George Parkin Grant, who died in 1988 at the age of 69, was world-famous in Canada—at least, that was the jest frequently made at the philosopher’s expense. The joke reflected his status as a public intellectual who made frequent appearances on Canadian Broadcast Corporation radio programs but never attracted much attention south of the 49th parallel. There are many reasons for his obscurity outside his home country, but one cause was surely his intense Canadian nationalism, coupled with his outspoken criticism of the form of liberalism he saw embodied in the hegemon to the south.
Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of one of Grant’s most influential works, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. In it, he rebuked Canada’s political establishment for bowing to pressure from the Kennedy administration to accept nuclear missiles on Canadian soil. This capitulation to Washington, he prophesied, heralded the demise of Canadian sovereignty and ensured its absorption into its southern neighbor as a “branch-plant satellite” of the emerging universal empire helmed by the United States. But the loss of Canadian sovereignty was only a local episode in a broader process that was erasing cultural particularity across the globe. Liberals trumpet diversity, but Grant argued that our global civilization would permit pluralism only in private pursuits. Describing the homogenization of North American society, he wryly observed, “Some like pizza, some like steaks; some like girls, some like boys; some like synagogues, some like Mass. But we all do it in churches, motels, and restaurants indistinguishable from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
“What Grant defended was not nationalism as an ideology but Canada as a nation.”
Ironically, a book intended as an elegy for the death of Canadian sovereignty inspired a revival of Canadian nationalism, with Grant becoming one of its leading intellectual figures throughout the 1960s and ’70s. What Grant defended was not nationalism as an ideology, but Canada as a nation. He wished to preserve Canada’s uniqueness against those who would transform it into a cultural and political vassal of the United States.
His denunciation of the bombing of Vietnam struck a chord with Canada’s New Left, and he became a frequent speaker at teach-ins and student protests. Yet his love of tradition and his sharp critique of progressivism made this alliance uneasy at times. In the final decade of his life, many of his left-wing admirers fell away when he became a vocal opponent of abortion and euthanasia.
Grant hadn’t changed, though. He always occupied a position that defied standard political categories. The dominant note in his political thought remained a distinctly Canadian conservatism that upholds an order lending form and continuity to our collective life. Everything hinges on what one deems worthy of conserving. The order Grant cherished was antithetical to the knee-jerk celebration of big business, free markets, and the ruthless pursuit of private gain found in much of what has come to call itself conservatism in North America.
The Canadian political scientist Gad Horowitz coined “Red Tory” to describe Grant, though the latter rather disliked the label. The scholar Ron Dart, who has written extensively on Grant’s significance, places him within the High Tory tradition, which combines a respect for social order with a robust conception of the common good and a willingness to use the power of the state to restrain corporate greed.
In short, Grant was a precursor of the new breed of conservative social democrats who have recently appeared on the political landscape (many of whom contribute to this magazine). But Grant’s concerns ran deeper than the immediacies and exigencies of practical politics, though they were never that far from his mind.
Born in 1918, George Grant was the scion of two prominent Canadian families, both highly regarded for their public service and devotion to education. A gifted student, he left for England to study law at Oxford University in 1939 on a Rhodes scholarship. Young George was being groomed for a life of conventional respectability, but the collision of his youthful idealism with the cataclysms of the middle 20th century launched him on a different path.
In England at the outbreak of World War II, Grant became an air-raid warden during the London Blitz. At the cry of the sirens, he would gather those in his charge under railway arches, the only shelter available for the poorest Londoners, and then attend to his other duties, such as pulling the injured out of bombed buildings, providing first aid, and guarding unexploded ordnance until the bomb squad arrived. One night a bomb killed 300 people he had settled under an arch, all of whom he knew and had worked with. His sanity began to unravel, and he fled London. When his family lost track of him, they assumed he was dead.
Haunted by the horrors he had witnessed, he found work on a farm in the English countryside. One morning, while passing through a gate on his way to work, he had a life-changing experience. He would later describe it as an immediate apprehension that “I am not my own.” He knew with a certainty that never left him that human beings aren’t the measure of things, but are enfolded in an eternal order that measures us, an order that is goodness itself and the proper object of our love. In religious language, he came to believe in God. This sense of being claimed by a transcendent good became the touchstone of Grant’s thought as he struggled to make sense of the darkness that had engulfed the world.
A decade later, he encountered the writings of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, who became his most important intellectual guide. Having lived through some of the most harrowing events of the 20th century, she, too, struggled to hold together the incommensurable truths of human affliction and divine perfection.
After the war, Grant returned to Oxford to study philosophy and theology and became close to C.S. Lewis through the Oxford Socratic Club. As he sought to combine religious faith with the insights of Greek philosophy, he found that he had little patience for the “minor logical twitterings” that dominated academic philosophy. In 1947, while still working on his doctorate, he was hired to teach philosophy at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and embarked on an academic career that would be marked early on by controversy.
In 1949, the Royal Massey Commission appointed him to prepare a report on the study of philosophy in Canada. Its publication shocked and angered the academic establishment. Grant rejected the reigning view of philosophy as a technical subject exclusively for specialists. Instead, he began his report by defining philosophy as “the analysis of the traditions of our society and the judgment of those traditions against our varying intuitions of the Perfection of God.” He argued that the tragedies of the 20th century made it urgent for sensitive minds to recover the intellectual, religious, and spiritual traditions of the past. The outrage this report sparked among professional philosophers would stymie his academic career for many years.
“Grant drew the lesson that he would need to communicate his ideas more indirectly.”
From this firestorm Grant drew the lesson that he would need to communicate his ideas more indirectly, to reconsider what a philosopher could accomplish in our present age. Judging his audience to be too enthralled by our modern fate for the untimely claims of ancient wisdom to be received as anything other than museum pieces, he turned to clarifying the nature of modernity and throwing into relief the spiritual yearnings it left unmet.
Grant’s Collected Works comprise four large volumes that include his six books, numerous essays, class notes and lectures, selected correspondence, and transcripts of his radio broadcasts and TV interviews. A riveting teacher with a larger-than-life personality, Grant was a very public philosopher. His mellifluous voice and crisp, elegant diction endeared him to audiences of his many CBC radio broadcasts, which covered a range of philosophical, religious, and political topics, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Augustine, Immanuel Kant, Carl Jung, natural law, and the Vietnam War.
“All-consuming dynamism had eclipsed our awareness of an eternal order.”
In the late 1950s, while Grant was still at Dalhousie, the CBC invited him to deliver a series of lectures, which he revised and published as his first book in 1960 under the title Philosophy in the Mass Age. But when a second edition appeared six years later, he wrote a new introduction, distancing himself from parts of its argument. In the book, he had argued that the technological and capitalistic imperatives of modern mass society were robbing us of the sense of limits at the heart of the ancient teaching of natural law. Their all-consuming dynamism had eclipsed our awareness of an eternal order from which we might take our measure. Yet as he confessed in his 1966 introduction, the book had still been too optimistic about modernity and modern thought. This was because he had fallen under the spell of Hegel, whom he then “considered the greatest of all philosophers,” and had been persuaded that the modern exaltation of human freedom to remake the world could somehow be reconciled with the ancient belief in moral limits.
Abandoning hope that the technological society could be reformed to foster ordered freedom, he now feared that it had become an end itself, governed by its own imperatives that destroyed any competing vision of human excellence. He also disavowed his former belief in the superiority of modern philosophy to its ancient predecessor, concluding that Plato’s account of human excellence was truer than Hegel’s. He credited this awakening from his neo-Hegelian slumber to his encounter with the works of the Jewish-German philosopher Leo Strauss, then at the University of Chicago, declaring it “a high blessing to have been acquainted with this man’s thought.”
In 1960, Grant left Dalhousie to chair the philosophy department at York University in Toronto, an appointment so short-lived that it was terminated before he could even step inside a classroom. In a second great affront to the philosophical establishment, he refused to teach from the assigned textbook because, among its other failings, he believed it unjustly disparaged Christianity and Plato. Resigning on this point of principle, he spent the next year as a consultant and editor for Mortimer Adler’s “Great Books” program. He returned to teaching in 1961 when McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, invited him to head its newly formed religious studies program, the first of its kind and, under Grant’s leadership, a model department that was widely emulated.
He published the next four of his six books while at McMaster. Lament for a Nation (1965) caused a stir with its elegiac account of the loss of Canadian sovereignty. The collection of essays titled Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969) deepened his critique of modernity and North American civilization. Time as History (1971) was another book that began life as a CBC radio broadcast. In 1969, Grant had delivered the distinguished Massey Lectures and chose as his topic the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, who wasn’t nearly as well-known in the English-speaking world then as he is now.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Grant had immersed himself in the study of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. He concluded that Nietzsche had “enucleated”—Grant’s striking term—the darkness of modernity like no other thinker. While recognizing the nobility of Nietzsche’s doctrine of amor fati, love of fate, he ended on a note of “simple incomprehension” at how one could possibly love our modern fate, which has blotted out all trace of the transcendent good, leaving us intellectually defenseless against the new possibilities of injustice and cruelty resulting from the unrestrained will.
English-Speaking Justice, published in 1978, comprises the Josiah Wood Lectures that Grant delivered at Mount Allison University in 1974. It is the one work by Grant that received some slight notice in the United States, after one of his students brought it to the attention of theologian Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas arranged for it to be reprinted by Notre Dame University Press, with a new introduction written by himself and philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. It continues the themes of Grant’s earlier works, with a special emphasis on what he saw as the “civilizational crisis” wrought by liberalism.
Liberal praise of individual liberty and material progress, Grant had concluded, was the only moral language that could sound a commanding note in our public realm—but it wasn’t the language that commanded him. His early epiphany that “we are not our own” led him to reject what he took to be the core tenet of modern liberalism: “the affirmation that our essence is our freedom.” Guided by the belief that to be human was to be an autonomous will, modern politics joined hands with modern technological science to push back the frontiers of anything that limited the exercise of that will.
The modern affirmation of the primacy of the will had implications for our understanding of justice that troubled Grant. With liberal modernity, justice becomes something human beings legislate for themselves in their freedom, in contrast to the Platonic conception of justice as “something in which we participate as we come to understand the nature of things through love and knowledge.” On this older view, justice was a set of practices and dispositions that contributed to the perfection of our nature. Being what human beings are “fitted for,” it directed us to the higher goods of virtue and contemplation and bade us to give other beings their due, what was properly owed to them. Within the Christian tradition, justice was especially concerned with protecting the most vulnerable members of society.
But modern thinkers rejected the claim that a thing’s nature could be a source of moral and political norms. The new mechanistic philosophy saw nature as a morally indifferent realm, governed by necessity and chance but subject to mastery by human beings once they armed themselves with knowledge of its workings. Grant drew on the insights of Heidegger and others to show that this view of nature was the foundation of modern science and technology. When nature is construed as nothing but resources—Heidegger’s “standing reserve”—to be pressed into service for ends dictated by the human will, how can it supply a standard of justice? In modernity, the human will to mastery becomes the ultimate legislator of our purposes.
“Justice, on this account, is self-interested calculation.”
The challenge for the founders of liberalism was to give a meaning and content to justice divorced from any conception of higher human purposes, which they believed would always be a matter of contention. Their solution was the social contract. Justice arises, the social-contract theorists argued, when autonomous individuals mutually agree to limit their conduct to secure the one thing any rational human being was said to prize above all: namely, comfortable self-preservation. Justice, on this account, is self-interested calculation.
But as Grant warned, the goal of comfortable self-preservation wasn’t enough to shield the weak from predation by the strong. After all, the Vietnam war was justified in terms of liberal ideology. The mightiest state on Earth was willing to rain fire on a small peasant country thousands of miles away because the Vietnamese didn’t want to be part of the liberal capitalist imperium. It was as though the self-evident superiority of the North American way of life licensed domination of countries that dared to reject it. Elsewhere, Grant said he was tempted to sum up the American ethos as “the orgasm at home and napalm abroad.” He also condemned the US Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which struck down legal restrictions on abortion, describing it as “a cup of poison to the lips of liberalism,” because its denial of rights to the unborn opened the possibility of excluding other categories of human beings from the protection of the law. He feared for the old, the infirm, the handicapped—for anyone whose claims might inconvenience us in our quest for ever greater quality of life.
If we view these consequences of liberalism as failings, it’s only because much of our contemporary morality still contains traces of premodern traditions of thought derived from the Bible and the classics. But liberalism, with its celebration of human autonomy, is the great solvent of every tradition that offers a roadmap through life other than the one projected by our strongest desires. Consequently, Grant anticipated that liberal societies would find themselves increasingly unable to resist the slide into illiberalism.
Grant left McMaster in 1980 to return to Dalhousie as a professor of politics, religion, and philosophy. He taught there until his death in 1988. His last collection of essays, Technology and Justice (1986), is an extended commentary on an aphorism from Simone Weil—“faith is the experience that intelligence is enlightened by love”—that opens into a rapturous meditation on how the transcendent good reaches us through the immediacy of the beautiful. At the time of his death, he was writing a book to answer Heidegger’s critique of Plato, a task he judged to be as pressing as it was daunting; only fragments of this final work were completed.
Liberalism, wrote Grant, was “fashioned in the same forge” as the will to technological progress. Aided by the drive to master human and nonhuman nature, liberalism promised to free us from the limitations of both nature and tradition. Dissolving all parochial loyalties, it ushered us into what Grant called the universal and homogeneous state, a phrase he borrowed from the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Looming on the horizon is a day when politics will be entirely replaced by impersonal administration, overseen by a managerial elite committed to mastering chance through the application of natural and social science. The global dominance of this technocratic rationality assured the demise of Canadian sovereignty, along with countless local cultures that could never hope to withstand the relentless dynamism of the modernizing juggernaut.
But even as he defended Canadian sovereignty, he regarded the nation as an instrumental good at best. We love our nation, he wrote, because it is our own, but the love of one’s own is only the first step on the ladder that culminates in a love of the good that transcends the local. As Simone Weil wrote, “we must make of our own country, not an idol, but a stepping-stone towards God.” Grant insisted that we come to love God, who is none other than goodness itself in his Platonic theology, only by first learning to love our own, for it provides our initial experience of being beholden to something greater than ourselves.
People sometimes speak of loving humankind or loving the planet, but these are pale and tepid abstractions compared to our love of the full-blooded people and things that give our lives texture and meaning. “People who are savagely bitter about their own, but love universal justice are often, to me, dangerous people,” Grant once observed.
“Love of our own is what first opens us to the possibility of loving a good beyond ourselves.”
Love of our own is what first opens us to the possibility of loving a good beyond ourselves. Our nation, family, friends, the local architecture, the local flora and fauna—these are not the “good in itself,” since they are only partial goods, local and particular, but through them we receive our first intimations of a perfection that can lure us, in the words of Saint Augustine that are inscribed on Grant’s tombstone, “out of the shadows and imaginings into the truth.”
It’s easy to scoff at this sort of language, but Grant would surely say that our derision reflects how impoverished our experience has become. Our view of the world as something to be mastered rather than loved prevents us from discerning, in its always partial and imperfect goodness, signs that the source of all being is benevolence. We experience this goodness most intensely and immediately in the people and things we love as our own.
Alongside the cultivation and preservation of these precious loves and alongside combatting the memoricide, the destruction of memory, Grant counseled us to listen for “intimations of deprival” in the enveloping darkness. “The job of thought at our time,” he wrote, “is to bring to the light that darkness as darkness.” This darkness takes many tangible forms these days—the octopoid reach of corporate and government surveillance (which Grant anticipated as the late technological turn to “cybernetics, the art of the steersman”; insidious new forms of warfare enabled by technology; the befouling of the oceans; the mass extinction of species; the destruction of local communities; the normalization of euthanasia.
“The justice of a society was decided by how it treated its weakest members.”
This last item was of special concern for Grant, who believed that the justice of a society turns on how it treats its weakest members. In his day, Grant was focused primarily on children, newborns with physical or mental disabilities like Down syndrome, who were sometimes killed through “benign neglect,” a euphemism that typically meant starving them to death. The concern for “quality of life,” another benign-sounding phrase, had come to be interpreted as grounds for withdrawing the right to life from those who were deemed to have lives not worth living. He saw it as evidence that the inhibitions that once protected the lives of the vulnerable had broken down, so that some people were now regarded as expendable.
What would he have made of the “medical-assistance-in-dying” protocols that became law in Canada in 2016? In their original, restricted form, they granted to patients at the end of their lives the right to “die with dignity”—a euphemism that Grant believed exaggerated our autonomy and blinked at our abject helplessness at the moment of death, however it arrives. They offered these patients the option of a medically induced final exit when their imminent death could be reasonably foreseen. In 2021, however, MAID was expanded to include those suffering from serious and irreversible medical conditions, even if a natural death isn’t imminent. Though delayed, a further expansion to include the mentally ill was scheduled for this year, continuing a trajectory Grant would have seen as the predictable unfolding of the implicit logic of “quality-of-life” ideology. There is substantial evidence that some people are motivated to seek MAID to escape lives of poverty and loneliness. MAID requests move through the system more quickly than applications for other forms of social support that could make life tolerable for many long-term sufferers.
Grant would be on the side of the disability and human-rights activists opposing this new euthanasia regime. He would point out that crouching behind the altruistic rhetoric about ending suffering are practical concerns about the cost and trouble of prolonging unproductive lives. But he would also argue that our response must be more than just reactive and piecemeal. We must seek to clarify the underlying beliefs and priorities that put us on this terrible path.
“What is it about human beings that makes it proper that we should have any rights at all?” he asked his readers to consider. The state of society in Grant’s beloved Canada today forces that question on us with renewed urgency. Seeking an answer may force us to step outside the ambit of modern liberalism and its drive to mastery. And once outside, we might then be able to hear again the claims of transcendent goodness and justice that arrested young George Grant that day long ago in the English countryside.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the age at which George Grant died.