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George Grant and the Embrace of Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Ian Box
Affiliation:
Mount Allison University

Extract

There is a disturbing quality to George Grant's more recent work that reflects less the substance than the obscurity of his so-called prophetic message. Gloomy reflections on the human prospect are, after all, not uncommon today, and while critics may describe yet another dismal forecast as pessimistic, they are unlikely to be “perplexed” by it or be struck by its “cranky obscurity.” The problem with books such as Time as History or English-Speaking Justice is not that their message is unpalatable but that one is never really sure just what the message is. Certainly Grant's work resists any simple ideological packaging. He has consistently repudiated the Utopian politics of the left and is well aware of the impossibility of conservatism in the modern world. Neither can it be said that in his writing Grant simply adopts the role of social critic. While apparently critical of modern society he is well aware that we are all moderns today, reminding us of the foolishness of attempting a return to the past as if the discoveries of the modern age had not been made.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1982

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References

1 William Christian describes the audience's perplexed reaction to the Wood lectures as authentic, because apparently Grant only told “half the story.” See his “Grant, George and the Twilight of our Justice,” Queen's Quarterly 85 (1978), 486.Google Scholar Eli Mandel refers to Grant's “cranky obscurity” in “Grant, George: Language, Nation, The Silence of God,” Canadian Literature 83 (1979), 164.Google Scholar

2 The difficulty of attaching ideological labels to Grant's views is pointed out by A. James Reimerin his essay “George Grant: Liberal, Socialist, or Conservative?” in Schmidt, Larry (ed.), George Grant in Process (Toronto: Anansi, 1978), 4957.Google Scholar

3 “All of us are increasingly enclosed by the modern account” see Grant, George, Time as History (Toronto: CBC, 1969), 47.Google Scholar

4 Grant, George, “Revolution and Tradition, ” in Rubinoff, Lionel (ed.), Tradition and Revolution (Toronto: Macmillan, 1971), 94.Google Scholar

5 Grant, George, “ ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used,’” in Rotstein, Abraham (ed.), Beyond Industrial Growth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 129.Google Scholar

6 The reviews of English-Speaking Justice (Sackville, N.B.: Mount Allison University, 1978) have been uniformly enthusiastic. In addition to William Christian's essay, see Darby, Tom's review in this JOURNAL 12 (1979), 161–65;Google Scholar and Badertscher, John, “The Prophecy of George Grant,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 4 (1980), 183–89.Google Scholar

7 Wolin, Sheldon, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” American Political Science Review 63 (1969), 1062–82;Google Scholar and “Paradigms and Political Theories,” in Preston King and Parekh, B. C. (eds.), Politics and Experience (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 125–52.Google ScholarSpragens, Thomas makes use of Wolin's model of political theory in Understanding Political Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976).Google Scholar

8 Grant, George, “Knowing and Making,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 4th series, 12 (1974), 6263.Google Scholar

9 Lampert, Laurence, “Zarathustra and George Grant: Two Teachers,” Dalhousie Review 58 (1978), 449.Google Scholar

10 On this point Grant's views are similar to Hannah Arendt's.account of the Platonic substitution of making for acting that characterizes much of political thought. See The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 194–96, 220–30.Google Scholar

11 Time as History, 49.

12 Grant, George, “Protest and Technology,” in Hanly, Charles (ed.), Revolution and Response (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), 123.Google Scholar

13 Time as History, 48.

14 English-Speaking Justice, 4,6, 13. Similar concern for “the unnervingly unanchored quality of the status attributed to these fine liberal values” is expressed by Dunn, John in Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 45.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 45, 46.

16 Rawls is among those “thinkers who deny the fact of that darkness” which envelopes the western world (“ ‘The computer does not impose..., ’” 130).

17 Ibid., 129.

18 Time as History, 25; English-Speaking Justice, 83.

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24 Ibid., 30.

25 Ibid., 22, 103.

26 Chapter five of Locke's Second Treatise of Government contains several references to the worthlessness of nature; see in particular, paras. 37, 42 and 45.

27 English-Speaking Justice, 77.

28 Ibid., 51.

29 Ibid., 44, 95, 96.

30 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner's, 1958), 124.Google Scholar

31 Cited in Knappen, M. M., Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), 324–25.Google Scholar

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33 Ibid., 68.

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35 English-Speaking Justice, 68; and Bernard Zylstra, “Philosophy, Revelation and Modernity: Crossroads in the Thought of George Grant,” in George Grant in Process, 156. The basic question for Grant is: “to what extent is modem technological society connected to, and a product of, the western interpretation of Christianity?” This is the question that Strauss is unwilling to consider and that Ellul is prevented from asking; see Grant, , Technology and Empire (Toronto: Anansi, 1969), 109;Google Scholar and George Grant in Process, 146.

36 English-Speaking Justice, 68.

37 From a conversation in George Grant in Process, 146–47.Google Scholar

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39 Lament fora Nation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 57.Google Scholar Some years later Grant wrote: “Within the practical liberalism of our past, techniques could be set within some context other than themselves—even if that context was shallow” (Technology and Empire, 40).

40 Technology and Empire, 143.

41 Time as History, 52.

42 Badertscher, “The Prophecy of George Grant,” 189; Christian, “George Grant and the Twilight of our Justice,” 486. In this respect, I disagree with Christian's claims for a positive but esoteric teaching in English-Speaking Justice.

43 English-Speaking Justice, 55.

44 Grant, George, “Why Read Rousseau?” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Halifax, 1981, 4.Google Scholar

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46 “Why Read Rousseau?” I.

47 Time as History, 45.

48 “Why Read Rousseau?” 5.

49 Technology and Empire, 109, 101.

50 Zylstra, , “Philosophy, Revelation and Modernity,” 152; George Grant in Process, 146.Google Scholar

51 Grant's review of this book appears in American Political Science Review 71 (1977), 1127–29.Google Scholar

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53 English-Speaking Justice, 95; see also Badertscher, , “The Prophecy of George Grant,” 188–89.Google Scholar

54 “Why Read Rousseau?” 8.