George Grant was a familiar name to Canadians of all ages one and two generations ago – a political philosopher who was also a cultural star. A conservative political philosopher who was also on the CBC all the time. I first met him when I was a young assistant professor living in Ontario. Grant’s gruff curiosity and distrust of university sophists reminded me of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. As an undergraduate at UBC I had read Grant’s most famous book, Lament for a Nation, published in 1965.
The 21st century has cast Grant into obscurity, and that is unfortunate. That’s why I was pleased to hear that a group of (mostly young) conservatives have banded together to produce a book that aims to revive the study of Grant: Reading George Grant in the 21st Century.
This generally well-written – though academic – book aims to discover what present-day Canadian conservatives could learn from George Grant. It was edited by Tyler Chamberlain, a part-time instructor at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C. As with many of the contributors, Chamberlain is a recent PhD.
Grant was born into a distinguished Upper Canadian (i.e., Ontario) academic aristocracy connected to Upper Canada College, which long functioned as the shaping institution for Ontario’s (male) elite, and which Grant himself attended during the 1930s; to Queen’s University, which Grant also attended; and to the Rhodes Trust, which administers the famous Oxford scholarships of which George was a recipient.
For Grant – as for the contributors to this book – nationalism and conservatism were connected. It’s very important to note up front that “nationalism” only recently received its negative connotation in Canada. For many decades it was considered a generally praiseworthy sentiment aimed at bolstering Canadian independence by looking for points of distinction from the very similar culture of the United States.
Grant was under no illusions about the difficulty of such a task; in fact he was something of a pessimist. Canadians, he wrote, “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.” Or as he put it more pithily if cryptically in Lament: “The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada.” Canada’s failure explained the book’s title.
Grant’s nationalism greatly influenced (if not distorted) his political analysis. Lament, for example, defended late-1950s Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker not as a Western populist but as a pan-Canadian leader who stood up to U.S. President John Kennedy. Kennedy had pressured Canada to deploy Bomarc surface-to-air missiles armed with nuclear warheads to shoot down Soviet bombers that might come flying across the North Pole to attack North America (missiles of the day being too inaccurate to strike fast-flying aircraft directly).
Diefenbaker half-accommodated Kennedy: he accepted the missiles but refused the warheads, thus drastically reducing the Bomarc’s effectiveness. Grant lauded this decision which, in his mind, would cost “Dief” the 1963 election, when he was replaced by a Liberal, Lester Pearson, whom Grant knew and despised. Grant attributed Diefenbaker’s loss to what we nowadays call election interference.
The 1963 election also confirmed Grant’s view of the United States as the centre of liberalism and technology. Several of Reading George Grant in the 21st Century’s essays deal with Grant’s serious misgivings regarding the synthesis of the two, which Grant called “technological modernity.” These chapters are heavy going for readers unfamiliar with recent philosophical disputes centred on Martin Heidegger, Alexandre Kojève or Leo Strauss – none of whom are household familiars. The general drift, however, continued the argument of Lament.
In his later writings, Grant was particularly sensitive to the application of “technological modernity” to what we now call biopolitics. He would have seen through the government response to the COVID-19 event as a gross usurpation of power by Ottawa, the provinces and the municipalities. He was appalled by abortion and euthanasia as technologically mediated conveniences. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand what Grant would have thought about Bill C-7, now Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying law.
Grant was a rare combination of philosopher and theologian. His thinking reflected the experiences associated with philosophy, chiefly that of the Ancient Greek Plato and, despite his being by confession an Anglican, his own rather idiosyncratic Christian faith, which he described as an openness or receptivity to Divine truth. These are enormous topics, of course, and none of the commentators would claim to have provided an exhaustive account of Grant’s thinking on major questions implicit in philosophy and Christianity.
Only in the final chapter is there any serious criticism of Grant or his thinking. There Ryan McKinnell discusses Grant’s ethical “myopia” in seriously comparing American behaviour in Vietnam to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, or in charging that the New Left and the directors of General Motors “sail down the same [technologically modern] river in different boats.” According to McKinnell, Grant’s fixation on philosophy and theology blinded him to the practical realities of how things are done in politics. In my view this is not the whole story, but it is a large chunk of it.
The book redeems the authors’ intention, to be sure, but it also requires significant reflection by its readers. In that respect, it is faithful to its title and also to the implicit requirement that conservatives undertake the bother of thinking.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
Barry Cooper is a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
