George Parkin Grant: A Philosopher of Localism, A Man for Europe
“Modern civilization makes all local cultures anachronistic,” wrote Canadian political philosopher George Grant (1918–1988) in his Lament for a Nation (1965). Grant, who regarded English-speaking Canada’s culture as essentially British, regretted what he considered to be the former country’s dissolution from a nation to a mere part of the U.S., through military, economic, and political relationships in which it was the weaker partner. Like Grant with Canada, most U.S. conservatives regarded their country’s political traditions as deriving from the British, and cited Edmund Burke’s support for the Revolution as evidence that it was an essentially conservative nation. While Grant conceded that there was at least an element of truth in this, he considered the U.S.’s founding fathers to be old-fashioned liberals (especially in comparison to the Canadian heritage) and dismissed his powerful neighbor to the south as a country that was both increasingly liberal and imperialist, forcing a global homogeneity in which no nation could distinguish itself from the whole.
The presence of brand names (such as Starbucks, Gap, McDonalds, etc.) now found on the high streets of almost every country, replacing local shops, would not have surprised Grant, nor would the implementation of the N.A.F.T.A., or even the railroading of traditional European countries into a de facto ‘state.’ However, so many changes have occurred on the American continent, especially, in recent decades, that Grant’s work may seem less relevant to its peoples. In his home country he seems almost entirely unknown, and the small city of Halifax where he spent his last years seems hardly to remember him either, though a used bookstore may occasionally carry one of his works. The city was populated early on by pro-British settlers who had fled America at he close of the Revolution, and it remains British in character even now, with Union Jacks flying alongside the Maple leaf, and a statue of Churchill opposite Dalhousie University, where Grant taught. But his obscurity would not have surprised him. The world seemed to be turning at too fast a pace to recall a Canadian nationalist philosopher.
Nevertheless, Grant’s meditations on the nature of man and technology, for example, are perhaps of greater relevance now than ever before, and, if it is no longer relevant to the continent of America, his Lament for a Nation is supremely applicable to the E.U. and its assumption of power over member states. Some of the issues he raises are striking for their similarity with those we face today, and one can only think that if this work had been compulsory reading in schools across Europe, we would now have a very different situation in Europe.
Of particular interest, perhaps, Grant was conscious that – at the very moment that the Canadian government was willingly surrendering its sovereignty to the U.S. – French-speaking Quebec was becoming increasingly nationalistic, and secession from the English-speaking part seemed likely. “Indigenous cultures are dying everywhere in the modern world. French-Canadian nationalism is a last-ditch stand. The French on this continent will at least disappear from history with more than the smirks and whimpers of their English-speaking compatriots,” Grant comments with some delight in their feisty resistance.
Today, we see such localism emerging in Europe, with England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales either calling for, or to some extent having won, devolution. These nations are also possibly headed for independence from one another, if not from Europe. Likewise, on the continent, we have seen electoral gains for Lega Nord, which aspires to an independent Padania (regions in Northern Italy), and for Vlaams Belang, for which an independent Flanders is one of the principle aims. Paul Belien has commented that such “localism might save the continent” of Europe and Grant, if he were alive today, might well agree. But, he lived in a time of the U.S. and U.S.S.R., and this informed his opinions. We, on the other hand, have witnessed the collapse of the latter into smaller, traditional countries, and the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church.
“Nations must resist the capitalist and Communist empires in different ways,” Grant asserted. There have been two methods, accordingly. The first has been to establish a socialist state that appeals to the “Communist empire for support in maintaining itself,” e.g., against the U.S. (Castroism). The second has been to “harness the nationalist spirit to technological planning and to insist that there are limits to the Western ‘alliance’” (Gaullism). The latter of these is reminiscent of the revival of nationalism in Europe today.
If, during the Cold War, Americans saw themselves and their political reality as the exact opposite of that of the U.S.S.R., Grant was less convinced. “Capitalism [is] the great solvent of all tradition in the modern era. When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country. This is why liberalism is the perfect ideology for capitalism. It demolishes those taboos that restrain expansion.”
Perhaps the Cold War has helped the U.S. avoid some of this homogenizing tendency. It perhaps leant more on its tradition of democracy, and indeed its religious tradition (as far as this can be defined), with the phrase, “one nation under God,” being added to the Pledge of Allegiance under the Eisenhower administration. In recent years religion has become more important in the political life of the nation, and, traditionally, the U.S. – in contradistinction to the U.S.S.R. or, now, the E.U. – has been keen to check the actions of government, as legislated by its Constitution. The flattening or “universalizing” tendency of liberalism has also been restrained in the U.S. by its localism of state government, which has facilitated a greatly more diverse culture (in regard to such things as the sale of alcohol) than is possible in the E.U.
While we in Europe are fully aware that Western, Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman culture has been siphoned off over a long period, to be largely replaced by so-called liberalism, the ethnic minority cultures (with the exception of Islam) seem unaware that they too are being co-opted into the liberal project. Grant had seen this in his own country, most especially with the issuing of a manifesto in 1964 by seven French-Canadian intellectuals, which called for the retaining of the “Canadian Confederation” which, as he says, was to accept its “cultural diversity,” but which would “not be economically nationalist.” As Grant noted, this was not a French-Canadian product, but one that encouraged the homogenization of the French-speaking with the English-speaking parts of Canada, with the intention of further unifying this conglomeration with the international community. Thus, humanism was to replace its Catholicism, and the desire of the manifesto’s authors was, in their words, “to contribute to the universal order.”
The manifesto proposed an early form of multiculturalism, apologizing to the “Indians, Metis, Orientals, Doukhobors, Hutterites [… etc.]” for their ‘victimization’ by Canada, and calling for the protection of such minority cultures. Grant questions this, saying, “But do they [liberals] not know that liberalism in its most unequivocal form […] includes not only the idea of universalism but also that of homogeneity?” The cultures are not liberal, and, as such, the liberal establishment cannot mean to preserve them in earnest. “’Universal’ values,” as Grant says, “go with internationalism rather than with nationalism,” such as has been required for these cultures to preserve themselves as distinct groups with distinct traditions. Yet, remarkably, almost the exact same actions and reasoning is employed by the liberals of modern Britain, and, no doubt, those of other E.U. member states. In the last few years in Britain we have seen weeping apologies for slavery, imperialism, etc., from high up liberals, who claim that they wish to help the various ethnic communities preserve their culture, but who yet undermine all culture by institutionalizing the “universal,” to use Grants term. Take for example the statement on the British government’s website for the U.S., that,
“Muslims promote universal values [my emphasis] and champion the causes of peace, justice, tolerance, human rights, democracy and co-existence.”
This sort of statement may be meant to win the Muslim vote, or to reassure or subtly scold the non-Muslim (indigenous) population, yet, there is no denying that, here, the description is of the perfect democratic socialist. Such highly suspect statements undoubtedly inflame the passions of non-Muslims, who are well aware of, and feel threatened by the growing presence and power of an extremist or “radical Islam,” and the statement no doubt also inflames the passions of Muslims who must surely note that there is no hint of religiousness in the description, which could just as easily describe an atheist – such is the dreamy, self-enforced ignorance of Labour.
Technology is another problem that threatens the independent nation of the modern age. The nation must remain at least as technologically advanced as others if it wants to engage in world trade, yet this very technology, according to Grant, aids the process of universalism. Quebec, like other nations, “who want to maintain their separateness also want the advantages of the age of progress. These two ends are not compatible.” Technology is inherently liberal, would seem to be the message. But technology has advanced in unexpected ways since Grant, and, as such, it has brought different challenges to the nation state.
Most interesting – and unpredictable even a decade ago – technology, in the form of the internet, now threatens the very universalism or globalism that it appeared to promise, even if it threatens the bordered nation as well. Fiesal G. Mohamed has observed that the internet has not transformed the world into a “global village” as was earlier predicted, but rather it has divided it into a “globe of villages,” and that “we live in a cacophony of hidebound parochialisms where individuals seek association only with those to whom they relate by way of primordial intuition.” He notes that while it is generally perceived that, “vernacular print and its [the nation’s] reading public helped to create the idea of the modern nation-state. [However] Electronic communications are causing this idea to dissolve,” because people are able to connect to one another across the globe, from London and New York to Pakistan and China.
There is little hope in Lament for a Nation, but there is at least some hope. In an assessment of the Canadian Liberal Party that so accurately reflects Britain’s Labour government and its relationship to the E.U., Grant says that the apparent “fate” of the nation has made them “willing” to be led by the neighboring super power, and that as a condition they have asked only for “personal charge of the government while our sovereignty disappears.” Technology, or science, has incapacitated man. We worship at its altar because it claims to represent the truth, and, yet, an “ambiguity at the heart of science,” as Grant says in his Time As History, exposes moral traditions and notions as man-made or “relative.” In the face of science, man can say that nothing is either morally right or wrong, good or evil, and as such, finds that he cannot act or ‘will.’
“But because men are wills,” Grant says, reflecting on Nietzsche, “the strong cannot give up willing.” At the end of Lament for a Nation he remarks in the same spirit, “But lamentation falls easily into the vice of self-pity. To live with courage is a virtue, whatever one may think of the dominant assumptions of one’s age.”
Recent comments
6 hours 14 min ago
6 hours 43 min ago
11 hours 5 min ago
11 hours 33 min ago
15 hours 9 min ago
15 hours 30 min ago
1 day 5 hours ago
1 day 5 hours ago
1 day 7 hours ago
1 day 8 hours ago