Ideas - Bring Back Grumpy George: The Forgotten Message of George Grant

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Canadian philosopher George Grant was known for his pessimism, and is best known for his book Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. PhD student Bryan Heystee makes the case to revive Grantian philosophy and make it work for the 21st century. *This episode originally aired on Dec. 6, 2023.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Some people like women.

Some like men. Some like alligators. But we all do it in holiday inns, the same from one end of this continent to the other. Professor George Grant, with his third Massey Lecture for 1969. And this is the actual version that my father had, paperback. I want people to see that he's got important stuff to say. He's not some has-been. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Today at PhD students with a mission to revive interest in a dead Canadian philosopher.

Granted, it will take some creativity to help him speak to audiences that he hadn't considered in his day. He was prophetic. I think he was prophetic. He is very much a conservative, conservative in an old sense that doesn't really exist in any popular form today. And who needs this old grumpy crank from the 60s to tell us why liberalism is wrong? Brian Hastie walked into a bookstore one day and happened to pick up a copy of Lament for a Nation. It's the work that made George Grant famous back in 1965. Most consider it a depressing account of Canada. After all, it is called Lament for a Nation.

That lament is full of pessimism about our country's ability to carve out a purposeful existence for itself, one separate from the United States. But for Brian, George Grant's lament for a nation gave him hope. Yeah, it really did give me hope that I could think important things here in Canada. Brian Hastie's PhD work at Memorial University in St. John's is the latest to be featured in our series Ideas from the Trenches, shining a light on outstanding PhD research across the country. Ideas producers Nikola Lukšić and Tom Howell pick up the tale. We no longer think of ourselves as measured and defined by all that is,

but as the measurers and the definers. George Grant was once a minor Canadian celebrity. Those who have dreamed since Machiavelli of controlling the planet by technology are no longer a minority, but have become our unquestioned rulers. The CBC's Peter Zofsky pondered whether George Grant counted as a cult figure.

If not a cult figure, then a folk hero of sorts to many people. Smoking on set, sitting back in a big armchair, he was the very picture of a public intellectual. I mean, American liberalism and Marxism are very close in some ways. Mr. Diebenbaker had his flaws, but he was a strong public champion of our nationalism. Canada was built on British ideas of decency and moderation and order. But since then, people have basically stopped caring about him.

Nobody really reads him. I don't really think anyone finds him important. It was very hard to find a supervisor who is willing and able to take on this project because, frankly, most of the people who read and cared about George Grant are either retired or dead. But I think a lot of what he has to say is actually still quite relevant, and it's helpful for understanding challenges that we face today. So I'm trying to revive interest in him. And what is the crux of your thesis? Unlike other philosophers, he never really wrote a single big book which systematizes his thought

or gives an overall view of what he's talking about. He wrote mostly sort of scattered essays or short books. He would give public talks on the CBC or on television. He'd write short essays for magazines rather than academic journals. The crux of my thesis is that although George Grant seems like a scattered and disjointed thinker, I think there is a single underlying theme going on. He's arguing that modern thought rests upon a fundamental assumption about what human beings are, namely that we are autonomous will, and that this assumption is counter to human well-being. And it expresses itself in a variety of ways like technology and political liberalism. And he wants to identify the assumption

so he can simply say no to it. Autonomous will sounds like a superhero, but is in fact a phrase from Immanuel Kant, who philosophizes that it is human free will that determines what is morally good in this world. Kant will say that the only thing that's good in itself is a good will. By contrast for someone like Plato, Kant will say that the only thing that's good in itself is a goodwill.

By contrast, for someone like Plato, morality is something that inheres in the cosmos. And it's not an act of our freedom, but an act of obedience to the truth. You know, there are many people in the world who just think there's no such certainty to be touched. And I just think there is. I can now give better arguments, you know what I mean, in a certain sense than I could. But that is still the central core of what I think about. What drew you in?

Was there a moment where you're like, oh my gosh, I found this guy and this is the guy I want to hang out with for several years while I work on my PhD? So I discovered George Grant quite by accident. I was just leafing through a used bookstore and found a copy of Lament for a Nation on the Shelf and picked it up and thought, well, this name sounds familiar. And I think he's Canadian. I guess I'll give this a read. and I think he's Canadian, I guess I'll give this a read. And I discovered, here is this philosopher who is talking about Canada and thinks that Canada is of philosophical interest. And this was something totally new to me.

No one I had studied in philosophy to that point mentioned, let alone cared about Canada. It was a detail in the grand scheme of things. George Grant comes along and says, no, actually, if we look at Canada, we can begin to understand important things about what it means to live in the modern world and what kind of life is available to us, what we should be doing or not doing, what we can and can't do. One thing Grant thought we definitely should not be doing in Canada is hosting nuclear weapons belonging to the United States. With US policy, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker of Canada

now faces the major crisis of his career. Canada's reluctance to arm Royal Canadian Air Force... This was a big issue in the federal election of 1963. ...precipitated the crisis, triggered by US statements which Diefenbaker resented as an intrusion into Canadian affairs. We have taken the stand for an end to nuclear weapons. Sooner or later, if the armaments continue, either by calculation or miscalculation, war must necessarily follow. Was Canada going to accept American nuclear warheads in the North to defend against the Soviet Union? The Conservatives and Diefenbaker said no,

and the Liberals said yes, and the Liberals won. Canada gets a new government as Liberal Party leader Lester Pearson becomes the Dominion's 14th Prime Minister. Immediately upon taking office, Mr. Pearson announces that the first task of his new government, a task expected to be completed within the month, will be to mend U.S.-Canadian relations.

It was the refusal to accept nuclear warheads for U.S.-supplied missiles that cost former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker his office. Grant thought this marked the last straw in Canada's integration into the American empire. In the future, Canada would become more and more integrated. Decisions would by and large be lockstep. We'd reach economic integration, which I think he would agree happened quite thoroughly with NAFTA,

so that we don't really present a distinct way of life from what's on offer in the United States anymore. This is the basic thrust of Grant's most famous essay, Lament for a Nation, published in 1965. The irony of that book is that it did inspire a minor nationalist movement in Canada in the decades to follow, when precisely what Grant was saying is, well, no, Canadian nationalism is dead. He's saying Canada is dead, but it obviously isn't, because here we are. But what was his version of Canada that had died? So he locates Canada between the United States and the United Kingdom. In his view, one of the things the United States represents is a total break from the past.

We're just going to cut ourselves off from the European tradition that preceded it, never mind anyone who was already living in the United States before Europeans arrived. Further, the United States represents almost a total commitment to individual liberty. By contrast, what he saw in the United Kingdom and the British tradition was a commitment to a more ordered society that restrained individual liberty, what he calls conservatism. And what he means by that is that there's some collective notion of the good or the good life, which ought to restrain individual liberty. And he thought

Canada had previously had some idea of conservatism, some commitment to a collective common good, but that had been abandoned when we became integrated with the United States. Oh, it sounds like he's a perfect Canadian figure of a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Why isn't he still popular today then? I don't really know why he's not popular. He is very much a conservative, and conservative in an old sense

that doesn't really exist in any popular form today. People are not interested in that. I think the consensus is that liberalism is the way to go. And who needs this old grumpy crank from the 60s to tell us why liberalism is wrong? I would argue too, maybe, you know, to people in the 21st century Canada, he's very Anglo-centric, like this idea that, oh, it's either the US or Britain, and, you know, not fully acknowledging the tapestry of culture that makes Canada what it is.

That is quite true. He's writing as an English-Canadian writing for English Canadians. He's not talking about French Canada at all. He's not talking about, so far as I can tell, he's not talking about indigenous people at all to his great detriment. He has virtually nothing to say about them, which is a major drawback to his writing. Well, that's a product of his time, I suppose. I don't know if you can give him a pass like that. In the 60s. But like, okay, so just so I'm clear here, he's very Anglo-centric, doesn't acknowledge immigration or indigenous people.

Grumpy, curmudgeonly. What is there in there that is redeemable? One of the central claims he wants to make is that technology and liberalism have a homogenizing effect. And they just sort of claim to be or they appear to be pluralist and making a free and open society where everyone can express their individuality. everyone can express their individuality, but in fact that as communities become increasingly technologized, they become basically identical, and sort of local idiosyncrasies and local traditions tend to disappear.

And what that means is that particular traditions and particular ways of life are no longer possible. One eats and sleeps and fornicates in motels, you know, just anywhere, are no longer possible. One eats and sleeps and fornicates in motels, you know, just anywhere, and they're all the same in North America. Why does one move from suburb to suburb? Why is one at home? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When I drive on the highways around Hamilton and Toronto through the proliferation of factories and apartments,

when I sit among the bureaucracies in which the educational side of the technological system is planned, when I watch the moon landing on television, it is then that the conception of time as history is most urgently present for me. Bryan admits that, at least on the surface, George Grant might be a hard sell in today's Canada. He looks and sounds like an old-school establishment figure.

He was educated at the posh Toronto private boys' school, Upper Canada College. His father was the principal there, as his grandfather had been before that. Grant's other grandfather was principal of Queen's University. Later on, George Grant did a PhD in theology at Oxford. Along the way, he developed cultural loyalties and a manner of expression that don't sound particularly hip. I think there were certain goods incarnate in certain traditions in Canada that we call British traditions. And I, you know, as practical things, I'm sad for them to go at certain points, you know, certain things.

But that they have gone. You know, I mean, you might as well talk, you know, I mean, again, it's like, is the table there? Why talk about it? It's just gone. And I think also, I mean, I'm incomparably more interested in the fate of man in technical society, because that is a universal problem and a problem that is just inescapable. Nevertheless, Brian isn't alone in believing it's high time we brought back George Grant and reconsider his ideas for our time.

We're now going to introduce you to someone who once described Grant's Lament for a Nation as, quote, one part Bob Dylan snarling like a rolling stone, but also one part Malcolm X. Okay, my name is George Elliott Clark. I'm a poet and I am a professor of English at the University of Toronto. And are you widely seen as an establishment figure, would you say? Are you comfortable with that description? No, I'm not comfortable with that description.

And yet you have an affection for George Grant. Well, yeah, and I should explain a little bit further. Last year in 2022, a couple of academics published a paper that was critical of myself. And one of the points that they used to critique me was the fact that I have read and I have appreciated the works of George Park and Grant. They were suggesting that Grant himself was an establishment figure, and he really was not. In fact, he troubled the establishment greatly, the establishment of Canada, troubling the idea that we could have any kind of easy alliance or deep imbrication with the politics and foreign policy of the United States of America. In that sense, he was following a very old tradition of what we've come to call reditorism, which is actually very Canadian,

using the powers of government to restrain the powers of private capital. We meet George Eliot Clark along a tree-lined path tucked between a couple of stately University of Toronto buildings, a space that's designed for high-minded discussions. It's actually called Philosopher's Walk. I was a great devotee as a child of my father's library. And one of the books that he had was a paperback version of Lament for a Nation from 1971. And eventually, when I was in my older teens, 18 or 19, I picked it up and read it. This will be 1978, 1979, The Age of Disco. Here I am in The Age of Disco, disco lots of polyester and I'm reading George Grant and liking it and why why what is it about it because I also had growing up simply growing up in Nova Scotia growing up in Canada I also imbibed a degree of it's it's a terrible word to use

anti-americanism is a terrible word to use because it sounds more negative than I actually intended to be but I did grow up with the maybe I should simply say, a nationalistic Canadian perspective, which was also at the same time extremely critical of the United States, especially in terms of its foreign policy. And I found those concerns, my own concerns, personal concerns about American foreign policy, justified and confirmed and reaffirmed by reading Lament for a Nation. Grant did not hesitate to call America an empire. He did not hesitate to describe the war on Vietnam as being a crime against humanity, as being an obscenity, as being an example of the will to power run amok, to have a great superpower obliterating or trying to obliterate a small country, trying to

make it decide for itself how it wants to be in the world. And he saw all 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. And one of the main aspects of that war, which he absolutely detested, was aerial bombardment. And this gets into his attack on technology in general. He was very concerned that because liberal capitalism, in order to progress, needs to have technological innovation, no matter what kind of innovation it is, that we will be enabled more and more to be able to kill each other indiscriminately in mass slaughter. And so he was looking for some kind of moral constraint on technological development, which could only come for him from faith.

And in George Grant's own case, his faith was Christianity. Grant became a Christian while getting off his bike somewhere in rural England near Oxford. I think it was 1939, shortly after he went to Oxford. And so he had this conversion experience where he suddenly knew Christ is my savior. Very important. As an expression of his pacifism as a Christian, he takes part in the war by basically working with the Red Cross and helping the wounded and so on. And in that process of doing that charitable work, he becomes involved romantically with a married woman. And they are intimate while her husband is stationed elsewhere. It's during the Blitz when this affair is taking place, so 1940, 1941.

And they are out together one evening and the German bombers approach. They both take cover under a bridge and they can still see each other. They're standing under different parts of a bridge. And where she is standing, there's a direct hit by a German bomb. And she is, of course, killed in front of Grant, in front of his eyes. And he has two great reactions to that. The first reaction, of course, is blaming himself

to an extent for having engaged in this relationship that was outside his Christian beliefs. So feeling guilt over that. But the second powerful reaction was understanding suddenly, as he understood his conversion, he understood suddenly the wanton evil of technological warfare. It came home to him in an instant, and that's why he was against the Vietnam War, because as we all know, more tonnage was dropped on Vietnam, including napalm, of course, in the years of that conflict, in terms of the American involvement, 1960 to 73, or thereabouts, than was dropped throughout

the entire Second World War. Right? That really shaped his suspicion and his wariness about any society that gives itself over to the forces of technological advancement, because they're always going to be used to create misery and destruction, rather than to actually advance the possibility for happiness. The greatest force in the Western world has been modern technological science, and this was the very centre of modern liberalism, the means of changing the world to make it as we wanted it in our freedom.

I think that the primary thing is for Canadians to know what it is that they are, English-speaking Canadians, what it is that they are that makes them different from Americans. And this is very hard to find in this kind of homogenized culture of the modern world. I don't agree with everything that he says. I don't support everything that he supported. The power of what I call modern liberalism,

that is the belief that you're going to build a universal and homogeneous state which eliminates all particularity, where men will be made new, has, except for the province of Quebec, built a universal and homogeneous state in North America in which the past is broken. And young people, therefore, find it an enormous jump

to come to that past. All conservatives believed that there was a golden age. For some of them, it was the Garden of Eden. If we could only get back there, everything would be perfect. For some others, it's the Wild West. You know, everything was great in the Wild West of the U.S. That's the problem with conservatism, is they're always trying to conserve things that actually were not necessarily progressive, or actually reactionary, and terribly reactionary. Grant, for instance,

in Lament for a Nation, defends the idea of, I'm not saying that he defends the old South, but he does defend the idea of Dixie as a distinctive society, and therefore as perhaps something that's valuable, if we push his argument a little bit further. Of course, being an African Canadian, African Nova Scotian, a descendant of people who fled the tyrannous slavery of the American Republic, I have to say I differ. And generally, generally 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. For George Eliot Clarke, even though Grant's books are decades old, anyone today wanting a fundamental understanding of Canadian politics, conservatism, and the differences between conservatives needs to read Lament for a Nation.

I've got a copy of it here with me. I was looking at it again on the subway on my way down to meet you. And this is the actual version that my father had. Paperback. Is that a first edition? No, no, no. I do have a first edition hardcover, but I keep that in the office.

1965. I think it's worth a little bit of money now, too. Right? But there's so many brilliant passages in this work. But there's so many brilliant passages in this work. But I'll just go to the very end of the last paragraph, part of the last paragraph. 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. Tendubonque manis repae ulterioris amore. Forgive my bad Latin, but here's the translation from Virgil's Aeneid, book six. They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore. Beautiful. Oh my golly. What's not to love? If you're crying a lot, you got to set this to music. Education is, after all, a word which comes from Plato's image of the cave.

Education is a leading out of the darkness of opinion into the light of knowledge. Any person who would want to become prime minister of this country should try to put into practice what Grant is saying philosophically, and he will be prime minister. should try to put into practice what Grant is saying philosophically, and he will be prime minister. People used to try to figure George out because they wanted labels on him. I wonder whether he was a conservative or whether he was a socialist or whether, and they were really, because George was always examining things

in terms of questions. things in terms of questions. You're listening to Ideas, we're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio

National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA

and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot

that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Here's George Grant speaking with the CBC's Peter Zosky back in 1973. In very fast-moving technical societies, memory goes. And, you know, if memory goes, men and women ceased to be men and women because memory is one of the most prodigious preservers of good in the world. It can be, you know, you can memorize bad things and can be terrible, but without it, one is lost.

When George Grant died in 1988, he left behind six books of his philosophy, along with hundreds of articles and interviews. He dealt with topics ranging from the dangers of trusting psychiatrists to the threat posed by the power of the United States and multinational corporations. George Grant is highly critical of technology. He says, well, technology is not simply a bunch of tools that you can use, but it's a way of life that sort of shapes what you can do and what you can think. And it might not be good for us overall. Brian Hastie has spent years

gathering together the strands of George Grant's work. He wants to make the argument that Grant had a unified message for us, a message we need to hear today, even if it's easy to be distracted by other aspects of what Grant said and wrote. Brian's PhD work is featured as part of our series, Ideas from the Trenches. He rejoins producers Tom Howell and Nikola Lukšić to discuss what they've heard so far. Hello, Brian. Hello, thank you for having me in. Thanks for coming in. What's the best defense against this accusation that he sort of thought culture was being better served by the old British standards, the British Empire, even the value of Dixie culture? That sounds a bit off-putting. I don't know that Grant would defend every particular culture. the practice of slavery, but rather his concern is that the homogenizing effects of technology and liberalism make particularity impossible. We can see that something like Dixie, evil as

slavery is, is simply not possible within a technological society any more than British conservatism or French-Canadian conservatism or whatever the tradition may be. And in particularity, in those unique cultural traditions, we can discern something of what it means to live a good life. But when particularity is not possible, when we're only living in a technological society, when this is our only option and there is no cultural or traditional difference between places, it makes it much harder to figure out what a good life is. Right. And so for most of this episode, as you've heard, we've been centering on George Grant's most famous work, Lament for a Nation.

You're interested in much more than that. Can you explain to us a bit more about what Grant's fear was with technology? Like, what's the threat? So, the basic underlying idea is that when technology becomes so dominant and becomes the defining characteristic of society, you're basically condemned to instrumental thinking. You're able to say what things are good for, but you're not able to say why they're good. You can figure out very, very well how to accomplish something, but you become less capable of saying what you should do or what the ultimate purpose is. There are obviously instrumental goods like overcoming scarcity and curing diseases. But once we overcome scarcity and once we

overcome diseases and we're all happy and healthy and wealthy, then what's the purpose of human life? What are we supposed to do with our time then? His idea that this is a question even worth asking, like once we're all happy, then what? That's based on just a sort of gut feeling, a faith that there should be a question there? Well, he's trying to recover a philosophical tradition. So, this is a very long and central question to the history of Western philosophy. What is the good life? How should we live? So, What is the good life? How should we live? So it's not that he's coming at this question as a gut feeling, but he's trying to revive important questions that philosophers for hundreds or thousands of years have asked

and thought was most important. It's the most important question you could possibly ask. Because what could be more important than leading a good life? So does this relate to what he thinks is the problem with liberalism? Yes, yeah, because the challenge he thinks with liberalism is it gives us a good idea of how to be just, but not why to be just. It doesn't tell us why we ought to include everyone in our social contract. I don't really understand what he means by liberalism.

So what is exactly? He's got a couple of definitions of liberalism, but the one we should look at is a social agreement that we will each restrict our individual freedoms and liberties in exchange for certain protections. I agree not to harm anyone else in exchange for other people not harming me. We also don't know about what the collective good is. We're agnostic about that. And the only thing we're going to say about ourselves is that we're free to do as we please until it interferes with

other people. And this is a working definition of liberalism that basically started with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and their account of the social contract. And to illustrate a modern confusion for anyone listening who also pays attention to current politics, under his definition, today's conservative party would be a liberal party. Absolutely, yeah. There are only liberal parties, only small L liberal parties. So the challenge of liberalism and technology, I think, for Grant is really illustrated in the Vietnam War. You have a government that, on the one hand, pays lip service to being humane and decent and kind to people in the United States.

And at the other time is, or on the other hand, is just dropping napalm and basically demolishing an entire country and engaging in the worst kind of violent imperialism. When you're not sort of thinking about it carefully, you can justify liberalism like, well, look how humane we are, never mind the fact that one in the same government is doing terrible crimes on the other side of the world because who cares about those people in Vietnam? They don't belong to our society. Okay, Brian, thank you so much. We'll catch up with you again at the end of the show. Great. Look forward to it. Brian's task, as he said, is to pull together the different threads of George Grant's thinking, like the bit where Grant wants Canada to be different from the U.S.,

and the bit where Grant doesn't like technology, and then there's Plato. Now he's following Plato and coming up with that notion. For Plato, the best life consists in contemplation of pure goodness or contemplating God. It turns out that Grant was a Christian Platonist, a worldview going back to at least the 3rd century AD that still influences modern worshippers today. Among them is a former student of George Grant's. He was prophetic. I think he was prophetic that if we do not understand limits on upon ourselves,

on what we can do and what we can't do, because we have no notion that there is a good beyond being, then we are just going to end up creating this sort of monster of a society wherein no one has any freedom to think anymore, because all your thinking is being done for you by other people, and you're being told how to live. My name is Roberta Bayer. I teach at Patrick Henry College in Northern Virginia, but I'm originally from Southern Ontario. How did you meet George Grant? Well, I met him when I arrived in Halifax. He had just retired there to the classics department. And I think I sat in or audited his last course he taught on Aristotle's Ethics and Politics. I had gone to Halifax to go to law school, but I decided not to be in law school.

And unfortunately, I then proceeded to stay in Halifax for three years as a junior fellow at the foundation year program at King's College. And so I knew Grant in person for four years. What was he like? Oh, he was a brilliant teacher. He conducted class very much as a Socratic teacher. And in person, he would do the same thing. I would go over for tea to his house from time to time, and he would question me. is to really elicit from the person you're talking to what they know about something, and then drawing on what they know in order to be able to make them see things in their ideas which they hadn't considered before.

Roberta thinks Grant was drawn into this mixture of Plato's philosophy with Christianity while he was at Oxford University. He went to Oxford right around the Second World War and people who know anything but the Inklings, you know, the people who, C.S. Lewis in his circle, well, they were at Oxford at that time. And Lewis used to hold public discussions once every couple of weeks. It was called the Socratic Club, where he would bring another academic, and they would discuss the faith. And Grant used to go to that. So not only was he working on a dissertation in theology, but he was also at the same time having his faith nurtured by a group of

very brilliant people at Oxford. And so that, one might say, was the intellectual side of his faith. How did he try to answer the question of what is a good life? That's an interesting question. I think that I'll turn it around. I think that the question for him was what is the good? Because he thought that the very idea of goodness was very much confused in our era. This takes one to his writings on technology, I think. He came to see that fundamentally our relation to the world around us was one of attempting to control nature through technology. And he associated this with basically the atheism of our day. People come to think that the purpose of life

is basically to be able to control all the accidents and the chances and the unforeseen events of life. And the more you control your life, the better off you are. What he called this was technological rationality, which meant that our reason was always directed to control. And as he said, you know, we come to see as ourselves as the new masters of the earth. And he didn't like this too. No, he did not like this very much. What's wrong with that? Sounds great. Well, what is the message? Well, of course he would write about these things.

He talked about the pollution of the day, the way we were harming nature. I mean, that was certainly part of it. There was also the fact that this mastery of nature dominating our thoughts, meaning we didn't think about what our ends were or what good is apart from mastery. Our reasoning is, in fact,

supposed to be directed at truth, at unchanging truth. And it is this which is supposed to give ourselves a knowledge of ourselves, not simply, we should not simply be directed towards controlling our lives. I mean, that's different,

but he thought it was better. And the idea that this was better was rooted in something to do with that conversion to Christianity, you think? Yes, of course. It has to do with that conversion to Christianity, you think? Yes, of course. It has to do with the conversion to Christianity. Because, you see, his understanding of Christianity was dominated by what he called the theology of the cross. Now, the theology of the cross is to look upon Christ's suffering for mankind as being the great act of God's love for us.

In other words, God came into the world because he loved us. And thus, of course, this gives us an understanding of what suffering is. Suffering is not the end because God has shared our suffering with us. Our end is, in fact, to love God. And this is very much a part of his thinking, that God is both someone to be known but also someone who is loved. And it's not just about loving God. In this account, people in a liberal, technological society don't even know how to love each other.

This concentration on mastery of the world, of course, involves mastery of other people. And if all of nature is, in fact, something simply to be mastered, then the other person simply becomes something that serves us. And the whole capacity to be able to love another person, which is so natural to mankind. And of course, the way God made us, because God made us in love, and we are to love other people. We've lost that in this technological world that we live in. And how central is it that God has to be part of this? Can this extend to people who are atheist or agnostic? Or do you need, from his point, do you need this Christian God to make it all come together? Yes, the platonic and the Christian God.

Always his Christianity is tinged with some Platonism because in Socrates, Socrates understood that the end of man is to love the good. And in technological rationality, the problem with sort of the nihilism of our day is that it simply makes the good what we control. And that's fundamentally nihilist. I mean, what the should, the ought, the good is simply ourselves. So consequently, the capacity to be able to love another is going to come through the recognition that there is a good which is beyond us. And that this good actually brought good things into the world. He used to quote Simone Weil that faith is the intelligence enlightened by love, right? That this, what faith is,

is the intelligence enlightened by the love of God. He loved Simone's idea of de-creation, which is a really hard concept to understand, and I'm a little afraid of discussing it because it could be misunderstood. Brian Hastie says George Grant didn't just appreciate the ideas of Simone Weil, he practically worshipped her. He takes her to be a saint. He thinks she got it spot on,

she understands what Plato is on about, and she understands how you can live as a Platonist in the 20th century. The person that I found very helpful in understanding Simone Weil and, by proxy, George Grant, is a scholar named Lisa McCullough. Hi, I'm Lisa McCullough, and I teach at California State University, Dominguez Hills. I teach at California State University, Dominguez Hills. I teach philosophy. I have been studying Simone Weil for a good 30 years, actually longer. She was a French philosopher who lived 1909 to 1943.

She was a highly original thinker, unconventional, and hard to categorize or pigeonhole. Really a maverick. What does she mean when she talks about decreation? Decreation is a willingness to accept our nothingness. We don't have any power, and certainly not the power of being. any power, and certainly not the power of being. All things exist thanks to a complex set of conditions that will eventually change and end. And that means we likewise only exist thanks to

a complex set of conditions that will end in death. But we feel in our core that we have a right to exist, that we are owed existence, that we have the power of existence, that we have a right to exist that we are owed existence that we have the power of existence that we have being itself and somehow the ego is that arrogant and i mean using the etymology of the word arrogant we're arrogating the power to be as our own but traditionally that is god's power and we have no right to arrogate it so the truth is we have no power and decreation allows us to see that and accept it and to do so without resentment against the world or god she writes about the will and how the will, the only creative use of the will, which is our power to say I, our arrogance, is to de-create ourselves. We should apply all of our powers of will to willingly accept our nothingness because what happens then is that we're giving place to God. God comes first.

God is our good. And when we act, we should always be acting out of God, out of motivated by the goodness of God and not by our own will. And this should, like the should is based on what? Like, is it a should based on that will be better for humans? Humans will prefer what we get if we do that? Yes. What do we get? It's better for humans because her idea is then one is motivated by the desire to be obedient to God. And what that means is letting perfect goodness guide everything that you do. Remember, God is perfect goodness. That's the very definition for her. So then instead of my will, which might be something nasty or selfish or self-seeking, self-aggrandizing, I'm saying, what would the perfect good do in this situation? And that

becomes your model for how to act in the world. Does that make sense to you? I think so. Although I, are we imagining the world would be nicer if we do this? There would be more saints. Yes. The more people who do that, the more saints in the world

and the more saints in the world, the more people are seeing this higher truth and participating it. As for, she didn't expect that this would actually reign as the principle of society. That would be utopian. And she was not utopian. She was very pessimistic, actually. But she does believe in better and worse societies. And the better ones always have these kind of higher motives that work in them, a higher truth, a higher goodness, putting those values in front of the eyes of everyone and aspiring to them. Why does the good need to be

captured in a God? Well, that's an interesting question because in the end, she doesn't distinguish those two things. She says that that perfect good that we long for, that's goodness itself, that is God. And this is where she brings together her love of Plato and Platonism with the Christian God. And yet note that God has to be absent for us to long for him. So the act of creation in her theology puts us at an infinite distance from God. That brings into being the love that crosses that distance between the creator and the creature. So love wouldn't exist without this infinite distance between God and the creature. For her, that's the logic of creation.

For her, that's the logic of creation. The whole reason of it is through this infinite distance of separation between the perfect good, which is not available because it's so absolute, and the relative goods of this world, as well as the evils. This is what gives birth to love. Love loves across the distance. Why is the question of what is the good life still relevant after 2,000 years and more of discussing this? Well, if you're asking what Simone Weil says about that, she believes that always in our life, every moment, we're having to choose between good and evil. There's no escaping it. It's really just the fundamental reality of existing in this world. No matter what you do, almost, there's some moral implication of any action. And so she would always ask the question, well, if you're asking,

would always ask the question, well, if you're asking what is the good life, it's the life that pursues the good. How do you do that? To truly pursue the good is to recognize our aspiration is to be obedient to God. It's a very high standard, right? You're asking asking i'm not asking like what do human beings think is good i'm asking what's a sort of perfect standard for goodness she has the conviction that if you look around in society most people are in one degree or another corrupted not trustworthy or self-interested in ways that are not perfectly good, you know. So where are you going to find that gold standard for goodness? It's not going to be a human standard. It's going to be what she calls a supernatural good.

Lisa McCullough, thank you so much for speaking with us. Well, thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for speaking with us. Well, thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Thanks so much. And we have Brian Hastie back on the line, this time from St. John's, Newfoundland. And he's been listening to everything you've heard so far. Hello, Brian. Hello. Thanks for having me back.

Welcome back. Hello, Brian. Hello. Thanks for having me back. Welcome back. What concretely does it add to our idea of goodness to introduce terms like God or our ultimate purpose? I think what's striking about Simone Weil's thought, especially in the context of George Grant, is that the good which we desire, our ultimate purpose is implicit in our everyday

lives, whether we know it or not, that we're constantly desiring goods, but we find that they never actually satisfy us. Right. So, it's not just about our own personal satisfaction and happiness. Like sure, that kind of goodness can be satisfied, but it's something external to us and beyond us that's a larger collective good to be had. Right, right, right. And it's precisely that when you are imposing your particular intentions and projects sort of on the world,

when you're trying to bring things under control through technological mastery or whatever means, then you're prone to making errors. And as Lisa and Roberta were sort of emphasizing, it's obedience towards the good is a more satisfactory end. It seems there's a bridge building to elide the words God and good in that way could remove a division that is between people who consider themselves secular and materialist and those who consider themselves religious.

Yeah, God is a word that comes with a lot of social, cultural, and historical baggage. of social, cultural, and historical baggage. So whenever you use the word God, you're almost inevitably implying a lot of things that you probably don't mean to imply. So usually when I talk about Grant, I just omit the word entirely and speak of the good or goodness. There aren't so many implications about it. It's going to help sell them to people who aren't already Christian, Platonist, Canadian nationalists.

Exactly, yeah. So why do we need George Grant right now? What is he going to do for us if we're going to bring him to a new audience right now? Maybe he's just an implicit good. I don't think he would go quite that far. One thing he wants to do, and what I think is helpful, is he wants to destroy false sources of hope. He wants to show that technology is not the solution. Technology is part of the problem. And in recognizing it that way, in recognizing sort of the evils in the world and all the problems there, we can withhold our love, we can withhold our trust

and patiently look for something else. In the one consequence of this, what I'd like to emphasize is that Grant's thought, and I think Simone Weil's thought as well, doesn't depend on a prior apprehension of God or the good. Rather, apprehending God or the good or understanding them is a consequence of seeing the world for what it is and seeing that something like technology isn't the answer to all our problems. So we need him now to put our optimism in check.

Is that basically it? That's a very good way of putting it, yeah. Well, thank you again. We really appreciate all your time. I appreciate you having me in. Thanks so much. You're listening to Bring Back Grumpy George, The Forgotten Message of George Grant by Ideas producers Nikola Lukšić and Tom Howell. Thanks to studio technicians Emily Chiaravezio in Toronto and Mark Strong and Andrew Wiseman in St. John's. Thanks also to Bob Rempel in the CBC Archives Department. And thanks to all of our guests. My name is George Elliott Clark. My name is Roberta

Bayer. Hi, I'm Lisa McCullough. My name is Brian Hastie, and I am a PhD candidate at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in philosophy. You can go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas for information on their work. This episode is part of our long-running documentary series, Ideas from the Trenches. It features emerging Canadian scholars in the act of creating new ideas in the form of PhD dissertations. If you're a PhD student and would like to be featured in the series, you can write to us at ideas at cbc.ca. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad.