Bring back 'grumpy' George Grant and his prophetic conservative message: scholars
George Grant’s Lament for A Nation is ‘one part Dylan… one part Malcolm X,’ says professor
George Grant was a minor Canadian celebrity in his day — the mid-1960s to late 70s. He spoke regularly on CBC radio and television, delivering the Massey Lectures in 1969. When he resigned as a professor at McMaster University in 1980, his decision made headlines in the Globe & Mail.
Above all, people knew Grant for his 1965 book, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. A depressing account of Canada's failure (in Grant's eyes) to maintain an existence separate from the U.S., it nevertheless inspired hope in one reader: Memorial University PhD candidate Bryan Heystee. He'd stumbled upon a copy in a used bookstore, half a century after Grant wrote the book.
"It really did give me hope that I could think important things here in Canada," said Heystee. "That thinking from my perspective as a Canadian living in the 21st century was still worthwhile. And I didn't just need to sort of be rehashing Plato and Rousseau and Kant, so to speak."
Heystee now wants to revive interest in Grant's work. He plunged himself into five years of intense study to refresh Grant's philosophy by re-interpreting it in today's climate. The project was hard to get underway — when looking for supporters and a PhD supervisor, Heystee found that most of the people who had read and cared about Grant are now retired or dead.
"The crux of my thesis is that although George Grant seems like a scattered and disjointed thinker, there is actually an underlying unity to his criticisms of modernity and modern society and technology," Heystee told IDEAS producers Tom Howell and Nicola Luksic, who make the long-running radio documentary series, Ideas from the Trenches, featuring PhD students and their work.
Canadian nationalism is dead
When Grant died in 1988, he left behind six books of his philosophy along with hundreds of articles and interviews.
But it was Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism that most struck a nerve in the Canadian psyche, inspiring a minor nationalist cultural revival beginning in the late 1960s. The irony is not lost on Heystee.
"Canadian thinkers afterwards said, 'Yeah, this book inspired me to be a Canadian nationalist' when precisely what Grant was saying is, 'Well, no, Canadian nationalism is dead!'"
Grant was a conservative "in an old sense that doesn't really exist in any popular form today," Heystee said. The philosopher's criticisms of liberalism and defences of conservatism refer to definitions that can confuse modern readers. (For Grant, all of Canada's major political parties today would count as 'liberal').
Who needs this old grumpy crank from the 60s to tell us about that, to tell us why liberalism is wrong?- Bryan Heystee
"He thought Canada had previously had some idea of conservatism, some commitment to a collective common good, which we could live out. But that had been abandoned when we became integrated with the United States."
Heystee adds that since the 1960s, a general consensus had formed that liberalism is the only workable political ideology in Western democracies.
"And who needs this old grumpy crank from the 60s to tell us about that, to tell us why liberalism is wrong?"
It's a fair assessment given that Grant's writing was anglo-centric and neglected to capture the rich tapestry of culture that makes Canada what it is.
"He's writing as an English Canadian, writing for English Canadians. So he's, for one, not talking about French Canada at all. And for another, he's not talking about ... as far as I can tell, he's not talking about Indigenous people at all, to his great detriment."
Preserving Canada's differences
One of Grant's central claims relates to what he saw as the homogenizing effect of liberalism and technology. Heystee believes Grant would have criticized the claims of modern liberal Canadians that we live in a truly pluralist society.
In Heystee's telling, a George Grant of the 21st century would work toward preserving what differences exist between sub-cultures within Canada. But Grant would also be skeptical about what could be accomplished.
"I think he would be very wary of the way that differences are being eroded or being elided. He'd be highly critical of colonialism, for example, and the ways of thinking that are impressed upon communities, that are foreign to them."
America the Empire
Heystee isn't the only one who believes we should reconsider George Grant's ideas for our own time.
Poet and professor George Elliott Clarke also finds wisdom in his work. In an essay he describes Lament for a Nation as "one-part Bob Dylan snarling, Like a Rolling Stone, but also one-part Malcolm X."
Clarke's appreciation for Grant's philosophy began decades ago when he read Lament for a Nation as an older teen during the '70s. Growing up in Nova Scotia, Clarke shared his neighbours' Canadian nationalistic perspective, and especially disapproved of American foreign policy.
His feelings were "justified, reconfirmed and reaffirmed" by reading Grant's work.
"Grant was so discomfiting for our domestic establishment, because he did not hesitate to call America an empire. He did not hesitate to describe the war on Vietnam as a crime against humanity, an obscenity, an example of the will to power run amuck."
"To have a great superpower obliterating or trying to obliterate a small country trying to decide for itself how it wants to be in the world. And he saw all of that as extremely negative, and was appalled that Canadian corporations were involved in manufacturing napalm, that the Canadian government was tacitly involved with this horrific war."
Clarke adds that an appreciation for Grant does not imply adoration or agreement with all of the philosopher's arguments, especially certain aspects of the latter's conservative approach.
"All conservatives believe that there was a Golden Age. And depending on what era and what country they pick, they may have different visions of when the Golden Age was," Clarke explained.
Clarke gives the example of Dixie, which Grant appeared to defend as a distinct society and perhaps therefore valuable.
"Of course, being an African-Canadian, African-Nova Scotian descendant of people who fled the tyrannous slavery of the American Republic, I have to say I differ," said Clarke.
"As well, there is the whole problem of where do minorities fit in with different values, different ideas, different faiths, different traditions, right? Is it possible for the conservative of the Grant style to be really comfortable with a diverse multicultural society?"
Nonetheless, Clarke argues there is value in considering Grant's philosophical approach.
Pulling out his own vintage paperback edition of Lament for A Nation, Clarke declaimed the rousing final lines:
"'To live with courage is a virtue. Whatever one may think of the dominant assumptions of one's age, multitudes of human beings through the course of history have had to live when their only political allegiance was irretrievably lost. What was lost was often something far nobler than what Canadians have lost.
"Beyond courage, it is also possible to live in the ancient faith which asserts that changes in the world, even if they be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within an eternal order that is not affected by their taking place. Whatever the difficulty of philosophy, the religious man has been told, that process is not all. From Virgil's Aeneid, book six: 'They're holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.'"
"Oh, my golly. Whoa! What's not to love?" commented Clarke.
Guests in this episode:
Roberta Bayer is an associate professor of Political Philosophy at Patrick Henry College, Purcellville, Virginia.
Lissa McCullough teaches philosophy at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
George Elliott Clarke is a poet, playwright, literary critic, and professor of English at the University of Toronto. His recent books include J'Accuse! (Poem versus silence).
Bryan Heystee is a PhD candidate at Memorial University in St. John's, Nfld.
Listen to the full episode by downloading the CBC IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.
*This episode was produced by Nicola Luksic and Tom Howell and is part of our on-going series, Ideas from the Trenches.
