamond’s 2015 chapter “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession.” He notes that around 2006 the “expansion of freedom and democracy came to a prolonged halt” and that crucial states in the non-western world have been “either stagnating or slipping backward.”24 Elsewhere he notes the “erosion” of electoral fairness and space for political dissent.25 Diamond is not alone in using this geological metaphor: erosion describes the undoing of something that had been previously built up—an equal and opposite reversal, that is, of something that came before. Descriptions of these types make use of the quasi-Hegelian conceptualization of political development identified above. Democratization—which is closely related to development and progress—and democratic breakdown are opposite political processes. What is missing from this dominant frame is the possibility that the democratic recession is not a reversal of earlier processes but the continuation of an underlying process—modernization, for example. This is the possibility raised by George Grant’s account of modernity, to which we now turn.

Democratic Recession as Fate of Modernity We see from the above discussion that some leading accounts of the fate of democracy adopt something akin to Hegel’s identification of political development with democratization, such that any weakening of democratic institutions is a reversal, rather than a continuation, of the process of political development. The connection between liberal democracy, political development, and modernization brings us to philosophical ground heavily traversed by George Grant. In English-Speaking Justice, he highlights the assumed relationship between modernity and liberal democracy when he speaks of the widely shared belief that the same account of reason which resulted in the discoveries of science [i.e. modern reason], also expressed itself humanly in the development of political regimes ever more congruent with the principles of English-speaking liberalism.26

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The words “ever more congruent” denote the historical progression toward fuller and fuller realizations of liberal democracy—that is to say, the story of democratization told by scholars like Huntington and Fukuyama.27 Never far from Grant’s mind was the question: what is modernity? The remainder of this chapter will explore his answer to that question, particularly as given during his “tragic-paradoxical” phase when his account of modernity began to take on a distinctly Nietzschean mark.28 Much of his work of the 1960s accepted the account of modernity given by Kojève’s Hegel, although he did not welcome the advent of the Universal Homogenous State as Kojève had. Grant’s 1969 CBC Massey Lectures, Time As History, mark a distinct turn to Nietzsche as the philosopher who best understood what it means to be modern.29 Modernity, as understood by the mature Grant through the lens of Nietzsche, is characterized by the will to master human and non-human nature. This account of modernity not only predicts a different future for liberal democracy and political equality, but challenges the assumed relationship between modernity, progress, and liberal democracy. The following passages draw attention to the central constituents of Grant’s account of modernity: In thinking the modern project, [Nietzsche] did not turn away from it....In his work, the themes that must be thought in thinking time as history are raised to a beautiful explicitness: the mastery of human and non-human nature in experimental science and technique, the primacy of the will, man as the creator of his own values, the finality of becoming, the assertion that potentiality is higher than actuality, that motion is nobler than rest, that dynamism rather than peace is the height.30 The word “technology” is new, and its unique bringing together of “techne” and “logos” shows that what is common around the world is this novel interpenetration of the arts and sciences. As in all marriages, this new union has changed both parties, so that when we speak “technology” we are speaking a new activity which western Europeans have brought into the world.31

Time as History reflects on the implications of the modern understanding of time as something upon which man imposes his will. To think time as history is to be future-oriented, and specifically to think of the future as open to human willing and creating. The conception of reason

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or, as Grant sometimes puts it, the paradigm of knowledge, appropriate to such a framework required a rethinking of the relationship between action and contemplation. Grant often referred to Bacon and Descartes as architects of this conception of reason, on account of their privileging of useful knowledge. The only knowledge worthy of the name is that which facilitates useful action, and the actions worth pursuing are restricted to those made possible by the new knowledge. Modernity for Grant is characterized by this conception of reason, which is at once an expression of the will to mastery and a principle of social organization that orders the activity of private and public corporations, universities, the media, and virtually all constituents of modern mass societies. Even before his Nietzschean turn he was attuned to the ways in which technological mastery restricted rather than expanded human freedom.32 This account of modernity differs from those that privilege man’s emancipation from traditional sources of control, whether ecclesiastical, political, or familial. On Grant’s reading, modernity is not the wellspring of human freedom and equality that some make it out to be, but encourages control of human and non-human nature in ways that fundamentally undermine the bases of political freedom and equality. Grant’s objective in English-Speaking Justice was to elucidate how this is so and what it means for the content of political justice as modernity continues to unfold. English-Speaking Justice combines historical, philosophical, and legal analysis, though the overarching argument can be briefly stated as follows: modern technological reason, and what it tells us about the world and man’s place in it, cannot sustain a politics of liberty and equality.33 When the implications of this thesis are fully explored, they constitute a direct challenge to the identification of modernity with liberal democracy; as William Christian put it in an early commentary on the book: “technology has eviscerated liberalism.”34 Grant is indeed expressing concern for the very survival of the institutions of liberal democracy; not, it should be stressed, due to any erosion of modernity, but as a result of its continuing implementation and development. Modernization itself, Grant will go on to suggest—in an anticipatory challenge to today’s theorists of the democratic recession—is driving the breakdown of the legal-political institutions of liberal democracy. The theoretical basis for what is often called “liberal” politics—namely a concern for human freedom and some measure of equality—is found in classical and Christian thought, not early enlightenment political theory. When Locke, Kant, and others attempted to ground “liberal” regimes

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in nature or the brute fact of human rationality, Grant sees this as a holdover from pre-modern thought—maintained despite, not because of, the modernness of their thinking. Grant’s simple yet incisive formulation of the difference between ancient and modern ontology runs as follows: The view of traditional philosophy and religion is that justice is the overriding order which we do not measure and define, but in terms of which we are measured and defined. The view of modern thought is that justice is a way in which we choose freedom, both individually and publicly, once we have taken our fate into our own hands, and know that we are responsible for what happens.35

Platonic and Christian thought (Grant’s “traditional philosophy and religion”) grounded justice and moral obligation in concrete facts that render justice our due—in Grant’s language, it is what we are fitted for. His 1961 essay “An Ethic of Community” argued that the CCF’s goal of social and economic equality must be grounded in a JudeoChristian doctrine of the absolute worth of all men. He criticized some of his party compatriots not for their left-wing views but for their materialist ontology that provided no theoretical basis for pursuing equality.36 Modern thought, in ways that will be explained below, conceives of justice as not requiring a foundation in the way things are. Nature does not provide guidance as to what we are fitted for or what we owe each other but is a blank slate to be shaped according to our will. Since modernity, as technological, directs human energies to seek power over nature for the “improvement of the human condition,”37 modern political thinking has made convenience into a chief social and political good. The basis of social contract theory is that justice consists of the conventional rules agreed to in order to avoid the inconveniences of the state of nature.38 Rawls’ contemporary formulation of contractarianism drops the threat of the state of nature, but nevertheless conceives of justice as those rules which a) must be mutually agreed to in order to create moral obligation and b) are crafted solely to maximize the selfinterest of those involved: “Rawls affirms that justice can only be truly understood when it is known as rooted in contract.”39 Grant brings his discussion of A Theory of Justice to a close by asking the unnerving question:

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Is such justification of justice [i.e. in terms of convenience] able to support the pursuit of liberty and equality at a time when the conveniences of technology do not seem to favour them?40

This is the crux of the issue. Convenience alone is an unsteady foundation for a politics that we hope will constrain the powerful or protect those who stand in the way of increased technological mastery or economic efficiency. The danger is best shown by example—in this case, Grant’s choice of abortion rights will suffice.41 Once the mechanism at play is understood, it can be seen at work in the Vietnam war, minority rights, and anywhere else the interests of a group or class threatens technological or economic progress.42 Grant thought the Roe v. Wade decision was notable for what it revealed about modernity; in itself it did not so much constitute a radical departure from traditional justice as reveal the departure that had already taken place.43 Modern thought is set apart from traditional philosophy and religion by not defining justice in terms of knowledge of the whole or of what it means to be human. Modern justice is ontologically groundless, and intentionally so. An ontological ground—i.e. an objective standard—would limit man’s ability to freely create his own values. The abortion ruling, however, revolved around an ontological distinction between members of the same species, some of whom are granted legal rights and some of whom are not. This distinction makes it impossible to hide any longer from “the whole question of what our species is. What is it about any members of our species which makes the liberal rights of justice our due?”.44 The problem, according to Grant, is that liberal contractualism has no answer to this question. Since our predominant philosophy provides no answer to this ontological question—and yet the question is unavoidably raised—the only answer that can be given is one that appeals to technological convenience. On this point Grant is quite blunt: legalconstitutional rights are now subject to the demands of convenience.45 This raises the important practical question of who is to interpret the meaning and requirements of convenience. In English-Speaking Justice itself Grant makes vague references to the powerful, or those with the ability to assent to contracts. However, in his 1985 interviews with David Cayley he deepens his analysis by noting the relationship between contractualism and capitalism.46 The convenience to which contractualism is in service is defined by the requirements of capitalism or, as Grant put it, by

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the interests of major corporations: “corporate power,” he writes, “act[s] under the banner of technological necessities.”47 On this point it is worth noting that one of Grant’s criticisms of Rawls is that his expression of contractual liberalism pays no attention to the social fact that justice must be realized in a world dominated by private corporations.48 In practice, then, those whose rights are rendered vulnerable are those whose rights would challenge either the broad goal of economic efficiency or the specific interests of corporations. In a later essay, Grant ties the desire for abortion access to the requirements of corporate capitalism: “their [i.e. potential mothers’] skilled or unskilled labour, their low or high ambitions are wanted in the marketplace.”49 Grant’s argument is that when the requirements of economic efficiency—in this case, the ability of women to join and remain in the labor force—required access to abortion on demand, there was nothing in our philosophical and political tradition to uphold traditional restraints against killing the vulnerable. Grant spilled more ink on the abortion controversy than on any other political question during the last two decades of his life, but his treatment of other issues was no less severe. As suggested above, he saw the legalization of abortion as merely the symptom of a larger civilizational crisis. In the 1960s Grant was a vocal supporter of student protests against the Vietnam War and described it as a military adventure to satisfy the requirements of American empire. He writes of the willingness of America—the supposed heartland of freedom and equality—to massacre civilians in order to keep Vietnam within its economic empire. English-Speaking Justice highlights the tension between the liberalism and constitutionalism at home and the imperial actions abroad: The ferocious determination to keep Indo-China within the orbit of their empire made it clear that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness might be politically important for members of the domestic heartland, but were not intended to be applicable to the tense outreaches of that empire.50

The intriguing suggestion is later raised that careful protection of the rights of congress and the courts in the Watergate scandal served as a “purging” or “anodyne” to justify Americans’ self-righteousness while killing Vietnamese civilians.51 That is, the American empire needed Vietnam to remain within its sphere of influence, and only emphasized domestic rights in order to placate its sense of justice.

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In the absence of a convincing answer to the question of why human beings should be accorded moral and legal rights even when it is politically and economically inconvenient to do so, this pattern will be repeated. Equality will be granted to those to whom it is convenient, but such equality will exclude “those who are too weak to enforce contracts – the imprisoned, the mentally unstable, the unborn, the aged, the defeated and sometimes even the morally unconforming.”52 Any group that is weak and whose refusal or inability to conform to the conveniences of the interests of the corporations, Grant thus claims, may eventually find that their constitutional rights are in jeopardy. If this were to come to pass, then the rule of law, especially for minorities that prove inconvenient, will have lost all practical effect. Moreover, this weakening or removal of rights might occur via the wholesale destruction or weakening of the political institutions that were designed to protect such rights. Grant does not articulate a complete theory of how this will take place, but some important remarks indicate that the very institutions of liberal democracy are at stake as technological modernity progresses. The problem is not simply that individuals will lose respect for the rights of others and may act or legislate accordingly, but that the very institutions that prevent individuals from so doing will not survive. “What,” he asks, “can be the place of representative government in the immense society ruled by private and public corporations with their immense bureaucracies?”53 Modern mass society renders more and more areas of our lives subject to bureaucratic decisions only loosely accountable to the voting public; instead, decisions are made with an eye to technological and economic efficiency. Among those political institutions whose survival is threatened by the new justice defined by convenience are “representative government,” “the protection by law of the rights of the individual,” and “those legal institutions which guard our justice.”54 To recap, modernity is characterized by the will to mastery. This is an expression of man’s freedom from external constraints and standards. Human freedom was to be put in the service of improving man’s condition, facilitating bodily comfort through the progress of the natural and moral sciences. The stated goal of technology, if not modernity itself, therefore, is convenience. On paper, this elevates categories like quality of life, health, technological progress, and economic growth in order to promote humanitarian ends. The practical effect of this reinterpretation of justice purely in terms of convenience, however, has been to

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remove the protection of justice from those whose protection stands in the way of technological progress and economic efficiency. Grant transcended the contemporary right-left ideological spectrum by interpreting multiple political issues through this lens, suggesting that abortion had been legalized for the same reason that the Vietnam war was undertaken. As Joan O’Donovan writes: Abortion is for Grant in the seventies what the Vietnam War was for him in the sixties, a searchlight thrown across our public darkness. If the Vietnam War revealed the shadowy contours of liberal justice at the outposts of American empire, then abortion reveals these same contours in its heartland.55

Conclusion This chapter has considered two accounts of the relation between modernity and democracy. The democratic decline literature adopts an image loosely inspired by Hegel’s conception of political development. Political development entails democratization, and democratic decline is understood as a reversal or erosion of what had been built up or developed. Grant begins English-Speaking Justice by noting the bringing-together in the popular mind of modernity and liberal democracy, only to subject this Hegelian conception of modernity to a Nietzschean critique. If Philosophy in the Mass Age was Grant’s Hegelian book, then English-Speaking Justice is his Nietzschean book insofar as it “undertakes the Nietzschean task of showing that the modern experience of reason cannot indefinitely sustain the force of ‘should’ in practice.”56 The central point of disagreement between the social scientific work summarized in the first section and Grant’s account of modernity analyzed in the second section concerns the compatibility of modernity with liberal democracy. The quasi-Hegelianism implicitly adopted by Huntington, Diamond, and others suggests that sustaining democracy is a matter of protecting democratic gains from the challenge of reverse waves, and thereby weathering the storm until the next democratic wave when further political development can take place.57 The current challenges are aberrations from the modern path of political development which, with some luck and prudent leadership, can be overcome and democratization resumed. Grant’s alarming thesis is a direct challenge to this conceptualization. He argues that the eroding constitutional

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protections of the rule of law are not aberrations from modernity but modernity emancipated from the moral restraints of Protestant Christianity: “As the Protestants accepted the liberalism of autonomous will, they became unable to provide their societies with the public sustenance of uncalculated justice which the contractual account of justice could not provide.”58 We are thus presented with two accounts of the fate of democracy, issuing from competing accounts of modernity itself. Is modernity defined by the rise of constitutional protections of rights and political accountability such that the democratic recession is a setback? Or is modernity defined by the will to technological mastery in such a way that convenience and economic efficiency come to outweigh the dignity of all men and women? For Grant, as this chapter has shown, the erosion of institutions of representative democracy and the rule of law is not an aberration from modernity or a temporary setback, but is the shape modernity takes when unrestrained by the “moral cement” of traditional accounts of justice. As technological reason continues to hammer away at this moral cement, we can expect the politics of freedom and equality to be further challenged by the requirements of technological progress and economic efficiency. One must avoid the temptation of turning Grant’s general warning into a set of specific predictions of twentieth-century global politics. He himself warned against hubristic projects of that sort: “Obviously no sane person predicts the details of the future.”59 His prognosis in ESJ was put in general terms and thus tended to avoid specific claims about how exactly the institutions of liberal democracy would falter. One possible exception to this tendency is a footnote near the end of Lament for a Nation. In the context of a discussion of the role of conservatives in the age of technological progress—whom he describes as merely providing a sufficient level of order amidst the rapid changes brought about by technology while failing to resist the technological impulse itself—he predicts that future American conservatives will prioritize a politics of law and order. The political battle, then, will be between “democratic tyrants and the authoritarians of the right.”60 What is perhaps relevant to the present argument is that the move toward the authoritarian politics of law and order is a consequence of social transformations brought about by technological modernity, not a revival of pre-modern impulses. On the global scale, however, there is no explicit Grantian theory about which polities are more likely to experience democratic rollback, or what

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any given country’s particular experience of modernity tells us about its future democratic prospects. Nevertheless, one is struck by his prescient warning—at the outset of a wave of democratization in 1974, no less— that representative democracy and the rule of law stand on shaky ground both in the outposts and the very heartland of empire. The political health of once-strong democracies seems to have confirmed his deepest suspicions.

Notes 1. Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2021: Democracy Under Siege (Washington, D.C.: Freedom House, 2021); Sarah Recuppi and Amy Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2022: The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule (Washington, D.C.: Freedom House 2022). 2. Repucci and Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2022, 1. These negative trends are also found in Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index 2021: The China Challenge (London: EIU 2022). 3. These three are featured in Freedom House’s list of 30 countries that suffered the largest 10-year decline in democracy. Repucci and Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2022, 16. 4. Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, “The End of the Democratic Century: Autocracy’s Global Ascendance,” Foreign Affairs 97:3 (2018). 5. Azar Gat, “The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers,” Foreign Affairs 86:4 (2008), 59. 6. Throughout this chapter, George Grant’s books will be abbreviated in the following way: PMA = George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995 [1966]). LN = George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005[1965]). TE = George Grant, Technology and Empire (Concord: Anansi 1969). TH = George Grant, Time as History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995[1969]). ESJ = George Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Toronto: Anansi 1985[1974]).

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

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TJ = George Grant Technology and Justice (Concord: Anansi 1986). Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1991): 14. Huntington, The Third Wave, 45–46. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History as the Last Man (New York: The Free Press 1992): 288. Italics in original. Gat, Return of Authoritarian Great Powers, 59. Larry Diamond, “The Democratic Rollback: The Resurgence of the Predatory State,” Foreign Affairs 87:2 (2008), 36. Examples abound, but see Larry Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” in Democracy in Decline? ed. Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 2015), 98–118; Larry Diamond, “Democracy’s Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled,” Journal of Democracy 33:1 (2022), 163–179, and Roberta Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy 27:3 (2016), 5–17. Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2015): 556–557. For a helpful collection of various interpretations of these phenomena, see Larry Diamond & Marc F. Plattner (eds.), Democracy in Decline? (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 2015). G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Trans. Robert S. Hartman. (Indianapolis: The Bobs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1953[1837]): 24. For more on the Universal Homogenous State see the following: Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Trans. James Nichols. (New York: Basic Books 1969); Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, Revised and Expanded Edition. Ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000), Fukuyama, End of History, Chapter 3 of Technology and Empire (TE) by George Grant. See also Chapter 4 in this volume. Kojève’s reading of Hegel is not shared by all interpreters. However, I pay particular attention to it here because it was the interpretation adopted by Grant. By the mid-1960s the Hegel with which he is in conversation is Kojève’s Hegel.

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18. It should be pointed out that Leo Strauss argued that the Universal Homogenous State would in fact be a tyranny. George Grant agreed with Strauss on this point. See Grant’s his comments on the Strauss-Kojève debate, see “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Chapter 3 of Technology and Empire (TE) by George Grant. 19. Though see Fukuyama, End of History. 20. Diamond, “Democratic Rollback.” 21. David Waldner and Ellen Lust, “Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding,” Annual Review of Political Science 21 (2018), 93–113; Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index 2020: In Sickness and in Health? (London: EIU 2021): 8. 22. Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession”; Diamond, “Democracy’s Arc”; Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index 2021: The China Challenge, 24. 23. Huntington, The Third Wave, 15–26, 290–294. 24. Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” 99, 111. 25. Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” 106. 26. ESJ 3–4. 27. It is worth noting that Grant delivered these remarks in 1974, the very year that saw the beginning of Huntington’s third democratic wave. It would be several decades before Grant’s warnings about the prospects of political freedom and equality in late modernity would be matched by mainstream social scientific scholars of democracy. 28. Joan O’Donovan, George Grant and the Twilight of Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984), 10–11, 126. 29. I do not wish to discount the importance of Heidegger to Grant’s mature thinking about modernity. I focus on Nietzsche in this chapter because it is he whom Grant repeatedly singles out as exposing the essence of modernity: TH 4; ESJ 77; and TJ 89. 30. TH 57. 31. ESJ 1. 32. George Grant, “An Ethic of Community,” in The George Grant Reader, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 60–61. 33. The following is an exploration of one element—albeit a major one—of English-Speaking Justice. For more in-depth treatments of the book as a whole, I direct the reader to the following:

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34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

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William Christian, “George Grant and the Terrifying Darkness,” in George Grant in Process, ed. Laurence Schmidt (Toronto: Anansi 1978), 167–178, O’Donovan, George Grant, 139–153, and Hugh Donald Forbes, George Grant: A Guide to His Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2007), 46–58. Christian, “George Grant and the Terrifying Darkness,” 174. ESJ 74. Similar formulations appear at PMA 93, LN 71, TE 138, and TJ 58–59. Grant, “Ethic of Community.” This phrase is Francis Bacon’s. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000[1620]), aphorism LII. ESJ 13–23. ESJ 13. ESJ 47. Grant’s views on abortion were not unimpeachable. For example, his penchant for fiery rhetoric often led him to statements that even many pro-life activists would shy away from. For a thoughtful response to, and critique of, Grant’s position on abortion see Leah Bradshaw, “Love and Will in the Miracle of Birth: An Arendtian Critique of George Grant on Abortion,” in George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity, ed. Arthur Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 220–239. My inclusion of economic progress and efficiency is intentional. Though English-Speaking Justice does not include a thorough analysis of the role of capitalism, Grant later came to believe that capitalism plays a central role in the sidelining of minority rights in modern politics. My interpretation of ESJ takes this into account. See David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation (Concord: Anansi 1995), 146. One is reminded of Nietzsche’s observation, concerning great thoughts: “What happens is a little like what happens in the realm of stars. The light of the remotest stars comes last to men; and until it has arrived man denies that there are–stars there.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Translated with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books 1989 [1886]). Since Grant was fond of relating the Nietzschean thesis of the death of God to the contemporary twilight of justice, this connection is certainly in the spirit of his thought.

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58. 59.

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ESJ 71. ESJ 83. Cayley, George Grant in Conversation, 146. ESJ 14. ESJ 41–42. George Grant, “The Triumph of the Will,” in George Grant Reader, 146. ESJ 8–9. ESJ 100n17. ESJ 83–84. ESJ 10. ESJ 10, 82. O’Donovan, George Grant, 149. O’Donovan, George Grant, 140. Though the specific concept of reverse waves is unique to Huntington, Diamond implies something similar by referring to the current period of democratic recession as a “setback.” Diamond, “Democratic Rollback,” 48. ESJ 65. Grant’s response to a question about the future of Canadian nationalism in “Conversations,” in Schmidt, George Grant in Process, 13. LN 66n23.

CHAPTER 12

George Grant’s Reflections on Revolution Nathan Pinkoski

Describing himself as a “lover of Plato within Christianity,” George Grant drew from philosophical and theological sources to defend the primacy of the Good.1 This activity brought him to reflect on the absence of the Good in modern society and politics. In particular, Grant’s focus on the injustice of contemporary political regimes led him to consider prospects for conscientious objection, resistance, and revolution. In “Revolution and Tradition” (1970), Grant provided a succinct summary of the key issue. It is one of performing the right action in the right circumstances. Resistance and revolution pertain to the virtue of prudence. It requires judging: what loyalty and respect one owes to a regime with which one does not feel any sympathy and how far one should act against the regime when its purposes pass beyond those with which one lacks sympathy and begin to appear monstrous. As in all practical matters, this judgment is one requiring not only true principles, but also phronesis.2

N. Pinkoski (B) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_12

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Whatever his hesitations about providing a definite judgment, Grant maintained openness to the legitimacy of revolution (understood here as regime change). This attracted the attention of the New Left, a movement whose influence can be seen today in revolutionary demands to abolish institutions or replace elites, rather than reform them. At the surface, Grant had considerable affinities with leftist radicals. He wrote fervent critiques of the Vietnam war,3 and was sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro’s regime.4 He supported leftists prosecuted by the American government and condemned legal practices in the United States.5 And he endorsed the prudence of revolution in some instances, writing that “there are parts of the world (for example, Brazil) where the situation may be sufficiently clear that to live by the light of revolution seems the only decent course.”6 Nevertheless, unlike the New Left, Grant rejected the act of revolution in North America, at least in the circumstances of the 1960s. In this essay, I explain Grant’s position and how the source of his hesitation to provide a definite judgment lies in his ambivalence toward two different accounts of history. To move beyond Grant’s hesitations, I draw from Grant’s exhortations to action and his admiration of General de Gaulle, in order to construct a Christian Platonist teaching on the prudence of revolution.

The Permissibility and Impermissibility of Revolution For Grant, the permissibility of revolution is measured by whether it adheres to what is good, not by whether it adheres to ideology. His sympathies for revolution in Brazil or for Castro’s revolution are not because the Brazilian opposition or the Cuban regime are committed to leftism or socialism; Grant’s approval of “socialism” was an approval of the principle that the public or common good is more important than individual material preferences.7 Nor does Grant advocate for an absolute prohibition against revolution in favor of conserving the present regime. He is not a “conservative” in this sense.8 Grant condemns the New Left not because it threatens to overthrow regimes, but because the New Left’s goals are too far in the future. It is too reliant on “easy hopes about the future human situation.”9 He refrains from concluding that violent regime change is never justified.10 For Grant, the presence of a good regime tends to rule against the permissibility of revolution. For a regime to be called “good,” Grant

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argues, it must “include political liberty and consent.”11 One regime-type that achieves this in the modern era is the representative, constitutional government, developed by the English-speaking peoples–whether in the British Parliamentary form, with its fused executive and legislative powers, or the American constitutional form of divided branches of government.12 In these and other forms, Grant praises loyalty to “old and settled legal institutions.”13 For Grant, liberalism in the old sense is the commitment to representative government and constitutionalism. But loyalty to this kind of liberalism does not stem from tradition alone. Nor does it stem from a progressive faith in the inevitable advancement of these governing institutions. It stems from their distinct goodness.14 In liberal regimes (regimes defined by representative government and constitutionalism)—Grant advises against revolution. Constitutionalism is for Grant “a frail plant.” and any action that encourages the majority to abandon constitutional government risks permanently suffocating constitutionalism.15 In the 1960s, Grant concludes that Canada still exists as a constitutional government, so revolutionary actions against it are not justifiable.16 However, he adds that this is not support for every act a constitutional government performs. A constitutional government can act unjustly and thereby lose its legitimacy. For instance, if a representative government were complicit in “genocide.” then more radical actions against it are permissible. 17 In short, revolution is impermissible when it would overthrow liberal regimes, except in cases where the regime commits illegitimate acts. The presence of liberal constitutionalism should generally, but not absolutely, ward off revolutionary action. Yet the absence of liberalism and the presence of injustice renders revolution permissible. The Scope for Prudence After The Revolution Grant’s disagreement with the New Left runs deeper than a disagreement about whether Canada is a constitutional regime or not. The New Left’s vision of revolution is not just caught up in distorted hope; it is caught up in the revolutionary project of unlimited technological progress, the “co-penetration of knowing and making.”18 The fact that promoting technological progress has become the modern tradition of the West renders both progressivism and conservatism capricious guides to discovering what the good is.

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Grant sees the commitment to unlimited technological progress inaugurated by modernity as driven by a desire “to whirl out higher potentialities of man which were not yet actualized.”19 This is a revolutionary desire, which strives to bring about something higher and newer for mankind. Technological progress, since it is revolutionary, comes with violence; yet this violence is necessary to bring potential freedom to actuality. It would appear that technology, fueling the revolutionary impulse, is avant-garde, destabilizing and destroying established orders. Nothing is certain and everything is possible. Yet in spite of these appearances, Grant contends that we have already organized life according to technological progress, so as to remove uncertainty and chance. All modern revolutions, Grant argues, are caught up in the technological project. Revolutionary action now comes after the triumph of technology. The paradox is that the constant revolutionary action that the demand for realizing potential freedom entails isn’t really a revolution at all. The freedom sought through greater mastery of the techniques that control us leads to tighter and tighter control. It entrenches rather than changes the technological regime. It is an ersatz revolution of mechanical recurrence, confirming the imposition of technology over all of nature and human nature. This means that in spite of the faith in progress, we actually have repetition of the status quo. The reign of technology means government transforms into administration. There might be various administrative shifts, but the form of government or regime remains the same.20 Revolutionary leftists accelerate the technological project and the cycle of control. They “appeal to the redemptive possibilities of technology” and the “control of nature achieved by modern techniques.”21 Their revolutions will entail the recurrence of an already extant unjust order and the intensification of the cycle of despotic control. The source of their revolutionary error lies in how they misrepresent Christian theological virtue. For Grant, leftists distort hope to exaggerate human possibilities, asserting that these capacities, and even more technological thinking and action, can escape the cycle of mechanical recurrence. “Their politics of hope and of Utopia – indeed with some of them another outbreak of the traditional form of the politics of the apocalypse—seems to me a kind of dream from which analysis should awaken them.”22 We should reject their distorted eschatological politics.

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Yet as Grant stresses, his diagnosis of the pervasive character of the modern project undercuts the conservative alternative to the revolutionary politics of the New Left. The triumph of technology, he contends, “proves the impossibility of conservatism as a theoretical stance in the technological society.”23 The central reason for this is because the lodestar of conservatism, the appeal to tradition, is not a reliable guide for discovering what is good. Grant’s position is not simply that technology devours tradition. Rather, the interaction between technology and the tradition of Western thought has prepared the way for the triumph of technological thinking. The appeal to tradition, Grant argues, fails to grasp the extent to which the Western tradition is itself implicated in the commitment to unlimited technological progress. “How can we,” Grant writes, “who are Western men, think about Western thought outside the thinking which makes us Western men?”24 Western tradition, the very thing to which conservatives would like to appeal against progress, has trapped us in habits of thinking and action that conceal the good and exacerbate injustice in the political orders we have inherited. As Grant put it, “what has been handed down is that we must change.”25 By appealing to this compromised tradition, conservatism is really appealing to technological progress. Conservatives are thoroughly modern, embracing technological progress but trying to qualify its expansion in instances where it might disturb what particular conservatives own. They are reduced to social conservatism—not in the sense of organizing society around fixed moral principles, but in the sense of preserving their own material and social position. Conservatives are, in Grant’s assessment, “those who accept the orientation to the future in the modern but who want to stop the movement of modernity at points which touch their special interests.”26 One might think that what conservatives have left is the shoring up of liberalism, understood as shoring up representative government. This would be something more significant and meaningful than mere “special interests.”27 In Grant’s exchanges with the New Left, we see something of this sort of conservatism, as prudence dictates that it is better to conserve the frail plants of these governing institutions in Canada than risk destroying them. However, Grant implies that these institutions are not long for the world, for technology also transforms liberal constitutionalism. While Grant is a friend of liberalism, he believes liberalism’s interaction with technology has changed the meaning of both. Liberalism, both because of the imperial successes of the countries associated

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with it and because of its own theoretical defects, plays a role in applying the technological way of thinking across the world. So while liberalism is not the same as technology, it has become the operating system of technology. In Grant’s account of modernity, the terminology of liberalism persists and the institutions associated with it still remain. Yet liberalism no longer means a commitment to representative government. It means a commitment to unlimited technological progress and freedom. At this stage, Western governments become not constitutional governments in the old sense, but technological governments which measure legitimacy only in terms of unlimited technological progress and freedom.28 It is at this point that the differences between the Crown-in-Parliament of the British mixed regime and the American separation of powers become epiphenomenal.29 The old liberal distinctions between these two constitutional forms cease to matter. Constitutional regimes fade away. In this situation, conservatism becomes practically impossible, as there is no tradition of constitutionalism left to preserve. Grant’s considered analysis of politics after the technological revolution does not just thwart the conservative theoretical appeal to prudence; it also thwarts conservative practice, because the window for a conservative defense of prevailing institutions is shrinking as these institutions vanish from the West. But at the very moment when liberal regimes are vanishing and more and more revolutions would be permissible, we come to understand that because of the triumph of technological thinking, we have lost sight of the primacy of the Good that could guide us to assess the prudence of revolution. Hence the modern tradition sustains the cycle of technological regimes, not constitutional ones. Neither revolution nor tradition can illuminate a way out of this cycle, which Grant calls the “darkness” of this epoch.30 For Grant, the discovery of how we need to recover the primacy of the Good stems from subjective awareness of the cycle of darkness. “It is that being in darkness,” he writes, “from which comes forth the determination to be outside that circle.”31 But he does not claim to have articulated the primacy of the Good. He “denies the denial of good and evil, and yet cannot even begin to think them, let alone give specification of them in the world.”32 In the absence of this discovery of the Good, there cannot be the articulation of something new that entails the dissolution of the technological epoch. The cycle persists. Because he concludes that the darkness will persist, Grant’s adumbrations of prudence tend toward resignation rather than action: “what is worth doing in this barren twilight,” he thinks, “is the incredibly difficult question.”33

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While Grant stresses the difficulty of determining what is worth doing, the stark emphasis Grant places on the “darkness” of modernity is in part an exhortation to measured yet courageous political action, oriented toward justice.34 This exhortation is driven by Grant’s understanding of human nature and the requirements of a good life. When human beings are “cut off from political action,” they are “less than themselves,” and are not leading happy and flourishing lives.35 “Theory,” Grant writes, “cannot be pursued in isolation from the need of courage in the world, because those men who do not live with courage in the world will never understand what is at stake in the profoundest differences of theory.”36 Moreover, this exhortation on the essential importance of political action oriented toward justice stems from Grant’s Christianity. As Grant reminds us, “Happy are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice” is one of the beatitudes.37 “Hunger and thirst for justice.” and the desire to act upon it, is a requirement of Christianity.38 Yet however strong this desire might be and however important it might be, that desire cannot in itself serve as an answer to the question of what justice is. That one should act politically may be essential; how one should act and what is worth doing is the matter of prudence. Because Grant’s philosophy emphasizes tentativeness, he stresses this problem as a problem, and wards us away from thinking there is the “easy hope” of a solution. He is caught between an awareness of the need to act in order to escape the darkness and injustice of the present; but he cultivates an awareness that we should expect no act to be able to escape the darkness and injustice of the present.

The Origins of Grant’s Ambivalence: Two Competing Accounts of History Grant points at times toward a political resolution of our problem. However, he hesitates to propose resolutions because he prefers to stress the stability of the ever-tightening cycle of technological rule that makes politics and philosophy impossible. He endorses a cyclical account of history, understood as an ever-tightening and inescapable circle of technological control and repression. But this cyclical history is not inevitable, because its origins are not inevitable. As we shall see, Grant cannot commit himself completely to this cyclical history, because it would be un-Christian. What prevents Grant from a wholesale embrace of this cyclical history of ever-tightening repression is his commitment to the thesis that this

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cycle is the product of a historical intervention. It is the end-stage of a linear history. For Grant, Christianity is responsible for putting the modern city into motion. Like Leo Strauss, Grant regards the crux of the divide between the ancients and the moderns as a different attitude toward technological progress.39 The ancients granted technological progress only for war; they preserved an essentially theoretical science, philosophy. But the moderns contend that all science, including philosophy, should have practical import. Behind the project of unlimited technological progress is, Grant contends, a Christian impulse. Christian theological concepts underwrite modernity, making a straight forward critique of technology impossible: no writing about technological progress and the rightness of imposing limits upon it should avoid expressing the fact that the poor, the diseased, the hungry, and the tired can hardly be expected to contemplate any such limitation with the equanimity of the philosopher.40

Strauss, by contrast, counters this linear argument that modernity represents a kind of post-Christian project. First, he questions whether Christianity motivates the modern project. The modern project is motivated by “anti-theological ire”—a passionate anti-Christian impulse.41 While the Baconian “relief of man’s estate” can be given a Christian ethical veneer, this is for Strauss exoteric. The esoteric reason for liberating science is the pursuit of empire, at least in the practical domain. In the theoretical domain, it is the preservation of the philosophic life in the face of Christian efforts to distort it. For Strauss, nothing in the ascent of Christendom suggests the overcoming of cyclical cataclysms. Machiavelli’s success is a vindication of one of his claims, that religions have natural cycles and the time was right for the cycle of Christian dominance to come to an end. In Strauss’s cyclical history, natural cataclysms provoke civilisational resets. He alludes to this at the end of Thoughts on Machiavelli, in a passage Grant himself cites without further comment.42 Admittedly, Strauss is vague on whether he ultimately commits to this cyclical history. Nevertheless, because he is not a Christian, he can affirm this thesis, whether or not he actually does. Grant, who is a Christian and believes that Christianity has irrevocably changed the course of history, cannot affirm this thesis. The puzzle for Grant, then, is not whether history is ultimately cyclical in the sense that Strauss entertains. The puzzle is what Christianity’s

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ultimate orientation is: whether it is pro-technological progress or antitechnological progress, whether it is “fundamentally oriented to history or to eternity.”43 Grant’s preference is to understand Christianity as oriented toward eternity, but he acknowledges how persuasive the case for the former is.44 In his view Strauss criticizes Christianity on the grounds that it is too historical, misunderstanding what nature is. For Grant’s Strauss, Biblical thought is probably “responsible for a false and therefore dangerous conception of nature among modern philosophers.”45 Grant himself is hesitant to either assert or deny this thesis. His considered position is that a de-Hellenised, voluntarist and Calvinist Christianity (separated from the Church Fathers46 ), creates the conditions for the technological project.47 In this sense, Christian ethics underwrite the fundamental justification for moving forward optimistically, in history, toward the realization of the best society. Christian concepts prompt these aggressive, modern hopes. Yet Grant does not negate these modern hopes or offer a path for Christians to counter them with a more ancient and therefore politically limited hope. He thinks Christians should sympathize with modern revolutionary efforts to achieve the best society.48

The Christian Platonist Case for Revolution Grant prefers to emphasize the painful state in which modernity leaves Christians. They see the benefits of the modern project and its Christian origins, but understand that its logic devastates real Christianity. These prevarications and the inclination to stress the cyclical tightening of technological rule have frustrated those seeking to discover prudential counsel through his work. The tendency is to counter his theoretical pessimism with ideological optimism. Since Grant was a nationalist, the left clasps for a nationalist solution, yet this nationalism must apologize for being nationalist; the Grantian leftists plead that their nationalism would be extra-inclusive, multinational, and super-tolerant, buttressed up with lengthy litanies to the appropriate victims. And Grantian conservatives attempting to propose a nationalist, conservative solution require a considerable degree of myopia in order to dodge Grant’s blunt conclusion that conservatism is now impossible. But rather than try to situate Grant’s appropriate place on the contemporary political spectrum, it is better to focus on a particular action type, revolution, and determine in which circumstances it is permissible.

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Grant confirms the essential importance of political action oriented toward justice. And while it is true that revolutionary actions focused on distant hopes intensify the cycle of technological control, we have also seen that Grant does not embrace this cyclical history completely. He thinks that Christians should sympathize with modern revolutionary efforts to revive the best society and escape this cycle, showing his delicate but constant commitment to a linear history. This commitment is delicate because Grant’s considered philosophic position is that knowledge of the Good eludes us. However, on the Platonic position that Grant holds to, we can act without knowledge of the Good. Knowledge of what is wrong suffices. This is precisely the kind of knowledge Socrates claims to have in the Apology, where after he stresses the limitations of his knowledge, he adds: But I do know that it is bad and shameful to do injustice and to disobey one’s better, whether god or human being. So compared to the bad things which I know are bad, I will never fear or flee the things about which I do not know whether they even happen to be good.49

This statement relates to another famous Socratic adage, that it is better to suffer injustice than commit it. Indeed, such an adage presupposes the knowledge of what is unjust.50 For the Platonic Socrates, waiting for the recovery of an ontology of the Good is not a precursor to action. On the basis of a zetetic activity that purports to grasp what is wrong and unjust, political action is possible. Second, the Christian position permits of evaluating political progress and regress, based on the hope for the best society; “hunger and thirst for justice” are a requirement of Christianity.51 Now, Grant’s concern with the revolutionary left is that it allowed this hunger and thirst to direct it toward false eschatological politics. The Christian position encourages hope and sympathizes with the desire for change, even regime change. But this hope must be tempered. The best application of Grant’s insights is simply to hope for a particular kind of political regime, which at least in his eyes existed in the 1960s and 70s. He gave his support to this regime and did not think its overthrow was justified. This may not be the best regime—we do not know Grant’s views on this–but it is at least a decent regime. Let us call this the regime of decent constitutionalism. Grant sustained the hope of preserving this regime. This hope is not the hope

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of the leftist revolutionary. It is a concrete hope focused on preserving a regime that really exists, or at least that had existed until very recently. On the basis of these two Christian Platonist tenets, knowledge of what is wrong and the hope for the best society tempered toward a concrete hope in decent constitutionalism, we can sketch a prudential teaching on revolution. Recall that Grant allows for revolutions in places that lack meaningful constitutional government, such as Brazil. By extension, in the case of postconstitutional regimes and other kinds of regimes that have abandoned meaningful representative or constitutional government, Grant implies revolutions are permissible. In these instances, Grant’s Christian Platonism suggests a revolution with a particular goal is prudential. Regime change with the narrow goal of promulgating a new founding of decent constitutionalism is prudential. This regime change would have to meet three criteria: it would have to be justified; it would have to be discriminate in its use of force; and it would have to be carefully organized to achieve its objectives. These criteria correspond to what General de Gaulle did in 1958. Throughout his work, Grant expresses admiration for de Gaulle and for his politics.52 He would not have praised him if he believed he had done something unjust. Indeed, de Gaulle stands out even more in Grant’s corpus because of the comparatively low opinion Grant offers of Winston Churchill. De Gaulle’s statesmanship was worthy of careful reflection and emulation in a way Churchill’s was not. Churchill was a victim of the self-confidence of the English-speaking people. For this reason, continental Europeans such as de Gaulle are more helpful guides in the present age. They faced a wider range of circumstances than English-speaking peoples, including revolution and regime change.53 In modern times, the statesman who condoned revolution and regime change for these ends of constitutional refounding was General de Gaulle. In 1958, de Gaulle understood that the Fourth Republic’s failures in France’s overseas territories, brought about due to the Fourth Republic’s constitutional design, had cost the regime its legitimacy. Civil war loomed. Moreover, de Gaulle understood that the representative institutions of the Republic would not, if left to their own devices, write the new constitution that would restore legitimate government. More drastic actions were needed to achieve that goal. Throughout 1958, orchestrated by de Gaulle’s allies, the army mutinied. Companies loyal to de Gaulle seized control of strategic sites and villages throughout French territory. Their goal, and the force they deployed to achieve it, was to compel

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parliament to ask de Gaulle to govern, with emergency powers and the power to change the constitution. After several months the Assembly’s resolve to resist de Gaulle broke. De Gaulle achieved his objective.54 The way he came to power and the constitutional changes he effected in 1958 and afterward were a regime change, a revolution. 55 Nevertheless it satisfied the three requisite criteria. Justified: De Gaulle was a popular, almost legendary figure at the end of the Second World War and the postwar head of state. But he did not want a new regime to rest solely on his personal legitimacy. He wanted a new regime to rest on the legitimacy of its constitution. For that reason, he had to wait until the French people regarded the old constitution as illegitimate and demanded a new one. He knew he could only act after the Fourth Republic’s legitimacy and governance problems were fully exposed. In 1946, that problem was not yet manifest to the French. Given the constitution’s problems, it was not feasible to continue in an executive position. Such a move would have associated him with the regime’s inevitable failure. De Gaulle could at that time have opted for dictatorship. However, he did not want to risk compromising the popular legitimacy of his new regime.56 Instead, he resigned, awaiting the eventual exposure of the Fourth Republic’s flaws. It took more time than he might have thought. His failed experiment with forming his own political party in the early 1950s demonstrated that in spite of the cracks appearing in the Fourth Republic, conventional parliamentary means would not enable his return to power and his constitutional refounding. Only when the crisis had fully developed in 1958 could he attempt to return to power. But it had to be through unconventional means. Discriminate. Unlike Marshal Pétain’s supporters in June 1940, the Gaullists in early 1958 knew they could not count on a parliament ready to confer a supermajority of support upon their man. This complicated the situation and obliged the Gaullists to involve the army, which Pétain opted not to do.57 Yet the plan the Gaullists organized, while using the tools of a coup d’état, remained focused on achieving a republican and constitutionalist outcome. Rejecting indiscriminate force and violence, the Gaullists did not follow the wartime tactic of declaring the present government illegal and illegitimate and declaring a provisional government outside of Paris. Instead, those inside and outside the army pursued a cautious strategy of seizing control of strategic points and villages. To distance themselves from the charge that they were attempting a farright coup, they gave the councils formed to administer these areas a

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left-republican name, calling them Committees of Public Safety. Slowly but inexorably, they worked their way closer and closer to Paris. The strategy here was not to have the army enter Paris and seize power, but to increase pressure on the government to compel them to vote and accept de Gaulle’s return to power. This would preserve republican legality, reinforced thereafter by constitutional transformation.58 Organized. The Gaullist actors were well-prepared. Relying on simultaneous political and military pressure, they maneuvered to weaken the government’s hand and strengthen the popular support for their proposal.59 De Gaulle himself was able to maintain a certain aloofness and distance from many of the more awkward details of this operation. This logistical acuity was an important constraint on future violence. It is why, after 1958, it was credible for de Gaulle to deny that the military had been involved in bringing him to power.60 By quickly reinforcing republican constitutionalism, he was able to establish the legality of his position. This allowed him to defeat the 1961 attempt of several generals to use his own strategy of military mutiny against him. Whatever kind of legitimacy they had, these generals lacked de Gaulle’s personal legitimacy and his republican legality.61 De Gaulle faced down a situation of eroded, failed constitutionalism. These circumstances were perhaps rare in the West in the 1950s, but that does not mean they should not be pondered. It is here where Grant’s philosophical diagnosis of the modern situation bears paying close attention to. As the technological empire expands, it transforms the liberal constitutional forms of government prevalent across the West. The goals of government are redefined. In Grant’s view, the French Fifth Republic suffered this fate after de Gaulle’s death. By 1974, President Valéry Giscard D’Estaing could claim that “he is working for ‘an advanced liberal society,’ just as he is pushing forward laws for the mass destruction of the unborn. What he must mean by liberal is a society organized for the human conveniences which fit the conveniences of technology.”62 If Grant’s analysis is correct, we should anticipate many cases of Western governments now ordered by this new liberal principle, not the old liberal constitutionalism. There are then many degenerate Fourth or even Fifth Republics today; the crisis of legitimacy is widescale. Prudence suggests that in these circumstances, it is permissible to consider a regime change in favor of decent constitutionalism and sovereignty, disrupting the trajectory of the technological regime and the Global American Empire that Grant opposed.

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Conclusion In Grant’s exchanges with the New Left in the 1960s, he made clear that while he supported regime change in some instances, he could not condone it in North America, where liberal constitutional and representative government remained. The logic of his position, however, suggests that constitutionalism in the West was in decline. Technology was distinct from liberal constitutionalism, but the march of technology would eat away at the constitutional regimes Grant admired. Constitutional regimes would give way to technological ones. To paraphrase Walter Bagehot, the veneers of constitutionalism, “the dignified,” might persist; but the actual way the regime was ordered and power deployed, “the effective.” lay with the technology and government ordered solely to meet the need for biological self-preservation.63 In these cases, constitutionalism has failed and there is nothing worthwhile left to conserve. If constitutionalism should fail, other political possibilities emerge. In these cases a revolution with the narrow goal of founding decent constitutionalism is permissible. In acting according to this prudential counsel, however, one must be under no illusions that this is a genuine counter-revolution against technology. It is instead a revolution opposing anti-constitutionalism and postconstitutionalism. It will not escape the technological order.64 But, like General de Gaulle, it may succeed in destabilizing that order and the Empire that sustains it, challenging policies the Empire takes for granted and forcing defenders of technological progressivism to recoil. “Who cannot have admiration for de Gaulle for having wrested French freedom from American dominance?” writes Grant.65 As de Gaulle put it, “when one wants to do something, first one must knock the flowerpot over. Otherwise people will just say, ‘it can be arranged; you must not do that.’ If you give a big kick, the problem is posed and it must be solved.”66 As long as the co-penetration of knowing and making persists, until a philosophical or theological solution to the modern problem arrives, knocking over the flowerpot is the best one can hope for.

Notes 1. George Grant, “Nietzsche and the Ancients,” in Technology and Justice, in The Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4: 1970– 1988, ed. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 647; See also Hugh Donald Forbes, George

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Grant: A Guide to His Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 224–226. George Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” in The Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4: 1970–1988, ed. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 85. See especially George Grant, “From Roosevelt to LBJ,” in Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 3: 1960–1969, eds. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 466. Grant, “Review of Christianity and Revolution: The Lesson of Cuba, by Leslie Dewart,” in Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 3: 1960–1969, 205; Lament for a Nation, in Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 3: 1960–1969, 309. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 86. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 82. “Now ‘socialist’ is just a word. What I mean is a society in which the public good is much more emphasized against the rights of people to make money than it is now in the United States or in present-day Canada.” Grant, “Two Televised Conversations beween George Grant and Gad Horowitz,” CW Vol. 3, 442. C.f. Michael Anton, “What does Fidelity to our Founding Principles Require Today,” American Greatness, September 26th, 2022. https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/26/what-does-fidelity-toour-founding-principles-require-today/ Accessed October. 28th, 2022. Grant, “Protest and Technology,” 399. C.f. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 176–177. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” CW Vol. 4, 201. Grant criticises the American system not for its constitutional theory, but because he thinks it is not as deeply rooted in tradition as British constitutionalism is. See “Revolution and Tradition,” 86n. For instance, Grant’s objection to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an act of constitutional vandalism, is not to warn that it must extinguish parliamentary sovereignty. It is to raise concerns about Canada becoming a litigious society. He approves of an American-style court-enforced individual rights regime. “A Giant Steps Down,” Vol. 4, 536. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 258.

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14. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 201. 15. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 86. 16. “You have been through this and say that Parliament is dead. I have not been through this and cannot take your experience.” Grant, “Appendix, Grant’s Disagreement with the New Left over Civil Disobedience at the Canadian Parliament,” CW Vol. 3, 402. 17. Grant, “Appendix, Grant’s Disagreement with the New Left over Civil Disobedience at the Canadian Parliament,” 402. 18. See especially Grant, “Thinking about Technology,” in Technology and Justice, CW Vol. 4, 591. 19. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 81. 20. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 80, 82. 21. Grant, “In Defence of North America,” in Technology and Empire, CW Vol. 3, 494–495. 22. Grant, “Protest and Technology,” 396. 23. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 84. 24. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 89. 25. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 84. 26. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 84. 27. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 86. 28. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 200–207. 29. C.f. Andrew Potter, “Introduction to the 40th Anniversary Edition,” in George Grant, Lament for a Nation, li-liii. 30. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 83. 31. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 89. 32. Grant, “Revolution and Tradition,” 84. 33. Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” in Technology and Empire, CW Vol 3, 532. 34. William Christian, “George Grant and the Terrifying Darkness,” in George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations, ed. Larry Schmidt (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1978), 178. 35. Grant, “Protest and Technology,” 398. 36. Grant, “Review of Christianity and Revolution: The Lesson of Cuba, by Leslie Dewart,” 208. 37. Matthew 5: 6. See also “Justice and Technology,” CW Vol. 4, 525. 38. Grant, “Justice and Technology,” 533. 39. See Timothy Burns, Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021). 40. Grant, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” CW Vol 3, 552. See also 555.

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41. Leo Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy,” 44; “Marsilius of Padua,” History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 294. Timothy Burns, “Reply to Devin Stauffer,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 48:3, 370. 42. Grant, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” 551; Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 299. 43. Grant, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” 555. 44. E.g. Grant, “Sermon for a Student Service, McMaster Divinity School,” CW Vol. 3, 138–139. 45. Grant, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” 557. 46. St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Book 22, para. 24. Cited in Grant, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” 555. 47. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 241–242. 48. “In an era when we have built our iron maiden of external restraint around us in our technology, there is the natural reaction against all restraint. Christians may sympathize with the cause of this revolt and yet know that the unlimited freedom of the world of LSD, etc., is no adequate response.” [my italics]. Grant, ‘How Deception Lurks in the Secular City’: Review of The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, by Harvey Cox. CW Vol. 3, 423–424. 49. Plato, Apology of Socrates, in Four Texts on Socrates, trans. by Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), 29b. 50. Plato, Crito 49b-e; Gorgias 474b ff. See also “Justice and Technology,” 525. 51. Grant, “Justice and Technology,” 533. 52. E.g. Grant, “Value and Technology,” CW 3, 237; Lament for a Nation, CW Vol. 3, 309. 53. Grant expresses his admiration for two twentieth-century French thinkers and writers, Simone Weil and Céline. No contemporary English thinker or writer merits similar admiration. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 301. “English-Speaking Justice,” 234–235, 258. 54. See Julian Jackson, De Gaulle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 453–476. 55. Frédéric Rouvillois, “La Révolution de 1958 a-t-elle eu lieu?” La Révolution de 1958, ed. Frédéric Rouvillois (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2019), 7–22.

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56. Will Morrisey, Reflections on De Gaulle: Political Founding in Modernity (Lanham: University Press of America, 2002), 170–171. 57. Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years 1940–44 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 129. 58. Christophe Boutin, “Brumaire, L’Exemple Évident,” La Révolution de 1958, 34–37, 40–46. 59. Olivier Dard, “Les Acteurs,” La Révolution de 1958, 47–63. 60. C.f. Julian Jackson, De Gaulle, 476. 61. C.f. Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, trans. by G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2007), 82–86, 92. 62. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 255. 63. For a case study, see Michael Glennon, National Security and Double Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 64. E.g. Grant, “The New Europe,” CW Vol. 3, 199; Lament for a Nation, 324. 65. Grant, “American-Soviet Disarmament,” CW Vol. 3, 213. See also Lament for a Nation, 313. 66. Jacques Foccart, Tous les soirs avec de Gaulle. Journal de l’Elysée I (1965–67) (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 424.

CHAPTER 13

Does Progress Need Liberalism Anymore? On George Grant’s Critique of Technology Toivo Koivukoski

The apprehension that technological development could be de-linked from the liberal principles which originally cultivated secular faith in the cumulative, historical liberation of the human species was an outlier idea when it was put forward by George Grant. Now this kind of critique of technology is all too familiar. It has become clear that technological development and the liberal principle that human beings should be respected as the bearers of universal rights, each one of us being inherently free and equal, are not necessarily mu tually sustaining concepts. Grant’s critical definitions of technology as issuing forth in the mastery of human and non-human nature and as the co-penetration of knowing and making are illuminating for understanding the unholy union of technology and authoritarianism that is evident in abundance. This essay will take note of the arc of Grant’s political philosophy, beginning with an early admiration for the noble moral register of Kantian ethics, through to Grant’s

T. Koivukoski (B) Nipissing University, North Bay, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_13

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repudiation of the idea that all that is good without qualification is the good will, seeing this focus on the free will as being core to the modern project, and ultimately commensurable with the patterns of domination that are increasingly fixtures of technological integration, whether manifest as creeping surveillance and emergency powers in democratic states, or as outright authoritarian regimes perfecting systematic control of the masses. The turn from liberalism in the thought of George Grant anticipates the crises of liberalism in the twenty-first century, with his then dissonant critique of the ideology at a time when its principles were ascendant and for the most part common-sensical, like water to fish, now becoming common to the spirit of our own dissonant times. The underlying idea of a progressive historical movement, directed toward the universal recognition of human beings as fundamentally free and equal has been the central, secular faith within modernity, in the sense of that which cannot be questioned. Clearly now that faith is increasingly being called into question in both principle and practice. This is the idea that Grant had initially seen as a high-water mark for Western political thought, personified in Kant, and in Grant’s early judgment, ultimately ennobling to historical humanity. He would turn from this judgment as he came to see progress understood in terms of technological development as an animus of its own and as being separable from the notion of an inherent value of the individual as such, such that the values of human freedom and equality could be left behind in the drive toward the mastery of human and non-human nature. Further to this growing apprehension that technological development could be de-linked from liberal principles, there was for Grant a concern about precisely what was the basis for the inherent value of the individual as an end in and of themselves in Kantian ethics. This change in his thought was born in part out of reflections on the dictum that “Nothing in the world- indeed nothing even beyond the world- can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a GOOD WILL.”1 For if it is the good will, understood in terms of the autonomous will that is the ultimate basis of the value of a person, then what of those who lack the means of exercising theirs? It would seem to be that if the commitment in principle is to the inherent freedom and equality of the individual, with the basis of that principle being the free will, the core of the self, conceived as the bearer of rights and freedoms, then a person

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with a diminished will, or no will at all, would somehow be less a person, and therefore not owed the full rights and freedoms of a person as such. And further, how can the will be called good simply because it is free, in the absence of ends and limits that would guide the human will toward purposes that are suited to our nature? The currency of this critique of liberal principles translates from Grant’s reflections on the meaning of Roe v. Wade at the time of that judgment through to the current salvos against liberalism on the basis of a right to life.2 But more broadly, there is the foreboding apprehension that although progress through technology may have been taken as an article of faith, so as to be a means of liberating human beings from toil, sickness, and the contingencies of nature, it has been turned back onto human nature in such a way that technology is no mere means and set of instrumentalities for us any longer. Rather, as Grant intones, technology is us: We do not know how unlimited are the potentialities of our drive to create ourselves and the world as we want it. For example, how far will the race be able to carry the divided state which characterizes individuals in modernity: the plush patina of hectic subjectivity lived out in the iron maiden of an objectified world inhabited by increasingly objectifiable beings?3

There are dangerous comparisons to be drawn here. The rabid loathing of liberalism as ideology that has been shot through the new culture wars, and that infects our civil discourse increasingly polarizes our politics into something akin to Karl Schmitt’s categories of friends and enemies, with few apparent prospects for reconciliation. This gridlock within liberal democracies emboldens the authoritarian alternatives to democracy, which are free to act unencumbered by claims to the fundamental freedom and equality of individuals. Clearly this is not Grant’s vantage for critique, with the question of true conservative alternatives opened up in a way that is unfulfilled by claims to authoritarianism and naturalized patterns of subordination and exclusion.4 And yet, Grant’s critique of multiculturalism as a shallow window dressing on the uniformity of “objectifiable beings”, along with his appeals to authochthonous belonging within a national community bear some similarities to current modes of rejection of ‘globalism’ via the lamenting appeals to national distinctiveness that have been the hallmarks of right-wing governments and movements. Even with that proviso made though, the core concern that Grant raises about liberalism

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that the question of what constitutes the essence of a human being cannot be answered from within this rubric, still remains. Grant recounts a shift in his philosophical sensibilities, from being an admirer of Kantian ethics as a more substantive account of the good than what was on offer from liberal pragmatism, to a premonition as to the dangerous open-endedness at the core of any conception of historical humanity in terms of a self-creating freedom. In a lecture on Kant given after the publication of English-Speaking Justice, Grant recalls this shift in his thinking: I remember after the war being intoxicated by Kant’s absolute morality. My position, brought up as I was in liberal pragmatism, could not go with the war. I was longing to understand the absolute, the unconditioned, and therefore was intoxicated by Kant’s account of morality. It freed me from all the vulgar liberal pragmatism, and this made it very difficult for me to see what a radical emancipation of man was being stated … the good will being the only good without qualification.5

Where by the “good will” Kant means the autonomous will—the unconditioned, hence free will. This ethical priority given to a will that can free itself from the determinations of those contingent circumstances that frame our daily lives marks the separation in Kant between the realms of freedom and necessity, between the ought and the is. Or in Grant’s reading, consistent with the drive toward technological progress understood as the mastery of human and non-human nature, the world is split between the free subject and a realm of indifferent objects thrown before humankind, matter in motion subject to forces, or simply stuff with no inherent value of its own, short of the value that human subjects can impose on it through the force of the will enabled by technology. Though Kant seems to attach ultimate value to the human as subject, this comes at the expense of devaluing the realm of necessity that is nature. Grant frames this conception of what constitutes the value of a human being within the larger project of modernity as an historical repudiation of classical and other pre-modern conceptions of the good life that remained tethered to an enduring idea of the Good as such, in a pattern of liberation that is ultimately inconsistent with any metaphysically derived conception of human purpose in the world.

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Suffice it to say here that the subject (human beings as subject) became that before which must be led everything which is, and through which everything that is is justified for what it is. The human being (call it if you will in the generic sense ‘man’) based on his own authority becomes the foundation and the measure of all that is … The world is represented to us as an object that we as subjects interrogate and over which we have jurisdiction.6

The specific concern with this event in the history of ideas is that the moral railings which Kant establishes around the free will articulated as a good will may not be integral to the liberation of historical humanity from the contingencies of nature, both human and non-human. Interestingly, Grant’s developed critique of Kant matches in part with his take on Marx, namely that both imported notions of human perfectibility and of a good society from pre-modern sources, even as that ballast of history is detached from the thrust of historical progress, conceived more essentially as the overcoming of historical, technological horizons than as the attainment of a good life or a good community. Making a point of distinction from Nietzsche’s radically open-ended historicism, amor fati and the drive to change for the sake of change, Grant reflects that, When Marx wrote of changing the world, he still believed that changing was not an end in itself, but the means to a future society conducive to the good life for all. Overcoming the chances of an indifferent nature by technique and politics was an interim stage until the conditions should be ripe for the realization of men’s potential goodness. For all his denial of past thought, he retained from that past the central truth about human beings - namely that in man is a given humanness that it is our purpose to fulfil.7

So, Grant claims that Marx’s ethical appeal to the overcoming of historical contradictions is inspired by an ahistorical idea of what would be a good society, without the alienations of labor under conditions of capitalism, while similarly Kant’s categorical imperative “offers a fundamental equality of persons, that is an account of justice that comes out from the older account of truth, which was based not on the first principle of subjectivity, but on the eternal order.”8 This revised take on Kant as the “great delayer” represents a shift in Grant’s thought from an early admiration of a metaphysic of morals based in the autonomous use of reason. One sees this in Grant’s doctoral thesis

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(1950) for example, where he notes John Oman’s praise of “the most admirable of modern philosophers” for the recognition “that the ultimate reality was fundamentally ethical in quality” and for the attempted preservation of “the autonomy of each person in his idealism.”9 Grant goes on to express sympathy with Kant on the basis of this elevation of ethical idealism over what is simply given to human beings in the natural order. “Kant’s denial of the possibility of natural theology had not been motivated by the sceptical denial that men can know, but by the noble faith that they ought not to know. It was an assertion that men must walk by faith not by sight.”10 And although Grant does express misgivings in this early writing on the absence of any conception of grace by which God’s will may be revealed in his creation, or of any possibility of joy accompanying ethical action, misgivings which carry onto his later writings on Kant, what is different in this early reading is a confidence that by having set aside the natural order as not properly speaking ethical as such, nature is left to itself through the elevation of the realm of ethical action as an expression of human autonomy. “Kant can show men how they should deny the natural, but not how they should possess it.”11 This is at the core of Grant’s later change of interpretation, that even if Kant cannot account for how humankind should possess nature, he leaves that realm of matter in motion subject to forces open to possession, though unbridled by any conception of how communion with nature ought to be sought, to what ends and within what limits. What remains of such considerations of purposes given to human beings by nature, in both the paired aspirational and moderating roles of such ends, must, therefore, be owed to older sources predating the conception of self as subject.

What Is Missing in the Liberal Subject? One key concept that Grant borrows from Plato is expressed in the phrase “loving one’s own”.12 There are for Plato two kinds of love conceived as eros: one characterized by a frenetic compulsion, and the other being that in which what is worth loving is freely chosen, with what is loved as one’s own claimed on the basis of a consent that is both rational and emotionally moving. It is in precisely this sense of the distinctiveness of a love of one’s own that Socrates asks the impetuous Glaucon:

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“Shall we be bold and say this: Of the desires concerned with the love of gain and the love of victory, some – followers of knowledge and argument – pursue in company with them the pleasures to which the prudential part leads and take only these; such desires will take the truest pleasures, so far as they can take true ones – because they follow truth – and those that are most their own – if indeed what is best for each thing is also most properly its own?”

Thus, Socrates identifies the truth of a being with what is most properly its own, an ethical and ontological claim that would ground reason in love. At this point in the dialogue, an at least somewhat tamed lover of consumption and a more moderate Glaucon agrees emphatically: “But, of course,” he said, “that is what is most its own.”13

This idea of a love of one’s own is at the basis of Grant’s critique of liberalism (which would otherwise settle the question of the good in a determinate and universal way), his philosophy of technology (as leveling the longing for justice to the realization of efficiencies) and in his account of American imperialism as the spearhead of modernity (in that, in the context of the Canadian experience, that relation obviates the love of one’s own as an apprehension of the Good). For Grant it becomes progressively harder to love what is one’s one, inasmuch as our own becomes indistinguishable from the innermost essence of historical humanity, which is described not by some autochthonous identity, belonging to place, or distinctive history, but as a planetary spread of technological development standing in as the Good. And although Grant is thorough-going in his critique of liberalism as ideological stand-in for the Good and of what is owed to human beings qua human beings, he is as concerned that technological development may become dissociated from liberalism as its justification, leaving nothing more than efficiency as the measure of what is just. He sees this dissociation of technological development and liberalism in the use of decidedly illiberal, imperial means to advance American interests in the war in Vietnam, to which could be added the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. Along with the diminished moral authority of liberal democracies, current advances made by illiberal regimes must be considered as well, where the transfer of technologies has not evidently issued forth in a constructive engagement and a long march to democracy, making

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authoritarian regimes more considerate to freedom and equality simply through the improvement in means of manufacture, communication, and trade. Rather, technological development and political authoritarianism offer a pregnant wedding, with advances in surveillance, crowd control, and the social engineering of behaviors presenting ready means for the suppression of dissent. In terms of the anti-war protests that Grant reflected on in the1960’s, though the protests may have had “some effect on some decisions”,14 in the end there is this basic paradox at the core of technological development, that what begins as a means for the emancipation of humanity becomes an imperious drive to mastery, with the new limits of imperialism traced out by technological, rather than ethical limits. The patina of liberal justifications, the hope in progressive liberation, and the promise of freedom from the contingencies of nature fall away from the arc of history. “The exigencies of violence necessary to our empire will increasingly make mockery of the rhetoric of that dream.”15 And for Grant, even more telling than the adoption of illiberal means to liberal ends, there is at the core of that political drive a reflexive turn of technological mastery from the domination of the world of nonhuman nature, toward the mastery of human nature, such that it becomes increasingly difficult to see technological development as an unproblematic guarantor of human freedom, to the extent that we become the objects of technology. Technology is in this sense, for Grant, not simply a set of useful tools that are external to us. Rather, technology describes the essence of modern humanity. Technology is that which is most our own, in that it shapes our understanding of who we are, and of what is worth knowing and doing. This mapping of technology onto humanity can be traced back to the early moderns, as in Hobbes’ reductionist observation: For what is the Heart but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body,16

…where now, instead of springs, strings, and wheels the metaphors for self-understanding are batteries, wires, and servos, cybernetic computers instead of mechanical machines, such that we see ourselves after the image of the world that we have made of ourselves. This new way of seeing requires a new mode of objective science, with its key features consisting

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of the distinction between facts and values, and a claim to objectivity premised on non-evaluative analysis. Embedded in this distinction between the subjectivity of valuations and the objective givenness of the natural world is an inherent prejudice for the moderns over the ancients, for whom conceptions of purpose and of goodness could not be abstracted from an understanding of nature, but were considered essential to any understanding of what nature is, and what it is for. This extends beyond what counts as an understanding of non-human nature, that is nature considered as external to us, and includes how we conceptualize the human-made world, so as to drop evaluative terms of our social sciences, like for example distinctions between just and unjust regimes—monarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy—categories that were for the classics made possible by what were to them quite natural distinctions, namely between those regimes that were considered choice-worthy and those that no reasonable person would willingly take part in if given the choice.17 Notwithstanding the seemingly obvious abhorrence of certain kinds of political regimes, at an epistemological level there is a relativism here that cannot give an account of its own truth claims, simultaneously diminishing claims to truths that transcend time and place, while insisting that all valuations are historically and socially specific, except for that truth claim itself, in a kind of absolutist relativism. This epistemological paradox issues forth in appeals to pluralism that in reality translate into a pervasive ideological imperium. For every worldview, including the modern liberal worldview, includes within it conceptions of what the world is in its being, that is an ontology, and judgments as to what is worth doing in the world, that is an ethic. In the modern liberal worldview this pairing of ontology and ethics includes the conception of the world as a collection of objects, and of the worth of human existence as the freedom to choose our own ends. The unique thing about liberalism is that these questions of fundamental ontology and of the application of ethical reason to questions of human purpose are suppressed. What should be undertaken as philosophic, collective, and personal inquiries into what is real and what is worth doing are taken as givens, as apparent goods that are sustained not so much by thought, persuasion, or reason as by some immanent historical necessity. When this occurs, the idea of the good is reduced from a transcendent standard by which a society is judged, to ideological lipservice in favor of the preferences and apparent, if exigent, necessities of

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the moment; that is progress as validation of status quo institutions and of liberal norms and customs. The effective management of humanity requires a social science suited to this specific task, that is a true social science after the Weberian model; not one concerned with perennial questions, or virtue ethics, but one that can address a society in a strictly factual manner, substituting the realization of efficiencies for a conception of the good society. For to manage the behaviors of human beings outwardly as objects requires a reconsideration of what it means to know human beings, not in terms of our nature, as if humans had a defining purpose, but simply in terms of what we happen to do, each of us behaving according to our subjective preferences and conditioning environments, the most all-enveloping of which is our relation to technology. In this sense, the technological imperative works upon our humanity not just in the outward sense of how we move through our cities, eat our food, pass through security checkpoints, and otherwise engage in society, but inwardly too, in terms of how we come to know the world; that is, what we consider knowledge to be, and what is worth knowing and doing in this age of inner technological integration and outer barbarism.

What Is Worth Loving? In a plaintive question toward the end of “Canadian Fate and Imperialism”, Grant laments that “What is worth doing in the midst of this barren twilight is the incredibly difficult question.”18 If we cannot answer in distinctive terms what is worth doing with our freedom, and what our national political community is for—that is what are our distinctive, shared purposes—then this leaves a waning gap at the center of an identity. If we cannot say what it is that makes a life worth living, as in what gives human life value, then we risk substituting the meaningless pursuit of novelty for fulfillment, while marginalizing those without the means to participate in the endless scrolling of trivial titillations. There is this hope and this danger at the core of the liberal project that would make human freedom in and of itself into the ultima ratio of the human endeavor, in that the emptying out of collective and individual purposes in this manner stokes the appetite for ideas of the good that transcend our particular proclivities and momentary obsessions. This has been a recurrent critique of liberalism and of mass society from the first late moderns on, beginning with Nietzsche’s caricature of the last men,

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the levelers who think that they have invented happiness, and then blink, with the ideology of liberalism represented in his history of ideas as a form of secularized Christianity, though incapable of articulating precisely what human beings are equal before in the absence of such a transcendent standard.19 Borne out of this deep longing for “the absolute, the unconditioned” that Grant refers to as his original basis for an admiration of Kantian ethics, unhealthy appetites can fill in where liberalism leaves off. It has become abundantly clear that there remain those inspired by purposes that do transcend comfortable self-preservation, to the extent that they are willing to kill and die for those causes. Sneering dismissals of liberalism as morally bankrupt and otherwise relativistic are shot through both our renewed culture wars domestically, while liberal democracy is violently rejected abroad as a mask for imperial interests, most often by state and non-state actors with no fealties to human rights or to a rules-based international order. For if the United States of America was then and still is, as Grant describes it, the “spearhead of progress”, then that spear has been blunted by its diminished leadership within the world.20 Within the arc of historical progress, this may be incidental and born out of the trials of domestic politics and the uncertainty that attends to military adventurism, or this may be a matter of a “cunning of Reason” in a Hegelian sense, retrieving something essential to the spirit of progress, taking up particular passions and interests while shedding the trappings of outdated moral and political principles owed to older sources.21 Grant repeatedly emphasizes that the uniqueness of the idea of progress in American colors is owed to the fact that the United States has no history predating the modern era, and was, therefore, freed of Old World prejudices and dispensations, untethered from the two traditional sources of wisdom in the Western tradition, Athens and Jerusalem.22 What remains of hope then is that, as with all prejudices, some of that wisdom may have endured in debts to the past unconsciously accrued. And yet, as an unselfconscious prejudice for freedom as the measure of man those kinds of remaining inheritances may not be thick enough social bonds, either to hold liberal political communities together or to serve as a basis for resistance to those decidedly illiberal regimes and mass movements that are on the march, from far-right forms of ethno-nationalism to theocratic aspirations to the restoration of global caliphates.23 And it

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may well be that this dawning awareness of what is missing within liberalism opens the way for these violent forms of identity formation, so as to locate national belonging in blood and soil, and to satiate the hunger for ultimate purpose with overdetermined versions of religious millenarianism. For if we cannot articulate who we are, what principles undergird our ethics and what causes we would aspire to, then the more fervent and determined are left freed to do so in the absence of vigorous collective efforts to the contrary. As in Yeats’ apocalyptic premonition of “mere anarchy” let loose upon the world, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”24 In part what makes Grant’s dawning encounter with this emptiness at the core of the liberal enlightenment project so very moving is precisely that it arises not out of the over-determinations of a fundamentalist faith, or some ethno-nationalist myth of origins, but distills rather into a love of one’s own where what is loveable is felt most acutely in the intimations of deprival that are experienced daily in a technological society. There is a perfect image of longing and belonging that Sheila Grant reflects upon in her afterward to Lament for a Nation, specifically its last sentence, in which her husband quotes a cherished line from Virgil— “They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore”.25 As she recounts, her husband would quote that line while standing on a chunk of island rock in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Nova Scotia, looking back toward the mainland of Canada, as grounded and situated as a person could be, while intimating a longing for what is beyond the immediately present.26 This kind of unrequited nationalism premised on an experience of love where what is essential to one’s being is beyond oneself can serve both as a locus for our energies, and as a moderating influence on claims to belonging and its correlate, exclusion. It would thus allow for a critique of multiculturalism as a shallow window dressing on an underlying conformism, while at the same time acknowledging, as Grant does, the depth of contributions from Canada’s three founding nations—French, British, and First Nations—along with newer immigrants to this land. This love of one’s own which recognizes that no one of us is complete unto ourselves, that even the first difficult experiences of European settlers in Canada were no hackneyed expressions of rugged individualism and of mastery in a hostile land, but were an encounter rather with a presence before which we can still stand in awe. Much as both Plato and Aristotle argue that myth and philosophy are alike in that both begin in wonder,

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so too does the sheer givenness of our environment make this place more than a horizon for the unfolding of technological mastery.27 As anyone who has traversed this place or weathered one of its winters knows, we cannot master such an indomitable country, so we have to seek understanding of it and of each other in a spirit of modesty, self-restraint, and respect. The distinctive places scattered in the vastness of this country are not simply the encampments of a homeless people; for even though Canada is in large part a settler nation, that founding act of settling has shaped the experiences of both new and old immigrants to Canada, as it has enframed the past and present realities of its original inhabitants, so as to make the nation what it is, shaping the land and its inhabitants in formative, reciprocal ways. For this land and these waters are not mere stuff, resources to be molded according to a capricious will, nor are its people mere subjects to technology, pleasure-seeking automatons indifferent to whatever may happen to objectively pre-exist their presence and purposes. Canada has been shaped in its essence by this reciprocal encounter, between the people and the land and between its founding nations, such that neither the country nor those others can be viewed as externalities to the experience of being Canadian, nor can those relations be understood as anything less than constitutive. The relations to both place and people are constitutive in the sense of an encounter with a love of our own, where what is our own is both a given and a moderating set of limits upon what may be justly done to another or to the lands and the waters that we share. In order to answer Grant’s question of what is worth doing, the hollowness of the conceptions of the self as subject and of non-human nature as plastic stuff to be molded according to a will liberated from any given ends or limits needs a response rooted in community. This would at the very least moderate the technological will to mastery, through the acknowledgment that there are these givens to our human nature, being borne out of our own, and belonging to a particular place. That is, relations to kin and to country cannot be conceived as externalities to a free will (otherwise, choose your parents carefully), but rather, these relations are constitutive—they make us who we are. This is not to imply that who are our own politically or what is our own ontologically are given in a reductionist, homogeneous sense of blood and soil belonging, though that kind of fascistic politics opens up as a dangerous possibility when liberalism falters as a means to shared identity.

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Rather, our searching notions of just relations with others, and of just relations with the lands and waters, are borne out of those intimations that something is missing in the conflation of justice with efficiency, that an endless horizon of technological possibilities unfolding is not the proper end of human freedom. The requisite answers to that question of what is just are rather the autonomous expressions of a people laying claim to who they are, living within the bounds of laws and customs of their own making, while holding themselves out toward a shared good that is worth loving.

Notes 1. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Lewis White Beck translation (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 9. 2. George Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1974), 69–89. 3. George Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: Anansi, 1969), 142. 4. Indeed, this is part of Grant’s premonition surrounding the delinking of liberalism from progress, that “The next wave of American conservatism is not likely to base its appeal on such unsuccessful slogans as the Constitution and free enterprise.” What would stand in for conservatism then shades into the imposition of order onto a mass society drifting without apparent purpose, with what remains of political alternatives degraded into contestation between species of tyranny. “The battle will be between democratic tyrants and the authoritarians of the right.” Lament for a Nation, p. 66, n. 23. 5. George Grant, The George Grant Reader, “Lecture Notes (1977/ 8)” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 223. 6. The George Grant Reader, 224. 7. George Grant, Time as History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 26–27. 8. The George Grant Reader, 225. 9. George Grant, “The Concept of Nature and Supernature in the Theology of John Oman” DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1950, in The Collected Works of George Grant, Vol. 1, 1933–1950, 196. 10. “The Concept of Nature and Supernature in the Theology of John Oman,” 197.

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11. Ibid. 12. For an extended reflection on the phrase in the context of the history of political thought, see Peter Emberley’s “Preface” to By Loving our Own: George Grant and the Legacy of Lament for a Nation, Peter Emberley (ed.) (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1990). 13. Plato, Republic, Bloom translation (HarperCollins: USA, 1991), 586d–e; contrast this pedagogical moment of staid desire with Glaucon’s rather transparent, tyrannical love of feverish desires—of cakes, couches and courtesans—at 372c–e. 14. Technology and Empire, 75n2. 15. Technology and Empire, 27. 16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), 81. 17. See Toivo Koivukoski and David Tabachnick (ed.), Confronting Tyranny: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics (Lanham: Roman and Littlefield, 2005). 18. Technology and Empire, 78. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra—A Book for All and None, Walter Kaufmann translation (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 1.§5, 17. 20. George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 53. 21. G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History, Robert S. Hartman translation (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1997), 44. 22. Technology and Empire, 17. 23. See Toivo Koivukoski and David Tabachnick (ed.), Challenging Theocracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 24. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), 2308. 25. p. 95, n. 38. 26. Sheila Grant, “Afterword” to Lament for a Nation, 99. 27. As Plato has Socrates say to the young Theaetetus, “For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy, and he who said that Iris was the child of Thaumas made a good genealogy.” Theaetetus, Harold North Fowler translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 155d. And as Aristotle compares similarly, “It is through

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wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; … Now he who wonders and is perplexed feels that he is ignorant (thus the myth-lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders)” Metaphysics, Hugh Tredennick translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), 982b9–11.

CHAPTER 14

George Grant and the Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Triumph of Technology? Mehmet Çiftçi

“I got thrown out of a McDonald’s for refusing to stand on a yellow circle. I was the only customer.” “The one-way system in my local pub, which meant that to visit the loo you had to make a circular journey through the building, ensuring you passed every table.” “I’m stuck in the infant in-patient ward with my nine-day-old sick baby, post C-section, unable to look after him. My husband (same household) is not allowed to be here with us. I’m having panic attacks, which is preventing me from producing milk for the baby.” “Not allowing people to sit on a park bench. My elderly aunt kept fit by walking her dog every day, but she needed to rest. Since that rule, she stopped going out. She went downhill and died last April.”1

M. Çiftçi (B) University of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_14

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It is easy to multiply examples of such overzealous restrictions enacted since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. What is harder is to understand how these restrictions could be created, enforced, and widely obeyed despite often lacking a clear rationale or sense of proportion. Instead of displaying prudence, the virtue that belongs most properly to rulers according to Aquinas,2 too often the response to the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to be thoughtless, driven by compassion but lacking a realistic judgement of what is right and just for the government to do. I intend to argue that George Grant’s writings on technology can help us to make some sense of our social and political response to the pandemic— that is, insofar as it is possible to understand folly. He can help us because his writings on technology reveal why at the level of government and society it has become harder to reason and act prudently in our time. My argument will begin by summarising Grant’s work on technology, before demonstrating how they can help us to understand the unprecedented features of our response to COVID-19 as part of the unfolding triumph of technology.

Grant on Technology Technology is a word that may make us think of the various devices and tools, the software and hardware, that made it possible to react to COVID-19 in entirely different ways than we did during the influenza pandemics of 1919, 1929, or 1968. Classes on Zoom, meetings on Teams, the rapid distribution of masks, vaccines, and tests, the media campaigns in print, TV, radio, and the internet to inform the public of shifting regulations and to encourage them to adopt certain forms of behaviour were all familiar experiences to anyone who lived through the pandemic in the Western world. For Grant, these tools, devices, and media are the products and manifestations of technology, but they are not what defines technology as such. Indeed, to think that they are is to make the mistake of thinking of technology simply as the sum of all the tools we invent for our convenience that are in themselves morally neutral, available for us to use for good or evil. In his mature writings on technology in the ‘70s and ‘80s,3 Grant defines technology as something deeper and more pervasive: it refers to the way we think of what we do as a form of making, and approach the world as something to be understood only so that it may become more amenable to what we want to make of it. Whereas he used Ellul’s preferred term “technique” for some time,4

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he turned in his later work to “technology” because its combination of the Greek words for art and reason (or science) seemed to capture “the fact that modern technology is not simply an extension of human making through the power of a perfected science, but is a new account of what it is to know and to make in which both activities are changed by their copenetration.”5 Elsewhere, in “broadly Heideggerian terms”6 he describes technology as “the endeavour which summons forth everything (both human and non-human) to give its reasons, and through the summoning forth of those reasons turns the world into potential raw material, at the disposal of our ‘creative’ wills.”7 He writes that technology “comes forth and is sustained in our vision of ourselves as creative freedom, making ourselves, and conquering the chances of an indifferent world.”8 Both of these quotations reveal the two intertwined aspects of technology for Grant: an epistemology that seeks to understand objects only in order to use them more effectively for our own purposes; and a voluntarism that defines our freedom as the capacity to choose without hindrance to make ourselves and the world around us as we wish. Grant traces the origins of technology back to various sources over the course of his career but, during the growing pessimism of his later years, he came increasingly to blame Western Christianity for fostering the distortions of the Gospel out of which technology emerged. Grant sees Western civilization resting on the two primals, as he calls them that are the philosophical contemplation of the Good in the PlatonicAristotelian tradition, and the centrality of love in the Gospels.9 The Christian emphasis on love, both as the highest of the virtues and as God’s fundamental nature, meant that Christians were susceptible to prioritise the will over the intellect in ways that revealed their dangers after the Reformation. Many Protestants (particularly certain Calvinists) were pessimistic of what we could know by reason after the Fall and rejected the Aristotelianism of mediaeval scholasticism to prioritise the act of faith in revelation, seeking to preserve the sovereign, transcendent will of God, as the sole cause of those he enables to be saved and to perform (not contemplation but) charitable deeds. The Protestant reaction against philosophy fatally coincided with the rise of the new natural sciences, as developed by Francis Bacon among others that “criticised the medieval teleological doctrine with its substantial forms as preventing men from observing and understanding the world as it is.”10 Among Dutch and English Protestants the ideas of the new science found a receptive audience, or at least they “did not provide a public brake upon the

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dissemination of the new ideas as did Catholicism and even sometimes Anglicanism.”11 Consequently, the rise of Protestantism and the new sciences conspired (unintentionally) to delegitimise the more contemplative nature of Greek philosophy and science. By “contemplative” Grant means that, in seeking “to understand the eternal causes of all things,”12 philosophical “contemplation is a way of surrender to natural necessity; it finds meaning in the constraints of what is given.”13 There is a special role in Grant’s genealogy for Calvinism because “the Calvinists claimed to be freeing theology from all but its Biblical roots and cut themselves off from pure contemplation more than did any other form of European theology—Catholic or Jewish, Lutheran or even Anglican.”14 Calvinists believed the purpose of theology was “to make its practical appeal to men,”15 and reoriented the Christian ethical life towards the active life of charity (rather than the contemplative life associated historically with Catholic monastic orders). They were therefore particularly receptive to the new science’s utilitarian tendency to favour those kinds of empirically based knowledge that improve our mastery over nature. Although Calvinism is no longer the presence it once was in Europe and North America after secularisation, its legacy remains in “the omnipresence of that practicality which trusts in technology to create the rationalised kingdom of man.”16 Grant never fails to acknowledge the benefits of the technology that emerged from the confluence of Protestantism’s focus on charity over contemplation and the developing modern sciences. “One must never think about technological destiny without looking squarely at the justice in those hopes,”17 Grant wrote, referring to “the faith that the mastery of nature would lead to the overcoming of hunger and labour, disease and war.”18 Nor does he suggest that technology has led to what is “only of superficial or ambiguous benefit.”19 Moreover, “no writing about technological progress and the rightness of imposing limits upon it should avoid expressing the fact that the poor, the diseased, the hungry, and the tired can hardly be expected to contemplate any such limitation with the equanimity of the philosopher.”20 It is not surprising that, as a Christian, Grant defends the Bible’s emphasis on charity and does not criticise contemporary man for “freeing himself for happiness against the old necessities of hunger and disease and overwork, and the consequent oppressions and repressions.”21 Why then is the rise of technology a problem? Concentrating on those aspects of Grant’s critique that are pertinent to understand our response

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to the pandemic, we can outline four interrelated problems. These are, in summary, that technology deforms our understanding of freedom, it deforms our understanding of the world around us, it blinds us to insuperable limits to our ability to know and control the future, and it leads to self-defeating paradoxes, where the desire to promote freedom using technology deprives us of freedom in new ways. Firstly, technology deforms how we understand freedom because the motivation to understand things in order to be able to use them more effectively presupposes that it is desirable to expand what we are capable of doing. This is the germ of the excessive focus on freedom of the will, or voluntarism, that Grant sees as arising from technology: “the very heart of what modern history has been and is – the belief that man’s essence is his freedom.”22 However, using technology to expand our freedom becomes increasingly directionless because it puts in question the authority of any objective standard that might judge or direct how we use our freedom. Referring to the role that myths have played in the past to convey moral norms and laws, Grant writes that today: every meaning, every purpose, every value has to come before the court of that freedom and is under the judgment of that sovereignty. … But it is the mark of any myth to speak of those things which transcend the individual, to speak of an order of which the individual is a part, but which does not originate in his freedom. The heart of any myth is to tell us of that which our freedom does not create but by which it is judged. … As modern people come to believe themselves to be the absolute source of themselves, all systems of order and meaning which appear to human beings as myths become other to them, and so in the very act of their sovereignty they experience the world as empty of meaning.23

What then motivates our expansion of technology? The motivation to overcome what inhibits our freedom by technology is supplied by compassion. Grant considered that it is “not by accident that as representative and perceptive a modern political philosopher as Feuerbach should have written that “compassion is before thought.” … the assertion that charity is more important than thought is obviously of Biblical origin.”24 Although Grant as a Christian could hardly be opposed to “the demand of charity that we relieve suffering wherever we find it,”25 the problem with compassion is helpfully elaborated by Oliver O’Donovan in his own Grantian reflections on technology. O’Donovan writes:

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Compassion is the virtue of being moved to action by the sight of suffering – that is to say, by the infringement of passive freedoms. It is a virtue that circumvents thought, since it prompts us immediately to action. It is a virtue that presupposes that an answer has already been found to the question “What needs to be done?”, a virtue of motivation rather than reasoning. As such it is the appropriate virtue for a liberal revolution, which requires no independent thinking about the object of morality, only a very strong motivation to its practice.26

Compassion is “a mere reaction to the transgression of the frontiers of individuals’ lives rather than a dimension of independent reasoned activity concerning a determinate, value-laden reality.”27 Compassion therefore suits an agnosticism or indifference towards the need for our freedom to obey any norms that we have created, since the relief of suffering seems to be a self-evident motivation, lacking the need for intellectual justification. Compassion, in other words, does not remedy but only reinforces the directionless nature of technology’s expansion of our freedom. Compassion makes it difficult to reason about what to do when faced with the limits to how much technology can prevent suffering. The second problem with technology is that it deforms our understanding of the world. Understanding something for the sake of using it more effectively leads to a reductive focus on those aspects of the object that serve technology’s logic of seeking ever-greater efficiency, while ignoring or downplaying other aspects of the object. This can happen in two ways. Firstly, the desire to order and organise phenomena leads us to gather data or information about objects that can be used to classify phenomena and analyse the gathered data by statistical techniques. (This plainly became even more feasible and desirable after the invention of the computer to store and process information.) However, the information that is gathered is necessarily abstract, since what is of concern is not the individual object, but only those aspects that make it possible to classify and compare it with other objects in ways that serve our purposes. The data to be gathered sets the terms for what is noticed, leaving the rest to be ignored. Or what is worse: the complexity and differences between things are elided by the process of classification, a process that Grant calls homogenization.28 The tremendous growth of our ability to shape the world by technology depended on the modern natural sciences, particularly physics, becoming the paradigm of knowledge in our time.29 The mathematical

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representation of reality in physics relies on treating nature according to properties that can be measured in quantifiable ways, which enable us to deduce scientific laws to describe the regularities observed. Gathering quantifiable data enables empirical studies to be repeated, compared, collated and analysed with greater complexity. Hence the second way in which our understanding is deformed: those properties that cannot be understood or observed in quantitative ways, such as the teleological properties of an object that tell us what it is fitted for, are lost from view. It was in those teleological terms, Grant writes, that the ancient philosophers were able to reach “a detailed knowledge of the frontiers and limitations of making.”30 By using the telos of human nature, they would debate the relative importance of the different arts, such as politics or medicine, for human flourishing. But since modern science’s methodology ignores teleology, it puts in question the basis on which moral philosophers had claimed that there are certain limits to what we ought or ought not to make of the world. Technological progress is thus in danger of derailing our ability to reason in moral terms, which causes us to understand the world in an amoral and reductive way, respecting no limits to how we treat the world, ourselves, and others. Grant claims that this “can be seen with startling clarity”31 in Justice Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade for the Supreme Court of the United States, who: states as self-evident that the Hippocratic oath comes from a mythical and irrelevant past and therefore has no claim today on any doctor. The Hippocratic oath is a statement concerning the frontiers and limitations of one art. It is considered mythical and irrelevant by the Justice because he believes that the account of the universe on which it is based has been shown to be untrue by the discoveries of modern science.32

Grant refers to the Hippocratic oath again when discussing how euthanasia is being justified by appealing to so-called “quality of life,” which creates the illusion that we are in a position to know (as if it were something easily quantifiable) when someone’s life is no longer worth living.33 This points again to the way that technology makes us focus excessively on what is quantifiable or, in the case of “quality of life” assessments, to what we think is quantifiable. But it also leads me to the third problem with technology: its reliance on a reductive way of understanding things makes us prone to be blind to the insuperable limits of what we can know and control. Whereas I discussed above how technology seems

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to undermine the basis of moral limits to what we ought to do and make, the issue I am dealing with here is rather that technology makes it hard for us to accept physical and biological limitations to what we can do. Grant quotes the following part of the Hippocratic oath to express what a proper estimation of our limits would be: “In general terms, [medicine] is to do away with the suffering of the sick, to lessen the violence of their diseases, and to refuse to treat those who are overmastered by diseases, realizing that in such cases medicine is powerless.”34 In an essay entitled “Conceptions of Health,” Grant writes that what is conspicuous about major works of contemporary psychology and psychoanalysis is the “absence of any definition of health.”35 Several works by psychotherapists, he argues, spend many pages discussing the methods of therapy but either devote little attention to therapy’s positive goal, or their definition of the psychological health to which therapy aims appears to rely on the unexamined assumptions of middle-class society.36 A consequence of the vagueness or lack of rational examination about how to define health is an inability to make sense of the role of suffering and death. “Nowhere has modern psychotherapy more mirrored and influenced our society of progress than in the way it disregards death or looks at it with stoicism.”37 For Grant it seems that technology’s focus on efficiency of methods, to the comparative neglect of ends, means that it cannot make sense of why the Gospel “includes suffering and death in health, recognizing them not simply as the negation of happiness, but as the voluntary shedding of the mortal necessary to the putting on of immortality.”38 The incredible control that technology has given us over the natural world can make us forget that as mortal creatures “[w]e do not have complete control of ourselves … at birth and death we are helpless.”39 Fourth and finally, although technology may promise to free societies from various forms of suffering, it leads to new forms of unfreedom. It does this in one of two ways. Firstly, by making it difficult for us to think outside of the paradigm of technology: The tight circle then in which we live is this: our present forms of existence have sapped the ability to think about standards of excellence and yet at the same time have imposed on us a standard [of technological efficiency] in terms of which the human good is monolithically asserted.40

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The paradox is that liberation from non-technological ways of thinking (derived from the Bible or from philosophy) did not create a pluralistic society, in which our individuality could be expressed free from the authority of dogmatism, but rather a society “dominated by a monolithic certainty about excellence – namely that the pursuit of technological efficiency is the chief purpose for which the community exists.”41 This may explain why technology “is now autonomous and produces its own needs, which are quite detached from human needs,”42 causing it to spread of its own accord into ever more areas of social life. We become shaped by technology to “trust in the overcoming of chance which leads us back to judge every human situation as being solvable in terms of technology.”43 Although Grant sometimes speaks of our “ruling managers,”44 which may reveal his familiarity with C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength,45 the self-propelling nature of technology makes it clear he does not see its spread as being caused by a conspiracy of sinister elites. “The highest political good is thought by the vast majority to be the building of the technical society by the overcoming of chance, through the application of the natural and social sciences.”46 Technology has a mass appeal.47 The pursuit of freedom through technology is evidently on a collision course with those who do not accept the imperatives of technology.48 In Oliver O’Donovan’s words: “The paradox is that the community’s goal is freedom; but such freedom clearly cannot include freedom of action which might frustrate communal action.”49 We see examples of the paradox in medical professionals who do not wish to perform abortions or physician-assisted dying; as a result of these difficulties, “a great agony arises today among Christians who wish to be doctors.”50 Once the priorities of technology become the priorities of an entire society, technology’s tremendous sway over public opinion means that behaviour and ideas that conflict with technology become marginalised and confined to the private sphere.51 In addition to weakening our ability to think and act publicly outside of its framework, a second way in which the technological society threatens our freedom is by requiring “not only the control of non-human nature, but equally the control of human nature.”52 Grant agrees with Heidegger that technology at its “apogee comes more and more to be unified around the planning and control of human activity,”53 an activity that Grant (again, relying on Heidegger) defines as cybernetics.54 Given (as I have explained above) technology’s reliance on sciences that view nature

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as inert “objects lying as raw material at the disposal of knowing and making subjects,”55 and given technology’s inability to recognise moral or physical limits to its expansion, entails for Grant that technology will come to treat human nature with the same ruthless demand for efficient manipulation as non-human nature. “Such work as behaviour modification, genetic engineering, population control by abortion are extreme examples”56 mentioned by Grant (from a book published in 1978) of what he sees developing in the most technologically developed societies. Elsewhere, he argued, the “proliferating power of the medical profession illustrates our drive to new technologies of human nature. This expanding power has generally been developed by people concerned with human betterment,”57 reiterating the role of compassion as the governing motive behind much technological progress. The therapeutic approach of modern social sciences mean that we can expect them “to be used unbridledly [sic] as servants of the modern belief that socially useful patterns of behaviour should be inculcated by force.”58 He even goes so far as to claim: We are moving on this continent to a society which is best described as the mental health state – that is, a regime in which massive coercion is above all exercised by the practitioners of the art of medicine and its satellite arts. … We are going to be patients (and I use the word in its fullest sense) of the mental health state.59 The practical question is whether a society in which technology must be oriented to cybernetics can maintain the institutions of free politics and the protection by law of the rights of the individual.60

Grant does not provide an immediate answer, but elsewhere he is clear that “the mass stimulation of socially useful attitudes can certainly not be [conducive] to the other end of man – thinking.”61 Grant’s expectation that medicine and other therapeutic-minded sciences will be used in wellintentioned ways to bring about what may well be called a “tyranny”62 brings to a crux the paradox of technology: the overcoming of chance to which we are committed builds institutions which more and more negate the freedom and equality for the sake of which the whole experiment against chance was undertaken.63

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The Pandemic The virtue of prudence, according to Aquinas, enables us to choose those acts that are the appropriate means to attain our teleological end, with circumspection of the present situation, and the foresight to estimate whether an act will aim at our end.64 The evidence of the imprudence of our response to COVID-19 continues to mount, and the long-term consequences of lockdowns and other unprecedented forms of non-pharmaceutical interventions reveal themselves in new and shocking ways.65 How do Grant’s ideas help us to understand our disastrous response to COVID-19? Firstly, Grant’s analysis of technology as something that has become “the fate of Western civilization … and not something which in our freedom we can control”66 enables us to understand the novelty of our response to the pandemic by putting it in the context of long-term trends. We thereby avoid mistaking the novelty of the restrictions as being signs of a malevolent conspiracy at work, pace Douglas Farrow. Grant helps us to see that the truth is bleaker than that: far from being the result of human cunning, the autonomous way that technology colonises more and more areas of our lives means that there is no one orchestrating events according to a plan. Rather the pandemic presented an opportunity for the acceleration of technology’s emergent, uncoordinated spread over society. Secondly, Grant’s critique of technology can help to explain why prudence was frequently lacking throughout the pandemic. Moral reasoning involves deliberating about whether the actions we choose (or, eg., in the case of politicians, what laws to enact) will promote our flourishing, whether they seek what is truly good for us. Technology, however, makes us focus only on finding the most effective means of achieving whatever goal we choose or to eliminate what hinders the pursuit of our goals. Technology allows us to conceive of more efficient ways to reduce harm, suffering, and anything else that negates health, but it does not presuppose (and indeed, as I have explained, it undermines the possibility of knowing) an objective definition of human flourishing to guide our actions. Hence, we struggle to define positively the state of health that technology is aiming to achieve; such a definition would not only help to direct the development of technology within certain parameters, but would also (at least) circumscribe what we ought to do to promote health, given the limitations to what is in our power to control. Crucially, what

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we need, and what technology has been unable to provide, is a way to find meaning in ill-health, suffering, and death. Consequently, our response to the pandemic was driven by an exclusive focus on reducing harm to bodily health which, while important, was not seen in its true place in a hierarchy of greater and lesser goods. Grant’s account of how technology deforms our understanding, through homogenising complex phenomena and prioritising what can be understood in quantifiable terms, also helps us to make sense of why our restrictions were driven by a monomania for reducing cases of and deaths caused by (or with) COVID-19.67 Would Grant have been surprised that our technological societies obsessed over COVID statistics, while forgetting the non-quantifiable value of, for instance, family members being present at the birth of a child, or at the death of a loved one? Or of children learning how to interact with and share the same physical space with other children at school? Or the value of visiting the elderly? (Incidentally, the lockdown sceptics who criticised governments for not presenting a cost–benefit analysis to justify restrictions have only perpetuated the perspective of technology by assuming we can quantify the social costs of lockdowns, and then weigh them against the benefits, as if they were commensurable values in a utilitarian calculus.)68 The cost of mobilising society to control a few metrics alone was evident in the callousness towards the weaker members of society that Grant feared might be a byproduct of technology.69 A particularly egregious example was New York State’s policy of sending COVID-19 patients back to nursing homes to free up beds in hospitals for what was projected to be a huge influx of COVID patients that, in the end, did not occur, causing thousands of nursing home residents to die.70 Grant’s concern that technology would ignore “the necessity for limits to man’s making of history”71 was demonstrated by the response to the pandemic in two different ways. Firstly, the goal of containing the spread of COVID-19 seemed to justify the use of means that ran roughshod over the moral limits to how governments should coerce citizens in a constitutional regime. Secondly, the restrictions revealed an unwillingness to accept that greater suffering may come from refusing to accept the physical limitations to what medicine can do for our mortal bodies. Too many instances can be mentioned to confirm Grant’s fears about “whether a society in which technology must be oriented to cybernetics can maintain the institutions of free politics and the protection by law of the rights of the individual.”72 It has been argued in one article that

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there is “a new, constitutional “pandemic” that is rising in tandem with COVID-19: the regression of governance to authoritarianism, triggered by the invocation of public health emergency powers.”73 Though not all countries have gone as far as China’s “uncompromising use of quick response code technology, facial recognition cameras, drones, and other means, to monitor citizens’ whereabouts,”74 the imitation of China’s lockdowns in purportedly liberal democracies raised serious questions about how robust their constitutional safeguards are to prevent excessive and disproportionate use of emergency measures. To give one example, “the Scottish Government attempted to arrogate to itself the power to dispense with the requirement for more serious criminal cases to be heard with a sitting jury,”75 which, although it was later abandoned, reveals the extent to which a key principle of the rule of law, in this case, the principle of trial by jury for criminal cases in common law systems, was considered dispensable during the pandemic. Another instance was in various governments’ use of fear-based media campaigns to nudge people to comply with the restrictions, which threatens to normalise manipulative media campaigns in the future, as Grant predicted, “to adjust the masses to behave appropriately amidst such technological crises as those of population and pollution and life in the cities.”76 Finally, the disproportionate reaction to the pandemic revealed Grant’s fears that we would become unwilling, in the name of compassion, to accept the physical limitations of medicine, that sometimes we must “refuse to treat those who are overmastered by diseases, realizing that in such cases medicine is powerless.”77 The attempted mastery of death at the heart of the UK government’s lockdown strategy was revealed by the health minister’s statement that travelling abroad for an assisted death was permissible during a national lockdown.78 Similarly, although done in the name of compassion, the various restrictions placed by the government on funerals and other rituals for the dead revealed a desire to put out of sight the ultimate reminder of the limits to medicine.79 Grant’s frustration with the Anglican Church’s failure to take a firm stance against euthanasia and abortion seemed to confirm his sense that the churches had failed to resist being influenced by the surrounding technological society.80 So also during the pandemic many churches failed to defy the evasion of death and to criticise how “the vulnerable and the sick have been isolated from ordinary human contact, and the dying often compelled to die in circumstances where, for fear of infection, not just the physical presence of

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loved ones but even the ordinary touch of human hands has been denied them.”81 Grant may also have questioned the authenticity or sufficiency of an ordained “priesthood” that not only obediently withdraws its immediate presence and closes the church doors but does not then involve itself (suitably protected like doctors and social workers) in going out to people to be with them as an “incarnational” presence where they are.82

Conclusion Seasoned readers of Grant will know that he does not often discuss medicine and healthcare. Yet what he did write about them and what he wrote about technology can give us enough reason to see the value of reading his work in the aftermath of the pandemic. There may be others who have explained more fully the problems with modern medicine,83 or described more vividly the despair and wishful thinking in our contemporary attitudes towards death.84 But few can help us see more clearly that our reaction to the pandemic was part of the ongoing triumph of technology. His pessimism about our technological fate was not meant to lead to a paralysing despair, but to sweep aside facile bromides about our situation and confront where technology has led us. “The job of thought at our time is to bring to the light that darkness as darkness.”85 While denying that we should turn away from the modern world made by technology, Grant counsels us to be attentive of what we have lost. “Any intimations of authentic deprival are precious, because they are the ways through which intimations of good, unthinkable in the public terms, may yet appear to us.”86

Notes 1. Allison Pearson, “I Was Pilloried for Being a Lockdown Sceptic— Now It’s Clear I Was Right About Quite a Few Things,” The Telegraph, 18 January 2022, accessed 24 September, 2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2022/01/18/pillor ied-lockdown-sceptic-now-clear-right-quite-things/. 2. Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 1966), 212. Cf. Aquinas, ST II-II, q50, a1, ad1.

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3. I will not discuss how Grant’s thought about technology evolved, which has been ably documented in Joan L. O’Donovan, George Grant and the Twilight of Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). 4. George Grant, “Knowing and Making,” in Collected Works of George Grant, Volume 4, 1970–1988 (hereafter: CW v.4), eds. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 274. 5. George Grant, “Technology and Justice,” CW v.4, 590. 6. Robert Song, Christianity and Liberal Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 88. 7. George Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” CW v.4, 254. 8. George Grant, “Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America,” Collected Works of George Grant, Volume 3, 1960–1969 (hereafter: CW v.3), eds. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 576. 9. Ibid., 483. 10. Ibid., 485. 11. Ibid., 487. 12. Ibid., 547. 13. Joan L. O’Donovan, George Grant and the Twilight of Justice, 100. 14. Grant, “Technology and Empire,” 499. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 498. 17. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 592. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Grant, “Technology and Empire,” 552. 21. Ibid., 492. 22. Grant, “Value and Technology,” CW v.3, 230–231. 23. Ibid., 231. 24. Grant, “Technology and Empire,” 552. 25. O’Donovan, Twilight of Justice, 75. 26. Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 11. 27. Joshua Hordern, Compassion in Healthcare: Pilgrimage, Practice, and Civic Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 37.

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28. Grant, “The Computer Does Not Impose on Us the Ways It Should Be Used,” CW v.4, 286. On the difference between information and knowledge of substantial forms, see D. C. Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2018), 66–74. 29. Grant, “Knowing and Making,” 269. 30. Ibid., 276. 31. Ibid., 277. 32. Ibid. Cf. Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World: A Search for Orientation (London: Sheed & Ward, 1956). 33. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 663–664, 672. 34. Ibid., 663. 35. Grant, “Conceptions of Health,” CW v.3, 168. 36. Ibid., 168–170. 37. Ibid., 178. 38. Ibid. 39. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 662. 40. Grant, “Technology and Empire,” 574. 41. Grant, “Technology and Empire,” 571. 42. Grant, “Protest and Technology,” CW v.3, 397. 43. Grant, “Technology and Empire,” 498. 44. Ibid., 492. 45. William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 115. 46. Grant, “Ideology in Modern Empires,” CW v.4, 179. Emphasis mine. 47. Grant, “Time as History,” CW v.4, 21. 48. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 632–634. 49. O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? 9. 50. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 632. 51. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 202. 52. Grant, “Technology and Empire,” 562. 53. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 594. 54. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 205. 55. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 605. 56. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 205. 57. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 593. 58. Grant, “Technology and Empire,” 578.

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66. 67.

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Grant, “Knowing and Making,” 270–271. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 205. Grant, “The Great Society,” CW v.3, 459. Ibid. Ibid. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 11–18; Aquinas, ST II-II, q47, a6; q49, a1–8. Example, Christian Bjørnskov, “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison,” CESifo Economic Studies 67.3 (2021): 318–331; Sam Williams et al., “COVID-19 Mortalities in England and Wales and the Peltzman Offsetting Effect,” Applied Economics 53.60 (2021): 6982–6998; Eran Bendavid et al., “Assessing Mandatory Stay-at-Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID-19,” European Journal of Clinical Investigation 51.4 (2021), online: https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13484; John Gibson, “Government Mandated Lockdowns Do Not Reduce Covid-19 Deaths: Implications for Evaluating the Stringent New Zealand Response,” New Zealand Economic Papers 56.1 (2022): 17–28; Moshe Yanovskiy & Yehoshua Socol. “Are Lockdowns Effective in Managing Pandemics?” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19.15 (2022), published online: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19159295; Michaéla C. Schippers et al., “Aggressive Measures, Rising Inequalities, and Mass Formation During the COVID-19 Crisis: An Overview and Proposed Way Forward,” Frontiers in Public Health 10 (2022), online: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2022.950965; Simon Wood, “Inferring UK COVID-19 Fatal Infection Trajectories from Daily Mortality Data: Were Infections Already in Decline Before the UK Lockdowns?” Biometrics 78.3 (2022): 1127–1140. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 588. Authoritarian states are empowered by the homogenising classification of information. Cf. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (London: Yale University Press, 1998). Example, Laura Dodsworth, A State of Fear (London: Pinter & Martin, 2021), 147; Douglas W. Allen, “Covid-19 Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature,” International Journal of the Economics of Business 29.1 (2022): 1–31.

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69. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 247. 70. New York State Office of Attorney General, “Nursing Home Response to COVID-19 Pandemic,” last modified 30 January, 2021, https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021-nursinghomes report.pdf; Bill Hammond, “Remembering the Scandal That Brought Down Health Commissioner Howard Zucker,” Empire Center, last modified 23 September, 2021, https://www.empire center.org/publications/remembering-the-scandal/. 71. Grant, “Philosophy in the Mass Age,” in Collected Works of George Grant, Volume 2, 1951–1959 (hereafter: CW v.2), ed. Arthur Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 365. 72. Grant, “English-Speaking Justice,” 205. 73. Stephen Thomson & Eric C Ip, “COVID-19 Emergency Measures and the Impending Authoritarian Pandemic,” Journal of Law and the Biosciences 7.1 (2020), online: https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/ lsaa064. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. Cf. Jonathan Sumption, “Government by Decree: Covid-19 and the British Constitution,” Law in a Time of Crisis (London: Profile Books, 2021), 218–238. 76. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 593. Cf. Dodsworth, A State of Fear. 77. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 663. 78. BBC News, “Covid-19: Assisted Dying Travel Allowed During Lockdown, says Hancock,” last modified 5 November, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-54823490. 79. Pierre Manent, “Time to Wake Up,” First Things, last modified 28 April, 2020, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/ 04/time-to-wake-up. 80. Grant, “Technology and Justice,” 659. 81. Oliver O’Donovan et al., “Learning from the Pandemic,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 21.2 (2021): 143–144. 82. Ibid., 142. 83. Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (London: Marion Boyars, 1995).

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84. Seamus O’Mahony, The Way We Die Now (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017). 85. Grant, “The Computer Does Not…”, 296. 86. Grant, “Technology and Empire,” 580.

CHAPTER 15

Between the Pincers: George Grant and the Crisis of Totalitarianism Ryan Alexander McKinnell

Introduction This chapter intends to examine the anomalous treatment of the twentieth-century crisis of totalitarianism in the political thought of George Grant. For a figure often labeled a “conservative” thinker, the championing of Western Civilization, parliamentarianism, or market liberty is strikingly absent from Grant’s writings. Instead, Grant’s most prominent reflections on the confrontation between liberal democracy and totalitarianism are found within the context of his polemical defense of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker during the Defence Crises of 1962–63 and Grant’s vehement criticism of the Vietnam War. While no admirer of Communism, Grant consistently presents the American regime as the greatest threat to the world’s autochthonous traditions and ways of life. Far from being the leader of the Western alliance against Communist tyranny or the “last best hope of man on earth,” for Grant, the United

R. A. McKinnell (B) McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8_15

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States is an “empire” like the Soviet Union or Maoist China, seeking to dominate the world and keep satellites such as Canada and Vietnam within its orbit.1 This assessment is not reducible to the typical Canadian vice of AntiAmericanism (though this is not to say it is not present) but originates in Grant’s interpretation of the American regime as the “spearhead of progress.” For Grant, the ideological differences between liberalism and communism are superficial as both are merely variants of the technological agenda to create the Universal Homogenous State (UHS). The United States and the Soviet Union are only “rival empires” because they both share a conception of the end or goal of human striving, a universal egalitarian society brought about through the technological mastery of nature, only differing on the best means to achieve the common good of modernity.2 Seen in this light, the outcome of the Cold War is not philosophically important since the liberal and communist blocs are both motivated by the belief in progress. In this, Grant follows thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Alexandre Kojève in categorizing modern regimes “as metaphysically the same.”3 Because Grant believes the UHS to be a dehumanizing tyranny, he considered the danger it comprises to human beings outweighs the threat to the liberal democratic order posed by totalitarianism. Furthermore, because Grant thinks the combination of liberalism and technology to be a better vehicle for the quest to achieve the UHS than Marxism, and the homogenizing power of the United States is of more immediate concern to Grant as a Canadian, he focuses his philosophical critique of modernity on its American manifestation. Whereas Heidegger believed Germany was trapped between the pincers of American Capitalism and Soviet Communism, Grant held that Canada and other traditional communities were caught between the homogenizing pincers of technological empires. Though there is much to be learned from Grant’s analysis of the modern liberal project, even the most ardent defenders of Grant must admit that his collapsing of the differences between liberal democracy and totalitarianism into a contest between rival empires represents a significant departure from other twentieth-century critics of modernity such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin.4 These thinkers, while expressing profound reservations on the consequences of modern political philosophy and the merits of liberal society, all maintained the superiority of Western liberal democracy over its totalitarian rivals.5 In contrast, though Grant’s earlier writings express some hope in

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liberal society and the global leadership of the United States, the mature Grant gives the impression that injustices committed by the United States and other Western democracies were morally equivalent to those perpetuated by totalitarian regimes. Indeed, Grant sometimes suggests that even the struggle against National Socialism and Imperial Japan was a fight between rival empires rather than an effort to defeat tyranny, with Franklin Roosevelt cast as an arch-imperialist while blaming Winston Churchill for bringing the United States into the Second World War and paving the way for American hegemony.6 While by no means dismissing the wrongs committed by the United States and its allies, it is ethically myopic to view the Final Solution, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, or the Killing Fields as comparable to the actions of the liberal democracies during the Second World War and Cold War. Whatever we may think of American involvement in Southeast Asia, it is deeply malapropos to liken the Vietnam War to Auschwitz.7 Similarly, while modern ideologies share the goal of bringing about the “relief of man’s estate” by reducing liberal and totalitarian states to predicates of the UHS, one ignores the genuine practical differences between regimes characterized by representative democracy, the rule of law, and constitutional rights on the one hand and coercion, oppression, and terror on the other. In short, Grant’s reflections on the crisis of totalitarianism instill profound doubts about the justness of liberal democracy compared to its totalitarian counterparts and our commitment to its preservation. This chapter explores why Grant reduces liberal democracy and communism to a shared philosophical orientation and the political consequences of adopting this position. I argue that Grant’s political reflections are notable for the absence of the central focus of classical political science: the assessment of the comparative justice and injustice of different regimes and political opinions. Instead, Grant reduces various regime types to an opposition between organic political communities “rooted” in a particular moral-political tradition and homogenizing technological societies. By interpreting the struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism through this perspective, Grant ignores the moral superiority of liberalism and is led to adopt ill-considered political views. In an era where we are confronted once again by the alternatives of despotism and parliamentary government, by reflecting on Grant’s apparent indifference to the contest between liberal democracy and totalitarianism, we are reminded of the intellectual and moral perils of failing to take the political seriously.

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Same River, Different Boats In what is undoubtedly the most memorable passage of his most famous work, Grant wrote in Lament for Nation that the impossibility of conservatism in the modern era entails the impossibility of Canada.8 An argument that for the past sixty years has engendered criticism from a myriad of Canadian nationalists.9 Yet these critics often overlook the most radical facet of Grant’s contention. Far more than an expression of pessimism on the prospects for Canadian nationhood or the mourning of the passing of a particular vision of the Canadian political community, Grant argued that modern conservatives were not adherents of an authentic conservative political philosophy, but merely proponents of an older version of liberalism.10 Grant contended that the differences between conservatives and liberals are a question of degree, not principle. Furthermore, not only does Grant’s thesis collapse the distinction between conservativism and liberalism, but he also insisted that the differences between socialism and the other two ideologies were superficial. Beneath the surface of the meditation on Canadian sovereignty, Grant argued that the traditional understanding of politics had ceased to be relevant. What is the justification for this dismissal of the political? For Grant, conservatives, liberals, and socialists are all striving (whether knowingly or unknowingly) for the establishment of the UHS. We have failed to understand this fundamental truth because we have yet to grasp the common philosophical foundation of all modern political ideologies. Consequently, we have failed to recognize the American regime for what it is, the spearhead of progressive modernity. Grant explored this thesis by comparing what he considered to be the inadequate understanding of the United States advanced by Marxists and American conservatives. For the Marxist, the United States appears as an obstacle to progress rather than its engine because Marxism considers the property relations under American capitalism to be reactionary, precipitating alienation. The United States is, therefore, “hostile to the interests of developing humanity.”11 For the American conservative, meanwhile, the United States retains a core of traditional values, with the American Revolution appealing to natural rights and the ideal of limited government instead of the “perfectibility of man.”12 For Grant, the Marxist analysis is wrong because it misunderstands the nature of the age of progress. For Marx, the happiness and “perfection” of human beings requires overcoming class struggle. This will only come about under a communist society, with

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humanity mastering nature and eliminating scarcity. Only when “the claims of personal freedom and social order” are reconciled “the essential cause of conflict between men will have been overcome.”13 However, in forwarding an interpretation of the human good which implies that some ways of life are fulfilling and others are not, Marxism reveals itself not simply as a philosophy of the age of progress but one fundamentally influenced by a pre-modern teleological conception of human ends. The doctrine of progress results in the perfectibility of man.14 However, Grant insisted that a pure doctrine of progress does not limit human action. Modern progress is not oriented by a telos . Instead, it denies that any conception of the good can impose limits on human freedom and conceives of progress as an “open ended progression in which men will be endlessly free to make the world as they want it.”15 Suppose progress implies the emancipation of the passions. In that case, socialism, which has always advocated restraining greed in the name of society, is not as compatible with progress and freedom as its followers maintain. Though early capitalism inherited from the Protestant Ethic a degree of moral restraint, Grant argues that the corporate capitalism of the twentieth century has broken free of these constraints, allowing for the complete emancipation of human passions. Grant wrote that for the liberal, social order can only ever be an instrument to increase individual freedom, and the good is whatever we choose it to be. “Nobody minds very much if we prefer women or dogs or boys, as long as we cause no public inconvenience.”16 Meanwhile, in the public sphere, the conquest of nature becomes the only recognizable public value. Thus, Marxists misunderstand the United States because of their failure to grasp that state capitalism is a more progressive form of social organization than socialism. In Grant’s presentation, far from being a revolutionary ideology, socialism is revealed to be “essentially conservative.”17 If Marxism for Grant is conservative, then American conservativism reveals itself to be committed to a progressive doctrine hostile to the preservation of traditional values. American conservatives understand themselves as supporters of the liberal constitutionalism articulated by Hobbes, Locke, and Smith. Drawing on the interpretation of modernity forwarded by Leo Strauss (whose school appears to be what Grant is referring to as the American conservative position), Grant acknowledged that while early modern thinkers criticized the classical and Christian view of natural right and natural law, they still maintained a conception of

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nature in contrast to the heirs of Rousseau who interpreted the human condition historically.18 Therefore, though deficient compared to classical thought, thanks to Lockean liberalism, English-speaking liberal democracies have enjoyed constitutional stability and avoided the extremism of the French, Russian, and German Revolutions. Thus, whatever the shortcoming of the American regime, in the view of the American conservative, it has proven far less destructive of humanity than the second or third waves of modernity and acts as a bulwark against the perversions of totalitarianism.19 While Grant admited that there is some truth to the claims of the American conservative—in that their society does seek to preserve constitutional government—he insisted that the more extreme forms of progressive modernity that are explicit in the political movements deriving from Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche are already implicit in Lockean liberalism. While traditional, “organic” conservatives asserted the right of the political community to restrain freedom in the name of the common good, the rallying cry of the American Revolution was freedom. In English-Speaking Justice, Grant argues that the “conservatism” of classical liberalism is due to the presence of Protestant Christianity. As the influence of Christianity recedes, the more unrestrained liberal society becomes.20 This evolution is reflected in the development of America as a political community. “The United States is no longer a society of small property owners, but of massive private and public corporations. Such organizations work with scientists in their efforts to master nature and reshape humanity. Internationally, the imperial power of corporations had destroyed indigenous cultures in every corner of the globe.”21 As Hugh Forbes observes, modern conservatives reveal themselves to be philosophical liberals due to their epistemological commitment to the dynamism of a technological society in which it is impossible to conserve tradition for long. Like the socialists, conservatives may be less progressive than their liberal counterparts, but they belong to the same species.22 The collapsing of the political spectrum into liberalism is further emphasized in the essays collected in Grant’s Technology and Empire, notably “In Defence of North America.” Here, Grant rearticulated the thesis advanced in Lament for Nation by asserting that what we naively refer to as the political “Left” and “Right” share the same fundamental faith in progress. Though the public ideologies shaped by state capitalism may differ in detail from those molded by state socialism, the conflict between these factions remains within the same horizon. The Political

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Right “stand by the freedoms of the individual to hold property and for the firmer enforcement of our present laws.” Though possessing some hesitation regarding “the consequences of modernity,” the Right still does not question technological advance.23 Meanwhile, though critical of contemporary social arrangements, members of the Political Left still “appeal to the redemptive possibilities of technology” and the “control of nature achieved by modern techniques.”24 Despite their differences, “the directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.”25 Grant’s collapsing of socialism and conservatism into liberalism is repeated in his presentation of liberal political theory. Though at times differentiating between liberal political practices and theory, for Grant, the core of liberalism is not government by consent, representative institutions, or the securing of individual rights but human autonomy. Because liberalism assumes that human beings are autonomous, any conception of justice based on claims of divine or natural authority is denied. Justice is what we make.26 Whatever the intentions of political philosophers such as Locke, in Grant’s telling, the historical unfolding of contractual liberalism unleash an inherent relativism that leads to a negation of nature as the drive for human autonomy seeks to overcome all limitations. Ultimately, liberalism aims at establishing the UHS, a universal (worldwide), egalitarian society that achieves full autonomy for the human will. This state can only be accomplished via modern science and the conquest of nature.27 Because liberalism relies on technology, liberalism must be understood as dependent on technology and cannot transcend it.28 Thus, like Heidegger, Grant did not believe that technology can remain an instrument of the liberal values of liberty and equality. Technology possesses a logic of its own, the freedom to “negate nature endlessly to produce more power with which to go on negating nature,” which swallows up justice “in an irresistibly more comprehensive global ‘destiny.’”29 Though liberalism remains the ideology that best embodies the drive for technological mastery, modern conservatism, and socialism share the same fundamental faith. Therefore, the three major ideologies do not offer any real political alternative and, following Heidegger and Kojève, are “metaphysically the same.” In stressing the common philosophical foundation of modern ideologies, Grant emphasized that the fundamental alternative lies between the modern understanding of politics and the traditional conception, which Grant referred to as “the organic conservatism that predated the age of

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progress.”30 Though Grant did not provide a comprehensive account of this organic conservatism, he attributed to it “essentially the social doctrine that public order and tradition, in contrast to freedom and experiment, were essential to a good life” sustained by the view that “virtue must be prior to freedom” and the “conception of an eternal order by which human actions are measured and defined.”31 Grant presented this “genuine” conservatism as the root of Canada’s distinctiveness from the United States, which the fall of the Diefenbaker government in 1963 signaled the end of in English-speaking Canada. However, forms of this organic conservatism still survive in French Canada, Charles De Gaulle’s France, and other communities such as Cuba that seek to protect their traditions and identity from the homogenizing forces of technological modernity.32 Though Grant was pessimistic regarding the prospects for nationalist movements to hold back the tide, his political sympathies were with communities such as Quebec and political leaders like Diefenbaker and De Gaulle who, even in a compromised way, resist the forces of the UHS or at the very least seek to limit the reach of the American empire by insisting on a degree of independence. De Gaulle, therefore, emerges as Grant’s example of statesmanship par excellence due to the General’s resistance to American hegemony in the name of French sovereignty and identity.33

Between the Pincers of Empire Grant was not the first nor the last political thinker to claim that differences between the Left and Right are more of degree rather than irreconcilable antagonism. The divide between Liberals and Conservatives, after all, is not the same as that between Royalists and Jacobins. Nor were Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson reiterations of Oliver Cromwell and Charles I. However, it is in Grant’s reflections on the struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism that the disconcerting implications of assimilating the different strands of modern political philosophy into global technology becomeevident. While it is one thing to downplay the differences between the North American Left and Right, Grant repeatedly described the United States and the Soviet Union as “rival empires” in agreement “as to what is the goal of human striving.”34 Despite the contrast between Soviet collectivism and American individualism, in Grant’s presentation, the differences between the two political systems were trivial.35

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In doing so, Grant broke with other twentieth-century political thinkers with whom he is usually associated. Despite their differences, during the Cold War, conservative and liberal political philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Eric Voegelin were united in articulating a defense of liberal democracy against communist totalitarianism. This was reflected politically by statesmen such as Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, Clement Atlee, Konrad Adenauer, Dean Acheson, Lester Pearson and their successors who sought to take the necessary steps to ensure the containment of communism and the preservation of liberal democracy. Fundamentally, they accepted the contention of Max Weber that the decisive political alternative in the twentieth century would be between regimes where “either the mass of citizens is left without freedom or rights in a bureaucratic, ‘authoritarian state’ which has only the appearance of parliamentary rule, and in which the citizens are ‘administered’ like a herd of cattle; or the citizens are integrated into the state by making them its co-rulers.”36 Put another way, under present conditions; our choice is between liberal constitutionalism and various manifestations of despotism. Whatever the defects of liberal society, its political and social arrangements are selfevidently preferable to totalitarianism. Thus, warranting a robust defense and commitment to its preservation. This recognition is absent from Grant’s reflections on the political crises of the twentieth century. Though at times acknowledging American constitutionalism possesses respect for individual rights, that the United States is not the sole source of violence in the world (while also insisting that the West cannot be understood as essentially peaceful), and that the American empire is “less brutal” than Communist imperialism, Grant primarily presented the United States as “a dynamic empire spearheading the age of progress.”37 Indeed, the overwhelming thrust of Grant’s analysis was to draw a moral equivalence between liberal democracy and communism. Grant was driven to draw this equivalence due to his insistence on interpreting liberalism and communism as oriented toward realizing the UHS. Furthermore, Grant hinted that the United States was worse in the long run because the liberal capitalism of the Americans proved to be even more effective in dissolving indigenous cultures than the less sophisticated methods of the Russians and Chinese.38 This was demonstrated by American actions in the Vietnam War, which for Grant, not only revealed the willingness of the United States to engage in brutality to keep its “satellites” within its orbit but the working out of

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the project of technological mastery at the heart of modernity. As a result, national communities find themselves caught between the pincers of rival empires with the same technological agenda. A country like Canada, therefore, is as much a part of the American empire as India was of the British or Czechoslovakia was of the Soviet Union.39 It is an extraordinary claim that the status of Canada in the 1960s was similar to a member of the Warsaw Pact. At the very least, for this to be persuasive, it would require a comparison of the institutions and practices within the rival power blocs (not to mention showing how Kennedy’s intervention in the 1963 Canadian federal election is comparable to Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968). Yet while Grant’s writings are brimming with denunciations of American domestic and foreign policy, they are silent when it comes to Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag, the Hungarian Revolt, the Prague Spring, Solidarity, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the anti-communist dissident movement. As Newell remarks, Grant’s political horizon seems confined to North America.40 Grant may very well have responded that, as a Canadian, his primary concern was with conditions within the American-dominated Western political system. Still, any judgment on the merits of the American liberal order must be made within the context of the political alternatives. By focusing exclusively on how liberalism and communism are manifestations of global technology, Grant failed to recognize that American liberalism did not share in the millenarian impulses of Bolshevism and Maoism. A fact that political figures such as Churchill, Atlee, and Pearson (whom Grant regularly criticized) understood. Whatever the validity of Grant’s criticisms of technological society, this is a severe defect in his political analysis. It must also be acknowledged that Grant’s tendency to present the struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism as a great power contest between rival empires preced the Cold War and his encounter with Heidegger. Commentators have argued that the Second World War was one of the “primal” events that shaped Grant’s thought (the other being his religious experience in 1941). While Grant’s response to the crisis of the War is often viewed through his struggle with his pacificism, his writings from both 1939–1945 and later in life reveal a similar inability to grapple with the nature of the conflict. As Scott Staring argues, the youthful Grant initially had a favorable opinion of Franklin Roosevelt and the United States but possessed deep misgivings about British imperialism. Eventually, however, he became distressed by the idea of a world

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dominated by an American liberal order.41 Upon learning of the American entry into the war, a forlorn Grant wrote that “the spreading of the war almost guaranteed in my mind the triumph of all that I hoped would not conquer… It may [help] (in fact almost certain) to establish the Anglo-American pax, but will that be much nearer to God than the alternative?”42 While Grant expressed these thoughts in his letters and journal, his contemporaries drew different conclusions. Writing from exile in Japan in 1940, Karl Löwith, who had begun to conceive modern philosophy to be motivated by a dangerous desire for eschatological fulfillment, still insisted that the difference between Germany and England was one between barbarians and civilized people because the Germans believed that “success” rather than “methods” were decisive.43 Similarly, reflecting on the problem of German nihilism at the New School in February 1941, Strauss argued that the war between Britain and Germany needed to be understood as a defense of not only of modern civilization but of the principles of civilization.44 In the immediate aftermath of the war, Grant seemed to have recognized that he had failed to understand what was at stake. Acknowledging that “in 1940 we saw that it was not the pious talk of idealists that stopped fascism and the forces of evil, it was the practical cooperation of the free nations of the British Commonwealth. Some always knew this lesson; some learned it very late (like this writer).”45 However, this lesson was forgotten as the Cold War began. In the aftermath of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, Grant wrote that “Quite frankly, if it is a question of U.S.A capitalism lined up with the sinister Realpolitik of the Vatican against the totalitarian USSR, it seems to me hard to choose – but on the whole the USSR.”46 In the last years of his life, Grant told his biographer William Christian that he viewed Churchill to be a warlord like Hitler and, in another interview, declared that I blame Churchill terribly for bringing the Americans into the Second World War to see that the English won in Europe. What has happened since ’45 has been the unequivocal victory of the English-speaking powers in the world with only Russia against them. And I think that the civilization that the English-speaking powers made out of their victory has not been such a great civilization. I say this as someone brought up in the English world.47

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Throughout his life, Grant appears to have believed that AngloAmerican liberalism, with its industrialism, uprooted populations, and secularism was an inauthentic form of existence, and it would seek to impose its standards on peoples in other parts of the world. In the language of the mature Grant, the triumph of the English-speaking powers in the Second World War could only increase the likelihood of the UHS.

The Danger of Disdaining the Political Perhaps the most troubling consequence of Grant’s neglect of the differences between the different forms of modern political order is demonstrated in his admiration for the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whom Grant calls an “artist of Dasein.”48 In seeking to explain his admiration for the writings of the infamous antisemite and Nazi collaborator, Grant wrote that Celine’s Rigadoon is the “supreme account of technological war suffered by civilians.”49 Further, in explaining Céline’s politics, Grant cited Heidegger’s claim that Europe was caught between the pincers of the technological frenzy of America and Russia. Céline, Grant argued, wanted to save Europe from the two continental empires. The two empires which were (with the help of the British) demolished Céline’s Europe.50 Grant’s insistence on viewing both Western liberalism and Soviet communism as expressions of the technological drive to mastery not only led him to defend a fellow traveler of National Socialism but, by omission, equate the suffering of Céline in the terror bombing of Germany to the victims of the concentration camps. Grant was forced into adopting these ill-conceived political views because, like Heidegger, he considered all forms of modern political order as manifestations of global technology. In doing so, he abandoned the comparative politics of classical political science. While Aristotle argued that all democratic regimes were oriented by equality, he maintained that different institutional arrangements result in distinctive types of democracy. Because political institutions are consequential, classical political science holds that we can exercise practical judgment to determine the comparative justice of constitutions, political opinions, and actions. It is unlikely that Aristotle would have had any difficulty judging an AngloAmerican pax as closer to justice than the alternative. Or see Céline’s politics for what they were.

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Similarly, though a classical political scientist may have agreed with Grant that Cold War America was an empire like the Soviet Union or Communist China, upon reflecting on the Great Purge, the Holodomor, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Gulag, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, can we claim they were merely rival empires? Was being in the American “orbit” equivalent to being in the Soviet? Despite the injustices committed by the American government at home and abroad, Western liberal democracy was and is a comparatively just regime. Grant’s “technological determinism” has no place for this form of political analysis. As Andrew Potter notes, by adopting the thesis of technological determinism, Grant is prevented from taking political institutions and practices seriously.51 For if the underlying logic of technology ultimately shapes the character of the political, then differences between liberal capitalism and totalitarianism become epiphenomenal. Grant, therefore, offered no sustained reflection on the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the institutional arrangements found in various liberal societies. Grant concluded that classical political science was outmoded in the age of technology, and he seems to have been unable to distinguish between better and worse regimes. His contemporaries retained such a capacity. Grant was either unwilling or incapable of doing so.

Conclusion The political consequences of Grant’s collapsing liberal democratic and communist regimes into variants of the UHS now become clear. Reflecting on her teacher, Janet Ajzenstat writes that while Grant will be remembered for teaching us to love Canada, his political teaching was fundamentally deficient. For Ajzenstat, Grant depicted “Canada’s future as a dreary round of consumerism and pettiness in an environment degraded by the greed and ambition of industrialists” and that “he taught us to disdain liberal democracy and offered nothing in its place.”52 Grant offered nothing in its place because his focus on the problem of global technology blinded him from seeing that while modern regimes may share traits in common and can be grouped in contrast to ancient regimes, their practical differences do matter. In his introductory remarks for the 1969 George C. Nowlan Lectures at Acadia University on “The Practice of Politics,” Grant distinguished the approach of

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Aristotle and Nietzsche. “Aristotle, starting from trust and confidence, speaks the restrained language of practical wisdom. Nietzsche, starting from anguish and chaos, speaks in the unforgettable but unrestrained language of tragedy.”53 Despite his admiration for Aristotle, the lack of political prudence demonstrated in Grant’s reflections on the contest between liberal democracy and totalitarianism demonstrates that Grant more closely embodied the crisis rhetoric of Nietzsche than the practical wisdom of Aristotle, which ultimately caused Grant to adopt frankly irresponsible political positions. What can we, citizens of the twenty-first century, learn from Grant’s encounter with totalitarianism? Though the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union are more than thirty years in the past, the dangers of technology have become even more apparent than they were in Grant’s lifetime. Today liberal democratic regimes find themselves assailed by internal critics of the Left and Right who view them as corrupt systems of power and by external antagonists who view them as corrosive of virtue. But the political alternatives we find ourselves with are the same as those faced by the political leaders and thinkers in the twentieth century. We can either strive to preserve the liberal democratic order against the forces of despotism arrayed against it or not. In such a situation, recalling that Canada’s greatest political philosopher at times fell victim to political myopia by dismissing the importance of practical political questions reminds us of the necessity of recapturing the central task of political science: differentiating between better and worse in light of the good.

Notes 1. George Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1969), 63. 2. Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 52. 3. See Michael Allen Gillespie, “George Grant and the Tradition of Political Philosophy,” in By Loving Our Own, ed. Peter C. Emberley (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1990), 126 and Waller R. Newell, “A Fruitful Disagreement: The Philosophical Encounter between George P. Grant and Leo Strauss,” in Leo Strauss and Contemporary Thought: Reading Outside the Lines, ed.

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

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Jeffrey A Bernstein and Jade Larissa Schiff (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), 161–186. For a comparison of Grant’s interpretation of the American regime with Strauss’s and Voegelin’s, see Newell, “A Fruitful Disagreement,” and Barry Cooper and John von Heyking, “A Cow is Just a Cow: George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States,” voe glinview.com, Feb 2009. It should be observed that their defence of modern liberal democracy rests on what they view to be its perpetuation of elements of classical thought. Arendt considered the American Founding to have constituted a public realm, Voegelin believed the United States to have preserved the Christian-classical heritage, Löwith discerneds the heritage of “Old Europe” in the modern West, while Strauss interpreted liberal democracy, and the English-speaking democracies especially, to derive the source of their strength from resting on philosophical foundations closer to classical political philosophy than regimes originating in modernity’s second and third “waves.”. Scott Staring, “‘Not Heaven-Endowed to Run the World’: The British Empire in the Early Thought of George Grant,” Journal of Canadian Studies 45:1 (2011), 33–57. Grant, “From Roosevelt to LBJ,” in Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 3: 1960–1969, ed. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 466. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 67. Gad Horowitz, “Tories, Socialists, and the Demise of Canada,” Canadian Dimension (1965), 12–15; Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1985); Michael Byers, Intent for a Nation—What Is Canada For? A Relentlessly Optimistic Manifesto for Canada’s Role in the World (Toronto: Douglas and MacIntyre, 2007); and Michael Ignatieff, True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2009), 150. As Hugh Forbes rightly points out, while Grant’s line about the impossibility of conservatism is regularly quoted, his statement that socialism is “essentially conservative” is often overlooked. H.D. Forbes, George Grant: A Guide to His Thought (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007), 63. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 54.

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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Grant, Lament for a Nation, 59. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 54. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 54–55. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 55. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 56. Also compare Grant’s EnglishSpeaking Justice with John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 58. H.D. Forbes, George Grant: A Guide to His Thought, 59–63. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 59. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 61. Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1998), 58. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 62. Forbes, George Grant: A Guide to His Thought, 63–66. Grant, Technology and Empire, 30. Grant, Technology and Empire, 30–31. Grant, Technology and Empire, 30. Grant, English-Speaking Justice, 4–11; Forbes, George Grant: A Guide to His Thought, 46–47. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 52. Grant, English-Speaking Justice, 85–86. Newell, “A Fruitful Disagreement,” 182. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 64. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 69, 74, 71. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 65–67; “American-Soviet Disarmament,” in Collected Works of George Grant, Volume III 1960–1969, ed. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005), 213. See Grant, Lament for Nation, 35, 45–47, 50, 61, 71; Technology and Empire, 70–71. Grant, Technology and Empire, 33. Newell, “A Fruitful Disagreement,” 162. Max Weber, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 129. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 62. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 65, 62. Grant, Lament for a Nation, 9. Newell, “A Fruitful Disagreement,” 173. Staring, “‘Not Heaven-Endowed to Run the World’,” 33–57. Staring points out that the texts often cited for proof of Grant’s

15

42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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attachment to the British Empire originate from the period when Grant only briefly hoped that a reorganized British Empire and Commonwealth could serve as a counterbalance between the United States and the Soviet Union. A hope that Grant would soon abandon. Grant, Selected Letters, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 95. Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 107. Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 26:3 (1999), 353–378. Grant, Collected Works of George Grant, Volume I 1933–1950, ed. Arthur Davis and Peter C. Emberley (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000), 104. Grant, Selected Letters, 129. Grant, “George Grant and Religion,” in Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4: 1970–1988, ed. Arthur Davis, Henry Roper, and Sheila Grant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, 755; “An Interview with George Grant,” Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4, 575. Grant, “Céline’s Trilogy,” in Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4, 464. Grant, “Céline’s Trilogy,” 443. Grant, “Céline: Art and Politics,” in Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4, 467. Andrew Potter, “Introduction to the 40th Anniversary Edition,” in George Grant, Lament for a Nation, li–liii. Janet Ajzenstat, The Once and Future Canadian Democracy: An Essay in Canadian Political Thought (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 109–11. Grant, “The Practice of Politics and Thought about Politics: The George C. Nowlan Lectures,” in Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 3: 1960–1969, 604.

Index

A abortion, 20, 24, 53, 123, 207, 208, 210, 259, 260, 263 Adams, John, 81 Adams, Samuel, 77 Alighieri, Dante, 53 Althusser, Louis, 101 America, United States of, 5, 20, 22, 23, 59, 74–77, 79–81, 83–89, 159, 162, 163, 165, 168, 182, 190, 208, 218, 230, 245, 254, 276, 280, 282, 283 Anabaptist, 97. See also Mennonites Anaximander, 116 Anglican, Anglicanism, 24, 76, 107–109, 152, 168, 254, 263 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 143, 252, 261 aristocracy, 20, 26, 27, 243 Aristotle, Aristotelianism, 36, 40, 81, 83, 122, 246, 253, 282, 284 Athanasiadis, Harris, 12, 21, 31, 33 Athens, 77, 107, 245

attachment, 5, 10, 106, 107, 123, 167, 170, 171, 173–175, 189 Augustine, Augustinian, 36, 39, 40, 44 authoritarianism, 11, 200, 201, 235, 237, 242, 263 authority, 18, 27, 41, 53, 56, 57, 60, 104, 118, 119, 145, 181, 184, 187, 239, 241, 255, 259, 277 autonomy, 6, 45, 63, 240, 277

B Bacon, Francis, 253 Bagehot, Walter, 80, 230 beauty, the beautiful, 38, 42–44, 47, 122, 130 becoming, 21, 54, 59, 119, 204, 236, 256 being, 2, 6, 7, 25–28, 36–39, 41–43, 46, 47, 56, 59, 61, 62, 74, 84, 86, 97, 100, 103, 106, 109, 118, 119, 121, 126–129, 148, 162,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Chamberlain (ed.), Reading George Grant in the 21st Century, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44889-8

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290

INDEX

171, 180, 187, 222, 236, 246, 256, 261, 272, 280, 283 Benoist, Alain de, 116 Bhagavad-Gita, 35 Bible, 25, 28, 86, 104, 254, 259 Brexit, 103 Britain, 9, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25–28, 54, 75, 76, 79, 87, 142, 148, 149, 161, 166, 180, 281 Buddhist, Buddhism, 46 Burke, Edmund, 8, 9, 18–21, 25–29, 76, 77, 82, 83, 102, 103, 107, 108 business, 23, 24, 28, 79, 99 C Calvinism, 254 Canada, 2–5, 9, 10, 18, 20–23, 47, 52–54, 75, 80, 82, 86, 87, 89, 98, 99, 101, 109, 141, 142, 148–152, 159–162, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172–175, 188, 190, 219, 246, 247, 274, 278, 283, 284 capitalism, 21, 22, 52, 75, 83, 99, 153, 163–166, 168, 186, 207, 208, 239, 272, 274–276, 279, 281, 283 Catholic, Catholicism, 18, 19, 24, 27, 76, 80, 82, 84, 107, 108, 123, 153, 162, 172, 254 Cayley, David, 46, 49, 197, 207, 216 CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 63, 96, 151 CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation), 22, 98, 99, 206 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 44, 282 certainty, 119, 259 chance, 59, 129, 146, 201, 220, 253, 259, 260 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 151, 172

Choice Chomsky, Noam, 108 Christ Christianity, 19, 20, 22–24, 27, 39, 44, 46, 67, 75–77, 80, 116, 120, 122, 123, 127–129, 131, 223–226, 276 Christian Platonism, 40, 147, 153, 227 Church, 18, 27, 76, 77, 84, 107, 119, 122, 123, 225, 263, 264 Churchill, Winston, 227, 273, 279–281 citizenship, 27, 169 City, 26, 224 civilization, 10, 21, 63, 116, 120, 121, 130, 144, 152, 161, 163, 165, 167–171, 173–175, 253, 261, 271, 281 class, 26, 59, 98, 106, 164, 183, 185, 186, 190, 207, 258, 274 Coleridge, Samuel, 96 colonialism, 18, 19, 26 Colville, Alex, 110 common good, 10, 75, 163, 184, 188, 218, 272, 276 Commonwealth, 18, 21, 22, 25, 103, 150 Communism, 52, 65, 83, 100, 126, 201, 271–273, 279, 280, 282 community, 10, 52, 103, 105, 147, 170, 182–185, 189, 237, 239, 244, 247, 259, 274, 276 Confederation, 22, 160, 174 consent, 8, 37, 38, 43, 44, 47, 167, 219, 240, 277 conservatism, 2, 3, 6, 9, 10, 19–23, 29, 75–83, 85, 88, 89, 95, 96, 98, 100, 102, 103, 105, 110, 143, 147, 148, 160, 161, 165, 166, 219, 221, 222, 276–278

INDEX

Constitution, constitutionalism, 10, 26, 53, 84, 85, 87, 89, 150, 152, 172, 219, 221, 227, 229, 279, 282 consumerism, 182, 283 consumption, 20, 182, 241 contemplation, 38, 39, 45, 46, 147, 152, 205, 253, 254 Continentalism, 141, 161, 163–165 Contractarianism convenience, 164, 187, 206, 207, 209, 211, 229, 252, 275 Cooper, Barry, 4 Corbyn, Jeremy, 187 Coronavirus corporations, 182, 186, 205, 208, 209, 276 COVID-19, 11, 252, 261–263 Cranmer, Thomas, 143 Creighton, Donald, 19, 28, 149, 150 Cromwell, Oliver, 57, 278 Cross, the Crown, Crown-in-Parliament, 75, 222 culture, 2, 17, 22, 23, 29, 52, 64, 75, 78, 79, 100, 131, 149–153, 162, 163, 172, 173, 189, 190, 237, 245, 276, 279 custom, 19, 20, 79, 167, 244, 248 D Darwin, Charles, 80 Davis, Arthur, 1–3 death, 2–4, 6, 7, 123, 128, 142, 149, 166, 175, 229, 258, 262–264 decadence, 23 de Gaulle, Charles, 10, 218, 227–229, 278 democracy, 8, 10, 11, 22, 23, 26, 28, 59, 61, 79, 83, 125, 150, 151, 163, 199–205, 210, 212, 245, 271–273, 278–280, 282–284 Deneen, Patrick, 89

291

Deprival, intimations of, 38, 44, 46, 129–131, 246 Derrida, Jacques, 108, 109 despair, 25, 186, 264 despotism, 18, 273, 279, 284 destiny Diefenbaker, John, 18, 22, 23, 67, 98, 99, 149, 152, 161, 165, 271, 278 discrimination, 28, 60 Disraeli, Benjamin, 76, 80, 106 diverse, diversity, 20, 59–61, 143, 172 divinity domination, 21, 26, 169, 236, 242 Doull, James, 107 Dugin, Aleksandr, 116, 126

E economy, 25, 62, 83, 98, 103, 148, 183, 188 education, 3–5, 61, 62, 64, 75, 76, 78, 79, 86, 100, 184 elites, 24, 61, 172, 180, 218, 259 Ellul, Jacques, 56, 63, 67, 252 Emberley, Peter C., 3, 54, 55 empire, 4, 5, 8, 21, 23, 26, 52, 54, 64, 75, 79, 82, 97, 149, 150, 153, 159, 165–169, 208, 210, 212, 224, 229, 230, 242, 272, 273, 278–280, 282 England, English, 80, 100, 101, 107, 281 English-Speaking Justice (George Grant), 36, 46, 64, 65, 200, 203, 205, 207, 208, 210, 238, 276 Enlightenment, 6, 81, 97, 205, 246 environment, 6, 110, 143, 244, 247, 283 epistemology equality, 2, 26, 27, 58, 60, 104, 153, 164, 200–202, 204–209, 211,

292

INDEX

236, 237, 239, 242, 260, 277, 282 eternity, 8, 36, 37, 39, 40, 66, 107, 117, 121, 122, 127, 129, 225 ethics, 129, 131, 225, 235, 236, 238, 243–246 ethno-nationalism Europe, 67, 102, 166, 281, 282 Euthanasia evil, 42, 63, 122, 126, 169, 222, 252 excellence, 3, 55, 146, 258, 259 existence, 7, 27, 47, 58, 79, 118, 124, 147, 165, 173, 181, 184, 185, 243, 258, 282 experts, 8, 73 exploitation, 21

F failure, 11, 23, 54, 57, 86, 109, 142, 228, 263, 274, 275 faith, 8, 35, 37, 40, 46, 59, 62, 78, 122, 123, 128, 131, 146, 219, 220, 235–237, 240, 246, 253, 254, 276, 277 family, 18, 22, 23, 26, 52, 77, 88, 101, 102, 144, 169, 170, 183, 185, 189, 262 far-right, 9, 116, 120, 131, 228, 245 Farthing, John, 150 Fascism, 126, 201 fate, 10, 37, 39, 45, 47, 116, 127, 131, 142, 148, 203, 206, 211, 229, 264 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 255 Forbes, H.D., 8, 21, 51, 276 force, 6, 22, 53, 58, 62, 81, 86, 119, 121, 127, 128, 130, 160, 161, 163–166, 168, 173, 175, 184, 189, 208, 210, 228, 238, 240, 260, 278, 282 Foucault, Michel, 101, 108, 109

France, 18, 27, 75, 80, 116, 168, 227, 278 Freedom, 2, 6, 8, 18, 22, 25–29, 37, 38, 44–46, 53, 58, 74, 77, 84, 97, 102, 103, 106, 107, 117, 128, 129, 143, 145, 147, 162, 164, 179–181, 184–187, 199, 202, 205, 209, 220, 222, 236, 237, 242, 243, 245, 253, 255, 259, 260, 275, 276, 278, 279 French-Canadians Fukuyama, Francis, 4, 52, 58, 103, 201, 202, 204 fundamentalism, 32

G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 6–8 genocide, 190, 219 Germany, 79, 169, 272, 281, 282 globalism, globalist, 6, 8, 64, 237 globalization, 2, 5, 8, 10, 131 God, 6, 24, 37–39, 42, 43, 78, 86, 97, 116–122, 124–126, 128, 130, 131, 253, 281 Good, the, 10, 27, 38, 42–46, 84, 116, 117, 121–124, 126, 128–131, 143–145, 147, 152, 154, 169, 170, 181, 219, 222, 226, 236, 238, 241, 243, 275, 284 Gospels government, 6, 10, 18, 20, 22–27, 53, 60, 83, 84, 88, 162, 183, 188, 209, 219, 222, 228–230, 252, 262, 263, 276, 283 Gramsci, Antonio, 101 Grant, Sheila (wife of George Grant), 246 Greeks, 24, 124, 129

INDEX

H Habermas, Jürgen, 101 Hayek, Friedrich, 181, 184 health, 11, 52, 209, 212, 258, 261, 262 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 36, 40, 55–58, 65, 102–107, 201–203, 210 hegemony, 168, 175, 273, 278, 280 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 8, 9, 62, 64, 66, 67, 107, 115–121, 123–131, 259, 277, 280, 282 hermeneutics, 6, 7, 66 hierarchy, 104, 262 historicism, 39, 40, 85, 117, 131, 239 history, 2, 4, 8, 18, 20, 21, 28, 29, 36, 39, 40, 52, 53, 57, 58, 60, 62, 66, 85, 96, 97, 100, 103, 106, 116, 118, 119, 123, 149, 151, 165, 168, 173, 200–202, 204, 223, 224, 239, 245, 262 Hitler, Adolf, 125, 281 Hobbes, Thomas, 56, 74, 81, 85, 102, 242, 275 Hobsbawm, Eric, 101 Hölderlin, Frederich, 124, 125 Holocaust, 123 homogeneity hope, 3, 5, 10, 23, 40, 46, 55, 86, 87, 90, 109, 125, 127, 130, 149, 161, 165, 171, 173, 175, 199, 207, 218–220, 223, 226 Horowitz, Gad, 98, 99, 104, 163, 171 human, humanity, 3, 7, 8, 11, 18, 21, 23, 24, 28, 29, 37, 39, 46, 53, 57, 58, 60, 74, 83, 97, 107, 118, 121, 124, 125, 128, 130, 144, 146, 152, 163, 167, 169, 175, 182, 201, 204, 205, 236, 239, 241, 244, 259, 274, 278 Hume, David, 80

293

Huntington, Samuel, 108, 200–202, 204, 210 Huxley, Aldous, 75

I idealism, 5, 23, 63, 87, 240 ideology, 9, 22, 25, 97–99, 101, 102, 110, 126, 145, 152, 164, 218, 236, 237, 245, 275, 277 Ignatieff, Michael, 9, 142, 148–153 illiberal imperialism, imperial, imperialist, 8, 9, 17–19, 21–23, 26–28, 59, 60, 75, 79, 87, 89, 99, 109, 123, 160, 165, 167, 169, 241, 242, 244, 279, 280 Incarnation India, 20, 26, 280 Indigenous peoples, 190 individualism, 18, 22, 29, 81, 147, 154, 163, 246, 278 inequality, 143, 185 injustice Innis, Harold, 20, 80 institutions, 20, 25, 52, 61, 80, 81, 142, 143, 146, 149, 151, 152, 160, 161, 166, 167, 172, 180, 184, 185, 187, 202, 203, 205, 209, 211, 219, 221, 227, 260, 280, 283 intellect, 109, 128, 253 intelligence, 8, 37, 38, 47, 122, 184 interdependence, 167 international, 6, 52, 53, 60, 104, 175, 184, 186–188, 245 interpretation Iraq, 241 Ireland, 18–20, 26, 27 Islam, 103, 109 Israel, 25

294

INDEX

J Jacobins, 27, 278 Jesus justice, 1, 20, 21, 27, 43, 44, 46, 53, 126–130, 167, 170, 183, 190, 206, 207, 210, 223, 248, 254, 257, 277, 282 K Kant, Immanuel, 53, 56, 58, 84, 87, 205, 236, 238–240 Kennedy, John F., 79, 98, 99, 280 Keynesianism, 187 Kirk, Russell, 8, 9, 75–82, 84–89 Knowledge, knowing, 24, 25, 36, 44, 45, 57, 59, 66, 77, 78, 86, 88, 121, 122, 143, 144, 205, 207, 226, 227, 241, 244, 254, 256 Kojéve, Alexandre, 71 L labour, 46, 181, 182, 186, 208, 254 laissez-faire, 28, 97 Lament for a Nation (George Grant), 4, 6, 22, 51, 54, 56, 65, 67, 75, 86, 99, 106, 143, 149, 159, 161, 190, 211, 246 language, 46, 53, 55, 63–65, 74, 78, 96, 98, 102, 121, 123, 124, 129, 150, 152, 183, 184, 190, 206, 282, 284 law, 18, 20–22, 27, 46, 53, 75, 87, 97, 106, 119, 144, 162, 209, 211, 212, 260, 262, 263, 273, 275 Leacock, Stephen, 99, 110 legitimacy, 200, 218, 219, 222, 227–229 liberalism, 8–10, 19, 21, 22, 25–29, 41, 52, 74–76, 79, 80, 82–85, 88, 89, 95, 97, 98, 100, 102,

103, 105, 107, 110, 123, 126, 145, 146, 153, 154, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 175, 180, 203, 205, 208, 219, 221, 222, 237, 241, 244, 245, 272–274, 276, 277, 279, 282 Liberal Party of Canada, 99 libertarianism, 29 liberty, 9, 22, 26, 27, 44, 77, 83, 85, 88, 97, 98, 102, 103, 106–108, 167, 207, 208, 219, 277 life, 3–5, 7, 8, 19, 20, 24–27, 44–46, 54, 74, 77, 84, 102, 116, 118, 125, 145, 147, 166, 169, 172, 175, 184, 208, 209, 223, 224, 237, 238, 244, 254, 257, 263, 278, 282 localism Locke, John, 22, 29, 56, 75, 79, 81, 82, 88, 96, 102, 103, 107, 108, 168, 205, 275, 277 London, 26, 100 love, 3, 8, 10, 37, 38, 43, 44, 47, 122, 127, 128, 131, 160, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 241, 246, 247, 283 Loyalists, 82, 88, 162, 168 Lukásc, György, 101 M MacDonald, John A., 106 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 85, 224 Macpherson, C.B., 5 Magna Carta, 25, 28 man, 6, 25, 39, 40, 44, 46, 52, 83, 84, 118, 120, 124, 125, 128, 164, 167, 169, 171, 180, 204, 207, 220, 238, 245, 255, 271, 275 Marcuse, Herbert, 23, 277 market, 22, 83, 98, 103, 165, 181, 182, 184–186, 188, 189

INDEX

Marxism, 52, 78, 97, 123, 164, 180, 272, 274, 275 Marx, Karl, 56, 65, 103, 165, 239, 274, 276 mastery, 8, 37, 47, 58, 128, 152, 166–168, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211, 220, 235, 236, 238, 242, 246, 247, 254, 263, 272, 275, 277, 280, 282 materialism, 24, 65, 123 McGill University, 103, 109 McIntyre, Alasdair, 154 McLuhan, Marshall, 20, 74 McMaster University, 109 meaning, 6, 7, 9, 36, 37, 43, 44, 65, 104, 117, 118, 120, 122, 130, 147, 185, 186, 221, 237, 254, 255, 262 media, 74, 78, 108, 205, 252, 263 Medical Assistance in Dying medicine, 257, 258, 260, 262–264 metaphysics, 39, 65, 116–122, 131, 146 Meynell, Robert, 5 Milbank, John, 108 Mill, John Stuart, 99 modernity, 1–3, 5–7, 10, 18, 19, 22, 24, 28, 29, 74, 79, 84, 85, 103, 115, 116, 119, 123, 125, 129, 131, 142, 144, 146, 147, 151–153, 163, 168, 200, 203–206, 209–211, 221, 224, 236, 237, 272, 274, 276, 277, 280 monarchy, 20, 27, 80, 243 money, 26 morality, 55, 63, 97, 131, 238, 256 Morton, W.L., 19, 28 Mouffe, Chantal, 191 Mulroney, Brian, 101 multiculturalism, 172, 237, 246 Multiversity, 43

295

myth, 185, 186, 246, 255 N Napoleon, Bonaparte, 57 nationalism, 3–6, 9, 20, 53, 54, 75, 142, 148, 152, 153, 159, 161, 162, 172–174, 180, 189, 191, 225, 246 natural law, 97, 144, 275 nature, 2, 3, 8, 18, 23, 47, 51, 58, 61, 76, 117, 118, 121, 130, 144, 161, 163, 167, 169, 171, 201, 205, 206, 220, 225, 236, 238, 240, 242, 243, 247, 254, 257, 259, 272, 276, 277, 280 Nazism, 125 NDP (New Democratic Party), 22, 98, 99 necessity, 5, 8, 36–43, 45, 46, 59, 123, 128, 152, 164, 238, 243, 254, 262, 284 neoconservatism, 79 neoliberalism, 10, 179–185, 187, 189 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 6, 18, 20, 36, 38–41, 86, 107, 119, 146, 204, 239, 244, 276, 284 nihilism, 9, 115, 117, 119, 122, 123, 125, 127, 131, 146, 147, 152, 281 North America, 4, 22, 23, 142, 165, 168, 218, 280 nostalgia, 9, 142, 148, 150, 151, 189 nuclear weapons, 60 O Oakeshott, Michael, 143 O’Donovan, Joan, 4, 5, 210, 255 oligarchy, 26, 243 Oman, John, 240 ontology, 6, 7, 117, 121, 126, 206, 226, 243

296

INDEX

optimism, 86, 89, 169, 175, 225 order, 2, 5–7, 21, 22, 45, 53, 66, 78, 80, 83, 84, 88, 106, 123, 143, 145, 152, 164, 181, 182, 184, 188, 206, 208, 211, 225, 240, 247, 255, 275, 278, 282, 284 Orwell, George, 75 P pacifist, pacifism, 86 paleo-conservative, 23 Pandemic parliament, 152, 228 particularity, 7, 160, 175 partisan, partisanship, 2, 53, 61, 65 patriotism, 172, 173, 189 peace, 6, 52, 53, 204 Pearson, Lester B., 22, 52, 67, 98, 99, 149, 152, 166, 279, 280 perfection, 24, 78, 123, 127, 274 pessimism, 1, 76, 85, 144, 148, 161, 166, 225, 253, 264, 274 phenomenology, 84 philosophy, 2–5, 8, 20–22, 39, 40, 55, 62, 63, 65, 66, 77, 78, 81, 83, 87, 88, 97, 100, 102, 108, 116, 123, 124, 126, 130, 169, 175, 206, 207, 223, 235, 253, 259, 275, 278, 281 Philosophy in the Mass Age (George Grant), 96, 97, 210 Physician-Assisted Suicide, 259 Pinar, William, 5 Planinc, Zdravko, 35, 40, 42 Plato, Platonism, 9, 25, 37, 39–41, 43–45, 96, 106, 107, 118, 119, 122, 127, 143, 147, 240, 246 Podemos, 187 politics, 3, 4, 10, 20, 51, 52, 54–58, 64, 74, 77, 86, 100, 126, 131, 147, 163, 167, 170, 171, 173, 200, 205, 207, 211, 217, 220,

221, 226, 227, 245, 247, 262, 274, 277, 282, 283 Popper, Karl, 106 populism, 187–189 postmodern, postmodernism, 101, 104 poverty, 28, 62, 164 power, 6, 10, 21, 26, 27, 37, 47, 59, 60, 74, 78, 99, 120, 123, 124, 129, 183, 201, 228, 229, 263, 277 prejudice, 6, 7, 59, 98, 146, 165, 187, 243, 245 pre-Socratics, 118 progress, 23, 24, 52, 57, 62, 97, 119, 148, 152, 163–167, 201, 202, 207, 210, 220–222, 224, 244, 245, 260, 274, 275 Protestantism, 24, 120, 254 prudence, 19, 78, 80, 217–219, 221–223, 229, 252, 261, 284 Puritans, puritanism, 81, 86, 97, 99 Q Québec, 190 R race, racism, 28, 53, 60, 164, 189, 237 rational, rationalism Reagan, Ronald, 76, 101, 180 reason, 5, 7, 11, 27, 40, 41, 47, 55, 59, 80, 97, 119, 144, 146, 161, 167, 171–173, 188, 203, 205, 211, 224, 227, 228, 241, 243, 252, 256, 257 Red Toryism, 98, 160, 163, 165 regimes, 10, 203, 205, 217–219, 222, 227, 230, 241–243, 272, 273, 282–284 relativism, 243, 277

INDEX

religion, religious, religiosity, 3, 4, 7, 24, 55, 62, 64, 65, 77, 88, 97, 100, 109, 127, 206, 207, 224 Republican, republicanism, 98, 162, 228, 229 revelation reverence Revolution, 8, 10, 18–20, 25, 28, 78, 81–83, 159, 217–220, 222, 227, 230, 274, 276, 283 rhetoric, 23, 106, 186, 190, 242, 284 rights, 20, 21, 24, 25, 59, 60, 77, 127, 145, 150, 152, 167, 170, 187, 190, 207–209, 235, 245, 273, 277, 279 Roman Catholicism, 24 rooted, rootedness, rootless, 6, 19, 108, 125, 152, 161, 170–175, 206, 247, 273 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 53, 56, 58, 79, 82, 87, 276 Russia, USSR, Soviet Union, 21, 52, 116, 180, 272, 278, 280–282, 284 S sacred, 58, 126 Said, Edward, 108–110 salvation, 60, 86, 119 Santayana, George, 76, 77 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 101 Saul, John Ralston, 190 scholars, scholarship, 19, 20, 65, 75, 180, 200–204 science, 2, 40, 52, 56, 61, 64, 81, 86, 97, 116, 121, 127, 145, 146, 152, 203, 204, 209, 224, 242, 244, 253, 254, 257, 260, 282–284 Scruton, Roger, 9, 95, 96, 100–105, 108, 110, 171 secularism, 22, 24, 282

297

self-government, 20 self-preservation, 230, 245 sexuality, 23 Sibley, Robert, 1, 5 skepticism, 143, 144 slavery, 20, 26 Smith, Adam, 80, 81, 96, 102, 103, 107, 108 Social Contract Theory, 206 socialism, 22, 23, 65, 87, 100, 125, 126, 163, 165, 187, 218, 273–277, 282 society, 17, 18, 23, 25, 28, 29, 52, 55, 58, 59, 62, 66, 75, 83, 86, 103, 104, 142, 143, 145, 146, 151, 153, 162–164, 168, 173, 183–186, 209, 221, 226, 229, 239, 244, 258–260, 262, 272, 275, 276, 280 Socrates, 42–45, 107, 127, 226, 240, 241 sovereignty, 185, 187, 229, 255, 274, 278 Soviet Union, 21, 52, 180, 272, 278, 280 Spinoza, Benedict, 56 spiritual State, the, 10, 60, 75, 84, 89, 97, 103, 105, 106, 146, 154, 160, 171, 179, 180, 183–185, 202, 206, 261, 279 stoicism, 258 Strauss, Leo, 20, 24, 52, 55–59, 61, 62, 64–66, 104, 106, 163, 169, 224, 225, 279, 281 subjectivism, 119, 120 subjects, 26, 65, 118, 119, 121, 238, 239, 247, 260 suffering, 38, 57, 127, 255, 256, 258, 261, 262, 282 Supreme Court, 85, 257 Swift, Jonathan, 78, 96

298

INDEX

T Tawney, Richard Henry, 97 Taylor, Charles, 5, 103, 106 techne, 84, 106, 117, 118, 124, 204 technique, 57, 60, 63, 78, 86, 146, 147, 152, 204, 220, 239, 252, 256, 277 technology, 2, 6, 8, 11, 20, 23, 24, 63, 64, 67, 74, 76, 78, 89, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 124, 127, 129–131, 142, 146, 160, 167, 175, 204, 211, 220, 221, 224, 230, 235, 237, 242, 247, 252, 253, 255, 256, 258, 259, 261, 262, 272, 277, 282, 284 Technology and Empire (George Grant), 23, 56, 63, 65, 104, 144, 276 Technology and Justice (George Grant), 63 teleology, telos, 80, 145, 146, 257, 275 Thatcher, Margaret, 101, 180 Theology, 21, 39–41, 67, 86, 97, 108, 240, 254 theory, 9, 57, 79, 97, 99, 102, 126, 145–147, 153, 205, 209, 211, 223, 277 thinking (thought), 2, 8, 11, 40, 44, 46, 55, 56, 62–66, 96, 97, 100, 101, 116, 119, 124, 125, 130, 163, 204, 205, 220–222, 238, 259, 264 Time as History (George Grant), 24, 36, 204 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 63, 88 Tory, Toryism, Tories, 6, 9, 26, 89, 99, 104, 108, 110, 143, 151, 152, 168 tory-touch thesis, 10, 160 totalitarianism, 11, 271–273, 276, 278–280, 283, 284

tradition, 3, 6, 18–20, 25, 28, 36, 37, 42, 43, 79, 80, 85, 87, 96–98, 122, 127, 143–145, 147, 149, 151, 163, 166, 168, 208, 219, 221, 222, 273, 278 transcendent, 2, 6, 37, 39, 45, 80, 116, 122, 131, 173, 174, 243, 245, 253 Trinity, the, 24 Trudeau, Pierre Elliot, 98, 101, 150, 152, 166 Trump, Donald, 187 twitter, 61 Tyranny, 104, 106, 163, 169, 187, 243, 260, 271, 272

U United Kingdom, 187, 263 United States of America, 245 Universal Homogenous State, 4, 5, 8, 10, 204, 272 University, Universities, 17, 47, 78, 205, 283 Utopia, 220

V vaccines, 252 values, 18, 19, 21, 22, 27, 28, 121, 125, 129, 130, 145, 204, 207, 236, 243, 262, 274, 275, 277 Vietnam War, 23, 99, 169, 207, 208, 210, 218, 271, 273, 279 violence, 21, 23, 28, 100, 147, 189, 220, 228, 229, 242, 258, 279 virtue, 9, 38, 46, 58, 78, 81, 83, 97, 165, 170, 171, 182, 217, 220, 244, 252, 253, 256, 284 Voegelin, Eric, 42, 272, 279 voluntarism, 253, 255

INDEX

W War, 23, 52, 64, 76, 79, 99, 166, 169, 180, 201, 208, 228, 272, 273, 279–281, 283 Weber, Max, 97, 146, 154, 279 Weil, Simone, 8, 9, 20, 37–47, 128, 129 West, the, 8, 46, 97, 108–110, 122, 126, 153, 162, 180, 219, 222, 229, 230, 279 Whiggism, 81 will, 2, 211, 236–238, 247, 255 will to power, 86 wisdom, 45, 46, 57, 59, 78, 163, 245, 284

299

women, 24, 78, 208, 275 world, 2, 5, 7–10, 21, 23, 29, 37, 39, 42–47, 53, 54, 56, 58–60, 64, 65, 74, 86, 87, 98, 102, 109, 117, 119–122, 126, 129, 142, 144, 146, 153, 163, 164, 167, 168, 171, 173, 180, 185, 186, 189, 201, 204, 205, 221, 222, 236, 238, 239, 243, 244, 252, 253, 256, 258, 275, 280, 282

X xenophobia Xenophon, 56, 57