George Grant's early warnings

Catholic New Times, Feb 29, 2004 by Peter Dembski

Collected Works of George Grant, volume 2, 1951-1959, edited by Arthur Davis. University of Toronto Press, 2002. 564pp.

This book, volume 2 in the series of The Collected Works of George Grant, covers the formative years of the young teacher of philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax from 1951 to 1959. The scope of the book is comprehensive and includes published articles, reviews and even a poem, as well as transcripts of his radio broadcasts, an unpublished manuscript and some selections from Grant's lectures at Dalhousie which surprisingly, proved the most difficult section to analyze.

The pages reveal a highly independent Canadian thinker who later jolted his countrymen with works such as Lament for a Nation in 1965, and Technology and Empire in 1969.

Here, Grant displays his fundamental concern for ethics, which is, for him, the most "crucial issue of life." His perspective on this pre-eminent subject flows from the assumption that both the individual and society ought to submit themselves freely to God and God's natural law. Only then will human reason and spirit find their ultimate fulfillment.

However, Grant is distressed by Canada in the 1950s which has generally abandoned its pursuit of the divine for the "manipulation of nature" and "short-term economic gains." Mammon, rather than God rules the Dominion in the mid-twentieth century. Thus, for Christian believers, interested in radical social as well as individual change, Grant provides a promising beginning, but he does not move much beyond this auspicious point of departure.

Grant writes about the regrettable "plutocracy" which governs "not only our economic apparatus, but all our institutions, our politics, our churches, our schools, our universities, our newspapers, our art and our science."

The reach of the domineering economic elite is indeed vast, but Grant furnishes few specifics about how this plutocracy actually operates, and no programme to alter this undesirable rule by the rich. A criticism directed at the French existentialist philosopher, Gabriel Marcel by Grant might well be applied to his own writings during this period. Grant observed that Marcel sowed some fine general principles but "he always becomes vague when he gets down to discussing how evils of poverty and inequality may be overcome."

At mid-twentieth century, George Grant supplied Christians interested in serious social, economic and political change with a sound starting position. But the hard and courageous work of implementing Christian rules of conduct in an antagonistic world was left to others like Simone Well in France and Dorothy Day in the United States.

It is interesting to note that in 1959 Grant referred to Weft as a "modern saint." Unfortunately, the Dalhousie Professor of Philosophy did not follow her example of relating general philosophical ideals to concrete political, economic and social circumstances as Well did, for example, in L'Enracinement (The Need for Roots) shortly before her death in 1943. The less academic Well in the end probed deeper spiritual waters than her later Canadian admirer who sought security in the ivory tower of the university where the quest for tenure often leads to confining limits on creativity and moral valour.

Peter Dembski is a retired university teacher, residing in Waterloo, Ont.