A.S. DUFF is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He has recently written on Stanley Rosen’s critique of Leo Strauss in the Review of Metaphysics
George Grant: A Guide to his Thought by Hugh Donald Forbes
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007)
George Grant is best known as a Canadian
nationalist, as a conservative of
such odd coloring that he welcomed the
formation of a federal socialist party in the
1960s and refused to set foot in the United
States during its prosecution of the Vietnam
War. He was a conservative who, in
his best known book, Lament for a Nation,
spoke of “the impossibility of conservatism”
entailing “the impossibility of Canada.”
In Canada he was the inadvertent
progenitor of a revived nationalism, often
left-wing, typically anti-American. In the
United States, insofar as he is known at
all it is for his philosophical opposition to
abortion, expressed in his later writings.
Such evidently retrograde positions are not
known to sit well with the soi disant nationalists
of Canadian progressivism, and give a
bad odor to the pretensions of Red Toryism,
where that recondite term is now usually
understood to refer to someone socially
left but economically right. Yet the friend
of Sixties radicals likewise seems to be no
friend of American conservatives.
It is rare that a book so fittingly inhabits
its title as H. D. Forbes’s George Grant: A
Guide to his Thought. As a good guide will
do, it shows the way through Grant’s work,
alerting the reader to what is interesting,
providing judicious warnings where necessary,
correcting mistaken apprehensions
of short-cuts, giving some sense of the
nearby terrain. It points the reader away
from the well-beaten paths of Grant the
nationalist, Grant the anti-American, to
more promising clearings: Grant the student
of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Grant
the friend and critic of Leo Strauss, Grant
the Christian follower of Simone Weil.
Beyond these clearings, longer and broader
vistas emerge: the character of the disappearing
local as the given route to the universal;
the problem of practicing Christian
charity and ancient contemplation in a
world altogether determined by modern
technology; the inconceivability of a politics
that would respond to such problems.
Forbes is hardly the first to understand
Grant in this context, but there is none
better. The book is the work of a mature
scholar who wears his impressive learning
very lightly. One is left with the sense that
this guide has not taken the reader all of
the way, but rather shown how one might
continue forward—markers having been
left for later retracing—into lands hoped
for, if not quite promised.
The structure and content of the book
point to the challenge of understanding the
coherency of Grant’s very unusual views.
The book ascends briskly from Grant’s
politics to his philosophical thought, then
to his highly unorthodox understanding of
Christianity. We are left to navigate our
own descent into more familiar, thicker
air, returning ourselves to practical questions
and concerns.
It is almost a necessity when writing
about Grant to begin with politics, as Forbes
does. Forbes goes very far in correcting the
widespread view that Grant is primarily a
Canadian nationalist, and thus better illuminates
the true character of his localism.
Grant wrote Lament for a Nation in response
to what to many seems like a minor event
in Canadian history. In 1963, the minority
Conservative government of John Diefenbaker
fell on a vote of non-confidence
when the opposition parties, the Liberals
and the socialist New Democratic Party
(NDP), voted to bring it down on the question
of whether American nuclear warheads
should be stationed in Canada. Diefenbaker
and his foreign minister, Greene, objected
to the American plan, but were opposed by
an unusual array of bedfellows from their
own Conservative defense minister to John
F. Kennedy, and, in a spasm of electoral
bloodthirstiness, the NDP. Grant, who
until this point professed himself a socialist,
cast Diefenbaker and Greene as the heroes
of the book. He thought the failure of the
government—they were turned out in the
Liberals’ subsequent electoral victory under
internationalist demigod Lester B. Pearson—
and their abandonment by the leading
classes of Canadian society on such an
elementary matter of sovereignty meant the
death of Canada. Not, to be clear, foretold
the death of Canada. No: marked it as an
event that had already happened. Forbes
isolates as few others have the strangeness of
Grant’s claim.
Forbes shrewdly penetrates and elegantly
articulates the inner logic of Grant’s
argument. In the process he saves Grant
from the accusation of mere Tory crankiness
or pessimism. Grant claims that the
death of Canada is not strictly attributable
to the economic or military bullying of
the United States, but rather, in Grant’s
obscure terms, to fate or necessity, more
particularly, to a “tendency of thought.”
According to Grant, Canada has passed
because in the midst of our late-modern
confusion, it has become impossible to
think clearly of an independent Canada.
Grant is not a historicist, but he stresses
those areas of political life where our confused
thinking is all but totally determined
by our times. In the present age, Grant
thinks that all latitude for genuine politics
and statesmanship has been lost because
it has become nearly impossible to think
outside of our pre-given, liberal, progressive
categories. He traces the source of this
fated thought to the shared Lockean philosophical
and Calvinist theological opinions
of North America’s early European
settlers and their experience of conquering
the untamed wilds of North America.
Grant attributes to this formative encounter
with nature as chaos in need of mastering
the uniquely North American success
of “technology.” As a consequence, Grant
finds the modern juggernaut of technology,
most advanced in North America,
to be now shaping nearly every aspect of
human life, including our politics, our religion,
and our thought. The fate of Canada
was to attempt to be a conservative,
ordered, restrained society while sharing a
continent with the dynamic “spearhead of
modernity.” As Forbes makes clear, Grant
was chilled by the apparently very great
difficulty, amidst the fate of modern technology,
of thinking the truth about justice
or charity. The “tendency of thought” that
has made it impossible to think of Canada
as an independent political entity is the
same that occludes our intimations of justice,
charity, and contemplation.
It is unfortunate that the term technology
conjures cybernetic bogeymen. What
Grant means is the widespread and virtually
inescapable disposition that man’s
reason operates by summoning nature
before it as a set of objects and demanding
of them their reasons. According to such
a view, reason is not man’s apprehension
of the order of eternity; it is, rather, an
instrument of the will. Reason works on
the project of freeing man from the bondage
of nature by mastering and subduing
it. It is thus in the service of freedom,
and freedom is seen to be the essence of
humanity. Grant fears that this concept of
freedom—at work in the heart of modernity—
is substantially indistinguishable
from mastery: freedom is power for desire
satisfaction, fi nally unregulated by God or
nature. Grant eventually comes to see the
society of progress for which such a view
is the foundation to be characterized by a
great mass whose existence consists in ever
greater satisfaction of their largely vulgar
desires and an elite few whose liberty is
disposed of in projects of creative willing
for will’s sake, sharing in “the plush patina
of hectic subjectivity lived out in the iron
maiden of an objectified world inhabited
by increasingly objectifiable beings.”1
This diagnosis sounds Nietzschean
because it is. Forbes’s book is superior for
his grasp of the thinkers who most moved
Grant. Forbes treats Grant’s relationship to
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss in the
longest section of the book, which is on philosophy.
As should already be clear, Grant
largely accepts the Heideggerean diagnosis
of technology and reads Nietzsche as the
consummate description thereof. Both
Strauss and Grant were philosophers who
saw the best response to the present crisis to
be a new or revived confrontation between
reason and revelation. Forbes’s approach to
this particularly dense thicket is enigmatic
and suggestive, but no more than suggestive.
He nonetheless makes it sufficiently
clear that Grant did not go far with Strauss
beyond the latter’s endorsement of ancient
thought over that of the moderns.
Forbes’s book moves next to its final
and highest peak, religion, where the
implicit contrast with Strauss is sharpened.
That Strauss saw the particulars of
the confrontation between philosophy
and revelation in terms that recalled Judaism
and Grant Christianity is the obvious
starting point. Unlike Strauss, Grant
thought the Heideggerean claims about
technology were both persuasive and catastrophic.
Like Heidegger, Grant came to
accept the darkening of the world as the
necessary route through the Great Deprival
characterized by the technological
civilization. Grant, however, thought the
origins of this were in Western Christianity,
not in Plato or Christianity as such.
Forbes leaves this path of Grant’s thought
virtually undisturbed. Grant’s step beyond
or away from Heidegger is to see intimations
of beauty in this deprival, visible, so
to speak, as shadows in the darkness. He
once called this “bringing the darkness
into light as darkness.” These intimations
of the universal are primarily accessible
through one’s own particular tradition.
He came to understand them as evidence
of the Christian truth, anticipated by
Plato, of the perfection of the good that
is beyond being. Here Grant’s guide was
neither Heidegger nor Strauss, but Simone
Weil. Grant was struck by Simone Weil’s
apprehension of the mystery of God’s perfection
and the misery of human suffering.
Through Weil’s highly unusual, indeed
unorthodox, Christianity, Grant was able
to read Heidegger as the great phenomenologist
of the world shorn from God.
Through Weil, Grant retained a distinctly
moral sense of the suffering and potentiality
for evil constitutive of the technological
world. Forbes’s guide ends with several
probing comments on Grant’s extremely
enigmatic religious thought. He does not
investigate the most unusual elements of
Weil’s understanding of Christianity nor
Grant’s related claims to be interested in
what he sometimes called the Hindu wing
of Christianity.
This aspect of Grant’s work takes him
far from anything that could be called a
normal approach to politics. The return
from these heights is tricky. It is sometimes
objected that Grant’s indictment of the liberal
modernity most triumphantly exhibited
by the United States blinded him to
the wickedness of the Soviet Union. From
as early as the mid-60s, Grant apparently
thought that America was destined to win
the Cold War. He thought that Marxism
retained too much of a pre-modern notion
of telos for it ever to last in the modern era
characterized by technological freedom’s
trumping purpose. Grant had little to say
about Soviet tyranny. It must be admitted
that in sharing Heidegger’s assimilation
of all forms of regime to technology he
repeated something of the latter’s obscurantism
on political matters. Forbes’s treatment
of this and related elements of Grant’s
political thought is very satisfying. He
admits to his own irritation at, for example,
Grant’s praise of Canadian socialists,
but concludes thus:
Grant did not hide that his disconcerting
interpretation of our condition
has its basis in tradition. He
did not claim simply to know the
truth about the ultimate questions
he raised. But by raising them he
provided Canadians of my generation
with access to an unorthodox
understanding of our tangled political-
philosophical-religious tradi
tion from an immediately intelligible
starting point, beginning from questions
that are inescapably present to
thoughtful or perplexed Canadians.
Forbes nicely brings out that, from our
perspective looking back, Grant’s silence
about communism is less irritating than his
insights into liberalism, modernity, technology,
and Christianity are striking.
Grant spoke of the impossibility of conservatism,
and yet his own attachment to
Canada’s peculiar institutions and traditions,
to say nothing of other considerations,
mark him as a conservative. What
kind of conservative is he? Forbes produces
a sound taxonomy of conservative types
and concludes that Grant does not easily
fit in any of the categories. He is neither a
Burkean conservative, a fiscal conservative,
a social conservative, nor a neoconservative.
Grant judges Burke to be little more
than Locke with a touch of romanticism,
and holds him partially responsible for the
hollowing-out of the British conservative
tradition to which Grant might otherwise
wish to cleave. Grant cares little for neoliberal
economics. He is probably closest to
social conservatives in his concerns, most
prominently his opposition to abortion and
euthanasia. But he regarded most of them
as advocating little more than enough
order to prevent technological society from
becoming absolutely unruly. As we have
seen, he had little sympathy for the projection
of American power as the guarantor
of world order. Each of these varieties of
conservatism is just another current in the
dynamic vortex of technological modernity,
each more or less oblivious of eternity.
In order to understand Grant’s conservatism
we need to see it as subordinate to
his Platonic Christianity. He understands
the love of one’s own, including one’s own
particular place and time, to be the necessary
first step in an ascent to the universal.
What he lamented was the deprival of that
first step, that first object of love. If Grant
is right, then the “impossibility of conservatism”
means not only the “impossibility”
of Canada, but also the impossibility
of any particularism or localism, including
American particularism. And as Forbes
makes helpfully clear, in Grant’s considered
opinion, the reasons for this cannot
be attributed to any wicked schemers or
disliked political clique, but are given as
both a fate and gift whose origins lie far
in the past of Western Christianity. The
truth of this is cause for neither despair nor
rebellion, for the long night of Western
Christianity is promised to be followed by
the dawn of Easter Sunday.
NOTES
- George Grant, Collected Works (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press) 3: 580.
