Header image: KF in Dall-E
(Dec 06, 2023) Bring back ‘grumpy’ George Grant and his prophetic conservative message: scholars
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/george-grant-lament-for-a-nation-1.7050666
- 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.
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “Canada originally was put together by two groups of people who didn’t have much in common but didn’t want to be American…I think the French have gone on knowing why they are not American. I think it’s very hard for English-speaking Canadians.”
- Do you think the rest of us would have a better chance or a poorer chance of surviving [as”Canadians”] if we didn’t have French Canada?
- “I don’t think we’d have a chance at all…It is inconceivable to me to have Canada without French Canada…”
- Re French Canada: “…They have largely given up their religion, you know, at least they’ve given up a very ancient and very remarkable religion for a rather cheap one at the moment I think…and what is going to happen to them without that religion is very hard to say.
- [02:54] “I think it is much harder to resist a capitalist empire than a communist empire”
- The Technological Society / Technique
- “I think ‘technological’ was a neologism invented in the US in the 1850s and it’s like, you know, you wouldn’t talk about ‘life’ as ‘biology’, biology is the study of like, well, technology is the study of technique, that’s why I like the word technique better.”
- Technique is not all that machinery out there; technique is the way that man thinks about his world.
- “Yes. Just the fact that science looks at the world as ‘object’ means it looks at the world in a particular way, it relates to the world in a particular way.”
- [The automobile shapes us]
- [Nietzsche]
- The creating of an increasingly homogenous world, as a consequence of technique, making everything uniform
- “In terms of modern science, it sees the world entirely as object and the world as object is the same one place as another…Canada and the university… chemistry is the same wherever it is done [and education?]”In terms of modern science, it sees the world entirely as object and the world as object is the same one place as another…Canada and the university… chemistry is the same wherever it is done [and education?]”
- “The point is that, at the heart of science, is summoning forth things to stand before them to give their reasons, that is to be objects, and objects are the same everywhere. Now, in that sense, scientific society led to homogenization but I think also that modern moral philosophy believed, and it was a rather fine belief, that the end of history was to build the universal society of free and equal men and that it was all these local differences that had caused wars…I think modern liberalism went directly with modern science; they came out of the same spirit and they went together. Now the question remains whether this universal society of free and equal men, if that, as a goal of human striving, does not lead to tyranny. That is the question, you know, whether the consequence of this extreme homogenization is not tyranny”
- KF: the “enormous technical weapons” of tyranny
- [Of modern tyranny] “It’s not going to be very nasty, you know, it’s not going to be a wild crazy romantic tyranny…
- [08:34 Education] “…Leading out, it was Plato’s word…it was leading out from the shadows and imaginings to the eternal order. Now, practically, nobody believes there is an eternal order, therefore what is to be known but organizing within, therefore the universities become sort of corporations for organizing the technical society.
- [09:55] If technological society makes a homeless world and the great question is how one can be, in any sense, ‘at home’ in the world, then one is always ‘at home in the word’ in a particular place…the status of particularity is a universal question
- [10:45] The question of how people can live in this universalized world
To Come Home To Yourself
May all that unforgiven in you,
Be released.
May your fears yield
Their deepest tranquilities.
May all that is unlived in you,
Blossom into a future,
Graced with love
– John O’Donohue, Benedictus: A Book of Blessings (2007)
KF See BP 2017 Notes