Technology and Empire

On the conservative intellectual who improbably became an inspiration to Canada's left

“Unless we have our own national way, we will have the American way. If we bow prostrate before the culture of Hollywood; if in education we accept from the south the phoney precepts of so-called ‘progressive education’; if socially we welcome in our Granite Clubs the Babbitry of the middle west and the intolerance of the deep south; if economically we accept the uncontrolled individualism of American business and call it British freedom; if our entertainment criterion is Frank Sinatra and philosophically and religiously we accept the materialist claptrap from the USA — then we will in effect have given up those values that are essentially Canadian and we might as well become part of Leviathan. Morally and intellectually we will have become a colony of the republic and should therefore ask for admission to the union.” - George Grant

Last weekend, I had a feature in the Saturday Toronto Star about a sixty year-old book I expect plenty of the paper’s readers — and many here on Substack as well — have probably never heard of. Not long ago, however, George Grant and his Lament for a Nation: the Defeat of Canadian Nationalism were still widely remembered (though more or less completely unknown outside of Canada).

Grant (1918-1988) was a singular kind of academic and public intellectual whose work was incredibly influential on the Canadian left in the 1960s and 70s. He was also, albeit in a somewhat different sense than the word implies today, a conservative. Here, from my Star piece, is some background on his most famous work:

On March 27th, 1965, McClelland & Stewart published a short and eccentric book like no other ever written in Canada. Its author was George Parkin Grant, a cerebral, unassuming, and mostly unknown professor of religion at McMaster University. Its thesis was that Canada would inevitably be swallowed up by the United States and cease to exist as a sovereign nation. Its effect — aside from becoming an instant bestseller and turning its author into one of Canada’s leading public intellectuals — was instead to inspire a new generation of young nationalists to think seriously and urgently about the future of their country.

As its title made explicit, Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism was intended as a requiem rather than a prospectus. It offered no practical prescriptions for how Canada could avoid American absorption, nor any suggestion that a nationalist renaissance might be in the offing. But Grant’s fatalism did nothing to blunt the reception of his book, and instead of fostering resignation Lament ignited the imaginations of Canadians concerned about their country’s future like never before. “Lament for a Nation was the most important book I ever read in my life,” remarked the political economist James Laxer, who in 1969 helped found the influential left wing nationalist group known as The Waffle. “Here was a crazy old philosopher of religion at McMaster and he woke up half our generation. He was saying Canada was dead, and by saying it, he was creating the country.”

…In more ways than one, Lament for a Nation made for both an unlikely literary success and an improbable source of inspiration for the students and other sixties radicals to whom it quickly became a cherished text. Born in Toronto in 1918 and educated at both Upper Canada College and Oxford by way of a Rhodes Scholarship, Grant hailed from aristocratic roots and was a deeply committed Anglican. His idea of Canada was pre-modern, quintessentially British and, amid the progressive zeitgeist of the 1960s, the book was more a romantic elegy than a rousing call to action; less an affirmation of radical possibility than a philosophical indictment of the very notion of progress itself.

So what exactly was this book?

In a sense, Lament consisted of two related but somewhat disparate parts: the first, a chronicle of Progressive Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker’s undoing at the hands of Canada’s traditional elite; the second, a sweeping philosophical critique of technological modernity and liberalism. For Grant, the former had been made inevitable by the triumph of the latter. While the immediate catalyst for the fall of Diefenbaker’s government had been its refusal to allow the deployment of American nuclear warheads on Canadian soil this was, as he saw it, merely the tragic last stand of a society destined to be swallowed.

To quote from the piece again:

For Grant, Canada’s tragic destiny had been sealed long before the errors of the Diefenbaker government, arising instead (as he put it) from “the very character of the modern era” itself. Lament for a Nation thus attached to its thesis about the fate of Canada a much more far-reaching and philosophical argument about the destiny of human society.

The crux of Grant’s case was that human beings now lived in a technological society from which there was no possibility of escape. “Technology”, in his sense, was less a series of discrete instruments than an entirely new way of being that would inevitably flatten all nations and cultures, finally yielding what he called a “universal and homogeneous state.” Where Grant’s philosophy and his nationalism converged was in seeing the American experiment as the ultimate expression of this trajectory. In the brave new world that lay ahead, liberal individualism would triumph, markets would transform citizens into consumers, and the entire notion of community as human beings had known it would disappear. Canada, by virtue of its close proximity to the US leviathan, was merely the first among all societies bound to the same tragic and — as he saw it — unavoidable fate.

If you’re unfamiliar with Grant, you might be wondering what exactly it was about this book that proved so attractive to radical students and others on Canada’s left during the 1960s. One reason was that Lament contained searing denunciations of profit and corporate enterprise such as this one:

“Capitalism is, after all, a way of life based on the principle that the most important activity is profit-making. That activity led the wealthy in the direction of continentalism. They lost nothing essential to the principle of their lives in losing their country. It is this very fact that has made capitalism the great solvent of all tradition in the modern era. When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country. This is why liberalism is the perfect ideology for capitalism. It demolishes those taboos that restrain expansion. Even the finest talk about internationalism opens markets for the powerful.”

Grant was also fiercely critical of the Vietnam War and spoke regularly at antiwar demonstrations. His critique of liberalism also led quite naturally to a critique of the corporatist society that was clearly in line with the New Left’s. As he declared at one Toronto teach-in during the 1960s: “I find myself in agreement with the account the leaders of this movement give of the inhumanity of the institutions of North America. How can a conservative not feel sympathy with their outrage against the emptiness and dehumanization that this society produces?”

In light of all this, Grant’s “conservatism” is an interesting thing to unpack. It was, fundamentally, the expression of a non-market localism which found its moral centre in Christian belief and its political ideas from ancient philosophy. In the modern sense of the term, Grant’s most obviously conservative attitude was his opposition to abortion. But, besides this, his conservatism largely expressed itself in opposition to the American empire, a reverence for public institutions and public goods, and a personal disposition that valued the bonds of thick community — whether that of 19th century Canada or the ancient Greek polis — to liberal cosmopolitanism.

This is, perhaps all-too fittingly, a synthesis that could only have appeared in a mid-20th century Canada caught between the Anglo-French identity of its past and the dizzying ascendence of an altogether new species of global empire. In the 1960s, these competing impulses combined to form a distinctly left wing kind of nationalism that was egalitarian, pro-multicultural, anti-imperialist, and radically democratic. Perhaps my favourite review of Lament for a Nation was published in May 1965 by the great political scientist and labour historian Gad Horowitz in the pages of Canadian Dimension. Among other things, I find this a wonderfully succinct description of the Grant’s guiding, if also somewhat disparate, impulses:

“George Grant is a Tory, a scion of the Loyalists. The nation he laments is the British-Ontarian nation which is now being absorbed into the culture of Michigan and New York. The dying values he mourns are the values of stability, order, [and] tradition…George Grant is also a socialist, a radical critic of the power elite of corporate capitalism, who would replace this society of competition and inequality with the co-operative commonwealth.”

In any case, Grant’s work still gives us much to think about. I have been trying for some years now— it must be said without much success — to introduce it to others as a compelling resource for thinking about liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, and so much else. If you’ve gotten this far, I recommend the wonderful 1986 audio series on Grant produced by the CBC’s David Cayley, which he’s made freely available on his personal blog. I also recommend Lament for a Nation, which makes for a remarkable read even if you’re unfamiliar with the machinations of Canadian politics in the early 1960s.

Finally, while I promise I won’t make a habit of using this Substack to write meta commentaries on my work elsewhere, I do hope you’ll read my Star piece on Grant in full.