Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 3 (1960-1969) 9781442673076

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Chronology: George Grant’s Life
Introduction to Volume 3: 1960–1969
Two Letters to Murray Ross, President of York University
Convocation Address Given at St John’s College, Winnipeg
An Ethic of Community
Memorandum on Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Year’s Developments in the Arts and Sciences: Philosophy and Religion
Review of Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841–1867, by John S. Moir
Exchange with Keith MacDonald, and Two Talks Given to Scientists
Sermon for a Student Service, McMaster Divinity School
Television Script: ‘Augustine’
Television Script: ‘Kant’
Conceptions of Health
Carl Gustav Jung
Review of Thought: Papers Given before the Learned Societies of Canada, 1960
Letter to Le Devoir
The New Europe
On Peter Fechter
Review of Christianity and Revolution: The Lesson of Cuba, by Leslie Dewart
Crime and Corruption
American-Soviet Disarmament
Unpublished Review of Plato on Man and Society, by I.M. Crombie
Review of Fountain Come Forth: The Anglican Church and the Valley Town of Dundas, prepared by R.B. Gilman
Memorandum of the Anglican Bishops Concerning the Roman Catholic Hierarchy’s Brief on Education
Value and Technology
Review of The Four Faces of Peace, by Lester B. Pearson
Review of The Predicament of Democratic Man, by Edmond Cahn
Man-Made Man
Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism
Introduction to the Carleton Library Edition (1970) of Lament for a Nation
Letter to Rodney Crook
Notes on the Constitutional Question: A Memorandum Written at the Request of the Rt. Hon. John G. Diefenbaker
Protest and Technology
Letter to the Globe and Mail: ‘Freedom Fighter’
Individuality in Mass Society
Review of The Technological Society, by Jacques Ellul
‘How Deception Lurks in the Secular City’: Review of The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, by Harvey Cox
The Value of Protest
Two Televised Conversations between George Grant and Gad Horowitz
The Great Society
The Conservatives Must Put Canada First
From Roosevelt to LBJ
Qui Tollit: Reflections on the Eucharist
Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America
‘Technology and Man’: An Interview of George Grant by Gad Horowitz
‘The Practice of Politics’ and ‘Thought about Politics’: The George C. Nowlan Lectures
George Grant and the Department of Religion, McMaster University
Course Lectures at McMaster in the 1960s: A Selection
Appendix 1 Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Appendix 2 Editorial and Textual Principles and Methods Applied in Volume 3
Index

Citation preview

COLLECT ED WORKS OF G EORGE G RANT VOL UM E 3 19 6 0 – 1 9 6 9

COLLECTED WORKS

OF GEORGE GRANT Volume 3 1960–1969 Edited by Arthur Davis and Henry Roper

U NI VE R S ITY O F TO R ON TO P RE S S Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press 2005 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3904-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Grant, George, 1918–1988. Collected works of George Grant / edited by Arthur Davis. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. 1933–1950 – v. 2. 1951–1959 – v. 3. 1960–1969 / edited by Arthur Davis and Henry Roper. ISBN 0-8020-0762-7 (v. 1). ISBN 0-8020-0763-5 (v. 2). ISBN 0-8020-3904-9 (v. 3) 1. Philosophy. 2. Political science. 3. Religion. 4. Canada – Politics and government. I. Davis, Arthur, 1939– II. Roper, Henry III. Title. B995.G74 1999

191

C99-931317-7

This volume has been published with the generous financial assistance of W.H. Loewen and York University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Permissions

xi

Chronology

xiii

Introduction to Volume 3: 1960–1969

xvii

Two Letters to Murray Ross, President of York University

3

Convocation Address Given at St John’s College, Winnipeg

9

‘An Ethic of Community’

20

Memorandum on Encyclopaedia Britannica

49

‘The Year’s Developments in the Arts and Sciences: Philosophy and Religion’

66

Review of Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841–1867, by John S. Moir

109

Exchange with Keith MacDonald, and Two Talks Given to Scientists

111

Sermon for a Student Service, McMaster Divinity School

134

Television Script: ‘Augustine’

140

vi

Contents

Television Script: ‘Kant’

151

‘Conceptions of Health’

163

‘Carl Gustav Jung’

181

Review of Thought: Papers Given before the Learned Societies of Canada, 1960

193

Letter to Le Devoir: ‘L’économie canadienne’

196

‘The New Europe’

198

‘On Peter Fechter’

202

Review of Christianity and Revolution: The Lesson of Cuba, by Leslie Dewart

204

‘Crime and Corruption’

209

‘American-Soviet Disarmament’

212

Review (Unpublished) of Plato on Man and Society, by I.M. Crombie

215

Review of Fountain Come Forth: The Anglican Church and the Valley Town of Dundas, prepared by R.B. Gilman

221

‘Memorandum of the Anglican Bishops Concerning the Roman Catholic Hierarchy’s Brief on Education’

224

‘Value and Technology’

227

Review of The Four Faces of Peace, by Lester B. Pearson

245

Review of The Predicament of Democratic Man, by Edmond Cahn

248

‘Man-Made Man’

255

Contents

vii

Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism

271

Introduction to the Carleton Library Edition (1970) of Lament for a Nation

368

Letter to Rodney Crook

379

‘Notes on the Constitutional Question’: A Memorandum Written at the Request of the Rt. Hon. John G. Diefenbaker

384

‘Protest and Technology’

393

Letter to the Globe and Mail: ‘Freedom Fighter’

406

‘Individuality in Mass Society’: An Interview of George Grant by Adrienne Clarkson

407

Review of The Technological Society, by Jacques Ellul

413

‘How Deception Lurks in the Secular City’: Review of The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, by Harvey Cox 419 ‘The Value of Protest’

426

Two Televised Conversations between George Grant and Gad Horowitz

431

‘The Great Society’

455

‘The Conservatives Must Put Canada First’

463

‘From Roosevelt to LBJ’

466

‘Qui Tollit: Reflections on the Eucharist’

470

Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America

473

viii

Contents

‘Technology and Man’: An Interview of George Grant by Gad Horowitz

595

‘The Practice of Politics’ and ‘Thought about Politics’: The George C. Nowlan Lectures

603

George Grant and the Department of Religion, McMaster University

633

Course Lectures at McMaster in the 1960s: A Selection

668

Appendix 1: List of Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant – CBC

763

Appendix 2: Editorial and Textual Principles and Methods Applied in Volume 3

771

Index

775

Acknowledgments

A large project needs the help and goodwill of many friends, colleagues, critics, and interested parties. We cannot mention them all, but we single out particularly Sheila Grant, who extended her wonderful hospitality during our many visits to work on the papers at her Halifax home, as well as giving her wise counsel, sharing her special knowledge of Grant’s writing, and contributing countless hours of hard work to the preparation of the papers; and Ron Schoeffel, editor-in-chief of University of Toronto Press and the editor of this project, who deserves heartfelt gratitude for years of advice, support, and assurance. We wish also to give special thanks to Anne Laughlin for her care, patience, and artistry while guiding the design and editing of all the volumes, and to Peter Emberley for his enormous contribution to the early preparation of the works in this volume. We thank Ed Andrew for his initial and strong ongoing support of the project, Gerald Owen for extensive and always valuable editorial assistance, Dennis Lee, for wise and timely editing and advice, Michael Burns, for support and advice in the early stages, Jon Alexander, for early work in the project scanning much of Grant’s published writing, Mark Haslett, for working so diligently in compiling an exhaustive bibliography and tracking down obscure journals, Louis Greenspan, for unflinching support and assistance, and William Christian, for sharing the knowledge of Grant he has garnered. Many others have helped along the way, including Bob Davis, Christopher Elson, H.D. Forbes, Nita Graham, David R. Jones, Kenneth Kierans, Peter Kussmaul, Neil G. Robertson, Phoebe Roper, Lawrence Schmidt, the late Kassie Temple, Samantha Thompson, and Mel Wiebe. We are also grateful to the readers at University of Toronto Press for their helpful suggestions.

x

Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful for financial assistance during the period of the early editorial work of the project from the Canadian Studies Directorate, Secretary of State, the Jackman Foundation, the Henry White Kinnear Foundation, and the McLean Foundation. We are especially thankful for indispensable, ongoing, generous financial support from Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University. Special Acknowledgment The editors are particularly indebted to W.H. Loewen for his commitment to support financially the publication of these volumes.

Permissions

The editors thank the following for permission to reprint material in this volume: Sheila Grant for the letters to President Murray Ross, the letter to Rodney Crook, the convocation address at St John’s College, the memorandum on Encyclopaedia Britannica, the talks given to scientists, the sermon for a student service at McMaster, the radio scripts ‘The New Europe,’ ‘On Peter Fechter,’ ‘Crime and Corruption,’ and ‘American-Soviet Disarmament,’ the unpublished review of the first volume of An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines, by Ian Crombie, the review of Fountain Come Forth, the remarks about the ‘Memorandum of Anglican Bishops,’ the notes on the constitutional question and the correspondence with John Diefenbaker, ‘Man-Made Man,’ ‘Qui Tollit,’ ‘The Practice of Politics’ and ‘Thought about Politics,’ ‘The Value of Protest,’ interviews and articles on the Department of Religion at McMaster, ‘Protest and Technology,’ the address to the Toronto International Teach-In, and the McMaster course lectures; University of Toronto Press for ‘An Ethic of Community’ and the review of The Predicament of Democratic Man, by Edmond Cahn; Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. for ‘Philosophy and Religion’; Journal of Ecclesiastical History for the review of Church and State in Canada West, by John Moir; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for ‘Augustine,’ ‘Kant,’ and ‘Carl Gustav Jung,’ in Architects of Modern Thought, ‘Individuality in Mass Society,’ Adrienne Clarkson’s interview of Grant on First Person, ‘Political Action in Canada,’ ‘A Canadian Identity,’ and ‘Comments on the Great Society’; McGill-Queen’s University Press for Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism; Van Nostrand Reinhold Co. Inc. for ‘Conceptions of Health’; Dialogue for the review of Thought - from the Learned Societies of Canada 1960; Le Devoir for the letter to the editor; Canadian Council on Social Development for ‘Value and Technology’;

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Permissions

Globe and Mail for ‘Freedom Fighter,’ a letter on the F-5 fighter; United Church Observer for the review of The Secular City, by Harvey Cox; Hamilton Spectator for ‘The Conservatives Must Put Canada First’; Hurtig Publishers for ‘From Roosevelt to LBJ’; Stoddart Publishing Co. for Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America; Canadian Forum for the review of The Four Faces of Peace: Lester Pearson and the review of Christianity and Revolution: The Lesson of Cuba, by Leslie Dewart; Canadian Dimension for the review of The Technological Society, by Jacques Ellul; and Journal of Canadian Studies for ‘A Conversation on Technology and Man.’

Chronology: George Grant’s Life

1918 1927 1935 1936 1939 1940 1941

1942 1943

1945 1947

1948 1950

1952

Born in Toronto on 13 November to William Grant and Maude Parkin. Enters Upper Canada College in Toronto. Father dies. Enters Queen’s University to study history. Awarded Ontario Rhodes Scholarship. Enters Balliol College, Oxford, to study jurisprudence. Volunteers as Air Raid Precaution Officer on the London docks in Bermondsey during the Battle of Britain. Applies to join the Merchant Marine but is rejected because he has contracted tuberculosis. Works on a farm in Buckinghamshire. Conversion experience to a belief in ‘order beyond space and time.’ Convalesces in Canada. Works under Dr E.A. Corbett as National Secretary of the Canadian Association for Adult Education. Writes for the journal Food for Thought and, with Jean Hunter Morrison, for the radio program Citizens’ Forum. Returns to Balliol to study theology. Attracted to circle of A.D. Lindsay, Austin Farrer, and C.S. Lewis. Meets Sheila Allen. Marries Sheila Allen. Begins work at Dalhousie University as Professor of Philosophy. Works closely with Professor James Doull, ‘who taught me to read Plato.’ Daughter Rachel born. Son William born. Oxford University awards Grant DPhil degree for dissertation entitled ‘The Concept of Nature and Supernature in the Theology of John Oman.’ Son Robert born.

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1954 1957 1959 1960

1961

1963 1965 1966 1969 1970 1971 1974 1976 1980

1982 1983 1984

Chronology: George Grant’s Life

Daughter Catherine born. Daughter Isabel born. Son David born. Grant delivers a series of nine talks on CBC Radio’s University of the Air. Publishes a revised version of the nine radio talks as Philosophy in the Mass Age. Accepts and then resigns a position at the newly established York University in Toronto. While in Toronto writes for Mortimer Adler of the Institute for Philosophical Research, including a review of the year’s books in philosophy and religion published in the first volume of Great Ideas of Today. Contributes ‘An Ethic of Community’ to Social Purpose for Canada, a book published to coincide with the founding of the New Democratic Party. Accepts a position as Associate Professor of Religion at McMaster University. Writes first essay on Simone Weil (unpublished). Mother dies. Appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Publishes Lament for a Nation. Addresses International Teach-In at the University of Toronto. Publishes a new introduction to Philosophy in the Mass Age. Publishes Technology and Empire. Delivers Massey Lectures on the CBC, which are published as Time as History in 1971. Writes a new introduction to Lament for a Nation. Begins work on ‘Technique(s) and Good,’ a book projected but not completed. Delivers Josiah Wood Lectures at Mount Allison University, which are published as English-Speaking Justice in 1978. Begins work on ‘Good and Technique,’ another book not completed. Resigns teaching position at McMaster University. Accepts Killam professorship in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University, with a cross-appointment to the Departments of Classics and Religion. Begins work on the idea of history in the thought of Rousseau and Darwin. Publishes essay on Céline, intended as part of a projected book on Céline and the nature of art. Retires from teaching.

Chronology: George Grant’s Life

1985 1986

1988

xv

Publishes Notre Dame University Press edition of EnglishSpeaking Justice. Publishes Technology and Justice (Anansi and Notre Dame University Presses). Publishes Est-ce la fin du Canada? Lamentation sur l’échec du nationalisme canadien, the French edition of Lament for a Nation (reprinted 1992). Begins work on a projected book responding to Heidegger’s Nietzsche with a defence of Christianity and Plato. Dies in Halifax on 27 September.

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Introduction to Volume 3: 1960–1969

McMaster University Department of Religion George Grant was forty-one when he resigned his position as George Munro professor of philosophy at Dalhousie University, having accepted an offer from President Murray Ross to chair the philosophy department of the newly founded York University. Almost immediately he gave up the York appointment over matters of principle involving control of its philosophy department by the University of Toronto. Without an academic post, he moved with his wife and six children to Toronto in September 1960, earning a living for the following year as a writer and editor for the Institute for Philosophical Research in San Francisco, headed by Mortimer Adler. One of his assignments was to produce a lengthy review of the major philosophical and religious books written in 1960 (see 66–108). This was published in The Great Ideas Today: 1961, edited by Adler and Robert Hutchins, one of a series of annual supplements to their publication project The Great Books of the Western World. Grant also wrote a wideranging unpublished memorandum on the nature and purpose of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, another enterprise controlled by Hutchins (49–65). During this difficult time, Grant also earned money by writing for the CBC, most notably by producing the scripts for two dramatizations, ‘Augustine’ and ‘Kant,’ which were performed nationally on CBC television (140–62). Grant received offers from Claremont College in California and St John’s College, Winnipeg, which he declined, finally accepting a position in the new department of religion at McMaster University in Hamilton. Grant’s decision to participate in the creation of this department gave him an opportunity to teach in a way that might have been

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difficult within a contemporary philosophy department. It also made it possible for him to bring before students the great religious traditions whose importance and influence tended to be neglected in what was coming to be called the multiversity. We have included a selection of Grant’s lectures, chosen both to give an idea of the scope of his teaching and because of the intrinsic interest of their subject matter (668– 762). In addition, volume 3 has a section on Grant and the department of religion at McMaster which includes unpublished as well as published material concerning his role in its development during the 1960s (633–67). Grant moved in 1961 from Toronto to Dundas, Ontario, a town just west of Hamilton within easy reach of McMaster. He was both amazed and perplexed by what he experienced in southern Ontario, which had been transformed in the seventeen years since he had last made his home there: I never forget returning home to Toronto after many years in Halifax. Driving in from the airport, I remember being gripped in the sheer presence of the booming, pulsating place which had arisen since 1945. What did it mean? Where was it going? What had made it? How could there be any stop to its dynamism without disaster, and yet, without a stop, how could there not be disaster? And part of that experience was the knowledge that I had come home to something that never could be my home.1

Grant had observed while at Dalhousie the absorption of the local mercantile culture of Nova Scotia into the larger Canadian and North American economy. In the industrial heartland of Canada, he witnessed the power of international capitalism to reshape the society he had known and understood as a youth, an impact which led him to reflect upon the questions which would engage him for the next decade. This is evident as early as 1961, in his first major essay in volume 3, ‘An Ethic of Community’ (20–48). Grant here argues that the mass society that had come into being as a result of the industrialization of Canada must not be dominated by the goals of a capitalist elite, whose focus upon profit and consumption creates an economy breeding poverty in the midst of affluence. As an alternative to the amorality of corporate capitalism, he proposes that the community

Introduction to Volume 3: 1960–1969

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must be rooted in ethical purpose, based on a belief in equality which is derived from the absolute worth of individuals as moral agents. While writing at this time from a socialist perspective, Grant’s dislike of corporate capitalism and scepticism about the elites that controlled the Canadian economy remained unaltered when he began to call himself a conservative. Grant’s other writings from the early 1960s such as ‘Value and Technology’ (227–44) reflect ‘An Ethic of Community’ in their preoccupation with the need to find a basis for social and political action transcending the incremental and the utilitarian. His developing vision of Canadian conservatism as rooted in a willingness to use state power both to further national goals and to control corporate capitalism led to Gad Horowitz’s formulation of a tradition of ‘Red Toryism’ in Canadian politics and thought. Although Grant resisted being called a Red Tory, his conversations with Horowitz included in volume 3 (431–54 and 595–602) are fascinating documents, providing insights into the issues that preoccupied these two major thinkers in the 1960s, most of which continue to be of importance to Canada’s survival. The events surrounding the Bomarc missile crisis and the defeat of the Progressive Conservative government of Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker in the 1963 federal election provided a further impetus to Grant’s thinking about Canada. He was appalled by the willingness of the Liberals led by Lester Pearson to accommodate the Kennedy administration by pursuing policies that undermined Canada’s existence as a nation. How such a situation had come to pass became the subject of an extended essay he began in January 1964, originally entitled ‘A Lament for a Nation (A Defence of Mr Diefenbaker),’ and published in March 1965 as Lament for a Nation (271–367). Grant had revised his manuscript (acting upon suggestions from his editor John Robert Colombo) to give it more popular appeal, but he could not have anticipated the enormous impact its publication had upon Canadian political debate. Lament for a Nation made him one of Canada’s best-known academic figures at a moment when he felt compelled to speak out against the American escalation of the Vietnam War, for example in a memorable address he gave to a teach-in at the University of Toronto in October 1965 (393–405). Despite his avowedly conservative stance in Lament for a Nation, the book had a deep impact upon the young activists of the

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Canadian New Left, who were further drawn to Grant by his opposition to American imperialism. Grant admired the moral clarity of his New Left allies, although he refused to support them in engaging in civil disobedience that involved breaking the law until all other attempts to convince the Canadian parliament had failed. For Grant, the Vietnam War was not simply a matter for protest, but a catalyst for his developing critique of liberalism, particularly the liberalism of North American society. He viewed the Vietnam War as not accidental, but the natural outcome of the drive to dominate human and nonhuman nature that was central to the liberal vision. The masters of technological society recognized no limits to the capacity of humans to exercise their unlimited wills in shaping themselves, or their environment. This is the central theme, developed against the background of the Vietnam atrocity, of Technology and Empire (473–594). Because of the importance of Lament for a Nation and Technology and Empire, we decided that they required extended introductions that can be found at the head of these works (271–7 and 473–9). The reader will discover by a close reading of volume 3 that these two works should be seen as integral to the larger perspective of Grant’s thinking about the meaning of modernity and its relation to the ancient world, particularly the Greeks and Christianity, or, to use his language, Athens and Jerusalem. During the period covered by this volume, three thinkers most deeply influenced his thought. The most important was Simone Weil, whose explication of the Divine in relation to necessity and the good had a lasting effect upon his understanding of Christianity. She also provided him with an interpretation of Greek mathematics suggesting a way of looking at nature that did not require the manipulation and control demanded by modern science. Grant’s views on the drive to mastery inherent in modern scientific research and the strong adverse reaction of scientists to his ideas can be found in ‘Exchange with Keith MacDonald, and Two Talks Given to Scientists’ (111–33), as well as in other writings in the volume. Although Grant hoped to produce a work that would do justice to the depth of insight he found in Simone Weil, as reflected in a number of unpublished writings in his papers, he came to feel unequal to this task and actually published very little about her. We decided to break with the chronological scheme generally followed in the Collected

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Works and include this published and unpublished material, which was written from the late 1950s through to the 1980s, in volume 4, in a section to be edited by Lawrence Schmidt. The second thinker who deeply influenced him was the GermanAmerican political philosopher Leo Strauss. Grant found in Strauss an approach to Greek philosophy which enabled him to reinforce his opposition to the historicist position of Hegel, as can be seen in his essay ‘Tyranny and Wisdom’ in Technology and Empire. He was impressed by Strauss’s argument that the Greeks’ understanding of such concepts as justice must be grasped not as simply relative to their own time and place but in the light of the eternal, of truths that transcended history. Strauss’s views reinforced Grant’s developing perception that the idea of history as progress, a view fundamental to modern liberalism, was not simply erroneous but at the heart of the intellectual and spiritual failure of the West. Finally, Grant found in the French Calvinist writer Jacques Ellul an analysis that confirmed his own sense that technology could not be seen as simply external, but as transforming those who lived within its horizon, making it difficult if not impossible to think outside the realm of the technological. His debt to Ellul is acknowledged in a number of essays in the volume as well as in Technology and Empire, but Grant found his thinking unsatisfying because its sociological focus failed to provide an adequate philosophical account of the nature and origins of the technological society. He found what was lacking in Ellul in Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. By the late 1960s he was immersing himself in their writings, particularly Nietzsche’s, as he worked on the Massey Lectures delivered on CBC Radio in 1969 and published in 1971 under the title Time as History. Grant’s encounter with Nietzsche and Heidegger would shape his thought throughout the next decade and beyond, as will be evident in the next volume of the Collected Works. Grant’s collected works for the period 1960–9 cover an extraordinary variety of subjects, from psychiatry in ‘Conceptions of Health’ (163–80) to international relations in ‘American-Soviet Disarmament’ (212–14) and the nature and practice of politics in his Nowlan Lectures given at Acadia University in 1969 (603–32) and not previously published. Even the occasional pieces, addresses, and interviews in this volume are

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infused with the passion that is one of his defining qualities, and with his conviction that both philosophy and religion are indispensable to human life if it is to be fully lived. His thought, whether about corporate capitalism, the future of Canada, Vietnam, or technology, is held together by his firm belief in the eternal reality of truth, beauty, and justice as found in Plato and Christianity. Grant’s consistency of intention and purpose emerges clearly through bringing together his unpublished and published work. This makes volume 3 much more than the sum of its parts. The Texts of Volume 3: Sources and Presentation Most of the published works in this volume did not present any unusual editorial problems. They include five philosophical essays and articles, a conference summary, a book survey, book reviews, broadcast scripts, interviews, addresses, newspaper articles, and letters to the editor. The broadcasts are all from the CBC, including radio scripts found with Grant’s papers, transcriptions of actual programs, and three programs published in books or magazines. The articles and essays have been gathered from the books where they originally appeared. The interviews and reviews appeared in newspapers, journals, and books. Lament for a Nation and Technology and Empire did require particular care because of their special contribution to the public’s understanding of Grant. For the Lament the editors have included a substantial headnote and extensive annotations. To help with the reading of Technology and Empire, we have included a substantial headnote and annotations containing information about the original publication of the essays and editorial changes in the 1969 publication. Grant composed by hand as well as on the typewriter, but generally did not retain original handwritten drafts once he had a typed version to work with. The lectures were written by hand and have been transferred to the computer. The task has been to reproduce the printed version, typescript, or manuscript accurately and to provide the necessary introductory notes and annotations. The works in this volume appear in chronological order with the exceptions of the lectures, some of the writings that cannot be given exact dates, and the essays of Technology and Empire, which are published as they appeared in 1969, though all

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but two were written earlier in the decade. Groups of writings are ‘classified’ arbitrarily in this introduction, only to facilitate an account of their sources and the editorial work involved in their presentation. Published Works of the 1960s 1. Lament for a Nation and Technology and Empire 2. Articles and Essays about Philosophy, Technology, Health, Politics, and the Study of Religion Grant’s publications of the 1960s (other than Lament for a Nation and Technology and Empire) include five substantial philosophical articles. The first is an important essay on the Canadian national ethos published together with essays by Pierre Trudeau and John Porter, among others, in a book brought out to coincide with the founding of the New Party, later to be called the New Democratic Party. The other four include writings on health, technology and morality, American politics, and the study of religion. 3. Book Reviews, Published Broadcasts, Teach-in Address, Philosophy and Religion Book Survey, and Conference Summary The volume includes reviews of books by Lester Pearson, John Moir, Leslie Dewart, Edmond Cahn, Jacques Ellul, and Harvey Cox, along with reviews of a Dundas church pamphlet and the published collection of the papers presented in 1960 to the Learned Societies of Canada. Included also are three broadcasts that later appeared in print, an address given at the 1965 International Teach-In at the University of Toronto, a review of new books on philosophy and religion prepared for The Great Ideas Today: 1961, a commentary on the addresses at the Couchiching Conference of 1967, and three interviews published in the Hamilton Spectator and Canadian Dimension. Unpublished Works of the 1960s 1. Talks, Addresses, Sermons, and Radio and Television Broadcasts The talks and addresses comprise a convocation address, two talks to scientists, an address to a conference, an address to an anti–Vietnam War protest, two talks on the study of religion, and the Nowlan Lectures. One of the sermons was prepared for a service at McMaster, and

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the other may have been a religious talk. The volume contains transcriptions of eleven radio and television broadcasts that have not previously appeared in print. Five of these have been transcribed from the actual broadcasts, and the remaining six are taken from Grant’s own scripts. 2. Letters, Unpublished Reviews, and an Interview Of the fifteen letters presented here, four are letters to various editors, two are addressed to President Ross of York University, two to Professor Keith MacDonald of the National Research Council, one to Professor Paul Clifford on the approach of the new department of religion, three to Prime Minister Diefenbaker, one of which includes Grant’s notes on the Constitution, one to Professor Rodney Crook on an important point of philosophy, one to Stephen Bornstein answering questions about Lament for a Nation, and one to Douglas Ward about civil disobedience. These letters have been published elsewhere but are included here because they shed light on Grant’s decisions and writings. The volume also contains a review that was not published because of an editorial dispute, a review of a pamphlet that may have appeared in a parish newsletter, remarks about an Anglican bishops’ memo, and an interview on the Department of Religion that originally appeared in a department newsletter. 3. Selection of 1960s Graduate and Undergraduate Lectures Sheila Grant found among the Grant papers well over one hundred 1960s graduate and undergraduate lectures. Most of the undergraduate lectures are written in longhand on legal-size foolscap, and the graduate lectures were found in notebooks. Seventeen lectures have been chosen for publication here. They were selected in part on the basis of intrinsic interest and in some cases because they illustrate Grant’s approach to teaching during this period. We have supplied annotations and headnotes to help readers understand Grant’s references and the 1960s McMaster context in which they were delivered. Only some of the lectures could be dated accurately. We have made an exception to the chronological principle and grouped all the lectures together in the final section of the volume.

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CBC Broadcast List (1950s to 1980s) We decided to include again in this volume the list of Grant’s radio and television broadcasts for the CBC, as complete as it can be, given the limitations of the CBC’s records and our resources. We consider the list valuable because it indicates the surprisingly large amount of broadcasting work Grant did. We decided to print the entire list in all the volumes because Grant’s ‘second career,’ as we called it in the introduction to the first volume, should be seen as a whole, from his behind-the-scenes work with the CAAE and the Citizens’ Forum programs in the mid-1940s and reaching into the 1970s and 1980s. Arthur Davis Henry Roper

Note 1 Larry Schmidt, ed., George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations (Toronto: Anansi 1978), 67.

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COLLECT ED WORKS OF G EORGE G RANT VOL UM E 3 19 6 0 – 1 9 6 9

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Two Letters to Murray Ross, President of York University

Grant bought a house at 132 Farnham Avenue in Toronto with a loan from the newly founded York University. He was planning to move with his family sometime in the summer after the 1959–60 term at Dalhousie, expecting to take up his appointment teaching philosophy at York in the fall. He wrote two letters to President Ross that explain why he felt compelled to resign. He objected to control of the York curriculum by the University of Toronto. Grant wanted his reasons for resigning to be made public at the time. Both letters appear in William Christian, ed., George Grant: Selected Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 199–203, and in William Christian, ‘Selected Letters on Universities and Education by George Grant,’ in Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 312–17. The letter of resignation appears also in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 188–90. For an account of the exchange with Ross, see William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 198–204.

27 February 1960 Dear President Ross, I am sorry to bother you with a letter when you have so much to attend to. Two weeks ago the Registrar of York wrote to ask me for a paragraph about the first year course in philosophy. He enclosed the paragraph from the Toronto calendar and said we were going to teach the

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same course as Toronto. Knowing that York was going to be under the guidance of Toronto, but not knowing that we were going to teach completely identical courses, I wrote to Professor Anderson asking him about textbooks and describing the way I would like to cover the material. I also said that as ethics was cut from general philosophy at the U of T because of the collegiate system I would like to include Plato’s Republic in the first year. I remembered what you had said about getting youngsters to think about what makes a good life and the Republic has always seemed to me the greatest book on that subject (perhaps on any subject). Professor Anderson replied civilly, but forcibly, that the questions I had raised were not pertinent as York students were going to have identical courses with the U of T for at least four years and were going to write the same examinations. I write, therefore, to ask clarification about that identity. Will the York professors have anything to do with setting the examinations at Toronto which their students write? Will we have anything to do with marking those joint examinations or will that be done solely by Toronto appointees? Identical is quite a word (and it could include York students listening to Toronto professors on tape or by microphone). Of course, what in fact matters is how these problems are worked out in a flexible and developing practice. I quite recognize that one need of York in the next years is to have a cooperative association with Toronto and that all you do or say to anyone must turn around that need. I recognize that all your skill will be required to balance this against the need for York to be something on its own. You also may be quite confident that I will not get into any theoretical argument with the philosophy department at Toronto about how it is best to teach philosophy and will try to eliminate any acerbity in the dealings I will have with them. But I had understood when I accepted your offer that the York teachers were going to have some freedom in what they taught and how they taught it. The minimum condition of there being any freedom is for the teacher to have some say in the setting and marking of the papers of the courses he teaches. I blame myself greatly for not having discussed these questions with you in detail. My enthusiasm about the whole project meant that it just never entered my head that the new university would have the hand of Toronto so heavily upon it. To repeat, I recognize that what is important is not formulas, but how these problems are worked out in prac-

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tice and how one sets out to make accommodations in good temper. But much hangs for me on how this relationship works itself out, for you can imagine that I do not relish the prospect of being in statu pupillari to the U of T.1 Please do not take this as a pressing letter as I recognize how subtle must be the job of guiding the new institution in these next months and years. Because of your burdens I have tried to make this letter short and practical and therefore have not raised questions of long range principle about the teaching of philosophy in Canada with the coming generation of youngsters. I am going to put in the mail some comments about these broader issues which you can read at your leisure (whenever that may be). Yours, George Grant

14 April 1960 Dear President Ross, This is just to say that after long thought I have decided it would be wrong on my part to introduce youngsters to philosophy by means of Professor Long’s textbook and that as there seems no alternative to such a procedure at York, I must with regret submit my resignation to you.2 As this is an important matter of academic principle I would like to state my objections to this procedure. (a) Professor Long’s textbook pretends to be an introduction to philosophy which does not take sides, but introduces the student objectively to the problems of the subject. This is, however, not the case. To illustrate why it is not the case, let me take as an example the basic question of the differences between classical and modern philosophy. Professor Long’s book is based on the presupposition that the assumptions of nineteenth century philosophy are true in a way that implies that those of classical philosophy are not. As an obvious example, the book is prefaced by a quotation from Lessing which is taken as true and which implies that Plato and Aristotle largely wrote untruth. It is, of course, not my purpose here to debate the very vexed and difficult question of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, but simply to say that one hardly has an objective textbook when it is based on such an assumption. What

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makes these assumptions particularly unobjective is that they are not made explicit in the work. (b) When I say that Professor Long’s book is based on an implied assumption of the truth of modern philosophy, I do not mean contemporary philosophy, but the philosophy of the late nineteenth century in Great Britain and the early twentieth in the USA. His book is oblivious to nearly all contemporary philosophy. For instance, there is no mention of Wittgenstein in his book – certainly the most influential modern philosopher in professional philosophic circles in the English-speaking world. (c) Apart from the assumptions of the book, its very method seems to me inimical to the proper teaching of philosophy. It is about philosophy; it is not philosophy. The result of this approach is to encourage sophism among youngsters – that is, it encourages them to say here are a lot of opinions about this subject and that, but it does not encourage them in the real task of trying to make true judgments about those matters. I would like to include a paragraph about Professor Long’s relation to religion and my own, because I am sure you have heard it said that I confuse religion and philosophy and that you will now hear it said that my objections to Professor Long’s book come from my religion. Let me make it clear that I consider the practice of religion and the practice of philosophy two distinct human activities. I do not think that philosophy can prove or disprove Christian doctrine. My position on this matter is illustrated by the fact that the philosopher I admire the most in North America is Leo Strauss at Chicago. He is a practising Jew and I would have no hesitation in saying that he is a better philosopher than any practising Christian I know on this continent. Some of my best graduate students have been practising Jews and I have had no difficulties with them on this score. Of course, though religion and philosophy are distinct activities, their relation is a philosophic question of magnitude and Professor Long inevitably deals with it. Unfortunately he does not deal with it accurately. If, for instance, you turn to what Professor Long says about the relation between philosophy and the idea of revelation in certain religions on p. 23 of this book, I do not think one could find any trained philosophers who are either believing Protestants or Catholics or Jews who would say that it is an accurate or adequate account of the matter. I did not ask that the textbooks I use should be directed towards the spread of my religion (I suggested the works of Plato and Russell neither of whom are in any way identified

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with the Christian church and neither of whom are in any way identified with the true). But I could hardly be expected to use a textbook which misrepresents the religion of my allegiance. I would also point out that though Professor Long deplores the influence of faith on certain philosophers, he has no hesitation in closely identifying the claims of his faith with the facts of the case. It is in my opinion just this which above all makes Professor Long’s book so poor an instrument for introducing youngsters to philosophy most of whom will have been born since 1940 in modern industrial Canada. Professor Long’s faith was obviously formed by the experience of his break with a limited Calvinism in the light of certain philosophic and scientific ideas. This was a very moving and formative experience for the English of the 1890’s, for the Americans of the early 1900’s and for Canadians in the 1920’s, but it has little bearing on the situation of Canadians growing up in Ontario at the moment. Some of my friends have suggested that I should get up in class and quietly say where I think the required textbook is inadequate. This would indeed be fun; but it would also be unjust. It would leave the beginners with two conflicting accounts and an exam to be faced. This might be good for the clever, but it would be radically unfair for the weaker brethren. Also I would hope that if my teaching were good the better students would understand the inadequacy of the book. Then they would surely ask (if I had the right relation with them) why I employed it as a textbook. To that question I would have no just answer – beyond appealing to the necessity of earning my living, my liking for my home town, etc. Such considerations would not stand up against the unflinching moral judgments of which youngsters are capable. Professor Anderson told Professor Long to write to me about details, where his own letter covered the matter unequivocally in terms of general policy. Professor Long told me I could use other textbooks. He included a list of these which Professor Anderson would consider suitable. I do not see, however, that this makes possible any solution because if the York students have to write Toronto exams, marked by Toronto examiners, the use of an alternative textbook would cause an unfair burden on York students. Professor Long’s textbook is sufficiently idiosyncratic that I do not see how students could answer questions chosen from it by studying from some other textbooks. The

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burden here would particularly fall on the marginal student, of which there are bound to be some at York. I am sorry that this resignation has been left so long, but it has only become clear to me gradually in the last months the degree to which York is going to be tied to the U of T and the consequences that this would have on my teaching at York. Would you ask Mr Small to get in touch with me about the loan which has been guaranteed by York so that I can make the proper arrangements about it. If you consider there is any need for a statement about my resignation in the newspapers and if you consider that such a statement should go beyond a simple one of fact, I think that we should work it out together. I regret that we will not be working together in the same institution. With all best wishes, George Grant

Notes 1 In the status of a student (Latin). 2 Marcus Long, The Spirit of Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1953).

Convocation Address Given at St John’s College, Winnipeg

Grant delivered this address to the Convocation at St John’s College, the Anglican college in Winnipeg, on 1 November 1960. It was not published. He was considering the possibility of a position there for the reason communicated in a letter to Derek Bedson (5 June 1960): As for St John’s it would interest me greatly – much more than the possibility you mentioned over the phone. My reason is the following: in the body of Christ there are many functions all necessary to that body, but mine is theory – theology and philosophy – and I am determined to stick to that function rather than to go into administration. I would be willing to do administration in a theological college because that would be serving an end which is related to my thought, but this administration of large secular institutions is largely having to pander to the pushing aims of the boom world ...1

Your Grace, Your Honour, Mr Premier, Mr Chief Justice, Mr Chancellor, Mr President, Warden, other distinguished guests, and, above all, graduates of St John’s College: It is, of course, a high honour to be allowed to speak on such an occasion as this, at an institution such as this, and to graduates such as yourselves. It is a particular honour on All Saints’ Day. Because the saints are the crowning glory of the Church – those before whom the practical organizers and the intellectuals of the Church must stand in awe. The saints are those who in the life of self-giving love partake of that very life of the Trinity which is an eternal self-giving. Therefore those of us who are not saints do well to remember those who are, because in so remembering we can get to know, as in a darkened glass, the divine life itself – and this is above all what it concerns us to know.

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What I want to speak about for a few minutes tonight is the role of the Church college. I do not mean by this question first and foremost the training of the clergy. That is, in itself, an intricate question, but it is only a part of the wider question about the Church college in general. Let me also say that I speak only of the Anglican college. I am sure that we all have much to learn from the Roman Catholic Church in its understanding of the relation of education to religion – but we must first of all be concerned with our own problems, which are different. On the other side there are Church colleges of the various Protestant sects who have their own problems, but they are not ours, because the Anglican Church has deeper roots in the learning and worship of the Western world than have any simply Protestant organizations. Therefore my subject is the Anglican college 1960. Now the problem of the Church and education has been with Christians since our beginning. One solution was present from the earliest days and stays with us even now. It is summed up in Tertullian’s phrase – What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?2 What he meant by that phrase was: the Christian who knows the truth of the Gospel has no need of the learning of the Greek intellectuals or for that matter of secular life in all spheres. On the other side you had a thinker like Origen, who so closely brought Christianity into line with Greek philosophy that he often writes of Christianity as if it were a watered-down philosophy for the masses.3 The masses are incapable of the understanding of the truth and therefore Christianity in popular metaphorical form mediates this higher truth to the masses. That is, with Tertullian the Christian says that his religion has nothing to do with the ordinary logic of the sciences and philosophy; in Origen religion is made a tame supernumerary of the sciences and philosophy. The main tradition of the Church has scorned both these opposite solutions – and has only fallen into either error at bad stages in its history. But between these two extremes there has been an enormous number of differing solutions in differing situations. Now what is the right one for our Church colleges in the very complicated mass society of modern North America? To think of that question it is necessary to speak quickly about our situation in Canada – that is, to speak of Canadian history. As Plato and Aristotle knew, the job of the theorist is to apply the ideal to the actual and derive from that combination the best possible regime under the circumstances,

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and if the circumstances are bad then the best possible régime will not necessarily be near the ideal. In this way they avoided the silly optimistic idealism which characterises so much modern thought. Our situation, it seems to me, can be sketched quickly in the following way. Our educational institutions were set up by Protestants from the United Kingdom, who brought with them the activist practical theology of the Calvinists, which even penetrated very deeply the Anglican communion, and which led them to conceive education as teaching about revelation plus technological education. It is not necessary here to speak in detail of that Protestant theology of worldly asceticism which Max Weber has so brilliantly described.4 It wonderfully fitted Canada when we were a pioneering society. But in the last part of the nineteenth century two things happened: (1) Protestantism itself lost faith in its traditional Calvinism and became increasingly a liberal moralism; (2) the gradual emergence of the mass democratic scientific society brought a need for the large-scale state university to train the enormous number of technicians to run the mass society. I combine these two disparate facts together for the following reason. It was Protestants (who were increasingly losing their theology) who carried out the secularisation of our universities. What must be recognised is that the educational system we have today in our schools and universities, far from being something to which Protestants have objected (until lately) is something they have largely built themselves. And the ministers who did so were not always ambitious front men pandering to the spirit of the age – they did it on principle, on the principle namely that revelation plus technical education was enough. And somehow this [dovetailed] with their increasing liberalism in a way that is hard to define. They somehow believed that with mass technological education everybody would continue to remain a good sensible Protestant, a decent moral man – even if the whole tradition of honour and philosophical and theological education was gradually cut out of the curriculum. This is a long and complicated story and it cannot be described in detail here. What it has left us with in Canada can be described in the following way: (a) Most of our education is now the technological education carried on by the busy state – the recipients of which are in varying measure cut off from the spiritual traditions of the West; (b) except for the Roman Church, the other churches play little part in the educa-

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tional life of our society except in small colleges and schools which find it increasingly hard to compete against the enormously powerful force of the large state systems. Now obviously one thing must be insisted upon. The mass technological education in our society is a necessity and the big organizations which provide it are a necessity. They are going to get bigger and more powerful. They are of the very essence of the modern world and the Church must not and cannot forsake [and] turn its back on them. But at same time the Church must recognize that such educational institutions more and more take people in two directions. First, they are going to produce people who are rudderless – people who in their education have not been required to think deeply about the philosophical and theological tradition of the West are not going automatically to find meaning and purpose in life. And this rudderlessness will become a subtler problem as automation grows and leisure increases. Because in the future the great question will be what gives life meaning and purpose when the robots are doing the work in the factories. But secondly and this must be emphasized there will grow up in these mass educational institutions not only rudderlessness, but views of reality which are explicitly and [blank space] contradictory to the Christian view of reality. There is the side of the modern spirit which is just indifferent to the Christian religion – but there is also the side that is consciously hostile to it. That is, the Church will be faced with the fact that in these institutes some youngsters will be taught nothing about ultimate questions, while others will be taught from certain quarters and in an increasingly explicit way that the Christian account of reality is plain and simple nonsense. And let those of us who are believers be aware that these alternative secular religions taught in our universities will less and less be the gentle human liberalism of an older era which was filled with decency, but a humanism which is much tougher and much less decent, and that this humanism will often equip people to succeed in our great economic institutes. And let us also remember that this alternative religion, however more ruthless than the rudderlessness, will still be probably more easy to come to grips with than the rudderlessness, with its retreat into private life and the pursuit of pleasure as a commodity – to use Marx’s incomparable phrase.5 Now what is the role of the Christian college in such a situation? Let

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me say incidentally what I am not talking about. I am not talking about the place of the believer who is inside the mass secular university either as a teacher or student. That is in itself an enormous subject – probably more important than the place of the Christian college. For thirteen years I have taught in a secular institution and I think I know something of the difficulties, traps, suspicions, [and] agonies that are involved in such a situation. But that is not my subject here. About the Christian college let me say one thing above all. Its job is to put forward in the full light of intelligence and the depth of profound contemplation – the Christian conception of reality. I can illustrate this negatively best. There is no use hoping that the Christian college will do its job if it sees that job as teaching youngsters certain values while it accepts the humanist account of reality. Let me illustrate. While I was at Dalhousie there were many professors in the medical school who themselves believed and implied in all they taught that man can be totally understood as a clever animal. Yet these professors were horrified when their students cheated or when they saw the old medical ethics breaking down before the growing love of money among the doctors. But why should they be? If man is simply an animal, morality is an illusion and then why shouldn’t students cheat, if they can get away with it, why shouldn’t we try to amass more nuts than the other squirrels? And what always seemed to me the most amazing in this is how little these professors saw that what they had been teaching students over the years about ultimate reality (namely that man can be fully comprehended as a biological object) had a direct effect in producing the kind of values which they did not like. That is, the Christian college must be concerned with reality – what is – not with values. Because what men consider to be valuable and what they attempt to realize in their lives is determined by what they deem to be so about the universe. You can’t teach youngsters to be chaste, to be loving, to not want more than their fair share – if at the same time you are teaching them that the only reality is the sensuous world of space and time. To put the point in a more positive way – and in doing so you will have to allow me to be philosophical – let us say that you believe the doctrine of creation to be true, that is, that the world comes forth from the divine will. And let us say, which seems obvious, that in thinking about this doctrine you soon come to recognize that the divine will is

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unimaginable. And yet to hold the doctrine we must somehow be able to think of a power which can make anything to be or not to be. Obviously to think the idea divine will which [makes anything to be or not to be] we must be able first to think the idea free will in general. One has to move from human will to divine will. But youngsters who are met with this predicament are being taught, in their secular natural and social science[s], assumptions that make it very difficult to think the idea human free will in any terms. I have just been asked to write a paper on [conceptions of health] for some psychiatrists in the States and have just read the body of modern psychological and psychiatric doctrines. I am therefore fully aware of how difficult it is in terms of modern psychology to think the conception of free will. But as I have said, if we can’t think the idea of human free will – that is, the idea of a power which makes something to be or not to be – it is quite impossible to think the Christian doctrine of creation. In saying this let me add for the sake of honesty that I am not implying that if [we] can think the idea human free will we automatically think the idea creation. To say that would be an example of philosophically dishonest apologetics. I am simply saying that unless [we] can think the idea human free will – the idea of creation must be a meaningless fable. What then become the alternatives to the student? There are three. (1) He accepts the modern psychological doctrine as given in the classroom and the theological doctrine as given in the Church. This is, of course, intellectual schizophrenia which splits off his faith from his thought more and more – and among the clever this leads to defeat; (2) simply to give up the doctrines of the Church as antediluvian nonsense. Solution three is of course for the youngster to be exposed to the reasonable tradition of philosophy and theology which has always been aware of these intellectual problems and which has very powerful arguments to show why it is necessary to think the idea of human free will and therefore is able to move by analogy to the idea of Divine Will – that is, to the idea of creation. What I am saying in this illustration, and there are hundreds of others, is that the Christian college must provide an atmosphere which allows youngsters to partake in solution three and so not be led to the schizophrenia of solution one, or the surrender of their religious tradition in solution two. This is the first and foremost job of the religious college and the one that will increasingly fall into its lap as the great

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and powerful universities become taken up with technological affairs. And it can only be successful in this job if it is concerned with the truth about reality – not with propaganda for certain values. To say this is the central job of the Christian college is not in any sense to take anything from the two great purposes of training the clergy and carrying on the worship of God in the university. For after all the training of the clergy is above all helping young people to incorporate in their lives the tested ways for the practice of the presence of God – it is only concerned with the practical discipline of the virtues insofar as they are known to be an absolutely necessary means to the practice of that presence. Making explicit for youngsters the reality of God is the basis of Christian education whether it be for those whose vocation will be clerical or lay. Beyond this, clerical and lay education are both technical. In the same way there is no contradiction between the essentially intellectual function of the Christian college and its life of worship. In speaking of this let me make perfectly clear that I do [not] confuse worship and prayer with theological and philosophical speculation as was so often done in the liberal tradition. I do not believe that when one is trying to think philosophically or theologically whether as student or teacher that one is partaking in the very life of the Deity in the same way as when one receives Communion at the altar. But having said that let it be also clear that a worship that is cut off from the intellectual roots of a being and is not founded on an understanding of the reason why we worship this reality in this way – will become simply either a subjective pandering to our emotions or a pleasing aesthetic show. A liturgy not related to theology can become as much a gate of hell as a theology that is not rooted in worship and prayer. Therefore to make an either/or question of the matter: either worship or thought comes first in a Christian college – is to make a false division of that which should not be divided. Of course to carry out this function the Christian college must have first-class people who know of the reality about which they teach. You can’t compete for the allegiance of the able young with second-rate intellectual performance. Youngsters aren’t fools. If they find secondrate intellectual ability in religious colleges, they will draw their own conclusions. They will also draw their own conclusions when they see first-rate scholars leaving religious colleges.

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Let me illustrate what I mean by saying that those who teach in our colleges should know the reality of the sciences with which they deal. The meaning of the mass industrial society which is coming to be all over North America takes a great deal of subtle understanding. It is quite different from the old rural and small-town world of fifty years ago and can only be understood by new categories – the categories that are being developed in the new social sciences. And this situation is so new that these new categories have to be examined philosophically within the new sciences. If such subjects are to be taught in the curriculum, it is essential they be taught by persons really versed in these new sciences and not, as they so often have in Church colleges, by people who thought piety and good will an excuse for being out of touch with the new knowledge. And this appeal for the first-rate means inevitably that the Church college must not try to do too much – but do what it does do excellently. It is no use for the Church college to try to cover all the vast and proliferating areas of vocational education – so that it can appeal to all sorts and conditions of students. If it tries to imitate in this way the powerful state universities and do all the new things – it won’t have the resources and it will just do them badly. The limited resources of the Church in our era mean that it must concentrate its attention in education not on making a splash – but in educating a few people in a coherent and consistent knowledge that will enable them to live triumphantly in the middle of all the subtle temptations of the affluent society. The great educational problem of our day is after all this. In the past there were two ways in which people learnt the attention and discipline necessary to give life direction and intensity. For most ordinary people that attention was taught by the sheer hard physical labour that they had to do for many hours to support life. That is why poor people so often had character. It was recognized in the old days that the only alternative means to that discipline was study and therefore those who were not forced with physical work were required to [have] a hard education. In the modern world attention will no longer be taught by the concentration of imposed hard physical work, and we can thank God for that. More and more our technology will remove the masses from that necessity. What then will provide that source of attention for the masses without which life will be a fritter-

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ing away in listless and increasingly perverted pleasures? It can only be provided by an enormous programme of education at all levels in society. In the affluent mass world, education must then become the great affair of all societies and not only vocational education to make us prosperous – but education dealing with the meaning and purpose of life. Mass leisure without mass education can obviously only lead to disaster. Even mass leisure with flaccid mass education will lead to disaster. To state the obvious, this great problem is of course not one that only Anglicans or only Christians will be concerned with – it is a problem that has hit our continent first, but will soon have hit the whole world. And on this continent, it is a problem which faces every institution – secular or religious – and will require the cooperation of people who believe very different things about what is ultimately so. But the part that the Church plays in this great enterprise will be of supreme importance to the direction of that enterprise. And indeed we must not forget that it is of the very nature of the Church to play a leading part in this worldly enterprise. For the Church has always known that though the purpose of life is transcendent – lies beyond the world – this is no reason for a false and empty denial of this world. We are saved in the world – not out of it. Therefore the Church must play its part in the great modern educational enterprise of equality of participation in mind, that enterprise which because of mass leisure cannot be skirted or avoided. And I see the Church college as the place which will train people who can hard-mindedly deal with the situation because they see all problems as rooted in the reality which we call God. Hard-minded they will have to be for after all we cannot get away from the fact [and pretend] that greed is no longer a vice amongst us; it is our great continental piety. And to be a Christian in this society [ruled] as it is by the new technological élites of the great corporations will require men and women who are not soft or woolly-minded. It will require a leadership in the Church which has a much tougher-minded partaking in the eternal truths of doctrine and their practical application to the [?] and [?] than was necessary in the simpler era of pioneer and capitalist expansion. And this theological tough-mindedness will have to be present not only among the clergy – but among laymen. I cannot see it coming forth except from the Christian college.

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The New Testament lesson at morning service last Sunday came from the Gospel of Luke and contained the comfortable words about the mustard seed and the coldly ironic words about those who are first and last in the world and in the Kingdom.6 The application of the mustard seed is obvious to the results that would be forthcoming if we could make our colleges the centres of excellence that we should all wish. But the words about the first and the last are also applicable. For those who come out of them – like the persons whom we honour tonight – cannot look forward to easy lives or lives that will bring them ease or prosperity or prestige. But if we care about our colleges, those who go out from them will all do things which are honourable and worth doing and what is more important, they will all know that which is worth knowing – indeed that which in the last resort is alone really worth knowing.

Notes 1 William Christian, ed., George Grant: Selected Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 204–5; and William Christian, ‘Selected Letters on Universities and Education by George Grant,’ in Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 318. See also William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 206–9. 2 Tertullian, properly Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (c.155–c.222), African church father, posed the famous question in De Praescriptione Haereticorum, 7. His complete question was: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Church with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic? 3 Origen (c.185–c.254) studied Plato and the Neoplatonists in the catechetical school of Ammonius in Alexandria. His exegetical writings included Scholia, Homilies, and Commentaries. 4 Max Weber (1864–1920), professor of political economy and one of the founders of sociology, taught at Freiburg and Heidelberg. See The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1958). 5 We are unable to find the source of this phrase. 6 ‘Then said he, unto what is the kingdom of God like? And whereunto shall I resemble it?’

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‘It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it’ (Luke 13:18–19). ‘And they shall come from the east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God.’ ‘And behold there are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last’ (Luke 13:29–30).

An Ethic of Community

This essay appeared in Social Purpose for Canada, edited by Michael Oliver (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1961), 3–26, and was reprinted in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 59–75. Social Purpose for Canada was prepared to coincide with the founding of ‘The New Party,’ when the Commonwealth Co-operative Federation allied with the Canadian Labour Congress to form what became the New Democratic Party. The book also included essays by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, John Porter, and Kenneth McNaught, among others. The project, begun in 1958, was funded by the Boag Foundation, a trust left, according to Michael Oliver, by a British Columbian for ‘socialist education.’ The editorial committee was made up of Frank R. Scott, George Grube, Eugene Forsey, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and David Lewis.

In the last twenty years we Canadians have achieved the biggest economic expansion of our history. We have been able to impose our dominion over nature so that we can satisfy more human desires than ever before. We have moved from producing primarily raw materials to being an industrial society of mass production and mass consumption such as the United States. Every year a higher percentage of Canadians lives in the new environment of the mass society. This achievement has been due partially to special Canadian circumstances – the vigour and initiative of our people, the rewards from new resources on the northern frontier of this continent – but even more has it been due to the worldwide scientific and technological revolution of the twentieth century. The organizing genius of the American applied the scientific discoveries of the European with great vigour to the problems of

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production and so created the first mass consumption society in history. We now recognize that this form of society will spread to all parts of the world. Our growing knowledge of the economic achievements of other societies (particularly the Soviet Union) under other forms of organization and different historical circumstances, has made Canadians speak less piously in praise of our own achievements and made us recognize that North America was only first in a world-wide process. It cannot be stressed too often what such control over nature can mean for mankind. In whatever other ways Marx’s philosophy be inadequate, it stated unforgettably that the organization of pre-technological societies was founded above all on one necessity – the need to keep the mass of men at hard physical work for long hours so that life could be sustained. This necessitated the high degree of inequality and coercion that characterized all past societies. The application of intelligence to the mastery of nature means that the mass of men need not use most of their energies for physical work and that we can provide a comfortable standard of living without such labours. Obviously some physical work will continue to be necessary, but much more necessary will be organizational and technical skills. Nevertheless, this liberation of the mass of men from sustained labour and the economic and political consequences arising therefrom – indeed its effects in the most intimate corners of the individual soul – cannot be overemphasized in assessing our present situation. Society is, of course, not only an expression of man’s relation to nature, but also and more importantly of man’s relation to man. We have attained dominance over nature by means of a particular structure of social organization in and by which some men are dominated by others. The best short description of this is ‘late state capitalism.’ It is ‘capitalist’ because it places the leadership in economic affairs (and through it in all affairs) in the hands of privately owned and controlled corporations. The original principle of capitalism was that any society will best flourish when men are encouraged to make their own economic interest the ruling motive of their actions. That principle is still affirmed amongst us, even when our economic interest is now channelled and narrowly circumscribed by the ideas and practices imposed by massive corporations. The adjective ‘late’ is used because the conditions under which men are able to exercise their economic self-interest have radically changed from the early days of market capitalism.

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Power is increasingly concentrated, so that most people have to pursue their individual gain within conditions set by the corporations, while the few who set the conditions operate the calculus of greed, ambition, and self-interest to their own ends. Ours is also a ‘state’ capitalism because our governments have taken an increasing role in the market, particularly because of the necessities of war (or as our euphemism puts it, defence). Throughout the Western world the private corporations can properly be called private governments transcending the limits of national states. In a small country such as Canada they have even greater power than in the United States, because they are often continental institutions which are controlled beyond the range of our constituted government. The need of Canada for capital, the fact that the chief source of capital has been the United States, and the eagerness with which government leaders such as C.D. Howe accepted American capital on its own terms have meant that economically Canadians live more and more under the control of continental institutions whose books cannot even be scrutinized by our government.1 It is often maintained that, because of the increasing role of the government, the pressure of the majority through the ballot, and the power of the unions, our society is not dominated by a capitalist élite. This is, however, a misrepresentation of the facts. The owners and managers of our powerful corporations still not only reap by far the largest benefits from our economy, but through their position in the structure decide in large measure what will be done and not done. It is indeed true that under state capitalism considerable power rests with government and is not held exclusively by the business élite as it was in the heyday of capitalism.a Nevertheless, it is foolish to believe that the power of government and business stand opposed to each other. Canadian governments, Liberal and Conservative alike, have in their major decisions identified their interests and the interests of Canada with those of the business élite. What else could be expected to happen? Inevitably, politicians are trained early to know in what alliances their possible power and political survival resides. Thus by the time they have served their apprenticeship they come to believe that accepa One should add the military to complete the modern triumvirate, but in Canada the power of the military is not on the same scale as in the United States.

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tance of the interests of capitalism is the only patriotic course. For instance, anybody who has lived in a small Canadian town will know that ambitious young people are quite aware that they would not be likely to prosper in law or politics if they showed themselves opposed to the interests of the great corporations. The prosperous in small towns are more and more those who serve the continental institutions either directly or by doing them favours. They can less and less afford interests primarily identified with their own community and region. In the wider sphere of power in Ottawa the same process operates. A governor of the Bank of Canada moves to the board of a United States automobile firm; a minister of Public Works becomes the head of a large mining company. The fact that the business community is the dominating and selfperpetuating élite must be insisted upon these days because of the recent prevalence of the idea that the power of organized labour constitutes the most present threat to our democracy. It is obviously true that labour in Canada is better organized to protect its interests than it was twenty years ago; it is also true that like all institutions the unions have not always exercised their power wisely (though this is less true in Canada than in the United States). But when magazines such as Life and Time are filled with stories about the abusive dictatorship of labour leaders and yet write of the leaders of continental capitalism as ‘simple guys’ only interested in production and patriotism, one must begin to question motives. Even if it may be disputable whether the control of large-scale capitalism in our society is good or evil, it hardly seems disputable that it is a fact. In saying all this, however, it is necessary to disclaim any ‘cops and robbers’ or ‘conspiracy’ view of history, which would imply that our society is at the mercy of a few wealthy and powerful men with Machiavellian intentions. To say our society is capitalist is simply to point out a fact within which all Canadians live, including our ruling élite. Though it is important to emphasize that a structure of power can be changed by free acts, it is equally important to emphasize that this particular structure has become a strait jacket, limiting the ways in which all of us can act. With the large interlocking concentration of power,b b I refer the reader to fuller discussion of this question in the essays by Professors Porter and Rosenbluth.

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even the individuals at the top level of responsibility have little freedom since the structure confines them in their decisions too. Capitalism then is not a conspiracy; it is a structure of institutions dedicated to certain ends which it considers sacrosanct, and in the achievement of which a society of certain virtues and vices arises. What is even more fundamental about our society than its structure of ‘state capitalist’ power is that it is a ‘mass society.’ The term ‘mass society’ is inadequate shorthand for the radically new conditions under which our highly organized technological society makes us live. These new conditions are experienced most profoundly in the growing urban conglomerations such as Toronto and Los Angeles, but nearly all people in North America now have a share of them. The farmer listens to television and drives a car and may even organize his supply of rain; he may not experience the mass society quite so directly as does a resident of Toronto, but he still experiences it. What makes this aspect of modern life more fundamental than the capitalist structure of power is that this is the condition of life towards which all human beings are moving, whether their institutions are capitalist or not. Certain problems produced by these conditions are common to any mass society. Indeed, even if our capitalist structure disappears in Canada, we will still live in a mass society. It seems imperative, therefore, to try to distinguish between those problems which are directly a product of our capitalist institutions and those which are indigenous to any mass society. The term ‘mass society’ is used to summarize a set of conditions and experiences so new and so different from the past that nobody can describe them adequately or fathom accurately what is coming to be in the world. Nevertheless, certain generalizations must be attempted. This is a society in which high individual acquisition and consumption of goods and services is increasingly open to most in return for comparatively short hours of work and in which an immense variety of commodities is ready to attract and to encourage a vast diversity of human desires. It is a society which requires a high technical competence from many to keep it operating efficiently and where therefore what is demanded of most people is to be skilled at one small part of the whole enterprise but not necessarily knowledgeable about the whole. It is a society in which most people live within and under the control of massive organizations (private and governmental), the purposes and direction of which are quite external to them. The popula-

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tion is more and more concentrated in the big cities, that is, in environments so complex that they must remain unfathomable to the individual and in which the individual’s encounters with other persons cannot always or even frequently be with neighbours he knows, but are rather with strangers who are likely to appear as impersonal units to him. It is only necessary to compare shopping in a super-market and in a country store, or driving to work in a small town and on a metropolitan freeway to see the different human relations which arise in this new life. The result of living in such a society is that individuals experience a new kind of freedom and independence, and also a new kind of control and dependence. The freedom is not only that in a high consumption economy a multitude of new choices and experiences is open to people, but also that in this environment the traditional standards of conduct become less operative. The high technical competence required and the kind of education necessary to produce it takes men to the point of technical reason where they see themselves as ‘wised up,’ and as not bound by the old ethical and religious standards. Authorities such as the family and the church become less powerful so that individuals are free to make their own standards. At the same time as the mass society produces this new sense of freedom, it also produces new impersonal authorities which bind the individual more than before, at the level both of action and of opinion. In large cities the maintenance of order in the vast tangle of conflicting egos requires a determined government and police force which must inevitably treat the individual arbitrarily and as a cipher. The individual is also coerced in what he desires and what he believes to be true by the instruments of mass communication which press on him from every side, presenting forcefully standards which suit the purposes of big organizations. Indeed this control of action and opinion has been intensified by the fact that the Cold War has made North America something of a garrison state. What is central to this new experience and what distinguishes it from living in the old small-town and rural worlds is that the individual is at one and the same time more dependent on big institutions and yet less organically related to them. This has meant inevitably a dying away of the individual’s effective participation in politics. The institutions which control us are so powerful and so impersonal that

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individuals come to believe that there is no point in trying to influence them; one must rather live with them as they are. The result is that more and more people think of the state as ‘they’ rather than as ‘we.’ In great cities where so much of existence is public, individuals find their most real satisfaction in private life because here their freedom is operative, while in the public sphere they know their actions to have less and less significance. Thus the mass society calls into question the possibility of democratic government, founded as it was on the idea that each citizen could and should exert his influence on the course of public affairs. In general it can be said that the mass society gives men a sense of their own personal freedom while destroying the old orders of life which mediated meaning to men in simpler environments. Indeed, as men sense their freedom to make themselves, unhampered by the old traditions, they may find it difficult to give content and meaning to that freedom, so that more easily than in the past their lives can reflect a surrender to passivity and the pursuit of pleasure as a commodity. When men have no easily apprehendable law of life given them by tradition, the danger is that their freedom will be governed by an arbitrary and external law of mediocrity and violence which will debase their humanity rather than fulfil it. This relation between increased freedom and the lack of well-defined meanings is the essential fact with which any politics of the mass age must come to grips. The capitalist structure of our institutions undoubtedly gives this problem its own peculiar tint, but basically the same problem will be present in all societies, whatever their economic structure, once they have reached a mature stage of technological development. What then should we think about this new society? What is good and bad about it now and what are the right ways to improve it? Those of a socialist persuasion would be wise to start from its indubitable achievements under state capitalism. North America has been the first society to organize mass production and distribution. Critics of capitalism are unwise if they deny its success in this field or if they claim that alternative economic arrangements could do a substantially better job at expanding such production. More people live with more consumer goods than at any time in history. The claim of the capitalist that this is the result of present institutions may not be as true as capitalists believe. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that the main reason why a vast

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majority of Canadians have continued to vote for two parties which accept capitalism is that by and large they do believe this claim. To make this acknowledgment, however, is not to state that our capitalist society has been an unqualified economic success. For it is not true that the production of those goods and services which can be produced privately at a profit is the only goal of economic life. That there are other goals is evident as soon as one asks: ‘production of what? and at what sacrifices and rewards for whom? for doing what?’ Indeed the central criticism of present-day capitalism must be that its very structure and mythology prevent the sufficient realization of economic goals (let alone supra-economic ones) other than the production of goods for the sake of private profit. To take the first question, ‘production of what?’ It is clear that in our society production is inevitably directed to those things which can be produced privately at a profit at the expense of those goods and services which cannot be.c Any sane person knows that efficient cars and detergents and household appliances are important to the good life, but he must know also that good hospitals and personnel to run them, good schools and teachers, good roads and adequate police forces, beautiful and efficient towns are equally necessary. These are as much part of a higher standard of living for individuals as are private goods and services. Yet under the present arrangements our productive capacity is of necessity primarily directed to what can be produced privately, even when there is a crying need for social goods. And this is caused by the very rationale of capitalism. Indeed one of the strangest contradictions of today is the vast amount of energy used to persuade people to buy those goods which can be produced privately at a profit, while social needs have to fight for their right to expansion. We spend more money on advertising than we do on education. Much of our cleverest talent receives a high reward for devoting its energies to entrapping people into believing that they need a new kind of car or soap. It is a platitude these days to point out that the health of the North American economy depends on c To state this is to take over the main argument of Professor J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. The closing words of that book should be engraved on the minds of North Americans. ‘To have failed to solve the problem of producing goods would have been to continue man in his oldest and most grievous misfortune. But to fail to see that we have solved it and to fail to proceed thence to the next task, would be fully as tragic.’

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the ability of manipulators to persuade consumers to be dissatisfied with last year’s luxuries, by appealing to all kinds of desires, particularly those associated with snobbery and sex. On the other hand governments at all levels are assailed for their prodigality if essential production of social goods is kept at even a minimum level. Advertising originally justified itself on the grounds that it gave the consumer information on the basis of which he could make choices. Can it be said to do that now when it increasingly uses what are really vicious means to stimulate desires, not simply to present alternatives? In what sense can such artificial desires be called natural needs? Yet advertising is not now primarily dangerous because it appeals to fear and greed, snobbery and sexual inferiority in all who are exposed to it, but even more because it does so in the interests of the profit-making mechanisms of capitalism. It has become the most potent instrument whereby society is persuaded to direct production away from its most pressing social needs and to continue to concentrate on those goods which can be produced privately at a profit. Thus the starvation of those needs that can only be met collectively belongs to the economic and political logic of our present institutions. The answer to the question, ‘at what sacrifices and rewards for whom and for doing what?’ must also indict the state capitalism of the last twenty years. It has failed in distributing justly the wealth from the new technology. This injustice has often been hidden behind the ‘all-iswell’ mythology of ‘people’s capitalism’ which puts out two fictions about our present situation. First, it is said that income has been radically redistributed in the last forty years to overcome inequalities; secondly, that poverty has largely been conquered amongst us. The first of these fictions has been able to maintain itself not only because of the capitalist associations with the public press but also because there has been a large growth in the national income. Nevertheless the proportion of that income going to various percentages of the total population has remained nearly the same. The wealthy top 10 per cent of the population continues to earn over thirty times as much as the lowest 10 per cent.d The percentage going to the lowest three-tenths of those earning d Unambiguous statistics for this comparison are not available in Canada. The figures are clearer for the United States. I have, therefore, used them assuming the situation is not likely to be radically different for us.

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has declined over the last forty years. Although the real wages of organized labour have increased, the increase has never kept up proportionately with the growth of the national income. This puts into perspective attempts to persuade the public that unions are the chief cause of inflation. It takes but the smallest knowledge of every-day living in Canada to know that most families are under the shadow of mortgage and loan companies if they are to have even those things (enough room, a washing machine, adequate health services) which could be simply normal at our stage of technological development. At the same time other families live at the level of conspicuous consumption. It seems unlikely that for the vast majority of either of these kinds of family the situation can be explained (as it often is by capitalist propagandists) as the result of simple foresight, hard work, and moral integrity on the part of the privileged. Within this general picture of inequality, however, the greatest moral blots on our society are the particular geographic areas of poverty (both rural and urban) and particular groups (old people, unsupported women in charge of children, and others) where the level of inequality reaches degradation. Such groups account for at least onefifth of our population. To be unconcerned about such degrading poverty (as our society has generally been) is particularly inexcusable where there is such affluence, and is particularly unpleasant alongside our rituals of self-righteousness. Yet any systematic attempt at the removal of deep poverty by social action is not a goal which logically can be pursued within the capitalist ethic. In the expansion of the post-war era damage has especially been done to certain groups by economic changes (changes occurring sometimes to the general benefit of the community, but sometimes only to the private profit of the few) and these groups are often made up of members of the community least able to bear them. Through all parts of that expansion, working people have been instruments in the service of the market, to be used when needed, but left to fend for themselves when no longer required. There has been little recognition of what should surely be a part of a great egalitarian principle: that the community has an obligation to ease by compensation the insecurity of those sacrificed to economic progress. Unemployment insurance has done something in this direction but its inadequacy has been exposed in the recent recessions.2 The ethic of individual responsibility is often

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brought forward to maintain that the moral fibre of individuals will be weakened if they are cushioned against inevitable economic change. It is interesting, however, that the wealthy and their propagandists seem to apply this only to the employee families. The managers of economic power quietly cushion themselves and their families against insecurity in their own lives. The questions of sacrifice consequent to economic progress are bound to grow in scope with the increase of automation. It is one of the saddest aspects of our present world that the development of automation, which makes possible that goal which men have longed for throughout the ages, should at the moment only produce anxiety in the minds both of capitalists and of the ordinary working population. This is surely because the results of automation are seen within the assumptions of our present economic system. The elimination of manual labour and constant human control which electronics increasingly allow will mean that sacrifices will fall on new groups. Are we to continue to allow the most painful sacrifices to fall on the individual worker and his family? Yet is not such an inequality part of the very structure of capitalism? Indeed the rise of automation illustrates more than anything else the crisis of our state capitalist institutions. To cope with this crisis will require more than compensationist policies; it will require policies which will allow a radical redistribution of income and a radical redistribution of rewards for the unpleasant toil of the world. Automation meets the centuries’ long moral demand for equality by making it a practical necessity. The failures of capitalism – underproduction of social goods and unfair distribution of the goods that are produced – can be seen together when one considers housing policy in Canada since the war. In 1945 the Liberal Government decided that housing development should be governed by the dictates of mortgage policy and that there should be little direct assistance by government for planned housing. This was done under the slogan of encouraging the individual Canadian to own his own home. The results have been unhappy. The poorest quarter of our population still lives in appalling housing in both town and country. The next two quarters are slaves to mortgage companies and in return live in ill-planned little boxes produced at great profit by speculative builders who are quite uninterested in planning attractive communities. A high percentage of our production has gone

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into the building of luxury apartments and houses for those who have profited from the boom and from whom the speculative builder in turn could derive his immense profits. The argument for housing regulated by mortgage policy was that it would safeguard freedom and individuality, but this has proved illusory. Our housing in big cities has the monotony of mass production; it lacks the efficiency and attractiveness of careful planning. In the ethos of capitalism, cities are considered encampments on the road to economic mastery, rather than worlds in which human beings attempt to lead the good life. Despite the inadequacies of present economic arrangements a greater cause for criticism of our society can be found in areas which are not simply economic but extend over the whole range of human well-being. In these areas it is more difficult to judge what is good and bad in our society and thus more difficult for socialists to state clearly and realistically how their goals differ from those now served. This can be seen as soon as one compares the goals of socialism in a society of scarcity with its goals in a society of affluence. On what grounds does a socialist party ask people to vote for it under high consumption conditions? It is clear, for example, that if there were a major economic catastrophe in North America the power of a socialist party would be vastly increased. But no sane person desires such a catastrophe. Nor does it seem likely. What seems likely is that technology will continue to bring us growing prosperity and that our present institutions, though not dividing that prosperity fairly, will do a sufficiently adequate job of management to prevent any widespread or bitter discontent. In such a society there may not be the goads of hunger to provoke dissent. This being so, by what criteria of human well-being would the socialist criticize such a society? It becomes more and more important for socialists to have a profound view of human good as society’s most pressing problems become less simply quantitative and begin to involve qualitative distinctions. If a child is undernourished, if a family is living in one room, if a man has to do hard or boring physical work for twelve hours a day, it is easy to see what is needed for greater well-being: more food, more room, shorter hours. There is still a multitude of such direct quantitative problems in Canada and the old socialist ethic of egalitarian material prosperity is the principle under which they can be solved. Nevertheless, it is clear that as we move to greater technological mas-

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tery (a movement that can only be stopped by war) the most pressing social questions will call forth judgments as to which activities realize our full humanity and which inhibit it. What can be done to make our cities communities in which the human spirit can flourish? How far can we go in seeing that in all work, particularly in large factories, construction jobs, and offices, the dull or even degrading element is cut to a minimum and the creative responsible part brought to a maximum? How far can we make the association of experts and power élite sufficiently open for large numbers of people to take part in those decisions which shape their lives? How can we stimulate education (in its broadest sense) so that the new leisure will be more than a new boredom of passive acquiescence in pleasures arranged by others? How can we see that in rightfully cultivating the fullest equality we do not produce a society of mediocrity and sameness rather than of quality and individuality? How can we produce an order and self-discipline in society which restrains the selfish and the greedy without becoming so authoritarian that individual initiative is crushed? How can we cultivate freedom for the individual without having it become identified (as it now is) with ruthless self-interest and the grasping of more than a fair share? Any set of institutions is finally held together by a general conception of well-being which pervades them all. For example, in the last twenty years the chief Canadian ideal of manhood has become the ambitious young executive, aggressive in his own interests, yet loyal to his corporation, with a smart wife and two happy children. (He is sexually adjusted yet respectable, and never puts sex above the interests of the corporation.) He looks forward to a continually rising income and continually rising power and prestige. He will drive increasingly expensive cars and live in an increasingly expensive neighbourhood. He plays a part in respectable community activities (such as charities and art galleries), but sees that this does not interfere with the interests of his corporation or himself and keeps it clear that what really matters in life is business and ambition. He tries to make his opinions on all matters conform to what is considered ‘sound’ in the higher echelons of his corporation and knows he can only take part in politics or other activities in so far as his superiors approve. That such a young man should be increasingly the ideal of our society is inevitable: this ideal best serves our corporations and they do everything in their power to

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encourage and even create it. The advertisements of conspicuous consumption are addressed to these young aspirants and their idealized image comes back to us from the advertisements. Such concepts of well-being (let the cynical call them mythology) are the visions in response to which the individual models and fashions himself. In developing such an ideal capitalism has not been without sense. The people who take up this ideal are full of the energetic spirit which assists certain forms of economic growth. Yet at what price in human well-being has this image and reality been created? For it is an ideal which can be achieved by very few. As a wise man has written about Canada: ‘It needs only a simple exercise in arithmetic to show that at any given moment, all but a very small minority, even of employed adult men, have passed the age when they can expect any kind of promotion. Business ambition is available as motivation only for the few, even in Canada.’e 3 The result of this is the frustration of many who attempt to pursue the ideal; but beyond this is the sad fact that its pervasiveness prevents any widespread expression of other ideals of human conduct which are more universally fulfilling. It thus persuades too much of our best talent to direct itself along one route. The immense rewards it offers (plus its public identification with true success) have led too large a percentage of our energetic young people into this one activity at the expense of other socially necessary and desirable activities, for example, school teaching, public service, pure science, social work, the ministry, and the arts. When we recognize how much better comparatively the Russians are doing in elementary education than ourselves, we must face the fact that the Russian communal idea encourages respect for school teaching in a way that our capitalist ethic cannot. Since rewards in money and power are directed by state capitalism to those concerned with goods which can be produced privately at a profit, other activities tend to become pale shadows of business. The word ‘business’ is now tacked on to all our professions and pursuits: ‘the medical business,’ ‘the legal business,’ ‘the entertainment business,’ ‘the education business,’ ‘the newspaper business.’ (‘The religion business’ is more advanced in the United States than it is as yet in Canada.) Health, entertainment, information, order, beauty, and truth are e Sir Geoffrey Vickers, University of Toronto Quarterly, July, 1959, 315.

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all commodities which individuals purvey at a profit and can only be socially justified if they can be ‘sold’ at a profit. The economic selfseeking of the individual is the only instrument available for the production of excellence. Yet this must frustrate excellence arising in many fields where the profit motive is not sufficient for achievement. These fields, where capitalist incentives fail, are the very ones where we most need success in the age of affluence. Questioning of this capitalist ideal may be raised at an even higher level of morality. The type of young executive described can easily pass over from healthy competitive energy to ruthlessness in his own interests within his corporation, and ruthlessness in the relations of his corporation to the rest of society. Indeed, the ideal tends to encourage ruthlessness as the very mark of the manly. But such ruthlessness is the mainspring of that division of person from person which is the cause of all social disruption. It is the very denial of our membership one with another: a more insidious type of sin than the personal weaknesses we often exclusively identify with that word. A society is not likely to be a place of healthy loyalties and ordered cohesion if its members are taught to pursue first and foremost their economic selfinterest and if its leaders are chosen from those who pursue that selfinterest more ruthlessly. Indeed the most dangerous result of state capitalism is that our society recruits its chief leadership from the executives who have been most successful in living out the capitalist ideal. As later essays will show in more detail, the top executives of the corporations will not only control our economic life, but also decisively control other institutions of our society – our political parties, our universities, our churches, our charities. For example, the leaders of the great corporations are an overwhelming majority of the members of the governing boards of our universities. The higher education which they control must therefore be in the last analysis the kind which their vision of life dictates. Is it likely that men trained to manage corporations whose chief end is maximum profit will be people of wide social vision? Can it be hoped that they will fully understand the subtle problems that the mass society of high consumption now faces? Yet at every point where these new problems are arising the structure of our capitalism gives men with this limited view the deciding power in dealing with them. It produces a leadership impotent to take the obvious next step forward

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in our society. And this question of leaderships applies not only to domestic issues, but to the relation of our society to the rest of the world. In 1945 the business élite in North America had in their hands the unquestioned leadership of the world. Because of their restricted vision that leadership is now passing more and more away from North America and more and more into the hands of a tough communist élite. With all its initial advantages the capitalist leadership could not compete against the also limited communist ideal, because it could only put up against it the motives of corporate and personal greed and the impulses for personal publicity and prestige hunting. It is, of course, not only the business community in North America which will pay for this failure of leadership, but all free men who care about the traditions of the West. Our state capitalism is indeed more than a practical system for producing and distributing goods; it is also a system of ideas and ideals which determines the character of leadership and inculcates a dominating ethic in our democracy. When socialists criticize it, therefore, they must recognize that they are not only concerned with alternative governmental techniques in economic affairs but with profound questions of what constitutes right and wrong for persons and for society. They are maintaining that not only capitalist arrangements but the very capitalist ethic is quite unable to come to grips with the problems of the mass technological world. Therefore, when socialists pass beyond criticism to their proposals for the future, these proposals must be put forward not only as a set of specific economic and political techniques but as a higher conception of well-being – that is, as a morality. They must also be able to show that the social morality they propound comes to grips more cogently with our problems than does the present capitalist ethic. Socialist doctrine must be a morality and it must be a higher and more realistic morality than that which it is to replace. Too often in the past socialists have been content to put up against the clearly defined capitalist account of human good a vague and innocent account of their own ethic. They often spoke as if the interests of mankind were simply identified with more commodities, and socialism was defined as the best technique for producing and distributing those commodities fairly. They often spoke as if the mass consumption society would bring with it automatically a unification of the people in equality in which the old evils of repressive power and stratified class

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would disappear. A mild-mannered utopia of reasonable men would take its place. In a society of more commodities, human ignorance and sin would no longer have to be contended with. Democratic socialists (rightly scorning revolution) believed that this would be accomplished eventually through the ballot box as in a prosperous world men would easily recognize the best interests of society. Belief in a simple doctrine of progress made socialists think that all this would inevitably come to be. There was an ‘obliging tendency’ in history. Such naive doctrine stood in the way of socialists thinking profoundly about political or personal morality. It prompted woolliness about how human beings come to know their own true interests. By encouraging optimism about the potential sense and goodness of us all, it made questions of morality look easy since their solution depended on economic circumstances alone. By making progress an inevitable process rather than dependent on the free acts of free men, it dulled thought about the principles on which such free acts should be based. In the light of what is coming to be in mass society such optimistic and unspecific theories do not suffice. Given the power of entrenched self-interest in individuals and institutions and the tendency to passive mediocrity among great numbers of persons, nobody can really believe that a just and creative society is emerging inevitably as our technological affluence increases. Neither can anyone believe that a new dawn will break after a great economic catastrophe, let alone after the absurdity of a violent revolution. Such ideas are the dreams of an innocent past. If we are to reach a better way of dealing with the problems of a mass society, this will only come about by the free choices of a multitude of Canadians who are highly conscious of true human good and determined on its wide social realization. In such a situation revitalized socialist theory is a necessary basis for effective socialist action. Only in terms of a consistent political and social morality will socialists be able to persuade Canadians that there is a better alternative to our present capitalist system and ethic. Such a morality can only be based on a profound vision of human well-being. Such a moral view of socialism is contrary to a belief held by certain politicians and political theorists in Canada: that the art of politics is just the balancing and refereeing of the interests of various pressure groups. This is the Mackenzie King theory of politics and it has been taken over by his disciples who may be found in both the Liberal and

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Conservative parties.4 In such a view of politics there is no need to appeal to ultimate criteria of human good. A socialist edition of this doctrine is that the job of a socialist party consists in marshalling together the short-term self-interests of those opposed to capitalism and through the power of that marshalling to realize those self-interests. Such a doctrine is supposed to be ‘realistic’ socialism. It is, however, not an alternative open to true socialists although it may be open to the slick and successful who were once Liberals and are now more likely to be Conservatives. The political technicians of the old parties are in a position to say that they are simply ‘honest brokers’ and therefore need not think about issues of ultimate human good; actually their aim, of course, is to stay in power and work things out within the limits of the present capitalist structure. Indeed, they seriously delude themselves in thinking they are balancing in the name of democracy. What they are really doing is becoming servants of an ever more powerful corporate capitalism and what they call balancing is doling out minor concessions so that interests other than the capitalist will not make too great a fuss. Socialists have not the alternative of this amoral theory of politics because what they are interested in is not simply power within the present system, but the art of using power to make men free. They cannot play the role of flatterers to a disappearing democracy, because they are the friends of a true and continuing democracy. A policy of drift in matters of theory about ultimate human good (which is the upshot of moral cynicism) has nothing to offer socialists because it simply serves to perpetuate the status quo. There is a further and stronger reason why socialism must be a welldefined moral doctrine and not only an appeal to the limited self-interest of certain groups. In all mass consumption societies the number of persons who have been traditionally classified as ‘labour’ is shrinking as a percentage of the total population. The maximum percentage that ‘labour’ can reach in advanced societies does not comprise a majority of voters. The industrial machine has an increasing need of engineers who organize, maintain, and repair that machine and of accountants who calculate and check its operations. Society has an increasing need of administrators, nurses, social workers, doctors, teachers, whose highly specialized functions keep the complex organization running efficiently. The percentage of skilled people must inevitably grow and

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the future quality of our society will more and more depend on the moral vision of these manifold specialists. No socialist party has any hope of success without large support among these groups and that support can only be gained by the reasonable persuasion of reasonable men. The capitalist ethic can after all appeal to the short-term self-interest of such specialists by trying to persuade them that they can only defend the just interests of their skills under the present system and that a socialist party will put them at the beck and call of the less skilled majority. Most specialists now support the capitalist ethic for this reason – they see no chance of protecting their self-interest except by the competitive methods now employed. Yet while most specialists see no alternative to this present method, many of the best of them do not like it, for as sensible people they recognize that this warring of group against group must increasingly undermine any proper sense of community loyalty and cohesion. In such a situation socialists must offer specific reassurance that theirs is a doctrine of social order in which the principle of justice for all safeguards the just interests of a skill or profession. Only in terms of such a morality can the specialist be brought to see any alternative to the present ruthless methods of maintaining his proper self-interest. Indeed it is possible to go further about this important group of highly skilled people. It is a tendency of modern industry no longer to need independent minds as it did in its early stages, but technical specialists of narrow training. The hope that such persons will have a high vision of human dignity will come not from their economic function but from their general education outside their technical training, that is, in their schools, their churches, their universities. The obvious point must therefore be made that since socialists depend very much on the support of such groups, they depend at the same time on the quality of these institutions. Conversely, socialist leaders can only appeal to these groups if they have an explicit doctrine of human good and an understanding of how this good is best to be realized in practice. The cement which binds together the ethical system of socialism is the belief in equality. It is the principle which tells us whom we are talking about when we speak of human well-being. We are not speaking of some rather than others, or of some more than others – but of each person. This assumption of equality may seem so commonplace in Can-

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ada that it hardly needs discussing as a principle. Is not equality an assumed article of faith for all true Canadians? Every political orator must speak of it; even our capitalism must justify itself by calling itself ‘people’s capitalism.’ At a deeper level, is not the central achievement of modern political theory the enunciation of the principle of equality, as against the principle of hierarchy which was central to the classical world? The chief driving force behind the social reforms of the last two hundred years has been this principle. Is not then a discussion of equality simply the rehashing of a platitude which every decent man accepts and to which the indecent have to pay lip service? Yet is this so? As we move into the mass world, how much is the belief in equality sustained in our thought or practice? It is indubitable that theoretical criticisms of equality are increasingly prevalent. Is not equality the enemy of liberty? Will not the striving for equality produce a dead-level society? Is not the search for equality something we should eschew economically, as making us unproductive by holding back the energetic, the responsible, and the intelligent? Has it not produced mediocrity in our education? Wealthy men with no knowledge of moral or political philosophy will bring out as a triumphant discovery (what one might have considered an obvious fact) that men are not equal in talent, and rush on to deduce from this that equality is a ridiculous doctrine. Nor is such ridicule met with only in expected quarters. In his attempt to drive the Russians to work, Stalin maintained that equality was a petty bourgeois ideal.5 More influential than these theoretical criticisms is the fact that equality is becoming more at variance with social reality. The tendency to stratification and non-participation which threatens equality is more than a product of capitalism, but is related to industrialism itself, as can be seen from the fact that a new class system is appearing in the Soviet Union as much is in North America. The very structure of mass society produces impersonal hierarchies of power in which equality can have no substance, particularly equality of participation in economic and political life. This tendency in any industrial society produces added difficulties with our capitalism in which vast accumulations of economic power in private hands and inequalities of possession are the very substance of the system. In such a situation double-think about equality becomes manifest. The popular leaders of governments orate about the glories of equality on the hustings while enacting economic policies which establish intractable inequalities as

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the very essence of our social life. In such circumstances, talk about equality becomes more and more ritual emptied of belief – part of the equipment of the ‘engineer of consent.’ It must also be recognized, of course, that the principle of equality has been interpreted in a particular way within North American history. In our past, it meant a combination of political equality (with all its rich content of the ballot, equality before the law, and so on) with equality of opportunity for economic advancement. It was believed that political equality would safeguard equality of opportunity in economic and social life from attacks by sinister interests. This combination of political equality and open careers for the talented would prevent the unfair ‘conventional’ inequalities, while leaving the ‘natural’ inequalities to work themselves out. In the early days when our country was a frontier individualistic capitalism, this edition of the equality principle worked pretty well. The question is now, however, whether such a theory of equality is adequate for the conditions of the stratified mass society. Can formal political equality still safeguard equality of opportunity from the attacks of vested interests? Does not equality of opportunity become more and more to mean the necessity of the ambitious to serve the corporations? In a world where the very complexity of our society makes us increasingly dependent on one another, do we not have to move forward to a richer conception of economic equality than equality of opportunity? Is this not particularly pressing for our democracy, in which the problem of leisure is as urgent as the problem of work? In such circumstances it is no longer possible to take equality as a platitudinous article of faith which all may be assumed to assume. To those who would attack the principle, openly or covertly, we must try to express why exactly we believe in it. We must elucidate how it is related to other necessary principles such as the recognition of the diversity of talent. No satisfactory or systematic answer to these problems is, of course, possible in a short essay. What follows is only intended as an introduction to the question.f

f Our present social and political theory is in grave need of a systematic discussion of equality. It is lacking, however, because the political philosophers and scientists sadly mirror the impersonality of our age by concentrating their energies on technical matters and on serving the society as it is.

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Equality should be the central principle of society since all persons, whatever their condition, must freely choose to live by what is right or wrong. This act of choosing is the ultimate human act and is open to all. In this sense all persons are equal, and differences of talent are of petty significance. Any man who is fair in his dealings, any woman who treats the interests of others as of the same importance as her own, may in so doing have achieved the essential human act of loving the good as much or more than the cleverest or most powerful person who ever lived. Because of this fact, no human being should be treated simply as a means, like a tree or a car, but as an end. Our moral choices matter absolutely in the scheme of things. Any social order must then try to constitute itself within the recognition of this basic fact of moral personality which all equally possess. It is clear that the foregoing is an essentially religious foundation for equality. Such a foundation will seem to the unbeliever too limited a basis for social principle. It must be insisted, however, that the idea of equality arose in the West within a particular set of religious and philosophical ideas. I cannot see why men should go on believing in the principle without some sharing in those ideas. The religious tradition was the biblical, in which each individual was counted as of absolute significance before God. This belief united with the principle of rationality as found in the Stoic philosophers. Among the greatest Western thinkers the conception of rationality has been increasingly unified with the religious principle of respect. To state this historical fact is not to deny that many men have believed in equality outside this religious and philosophical tradition. The question is rather whether they have been thinking clearly when they have so believed. This religious basis for equality seems to me the only adequate one, because I cannot see why one should embark on the immensely difficult social practice of treating each person as important unless there is something intrinsically valuable about personality. And what is intrinsically valuable about all persons except their freedom as moral agents? At the level of efficiency it is surely more convenient to treat some persons as having no importance, and thus to build a society of inequality in which some people matter and some do not. If individuals are only accidental conglomerations of atoms, why should we respect their rights when it does not suit our interests or inclinations to do so? It is clear that Marxism, as the dominant Western philosophy in the

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East, appeals to the sense of equality. The question is not whether this is good, but whether within Marxist materialism there is any consistent place for this belief; whether, indeed, one of the reasons why the Marxists in power have been so willing to sacrifice persons ruthlessly has not been that moral personality has no place in their theory. So also in the West ideas such as ‘the survival of the fittest,’ when taken over from biology and used about society, led to an undermining of respect for the individual. How often has one heard business people justify the results of the market by such an appeal to Darwin? What must be insisted upon is that in mass society the practice which sustains the rights of persons qua persons is very difficult to preserve. It will surely only be sustained by those who have thought clearly what it is about human beings which makes them worthy of being treated with respect. To state this is, of course, in no way to imply that socialists who disagree as to the ultimate justification of equality cannot work together. Religious believers from various traditions will hold that in the hard pinches only such belief will make equality a possibility. The non-religious who are egalitarians may feel this is only superstition and have some other basis for their belief. But this need not prevent them working together. For, as the history of Canada manifests, common political ends can be sought without theoretical agreement. It may still be argued (and has been) that although we should treat ourselves and others as of absolute worth, this does not imply equality in the day-to-day doings of life. A man is as free to save his soul in a slum as in a mansion, we are sometimes told, and therefore there can be no argument from this religious account to any particular worldly conditions. The truth of the first part of this statement may be admitted; the second part, however, must be categorically denied. The justification of equality must then make this denial. It is based on two facts about human personality which seem to the present writer indubitable. First, it is likely to be spiritually bad for any person to be in a position of permanent and inevitable inferiority in his relations with anyone else. Secondly, it is likely to be spiritually bad for a person to be in a position of unchecked superiority in his relations with another. That is, relations of superiority-subordination tend to thwart the true good of the people on either side (whatever petty pleasures of sadism or masochism may result and whatever mechanical efficiency may be obtained). Because this thwarting tends to occur, social policy should

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be directed always to the elimination of such relations. And this policy should be applied in the factory, the office, the family, the general social and political order. For example, families require discipline, but if that discipline is not to degrade children and parents alike, it must be directed to its proper end of leading the children to a freedom equal to that of their parents. So in a factory or office there must be a proper ordering of work by somebody in authority, but that authority must not deny the equality of those ordered, or their creativity and responsibility for the work done. The end which any society should be working for, however slow and difficult its accomplishment, is the elimination of these relations of superiority and subordination in all aspects of life. Nearly all in Canada will grant some degree of equality before the law or at the ballot box, but when it comes to equality of participation in wealth, responsibility, and culture there is a violent anti-egalitarian reaction. Therefore, it must be insisted that a society which takes seriously its first principle that all its members are to be regarded as equal must give economic content to that regard. Men are living beings and if society does not allow them to sustain life it cannot be said to regard them. To have enough and to get it from reasonable hours of work is the condition not only of a comfortable and sensuously gratifying life (of which freedom from fatigue is not the least part) but of a life which can partake properly in love and play, art and thought, politics and religion. At the beginning of political theory Aristotle laid down that a free man must be a man with leisure – that is, a man who can get enough goods without working too hard. It is obvious that mothers with automatic washing machines are likely to have more energy to give to the cultivation of their children than those who must do the washing on boards, that a machinist who earns the same amount for forty as against sixty hours has more energy to go fishing, take responsibility in the union, or paint a picture. It is now necessary to see how these arguments are related to the main argument against equality. This is based on an appeal to the fact of natural diversity of talent. It is said that men are unequal in talent and that therefore to base society on equality is to base it on an illusion which can only lead to social disaster in the form of stagnation and mediocrity. When society follows the facts of diversity of talent, it naturally falls into a hierarchical structure. We so need the gifts of the talented that we must reward them greatly. It is obvious that this

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argument has cogency. Men do differ widely in talents. It is also obviously true that a wise social order will encourage certain talents for the sake of its continuing health and that any system of rewards must include the economic. Also, economic reward is not solely for the purpose of giving people things. Responsible officials, brain surgeons, and artists need a high standard of life to give them the peace necessary to their efficient performance. Nevertheless this is not all the story: the principle of hierarchy which arises from diversity of talents must be balanced against the principle of equality which arises from the absolute worth of all men. That proper balancing must be based on the moral distinction between the valuing of qualities and the regarding of persons. This distinction is the following: to be with any set of people is to be aware of valuing disparate qualities of intellect and physique, responsibility and imagination. But this does not mean that we should regard the interests of one of those persons less highly than any of the others. That is, qualities are valued, persons are regarded. To make this distinction is to put two activities on different levels of moral importance. The regard which is due to persons is not dependent on the sum total of their qualities. We cannot score John 90 per cent in qualities and Richard 40 per cent and therefore say the regard due to Richard is limited by his low score. To do so is to deny the absolute regard which is due him. It is, of course, quite possible to give up the Judaeo-Christian truth. But if one holds it, then a hierarchy of talent and an equality of persons cannot be on the same level as principles for the ordering of society. How else have we learnt to scorn slavery? We scorn it because we do not find admirable a society whose leaders, thinkers, and artists bring forth their highest qualities in the freedom of being waited on by a slave class. We scorn it because the encouragement of these qualities cannot be measured in the same scale as the debasement of these other persons by slavery. The extreme case of slavery makes clear what is true in any circumstance. The value to be recognized in the highest artistic or scientific genius – in such men as Mozart or Einstein – gives me no reason to regard them more highly as persons than anybody else, or to fail to recognize that my duty to regard persons is a duty of a higher level than my valuing of the true, the noble, or the beautiful. For this reason, the hierarchy of talents must always be subordinate as a social principle to the basic equality of persons.

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To say this is not to deny that there is a grave difficulty in balancing properly the claims of equality and diversity of talent in any society. Differences in human talent are inevitably so great that the differences in ways of life and degrees of power must also be great. A corrupt belief in equality which stood in the way of people knowing what it is to do something well would obviously be pernicious. Society must offer incentives to encourage people to do things well and to do the difficult jobs well. It is clear that some persons give to society more than they take; while others use society simply for what they can get out of it. Social policy must obviously encourage the givers. Once having granted the real substance in the argument about incentives, it must be repeated that most of the talk along that line now heard in Canada is mainly a justification of the belief that the most important thing in life is to make a lot of money. This becomes clear when one asks the question: what incentives and what social structure [are required] to produce these incentives? There are all kinds of varying systems to produce incentives towards differing social aims. And it must be insisted here that most people in our society who argue against equality in the name of incentives are arguing in the name of one particular structure of incentives – the structure which encourages men to assist profitable private production and distribution of goods. Moreover, the powerful instruments of opinion have tried to identify in the minds of the general public the capitalist model of incentive with all possible systems of incentive. They have tried (with some success) to convince people that only a capitalist society will maintain a proper care for incentive and that therefore an alternative form of organization will destroy initiative and energy. This is nonsense. What our present capitalism encourages is certain forms of activities at the expense of others. It is often argued that by maintaining a wealthy and privileged class certain ‘finer things’ are kept alive. It is not necessary to discuss this argument in general, because it is so patently absurd to apply it to the privileged groups which exist in Canada. What are these ‘finer things’ that owe their survival to the rich, and which would not continue in a more egalitarian society? What valuable qualities of life do the very rich keep going in Canada with their pursuit of luxury (conspicuous or inconspicuous as their taste may be), their externalized culture and prestige seeking? Horse racing and collecting pictures are their greatest

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positive achievements. Among the moderately rich what noble culture is the product of Forest Hill and Westmount which might be threatened by greater equality? People who give their lives to the petty round of snobbery at home and relax playing cards in Florida in identical luxury hotels and mink stoles are hardly likely to be the vanguard of a Canadian renaissance. Our capitalist system of incentives, then, can no longer be said to lead to that encouragement of diversity of talents which was its original justification. Equality of opportunity to serve General Motors or the Argus Corporation is not what earlier democrats meant by their doctrine. The incentives of capitalism no longer do what they are said they do. They no longer encourage that wide range of skilful activities which becomes increasingly our need in a mass society. In such a situation it is as much the function of a socialist morality to work out new and realistic schemes of incentive as it is to think out new means of sustaining and enlarging the equality of all persons against the threats of the mass age. Two last points must be emphasized about the principle of equality in the technological society. First, it must be repeated that never before in history has it been open for the majority to have large amounts of goods with high degrees of leisure. This will be a growing possibility as techniques of automation increase, as the robots do more and more of the work in the factories and offices. Such equality to participate in leisure becomes moreover a pressing necessity of our economic health. Since 1939 a large percentage of the income of this continent has been devoted to defence. No sane man can want that to continue indefinitely. If the tension between the West and the communist world is reduced, however gradually, somehow the immense resources that have been put into the military effort will have to be used for peaceful purposes. This will only be possible if the old shibboleths of inequality are overcome. If our mastery of nature is to be used for peaceful purposes, a conscious policy of equality becomes a necessity. Such a policy within North America must, of course, be related to conditions in the rest of the world and our responsibility for and dependence on such conditions. How fast we should push for a realized society of leisure at home, and how far that should be restrained to help the Asians and Africans develop industrially, is a difficult question of balance and cannot be discussed in detail here. However, it only suggests caution; it

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does not change the basic fact that the scientific economy of North America can only be healthy if it is set towards a basic policy of economic equality. Secondly and more important, the very form of human existence created by the mass society makes imperative a struggle for equality of participation in mind; imperative, that is, if we are to escape the civilization of the ant-heap. If it be probable that in the future human beings grow up in conditions where physical survival does not take most of their time, what then will give life its meaning and purpose? What is worth doing when the robots are doing the work in the factories? In a society of widespread leisure, aimlessness and boredom will be much more likely than in the past when leisure was the privilege of the few. To meet such a situation, our democracy must consciously stimulate the equality of participation in mind, in ways that it has never dreamed of in the past. When leisure is open to all, then education must be opened to all. To overcome the impersonality of the mass society, new relationships in work and leisure must be developed and lived out; indeed new relationships at every level of existence – in art, in sex, and in religion. It would be folly, of course, to think that these new experiences will come easily or inevitably. Human sin is a historical constant however much the forms of it may vary from era to era. Under any conditions it is hard for us to make a success of living. Nevertheless one thing is certain. North America is the first continent called to bring human excellence to birth throughout the whole range of the technological society. At the moment, the survival of its capitalist ethic, more than anything else, stands in the way of realizing that opportunity. The only basis on which it could be realized is a clearly defined ethic of community which understands the dignity of every person and is determined on ways of fulfilling that dignity in our new conditions.

Notes 1 Clarence Decatur Howe (1886–1960), engineer, businessman, and politician, entered politics (1935) after making a fortune designing and building grain elevators. As minister of munitions and supply during the Second World War, he directed Canada’s war production program; in the post-war period,

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An Ethic of Community he oversaw the country’s return to a free-enterprise system. While minister of trade and commerce (1948–57), his contempt for opposition to his plans to build a trans-Canada pipeline in 1956 played a significant role in the defeat of the Liberal government the following year. The Canadian economy experienced major downturns in 1957–8 and again in 1960. The national unemployment rate went from 3.4 per cent in 1956 to 7.0 per cent in 1958 and dropped again in 1960 to 7.0 per cent after a slight improvement in 1959. In 1961 the Gill Committee was studying the Unemployment Insurance Act and its relation to other social security payments. The UI fund was being criticized by women’s groups and others for its failure to serve all the workers fairly in the rapidly automating industrial sector and the regional resource sector. Grant criticized Diefenbaker’s government for its failure to respond to the recession in Lament for a Nation (1965): ‘The less prosperous felt the pinches of the recession which started in 1957. Diefenbaker did not meet this situation with any co-ordinated economic plan. The government only alleviated the growing unemployment by winter works, and scarcely touched upon the problems caused by automation’ (286 below). Sir Geoffrey Vickers (1894–1982), systems thinker and public administrator, worked for the National Coal Board from 1940 to 1955 and lectured at the University of Toronto School of Social Work. His works also include Is Adaptability Enough? (1958) and The Undirected Society: Essays on the Human Implications of Industrialization in Canada (1959). William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874–1950), politician, was Liberal prime minister of Canada during 1921–6, 1926–30, and 1935–48. King’s long tenure in office made him the dominant figure in Canadian politics during the first half of the twentieth century. Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–53) and premier of the Soviet state (1941–53), claimed to be continuing the regime headed by Lenin, but overturned the earlier Bolshevik positions on internationalism, the right to self-determination, workers’ democracy, and social equality. In a speech delivered at a conference of business executives, 23 June 1931, entitled ‘New Conditions – New Tasks in Economic Construction,’ he attacked the ‘Leftist’ practice of wage equalization, citing Marx and Lenin versus the egalitarians. See J. Stalin – Works, Volume 13 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House 1955), 58ff.

Memorandum on Encyclopaedia Britannica

Grant was asked by Robert Maynard Hutchins to respond to Jacques Barzun’s conception of the proposed new phase of the Encylopaedia Britannica.1 At the time (May 1960) Grant thought he might be hired by Hutchins as editor of the Encyclopaedia (though there were other elements in Hutchins’s group who were strongly opposed to him). Later he was hired instead by Hutchins’s colleague, Mortimer Adler, to work for the Institute for Philosophical Research.2

At the beginning of his memorandum, Mr Barzun writes that he was persuaded by the meeting of the Editorial Board of last January that the Board was mainly in agreement as to its ‘principal desires and intentions.’ My impression of the minutes was quite different. The proposal of Mr Hutchins that the Encyclopaedia might become an instrument for mediating coherent meaning to people in a confused and fragmented civilization did not seem to produce unanimity of intention. In the discussion of Mr Hutchins’ proposal two lines of thought must, however, be distinguished. (1) Those comments which, while accepting or keeping a hopeful mind about Mr Hutchins’ proposal, raised certain practical questions that would necessarily have to be faced (e.g. how this type of Encyclopaedia could continue to carry out its necessary reference function under the new conditions). (2) Those comments which come from quite a different idea of the Encyclopaedia’s future. There is no point in discussing the practical difficulties of Mr Hutchins’ proposal, if the whole proposal is dismissed on principle. Therefore, it is first necessary to look at the comments of the second type to see what alternate future they propose for the Encyclopaedia, and the

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merits of that future as compared to that envisaged by Mr Hutchins. It is but platitudinous to say that these alternative views are incompatible in the sense that a quite different Encyclopaedia would result from the adoption of either, and that therefore the Board cannot hope to proceed to the future without choosing what future it envisages. The alternative to Mr Hutchins’ proposal is put in its clearest and most sophisticated form in Mr Barzun’s memorandum. Mr Barzun’s proposal is that the Encyclopaedia should remain in essence what it has been in the past. There should be improvements in its style, in the relating of its parts to each other, and in the strengthening of its humane tone. It must recognize that the modern world is different from that to which the Encyclopaedia was addressed in the nineteenth century, but it must continue to address the world in essentially the same way as it always has. To see what Mr Barzun’s memorandum proposes, then, it is necessary to look at what the Encyclopaedia was at its best in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The great ninth and eleventh editions of the Encyclopaedia were a product of that flowering of scholarship which took place in nineteenth-century Europe, particularly in England and Germany. The Encyclopaedia reflected that scholarship both in its greatness and in its limitations. To the scholars of that era, ‘scientific’ knowledge was the final court of appeal and there was nothing beyond it. Most of them so confidently assumed that their liberal faith gave meaning to the world that they did not even consider that above scholarship lies thought and that scholarship, like money, must serve purposes beyond itself. They saw little need therefore to unify or give meaning to the knowledge they presented to the world. It is this assumed objectivity which distinguishes the nineteenth-century Britannica from Diderot’s Encyclopaedia. To Diderot and his friends, Newtonian science, deism, and the new political humanism are written about to free men from what they thought was the political tyranny and theological superstition of the old world of landlords and clerics. Diderot, therefore, does not skirt the issue of unity and meaning. He thinks a true meaning lies in the new science and humanism of the Enlightenment, and his Encyclopaedia is used for this end. His document was therefore one which had the most profound effect on the practice and theory of the age. In the nineteenth-century Encyclopaedia, on the other hand, the modern assumptions are no longer fighting for

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acceptance but have become the established tradition. The result is that the Encyclopaedia is a powerful summation of the scholarship of its day written within the modern assumption of the primacy of scientific and scholarly knowledge without any discussion of that assumption. It could not occur to many in such an era that scholarly objectivity was as compatible with philosophic and moral nihilism as with its opposite. This assumption of scholarship being the ultimate criterion is also clear in the ‘ideal man’ to whom the Encyclopaedia was addressed. Those who wrote and organized these editions believed that if men were given all the facts about nature and history they would become enlightened members of a decent society. This followed from the progressivist faith that all that good men needed were the facts. With this faith in the facts (conceived in a simple positivist way) went also the belief that a properly educated man could keep abreast of the expanding sciences and that the job of the Encyclopaedia was primarily to provide this good-willed educated man with the best means of so keeping abreast. Since the Encyclopaedia has moved to the USA, two elements have been added to this situation. American scholarship has developed and continues the tradition of the nineteenth-century Europeans on a mass scale. The Encyclopaedia can now call on that large new font of scholarship. American scholarship is of course even more fragmented than the nineteenth-century tradition in England and Germany because the great scholars of Europe, even when they were consciously positivist, took for granted the unifying tradition of their older culture in a way that Americans cannot. The Encyclopaedia has also called on American techniques of organization so that it could run itself efficiently and keep itself up to date in continuous production in a way that was not possible in the past. Some scholars think that this efficiency has been the cause of cheapening the Encyclopaedia. But there is no reason that efficient techniques should have this consequence. It is clear that Mr Barzun’s vision of the future of the Encyclopaedia is that it should continue to be a document of essentially the same kind as it was in the nineteenth century, because he takes the same view of the primacy of ‘objective’ scholarship as was taken by the writers of the earlier document. He is indeed one of the most sensitive and intelligent proponents of this view in the English-speaking world. Scientific and humane scholarship must be the final court of appeal because

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there is no knowledge beyond scholarship which can unify and give meaning to the results of that scholarship. That this is his belief is evident, for example, from his distinction between information and understanding, and his assumption that the Encyclopaedia’s task is with information. Information is objective fact and understanding subjective interpretation. The interpretation is extrinsic to the fact. Such a distinction can only be based on the belief that there is no such thing as philosophic knowledge which gives the meaning of the fact, not externally, but by bringing out its reality as a fact. Or again, Mr Barzun adds to the scientific emphasis of the scholars of the 19th century an appropriate 20th-century interest in art. Human contemplative activity is divided by him into two spheres, the scientific and the artistic. Scholarship describes and comments on those two contemplative activities. And it is plain in what he says about this division that he does not consider that there is any higher function of reason which attempts to show the meaning of these activities in the total life of man. Mr Barzun cannot believe that an Encyclopaedia should see its purpose as making meaningful the modern world, because meaning does not belong objectively to the world, but is a question of subjective interpretation. This being the case it is better to exclude this function from an Encyclopaedia, as was done in the great 19th-century editions. This position is particularly evident in what Mr Barzun writes about those who would ‘obtrude a didactic intention’ on the work and include ‘artificial injections of “significance,” “perspective,” and “insight.”’ What is implied by saying that significance is artificial is that it is external to the factual content and not intrinsic to it. What is implied by ‘obtruding a didactic intention’ is that any attempt to make scholarship meaningful by philosophic thought is always suspect as being a kind of propaganda put over by somebody with an axe to grind. But this is only true if there is no such thing as philosophical synthesis. It is, of course, true that philosophy has been and can be perverted by being used for propagandist purposes, and that artificial injections of significance (external to the information) would do appalling harm to any decent and fair-minded Encyclopaedia. As a ‘reductio ad absurdum’ of both these processes we have before us certain parts of the Soviet Encyclopaedia. The spread of ideologies, masquerading as philosophy, has made many Western philosophers suspicious of synthesis, has driven them

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back to the nineteenth-century conception of ‘objectivity’ and scholarship as the final court of appeal, and to a refusal to raise the questions of ultimate meaning. But the question remains whether the Western world can be content with facing ideologies by excluding questions of meaning, and whether it should do this in as central a document of its intellectual tradition as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. To admit that questions of meaning can be answered pervertedly is not to imply that we must not attempt to deal with them by philosophy. The gravest reason for hoping that scholars will care about the meaning of their scholarship is that common-sense men are concerned to seek meaning in their lives, and that if the universities and scholarship do not help them in this task they will turn to find meaning in wild and irrational sources. It cannot be emphasized too often that the tradition of ‘scientific objectivity’ in the German universities, which excluded all question but those of scholarship, was responsible for driving many young people to look for meaning in sources quite outside reason and sanity. This brief description of Mr Barzun’s assumptions has been carried out for two reasons: (i) to show that his vision of the Encyclopaedia is essentially a conservative one which sees the Encyclopaedia as the same in principle as it was at its peak in the 19th century, and which implies that the general state of the English-speaking academic community should be accepted as the basis of proceeding, (ii) to show that the Board of Editors in deciding for or against Mr Barzun’s vision are deciding not only about their particular problem but about issues of magnitude concerning the present intellectual state of the Western world. It will be clear also from the foregoing that I do not think that Mr Barzun’s vision of the future Encyclopaedia is an adequate one because I do not think the nineteenth-century idea of scholarly objectivity is a right basis for education. However these notes are not the place to justify a position which raises the ultimate questions of human existence. It will also be clear from the terms in which I have rejected Mr Barzun’s vision that I see much merit in Mr Hutchins’ alternative. Therefore I turn to that alternative, discussing it first in general and then raising certain practical difficulties about it. Mr Hutchins’ proposal suggests that something new should be made. In the making of the new it is inevitable that what is being made can only gradually be seen in concrete, and can only be seen for what it

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is when the work is done. This always puts the new at a disadvantage when it competes with a conservative alternative. There is, of course, L’Encyclopédie française (described in the memorandum from the Institute of Philosophical Research) from which obviously much can be learnt. (It would seem clear that if the Board of Editors are to take Phase II seriously they should have one of their members find out in much more detail what is being done in Paris and what have been the lessons learnt and the obstacles overcome in that undertaking.) Nevertheless it is unquestionable that if Mr Hutchins’ proposal is to be made incarnate, it will require an immense amount of careful planning, proceeding slowly under the direction of a group of men who believe it is a wise idea. Something so new and so important cannot be made explicit quickly. The danger is that it will be rejected because it is so new, before the necessary steps can be taken in terms of which alone it can be made explicit. But the profundity and the difficulty of Mr Hutchins’ proposal can be brought out by comparing it with the work of Diderot.3 To repeat what has been said earlier, Diderot did not skirt the issue of meaning. His Encyclopaedia was an instrument for spreading the new meaning of the Enlightenment as against the meaning of the old order of Christianized Aristotelian Europe. Mr Hutchins is proposing something more difficult. He is proposing that the Britannica should attempt to make meaningful the modern world – not as over against some old meaning, but as against the general chaos and meaninglessness which now characterises the intellectual life of the Western world and of North America in particular. It has been said earlier that the 19th-century Britannica maintained its belief in the primacy of scholarship because of the faith it assumed with its age. It now continues to maintain the same brand of objectivity in a very different climate. It no longer addresses a public which is much held by the 19th-century assumptions or for that matter by any (except perhaps the mass expectations from technology). There may be enclaves of the older liberalism among some academics, but they are fewer and farther between and do not much touch the young or those who have any contact with the practical. The result is that the present objectivity of the Encyclopaedia addresses as it were a void. Diderot’s task was easier because it is always easier to do the negative job of defining something new by criticizing what is positive in the old, than to make meaning clear as

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against chaos and disorder. It may be said that this is a task doomed to failure because Western society is fated for intellectual bankruptcy. This may be so; I do not see that it is necessarily so. But whatever the case, Mr Hutchins has made an immensely exciting and therefore difficult proposal, which points to the centre of our present intellectual position. The feasibility of such a proposal depends on the availability of scholars who have passed beyond philosophy of criticism and who are attempting to think the meaning of their scholarship. Mr Hutchins says at the end of his memorandum of January 1960: ‘Britannica should seek to rise above the level of contemporary scholarship, which it now accurately reflects. It should seek to put things in their proper places and perspective, a task which contemporary scholarship has all but abandoned. It cannot uncritically accept the judgments of those who occupy high academic posts or enjoy high academic reputations. It must rely on its own judgment in terms of its conception of its own mission.’ I agree with Mr Hutchins about the quality of contemporary scholarship, but only as one takes the general level of mediocrity. There is also a minority in the scholarly community who have an intense desire to overcome this limited standpoint. There are scholars in every field (and they are often the best scholars in those fields) who now see that the main intellectual task of the modern world is to seek to put things in their proper places and perspectives. It is also true that these men are those who most often gather the young and alive new scholars around them. This is not surprising, considering that nearly all the able young are quite aware of the emptiness of the older academic tradition. Even in England, which had deeper roots in the liberal tradition and understood its very real virtues better than North America, it is evident that there is a profound discontent with it among the younger members of the academic community. If these scholars did not exist, Mr Hutchins’ proposal would not be feasible. It would not be possible for the Encyclopaedia to be ahead of the educated community unless it had strong support from the best in that community. As Mr Hutchins says, the Encyclopaedia cannot accept uncritically the judgments of those who occupy high academic posts and reputation. But the alternative to this cannot be that the Encyclopaedia should go it alone without support from the academic community. Fortunately, potential support for Mr Hutchins’ proposal is present and growing in

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strength every year. Therefore the Encyclopaedia would not have to consider going it alone. It would seem then that the feasibility of Mr Hutchins’ proposal depends on how far the Board would be willing to rise above the level of contemporary scholarship and rely on that creative minority of scholars in all countries who are now searching to understand the meaning of their particular studies. Should the Board go ahead with Mr Hutchins’ proposal for a modern Encyclopaedia, one of the first tasks would be finding out where the creative work of synthesis is being done. To illustrate from one small area of knowledge: great advances have been made by modern neurophysiologists in understanding the mechanism of the brain. The meaning of these advances presents questions to a large number of scientists, technicians, and laymen. Our knowledge of the mechanism of the brain and nerves is now so detailed that those who are aware of these facts and who have been educated to take only such facts seriously (scientifically-minded doctors etc.) cannot reconcile them with what they hope about the rest of existence. What they know scientifically is obviously at odds with their common-sense understanding of free persons, and even more with the truths of moral philosophy and the religious tradition. Anybody close to intelligent doctors knows how much their minds are constantly assailed by the belief that persons are finally nothing but a set of electric charges; and how often this theoretical tension results in the moral nihilism so characteristic of the medical profession in the West. For it is clear that if taken as the final word about man, the language of electric charges must lead to personal and political nihilism. It is no accident that German doctors were willing to experiment on live conscious persons against their will. Because of this situation, some of the most expert physiologists recognize that if the concepts in their science lead to nihilism, then these concepts cannot be self-complete, and must be understood in a wider perspective of other facts and other concepts. This is evident in the work of such men as Eccles in England and Penfield in Canada.4 They do not want to go back on their discoveries as physiologists, but they recognize their responsibility to be more than physiologists because of the ambiguous significance of their discoveries. They are much less prone simply to take their facts at face value or to rest in the mythology of scientism as their predecessors did so often. The best philosophers also are less inclined either to disregard the new facts or on the other hand to get

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down and worship them, as was the alternative for most of their predecessors. The result of this situation among the wise is that a new synthesis is coming to be. This example from physiology will of course not only have consequences in its own field but has significance for all theoretical and practical studies, just as their new syntheses will have upon physiology. Anybody who moves in medical circles will know how open the best teaching doctors are to understand their work in a fuller perspective. But the problem of the educated yet busy doctor or scientist is to find the means. Some confusion may arise in the discussions about Phase II through the use of the word ‘synthesis.’ It would seen to me that three different degrees of synthesis are implied in that proposal. (1) There is synthesis within a subject - to give, as Mr Barzun says, the Institutes of that subject. It is true that this is not always done well in the present Encyclopaedia, so that a subject may appear as a simple jumble of facts. There is no doubt that scholars can be helped to accomplish this by skillful writers and that scholars who have this skill should be picked. Such synthesis will not cause much controversy because the architectonic of the experts will be accepted. But such synthesis must not be confused with other forms of synthesis, as seems possible from the expectation of using such writers as Miss Rachel Carson.5 (2) There is the synthesis between subjects – the relating of everything to everything else, so that people can see, for example, the interdependence of physical and political theory. (3) The third degree of synthesis is the bringing together of all the knowledge with which the Encyclopaedia deals under a principle of meaning which gives order a cogency to the work as a whole. The second type of synthesis would raise the most difficult questions of content and technique because it would be concerned with the new and the original. It could be done very badly, if done by persons who were not highly knowledgeable about that which they were interrelating. The intelligible meaning would have to realized in the very details of the interrelations, truly understood, or else it would remain a merely ineffectual general intention. The example already given, the interdependence of physiological knowledge with other subjects, gives some indication of what is intended. In the present state of knowledge it could perhaps only be done in certain areas, while other areas would have to be left open because nobody in the world has thought through

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the relation of them to other fields. For instance, I think there are men now ready to relate the discoveries of Freud to the truths of the older rational psychology. On the other hand what the new relativity and quantum physics means for the study of man, the cosmos, and God is not yet very deeply thought. It would take wise direction to know where the Encyclopaedia could proceed and where it should not. Above all it could only proceed at all, if those in charge started from a serious act of faith in the possible unity of knowledge. Synthesis (2) would also raise difficulties of technique in its presentation. When there had been found persons who understood the right relations between different areas, there would still be difficulty in presenting those interrelations in a clear and indeed a beautiful way. This would be a question not so much of style but of the whole form of the Encyclopaedia. It would be absurd to make these interrelations intelligible merely by a vast array of cross-indexing. This would frustrate the very purpose of the work by an aura of complicated pedantry. A work of true synthesis which was an unreasonable jumble would not meet the needs of the present. New, flexible, and imaginative techniques will have to be invented. It is evident that the problems of technique which arise from synthesis (2) can only be answered in terms of synthesis (3). M. Febvre makes clear in what he says of L’Encyclopédie française that it is the unity of principle binding together the whole which determines the very form in which the twenty volumes are laid out.6 The French work can without loss of efficiency discard an alphabetical ordering for a logical one, because it has a clear principle which determines the logic. This principle can be understood easily, and once understood allows anybody to know to which volume to turn when using the work. The French work makes clear that the form of an Encyclopaedia is not something given, but something determined by what it is trying to do, which is in turn determined by the synthesis under which the organisers of the Encyclopaedia place all knowledge. Thus in the case of the Britannica, its present alphabetical form is determined by its philosophy of scholarly objectivity which says that there should be no principle of comprehension. The alphabet is the right logic for such a view of knowledge. To say this is not to deny that in any age the alphabetical division has its advantages. They young and the unthoughtful and the lazy can use it more easily. This is particularly true of our young who live in a matter-

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of-fact civilization. What must be repeated however is that form and techniques of form are dependent upon purpose and that therefore in this stage of the discussions of phase II it is synthesis (3) which must engage primary attention. The principle of synthesis in L’Encyclopédie française is a highly sophisticated French humanism. It starts with man - but man as a civilized Frenchman conceives him. From this principle the content of the work flows as if by necessity in a comprehensible order. This principle is a subtle formulation because it gives a clear basis for ordering while at the same time it is sufficiently broad so that the work does not become a narrowly partisan document which could not stand for French civilization. Whether it is a sufficiently sturdy principle to achieve the ‘faire comprendre’ of M. Febvre is another matter. In reaching such a principle of meaning, firm yet not narrow, the French have the advantage that they have kept philosophy central to the education of their scholars in a way that is not true of the less contemplative tradition with us. There aren’t many French scholars one has to convince that there are logics for organizing knowledge and that they depend on principles of meaning. For the Britannica to find a sufficiently definite principle of synthesis which is yet not partisan or narrow would be a major problem, if Mr Hutchins’ proposal were to be made actual. The difficulty stems from the position of our society. How can there be a philosophy from which the Encyclopaedia flows when there is so little understanding of or agreement about principle in the Western world; when indeed the whole idea of philosophy is inimical to the dominant spirit of the society; when the élite scorn thought in the name of prestige and power, and the masses scorn it in the name of a bored hedonism; when knowledge itself is derided except as a means to control in society and over nature? It would be folly and the wildest presumption if in answering these difficulties I simply formulated at this point a principle around which the Encyclopaedia could be built. The anti-philosophic tendencies of our world are too deep and too numerous to be met by any ‘ad hoc’ formulation. Nevertheless this does not mean that nothing should be done or that nothing can be said about the principle. Here are four general comments about it. (1) In North America, the forms of the mass society have been taken

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further than anywhere else – almost to their limit. The result is that the absence of meaning is more evident to intelligent and sensitive Americans than to the members of any other society. They have looked the chaos of modernity in the face and are therefore willing to look beyond it. Among the minority who have seen the limits of the mass society there is a remarkable degree of common ground. Evidence of this is the widespread return in the United States to an understanding that there is more in the doctrine of natural law than the modern tradition has allowed, and the desire to bring such a doctrine into jurisprudence, political science, and theory. Some of this thought may be stumbling, but it expresses the desire to find a basis for public and personal morality. Other evidence is found in the search for a greater theoretical and practical sophistication among the natural scientists. The public concern with religion, however much it may look for solutions in unsatisfactory and archaic forms (e.g. Billy Graham), expresses an awareness of emptiness among people, the absence of something essential to existence. The claims of Europeans and Asians that North America is a decadent society which has nothing creative to offer now that its techniques have been learnt, is only wrong if the Americans move forward to showing how the technological world can be a place for human flourishing. Those North Americans who are thinking about this problem may be a small minority, but they exist with greater intensity than anywhere else. It is from the careful sounding of this minority that the right synthesis for a new Encyclopaedia would gradually be formulated. (2) The formulation must be sufficiently specific to give intelligibility; it must not be so specific as to be narrow and excluding. On the one hand it could not be based on as highly formulated a synthesis as Hegelianism or Thomism; on the other hand it could not be so vague as to be neutral about the unjust and the base, or to treat nihilism with the same respect as the moral law. The principle of synthesis would have to be found somewhere between the extremes of a supposedly objective neutrality, which says it is outside the purview of scholarship to say whether life is a joke, and the tightly ordered philosophical systems which would be inappropriate for the organization of a great public Encyclopaedia. It must be inclusive but not neutral. Professor McKeon’s remarks about issues and ideas point the way towards a proper formulation.7 (3) The formulation of this principle could not be done quickly or

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easily. Sir Geoffrey Crowther spoke of the absence of an editorial presence in the Britannica and indeed this appears in the current edition.8 No doubt the formulation of such a principle would depend greatly on the editor, as syntheses cannot be produced by committees. Nevertheless it must be emphasized that the formulation of such a principle would not be solved by appointing an editor in chief. It would have to be an editor who could listen long and carefully to the search for meaning that is going on in the thinking West and who would be ready to learn from his long listening. An editorial presence who did not so listen would be in danger at one extreme of imposing a too limited individual principle on the Encyclopaedia and at the other extreme of being simply a personal presence without principle. (4) If a synthesis were discovered which allowed the Encyclopaedia to follow a logical rather than an alphabetical order, the chief difficulty would be the fitting into that pattern of the historical material - the biographies etc. In a less important way this would apply to the geographical material. In discussing L’Encyclopédie française, the memorandum from the Institute for Philosophical Research emphasized that the French document concentrated on modernity and praised it for that tendency, because of the newness of our situation. The study of history can indeed become mere retreat into archaism, but it is nevertheless essential, for modernity will be misinterpreted without it. How could anybody understand the moral religious and philosophical question of today without knowledge of the antique world, and this would surely include such details as the career of Alexander the Great? The details of how historical matter could be rightfully included in a logical order would be in part one of techniques. But the synthesis out of which the logical ordering comes must not be allowed to dilute the Encyclopaedia of its historical riches. That is, it must be a logic which brings together the questions of modernity with the necessity of men seeing the historical deposit out of which they arise. The central practical question is who would use an Encyclopaedia of this new kind? This is obviously of immense importance to the Board, who have responsibility for a great investment from which many people derive their livelihood. I do not have the accurate data of ‘market research,’ which would certainly throw light on the subject. For instance, who buys the present Encyclopaedia, and more important, who uses it? My impressions from the Canadian community are the

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following: It is most often used by adults who want to find out some particular facts in some areas in which they are not specialists, and by youngsters who want some facts or a general introduction to some subject. The idea of its use has indeed changed since its 19th-century heyday for two reasons. (1) Competent scientists do not often use the Encyclopaedia to find out anything about their science, even some aspect of it in which they are not specialists but which they need for such purposes as general teaching. This is because (a) scientists are becoming more limited in their area of research, (b) there are encyclopaedias of great competence in particular fields, and (c) the progress of research is now so fast. I gather that school teachers use the Encyclopaedia more often. (2) The expectation of the 19th century was that scientists and scholars and educated laymen would keep abreast of the progress of knowledge in the particular sciences and that this indeed was the heart of being educated. To put it mildly, this does not happen, both because it would be impossible and because the technological society gives success to those who narrowly specialize. Thus the tendency is increasingly to use the Encyclopaedia as an almanac. Adults use it if they happen to want to know something of interest to their leisure or if their technical duties involve some fact outside their specialty. Adults who already have the interest in general education are liable to turn to earlier editions of the work. It seems likely that if the Britannica remains what it is now, it will still be the reference book with the greatest reputation and drive behind it, but it will inevitably become one among many good reference books. Mr Hutchins’ proposal would attempt to reverse the trend whereby the Encyclopaedia is used in this way. But will it be used in other ways? Before raising this question one general platitude may be made. Because of the lethargy of tradition and obeisance to accepted reputation, the Encyclopaedia will be bought in the next years by libraries and parents, whatever its form. But this does not affect the central question either way. Whether an Encyclopaedia of the new kind would be used and bought depends on the future of our society. It depends on whether our society is inevitably going to decline into one of ‘specialists without spirit and voluptuaries without heart.’9 If that decline takes place, the desire for knowledge will arise in men only when they have some technical problems to solve, and the Britannica will have to go much farther than it has already to make itself acceptable. On the

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other hand, as our mastery over nature is realized, for the first time in history large numbers of people may freely seek rational meaning in existence. In this process they may find the old systems of meaning inadequate, and the old institutions for mediating meaning decayed. Then if the Britannica did a brilliant job, it might have a wide and eager audience. The question is analogous to the earlier one of whether there are scholars who now transcend the majority level. There is already evidence of a widespread search for meaning, which could provide an audience for the Encyclopaedia; but whether it will be a dominant tradition in our society is impossible to say. It is a wager which the Board can decide to take or not. But it reminds me of Pascal’s wager. If our society is moving to a more rational way of life, then it is worth taking. If our society is falling apart, it is not. In the latter eventuality, the present Encyclopaedia would neither do much harm nor much good, except to provide certain people with incomes which they could probably earn by selling some other commodity. Mr Barzun’s report includes a very important point which unites his discussion of the possible Encyclopaedia, both at the level of its content and of its audience. He writes that understanding should not be ‘the explicit theme of the work,’ and he quotes Dr Johnson that no man can be required to furnish another with understanding. By this I take him to be saying that the Britannica cannot be the direct means whereby people can be helped in discovering the rational meaning of the world and their existence. This is because people only take to it the intelligence they already have. Admittedly the reading of any encyclopaedia is not likely to be a sufficient means to teach the virtue of wisdom. It still can, however, be of assistance to this end. If one believes that the world is a comprehensible order, and persons can partake in it, then surely an encyclopaedia which attempts to unify knowledge may be a very important instrument (particularly among the young) for developing their potential reason. Understanding is not simply an inevitable gift, it depends for its development on the institutions of society. The Britannica is one of those institutions. It therefore can be used to develop understanding. In an age when so many of our institutions, intended to promote understanding, choose to neglect or even frustrate it, it would be a courageous thing for the Encyclopaedia to choose otherwise. George P. Grant

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Notes 1 Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977), American educator, president and later chancellor of the University of Chicago (1929–51), and chairman of the Fund for the Republic, took over the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1958. See Grant’s early review of Hutchins’s The Higher Learning in America (1937) in Volume 1 of the Collected Works, 6–8. See note 1 there for Hutchins’s publications. Jacques Barzun (1907–), French-born American teacher, historian, and author, was probably consulted by Hutchins about the future of the Encyclopaedia because they shared the conviction that students should be given broad instruction in the humanities. Barzun helped develop a two-year course for the reading and discussion of great books at Columbia University. His works include Teacher in America (1945) and The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going (1969). 2 Mortimer Jerome Adler (1902–2001) taught philosophy at Columbia and Chicago. His work culminated in the publication by Britannica of the Great Books and Great Ideas series. He hired Grant through his Institute for Philosophical Research to work on The Great Ideas Today: 1961 and on The Idea of Freedom. Adler’s works include How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (1940) and The Dialectic of Morals: Towards the Foundations of Political Philosophy (1958). 3 Denis Diderot (1713–84), French philosopher of the Enlightenment, who was the chief editor of the Encyclopédie. 4 Sir John Carew Eccles (1903–97), Australian physiologist, received the 1963 Nobel Prize for physiology for his discovery of the chemical means by which impulses are communicated or repressed by nerve cells. His works include Reflex Activity of the Spinal Cord (1932) and The Physiology of Nerve Cells (1957). Wilder Graves Penfield (1891–1976), American-born Canadian brain surgeon and physiologist, founded and directed the world-famous Montreal Neurological Institute. Through his research, Penfield developed an interest in the connection between the brain and the human mind. His works include The Mystery of the Mind (1975) 5 Rachel Louise Carson (1907–64), American naturalist and science writer, taught biology at Maryland (1931–6) and published The Sea around Us (1951), establishing her reputation as a marine ecologist. Her more famous book on the problems of pesticides in the food chain, Silent Spring, appeared in 1962, two years after this writing of Grant’s. 6 Grant is referring to a memorandum from the Institute for Philosophical Research that may include an account of the Encylopédie française by Lucien

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Paul Victor Febvre (1878–1956), French historian, who co-founded the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale with Marc Bloch in 1929. Febvre’s works include Un destin: Martin Luther (1945) and L’Apparition du livre (1971). 7 Probably Richard Peter McKeon (1900–85), American philosopher who taught at Columbia and Chicago. He believed that a pertinent analysis could be made of any subject matter from the standpoint of the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. His works include Freedom and History: The Semantics of Philosophical Controversies and Ideological Conflicts (1952) and The Freedom to Read: Perspective and Program (1957). 8 Geoffrey Crowther, Baron (1907–72), English economist, was editor of the Economist (1938–56) and produced the Crowther Report on education (1959) during his period as chair of the British Central Advisory Council for Education. The report was the first such document to consider social and economic factors in its recommendations. Grant is probably referring to that report, although it is also possible that Hutchins consulted Crowther on the encyclopedia question. 9 See Max Weber’s passage on the ‘iron cage’ of modern rationality in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s 1958), 180–3.

The Year’s Developments in the Arts and Sciences: Philosophy and Religion

This survey was published in The Great Ideas Today: 1961 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica), 336–76; its footnotes refer to the relevant texts in The Great Books of the Western World. Grant worked for Mortimer Adler as a consultant to the Institute for Philosophical Research for a year after resigning his York University position. The job enabled him to stay in Canada rather than take a job he had been offered at Claremont College in California. Grant often said, speaking loosely, that he worked for Robert Hutchins, co-editor with Adler of The Great Ideas Today: 1961. According to Sheila Grant, Hutchins and Adler were very close, particularly in her husband’s mind. Hutchins had nearly offered him a job as editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica a year earlier. It was no doubt through that contact that Adler heard about Grant. There were no absolute guidelines as to what was to be written about in the survey, but the books to be reviewed were not chosen by Grant. In addition to this piece, he prepared six book reviews that were not published, perhaps because the essay incorporated much of what they said. He also worked as an editor on Adler’s manuscript for The Idea of Freedom, published in 1961, and did some promotional work, such as addressing study groups about the ‘Great Books.’

Philosophy In recent years, philosophical studies have sounded a hesitant note. The cause of this uncertainty is that so many of the leading philosophers spend their time pondering the subject matter and the proper method of their study. This is in marked contrast to the biologists and physicists who are not so much concerned with arguing what their science is, as in doing it. Because there is both great disagreement and

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uncertainty about the nature of the philosophic enterprise, hesitancy is inevitable. Indeed, nowhere is the intellectual incoherence of the Western world more manifest than in the diverse currents of contemporary philosophy. There has always been argument about the subject matter and method of philosophy. One of the great questions asked by philosophers has been ‘What is philosophy?’ In the first flowering of philosophy among the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle disagreed on the definition of knowledge and its relation to philosophy.a In a later flowering among the Germans at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the two leading geniuses, Kant and Hegel, were in disagreement about the limits of knowledge and how wisdom is to be attained.b Nevertheless, behind these disagreements, which appeared again and again in the history of thought, there lay a profound sense of agreement as to the essential nature of philosophy. There was no doubt that the philosopher was par excellence the man of knowledge, as distinguished from opinion, and that his ultimate goal was wisdom. Scepticism about these matters was always a minority report. The disagreement about philosophy in the modern scientific era is much more fundamental. There are many who deny that there is any such thing as philosophy, as it has been practised from the dawn of civilization. In its place these modern thinkers substitute a conception of philosophy as criticism and analysis which implies a radical break with the intellectual tradition of the past. To understand recent philosophy therefore, it is necessary to describe the traditional conception of philosophy and to compare it with the conceptions which are now substituted for it. From its origins in the ancient world and through most of the history of Europe, philosophy was believed to be the contemplation of reality as a whole. By means of thought, men gained knowledge of the fundamental principles by which the universe and their own existence

a To contrast Plato and Aristotle in their views of philosophy, see The Republic, Vol. 7, pp. 356b–401d, and Metaphysics, Vol. 8, pp. 499a–513d. b To contrast Kant and Hegel, see, for example, The Critique of Pure Reason, Vol. 42, pp. 14a–22a, c, and The Philosophy of Right, Vol. 46, pp. 9a–20d.

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in particular could be understood.c Philosophy was thus the perfecting of man’s capacity to know, because it provided knowledge of the most universal kind. Because it led to the understanding of the whole, it could direct human conduct to good as against evil ends. Philosophy was the heart of education. (The literal meaning of the word is ‘the love of wisdom,’ and because all men should love to be wise, all should pursue philosophy as much as their talents and circumstances permit.d) Philosophy must be carefully distinguished from science and religion. (The distinction between philosophy and science was made particularly sharp in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our era by the work of such men as Descartes, Hume, and Kant.) The function of the scientist is to inquire into and describe accurately particular aspects of reality – the physical, the living, or the human. Science provides us with knowledge of how events happen in the world. It thus answers different questions from those answered by philosophy, which seeks to comprehend the whole. Religious knowledge, on the other hand, is concerned with answers reached through the help of faith. In the Western world, the religion is that of the Bible – in its majority form, Christian; in its minority form, Jewish. Faith is the trust of the believer that God has answered certain questions by revelation – questions which men cannot answer through their own unaided reason. Not all the great philosophers, of course, have believed that such answers are given in religion.e There are those, such as Spinoza, who believe that philosophy can answer all questions and that there is no need for revelation.f Hegel affirmed that philosophy could take up into

c See Plato, The Republic, Vol. 7, pp. 370d-373c, 397a–398b; Aristotle, Metaphysics, Vol. 8, pp. 522a–525a; Epictetus, Discourses, Vol. 12, pp. 150a–151b; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol. 19, pp. 3b–4a; Hobbes, Leviathan, Vol. 23, pp. 60a–b, 72 a–d; Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Vol. 30, pp. 40a–c, 42a–46a; Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 35, pp. 451a–455b; Kant, Critique of Judgement, Vol. 42, pp. 463a– 465c; and Hegel, Philosophy of History, Vol. 46, pp. 184d-185c. d The part of love in the practice of philosophy has never been better described than by Plato in his two dialogues Phaedrus and Symposium. See Vol. 7, pp. 115a–141 a,c, and pp. 149a–173c. e For a brilliant attack on supernatural religion as quite outside the bounds of reason, see Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 35, pp. 488d-509d. f See Ethics, Vol. 31, pp. 355a–372d.

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itself all the truth given in more primitive form in religion.g On the other hand, many philosophers are either Christians or Jews, and believe that revelation completes the pursuit of philosophy. The traditional account of what it is to philosophize is now a minority report in the most influential intellectual circles of the Englishspeaking world. Our scientific and pragmatic civilization has been both the result and the cause of a new view of philosophy. In this view, philosophy should not try to understand the true way of life for man but should try to criticize the intellectual activities of civilization. Philosophy is not concerned with great speculative systems which give us knowledge of reality as a whole, but with analyzing the logic which men employ in their various activities. To seek the cause of this new view would involve understanding the modern civilization of progress. For what men consider philosophy to be is a mirror of themselves and of their aspirations. This account of philosophy as criticism sees the relation of the subject to science and religion in a new way. The older philosophy is considered to have arisen in essentially religious societies and therefore to have confused its function with religion. Philosophy is now believed to be freed from its religious origins and therefore freed from giving authoritative answers to questions about ‘the meaning of life.’ Its essential purpose is criticism.h It is recognized that, historically, philosophy was the mother of the sciences. As a good mother, however, it has given its children independence and surrendered many of its old functions. Thus the scope of philosophy has gradually contracted. Accurate descriptions of reality are now provided by the sciences with their appeal to experiment. The claims of philosophy to provide ontological knowledge beyond that provided by the sciences is a sham. Philosophy is no super-science, but a critical method concerned primarily with logic. The remarkable developments in mathematics and the sciences in the last hundred years have given the philosophers an enormous task. Symbolic logic has provided new means of analysis. Modern analytic philosophy has indeed been chiefly concerned with the science of logic and the logic of science. g See Philosophy of History, Vol. 46, pp. 360c–369a, c. h Kant was the first philosopher to maintain that the essential task of philosophy is criticism. See Critique of Pure Reason, Vol. 42, pp. 5a–13d.

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One result of the analytical account of philosophy has been to make the subject increasingly professional, which adds to its difficulty and limits its importance. As philosophers are no longer concerned with authoritative answers to the great questions, their importance in society is naturally decreased. This has meant that philosophy plays an increasingly narrow role in the educational system. Unless to be wise is simply to be critical, the new philosophy does not claim to make us wise. Another result of this professionalizing (a result evident in the writing of 1960) is that much philosophical literature is highly technical and requires great technical competence on the reader’s part. In the contemporary Anglo-American world, two forms of this new philosophy are particularly influential – the first more especially in the United States, the second in England. These two schools share certain common origins and interests, but must be distinguished as to what they consider to be the practice of philosophy. The first is particularly concerned with the logic of mathematics and the sciences. Philosophy is thus not essentially different from the sciences, but broader in framework because interested in a logical language which is comprehensive. Some logicians are interested in this pursuit for pragmatic reasons: it helps the scientist to better understand what he is doing and to communicate with his colleagues. The interest of other logicians is a pure interest in simplicity for its own sake. But whether the interest is pragmatic or intellectual, the philosopher’s function is essentially the logic of the sciences. The chief philosopher who has made this account influential in the United States is Rudolf Carnap [1891–1970], who was a famous Austrian logician before coming to this country. Its most distinguished current exponent is Professor W.V. Quine [1908–2002] of Harvard, who in 1960 published Word and Object. Other notable exponents are Hans Reichenbach [1891– 1953], whose posthumous essays, Modern Philosophy of Science, were published in 1959, and Professor Ernest Nagel [1901–85] of Columbia, who brought out The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. To be distinguished from this form of analytical philosophy is the school of ‘linguistic analysis’ which is particularly influential in England. According to its practitioners, to philosophize is to study the use we actually make of our linguistic instruments in the course of our business one with another and with the world. This frees us from the

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conceptual confusions and illusions which become imbedded in unanalysed language. The ‘puzzles’ of traditional metaphysics (e.g. free will and determinism) will melt away when they are seen to have been caused by linguistic confusions. At its most extreme this school has believed that philosophy is simply prolegomena to a future science of language. Unlike the logicians of science, the analytic school does not believe there is any ideal language but only common-sense language. The meaning of language is to be found in its use – whether for scientific, moral, artistic, or religious purposes. Each statement of ordinary language has its own unique logic, so that no ideal or comprehensive logic is possible. The chief influence in forming this school was the work of another Austrian, Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889–1951]. The centre of its influence has been in the University of Oxford. Its most notable exponent, Professor J.L. Austin [born 1911], died in 1959. It is now possible to see very clearly what the linguistic analysts mean by philosophy. The Concise Encyclopaedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers, edited by J.O. Urmson [1915– ], covers the whole range of philosophy from Abelard to Zeno within the analytic assumptions. Since the end of World War II the dominance of these two forms of analytical philosophy has been almost complete in the English-speaking universities. The older tradition of metaphysics has been carried on, but more and more as a minority report. For instance, in 1959 Professor Paul Weiss [1901–2002] of Yale brought out his monumental study in modern metaphysics, Modes of Being. But such a work can only come from one who does not accept the general climate of the day. In Catholic circles (where authority and tradition are strong) there is still institutional support for traditional philosophy. The support of an older tradition has more and more fallen on Catholic shoulders, and this has often led to the identification of metaphysics with the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas. In the past year a remarkable example of Catholic metaphysics has appeared in Professor Étienne Gilson’s [1884–1975] The Elements of Christian Philosophy. Analytical philosophy is now the tradition. Criticism, which started several centuries ago as a revolt against metaphysics, is now itself the establishment. Its practitioners have been in control of the teaching of philosophy for two decades at the major intellectual centres, so that the coming generation is taught to conceive the subject in this way and

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sometimes to be hardly aware of any other conception. In the 1940s and 1950s much positive work in logical and linguistic analysis was carried on within this established and confident framework. What Is Philosophy? What characterizes philosophical literature during the past year is a return to the question ‘What is philosophy?’ A number of books have been published which turn away from the monolithic certainty of the analytic tradition and question what the philosophic enterprise is all about. Men only stop what they are doing, and ponder what it is they are doing, if they are not entirely satisfied. One indication of this questioning is a greater sympathy for the philosophic work of the past. Indeed, the least endearing aspect of analytical philosophy has been its readiness to speak of past philosophy as if it had been mostly a catalogue of errors. This arrogance has faded, and analytical philosophers even write of the past as if they have something to learn from it. Professor W.V. Quine’s Word and Object takes us right into the heart of analytical philosophy as envisaged by its subtlest American exponent. Quine is concerned with inquiring into the mechanism of language, but for the purposes of that inquiry he clearly describes what he considers the nature of philosophy to be. More than in any of his earlier books (such as From a Logical Point of View) the method and scope of analytical philosophy are made plain. Therefore, it is a splendid introduction for anyone who wishes to understand what modern philosophers are doing. Quine understands philosophy to be the effort to become clear and self-conscious about all communication, all language, technical and otherwise. He describes science as ‘self-conscious common sense.’ Thus the new vocabulary and formulae found therein are seen as a natural evolution of ordinary language. The scientist’s attempt to communicate about the world with the maximum of clarity and economy is the same for Quine as the purpose and method of philosophy. The same kind of things are being done, and in the same way. The one essential difference is that philosophy has a broader framework of concern. It deals not only with particular subjects, but also with whatever we consider useful to admit into our discourse on all subjects. Quine then sees philosophy as ‘an effort to get things clear,’ ‘things’

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being mainly our own evolving concept of the world in general, including ourselves and our own knowledge. But in saying this, it must be made clear that he is thoroughly positivist in his assumptions about knowledge and thoroughly behaviourist in his assumptions about human conduct. Scientific method is the way to truth. This is why the study of language is seen as basic. We can watch how people use language in the market place. Therefore, our conclusions from it are ascertainable by all. Only in terms of language can we contemplate our own acts of knowing. Any attempt to stand outside our own cognitions (as if firmer ground existed somehow outside the empirically testable, the behaviourally scrutable) is to reduce philosophy to a mere ‘whistling in the dark.’ There is no firmer ground outside our world of experience, so no such ‘cosmic exile’ is possible. The failure to understand this was what vitiated traditional metaphysics. The concentration on understanding this world, the belief that this world is completely explainable in its own terms, is an essential aspect of modern philosophy. Quine is indubitably one of such ‘worldly’ philosophers. Philosophy for Quine is thus essentially a semantical undertaking. What he thinks is achieved through such analysis may be elucidated by comparing him with the school of linguistic analysis. In their negative aims they are similar. Both Quine and linguistic analysts believe that most metaphysical problems will be dissolved by showing them to be unreal and to have arisen because of faulty use of language.i But the positive results they hope to achieve through their semantical work are quite different. A basic slogan of the linguistic analysts is that every statement has its own logic. Therefore their analysis reveals hidden meanings and subtleties in all statements, rather than one common logic. Quine’s aim is quite different. Above all it is to simplify – to clear the ontological slums – to eliminate subtleties rather than to discover them. He rejects the slogan that every statement has its own logic and believes that the purpose of his technique is to reduce all language to certain basic logical constructions. This will enable people to reach a common ground from which they will be able to communicate successi Distress at the failings of language was voiced by Hobbes in Leviathan, Vol. 23, pp. 54c–61a. See also Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 35, pp. 285a– 301c; and Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 35, pp. 470d-471c.

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fully in a way previously impossible. Above all it will enable them to clarify and simplify their total world picture. Quine recognizes that these basic logical constructions will never constitute a complete, but only a partial system. But it will provide a unified logic which will apply to discourse on all subjects – not separate logics for each special subject, let along each separate statement. In this aim for ‘a partial notation for discourse on all subjects,’ Quine is clearly differentiated from the analytical philosophers of the Wittgensteinian school. Quine’s unwavering allegiance to the ideal of simplicity and economy is hard to reconcile with the pragmatic reference of his thought at other points. Although there has always been in science the motive to explain things as simply as possible and for the sake of simplicity itself, this has been more and more subordinated to the power motive which wants to manipulate.j Quine, for all his positivist assumptions, is so far from any interest in the power motive in science that he seems hardly aware of its existence. There is an almost Platonic ring in his constant appeals to the idea of simplicity as the very standard of truth, as the good towards which the intellect is drawn. He tries to describe this central value of his thought in pragmatic enough terms, but these elucidations deepen our conception rather than clarify it. He speaks of the unknown neurological mechanism of our drive for simplicity and the overwhelming survival value it must have: simplicity engenders good working conditions for the creative imagination; it tends to enhance the scope of a scientific theory; above all, ‘simplicity is the best evidence of truth we can ask.’ This mixture of Platonic and Darwinian language does not make what he means by it any clearer. Its status within his system remains ambiguous. In another way, Quine also departs from the positivist tradition. His conception of philosophy makes a strange kind of room for ontology – for philosophy as the study of reality. According to Quine, we construct logic and produce theories, and in typical fashion he says that usefulness is the standard by which we judge the value of these constructions and theories. But at this point he makes a key concession to the metaphysical account of philosophy because he asserts that usefulness is not a chance attribute but grounded in the nature of things. j See Bacon, Novum Organum, Vol. 30, pp. 107a–b, 120 b–c.

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‘Such is the nature of reality,’ he writes, ‘that one physical theory will get us around better than another.’ Philosophy is therefore concerned with the nature of things in the same way that science is. Considering how deep the tendency has been to say that science is concerned only with what is and philosophy only with criticism, his is a surprising concession and once more makes ontology central to the philosophic enterprise. Despite such a concession, however, Quine remains basically in the analytical school because he is entirely unconcerned with another aim of traditional philosophy, that of directing human conduct. Quine’s work is no more concerned with moral philosophy than is that of any scientist. When he writes that one physical theory will get us around better than another, he means that one theory will perform its task more efficiently than another. Perhaps he just assumes that all civilized and sensible men know what they ought to be doing and need no instruction, beyond the technical question of means. Indeed most Anglo-American analytical philosophers accept the assumption that questions of right and wrong are not to be answered philosophically. For Quine, philosophy remains a specialized instrument for clarifying and communicating our knowledge of our world and of ourselves. The most important book of 1960 which ponders the question ‘What is philosophy?’ would seem to me to be Professor Gustav Bergmann’s [1906–87] Meaning and Existence. Bergmann, a professor at the State University of Iowa, came to this country from Austria in 1938. He had studied mathematics there and had been a member of the Vienna Circle – an internationally famous group of analytical philosophers of whom Rudolf Carnap is the most notable. The tenets of logical positivism were formulated by this group. In 1954, Bergmann published The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism. This was a paradoxical title: the very basis of logical positivism is the assertion that metaphysical statements are meaningless because they claim to be about reality and yet cannot be verified in experience. Bergmann argued that behind logical positivism there lies a set of presuppositions which in fact constitutes a metaphysics. In Meaning and Existence, Bergmann discusses contemporary analytic philosophy in detail. The book is important because it does not try to reconcile the present crisis as to the nature of philosophy by means of easy or partisan slogans. At a time when there is such wide division

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as to the nature of philosophy, those who practise it have the tendency to retreat into their respective ghettos and content themselves with never looking at anything but their own method and system. Thus traditional Thomistic metaphysicians expound what they believe without seeming to recognize the modern analytical attack. Analytical philosophers, on the other hand, seem so content with their new methods that they are hardly aware of those who disagree with them. If they speak at all about non-scientific philosophers, it is to misrepresent the past by catchwords. Bergmann’s superiority to this ghetto mentality is that he neither thinks that we can pretend that analytical philosophy does not exist, nor that the great metaphysicians of the past were dealing with meaningless problems. For this reason I consider his book the most interesting and significant philosophic work of 1960. It is indeed difficult reading; but for those who want to know where philosophy stands in the modern world, it will be rewarding. What does Bergmann think philosophy is? First, he recognizes that it is dialectical. That is, a critical examination of the positions a philosopher rejects is a necessary beginning to his arguments for the one he adopts.k His book is therefore much taken up with his reasons for rejecting the account of philosophy given by the linguistic analysts and by the logicians of science such as Quine. One of the essays in Meaning and Existence, ‘The Revolt against Logical Atomism,’ analyses the assumptions and the historical causes of linguistic analysis, and lays bare why Bergmann considers it an inadequate account of the philosophic enterprise. Linguistic analysts are communication theorists, not philosophers. They are interested in explaining how we manage to learn ordinary language and, having learned it, to communicate with each other by means of it. Such an account turns philosophy into the psychology of language practised by amateurs. Bergmann also argues against the logicians of science. They fundamentally believe or hope that all philosophical questions belong to the philosophy of science. According to Bergmann, none of the major k The idea of philosophy as dialectical in this sense is central to the writings of many of the great philosophers. Plato starts many of his dialogues by stating the inadequate positions of others, and proceeding from them to his own. Several of Aristotle’s treatises begin with an examination and criticism of previous thought. Aquinas always examines opinions opposed to his own in the objections that are found in each article of the Summa Theologica.

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philosophical questions do. The philosophy of science has the limited task of analysing new problems which the work of science presents to it – e.g., how should the theory of relativity be interpreted. But this leaves untouched the analysis of such fundamental notions as change and identity, meaning, and existence, which have remained with philosophy since its origin. Through Bergmann’s rejection of other accounts, he moves to his own. The chief task of philosophy is ontology – the study of what exists. It is but platitudinous to say that philosophy is concerned with language. Yet it does not try to understand language, but rather the world by means of language. In its task, it employs ideal languages. Bergmann clearly distinguishes between ordinary and ideal languages: ‘When is a word used philosophically? Some philosophers maintained that bodies do not exist. Either they were raving mad or they used “exist” in the peculiar way I call philosophical.’ Ordinary language is not unimportant. Scientific, moral, and other forms of discourse are carried on by means of it. But the analysis of such ordinary language is always pre-philosophical. The function of the philosopher is to improve ordinary language so that it becomes an ideal language. In these essays, Bergmann does not discuss the relation of philosophy to human conduct. In this he follows the analytical tradition which has always showed a lack of interest in moral and social questions. Nevertheless, as Bergmann is so explicit about the relation of common sense to science and of both to philosophy, it would be interesting if he were also explicit about the relation of philosophy to morals, religion, art, and politics. This question is related to the subtle one of progress in philosophy. Can philosophical problems be better explained in 1961 than by Aristotle? Certainly philosophy used to be much concerned with its application to the practical realm. Is the abdication of this concern a sign of progress? A less profound book than Bergmann’s but one that points in the same directions is P.F. Strawson’s [1919– ] Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Here is a leading British analytical philosopher who does not only philosophize about language but also uses it to explain the world. Like Bergmann, Strawson believes that the study of ontology is the heart of the philosophical enterprise, rather than communication theory. Unlike Bergmann, he believes that he can reach ontological conclusions by the analysis of ordinary language rather

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than by the method of ideal languages. In terms of Strawson’s method it is difficult to know when his statements are based on the authority of common sense and when their verification lies elsewhere. Nevertheless, what is significant about this book is that it should be written at all. Ontology has been so long excluded from philosophy that this book is another sign of the reassessment of the nature of philosophy at the present time. An outright and raucous attack on linguistic analysis is Mr Ernest Gellner’s [1925–95] Words and Things. This is published with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, who gives his high logical authority unqualifiedly to the indictment. So complete an attack is this that the English linguistic analysts even refused to review it in their leading journal, Mind. Linguistic analysis had claimed to be one of the great revolutions in the history of thought. By its analysis of ordinary language, the total dissolution of ancient problems and the final extinction of metaphysics would at last take place. It claimed to be the apotheosis of the modern humanist vision which would finally be realized by the use of that common sense which the upper-class English think they so uniquely possess. Gellner’s argument is that this claim to be a revolution in philosophy is patent nonsense. On the contrary, linguistic analysis, far from being a revolution, is the very death of thought. It turns philosophy from its basic task of discussing fundamental and genuine conceptual alternatives into the impressionistic study of words as they are used in English society. Philosophy is misdirected into an unimportant lexicography. In a long analysis of the work of Wittgenstein, Gellner maintains that the whole movement is based on assumptions about the relation of language to truth which are either mistaken or half-truths. The two most important of these are: (1) the belief that one can argue from the actual use of common-sense language to the answer to philosophical problems; (2) from the variety of uses to which we can put concepts, it is concluded that general assertions about the use of words are impossible. In terms of these basic mistakes, Gellner examines the doctrines that linguistic analysts hold about knowledge, the world, and the practice of philosophy. He ends his book with an anthropological and sociological account of why this trivializing of thought should have become the dominant philosophic tradition of his country. He main-

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tains that it is the last ditch of a tired and secularized ruling élite which wants to be sceptical and anti-metaphysical and yet at the same time to avoid any of the dangerous social results which are generally consequent on scepticism. Linguistic philosophy has exerted a powerful influence in the universities of America. If it is true that the state of philosophy is a very important mark of the health of any civilization, and if linguistic analysis is as empty and futile as Gellner makes out, then its influence in our culture is a sad sign, and we should be aware of it. This perhaps justifies Gellner’s violence of attack. Apart from this, the book has one advantage rare in philosophical writing. It is very witty. One cannot but be glad that there are still people in the mass society who can be funny about the follies of men – particularly pretentious academics. Yet another book about the proper scope and method of philosophy is Philosophical Systems by Professor E.W. Hall [1901–60] of North Carolina. Hall believes that the traditional questions of philosophy were real questions to be answered neither empirically nor logically. They involved real theoretical dispute. Hall is worried by the difficulty that philosophers have in coming to grips with each other’s differing solutions. He faces this with the idea of ‘categorical commitment’ – the commitment by a philosopher to categories which are basic to his system. In terms of this he raises the question whether a philosophical system would be possible without categorical commitment and whether there are neutral categories available to all systems. From this he moves to his own position which rests basically on the analysis of ordinary language. This is a clever book about the dilemma of eternal philosophic dispute in the midst of a world where science solves its problems. Its virtue is lessened, however, by the fact that the discussion of philosophical systems is confined almost entirely to modern thought, and by the fact that it is addressed to the professional rather than to the layman. Of the books which approach philosophy in the metaphysical manner and do not accept the analytical account of the subject, the one coming from the most famous pen in 1960 is Professor E. Gilson’s The Elements of Christian Philosophy. Here is an account of metaphysics within the Roman Catholic tradition. The historical writing of Professor Gilson about the middle ages, and particularly his explication of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, has recently been the dominant

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influence in Catholic intellectual life in America. There are disagreements among Catholic scholars as to what constitutes true Thomistic doctrine, and many disagree with certain aspects of Gilson’s interpretation. But even those who disagree with him recognize that he is the greatest of modern Thomistic interpreters and that therefore all accounts of the matter must at least start from his work. Therefore, in this comprehensive recapitulation of his thought we are as close as we can be to the pure milk of Catholic metaphysics. We can see clearly what the practice of philosophy means within the Catholic tradition. Gilson takes the term ‘Christian Philosophy’ not from Aquinas but from the Encyclical Letter ‘Aeterni Patris’ of Pope Leo XIII in 1878–79, in which the Pope recommended the study of Aquinas to all Catholic institutions. Christian philosophy is that way of philosophizing in which the Christian faith and the human intellect join forces in a common investigation of philosophical truth. In the Encyclical, Aquinas is singled out as the supreme practitioner of that art, and Gilson accepts him as such. Therefore the study of the riches of Aquinas is essential for the philosopher who would practise his art within the faith. To Aquinas there can be no conflict between the purposes of theological and philosophical inquiry, because their ultimate object is the same – the knowledge of God.l As Gilson writes: ‘At any rate the Greek philosophers – to consider the only philosophers whom Thomas Aquinas knew – were of the opinion that to know God was the supreme aim of all true lovers of wisdom.’ Why is there then a difference between philosophy based on human reason and sacred doctrine based on faith? Man cannot direct his thoughts and actions to an end unless he first has knowledge of that end. Yet the fact is that man has been directed by God to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason. Therefore, it was necessary for the salvation of man that those truths which are beyond the reach of his reason should be known by divine revelation. And revelation teaches us not only those truths which exceed our unaided reason, but also teaches all persons those truths which only some could reach by reason alone. If God left men to themselves, how many would come to knowledge? Aquinas points out that without revelation, ‘... the truth about God such as reason could disl See Summa Theologica, Vol. 19, pp. 3b–4a.

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cover would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors.’m The particular merit of Gilson’s book is that it takes into account the misinterpretations that have been placed on the division between the roles of philosophy and sacred doctrine by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. It shows why these alternatives are misinterpretations of the true Thomistic teaching. In terms of this definition of Christian philosophy, Gilson proceeds to expound the central notions of Thomistic metaphysics. Looked at historically, the achievement of Aquinas was to interpret Aristotle in a way compatible with Christianity and then to interpret all Christian thought before his own in the light of that compatibility. But it must be remembered that, since Aquinas, the presuppositions of Aristotle about human and non-human nature have been criticized root and branch. Indeed modern civilization is based on assumptions which were chiefly defined in reaction to the Aristotelian assumptions in the field of science and politics. Therefore, since Aquinas takes Aristotle to be ‘the’ philosopher, the Christian who accepts Aquinas is judging the central principles of modern civilization to be false or at least radically inadequate. Perhaps this is the right course for Christianity. Perhaps it is only possible to make metaphysical statements within broadly Aristotelian principles and perhaps such metaphysical statements are necessary for Christianity. Yet if this be so, Christianity is committed either to a radical reconstruction of modern civilization or to remaining a critical minority in its midst. What is remarkable in Gilson’s book is that he does not discuss these questions, but rests in the assumption that Christian philosophy is fundamentally committed to the philosophy of the Greeks and of Aristotle in particular. This philosophical commitment has direct bearing on a practical matter – the reunion of the churches. One of the facts of the last two years is a remarkable movement in the Catholic church to overcome the divisions between itself and its separated brethren in the Protestant and Orthodox worlds. Yet the life of Protestantism since its origins has been closely identified with the criticism of the Aristotelian view of the world. It is extraordi-

m Ibid., p. 3d.

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narily difficult for a Protestant to identify Christianity with Aristotelian ways of thought. Professor Gilson’s book therefore raises important non-philosophic issues for Roman Catholics and other Christians. But above all, its interest is philosophical. Here is metaphysics in the grand traditional manner which draws on the ancient wisdom that mankind inherits from the Greeks and the Jews. What is particularly fine about it is that the metaphysical answers are expounded with lucidity and yet never over-simplified. This is rare in the modern world where there is a wide division between popular and scholarly writing. Popular writing tends to be clear but inaccurate; scholarly writing is accurate but pompously parades its learning. Gilson is too wise a man to think that he has to parade his great learning. Moral and Political Philosophy The liberating effects that analytical philosophy has had in the fields of logic and science are matched by the inhibiting effects it has had in morals and politics. To the analysts, the function of philosophy is criticism. It is therefore not the task of philosophy to think out the principles of right action, but rather to analyse the way we use language in our day-to-day moral and political actions. Analysts have applied much ridicule to the ‘moralizing’ and ‘sermonizing’ tendencies of traditional philosophy and its claim to be able to speak about a ‘good way of life.’ Indeed most analysts were by conviction humanists and relativists, and therefore believed that there were no objective standards of right and wrong. Such notions were rather matters of personal taste. It is difficult to say which was primary in the analytic tradition: its acceptance of a relativist morality or its methodological assumption that philosophy could say nothing substantive about moral questions.n The belief and the methodology fitted together as one. Both fit the climate of our pluralist democracies in which it is considered intolerant to assert that one standard of conduct is better than another. Whether or not these assumptions about morality and philosophy n In morals, as in many other matters, analytic philosophers have been greatly influenced by Hume. For Hume’s moral relativism, see An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and also Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 35, p. 509c–d.

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are true, their dominance among philosophers inevitably means that there is little writing about morals and politics. Insofar as Englishspeaking philosophers have been concerned with these matters, they have been concerned with criticizing ancient standards which claimed universality and with showing that this claim has no rational foundation. The study of human action has been turned over to the social scientists who generally study human conduct within positivist assumptions, which cut it off from questions of value. Both scientists and philosophers have then been largely concerned with conduct as objective observers, criticizing it from the outside. One increasingly important result of philosophy’s losing interest in moral and political theory is that the discussion of these matters is carried on without the participation of trained philosophers. This is particularly noticeable in the academic world. It is the teachers of law, of history, and of literature who bring out books about the broad principles of right action. The learned lawyers in the United States more and more devote their efforts to defining a doctrine of natural law in terms of which they can judge the justice or injustice of particular legislation. It may indeed be considered a matter of rejoicing that the problems of law or literature lead people back to thought about morality; but it is surely a matter of regret that this movement has had so little support from trained philosophers. Political Philosophy It is not surprising that one of the interesting books in political philosophy should be written in the form of history: Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase, by Professor J.L. Talmon [1916–80]. This book is one of several volumes in which Talmon traces what he calls ‘totalitarian democracy’ and the utopian venture of modern political theory which attempts to bring in the millennium on earth. Talmon studies the development of this belief from its background in Rousseauo and the French revolution to its contemporary exemplification in Marxist-Leninism. In this volume he covers the period of the early nineteenth century up to the revolutions of 1848. He shows how the heritage of liberal utopianism was gradually taken over by communism. o See The Social Contract, Vol. 38, pp. 395a–406d.

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Talmon’s study is explicitly motivated by his belief that political messianism as it gains power turns ‘from a vision of release into a snare and a yoke.’ He has lived in the twentieth century and his conservativism leads him to distrust the spirit of absolute political reform which will do anything to human beings in its attempt to change the world. The fear of world communism is in every word that he writes. What is disappointing in this book, however, is that Talmon has not the philosophical equipment to deal with the spirit of worldly messianism. He is content to say that it should be turned over to the psychologists who could understand it as a manifestation of mental illness. But is this good enough? Messianism is, after all, central to the political philosophy of the West, coming into the tradition through the Judeo-Christian religion. It may indeed have been corrupted into a worldly tyranny by the Marxists. But surely such a central political idea needs to be discussed philosophically. As great a philosopher as Kant could say that one of the central questions of philosophy is ‘What may I hope?’p This is of course a pressing question of theory now that the political messianism which originated in Europe is sweeping through Asia and Africa under the banner of communism. Talmon writes as an historian; most of the philosophers of the English-speaking world do not touch such a large problems as political messianism. Indeed the title of a book by Mr Daniel Bell [1919– ] in 1960 characterizes the state of English-speaking political theory: The End of Ideology – On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Bell is more interested in the exhaustion of political ideas in the practical world than in basic political theory. There is, however, perhaps some connection between the two. The analysts have taken the view that the purpose of philosophy is to criticize and therefore to free the educated from illusions. This is certainly a useful negative purpose, but does it mean that such criticism must free our most educated minds from considering anything as a standard to live by? If philosophy is simply critical, must the educated live by a sceptical stoicism and believe that the foundations of a free society rest on such a sceptical stoicism? The success and limitation of analytical method in political and legal matters can be seen in a large volume from England, Causation in the Law, by H.L.A. Hart [1907–92] and A.M. Honoré [ 1921– ]. Hart is p Critique of Pure Reason, Vol. 42, p. 236b.

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Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, and one of the leading linguistic philosophers. Though the last part of the work is concerned with a detailed study of the law, the first chapters are of general philosophic interest. The authors are concerned with the concept of causation as it is applied in understanding the particular happenings of ordinary life. The book is particularly fascinating because it is such a good example of what political or legal philosophy becomes within the analytical tradition. In this tradition philosophy is a technique to sharpen the instruments which lawyers or politicians use. Law is firmly defined as positive law – what is on the statute books or in the judicial decisions of any particular society. The philosopher by his theoretical analyses of language tries to help the lawyer make the law run smoothly. He is not concerned with stating what the law is for or what are the standards by which we judge that a law is just. Such ultimate problems about the morality of law or politics are beyond the philosopher’s competence. He is the technician of theory. Under this definition of philosophy, its practitioners might well lend their talents to helping those engaged in the business of prostitution. Prostitutes and pimps could presumably carry out their activities more effectively if their linguistic usage was clarified for them by an able theoretician. Political philosophy as technique can serve equally well the smooth operation of a tyrannical or a free society. Because political philosophy has become a technique, it is not surprising that it is not a flourishing art in our civilization. Political thinking which deals directly with the proper ends of society is found in Professor Paul Weiss’s Our Public Life. Weiss discusses such things as society, state, culture, and civilization. He looks at them in the most general and abstract way – as aspects of the world he has understood as a metaphysician and in which he lives as a man. The sceptic may ask how such an Olympian view of our public life can help us to get on with running our affairs. Weiss’s answer would be that the task of political philosophy is not to be the Emily Post of the practising politician (how shall we deal with Southeast Asia or medical insurance?). It is rather to help us to understand the meaning of our public life within the perspective of all time and all existence. Only in terms of such meaning can we escape the politics of ‘ad hoc’ decision and quick ideological slogan. This intelligent book is not ‘an answer to commu-

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nism’ in the sense that catchwords can be taken from it to indoctrinate our children in high school. But it gives a subtle definition of the ends of public life for a civilized and free society. Weiss’s understanding of these ends constitutes for him an answer to the more limited ends of alternative theories such as Marxism. Philosophers in the Catholic tradition also deal with political theory in a substantive manner. A representative example of Catholic political theory is Father J. Courtney Murray’s [1904–67] We Hold These Truths. Murray argues that the American system of democratic and republican government finds its basic moral roots in the doctrine of natural law. There are immutable standards of personal and public morality which are to be derived from the proper understanding of man’s essential nature. He argues that the basic theoretical justification of natural law is to be found in the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas.q He asserts that such a doctrine of natural law provides the necessary moral cohesion for a politically and religiously pluralist democracy. One may wonder, of course, what such a product of the Enlightenment as Jefferson would think of connecting his work with that of Thomas Aquinas. ‘Nature’ had come to mean something very different in the eighteenth century, when the American Constitution was written, from what it had meant in the essentially Aristotelian formulation of St Thomas.r Nevertheless, this is a book which comes to grips with a central moral issue in our contemporary democracy. What are the grounds of moral cohesion in a society dedicated to the right of free men to disagree religiously and politically? Murray sees that traditional Catholic political theory must be reshaped for the conditions of American liberal democracy. Moral Philosophy Moral philosophy has traditionally been made up of two parts: first, the attempt to understand particular subjects of pressing moral concern in terms of first principles, and second, the more theoretical discussion of the presuppositions of morality. There is a contemporary paucity of moral philosophy dealing with special questions. q See Summa Theologica, Vol. 20, pp. 220d-226b. r See, for instance, the un-Aristotelian fashion in which Locke, one of the main influences on the writers of the United States Constitution, interpreted the nature or essence of a thing in Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 35, pp. 268b–283a.

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The analytical philosophers make a distinction between ethics and morals. Morals deals with the whole sphere of actions which men call right and wrong. Ethics is the analysis of the logic and language of morals. Philosophy, say the analytic philosophers, is concerned with ethics, not morals. The result of this has been to inhibit writing about practical problems of decision. These problems have largely been turned over from the moral philosopher to the moral theologian. The thinkers within the various religious denominations cannot avoid the discussion of moral issues, and there is a continual stream of such discussion in the churches. However, such moral theology must be distinguished from moral philosophy. In the field of philosophy proper, the discussion of particular moral problems has been almost non-existent this year. There have also been few books about the presuppositions of ethics. Ten years ago when the analytic tradition was at its height, there was a steady stream of books applying the new linguistic techniques to the moral language of mankind, usually for the purpose of showing that the old formulations of moral philosophy were unsound. This stream has dried up – perhaps because the analytic philosophers feel that the destructive work has been so thoroughly done. Discussions of the logic of ethics continue in the learned journals but more and more they centre on small points of contention, and there has been no full-dress book on ethics this year from an analytic philosopher. There have been, however, several books which discuss moral philosophy in a broader framework than the analytic. Two of the best of these have come from England. The English have always been more successful in the practical than in the speculative arts, and they have therefore produced more moral philosophers than metaphysicians. Their dissatisfaction with analytic philosophy arises at the level of the practical, around the question whether analysis can come to terms with man’s role as a moral agent. Professor Stuart Hampshire’s [1914–2004] Thought and Action is a discussion of man as a moral agent by one who has been a central figure in English critical philosophy. Hampshire’s plea is that philosophy should be concerned with careful thought about art and history, morals and politics, as well as with the science of logic and the logic of science. His book cannot be neatly classified as moral philosophy because it could as easily be called a study in the philosophy of mind. Hamp-

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shire’s main thesis is that human beings are essentially agents, forward-moving creatures who must decide and act, and that any true philosophy must come to terms with the implications of this fact. The moral situation is more at the heart of our existence than our observations and speculations about the world. Because of this, Hampshire makes his attack on ‘the myth of complete description’ – the view which presupposes that we can know our situation in the world completely and proceed from that knowledge to action which flows logically from it. The human condition is not like this. Knowledge in any situation is never perfect, and we must act without ‘complete descriptions.’ From his analysis of action, Hampshire proceeds to an analysis of intention, and from intention he proceeds to consciousness. Here it is clear that he has read carefully the phenomenological analyses of consciousness and self-consciousness by such French existentialists as Sartre [1905–80] and Merleau-Ponty [1908–61]. It is rare these days for a philosopher bred in the analytic tradition to take these accounts of the human condition seriously. Nevertheless, one thing about this book that is strange for North Americans is that Hampshire seems entirely unaware of how many of his positions are recapitulations of those held by such American pragmatists as James, Dewey, and Peirce. The idiom is different, but the substance seems the same. The Europeans (the British included) have never paid sufficient attention to American thought. There has been a contemptuous assumption that Americans might be good at engineering or money-making, but too unsophisticated or too crude to speculate about ultimate questions. In Hampshire’s book the price of this superior indifference is evidently paid. Hampshire takes his criticisms of classical philosophy as novel, although they are almost identical with those which have been the current coin of American thought since the turn of the century. Despite this criticism, however, it is a refreshing experience to read Hampshire’s book. In a world intellectually dominated by the models of science and logic, where an implicit or explicit behaviourism is almost universally present, the book analyses that which is essentially human in man – his existence as an intentional and therefore as a moral being. Dr Austin Farrer’s [1904–68] The Freedom of the Will probes one of the essential questions of philosophy, though his purpose in discussing the freedom of the will is theological. Farrer does not think that the belief

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in free will can be proved by some quick syllogism. After all, its existence has been doubted by some of the ablest minds of our civilization.s The function of the theistic philosopher, says Farrer, is to start from a belief in the existence of free will. He then should proceed with the negative task of clearing away the obstacles which impede the serious contemplation of that existence and then go on to the positive task of describing coherently what it is for a person to act freely. The negative and positive tasks are necessary to each other. Farrer, therefore, carries along through the whole book his answers to the critics of free will and his own account of creative human activity. He deals with the objections arising from the mind-body problem, the science of physiology, empirical psychology, legal terminology, and many others. Dimensions of Mind – a series of papers given at New York University, and edited by Professor Sidney Hook [1902–89] – cannot be labeled simply as moral philosophy because it also deals with the philosophy of mind. Hook is a prominent exponent of the scientific philosophy of a generation ago, before it had been refined and clarified by linguistic and logical techniques. He is a sceptical humanist of the old school. The papers he has here assembled around the body-mind problem are concerned with imposing limits on the extreme behaviourism which characterized the scientific philosophy of the 1930s. Historical and Scholarly Works One effect of the uncertainty about the nature of philosophy is a great concentration on historical scholarship. When men are unsure what their subject is, it is both easier and safer to turn to the past and explicate what great minds have thought than to state what is considered true in the here and now. Also, in a period of political and intellectual flux such as ours, there is an intense desire to search out how the past has brought us to the present. Indeed it is a paradox of North American civilization that at one and the same time there is a willingness to experiment in practical affairs, outside the lessons of past wisdom, and a concentration within the universities on antiquarianism. There is, of s See, for instance, Hobbes, Leviathan, Vol. 23, p. 113a–c; Spinoza, Ethics, Vol. 31, pp. 367a–b, 391a–c; Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 35, pp. 183a–184b; Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 35, pp. 478a–484c.

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course, a perennial need in all societies to keep in touch with the great ideas of the past. Nobody can live effectively in the present without contemplating what the wise men of the past have thought about the same matters.t Nevertheless, if there is too great a concentration on historical scholarship, it may come to be thought of as an end in itself, rather than as a means to help men to the truth in the here and now. Philosophy is not the history of philosophy. We would all know that science was in a bad way if scientists spent most of their time studying the history of science. In 1960, the academic mill turned out an enormous number of historical and scholarly works. It is possible to mention only a few here, singling out those works which are helpful to the layman. A wellknown American philosopher, Professor J.H. Randall [1899–1980] of Columbia, has written a valuable study entitled Aristotle.u So often these days a concentrated study of Aristotle is confined to those who see him through the eyes of St Thomas Aquinas. It is therefore helpful to have someone look at Aristotle directly. Randall interprets Aristotle as being interested in understanding things as they are, not in controlling them. Such an aim is so alien to our contemporary culture that we are wise to contemplate what is meant by it. The thought of the greatest Christian philosopher and theologian of the ancient world (and perhaps of all times) is described in Father E. Portalié’s [1852–1909] A Guide to the Thought of St Augustine.v This work has long been considered by scholars as the definitive introduction to the understanding of Augustine. It has at last been translated and published in the United States. Two other commentaries deserve mention because they concern authors included in Great Books of the Western World. Professor C.W. Hendel’s [1890–1982] Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume is a useful introduction to the most systematic sceptic of the Enlightenment.w Professor L.W. Beck [1913–97] has produced a commentary to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.x The study of Kant’s moral philosophy is t To help men do this is, of course, the purpose of Great Books of the Western World, the Syntopticon, and The Great Ideas Today. u For Aristotle’s works, see Vols. 8 and 9. v See Vol. 18 for Augustine’s Confessions, The City of God, and On Christian Doctrine. w See Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 35, pp. 451–509. x See Vol. 42, pp. 291–361.

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indispensable to anyone who would like to understand the moral ideas of modern Europe. This book is a splendid introduction to that very difficult study. It does just what a commentary should: it helps us to find our way through territory very difficult without a map. In modern European philosophy, Father F. Copleston [1907–94] has reached the sixth volume of his History of Philosophy, which covers the end of the eighteenth century. Copleston’s early volumes are the most useful of all histories of philosophy in English, and this volume maintains the high standard of its predecessors. It is accurate and scrupulously fair about philosophers with whom, as a Catholic priest, Copleston cannot agree. His fairness is particularly evident in this volume, a great part of which is devoted to Kant – a philosopher who summed up the traditions of the Enlightenment and Protestantism, both of which are alien to Copleston’s own. The Western Intellectual Tradition by J. Bronowski [1908–74] and B. Mazlish [1923– ] covers a broader sweep in the history of thought – from Leonardo to Hegel. It stresses particularly the interaction of ideas and technology. Compared to Copleston’s book, however, it shows the mark of the enthusiastic amateur. 1959 was the centenary of John Dewey and in that year American philosophers honoured his memory. One result of the centenary did not appear until 1960: John Dewey: His Thought and Influence – a series of papers on Dewey given at Fordham University. These papers are particularly interesting because Catholics have generally not been favourable to Dewey’s pragmatism. It is part of the American tradition which they cannot easily accept. It is always instructive to follow the discussion of a philosopher by those whose tradition is very different. Both parties to the dialogue are illumined thereby. Several books on Ludwig Wittgenstein have been published. This is not surprising, as Wittgenstein’s is the holiest name in modern philosophy. The best of these books is Professor E. Stenius’ [1922–90] commentary on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Stenius’ work is not a word by word commentary on this book, but rather is an exploration of the various themes of Wittgenstein’s thought. Stenius envisages Wittgenstein as a critical philosopher of the same school as Kant, interested in the limits of what can be said clearly about the world and our existence in it. Professor P.A. Schilpp [1897–1993] of Northwestern has brought out

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another of the enormous volumes in his series, The Library of Living Philosophers. This time it is The Philosophy of C.D. Broad [1887–1971], one of the most influential of English analytical philosophers from Cambridge. The earlier volumes have already covered such leading figures of the twentieth century as Whitehead, Russell, Dewey, and Jaspers. The volumes include articles by the leading exponents and opponents of the philosopher in question. They also include an intellectual autobiography by the philosopher himself, and answers by him to the questions raised by his critics. Foreign Philosophy The differences of opinion about the nature of philosophy within the English-speaking world are mirrored by an equal fragmentation of the subject within various geographic areas. There is no international community in philosophy as there is in science. In 1960 this point was made in detail by Professor José Ferrater Mora [1912–91] in his Philosophy Today – Conflicting Tendencies in Contemporary Thought. According to Ferrater Mora, the dominant definitions of philosophy are quite different in Western Europe, in Russia, and in the Anglo-American world. The marked lack of interest within the various areas in what the others are doing means that there is little cross-fertilization. In Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe, philosophy is understood as the exposition and furtherance of Marxist-Leninism. This official philosophy claims to be able to direct human conduct to its proper end of building a truly human industrial society. In Western European philosophy there has been a greater diversity of philosophical practice than in either Soviet Marxism or Anglo-American analysis. This diversity, however, finds its centre in the concern with the human condition which is so marked in both existentialism and phenomenology. Indeed, because of this concern, philosophy in Western Europe is in touch with the older tradition in a way that has not been the case in either Russia or the United States or England. The lack of communication between the various areas is in sharp contrast to the situation in the sciences, where despite the limitations of the Cold War the discoveries of one continent soon become the property of the international community. To gain knowledge of what is happening philosophically in Eastern Europe and Asia is particularly difficult. Luckily in 1960 a

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joint international work by the United Nations, Philosophy in the MidCentury, was completed. The fourth and last volume is concerned with an account of developments in Eastern Europe and Asia. The communication in philosophy between America and Western Europe is better than the communication between Western Europe and England. The American interest of a few years ago in French existentialism seems now to be replaced by a considerable interest in phenomenology. Phenomenology is the ‘logos’ or science of all that appears. Its purpose and method as a school of philosophy is to allow our experience to reveal its essence and structure. The philosopher must go to the facts in all their innocent power and learn from them. This school of philosophy has been very influential in Germany and France since World War I, and from it existentialism sprang as a subsidiary movement. Mr R.M. Chisholm [1916–99] has edited an able introduction to the whole movement in Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, a volume in the very useful series ‘The Library of Philosophical Movements.’ He includes the early classics of the movement by Meinong and Husserl as well as a careful discussion of its aims and methods.1 The growing interest in phenomenology among professional philosophers in America may be taken as another mark in limitation of the dominance of analytical philosophy. The purpose and canon of phenomenology place it close to the older tradition. French existentialism continues to be plagued by divisions over social policy. The movement has been rent since 1947 by great strife on the subject of Marxism in general and the Communist party in particular. Jean-Paul Sartre, the father of the movement, produced in 1960 his first large-scale theoretical work in twenty years: Critique de la raison dialectique. In this volume he appears to be making a complete capitulation to Marxism. He argues that Marxism has correctly analysed the objective situation in the world, and that all philosophy must accept that analysis. Total secularism is the truth, and Marxism is the fullest understanding of that secularism. Such a line of thought is foreign to English-speaking people. Nevertheless, it is of interest to see how a philosopher of remarkable intellectual equipment reaches his Marxist conclusions. In reading it, one can better understand the power of Marxism over the European liberal intelligentsia. Within existentialism, the leader of the opposition to Sartre’s surrender to Marxism was from the beginning Albert Camus [1913–60], the

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novelist and Nobel prize winner. Last year Camus was killed, in his early forties. His posthumous essays, Resistance, Rebellion and Death, are a paean of praise to human freedom and the impossibility of controlling man completely, however perfect human technology. These essays are not profound or subtle philosophical analyses, but they go to the heart of political existence in a way that is often missed by more comprehensive thinkers. German existentialism has much greater theoretical subtlety than the French variety, though it lacks the latter’s social passion. This year two works by the leading German existentialist, Martin Heidegger [1889–1976], have been brought out in English translation: Essays in Metaphysics and An Introduction to Metaphysics. It is difficult to assess Heidegger’s appeal for a return to the point of view of Greek philosophy prior to Plato and Aristotle. But, as always, his writings are filled with penetrating observations on philosophy and the human condition. Religion There is a wide variety of intellectual pursuits, all of which fall under the category ‘religion.’ The chief cause of this diversity is that the study of religion may be approached from two different poles – the scientific and the theological. In the scientific study of religion, men describe systematically all those activities, whether past or present, which we call religious. It is possible to examine the outward forms of worship in ancient Greece or China, in the contemporary Congo or Los Angeles, without asking what is true about God and his relation to the universe. One can study Buddhism or Christianity, either as a believer in one or an unbeliever in both, simply for the purpose of knowing how these religions have expanded, changed, and developed throughout the centuries. On the other hand, the theological or philosophical approaches to religion seek to understand what is true about God. This intellectual approach cannot, however, be freed from faith or commitment of the will.y This element of commitment exists in all intellectual activities. It is, however, necessarily at its height in religion. To those who affirm God’s existence, the knowledge of him is what should most concern y The place of the will in faith is discussed in Pascal, Pensées, Vol. 33, pp. 217b–225a.

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us, and, therefore, it is something about which we cannot be neutral. To those who deny his existence, belief in him is a superstition and therefore neutrality is equally impossible. The scientific and theological approaches must, however, be seen simply as poles. At one pole there is the student who measures the Temple of Apollo; at the other, the saint who writes of the journey of the mind to God. Between these two there are all kinds of studies and methods: the history of religion, its psychology and sociology, systematic theology, and the writing of prayers. The differing approaches to religion must be kept separate because they seek answers to such different questions. Nevertheless, the answers reached in one area of study affect the course of study in the others. For example, in the last five hundred years Western peoples have reached out to make new contacts with the rest of the world. In the course of that reaching out, they have accumulated new information about other peoples’ religions. At first this was only in the form of explorers’ tales. But in the nineteenth century a great effort was made to systematize this information and to understand the religions of other civilizations. In our universities there grew up such studies as comparative religion and the history of religion. This new scientific knowledge inevitably raised new questions and intensified others. What is the relation of Christianity to other religions? Does the enormous diversity among religious practices and doctrines mean that there is no uniquely true religion? Such questions cannot be answered by science but only by theology and philosophy. The historian of religion can tell us what Hinduism or Christianity have said about divergent paths to salvation. But only the theologian (be he Hindu, Christian, or other) can take this information from the scientist and discuss what is true and what is false in it. Ancient Religion With the increase in his knowledge of the religions of the world, one of the problems that faces modern man is to define religion. What is the common essence of all those activities which range from the cult of stones to the goodness of St Francis, from ecstatic sexual orgies to the pure contemplation of the Hindu mystic? One approach to this problem is to attempt to discover the beginnings of religion in the primitive

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world and, from knowledge of those beginnings, to understand religion as a whole. Thus there has arisen a great interest in the ancient religions. This interest is further fortified by the recognition in modern depth psychology that primitive myths survive in the unconscious. Professor E.O. James [1888–1972] of London brought out in 1960 The Ancient Gods, which incorporates the scientific findings of a generation about the religion of the Near East, the cradle of the faiths. He covers the period from the Neolithic era to the beginnings of Greek philosophy, when rational speculation about the deities superseded the ancient myths. His book covers the period when men still apprehended the divine immediately in myths, without the analysis of the myth by thought. In the last ten years Professor Mircea Eliade [1907–86] of Chicago has produced a series of books which have not only described and compared the religions of the world, but have also attempted to define their meaning in the history of the race and their significance for the peoples of Western civilization. In his most recent book, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, he analyses the practices of many religions, and shows that myths are the means by which men apprehend the reality of the sacred. He defines religion as ‘an experience of existence in its totality, which recalls to a man his own mode of being in the world.’ In terms of that definition, he looks at that experience in the cults and beliefs of religions, both simple and sophisticated, so that he can show the meaning of existence in both traditional and modern societies. The purpose of Eliade’s book is to explore the confrontation of two types of mentality – the traditional and the modern. The first is characteristic of man in archaic and Oriental societies; the second, of man in modern societies of the Western type. The West is now no longer the only maker of history. Western peoples are therefore forced to encounter traditional societies which are becoming impregnated with the history-making spirit. Eliade believes that certain great cultural movements of this century prepare the West for this encounter – the various revivals of religion, depth-psychology, surrealist and abstract art, the sciences of comparative religion and ethnology. He believes that myths and mysteries are always homologous to the activities of the unconscious in dreams and that the understanding of the myth will one day be counted among the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. Modern societies are living unconsciously by the decadent

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remains of primitive mythologies. Because of their gradual loss of the perennial myths, they fall prey to such partial and tragic myths as historicism, fascism, and communism, which leave them open to the deepest anxieties about nothingness and death. Eliade believes that Western man needs to comprehend the religious values of other cultures in order to understand his own anxiety. Western man’s anguish about nothingness and death will be better understood as he discovers how older societies coped with the same problem in their rituals of initiation, rebirth, and resurrection. He will revivify his own decadence only by looking at the spiritual resources of religions which are not decadent. There is, however, one question which Eliade’s book raises but does not answer. He believes that the spiritual content of the cults of initiation and the myths of regeneration must be brought back into the West if its culture is to be reanimated. He also thinks this can occur only as Christianity drinks at the fountains of the East. Yet Eliade does not explain how Christianity will learn from the East without ceasing to be Christianity. Eastern Religions Works about Eastern religions must be clearly divided between scholarly works which attempt to give us an accurate picture of the religions of the Eastern world, and missionary works intended to convince Western people of the truth of these religions.z This division must be made chiefly because of the wide popular influence that Buddhism is now exerting in the West, and particularly in the United States. Buddhism, of course, has been influential among the educated élite of Europe for many years. But now in the United States it has ceased to be a small movement among scholars and has become a wide-spread and prestigious cult. Courses on Zen Buddhism are taught in the universities; its phrases are constantly heard in ‘beat’ communities. Zen artists paint Zen pictures and Zen poets compose Zen poems. The voice of Zen is heard in the novels of J.D. Salinger [1919– ] and Jack Kerouac [1922–69]. z One of the first Western philosophers to discuss Buddhism was Hegel. See Philosophy of History, Vol. 46, pp. 233b–235c.

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It is always an immensely difficult exercise to enter into the religion of another civilization or to know when one is learning the truth about that religion. This situation has become acute in the case of Buddhism because of the spate of popular books on the subject. How does one know where one can discover real Buddhism and when one is getting a dish made stimulating for the jaded palates of those who seek a new cult for the West? The chief missionary of Buddhism in the United States is, of course, Dr D.T. Suzuki [1870–1966]. Twenty years ago Dr Suzuki produced Studies in Zen Buddhism, the credentials of which are found in the fact that it has been acclaimed by learned men in the East and in the West. But since that time it has been questioned whether in spreading Zen in the West, Dr Suzuki is still concerned with the authentic article. He more and more identifies Zen with philosophical negation, the belief that the enlightened person must have freed himself from all ideas. This position makes Zen very popular with the contemporary irrationalism of the West. It is very attractive to the ‘beat generation’ because it frees them from the need of intellectual discipline. Dr Chang ChenChi [1920– ], in his The Practice of Zen, makes a forceful plea against Dr Suzuki’s identification of Zen with intellectual negation, and maintains that Zen rests on a more intelligible foundation than its cult in the West would allow. Those who are interested in the influence of Buddhism in the West should have enough respect both for Buddhism and Western civilization to care that we should be influenced by the real thing and not by some bastard article. If this is not done, Western Buddhism will become a superficial cult for sensationalists rather than a source of disciplined spiritual riches. It is, therefore, essential to distinguish between the accurate and the inaccurate even in popular works. To do this, one must take books recommended by serious scholars. Dr E. Conze’s [1904– ] Buddhist Scriptures has been widely praised as a fair, popular translation of the essential documents. Dr Chang’s book, The Practice of Zen, is also well recommended. It is a question of signal importance whether Christianity and Buddhism should be separated, as has been suggested by Arnold Toynbee.2 Dr Hendrick Kraemer [1888–1965] of the Princeton Theological Seminary discusses this question in his World Cultures and World Religions: The Coming Dialogue.3 This is an analysis of the effects that West-

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ern secular civilization and the Eastern religious cultures have had, are having, and will have on each other. Kraemer is forthright in condemning certain aspects of Western colonialism, but he does not condemn Western technological culture. He sees the tyranny that the West sometimes imposed on its weaker neighbours and yet considers that the Christian missionaries accomplished much that was good. Kraemer is a believing Christian, and does not make the liberal assumption that all religions are really the same – alternative expressions of a pleasant humanism. He is concerned about the cultural invasion of the West by the East, now in its early stage. He singles out the psychologist C.G. Jung and the historian Arnold Toynbee as the chief hidden persuaders of the invasion. Toynbee and Jung are ‘Asian sages,’ because, though they are friendly to Christianity, their basic position is ‘naturalistic monism,’ the common denominator of Indian and Chinese religion.4 Judaism The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, by Yehezkel Kaufman [1889–1963], is a famous Hebrew classic on the character of Israelite religion up to the exile. The first seven volumes of the original Hebrew work have been condensed into one and translated by Moshe Greenberg. This is, of course, a book for scholars – those interested in Old Testament theology or the history of Israel. For those who want a simpler introduction to the history of Judaism as a whole, Professor Leon Roth’s [1896–1963] Judaism – A Portrait is highly recommended. The main object of Roth’s book is to stimulate fresh thinking about Judaism. He attempts to present its irreducible religious affirmation, the transmitting of which has made the Jews the ‘community of holiness’ which at their best they have always been. The Jews are the Chosen People because it is their vocation to bear witness to all men of the revelation God has given them. Roth sums up their history as ‘the balance, often an uneasy one, between the universality of the doctrine and the particularity of the transmitters.’ If he is right about the essence of Judaism, then modern Judaism is in large measure throwing away its treasure. Roth discusses the gradual disintegration of the Jewish religious community in terms of two writers, themselves both formative of the

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process and observers of it. The first is Moses Mendelssohn [1729–86]. In Mendelssohn’s system there was room for everything but holiness. Roth sees the process that was started by Mendelssohn in the eighteenth century as completed in our own time by sociological and psychological doctrine. He singles out Ahad Haam [1856–1927] as the greatest influence in making God a mere subjective manifestation of national consciousness. Roth paraphrases the words of Micah into the new language: ‘What doth the National Spirit require of thee but to do justly and to love kindness and to walk humbly with thy National Will to Survive?’5 The Origins of Christianity In the West, where Christianity has been the predominant religion, there is an intense interest in the scientific investigation of the origins of Christianity. Since the last war, there have been two major discoveries which have completely revolutionized our knowledge of that subject. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provided much new evidence for understanding the religious life of the Palestine in which Jesus lived. The Dead Sea documents not only gave us the earliest texts of certain Old Testament books, but also an account of the religious life of the Essene monks of Qumran, covering the crucial period from 150 B.C. to 68 A.D. They also provided a remarkable account of the great Essene leader, the Teacher of Righteousness. Since these discoveries, scholars have not only been deciphering the documents but have been trying to piece together what they tell us of Jewish history and religion. What is their meaning for the truths of religion? What was the relation between the religion of the Essene monks and that of apostolic Christianity? How is the Teacher of Righteousness to be conceived in relation to Jesus Christ? Hypothesis and counter-hypothesis about both the historical and theological interpretations have been offered to a bewildered public. Laymen such as the literary critic Edmund Wilson [1895–1972] put forward the wild hypothesis that these documents had disproved the uniqueness of Christianity. Recently, Pravda has maintained that the Scrolls proved that Jesus Christ was a mythical figure. The public could not know what to believe, or which book to read as objective and reliable. By 1960 this period of confusion came to an end. It is now possible to state

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with clarity what the documents tell us historically and what questions they raise for theological speculation. E.F. Sutcliffe [1911–63], an English Jesuit, produced an account of the whole matter which has received high praise from scholars of different persuasions. His book, The Monks of Qumran: As Depicted in the Dead Sea Scrolls, with translations in English, states the consensus of scientists as to the nature of this religious community and of the Teacher of Righteousness. Sutcliffe places the establishment of the monastery in the second half of the second century B.C., and the death of the Teacher of Righteousness somewhere between the years 140–120 B.C. On the identity of the Wicked Priest, who was the adversary of the Teacher of Righteousness, he is at odds with the majority of scholars, however. What was the influence of the Essene sect in general and of this community in particular upon the origins of the Christian Church? Sutcliffe approaches this question cautiously by confining himself to the documents – the Scrolls and the New Testament. The result of this method is to avoid the pitfalls of reading the New Testament into the monastery, or vice versa. His conclusion is that there must have been many real links between the two, but also that there is a wide theological difference between the two communities. For instance, the strong sabbatarianism of the monks is at variance with the teachings of Jesus on the matter. The strong asceticism of the monks is also not present in the Gospels. Equally important for the study of Christian origins are the Gnostic writings discovered in the Egyptian desert at Nag-Hammadi in 1945– 46. These have not aroused the same public interest as the Dead Sea Scrolls, yet they are of equal importance in enlarging our understanding of the history of early Christianity. Gnosticism had previously been considered a rival religion to Christianity with which Christianity had had to do battle in its early years. The word gnosis means knowledge, and the Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge, divinely imparted, and not available to ordinary men. They believed that the true God is unknowable without such knowledge. The true God is not the creator of this world of imperfection which was in fact created by an imperfect God. Man can only free himself from the evil tyranny of this imperfect world by a secret gnosis which returns him to the perfect God. The first words of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas are: ‘These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke.’

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In the light of these documents, it is now clear that the relation between Gnosticism and Christianity was much closer than a simple rivalry. Christianity developed in reaction against Gnosticism and was much more influenced by it than had previously been believed. In understanding Gnosticism we are therefore able to come much closer to understanding the development of Christianity and the causes of that development.aa In 1960 there were many books about these Gnostic documents, some of them giving English translations of the documents, others concerned with the light they throw on religious history. Probably the best introduction to the facts is Newly Discovered Gnostic Writings, by W.C. van Unnik [1910–78]. This states what has been found, and reaches certain tentative conclusions about the meaning of these discoveries. The newly discovered Gnostic book on the sayings of Jesus, The Gospel according to Thomas, was translated in 1959. It is a valuable document. Unlike the four canonical gospels of the Bible, its fundamental interest is in the words rather than the deeds of Christ. The knowledge imparted by the Saviour to free men from this evil world was the essential thing, rather than his work in the world. It is important to see what the Gnostics considered the teaching of Jesus to be, and from that to try to determine how deeply imbedded in original Christianity were the Gnostic elements. Years of interpretation will, of course, be necessary for us to evaluate the evidence. A broad look at the whole question, however, has been taken by Dr R.M. Grant [1917– ] in six lectures given at Columbia University and now published as Gnosticism and Early Christianity. Dr Grant discusses the Gnostic influence in the official documents of the New Testament and the conflict of the early Church with Gnosticism as a rival religion. His theory is that Gnosticism gained power over men because of the shattering of apocalyptic enthusiasm about the coming of God to the world after the fall or falls of Jerusalem. As the worldly hope failed, people of the Jewish faith moved towards the otherworldly salvation of Gnosticism. Grant takes the official position of Christianity that the early Church was right to spurn Gnosticism as heretical because its other-worldliness did not allow it to give an adeaa For Gibbon’s account of the relation between Gnosticism and Christianity, see The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 40, pp. 183a–184b.

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quate answer to the problems of human existence: true Christianity must take worldly history much more seriously than Gnosticism did, and this requires the apocalyptic vision. Grant emphasizes the difference between Gnosticism and Christianity, and is inclined to dismiss any thought that Christianity might have originally had deeply Gnostic elements. This, of course, raises questions which are theological rather than scientific. How much is Christianity a worldly religion and how much an other-worldly religion? Did the official Church, by spurning Gnosticism and its recrudescences through the ages, maintain the true faith, or was something essential to the original Gospel lost? The discussion in the first century illuminates our discussion in the twentieth: What value should the religious believer put upon the events of time and history? Whether one is a believer or not, Semitic religion has exerted such an enormous influence that one must understand it if one is to understand the Western world. For those who are believers, the importance of these discoveries is even greater. They must rethink in terms of indubitable evidence what it is in which they believe. By far the leading contribution to the study of the Bible in our time is the work of Professor Rudolf Bultmann [1884–1976] in Germany. His book This World and the Beyond, which appeared in 1960, is not one of his major systematic works, but it is a good introduction to his religious thought. Bultmann’s method of exegesis is demythologizing. He cuts away the elements in the New Testament which reflect the ancient conception of the world and thinks that by doing so he is making the authentic Gospel available to modern men. His demythologizing of the New Testament stems mainly from his dissatisfaction with liberal Christianity. Such liberalism maintains that the essence of the Gospel consists in a collection of religious truths immanent in the human mind. This leads to a sentimental approach to the Gospel and to the worship of man rather than to the worship of the transcendent God. According to Bultmann, God in his transcendence has no need to justify himself to man. The modern person to whom Bultmann is making the Gospel available is man defined in existentialist terms. Bultmann ties Christianity to Heidegger’s existentialism as closely as St Thomas tied it to Aristotle. Into the loneliness and anguish of historical existence comes the word of God from the beyond.

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A stream of books and articles continues to appear every year as commentaries on Bultmann’s work. This year, two particularly good books have been produced about him, one by a Protestant, the other by a Catholic. Professor David Cairns’ [1904–92] A Gospel without Myth concentrates on Bultmann’s challenge to the practical preacher. Can a modern preacher really present the Gospel in a relevant way to his hearers without making it seem mythical? Father L. Malevez’s [1900– ] The Christian Message and Myth is an extremely able account of Bultmann by a trained Catholic theologian. Malevez separates those aspects of Bultmann’s thought which can be reconciled with Catholic doctrine from those which cannot. Religious Theory In our century religion and philosophy are more widely separated than at any time in civilized history. Yet there are still many to whom thought is a holy art and religion at least partly an intellectual activity: they therefore theorize about their religion. Such theory takes many forms, from the philosophy of religion in which men speculate about all religions, including their own, to systematic theology, where the creeds of particular religions are expounded coherently. In all such activities the lives of intellect and faith mingle, and it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between philosophy proper and religious speculation: for example, in an earlier section of this essay, Professor Gilson’s Elements of Christian Philosophy was discussed as an example of traditional metaphysics. Gilson philosophizes as a believing Christian, but what he produces he claims to be pure philosophy, not theory about his religion. An interesting book in which philosophical methods are used to discuss religious questions is Freedom and Immortality by I.T. Ramsey [1915–72], Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford. Ramsey, using the method of linguistic analysis, analyses the two ideas in his title, which he considers central to the Christian understanding of man. His purpose is apologetic. He is aware that freedom and immortality are two concepts which have been criticized by modern analysts as meaningless. His purpose is to show why men use these concepts, and why they have to use them to talk realistically about the human condition. He finds that traditional religious

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language, when analysed, is not as silly as some sceptics have maintained. Ramsey maintains that both freedom and immortality make the claim that certain human situations cannot be fully explained by what is observed in sense experience. It is these situations which justify a belief in freedom and immortality. A situation in which a person transcends his public behaviour and makes a decision in response to an objective challenge called ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’ is one which justifies a belief in freedom. Such a situation also offers discernments of immortality because when we are ‘free,’ when we exhibit what we call ‘personal decision,’ we are ‘alive’ in a sense which mortality cannot exhaust. In terms of these situations, Ramsey analyses the way in which religious people use these two concepts. In a certain sense, Ramsey is only paraphrasing Kant’s great dictum that the three postulates of morality are God, freedom, and immortality.bb Indeed he pays his debt to Kant when he writes: ‘I think Kant was abundantly right insofar as he suggested that even Christian doctrines only receive an adequate logical placing when they are given in relation to a situation which, in some very important respects, is similar to that in which we discern duty.’6 Yet Ramsey uses this great insight of Kant in a way which carries the discussion of immortality (though not freedom) much farther than Kant did. There is one point where this book, and indeed the whole method of linguistic analysis, is not convincing. The book appeals to ordinary language, and from that ordinary language moves to the meaningfulness of popular religious affirmations. But is ordinary language really as static a thing as Ramsey suggests? If, for example, the peoples of the United States and Great Britain continue to break with the JudeoChristian tradition, will their ordinary language remain the same as it is now, with their centuries of religious belief behind them? Would the concept of duty become gradually less recognizable in ordinary speech? Would it then be proper for Ramsey to appeal to that change? Relativism, Knowledge and Faith is by a young theologian at Vanderbilt University, Professor G.D. Kaufman [1925– ]. It is a book quite characteristic of modern Protestant thinking. It deals with the relativism which Kaufman sees as essential to the human condition. To be bb See Critique of Practical Reason, Vol. 42, p. 348b–c.

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human is to be in a situation of insecurity because there is nothing of which men can be rationally certain. Kaufman has been profoundly influenced by existentialism and its insistence that our freedom (call it, if you will, our existence) can never be explained, and that therefore we are thrown into a world where there is no settled comfort. Kaufman’s existentialism shows the influence of Paul Tillich [1886–1965], the leading Protestant theologian of North America. Protestantism and existentialism are inevitably close in origin and conviction because of their mutual appeal to the authentic freedom of the individual, which no rational scheme can encompass. Indeed, existentialism has become the philosophic framework in which most Protestants expound their theology. Kaufman is also indebted to the German nineteenth-century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey [1833–1911], who insisted upon the relativity of all historical phenomena, including the philosophical. Since philosophy cannot reach truths which transcend the historical situation, man can find the absolute only in faith. The second of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s [1881–1955] books was brought out in English in 1960: The Divine Milieu. The degree of interest in Teilhard’s thought is manifest in the fact that since the publication of his first book, The Phenomenon of Man, in 1959, four books about him have appeared in English. Also hundreds of articles have appeared about him in learned journals and newspapers by philosophers, scientists, and theologians. In France a foundation has been established to see to the editing and publication of all his papers. The focus of this interest was an extraordinary person – a Jesuit who was also a geologist, paleontologist, and anthropologist of international reputation. His best-known scientific work was his part in the discovery and reconstruction of Peking man – a foundation stone in modern evolutionary theory. As Teilhard grew older, he gave less of his time to scientific investigation and turned to reflection on the meaning of modern science and the interpretation of its discoveries in the light of his Christian faith. He seems to have had an intense desire to influence the scientific community, most of whose members interpreted the data of their work in a strictly positivistic and even mechanistic way. He desired to show them that a true understanding of the findings of modern science must lead to a ‘mystical vision’ and an acceptance of the truth of Christianity. At the same time, he wished to

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confront theologians with the new discoveries of the world of science, to show them that the new facts added incalculably to man’s knowledge. Teilhard died in 1955. His writings have been published posthumously and without the usual imprimatur of his Church. The Divine Milieu is of much smaller compass than the earlier work, The Phenomenon of Man. The latter had the enormous canvas of the whole history of evolution. Teilhard tried to show this history in detail as a dynamic work of creation. Evolution converges on what he called the ‘Omega Point’ where God will be all in all. Teilhard’s intention was to take all of modern scientific knowledge and derive from it the meaning of the whole. He claimed that, in doing so, he was writing as a scientist, and not as a theologian or a philosopher. The Divine Milieu is quite different, both in scope and method. It is subtitled ‘an essay on the interior of life,’ and treats of the ascent of man to God in Christ. It is difficult to describe Teilhard’s position precisely. There is no single synonym in English for the French word milieu, which can mean both the surroundings and the midst. Both of these conceptions are included in what Teilhard means by the divine. God is revealed everywhere as ‘a universal milieu’ in which we all live, but at the same time he is also the centre towards which all beings move. In terms of this essentially traditional view of God, Teilhard discusses the divinization of our activities and of our passivities. Teilhard’s distinction between activities and passivities follows Aristotle, and his use of the word ‘divinization’ shows the essentially Christian framework of his humanism: ‘God became man in order that man might become God.’ In this sense the Incarnation is the focal point for all human activity. The ascetic life is as necessary to divinization as is participation in the world. The affirmation of life’s possibilities and their renunciation are not to be seen as excluding each other, for both are necessary to the attainment of the final harmony of man and God. Indeed, God is seen always as the harmony of contraries. It is of the essence of Teilhard’s thought that the pattern of history is not yet complete. The world is still moving to its final goal. The theologians – both Protestant and Catholic – who find this Redemptive Evolution unacceptable, do so because they feel it denies the basic claim of Christianity that the final goal of history has already been revealed once and for all in Jesus Christ. Those who accept Teilhard deny that

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there is any contradiction between this fact and his doctrine of an emerging pattern. Whether these criticisms be cogent or not, Teilhard is worth reading because he has undertaken a synthesis of science, philosophy, and theology on the grand scale, and his synthesis is essentially optimistic. Most modern religious thinking of any distinction has been profoundly pessimistic. Men are asked to turn to God because of the horror of the human condition, or because progress has been exposed as a myth, or because the world of nature is essentially tragic. To be optimistic about nature and the future is to belong to the nineteenth century. It is therefore fascinating to read a work such as Teilhard’s which is cosmically optimistic. It is a continuation of the Alexandrian tradition of Christian theology which emphasized the Incarnation of God rather than the fall of man.

Notes 1 Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) taught in Prague and Graz. His writings include Psychological-Ethical Investigations on Value Theory (1894), and Foundation-Work on the General Theory of Value (1923). Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) taught at Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg. His works include Logical Investigations, 2 vols (1900), Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Inner Time Consciousness (1928), and The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936). 2 In one of his essays in Civilization on Trial, English historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975) predicts that future historians will consider the great event of the twentieth century to be the impact of the West on the East leading to a counter influence of Eastern religion on Western religion. Toynbee is the author of A Study of History, 10 vols (1934–54). 3 See World Cultures and World Religions: The Coming Dialogue (Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1960), 12–15. 4 Ibid., 328–30. 5 The original, from Micah 6:7–9, is: ‘He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’ 6 Ian T. Ramsey, Freedom and Immortality (London: SCM Press 1960), 147.

Review of Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841–1867, by John S. Moir1

Grant published this review in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History 12 (1961): 131. The book had been published by University of Toronto Press in 1959.

This is the first volume in a new series Canadian Studies in History and Government.2 Those responsible for this series are to be complimented for starting with a work on Church and State. This side of Canadian history has been much neglected by our historians schooled in the presuppositions of positivist science. Our historians have been unwilling to understand how much their pluralist society and therefore themselves were a product of Protestantism. Yet how is North American civilization to be conceived at all without such a category as ‘Protestant secularism’? After a few weeks in North America Max Weber understood us better than our resident liberal historians.3 The geographical area considered in this study is ‘Canada West,’ which since 1867 has been known as the province of Ontario. The period considered is 1841–67. This is the time between the settlement after the Canadian rebellions of 1837 and the confederation of British North America into the Dominion of Canada in 1867. The sub-title of the work is ‘Three studies in the relation of denominationalism and nationalism.’ Professor Moir works out with close attention to the intricacy and subtlety of detail the story of how a compromise was reached between the claims of centrifugal denominationalism and centripetal nationalism in Canadian Church-State relations. The claims of the Church of England to a privileged position in the life of the colony were, of course, bound to be rejected after the rebellion of 1837. This study follows the gradual retreat from such claims. As Professor Moir

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writes, ‘The Old World concept of an established church had been discarded long before Confederation. The New World ideal of complete separation had seemingly triumphed’ (181). Yet he also makes it clear that the Canadian settlement was never as completely voluntarist as that of the United States. The Canadian solution, though inevitably North American, had conservative elements in it which distinguished (as in other areas) the pattern of our life from that of the United States. This able and scholarly book is, of course, of great fascination to any Canadian who would understand better his tradition. To a European who thinks the Christian Church more than an aspect of his particular civilization, it also should be of interest. The pluralist mass-consumption society has nowhere been earlier realised than in the area which was once ‘Canada West.’ The influence of reformist Protestantism in bringing that society into being is a subtle part of ecclesiastical history. And it is that kind of society to which the Church must increasingly preach the Gospel.

Notes 1 John S. Moir (1926– ), professor of history (and specialist in Canadian religious history) at Carleton (1956–67) and Toronto (1967– ), also published Two Democracies (1963), The Cross in Canada (1966), Church and State in Canada, 1627–1867 (1967), The Canadian Experience (1969), and Called to Witness (1975). 2 The series Canadian Studies in History and Government was published by University of Toronto Press. 3 Max Weber (1864–1920). See page 18, note 4.

Exchange with Keith MacDonald, and Two Talks Given to Scientists

Grant interviewed Dr Keith MacDonald, along with five other prominent Canadians, for a CBC television program in the series Explorations entitled ‘Belief’ (5 March 1959). MacDonald’s responses to Grant’s questions led to a dialogue between them on scientists’ ethical responsibility.1 MacDonald, in his capacity as head of pure physics at the National Research Council, asked Grant, two years later, to speak on language to a gathering of scientists. The official theme of the session (held 20 October 1961 at the Montreal Neurological Institute) was ‘Memory and Language,’ part of the ongoing ‘Fifth Informal Symposium on Self-Regulation in Living Systems.’ Grant gave his talk the title of ‘Speech: Some General and Incoherent Comments.’ We have reproduced here the typescript found in his papers. The presentation caused a stir among some of the scientists, with a few apparently shouting angry questions and others walking out. The whole experience shocked Grant but also ‘taught [him] more than anything that had happened to [him] for years.’ He said in a letter to MacDonald that he had been ‘swept away on a sea of terror’ by the far-ranging implications of the propositions put forward at the session. Grant expressed the fear that he had broken ‘the dialogue [that] should never be broken’ because he failed to communicate well at the first session. He spoke in a more conciliatory way in his second talk, given to a smaller audience selected by MacDonald. This dialogue between a philosopher and a scientist addressed important and difficult ethical and epistemological questions that continue to be divisive and thought-provoking. Unfortunately MacDonald’s untimely death in 1963 prevented the exchange from developing further. The two did appear together one last time, however, on a TV program, ‘The Best of All Possible Beasts,’ on memory, the human brain, and the computer for the CBC TV series Science Review (8 January 1963).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

First talk given to symposium, Montreal, 20 October 1961 Grant’s letter to MacDonald, 7 November 1961 MacDonald’s letter to Grant, 10 November 1961 Excerpts from MacDonald’s draft report on the symposium Grant’s letter to MacDonald, early December [missing] MacDonald’s letter to Grant, 8 December 1961 Grant’s letter to MacDonald, 14 December 1961 Second talk to selected scientists, Ottawa, 12 January 1962 Grant’s letter to MacDonald, 24 January 1962

TALK GIVEN AT THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL SYMPOSIUM, 20 OCTOBER 1961 Grant wrote ‘Mauriac and Cardinal Spellman’ at the top of his typescript. Sheila Grant recalls that he told a story about Mauriac and the Dalai Lama to lead off his talk, but cannot remember the point of the story. Grant suggested as a title for his talk: ‘Speech: Some General and Incoherent Comments.’

The following remarks have no direct relevance for your particular studies. Perhaps, they have some indirect relevance. I am going to present certain propositions about such words as ‘speech,’ ‘brain,’ ‘mind,’ ‘political theory,’ etc. These propositions may at first seem to have no relation to each other. Please be indulgent and wait to decide whether they make up a coherent argument. Most of these propositions cannot be proved in short space, but only affirmed. I take them as having been proved elsewhere and will give references after the paper, if anybody desires, where those proofs are to be found. To most of the propositions I will add a short expository commentary. I. There are different sciences of speech and these may be distinguished broadly as the direct and indirect. The main direct science of speech is philology or as I find since coming to this science it is called linguistics in the United States of America. There are various branches of this science. An amateur branch which is currently popular in

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England is the analysis of language carried on by those who want to understand and correct the logic of various forms of discourse. The indirect study of speech is carried on by those who study it as a means to the understanding of something else. To quote Fournié: The physiologist studies speech as the window through which he can view the cerebral life.2 So analogously, the political philosopher studies speech as the window through which he can view intentional activity. Let us now forget about philology. This paper is concerned with the indirect study of speech. II. From Gödel’s theorem that in any consistent system which is strong enough to produce simple arithmetic there are formulae which cannot be proved-in-the-system but which we can see to be true, it follows necessarily that no machine can do everything that human beings can.3 Perhaps some, but not everything. III. This inference from Gödel’s theorem has no direct effect on the work of any practising scientist. To prove that human beings are not machines does not mean that scientists will not learn much from studying the mechanism of the brain or that they will not learn much from making mechanical models of the mind. The ontological inference from Gödel’s theorem sets no methodological limits to any scientific endeavour. IV. It does, however, have direct effect on what some physiologists, neurologists, psychologists, etc., think they are doing or at least what they say they think they are doing. Example: K.S. Lashley, neuropsychologist at Harvard, addresses a symposium of scientists studying the brain in the following words: ‘Our common meeting ground is the faith to which we all subscribe, I believe, that the phenomenon of behavior and of mind are ultimately describable in the concepts of the mathematical and physical sciences’ (Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, ed. by L.A. Jeffress, Wiley 1951).4 Even at the level of elementary usage, ‘phenomenon of behaviour’ is an incantation. Why not just behaviour is behaviour and is what appears [?] What the inference from Gödel’s theorem does to Lashley’s sentence, however, is more profound. It is to tell him that he is not talking consistently when he holds the faith that ‘the phenomenon of mind’ (I presume he means the phenomena of minds) is ‘ultimately describable in the concepts of the mathematical and physical sciences’ – unless he uses these last words in a rather specialized way.

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V. In the following propositions I move from your interests to mine. What I mean by my interest is political philosophy – because though I teach religion, my chief competence is political philosophy.5 I have never been able to decide whether Wittgenstein’s proposition ‘the thinkable is the verbalisable’ is true.6 That is, I do not know whether there are or are not truths beyond speech. But if there are such truths, they can only have relevance to man in the singular – that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being. Wittgenstein’s proposition is a platitude about politics – a true one. VI. Political activity is in the main intentional activity. VII. The truth about politics can only be sought if we study politics as intentional activity and not simply as behaviour. VIII. Political theory is concerned with systematic thought about the better and worse direction of this intentional activity. This is, of course, the assumption in the paper which would require the longest proof. To make the point in a common-sense way, yet carefully, this view of political theory maintains that it must be able to speak of tyranny in the same way that a medical theorist would speak of cancer with the Hippocratic oath, that is, in a way that will persuade political practitioners to act so as to avoid or to eliminate it. The chief methodological assumption of this account of political theory may be stated negatively as the rejection of the disjunction between descriptive and normative propositions; in the popular lingo of modern social science it involves the rejection of the fact-value distinction. IX. To pass from the language of behaviour to that of intentional activity is a very difficult logical step because of the fatal gap between language and reality. How do we know that we are describing behaviour correctly when we describe it as intentional activity? Is this not an entirely arbitrary predication? I need not further expatiate the old phenomenalist and positivist dilemma about the language of intention.7 X. This gap is, however, not fatal to political philosophy because it is closed by the following fact. Language is not in the same relation to us as it is to other objects of the world which it is used to describe. Speech is our linguistic activity. It is not only a means to describe our own and other people’s behaviour, it is also what we do. To other people it is one form of our behaviour; to ourselves it is a particular form of intentional activity. In other words, speech bridges the gap between lan-

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guage and intentional activity, because it is both. This last sentence is the axis on which this paper turns.8 XI. Speech is the unique place where the philosopher can grasp the image of intent without which his study cannot fairly proceed. At the beginning, I borrowed the phrase that speech was for the physiologist a window into the life of the brain. Window is, of course, here a very loose metaphor – but for the moment it will do. I also said that it was a window into the mind. In the previous proposition I have now made clear what I meant by that. It gives the political philosopher that access to intentional activity without which his study cannot begin. Let me say by way of footnote that not all political philosophers know that speech is their necessary starting point. But as you will know from your own professions, one does not expect all members of the theoretical professions to be methodologically clear. XII. You will, I am sure, have gathered in the past that some people feel threatened by those who study the brain and make mechanical models of it. Many of the people who feel this way do so because they have not thought the matter through clearly. All men have a very real practical interest that more be known about the working of the brain and they should recognise that practical interest. No knowledge discovered about the brain can threaten anybody. At another level, however, the threat from the scientists of the brain is a very real matter. And to repeat what I have said about Lashley, it lies not in what they do as scientists but how they speak about what they do. This can be now shown in a more specific way. The scientist of the brain and the political philosopher have a common interest in speech – as the window through which they can view the object of their study. If the scientist of the brain then says (as Lashley does) that speech cannot be the window by which to view our intentions, he is then saying that there is no such study as a political philosophy. This a very real threat to political philosophers. XIII. And let me draw out a platitudinous consequence of this argument – namely that all men, including the scientist of the brain, are threatened if there is no such thing as political philosophy. To say that there is no such thing as political philosophy is not only a threat to a vested interest – that of political philosophers. This is so for the following reason. Knowledge about the brain can be used for useful surgery

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or for tyranny. Its good uses will depend on a good political practice and that has some connection with the pursuit of a clear political theory. Thus it becomes a general interest that speech be not defined in such a way as to make impossible that there be such a study as political theory. To recapitulate, the difficulties in the relation between political philosophy and the various sciences represented here cannot lie in knowledge about anything that any scientist may discover. The difficulties from the side of the political philosopher arise only at the level of meta-language – that is, when the scientist begins to talk about the context, assumptions, or what Lashley coldly calls faith in which this science is carried on. And, as in the present context, these sciences are concerned with men and women, that meta-language centres around words such as brain and mind. Because speech points both to behaviour and intentional activity, I have maintained that this will be the key word, the use of which in the meta-language will raise the difficulties in their clearest form. Now I took Gödel’s theorem as a successful argument against one of the meta-languages (albeit a simple or not very defined one) in which some men in the last centuries have talked about the science of man. I hope it is also clear from what I have said about speech that another meta-language – namely parallelism or dualism (as found, for instance, in the Cartesian tradition) seems to me inadequate. If speech is at one and the same time bodily behaviour and intentional activity, it does not seem to me that parallelism can be a valid meta-language about minds and brains. Let me make here in parenthesis a footnote to the history of political philosophy which seems to me germane to the general question of speech. Cartesian dualism had, I think, an appalling effect on political philosophy, by making it idealist. Because within dualism the physical world was something to be understood by the mathematical and physical sciences, political philosophy came to be thought of as a branch of the philosophy of the mind. And for reasons which seem to me merely commonsensical, a political philosophy which deals with human beings as minds contextually considered, is not likely to be very specific or helpful. In other words, idealism seems to me a hopeless meta-language. Is there then any way of talking about speech which will allow the

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scientist of human behaviour and the political theorist to continue their activities without fear of aggression? The obvious answer is what I would call the coexistence theory – to borrow a metaphor from the happier international atmosphere of the Eisenhower era. What this position would say from the side of the behavioural sciences is something like this. We will be careful of our meta-languages; we will certainly eliminate such tawdry excursions into second-rate metaphysics as mechanism and parallelism. We will use whatever models we need to find out what we can. Of course, we cannot predict what these models will be; they will be the product of scientific genius. But whatever they are, we will sit loose to them. We will make no objection to the political theorist talking about speech any way he likes, as long as he keeps himself cognisant of the facts we discover. We will even admit into our territory a truce team of logicians to whom we will pay strict attention when they draw to our attention that the meta-language we are using may have implications outside our particular activities. To such an ironic position what possible objection can there be? Objections to this more sophisticated position indeed would take one to the heart of the matter and would require a better philosopher than myself and more time than these last minutes. But let me make two points both of which turn around the desire for consistency, or to put it less pretentiously, intellectual tidiness. I put them both in the language of political philosophy or what in our age is less wisely called communication theory. They are both really the same argument, the first put practically, the second more theoretically. (i) Let us say that the theory of coexistence is accepted as I have described it, what then happens to the political practitioner? Political practitioners, from presidents to members of local planning boards, run society according to principles which they deduce from their image of man in the universe. That image, though influenced by science and philosophy and sometimes by revelation is in essence a product of the imagination. It has to do with man’s apprehension of reality through myth. (In thus describing myth, I obviously do not take it to be an uncreative side of cognition as did so many scholars in the nineteenth century.) Now within my account of coexistence, the political practitioner will want to use the knowledge of both the behavioural scientist and the political philosopher. Yet he cannot take that knowledge knowing it to be true, but on authority. What a fantastic confusion

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will then result if there is no effort on the part of behavioural scientists and political philosophers to achieve some consistent relation between what they both say about such words as ‘speech,’ ‘brain,’ ‘mind,’ etc. This confusion is indeed what is happening at the moment in nearly all North American education. Most of our political practitioners pass through a university. They are likely to have studied one or two courses in the behavioural sciences and with luck they may still gain some introduction to political philosophy. The result is that they are assailed by contradictory images. To be concrete, if you thought about speech within the context of D.O. Hebb’s textbook on psychology and also learnt the teaching about speech in the traditional political philosophy, the result will be that you are either going to think one is a true image and the other false, or you are going to see the difference and be undecided or as is the case with most graduates, you are going to be in total confusion as to your image of man.9 I think none of these alternatives among our political practitioners is a price we can afford to pay. (ii) To put the same argument more theoretically. There seem to me two alternatives open to the behavioural scientist: either he is concerned with knowledge about man as a whole and sees his particular science as concerned with a part of the whole (this seems to me the spirit of this symposium) or else he is concerned with knowledge about man for particular practical ends. The coexistence theory falls inevitably into the second alternative. But to serve limited practical ends in our society is to work for the realisation of the universal [and] homogeneous state. That is, the theory of coexistence is really making the sciences the servant of the universal and homogeneous state – the first premise of which is unlimited technological advance taken as an indubitable end in itself. But the universal and homogeneous state will be a tyranny. (Very difficult proof here.) Therefore, to take the theory of coexistence is to make the sciences a servant of tyranny. But no sane man who practises an art or science can well endure to be a servant of tyranny. Indeed, to put the corollary of this conclusion: every time any scientist insists that his particular science is part of a total view of man’s self-knowledge, he is delaying the advent of the universal and homogeneous state. To conclude then, to discuss the truth about speech directly raises questions about the truth of the whole more than the study of any other activity of behaviour. But let me end by saying something about

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speech in general. We speak about anything when it concerns us to have discourse about it. The sciences are a highly specialised and particularly pure form of discourse. The kind of discourse (call it if you will communication) that we find in common-sense practical matters is taken to a more careful and therefore purer level by the scientist. But I can see no qualitative distinction between them. To make an analogy: Common-sense practical discourse stands in the same relation to scientific speech as the discourse of ordinary lovers stands to the music that Mozart puts into the mouths of Pamina and Tamino in The Magic Flute. And this is so when the object of the science is speech itself. If the prime object of the scientist is to communicate clearly about speech through speech to others, that aim can only be accomplished if the particular communication is seen as part of a total communication about speech. Such communication is inevitably one of the glories of the ideal commonwealth, the realization of which in Plato’s words, depends on chance.

GRANT’S LETTER TO MACDONALD, 7 NOVEMBER 1961 Dr D.K.C. MacDonald Solid State Physics Group, National Research Council, Ottawa, Ontario Dear Keith, Herewith is my expense account. I hope you will forgive some breast-beating, but I must apologise for how unclear I was at the symposium. The whole thing was so wonderfully new to me and many of the propositions asserted seemed to me to have such far-ranging implications that I was swept away on a sea of terror. In so doing, I broke the one rule which seems to me absolute for philosophy – that the dialogue should never be broken – but the whole experience has taught me more than anything that has happened to me for years. Yours ever, George Grant

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MACDONALD’S LETTER TO GRANT, 10 NOVEMBER 1961 Professor George Grant, Department of Religion, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Dear George, Many thanks for your letter of November 1; your expense account was immediately forwarded to ‘the appropriate authorities’ and I trust you will receive your proper and just rewards in due course: Now this last letter of yours really begins to intrigue me a great deal, and I would like to explore the matter further, if I may: My personal chores of living made me about five minutes late for the opening of your talk at Montreal, so I was perhaps not fully competent to judge what you had to say; however, I do not think this was too serious an omission. As the discussion, in particular, after your presentation ranged to and fro, I had two or three very broad impressions myself: (1) Your difficulties from time to time in answering questions, comments, or criticisms seemed to me quite normal and natural for a scholar. To me it seemed quite understandable, and even praiseworthy, that you would wish to consider and re-consider many statements, but in brief what I want to say here is that I personally had no sense of embarrassment whatever. (2) It did seem to me that probably your ‘brand’ of philosophy was something rather different from what I might have expected productive, critical philosophy to be today, but again this did not seem to me anything too remarkable, and I enjoyed listening. (3) I did feel that there was a moral to be drawn about the problem of useful communication between people. In its simplest terms: if it is so difficult for ‘scholars’ of different disciplines to communicate easily with one another, presumably it is not at all surprising that it can be a great deal more difficult between people who are not trained in intellectual argument. I also made some enquiries after the symposium and found that two of my colleagues from our group here shared entirely my feeling that

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they had no sense of embarrassment, and indeed enjoyed listening to you. But now, over lunch at Montreal on the Saturday and afterwards, it is true that a number of other people did indeed say that they had felt embarrassed and, as you yourself obviously realized, your talk, and the discussion, certainly evoked quite an emotional reaction in some of your listeners. This surprised me considerably, but moreover now comes your last letter with what are, to me at any rate, such surprising phrases as ‘I was swept away on a sea of terror’ and (though naturally I am delighted that the symposium has such effects!) ‘the whole experience has taught me more than anything that has happened to me for years.’ Having thought about this further, I would therefore like to ask you a couple of questions. To the first one I presume almost certainly that the answer is ‘no, of course not,’ but I feel I ought to ask: (1) Was this by any chance the first time you had found yourself confronted with what seemed at best to you largely an agnostic group? (2) Was this the first time that you had been confronted with a group, who might reasonably be considered your intellectual peers, who found the idea reasonably acceptable that man might be in quite a broad sense a machine*? Do you perhaps find it incredible that anyone who really tries to think seriously about the problems of man would sincerely doubt that he had what I suppose you might call a ‘spirit’? I hope that you may feel it worthwhile to ‘keep the dialogue going,’ and I also hope that my comments and questions are not so wildly far from the mark that you despair of communicating with someone like me – but if I am anywhere near the mark in my last question, why then did you and I seem at any rate to get on rather well, and (I thought) communicate to some degree, when you interviewed me for that television programme? I shall look forward keenly to hearing from you. Believe me, Yours very sincerely, Keith MacDonald

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* ‘Machine,’ I suppose, is a rather ‘bad’ word to most people – would you feel happier with ‘a (more or less) self-regulating organism,’ or ‘a (more or less) self-contained goal-seeking apparatus’?

EXCERPTS FROM MACDONALD’S DRAFT REPORT ON THE SYMPOSIUM On Saturday morning, a political philosopher, Professor G. Grant (McMaster University), gave a paper with the title ‘Speech: Some General and Incoherent Comments.’ The main interest of the paper, and of the ensuing discussion, to many of those present seemed to lie in apparent divergences of attitude between workers in different disciplines. In the discussion, Professor Grant tried to explain to his audience the proof of one of his propositions (namely ‘the universal and homogeneous state must be a tyranny’); but unfortunately time did not permit him to finish his proof, as each step provoked a further torrent of questions ... The difficulties on certain occasions of communication (a rather overworked word) between experts in various disciplines were rather evident. This was particularly so in the case of Professor Grant’s philosophical contribution where, as it transpired subsequently, considerable emotion (and even embarrassment, surprisingly enough) was aroused in part of the audience. We as reporters felt no such embarrassment, but were certainly aware of Professor Grant’s difficulty in finding a common basis for discussion with many members of his audience, and perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that Professor Grant and some of his questioners probably felt that they inhabited two quite different worlds.

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MACDONALD’S LETTER TO GRANT, 8 DECEMBER 1961 This letter is in response to a letter from Grant that is missing.

Professor George Grant, 80 South Street, Dundas, Ontario. My dear George: Very many thanks for your very welcome letter received yesterday. I enjoyed reading it very much and so also did Drs Dugdale and Guénault. Dugdale in particular suggested that your letter embodies the two propositions: 1. Scientists, (a) whether they like it or not, wield a great deal of power in our modern society, and (b) are not really trained to exercise this function with responsibility. 2. Scientists tend to say ‘the pursuit of knowledge is a good thing and therefore any means are justified for carrying it out.’ I don’t think I believe that 1(a) is true at least not in those parts of our Western civilization (i.e. Canada, USA, and the UK) with which I have any familiarity. But if it were true, I would agree in general with 1(b). I also doubt the general validity of 2; is it relevant for me to say that my own personal experience of scientists as a whole has been that they are at least as kind and understanding as any other group of human beings? In fact I am inclined to agree very much with one John Erskine in an essay I’m very fond of (‘The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent’), when he suggests that knowledge is essentially a prerequisite for doing good (i.e. in his terms ‘doing God’s will’). Of course individual scientists can be just as narrow-minded and morally short-sighted as anyone else, but I don’t feel they are any worse ... and, I repeat, I have found many individual scientists to be at least as humane, understanding, and sympathetic in their understanding of human frailties, emotions and problems, as anyone else. I hope my memory of this essay is fair and that I am not misrepresenting him in any way.

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In fact, I must say that I am sometimes rather frightened of some at least of those who have a more or less orthodoxly-religious outlook, inasmuch as they seem to take ‘God’s will’ and matters of that ilk more seriously than they do their fellow men. I feel that I understand very clearly what Somerset Maugham was trying to say, again if I remember aright, when I believe he suggested that it was difficult to believe in the benevolence of a Deity and so on because ‘he had seen children die of meningitis,’ or words to that effect. I’m taking the liberty of enclosing a copy of something I tried to say somewhat over a year ago at the National Conference of Canadian Universities; this you can use for lighting a small bonfire if you find it too dull to read! 3. Now I have a suggestion to make. This whole business interests me a great deal, and I feel that a number of other people are interested too. If I got one or two people together here (including naturally Drs Dugdale, Guénault, your humble servant, and probably one or two others such as Drs Herzberg and Howlett,* perhaps Dr Steacie – all of whom I think would be interested), would you be willing to take the trouble to come and talk to, and with, us on a theme such as ‘Do scientists know what on earth they are about, and do they have any concept of the consequences of their actions, in this modern society of ours?’? This could be made as informal as you wished, but I do feel that something of this sort could be worthwhile, and I would only ask (say the order of a dozen to eighteen people at most) those to come that I felt had some real interest in your (and our) problem. Naturally I would ask the NRC to meet your travel expenses if you were prepared to make such a visit here. I shall look forward very much to hearing from you, and I hope you will say yes. I am, as ever, Yours very sincerely, Keith D.K.C. MacDonald P.S. Of course we shall try to make the small change, for which you ask, in the proof-stage of our Report. * I have already spoken informally to Drs Herzberg and Howlett (Directors of Pure and Applied Physics here), and they have expressed much interest in the possibility of such a discussion.

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GRANT’S LETTER TO MACDONALD, 14 DECEMBER 1961 Dr D.K.C. MacDonald, National Research Council, Ottawa 2 Dear Keith, Thanks very much for your letter. Of course, I would be immensely honoured to come and meet such a group of people, but not to talk to them, but with them. It would be impertinent beyond words on my part to think that I could do any more than discuss the problem in general. Above all these days I am very agnostic about nearly everything – agnostic not in the sense that it leads me to think the universe is worth nothing, but that it is a mystery, and that its meaning as a whole is a fantastic mystery. I don’t believe as a philosopher that there are easy solutions to the kind of question we have been discussing. But sometimes it appalls me about North America the assumption that there is some practical [?] for facing every situation. I repeat, however, I would be immensely honoured to meet with anybody of that intellectual calibre. I liked your paper very much. I don’t think there is one proposition in it that I would wish to say no to. By the way, I heard a lot about Erskine this year, as he had educated the people I was working with. I think there is no answer to Maugham’s remark, and any religious believer ought to have it in his mind night and day. It certainly makes impossible any cheap or foolish conception of the deity, but it does not make impossible to me any conception whatsoever. If you want me to come up to Ottawa some day, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are very bad days for me. As ever, George Grant

SECOND TALK TO SELECTED SCIENTISTS, OTTAWA, 12 JANUARY 1962 This second session with the scientists was billed as an informal discussion. It was held in the NRC Council Chamber on Friday, 12 January 1962, 2:30 p.m. Grant opened the discussion with an audience of some

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of Canada’a leading scientists: Z.S. Basinski, A.M. Guénault, G. Herzberg, L.E. Howlett, D.K.C. MacDonald, W.B. Pearson, E.W. Peterson, H. Preston-Thomas, J.M. Robson, and E.W.R. Steacie.10 Also present was Davidson Dunton, president of Carleton University. Tea was served from 3:30 to 4:00 p.m. The following text is taken from Grant’s notes written on hotel stationery.

(1) Keith MacDonald asked me to introduce the discussion. He said be direct for God’s sake, George! Well I’ll try, but directness about difficult matters is only for geniuses or fools. But I make the boast in neither. (2) MacDonald and I have argued about the facts. How much power do scientists have? MacDonald maintains that I exaggerate the power. Therefore I want to start by saying what I mean on this question. Now of course it is true that the major political and economic decisions of our society are not made by scientists. They are made by an organizational élite in business and government and the two professions most clearly represented in that élite are lawyers and engineers. The lawyers are more prominent in North America; the engineers in the Soviet Union. At this level of practical authority, MacDonald is obviously right. But the power of the scientists is still more fundamental than this because they are the only community in our society who are concerned with knowing what is so. And let me state as categorically as I can, that at all times and at all places men always act and live according to what they think they know to be true about reality. This seems to me a universal law about human beings. Therefore those who can teach other men what is true about reality are the people who wield authority finally in the society. To put it concretely, the scientists teach the engineers. The relation between the scientists and the technologists seems to me very much the same as the relation between the theologians and the priests in an earlier era of the West. The theologian thought he knew and he had to mediate that knowledge to the practical man, the priest who took it into the world. As the priest did not know, he took the knowledge of the theologian in the form of great images or myths. So with the engineer, he takes his vision of what is so, of what the universe is, of reality, from the scientist, and this applies to many more classes of people than just engineers. Let me say that at the universities

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of English-speaking Canada, leaving aside technical training, the only community which knows what it is doing is the natural scientists. What do I mean by knowing clearly what it is doing? They know clearly what it is they want their students to know. There is no such clarity in other parts of the university. To sum up: This is where the power or authority of the scientist lies – not in the immediate practical day-to-day decisions – but because it is to them that most people look when they want to know what reality is, what the universe is. And as I maintained the ultimate fact about any society or individual is what it thinks about this question. This is what I meant Keith by saying the scientists have power. They are the chief point of theoretical authority in our society. And as I have maintained theoretical authority is much more influential in the long run than practical authority. Second and different point, but which I will join up to this first point at the end. Keith MacDonald has seen clearly my chief worry about modern science. As he puts it, ‘The pursuit of knowledge being a good thing, any means are justified for carrying it out.’ And against my argument he makes two answers. (a) Individual scientists are no less and no more decent than other people, and (b) if scientists discover truths about the atom, is it surprising that aggressive men should use it for bad purposes – why blame the scientists? Now this second argument is quite valid. I see no reason at all to blame the curiosity of scientists for Hiroshima, and it would be iniquitous to say that Rutherford and others should not have investigated the atom. But this does not close the question about means. What I am thinking of when I raise the question is should a scientist experiment on another human being against his will to gain knowledge about how the brain operates? Now in answering this, MacDonald appeals to his first point, namely, that scientists are pretty ordinary decent chaps – but in the same letter in referring to a joint meeting of neuro-physiologists we attended [he states] ‘were you surprised to meet a group of educated men who work on the hypothesis that human beings can be understood as machines?’ And here is the point where I wonder whether the scientists are sufficiently clear because I think that you can’t assert both that a man can be moral and that he can believe that human beings can be understood as machines. Before saying why, let me put in one parenthesis. Of course we can learn a lot by studying the brain as a machine.

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That would seem to me self-evident. Now my argument. It is this. The central truth of Western ethical teaching has been that no human being should be treated simply as a means – but also as an end. The argument for the truth of that proposition I find most clearly expressed in Immanuel Kant. But a machine is never an end but always a means. Therefore it seems to me that the assertion that men can be understood as machines contradicts the central truth of morality. And I do not believe that men who in their theoretical work use an hypothesis that contradicts the central truth of morality will long remain moral. And I think this is what we have seen from many groups of people in the last half century. Men are machines therefore we can practice brainwashing on them. Men are machines therefore we can practice subliminal advertising on them. Men are machines therefore we can experiment on them. (Insert here practical effects of saying this in the modern world.) Now let me unite my first point and my second point. My first point was that scientists are the chief theoretical authority in our society. Now how does this affect this second question? Any scientist knows that he can get knowledge about the operation of the brain by watching it at work in a live conscious person. But I have maintained that if he experiments on a person against their will to gain knowledge, he is denying knowledge of another sort – namely the knowledge of the basis of the ethical tradition that other persons are not simply means but ends. Now as the chief theoretical authority of the modern world, the scientific community has a colossal responsibility at this point. It must know what it is doing when it is faced by a dilemma such as this. Give up getting knowledge or do something which is wrong. Most human beings do something but don’t think about what they are doing. But it is the chief responsibility of a theoretical authority not only to do but to think about what they do. And let me say that it seems to me there is one fact above all that stands in the way of the scientific community fulfilling that responsibility. The scientific community won its place as the chief theoretical authority in our society by winning a long battle against the ancient authority – the theologians. And so in formulating what it thought to be so, it often formulated its position as against the position of that ancient authority. But now that it is in authority it must not only

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emphasize what was inadequate in the truths proclaimed by the old authority but what was adequate. To take an analogy that comes to mind, in Ottawa the Conservatives came to power by stressing the faults of the Liberals, but if they are to govern well they must not only see what was bad about the Liberals – but what was good. Now to apply the analogy: The scientific community because of its theoretical authority when it faces the kind of practical question of experiment on persons must look at the tradition of the human race as a whole – not just the tradition of modernity which is its own. And let me say one general thing about the ancient and the modern one. The great truth of the modern tradition was the truth of man’s unlimited creative power – to make the world as man wanted it – through advances in science – in medicine etc. This was the central force in the modern progressive faith. Now the central truth in the ancient tradition was on the other hand the idea of limit on man. Let me illustrate from my example of experiment on other people. To say as I have said that the old ethical tradition maintained that men were ends, not only means – was to put a limit on conduct. There were certain things we should not do to other people. The idea of limit and to put the matter generally what it seems to me scientists have most to learn from the ancient tradition is the concept of limit which has been so forgotten in the modern world. And it seems to me the chief source of theoretical hope in the modern world is that, of all groups in our society, the scientists is the one most likely to recapture the meaning of the concept of limit, and for the following reason. All knowledge is partial and the greater the scientist the greater awareness of this partiality. Who better illustrates in the modern world the great dictum of Socrates that the wise man is the man who knows not, or is limited – than Einstein. Lastly, the scientific community is in the position of the chief theoretical authority in the world whether they like it or not, and have the responsibility of that position. And they are not going to get much help from outside in the responsibility that that position entails. Therefore the degree to which that position is satisfactorily carried out will depend on their own wisdom. I don’t think they will get much help from the other studies in the universities which are so much at sea. Perhaps they may get some help from the few wise people left in the church. But above all it is up to them as a community, to answer the

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requirements of the position that is inevitably theirs. And of course if you have power the only hope to exercise it wisely is a broad diffusion of the virtue of humility, and humility above all derives from knowledge of the limited in one’s own existence and in nature in general.

GRANT’S LETTER TO MACDONALD, 24 JANUARY 1962 Dr D.K.C. MacDonald, National Research Council, Ottawa 2. Dear Keith, Just a note to thank you for having me at Ottawa the other day. I have certainly learned a lot from our last two meetings. What they have impressed upon me more than anything else is the desire for ‘objectivity’ among scientists, and this seems to me a very pure (to use the old language) desire. I have thought a lot, particularly about our conversation in the cafeteria before the meeting, and I want to make a suggestion. Could you write down, to be published somewhere, an article relating what you said about the loneliness of the ‘I’ with the equally important fact of the objectivity of science. As I see it , it teaches one to come to terms with the world as it is, not as one wishes it. On the other hand, the inevitable loneliness of the ‘I’ makes all our worlds strange. Few scientists I have ever met seem to have as forcibly as you do the clear recognition of both sides of this – subjectivity – objectivity? (To use jargon.) I don’t know if these words have any meaning for you, but I think it would be remarkable if you wrote something on the question. I enclose my expense account. Life seems to be one damn lecture after another at the moment, but I hope that if I am in Ottawa you won’t mind if I ring you up so that we can have a word. Yours, George

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Notes 1 Keith MacDonald’s responses to Grant’s questions during the CBC program, ‘Belief’ (5 March 1959), show that he experienced his individual conscious self as conceptually distinct from the knowledge achieved in scientific work. Grant was clearly struck by what he perceived as a disjunction and urged MacDonald to write further about this question. During the CBC interview, MacDonald had responded as follows to Grant’s question about the special responsibility of physicists for the atomic bomb: ‘People like you, or anybody who thinks, any member of the intellectual part of humankind, are just as responsible. And again, you mustn’t confuse science with technology. Science’s great discoveries are things of fact; they are matters of truth. They are neither good nor bad, in themselves. But if technology, which is in fact often at the beck and call of society at large, chooses to use these things in one way or another, then the whole of society must bear the responsibility. It is not that I want to shelve it, but it seems to me blatantly obvious that you cannot suddenly turn to the physicist and say, “You made an atom bomb!” This is a very handy outlook today, to shelve responsibility in that way.’ Later, in response to the question about what gives substance to our spiritual life, MacDonald replied: ‘The fact that I am I. This is the utter loneliness of the human being. I don’t know, I must admit, how deeply this goes – the feeling that the dignity of being a human being (if this has any meaning) would be to show kindness beyond ... I am reminded of the phrase “beyond the call of duty.” I mean some of the things that belong traditionally to what Christ is supposed to have said – such things as “No greater commandment I give ye, than that ye love one another” [John 15:11–13]. How profoundly true that is, one feels.’ 2 Édouard Fournié (1833–86), doctor at L’Institut national des sourds-muets in Paris, was the author of Physiologie et instruction du sourd-muet d’apres la physiologie des divers langages (1868) and Application des sciences à la médecine (1878). 3 Kurt Gödel (1906–78), logician and mathematician, studied and taught at Vienna, then emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Princeton. His famous theorem, published in 1931, demonstrated that the axiomatic method of mathematics cannot yield information concerning both the completeness and the consistency of the system axiomatized. 4 The complete title is Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior: The Hixon Symposium. Lashley’s statement appears on page 112, near the beginning of his paper entitled ‘The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior.’ Karl Spencer Lashley (1890–1958) taught at Minnesota (1920–9) and Chicago (1929–35) before

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Exchange with Keith MacDonald, and Two Talks to Scientists Harvard (1935–58). He did experimental work at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology. He was a specialist in genetic psychology, contributing to the study of localization of brain function. The editor, Lloyd A. Jeffress, was Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas and Hixon Visiting Professor at the California Institute of Technology (1947–8) Grant showed his debt to Leo Strauss when he called his own field ‘political philosophy.’ In Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959) he had called himself a moral philosopher, but in the new introduction to the work (1966) he explained how Strauss had changed his mind, citing Strauss’s What Is Political Philosophy? For a discussion of Strauss’s influence, see H.D. Forbes, ‘George Grant and Leo Strauss,’ in Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), especially 169–71. When Grant speaks of Wittgenstein’s proposition ‘the thinkable is the verbalisable,’ he seems to be paraphrasing the last sentence of the Tractatus: ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, muss man schweigen’ (‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ or ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’). The dilemma, as agreed upon by phenomenalists such as John Stuart Mill, the early Bertrand Russell, members of the Vienna Circle, and Rudolph Carnap, is that intention cannot be verified in the same manner as statements about sense data. A leading exponent of the view was W.V. Quine, whose book Word and Object (1960) Grant reviewed in his essay ‘This Year’s Developments in the Arts and Sciences: Philosophy and Religion’ (72 above). Grant’s argument here stands on its own and need not have been influenced by other thinkers. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that his position is consistent with the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Heidegger, and Georges Gusdorf (see La parole [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1971]), and also with the work of Wittgenstein’s follower Elizabeth Anscombe. See her book Intention (Oxford: Blackwell 1963). See The Organization of Behaviour (1949) which revolutionized psychology by putting ‘mind’ back into the brain. Donald Olding Hebb (1904–85), Canadian psychologist, wrote that long-term memory was the result of the strengthening of the synapses through repeated use. Zbigniew Stanislaw Basinski (1928– ), Polish metal physicist, taught and did research at Oxford and MIT before joining the NRC in 1956. Arnold Davidson Dunton (1912–87), public servant and educator, was chairman of the CBC (1945), president of Carleton University (1958), and co-chairman of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963).

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Anthony Michael Guénault later published Statistical Physics (London and New York: Routledge 1988). Gerhard Herzberg (1904–), German physicist and Nobel laureate who emigrated to Canada, became director of physics at the NRC during 1949–69, after teaching at Saskatchewan. Together with President Steacie, he helped lay the foundations of the NRC’s post-war reputation as a scientific ‘centre of excellence.’ Leslie Ernest Howlett (1903–) was head of the optics laboratory at the NRC after 1931. David Keith Chalmers MacDonald (1920–63) was principal research officer in the division of pure physics at the NRC. His specialty was low temperature and solid state physics. He listed himself in the Canadian Who’s Who as ‘agnostic.’ William Burton Pearson was an engineer who specialized in crystal chemistry and the physics of metals and alloys. He published Lattice Spacings and Structures of Metals and Alloys (1958). Possibly Edwin Arthur Peterson (1921–), who worked in the Canadian Department of Agriculture doing research in agricultural microbiology. Hugh Preston-Thomas (1923–) was an experimental physicist at the NRC (1951–) who made advances in fundamental and practical metrology. John M. Robson (1920–) was chair of physics at University of Ottawa (1960– 8) and then chair at McGill. Prior to his Ottawa appointment, he had been with the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (1945–50) and the AECL (1950–60). Edgar William Richard Steacie (1900–62), physical chemist and scientiststatesman, was internationally renowned in the field of free radical kinetics, and also pioneered the government support structure necessary to promote the development of Canadian science and the growth of modern industrial technology (NRC).

Sermon for a Student Service, McMaster Divinity School

Grant delivered this sermon to a student service at the McMaster Divinity School on 6 October 1961. A copy of his poem ‘Good Friday’ was clipped to his typescript, although there is no indication in the text that he read it to the students. The poem had been published in the United Church Observer 14/3 (1 April 1953): 3, and appears in Collected Works, Volume 2, p. 534.

The conversation between Pilate and Jesus is one of those meetings in history which cannot fail to fascinate. Here the intelligent Roman politician meets the intense Palestine peasant. The words ring out with great force on both sides: Because from Pilate’s side he is dealing with a man whom he can condemn to death, and the Romans were civilized people and did not like to condemn others unless it were politically or socially necessary. From Jesus’ side they ring out with that clarity which is alone possible from somebody who has decided to die. The act of absolute obedience to His Father’s will has been made once and for all by Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and, therefore, all that is left is to drink the cup of that obedience to its last and bitterest dregs. He is, therefore, free to speak with uncompromising clarity because he expects nothing. Pilate, on the other hand, argues with him because as a reasonable ruler he wants to avoid the terrible dilemma of either condemning an innocent man or landing his colonial territory in a political mess. You may remember that Francis Bacon, the English philosopher of science and contemporary of Shakespeare, started his essay on truth with the famous phrase, ‘What is truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer.’1 As in so many other matters Bacon was here quite unfair. When Pilate asks the question ‘What is truth?’ it is unfair

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to accuse him of jesting. Pilate was, after all, an educated human being who almost certainly would have studied with the philosophers of the ancient world. He would have certainly had a more sophisticated education than, for instance, such members of our ruling class as John Kennedy or Nelson Rockefeller – to take two well-educated Americans.2 The question he asks, ‘what is truth?’ is, therefore, asked not in jest but rather to say to Jesus: ‘How on earth can you let yourself be killed for advocating this fanatical teaching of yours when it has no place in society where sensible, worldly wisdom must operate. Wake up, grow up, you can save yourself and save me from having to be tough. After all, no Roman likes to kill a religious teacher, if he will only be sensible. So please give up this dubious fanaticism you advocate and live by worldly wisdom.’ The meeting between Pilate and Jesus is not interesting – till we see the force of the argument on both sides. And I have chosen to speak about this scene at this time because this conversation – this dialogue between the transcendent truth of the soul and the wisdom of the world – has gone on in Western society from that day to this. It is the tension in their meeting which has more than anything else given Western society its greatness and only in so far as Western society keeps that tension has it anything valuable in it. Nowhere is this tension more present than at a university and anybody who wants to experience the full force of a university education must experience this tension. Let me say what I mean by this. The first and immediate duty of all of us at university is to become competent at certain studies – to learn of the wisdom of the world – to become trained at history or literature, physics or psychology, engineering or logic, economics or biology. It is our duty to do this because we are lucky enough to have been called out of society and are given support by our families or others to carry on these studies and, therefore, it is up to us, whether faculty, undergraduate, or postgraduate, to see that we carry them on competently and with energy. Anybody at university who doesn’t think of the food being grown, the clothes being made, the ditches being dug, the buildings being built, by others, so that we have the privilege of being at a university, is an ass. The university exists then so that the world’s wisdom in many forms may be carried on and transmitted from generation to generation, and indeed sometimes is even increased. To do this many

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arts and sciences have to be practiced. This is the first reason why all of us are here. But beyond these questions raised and answers formulated about the wisdom of the world – there is another set of questions which fall upon men and women like some deadly blight – those that have to do with the transcendent truth of the soul. Such questions as ‘What is my eternal destiny?’ ‘What is deity – or perhaps better, who is deity?’ ‘What is truth, what is beauty, what is love, what is goodness?’ I say these questions fall like some deadly blight because once they have dawned in anybody’s mind there is no escape from them. Bees or rats or dogs are happy in not having to face them. But we are men who live in the consciousness of eternity and, therefore, these questions inevitably arise. Now you may say, the university is not concerned with these questions. It is concerned only with the wisdom of the world; it is the church which is concerned with our destiny in eternity. This answer won’t do, however. These questions are real questions, they are intellectual questions, and above all they are questions for which education is required if a clear and cogent answer is to be given. Therefore, they cannot be excluded from the university. But this must produce a deep tension in all of us, for the following reason. At one and the same time while we are educating ourselves at university we should be doing two things. We should be making ourselves competent to understand the wisdom of the world – with all the disciplined study that that requires; we should at the same time be opening for ourselves those ultimate questions of the meaning of human existence which I have called the transcendent truth of the soul. To fail at either is to miss an essential part of being at a university. Yet to achieve both requires great discipline. How often have I seen the consequences of the tension between these two requirements. I used to teach ethics to medical students. Parents or anatomy professors would come to me and say, ‘So and so is spending too much time on Plato and not enough on anatomy – what is the point of him studying Plato if he is just going to be a doctor?’ And what could be answered but the following? ‘It is of course vital that he know his anatomy if he is going to be a doctor – but it is also vital that he know the truth of existence if he is to be a man.’ And this is true of all of us. Let me illustrate the difficulty in another way. Our business is to be good at our trade – good physicists, good logicians, good historians,

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and the essential virtue of any intellectual trade is integrity. The scientist must be scrupulously scientific in the practice of his science. The historian must be strictly careful in his choice of evidence. The virtue of such integrity is one of the chief things that a university training should teach us. I remember learning about this virtue early from my father, who was an historian of Canada. I remember him spending a week trying to find out who had been present at a particular meeting between John A. Macdonald and Joe Howe. Integrity required that nothing inaccurate or slipshod should be in what he wrote. This should be the general academic virtue. Yet all virtues have their limitations and the limitation of intellectual integrity is that it may easily lead to narrowness of vision. We may get so concentrated on accuracy and competence in our own subject that we lose sight of all the questions which lie beyond our subject and to which we as men should be open. That is, if we get so concentrated on the intellectual integrity which our subject requires, we may entirely forget the truth of the infinite to which we as men are being called. Then we will be good scholars; but poor human beings. The words of Christ are here easily applied: ‘What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?’3 Scholarship can be as much an idolatry as money – though it is not so usual an idolatry in our society. If scholarship is limiting, it is such an idolatry. The tension at the university is then to have integrity without narrowness; and vision without woolliness. There is, of course, no easy answer to how we should face this tension between the wisdom of the world and the questions of eternity. Each must work it out as best he or she can – trying to avoid on the one side the pitfall of incompetence in our own field of study and on the other side a competence in a particular field which is not open to the religious questions which beset us as men. But there is one fact which must never be forgotten and which helps us in understanding the relation between the realm of the world and the realm of the eternal. It is this. The proper use of our worldly studies can lead us beyond them to the realm of religion. This is because all study, if properly undertaken, has a sacred content. And this sacred content is that it teaches us attention. And how can we ever pay attention to Deity if we have not first paid attention to the world. At school the study of geometry, at university the study of the calculus or mathe-

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matical logic have great religious value for us quite beyond their practical utility. Because we have to give our full attention to it, if we are to understand, and in it we learn that attention which we can then use for fuller purposes. There is an idea abroad that the religious act of ‘loving your neighbour’ is having a warm feeling for him. This is, of course, nonsense. Loving your neighbour is paying attention to him as he is. And that very difficult art is not going to develop in men, unless they first learn the faculty of attention in narrower fields. Therefore, the attention to the clear, hard, rigour of evidence and argument which we get in our worldly studies teaches us something essential if we are ever to pay attention to God. This is why the hard grind of study should never be taken simply as if it were a tough means to be got over as soon as possible. It is valuable in itself, [and also] a means to something beyond itself. It is something necessary to becoming a human being in the fullest and richest sense of that word – a religious human being. In this fact there can be achieved a kind of union between the wisdom of the world and the ultimate truth of the soul. The attention gained in the first leads us to the second. The last thing I would say is this. This tension at a university is made particularly difficult in our era by the fact that there are many people saying that the transcendent truth of the soul is nothing but the wisdom of the world. This was one of the central ideas of the age of progress we have just passed through. The people who say this are saying that in the argument between Pilate and our saviour that Pilate is really right. What they say is that if you know how to get along in the world – if you are a competent physicist or psychologist, politician or doctor – that is enough. I do not want to argue this point – but just to state that Christianity has always known that it is not so. Beyond the wisdom of the world is the transcendent truth of the soul. Don’t believe those who try and persuade you of the opposite: those who say that any subject at a university can in itself be a substitute for that eternal truth. We must be more than a good physicist or psychologist; more than a competent lawyer, doctor, or civil servant. Of course, at McMaster this does not greatly need saying. The motto of McMaster is ‘In Christ all things hang together.’4 And to make a pun, they hang together there because He was hanged and hung on a Cross. Christian believers have always known that the eternal truth mani-

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fests itself at many points in human life, in philosophy and science, in love between human beings, in the other religions of the world, in art and in nature – but we have always claimed that the eternal fire of truth manifests itself with a supreme and unique intensity at Golgotha. Perhaps living in this tragic age of fallout and extermination camps, those who have not understood this, will be better able at least to sympathise with what we Christians have meant.

Notes 1 Bacon, Essays, ‘Of Truth.’ 2 John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–63) was thirty-fifth president of the United States, holding office from 1961 until his assassination in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (1908–79) was elected Republican governor of New York State in 1958, 1962, and 1966, and he was vice-president of the United States from 1974 to 1977. 3 Mark 8:35–7: ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ See also Matthew 16:25–7. 4 The McMaster motto in transliterated Greek is ‘Ta Panta en Christoi synetsteken,’ taken from Colossians 1:17: ‘And he is before all things, and by him all things consist’ (King James Version); ‘He is before all things, and in him all things hold together’ (Revised Standard Version).

Television Script: ‘Augustine’

This half-hour program, the second of a four-part television series on ‘four great philosophers who have had a considerable influence on Western civilization,’ was broadcast 19 July 1961 for CBC Educational Television’s Explorations. Grant wrote the script for the dramatization (in which the part of Augustine was played by Percy Rodriguez) and the interview segments, in which Bruce Rogers asked Grant questions. A transcription of the actual videotape of the program is presented here. The actors kept close to Grant’s draft script for the dramatizations; the few changes they made did not alter Grant’s meaning.

Camera starts on Augustine, kneeling and looking heavenward. augustine: Too late have I loved you oh beauty, so old and always new. Too late have I loved you. You were with me and I was not with you. I sought you in the world and could not find you. You called and cried and burst through my deafness. You flashed, you shined and you scattered my blindness. I have tasted and still hunger and thirst. You touched me and I burn for your truth. Camera fades to black, and then lights go up on two men sitting across from each other. bruce rogers (interviewer): Our opening scene was based on a prayer from the writings of the early Christian philosopher and saint, Augustine. On Explorations, the second in our series on four philosophers who have contributed greatly to our Western world. In this program on Augustine, we will try to glimpse the greatness of

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his thought while watching scenes from his life. Our host, philosopher George Grant of McMaster University. Dr Grant, why include Augustine in a list of great philosophers? grant: In Augustine, Bruce, the two great sources of Western wisdom are united – the Christian and the Greek. Just as it is impossible to conceive the Western world without the Greeks, it is impossible to conceive that without the story of Israel in revelation, God’s dealing with Israel culminating for the Christian in Christ. Now Augustine lived four centuries after Christ as the Roman world was collapsing in Hippo in North Africa. And through him these two great sources of wisdom come into the West. In him, philosophy meets the Christian religion and the Christian religion comes to grips with philosophy, and this makes it a great moment in the history of the West. His thought – that the two sources from which all our wisdom comes are united in him. Camera moves back to the drama ... with Grant’s voice over. grant: In this scene you will see Augustine meeting a Roman aristocrat who is overwhelmed that he should have become a Christian. rufinus (approaching Augustine and shaking his hand): So you really have become a Christian priest, Augustine. But, surely you can’t take this Palestine superstition seriously, take this Jewish peasant to be God. I thought you were an intelligent man. augustine: I have not turned away from truth in accepting Christ. rufinus: What craziness! Truth? In this crucified Jesus and his wild followers? Have you gone out of your mind? augustine: For the first time I am sane. I am freed by Christ from the conflicts that tormented me. Remember how I used to say, ‘Give me chastity but not yet.’ Yes I talked enough about God, but I did not love him. Do you think one is a philosopher by merely talking about God? Plato knew better than that. rufinus: Come now, you always exaggerate, Augustine. You weren’t perfect, but who is? You were a good citizen of Rome. augustine: God did not make us to be merely citizens of Rome. He had higher plans for us when he made us in his image. Yes I was a man of the world. All I cared about was ambition and lust. I pretended to love goodness, but all I really loved was the flesh in all its forms.

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rufinus: You were a normal man. I wish you still were. augustine: I can remember with horror the day some people dragged me to see a gladiatorial show. At the beginning I kept my eyes shut. But at the first death there was a shout and I opened them. I drank down that savageness. I was drunk with the joy of blood and cruelty. How could I have been so proud of my moral superiority? rufinus: There’s a black side in us all, Augustine. What does Jesus have to say about such things in comparison to a genius like Plato? augustine: I don’t want to belittle Plato. God granted him a very great light. I would go as far as to say that Plato knew all the truth except that the word, the eternal word, has been made flesh in Jesus Christ. rufinus: Word made flesh? That’s a contradiction in terms. augustine: No it’s not a contradiction. It is the mystery by which all else is made clear. Don’t you see that the philosopher’s principles are not enough for men of flesh and blood. They are too abstract. You can’t find God through them. So God came into the world so that we could know him. With Christ we are reborn. With Christ we are resurrected into eternity. rufinus: Well, if it is a sense of rebirth you want, why don’t you stick to a healthy cult like Osiris. Those Egyptians have a marvellous myth of resurrection. augustine: It is no myth or image that I have found. Christ is that which lies behind all images. He is reality itself. Screen fades to black. rogers: What is the relation between religion and philosophy, Dr Grant? grant: Well, in Augustine religion and philosophy are very closely linked. You see the only philosophers he knew were the Greek philosophers – Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus. For them the highest object of knowledge was God and Augustine accepted them. What Christianity added to this was that God had revealed himself in time, that is, unveiled himself so that men could have more perfect knowledge of him. But Augustine takes the philosophers as true. Therefore he thinks that what he is doing at the altar when he is worshipping is almost the same thing as when he is philosophizing or contemplating. They have the common object, the object God.

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rogers: But aren’t there many philosophers that think that philosophy has nothing to do with religion? grant: Of course. And in the modern world, indeed, faith and reason, revelation and philosophy have split apart and this splitting apart is inevitable for philosophers whether they are believers or not. But even with that splitting apart philosophy and religion can’t get along without each other somehow. It is like a marriage where the partners don’t know whether they love or hate each other but they can’t leave each other alone. But in Augustine you see philosophy coming to grips with the chief Western religion. There are other religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, all kinds, philosophy comes to grips with them, but what is interesting is that this religion is the particular one of the Western world. In Augustine we see philosophy coming to grips with it. rogers: But aren’t faith and reason distinct ideas? grant: Oh yes in a certain sense, but not for Augustine. There were in his day religious fundamentalists who thought faith was everything. You have a man like Tertullian, who thinks that reason is a pagan activity. These fundamentalists remain with us until today. In the modern world you have people who do not believe in God and think that philosophy is corrupted by having any contact with faith. This wouldn’t be true for Augustine. For Augustine faith and reason would be tied very closely together. Indeed, faith and reason would be different activities of the human mind’s journey into God. And so you don’t have this division at all. Now in this scene you will see Augustine talking to a religious fundamentalist about faith and reason. cephus: That’s what they’re saying, Augustine, it is wrong to be so concerned with philosophy. augustine: And what’s wrong with it Cephus? cephus: You are acting like a professor instead of a bishop. augustine: What do they mean? cephus: You put reason before faith. augustine: How ridiculous. cephus: Ridiculous? They are right. If faith in Christ is good enough for the rest of them, then why not for you? augustine: By faith, Cephus, you don’t mean blind faith do you? If that were so, then one faith would be as true as another. Faith in

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Venus would be as true as faith in Christ. How do we know that they are wrong and we are right? cephus: It is on the authority of the Church. augustine: I don’t question the authority of the Church. All learning starts with authority. A child could learn nothing if it did not accept the authority of its parents and teachers. And authority demands faith. cephus: So you agree with me. augustine: It’s not that simple. A child should not accept the authority of the parent just because it has power but to gain understanding and knowledge. cephus: What does all this have to do with faith in Christ? augustine: Our faith in Christ is no excuse to close our mind. Haven’t you always heard me say that we believe so that we can seek understanding? cephus: All this love of knowledge is really just pride. You are setting yourself up in place of God. augustine: Do you really suppose that God abhors the use of our minds? His gift of reason is what makes us superior to the animals. cephus: You talk like a pagan scientist. For the Christian it is faith that matters. augustine: You mistake what faith is. You make it sound like sleepwalking or blind choice. You put faith on one side and reason on the other, as if they contradicted each other. Did you ever think that man couldn’t have faith at all if he didn’t have reason. cephus: I don’t follow you. augustine: For animals there would be no question of believing or not believing. It is only because we are intelligent human beings that faith in God arises at all. All who talk of faith without reason make a mockery of Christianity. rogers: That may have been all right for a brilliant man like Augustine, but how can an ordinary person understand religion the way Augustine would have had it understood? grant: I don’t know what you mean by an ordinary person, Bruce. For all men are faced with the measureless fact of existence, the mysteries all around, trying to understand what we are and what the universe is. It seems to me that we have no alternative but to try to think about what is true about the universe. And religion is one of

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the great answers, and we have to think about that and understand our religion if we are religious believers. I grant authority. I think authority has a place in all parts of human life – in politics, in education, in religion. But authority must always be based on reason. You see in the modern world, for instance, you have all kinds of authorities presenting themselves to people. But how do they choose? They choose which authority to accept by reason. I don’t see how reason cannot be ultimately important. As Luther said, ‘A man must do his own believing as he does his own dying.’ rogers: Undoubtedly Augustine has a great reputation, but what practical effect has his philosophy had? grant: He had enormous practical effect. He came at the time when the Roman Empire was collapsing. People were going to live in those terrible fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. It was his thought that sustained them during those terrible centuries before the wonderful civilization of the Middle Ages arose. And it was his vision that really stamped itself, more than any, on the Middle Ages. If you want to understand, for instance, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages with their sense of transcendence and moving into the beyond, it is from Augustine more than anyone else that this vision comes. rogers: What was it from his political thought that had such a great influence? grant: The separation between church and state. In the Islamic or for that matter in the communist world there is no distinction between church and state. The church is the state, the state is the church. In the West there has always been this distinction between the church and the state. It was Augustine who formulated that distinction more than any other. rogers: Where would I as a reader begin to learn something about Augustine’s political philosophy? grant: In his City of God. I think it is a wonderful volume. It unites the criticism of Roman assumptions with his own setting down of Christian political assumptions. Now in this scene, for instance, you see Augustine face to face with the Roman general Boniface, arguing about the church and the state. boniface (pointing to a map of army positions): Here we are, Hippo; the

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Vandals are here. In three weeks they will be at our gates, the siege will be desperate. I will need all the support I can get. augustine: You can rest assured, General. We Christians will do our duty to the state. Only last week I preached obedience to the law. boniface: But we will need more than obedience now, we will need men if we are ever going to stop these barbarians. augustine: General, two days ago a centurion asked me if it was right for him to be a soldier and a Christian. I answered yes. boniface: So I was informed. But you don’t seem to appreciate our situation. This is a life-and-death struggle. The Hordes are ready to wipe out this city. augustine: You have a great responsibility. You are always in my prayers. boniface: There’s a time for prayers and it’s not now. Where will we be if this city is wiped out? augustine: Where we are right now – in the hands of almighty God. boniface: Do you understand your responsibility to the state? Where would you be without us? augustine: You persecuted us for many centuries. boniface: That’s all over. My God man, the Empress is a Christian and nearly all the good politicians all around her. Rome has taken Christianity into its heart. augustine: But only to use it. You power-hungry Romans will use anything. You used to think the old pagan gods would bring you success but now you have taken up with Christianity. boniface: And we have succeeded. augustine: Have you? What kind of state would worship God for its own ends? God should be worshipped because he is the true God. Whether he brings us prosperity or death. boniface: This kind of arguing isn’t going to save the city. I need your help. You must encourage our people to fight. augustine: That’s exactly what I can’t do. I can’t teach my people that political events come first, that they matter supremely. boniface: Don’t matter? They will certainly matter when this city is sacked, your men killed, your women taken as prostitutes. augustine: No, General. Politics do not finally matter. We Christians are pilgrims passing through this world. Sometimes we live under good government, sometimes bad.

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boniface: You will see the difference between good governments and bad if you allow the Vandals to overrun the city. augustine: People will convert the Vandals and out of that conversion will come another civilization. boniface: Another civilization? To replace eternal Rome? Ours is the greatest civilization that has ever been. Nothing can replace it. And I say this to you – after Rome has given you citizenship you have a duty to her. augustine: We will do our duty as citizens. But we are not finally citizens of Rome. Our citizenship is in heaven. We belong to the city of God, not to the city of this world. boniface: Have you no gratitude, Bishop? Rome saves the world from chaos and injustice. augustine: Do you think so? What forms the character of any society is what its members love. The people of the empire love only greed and possession not justice. Rome will fall because it has become morally bankrupt. Not because of what you or I do. The city of God will stand because its foundations are the love of God. boniface: I’m not getting my job done arguing with you. Good day, Bishop. I count on you for your duty. rogers: You spoke of Augustine’s great work, The City of God, Dr Grant, but you did not mention his Confessions. Of what importance are his Confessions? grant: They are of a very great importance. They teach us psychology, religion, and philosophy. There is also a remarkable philosophical discussion on time in the Confessions. They are addressed to God. And in them Augustine exposes all his own evil before God with all his masterly psychological insight. People have said that they are the first document about the modern man. These days when the psychology we are taught is so often full of the onward and upward, very optimistic about human nature, it is remarkably good to read a psychology such as Augustine’s which sees not only the beautiful side of the human heart but also its capacity for loving very evil things. rogers: Now you said in effect that Augustine had a great understanding for evil. How does he reconcile evil with the existence of God? grant: Of course, this is the great mystery for anyone and particularly for the religious believer. It is a mystery that we inevitably ponder.

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Now Augustine’s works, all his works – he wrote voluminously – are really just a long commentary on the providence of God and human evil. Now it isn’t possible shortly to give an answer for his answer is a very systematic and a very highly worked out answer. A most brilliant answer. But what is wonderful about that answer, is that unlike some theologians, he looks evil straight in the face, both moral evil and natural evil. He does not turn away from it. Because of that, his answer is a very great answer. rogers: Isn’t it rather difficult for a person who has suffered terribly as a result of evil to derive any consolation or help from theories about it? grant: Well, evil is a practical or personal problem and a theoretical problem. When a person is suffering, one gives them love and tenderness. It is also a theoretical problem that men must face inevitably because they face evil in the world. Then it seems to me that answers have to be sought out like you search for answers for any question. For instance, some of Augustine’s great generalizations, philosophic generalizations about evil, may not seem a help to us at certain moments. But really they are a great help when one thinks of it. Now here we see Augustine discussing the providence of God with a troubled monk. cephus: How can I go on? When I pray, all I can think of is my father slaughtered, my mother in their hands as a slave. It is not only them. Every day brings news of some terrible outrage, cities sacked, congregations burned alive in their churches. How can God allow it? augustine: Even Our Lord cried out in desolation. cephus: Evil everywhere. Our creator is love but look what he has created. augustine: When evil strikes a man as it has struck you, Cephus, it seems nothing but outrage. It drives one mad. But you are a priest of God and must bear it. cephus: At a time like this how is it possible? augustine: Cephus, how would you define evil? cephus: It is the opposite of good. augustine: No, not quite. Not the opposite, but the absence, of good. cephus: Evil an absence? augustine: It is a nothingness. You must not think like the heretics that evil is the opposite of good. That makes evil a positive force in the

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world. We must remember that everything in the world comes from God and is basically good. cephus: Everything basically good? Even a murderer? augustine: Even a murderer. For he is a man and the nature of man is good. A murderer is only evil because he has ceased to be fully a man. His evil is the absence of his manhood. All evil is such absence. The good that is turned bad. cephus: But why does God let it go bad? If he is all powerful, if he can create us good, why does he not keep us good? Why does he allow the world to be full of slaughterers and torturers? augustine: That is the real question. To understand why God created. cephus: Why God created? What do you mean, why? augustine: After all, God did not need to create. All perfection is in himself. He must have created from love to share his perfection. cephus: Created from love? This world? augustine: Before him was an infinity of possible worlds, he chose this one. cephus: But when you ask Why this one? you cannot answer, can you? augustine: No. We cannot grasp the final answer except perhaps in the cross. Just because we cannot see the final answer does not mean we can say nothing. cephus: But what can you say that is worth anything? augustine: Look at one part of creation – human beings. Now don’t we find some meaning in the evil that bests us? cephus: Where? augustine: Men are superior to the animals are they not? cephus: Yes, of course. augustine: How? cephus: They can reason and they can choose. augustine: That means that we are free to do evil as well as good. cephus: That is true. augustine: To create a being higher than the animals God had to open the door to evil. cephus: But why? Why could he not create us so that we loved only him? augustine: He did not want slaves to worship him. But love freely given and in that was the possibility of evil. We were free to love ourselves and not him.

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cephus: How can this help us when our parents are slaughtered? augustine: It gives purpose to our life in time. Purpose for which we must suffer. All history is an unfolding in which men learn to love themselves or to love God. Two cities founded on two principles. Members of this world love themselves and are in contempt of God; members of the heavenly city love God and are in contempt of themselves. Do not be afraid for your parents. They have loved God and are in his peace. His peace be with you, dear friend. Walking over to he cross, Augustine kneels down and prays ... Oh Lord, what torments we must suffer on this earth. Give us your grace to bear them. Sustain us in our grief with the assurance of your joy. You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until we find rest in thee. Bless us, Oh Lord. Camera fades out slowly.

Television Script: ‘Kant’

This half-hour program was broadcast on 2 August 1961 in the same CBC Explorations television series as the Augustine program. Grant also wrote the script for the dramatizations (in which the part of Kant was played by Barry Morse) and the interview segments, again with Bruce Rogers questioning Grant. The transcription presented here does not vary substantially from Grant’s draft script.

Scene opens with Immanuel Kant writing and thinking to himself. kant: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? Those are the problems of philosophy. They all depend on a much deeper question – what is man? Our purpose must be to restore the dignity of man by placing him once again at the centre of all existence. Music begins and introduction begins. bruce rogers: Our opening scene was based on the writing of one of the greatest philosophers of all time, Immanuel Kant – on Explorations, the fourth and final program of our series on four philosophers who have profoundly influenced the Western world. In this program on Kant, we will try to glimpse his greatness in imagined scenes from his life with our host philosopher George Grant from McMaster University. Dr Grant, why is Kant one of the greatest philosophers? grant: Kant lived in Germany about two hundred years ago in a town called Königsberg, which the Russians have now renamed Kaliningrad. He never moved more than fifty miles from that little town.

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Yet in his thought, all the great themes of modern Europe are brought into unity – science, democracy, Protestantism, progress, the analytical and critical spirit. I think it is this wonderful uniting of these themes that makes him the greatest of modern philosophers. Where Shakespeare stands in English literature, Kant stands in modern philosophy. He is the towering genius. I may be prejudiced on this because it was Kant who illumined me as far as philosophy went. He was the one who taught me to be a philosopher. Now in this scene we see Kant discussing the implications of modern science with his pupils. student: Professor Kant, I am becoming confused with your philosophy. One moment you talk about man as being the centre of life, as if he were an object that scientists could measure like a stone. kant: I talk in both ways because both are true. student: How can both be true? Either man is more important than a stone or he is not? kant: No doubt you have learned this law of Newton’s in your physics class (going over to the blackboard to write down a formula). F = m1 × m2 over r squared.1 That would describe your falling from a window just as this (Kant demonstrates by dropping a piece of chalk). When you fall, you are an object just like this piece of chalk. A scientist can assess the causes of your behaviour just as much as the chalk. student: But surely only some parts of my behaviour. He can tell how I will fall but he can’t tell whether I will jump or not. kant: But why not? Give us time. As psychologists observe men, they will be able to tell why men jump or why other men push them. Psychology is a new science but as it develops we should be able to assess the causes of man’s behaviour and predict it just as surely as I predict what will happen when this ball swings towards and hits the other. student: I don’t believe it. kant: But of course we will. If scientists could know all the facts about any one man, they could predict all the details of his behaviour for the whole of his future. student: This makes us machines, robots! kant: Observed by scientists that is what we are, just part of the great system of nature and a somewhat insignificant part of that.

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student: He is the most important creature on earth. Certainly you don’t deny that? kant: Ah, yes, but think of the infinity of space. Man used to believe that the earth was the centre of the universe and that all revolved around it. Well, now we know that the earth revolves around the sun and is only one of a number of planets and our whole solar system is a rather unimportant part of the universe. Think of the thousands of stars, millions of miles away. Don’t you marvel at the infinity of space? student: Space may be more immense than we once thought but you haven’t proved that it is infinite. kant: How do you think of an end of space? I mean when you come to the end, what would there be? More space! One can always take another step. Man is a mere speck in the infinity of space and time. student: We haven’t talked of time. Time did have a beginning. kant: Ah yes, but what was before that beginning of time, was there a time when there was no time or another kind of time? You see, contradictions arise when one thinks in that way, one cannot avoid it. Any man’s life is a mere puff of smoke at these immensities. student: Professor, you are a philosopher, why insist on these facts? They make a person feel like their life is meaningless and what then? kant: I insist on these facts because they are true – scientists can prove to you that is what the universe is like. There is no use any longer imagining that we live in a closed box. We know we live in the vast system of the universe which is subject to the law of cause and effect. And as objects in this system we are just like this book. student: But you haven’t restored the dignity of man. You have totally destroyed it ... Scene fades and camera is back on George Grant. bruce rogers: Kant was taken up with science. Did he have any personal knowledge of it? grant: As a young man in the first part of his life, Kant was a scientist of some distinction. His work on the origin of the solar system would give him a place in the history of science even if he didn’t write a word of philosophy. But in the last half of his life, he turned

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almost entirely to the study of philosophy to write what is known as his great critical system. rogers: Kant said that when a man falls he is considered an object like a piece of chalk. What were his views on this? grant: Well, Kant understood, you see, that science was concerned with the objects of the world. He saw that man, as observed, was an object of the world and therefore science could understand him. If a scientist gave me a hypodermic now, it would change my behaviour entirely, and that would come from his knowledge of biochemistry. rogers: But if man is able to be studied as an object like chalk or a stone, then how can we say that he is important? grant: The scientific view of man is observing man as he exists in the external world. But Kant sees clearly that when you pass beyond being a scientist you start being a man, that is, you start acting in the world and choosing between good and evil; then you must assume that he is free and of infinite significance. The scientist who can give me the hypodermic still has to choose whether it is good or evil to give me that hypodermic. As that, he is free to make that decision, to choose if the world should be this way or that way. It is Kant’s greatness, to me, that he sees that this is the central fact of man – how he acts, and under what motives he chooses to act and live in the world. He is not concerned with man as an observed fact but man as he acts and creates the world. This is what distinguishes him from the Greeks, who were interested in thought; Kant is essentially interested in practice and in moral action. Here we see Kant discussing man as free and man as determined. kant: The dignity of man is that he is a moral agent. He is free. student: But you just said that he is not, that he is a speck in an infinite machine. kant: But he also stands poised between good and evil. student: How does that make him free? kant: We cannot blame a wolf when it kills its prey because it cannot choose otherwise. It is led by its instincts. But we do blame a man for murder because he could have chosen otherwise. student: Yes, we can choose wrong, and when we do we are worse than animals.

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kant: The fact of our choice puts us on a different plane, above the world of instincts, alone among animals. Man is free to decide whether good or evil shall prevail. That is his dignity. student: I am sorry to be rude, Professor, but you are now completely contradicting what you said a moment ago. You talk of man as free and then as un-free. kant: It is necessary to talk in both ways. student: But we aren’t two creatures free at one moment and determined at the next. kant: We aren’t two creatures, but we can, each of us, be considered from two points of view. When I look at other people, I observe them as objects and thus completely determined, but when I myself act, then at the moment of decision my choice of action is free. student: Then one way of looking at man must be true and the other false. kant: Not at all. As scientists, we are interested in understanding the world. In order to understand the world, we must assume that everything is caused. student: Then it is just the way we think and not really true. Is that what you mean? kant: What I mean is that the questions the scientist asks will determine the kind of answers he is going to get. He is interested in nature and nature must always appear to us as caused. student: Do you mean that they are only importing their own theories into nature? kant: No not at all. Look at the success scientific answers have, based on the assumption that it is possible to discover natural causes of events. Do you suppose that that success would have come if that were not a true assumption? student: Then why do you use a different assumption in morality and say that man is free? kant: Decision is different than observation. We cannot change the world by observing but by action. As moral agents we must act – we are totally responsible whether this or that happens and thus we must assume that we are free. student: But that is a feeling. As a scientist you know that you are not free.

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kant: It is more central to a man to be a moral agent than to be a scientist. At the moment of decision I have the knowledge of good and evil as they really are. student: What you are saying is that in science we assume one thing and in morality another. kant: Exactly. That is the cause of our paradox, you see. As scientists, we must assume that man is determined, but as moralists we must act as if we are free. And philosophy must not discard either of these suppositions. It must not neglect the possibility of science in the name of morality, but even more it must not deny morality in the name of science. We must understand how both of these things are possible. Scene fades. rogers: How are both morality and science possible? grant: Well, Kant’s answer to this is a very subtle and systematic answer. It seems impossible to give it in quick capsule form. One must read his Critique of Pure Reason, where it is given. If I could save one book out of modern civilization, I would save the Critique of Pure Reason. You can’t describe the Critique of Pure Reason in a moment. It seems that some people look for capsules for philosophy. They wouldn’t expect in their study of quantum physics to learn it without a long period of study, but somehow they expect that philosophy should be able to answer every question easily. Well, that is just not the case and you can’t get Kant easily. rogers: Well, allowing that we can’t get quick and easy answers, are there any generalizations that could be made about what Kant says? grant: Yes, I think one can say that Kant is primarily a philosopher of mind. Mind as knowing and mind as willing. One thing he says about knowing, for instance – he reverses the common sense idea of knowing (taking a pencil from his coat pocket). Now if you take this pencil, for instance, the common-sense idea of knowing is that this pencil somehow impresses itself on my mind as impressions on a wax tablet. Kant says this is quite impossible [if we are] to explain the precise nature of modern science. Therefore he says we must assume that, in knowing, it is the mind that impresses itself on the object, on the pencil. And it is the instruments of our mind that

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make our world so that it is knowable and so we can understand it. rogers: How does this relate to morality? grant: Well, you see in knowledge, knowledge is about the world and therefore is limited by and to our world. In morality, we are not so limited. Morality is sheer creativity to Kant. We give to ourselves in our reasons a standard by which we judge between right and wrong – we creatively impose that on the world. This understanding of morality as the central creative act is right at the centre of Kant. It isn’t man as knowing that matters, it is man as acting. Now in this scene you see Kant discussing morality with his students. student: You put moral action at the centre of life. Now what exactly is moral action? kant: Obeying the command of your conscience – choosing right rather than wrong. student: But what tells us what’s right and what’s wrong? kant: You must act on the motive of duty alone. That is, on a motive that you would will as the law of the universe, as if you were creating the world, setting a pattern for the behaviour of any man in similar circumstances. student: Are you suggesting that all of our behaviour should follow the same pattern? kant: Oh, no. Only those that are required to. For example, I may choose red or white wine for dinner today. But that doesn’t really matter. But if I owe you fifty dollars, then I ought to repay you whether I want to or not. What I want to do should not affect what I ought to do. student: You make it sound very uncomfortable. But surely there are lots of things that we want to do that are perfectly moral – for instance, it is my duty to go and see my family this weekend but I also want to. kant: But whether you want to or not does not affect the morality of your actual going. But what matters is whether you do it from duty or simply because you want to. student: Why is it so wonderful to do something from duty? kant: We are the only animals that can. All other creatures are bound to blindly follow their desires – they have no choice. But man alone

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can choose a course opposed to his desires. He can choose a motive that sets his desires aside in the name of duty. student: Motives are not the only thing, Professor. I mean, look, a doctor may think he has diagnosed a patient properly but the patient dies. The consequences are dreadful. kant: But the action is still good. It is not by consequences that we can assess the rightness or wrongness of what people do. student: Are you suggesting that consequences don’t matter? Should we all go around paying no attention to the results of our action? kant: Of course I am not suggesting any such nonsense. If I drive my carriage too fast, I may kill people. But the killing is not the wrongness of my reckless driving. What is wrong is my carelessness, my irresponsibility, and that is equally wrong whether I happened to kill someone or not. student: Are you saying then that physical things don’t matter? kant: No. Poverty and tyranny matter absolutely and they must be done away with. But why? Because of what they do to the wills of people. You see, physical things are only means. What is important is a good will. Good wills do not exist to help society. Society exists to produce good wills. student: What on earth do you mean? Society produces many other good things in this life – health, riches, education. kant: All of those things are only good to something beyond themselves. The only absolutely good thing is a good will. You can take education, for example; education, of course, is a very fine thing but it is not the purpose of life and it can be used for evil. I am sure you all know many educated men who are rogues. student: Yes, but look at the harm that good people can do. kant: No, not really. True goodness is what matters. The good man makes the whole process clear, makes the point. Now let us consider the world without men. What is it? A pointless machine full of suffering, obeying laws over which it has no control. One can see no final purpose in it. But look at man, and the purpose begins to become clear because he is free to choose whether he will do good or evil, and it matters absolutely which he chooses. There is the purpose of all our lives and indeed of the whole world. It is, in fact, a school for goodness.

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Scene fades. rogers: The only absolutely good thing is a good will? grant: Here I think you see Kant’s relation to the inwardness of German Protestantism. He makes morality centre on the motive. Kant understands that there are goods which are good simply as means, like health. Health is a good thing but it is only a means to do other things. He asks himself what is something that is good completely in itself. He says that which is good always and in every circumstance is a good will because all other goods are related, exist to produce good wills, and therefore this is the centre of his moral system. I think this is wonderful for explaining something about life – why there is purpose for everybody in life. If you make the purpose of life moral goodness, it is something that is open to everybody. If you make talent, education, money, or pleasure the centre of life, then some people have it and some people don’t. But everybody can make moral decisions and therefore in saying that moral goodness is the centre of human life you make the purpose of life open to everybody. rogers: Where would I find what Kant says about moral personality? grant: To start, in a book of his which has a rather pedantic title, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; it is a short book and anyone can read it, a most wonderful book. Where Plato’s Republic, it seems to me, is the great book on ethics in the ancient world, this seems to me the great book on ethics of the modern world. rogers: Did Kant apply this to politics? grant: Yes, it inevitably had political consequences. The political consequences of democracy and equality. For Kant if everybody has open to them the final decision of making judgments between right and wrong, then everyone must take part in government, and is equal to take part in government. Now in this scene you see Kant discussing politics with his old friend Green. kant (pouring some wine): This first glass must be to the news from France. green: What’s this Immanuel? kant: It just arrived today that the Bastille has fallen to the people of Paris.

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green: Oh I’ve heard. But I’ll be damned if I’ll drink to it. That rabble in charge of Paris. kant: Drink, I say, this is the dawn of democracy – the beginning of government under the will of the people. green: Beginning of a bloody revolution, the end of all law and order. kant: No, a new order. Men will govern themselves instead of living under oppression. green: Do you really believe that men are capable of governing themselves? kant: It is the only rational system. The will of the state must represent the will of its members. green: But we were never meant for it. Look at our system in England. We recognize that some people were brought up to be rulers – the rest of us never claimed to be equal. kant: Oh, Green, I thought you understood my philosophy. Men are all equal in what ultimately concerns them: they are all morally free. green: I don’t believe it. Equality is denied by all the facts. Some are educated; some are not. There is a natural order in this business, Immanuel. God created some to rule and some to be ruled. Do you want us to be ruled by that rabble you call the people? kant: I was brought up by uneducated parents, Green. My father was a harness-maker and yet he and my mother could distinguish the difference between right and wrong quite as readily as an aristocrat or priest. That is the basis of democracy. Government of the people does not mean that all have equal talent but that all are equal in something much more important than talent. They have the power to make judgments between right and wrong – therefore they deserve a voice in their government. It is their natural right. green: Their right to interfere in matters that they don’t know the first thing about? kant: Would you have them kept in chains, Green? Remember Rousseau said that men are born free but everywhere they are in chains. green: But you are writing a book on the rational evil in human beings. If men are tainted with evil, how do you expect them to be good enough to govern themselves? kant: But which of us is not tainted? That is the whole point. Your aris-

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tocrat may be tainted just as much as anyone else; that is no argument against democracy. Reason demands a government where all shall have the power for developing the freedom which they possess. After all, this is the principle of the Enlightenment. green: Are you identifying that rabble in Paris with the Enlightenment? kant: Yes, have the courage to use your intelligence. That is the motto of the Enlightenment and that is precisely what these people in Paris are doing. At this stage all over Europe people are shaking off the shackles of their immaturity. We cannot live any longer under these old authorities. green: The overthrowing of authority will only lead to chaos, my friend – they are not good enough for freedom. kant: You have the impertinence to despair when men have the courage to take their lives into their own hands and to demand a government based on reason instead of on privilege. green: The age of democracy will be a matter of viciousness and greed. I live in nothing but despair of it. kant: Despair, because men choose to build a government on reason rather than privilege and forcefully gained power? green: Yes, it will be a false age. An age of pigs at the trough. kant: No, you are wrong, Green. Man is not so completely an animal as to be indifferent to reason and thus to duty. Recognizing duty he will behold a power and a dignity that will surpass all other good and that power is nothing but freedom. green (chuckling out loud): You head is in the clouds, Immanuel. We have to live in this world. kant: Man is a member of two worlds. In one he is a mere animal creature which will shortly have to give up its matter to the planet which it inhabits – this speck of dust in the universe, this world that it shares with the dust and the stars. But as a member of the other world his worth is infinitely elevated – revealed to him is a moral power independent of the physical life, not subject to the limitations and conditions and restrictions of life in terms of space and time but eternal and reaching out into the infinite. Two things fill the mind with ever increasing awe and admiration: the stars in the heaven above and the moral law within.

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Scene slowly fades as music comes on and credits roll.

Note 1 Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) revolutionized physics by explaining the working of universal gravitation that holds planets in their orbits.

Conceptions of Health

This essay appeared in Psychiatry and Responsibility, edited by Helmut Schoek and James W. Wiggins (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand 1962), 117– 34, and an abridged version was reprinted in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 334–45.

To start from a traditional platitude: Health and disease are generally described in relation to each other, and therapy is defined with emphasis on one or the other. Thus, in the Oxford Dictionary one finds under ‘therapy’ such phrases as ‘the art of healing’ and ‘the curative treatment of disease.’ The verbs ‘to heal’ and ‘to cure’ are both defined as ‘to restore to health.’ To restore is to give back, and so curing implies the loss of something that is normally present and that now through therapy is given back. We are inclined, however, to look at the matter the other way around when we are being practical. We think of our breathing only when it is obstructed. Health is thought of as the absence of disease. Indeed, in the disease-therapy-health progression, therapy inevitably looks both ways, and in the various moments of its activity fastens its gaze now this way, now that. This is true of all the influential systems of therapy, both in the past and in the present. From the Western tradition I single out the two most influential – the Platonic progression, ‘ignorance – conversion to dialectic – illumination,’ and the Christian progression of ‘sin – repentance through grace – salvation.’ These two have often been united; they have often been thought of as one. Without discussing this subtle matter, I will for the present purposes distinguish them. From the modern world I single out the medical pattern, ‘neurosis – psychotherapy – normality.’

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In these systems, therapy has its positive and its negative moments. The philosopher must be continually aware of his ignorance if he would persevere in the pursuit of wisdom. If the Christian is to be in true repentance before the Cross, he must face some of his past acts as sins. The patient must admit the unconscious source of some of his acts if the analysis is to be a success. On the other hand, philosophy will be frustrated by misologism if its dialectical struggles are not known as leading to the Good. The Christian’s repentance will leave him a Stoic or a Pharisee if it is not seen as preparation for the divine love. The modern patient must give some meaning to the idea of normality. Indeed, one aspect of the art of the therapist is to find a rhythm between these positive and negative moments suitable to the individual case. As modern psychotherapists have made their art central to North American society and established an institutional framework appropriate to their social power, two phenomena about their theory and practice become increasingly evident – the certainty of their conceptions of disease, the vagueness of their conceptions of health. To account for this would require a book of social history and is not my purpose here. Some generalizations about it can, however, be made. 1) In the work of the master himself, therapeutic pessimism is continually present. This seems to me to arise above all from Freud’s ambiguous relationship to modern science and the modern assumptions about man and civilization which are the framework of that science. He writes of himself as one of the dedicated priesthood of science who have put aside the ancient religious and metaphysical superstitions and who can, therefore, distinguish provable knowledge from mythology. Basic to this positivism is the identification of knowledge with human power to change the world. At the same time, one result of his science was an account of the structure of the mind in which reason is viewed both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, as arising from the suppression of the instinctual in man. That suppression of the instinctual is seen as the very cause of personal and social disease. The gaining of power over nature, central to modern science, is the very cause of disease when applied by man to himself. This ambiguous relation toward science is illustrated in the very history of Freud’s work and in his account of that work. In his writings before 1919, he is firm in stating the methodological principle that

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his conceptions are not final, but are hypotheses to be changed readily in the light of observation and practice. Yet even these earlier techniques and conceptions are themselves based on something extra-scientific – his own self-analysis of the 1890s. To see that this self-analysis is extra-scientific in psychoanalytical terms, it is only necessary to state that since Freud’s day all professional analysts must themselves be analyzed by somebody else.1 The very term ‘self-analysis’ is one of ridicule to the orthodox. Yet for psychoanalysis to come to be, there had to be an original self-analysis. It is for this reason that Freud’s most loyal disciples, while praising him as the great scientist of the psyche, still write of this self-analysis in language that believers would use about the redemption of the world by the passion of Jesus Christ. According to Edward Glover, there have been two moments in history of crucial significance – the first repression buried deep in primitive times and Freud’s recognition of the causes of repression in his self-analysis.2 That language of uniqueness and victory is best found in Ernest Jones’ life of Freud on the first page of the chapter on the self-analysis. ‘Once done, it is done forever,’ writes Jones as a latter-day St Paul.3 This is not said to cast ridicule on this great act of Freud by comparing it with the acts of acts, but simply to point out that the basis of modern psychotherapy is not a scientific discovery in the proper sense and that there is an ambiguity in the Freudians resulting from their insistence both that they are scientists and yet that they must pay homage to this act. Indeed, in Freud’s later writings (Civilization and Its Discontents most particularly), he passes completely beyond the scientific into the metaphysical. Eros and Thanatos, which are the final rulers of human existence, are not written about as scientific hypotheses, but as postulated realities from which he deduces a metaphysic of history in terms of which his therapeutic and social pessimism, implicit in his earlier practical works, is lifted to a new level of intelligibility. Civilization is a product of the ego and the superego, which arose as the individual was forced to come to terms with ‘reality’ – that is, to live by the reality principle rather than by the pleasure principle. Freud works out this tragic history, not only in terms of the life of the individual, but of the race as a whole. Sexuality is the basic manifestation of the life instinct, Eros. Civilization is produced by sublimated Eros. But sublimated Eros is desexualized Eros. Thus, though civilization is built by Eros, con-

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stant de-sexualization is necessary as civilization broadens its sway. Hence, Eros is weakened, and the death instinct is released, with all its potentialities for destruction. In fact, civilization moves to its destruction as it moves to its fulfilment. Here is no optimistic ‘gnosticism’ of progress, but a statement of certain necessary limits to human existence. The earlier insistence by Freud that psychoanalysis is part of the liberating tradition of modern science here openly meets the facts that Western civilization’s modern mark has been science, that the mark of that science has been the pursuit of power, and that, therefore, modern science is a result of the successful repression that Western man has imposed on the free play of his instincts, and this in turn causes the releasing of the death instinct. Freud’s therapeutic pessimism is thus understandable, and it is no wonder that health for man is a very limited state. Therapy does not result in a return of the repressed instincts to full play, but to a sublimation through recognition of what has been repressed – a sublimation which holds in check the death instinct, but which has inevitable stoical undertones. It is not too much to say that health becomes for Freud the making of the best of a bad job. His metaphysical and tragic sense of life leads him to assumptions about human existence very different from the optimism so characteristic of the science of his day. Such a position could not include any clear or positive account of what constitutes health for human beings. 2) As the psychotherapeutic movement changed from its origins as a minority of secularized Jews living in the alien atmosphere of the Hapsburg Empire to the wielders of social power that they are now in North America, it is not surprising that their conceptions of health should have been modified. Their enormously rapid rise to a position of ascendance was partly made possible by the fact that they remained within the medical profession. In early twentieth-century America the medical profession had unequalled prestige because it combined the power of modern science with the practical ‘do-goodery’ of liberal Protestantism. And the medical profession itself – particularly its more advanced members, who were held by the religion of science – had a clear interest in accepting psychotherapy. The very arrogance of the modern medical profession saw in the new successes of psychotherapy – assumedly carried out entirely within naturalist assumptions – the chance for themselves to be the arbiters not only of the body but of the

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mind. American scientists and doctors were much more practical and immediate than the Europeans from whom psychoanalysis had sprung. Freud may have thought that he had freed his mind from finalist conceptions in the name of positivism, but this for him was mere theory compared to the unphilosophical practicality which was the very fabric of the American Protestant scientist. In accepting psychotherapy, therefore, American medicine was not only influenced by it, but also put its arrogant practical stamp upon it. Further, as psychotherapy took over the leadership in providing mental health in a mass society, it was inevitably caught even deeper in the dilemmas of responsible success. So psychotherapy was influenced not only by American medicine but by the whole fabric of American culture. Professions do not gain power in any society unless in large measure they do what powerful influences in that society want. Psychotherapists adjusted themselves to the needs, desires, and interests of the industrialized, democratic, capitalist society. Finally, as responsibility for the mass society grows, the very immediacies of practicality push the profession farther and farther away from clarity about its ends. When a physician attends a child with earache, obviously something needs to be done. When the child is better, the doctor has a waiting room full of patients and has little time to define health other than to say that the child can now do what children generally do in our society. Most parents and doctors will settle for such a pragmatic account of health. So equally the office of the psychotherapist is crowded, and beyond is the spectre of the mental hospitals. The patient may still be neurotic, but she can now function as a wife and mother and need not come to the office or, worse, go on to the mental hospital. In this paper I am criticizing the emptiness of modern psychotherapy in terms of ultimate truth. But let me state unequivocally that ‘getting on with the job’ is a necessary moral maxim for all men. What the world tends toward without it is seen in quietist societies, and against this we may thank God for our activist tradition. Any theorist who neglects the circumstances that make the maxim necessary neglects an essential aspect of truth in the name of theoretical pride. This is so even in North America, where the maxim is so often an excuse for idolatry. At the same time, however, it is permissible for the theorist to point out the ambiguity in men who arrogate to themselves more and more social power and then justify their confusion by how much work they

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have to do. The absence of any definition of health in modern psychotherapy is certainly in part a function of this latter process. This absence of interest in the meaning of health is seen not only in the everyday work of the clinician, but in the supposedly theoretical books that influence the practitioner. a) Otto Fenichel’s The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis is (I am told) influential among practising therapists.4 They use it to pick out a description of some symptom they have met in their work. It is a plumber’s manual for the Freudians. It achieves this by eliminating all of Freud except that which concerned the immediately useful to the practising therapist. It takes Freud’s writings (between his self-analysis and 1919) and turns them into clear-cut accounts of a method of therapy written entirely within the assumptions of naturalistic positivism. The result of this ‘de-metaphysicizing’ process is six hundred pages of details about techniques of therapy and a few vague lines about the purpose of therapy. Fenichel gives some meaning to that purpose by making a short obeisance to genital primacy, but he does not give substance to that term or show what it means within a systematic account of human nature and destiny. b) Personality and Psychotherapy by Dollard and Miller of Yale is an influential book in the conversations between psychologists and psychotherapists.5 It attempts to integrate the ‘learning theory’ of modern experimental psychology with the methods and ideas of the Freudians. Here pragmatic American good sense is right in the picture, so that the metaphysical and aesthetic elements in Freud are further eliminated, and solid American individualism can come more clearly to the fore. Though I am sure that personality cannot be a solely objective category and that we shall not find out much about persons as personalities by limiting ourselves to the observational methods of modern science, there is something to be learned about persons by such methods and no great harm is done as long as the results are not thought of as selfcontained. Dollard and Miller, indeed, say some quite interesting things about the learning process. But they also claim to be writing of therapy, and here, of course, their method has greater limitations because therapy is a practical art concerned with realizing goals in human life. The result is that when they write about therapy, they write about its methods, implying that all sensible middle-class Americans know what the goals are. Their assumed goals are the perfectly

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decent ones of liberal and gentlemanly minded eastern seaboard professors. The assuming rather than the rational examination of such goals obviously implies a reliance on the massive middle-class consensus about such goals. Such an assuming of the consensus always exerts more immediate influence than the attempt at theoretical clarity. But it is bought at the price of that sloppiness which more and more characterizes the social sciences in North America. From it we cannot expect any clear thought about human health. c) Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition by J. Wolpe is an account of an attempt to use the findings of Pavlovian behaviourism for the purposes of therapy.6 In an era of coexistence the Russians are looking more favourably to Freudianism, while the West is looking more favourably to behaviourism. It is to be doubted whether the West has got the best of the bargain. Professor Wolpe has been willing to go in for the systematic manipulation of cats so that he can discover means by which human beings can be brought to ‘natural’ behaviour. As in the case of Dollard and Miller, the meaning of the ‘natural’ is just assumed, and it is a cruder meaning than theirs – the tough and insensitive middle-class life of the British Dominions. Here we have two hundred and twenty pages of technique and one sentence of positive description of the goal of therapy. With Professor Wolpe one cannot avoid the rhetoric of anger and outrage, for he has that staggering blend of inane innocence and arrogance which goes with the social engineers who have been educated only in the physiological and mechanical aspects of the tradition. Freud knew so well what causes men to enjoy manipulating people by stringent techniques. d) My last example is Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health – a report to the American Joint Commission on Mental Health and Illness by Dr Marie Jahoda.7 After Wolpe, here we return to the human. It is an attempt to describe the content given to the idea of health in the mental health movement. The writer is a civilized American scientist and therefore can present her material systematically. The positive content described, however, is an extraordinary amalgam of ideas from the American tradition – ‘autonomy,’ ‘mastery of environment,’ ‘perception of reality,’ ‘attitudes to the self,’ etc. It is remarkable to find the common-sense platitudes of current American civilization (a mixed bag of many subtle traditions) being put down as the result of objective psychological investigation and thus given status as scientifically

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established. The truism that America is the only civilization with no history before the age of progress is here brought home by the complete acceptance of the scientific mythology and the disregard of the metaphysical and religious issues that Western man has always assumed were involved in the concept of health. One can understand why certain Europeans doubt whether we really belong to that tradition at all, when there seems to be no knowledge of it before 1800. For example, ‘autonomy’ is taken as a criterion (how could it not be in democratic, pluralist America with its Protestant traditions?), and yet any systematic account of what is meant by it, or why it is good, is entirely absent. Thus, the attempt to be positive about health only ends up with accepting the general standards and giving them status by disguising them in the jargon of the social sciences. In contrast to the growing vagueness about health among psychotherapists, there is one group of Freudians who give a definite and positive content to their concept of health and justify that account within a philosophy of nature and history. They are those who have attempted to unite the thought of Freud and Marx. For the rest of this paper I intend to describe and comment on these thinkers. I do so because in them the assumptions of modern humanism about man and society are enunciated in a most explicit way and also because in them much that is unsystematically assumed in official therapy is openly asserted. To put the matter historically: Since 1914 it has surely become obvious that the truth of the assumptions of modernity cannot be taken with quite the uncritical certitude that they were previously. (I use ‘the assumptions of modernity’ in the broad sense to distinguish them from those of the antique world and from those of Christianity.) Yet modern psychotherapy is essentially a product of that modernity. And in these thinkers this modernity is given its widest scope. Therefore, in them the assumptions of modern psychotherapy are most openly explicit. I am also quite confident that the view of existence of these thinkers is becoming and will become increasingly a popular faith in our society. Before specifying who these thinkers are, I must give them a common name. ‘Marxist Freudians’ or ‘Freudian Marxists’ only describes their chief teachers. Professor Voegelin uses the term ‘gnostic’ in his political theory to describe those moderns whose chief end is the realizing of the Kingdom of Man on earth.8 I will, therefore, call these thinkers ‘orgastic gnostics’ because they believe that the liberated life

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of the instincts will provide the positive glory of that kingdom. In the therapeutic movement itself the chief of these men is Wilhelm Reich.9 The last years of Reich’s life have been so full of personal and functional idiosyncrasies (in excommunicating him his orthodox brethren accused him of paranoia) that it is easy to dismiss him simply as a crank. But in such works as Einbruch der Sexualmoral, The Function of the Orgasm, and Character Analysis, the relation between psychoanalysis and modern social theory is worked out comprehensively. The assumptions of gnostic modernity may be false (it is my contention that they are), but in Reich they are put forward honestly and openly rather than in the covert and half-hearted way in which they are presented in the general run of psychoanalytical writings. In his later works Reich was clear about the type of sexual actions that follow from his doctrine, in a way that other modern writers avoid (even if they believe the same) for fear of offending the common-sense traditions of restraint. Reich’s influence may seem to have been dissipated by the last years of his career, but one finds that Norman Mailer (writing as the chief theoretical voice of the ‘hipsters’) takes Reich as the psychoanalytic prophet of the coming liberated world.a And let us have no hesitation in recognizing that among the clever and alienated young (of which there are a growing number in our society) Mailer’s writings are taken with high seriousness, whatever he may intend by them.10 Positions close to Reich’s have been put forward in two clever books by philosophers – Eros and Civilization by H. Marcuse11 and Life Against Death by N. Brown.b 12 As is to be expected from a Marxist theoretician of the highest order (and many Western philosophers have been foolish since 1945 implying there are none such), Marcuse’s work makes the fusion of Freud and Marx in the most brilliant way.13 In what follows I will rely above all on his account of this position. Brown’s Life Against Death has basically the same thesis as that of Marcuse. It is, however, less systematic than the latter’s, because, though his philosophic debt is more explicitly to Hegel than to Marx, Brown interprets Hegel in a Marxian way without being seemingly aware of the depth

a See Mailer’s essay ‘The White Negro,’ Dissent, Winter, 1958, and a discussion in the same journal. b See also the controversy between Marcuse and Fromm in Dissent, Summer, 1955, et seq.

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of Marx’s criticism of Hegel. Indeed he is incomparably less aware of the modern philosophic tradition than is Marcuse. Brown’s book is a worthy supplement to that of Marcuse, however, because it reconciles with Freud many elements from art and religion in both the antique and modern traditions to which Marcuse pays insufficient attention. The concept of health in these thinkers is reached by combining the progressivist view of history (as found in its most sophisticated expositor, Marx) with Freud’s assumption that the alienation of man from his job is caused by the alienation of man from his instincts. In describing that position, I take the Marxist account of history as given.c These men believe, however, that Freud’s recognition of the alienation of man from his instincts leads him to a therapeutic pessimism (as described above) because it is interpreted within a simple nineteenth-century naturalism. He expresses the relationship of man to nature biologically instead of historically. Scarcity for Freud is, therefore, seen as an everpresent condition, imposing the need for dominance and therefore repression in any possible society. He does not understand man’s relation to nature as an historical process (to be understood dialectically) in which the domination of nature by man overcomes the very conditions that it arose to meet. He cannot conceive a society in which scarcity has been overcome and in which man can turn his full attention to liberating his instincts from repression by the very methods that he himself has discovered. Thus, he is forced to see the struggle between Eros and Thanatos as everlasting (I scorn the use of the word ‘eternal’ in this debased sense) and one in which there can be no final overcoming of evil. Marcuse distinguishes between basic and surplus repression. Basic repression is caused by the very conditions of our childhood and can be overcome only by the methods of psychoanalysis carried out in a proper society. Surplus repression has arisen from the necessities of class dominance in the age of scarcity. It is historical and can be removed when it is no longer historically necessary. Now that historical conditions have brought us to the point where our dominance over nature makes prosperity possible, men will come to realize that the surplus repression of a class society is no longer necessary and will c For my understanding of this account, see my Philosophy in the Mass Age (New York, 1960), chap.v.

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undertake the social action necessary to that liberation. As surplus repression is eliminated in society, it will be possible to organize society so that human beings can spend their time liberating themselves from the repressions implicit in the very form of the instincts of birth and of the family. Here it becomes obvious that the intellectual debt is not only what Freud pays to Marx, but also vice versa. The perennial objection to the end of history has always been that true joy lies in striving and choice and in the presence of tasks to be done and evils to be overcome. A realized human society would be limited and dull. This criticism is a reminder of the eighteenth-century idea (found, for example, in Lessing)14 of the dullness of salvation – an idea that is deeply embedded in all the modern attacks on the traditional religion. And it is indeed true that Marx, as he concentrated his intellectual rage on the overcoming of the evils of his present, gave little attention to the positive content of the Kingdom of Man which he considered lay ahead. To the thinkers I am discussing, Freud has given the answer to what that content will be. It will be an unrepressed polymorphous life of the instincts. According to Brown, man will be concerned with the resurrection of the flesh in the world. Here Reich’s conception of object-oriented orgastic satisfaction gives the fullest description of what will be the goal of this unrepressed sexuality. More than any of these writers, he is unequivocal in stating that man’s end is orgastic satisfaction. (Because of his claims to the mantle of the modern scientist, he probably would not like this teleological terminology, but it is unavoidable from the way he writes of the orgasm.) At this stage in history the ‘redeemed’ therapist can be concerned only with individuals or a cult, but the organization of society finally will be given over to a priesthood of therapists who will help to move youngsters through the necessarily incomplete stages of sexuality to the achievement of this orgastic state of realized satisfaction. Reich is honestly unequivocal in stating that this requires the full development of the love life proper to children, adolescents, and adults. As Mailer makes clear, those capable of the ‘good’ orgasm are saved; those who have the ‘bad’ orgasm are damned. It must be remarked that Mailer seems at odds here with his masters. He seems to imply that the ‘good’ orgasm can be achieved with either a homosexual or a heterosexual partner and with a changing set of partners. Reich and Marcuse seem to assert that this will be

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achieved only when persons pass through polymorphous perversity and reach an object-oriented love of one partner of the opposite sex. Mailer’s views on this point are perhaps not to be taken seriously, as he always tries to combine the role of the prophet with the pseudo sophistication necessary to commercial success among American authors. According to Hegel, history comes to an end with the dawn of the age of reason (first realized in his thought, which is no longer philosophia, but sophia itself). So with these Marxists, true humanity will come to be in this world of realized sexuality, in which the orders of freedom and necessity are at last made one. The ecstatic longing for a free society that has lain as an illicit dream in the history of mankind now arises as a concrete possibility before us. (‘How’re they going to keep him down on the farm, now that he’s seen Paree?’)15 In the full tide of gnostic prophecy, Marcuse asserts that in such a society man will be able to conquer his old enemies – time and death. In the world of the instincts, measured time, the very mark of repression, ceases to exist. Reconciled at last in the union of freedom and happiness, persons will choose to go down to the grave when they so desire. Across this blissful world will fall one shadow – the memory of those in the past who died in alienation. The Kingdom of Man will thus be darkened, but even this darkness will be alleviated by the knowledge that evil was not in vain. On the subject of death, Reich is at odds with Marcuse and Brown in that he denies the existence of the death instinct. There is for him, therefore, no such thing as non-repressive sublimation. This gives his concept of health a simple objective content – orgastic satisfaction. It is this in turn that leads Reich in his later writing to depart more and more from Marxism and to see man as a simple biological entity. So when he gets onto the subject of what else people do when they have ‘good’ orgasms, he writes of work and thought and art with a naivete worthy of Edward Bellamy.16 For Marcuse and Brown, on the other hand, the acceptance of the death instinct means that the end of history will not be a return to the primitive, because it will take into itself the negative moment of the death instinct and its overcoming. In true Hegelian fashion, Eros must, through struggle, take into itself the overcoming of Thanatos. This is such a mystical conception that the only way I can think about it is as an immanentized version of St Paul’s transcendent conception of the spiritual body in Romans. Thus, the

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conception of health in Marcuse and Brown includes not only the realized orgasm, but also the non-repressive sublimation of art and nonalienated work. Here they join the general humanist tradition with a great deal of uplifting talk about the therapeutic value of art. Art is more than a poor substitute for the ‘good’ orgasm; it is a minor part of polymorphous sexuality. There is only space for two comments on this orgastic gnosticism, though many more are required. a) It brings out unequivocally that virtue and vice are not part of the Freudian account of man. This is often slurred over in North America because of the very brilliance of Freud’s account of the history of the instincts and the liberating effect the acceptance of that account can have for us personally. Our debt is so great because Freud shows us in detail how the very conditions of our early existence twist and chain us and how we may overcome these distortions of our instincts. Moreover, to speak theologically, Freud’s discoveries give content to the doctrines of Providence, Fall, and Redemption by showing how we do not move simply and directly to our end, but must move to it by overcoming the ambiguities and tragedies that are not accidental, but of the very necessity of our existence. He is closer to the Biblical doctrines of the Fall and Providence than to the oversimplified Aristotelian teleology that skirts the question of evil by saying that nature achieves its purposes only in the main. To admit this greatness on the part of Freud, however, must not allow us to forget that his account of man denies the essential practical truth about us – namely, that we are beings who must choose between virtue and vice. Nor must we minimize or sentimentalize this theoretical denial, because society has and will continue to pay a steep price for it. That this denial is made by Freud is most easily seen in his account of the structure of the mind as id, ego, and superego.d The id is the determinative aspect of us all. The ego and the superego arise from it through historical circumstances. Thus, for Freud, thought is somehow artificial to man, something forced on him by necessity. In his own words it is ‘a detour from the memory of gratification.’ But even within this assumption, he does not think of thought in a way that would make possible virtue and vice. d The full implication of my point can be better seen in the light of the original German es, ich, and überich.

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Thought for him is simply technical reason as conceived by nineteenthcentury scientism. For where the ego is made the seat of reason, the superego is made the seat of morality. Thus, it is not reasonable to be moral, and morality belongs less truly to man than his ability to calculate. If reason is simply a calculating instrument and cannot teach us to choose between virtuous and vicious acts, then there is no objective morality in the public or personal sphere. The orgastic gnostics bring out this theoretical implication with the greatest clarity, for they openly deny the platitudes of the old rational morality. The traditional morality presented itself in day-to-day practice as two simple statements that were taken as self-evident: (i) men should care not only for themselves but for others; (ii) they should sometimes control their instinctual appetites in the name of some greater good. These great platitudes were the court to which the doctrine of virtue and vice publicly appealed. Of course, the denial of virtue and vice is part of the whole tradition of modernity. One sees its beginnings in the arrogant immanentism of Spinoza (i.e., in his attack on the act of repentance as unworthy of a rational man). But it has never been made more clearly than in these orgastic gnostics. We may thank them for this lack of equivocation, for it brings out (what is elsewhere often slurred over) that the assumptions of modernity cannot consistently include a doctrine of right and wrong. Of course, these gnostics have an answer to this criticism that is traditional among all gnostics.e When people achieve genital primacy or orgastic potency, there will be no need for the idea of virtue, because the activities that the tradition called vicious will just disappear. Just as the Marxists, true to their dogma that the cause of evil lies in property relations, believe, therefore, that evil will largely disappear when that cause has been eliminated, so these gnostics unite as the cause of evil bad property relations and sexual repression and believe that the overcoming of both will lead to the good society. Here indeed we come close to the very centre of modern man’s image of himself. Evil is not in the free will, but arises from the realm of necessity. The most obvious implication of this is that it cannot be called sin. b) Although this account of health must be condemned as having no e It is not accidental that Plotinus’ criticism of antique gnosticism was that it had no place for the discipline of virtue as a necessary means to health.

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moral doctrine, it has great religious advantages compared to the other types of humanism (educated and uneducated) that characterize our society. The chief of these is that it is a doctrine of hope, and Christians must believe that true hope is a virtue even when it is an inadequate object, just as true charity in an atheist is supernatural. There is no doubt that the young who read Mailer or Miller are attracted to this worship of the orgasm because it seems a true affirmation compared to what they have heard elsewhere.17 The young are, after all, reared in a society avid in its concentration on the mortal and the immanent. Yet in these days of tightened organization and the possibility of technological nightmare, an immanentism of despair is all too easy. Such an immanentism is the most influential philosophic basis for therapy in Europe today (Daseinsanalyse). Moreover, in the tightened society, sexuality is often the only form of creativity left open to persons and is certainly a more universal foundation of hope than the aestheticism of the culture addict or the worldly-wise empiricism of the social engineer. This is true even if we take this orgastic gnosticism at the point where it is most horrifying to the believer: Reich’s techniques of overtly sexual therapy (horrifying particularly when applied to children). Is there not more hope even here than in the widespread and indeed indiscriminate use of insulin and electric shock treatment carried out by order of the social engineers in the name of short-term adjustment? Moreover, sexuality is for many not only the road to gratification but to ecstasy. ‘With my body I thee worship.’ The object of worship among the orgastic may be limited to the immanent and may therefore be justly characterized as idolatry. Nevertheless, in their very worshipping they seem to discover something of the sacred in nature that has been lost by those held by the philosophy of human power and selfconfidence. The rediscovery of that sacredness may be a condition for the rediscovery of a worship that is more than natural. For all its dangers, idolatry may be the only road back to worship. To carry this train of thought further, it would be necessary not only to criticize the modern view of nature but also to consider why our North American Christianity was so influenced by that view of nature that it failed to have any adequate theology of human love. Having praised this concept of health for its hope, I must end by insisting that it fails religiously by placing its hope in life alone. The tru-

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ism need hardly be supported here that suffering and death are as much facts as life and gratification. Yet this gnosticism cannot include these facts within itself despite all its efforts. The concept of health given us by Him who says, ‘Take up your gallows tree and follow me’ is complete in a way that no modern conception is, because it includes suffering and death in health, recognizing them not simply as the negation of happiness, but as the voluntary shedding of the mortal necessary to the putting on of immortality.18 Christianity may too often have forgotten a proper affirmation of life and gratification (and modern therapy has done well to remind it of this forgetting); but its incomparable truth has been never to forget that suffering and death must be included in health as much as life and gratification. Nowhere has modern psychotherapy more mirrored and influenced our society of progress than in the way it disregards death or looks at it with stoicism.

Notes 1 These paragraphs on Freud’s relation to science, his self-analysis, and the references to Ernest Jones and Edward Glover, are taken, with revisions, from ‘Acceptance and Rebellion,’ the typescript Grant produced in England on sabbatical leave in 1957. See Collected Works, Volume 2, pp. 236–40. 2 Edward Glover (1888–1972), medical doctor and psychologist, was director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis and director of research to the Institute of Psychoanalysis. His many books and monographs include The Dangers of Being Human (1936), Psychoanalysis (1939), Freud or Jung (1950), On the Early Development of Mind (1956), and Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (1956). 3 The statement is in chapter 14 of Sigmund Freud: Life and Works, Volume 1, called ‘Self-Analysis’ (351). Ernest Jones (1897–1958) was a prominent British psychoanalyst and one of Sigmund Freud’s closest associates and staunchest supporters. 4 Otto Fenichel (1897–1948), Viennese psychoanalyst, taught in Berlin and helped to inspire the Freudian left movement. His works include The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945) and Collected Papers (1953). 5 John Dollard (1900–80) and Neal Miller (1909– ) taught in the Department of Psychology at the Institute of Human Relations at Yale University. The full title of their book is Personality and Psychotherapy: An Analysis in Terms of Learning, Thinking, and Culture (1950). They also published Social Learning and Imitation (1953).

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6 Joseph Wolpe (1915–97) was professor of psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine and at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute. He also edited The Conditioning Therapies: The Challenge in Psychotherapy (1964). 7 Marie Jahoda (1907– ), social psychologist, taught at Sussex. She also published Race Relations and Mental Health (1960) and, later, Freud and the Dilemmas of Psychology (1977). 8 Eric Voegelin (1901–85), philosopher and historian, whose studies ranged from languages, mathematics, and economics to philosophy, law, and political science, fled Germany in 1938 and spent most of his career as a professor in the United States. His publications include Order and History (5 vols), New Science of Politics (1952), Socrate (1966), Les trois protreptiques de Platon (1973), and Anamnesis (1978). 9 Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), Austrian psychoanalyst, settled in the United States in 1939. His Marxism and his theory that sexual repression underlies all psychological and many social problems alienated him from Freud’s psychoanalytic group. He claimed to have discovered a type of physicalbiological energy that he called ‘orgone,’ and he built and sold ‘orgone boxes’ in which patients sat to absorb life-enhancing rays. In 1954 the US government enjoined him from selling the boxes, and in 1956 he was convicted of violating the injunction and sentenced to a term in Lewisburg Penitentiary, where he died. His works include Function of the Orgasm: Sexeconomic Problems of Biological Energy (1961) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1970). 10 Norman Mailer (1923– ), American novelist, essayist, and literary celebrity, was lionized by young North American ‘hipsters’ for his essay ‘The White Negro’ (1958). His war novel The Naked and the Dead is considered an American classic. 11 Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), American political philosopher, emigrated to the United States in 1934 from Germany, where he studied and taught with members of the Frankfurt School of critical social theory. He taught at Columbia, Brandeis, and San Diego and during the 1960s became the most influential Marxist thinker for North American New Left activists. He interpreted Hegel as a critical thinker (Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory [1941]); he described and analysed one-dimensional society in the post-1945 affluent West (One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society [1964]); and he attempted to sketch a society beyond one-dimensionality, through a synthesis of Marx and Freud (Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud [1955]). 12 Norman Oliver Brown (1913– ), American author and professor of classics and comparative literature, published Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959) and Love’s Body (1966).

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13 This discussion of the ‘Freudian Marxists,’ Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, draws on the earlier one in ‘Acceptance and Rebellion.’ See Collected Works, Volume 2, pp. 238–9. 14 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), German dramatist, critic, and prose stylist, wrote The Freethinker (1749) and Nathan the Wise (1779). 15 The phrase is taken from an American song by Walter Donaldson about troops returning from France after the First World War. 16 Edward Bellamy (1850–98), American writer, was known chiefly for his utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887. He worked as a journalist and then as an editorial writer for the New York Evening Post. In Looking Backward he describes the United States under an ideal socialist system. 17 Henry Miller (1891–1980), American author, was popular with the young in the 1960s. His sexually graphic autobiographical novels were banned from publication in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada until the early sixties. 18 Luke 9:22–4: ‘And he said unto them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.’ See also Matthew 16:23–5 and Mark 8:33–5.

Carl Gustav Jung

This talk was delivered on CBC radio on 11 December 1961. It was published in Architects of Modern Thought, 5th & 6th Series, Twelve Talks for CBC Radio (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1962), 63–74, and reprinted in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 344–54.

In modern psychology two men have been dominant: first the towering figure of Sigmund Freud and close behind in influence Carl Jung. The chief mark of our modern civilization has been what we call science. By this word we mean a particular set of procedures by which men come to understand the world and so have mastery over it. The application of these procedures to the study of mind came late in the history of modern science. They were first used for the study of the physical world and of the living world. It is only in the last hundred years that they have been applied to the study of mind. But psychology is a product not only of science, but also of the art of medicine – the art which is concerned with the cure of disease – to use a beautiful Greek word, the therapeutic art. Because medicine these days is so intimately connected with science, we often think of the two as if they were the same. But of course they are not, because clearly one can understand something without wanting to cure it of its ills. The expert advertising man or the communist brain-washer may have consummate understanding of the mind, but rather than want to cure he may wish to add to its ills, that of enslavement, so that the enslaver may add to his bankroll or power. The psychologies of Freud and Jung were as much a product of the therapeutic art as of scientific understanding. As Jung himself has written, ‘Our psychology is ... practical science.

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We do research not for the sake of research but because of our immediate aim of helping. We could just as well say that science was a byproduct of our psychology, not its main goal, which constitutes a great difference between it and what is understood by “academic science.”’1 Neither Freud nor Jung therefore ever divide their account of what the mind is like from what they think its condition should be – its health, its integration – use what terms you will. They are not pure scientists and it is indeed a good question whether psychology can ever be a pure science – that is, if the truth about mind can ever be understood if detached from the desire of the therapist to move minds to their health. As is true of all intellectuals, the outward events of Jung’s life are not what is important, but rather what he thought and wrote. He was born in 1875 in Switzerland – the son of a Protestant pastor. In 1900 he graduated in medicine and immediately took up the psychiatric branch of the art in Switzerland. In 1907 came his first meeting with Freud; for he recognized that Freud’s psychoanalytical techniques and theory had discovered facts which were becoming more and more central to his own understanding of mental disease. During the next years he worked closely with Freud in the development of psychoanalysis. In 1913 the break with Freud came. Jung had criticized some of Freud’s theories of the unconscious in his famous book The Psychology of the Unconscious. Freud and his disciples were a closed group and intolerant of any disagreement about the central doctrines. They were quite unwilling to continue co-operation with therapeutic techniques which stemmed from different dogma. Jung therefore had to withdraw from the psychoanalytical movement and from then on he called his psychology ‘analytical psychology’ to distinguish it from dogmatic Freudian psychoanalysis. From that day on, Vienna and Zurich became rival Romes of the psychological church in Europe. Jung did not die till about a year ago at the age of eighty-six and he continued as a productive scientist right up till his death. From 1914 to 1960 he carried on his investigations of the unconscious. His output of work was simply staggering. I think it is fair to say that the output of few scientists of our era can compare in range and quantity to that of Jung’s. Not only did he continue as a practising therapist, but he constantly lectured on fundamental theory at the great universities of both East and West. Because he came to believe that the mind was an incomparably more complex entity than Freud or the Freudians had thought

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it to be, his researches took him into areas far from what is generally considered psychology. He became, for instance, the greatest interpreter of Asian religion to the West, because he saw in Asian religion remarkable techniques whereby the mind freed itself from its ills. Anybody today who wishes to understand Asian religion would seem to me to have no alternative but to read Jung. He became an expert on primitive peoples and travelled widely among them because he saw a close relation between the contents of the unconscious of his Western patients and the manifestations of the primitive mind in myth and legend. He studied the medieval alchemists because he believed their doctrines were concerned with a scientific approach to human liberation. According to Jung, their doctrines were really descriptions of the unconscious and its processes, projected into externalized images. Indeed in many ways Jung’s chief influence has been outside psychology and immediate therapy; rather among those scholars who in our century have been trying to reach new insights into the civilizations and religions of the past. Around him in Switzerland there gathered a group of the learned from a wide variety of disciplines, who were concerned with this question from many angles. Anybody who wants to follow these researches should read the Eranos Yearbooks, which are the proceedings of their yearly meetings. It was not surprising in the Europe of the twentieth century that this desire to understand the past should be so actively pursued. Jung’s writings are full of the sense that in our era Western civilization had entered a time of terrible cataclysm. This manifested itself not only in the outward events of the two world wars through which he lived and the potential holocaust now possible through the inventions of modern physics, but even more in the sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness which Jung considered so much the mark of his patients. He has said that in nearly all the therapeutic analyses he has undertaken the most deep-rooted problem was always the religious one – that is, the need for the patient to see some meaning and purpose in his life. It was his desire to meet this need which led Jung back to the study of Asian religion and culture and to the study of primitive cultures. Indeed whatever else needs to be said about Jung’s psychology as a whole, there is one point where it cannot fail to appeal to the educated person. He does not treat the past with contempt. One of the most

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alarming qualities in many modern scientists has been their discarding of ancient wisdom, both European and Asian. Their present triumphs and their faith in the doctrine of progress has made them contemptuous of pre-scientific civilizations and what those civilizations knew about the proper purposes of human existence. The present state of our civilization makes that contempt seem pretty juvenile. And it is to Jung’s immense merit that among modern psychologists he is pre-eminent in studying the past not as a home of error and superstition but as something from which we must learn. The range and profundity of Jung’s writing make it impossible to encapsulate his teachings about the mind in a few neat sentences. I am therefore going to speak about what seems central in his thought and that which most clearly distinguishes his teaching from that of Freud. This is his assertion of the existence of the ‘collective unconscious.’ It is important on this continent to emphasize those aspects where he differs from Freud, because it is here in North America more than anywhere else that the Freudian teachings have been most influential among practising therapists. Indeed in North America Jung’s influence among psychiatrists and psychologists has been minimal. What Jung means by the ‘collective unconscious’ can best be described by stating his agreement with the Freudian doctrine of the unconscious and also where he differs from it. It was Freud who brought back into Western thought the conception of the unconscious: that is, the idea that the mind is made up of two spheres – first, those events of which we are conscious and, secondly, another sphere of psychic life of which we are not conscious. The metaphor which has been continually used to illuminate this is the iceberg. The conscious is the eleventh part of the iceberg which is visible above the ocean; the unconscious is the ten-elevenths which lies hidden in the deep. Freud made clear to modern men that their mental ills were often caused by conflicts in the unconscious and conflicts between the conscious and the unconscious. He also saw that the unconscious manifests itself in our dreams so that the therapist by analysing the dreams of his patients can help them to understand their conflicts by lifting them into consciousness and so to begin to overcome them. In such conceptions as the ‘Oedipus complex,’ Freud stated the causes of repression and gave some content to the unconscious. The scientific and rationalist West, which had cut itself off from any knowledge of the depths of

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the mind, owes an immense debt to Freud for his rediscovery of the ten-elevenths of the iceberg. Jung took from Freud the conception of the mind as made up of both a conscious and an unconscious sphere. But he says that the unconscious itself must be divided into two spheres – the realm of the ‘personal unconscious’ and the realm of the ‘collective unconscious.’ The ‘collective unconscious’ is not made up of material which belongs to any individual history, but, to use Jung’s own words, comes ‘from the inherited possibility of psychical functioning in general; namely, from the inherited brain structure.’ Or again in his own words, ‘the collective unconscious is the mighty spiritual inheritance of human development, reborn in every individual.’2 It is this collective realm of the unconscious which is most deeply buried and which presents the most difficult problem to the therapist. The very words ‘reborn in every individual,’ which Jung uses to describe it, show immediately his debt to Buddhism with its central doctrine of the cycle of rebirths which are necessary to the law of karma and from which the enlightened alone escape. How different is his way of speaking from ‘the once and for all’ event language of Christianity. The ordering content of the ‘collective unconscious’ Jung calls the ’archetypes.’ The Oxford dictionary defines the word ‘archetype’ as ‘original model.’ Jung means by it ‘self-portrait of the instincts.’ But by instincts he does not mean anything individual but rather universal – the very patterns of behaviour which have been with man always. As the language of the unconscious in dreams is that of imaginative symbol, they appear in dreams as universal figures. Thus for instance the archetype ‘mother’ or ‘great mother’ appears in dreams in many forms. But what makes it an archetype is that ‘mother’ pre-exists in our unconscious every worldly manifestation of the motherly and has existed in the unconscious of man so long as man has been man. We must not turn these archetypes into concepts and make out that the archetype of ‘mother’ is the universal concept of ‘motherliness.’ Rather the archetypes are universal psychic forces which we can only begin to touch in experience. When we experience these archetypes at all consciously, we are touching in our individual lives the whole task of humanity at all times and so are in a sense outside time. Jung indeed says that when we reactivate the contents of the collective unconscious by opening our-

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selves to the archetypes we have experience of the eternal. The word ‘eternal’ is here used in no transcendent sense. It is timeless but in the world. What I think he means is that in re-activating the collective unconscious we cease to be simply individual human beings and partake of ‘human beingness’ in general. And the more archetypes we reactivate through analysis, the more we have entered into the fullness of being men. The neglect of them is the final cause of all neurotic and psychotic disorders. Such an account of the collective unconscious clearly distinguishes Jung from Freud both in their science and their therapy. It can not just be added on to the personal unconscious, as if Freud and Jung agreed about the conscious and the personal unconscious and then on top (or better at the bottom) Jung added the collective unconscious. On the contrary, it leads to clear distinction between their two accounts of the human condition – healthy or unhealthy. Freud is clearly here a Western man, moulded by the tradition of Semitic religion, and therefore thinks that what is ultimately real is the individual and his instincts. This is not so for Jung. A man becomes a man as he re-activates the eternal archetypes, as he partakes in them. In this sense the individual person is not an ultimate anymore than he is an ultimate in the great religions of the East. This very profound difference is apparent in what a Freudian and Jungian would mean by a successful analysis – or to put it simply, what is the goal of psychoanalysis? To a Freudian the goal is to come to terms with one’s own instincts. In Freudian language the ‘ego’ and the ‘superego’ and ‘id’ can through analysis come to live together. But such a living together can only be a compromise because the pleasure seeking of the id has to be limited by the reality principle so that people can go on living in the world. This is why there are such stoical and ironical undertones in Freud – to be successfully analysed is to make the best of a bad job – to reach some compromise between reality and pleasure seeking. The goal of a successful analysis with Jung on the other hand is integration, that is, the combination of all the mental forces into a whole. And this immensely optimistic goal is possible because of his postulated eternal experience of touching the universal archetypes. Just compare Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents with Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul and one sees how incomparably more optimistic Jung is about the goal of analysis – and please let me make it quite clear that I do not use optimistic

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as a word of praise or blame.3 To say that a person’s account of the human condition is more optimistic than another’s is to say nothing about its truth. From the foregoing it is easy to see why Jung has devoted so much time to the study of myth. He came to realize that the same material manifested itself in the mythic religion of primitive peoples as it did in the unconscious. The ‘great mothers,’ the ‘trees of the world,’ the ‘wise old men,’ which he had discovered in the unconscious, are of course the very stuff of the primitive peoples. Also archaic religions have always been immensely aware of the need to integrate the soul and have been full of differing ways of achieving such integration. Jung studied such phenomena as a means of improving his techniques of therapy, and also to learn more of the very content of the unconscious. Indeed Jung believes that it is just because Western man has cut himself off from the depths of the unconscious that he has become irreligious and so lives in confusion. Our world is emptied inwardly as we think of religion as either nothing or else concerned with non-dynamic intellectual convictions; it is rationalized outwardly in a society dominated by its technical apparatus. So, cut off by such rationalism from the eternal archetypes, man in the West must become ever more prone to outward violence and inward meaninglessness. At this point Jung is particularly condemnatory of Western Protestantism, which cut itself off from the whole world of symbol and myth and ritual and so condemned itself to be out of touch with the wholeness of the archetypes. Jung is more friendly disposed to Catholicism because it has never attempted so to rationalize itself. When in the 1950s, the Pope promulgated the doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Jung hailed it as one of the crucial acts of our era because in it the feminine was taken back into the Godhead. But – and this is a very large but – in thinking about Jung’s interest in religion or in myth one must be clear that it is a very particular kind of interest. He always views religion or myth (and I do not use the words synonymously) as they serve the mental health of human beings. I think this is important because many clerics and theologians have maintained that Jung is a truly religious psychologist while Freud is essentially irreligious. I am not sure that the people who make these statements are really looking for their allies in the right place. These

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statements are made because it seems at first sight clear that Jung gives a more creative role to myth and religion than Freud does. To Freud all religion was mythical and the mythical arose as a response to a diseased psychological condition. The domination of the patriarchal father led to a belief in the existence of the first person of the Trinity. Such superstitions will drop away if we have had a successful analysis. Religion is a corporate neurosis of mankind which falls away from the wiser members of society in the age of scientific enlightenment. Compared to this negative approach to religion, Jung’s insistence on the wisdom of religious cultures is refreshing to the believer and it is because of this that Protestant and more often Catholic clerics have seen him as an ally. I think those who talk this way often seem to forget that Jung is not concerned with the truth or falsity of any particular religion; nor, as far as myth is concerned, with what transcendent reality is manifested in it. It is surely clear that the men of the ancient religious cultures when they apprehended myth thought they were apprehending the real and knew that the real so apprehended always led them to particular forms of conduct. They thought they were being opened to an absolute and universal reality. Now it is clear that Jung does not think this. When men come upon the archetypes of the collective unconscious, they are concerned with the integration of their own psyches – not with being lifted to another realm of reality, the realm of the spirit. In other words, Jung is concerned with myth in quite a different way from those who live in myth. They are concerned with being opened to reality; he is concerned with it as a psychological aid. And this distinction becomes even more important when we pass beyond the limited subject of Jung’s relation to myth and look at his relation to the living religions of the Western world. He is concerned with them in so far as the practice of them is an aid to the mental health of the practitioner. But he is not concerned with whether the affirmations these religions make about reality are true or false. Indeed, although he is cagey about this point in his voluminous writings, I think it can be fairly deduced that he thinks that the affirmations of Western religion about reality are nonsense. Now it does not seem to me that any serious adult practitioner of a religion can simply disregard whether what his religion says about ultimate reality is true or

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false. Can he just practise it for the good of his mental health if he thinks what it says is nonsense? It is surely particularly difficult to take this attitude to the Semitic religions of the West – Judaism and Christianity, both of which clearly involve making statements about reality. In other words, I don’t think we can get away from the fact that Jung’s relation to Western religion is one of patronizing. Is one more a friend of Western religion if one directly assails it like Freud or if one covertly patronizes it like Jung? I have emphasized Jung’s doctrine of the collective unconscious and his interest in myth and religion because it is relevant to the chief way in which Jung is an architect of modern thought. He is the leading exponent of Asian religion in the West. I don’t see how anyone can take at its face value Jung’s claim to be an empirical scientist – in any clearly defined sense of the word `empirical' – any more than one can take Freud’s claim to be chiefly a scientist and not essentially a metaphysician and a prophet. Nevertheless, Jung must be regarded with the utmost seriousness because more than any other man of this century he has made Asian religion a living force in the West. And surely one of the key developments of our age is the spreading of the thought of the Orient through the Occident. The Western invasion of the world in the last centuries is such an obvious fact that we are inclined to forget how much the influence has been reciprocal. And this process has been going on for a long time. As early as 1625 there was a Chair of Oriental Studies at the University of Utrecht. Since that time, Asia has been a growing influence in the lives of European intellectuals. In our era it has become a flood touching not only the intellectual élite but all parts of our society. We are influenced not so much by such open missionaries as Dr Suzuki but rather by Western people who consciously or unconsciously believe Asian religion (most often Buddhism, but sometimes Hinduism) to be true.4 A conscious example at a brilliant popular level are the Buddhist novels of J.D. Salinger.5 The historian Arnold Toynbee is another example – although it is difficult to know how conscious Toynbee is about his beliefs.6 But by far the most influential and effective exponent of Asian religion has been Jung. When I say Asian religion there are clearly Hindu influences in Jung’s account of the psyche – but more obviously present are the influences of Buddhism.

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The evidence for this is not found primarily in Jung’s direct writings on Eastern religion – for instance his interpretation of the mandalas (or magic circles) which are unifying symbols for the personality, or his interest in the quadernity (the fourfold) in distinction to the trinity. It lies rather in the fact that his psychology and Asian religion are concerned with the same questions – have the same centre. They both deal with the liberation of the soul as it discovers itself as immortal. They are both concerned with the means whereby the individual can experience immortality – and let me emphasize that experience is here the key word – the realization of timeless being in oneself. For Jung this is achieved when the opposing aspects of the soul, male and female, good and evil, are experienced not as opposites but as one. To put the matter negatively, I think one can see how little Jung’s religion has to do with traditional Western religion if one recognizes what is implied in this doctrine of the union of contraries. To Jung, God is an experience in the soul which can only be realized when we have overcome the opposition between good and evil. Integration – call it if you will enlightenment – is beyond good and evil. But such a doctrine unequivocally breaks with the main stream of Western religion. Moreover, it totally undermines the Western view of existence as essentially moral. It is surely no accident that Jung grew up in that Germanic generation which was so deeply shaped by Nietzsche. For Nietzsche’s attack on Semitic religion went more to the heart than any other of the many attacks which have characterized the last centuries; and it was made exactly at this point – man should pass beyond good and evil. The only time that Jung ever spoke unequivocally and at length about his antipathy to Biblical religion was in his brilliant and witty commentary on the book of Job.7 Those clerics and theologians who say that Jung is an essentially religious psychologist are then right – but it depends on what religion they are talking about. For the common liberal platitude that all religions are the same is an obvious fallacy. Now it may be that the Catholic theologians in France are right and that in our era the greatest task of Christianity is not to take Marxism into itself or to come to terms with the Prometheanism of science but to include Buddhism within the universal faith. It is not easy to speak quickly about such matters because they raise subtle matters of principle and anything one says may sound on the one side like ignorant imperialism or on the other

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like vague eclecticism. One thing can, however, be said with certainty. As one looks at the history of the race, two figures tower above the rest – Jesus the Christ and Siddhartha Gautama, the Samsara sam buddha, that is, the fully self-enlightened one. Presumably also if a religion is catholic, all may and can be included within it. But certainly this is not what is present in Jung’s mind. It is implied in every line he writes that what is true in Western religion can be included in the much richer religions of the East. In this sense he is an incomparably greater radical than Freud; for he is attacking the roots of Western civilization. Freud after all only attacks Semitic religion from within its own assumptions. But Jung, for all his surface conservatism and appeal to the past, attacks these very assumptions – the concrete historical person in the face of the transcendent. Those who do not see this radical centre of Jung’s thought have chiefly been prevented from seeing it because they have accepted, in most cases unconsciously, Hegel’s and Marx’s accounts of Asian history.

Notes 1 We were unable to find the exact source of this quotation. 2 For a similar statement on the collective unconscious, see The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8 (New York: Bollingen 1960), 376: ‘... the collective unconscious is in no sense an obscure corner of the mind, but the mighty deposit of ancestral experience accumulated over millions of years, the echo of prehistoric happenings to which each century adds an infinitesimally small amount of variation and differentiation.’ 3 C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (London: Routledge 1933); Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton 1961). 4 Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966) also published Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (1957), Zen and Japanese Culture (1959), and Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960). 5 Jerome David Salinger (1919– ), New York writer, whose 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye won him critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post–Second World War generation of college students in the USA and Canada. Franny and Zooey (1961) brought together two earlier New Yorker stories.

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6 Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975), English historian and philosopher of history, taught at Oxford and London and was director of studies in the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1924 to 1954. He published A Study of History, 10 vols (1934–54), The World and the West (1953), and Christianity among the Religions of the World (1957). 7 See C.G. Jung, Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Pastoral Psychology Book Club 1955).

Review of Thought: Papers Given before the Learned Societies of Canada, 1960

Grant published this review in Dialogue 1/1 (1962): 100–1. The book, published by W.J. Gage, Toronto, was the first volume of a projected series that ended after the second volume in 1961.

Thought is made up of twenty papers given before the Learned Societies of Canada at Queen’s University, Kingston, in 1960. The book was planned according to the current educational dogma whereby studies are divided into ‘the natural sciences,’ ‘the social sciences,’ and ‘the humanities.’ The volume is concerned with the second and third of these three categories. A more accurate title for the book would have been ‘Scholarship 1960" because very few of the papers have much to do with theory. Indeed, for the most part they mirror the university milieu of the country of their origin – accurate, useful, decent, and immediate. Of the social science papers, I found H. Guindon’s ‘The Social Evolution of Quebec Reconsidered’ the most penetrating.1 Whether or not the chief aim of education be the transcending of one’s own society, certainly Professor Guindon’s detachment gives bite and cogency to his analysis. The absence of such transcendence can be seen in H.G. Johnson’s ‘The Political Economy of Opulence.’2 Here North American society is analysed, but from within the assumptions that are dominant among the majority. The result is that the essay mirrors that which it seeks to explain. The social sciences section also includes essays on such subjects as ‘The Occupation of Mashonaland’ and ‘Recent Land Development in Coastal British Guiana.’ These titles accurately describe what is in the articles. It is pleasant to record that the one article representing philosophy is

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of high calibre. A.M. Mardiros writes on ‘The Origin and Development of Contemporary Philosophical Analysis.’3 The one hesitation about this article is that I wish the word ‘English’ had been included in the title as the essay is not concerned with philosophical analysis as it has been practised in Europe. D. Conacher’s ‘Freedom and Necessity in Greek Tragedy" is also of a high order.4 His rigorous terminology throws light on a subject which has already been written about so copiously. Conacher’s advantage is that he has a profound subject, also the theoretical subtlety to write of it profoundly. These days when English literature is the chief means by which our universities hope to civilize their massive clientele, the essays on that subject do not encourage one concerning the rigour implicit in that subject. In the introduction to the volume, W.A. Mackintosh, a former principal of Queen’s University, writes: ‘It is desirable that the proceedings of these (learned) societies should be available to a larger public than their members.’5 If this collection is typical of the Canadian learned meetings, it is too much like the curate’s egg for me to share the principal’s desire.6

Notes 1 Hubert Guindon (1929– ), sociologist, taught at Montreal and Concordia. His works include Modernization and the Canadian State (1978) and Quebec Society: Tradition, Modernity and Nationhood (1988). 2 Harry G. Johnson (1923–77), economist. The essay Grant discusses was reprinted in Johnson’s book, The Canadian Quandary (1963). 3 Anthony Mardiros (1912– ), historian, published William Irvine: The Life of a Prairie Radical (1979). 4 Desmond John Conacher (1918– ) classicist, taught at several American universities and at the University of Toronto. His works include Euripidean Drama (1967) and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: A Literary Commentary (1980). 5 William Archibald Mackintosh (1895–1970), Canadian academic and public servant, was educated at Queen’s and Harvard, and from 1920 to 1945 taught economic history at Queen’s, where he wrote Economic Factors in Canadian History in 1923 and The Economic Background of Dominion-Provincial Relations for the Rowell-Sirois Report. While working with O.D. Skelton at the Department of Finance and Reconstruction, he wrote the White

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Paper on Employment and Income. He was principal of Queen’s from 1951 to 1961. 6 Grant’s reference to ‘the curate’s egg’ comes from an English saying based on a story about a curate. The curate was asked if his egg was good, and, not wanting to offend, he replied that it was good in part.

Letter to Le Devoir

This letter appeared under the caption ‘L’économie canadienne’ in the 29 May 1962 edition.

Monsieur, le rédacteur, J’ai été surpris de constater qu’au Québec certaines personnes pussent croire que le parti libéral fût propre à conserver la culture française sur ce continent. N’est-ce pas le parti libéral fédéral qui décida en 1945, sous la direction de C.D. Howe, d’abandonner la direction de l’économie canadienne au capitalisme américain? Et l’idéal du capitaliste américain n’est-il pas l’ennemi no 1 de la culture catholique et française, dont l’existence dans le Québec m’a toujours paru si importante? Il est juste d’affirmer que la culture transcende l’économique et que le Christianisme transcende la culture. Néanmoins, la vie spirituelle s’inscrit dans une culture et celle-ci doit avoir une base économique. Je ne vois pas que la domination du Canada par le capital américain puisse fournir une base économique – adéquate à une culture française et catholique. Pourtant le parti libéral a appuyé de toute ses forces, de 1945 jusqu’à maintenant, l’hégémonie du capitalisme américain dans notre pays. Si une culture propre au Canada doit survivre, la responsabilité de sa conservation économique incombe à un gouvernement fédéral qui affranchirait notre économie de la tutelle des grandes corporations. Cette tâche ne sera certainement pas accomplie par le parti libéral. Voilà pourquoi je m’étonne que le Nouveau parti démocratique ne reçoive pas un plus grand appui de la part des Québecois. C’est en effet le seul parti qui se soit engagé à étudier les possibilités de repren-

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dre à New York et à Chicago notre indépendance économique si lâchement bradée par le passé. Il peut vous sembler impertinent qu’un Canadien de langue anglaise se permette de discuter ainsi ces problémes du Canada français, mais ceux d’entre nous qui sont chrétiens et Canadiens considerent le Canada français comme une authentique source d’espoir en Amérique du Nord. George Grant (professeur de réligion à l’université McMaster, Hamilton, Ont.)

The New Europe

Grant’s typescript is headed ‘The New Europe – 1962 CBC.’ He is reporting on the thirty-first Couchiching Conference, entitled ‘The New Europe,’ presented by the Canadian Institute on Public Affairs in cooperation with the CBC at Geneva Park, 28 July–4 August 1962.

At this conference a group of able Europeans have been discussing what is happening in the new Europe – the massive booming society of the Common Market. And these Europeans have been some of the most influential leaders of this new and amazing prosperity – the people who have planned and organized the economic revival – civil servants, bankers, professors from Germany and France. And they talk of this new Europe they are building with the deepest enthusiasm. Europe is on the march again. It is going to be a great centre of world power. Indeed, they talk of this new society in language which I, as a professor of religion, would find more appropriate to the Kingdom of Heaven. The new technology is going to solve all problems. It will bring affluence, power, peace, national fulfilment, and human happiness. ‘All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’1 Now of course I do not mean to ridicule their enthusiasm. Their achievements have been great. Seventeen years after the Götterdamerung of Hitler, Europe is a going concern. And those men who have worked and planned for it have every reason to be excited and proud. But what has amazed me is how these men who have planned this revival under state capitalism just refuse to ask any questions about the quality of society they are producing. And it particularly amazes me because these are highly educated, sophisticated Europeans –

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trained in the old tradition of philosophy – the greatness of which was to ask questions about the personal and social good and which knew as well as anybody that when you make vast quantitative changes in the economic pattern of a society, you also change the whole qualitative pattern of life in that society. Yet I find with these European planners that they simply refuse to be concerned with these issues of quality. They simply assert over and over again that technology and economic organization will bring everything that human beings could wish. The English novelist C.P. Snow might well be their theoretical pope.2 Indeed they remind me very much of the businessmen and civil servants who ran Canada between 1945 and 1955 under the leadership of C.D. Howe.3 These people also said that all questions of the good life would be settled by the economic boom. You don’t have to think of what classes come to dominance under the boom. You don’t have to think of the quality of life which arises in the civilization of highway 401.4 Just go on and expand economically and everything will turn out all right. And of course these European planners are building a world just like the state capitalism we have built in North America since 1945 – with all its virtues and all its limitations. And what is funny in this is that it reverses the traditional positions of the European and the North American. Europe has always thought of itself as the wise, old civilization and they have thought of North Americans as the young, the brash, the childish lovers of machines. But with these European intellectuals I feel exactly the opposite. After all we have lived with affluence and salvation by technology for a whole generation and seeing its limitation has made us feel cynical and old. Looking at these European optimists confident in their faith in organization makes me feel that ‘Ages and ages have fallen on me.’ 5 And what adds to the irony of this situation is that the new affluent Europe has been achieved by political Catholicism. Since the war it has been political Catholicism – the parties of Dr Adenauer, De Gasperi, and de Gaulle which have kept the socialists out and built this prosperous world of state capitalism – with its new class system of ignorant wealth and acquiescent masses.6 And what is ironic about this is that Catholicism at its best has always been the great critic in the Western World of the ideas of the age of progress – the idea that the good social order depends alone on the pursuit of wealth by techniques. Yet this

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very political Catholicism has now achieved a society which almost inevitably must destroy the values for which European Catholicism has stood. Such irony is, of course, the very stuff of human history. Men do not build what they think they are building. But those of us in North America who have been forced to look at the affluent society straight in the face cannot help but wonder and smile at what seems to be rising in the New Europe.

Notes 1 Grant is quoting a phrase of Lady Julian or Juliana of Norwich (1342–1416), English mystic, from a passage which reads: ‘Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’ (from chapter 27 of Showings or Revelations of Divine Love). Lady Julian received a series of visions on the 8th of May, 1373. Her account of the visions, and her meditations twenty years later, were published as the Showings. She was assured by her visions that everything is held in being by the love of God so that ‘all will be well.’ 2 Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of the City of Leicester (1905–80), British novelist, scientist, and government administrator, taught physics at Cambridge, became a university administrator, and then scientific adviser to the British government in 1939. In The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) and Second Look (1964), he argued that the literary and scientific branches of Western culture are nearly unable to communicate with each other. Grant may be referring to Snow’s affirmation of the assumptions of modern science and technology. 3 Clarence Decatur Howe (1886–1960). See page 47, note 1. 4 Highway 401, the Macdonald-Cartier freeway, crosses southern Ontario and is the principal transportation artery of the most heavily populated part of the province from Windsor to the Quebec border. 5 Grant is quoting a line from the last stanza of Walter de la Mare’s poem about loss, ‘A Song of Enchantment’: But the music is lost and the words are gone Of the song I sang as I sat alone, Ages and ages have fallen on me – On the wood and the pool and the elder tree. See The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (New York: Alfred Knopf 1970), 186. The poem was first published in Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913).

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6 Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967), first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949–63), was a Christian Democrat and firm anti-communist who worked to reconcile Germany with its former enemies, especially France. He was opposed to socialist ideas and rejected the notion of an egalitarian mass society. His leading political theme was individualism under the rule of law as he presided over the West German economic recovery after the Second World War. Alcide De Gasperi (1881–1954), politician in the Christian Democratic Party and prime minister of Italy (1945–53), contributed to the material and moral reconstruction of his nation after the Second World War. He instituted a long-term land reform program in southern and central Italy and sought to increase utilization of Italy’s natural resources by constructing new power plants fuelled by natural gas or natural steam of volcanic origin. Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (1890–1970), soldier, statesman, and first president of the French Fifth Republic (1958–1969), prevented Great Britain from joining the European Common Market (January 1963). After 1962 he attempted to strengthen the French economy using the European Economic Community and detente and cooperation with countries behind the Iron Curtain. Under de Gaulle’s leadership, France followed an independent foreign policy and developed its own nuclear deterrent capability.

On Peter Fechter

This short talk was given on CBC Radio in September of 1962.

Peter Fechter was left to bleed to death in the ‘no-man’s land’ between the East German wall and West Berlin. At his funeral last week in East Germany his family, fiancée, and friends were addressed by a blackcoated orator authorized by the communist government to speak at non-religious funerals. This official orator said to the mourners the following words about the dead man: ‘A lot of you have been in the mountains on vacation; sometimes you come across paths marked no entry. Just as the authorities have to protect you against taking such dangerous paths, so they have a duty to keep the unripe and immature from taking dangerous ways.’ The scene of this state-appointed official self-righteously justifying the killing of their son, before his parents at his funeral, catches the very essence of tyranny – the absolute tyrannies that have become possible in the twentieth century. In the old days one had at least the right to emigrate as the last court of appeal against tyranny. Now tyrants build walls so that that appeal is lost. And the orator at the funeral represents the monstrosity because he speaks with the voice of a government that so thinks it possesses the complete truth that in the name of this truth it can force its citizens to do anything and that it is morally right in so forcing them. Tyranny is never so absolute as when its leaders think they are serving righteousness by forcing everybody into their service – even to the point of death. But what is particularly macabre is that even when the deed is done – the boy has bled to death – he has not escaped – the tyranny must follow him even to his funeral – insinuate itself into the tragic moment of the family and make the funeral serve its absolute purposes by justifying its ruthless-

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ness by pious rhetoric about the all-wise leadership of the state. Funerals should represent the fact that the individual is now beyond the touch of the world – even of the state. But the absolute tyranny does not admit that anything is beyond its touch. Men cannot pass beyond its grasp and therefore it takes this sacred moment to use the individual for its purposes – even at the last. Presumably this oration about the wise leadership of the state was partially said to comfort the parents. We cannot know whether it did. But if it did – this is even worse because then people have really become attuned to accept what tyranny would have them believe – namely that they will only find happiness by recognizing themselves as creatures of the state and accepting that creaturehood as consolation even for the death of their children.

Review of Christianity and Revolution: The Lesson of Cuba, by Leslie Dewart1

Grant published this review in Canadian Forum 43/518 (March 1964): 282–3.

Professor Dewart’s theme is well expressed by his title and subtitle.a He starts from an analysis of why the Cuban revolution became communist; he then describes in detail the degeneration of relations between the revolution and the Cuban Catholic Church; from this he proceeds to draw out the lessons of those relations for Christians’ political existence in the nuclear age and situation. As are most good books on practical matters, this is addressed particularly to a specified audience, Roman Catholic Christians, especially those in North America. Yet (and the ‘yet’ is essential to what follows) the book will be of great interest both to those who feel themselves outside Christianity and to those who are Christians and not Roman Catholics. In the first half of his book Dewart shows himself a consummate expositor of the history of the Cuban revolution. He clearly has a mastery of Cuban history. Because he writes closely, he can analyse the relevant texts in a firm way. For example, on p. 23 he shows in a few sentences how Castro’s speech of December 1st, 1961, was ‘quoted’ by Time in such a way (part real, part fabrication) that it appeared that Castro had said that he was a communist before he came to power, when in fact he had said no such thing.2 (In passing let it be said that if Time is concerned with its reputation as a purveyor of news it has the alternative of suing Dewart or of issuing a correction of its ‘quotaa Christianity and Revolution, The Lesson of Cuba: Leslie Dewart Palm Publishers Ltd.; $6.25.

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tions.’) The ordinary person is at the mercy of such distortions. Dewart fulfils masterfully the first purpose of the contemporary historian – clearing such junk out of the way and stating the facts of the case. For example, in chapter 3 Dewart follows in detail the relations between the governments of the US and Cuba from the revolution to the end of the Eisenhower regime.3 This chapter is a model of exposition of complicated historical phenomena. This account of the folly of American policy is particularly telling because it is not written in the style of the movie version of the righteous counsel for the prosecution – what may be called these days in Canada the Peter Newman style.4 The second part of the book is concerned with the Cuban Church’s relation to the Castro revolution and is also a fascinating piece of contemporary history. Starting from a knowledge of the Cuban Church, Dewart carefully analyses the statements of the clergy, the laity, and Castro to show how the tragedy of outright break occurred. For Dewart the break is above all a tragedy for the Church. It has cut her off from the aspirations and loyalties of the great majority of Cubans. It is indeed a tragedy in the classical sense. The more intransigent the American government was in its relations with Castro, the more Castro was driven to seek support in Moscow; the more support he got from Moscow, the more suspicious the local Catholics became; the more defections from the revolution by Catholics, the more justified the American leaders appeared in their claim that the revolution was a foreign importation. Dewart sees the failure of the Cuban and American Catholics to lie in a sterile anti-communism which did not recognize the difference between the rejection of communism as truth and the need to reach out to communists and communist society in the recognition of what is legitimate in their aspirations. His appendix ‘The Theology of Counter-revolution’ is a description of how Catholicism can be led into a barren defence and negativity. For the non-Catholic Christian, one of his more fascinating points is that the Holy See has remained much more tolerant of Castro than Cuban or American Catholics. The last parts of the book are concerned with the lessons which Cuba should teach Catholics about their confrontation with the modern era. Dewart’s plea is that the people of Christ have no alternative but to forego any politics based on the possibility of total war. Taking their authentic freedom into the world, Catholics must be the salt of a

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modern world which for the first time involves the possibility of a universal human society from which war is excluded. Here perhaps the entirely secular modern reader will be less concerned with Dewart’s argument because it is written from within Catholicism for Catholics. Nevertheless those non-Catholics who want to know what modern progressive Catholicism is, will find here a noble and eloquent statement of what it is to live from that standpoint. I have no criticisms of this book, only a disagreement. This disagreement is not at the level of the practical, but at the level of the theology of history. Dewart’s writing is based upon a profound optimism about the modern experiment of universal technological civilization. This optimism expresses itself in a theology which affirms that history is the unfolding of the divinely ordained process of man’s salvation and that the world-wide civilization of technology and freedom is a step forward in that plan. That is, Dewart believes in a history of salvation and identifies it closely with the unfolding of worldly progress. This identification has, of course, been very deep in European and North American Christian history. It is surely true to say that the identification of the history of salvation with the history of worldly progress by Christians has been the dominating religious motive for the emergence of modern society. But it is also true that until recently the Roman Catholic Church has been the only institution in the West which maintained a sustained and intellectually respectable defence against the religion of progress. Although the official Church had within it the idea of reform, it fought the ecstatic apocalyptics of the Middle Ages with inexorable rigour. For this reason it has generally been from within Protestantism that those thinkers have emerged who closely identified worldly progress with the history of salvation. There are now powerful forces in the Roman communion who want to modernize the Church and the essential step in so doing is the unequivocal acceptance of modern progressive technological society. Dewart is clearly among those Catholic thinkers who see this. Above all this must mean theoretically the acceptance of some form of the doctrine of historical progress into Catholic theology. This includes the implication that modern society can truly incarnate a fuller Catholic humanism than has yet appeared. The religious implication of this for Dewart is to insist that optimism about worldly life is rooted in the truly biblical conception of his-

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tory, and that the traditionally unprogressive elements in Catholic theology have come from its too long acceptance of Greek philosophy with its unprogressive doctrines of nature. This appeal to the biblical as against the Greek has a long history in Protestantism and has only lately become popular among Catholics. Dewart’s philosophical implication is to state that he is ‘empirical and existentialist’ in philosophy; that is, he accepts modern philosophy as against the essentially Greek basis of traditional Catholicism. The fundamental optimism about the modern era influences Dewart’s account of present political facts. Though he criticizes American Cuban policy, he expresses his faith in the basic health of American society (e.g. p. 239 et seq.). Such an assessment is a necessary facet of a system which closely identifies the history of salvation with the progress of secular culture. For (Marxists to the contrary) it is surely clear that American society incarnates more than any other the principles of the progressivist faith. Moreover it is in that country that Catholicism has most deeply made itself one with a progressive society, as can be seen in such figures as the late President. Therefore to be a progressive Catholic is to have basic hope about the future of American society. If one questions the fundamental health of American society, one is questioning in some sense the whole modern experiment. The following are then the questions I would ask Dewart: is it true so to identify the history of salvation with the history of worldly progress? And beyond this the more difficult question: have Western Christians been right to unite intimately history and salvation even if history were not given its progressivist interpretation? That is, have we been right to make a ‘Heilsgeschichte’ the centre of our religious life? This last question is being pushed under the mat in the present intimacy of Catholics and Protestants, which is built on a united acceptance of Heilsgeschichte. It cannot be pushed under the mat in the meeting with the Platonic Orthodox, nor in the meeting with Hinduism and Buddhism. Apart from these questions, it is also perhaps fair for a Protestant to point out one fact to those Catholics who are so concerned with biblical theology. Has not the Protestant scorn of Greek thought led most of its laity into being swallowed up by the religion of progress and becoming flatterers of the spirit of their age, while a small clerical minority has retreated into a ghetto which interprets the Gospel as a barren existentialism?

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To raise disagreement with progressive Catholicism as a theology of history in no sense implies a lack of admiration or general agreement with its courageous practical response to the immediacies of politics. Theoretical conservatism is no reason against hoping that South American societies will be better governed or that Christians will meet the nuclear age in the light of the divine charity. Theory cannot be pursued in isolation from the need of courage in the world, because those men who do not live with courage in the world will never understand what is at stake in the profoundest differences of theory. Dewart’s book is an example of a noble theology which knows what it is to live with courage in the world.

Notes 1 Leslie Dewart (1922– ), professor of philosophy of religion at St Michael’s College, Toronto (1956–88), also published Cuba, Church and Crisis (1964), The Future of Belief (1966), The Foundations of Belief (1969), and Religion, Language and Truth (1970). 2 Fidel Castro (1927– ), Cuban revolutionary and politician, prime minister (1959– ) and president (1976– ) of Cuba, led a successful revolt against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, embarking upon a program of reform based upon Marxist-Leninist principles, involving the destruction of American economic domination with the support of Soviet economic aid. 3 In January 1961, during the last weeks of the Eisenhower administration, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Cuba, which for two years had been under the control of Fidel Castro. Dwight David Eisenhower (1890–1969), soldier and statesman, was thirtyfourth president of the United States (1953–61). As supreme commander of the allied expeditionary forces during and after the Normandy landings (6 June 1944), he played a major role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. 4 Peter Charles Newman (1929– ), journalist, author, and newspaper and magazine editor, wrote Flame of Power (1959) and Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years (1963) during this period. He later published several further works, including The Canadian Establishment (2 vols, 1975–81), and was editor of Maclean’s magazine (1971–81).

Crime and Corruption

Grant delivered this short talk 7 October 1963 on the CBC Radio show Preview Commentary. He gave permission to Christian Outlook to publish it in volume 19, no. 3, December 1963, pp. 11–12.

In the last year the news has been full of stories of organized crime and widespread political corruption. At the moment the American television is giving us another of its live shows straight from Congress in Washington in which Mr Joseph Valachi tells about murders, tortures, etc., in the Cosa Nostra.1 It is almost as good a spectacle as the World Series or Mrs Kennedy showing us the White House. The Valachi hearings are a fascinating circus to watch but after all it tells nothing new to any sensible person. We all know that our society has large-scale organized crime just as it has large-scale political corruption. Many people who are optimistic about human society say, ‘What are we going to do about this? Can’t we in this enlightened age run a society without organized crime, without massive political corruption? Surely, the mass of ordinary people can unite their actions to employ the law to stamp it out.’ This is denied, however, by the fact that voters in North America no longer show themselves as deeply moved to rage by scandals of political corruption and it is extremely hard to raise any strong protest against organized crime. And I think the reason why people are hard to arouse is that they see political corruption and organized crime as just part of the system in which we live. We now live in a society run by large private governments – the corporations – and large public governments. That is, in a bureaucratized mass society. The motive that keeps that society running is the appeal that everybody should make as much money as fast

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as they can. People are, then, not surprised that men should make what they can out of politics or that as paying a proposition as crime should be bureaucratized into its own corporation. This is private enterprise. Those on the outside of our society, such as immigrants, can’t get high up in ordinary corporations so they create their own ones in the dangerous fringe activities. I think, then, the mass of people who accept organized crime or political corruption are wiser than those who are shocked by it. They know that it is part of the system, part of the North American way of life. This way of life brings much comfort and people are willing to look the other way at dishonesty and crime as long as enough highways are built and life doesn’t get too unpleasant. Of course, there will be occasional men who make their political careers out of exposing some particularly beastly organizations. Such men as Thomas Dewey, Bobby Kennedy, and Senator McClellan have done this in the United States.2 Television can now turn crime investigations into a rewarding political activity and this investigation will serve the real purpose of scaring the criminal organizations from going too far. We in Canada haven’t got as used to this kind of thing as the United States because we have been a smaller society with higher standards of law and public responsibility. But in the last years we have pretty well decided that we are going to be part of the United States and this means we have to get used to their system in which organized crime and widespread corruption are part of the show. The hope that citizens can do much to stop it comes from the democratic rhetoric which is left over from an earlier age. We don’t live in a democratic society; we live in a mass, bureaucratized capitalism – the nearest parallel to which is the Roman Empire at its height. By saying this I do not mean there is nothing we can do about it. Honesty and decency are as noble virtues as they have always been. And those who believe in them will want to teach them to their children. The only difference will be that one will have to pay a higher price for the practice of these virtues in the mass society than in our earlier and simpler society. But let’s not fool ourselves that organized crime and widespread corruption are simply excrescences which can be removed root and branch. They are part of the system and we have to learn to live with them – either honestly or dishonestly.

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Notes 1 Joseph Michael Valachi (1903–71), American gangster and member of Lucky Luciano’s ‘family,’ was a Mafia informant whose testimony in 1962 gave unprecedented information about the internal organization and functioning of organized crime in America. His testimony is contained in the publication The Valachi Papers, by Peter Maas (1968). Cosa Nostra (Our Thing) is an Italian term for the Mafia. 2 Thomas Edmund Dewey (1902–71) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a special prosecutor to investigate organized crime in New York City. He was governor of New York for three terms from 1943 to 1955 and Republican presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948, losing first to Franklin D. Roosevelt and in 1948 to Harry S. Truman. Robert Francis Kennedy (1925–68) was attorney-general of the United States during 1961–4, Democratic senator from New York during 1965–8, and Democratic candidate for the presidency when he was assassinated in 1968. In 1957 he was chief counsel to the Senate select committee conducting investigations into labour racketeering, which led to a long-standing feud with Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters’ Union. John Little McClellan (1896–1977) served as US senator from Arkansas (1943–77). He headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which heard Joe Valachi’s revelations about the Cosa Nostra.

American-Soviet Disarmament

This short talk assessing the nuclear test ban treaty agreed upon by the USA, the USSR, and the UK in 1963 may have been broadcast on CBC Radio on the program Viewpoint.

Nearly everybody in Canada must rejoice that there is a lessening of friction between the Soviet Union and the United States. Only people who have a hidden love of death can like it when the two nuclear giants are growling at each other. And this present test ban looks really hopeful – as if it might lead forward to fuller disarmament and agreement about differences in many parts of the world. Agreement between the two powers has been coming for a long time. Whatever else can be said of the American and Soviet leaders, they are both aware of two evident facts. First, they both know that the other would use its weapons rather than suffer a grave loss of power. Khrushchev is surely correct in his argument with the Chinese about the fact that the American rulers are determined not to lose. He knows the American capitalists for what they are: an imperial ruling class which is no more to be pushed to the limit than his own class. This is why Khrushchev acted with such dignity and sense over Cuba.1 Secondly, both the Americans and the Soviets know that they must stop the spread of weapons now – except to minor satellites such as Canada – that is, stop the spread of nuclear weapons in countries they cannot control. If they don’t, the world is going to be a ghastly place and both of them know this. The Soviet Union has ideological closeness to China – but it has as great an interest as the United States in keeping the Chinese from being a first-class nuclear power. It is indeed

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this obvious unity of interest which is going to make it difficult for the American Senate to turn down the treaty. Where I do not understand the present negotiations is as it concerns western Europe – that is, above all France and the marvellous General himself.2 What does the present test ban agreement mean for the French determination to have a separate nuclear force? Are the Americans being called on in Moscow to control the French, and if so how? Clearly the Americans can no longer keep Europe subservient any more than the Russians can keep the Chinese. Who cannot have admiration for de Gaulle for having wrested French freedom from American dominance – but what is the effect of this freedom on the larger question of agreement between the nuclear giants? It is this side of the present negotiations which I find cloudy and difficult to understand. We can only wait and see and above all hope. In this happy prospect there is only one long-range possibility which has a rather terrible implication. In the last years we have seen the world divided on what were at least partially ideological grounds – communism versus capitalism, etc. But it would surely be worse if the world was divided on racial rather than ideological grounds – and this seems to be what may be happening. If the Soviet Union, the United States, and western Europe get together, this would be a great bloc of the peoples of European origin. They would also be the peoples who are technically advanced. What if they began to maintain their prosperity against the southern parts of the world – non-European and poor. There is, of course, the Indian-Chinese conflict which pits Asians against Asians. But as the Soviets move close to the Europeans, it might be that the poorer countries of Asia will find their one hope in China – as indeed many of them already seem to think. Then the world might easily be split down the centre on racial lines. And surely it is true to say that although men will be brutal to each other over ideological differences and even more brutal over economic matters – hatred is at its worst in racial conflict. The wars where it is an issue have an unequalled ferocity. If the races of European origin were really threatened, would they not find it easier to incinerate other races than others like them? The only time that atomic weapons have been used was by Americans on Japanese. Race is such an elevated fact at the heart of animality and the emotions pertaining to it take us into the depths of the soul. A world in

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which the difference between the poor and rich nations mirrored a division of race could be one of terrible passions. Above all it would require very great wisdom and forbearance on the part of those of European origin, who after all have been the dominant aggressive peoples in the last centuries. In other words, if there is to be a close agreement between the Soviets, the United States, and western Europe – aimed above all at the control of China – then we must move into it aware that it may antagonise Asians and Africans. There is indeed an enormous necessity to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and this means above all sure control over China. How this can be done without creating a racially divided world is what will require skill and patience. This is of course a long-term process and the future is not knowable in detail. In the present we can but rejoice that the first step for nuclear control is being taken by the Americans and the Soviets.

Notes 1 Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894–1971), first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1958–64) and premier of the Soviet Union (1958–64), is known for his policies of de-Stalinization and coexistence with the West. During the tense confrontation in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union apparently stood on the brink of nuclear war, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles on the promise that the United States would make no further attempt to overthrow Cuba’s Communist government. 2 Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970). See page 201, note 6.

Unpublished Review of Plato on Man and Society, by I.M. Crombie1

This review was written for Queen’s Quarterly in 1963 but was not published when Professor Martyn Estal of the Queen’s Department of Philosophy asked for changes Grant was not willing to make.2 The book (two volumes) was published in London by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1962– 3 and reprinted in 2002. Grant’s review is of volume one.

This volume is the first part of a two-part examination of Plato’s doctrines. The first part is concerned with what Mr Crombie names ‘Plato’s views on man and society.’ The second volume will include what Mr Crombie calls ‘more technical philosophical topics,’ thus taking the modern assumption that epistemology and metaphysics are more technical than political philosophy. The book begins with two general chapters, ‘Plato’s Life and Writings’ and ‘The Development of Plato’s Thought.’ This is followed by a chapter which is a précis of what Mr Crombie finds in the Republic. The rest of the book is comprised of chapters on ‘Politics,’ ‘Beauty, Art, Ideology, Rhetoric, Education,’ ‘Ethics,’ ‘Philosophy of Mind,’ and ‘Theology and Religion.’ In the preface Mr Crombie states his purpose in writing the book. Plato has not been admired by modern philosophers. (Here as elsewhere Mr Crombie is concerned with the philosophic tradition of his own country.) He thinks this has often arisen from an inaccurate appraisal of Plato’s doctrines. In the light of his own reading, he wishes to state his own and truer account of these doctrines and so make Plato more readily available both to specialized students of philosophy and to a more general audience. Mr Crombie is a clear writer who has gone to some trouble to achieve his end. It is my opinion, however, that Mr Crombie has failed in his worthy

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purpose. The process of enucleating Plato’s doctrines from the dialogues is at the best of times a hard one at which to succeed, but in this book it is done with a singular lack of success. The book is an inaccurate description of what Plato taught about politics, ethics, and religion. (I am not sure what Plato thought about aesthetics and therefore do not comment on this aspect of the matter.) Less important, but more annoying than this inaccuracy, is the fact that Plato is accused in the commentary of logical and literary carelessness. About some of the logical fallacies of which Plato is accused, I am not yet sure whether Mr Crombie has a case; all the cases of the literary carelessness I am sure are in Mr Crombie’s mind and arise from the inattention of his reading and not of Plato’s writing. Such general statements about this book could only, of course, be justified by a detailed analysis of his account of Plato’s doctrine and an appeal from that to my own account of the manifold texts on the particular topics. This would require a long series of articles rather than the short review which the book warrants. Rather I would like to comment on the causes of Mr Crombie’s failure, because these seem to me to be relevant to the general matter of contemporary Platonic scholarship. The chief cause of Mr Crombie’s failure seems to me to lie in the fact that he has no adequate answer to the question: ‘Why did Plato write dialogues?’ This means that he never comes to grips with the prior question: ‘What does Plato say that a dialogue is?’ Mr Crombie has a section on ‘The difficulties of the dialogue form’ but at no point in this section does he state what Plato said about the matter in the Phaedrus. Mr Crombie devotes eight lines (p. 19) to a small section of the Phaedrus (275–276). Later in his chapter on ‘Beauty, Art, Ideology, Rhetoric, Education’ (indeed a mélange of Platonic subjects) he returns to the Phaedrus in his discussion of rhetoric, but does not state what it says about writings in general. In this return to the subject, Mr Crombie states: ‘I have straightened out the argument a little’ (p. 198). This magnificently confident claim to straightening Plato’s argument takes one to the heart of Mr Crombie’s failure. To attempt to straighten the straight leads me to suppose that the argument has not been understood in the first place. I will therefore now attempt to summarize what Plato does say in Phaedrus about writings in general and dialogues in particular.

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According to Plato in the Phaedrus, a dialogue is free of the essential defect of writings. This defect is that most writings (whatever may happen to them accidentally) are intended ideally to say the same thing to all readers. But Plato takes a hierarchical view of man and society and therefore makes clear through Socrates in the Phaedrus that the philosopher should not say the same thing to people of differing capabilities about the most important matters. The dialogue gets around this difficulty by allowing the philosopher to maintain a distinction between the exoteric and esoteric meaning of what is being said. It does this by placing what is said in a particular place and a particular time and with particular people. The full meaning of the dialogue can only be understood therefore in terms not only of the spoken words but also of the actions. To quote Professor Leo Strauss of Chicago: ‘In order to get Plato’s universal or abstract teaching one must enucleate that from what Socrates says in these particular situations. One must enucleate from that the universal.’a 3 As Plato says in the Phaedrus, in a speech every part, however casual it may seem, fulfils a necessary function. In his own writings Plato obviously knew that the particular would not reach the ideal. But he knew what the ideal was and certainly attempted to reach it. In Mr Crombie’s long chapter on the Republic he fails to discuss the meaning of such details as that the dialogue takes place in the Piraeus, in the house of a foreigner, and at the time of the introduction of a new form of worship. Surely such facts are of crucial significance to Plato’s argument in the Republic. The result is that Mr Crombie’s account of what Plato believes to be the relation of the philosopher to the state is a travesty. It is not quite so abusive a travesty as that of Professor Popper on the matter4 but it quite fails to reach even the essential beginning, namely that according to Plato the chief reason for the interest of the philosopher in the state is his interest in protecting those who are potential philosophers. It is necessary to repeat often these days that one’s objection to what many English political philosophers have said about Plato in the last years is not that they disagree with him, but that they interpret him as having written pernicious nonsense about politia This quotation is from an unpublished writing of Professor Strauss on the Republic. This paragraph of my review accepts Professor Strauss’ interpretation of the Phaedrus in that article.

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cal matters and that what they say is not borne out by what he actually says in either the Republic, the Gorgias, or the Laws. Nobody is being asked to be a Platonist but simply not to put up straw men. The English tradition was once fairer than this. As great an opponent of Platonic political doctrine as Hobbes, stated fairly the Platonic doctrines he was opposing. A second and minor cause of Mr Crombie’s failure appears to lie in his provincialism. In his Preface (p. viii) he writes: ‘In reading and trying to understand Plato I have made use of many of the best known books and commentaries, and I have found them immensely helpful especially those of Taylor, Cornford, Ross, Murphy and Robinson.’5 Such a list is interesting in that it includes no name from contemporary German and French scholarship - Festugière, Friedlander, Schaerer, Stenzel, Strauss, Voegelin, (to mention but a few).6 This is particularly unfortunate in a volume devoted to ‘Plato on man and society,’ because it is surely the case that the climate of English political philosophy is least sympathetic of any modern country to the study of Plato and that therefore the English have not been very active in attempting to understand his doctrines on politics. It is to be hoped that Mr Crombie will read some non-English commentaries before publishing his second volume. Such provincialism would be more understandable if the English publishing companies did not make such an effort to sell their products abroad. If publishers are so concerned with an international market, they surely should notify their writers that scholarship in the history of philosophy is an international affair.

Notes 1 Ian M. Crombie (1917–), fellow of Wadham College, Oxford (1947–83), also published Plato, the Midwife’s Apprentice (1965). 2 In a letter dated 25 February 1963 the editor of Queen’s Quarterly, Queen’s Professor Martyn Estal, requested two changes that Grant presumably found unacceptable: ‘(1) Your review is going to take up more space than I want to allocate to it. It would be fairly easy to delete the last paragraph. I have some sympathy with your complaint, but it is a bit peevish, and getting at authors through their publishers strikes me as in principle wrong where their scholarship is concerned. (2) I doubt whether the reference to the Phaedrus needs to be so extended, and I’m more than doubtful whether

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it should claim support from an unpublished article by Leo Strauss. Footnotes in book reviews are a nuisance anyway (the print gets to be too small), and this one credits Strauss with two sentences whose syntax seems to have gone adrift. I don’t think you can with propriety quote him until he has had first whack in print, unless of course he has said you may. I assume you kept a copy of your review. May I operate on it in these two ways?’ Leo Strauss (1899–1973), German-American philosopher, emigrated from Germany in 1938 and taught at the New School for Social Research, Chicago (1949–68), Claremont, and St John’s College. He is chiefly known for re-examining the quarrel between ancient and modern political philosophers and siding with the ancients. His work includes a critique of modern liberalism and egalitarian democracy, modern political science, and historicist hermeneutics. At the same time, he argued that liberal democracy, with all its flaws, is preferable to its twentieth-century competitors, national socialism and communism. See also page 132, note 5. Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902–94), Austrian philosopher, fled the Nazis in 1938, eventually becoming a professor at the London School of Economics. His works include The Open Society and Its Enemies (1947) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957). See Grant’s critique of Popper in Collected Works, Volume 2, pp. 75–92. Alfred E. Taylor (1869–1945), British classicist, taught at Oxford, Manchester, McGill, St Andrews, and Edinburgh. His works include Plato, the Man and His Work (1948) and Platonism and Its Influences (1963). Francis Macdonald Cornford (1874–1943), English classicist, was professor of ancient philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. His publications include Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (1935), Before and after Socrates (1932), and From Religion to Philosophy (1957). Sir David Ross (1877–1971) was a Scottish moral philosopher and critic of Utilitarianism who gained recognition by editing the Oxford English translations of Aristotle (1908–52). His publications include Aristotle (1930), Plato’s Theory of Ideas (1951), and Kant’s Ethical Theory (1954). Neville Richard Murphy published The Interpretation of Plato’s Republic (1951). Richard Robinson was a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, whose publications include The Province of Logic (1931) and Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (1953). André Jean Festugière (1898–1982) was a French specialist in the history of Greek thought and religion. His works include Contemplation et vie contemplative selon Platon (1936), Liberté et civilisation chez les Grecs (1947), and Personal Religion among the Greeks (1954). Paul Friedlander (1882–1968), German Plato scholar, published Plato (3 vols) in 1954.

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Review of Plato on Man and Society René Schaerer (1901– ), historian and philosopher, taught at the University of Geneva. His works include Dieu, l’homme et la vie d’après Platon (1944), and L’homme antique et la structure du monde intérieur d’Homère à Socrate (1958). Julius Stenzel (1883–1935), German professor of philosophy, taught at Kiel and Halle. His works include Metaphysik der Altertums (1934) and Plato’s Method of Dialectic (1940). Eric Voegelin (1901–85). See page 179, note 8.

Review of Fountain Come Forth: The Anglican Church and the Valley Town of Dundas, prepared by R.B. Gilman1

Grant reviewed this ninety-three-page book about his own parish church possibly for an Anglican publication or a local newspaper. Either it was not published or it appeared in a parish publication of which we have found no record. We have contacted Gilman, who has no recollection of the review.

This is the history of St James Anglican Church in the town of Dundas, written for the 125th anniversary of the parish. It traces the life of church work from its earliest beginnings in 1784 and relates it to the history of the town and of our province as a whole. At the head of the lake, Dundas was the point from which new settlers moved into western Ontario down John Graves Simcoe’s road. It was also one of the first towns with manufacturing and therefore the first with a long established middle class. As one drives through the town today, the evidence of this remains in the substantial houses, some of which have been there for well over a century. Indeed the most fascinating part of this book is that it gives a lively history of how the Anglican Church established itself in western Ontario. Reading this book one can understand why the church of Bishop Strachan was successful in laying such deep roots in Ontario.2 The men around him were not flaccid or lazy. It is all summed up in a photograph of the Reverend William McMurray, who served as curate and rector of the town from 1838–1857. There he is, intelligent and sensitive, but above all strong; clearly a man who knew what he was doing and believed in what he was doing. No wonder that the roots of the church were laid deep in the new land. These conservative Anglicans brought a sane, reasonable, and fitting religion for a society which had to be built

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from nothing. Too much of the history of Ontario has been written by those sympathetic to the radical tradition of William Lyon Mackenzie (who also lived in Dundas).3 But it was this conservative Anglicanism which gave western Ontario much of its flavour of solidity, decency, and continuity. Families such as the Oslers and the Ewarts (who have played such a part in Ontario history) came from this parish.4 Beyond the formative years, the book carries on the history of the church to the present day. Because of the railroads and the port, Hamilton became the big city and Dundas the charming and sleepy valley town. Through wars and depressions the church was carried on by the loyalty of its priests and laity. This book is above all the history of generations of hard work by ordinary men and women who were determined that the church would be. Raising money for a parish hall may not be sensational but it is the very stuff of the kingdom of heaven. It is ultimately what gives the world its richness, far more than battles or political rivalries. Mr R.B. Gilman is to be congratulated for how well he catches the day-to-day quality of church life and how well he relates it to the life of the town and of the province. Since the end of the Second World War, Dundas has started to grow once more. It has become part of the dynamic ‘civilization’ of the Golden Horseshoe. Now in the church of St James there meets the solid core of the old town of Dundas with its roots going back for generations and the new inhabitants who have made Dundas a dormitory suburb. The wonder of the Church of Christ is that under the vital leadership of the Reverend John Bothwell the parish meets these new circumstances and blends its traditions with its commitment to the future, because of its hold on those truths which are unchanging in any society. This volume has been wisely given the title ‘Fountain Come Forth’ from the words of the prophet Joel: ‘A fountain shall come forth from the House of the Lord and shall water the valley.’5

Notes 1 Richard (Dick) B. Gilman (1923– ) had a varied career, which included teaching English and religion at Hillfield-Strathallan College, a private school serving Hamilton and its surrounding communities. He was head of the junior school from 1955 to 1961.

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2 John Strachan (1778–1867), Anglican bishop, educator, became bishop of Toronto in 1839, ruling the Anglican Church in Upper Canada. His attempts to maintain Anglican dominance in Upper Canadian politics had failed by 1841. In 1857 he formed a self-governing synod of clergy and laity and began dividing his large diocese by holding synodical elections for new bishops. 3 William Lyon Mackenzie (1795–1861), Upper Canadian journalist and politician, led the farmers in the unsuccessful rebellion of 1837. During his flight, he is said to have spent a brief time in a cave in the hills above Dundas, before continuing to the United States. 4 Sir William Osler (1849–1919), physician, writer, and educator, was raised in Dundas and educated at University of Toronto and McGill. He taught medicine at McGill, Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford. By 1900 he was probably the best-known physician in the English-speaking world. John Skirving Ewart (1849–1933), lawyer and publicist, first practised law in Winnipeg and represented the French-speaking minority in the Manitoba Schools Dispute. He relocated his legal practice to Ottawa in 1904 because he appeared frequently before the Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, England. 5 Joel 3:17–19: ‘And it shall come to pass in that day, that the mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth out of the house of the Lord, and shall water the valley of Shittim.’

Memorandum of the Anglican Bishops Concerning the Roman Catholic Hierarchy’s Brief on Education

These remarks, dated 4 January 1963, may have been written down for a broadcast. The Ontario Roman Catholic bishops’ brief was submitted to Premier John Robarts and members of the Ontario legislature in October 1962 requesting that ecclesiastical control of the education of Roman Catholic children in state-supported schools be extended to include the high-school level. For the text of the proposal, see the Globe and Mail (Toronto), 29 October 1962. The Anglican memorandum on the brief was presented to the premier and the legislature on 12 December 1962 and appeared in the January 1963 edition of the Canadian Churchman (vol. 90, no. 1). While supporting the Roman Catholic bishops in their efforts to uphold Christian values and principles in education, the Anglican bishops said they regretfully parted company on the question of extension of privilege presently enjoyed by Roman Catholics.

I start from the fact that when Christ said ‘I am the truth’ He meant it. This means that all the particular truths of science, technology, morality, and art can only be properly understood in their relation to what He tells us about Deity. The understanding of such relations does not happen in the human mind automatically. It requires education and this education is now a requirement of nearly everybody in an era when most of the population must be educated to a high level of technical skill. What has secularized Canada more than anything else is the fact that our competent people have not been able to understand the relation of Christianity to their competence. They have either got out of the Church or stayed in and not taken the claims of Christ seriously. The foregoing facts mean that the Christian Church has no alternative but to be involved in the educational process at every stage of its members’ development.

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What worries me is that the Roman Catholic bishops understand this fact; the Anglican bishops seem not to. The Roman Catholic bishops say in their first sentence that education is the principal duty of the Church.1 Of course, this difference is manifest in the fact that in Canada the Roman Catholic Church have kept their hand on the tiller of their educational institutions, while for the last hundred years the nonRoman churches have turned their tillers over to the state. The Anglican bishops appeal to the fact that our state schools are really Christian. This is less and less the case. The Christian religion is more and more a façade placed over the top of a basically secularist orientation. The Anglican bishops say that ethics are taught in the schools. But surely the Christian Church has always known that ethics have no meaning for people if they are not rooted in metaphysics – that is, rooted in clear statements about the ultimate nature of reality. This is what Roman Catholic education attempts to do in its schools and universities. The secular universities of Canada are more and more places where our clever young people are indoctrinated with an opposition religion to Christianity – secularized humanism. And this is becoming gradually the case in our schools. Having given up its relation to schools and universities over the last hundred years, there is nothing that can be done quickly by the Anglican Church to reverse those disastrous decisions. The reversal of this trend can only be a long-term process. In the meantime, however, it is hard to understand why the Anglican bishops should attack the position of another Christian body which takes more seriously the proposition that Christ is the truth and that therefore its young people must be educated in Christian surroundings. In doing so, the Anglican Church seems to be saying that modern secularism and the secular state is closer to it than the Roman Catholic Church. To put the matter in a practical way, what should Anglican parents do for their children when they have a choice between schools and universities dominated by the secular religion or by the Roman Catholic Church? Much as we may distrust some parts of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical system it is surely the case that if one had to choose between the two one would have to send one’s children to the Roman Catholic institutions. Nothing in the foregoing implies agreement in detail with all the Roman Catholic proposals. The Anglican bishops clearly have a political duty of scrutinizing the individual proposals one by one.

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Note 1 The first sentence of the Roman Catholic bishops’ brief: ‘Whereas the education of youth must be ranked as the principal duty of the various agencies concerned with the welfare of mankind and, in particular, of those agencies to whom children are entrusted in a special way, namely the family, the State, and the Church, it is most important that all these agencies coordinate their interest and their efforts in procuring the benefits of all to the detriment of none.’

Value and Technology

This talk was published in Conference Proceedings: Welfare Services in a Changing Technology (Ottawa: The Canadian Conference on Social Welfare 1964), 21–9. Grant had many connections in the social welfare community, some dating from his years working with the Canadian Association for Adult Education. An abridged version of the talk is published in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 387–94.

The pursuit of those sciences which issue in the masterful control of human and non-human nature is clearly the activity which is considered the most valuable in our society. It surely does not need to be argued that this is dominant in progressive civilization, whether in its most advanced home in North America or in later developers such as the Soviet Union. And it must be emphasized that we are speaking just as much of the sciences that issue in the mastery of human as in the mastery of non-human nature. In the first wave of modernity several hundred years ago, it was believed that science was essentially concerned with the mastery of non-human nature to serve human beings whose nature was essentially a given fact, and therefore not capable of being mastered. But for the last hundred years we have been in the second wave of modernity which does not so believe. Our science issues as much in the mastery of our own species as in the mastery of the rocks, the plants, and the other animals. Indeed the more modern the society the more effort will be placed on what is called ‘social science.’ It is necessary to make distinctions between the motives which lead men to think that this pursuit is the most important human activity. Until recently the pursuit of these sciences was generally seen as a

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means to human ends which were outside the pursuit. This is for instance how Marx saw technology. More recently, however, there are many in our civilization who believe that the practice of such sciences is in itself an end. They are no longer viewed as serving purposes beyond themselves but rather as themselves giving to existence any meaning and purpose that it may have. Obviously much of the modern interest in space is of this kind. Whatever the motive, however, the primary question that must be asked about value in our civilization is: ‘Does the pursuit of these sciences which issue in the masterful control of human and non-human nature serve good?’ Although this is the chief question about value in our civilization, I do not intend to discuss it for the following reason. For all practical purposes the truth of this proposition has been settled. Our civilization is committed at the very roots of its being to the idea that such sciences serve good. It is the fundamental dogma of our religion. Therefore, although we may as theorists discuss its truth, as practical men we have to live as if it were assumed. It is the duty of all human beings to live with courage in the world, but it is the very substance of your profession so to live. Therefore as we all belong to a society which does assume that a science issuing in the masterful control of nature serves good, it is our first job as practical people to make the best of the world that proceeds from that assumption. And to do that we must discuss what will be the difficulties of value which will arise in a society which makes that assumption. As theoretical men (that is, as spectators of all time and all existence) we may question the fundamental assumptions of our civilization; as practical men we have to learn to live with them. In turning to our society as it is, I do not want simply to run down the list of the most important social problems which arise at the present state of technological advance and proceed to discuss the problems of value created by these new technological conditions. You all know the usual list of these problems discussed in papers such as this: automation and what it means for the definition of work and leisure; the new kinds of poverty and the lack of care about it among the prosperous majority; mass training and the people who cannot cope with the skills of a technological world; the neglected horrors at the centre of our cities and the characterless sprawls which are the suburbs; the difficulties in the new definitions of masculinity and femininity, etc., etc. These are all

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questions about each of which important papers could be written. But you all know the facts of our society as well as I do, and you all know incomparably better than I what special questions these situations raise for your profession. It would be boring if I simply repeated the platitudinous descriptions of the new sociology; it would be impertinent if I told you how to do your work. In fact I do not want to talk about values but about value itself, because the crucial thing to see about our society is not simply that technology changes social values, but that it makes problematic the very idea of value itself. And in speaking of value itself let me specify the particular society with which I am concerned. (1) It is the highly organized industrial society of the Great Lakes region. Let us have no doubt that North America is the most advanced progressive society on earth and that we are at the heart of it in the Great Lakes region. This world is worth looking at because it is what more and more societies are in general going to come to be like. And (2) I am concerned with the heart of this society, the part of it which is a going dynamic concern. I am not concerned with enclaves in that society like the new poverty, even though these may be its most terrible aspect. I am not concerned with enclaves from the past which have not yet been swept into megalopolis. I am concerned with the society of which the majority are a part; in which nearly everybody has a highly specialized job; where a large percentage has a sufficient income to drive on the super highways and live in a richer or poorer suburb; where most people work within some great bureaucracy, one of the public or private corporate governments. This emphasis does not mean that I do not have the highest admiration for those people whose business is to deal with the rotting and cancerous growths of our society. I thank God every day that Eileen Jackson is in Hamilton.1 But my concern is with value in the central core of our society because it is there that a growing proportion of human beings will live. And your profession so well knows that its job is not simply to deal with those who are excluded from the main stream but also with those in the dynamic core of the universal and homogenous empire. If this means that I am talking about ourselves, not some unfortunate people out there, this is surely to the good. For value is not a word which we can talk about in exclusion from our own existence. What is it then about the age of progress which does not merely

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change values, but makes the very idea of value problematic to large numbers and particularly to those who are most explicitly part of the age of progress? To give the most general answer to this question: the cause lies in the fact that there is an almost complete separation for many between their freedom and the myths. So to speak may seem to you highly general and rather pedantic, but this is the central condition of most modern human beings and therefore it is a fact with which your profession deals in its daily work. What then is myth? It is an account of existence in its totality which reveals to most men their own mode of being in the world.a Myths are the way that systems of meaning are given to most human beings. And it is from systems of meaning that we make judgments about what is valuable. Why is meaning given to most human beings in myth? The greatest of all philosophers answered this in saying that myths exist ‘to enchant the soul.’ Why is it necessary for the soul to be enchanted? So that it may be led to the true purposes of human existence. The myths are not then the truth about human life; they are the enchanting images by which most men are led to apprehend some purpose in their existence. They are the chief way that most of us apprehend the beauty of the world. Being what we are – neither gods nor beasts but human beings – we need to be enchanted into the good way. Let me make clear that in speaking about myths, I am not here discussing how we move through myth to truth. Truth is certainly more than myth. For example, in my opinion Christianity is more than myth; it is the truth. But it is certainly mythical in the sense that it has revealed to countless millions their own mode of being in the world. But in so far as I must be able to judge its relation to competing myths, for example in the modern world the myth of progress, I must be able to know it as myth, but more than myth. On the other hand myths are not altogether other than truth, because they are more than particular tales. They carry with them the note of universality. The story of Oedipus tells us something universal in which we can live. Yet again it is not so universal as the story of the Bo tree or beyond that of the cross, because they tell us of what is even more universal about human existence, about enlightenment and about dereliction.2 By freedom is meant the modern account of self-consciousness: that is, of the self as absolute. This is indeed, the very heart of what modern a See M. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries.

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history has been and is – the belief that man’s essence is his freedom. The negative aspect of this authentic and absolute freedom must be that every meaning, every purpose, every value has to come before the court of that freedom and is under the judgment of that sovereignty. We conceive ourselves to be the source of ourselves, the source of our own order. But it is the very mark of any myth to speak of those things which transcend the individual, to speak of an order of which the individual is a part, but which does not originate in his freedom. The heart of any myth is to tell us of that which our freedom does not create but by which it is judged. This is then what I mean by that separation between freedom and myth. As modern people come to believe themselves to be the absolute source of themselves, all systems of order and meaning which appear to human beings as myth become other to them, and so in the very act of their sovereignty they experience the world as empty of meaning. This affirmation that man’s essence is his freedom is not something experienced by the few, but by more and more in our technological and mobile society. More and more find themselves separated from the myths in and through which most human beings found point and purpose. The last great myth which held masses in the modern world and still holds many was the myth of progress. It was last by definition because it depended on the assertion of absolute human sovereignty. But once one has asserted that absolute freedom, one has excluded oneself from myth. This process of alienation (to use the jargon) will affect great numbers of people in the universal and homogenous state – from those at the pinnacles of authority in the bureaucracy down through the varying echelons of technical skill. The liberals who led in this definition of man as freedom acted in earlier generations as if those in the centres of power would be free, but that the ordering myths would continue among those in the sticks who were too foolish to see through them. But in our day and generation in North America we live in a world where emancipation from the myths touches every corner of our civilization and where imitation of the sophisticated is preached over the television and through the magazine in every home. We have achieved equality in our society at least at the point where we massively can liberate people from all sense of meaning. It takes a high degree of stubbornness in our society not to try and seem a sophisticate.

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Now I have no doubt that this alienation of people’s freedom from the myths and the ensuing sense of existence as arbitrary and contingent will be the chief phenomenon of our highly automated society. Therefore an increasing number of these among whom you practise your profession will find themselves confronted with this situation. This separation will appear most clearly in new forms of what this generation calls ‘mental illness.’ As Plato makes clear, mental illness must above all be defined socially, and therefore this new condition of separation will produce new forms of mental illness. It is very difficult to catalogue them because they are so new. But certainly that unclear and catch-all-term of modern psychiatry – schizophrenia – will be applied to them. As my experience is rather concentrated on bureaucrats of the second or third orders of power, let me speak of some of the phenomena I notice there. In the immediate North American past, the majority of those who built the great bureaucracies, private and public, which have given us the most advanced technological society on earth, were held in being by the great myths of Protestantism. We do not have to say that that form of Christianity was a true account of that religion to recognize that those myths of work and responsibility were marvellous in the dynamism they produced in pioneering and early industrial America. It is because of them more than anything else that we live today in a neo-capitalist empire which more than any other force dominates the world. The very power of those myths is seen in the fact that they have been so imitated by Catholics and Jews. (What after all is the Kennedy phenomenon, but a Catholic family imitating the liberal Protestant myths a generation or two after they have lost their meaning for most Protestants?) And for all the inadequacy and the ruthlessness of the old Protestant ethic, it gave the middle-class organizers a vision of society as a moral universe of which they were a part and in which they lived as moral agents along with other moral agents. But now our bureaucrats are increasingly of a new kind. For one reason or another, they have accepted the entirely modern and believe themselves to be the source of their own freedom. And the more sophisticated these people are, the less they see themselves as part of a common moral world and the more they see themselves as over against the world, dealing with it as otherness, as a series of objects which they move around as a means of proving to themselves that they are free. To put it

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crudely, many of the products of these new bureaucracies seem less and less able to imagine or to conceive that the objects with which they deal are in fact human beings who exist in the same way that they do. This atmosphere of solipsism will of course never be absolute, but in so far as it exists political activity becomes an assertion of self and sexual activity a completion of one’s own fantasies. This removal of the self from the shared world of moral striving, this vision of everything other as outside oneself, is in my Platonic book the source of many forms of madness. This is not to say that many of these bureaucrats of which I speak will be locked up; it is much more likely that they will do the locking up. This separation between myth and freedom will take very different forms among different people. There will be those who simply do not have the drive for recognition required in big bureaucracies, and who will seek meaning in a changing series of masks. Some of these may even return to the conception of virtue; others may so suffer from the absence of meaning as to fill the hospitals. It may be indeed that so great will be the separation from the myth that we will not be able to produce a sufficient number sane enough long enough to fill the places of responsibility necessary to a complex society. Indeed when we look at the power and prestige and certainty of the social institutions of the neo-capitalist empire, we are forced to forego any of those socialist dreams about it being upset by its inner economic contradictions. But what, however, could upset us is something more inner than these, this widespread separation from meaning (but as soon as we say that, we must remember that the Roman Empire kept itself in being for centuries after any system of meaning had disappeared from its ruling classes). The provinces and the small towns were the reservoirs from which the sufficiently solid seekers of recognition came to provide the bureaucracies with continuing efficiency and stability. In our industrial society these reservoirs are of course more quickly dried up. In Ontario sophistication is reaching into Lindsay and Meaford and Port Arthur. There will be a hectic search for pseudo-myths in our society as also there will be profound attempts to live truly in the ancient myths. In so far as the modern craze for art is more than ‘interior decoration,’ it is obviously a search for myth, pseudo or otherwise. One extraordinary aspect of this separation between myth and freedom is that where the political liturgy is full of appeals to the individ-

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ual in his freedom to make society, the scientific analysis of society and individuals is centred around the principle of a complete determinism. You all know the language of modern sociology and psychology so I do not have to describe it. Man is then conceived from the widest extreme. We assert ‘scientifically’ that human conduct can be absolutely predicted and therefore controlled; as individuals we believe ourselves to be free in the most absolute sense, as the makers of our own selves and our own values. And let me say about this extraordinary picture of man, that the cause of meaninglessness lies more in the assertion of freedom than determinism. It is sometimes asserted that modern social science is a danger to traditional morality and religion because it claims to be able to predict and control individual and collective behaviour. But it does not seem to me that this side of the modern picture of man has the highest danger. Rather it is the other side, which asserts that man’s essence is his freedom, that we are the cause of ourselves, which is much more the source of meaninglessness. It is certainly a slight misinterpretation to be told that one’s conduct can be interpreted by analogies from the rats; but it does not destroy one like believing one is absolute, that is, that one is God. To put the point in another way, using the language of freedom we talk of people as ‘selves’ rather than ‘souls.’ But in changing the vocabulary we have changed how we consider ourselves. As Leo Strauss has said: ‘The self is obviously a descendant of the soul; i.e., it is not the soul. The soul may be responsible for its being good or bad but it is not responsible for its being a soul; of the self on the other hand it is not certain whether it is not a self by virtue of its own effort.’3 And it is this absolute sovereignty of the self in its own effort which puts on people a burden which should not be put and which leads people to utter despair. To take a very simple illustration, Mrs Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique: The book says a lot of true things about women in North America. But it is written as a sermon to encourage people to make their own lives and so puts a terrible burden of compulsion on women to be absolutely sovereign in their freedom.4 Indeed it can be said that this separation between freedom and myth expresses itself most profoundly in our very use of the word ‘value.’ The word ‘value,’ as we now use it, is part of the logic of the new social sciences, which claim to be the chief way we get information about our society. Those sciences have at their theoretical centre

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the proposition that we must sharply distinguish between judgments of fact and judgments of value. Any neophyte in social science can tell one these days that it is self-evident that we must distinguish between facts and values. What is meant by this distinction between facts and values? What is meant by this distinction is that there is a world of facts which we do not make but which we discover and about which we can make objective judgments. On the other hand there are values which are made by human beings, who are not part of the objective world and about which our judgments are subjective, that is, relative to us. Man in his freedom makes values – they are what he does with the facts. To illustrate: those who make this distinction would say that when I state that Bessie Touzel weighs 135 lbs.5 I am stating a fact; but when I state that she is a noble human being I am simply expressing my value preferences. But this use of the word ‘value’ is a symptom of the very split between freedom and myth of which I have been speaking. Value is seen as something external to the facts; something which is created by man and not given in the world. This is to deny that the world apart from us is valuable, and to deny that the world is in itself good is the heart of blasphemy. In this sense the crisis of value in technology is nowhere better seen than in the social sciences which make the fact-value distinction. For in that very distinction is the denial that the world is in itself valuable. This is to leave the individual naked and alone in the dreadful pressure of time. No wonder ours is the most dynamic society on earth when we believe we have to make the meaning of our own lives. No wonder the most explicitly modern men alternate between the rage to live and despair about their contingency. The question in our civilization does not seem then how particular values will change but what can be the source of value or meaning itself. And let me emphasize that this is not simply a matter to be solved by changing our thought patterns – as if the separation between myth and freedom could be overcome if we all went out and chose ourselves a good myth like a hat or a car or a house. To think that would be itself an example of the very separation I am talking about. It would be to say that we could make the world meaningful, if we would only use our freedom to make it so. ‘Just think right’ or ‘Be responsible’ are not adequate mottoes for social order. The worst of this nonsense is to be found in those psychiatric dramas with which the corporations flood the networks. All problems depend on some madness in our heads, and there-

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fore we do not have to think about the nature of society. This is the cheapest form of idealism. No, what I am saying is that indeed the separation between myth and freedom originates in the way that modern men have thought of themselves for several centuries, but also that this way of looking at ourselves is made true for most of us by the immediate situations we encounter in the mass society. In the long run this view of man has created the situations; but in the short run it is the situations which give people this view of man. In our work and our play, in our dealings with people and with the environment, more and more of us find ourselves in more and more situations in which our freedom is the source of our existence. To take a rather simple example: the other day I listened while an older student who cared talked to a younger student who found himself quite lost at his university. What he said was: ‘Remember when commodities are in surplus they will be cheap, and today there is a surplus of human beings and therefore students are cheap. Universities exist to produce enough skilled people to keep the great beast going and won’t care for you. Therefore look to your own self.’ Any example will seem obvious, but all of us meet a myriad of examples of how as the society gets massive, the individual is thrown in on his solitariness, if he is to survive. Now obviously in many ways the world has always been like this – in any society people have had to fight for recognition or survival, have had to bargain to see that they were not gypped. But what I am saying is that in our mass society the number of these situations, simple or complex, and the amount of our lives they fill will grow and grow. More and more of our time is spent in situations which depend on our own absolute sovereignty. A few years ago there was a kick on in which people talked about the dreadful results of conformity in our society. But conformity is not the chief cause of meaninglessness but rather solitariness – being one’s own and on one’s own. There cannot be much privacy in mass society, but there is endless solitariness. After all it is through humane and intimate social structures that the myths appear to most human beings and when we experience ourselves as on our own the myths cannot appear to enchant the soul. This is indeed the chief cause of the ambiguity with which some look at the age of progress (and I use ‘ambiguity’ here literally). On the one hand one sees every day of one’s life the convenience of that age –

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its production of commodities which ease this life and enable masses to live in the world with comfort and even affluence. On the other hand ones sees that at the heart of society there arises this meaninglessness – this sense of the atrophy of the soul. There are those who place the difficulties of our age in more external questions. Can we bring the underdeveloped nations to be like us quickly enough to prevent the population explosion? Can we stop some nutty government from using the Bomb? etc., etc. If these external difficulties can be met, then all will be well. But I think this is to miss the real ambiguity of our age: what is the quality of being in the age of progress? It is here above all in North America that that ambiguity most clearly arises, because we have first realized what in general everybody else is going to become. If you like to ride the crest of the wave of the future, you’re on it in Chicago or Toronto. But let me repeat we are not in a position to choose or to refuse that future. We are bound to live in it. We are not so situated that we can simply say that the death of the spirit is the price of progress and retire. Our job is to deal with that ambiguity from day to day. To deal with it is to attempt to incarnate meaning in those very structures which we know inhibit or even negate its very possibility. I do not like the formulation for your profession or mine: how can we help others to find meaning? It implies too great a certainty about our possession of it; it implies that we are in some absolute situation outside the very pressures that negate meaning for others. It is to speak as if we had less need of the enchanting myths. In speaking of the possibility of value in the progressive society, let me start from the two poles between which all our lives move – the private and the public. And to start from the public pole: it is clear that a society shaped by a science which issues in the conquest of nature is going to be a large society run by massive institutions. Small institutions just disappear in our era. For example, nearly all of us in this room have watched our small country disappear, swallowed by the continental institutions. Size will be a fact whatever the form of government or economic institutions we live under. Societies will be large whether they be state capitalist, communist, or Gaullist. Of course, some of our problems are created by our particular traditions of social organization. But in speaking about size I will emphasize what will be universally true for men in any industrial society.

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To speak first negatively, it is clear that certain traditional social values disappear because of size. For example, at the level of the organization of government it means the end of that system of government which we have called the democratic. If over a long period a civilization chooses size, it rejects democracy. I am not saying that it necessarily rejects constitutional government (that is another question). I am only saying it rejects democratic government. With the massive private and public corporations and the massive concentration of power that a large society requires, you cannot preserve government by the many. Insofar as such a form of government was ever realized, it was based on the expectation that a large number of citizens would be able to make common-sense choices founded on some knowledge of the alternatives, and on the possession of fairly virtuous standards by which they made the choice. To speak only about the first of these conditions, it is perfectly clear that most people cannot have the opportunity of knowing the facts anymore. The account of the facts which ruling-class liberalism wants to be believed can be legitimised on this continent without much difficulty these days, except perhaps in the case of race relations. The destruction of Mr Diefenbaker last year is a good example of what can be done when it is deemed necessary. An even more important example is the almost total silence on this continent about what has happened in Brazil in the last months, when those events must inevitably have an enormous influence on our children’s future.6 Just listen to the ‘news’ in the papers and on the networks and one sees how far the legitimising process can be carried in a mass society. Of course in North America the excitement of elections and voting will continue, but they will be rituals of legitimising and not exercises in governing. Democracy is a way of government appropriate to the city or perhaps even to the nation. It is not appropriate to empires. I use this example of the disappearance of certain ways of government, not for the sake of gloom, but to make clear the distinction between what is possible and what is not. It is hard to be sufficiently courageous to live for what is possible without wasting one’s energies on trying to do what is not possible, or even on the self-pity of regret. To turn to the other pole – the private – it is clear that in our imperial age the centre of meaning for many people is found in that which is the nearest to the totally private, namely, the passionate relations of the pair. I do not think it is the tossing aside of ancient restraints or our

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understanding of ourselves as essentially animal which leads so many to find in the erotic the meaningful. Rather it is in this communication (which is nearest to privacy) that people think they can find meaning in a way that seems impossible in the wider community. Nor am I saying that this is a drawing back from the city or the nation to the family or the household, because for many this is a withdrawal to a smaller unity than the family, namely the lovers; or the friends. We are all aware that it is becoming widespread that when the lovers must become the wider community of the household, one member or other often simply refuses this wider unity. Indeed I am sure that among many people, the prodigious strain that is being put on the pair is that each believes the other and their relation with the other will bear the full weight of giving meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. The weight which was once borne by the lovers, the kin group, the city, the church, and the nation, people are now asking the pair to bear alone. And this burden falls with crashing strain particularly on some young women. Kafka’s myth that in a totally absurd world the lonely man will find salvation in a loving woman has a timeless element in it, but like all romanticism it is finally selfish and solitary and leaves a multitude of the young stranded.7 But leaving its limitations alone, it is clear that the private world of the pair is a source of meaning already present in the society. Whatever strains the wider institutions of the mass society put on the lovers and the friends, it is surely clear that in our society the place where it is the hardest to kill meaning and its myths is in private relations. To pass beyond the pair, we all read much these days about the possibility of the family in the technological age. I am not qualified to analyse the strains which that institution is under, nor do I wish to predict what future there is for it. Let me make but one point. If our society cannot give meaning to the household – that is, if the idea of the family cannot find itself within the myth – then I do not think that we will be able to have any meaning in wider institutions than the family. If our society fails there, it will be meaningless beyond it. That is, I stand with the tradition of the antique world and of the Church which asserts that the family is natural to man – and the word ‘natural’ so used means that the household is necessary to general human excellence. In saying this I grant what Freud has emphasized about the destructive power of the family. I also grant that the accidents of the household may change

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as long as its essence remains. What I mean by accidents is, for instance, that patriarchy may not be essential to the household. One aspect of its essence is that ‘sun and man still generate man.’ And if anyone here thinks that essence is inviolable, let him remember how fast we are moving in our researches and proposals to the absolute denial that sun and man should generate man. What I am asserting is the conservative proposition that those of us who are interested in meaning had better close shop if we cannot bring meaning into the household. There are many proposals these days (and some of them come from your profession) which in the name of the good of some wider institution are willing to sacrifice the strength of the family. But if in the name of the wider good, the institution of the narrower good is attacked, the very idea of good itself is threatened. For I would assert here the principle that one will not be able to incarnate meaning at wider levels if it cannot exist at the narrower ones. The Russians for instance have decided to limit the strength of the family in the name of the wider loyalty. This will be an effective instrument for years of quick modernization. But they will pay a dreadful price for it in the long run. (Obviously nothing I have said limits the rights of judges to take children away from parents who cannot be parents.) Beyond these elementary and almost private institutions, it is much harder to see how far meaning will be able to incarnate itself. The next stage outward is of course the sphere of education. And in speaking of this sphere it is necessary to insist on the principle that ideally the highest end for which the city exists is the fullest education (in the truest sense of that word) of its members. This principle is insisted upon because at present it is often forgotten. Public officials say we cannot do without education because without it our society cannot compete against others. This may be so, but the use of such an argument must not let us invert the proper order of good, which is that society as a natural entity has as its highest end the education of its members. Economic competition or even survival are not in themselves ends which realize human excellence. And in speaking of education as a sphere of meaning, it is necessary to recognize that in a society where nearly all human beings are going to be asked to be highly technically trained, we are inevitably producing schools and universities where individuals are going to be under the most frantic pressures, and therefore that education is a sphere where the social worker who cares will have to be

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present. One does not have to go far from this room to enter the world of drop-outs and blackboard jungles – that is, of meaninglessness. And in the massive impersonal multiversities, where the young are competing for their places in the meritocracy and where the pressure for them to become skilled is less and less related to any thought about the ultimate purposes of being skilled, the anguish and the tension and the solitariness is everywhere. To think that the official appointment of Freudian trained psychiatrists and behaviourally trained psychologists (who are supposed to patch the broken) is going to be enough is not to know the ‘communitylessness’ of our universities. Teachers, clergy, and social workers are going to have to be together in such institutions. And as this is an audience of people who have advanced in a profession, let me make one comment of how they will have to be there. In all our bureaucracies it pays in money and prestige to be far from the pitface. But it is only in the pit-face that the coal of meaning can be dug. All the people in the office only ideally exist so that work at the pit-face can the better be done. Social workers, teachers, or clergy will have to pay the price which the saints must always be asked to pay of being at the pit-face. As one moves back from the private to the imperial it becomes more difficult to understand how meaning will be present in the wider structures. For the central institution here is the corporation – those private and public governments who bear the weight of ruling in the neo-capitalist empire of the West. These corporations – mammoth bureaucracies – are the world in which most people will live out their lives. To exemplify in a Canadian setting what I mean at a high level, the life of Mr Mitchell Sharp will serve.8 First a civil servant under Howe, the organizer of the pipeline,9 then when there was a break in governmental legitimacy, a vice-president of Brazilian Traction, and now back in satellite politics – but always in the interlocking bureaucracies. Of course one thing that will be a source of meaning in bureaucracies will be the desire for recognition, and the consequent climbing of the slippery pole. But what of the masses in those bureaucracies who cannot find meaning in recognition? What beyond the private will be the myth to enchant their souls? There is a lot written these days about these private and public governments and some of it is fascinating, but none that I have read answers the question of how they will be anything but other to most of their members. But there is much about

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these organizations I do not understand and therefore I cannot say more. I am sure however that the fate of our civilization will be found in them. It is sometimes said that the mediator of meaning between the empire and the private will not be the corporations but the city. Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, Toronto will be what people will pay their loyalty to within the empire, rather as once they paid their loyalty to nation states such as Canada. The myth in the city will flourish. But I am dubious about this for the following reason. The city is finally ruled by the corporations – private and public – and these are organizations which serve themselves in serving the empire, not in serving the city. The élite of these corporations are essentially mobile and owe only passing allegiance to the cities through which they move. Indeed mobility now goes throughout hierarchy, so that cities are only encampments on the road to economic mastery. The owners of private governments will more and more move around in imperial society of the jet age. It will be at the level of the city that what Sir Geoffrey Vickers has called the undirected nature of our society will be most manifest.10 I do not think then that the city can be the unity of meaning between the empire and the household. It will be the corporation. Let me end on one rather complicated note; in the years ahead in your profession as in mine there will be two different types (that is to exclude those too boring to consider who simply use our professions for recognition). The first will be those who are concerned with keeping the present show fairly decently upon the road. In your profession they will patch up the wounds of a tough society. Such people who keep the system from being too unkind will be of the highest importance. Two generations ago in Canada such people were moved by biblical religion, a generation ago by liberalism. Their practical jobs are ever before them. The second kind will be those who are interested not simply in patching up the wounds but in trying to incarnate meaning into the structures of the automated age. For these people one thing above all will be necessary: a much higher degree of theoretical sophistication than has yet been generally vouchsafed in your profession. By theory I mean the attempt to have knowledge of the whole. The goodwilled pragmatism of your profession in a simpler North America will not do in this complex age. Man in his freedom has built an enormous, complex, sophisticated beast and to incarnate meaning in it will

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require the clearest thought. For your profession there is one great impediment to that theoretical clarity. You rely on the new social sciences. These new sciences have had many great achievements, but in North America they are like blank tablets as far as profundity and sophistication of theory goes. Naïveté is the general order of the day among the majority in these sciences. But for those of your profession interested in meaning for a mass imperial culture, naïveté will not serve. This then presents no easy task to your profession because you must take upon yourselves the full weight and suffering of the present particularities, while at the same time seeking that serenity and felicity which comes from being spectators of all time and all existence.

Notes 1 Eileen Jackson was a Hamilton social worker who published Family Revitalization Experiment, North District (1969). 2 ‘The story of Oedipus’: In Greek legend, Oedipus was the son of Laius, King of Thebes, and his wife Jocasta. He was abandoned on a mountainside after Apollo told Laius he was fated to be killed by his own son. Oedipus survived, was raised at Corinth by foster parents, and later learned from Apollo that he was doomed to kill his father and marry his mother. The prophecy was fulfilled by an unwitting Oedipus, who blinded himself in an agony of horror when he learned the truth. ‘The story of the Bo tree’: The fateful day in the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, came when he was meditating beneath a fig tree. Deep in meditation, he reached the highest degree of consciousness, nirvana. He is said to have stayed under the tree for seven days. After that, the fig tree was called the bodhi, or the Bo tree, the tree of wisdom. The wisdom attained was the middle path between self-indulgence and self-torture, and it was taught as the Eightfold Path, namely, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. The story of the cross: According to Grant, Christ, by the way he bore the cross, revealed how God’s love and forgiveness had entered into the suffering and injustice of the world. He argued that individual human beings can partake of this forgiveness and hence know God’s world as good, albeit in a mysterious way that cannot be explained. They are saved from despair, and from what Luther called ‘secret anger against God and hurt to oneself’; they see the world with its afflictions and joys as what it is.

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3 See ‘Perspectives on the Good Society,’ originally published in Criterion: A Publication of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago 2/3 (Summer 1963): 3, and later in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books 1968), 261. Leo Strauss (1899–1973). See page 132, note 5, and page 219, note 3. 4 Betty Friedan (1921– ), American feminist, founded the National Organization of Women and was first president from 1966 to 1970. Her works include The Feminine Mystique (1963) and The Second Stage (1981). 5 Bessie Touzel (1904– ) was a social welfare executive who worked for the Welfare Council of Toronto District (1940–48), was executive director of the Ontario Welfare Council (1953–65), and was the vice-president for North America of the International Federation of Social Workers (1956–8). Grant became friends with Touzel in 1959 when they both participated in a CBC program on ‘Belief.’ 6 Early in 1964, when Brazil’s President Goulart signed decrees setting lowrent controls, nationalizing petroleum refineries, expropriating unused lands, and limiting export of profits, he was overthrown by an army revolt. General Branco, army chief of staff, became president, and his regime suppressed opposition, particularly from the left, depriving some three hundred people of political rights. A law passed in 1965 curbed civil liberties and increased the power of the national government. 7 Franz Kafka (1883–1924), German-Czech author, studied at Prague and Munich and became an official at a workers’ accident insurance company. His works, published posthumously, include The Trial (1945), Amerika (1949), and The Castle (1953). His (‘Kafka-esque’) vision of society as a bureaucratic and totalitarian nightmare for the bewildered individual fits with Grant’s point about the absurd world. On the desperate search for love as a solution, Grant may be referring to Kafka’s Letters to Milena (ed. Willi Haas, trans. Tania and James Stern [New York: Schocken Books 1962]), or his Letters to Felice (ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth [New York: Schocken Books 1973]). 8 Mitchell William Sharp (1911–2004), civil servant, businessman, and politician, was associate deputy minister and deputy minister of trade and commerce (1951–8). After the Liberal defeat in the 1957 election, he left the civil service to enter private business. He was elected to parliament in 1963 and was appointed minister of trade and commerce (1963–5) in the government of L.B. Pearson. 9 Clarence Decatur Howe (1886–1960). See page 47, note 1. 10 Sir Geoffrey Vickers (1894–1982). See page 48, note 3. Grant is referring to The Undirected Society: Essays on the Human Implications of Industrialization in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1959).

Review of The Four Faces of Peace, by Lester B. Pearson

The review appeared in the Canadian Forum, 44/524 (Sept. 1964): 140.

This book is a collection of speeches and statements by Prime Minister L.B. Pearson collected and edited by another, but with an introduction by himself.1 They cover the period of time since 1948 when he stopped being a civil servant and became a politician. The largest part of the book is in two sections entitled ‘World Statesman’ and ‘Canadian Spokesman.’ Under ‘World Statesman’ are found statements about certain international issues of the 1950s, for example, the Korean War, the Suez crisis, the Atlantic alliance etc. These statements are most often taken from what he said at the UN. Under ‘Canadian Spokesman,’ the statements are generally about Canadian relations with the rest of the world, e.g. with the US, the UN, NATO, and the Commonwealth. In this section is included his speech of 1962 in which he advocated that Canada should accept nuclear arms. It is entitled ‘The Only Honourable Course.’ The book also includes his Nobel Peace Prize address and a section called ‘A Spectrum of Values’ dealing with his general views on such issues as education, democracy, etc. At the end are excerpts from his speeches on Canadian unity and his tribute to President Kennedy. The main question posed by this book is: why was it allowed to be published? Mr Pearson has spent his life as a diplomat and a politician. He has perforce had to spend much of his time being a good committee man. Such a role is a perfectly respectable one, but it does not lead to profundity of political analysis or subtlety of literary style. For example, the speeches and statements about international affairs in this book read like the platitudes which are publicly presented to legitimise

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governmental policies after the committee has met. But such legitimising is by its very nature ephemeral and suffers from the permanence of hard covers a decade later. The limits to the solution of ‘ad hoc’ problems are given in a career such as Mr Pearson's by the dominant classes and interests it serves. Therefore by his very role, these pronouncements must be ‘the conventional wisdom’ as it is modified from month to month. The result is that although the percentage of clichés is high when the speeches are about public events, it is overwhelming when the writing is concerned with general human questions, such as education, democracy, peace, etc. We should not be asked to read commencement addresses in cold blood. Perhaps if Mr Pearson was to sit down in his retirement he could write an amusing book about the tensions of international negotiations or the decisions involved in having a successful political career in the Western empire. Such a book would surely more fairly represent his particular qualities than these attenuated pronouncements. One can only speculate about the reasons for the publication of this book. Perhaps they were bound up with a form of tragedy which has often been associated with public success. The book came out early in 1964. This was a high point in Mr Pearson's career. He had returned to office and for the first time as Prime Minister. He had returned with high prestige in his cabinet and his party because he had been very adroit in the stratagems he had used to bring about the defeat of his opponents. Perhaps Mr Pearson wanted to show forth in this book the image of himself as the thoughtful man in politics. If this were the intention, it could not be realised by allowing these speeches to be published.

Notes 1 Lester B. Pearson, The Four Faces of Peace, selected and edited by Sherleigh G. Pierson (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1964). Lester Bowles (Mike) Pearson (1897–1973), diplomat, politician, was born in Ontario, the son of a Methodist minister. After studies at the University of Toronto and Oxford, he taught history at the University of Toronto before entering the Department of External Affairs in 1928, rising to the position of under-secretary (1946–8). He resigned from the public service in 1948 to enter politics, immediately being appointed minister of external affairs, serv-

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ing in the office until 21 June 1957. He succeeded St Laurent as leader of the Liberal party and leader of the opposition after the Liberal defeat in 1957. He became prime minister of Canada leading a minority government as a result of the election of 1963, and forming another minority government after the 1965 election. He resigned office and gave up political life in 1968 when he was succeeded as prime minister and leader of the Liberal party by Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Review of The Predicament of Democratic Man, by Edmond Cahn1

The review appeared in the University of Toronto Law Journal 15 (1964): 461–3. The book was published by Collier-Macmillan Co. (Toronto and New York: 1961).

This new book by Professor Cahn fills out the thoughts on jurisprudence which he mapped in such earlier works as The Sense of Injustice and The Moral Decision. His general position in jurisprudence may be described as educated American liberal common sense. In this book he is discussing the relation between the citizen and the state in democratic communities, particularly the United States. He believes that the modern democratic state is the great political achievement of the species. It does not automatically solve, however, the question of preventing public officials from committing acts of injustice. Because of the very structure of democracy, the citizen is morally involved in the misdeeds of his government in a more direct way than under any other form of government. In this book Cahn is interested in describing and defining that involvement; in showing how a citizen can and should cope with it; in painting a picture of the virtue necessary to the citizen if he is to respond adequately to that moral situation. This book is in essence more a sermon than a treatise. That is, Cahn’s chief purpose is to persuade men to a particular form of moral life – that of the active and honourable democratic citizen. As in most sermons, he employs the language of common sense and of philosophy to enunciate his ideals and describe the world. But this is only as a means to the moral suasion of his homily. I mean no disparagement in saying this. Written and spoken sermons are a necessary part of the common good and liberals have as much right to preach them as any-

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body else. The sermons of Donne and Butler in the temple, in other eras and on behalf of another religion, should not be precedents which prevent the legal profession from rejoicing in producing learned preachers from their own ranks.2 Mr Justice Holmes brought the liberal pulpit onto the bench; Cahn brings it with equal distinction onto the academic podium.3 There are many kinds of liberalism in the United States. It has been the dominant, indeed almost the only, literate tradition of political philosophy which the republic has produced. In my opinion, Cahn’s liberalism is as decent and attractive as any to be found in contemporary writing. I say this for the following reasons: (i) He thinks that moral action exists and that the categories of just and unjust, right and wrong, cannot be reduced by contemporary psychoanalysis, sociology, or economics. For Cahn the centre of manhood is being a moral agent and the heart of jurisprudence is a moral science. This enables him to avoid that side of liberalism (Dr Erich Fromm is a good example)4 which believes that the cultivation of socially useful attitudes, rather than the virtues, is the first prerequisite of the good society, and that these can be produced by psychoanalysis and proper social engineering. Cahn never falls into that short cut which bypasses the necessary disciplines of morality. In the last part of his book, he describes the virtues which he considers necessary in the good citizen, and he uses the word ‘virtue’ in the strict classical sense which does not allow it to be reduced to socially useful emotion and thus become external to the rational will. Indeed in advocating the open society of experimentation and change, he raises (p. 157) the question of limits to experimentation. Such a discussion of the moral good as limit is almost unheard of in liberal writers, and is a mark of the depth of Cahn’s ethics. In short, he is a moral realist, in the sense that he does not think that there is any solution by which men can be made good ab extra. His writing escapes thereby any note of utopianism, a rare escape in the American liberal tradition. (ii) Cahn writes of the older moral traditions of the Greek, the Biblical, and indeed the Chinese, as if they had some authority for us, and so does not imply that all human wisdom started with age of progress. This gives his writing a depth of continuity with the past which is naturally attractive to the conservative. In praising this sense of continuity, I do not imply that it makes Professor Cahn more consistent than

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the usual liberal tradition which rejects it. Despite the efforts of American nationalists, such as Father Courtney Murray, it is not possible to make a consistent jurisprudence by uniting pieces of Aristotle (or his medieval epigones) with pieces of Jefferson.5 The liberals who scorn the thought from before the age of progress are more consistent than the Cahns who try to combine the antique and the modern jurisprudence. My claim is not, however, that Cahn is more consistent than Fromm but that he sees more about man’s moral nature. In short, Professor Cahn advocates a moderate, humane, and nonUtopian liberalism, of a kind attractive to a moral and religious conservative. I must end, however, by saying shortly why this book seems inadequate for understanding the duties of the citizen to the modern state. Before doing so, let me mention why I hesitate to criticize Cahn. As liberalism is the only political philosophy in the United States which is both widespread and literate, and as Cahn is a noble exemplar of it, his thought is perhaps the best possible jurisprudence that could be hoped for in our era. Cahn’s thought may be inadequate to a conservative but the thought of Kelsen, Holmes, or Hart is outrageous.6 I am therefore hesitant in criticizing as decent a moralist as Cahn. My criticism is put in two points. (i) In describing the United States as a democracy Cahn is surely only speaking in a formal legal sense. He rarely mentions the economic and social content of that society. He does not discuss the relation of the economic structure to its legal and political system. For instance, one would not know from reading this book that the property relations of our society are those of an advanced corporation capitalism. But is it not a fact that our present capitalism, with its enormous private and public bureaucracies, makes almost impossible the very type of individual action which Cahn deems necessary to the good functioning of democratic government? Is it not a fact that our economic system with its growing concentrations of wealth and power and its consequent class system, has destroyed any chance of that equality of political participation which he advocates? It may be that in the era of industrial imperial powers the individual gains new freedoms in the personal sphere. High technology enables more individuals to pursue their private interests. But surely it is exactly the freedom of effective participations in the public world that we have lost in this era. Our fine legal institutions from the past continue to function and for that we may be grateful. But we can hardly

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expect them to be buttressed by an active democratic citizenry. Most of us have no alternative but to find our freedom in private rather than in public life. This cannot be the era of the democratic citizen. Cahn’s failure to reconcile his plea for widespread democratic citizenship with the facts of mass society, seems to me a weakness present in nearly all modern political thought. The reason for this seems to me the following. Such thought takes its origin in the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who defined their own positions in criticism of the classical thinkers. In the political realm, they believed in equality, and in democratic government and citizenship. In the scientific realm, modern thought invented a science that issued in the masterful control of nature. The masterful control of nature has inevitably produced the dynamic modern society with its vast units of imperial and corporate power. But such a society is hardly one in which equality and democratic citizenship can exist. And this is the source of Cahn’s difficulty. As a good son of the Enlightenment he is faithful both to its democratic heritage and to the masterful control of nature. (ii) Cahn gives no answer to the question: ‘why should a man be just?’ He outlines brilliantly and concretely the virtues of the just citizen and tries to persuade us to be such by the attractiveness of his description. But he does not give us any reason to be so. In the antique world the dominant tradition of Greek religion and philosophy said: ‘Be just so that you may conform to the eternal order which both the stars and man necessarily obey.’ Volentem fata ducunt, nolentem trahunt.7 The Jews said one should be just because it is the will of God. Christianity combined these two traditions in various alternative ways. That is, virtue was believed to be dependent on some form of piety, not necessarily specified. As I have said earlier, Cahn does not follow the dominant modern solution of substituting the concept of socially useful attitudes for the concept of virtue. It is this which I have claimed gives his liberalism a more solid base than most. But he does not discuss the question of whether the virtues depend on piety and he only discusses piety at one point. That point is where he argues that the democratic citizen should put aside the ancient view of piety towards the state, and adopt a consumer relation to government. The consumer relation is, of course, the exact opposite of piety. We are surely right in not owing any piety to supermarkets, chain stores and

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banks. But Cahn advocates virtues in the citizen’s relation towards the state, at the same time advocating a consumer relation to replace piety. He is therefore confronted with the doctrine of classical jurisprudence: it is not possible to think the idea ‘virtue’ without implying the idea ‘piety.’ Appendix: Letter from Professor Cahn 19 February 1964 Dr George Grant Department of Religion McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Dear Dr Grant: I have just received a copy of your book review in the Toronto Law Journal and wish to thank you heartily for the many kind things you have to say. It was indeed gracious of you to give my book as much commendation as your religious premises permit, and I am sincerely grateful. May I, without presuming to argue with the reviewer, submit two comments for your consideration? They are: 1. In your final paragraph, I fear that you misrepresent me rather badly. It was in the interest of piety that I was arguing against piety to the state, which I regard as one of the worst forms of idolatry. Surely you would not advocate piety to the state? As for my use of the phrase ‘consumer perspective’ do you not think it unfair to refer to ‘supermarkets, chain stores, and banks,’ when I have tried so hard and even repetitiously in the book to give a moral significance to the consumption of law and government (for example on page 29)? My readers have quite uniformly understood that I was not writing about consumption in a piggish sense, and I am disappointed that I did not make the point clear to you. 2. Having just finished conducting an annual seminar at the Jewish Theological Seminary with full participation by students of Union Theological Seminary, I feel rather taken aback by the failure of my book to communicate religious convictions to you. Most Jewish and Protestant scholars tell me everything I write is impregnated with the

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principles and impulses of the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps if you were familiar with my previous books, The Sense of Injustice and The Moral Decision, you would have recognized the constant religious motive. At any rate, I can assure you that criticisms come invariably from the atheistic crowd, who find my analyses intolerably religious. The Moral Decision is in use as a standard text or as collateral reading in more than one seminary. If you come to New York, I hope you will arrange to visit with me. It would be a genuine pleasure to make your acquaintance. Sincerely yours, Edmond Cahn

Notes 1 Edmond Nathaniel Cahn (1906–64) was a lawyer and law professor who taught at New York University and Hebrew University. The complete titles of the books Grant cites are The Sense of Injustice: An Anthropocentric View of Law (1949) and The Moral Decision: Right and Wrong in the Light of American Law (1955). Other works include Supreme Court and Supreme Law (1954) and The Great Rights (1963). 2 John Donne (1572–1631) and Samuel Butler (1835–1902). 3 Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), chief justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts (1899–1902) and associate justice of the US Supreme Court (1902–32), published his work in Collected Legal Papers (1920) and The Common Law (1881, 1963). Holmes was a pioneer of American judicial liberalism. 4 Erich Fromm (1900–80), American psychologist and social critic, emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1934. His best-known works are Escape from Freedom (1941), The Sane Society (1955), and The Art of Loving (1956). 5 John Courtney Murray SJ (1904–67), American Roman Catholic theologian, was editor of the Jesuit magazine America and the journal Theological Studies. His liberal views angered Church conservatives, who silenced him for a time, but he influenced the position on religious liberty adopted by the Second Vatican Council. He also wrote Morality and Modern War (1959) and The Problem of God, Yesterday and Today (1964). 6 Hans Kelsen (1881–1973), German-American jurist and legal philosopher, taught at Vienna, Cologne, and Geneva, then emigrated in 1940 to the United States, where he lectured at various universities. His works include

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Society and Nature: A Sociological Inquiry (1943) and Principles of International Law (1966). Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart (1907–72), lawyer and professor of jurisprudence, taught at Oxford, Harvard, and UCLA. His works include Causation in the Law (1959) and Morality of the Criminal Law (1964). 7 ‘Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant’ (Seneca).

Man-Made Man

Grant delivered this address at the Vermont Conference (24 March 1965) guided by the conference topic of ‘Genesis Revisited: The Scientific, Social, and Ethical Implications of “Man-Made Man.”’ The other main speakers were Paul Weiss of Yale, the founder of the Review of Metaphysics, and George Wald of Harvard, an award-winning biochemist.1 Sheila Grant was present at the meetings, which were ‘very pleasant and hospitable, but one didn’t feel any passionate interest in the subject.’ She sees this talk as more relevant now because it speaks to an area of technology that has enormously increased in scope and sophistication since 1965.

There are many activities which may be brought under the rubric of ‘man-made man.’ Even the traditional method of procreation can in some sense be spoken of as man making man, in so far as human beings know that one end of the act of love is procreation. Beyond that, modern science now makes it possible for women to be impregnated with stored seed, quite disassociated from the traditional act of love. Many women with sterile husbands do just this. Leading geneticists propose that this should become a widespread activity and be used for socially useful ends. ‘Oh mummy thank you for buying into the Einstein bank. I like the man who is my social father, but I’m so glad I’m going to be a great scientist.’ ‘I do want that baby to be a good boy; now you’ve got your promotion, dearest, couldn’t we afford Martin Luther King?’ ‘Your Mummy only bought a Rockefeller, mine got a Kennedy.’ There seems to be a division among geneticists as to whether the organization of this should be left to individuals who have the social wisdom always to buy Cadillacs or whether the situation

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demands that the government get into the business of controlling heredity. Indeed the demand for the control of propagation by the state is made pressing by the very triumphs of the scientists who now advocate that control. Biologists are not only worried by the quantitative explosion of population. But believing the doctrine of the survival of the fittest to be a true account of evolution, they are worried that medicine, agriculture, and welfare are leading to a qualitative failure of the race, by allowing the lower strains of the race to perpetuate themselves. As in every part of our society, the plea goes up that we need more science to cure the ills that modern science has caused. But beyond these possible feats of ‘maximizing our seed potential’ we approach a more profound triumph of science: (1) the biochemists’ knowledge of the chemical make-up of our genes and (2) the engineering feat of making life in a test tube, (tentatively we may call it human) of a kind these scientists and engineers desire. I have no technical knowledge of how far and how quickly certain scientists and technicians will and can go in doing this. The means of what I call man-made man are multiform; what enables us to group them together is their common aim or goal. I am talking about aims today not methods. I do not think that the moral question about such activities should be stated in the form: Should these scientists be allowed to embark on these activities? The question should not be put in any way which implies that it is an open question whether this will be done or not. It is not an open question. It has already been settled. Men are going to do anything they can do and nothing that any of us can do will stop them. The question is not an open one, because it has been settled by the presuppositions which govern the minds of our rulers in modern society. For several centuries the dominant classes of Western society have believed with increasing certainty that the most important human activity is that science which issues in the conquest of nature. Three centuries ago there was some moderation in the reverence paid to that activity, but in the last century the moderation has disappeared. And in the last century the dominant classes have directed themselves more and more towards knowledge that will issue in the conquest of human nature. Modern people’s most comprehensive self-definition has been that our essence is our freedom, and that freedom means to make the world (our race included) as we desire it. The moral question concerning man-made man should rather be

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put in the form: When these things are done, will it be good that they are done? The course of human events at any time does not much lie in the control of individuals, probably least of all history in our present time. But human beings are still left with the responsibility of judging whether those events which they do not control are good or bad. It is to that question which I address myself concerning man-made man. In doing so let me put the case for and against such actions. The case for man making man is, it seems to me, the following. The human condition demands that we interfere intelligently with nature. We find ourselves in a world of pain and scarcity, accident and disease. It is our business to use our intelligences to see that these evils are eliminated. If we had not done this, we would still be in the caves and jungles. The human enterprise is at its centre committed to interference; why should we stop at this central point, the control of the perpetuation of the race and the making of man as we choose? Has the old method (whatever its attendant charms) been such a success? Have we not relied on accidental whims to decide what kind of a species we want to be, and often the accidental whims of the least intelligent and least responsible? The old method has left us with a world in which ignorance and vice are perpetuated. When we go into a home for mental defectives, or when we contemplate all the strange and indeed monstrous creatures that proceed from the most friendly mating of men and women, must we not say to ourselves: cannot human intelligence find a better way to organize the propagation of the species? The whole scientific effort of man has been the elimination of accident and yet we have left to the most improbable accidents (Tristram Shandy’s father getting up to wind the clock)2 the most important matter. The control of accident has become now crucial as the explosion of population threatens disaster for mankind as a species. Modern science has extended the realm of freedom and the conquest of the hated realm of necessity. The tremendous effort by modern people to control accident has two fronts when it turns to the control of the perpetuation of the species. Negatively it has conquered accident through efficient birth control and abortion. Positively the same movement now turns through its knowledge and control to producing the kinds of human beings it wants. This change from the negative to the positive in modern liberalism has been politically summed up in Mr Johnson’s ‘Great Society.’3 Mankind has come of age in the knowledge of his own free-

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dom, and what more important place is there to do that than in the organization of the kind of race we want to be? As is sometimes said, we have taken the evolutionary process into our own hands. We can make this planet a better place to be than it has been in the past. Of course those who use the argument from evolution and the fact that we have now reached the point where evolution can be consciously directed are faced with the problem of passing to a species higher than man. I have been at scientific meetings where it has been said that man’s day is now over and that we must pass onto a higher form of being. In the modern world ‘higher’ is generally defined as the ability to do more. Certain machines may be able to do more. Let us then pass on the torch to those beings which (or should I say who) are coming to be at IBM. There is another argument in favour of man-made man, in my opinion of a lower moral order than the previous. It was once perfectly expressed by Mr Robert Oppenheimer of Princeton, who is quoted as having said: ‘If something is technically sweet, then you must go ahead with it.’4 In other words, when an experiment is possible, scientists must go ahead with it. To refuse is to be against the progress of knowledge. It is no wonder that Mr Oppenheimer is a hero to liberals. He has here perfectly expressed the basic doctrine of that creed that man’s essence is his freedom. If one looks at the case for the other side, that is those who say that it will not be good for us when sun and humanity cease to be the instrument of the generation of man, one is immediately aware that one has moved out of the main thrust of modern civilization. For here one is saying something like the following. There is in nature something which should be left alone by man. Man must of course use nature for his purposes in some ways, but there is something in nature which is beyond being manipulated, so that there are some activities which cannot be entirely controlled – in this case the perpetuation of the species. Because of this unchangeableness in nature we must as men leave the propagation of the species to something which is not entirely subsumed under organizing intelligence. It implies that nature is beneficent. If we attempt to tamper with it, it will somehow frustrate our purposes – in the form of massive human catastrophes. In such a view, nature is not only change, but unchangingness; nature is not solely a neutral otherness, but in some sense good.

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What is obvious about these two cases (even so shortly and cryptically put) is that they depend upon very different uses of the word ‘nature.’ In the case for interference, nature is seen as something other than human freedom, but existing to serve human freedom – even when its otherness is what we call our own bodies. Nature is as it were a kind of utterly plastic unformed clay which man in his freedom shapes as he chooses. In the case against man-made man, nature is thought of rather as something which has limits to its shaping. It is finally unamenable to shaping because what it is proceeds from an unchanging and unchangeable principle. To use earlier language, in such a view of nature, the realm of freedom is but a dependency of the realm of necessity, and any attempt by man to extend freedom beyond a certain point is known in advance to lead to failure, because that very freedom itself proceeds from the same unchanging principle. In thinking about the question ‘Will the new biochemistry and its technology serve human good?’ we are then faced with thinking what we mean when we use the word ‘nature.’ A traditional way of asking that question would have been to ask ‘What is the nature of nature?’ And indeed as soon as the question is put in that way, we can see what an ambiguous word ‘nature’ is in our language. For in the question ‘what is the nature of nature?’ the meaning of the word in the first and second case is quite different. In the second use of the word we mean what is out there – this hand, the birds, the trees, the snow, the stars. But in the first sense of the word we mean something quite different; we mean what is it that makes the things out there what they are? The nature of something is what that something is. In this sense, when I speak of the nature of man, I am asking what it is to be a man; or the nature of empire, what is it to be an empire. And let me say as clearly as I possibly can that the way I have put the question illustrates the difficulty of the whole matter of man-made man. For to put the question ‘What is the nature of nature?’ is immediately to speak in that language which will answer the question of manmade man with great conservatism. For to ask the question about the nature of nature is to imply that nature is something determinative in itself, with the implication that there is some determination in it which puts limits to our possible changing of it. To put the matter the other way, no person trained in modern philosophy or science and convinced that [their] doctrines are true would consider the question

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‘What is the nature of nature?’ a meaningful one. Modern science and philosophy are not concerned with that kind of question. Rather, surely [they] would speak in some way such as this: ‘What is the clearest way of using the word “nature” in discourse, if we are to proceed with the business of finding out how the world works?’ What I am saying in its most general form is the following: the question about man making man takes one to the heart of what one thinks about human nature and destiny. And in going to that heart, we find that the presuppositions of the age of progress lead inevitably to man taking upon himself the shaping of his own heredity, while the presuppositions from before that age would make one appalled by such an activity. Therefore the question turns around the truth and falsity of these different presuppositions. And this difference between presuppositions is not simply a difference about nature, but a difference about nearly every question – that is, differences about politics and religion, art and morality, science and logic. How immensely difficult it is to come to know the truth about a matter when the difference between two positions is a difference which manifests itself in nearly every aspect of existence. If we start with politics, we will be led by the differences there to the respective merits of the presuppositions about science. If we start with science, we are led back to differences in religion, morality, art etc. In philosophy every question is both a starting point and a conclusion. Let me put the difficulty in an immediate way. It can only be with an enormous hesitation that one dares to question the assumptions of our age of progress. Has it not been in the age of progress that disease and overwork, hunger and poverty, have been drastically reduced? Those who criticize our age must at the same time contemplate pain, infant mortality, crop failures in isolated areas, and the sixteen-hour day. But on the other side, other facts must be remembered: the increasing outbreaks of impersonal ferocity, genocide, the banality of existence in our concrete prisons, the pursuit of expansion as an end in itself. The powers of manipulation (not least man’s ability to make man) may portend the most complete tyranny the world has ever known. When we contemplate these facts, we may wonder whether the age of progress has not been a tragic aberration in the history of the species. As we consider the practical aspects our minds are led back and forth between these sets of conflicting presuppositions. And theoretically, we are in an even more difficult position, because

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when we see these differing positions put forward in the most systematic way by the greatest thinkers, we still cannot aspire to decide easily between classical and modern philosophy. This seems to me to characterize one of the gravest difficulties of all human life, whatever its situation. Hesitation is a virtue in the theoretical life; it may become a vice in the practical life. In the theoretical life it is unwise to rush into answers about the most important matters. It takes a lifetime of study to discover the answers given by the greatest thinkers to the ultimate questions – let us say the answers given by Plato, who is in my opinion the greatest of all philosophers, and the answers given by the very great modern philosophers such as Kant and Hegel. It would be the height of foolishness to think it easy to choose between them. Yet we are not simply theoretical men; we are also practical men, citizens, fathers etc. etc. who are called to live with courage in the world. We simply cannot wait till we are clear about the most important questions before we take up our responsibilities. Good and evil is being done in the world at every moment, and it is part of our manhood to come to terms with the practical. This tension between our responsibility as theoretical men to be hesitant about our ability to know the truth about the most important matters, and our need as practical men to live with courage and moderation in the world is one of the most difficult dilemmas which educated people face. The implication of this is the foregoing. It would be presumptuous of me to try to raise in a few short minutes all the theoretical issues at stake between the ancient and the modern view of man and then to judge quickly between them. Rather I want to speak practically about why I feel frightened at the direction in which we are heading in genetics, and why I think so many people in the world are frightened by ‘man-made man.’ Many modern scientists say that those who stand against any scientific advance are restrained in their minds by old-fashioned taboos. My words are in praise of those taboos. What the scientists call taboos, I prefer to call sacred restraints, or limits. And both the words ‘sacred’ and ‘restraint’ seem to me words filled with meaning. Let me start by saying how the word ‘limit’ or ‘restraint’ has come to be translated as the word ‘taboo.’ The first modern scientists took for granted that they should be both philosophers and scientists. They therefore were quite clear that it was for moral reasons that man should embark on the conquest of nature. The reason was that by con-

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quering nature they faced it under the service of man. Freed from scarcity and disease, human nature would more widely be able to realise its highest goals. But they assumed that there was such a thing as the nature of man which would not be changed by the conquest of nonhuman nature. Nature was to be controlled for the sake of achieving human excellence. One can see this clearly stated in the early philosophic scientists of the seventeenth century. But gradually in the development of modern science and philosophy a second step was taken. It was seen that there was no reason to draw a line between human and non-human nature. Thus the centre of the modern scientific movement was no longer the control of that which was not human in the name of the human, but the conquest of human nature itself. I remember seeing this with great clarity in the public debate in Moscow between Mr Nixon and Mr Khrushchev, the late leader of the Soviets.5 Khrushchev was twitting Nixon about the Soviet victories in space. Mr Nixon very aptly replied that America was a more progressive society because it was far ahead in the sciences of sociology and psychology. Mr Nixon was tellingly accurate for a politician in making clear that the heart of modern science lay in the conquest of human nature. In general, we can say that the motive behind this conquest was the desire to perfect man. But one assumption of the conquest of human nature becomes clearer and clearer in the modern world. If we are set on conquering human nature, we have to give up the idea of an unchangeable human nature. For the idea of an unchangeable human nature puts limits on our ability to conquer it. Therefore the mark of modern social science has been to deny that there is such a thing as unchangeable human nature. Man can shape man to make him as he pleases. Now it is just at this point that my fear of what is happening in the modern world arises and for the following reasons. The idea that there was in us a human nature which was at its heart finally unchangeable was rooted in the idea of an excellence which was proper to man at all time and all places. The nature of man was his desire for an immutable good. Human nature was defined in terms of human goodness – an unchangeable account of what constituted human goodness or excellence. All human activities were judged natural in so far as they led to the achievement of that unchanging standard. What gave personal and social life its intelligibility was that nature and moral goodness were

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not held apart. Everything in personal and social life was directed towards the achievement of human excellence. Men might not live up to those standards (call them if you will virtues) but they were unhesitating in recognising that there were such standards. Now once you discard the idea of an unchangeable human nature, you discard also the idea of an unchangeable standard of human excellence by which all human activities at all times and all places are judged. However much our ancestors may have recognized how unclearly they could define that standard of good, it was present for them as the measure of all their personal and public decisions. Without it, how do we know whether a particular control of our heredity serves humanity or does not serve humanity? This seems to me the dilemma with which modern science squarely faces us. Its very success in conquering human nature was dependent on its giving up the conception of an unchangeable human nature; but in surrendering that conception we have lost the standard by which we can judge whether these particular achievements serve human good or not. The way that most scientists answer the criticism implied in this dilemma is by making the distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value. What is meant by this distinction is that there is a world of facts which we do not make but which we experience, and about which we can make objective judgments. On the other hand there are values, which are asserted by human beings but are not part of the objective world. Judgments about them are subjective, that is, relative to us. Man in his freedom makes values – they are what he does with the facts. To illustrate: those who make this distinction would say that when I state your principal weighs 150 pounds I am stating a fact; but when I state that he is a noble human being I am simply stating my value preferences. Value is seen as something external to the facts; something which is created by man and not inherent in the world. Within this distinction it is asserted that scientists are concerned with the facts, and with presenting mankind with the power consequent on the knowledge of the facts. It is up to the race as a whole to use this new power for good or ill. This has been the usual way that scientists have spoken when they have presented the world with some enormous new power. But where is mankind to find the values by which to judge how to use these new powers? The values are to come

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from man. They are what man chooses. But if values are man-made, then if certain men want to use these powers to enslave other men, to force other men to do what they want, indeed to make beings who will do what they want – or at the worst to use them simply for the pleasure that many get from sadism – how are we to judge that this is a less valuable use than other purposes? If man creates values, how are we to judge that altruism is a more valid criterion than the simplest egoism? Any man who has experienced the twentieth century is hardly in the position to say that man’s emotions are predominantly altruistic. Indeed if we make the distinction between facts and values, we are not in a position to say that anything is natural to man. The very basis of the modern scheme is to deny that man is naturally anything; he is neutral stuff to be directed in the way that we in our freedom happen to choose. So once you have said that the basis for science is the distinction between judgments of fact and value, there is no objective or natural criterion by which we can judge for what ends the control of heredity should be used. The great liberal lie you will often have heard: ‘Mankind has new and enormous powers; it is up to you young people whether we will use them for good or evil.’ Such rhetoric misses the point. The point is that the new social sciences, by denying an unchangeable human nature, deprive us of any clear standard of human good and evil by which such decisions can be made. The ambiguity of our era is then that the very development of science requires the development of moral nihilism. It is not by accident that our society is marked by an enormous progress of science and an enormous progress of moral nihilism. The two go together. The obvious implication of the distinction between judgments of fact and value is to deny that nature apart from us is valuable. We have to make the world valuable, surrounded as we are by this kingdom of neutral stuff. No wonder ours is the most dynamic society on earth when we have to make the meaning of our own lives. No wonder the most explicitly modern men alternate between the rage to live and despair about their contingency in an absurd world. It is this disappearance of a clear vision of human excellence which makes one face the question of the control of heredity with such fear. For many generations the Western world has been developing its powers to do new things, at the same time as our views of human excellence have grown so dim and so uncertain. Yet how can anyone judge

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what control of heredity will be good and what bad without a clear conception of human excellence? The idea of human excellence is after all the limit by which we have decided that certain actions were to be done and others not done. Torture was eliminated from the judicial system of civilised nations because it was understood that even if certain specific advantages could be gained by torture, it did not belong to the human excellence of either tortured or torturer. The great return to the practice of torture by those who want to achieve their ends at all costs is surely part of the dimming of the idea of human excellence in Western society. Without the idea of limit, and that limit is the idea of human nature, nothing will prevent us from going ahead and just doing anything that suits us. For example, when we are able to control heredity negatively by sterilization and contraception and positively by banks of stored seed, how will we know what kind of people we want and who are going to decide what kind of people we want? We seem to be rushing towards the control of heredity just as we rushed towards the smashing of the atom, with hardly any ideas of the ends for which it should be used and who should decide on these ends. I find a kind of double talk about these matters from the community of geneticists. On the one hand, they sometimes talk the fact-value language and say that it is not up to them but up to our society how the new powers will be used. At other times, many geneticists speak as if they know exactly what kind of a race they want to produce – more scientists. What seems at issue here is the idea of moderation. I think Plato was correct when he said that the virtue most needed by most men was the virtue of moderation. And it is not a popular virtue in our society. Moderation is not thought to be a virtue because one of the dominant ideas of the last centuries has been a belief in the emancipation of the passions. And moderation is defined as the control of the passions. In our North American society we have been immoderate in our passion to control and to enslave nature. We have been immoderate in the sense that we have pursued the control of nature without much thought of what ends of human excellence we were going to achieve through that control. It is this failure of moderation in our passion to control nature that seems to me the deepest cause of worry in the present case. Here we have the control of nature applied to the very heart of man. We cannot

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doubt that sexuality is the core of human beings in the sense that it is there that flesh and spirit most concretely are at one. In sexuality they are in some sense tied together. When one touches this aspect of human existence, one is raising extremely complex biological, social, and political issues. Most of these issues which are consequent on our new powers over heredity are very dimly perceived by nearly all of us and practically nobody has any clear answers to the questions of human good which are involved. Yet the scientific community rushes headlong into doing these things the social consequences of which we are so uncertain about. And the community as a whole gives unqualified financial and moral support to the scientific community in this headlong rush. There are hymns of praise in mass propaganda magazines such as Time to the fact that human knowledge is proliferating at an increasingly accelerated rate. To raise objections to such speed and rush is to be met with slogans about the ‘progress of science,’ and how nothing must stand in the way of this progress. ‘You are worth as much as your information.’6 But let me point out that what the banner ‘the progress of science’ means is just what Mr Oppenheimer meant when he said: ‘If something is technically sweet, you have to go ahead with it.’ A society so embarked on projects of this kind – the consequences of which are so little thought – seems to me an immoderate society. This immoderation is what presently frightens me about the Western world. In parenthesis, let me ask what it is, apart from moderation, that distinguishes us from the communist world? Communism, which after all was a Western product, was rejected by the best in the Western world just exactly at this point. The general outlines of the good society as proposed by Marx are not distasteful. But what Marx proposes is that the good society should be brought into being – in fact must be brought into being – by patently immoderate means. Noble human activity will be produced in the world by base human activity. This doctrine was at the very heart of Marxism. Now what seems to me wrong in our own immoderation in the questions of control of heredity is not the we are openly advocating the use of evil means, but that by rushing ahead we are becoming immensely cavalier about the question of means. We are starting to do things in the name of progress of science without really thinking whether these means are in themselves sufficiently good to produce human goodness.

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Let me take one of the simple social questions which is inevitably involved in this matter and try to say how difficult it is to understand the consequences for it of our new powers – parenthood. One of the assumptions present in many of the geneticists and social scientists is that the rationalised control of procreation and child rearing will involve the liberation of human beings from what have been the chains of parenthood. It is hardly necessary for a father of six to say that great liberation would be achieved. In the past men, and to a much greater extent women, have been bound by parenthood. Without these bonds, human beings could go in for those activities which in the past were reserved for the privileged who used servants to look after their children. Human beings would be freed for the life of thought, of art, of civic enterprise, and of private pleasure. At last these noble and pleasant activities would be open not only to the economically fortunate but to all human beings. Here the powers of science unite with a doctrine of freedom and human perfectibility. And with them go evolutionary theory and sociology, which present arguments to press for the consummation of these achievements. Evolutionary theory can be used to say that we have passed beyond the stage of traditional procreation and that we can now direct the course of evolution without employing parenthood. Sociology may be employed to point out that not all societies make people think that they want to be parents and that the traditional appeal to parenthood has no more status than the convenience of a passing social arrangement. But when all this is said, an unanswered question remains in my head. Are we sure that it will be good for most men when we deprive them of parenthood? We will certainly be making people freer – but will the content with which that freedom is filled be nobler activities than parenthood, or will it be a freedom which does not know what to do with itself? There are of course in the Western tradition (leaving aside for the moment the great traditions of India and China) plenty of arguments in philosophy and theology that there are certain activities of the noblest kind which require that those people who pursue them should be freed from both the joys and burdens of parenthood. But the freedom from parenthood which is a potential consequence of the new sciences of heredity would be something not for a few priests or philosophers as in the past but open to all human beings. The question then is whether the mass of men will be able to

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use their freedom from parenthood to pass to those nobler activities. Let me speak here as one of those ordinary masses. Society has spent an enormous amount of money on me to give me the freedom to be a philosopher. For very short periods at occasional intervals I am capable of thought. But most of the time what gives my freedom shape and purpose are those everyday activities of earning a living and organizing a household which make up the job of parenthood. The ordinary family pattern of work and joy, pride and failure has provided the form inside which I have learnt enough stability for my freedom to be worth anything. Experience is no argument, yet I cannot help believing that I am not much different from others in finding in the everyday pattern of life the content of my freedom. To speak thus personally is only to raise the general question: if you take away parenthood from the mass of people, will you not perhaps take away from us something that we need to give direction and purpose to our freedom? Now as I have said, the people who advocate this say they will be taking this away to open to mankind higher doors of human activity. Parenthood will be eliminated so that we be able to transcend parenthood. And if my argument is to imply that most human beings are not capable of much of this higher activity, then the answer by those who advocate the control of heredity might be: ‘We will be able to produce human beings who are capable of these higher activities.’ And the answer in reply could only be: ‘Are you sure?’ May it not be that it is not possible for men to make many beings who are capable of these excellent activities? And in the meantime you will have taken away from most people the ordinary ways in which we find purpose and through which dimly we get some vision of an even nobler purpose. To say this latter is to say that parenthood belongs to the good life for most human beings, and to say this is to get back to those theoretical questions about human nature and human excellence from which I started. What I have said about parenthood is simply an illustration of one of the numerous social questions that is inevitably raised by the control of heredity, and to which it does not seem that we have any very clearcut answers. There are, of course, an even greater number of immediate political questions as to who are going to control these powers, etc., etc. which I not have time to raise. But from all these questions, there arises the desire to make the plea for moderation and caution. Let us not start doing things without the most careful scrutiny of what we are

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doing. For the last generations Western civilization has been an immensely audacious society. Again and again in the last century it has decided for audacity and against moderation. It has decided for an unrestrained plunge into the future. One consequence of this has been the violence and instability that have marked our era. Now when control of nature has reached power over the very roots of our beings, we have surely come to the point where even the most reckless may be willing to admit that talk about restraints and limits is not simply to be pushed under the carpet by calling them taboos and superstitions. Let me end by making one theoretical point on the side of optimism. If one holds the position that there is something called human nature, one is asserting a prodigious optimism which cannot theoretically be touched by anything that anybody may do. For the concept of human nature is bound up with the conception the nature is beneficent. Misdirected efforts by man may lead away from human excellence, they may even succeed in destroying all our species, but they can never succeed in the total perversion of nature. Already in this century there have been revolts of nature against the desire of men to control it. These revolts take the form of great cataclysms and what seem to us calamities. But these cataclysms will be the way that human nature is directed back to the pursuit of its true excellence. The natures of things finally are what they are. A fundamental optimism is possible because despite all that men can do, what happens does not ultimately depend on our freedom.

Notes 1 Paul Weiss (1901–2002) taught philosophy at Yale. He was the founder of the Review of Metaphysics and founder and president of the Metaphysical Society of America. His works also include Man’s Freedom (1950) and Modes of Being (1958). George Wald (1906–97), biologist and biochemist, went to Harvard in 1934 and was awarded the Eli Lilly Award for fundamental research in biochemistry in 1939. Along with numerous other awards, he shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1967 with two others for ‘discoveries concerning the primary physiological and chemical visual processes in the eye.’ 2 Grant is referring to the first few pages of Tristram Shandy where Laurence Sterne has Tristram describe what went wrong with his begetting. See The

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Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (New York: Boni and Liveright 1925), Book I, chapters 1–4, pages 1–5. See Dorothy Van Ghent’s ‘On Tristram Shandy,’ in Tristram Shandy, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House 1987), 13, for one account of what went wrong: ‘... Mrs Shandy, accustomed to associate the winding of the clock with the marital act (like Pavlov’s dogs and the dinner bell), missed the association appropriate at the moment, and in speaking of it to Mr Shandy distracted his attention and prepared for poor Homunculus nine long months of disordered nerves and melancholy dreams.’ Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73), thirty-sixth president of the United States (1963–9), described his domestic agenda as the building of the Great Society at the University of Michigan convocation in May 1964 (after he became president upon the assassination of President John F. Kennedy): ‘In your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upwards to the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time.’ Elements of the agenda included the Civil Rights Act and the ‘War on Poverty’ (Job Corps, Head Start Program, Voting Rights Act, and other legislation addressing problems in education, housing and urban development, transportation, environmental conservation, and immigration). Grant’s later talk on the Great Society, delivered at the thirty-fifth annual Couchiching Conference, was published in John Irwin, ed., Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions (Toronto: CBC 1967), 71–6. See pages 455–62 in this volume. Grant cited this alleged Oppenheimer dictum frequently as a revelation of the lack of any moral limit in scientific research. J(ulius) Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67), American physicist, taught at the California Institute of Technology before joining the Manhattan Project to construct the atomic bomb, becoming director of the Los Alamos Laboratory (1943–5). He became director of the Institute for Advanced Study and professor of physics at Princeton (1946). He was chairman of the advisory committee to the US Atomic Energy Commission (1946–52) before losing his security clearance because of his supposed communist connections. Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–94), thirty-seventh president of the United States (1969–74), was vice-president (1953–61) under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1959, during his vice-presidency, he made a well-publicized visit to the Soviet Union, highlighted by an impromptu ‘kitchen debate’ in Moscow with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev concerning the merits of communism and capitalism. It is not clear if Grant was quoting this slogan or coining it. At any rate, no source was given.

Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism

Lament for a Nation was first published in March 1965. It quickly became a best-seller and its author a nationally known figure.1 Ironically enough, Grant’s elegy on the inevitable disappearance of Canada inspired a surge of nationalist feeling, particularly among the young involved in the ‘New Left.’2 It also added fuel to the anti-American sentiment generated by the Vietnam War. Readers of the book tended to ignore its elegiac tone. Instead they embraced Grant’s account of what historically made Canada different from the United States as well as his scintillating analysis of the relationship between liberalism and American imperialism, whose consequences were becoming evident in the unfolding Vietnam catastrophe. Although written in response to a specific set of circumstances, the collapse and electoral defeat of the Diefenbaker government in 1962–3, Lament for a Nation is not simply a polemic. It is a work of political philosophy, whose theoretical purpose is particularly evident in the first unpublished draft; the argument there is essentially the same as in the published version but is less vividly presented with fewer of the punchy examples and apt quotations that make the book so memorable.3 These were added after the book had been accepted for publication by McClelland and Stewart.4 These additions made the book accessible to a wide audience but do not account for its continuing significance long after the events that inspired it have been forgotten by most Canadians. The sophistication and subtlety of Grant’s argument elevate Lament for a Nation to its position as one of the most influential books written in Canada in the second half of the twentieth century.5 After completing the first draft, Grant approached Queen’s Quarterly in February 1964, but was told by the editor in a sympathetic letter that it was too long to appear as an article.6 Grant then sent the typescript to

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J.S. Campsie of J.M. Dent, a contact arranged by his friend and colleague Paul Clifford. Campsie and other readers liked it, but in a letter of 29 July 1964 he questioned how quickly Dent could publish.7 Accordingly Grant asked him to send the typescript to McClelland and Stewart, which after a favourable report by James M. Minifie, a prominent Canadian journalist who specialized in defence policy and Canada’s relations with the United States, accepted it for publication.8 Lament for a Nation was published on 27 March 1965.9 In 1970, five years after its publication, Grant asserted that Lament for a Nation ‘was written too much from anger and too little from irony.’10 Certainly the anger is manifest from the opening paragraph. ‘Never have the wealthy and the clever been so united as they were in their joint attack on Mr John Diefenbaker. It has made life pleasant for the literate classes to know that they were on the winning side’ (277).11 The conventional explanations of this animosity, such as Diefenbaker’s supposed lust for power and egomania, Grant suggests, are inadequate. Hatred of what Diefenbaker stood for is bound up with the fate of Canada, which is to disappear. It is that disappearance which is a matter for lament. ‘To lament is to cry out at the death or at the dying of something loved. This lament mourns the end of Canada as a sovereign state’ (278). Canada was once a nation with meaning and purpose. ‘To be a Canadian was to build, along with the French, a more ordered and stable society than the liberal experiment in the United States’ (279). Canadians were, accordingly, ‘a unique species of North American’ (279). The possibility of creating such a nation had been undermined, however, by the policies pursued by successive Liberal governments since the prime ministership of Mackenzie King. Diefenbaker, despite his failings, had attempted to find policies that would preserve an independent Canada. ‘Those who crowed at Diefenbaker’s fall did not understand the policies of government that were essential if Canada was to survive. In their derision they showed ... that they really paid allegiance to the homogenized culture of the American Empire’ (280). Grant makes clear that the purpose of his book is not to make practical proposals, as Canada’s disappearance is ‘a matter of necessity’ (280). It is, rather, ‘a celebration of memory; in this case, the memory of that tenuous hope that was the principle of my ancestors’ (280). Grant does not gloss over John Diefenbaker’s inadequacies. He presents him as well-intentioned but lacking insight and focus. The prime

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minister’s nostalgia for a Canada of small towns and small business blinded him to the newer reality of international corporate capitalism. Confronted by forces he did not understand, Diefenbaker had no notion of how to defend the country he loved, which demanded strong action to reverse the trend towards Canadian economic and cultural integration with the United States. Morever, he had no understanding of French Canada and its unique importance to the nation’s survival. However, these obvious failures were redeemed by Diefenbaker’s conduct during the defence crisis of 1962–3. At this crucial juncture, he could see clearly the issue and what was at stake. The crisis revealed the depth of his nationalism, and also his courage: The old war-horse would not budge from his principle: The government of the United States should not be allowed to force the Canadian government to a particular defence policy. His determination to stand on that belief finally convinced the ruling class that he was more than a nuisance, that he must be removed. (294)

Unlike his rival, Lester B. Pearson, who ‘changed his defence policies to suit the interests of the powerful’ (295) by showing himself ready to accept nuclear weapons for Canada, Diefenbaker refused to cave in to American pressure despite vilification by Canadian journalists and intellectuals who failed to see that Canada’s nationhood was at risk. He and Howard Green, minister of external affairs, were determined to sustain a distinctively Canadian foreign policy. Green, in particular, receives praise from Grant for his determination to maintain an independent course. But their hopes, particularly in Britain and the Commonwealth as a counterweight to the United States, were illusory as Britain had long been an American satellite. If Diefenbaker’s failures were redeemed by his attempts to defend the integrity of Canada during his last months in office, Grant finds little to admire in his Liberal opponents. The best that can be said for them is that as early as 1940 they grasped that Canada was doomed to be absorbed by the United States. Accordingly, the governments of Mackenzie King and his successors have worked since the Second World War to ensure that the transition from independent nationhood would be smooth. Liberals have accepted this destiny as not only inevitable but desirable because of their belief in progress. They have, nevertheless,

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been compelled to disguise their purposes, perhaps even from themselves, by cloaking them in the garb of Canadian nationalism. They have accomplished the goal of continental integration by following economic policies which suited the interests of the multinational corporations, and by subservience to the Americans on questions of defence. To their credit, the Liberals have recognized the need to accommodate the aspirations of French Canadians. However, the upshot of their rule has been that policies presented to the electorate as essential to Canadian survival have had the contrary result. Canada’s role as a branch-plant of the American economic machine has destroyed the possibility of an independent Canada, as was revealed by the nuclear weapons crisis of 1962–3. The strength of the Liberal position, Grant argues, is that it has recognized necessity. Nationalist policies elsewhere – for example, those adopted by Castro and de Gaulle to defend the independence of Cuba and France – provide insight into the Canadian dilemma. Although Castroism is obviously irrelevant, de Gaulle’s use of state power in the economic sphere for nationalist purposes has significance for Canada, as Canadian governmental intervention has made a fundamental contribution to the development and preservation of the nation. Grant concludes, however, that nationalism, which in France is sufficiently powerful to motivate the business and civil service élites to work against the corrosive forces of international capitalism, has been too feeble in Canada to have the same result. For the Canadian business élite, nationhood has taken second place to profit. In the case of the Canadian civil service, senior civil servants, steeped in classical economic theory and the sceptical liberalism that permeated pre-war Oxford, have provided no opposition to the policies of the Mackenzie King and St Laurent governments, whose economic stance of alliance with the business community was shaped by the continentalist C.D. Howe. At the political level, figures such as King failed to realize the danger to Canada of the rapid rise of the United States, as they had come to maturity at a time when Great Britain seemed the larger threat to Canada’s independence. Grant then turns away from what he calls the ‘confused strivings of politicians, businessmen, and civil servants’ (314) to the larger forces that are shaping Canada’s fate. Canada’s disappearance is ordained because of the triumph of the idea of progress. Humans are moving towards a universal, homogeneous state shaped by science and guided either by international capitalism or international communism. This new

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order, either in its communist or capitalist form, must lead to the destruction of local cultures by homogenization through technology. Modern thought is animated by the conviction that humans shape both human and non-human nature unrestrained by traditional notions of good which might provide a check upon the will. To Grant, Marxist belief in human perfectibility makes Marxism a less consistent progessivist ideology than liberalism; it suggests that there exists something essential about human beings that can be brought to perfection through history. By contrast, North American liberals hold a more radical view of human freedom, one in which human nature and human destiny are completely malleable: As liberals become more and more aware of the implications of their own doctrine, they recognize that no appeal to human good, now or in the future, must be allowed to limit their freedom to make the world as they choose. Social order is a man-made convenience, and its only purpose is to increase freedom. (316)

The triumph of technology, whose instruments are big government and the multinational corporation, faces little opposition in the United States. The moral inhibitions of the Protestant and other religious traditions which provided a brake upon the passion for acquisition animating capitalism are becoming increasingly weak. So-called American ‘conservatism’ is simply nineteenth-century liberalism in another guise. This nostalgia for a return to a world of small property owners received a decisive rebuff in the 1964 American presidential election with the crushing of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon Johnson. To Grant, the triumph of technology makes true conservatism impossible, an example of which is the paradox of de Gaulle’s defending French culture by relying upon technocrats. A France built in this way must eventually lose the distinctiveness which de Gaulle has devoted his life to preserve and become more and more like other technocratic societies. If conservatism is unsustainable in a country such as France with its ancient traditions, it must surely be so in Canada, where the principles of order and self-restraint which underpinned the founding of Canada have lacked clear articulation and were dependent on the waning political power and dying conservatism of Great Britain. Grant sees French Canadians as possessing more will than their English-speaking counterparts to preserve an indigenous culture,

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because their society is grounded in a Catholic tradition that pre-dates the age of progress. ‘To Catholics who remain Catholics, whatever their level of sophistication, virtue must be prior to freedom. They will therefore build a society in which the right of the common good restrains the freedom of the individual’ (331). He respects the efforts of René Lévesque, architect of the Lesage government’s nationalization of electric power, to transfer control of the Quebec economy to French Canadians, but questions whether their distinctive culture can survive the far-reaching changes this must entail. ‘French Canadians must modernize their educational system if they are to have more than a peon’s place in their own industrialization. Yet to modernize their education is to renounce their particularity’ (334). The preservation of Quebec’s distinctiveness is tied to the future of Catholicism, to the larger question whether the Roman Catholic Church can regroup to become a humanizing influence upon mass society. But French Canadians like Pierre Elliott Trudeau who believe that the survival of both Quebec and Canada can be achieved through embracing liberalism are simply naive as they fail to grasp the fundamental point that liberal principles are irreconcilable with the goal of particular cultures, whether that of Canada, Quebec, or anywhere in the world. Finally, Grant turns to the question of whether Canada’s disappearance is not only necessary but good, making clear at the outset that he rejects the notion that the good and necessity are inseparable. From a materialistic standpoint, the elimination of Canada would probably mean greater possibilities for consumption, which is, after all, the goal of mass societies. At a higher level, the United States has always represented to Canadians the possibility of a more open, democratic society, less rooted in tradition than their own. Most comprehensively, the end of Canada can be seen as a positive stage in the passing away of destructive nationalisms as the world moves towards a homogeneous order. It must be understood, however, that the affirmation of this liberal vision demands acceptance of its account of human nature, in which humans are free to shape the world and themselves through history unrestrained by belief in an eternal order as found in the writings of the ancients, particularly those of Plato and Aristotle. Grant concludes Lament for a Nation by reminding his readers that his lament is not based on philosophy but tradition. In the face of the disappearance of the Canada that he has loved, it is necessary to live with courage. There is a further consolation, that of religion, ‘which asserts

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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’ (347). Henry Roper

TO DEREK BEDSON12 AND JUDITH ROBINSON13 Two Lovers of Their Country One Living and One Dead

CHAPTER 1 Never has such a torrent of abuse been poured on any Canadian figure as that during the years from 1960 to 1965. Never have the wealthy and the clever been so united as they were in their joint attack on Mr John Diefenbaker.14 It has made life pleasant for the literate classes to know that they were on the winning side. Emancipated journalists were encouraged to express their dislike of the small-town Protestant politician, and they knew they would be well paid by the powerful for their efforts. Suburban matrons and professors knew that there was an open season on Diefenbaker, and that jokes against him at cocktail parties would guarantee the medal of sophistication. New agreements were produced. Such a progressive intellectual as F.H. Underhill15 ridiculed Diefenbaker in the same accents as the editorials of the Globe and Mail. Socialist members of parliament united with the representatives of Toronto and Montreal business to vote his government from office. In my parish in southern Ontario, on the Sunday before the election of 1963, the Holy Eucharist was offered for ‘stable government,’ well expressing the unanimity of bourgeois intention.16 Only the rural and smalltown people voted for Diefenbaker en masse, but such people are members of neither the ruling nor the opinion-forming classes. The tide of abuse abated after the election of 1963. The establishment thought that it had broken Diefenbaker and could now afford to patronize him. But Diefenbaker has refused to play dead. He has shown himself capable of something the wealthy and the clever rarely understand – the virtue of courage. The patronizing airs are turning

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once more into abuse; the editorials and the ‘news’ become increasingly vindictive. It is interesting to speculate why Diefenbaker raised the concentrated wrath of the established classes. Most of his critics claim that he is dominated by ambition, almost to the point of egomania. They also claimed (while he was still in office) that he was dangerous because he was an astute politician who put personal power first. Yet his actions turned the ruling class into a pack howling for his blood. Astute politicians, who are only interested in political power, simply do not act this way. There must be something false or something missing in this description of his actions. To search for a consistent description is partly why I have written this book. The search must be related to the title of this meditation. To lament is to cry out at the death or at the dying of something loved. This lament mourns the end of Canada as a sovereign state. Political laments are not usual in the age of progress, because most people think that society always moves forward to better things. Lamentation is not an indulgence in despair or cynicism. In a lament for a child’s death, there is not only pain and regret, but also celebration of passed good. I cannot but remember such things were That were most precious to me.17

In Mozart’s great threnody, the Countess sings of la memoria di quel bene.18 One cannot argue the meaninglessness of the world from the facts of evil, because what could evil deprive us of, if we had not some prior knowledge of good? The situation of absolute despair does not allow a man to write. In the theatre of the absurd, dramatists like Ionesco and Beckett do not escape this dilemma. They pretend to absolute despair and yet pour out novels and plays.19 When a man truly despairs, he does not write; he commits suicide. At the other extreme, there are the saints who know that the destruction of good serves the supernatural end; therefore they cannot lament. Those who write laments may have heard the propositions of the saints, but they do not know that they are true. A lament arises from a condition that is common to the majority of men, for we are situated between despair and absolute certainty. I have implied that the existence of a sovereign Canada served the good. But can the disappearance of an unimportant nation be worthy of

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serious grief? For some older Canadians it can. Our country is the only political entity to which we have been trained to pay allegiance. Growing up in Ontario, the generation of the 1920s took it for granted that they belonged to a nation. The character of the country was self-evident. To say it was British was not to deny it was North American. To be a Canadian was to be a unique species of North American. Such alternatives as F.H. Underhill’s – ‘Stop being British if you want to be a nationalist’ – seemed obviously ridiculous. We were grounded in the wisdom of Sir John A. Macdonald, who saw plainly more than a hundred years ago that the only threat to nationalism was from the South, not from across the sea.20 To be a Canadian was to build, along with the French, a more ordered and stable society than the liberal experiment in the United States. Now that this hope has been extinguished, we are too old to be retrained by a new master. We find ourselves like fish left on the shores of a drying lake. The element necessary to our existence has passed away. As some form of political loyalty is part of the good life, and as we are not flexible enough to kneel to the rising sun, we must be allowed to lament the passing of what had claimed our allegiance. Even on a continent too dynamic to have memory, it may still be salutary to celebrate memory. The history of the race is strewn with gasping political fish. What makes the gasping comic, in the present case, is its involvement with such ambiguous and contrasting figures as Pearson21 and Diefenbaker. Lamenting for Canada is inevitably associated with the tragedy of Diefenbaker. His inability to govern is linked with the inability of this country to be sovereign. In the last years, many writers have described the confusions, contradictions, and failures of the Diefenbaker government. Even when Peter Newman has exuded malice, or Blair Fraser has hidden Liberal propaganda behind the mask of impartiality, their descriptions have often been accurate.22 Yet their accuracy is made suspect by their total argument. They rejoice that we have back in office the party of the ruling class. They generously allow that the Liberal party had become arrogant by 1957, and that in a ‘democratic’ system it is good to have alternative administrations. (For example, it gives our natural rulers a proper chastening.) But they never grant that, for twenty years before its defeat in 1957, the Liberal party had been pursuing policies that led inexorably to the disappearance of Canada. Its policies led to the impossibility of an alternative to the American republic being built on the northern half of this continent. They never

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grant that the seeds of Canada’s surrender lay in Mackenzie King’s regime.23 This fact and Diefenbaker’s inchoate knowledge of it are ignored by the journalists of the establishment. They never allow that when the Conservatives came to office they were faced with a situation that would lead, if not corrected, to the disappearance of their country’s independence. No credit is given to the desperate attempts of Diefenbaker and his colleagues to find alternative policies, both national and international, to those of their predecessors. Diefenbaker’s confusions and inconsistencies are, then, to be seen as essential to the Canadian fate. His administration was not an aberration from which Canada will recover under the sensible rule of the established classes. It was a bewildered attempt to find policies that were adequate to its noble cause. The 1957 election was the Canadian people’s last gasp of nationalism.24 Diefenbaker’s government was the strident swan-song of that hope. Although the Canadian nationalist may be saddened by the failures of Diefenbaker, he is sickened by the shouts of sophisticated derision at his defeat. Those who crowed at Diefenbaker’s fall did not understand the policies of government that were essential if Canada was to survive. In their derision they showed, whether they were aware of it or not, that they really paid allegiance to the homogenized culture of the American Empire. This meditation is limited to lamenting. It makes no practical proposals for our survival as a nation. It argues that Canada’s disappearance was a matter of necessity. But how can one lament necessity – or, if you will, fate? The noblest of men love it; the ordinary accept it; the narcissists rail against it. But I lament it as a celebration of memory; in this case, the memory of that tenuous hope that was the principle of my ancestors. The insignificance of that hope in the endless ebb and flow of nature does not prevent us from mourning. At least we can say with Richard Hooker: ‘Posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream.’25

CHAPTER 2 How did Diefenbaker conceive Canada? Why did the men who run the country come to dislike and then fear his conception? The answers demonstrate much about Canada and its collapse.

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Most journalists account for Diefenbaker’s failure by the foibles of his personality. Influenced by Time magazine, politics is served up as gossip, and the more titillating the better. The jaded public wants to be amused; journalists have to eat well. Reducing issues to personalities is useful to the ruling class. The ‘news’ now functions to legitimize power, not to convey information. The politics of personalities helps the legitimizers to divert attention from issues that might upset the status quo. Huntley and Brinkley are basic to the American way of life.26 Canadian journalists worked this way in the election of 1963. Their purposes were better served by writing of Diefenbaker’s ‘indecision,’ of Diefenbaker’s ‘arrogance,’ of Diefenbaker’s ‘ambition,’ than by writing about American-Canadian relations. Indeed, his personality was good copy. The tragedy of his leap to unquestioned power, the messianic stance applied to administrative detail, the prairie rhetoric murdering the television – these are an essential part of the Diefenbaker years. But behind all the stories of arrogance and indecision, there are conflicts – conflicts over principles. The man had a conception of Canada that threatened the dominant classes. This encounter is the central clue to the Diefenbaker administration. The political actions of men are ultimately more serious than the gossip of Time and Newsweek will allow. All ruling classes are produced by the societies they are required to rule. In the 1960s, state capitalism organizes a technological North America. The ruling classes are those that control the private governments (that is, the corporations) and those that control the public government which co-ordinates the activities of these corporations. North America is the base of the world’s most powerful empire to date, and this empire is in competition with other empires. The civilians and soldiers who run its military operations increasingly crowd its corridors of power.a Since 1960, Canada has developed into a northern extension of the continental economy. This was involved in the decisions made by C.D.

a The use of the concept ‘American Empire’ is often objected to, particularly by those who like to believe that the age of empires is over. They associate an empire with earlier patterns – the British, the Spanish, and the French – when Europeans maintained rule in distant parts of the globe by superior arms and control of the sea. But an empire does not have to wield direct political control over colonial countries. Poland and Czechoslovakia are as much part of the Russian Empire as India was of the British, or Canada and Brazil of the American. An empire is the control of one state by another. In this sense, the United States of America has an empire.

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Howe and his men.27 Our traditional role – as an exporter of raw materials (particularly to Europe) with highly protected industry in central Canada – gradually lost its importance in relation to our role as a branch-plant of American capitalism. Our ruling class is composed of the same groups as that of the United States, with the signal difference that the Canadian ruling class looks across the border for its final authority in both politics and culture. As Canada is only gradually being called upon to play a full role in United States’ world policies, our military is less influential at home than is the case in the United States. Of all the aspects of our society, the military is the most directly an errand boy for the Americans. Our rulers, particularly those who enjoy wielding power, move in and out of the corporations, the civil service, and politics. For example, Mitchell Sharp was a leading civil servant under C.D. Howe, directing the development of our resources by continental capitalism. With the fall of the Liberals, he had to move to Brazilian Traction. He had the gumption, however, to be interested in the revival of the Liberal party at its lowest ebb, and so today he exercises power as Minister of Trade and Commerce.28 The political members of the ruling class live more precariously than the businessmen and the civil servants, but if successful they have the pleasures of public power. For instance, it did not appear likely, before the election of 1957, that Pearson would be the leader of the Liberal party. A civil servant who had turned Minister of External Affairs was not close to the heart of those creating the new Canada from 1945 to 1957. Yet after the election of 1957, when many Liberal leaders immediately retreated into the cover of the corporations, he had the courage to stay with the inconveniences of politics. Today he and his friends have direct control over the government. On the other hand, Robert Winters, who could not stomach the inconveniences of opposition, must content himself with running Rio Tinto and York University.29 From 1940 to 1957, the ruling class of this country was radically reshaped. In 1939, the United Kingdom still seemed a powerful force, and the men who ruled Canada were a part of the old Atlantic triangle. They turned almost as much to Great Britain as to the United States, economically, culturally, and politically. After 1940, the ruling class found its centre of gravity in the United States. During the long years of Liberal rule, the strength of the Conservative party was maintained

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by those who were still to some extent oriented toward Great Britain. The new rulers of the Howe era inevitably backed the Liberal party; economic and political power were mutually dependent. The old Conservative élite kept Diefenbaker from a central place in his party for many years. They ensured that the control of the party remained in Toronto. After Bennett’s defeat in 1935, the Conservative party became a rump, with nearly all its strength in Ontario.b 30 Diefenbaker only came to leadership because of support from the fringe areas of the country, and because the Toronto group was at the end of its tether after the failure to build a national party under Drew.31 When, in 1957, Diefenbaker did squeeze in, he did so in spite of the dominant classes of the Howe era. Indeed, even after the business community had thrown over Bennett for King, it continued its contributions to the Conservative party, because it is wise for the wealthy to have their feet in both the opposition and the government. Despite these contributions, large-scale business did not expect or support the defeat of the Liberal party in 1957. The cause of that defeat was a protest by Canadians not against the principles but against the pin-pricks of the Howe regime. The new engineers were not very agile in the legitimizing of power. In 1956, the Pipe-Line Debate was a signal example of failure to legitimize power. The Liberals openly announced that our resources were at the disposal of continental capitalism. The use of closure expressed the Howe administration’s contempt for the ‘talking shop.’32 So much did they identify their branch-plant society with the Kingdom of Heaven that they did not pay sufficient attention to the farmers or the outlying regions. Such regions existed for them as colonies of Montreal and Toronto. The Conservative victory was accomplished by local businessmen who felt excluded from their own country by corporation capitalism. Young men, ambitious for a life in politics, could not turn to the Liberal party, where the positions of power were well secured by the old pros. The Liberals’ policy of satellite status to the United States, b This may seem to be contradicted by the leadership in those years being in the hands of Manion and Bracken. In both cases these men were the choices of the Toronto group. For example, Bracken was supported for the leadership against Murdo MacPherson because, in 1943, the CCF was a real threat in Ontario. It was hoped that by making a farmer head of the party, the rural ridings of Ontario would remain loyal provincially. Only with Drew did the Toronto group actually have one of its own.

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and their open attack on the British at the time of Suez, annoyed the residual loyalties of older Canadians. Diefenbaker made the most of these pin-pricks in his campaign of 1957. The victory of 1958 followed as the night the day. The masses wanted a change. The business community naturally backed the successful. What did it have to fear when as orthodox a servant of business as Donald Fleming was given the finance portfolio in 1957?33 Quebec found it necessary to get on the bandwagon. Even Diefenbaker’s nationalist rhetoric stirred the old memories. He was mistaken, however, when he imagined that such rhetoric was central to his victory. Later he was to rely on it, when it no longer brought the same response. Within five years of gaining the largest majority in our history, Diefenbaker’s government was defeated, and a new copy of the old regime was back in power. In this sense, at least, his administration had been a failure. Clearly he had not failed in sincerity, although the journalists of legitimacy even discounted that quality in him. They maintained that his nationalism was a cloak concealing the real man of ambition. But is it feasible to doubt his integrity at this point? In the Defence Crisis of 1963, his nationalism occasioned the strongest stand against satellite status that any Canadian government ever attempted. He maintained his stand even when the full power of the Canadian ruling class, the American government, and the military were brought against him. It is fair to maintain that such nationalism was misguided, but it is hardly honest to judge it to be insincere. What should be asked is: What kind of nationalism brought down on top of him the full wrath of a continental ruling class, and at the same time failed to produce feasible policies of government? Diefenbaker saw his destiny as revivifying the Canadian nation. But what did he think that nation was? Certainly he had a profound – if romantic – sense of historical continuity. But a nation does not remain a nation only because it has roots in the past. Memory is never enough to guarantee that a nation can articulate itself in the present.c There must

c National articulation is a process through which human beings form and re-form themselves into a society to act historically. This process coheres around the intention realized in the action. See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 37 et seq.

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be a thrust of intention into the future. When the nation is the intimate neighbour of a dynamic empire, this necessity is even more obvious. Diefenbaker certainly saw his government as a spearhead of Canada’s intention. His destiny was to revive a nation that had been disintegrating under the previous Liberal regime. Yet, because he was never specific about what Canada should be, he failed. In studying his government, one becomes aware of a series of mutually conflicting conceptions. Diefenbaker was committed to a Canadian populism. He believed that he represented all the people and all the regions of the country. As a criminal lawyer he had learnt that the interests of the small need defending against the powerful. After 1958, he often repeated: ‘Everyone is against me but the people.’34 One of his chosen models was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he interpreted Roosevelt’s success as an appeal to the people over the heads of the great.35 In the past, Diefenbaker’s party had relied on support from the established classes in Ontario – from men whose philosophy was hardly that of the fair share. Diefenbaker contradicted his populism at the very beginning of his regime by appointing Donald Fleming the Minister of Finance. As an Ontario Tory, Fleming shared nationalism with Diefenbaker, but not populism. One of the comedies of this period was the tension between a Prime Minister set on populism and a Finance Minister who was even less Keynesian than Howe.36 It was ironic that Diefenbaker should have consented to a conversion loan that was obviously in the interest of the bond houses, while Fleming should have listened to his Prime Minister attacking the chartered banks over television. The tension between Diefenbaker and the business Conservatives was reconciled in the election of 1963. Nearly all the economic power deserted the Conservative party. He did not convince them with his nationalist appeals. The history of the breed does not make this surprising. The wealthy rarely maintain their nationalism when it is in conflict with the economic drive of the day. By 1957, many Canadians could do with a spot of populism. The Howe-Abbott-Harris regime had run the country in the interests of Toronto-Montreal and their representatives in other provinces.37 The regime was building an expansionist society for the entrepreneur, the salesman, and the stock-broker. Diefenbaker’s increased welfare payments and aid to ‘outlying regions’ showed him turning to the people.

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But populist democracy is a dying force in contemporary America. It belonged to the Saskatchewan or Wisconsin of Diefenbaker’s youth, not to those who work for Simpson’s-Sears or General Motors. When he combined his prairie populism with the private-enterprise ideology of the small town, it made a strange mixture. Diefenbaker, the foe of bureaucracy and planning, went ill with Diefenbaker, the admirer of Roosevelt. Nor did his talk of free enterprise belong to an older Canadian conservatism, which had used public power to achieve national purposes. The Conservative party had, after all, created Ontario Hydro, the CNR, the Bank of Canada, and the CBC.38 Populism plus small-town free enterprise was entirely inadequate, and it could not come to terms with the society that had arisen since the war. Central Canada had grown into an industrialized complex. Any government to remain in office had to meet the new needs of this sector. A government set upon national revival had to do even more: it had to reverse the trend that was taking the keystone of the country and integrating it with Michigan and New York. Diefenbaker’s administration did neither. He did not meet the needs of this heartland, and he realized no nationalist ends. His remarkable achievement was to alienate the support of both the rulers and the ruled in both Ontario and Quebec. The Conservatives came to power at a time when world economics were less favourably disposed to Canada than at any time since the war. The less prosperous felt the pinches of the recession which started in 1957. Diefenbaker did not meet this situation with any co-ordinated economic plan. The government only alleviated the growing unemployment by winter works, and scarcely touched upon the problems caused by automation. Diefenbaker lost the wide support he had once held among the ordinary people of Ontario. Those who were suffering came to think his nationalism was the usual political yapping. Once more the Conservative party was associated with unemployment and recession. At the same time, Diefenbaker succeeded in antagonizing the citadels of corporate power. His talk of free enterprise meant no more to corporate wealth than Barry Goldwater’s did in 1964.39 During the Howe era, the wealthy had become used to running the country; they assumed it was natural there should be an identity of interests between themselves and the Liberal government. It is quite clear that this iden-

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tity was far less complete under the Conservatives, despite Donald Fleming, than under the Liberals. The Conservatives handled the machine of state capitalism less skilfully than had the Liberal smoothies. Not only did Diefenbaker lose political support in industrial Canada; he did not accomplish the work of economic nationalism. The ‘northern vision’ was a pleasant extra, but no substitute for national survival.40 During his years in office, American control grew at a quickening rate. This was the crucial issue in 1957. If Canada was to survive, the cornerstone of its existence was the Great Lakes region. The population in that area was rushing toward cultural and economic integration with the United States. Any hope for a Canadian nation demanded some reversal of the process, and this could only be achieved through concentrated use of Ottawa’s planning and control. After 1940, nationalism had to go hand in hand with some measure of socialism. Only nationalism could provide the political incentive for planning; only planning could restrain the victory of continentalism. Later I will argue that no such combination was possible, and therefore our nation was bound to disappear. To write of ‘if’s’ in history is always foolish. Nevertheless, if Diefenbaker had been a realistic nationalist, he would have had to try some such policy. He would have had to appeal over the heads of corporation capitalism to the masses of Ontario and Quebec. He would have had to mobilize the electorate to support the use of Ottawa’s power for nationalist purposes. Above all, he would have had to have known that the corporation élite was basically anti-national. Perhaps a criminal lawyer who had spent his life between Prince Albert and Ottawa could remain unaware of what had happened in central Canada since 1940. After his sweeping victory of 1958, Diefenbaker even seems to have thought that he had become a leader of ‘all the people,’ a conception that corporation capitalism could never take seriously. Had he forgotten why he had been kept by the traditional Ontario classes from the leadership of his party for so long, and how he had come into power in 1957? Never in Canadian history had a party come to power with fewer debts to large business than in the election of 1957. But Diefenbaker seems to have been blinded into believing that the powerful of central Canada could still be appealed to as ‘my fellow Canadians,’ and were not committed to continentalism

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by the very nature of what they did.41 He seems to have been blinded into believing that ‘Canadianism’ could provide the basis for a harmony of interests between his populist nationalism and the new central Canada. The Canada he thought about was not the country he was required to govern. There is something naive about Diefenbaker’s attacks on Toronto and Montreal business in the 1963 election, particularly in the light of the economic policies his government had pursued from 1958 to 1962. It is not surprising that the only literate and established voice on the side of Diefenbaker in the election of 1963 was Senator Grattan O’Leary, who was himself caught in the trap of romantic nationalism.42 Senator O’Leary also was a supporter of both nationalism and capitalism. He could presumably combine the two because he thought the leaders of Canadian capitalism after 1940 were still nationalists. There seems less excuse for such nonsense from the publisher of a great eastern newspaper than from a western lawyer. It is, nevertheless, startling that the western lawyer could still believe capitalists were nationalists after a term as Prime Minister. In short, Diefenbaker did not understand the economic implications of Canadian nationalism; he could not appraise the class structure realistically, and therefore he could not formulate the economic policies that were necessary if nationalism was to be more than rhetoric and romance. Even after his defeat, he does not seem to have learnt these lessons. As Leader of the Opposition, he attacked the measures put forward by Walter Gordon to limit the control of this country by American capital.43 Diefenbaker’s confusion of populism, free enterprise, and nationalism can be seen in his dealings with James Coyne, the Governor of the Bank of Canada. Leaving aside the legal rights of the Bank or the behaviour of the Governor or the Government, it is clear that Coyne was a firm Canadian.d He advocated a ‘tight-money’ nationalism that would protect Canada from foreign control. This may not have been the most effective protection, but it was at least one viable alternative. Diefenbaker rejected it.44 He also rejected the only other possible nationalist alterative – stringent governmental control of investment. The free-enterprise assumptions of the Diefenbaker administration d One complication was that Coyne came from an old Liberal family. The affair illustrated Diefenbaker’s failure to forget old differences when great issues were at stake.

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led to actions that were obviously anti-national. In appointing the Glassco Commission as an equivalent to the Hoover Commission, the government seemed to be appealing to an element of the American ‘conservative’ tradition. The civil service was investigated by the head of Brazilian Traction.45 Although such ‘conservatism’ may be appropriate to the United States, it cannot be to Canada, where limiting the civil service in the name of free enterprise simply strengthens the power of the private governments. Such strengthening must be anti-nationalist because the corporations are continental. Diefenbaker’s relations with the civil service invite the writing of a picaresque novel. By including these strained relations under his failures, I do not imply that the fault lay all on his side. Too many civil servants had too closely identified themselves with Liberal men and Liberal measures before 1957, and some of these did not show the proper loyalty to the elected government after 1957. Some of the senior civil servants were certain they knew what was best for Canada, both internally and externally, and they were not willing to accept the fact that elected leaders could sensibly advocate alternative policies. In the summer of 1963, the photograph of Pearson being welcomed back to office by the deputy ministers showed how far the British conception of the civil service had disappeared.e Nevertheless, that Diefenbaker failed to win the respect of the civil service was a disaster. No modern state can be run without great authority in the hands of its non-elected officials. In such an uncertain nation as Canada, the civil service is perhaps the essential instrument by which nationhood is preserved. The power of Ottawa has to be skilfully used by politicians to balance the enormous anti-national forces concentrated in the economic capitals of Toronto and Montreal. If Diefenbaker was to foster nationalism, he needed to win the respect of the civil service. The best civil servants were devoted to both the British account of their function and the conception of a sovereign Canadian nation. Only under Alvin Hamilton was a team of civil servants brought in to realize new goals.46 It was from George Drew that Diefenbaker inherited the free-enterprise policy of limiting the crown corporations. The Conservatives had e The question will be raised later whether the civil service could have been persuaded to co-operate with nationalist policies, or whether its leading personnel were too deeply involved with international administration.

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long supported the Canadian Pacific Airlines in Parliament. It soon became evident that their objections to the Pipe Line had been only constitutional. They did not object to the control of public resources by private and foreign capitalists, but simply to the way Howe had pushed that control through Parliament. The administration’s policy toward broadcasting is extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with any consistent nationalism. The Conservatives had long advocated a reassessment of broadcasting policy and the creation of a supervisory power to stand above both the CBC and the private broadcasters. For years Fleming had been advocating more power for private broadcasters, and he had gained support for his party when they really needed it. The Conservatives also justifiably felt that the CBC, then as today, gave too great prominence to the Liberal view of Canada. The broadcasting policy of the Conservatives was a compromise between various elements in the party. Diefenbaker and Nowlan restrained the Toronto Tories from an all-out attack on the CBC.47 But the Board of Broadcast Governors was implemented; a private television network was established; licenses for television stations were ladled out to prosperous party supporters.48 Thus the Conservative party became identified with an attack on one of the central national institutions. It was forgotten that the CBC had been established by a Conservative government under Bennett, in order to maintain national control over broadcasting and to prevent the airwaves being used simply for private gain. The encouragement of private broadcasting must be anti-nationalist: the purpose of private broadcasting is to make money, and the easiest way to do this is to import canned American programs appealing to the lowest common denominator of the audience. Diefenbaker’s policy was not even politically successful. John Bassett did not have the stuff of loyalty, and turned on Diefenbaker in 1963.49 The most bewildering aspect of Diefenbaker’s nationalism was his failure to find effective French-Canadian colleagues. The keystone of a Canadian nation is the French fact; the slightest knowledge of history makes this platitudinous. English-speaking Canadians who desire the survival of their nation have to co-operate with those who seek the continuance of Franco-American civilization. The failure of Diefenbaker to act on this maxim was his most tragic mistake. The election tactic of 1957, by which the Conservatives made no appeal to French Canada, helped to gain them an initial plurality. This may have been

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necessary after all the years of Liberal double-talk. The cynical belief that Quebec would go along with the winning side proved correct in 1958. How, on so base a motive, did Diefenbaker expect to build a permanent loyalty to the Conservative cause among a sophisticated and threatened people? With fifty Quebec seats behind him from 1958 to 1962, Diefenbaker does not seem to have sought serious French lieutenants who could mediate the interests of their people to the rest of the country. He seems to have contented himself with the rag and bobtail of the Union Nationale. Despite present propaganda, there were noble elements in that party. Even after the death of Duplessis, in September of 1959, Diefenbaker does not seem to have tried to bring such obvious Quebec conservatives as Bertrand into his cabinet.50 Duplessis’s death was followed immediately by that of his successor, J.M.P. Sauvé, in January of 1960. This was the deepest blow that Canadian conservatism ever sustained. Sauvé could have become the first French-Canadian Conservative Prime Minister.51 However, this disaster need not have prevented Diefenbaker from seeking out other leaders from the Union Nationale. There was one aspect of Diefenbaker’s nationalism that was repugnant to thoughtful French Canadians, however attractive to Englishspeaking Liberals and New Canadians. He appealed to one united Canada, in which individuals would have equal rights irrespective of race and religion; there would be no first- and second-class citizens. As far as the civil rights of individuals are concerned, this is obviously an acceptable doctrine. Nevertheless, the rights of the individual do not encompass the rights of nations, liberal doctrine to the contrary. The French Canadians had entered Confederation not to protect the rights of the individual but the rights of a nation. They did not want to be swallowed up by that sea which Henri Bourassa had called ‘l’américanisme saxonisant.’52 Diefenbaker’s prairie experience had taught him to understand the rights of ethnic and religious communities, such as the Ukrainians and the Jews. He was no petty Anglo-Saxon homogenizer who wanted everybody to be the same. He had defended the rights of communities to protect their ancient cultural patterns. But in what way was this different from the United States, where Polish and Greek Americans keep their remembrances while accepting the general ends of the Republic? The French-Canadian nation, with its unique homeland and civilization, is quite a different case. The appeal

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of a nation within a nation is more substantial than that of the Ukrainians or the Jews. For Diefenbaker, the unity of all Canadians is a final fact. His interpretation of federalism is basically American. It could not encompass those who were concerned with being a nation, only those who wanted to preserve charming residual customs. This failure to recognize the rights of French Canadians, qua community, was inconsistent with the roots of Canadian nationalism. One distinction between Canada and the United States has been the belief that Canada was predicated on the rights of nations as well as on the rights of individuals. American nationalism was, after all, founded on the civil rights of individuals in just as firm a way as the British appeal to liberty was founded on these rights. As the price of that liberty, American society has always demanded that all autonomous communities be swallowed up into the common culture. This was demanded during the Civil War; it was demanded of each immigrant; it is still the basis of the American school system. Diefenbaker appealed to a principle that was more American than Canadian. On this principle, the French Canadians might as well be asked to be homogenized straight into the American Republic. In so far as he did not distinguish between the rights of individuals and the rights of nations, Diefenbaker showed himself to be a liberal rather than a conservative. To explain the failure of prairie nationalism to understand French Canada, I must turn to the older quarrels that have beset the nation. The two original peoples, French and Catholic, British and Protestant, united precariously in their desire not to be part of the great Republic; but their reasons were quite different. This union was precarious partly because the preponderant classes of British stock were determined that the Canadian nation should support the international policies of the British Empire, whereas the French were either indifferent or hostile to these policies. In the Boer War and the World War of 1914 and 1939, the English-speaking Canadians forced their determination on the French. Many of the Conservatives who came to power with Diefenbaker – Gordon Churchill, Alvin Hamilton, Douglas Harkness, George Pearkes, George Hees – were men of the 1939 war.53 They had taken many of their views of French Canada from their bitterness over the Conscription Crisis, in which Mackenzie King had seemed to support French isolationism. Diefenbaker and Howard Green were of the generation that had seen Canadian nationalism and pro-Britishness closely

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united.54 It was this that gave their nationalism some real bite in an era swamped by continentalism. It is well to remember that the anti-British nationalists of English-speaking Canada in the 1930s have nearly all shown the emptiness of their early protestations by becoming consistent continentalists later on. Nevertheless, the very tradition that bred so intense a nationalism in Diefenbaker and Green55 and Churchill inhibited them from coming to terms with French Canada and finding a base for the Conservative party in Quebec. In the Defence Election of 1963, it was a sad fact for Canadian nationalism that Green and Diefenbaker were unable to find any support for their policies in Quebec, although they were a government keeping nuclear arms off Canadian soil. By this stage in our history, Diefenbaker’s and Green’s nationalism was taking the form of a new kind of neutralism, a simple refusal to accept any demand from the present imperialism. It might have been thought that such a policy would have appealed to elements in Quebec. Indeed, to maintain such a policy Diefenbaker needed that support. It was not forthcoming. It was impossible for prairie nationalists and French-Canadian nationalists to get together. During the five years of his immense power, Diefenbaker had not encouraged French Canadians to feel sympathy for the nationalism he advocated, and populism in Quebec had turned to the Social Credit movement. The very nature of Diefenbaker’s Protestantism made him unsympathetic to Catholic Quebec. He even broke with tradition and did not appoint an Ontario Catholic to his Cabinet – this during a period when the Catholic population was a stronger force than ever before. Only after dissolution in 1963 did he appoint Frank McGee to his Cabinet.56 Diefenbaker’s nationalism included contempt for the intellectual community, particularly the one found in the universities. In the age and community in which he spiritually belonged, this would not have been an important failure. The universities had no great political place in the 1920s and 1930s; but in the 1950s and 1960s, they were playing a more public role. Both Roosevelt and Kennedy57 had found it useful to harness elements from the intellectual community to their administrations. Diefenbaker was unwise to treat the university community with the neglect and contempt that he did. To take one example – it is difficult to believe that the leading contemporary theorist of the conservative view of Canadian history, Professor D.G. Creighton, should never

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have been used on the manifold boards, councils, commissions, etc., that formulate our national policies. Not only was he the biographer of Diefenbaker’s hero, Sir John A. Macdonald, but Creighton had defined the conservative view of Canada to a whole generation.58 He had the courage to do this when a definition of conservatism was not being welcomed by the Liberal establishment. Did not Diefenbaker know that the existence of Canada depended on a clear definition of conservatism? Did he not know that there had been diverse formulations of the meaning of Canadian history? For most of his appointments to Royal Commissions and other bodies, Diefenbaker chose the established wealthy or party wheel-horses. When he did choose from the university community, he turned to administrators and technicians, to those with the minimum of intellectual conviction. In the election of 1963, Diefenbaker had no support from the intellectual community, although he was standing on the attractive platform of Canadian sovereignty. This is a measure of how far he had carried yahooism in his years of office. He acted as if friendship with public-relations men and party journalists was a sufficient means to an intellectual nationalism.

CHAPTER 3 The Defence Crisis of 1962 and 1963 revealed the depth of Diefenbaker’s nationalism. Except for these events, one might interpret him as a romantic demagogue yearning for recognition. But his actions during the Defence Crisis make it clear that his nationalism was a deeply held principle for which he would fight with great courage and would sacrifice political advantage. Nothing in Diefenbaker’s ministry was as noble as his leaving of it. The old war-horse would not budge from his principle: The government of the United States should not be allowed to force the Canadian government to a particular defence policy. His determination to stand on that belief finally convinced the ruling class that he was more than a nuisance, that he must be removed. One comedy in these tragic events was that the intellectuals could not recognize that Diefenbaker was standing on principle. Such a recognition would have been outside the scope of the class-liberalism by which North American intellectuals live. The literati had assessed Pearson to be the intellectual of principle who did not know the politi-

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cal arts, and Diefenbaker as the tough provincial politician interested in succeeding at all costs. Yet Diefenbaker was willing to bring the dominant classes of society down on his head; while Pearson changed his defence policies to suit the interests of the powerful. After the Cuban Crisis, Pearson acted with great political skill to unite the powerful forces of continentalism around him. The crisis over defence blew into an issue after October of 1962, when Kennedy demanded that Castro’s Cuba remove its missiles. A conflict had long been brewing between Howard Green, the Minister of External Affairs, and the military, whose spokesman in the Cabinet was Douglas Harkness, the Minister of Defence. It was brought to a head over Cuba because it was rumoured that in the crisis between the United States and the USSR, the Canadian government had been slow in alerting Canadian forces involved in North American defence.59 The facts of Canadian action in October of 1962 are still in dispute. It is certainly clear that influential sections of the Canadian military did not think that the government had properly acquiesced in NORAD.60 The issue soon rose to much greater proportions. Diefenbaker had buzzing around his ears the American government, the military, and soon the uproar of the Canadian power élite with its press. Under Pearson, the Liberal party became the spokesman of these forces. Whether Canada should arm the Bomarc missiles with atomic warheads became the issue at stake. Pearson, who had previously argued that Canada should not accept nuclear arms, turned round and asserted that any government of his would promptly negotiate their acceptance. The crisis is illuminated by the forces that confronted Diefenbaker during those months. The Canadian head of a great American soap company first questioned publicly the government’s relations with the United States. Hellyer and Pearson reversed the Liberal defence policy.61 The supreme Commander at NATO, General Norstad, gave a press conference in Ottawa under the auspices of the Canadian military, in which he implied that Canada was not living up to its commitments.62 The American State Department issued a memorandum denying the veracity of the Canadian Prime Minister on the matter.63 The three Toronto newspapers (two of them traditionally Conservative) came out on the same day for Diefenbaker’s removal.64 Through all the abuse that Diefenbaker has suffered, he may well remember that it took the full weight of the North American establishment to bring

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him down. He may well remember that, in the election of 1963, he still maintained nearly one hundred seats in Parliament when all the resources of the establishment were against him.65 In the months of the crisis, there was a clear distinction between the motives of Green and Diefenbaker. They were old and trusted friends, deeply shaped by the same tradition of Canadian conservatism. Green had nominated Diefenbaker for the leadership of his party as long ago as 1948 when George Drew won the contest. When he became Minister of External Affairs in 1959, Green was clearly Diefenbaker’s first lieutenant. In this office, his first consideration was that Canada’s best role in international affairs should be to use its influence for disarmament. He believed that Canada’s acquisition of nuclear arms would add to nuclear tension and diminish Canadian influence abroad. In all this he took for granted that there was such an entity as ‘Canada,’ that it was sufficiently a sovereign nation for this kind of policy to be possible. During and after the Cuban Crisis, another factor came more to the fore. Green publicly questioned American actions around the world, not only in Laos and Vietnam. He went as far as to warn the Americans that their preponderant power might tempt them to be bullies. Indeed, in those months he expressed a deeper disquiet about the role of the United States in the world than any Canadian leader had done for generations. In Parliament, on January 24, 1963, he said: The Cuban episode has made perfectly clear that in the world today the preponderance of power is with the United States. No longer is it a question of two great equal nuclear powers. I suggest that at the present time the United States is beyond any shadow of doubt preponderant in power. That, Mr Chairman, may constitute quite a temptation. When you are the biggest fellow in the school yard it is quite a temptation to shove everybody else around. Now, I am confident that there will be no such development in United States policy. I am confident that they will not adopt a policy of getting tough with their allies. For Canada, of course, it is particularly important whether anything of that kind develops.f

Whether he was wise to be so explicit depends on how one interprets f See Hansard of that date, p. 3067.

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the role of the United States in the world, and this question cannot be undertaken here. Suffice it to say that for those who accept Howard Green’s interpretation, his actions during those months make him one of the rare politicians who literally deserve the prefix ‘Right Honourable.’ Whether wisely or not, Canada played a more independent role internationally during those short months than ever before in its history. It was not likely that the American government under Kennedy would take such talk lightly from its closest ‘ally.’ The gentler regime of Eisenhower was a thing of the past. In 1962, Kennedy had made clear that the United States was no longer going to take any nonsense from its allies. An air of innocence pervades Green’s statements about the United States. He spoke as if his comments would be taken in friendship. He seemed unaware that he was an official in a satellite country. Can an ant be an ally with an elephant? Diefenbaker stood for a much more limited nationalism. He did not criticize American world policy, but insisted that Canadian defence policy should not be determined in Washington. Only at one point did he by implication criticize American world policy. In calling for the UN to investigate Cuba, he implied that he did not automatically accept Kennedy’s account of the facts.66 At no other time did he imply any criticism of America’s world role; he simply affirmed his belief in Canadian sovereignty. In his speech to Parliament on February 5, 1963, just before it voted down his government – surely a great document of Canadian nationalism – he did not attack American policy even when the weight of the American government was being used against him through General Norstad’s press conference and the press release on Canadian relations by the American State Department.g Even during the following election, when he was under attack by such friends of the Kennedys as the publisher of Newsweek, and when the Liberals had the Kennedys’ own election expert Louis Harris advising them, he g On his first trip abroad, after his Inauguration in 1961, Kennedy had come to Ottawa and made a strong pitch for Canada’s membership in the OAS, which was met without response from the Canadian government and Parliament. The President had also publicly announced that the United States was going to demand greater co-operation from its ‘allies,’ even if this meant less ease in friendship. In light of these events, it is surprising how Diefenbaker showed himself little ready for the great pressure that the American government would exert for the overthrow of his regime. Because of his early assassination, Kennedy’s policy of exerting pressure on his ‘allies’ only succeeded with two countries, Canada and the United Kingdom.

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refrained from any attack on the aims of the American Empire.67 He continually repeated that Canada should settle its defence commitments after the facts were clarified by the NATO meetings in May of 1963. His opponents successfully raised the cry of ‘indecisiveness.’ (Decisiveness had become a good slogan under the Kennedys.) They explained his actions by saying that he was trying to have the best of Harkness’s and Green’s positions for the low motive of political success. Such an explanation cannot hold water for the simple reason that he was willing to let Harkness go, and in doing so he must have known the price he was paying. His speech at the dissolution of Parliament made clear that the one thing he would not stomach was the United States government determining Canadian defence policy.68 Diefenbaker and General Pearkes, the Defence Minister before Harkness, had negotiated the acceptance of the Bomarcs when they scrapped the Arrow program. The Bomarcs were useless without nuclear warheads. It was claimed that in refusing the warheads Diefenbaker was reneging on his own commitment to the United States.69 It was even claimed that he might not have understood the nature of the original commitment. In refusing to make up his mind about accepting the warheads, he was accused of being ‘indecisive.’ The ‘bad ally’ and ‘the man of indecision’ became Liberal images for the campaign. Diefenbaker answered these charges in his speech to Parliament on January 25, 1963.h He claimed that the acceptance of warheads for the Bomarcs had always been conditional on needing them for the defence of the alliance. Defence technology was in constant flux, and it was no longer clear that warheads were necessary. He maintained that the decision should await the NATO meetings in May of 1963, when there was to be an over-all assessment of the military needs of the alliance. The interests of world peace demanded that warheads should be kept off Canadian soil until it was certain that they were needed. This speech illuminates his assumptions about Canada’s place in the world. He was no pacifist, no unilateralist, nor was he sentimental about communism. If nuclear arms were necessary for North-American defence, Canada would take them. He also assumed that NATO was an alliance and not h It will be well for historians to read the Hansard of that day. By this stage in the crisis, the press was baying for Diefenbaker’s blood, so the force of his arguments was not given much public prominence.

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simply an American instrument. (After all, it was the Russians who had maintained the contrary for many years.) Canada’s sovereignty entailed that our defence policy be determined in Ottawa. These last two assumptions did not correspond with reality and could not be politically sustained in the climate of Diefenbaker’s own country. How much was Diefenbaker aware that Canadian nationalism was no longer an effective rallying-cry in the urban Canada of 1963? Did a man with his past realize how much the structure of society had been changed in the Howe era so that the ruling class was no longer indigenous? Was he aware that a branch-plant society could not possibly show independence over an issue on which the American government was seriously determined? Most Canadians were as convinced as the American public that Kennedy had been right doing what he did in Cuba, and that his actions showed the wisdom of ‘decisiveness’ in foreign policy. So ‘decisiveness’ was subtly identified with Canada’s need to have atomic arms. Green’s appeal to a gentler tradition of international morality had little attraction for the new Canada, outside of such unimportant groups as the Voice of Women.70 It seems likely that Diefenbaker actually believed that NATO was an alliance of sovereign states, not an instrument of the American Empire. Pearson had always acted internationally from different premises. His unequivocal praise of American action in Cuba showed that he knew there was a difference between Canadian initiative limiting the actions of a dying British power at the time of Suez and Canadian influence limiting the actions of the American Empire.71 He could use the rhetoric of ‘internationalism’ even more effectively than Green, but he knew it for what it was. Can it be denied that the actions of the Kennedy administration were directed toward removing an unreliable government in Ottawa rather than to guaranteeing a specific commitment? The American Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, made clear that the Bomarcs were not essential to the defence of North America.72 Diefenbaker and Green must have seemed too suspicious of American motives to be allowed to remain in office.i Their relation to the OAS and Cuba endani In the election of 1963, American officials followed Green to his political meetings. It was innocent of Green to object to this. Did he not know how the CIA considered South American elections?

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gered what lay ahead in South America.73 Kennedy was a past master in the use of power for personal and imperial purposes. Historians will only be able to speculate about what Pearson and Kennedy discussed before the dinner for Nobel-Prize winners at the White House in 1962. The Defence Crisis illustrated how profoundly Diefenbaker’s Canadianism was bound up with the British connection. Since 1914, Britain had ceased to be a great power. Both Green and Diefenbaker continued to accept as real, however, the meaning of Canada’s membership in the British Commonwealth. The character of Canada as British North America was in their flesh and bones. Yet it was their fate to be in charge of the Canadian government at the time that the English ruling class had come to think of its Commonwealth relations as a tiresome burden, when the wealthy of Canada had ceased to be connected with their British past. It is easy for the clever and the rootless to point out the mistakes that Diefenbaker and Green made in this regard; it is kinder, however, to sympathize with these men of deep loyalty, who found themselves impotent in the face of their disappearing past. The British connection had been a source of Canadian nationalism. The west-east pull of trade – from the prairies, down the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence, to western Europe – provided a counter-thrust to the pull of continentalism. It depended on the existence of a true North Atlantic triangle. But the Britishness of Canada was more than economic. It was a tradition that stood in firm opposition to the Jeffersonian liberalism74 so dominant in the United States.j By its nature this conservatism was not philosophically explicit, although it had shaped our institutions and had penetrated into the lives of generations of Canadians. Green and Diefenbaker were of this tradition. Such Canadians could not give their loyalty to the great Republic to the south. This did not imply anti-Americanism, simply a lack of Americanism. In the election of 1963, Diefenbaker was accused of anti-Americanism, but he was surely being honest to his own past when he said that he thought of his policies as being pro-Canadian, not anti-American. During the Howe era, this older Canadianism disappeared first in Toronto and Montreal, cities that once prided themselves on being most British. But ways of life die hard, and this loyalty still survived in the lessmodern parts of Canada. Loyalty cannot quickly be destroyed by ecoj A discussion of British conservatism will be found later.

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nomic circumstances because it does not depend on economics alone. In his speech at dissolution in 1963, Diefenbaker spoke with unerring historical appropriateness when he reminded his hearers of the Annexation Manifesto of 1849.75 The economic self-seekers had never been the ones to care about Canada as a nation. With his passionate sense of British North America, Diefenbaker took office at a time when the Suez venture had driven home to the English their exact place in the world. The British decided then that their hope for any international influence lay in a careful manipulation of their ‘special’ relation with the United States.k 76 The loan that Keynes negotiated for them after 1945 guaranteed their being tied to the American Empire.77 Whether or not there was any alternative, they saw none. After all, their greatest contemporary leader, Churchill, had not de Gaulle’s clarity of intelligence.78 Beginning in the 1960s, the United Kingdom decided to seek entrance to the new European community. They saw the European Common Market as an outreach of American power. They desired to free themselves as gracefully as possible from Commonwealth commitments. The length to which the English were willing to carry their ‘special’ relation was seen in Lord Home’s trumpeting of support for American policy in Cuba, and Mr Macmillan’s ability to eat crow when the Americans cancelled the Skybolt program.79 As realistic a politician as de Gaulle graphically described the English as a Trojan Horse when he vetoed their entrance to Europe in January of 1963.80 In this context, the appeal of the Conservatives to the British connection carried an air of unreality. The pattern of Canadian trade could not be changed in the way Diefenbaker suggested in 1957.81 He understood this himself by the time he turned down the United Kingdom’s later proposals for a free-trade area with Canada.82 After such a refusal, the English could not stomach the appeal he made for the Commonwealth in London, in September of 1962.83 It seemed the stuff of fantasy, not a viable alternative. Tough politicians like Macmillan and Duncan Sandys were quick to use the press, and Diefenbaker was accused of trying to upset England’s entry into the Common Market.84 k Bismarck said the central fact of the modern era was that the Americans spoke English. In 1917, the English brought in the Americans to settle their European quarrel. Thirty years later their ally had become their master.

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Men who felt deeply about the Commonwealth could be accused of being bad allies, not only of the United States but also of the United Kingdom. The two had become synonymous, once the English had become a satellite. This was made crystal clear when Lord Home welcomed Pearson back to power as a ‘good ally’ at the NATO meetings in Ottawa in May of 1963.85 Because the English had been rejected by the Europeans as an American Trojan Horse, they had little sympathy with such a peripheral matter as Canadian nationalism. After what the English did to him in 1962 and 1963, Diefenbaker still fought for the Red Ensign in 1964.86 His basic principles were far removed from any petty sense of self-importance. It was often considered strange that a Conservative government should follow the independent internationalism associated with Green. The only explanation brought forward by its opponents was that the administration was overwhelmed with a pathological ‘indecision.’ But there was something consistent and inevitable in Green’s policies. Green and Diefenbaker had always considered Canada an independent country. The role of Canada was to mediate between the United States and western Europe, particularly Great Britain. But this conception could no longer fit the facts. By the 1950s NATO was a servant of the American Empire. The Canadian élite accepted the consequences of this for Canada. But Green could not accept the end of independence. He cried out against Canada becoming a vassal. As the Commonwealth had so little substance, the only role now possible seemed that of an independent agent in the United Nations, exerting influence for disarmament. His Protestant idealism pointed in the same direction. But such independence in international relations was not something the dominant forces in Canadian life could accept. The sincerity of Diefenbaker’s nationalism is established by the fact that he stood by Green, and would not accept the American demands, even when it was in his overwhelming interest to do so. One is reminded of Milton’s Abdiel: ‘Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified.’87

CHAPTER 4 In the light of Diefenbaker, I would like to turn to the Canadian establishment and its political instrument, the Liberal party. There are three

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arguments for nationalism that could justify the Liberals. First, the Liberals are the realistic defenders of this country, piloting us through the shoals of foreign control and internal dissension that might shipwreck Canada. Second, in the twentieth century it is inevitable that Canada should be swallowed up; since 1940 this should have been obvious to any political analyst. Liberal leadership has recognized this and has taught the masses to accept it smoothly. Third, Canada’s disappearance is not only necessary but good. As part of the great North American civilization, we enter wider horizons; Liberal policies are leading to a richer continentalism. The second and third arguments are often taken to be the same. They are identified because men assume in the age of progress that the broad movement of history is upward. Taken as a whole, what is bound to happen is bound also to be good. But this assumption is not self-evident. The fact that events happen does not imply that they are good. We understand this in the small events of personal life. We only forget it in the large events when we worship the future. The last two arguments for the Liberals are, therefore, clearly distinct. The Liberals use the first of these three in public. There is still much nationalist sentiment in certain parts of the country. On the hustings the image of the Liberals has been that of the realistic defenders of Canadian unity. At the level of economic policy, the argument runs, they have shown themselves skilful masters of national development. This skill was exemplified in the policies of Howe from 1945 to 1957. These policies proceeded from the recognition of certain realities: that the Canadian economy was part of the total resources of North America; that Canada was an undeveloped frontier within that total, and the capital necessary for that development would come largely from the United States; that North America was committed to a capitalist structure in which the control of production would be in the hands of ‘private’ corporations, while the government would only play a supervisory role. Within these assumptions, the Liberal party gave brilliant leadership to the development of the country; the corporations ran an economy that was blessed by a benevolent government; certain complementary needs were met by the judicious use of Crown corporations; injustices were palliated with limited social services. If the terms for American investment had been tougher, there would have been

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less investment. Canada would have developed more slowly and with a substantially lower standard of living than the United States. This would have been the quickest way to undermine the nation. The inevitability of Howe’s policies is seen by the fact that the Conservatives could find no viable alternative. Since coming back to office in 1963, the Liberals have recognized the need for a more nationalistic economic policy. Only the circumstances of minority government have prevented Walter Gordon from initiating it. Beyond economic policy, the argument continues, the Liberals alone have understood that French Canada is the keystone of Confederation. They have always allowed for the legitimate interests of Quebec and have produced French leaders who supported Confederation. The provincial Liberal party has directed Quebec’s awakening since Duplessis, and from 1963 the federal party has recognized that Quebec must have a new place in Confederation, if it is going to remain in the same country. Co-operative federalism is the only basis on which Quebec will stay. Pearson has wisely compromised with Prime Minister Lesage on matters of provincial autonomy. He has fought for a national flag free of any hated British symbols. He has established a strong Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.88 When one compares this with the previous administration, the claim of the Liberals is strong. At the level of defence policy, the Liberals argue that the issue about nuclear arms did not involve any surrender of proper Canadian sovereignty. Canada ought to play a fair and honourable part in ‘the defence of the West,’ and the Americans are the leaders of that alliance. It is only in terms of such realities that our nation can be built. Only as a friendly satellite of the United States can we use such diplomats as Pearson to influence the American leaders to play their world role with skill and moderation. Doing this is not negating nationalism but recognizing its limits. The Liberal argument was symbolized in August of 1963 when, on the same weekend that the secret agreement with the United States over nuclear warheads was announced, Pearson spoke feelingly about Canadian nationalism at a meeting of Quebec journalists. The whole argument for the Liberals as realistic nationalists breaks down with their actual achievements. Their policies have not been such as could sustain a continuing nation. The old adage ‘The operation was a success but the patient died’ can be too readily applied.

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They were in office during the years when the possible basis for nationalism disappeared. It was under a Liberal regime that Canada became a branch-plant society; it was under Liberal leadership that our independence in defence and foreign affairs was finally broken. It is perfectly convincing to argue that these policies were necessary for Canada or to argue that they were good for Canada. The widespread claim that the Liberals were the best possible regime is not the issue at this point. It may be convincing to argue that if Howe had not existed, we would have had to invent him. But it is absurd to argue that the Liberals have been successful nationalists. The Liberals failed in English-speaking Canada. If the nation were to survive, it had to be anchored in both English- and French-speaking Canada, and a modus vivendi had to be established between the two. The Liberals failed to recognize that the real danger to nationalism lay in the incipient continentalism of English-speaking society, rather than in any Quebec separatism. Their economic policies homogenized the culture of Ontario with that of Michigan and New York. The crucial years were those of the early ’forties. The decisions of those years were made once and for all, and were not compatible with the continuance of a sovereign Canadian nation.l Once it was decided that Canada was to be a branch-plant society of American capitalism, the issue of Canadian nationalism had been settled. The decision may or may not have been necessary; it may have been good or bad for Canada to be integrated into the international capitalism that has dominated the West since 1945. But certainly Canada could not exist as a nation when the chief end of the government’s policy was the quickest integration into that complex. The Liberal policy under Howe was integration as fast as possible and at all costs. No other consideration was allowed to stand in the way. The society produced by such policies may reap enormous benefits, but it will not be a nation. Its culture will become the empire’s to which it belongs. Branch-plant l A note is required here about the use of such words as ‘decision’ and ‘possible.’ In writing history, one employs a certain logic, which one hopes has a high degree of consistency. For example, the use of the word ‘decisions’ does not entail any concept of free will or imply that these ‘decisions’ ‘could have been otherwise.’ It is clear that in this writing I am employing the word ‘fate’ in a way that most modern writers avoid. They accept a modern notion of free will, while I accept a classical account of ethics. In this writing I cannot justify that vocabulary.

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economies have branch-plant cultures. The O’Keefe Centre symbolizes Canada.89 The Ontario vote in the national election of 1963 showed what that society had become. In the southern metropolitan areas, the writ of the continental corporations runs with small impediment, and the Liberals swept the board. A society dominated by corporations could not vote for an independent defence policy. The power of the American government to control Canada does not lie primarily in its ability to exert direct pressure; the power lies in the fact that the dominant classes in Canada see themselves at one with the continent on all essential matters. Dominant classes get the kind of government they want. The nature of our rulers was determined by the economic policies of the Liberals in the 1940s. The matter can be summed up quickly: The policies pursued by Howe produced a ruling class composed of such men as E.P. Taylor. In the winter of 1963, Mr Taylor was quoted as saying: ‘Canadian nationalism! How old-fashioned can you get?’90 The democratic argument asserts that it took more votes than the votes of the powerful to make Pearson Prime Minister. Was it not the majority of Canadian people – and not simply the managers – that settled the issue? To meet this argument would require a long account of corporation capitalism and the processes whereby power is legitimized. This can obviously not be done in a short space. Let it suffice to make the following point: In no society is it possible for many men to live outside the dominant assumptions of their world for very long. Where can people learn independent views, when newspapers and television throw at them only processed opinions? In a society of large bureaucracies, power is legitimized by conscious and unconscious processes. The overwhelming vote for the Liberals in urban Ontario should not be surprising, since the powers of legitimacy were naturally strongest in those areas controlled by continental capitalism. The democratic idea of the free man making up his mind to create the society of his choice as he casts his ballot may have had meaning at some moments in history, but it can hardly apply in as dynamic a society as Southern Ontario. To say this is not to deny that the ballot box has ritual and other significance. A society proceeding from economic decisions made in the ’forties was not one capable of deciding on a defence policy or a foreign policy different from those of the United States or,

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for that matter, deciding on a distinct culture. Ontario was determined it would be integrated into the Great Lakes region. It has been said that the inability of a country to have an independent foreign policy does not prevent it from being a nation. This means that Canadians have to recognize the limitations on sovereignty in a nation that lives beside the most powerful country on earth. This argument sees our case as similar to that of Poland. But whatever possible future there may be for Poland, there are clearly two chief differences between ourselves and that nation. First, the Poles have an ancient culture which has shown strength in resisting the new change. The new came to Poland not only as something Russian (that is, nationally alien) but also as something Marxist (that is, profoundly alien to a Roman Catholic people). In Canada outside of Quebec, there is no deeply rooted culture, and the new changes come in the form of an ideology (capitalist and liberal) which seems to many a splendid vision of human existence. Second, we are different from Poland in that in many ways capitalist imperialism is much harder to resist than communist imperialism. This is not simply a matter of counting up the Hungarys and Tibets, the Brazils and Guatemalas, and seeing which empire has the lowest score. Nor is it simply that the United States is the most progressive society on earth and therefore the most radical force for the homogenizing of the world. By its very nature the capitalist system makes of national boundaries only matters of political formality. The governments of small capitalist nations do not have the same means to protect themselves as do small communist states. Economic control is not finally in the hands of the government, and foreign capital is able to determine possible governments by incarnating itself as an indigenous ruling class. When Pearson praised Howe at the Liberal convention of 1958,91 he was surely showing that the existence of the Canadian nation was not a priority on the agenda of the Liberal party. The one implies the other. Whether or not Pearson intended or recognized this implication is fundamentally unimportant. I do not wish to impugn the motives of the Liberal leaders. To understand public events, it is necessary to distinguish between ‘decision’ and ‘intention.’ Intention, political or otherwise, is always hard to fathom. This does not prevent decisions made in public having consequences that are not difficult to understand. The ‘personalized’ political journalism, associated on this continent with

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Time and exemplified in Canada by Maclean’s, has done much to obscure this fundamental distinction. In the preceding arguments I am not concerned with the nature of intention, but with that of decision. It is therefore unnecessary to discuss whether those responsible were aware of the likely results of their decisions, or whether they thought these consequences good. For example, nothing that has been said implies that Pearson or his lieutenant, Jack Pickersgill, did not think of themselves as nationalists.92 To speculate about the intentions of those who were responsible for these decisions would require a series of biographies. One man might be described as believing in continentalism but as using the rhetoric of nationalism as the necessary cloak of the politician; another might be explained to be a nationalist who nevertheless could not bear to be out of office; a third might be a nationalist who did not understand the consequences of what he voted for in Cabinet. The results would not much affect the issues. The consequences of decisions can be understood historically for what they are, whereas the motives of the decision-makers are mainly of biographical – and perhaps of eternal – significance. Biography is not the purpose of this writing. The assertion that the Liberals were not successful nationalists does not depend on any assessment of their characters.m The second way to justify the Liberals is to argue that politics is the art of leading people to accept necessities. As the argument goes, it was necessary for Canada to become part of the civilization of the United States. The Liberals have been the smooth instrument of that necessity. The last part of this argument has already been accepted – Liberal policies have led efficiently in that direction. Their record of smoothness is marred by their defeat in 1957. But they have quickly and efficiently regained power. The argument then turns on the truth of its first proposition, whether or not it was necessary for Canada to become part of the homogenized continental culture. And this in turn hinges on the question whether there were any possible alternatives to the decisions m The large amount of biographical writing about Mackenzie King in the last decade has done little to elucidate to what degree he was a nationalist, a continentalist, a man chiefly concerned about office, or a subtle conglomeration of all three, held together by his belief that a brilliant manipulation of day-to-day events was in his ordained hands sufficient to bring about the best of all possible worlds. King’s biographers have failed to elucidate his intentions, partly because they did not understand what Marx and Freud have taught us about the logic of ‘intention.‘

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taken in the 1940s. If there were none, the necessity of Canada’s disappearance is plain, and the argument in favour of the Liberal party follows. What would these alternative policies have been? Nations must resist the capitalist and communist empires in different ways. Resistance to Western imperialism has taken two main forms. The first is to establish a rigorous socialist state that turns to the communist empire for support in maintaining itself. This policy can be called Castroism after its most successful practitioner.93 The second method is to harness the nationalist spirit to technological planning and to insist internationally that there are limits to the Western ‘alliance.’ This policy may be called Gaullism after its most successful practitioner.94 Castroism was so obviously not a possible policy for Canada in the middle ‘forties that it is hardly worth making the point that it was not. ‘Leftist’ nationalism is only possible in a less-developed society in which the majority of citizens desires industrialism and believes that this is being prevented by anti-nationalist forces from the capitalist empire. This was not the situation in Canada.n Was there the possibility of some form of Gaullism in which the planning and control of investment would have left the ordering of the economy in Canadian hands? Gaullism is only possible when nationalism is such a dominant motive among certain é1ites that they are able to control the economy so as to stop the tendency of capitalism to become international. There are no such é1ites in the Canada of 1965. In an earlier era, Macdonald’s ‘National Policy’ was of the Gaullist kind.95 It was possible because enough Canadians were determined to pay the economic price for such nationalism, and because Britain was still a dominant force pulling the flow of trade eastward. Enough entrepreneurs could resist the pull of continentalism. Since R.B. Bennett’s abortive social legislation of the late ‘thirties, and the acquies-

n Could Canada have achieved even the degree of independence that Mexico has maintained? This is not the place to compare the complex differences between the two countries. The conflict between the Spanish and the Indian in Mexico allowed the country to fit incomparably less easily into the common Western pattern. Can one imagine Canadians expropriating the oil properties and taking on international capitalism as Cardenas did in the 1930s? Even with these traditions, it would seem likely that as Mexico is industrialized, its new middle class will make it an increasingly acquiescent neighbour.

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cence of the succeeding Liberal government, the business community (particularly in Montreal, which was then more important than Toronto) has identified its interests with the Liberal party.96 This was Mackenzie King’s chief political achievement. The organization of the war and of postwar reconstruction was carried on within the assumption that government action never questioned the ultimate authority of business interests to run the economy. Howe’s cost-plus arrangements for war production make this clear.97 The Liberal politicians and civil servants always acted within that assumption because they knew their limited power depended on it. No government that acted on other principles would have lasted long. And to repeat, after 1940 it was not in the interests of the economically powerful to be nationalists. Most of them made more money by being the representatives of American capitalism and setting up the branch plants. No class in Canada more welcomed the American managers than the established wealthy of Montreal and Toronto, who had once seen themselves the pillars of Canada. Nor should this be surprising. Capitalism is, after all, a way of life based on the principle that the most important activity is profitmaking. That activity led the wealthy in the direction of continentalism. They lost nothing essential to the principle of their lives in losing their country. It is this very fact that has made capitalism 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. Even the finest talk about internationalism opens markets for the powerful. If there had been an influential group that seriously desired the continuance of the country after 1940, it would have needed the animation of some political creed that differed from the capitalist liberalism of the United States. Only then could they have acted with sufficient decision to build an alternative nation on this continent. De Gaulle has been able to count on a deeply felt nationalism. This is based on a tradition that pre-dates the age of progress and yet is held by men who can handle the modern world. But no such tradition existed among any of the important decision-makers in Canada. The only Canadians who had a profoundly different tradition from capitalist liberalism were the French Canadians, and they were not generally taken into decision-

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making unless they had foregone these traditions. Their very Catholicism did not lead the best of them to be interested in the managerial, financial, and technical skills of the age of progress. The only possible basis for a Gaullist é1ite would have been the senior civil servants working closely with politicians who knew what they were doing. Such a union of civil servants and politicians could have used the power of Ottawa to control the representatives of continentalism in Toronto and Montreal. In fact, the Liberal politicians and their civil servants saw themselves in pleasant co-operation with the tycoons of the real capitals. I must repeat again Mackenzie King’s great discovery: If his government was the friend of business, the Liberal party could stay in office almost indefinitely. His chosen representative for that co-operation was C.D. Howe. An old newspaper photograph lingers in the mind. In the summer of 1945, a crowd of strikers followed Howe to a Toronto golf club. They had not been allowed to reach the Minister of Trade and Commerce officially. He was forced to speak with the unionists to get them out of the locker room. In his anger at the invasion of the country club, Howe made perfectly plain what postwar reconstruction would be like. The continental corporations were going to rule. Such Liberal politicians as Brooke Claxton and Paul Martin knew where the real power lay – in St James and Bay Streets.98 They did not risk using the government as a nationalist instrument. The politicians, the businessmen, and the civil servants worked harmoniously together. The enormous majorities for the Liberals in 1945, 1948, and 1953 showed that the Canadian people were attuned to the system produced by this co-operation. Any desire for nationalism among the civil service could not be effective. Some of them who directly served Howe, like Mitchell Sharp and William Bennett, obviously welcomed the union between government and international business.99 When they were forced out of the government by the Conservatives in 1958, they quickly found high places in international companies. But what of the traditional civil servants in the Departments of Finance and External Affairs? They had given their lives to government service and presumably wanted to serve a sovereign Canada. For over a generation, choruses of praise have been offered to these civil servants. How wonderful for Canada that it should be represented by such permanent officials as Norman Robertson and Robert Bryce.100 They have been spoken of as a kind of

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secular priesthood. Yet the country they represented is now a fragmented nation, a satellite. It would be a travesty to deny that most of them wanted to preserve their country. But they were not of the diamond stuff of which nationalists must be made in these circumstances. Their education was not of a kind to produce a realistic attitude toward the twentieth century. The officials of the Department of Finance had mostly learnt their economics at Queen’s University in Ontario, where the glories of the free market were the first dogma. But nationalism was negated by the policies that proceeded from such a dogma. The officials of External Affairs had mostly been educated in the twilight scepticism of Oxford liberalism. This kind of culture does not give one the stamina to be a nationalist in the twentieth century. They went on representing Canada at significant conferences, while the ‘new’ Canada was being shaped by other hands in Southern Ontario. The old-fashioned city of Ottawa continued to shelter them from the Canada they had helped to make. They were not in a position to be the necessary nationalist é1ite. But where else could it come from? Isolated intellectuals in the universities? Small-town politicians who remembered? Nevertheless it is interesting to speculate why the civil-service é1ite did so little. To take the example of one government department, it seems likely that some officials in External Affairs have some feeling for the continuance of their nation. Yet they were the instruments of a policy that left Canada a satellite internationally. In 1940, it was necessary for Canada to throw in her lot with continental defence.101 The whole of Eurasia might have fallen into the hands of Germany and Japan. The British Empire was collapsing once and for all as an international force. Canada and the United States of America had to be unequivocally united for the defence of this hemisphere. But it is surprising how little the politicians and officials seem to have realized that this new situation would have to be manipulated with great wisdom if any Canadian independence was to survive. Perhaps nothing could have been done; perhaps the collapse of nineteenth-century Europe automatically entailed the collapse of Canada. Nevertheless, it is extraordinary that King and his associates in External Affairs did not seem to recognize the perilous situation that the new circumstances entailed. In all eras, wise politicians have to play a balancing game. How little the American alliance was balanced by any defence of national independence!

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In the case of King, this lack of balance seems to be bound up with a very usual syndrome among people who give themselves to the practical life: when they gain power, they carry on with the ideas they learnt thirty years before. King had seen the centre of Canadian independence as being threatened by the British; he had been raised by a beloved mother who was impregnated with the memory of the supposed injustices that her father, William Lyon Mackenzie, had received at the hands of the British.102 Even after 1940, he still held the fear that Canadian independence was threatened from Whitehall. It may also have been that King was sufficiently held by liberal theory to believe that the United States was a democracy, and therefore not in essence an imperial power like the old societies of Europe. His relations with the Rockefellers were certainly a classic case of the ability of liberals to fool themselves about the relation between capitalism and democracy.103 King seems to have admired instinctively the liberal rhetoric of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Roosevelt surely stands as a perfect example of the division between ideology and action. One of the great imperialists of American history imagined himself an enemy of imperialism. In the late ‘forties, NATO policy seems to have been advocated by senior civil servants not only as defence against the Russian Empire but also as a means of building an Atlantic community that would provide tugs on Canada other than the continental. Yet by the 1960s, NATO had become the military instrument of the strongest empire on earth. It may indeed be argued that the safety of the Western world against the hostile forces of Asia requires that we be part of a tightly unified empire; the integration of Canada into that empire would be a small price to pay. Yet as realistic a politician as de Gaulle recognizes that he must try to limit the power of NATO if the existence of France as a country is to be maintained.104 American hegemony was obvious. Why was it not balanced by a greater initiative for independence? In the Defence Crisis of 1963, Green and Diefenbaker did not receive loyalty from their civil service. General Norstad’s press conference in Ottawa in January of 1963 could hardly have been organized without help – the help of various top officials in the very government that held the policies that Norstad’s remarks were undermining. Presumably the permanent officials felt justified in this action because their view of Canada was entirely dominated by the concept of ‘the good ally.’ What seems central to this process is that such officials had in the

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previous twenty years become more and more representative of a Western empire rather than civil servants of a particular nation state. They were part of an international bureaucracy, mainly English-speaking, whose chief job was to see that the West maintained its superior power over the East. They identified themselves with the international community rather than with nationalist ‘hayseeds’ such as Green and Diefenbaker. In the final analysis, they were provincial servants of the greatest empire since Rome. Was there anything that could have been done to preserve Canadian independence after 1960? Where were the people in Canada who could have done it?

CHAPTER 5 The confused strivings of politicians, businessmen, and civil servants cannot alone account for Canada’s collapse. This stems from the very character of the modern era.o The aspirations of progress have made Canada redundant. The universal and homogeneous state is the pinnacle of political striving. ‘Universal’ implies a world-wide state, which would eliminate the curse of war among nations; ‘homogeneous’ means that all men would be equal, and war among classes would be eliminated. The masses and the philosophers have both agreed that this universal and egalitarian society is the goal of historical striving. It gives content to the rhetoric of both communists and capitalists. This state will be achieved by means of modern science – a science that leads to the conquest of nature. Today scientists master not only non-human nature, but human nature itself. Particularly in America, scientists concern themselves with the control of heredity, the human mind, and society. Their victories in biochemistry and psychology will give the politicians a prodigious power to universalize and homogenize. Since 1945, the world-wide and uniform society is no longer a distant dream but a close possibility. Man will conquer man and perfect himself.

o In what follows I use ‘modern’ to describe the civilization of the age of progress. This civilization arose in Western Europe and is now conquering the whole globe and perhaps other parts of the universe. ‘Modern’ is applied to political philosophy to distinguish the thought of Western Europe from that of the antique world of Greece.

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Modern civilization makes all local cultures anachronistic. Where modern science has achieved its mastery, there is no place for local cultures. It has often been argued that geography and language caused Canada’s defeat. But behind these there is a necessity that is incomparably more powerful. Our culture floundered on the aspirations of the age of progress. The argument that Canada, a local culture, must disappear can, therefore, be stated in three steps. First, men everywhere move ineluctably toward membership in the universal and homogeneous state. Second, Canadians live next to a society that is the heart of modernity. Third, nearly all Canadians think that modernity is good, so nothing essential distinguishes Canadians from Americans. When they oblate themselves before ‘the American way of life,’ they offer themselves on the altar of the reigning Western goddess. When Pearson set out on his electoral campaign of 1963, he was photographed reading Will Durant’s The Dawning of the Age of Reason.105 To Durant, the age of reason is the age of progress. The book was therefore appropriate reading for Pearson, who was about to persuade Canadians to adopt American atomic arms. There are many who would deny the second statement in the previous paragraph, that the United States is the spearhead of progress. Strangely enough, the two groups that deny it do so from opposite positions. The Marxists deny it from progressive assumptions, and American ‘conservatives’ deny it because they consider their country the chief guardian of Western values. These two points of view are sometimes confused and combined by certain Europeans whose jealousy of the United States leads them to accuse Americans of being too reactionary and too modern at one and the same time. To maintain my stand that the United States is the spearhead of progress, these two denials must be refuted. To do so, I must turn away from Canadian history to the more important questions of modern political theory. Marxists believe that their philosophy leads to the true understanding of history. They insist that the aims of the United States are hostile to the interests of developing humanity. They assert that American corporation capitalism – its system of property relations and consequent world policies – makes the United States an essentially ‘reactionary’ rather than a ‘progressive’ force. The Russian and Chinese leaders may disagree on how to deal with this situation, but they do not disagree about the diagnosis. Canadian Marxists have therefore argued that

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Canadian nationalism serves the interests of progress because our incorporation in the United States would add to the power of reaction in the world. To be progressive in Canada is to be nationalistic. To see where the Marxists are wrong in detail about Canada, I must discuss where they are wrong about the age of progress in general. Marx believed that history unfolds as progress, and that when man’s control of nature has eliminated scarcity, the objective conditions will be present for a society in which human beings no longer exploit each other. With the end of exploitation, men will not be alienated from their own happiness or from each other. A society will emerge in which the full claims of personal freedom and social order will be reconciled, because the essential cause of conflict between men will have been overcome. This world-wide society will be one in which all human beings can at last realize their happiness in the world without the necessity of lessening that of others. This doctrine implies that there are ways of life in which men are fulfilled and others in which they are not. How else could Marx distinguish between man’s alienation and its opposite? Marxism includes therefore a doctrine of human good (call it, if you will, happiness). Technological development is a means by which all men will realize this good. But such a doctrine of good means that Marx is not purely a philosopher of the age of progress; he is rooted in the teleological philosophy that predates the age of progress. It is the very signature of modern man to deny reality to any conception of good that imposes limits on human freedom. To modern political theory, man’s essence is his freedom. Nothing must stand in the way of our absolute freedom to create the world as we want it. There must be no conceptions of good that put limitations on human action. This definition of man as freedom constitutes the heart of the age of progress. The doctrine of progress is not, as Marx believed, the perfectibility of man, but an open–ended progression in which men will be endlessly free to make the world as they want it. In Marxism, technology remains an instrument that serves human good. But many technologists speak as if mastery were an end in itself. To conquer space it may be necessary to transcend ordinary humanity, and produce creatures half flesh and half metal. North American liberalism expresses the belief in open–ended progress more accurately than Marxism. It understands more fully the implications of man’s essence being his freedom. As liberals become more and more aware of the implications of their own doctrine, they

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recognize that no appeal to human good, now or in the future, must be allowed to limit their freedom to make the world as they choose. Social order is a man-made convenience, and its only purpose is to increase freedom. What matters is that men shall be able to do what they want, when they want. The logic of this liberalism makes the distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value. ‘Value judgments’ are subjective. In other words, man in his freedom creates the valuable. The human good is what we choose for our good. In an earlier generation, liberals such as John Dewey claimed that this doctrine improved upon the past because it guaranteed a society in which all could do what they wanted, in which the standards of some would not be imposed upon others.106 Tastes are different, and we should have a society that caters to the plurality of tastes. How much fairer this would be than the old societies in which standards of virtue were imposed on the masses by pertinacious priests and arrogant philosophers. But this is not what is happening in our state capitalism. In the private spheres, all kinds of tastes are allowed. Nobody minds very much if we prefer women or dogs or boys, as long as we cause no public inconvenience. But in the public sphere, such pluralism of taste is not permitted. The conquest of human and non-human nature becomes the only public value. As this planet becomes crowded and even dangerous, our greatest public activity becomes ‘the exploitation of the solar system.’ The vaunted freedom of the individual to choose becomes either the necessity of finding one’s role in the public engineering or the necessity of retreating into the privacy of pleasure. Liberalism is the fitting ideology for a society directed toward these ends. It denies unequivocally that there are any given restraints that might hinder pursuit of dynamic dominance. In political terms, liberalism is now an appeal for ‘the end of ideology.’107 This means that we must experiment in shaping society unhindered by any preconceived notions of good. ‘The end of ideology’ is the perfect slogan for men who want to do what they want. Liberalism is, then, the faith that can understand progress as an extension into the unlimited possibility of the future. It does this much better than Marxism, which still blocks progress by its old-fashioned ideas of the perfectibility of man. Marxists fail to understand the modern age when they assume that socialism is a more progressive form of organization than state capitalism. Implied in the progressive idea of freedom is the belief that men should emancipate their passions. When men are free to do what they

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want, all will be well because the liberated desires will be socially creative. This belief lies at the very centre of liberal movements.p Marx claimed to be the inheritor of the noblest aspects of liberal thought. He believed that when scientists had eliminated scarcity as the cause of greed and oppression, a society would arise in which the freedom of each to pursue his desires would not conflict with a happy social order. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a passing necessity that would lead into a society of freedom. Under communism, the passions would be emancipated, but they would be socially useful, not the corrupt passion of greed caused by scarcity. Even those socialists who did not follow Marx in the doctrine of the withering away of the state still generally believed that socialism would create a society of freedom in the sense of the emancipated passions. Socialism was considered an essentially progressive doctrine. It led to freedom. There is confusion in the minds of those who believe in socialism and the emancipation of the passions. It is surely difficult to deny that greed in some form is a desire that belongs to man qua man, and is not simply produced by the society of scarcity. If this is so, to emancipate the passions is to emancipate greed. Yet what is socialism, if it is not the use of the government to restrain greed in the name of social good? In actual practice, socialism has always had to advocate inhibition in this respect. In doing so, was it not appealing to the conservative idea of social order against the liberal idea of freedom? Even if socialists maintain that their policies would lead in the long run to a society of unrestricted freedom, in the short run they have always been advocates of greater control over freedom. This confusion in their thought is the chief reason why socialism has not succeeded in the large technological societies since 1945. Western civilization was committed in its heart to the religion of progress and the emancipated passions. Those who accepted such a doctrine found corporation capitalism was a much more suitable regime than the inhibiting policies of socialism.q Since 1945, Marxist socialism has had its triumphs, but these have been p This last doctrine reminds one of the vast gulf that separates modern moral philosophy from the central teachings of the antique world. q This failure of socialism to recognize itself as an essentially conservative force has nowhere been so patently obvious as in the confusions of the Canadian socialist movement.

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in authoritarian regimes, in societies that needed the discipline of authority in order to industrialize quickly. The triumphs have not been in the West. Early capitalism was full of moral restraints. The Protestant ethic inhibited any passion that did not encourage acquisition. The greed of each would lead to the greatest good for all. But in the age of high technology, the new capitalism can allow all passions to flourish along with greed. Playboy illustrates the fact that the young executive is not expected to be Horatio Alger.108 The titillation of the jaded tastes of the masses serves the purpose of the corporation é1ites, so long as a sufficient quota of the young is siphoned off as scientists and executives. With automation, the work-ethic of Protestantism disappears. Liberal ideology reconciles the political power of the é1ites with the private satisfactions of the masses. State capitalism and liberalism are much more advanced manifestations of the age of progress than the Russian system with its official Marxism. American conservatives also claim that the United States is not the most progressive society on earth. Conservatives maintain that American society retains certain traditional values that have been lost in Communist societies. This claim appeals to history by asserting that the American Revolution was essentially conservative – as distinct from the radical revolution in France. The American Revolution did not appeal to the perfectibility of man but to the traditional rights of Englishmen. At its heart there were the ideals of a constitutional government and the inalienable rights of persons and their property. It is admitted in such arguments that many who supported the revolution were influenced by French revolutionary ideas; but at the centre of the Republic were such men as Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and Adams,109 rather than such men as Jefferson and Paine.110 Edmund Burke castigated the revolution in France while he defended the American cause.111 This indicates the conservatism of the American Revolution. The claim of conservatives is that bourgeois constitutionalism has remained the dominant tradition of the Republic despite the continuing liberal attack. This argument has at its heart an interpretation of the history of political philosophy with which the present writer would agree. To put that interpretation simply, modern political philosophy may be

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divided into two main waves.r The first wave started with Machiavelli and Hobbes and found its bourgeois expression in such British thinkers as Locke, Smith, and Hume. The chief originator of the second wave was Rousseau, and this wave has spread out into the world through Kant and Hegel.112 The earlier thinkers criticized the classical view of nature and natural law, but they still maintained some conception of what was natural. While believing that man’s essence was his freedom, the later thinkers advocated the progressive mastery through that freedom of human and non-human nature. Man in his freedom was thought to stand outside nature, and therefore to be able to perfect it. We could interfere with nature and make it what we wanted. It is from this doctrine that the continuous revolution of the modern era has proceeded. In applying this interpretation, the American conservatives claim that the United States was founded on the thought of the first wave, while the communist empires took their ideology from Rousseau and Marx. Therefore the United States should be called a conservative force. The founders of the American Republic were followers of Locke.s 113 The assumptions of Locke and Smith are said to have given English-speaking societies stability of constitutional government and freedom from continuous revolution. They escaped the worst results of totalitarianism (call it, if you will, totalitarian democracy) which swept eastward from the continent of Europe. The capitalism of the Englishspeaking world was stabilized by being founded on a conception of human nature. The doctrine of human nature of Locke and Smith may

r For this account of political philosophy see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1953). s A recent Roman Catholic form of the argument from Locke makes an even fuller claim. It identifies the Lockian thoughts of the nation’s founders with the political philosophy of Aquinas. Father Courtney Murray has made the same attempt for the United States that Acton made a century ago in England – the identification of the modern belief in political freedom with Catholic Christianity. Suffice it to say that Locke largely accepted Hobbes’s account of the state of nature, while Aquinas accepted the Aristotelian account. How then can their doctrines of natural right be closely identified? Those who make such attempts should surely be asked to read Coleridge’s writings on Locke. To find any close identification between Aquinas’s and Locke’s doctrines of the virtues surely requires a looser reading of both than nationalist prejudice and flattery of the spirit of the age should allow. This branch of Roman Catholic American political philosophy is hardly then to be treated seriously.

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be inadequate compared to the classical teachings, but it is less destructive of humanity than the later doctrines, which assert that men are completely malleable to perpetual conditioning. Because of the conservative nature of the United States, as against the revolutionary character of the communist empires, Christianity and Judaism have been able to survive in North America, while they are persecuted in the modern empires of the East. Whatever the imperfections of American government, it remains at least formally constitutional, while the Marxist societies are tyrannies. The United States must be accepted as the guardian of Western values against the perversions of Western revolutionary thought as they have spread into the East. It is important to point out one effect of this argument on Canada and the United Kingdom. This appeal to Lockian liberalism has been the philosophy of those who have believed that English-speaking unity was the hope of the modern world. The basic assumption of Churchill’s life was that the British future lay in its alliance with the United States – the unity of the democratic-capitalist nations.t 114 In Canada, this appeal to English-speaking unity has also been used as an argument for the destruction of Canadian independence. In the events around which this writing turns, many conservative Canadians were convinced that Diefenbaker was being false to English-speaking unity in refusing nuclear arms. The Liberal victory was welcomed in the press of the United Kingdom, and Pearson has always appealed to those in England whose hopes lay in the special relation with the United States. Yet it must be pointed out that the argument from English-speaking unity must play an ambiguous role in relation to Canadian nationalism. If Lockian liberalism is the conservatism of the English-speaking peoples, what was there in British conservatism that was not present in the bourgeois thought of Hamilton and Madison? If there was nothing, then the acts of the Loyalists are deprived of all moral significance. Many of the American Tories were Anglicans and knew well that in opposing the revolution they were opposing Locke. They appealed to the older political philosophy of Richard Hooker. They were not, as the liberal Canadian historians have often described them, a mixture of selfish and unfortunate men who chose the wrong t Many contemporary English Conservative leaders – Churchill, Macmillan, Hogg and others – have been born of wealthy American mothers.

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side. If there was nothing valuable in the founders of English-speaking Canada, what makes it valuable for Canadians to continue as a nation today? To return to the general argument. There is some truth in the claim of American conservatives. Their society does preserve constitutional government and respect for the legal rights of individuals in a way that the Eastern tyrannies do not. The perpetuation of these depends on the continuing tradition of Lockian liberalism among influential classes. Bourgeois Protestantism, with its Catholic and Jewish imitations, have survived in the United States and give some sense of the eternal to many people. Nevertheless, these traditions – no longer the heart of American civilization – become more residual every year. Sceptical liberalism becomes increasingly the dominant ideology of those who shape society; and, as it was argued earlier, this ideology is the extreme form of progressive modernity. The United States is no longer a society of small property owners, but of massive private and public corporations. Such organizations work with the scientists in their efforts to master nature and reshape humanity. Internationally, the imperial power of these corporations has destroyed indigenous cultures in every corner of the globe. Communist imperialism is more brutally immediate, but American capitalism has shown itself more subtly able to dissolve indigenous societies. This can make it harder to resist than the blatant thrusts of the Russians or the Chinese. The new methods the social sciences use to dissolve the opposition in friendly or enemy societies are welcomed by the government of the United States.u The history of how modern liberalism has replaced the older republican traditions cannot be given in detail. It is not surprising that this should have happened. It was in the West the idea arose that human nature is completely malleable, and this the United States today inherits. American society has also inherited the older aspects of the Western tradition: the Church, constitutional government, classical and philosophical studies. But every day these become more like museum pieces, mere survivals on the periphery. The Americans who call themselves ‘conservatives’ have the right to u See ‘Toward a Technology of Human Behaviour for Defence Use’ by Charles W. Bray, in The American Psychologist (August 1962). This is a synopsis of a report to the American Secretary of Defence.

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the title only in a particular sense. In fact, they are old-fashioned liberals. They stand for the freedom of the individual to use his property as he wishes, and for a limited government which must keep out of the marketplace. Their concentration on freedom from governmental interference has more to do with nineteenth-century liberalism than with traditional conservatism, which asserts the right of the community to restrain freedom in the name of the common good. Senator Goldwater appealed directly to the American Constitution and to Locke, its philosophical architect. The Senator’s chief economic adviser, Professor Milton Friedman, appeals to the British liberal economists of the nineteenth century.115 They are ‘conservatives’ only in terms of the short history of their own country. They claim that the authentic American tradition went off the rails with the mass liberalism of the New Deal and should return to the individualism of the founding fathers. The makers of the Constitution took their philosophy from the first wave of modernity; the spirit of the New Deal belonged to the later waves of liberalism. In this sense, Goldwater is an American conservative. But what he conserves is the liberal philosophy of Locke. The founders of the United States took their thought from the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment. Their rallying cry was ‘freedom.’ There was no place in their cry for the organic conservatism that pre-dated the age of progress. Indeed, the United States is the only society on earth that has no traditions from before the age of progress. Their ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ are just different species of liberalism. ‘Freedom’ was the slogan of both Goldwater and President Johnson.v 116 The clobbering of Goldwater at the polls in November of 1964 shows how little the American people cared about the early liberalism of their founders.117 Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ expressed the new American ‘freedom’ far better than Goldwater’s talk of limited government and free enterprise.118 The majority tradition in the United States backs v In an earlier day, this was one respect in which Canada could be differentiated from the United States. Canadians had memories of a conservative tradition that was more than covert liberalism. At their best, Canadian conservatives never stood on an abstract appeal to free enterprise. They were willing to use the government to protect the common good. They were willing to restrain the individual’s freedom in the interests of the community. The recent conservatism of Toronto, as expressed by George Hogan and the Globe and Mail, is American, not Canadian, conservatism. They call for the protection of property from government interference. Canadian Goldwaterism shows how much Toronto is now in spirit a part of the United States.

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Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, whose liberalism is the most modern. The older liberalism of the Constitution had its swan-song in the election of 1964. The classes that had once opposed Roosevelt were spent forces by 1964. The leaders of the new capitalism supported Johnson. Goldwater’s cry for limited government seemed as antediluvian to the leaders of the corporations as Diefenbaker’s nationalism seemed to the same elements in Canada. Johnson was supported not only by such obvious groups as Negroes and labour but also by the new managerial bourgeoisie of the suburbs. The farmers, who were supposed to be the last bastion of individualism, were not slow in voting for the continuance of subsidies. Four of Goldwater’s five states were from the South.119 This was the last-ditch stand of a local culture. But it is doomed to disappear as much as an indigenous French Canada. The Goldwater camp was outraged by the sustained attacks of the television networks and newspaper chains. Were they not aware who had become the American establishment since 1932? Corporation capitalism and liberalism go together by the nature of things. The establishment knew how to defend itself when threatened by the outrageous challenge of outsiders from Arizona. The American election of 1964 is sufficient evidence that the United States is not a conservative society. It is a dynamic empire spearheading the age of progress. The foregoing is platitudinous. But one consequence of the argument is not always made explicit: the impossibility of conservatism as a viable political ideology in our era. The practical men who call themselves conservatives must commit themselves to a science that leads to the conquest of nature. This science produces such a dynamic society that it is impossible to conserve anything for long. In such an environment, all institutions and standards are constantly changing. Conservatives who attempt to be practical face a dilemma. If they are not committed to a dynamic technology, they cannot hope to make any popular appeal. If they are so committed, they cannot hope to be conservatives. For example, the most brilliant conservative of our era has only been able to preserve what he loves (the power and culture of France) by gaining support for nationalism from the most advanced technocrats. De Gaulle has had immediate success, but in the long run he will have helped to build a Europe in which the particularities of France cannot hope to exist. Other examples are legion. These days even the Papacy attempts to liberalize itself.

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The impossibility of conservatism in our epoch is seen in the fact that those who adopt that title can be no more than the defenders of whatever structure of power is at any moment necessary to technological change. They provide the external force necessary if the society is to be kept together. They are not conservatives in the sense of being the custodians of something that is not subject to change. They are conservatives, generally, in the sense of advocating a sufficient amount of order so the demands of technology will not carry the society into chaos.w 120 Because they are advocates of nothing more than this external order, they have come to be thought of as objects of opprobrium by the generous-hearted.

CHAPTER 6 The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada. As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth. The current of modern history was against us. A society only articulates itself as a nation through some common intention among its people. The constitutional arrangements of 1791, and the wider arrangements of the next century, were only possible because of a widespread determination not to become part of the great Republic.121 Among both the French and the British, this negative intention sprang from widely divergent traditions. What both peoples had in common was the fact they both recognized, that they could only be preserved outside the United States of America. The French were willing to co-operate with the English because they had no alternative but to go along with the endurable arrangements proposed by the rul-

w The next wave of American ‘conservatism’ is not likely to base its appeal on such unsuccessful slogans as the Constitution and free enterprise. Its leader will not be a gentleman who truly cares about his country’s past. It will concentrate directly on such questions as ‘order in the streets’ which are likely to become crucial in the years ahead. The battle will be between democratic tyrants and the authoritarians of the right. If the past is a teacher to the present, it surely says that democratic Caesarism is likely to be successful. In the fight between Sulla and Marius, it was the descendants of the latter who established the Julian line of emperors.

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ing power. Both the French and the British had limited common ground in their sense of social order – belief that society required a high degree of law, and respect for a public conception of virtue. Both would grant the state much wider rights to control the individual than was recognized in the libertarian ideas of the American constitution. If their different conservatisms could have become a conscious bond, this nation might have preserved itself. An indigenous society might have continued to exist on the northern half of this continent. To see why this intention failed in Canada, it is necessary to look more closely at the origins of both the French and the British traditions to see what has happened to them. To start with the British, it would be foolish to over-emphasize the niceties of theory among those who came to the St John Valley or Upper Canada in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is difficult to put into words the conservatism of the English-speaking peoples in the Atlantic colonies or Upper Canada. The manifold waves of differing settlers must not be simplified into any common pattern. Much of English-speaking conservatism was simply a loyalty based on the flow of trade, and therefore destined to change when that flow changed. To repeat, Diefenbaker spoke with telling historical sense when he mentioned the Annexation Manifesto in his last speech to Parliament before the defeat of his government in 1963. He pointed out the similarity between the views of the Montreal merchants in 1849 and the wealthy of Toronto and Montreal in 1963.122 In neither case did they care about Canada. No small country can depend for its existence on the loyalty of its capitalists. International interests may require the sacrifice of the lesser loyalty of patriotism. Only in dominant nations is the loyalty of capitalists ensured. In such situations, their interests are tied to the strength and vigour of their empire. This does not imply that the nationalism in English-speaking Canada was simply a front for interest. Many of its elements were shaped by that strange phenomenon, British conservatism, which led the settlers to try to build on the northern half of this continent an independent society. British conservatism is difficult to describe because it is less a clear view of existence than an appeal to an ill-defined past. The writings of Edmund Burke are evidence of this. Yet many of the British officials, many Loyalists, and later many immigrants felt this conservatism very strongly. It was an inchoate desire to build, in these cold and

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forbidding regions, a society with a greater sense of order and restraint than freedom-loving republicanism would allow. It was no better defined than a kind of suspicion that we in Canada could be less lawless and have a greater sense of propriety than the United States. The inherited determination not to be Americans allowed these British people to come to a modus vivendi with the more defined desires of the French. English-speaking Canadians have been called a dull, stodgy, and indeed costive lot. In these dynamic days, such qualities are particularly unattractive to the chic.x 123 Yet our stodginess has made us a society of greater simplicity, formality, and perhaps even innocence than the people to the south. Whatever differences there were between the Anglicans and the Presbyterians, and however differently their theologians might interpret the doctrine of original sin, both communities believed that the good life made strict demands on self-restraint. Nothing was more alien to them than the ‘emancipation of the passions’ desired in American liberalism. An ethic of self-restraint naturally looks with suspicion on utopian movements, which proceed from an ethic of freedom. The early leaders of British North America identified lack of public and personal restraint with the democratic Republic. Their conservatism was essentially the social doctrine that public order and tradition, in contrast to freedom and experiment, were central to the good life. The British Crown was a symbol of a continuing loyalty to the state – less equivocal than was expected from republicans. In our early expansions, this conservative nationalism expressed itself in the use of public control in the political and economic spheres. Our opening of the West differed from that of the United States, in that the law of the central government was used more extensively, and less reliance was placed on the free settler. Until recently, Canadians have been much more willing than Americans to use governmental control over economic life to protect the public good against private freedom. To repeat, Ontario Hydro, the CNR, and the CBC were all established by Conservative governments. The early establishment of Ontario Hydro succeeded because of the efforts of an administrator, a politician, and a

x In his recent book The Scotch (New York and Toronto: Macmillan 1964), Professor J.K. Galbraith has patronized his ancestors from western Ontario in this vein. A great human advance has been made from the Presbyterian farm to the sophistication of Harvard.

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journalist, all of whom wrapped themselves in the Union Jack in their efforts to keep the development of electric power out of the hands of individual freedom.y 124 English-speaking Canadians had never broken with their origins in Western Europe. Many of them had continuing connections with the British Isles, which in the nineteenth century still had ways of life from before the age of progress. That we never broke with Great Britain is often said to prove that we are not a nation but a colony. But the great politicians who believed in this connection – from Joseph Howe and Robert Baldwin to Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Robert Borden, and indeed to John G. Diefenbaker himself – make a long list.125 They did not see it this way, but rather as a relation to the font of constitutional government in the British Crown. Many Canadians saw it as a means of preserving at every level of our life – religious, educational, political, social – certain forms of existence that distinguish us from the United States. To repeat what has been said earlier about the tragedy of Green and Diefenbaker, the end of the Canadian experiment was involved in the collapse of Western Europe, particularly in the disappearance of the British political tradition. Since 1945, the collapse of British power and moral force has been evident to nearly all the world. Its present position is the end-process of that terrible fate that has overtaken Western civilization in the last century. When the British ruling class rushed headlong into the holocaust of 1914, they showed their total lack of political wisdom. As much as anybody, they had been corrupted by the modern mania. Whatever the courage of Churchill in 1940, it must be remembered that he was one of those in the Liberal Cabinet of 1914 who pushed their nation into the intemperance of the earlier disaster.126 The best British and Canadian youth had their guts torn out in the charnel house of the First World War. To write of the collapse of Western Europe is not my purpose here, but one small result was to destroy Great Britain as an alternative pull in Canadian life. The history of conservatism in Great Britain has been one of growing emptiness and ambiguity. A political philosophy that is centred on virtue must be a shadowy voice in a technological civilization. When y The three men were Sir Adam Beck, Sir James Whitney, and ‘Black Jack’ Robinson.

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men are committed to technology, they are also committed to continual change in institutions and customs. Freedom must be the first political principle – the freedom to change any order that stands in the way of technological advance. Such a society cannot take seriously the conception of an eternal order by which human actions are measured and defined. For some individuals it remains a heavenly insurance policy. Without the conception of such an order, conservatism becomes nothing but the defence of property rights and chauvinism, attractively packaged as appeal to the past. Great Britain was the chief centre from which the progressive civilization spread around the world. Politically it became the leading imperial power of the West. As Plato saw with unflinching clarity, an imperialistic power cannot have a conservative society as its home base.127 From Hooker to Coleridge, the English conservatives had less and less influence in their own society.128 The thinkers who increasingly influenced their society were the liberals, with their clear advocacy of freedom and the knowledge that history was on their side. Practical conservatives continued to exert influence. But the classes and institutions to which they belonged have disappeared. The more honest have simply fought rearguard actions; the more ambitious have twisted conservatism into a façade for class and imperial interests. By the second half of the nineteenth century, appeals to such institutions as the monarchy and the church become little more than the praising of formal rituals, residual customs, and museums. Politicians from Disraeli129 to Macmillan have applied the term ‘conservative’ to themselves; this was hardly more than a nationalist desire to take as much from the age of progress as they could. Indeed, they were less and less competent to do even this. Canada exported to Great Britain a series of extreme buccaneers who assumed the name ‘British conservative’ during its degenerate era. British conservatism was already largely a spent force at the beginning of the nineteenth century when English-speaking Canadians were making a nation. By the twentieth century, its adherents in Britain were helping to make their country an island outpost in the American conquest of Europe. Was British conservatism likely, then, to continue as a force to make English-speaking Canada independent? If not, what would? The Laurentian Shield and the Eskimos? British tradition has provided us with certain political and legal institutions, some of which are better than their American counterparts. Our parliamentary and

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judicial institutions may be preferable to the American system, but there is no deep division of principle. Certainly none of the differences between the two sets of institutions are sufficiently important to provide the basis for an alternative culture on the northern half of this continent. For all the fruitfulness of the British tradition in nineteenth-century Canada, it did not provide any radically different approach to the questions of industrial civilization. Canadians in particular felt the blessings of technology in an environment so hard that to master it needed courage. But conservatism must languish as technology increases. It was not conceivable that industrial society would be organized along essentially different principles from those to the south. Try to imagine whether Toronto could be a quite dissimilar community from Buffalo or Chicago, or Vancouver from Seattle, and this is to answer the question. What other kind of industrial civilization is likely to appear anywhere on earth, let alone on the northern frontier of Manifest Destiny? Because of the British tradition, socialist movements have been stronger in Canada than in the United States. But socialism has been a weakening force in Canadian life since 1945. To repeat a previous generalization: democratic socialism is not, as it believed itself to be, the high crest of the wave of the future, but rather a phenomenon from the nineteenth century. Since 1945, the forces that will shape our future in the West show themselves to be bureaucratic state capitalism. The only time when democratic socialism was strong in Canadian industrial society was in Ontario during the utopian days at the end of the Second World War. But the Frost and Robarts regimes have shown what a feeble and transitory phenomenon that was.130 In Ontario, some form of planned economy was the only conceivable alternative to Americanization. But to have anticipated a socialist Ontario was to hope rather than to predict. Certainly its leadership could not have come from the good-natured utopians who led our socialist parties. They had no understanding of the dependence of socialism and nationalism in the Canadian setting. Their confused optimism is seen in the fact that they have generally acted as if they were ‘left-wing’ allies of the Liberal party. Socialist leadership in Canada has been largely a pleasant remnant of the British nineteenth century – the Protestant tabernacle

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turned liberal. Such a doctrine was too flaccid to provide any basis for independence.z To turn to the more formidable tradition, the French Canadians are determined to remain a nation. During the nineteenth century, they accepted almost unanimously the leadership of their particular Catholicism – a religion with an ancient doctrine of virtue. After 1789, they maintained their connection with the roots of their civilization through their church and its city, which more than any other in the West held high a vision of the eternal. To Catholics who remain Catholics, whatever their level of sophistication, virtue must be prior to freedom. They will therefore build a society in which the right of the common good restrains the freedom of the individual. Quebec was not a society that would come to terms with the political philosophy of Jefferson or the New England capitalists. Nevertheless, 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 – with their flags flying and, indeed, with some guns blazing. The reality of their culture, and their desire not to be swamped, cannot save them from the inexorable facts in the continental case. Solutions vary to the problem of how an autonomous culture can be maintained in Quebec. But all the answers face the same dilemma: Those who want to maintain separateness also want the advantages of the age of progress. These two ends are not compatible, for the pursuit of one negates the pursuit of the other. Nationalism can only be asserted successfully by an identification with technological advance; but technological advance entails the disappearance of those indigenous differences that give substance to nationalism. The solutions to this dilemma, which were attempted in the last few years, illustrate its nature. z A temporary advantage for the New Democratic Party is the fact that the powerful have used their heavy artillery on Diefenbaker. In the meantime, they neglected the socialists. In the past, the establishment has been able to keep its hands on both the big parties, which could be substituted for each other when the voters wanted a change. When they have re-established their control in the Conservative party and removed Diefenbaker, this advantage will cease. The farmers are weakening as a force in Canadian life and will not have to be reckoned with in the same way in the future.

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One solution was the regime directed by Duplessis. No province in Canada gave more welcoming terms to American capital than the government of Duplessis. At the same time, in questions of education, provincial autonomy, etc., Duplessis followed policies that won support from the rural episcopate. It is all very well for a practising politician to base his regime on the combined support of St James St. and the traditional Church. The people would depend on the corporations for their employment, while accepting the paternal hand of the cleric in the parish and in the school. Did the clerics think this was the best way for their people to learn to live with industrialism? Surely they recognized that such a regime could not last; it would produce new classes in society ultimately more hostile to Catholicism than to capitalism. René Lévesque’s solution to the problem, unlike Duplessis’s liaison with American capitalism, seems to attempt to build a semi-socialist society within the bounds of the province. The idea is to guarantee that the managerial élite be men of French culture, and that the control of the economy rest firmly in native hands. In such a scheme the continuance of Confederation is simply a question of convenience. If French civilization can be protected as a province within Confederation, then all well and good. If it cannot be, then separatism becomes a necessity. Lévesque’s brilliant description of Laurier as ‘a black king’ shows the seriousness of his intention.131 There are two main difficulties in a semi-socialistic solution. The first of these is symbolized by the presence of Eric Kierans and George Marler as Ministers in the same government as Lévesque.132 The two men well represent the new and the old establishments of English-speaking Montreal. Provincial control of economic development is not only useful for French-Canadian nationalism but also for international capitalism. Any federal system of government strengthens the power of the corporations. The division of powers weakens the ability of public authority to control private governments; the size of the provinces allows them to be controlled by private economic power. The espousing by American or Canadian ‘conservatives’ of greater authority for the local states has always a phony ring about it, unless it is coupled with an appeal for the break-up of continental corporations. Decentralized government and continental corporations can lead in only one direction. In his criticism of Walter Gordon’s budget in 1963, Kierans made a violent attack against any curbing of foreign investment as

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being a deterrent to economic growth.aa 133 As a Minister of the Quebec government, he accepts the thesis that economic growth is chiefly a responsibility of provincial governments. As regards provincial responsibility, Lévesque and Kierans are in agreement, but their motives for espousing responsibility are quite different. The motive of quick industrializing is surely likely to come in conflict with the motive of nationalism. The financial pages of every newspaper are filled with announcements of French-speaking appointments to management. Continental capitalists have learnt that they are going to be in trouble if such appointments are not made. But when French nationalists derive satisfaction from these appointments, they would do well to remind themselves of the ancient adage: ‘I fear the Greeks, especially when they come with gifts.’ Corporations make concessions about management personnel for the sake of better relations with the alien community. These do not involve the basic control of the economy. Here the lines of battle will surely be drawn. How long will the people of Quebec be willing to pay the economic price of rejecting the terms laid down by big business for the development of power at Hamilton Falls?134 It is not likely that even such an unusual Liberal government as that of Prime Minister Lesage will be able to wrest control of the economy from the corporations and then keep it in the government’s hands.bb The concession over French managerial personnel points to a greater chink in the nationalist armour. Lévesque presumably believes that the indigenous control of the French-Canadian economy will be maintained by the vote. Governments will retain final control of their economies through socialistic measures by seeking electoral support. But is it to be expected that the new managerial élites will sustain their French culture for very long? If they work for continental corporations, will they not identify themselves with those corporations and vote for governments not interested in preserving national control of the econaa Kierans repeated this attack in a speech in Toronto in December of 1963. bb The difference between the federal and provincial parties is wide, but not that wide. Indeed, Lévesque won a great victory when the provincial Liberals voted in their convention of 1964 that their party did not owe allegiance to the federal organization. Lévesque spent the federal election of 1963 in France. Presumably be could not stomach the policy of the federal Liberals on nuclear arms. His absence was a sop he had to pay for his membership in the party.

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omy? This is what happened in Ontario in the 1940s and 1950s. Even when much of the economy is socialized, the managers will gradually become indistinguishable from their international counterparts. To run a modern economy, men must be trained in the new technology over human and non-human nature. Such training cannot be reconciled with French-Canadian classical education. An élite trained in the modern way may speak French for many generations, but what other traditions will it uphold? The new social sciences are dissolvents of the family, of Catholicism, of classical education. It is surely more than a language that Lévesque wishes to preserve in his nation. New Orleans is a pleasant place for tourists. The dilemma remains. French Canadians must modernize their educational system if they are to have more than a peon’s place in their own industrialization. Yet to modernize their education is to renounce their particularity. At the heart of modern liberal education lies the desire to homogenize the world. Today’s natural and social sciences were consciously produced as instruments to this end. In the immediate future, the wilder of the nationalist French-Canadian youths may hope to build some kind of Castro-like state in Quebec. As traditional Catholicism breaks up, there will be some exciting moments. A Catholic society cannot be modernized as easily as a Protestant one. When the dam breaks the flood will be furious. Nevertheless, the young intellectuals of the upper-middle class will gradually desert their existentialist nationalism and take the places made for them in the continental corporations. The enormity of the break from the past will arouse in the dispossessed youth intense forms of beatness. But after all, the United States supports a large beat fringe.135 Joan Baez and Pete Seeger titillate the status quo rather than threaten it.136 Dissent is built into the fabric of the modern system. We bureaucratize it as much as everything else. Is there any reason to believe that French Canada will be different? A majority of the young is gradually patterned for its place in the bureaucracies. Those who resist such shaping will retreat into a fringe world of pseudo-revolt. What does Lévesque think is the place of Catholicism in the continuing French fact? The young French Canadians who desire a better society, because they grew up under Duplessis, believe in both nationalism and social freedom. Their liberalism is openly anti-Catholic and even existentialist or Marxist. Others accept Catholicism but are deter-

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mined that the Church should be disestablished. But the old Church with its educational privileges has been the chief instrument by which an indigenous French culture has survived in North America. Liberalism is the ideological means whereby indigenous cultures are homogenized. How then can nationalism and liberalism merge together into a consistent political creed? In 1918, Bourassa put the purposes of French-Canadian existence in clear words: Notre tâche à nous, Canadiens-français, c’est de prolonger en Amérique l’effort de la France chrétienne; c’est de défendre contre tout venant, le fallût-il contre la France elle-même, notre patrimoine religieux et national. Ce patrimoine, il n’est pas à nous seulement: il appartient à toute l’Amérique catholique, dont il est le foyer inspirateur et rayonnant; il appartient à toute l’Eglise, dont il est le principal point d’appui dans cette partie du monde; il appartient à toute la civilisation française, dont il est l’unique port de refuge et d’attache dans cette mer immense de l’américanisme saxonisant.cc 137

Here is a national intention, beautifully expressed. Bourassa’s clarity about this intention was not matched by his understanding of what the twentieth century was going to be. He considered North America to be essentially saxonisant and dominated by an explicitly Protestant ethos – the ‘time is money’ theology of a debased and secularized Calvinism. He lived in a world in which the British Empire still appeared a dominant force. Presumably he still thought of Latin America as in that twilight period of subservience to North America, which extended from the beginning of the nineteenth century.dd Above all, Bourassa does not seem to have been aware of the cc See H. Bourassa, La Langue, gardienne de la Foi (Montreal, 1918). Freely translated: ‘Our special task, as French Canadians, is to insert into America the spirit of Christian France. It is to defend against all comers, perhaps even against France herself, our religious and national heritage. This heritage does not belong to us alone. It belongs to all Catholic America. It is the inspiring and shining hearth of that America. It belongs to the whole Church, and it is the basic foundation of the Church in this part of the world. It belongs to all French civilization of which it is the refuge and anchor amid the immense sea of saxonizing Americanism.’ dd In Latin America, there were 62 million in 1900, 120 million in 1950, 205 million in 1960. In the year 1955, North America ceased to have more people than South America.

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effect of homogenization – what industrial civilization would do to all countries and all religions. Industrial culture had arisen in Protestant societies and was the very form of américanisme saxonisant that surrounded his nation. Bourassa seems therefore to have identified the two, rather than to have recognized that technological culture was a dissolvent of all national and religious traditions, not simply an expression of one of them. There is little of Gandhi’s rejection of industrialism in his writings, but rather the positive assumption that the culture of Quebec was French Christianity.ee138 Nationalism was for him something essentially conservative – the maintenance in his part of the world of the true way of life against the heresy of américanisme saxonisant. This was a wasting and tragic dream for our dynamic era. Nevertheless, despite his unawareness of the dynamism of the twentieth century, he was surely right when he said that Catholicism as well as Frenchness was necessary to make Quebec a nation. Dynamic civilization has spread like oil over the surface of the world during the half-century since Bourassa wrote. The twentieth century is not something that belongs essentially to l’américanisme saxonisant. It is no longer potential but actual in Quebec. Indeed, a wider question arises here: What is the status of Catholicism in the age of progress? Will a liberalized Catholicism accept industrialism and still be able to shape it to a more human end? In Quebec, Catholicism will no longer be ‘Je me souviens,’139 but a Catholicism appropriate to a vital present. Lay education will not destroy the Church, but enable her to become the spiritual leader of a free people. Accepting the age of progress, the Church will give leadership to a more humane industrialism than has arisen elsewhere in North America. It will provide the spiritual basis for a continuing Franco-American civilization. The possibility of such a Catholicism in Quebec cannot be discussed apart from the relation of Catholicism to technology throughout the world. That intricate question cannot be discussed at length in this writing. Suffice it to say that, although the recent statements of the Papacy seem optimistic about the Church’s ability to live with our age, it is still an open question whether Catholicism will be able to humanize mass Western society or be swept into the catacombs. What hapee France herself has always been a middle term between the dynamic civilization of Northern Europe and the more static culture of the Mediterranean.

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pens to the Catholic view of man, when Catholics are asked to shape society through the new sciences of biochemistry, physiological psychology, and sociology? These sciences arose from assumptions hostile to the Catholic view of man. Whatever the historical outcome, the ability of Catholicism to sustain a continuing Franco-American civilization appears dubious. If liberal Catholicism arises in Quebec, will it not be similar to the Catholicism of Cushing and Spellman, which is wellestablished within the assumptions of the American Empire?ff 140 Such a religion may have the same name, but it will be very different from the one Bourassa envisaged. The Church in America does not question the assumption of the society that permits it, except in the most general way. With this kind of Catholicism, industrialized Quebec would hardly be distinguishable from the rest of North America. Yet this is what the leading liberal clerics and laity seem to be establishing in the province. With such a moral heart, Quebec will soon blend into the continental whole and cease to be a nation except in its maintenance of residual patterns of language and personal habit. Lévesque, at least, appears to be aware how difficult it will be to preserve the French fact on this continent. The French-Canadian liberals who plead for the continuance of Confederation and the extension of co-operative federalism seem to be more naïve. The confusion of these French-Canadian liberals is evident in a recent pronouncement by seven French-Canadian intellectuals under the title ‘An Appeal for Realism in Politics.’gg This pronouncement is considered by its authors to be a Canadian – not a French-Canadian – manifesto. It is an appeal for the continuance of Confederation against the various parochialisms that threaten it. It puts forward the hope for a vital federalism that will accept the cultural diversity of Canada but will not be economically nationalist. It is not my purpose here to discuss its detailed proposals, but to quote its philosophical justification as an example of the present thought of French-Canadian liberal intellectuals. At the end of the manifesto, two reasons are given why the writers refuse to be ‘locked ff It is hard to imagine what Bourassa would have thought of the fact that it was a Catholic President of the United States of America (albeit a Teddy Roosevelt Catholic) who successfully applied pressure on the Canadian people for the acquisition of nuclear arms. gg This manifesto was published concurrently in French in Cité Libre, Montreal, and in English in The Canadian Forum (May, 1964), Toronto.

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into a constitutional frame smaller than Canada.’ The second reason for this is described in the following language: The most valid trends today are toward more enlightened humanism, toward various forms of political, social, and economic universalism. Canada is a reproduction on a smaller and simpler scale of this universal phenomenon. The challenge is for a number of ethnic groups to learn to live together. It is a modern challenge, meaningful and indicative of what can be expected from man. If Canadians cannot make a success of a country such as theirs, how can they contribute in any way to the elaboration of humanism, to the formulation of the international structures of tomorrow? To confess one’s inability to make Canadian Confederation work is, at this stage of history, to admit one’s unworthiness to contribute to the universal order.141

Leaving aside such questions as what makes a trend ‘valid’ and what are the conditions of human enlightenment, the point at issue is that the authors assert their faith in universalism and in the continued existence of Canada at one and the same time. The faith in universalism makes it accurate to call the authors liberal. But how can a faith in universalism go with a desire for the continuance of Canada? The belief in Canada’s continued existence has always appealed against universalism. It appealed to particularity against the wider loyalty to the continent. If universalism is the most ‘valid modern trend,’ then is it not right for Canadians to welcome our integration into the empire? Canadian nationalism is a more universal faith than French-Canadian nationalism. But if one is a universalist, why should one stop at that point of particularity? Many French-Canadian liberals seem to espouse ‘enlightened humanism’ and universalism as against the parochial Catholicism that inhibited them personally and politically when it ruled their society. They seem to expect liberalism to purge Catholicism, but to maintain within itself all that was best in the ancient faith. In this manifesto, for example, the authors espouse the continuance of indigenous cultures and regret the victimizing of the ‘Indians, Métis, Orientals, Doukhobors, Hutterites, and dissidents of all kinds’ in our past.142 They call for the democratic protection of such cultures. But do they not know that liberalism in its most unequivocal form (that is, untinged by mem-

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ories of past traditions) includes not only the idea of universalism but also that of homogeneity? The high rhetoric of democracy was used when the Doukhobors were ‘victimized’ under a French-Canadian Prime Minister.143 If the writers are to be truly liberal, they cannot escape the fact that the goal of their political philosophy is the universal and homogeneous state. If this is the noblest goal, then the idea of Canada was a temporary and misguided parochialism. Only those who reject that goal and claim that the universal state will be a tyranny, that is, a society destructive of human excellence, can assert consistently that parochial nationalisms are to be fought for. My purpose is not to debate at this point the question whether the ‘universal’ values of liberalism lead to human excellence. What is indubitable is that those values go with internationalism rather than with nationalism. In this century, many men have known that the choice between internationalism and nationalism is the same choice as that between liberalism and conservatism. In a Canadian setting, internationalism means continentalism. French-Canadian liberalism does not seem to be the means whereby this nation could have been preserved. All the preceding arguments point to the conclusion that Canada cannot survive as a sovereign nation. In the language of the new bureaucrats, our nation was not a viable entity. If one adds to this proposition the memory of the Liberals’ policies, then one can truly say that the argument in their favour succeeds. They have been the best rulers for Canada because they have led the majority of us to accept necessity without much pain. Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt. Fate leads the willing, and drives the unwilling. The debt that we owe the Liberals is that they have been so willing to be led. The party has been made up of those who put only one condition on their willingness: that they should have personal charge of the government while our sovereignty disappears. Canada has ceased to be a nation, but its formal political existence will not end quickly. Our social and economic blending into the empire will continue apace, but political union will probably be delayed. Some international catastrophe or great shift of power might speed up this process. Its slowness does not depend only on the fact that large numbers of Canadians do not want it, but also on sheer lethargy. Changes require decisions, and it is much easier for practising politicians to continue with traditional structures. The dominant forces in the Republic do not need

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to incorporate us. A branch-plant satellite, which has shown in the past that it will not insist on any difficulties in foreign or defence policy, is a pleasant arrangement for one’s northern frontier. The pin-pricks of disagreement are a small price to pay. If the negotiations for union include Quebec, there will be strong elements in the United States that will dislike their admission. The kindest of all God’s dispensations is that individuals cannot predict the future in detail. Nevertheless, the formal end of Canada may be prefaced by a period during which the government of the United States has to resist the strong desire of English-speaking Canadians to be annexed.

CHAPTER 7 Perhaps we should rejoice in the disappearance of Canada. We leave the narrow provincialism and our backwoods culture; we enter the excitement of the United States where all the great things are being done. Who would compare the science, the art, the politics, the entertainment of our petty world to the overflowing achievements of New York, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco? Think of William Faulkner and then think of Morley Callaghan.144 Think of the Kennedys and the Rockefellers and then think of Pearson and E.P. Taylor. This is the profoundest argument for the Liberals. They governed so as to break down our parochialism and lead us into the future. Before discussing this position, I must dissociate myself from a common philosophic assumption. I do not identify necessity and goodness. This identification is widely assumed during an age of progress. Those who worship ‘evolution’ or ‘history’ consider that what must come in the future will be ‘higher,’ ‘more developed,’ ‘better,’ ‘freer’ than what has been in the past. This identification is also common among those who worship God according to Moses or the Gospels. They identify necessity and good within the rubric of providence. From the assumption that God’s purposes are unfolded in historical events, one may be led to view history as an ever-fuller manifestation of good. Since the tenth century of the Christian era, some Western theologians have tended to interpret the fallen sparrow as if particular events could be apprehended by faith as good. This doctrine of providence was given its best philosophical expression by Hegel: ‘Die Weltgeschichte ist das

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Weltgericht’ – ‘World history is the world’s judgment.’145 Here the doctrines of progress and providence have been brought together. But if history is the final court of appeal, force is the final argument. Is it possible to look at history and deny that within its dimensions force is the supreme ruler? To take a progressive view of providence is to come close to worshipping force. Does this not make us cavalier about evil? The screams of the tortured child can be justified by the achievements of history.146 How pleasant for the achievers, but how meaningless for the child. As a believer, I must then reject these Western interpretations of providence. Belief is blasphemy if it rests on any easy identification of necessity and good. It is plain that there must be other interpretations of the doctrine. However massive the disaster we might face – for example, the disappearance of constitutional government for several centuries, or the disappearance of our species – belief in providence should be unaffected. It must be possible within the doctrine of providence to distinguish between the necessity of certain happenings and their goodness. A discussion of the goodness of Canada’s disappearance must therefore be separated from a discussion of its necessity. Many levels of argument have been used to say that it is good that Canada should disappear. In its simplest form, continentalism is the view of those who do not see what all the fuss is about. The purpose of life is consumption, and therefore the border is an anachronism. The forty-ninth parallel results in a lower standard of living for the majority to the north of it. Such continentalism has been an important force throughout Canadian history. Until recently it was limited by two factors. Emigration to the United States was not too difficult for Canadians, so that millions were able to seek their fuller future to the south. Moreover, those who believed in the primacy of private prosperity have generally been too concerned with individual pursuits to bother with political advocacy. Nevertheless, this spirit is bound to grow. One has only to live in the Niagara peninsula to understand it. In the mass era, most human beings are defined in terms of their capacity to consume. All other differences between them, like political traditions, begin to appear unreal and unprogressive. As consumption becomes primary, the border appears an anachronism, and a frustrating one at that. The disadvantages in being a branch-plant satellite rather than in

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having full membership in the Republic will become obvious. As the facts of our society substantiate continentalism, more people will explicitly espouse it. A way of life shaped by continental institutions will produce political continentalism. Young and ambitious politicians will arise to give tongue to it. The election of 1963 was the first time in our history that a strongly nationalist campaign did not succeed, and that a government was brought down for standing up to the Americans. The ambitious young will not be slow to learn the lesson that Pearson so ably taught them about what pays politically. Some of the extreme actions of French Canadians in their efforts to preserve their society will drive other Canadians to identify themselves more closely with their southern neighbours than with the strange and alien people of Quebec. Of course continentalism was more than a consumption-ideology. In the nineteenth century, the United States appeared to be the haven of opportunity for those who had found no proper place in the older societies. Men could throw off the shackles of inequality and poverty in the new land of opportunity. To many Canadians, the Republic seemed a freer and more open world than the costive colonial society with its restraints of tradition and privilege. The United States appeared to be the best society the world had ever produced for the ordinary citizen. Whatever the mass society of prosperity has become, the idea that the United States is the society of freedom, equality, and opportunity will continue to stir many hearts. The affection and identification that a vast majority of Canadians have given to the publicly expressed ideals of such leaders as Roosevelt and Kennedy is evidence of this. Continentalism as a philosophy is based on the liberal interpretation of history. Because much of our intellectual life has been oriented to Great Britain, it is not surprising that our chief continentalists have been particularly influenced by British liberalism. The writings of Goldwin Smith and F.H. Underhill carry more the note of Mill and Macaulay than of Jefferson and Jackson.147 This continentalism has made two main appeals. First, Canadians need the greater democracy of the Republic. To the continentalists, both the French and British traditions in Canada were less democratic than the social assumptions of the United States. In such arguments, democracy has not been interpreted solely in a political sense, but has been identified with social equality, contractual human relations, and the society open to all men,

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regardless of race or creed or class. American history is seen to be the development of the first mass democracy on earth.hh The second appeal of continentalism is that humanity requires that nationalisms be overcome. In moving to larger units of government, we are moving in the direction of world order. If Canadians refuse this, they are standing back from the vital job of building a peaceful world. After the horrors that nationalistic wars have inflicted on this century, how can one have any sympathy for nationalism? Thank God the world is moving beyond such divisive loyalties. Both these arguments were used with particular literacy by F.H. Underhill in his appeals for the Liberal party in the Toronto Star at the time of the 1963 election.ii In his use of both these arguments it was sometimes difficult to know whether Underhill was appealing to the order of good or to the order of necessity, or whether in his mind the two were identical. For example, closeness to the United States was identified in this writing with true internationalism. The argument from necessity is that nationalism must disappear and that we are moving inevitably to a world of continental empires. But this inevitable movement does not in itself mean that we are moving to a better and more peaceful world order. The era of continental rivalries may be more ferocious than the era of nationalisms. Only when one adds to this argument the liberal faith in progress does one believe that continentalism must be a step toward a nobler internationalism. The argument for continentalism is different when it appeals to inevitability than when it is based on the brotherhood of man. This ambiguity in Underhill was mirrored in the whole Liberal campaign of 1963, in which Pearson wrapped his acceptance of continental atomic arms in

hh In our generation this interpretation is expounded at length in the sermons of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ii Professor F.H. Underhill is a key figure in the intellectual history of Canadian liberalism. See his book In Search of Canadian Liberalism (Toronto: Macmillan 1960). Underhill gave many years to building the CCF. He found himself on the opposite side from the business community in Toronto on nearly every public question. Yet in a speech in Toronto in 1964, he could in his seventies announce that the liberal hope lies now with the great corporations. This conversion surely shows how consistently he continues to work out the consequences of his thought. He has recognized that the business community in America is no longer the propertied classes of his youth but managers whose ideology is liberal. He is right to believe that corporations and not doctrinaire socialism are the wave of the future.

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the language of international obligations and his loyalty to the United Nations. To those outside the progressive view of history, there was a note of high comedy in the use of the Tennysonian ‘parliament of man’148 language to attack Diefenbaker’s defence of national sovereignty, when the issue at stake was the acquisition of nuclear arms. The Sifton and Southam papers made any fear of dominance by the American Empire seem a retreat from true internationalism.149 This note of comedy went further in the summer of 1963, when the CBC made misty-eyed television programs about Pearson’s return to the United Nations as the true Canadian internationalist, at a time when he was negotiating with the United States for the spread of nuclear arms to Canada. However, laughter should not allow us to fail in charity toward liberalism. It was easier to use its language consistently in the era of Goldwin Smith than in the twentieth century. Liberalism was, in origin, criticism of the old established order. Today it is the voice of the establishment. It could sound a purer note when it was the voice of the outsider than today when it is required to legislate freedom. For example, Harvard liberalism was surely nobler when William James opposed the Spanish-American war than when Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, advised Kennedy on Cuban policy.150 It has already been argued that, because of our modern assumptions about human good, Canada’s disappearance is necessary.jj In deciding whether continentalism is good, one is making a judgment about progressive political philosophy and its interpretation of history. Those who dislike continentalism are in some sense rejecting that progressive interpretation. It can only be with an enormous sense of hesitation that one dares to question modern political philosophy. If its assumptions are false, the age of progress has been a tragic aberration in the history of the species. To assert such a proposition lightly would be the height of irresponsibility. Has it not been in the age of progress that disease and overwork, hunger and poverty, have been drastically reduced? jj In our day, necessity is often identified with some fate in the atoms or the ‘life force.’ But historical necessity is chiefly concerned with what the most influential souls have thought about human good. Political philosophy is not some pleasant cultural game reserved for those too impotent for practice. It is concerned with judgments about goodness. As these judgments are apprehended and acted upon by practical men, they become the unfolding of fate.

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Those who criticize our age must at the same time contemplate pain, infant mortality, crop failures in isolated areas, and the sixteen-hour day. As soon as that is said, facts about our age must also be remembered: the increasing outbreaks of impersonal ferocity, the banality of existence in technological societies, the pursuit of expansion as an end in itself. Will it be good for men to control their genes? The possibility of nuclear destruction and mass starvation may be no more terrible than that of man tampering with the roots of his humanity. Interference with human nature seems to the moderns the hope of a higher species in the ascent of life; to others it may seem that man in his pride could corrupt his very being. The powers of manipulation now available may portend the most complete tyranny imaginable. At least, it is feasible to wonder whether modern assumptions may be basically inhuman. To many modern men, the assumptions of this age appear inevitable, as being the expression of the highest wisdom that the race has distilled. The assumptions appear so inevitable that to entertain the possibility of their falsity may seem the work of a madman. Yet these assumptions were made by particular men in particular settings. Machiavelli and Hobbes, Spinoza and Vico, Rousseau and Hegel, Marx and Darwin, originated this account of human nature and destiny. Their view of social excellence was reached in conscious opposition to that of the ancient philosophers. The modern account of human nature and destiny was developed from a profound criticism of what Plato and Aristotle had written. The modern thinkers believed that they had overcome the inadequacies of ancient thought, while maintaining what was true in the ancients. Yet Plato and Aristotle would not have admitted that their teachings could be used in this way. They believed that their own teaching was the complete teaching for all men everywhere, or else they were not philosophers. They believed that they had considered all the possibilities open to man and had reached the true doctrine concerning human excellence. Only the thinkers of the age of progress considered the classical writers as a preparation for the perfected thought of their own age. The classical philosophers did not so consider themselves. To see the classics as a preparation for later thought is then to think within the assumptions of the age of progress. But this is to beg the question, when the issue at stake is whether these assumptions

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are true. It is this very issue that is raised by the tragedies and ambiguities of our day.kk Ancient philosophy gives alternative answers to modern man concerning the questions of human nature and destiny. It touches all the central questions that man has asked about himself and the world. The classical philosophers asserted that a universal and homogeneous state would be a tyranny. To elucidate their argument would require an account of their total teaching concerning human beings. It would take one beyond political philosophy into the metaphysical assertion that changes in the world take place within an eternal order that is not affected by them. This implies a definition of human freedom quite different from the modern view that freedom is man’s essence. It implies a science different from that which aims at the conquest of nature. The discussion of issues such as these is impossible in a short writing about Canada. Also, the discussion would be inconclusive, because I do not know the truth about these ultimate matters. Therefore, the question as to whether it is good that Canada should disappear must be left unsettled. If the best social order is the universal and homogeneous state, then the disappearance of Canada can be understood as a step toward that order. If the universal and homogeneous state would be a tyranny, then the disappearance of even this indigenous culture can be seen as the removal of a minor barrier on the road to that tyranny. As the central issue is left undecided, the propriety of lamenting must also be left unsettled. My lament is not based on philosophy but on tradition. If one cannot be sure about the answer to the most important questions, then tradition is the best basis for the practical life. Those who loved the older traditions of Canada may be allowed to lament what has been lost, even though they do not know whether or not that loss will lead to some greater political good. 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. Multitudes of human beings through the course of history have had to live when their only political kk The previous paragraph is dependent on the writings of Professor Leo Strauss, who teaches at the University of Chicago. For Strauss’s account of political philosophy, see, for example, What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe: The Free Press 1959) and The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally 1964). I only hope that nothing in the foregoing misinterprets the teaching of that wise man.

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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. Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.ll 151

Notes 1 Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1965). A second edition, with an introduction by Grant, was published in 1970 by McClelland and Stewart as number 50 in its Carleton Library series. A new and re-set edition in the Carleton Library series, now published by Carleton University Press, appeared in 1994 with a foreword by Peter Emberley; this edition was reprinted in 1997 with the addition of an afterword by Sheila Grant. It appeared in French in 1986, in a translation by Gaston Laurion, under the title Est-ce la fin du Canada? Lamentation sur l’échec du nationalisme canadien (Montreal: Editions du Beffroi, Editions Montmorency). Extracts from Lament for a Nation were included in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 76–83. The copy-text for this volume is the 1965 edition. 2 For Grant’s influence on Canadian nationalism and the new left, see Paul Romney, Getting It Wrong: How Canadians Forgot Their Past and Imperilled Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999), 229–35; see also Matt Cohen, Typing: A Life in Twenty-six Keys (Toronto: Random House Canada 2000), 33–42. 3 This typescript is part of the Grant papers in the possession of Sheila Grant. 4 Grant revised his first draft, ‘A Lament for a Nation,’ as a result of suggestions made by John Robert Colombo, the freelance editor McClelland and Stewart assigned to the book. The new draft, entitled ‘Lament for Canada,’ was then copy-edited by Colombo. Jack McClelland, president of McClelland and Stewart, resisted the inclusion of the word ‘Lament’ in the title, but finally agreed to call the book Lament for a Nation. Colombo regards his work on Lament for a Nation as one of the ‘most successful editorial cri-

ll Virgil, Aeneid (Book VI): ‘They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.’

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Lament for a Nation tiques’ of his career (telephone conversation with Henry Roper, 21 June 2004). See also William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 244. There is a very substantial body of writing which discusses Lament for a Nation. See, for example, Ramsay Cook, ‘Loyalism, Technology and Canada’s Fate,’ in The Maple Leaf Forever (Toronto: Macmillan 1971), 46–67; Peter C. Emberley, ed., By Loving Our Own: The Legacy of ‘Lament for a Nation’ (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1990); Usuf K. Umar, ed., George Grant and the Future of Canada (Calgary: University of Calgary Press 1992), passim; and Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), passim. See also the foreword by Peter Emberley and the afterword by Sheila Grant to the 1997 edition of Lament for a Nation (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1997), 9–22, 109–11; and William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 240–53. George Grant papers, Albert Fell to George P. Grant, 21 February 1964. Grant papers, Paul Clifford to J.S. Campsie, 25 February 1964 (copy); J.S. Campsie to George P. Grant, 29 July 1964. For the publication history of Lament for a Nation, see Christian, George Grant: A Biography, 242–4. Grant papers, J.S. Totten to George P. Grant, 26 March 1965. George Grant, Introduction, Lament for a Nation, 2nd ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1970), x. Diefenbaker and the other figures mentioned in this Introduction, as well as the events referred to in Lament for a Nation, are discussed in the notes to the text. Derek Bedson (1920–89), whom Grant met at Oxford after the Second World War, remained a close friend until his death. Bedson worked as a federal civil servant before becoming John G. Diefenbaker’s principal secretary from 1955 until after his election victory in the federal election of 1957. He then entered the public service of the province of Manitoba, serving as clerk of the executive council until his retirement in 1981. Judith Robinson (1899–1961), journalist, was a well-known reporter and columnist. A collection of her articles written for the Toronto Telegram, highly critical of the Liberal government’s treatment of parliamentary institutions between 1953 and 1957, was published under the title This Is on the House (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1957). John George Diefenbaker (1895–1979), lawyer and politician, was Progressive Conservative prime minister of Canada, 1957–63. The crisis over Canadian defence policy faced by his administration and the implications of the crisis for the country and its future are the subject of Lament for a Nation.

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Diefenbaker was born in Ontario, but in 1903 his family moved to Saskatchewan, where his father worked as a schoolteacher and homesteader. After briefly serving in the Canadian Army during the First World War, Diefenbaker became a lawyer and established a strong reputation in Saskatchewan as a defence counsel. After years of political disappointment, he was elected member of parliament for Prince Albert in 1940. He was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative party in November 1956 upon the retirement of George Drew, becoming prime minister and leading a minority government after the federal election held in June 1957. Nine months later, on 31 March 1958, the Conservatives swept the country, winning 208 seats to 48 for the Liberals and 8 for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). After the election held in June 1962, the Conservatives dropped to 116 seats to 100 for the Liberals, 30 for Social Credit, and 19 for the New Democratic party (NDP), the successor to the CCF (formed in 1961). It was as the leader of another minority government that Diefenbaker had to deal with the tumultuous events discussed in Lament for a Nation. Frank Hawkins Underhill (1889–1971), historian and political thinker, was a professor of history at the University of Toronto (1927–55). Although the principal author of the Regina Manifesto (1933), the founding document of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), he moved towards the Liberal party after the Second World War and was a strong supporter of Lester B. Pearson during the election of 1963. Grant was at this time a parishioner at St James Anglican Church, Dundas, Ontario. Macbeth, IV, iii, 222–3. La Nozze di Figaro, Act III, the aria ‘Dove Sono’: ‘The memory of what was good.’ Eugene Ionesco (1912–94), Romanian-born French playwright, was, along with the Irish writer and (1969) Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett (1906– 89), a leading figure in the ‘theatre of the absurd.’ Sir John Alexander Macdonald (1815–91), lawyer, politician, and principal architect of the Canadian Confederation in 1867, was Conservative prime minister of Canada during 1867–73 and 1878–91. Lester Bowles (Mike) Pearson (1897–1973). See page 246, note 1. Peter Charles Newman (1929– ). See page 208, note 4. Blair Fraser (1909–68), journalist, was Ottawa editor of Maclean’s magazine (1943–60), and editor (1960–2). He had close personal relations with many politicians, particularly in the Liberal party. William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874–1950). See page 48, note 4. In the election held on the 10 June 1957, the Progressive Conservatives

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Lament for a Nation under John Diefenbaker, winning 112 seats, won the largest number of seats in the House of Commons. The Liberals won 105, the CCF 25, and the Social Credit party 19. The Liberals, who had governed continuously since 1935 under Mackenzie King (1935–48) and Louis St Laurent (1948–57), chose to resign, and Diefenbaker became prime minister on 21 June 1957. Richard Hooker, ‘Preface,’ Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity [1594] (London: J.M. Dent 1907), 77. Chet (Chester Robert) Huntley (1911–74), American radio and TV journalist, who, with David Brinkley (1920–2002), co-presented the HuntleyBrinkley Report on NBC Television during the 1960s. Clarence Decatur Howe (1886–1960). See page 47, note 1. Mitchell William Sharp (1911–2004). See page 244, note 8. Robert Henry Winters (1910–69), businessman and politician, entered parliament after military service in the Second World War, holding several portfolios, including that of public works (1953–7) in the government of Louis St Laurent. Losing his seat in the election of 1957, he spent eight years in business as president of Rio Tinto Canada. He re-entered parliament in 1965 and was appointed minister of trade and commerce (1966–8), retiring from politics after finishing second to Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the Liberal leadership election in 1968. Winters served as first chancellor of York University, founded in 1959. Richard Bedford Bennett, Viscount (1870–1947), lawyer and politician, was Conservative prime minister of Canada, 1930–5. After his defeat by the Liberals under Mackenzie King, Bennett served as leader of the opposition until 1938, when he retired and moved to England. He received a viscountcy in 1941. Robert James Manion (1881–1943), physician and politician, was minister of railways and canals in Bennett’s government. Chosen as leader of the Conservative party in 1938 partly because his Roman Catholicism and FrenchCanadian wife might appeal to Quebec voters, he lost the support of Toronto Tories because of his opposition to conscription after the outbreak of the Second World War. He lost his seat in the 1940 federal election and resigned as leader. John Bracken (1883–1969), politician, was premier of Manitoba (1922–42) before becoming leader of the Conservatives (1942) on condition that the party name be changed to the ‘Progressive Conservative’ party. The Progressive Conservatives were defeated in 1945 by the Liberals under Mackenzie King, and Bracken resigned the leadership in 1948. George Alexander Drew (1894–1973), lawyer and politician, was premier of Ontario during 1943–8. He led the federal Conservative party from 1948 to 1956, being succeeded by John G. Diefenbaker.

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32 The ‘pipeline’ debate (8 May–6 June 1956) was a turning point in Canadian politics as it led to the defeat of the Liberals, who had formed the government for twenty-two years, in the 1957 federal election. Acting on policies developed by the minister of trade and commerce, C.D. Howe, the St Laurent government introduced a bill authorizing the construction of a pipeline from Alberta to central Canada by TransCanada Pipelines, a syndicate of businessmen dominated at the time by American interests. The use of closure to limit debate as well as accusations of American domination of the scheme discredited both Howe and the government. 33 Donald Methuen Fleming (1905–86), lawyer and politician, was minister of finance in the Diefenbaker government (1957–62) and minister of justice (1962–3). 34 For example, during the 1963 election campaign: ‘Everybody’s against me but the people. No, I haven’t got the big Toronto papers with me, but a crowd like this makes it pretty plain that the people are reading other papers.’ See J.L. Granatstein, Canada, 1957–67 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1986), 135. 35 Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), was thirty-second president of the United States (1933–45). Roosevelt was the architect of the ‘new deal’ for American recovery from the great depression of the 1930s and the leader of the American war effort during the Second World War. 36 John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes (1883–1946), whose writings such as The Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) gave rise to the ‘Keynesian school’ of economics, advocating governmental intervention to encourage economic activity during periods of recession. 37 Douglas Charles Abbott (1899–1987), lawyer, politician, jurist, was minister of finance in the St Laurent government (1946–54) before being appointed a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1954–73). Walter Edward Harris (1904–1999), lawyer and politician, minister of citizenship and immigration (1950–4) and finance (1954–7) in the St Laurent government. 38 Ontario Hydro, a Crown corporation owned by the government of Ontario. Until it was partially privatized in 1999, it was the largest public electric utility in North America. (See note 124 below.) Canadian National Railways (CNR) was established as a Crown corporation in 1919 by the Conservative government of Robert Borden. The CNR amalgamated five financially troubled railway lines into one entity. The Bank of Canada was established in 1935 as Canada’s central bank, following the passage of the Bank of Canada Act (1934) by the Bennett government. Originally privately owned, the Bank of Canada was nationalized in 1938.

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Lament for a Nation The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s public broadcasting organization (radio and television), was created as a Crown corporation in 1936, succeeding the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (1932), established by the Conservative government of R.B. Bennett. Barry Morris Goldwater (1909–98), politician, was US senator for Arizona during 1952–64 before resigning to run unsuccessfully against Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 as Republican candidate for president. See John G. Diefenbaker, One Canada: The Crusading Years, 1895–1956 (Toronto: Macmillan 1975), ii: ‘In emphasizing the question of northern development and northern vision, I advocated a twentieth century equivalent of Sir John Macdonald’s national policy, a uniquely Canadian economic dream.’ Diefenbaker invariably began his addresses with this salutation. Michael Grattan O’Leary (1888–1976), journalist, publisher, and politician, was associated with the Ottawa Journal from 1911 to 1966, when he retired as president. He chaired the Royal Commission on Publications (1960–1) and was subsequently appointed to the Senate (1962–76). Walter Lockhart Gordon (1906–87), businessman, public servant, and politician, chaired the influential Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects (1955–7). He entered parliament in 1963, becoming minister of finance in the Pearson government. His budget proposal (1963) for a tax on foreign takeovers of Canadian firms was withdrawn as a result of pressure from the business community. James Elliot Coyne (1910– ), banker and businessman, governor of the Bank of Canada (1955–61), came into conflict with the Diefenbaker government and its finance minister, Donald Fleming, over the government’s expansionist monetary policy. Diefenbaker, who had previously mistrusted Coyne because of his Liberal connections, demanded his resignation. Although he initially resisted, Coyne resigned on 13 July 1961 when the government proceeded to remove him by parliamentary action. As governor of the Bank of Canada, Coyne had expressed concern about the level of foreign investment in Canada. The Glassco Commission (Royal Commission on Government Organization) was appointed in 1960 under the chairmanship of J. Grant Glassco of the Brazilian Traction and Power Corporation to investigate the oganization of the federal civil service and agencies. The commission produced a five-volume report in 1962–3. Francis Alvin George Hamilton (1912–2004), teacher, politician, was, after the prime minister himself, the most prominent Progressive Conservative MP from Saskatchewan during the Diefenbaker years. He helped to develop the ‘Vision of the North’ which Diefenbaker used with great effect

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during the 1958 election campaign. A diehard Diefenbaker loyalist, he served as minister of northern affairs and natural resources (1957–60) and agriculture (1960–3) in the Diefenbaker government. George Clyde Nowlan (1898–1965), lawyer and politician, was minister of national revenue (1957–62) and minister of finance (1962–3) in the Diefenbaker government. In 1958 the Diefenbaker government brought in legislation, the Broadcasting Act, to replace the Canadian Broadcasting Act (1936), under which the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) not only ran radio and TV networks but also regulated both private and public broadcasting. The 1958 Broadcasting Act created a new fifteen-member body, the Board of Broadcast Governors, which was given the regulatory authority over both private and public broadcasting previously possessed by the CBC. John White Hughes Bassett (1915–98), publisher, broadcasting executive, Progressive Conservative power broker, was owner of the Toronto Telegram (1952–71) and chairman of Baton Broadcasting Inc., a chain of radio and television stations controlled by the Bassett and Eaton families. He ran unsuccessfully as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Toronto Spadina riding in the 1962 election. Bassett was active in the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, an organization representing private broadcasters, which argued against the regulatory role of the CBC; the Diefenbaker government responded to this pressure by creating the Board of Broadcast Governors in 1958. Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis (1890–1959), lawyer and politician, was premier of Quebec (1936–9, 1944–59). He was a strong Quebec nationalist, and the party he founded in 1936, the Union Nationale, was dedicated to preserving French Canada through the defence of provincial rights and traditional institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church. One of the major figures in the Union Nationale was Jean-Jacques Bertrand (1916–73), who held various portfolios in Union Nationale governments, eventually becoming premier of Quebec (1968–70). Joseph Mignault Paul Sauvé (1907–60) succeeded Duplessis as premier of Quebec and leader of the Union Nationale. His brief period in office before his death, the so-called ‘hundred days,’ marked the beginning of the ‘Quiet Revolution’ in Quebec. Henri Bourassa (1868–1952), politician and journalist, founded Le Devoir (1910), the leading French-Canadian nationalist newspaper, editing it until 1932. Bourassa believed in Canada as a bulwark by which French-Canadian culture upheld by Roman Catholicism could survive in ‘Saxon America,’ dominated by materialistic, capitalist values. He hoped that French Canadians would have a place throughout Canada and fought vigorously to pre-

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serve their religious and linguistic rights when these were threatened, for example, by the Manitoba Schools Act (1890). 53 Gordon Minto Churchill (1898–1985), lawyer and politician, was a soldier in both the First and Second World Wars. He was a strong Diefenbaker loyalist, having organized caucus support for him during the 1956 leadership convention. He held the portfolios of trade and commerce (1957–61) and veterans’ affairs (1960–3), and was defence minister briefly before the 1963 election. Douglas Scott Harkness (1909–99), politician, won the George Medal for valour in 1943. He served as minister of agriculture (1957–60) and of defence (1960–3) in the Diefenbaker government before his resignation from the cabinet over the issue of arming the Bomarc missile system with nuclear warheads. General George Randolph Pearkes (1888–1984), soldier, politician, war hero (V.C., D.S.O. M.C.), served in both world wars. In the Second World War he commanded the First Canadian Infantry Division (1940–2). He was minister of national defence in the Diefenbaker government (1957–60) at the time the decision was made to halt the production of the Avro Arrow fighter plane (1959) and introduce instead the Bomarc missile. In 1960 Pearkes left federal politics and was appointed lieutenant-governor of British Columbia. George Harris Hees (1910–96), politician, was minister of transport (1957– 60) and minister of trade and commerce (1960–3) in the Diefenbaker government. In February 1963 he joined Douglas Harkness and other ministers in resigning from the cabinet over the issue of accepting nuclear warheads for the Bomarc missile system. 54 In 1942 the King government, after holding a plebiscite asking the Canadian people to release it from its pledge not to introduce conscription for overseas service, passed a bill (‘Bill 80’) which authorized conscription for overseas service if it was determined to be necessary. On 1 November 1944, J.L. Ralston, minister of national defence, resigned from the cabinet because of King’s unwillingness to invoke Bill 80 to meet the manpower needs of the Canadian army fighting in Europe. Three weeks later, facing a cabinet revolt and dissatisfaction in English Canada, King reversed his position and the government invoked Bill 80. Only 12,908 conscripted soldiers were actually sent overseas, but this conscription crisis, like that of the First World War, although to a lesser degree, embittered relations between English and French Canadians. 55 Howard Charles Green (1895–1989), lawyer and politician, was minister of public works (1957–9) and external affairs (1959–63) in the Diefenbaker government. A Diefenbaker loyalist, Green opposed arming the Bomarc

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system with nuclear weapons and was an advocate of nuclear disarmament. Frank McGee (1926– ), businessman and politician, served briefly as minister without portfolio in the Diefenbaker government before its defeat in the 1963 election. John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–63). See page 139, note 2. Donald Grant Creighton (1902–79), historian, was professor of history, University of Toronto (1927–71). Under the influence of his colleague Harold A. Innis, Creighton developed the ‘Laurentian thesis,’ seeing the St Lawrence River and its watershed as the geographic foundation for the creation of a coast-to-coast political and economic union in British North America. His ideas were given their most important expression in his first book, The Commercial Empire of the St Lawrence (1937). Creighton’s two-volume biography of Sir John A. Macdonald (1952, 1955) is notable not only for depth of research but for its literary verve. On 22 October 1962 President John F. Kennedy announced a naval blockade of Cuba in response to reports of the installation there of missiles by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) capable of reaching targets in the United States and Canada. The Canadian government, given notice only one and one-half hours in advance of American action, was asked to move forces to a high alert status, as part of its commitment to membership in the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD), which placed the air forces of Canada and the United States under joint operational control for the purposes of North American air defence. High alert status was implemented on an informal basis by the instructions of the minister of national defence, Douglas Harkness. Prime Minister Diefenbaker and Howard Green, minister of external affairs, were reluctant to comply with the American request because of the lack of notice and their reservations about the American action. After protracted debate in cabinet, the government authorized the alert. The North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) agreement had been negotiated between the Eisenhower administration and the St Laurent government, although it was not given final approval until July 1957 by the Diefenbaker government after the Conservative victory in the 1957 federal election. Pearson announced the Liberals’ new defence policy in a speech in Toronto on 12 January 1963: ‘[Canada] should end at once its evasion of responsibility by discharging the commitments it has already accepted ... It can only do this by accepting nuclear warheads, for those defensive tactical weapons which cannot effectively be used without them but which we have agreed to use.’ See Granatstein, Canada, 1957–67, 126.

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62 Lauris Norstad (1907–88), general, US Air Force, supreme allied commander, Europe (1956–63), held a press conference in Ottawa on 3 January 1963, at which he stated: ‘We are depending on Canada to produce some of the tactical atomic strike force ...’ See Granatstein, Canada, 126. 63 A statement was issued by the Department of State on 30 January 1963 which, among other matters, corrected what the American government believed to be errors in Diefenbaker’s comments in the House of Commons on 25 January 1963. See Granatstein, Canada, 129. 64 Globe and Mail, the Star, and the Telegram, 6 February 1963. John Bassett, publisher of the Telegram, and Oakeley Dalgleish, publisher and editor of the Globe and Mail, had been ‘closely in touch’ during the cabinet crisis of the previous two weeks. See Denis Smith, Rogue Tory: The Life and Legend of John G. Diefenbaker (Toronto: Macfarlane, Walter and Ross 1995), 485–6. 65 In the election, held on 8 April 1963, the Liberals won 129 seats, the Conservatives 95, the Social Credit party 24, and the New Democratic party 17 seats. 66 Diefenbaker made this suggestion in his speech to the House of Commons on 22 October 1962 (House of Commons, Debates, 805–7). See Smith, Rogue Tory, 456–7. 67 Louis Harris (1921– ), public opinion analyst and pollster, founded Louis Harris and Associates Inc. in 1951, which was associated with election campaigns, particularly that of John F. Kennedy for president in 1960. 68 House of Commons, Debates, 3438–48 (5 February 1963). 69 In 1959 the Diefenbaker government cancelled the construction of the Arrow, an advanced supersonic all-weather interceptor aircraft developed by A.V. Roe of Canada, leading to the dismissal of fourteen thousand aircraft workers. Several months before the scrapping of the Arrow program, the government had agreed to deploy the Bomarc interceptor missile, which, it was argued, would serve as an alternative to a manned interceptor such as the Arrow. 70 The Voice of Women was formed in 1960 as a voluntary non-partisan organization of women to promote disarmament and peace. Two of its early members were Maryon and Patricia Pearson, wife and daughter of L.B. Pearson. See John English, The Worldly Years: The Life of Lester Pearson, 1949– 72 (Toronto: Knopf 1992), 245. 71 The Suez crisis began on 26 July 1956 when President Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal Company, controlled by Anglo-French interests. After the failure of diplomatic efforts, Israel attacked Egypt on 29 October, and Britain and France dropped paratroopers in the Suez Canal Zone on 4 November. Under the leadership of External Affairs Minister

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Lester B. Pearson, Canada played an important role in the passage of a resolution by the UN General Assembly calling for an international force ‘to secure and supervise the cessation of hostilities.’ American pressure forced the British, French, and Israelis to accept a ceasefire on 6 November, which was enforced by the introduction of a UN Emergency Force including Canadian troops. Pearson received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957, but the Canadian government’s perceived lack of support for Britain caused controversy both in Canada and Britain. Robert Strange McNamara (1916– ), businessman and politician, was president of the Ford Motor Company before becoming secretary of defence (1961–8) in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Grant is referring to McNamara’s secret Congressional testimony, which became public during the 1963 election campaign, in which he suggested that the principal use of the Bomarcs was to attract Soviet firepower towards Canada, but that they were ineffective as weapons of defence against attack. Diefenbaker made effective use of McNamara’s statements in his campaign speeches. See Smith, Rogue Tory, 500–2, and J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer, For Better or for Worse: Canada and the United States to the 1990s (Toronto: Copp Clark 1991), 212. The Organization of American States (OAS) was created as a regional agency in 1947 to foster hemispheric solidarity and economic development by the United States and Latin American governments. Canada did not participate until 1970 when it was granted permanent observer status; it became a full voting member in 1990. The activities of the OAS have been dominated, particularly between 1947 and the mid-1970s, by American foreign policy interests, and its general secretariat is located in Washington, DC. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), statesman and political theorist, was third president of the United States, principal author of the American Declaration of Independence (1776), and perhaps the most important theorist of American democracy. Deeply influenced by Locke’s ideas on freedom and government by consent, Jefferson believed in a democratic society of freedom and virtue made possible by the wide ownership of property, the diffusion of education, and limited government expressed in the aphorism ‘That government is best which governs least.’ House of Commons, Debates, 3441 (5 February 1963). The Annexation Manifesto (1849) was produced by a group of Montreal business leaders in response to the repeal of laws such as the Navigation Acts providing imperial protection for Canadian goods and commerce. The Manifesto declared that in the absence of imperial protection Canada must join with the United States.

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76 Prince Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), statesman, was architect of the German Empire (1871) and its first chancellor (1871–90). 77 In early December 1945 the British government negotiated a loan agreement with the United States on extremely disadvantageous terms. One of the requirements was that sterling be made convertible within a year of the signing of the agreement, weakening the sterling bloc and by implication the British Empire. The principal negotiator was John Maynard Keynes (Baron Keynes). 78 Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970). See page 201, note 6. 79 Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home (Sir Alec Douglas-Home), 14th Earl of Home (1903–95), politician, having renounced his peerage, became prime minister of Great Britain (1963–4); previously he had served as British foreign secretary (1960–3). Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl Stockton (1894–1986), politician, prime minister of Great Britain (1957–63). In December 1962 at a meeting in Nassau, Bahamas, President John F. Kennedy informed Prime Minister Macmillan that the American government had decided to cancel the ‘Skybolt’ missile program, upon which the British government was depending to provide a delivery system for its nuclear warheads. 80 De Gaulle used the expression ‘Trojan Horse’ at the press conference on 14 January 1963 at which he vetoed British entry to the Common Market. He stated that the consequence of Britain’s entry would be ‘in the end ... a colossal Atlantic Community under American dependence and leadership which would completely swallow up the EEC.’ See Paul Johnson, Modern Times (London: Phoenix 1992), 600. 81 On 7 July 1957, after returning from the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, Diefenbaker stated at a press conference that his government intended to divert 15 per cent of Canada’s purchases from the United States to the United Kingdom. The proposal was shown by the Department of Finance to be unrealistic and quickly dropped. See Granatstein, Canada, 44. 82 On 9 September 1957 the British presented a free trade proposal to the Canadian government which was immediately rejected, Diefenbaker stating ‘that he recognized the advantages it would provide to UK exports, but could not see what advantage there would be in it for Canada.’ See Granatstein, Canada 44–5. 83 At the 1962 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference (10 September 1962), Diefenbaker expressed strong reservations about Britain’s proposed entry into the European Common Market because of the effect this would have on Britain’s relations with the countries of the Commonwealth, particularly on Commonwealth trade.

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84 Duncan Edwin Sandys, Baron Sandys (1918–87), politician, was secretary of state for Commonwealth relations in the Macmillan and Douglas-Home governments (1960–4). 85 ‘Lord Home went out of his way yesterday to build up Mr Pearson by saying, in effect, that he became Prime Minister because he wanted Canada to be a good ally. Several of my colleagues are most annoyed at this because I refrained at all times from making political speeches in London that would criticize the Government or assist the Opposition’ (John G. Diefenbaker to Elmer Diefenbaker, 23 May 1963; see Smith, Rogue Tory, 511). 86 The Red Ensign, the flag of the British merchant marine (red, with the Union Jack near the staff), was authorized for use on Canadian-registered vessels in 1892. From 1924 it was flown over Canadian government buildings abroad and was approved for use over federal buildings in Canada. Its wide use, as well as its having been carried by Canadian troops during the Second World War, meant that many looked upon the Red Ensign as Canada’s national flag, despite its lack of official status. It was unpopular among French Canadians, however, because of its British associations. Accordingly, in 1964 the Pearson government decided to adopt an official national flag. After a protracted and acrimonious debate in Parliament, with the opposition being led by Diefenbaker, a new flag was adopted and approved by royal proclamation on 15 February 1965. 87 Paradise Lost, Book V, 1. 899. 88 The landmark recommendations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963–9), initially co-chaired by Andre Laurendeau, editor of Le Devoir, and Davidson Dunton, president of Carleton University, led to the Official Languages Act of 1969. The Commission recommended that where numbers warrant, public services should be available in both English and French. It also proposed that in the Public Service of Canada, French become a normal language of work, with documents and correspondence generally available in both languages. The Official Languages Act established the ‘equality of status’ of both English and French in Parliament and the Canadian public service, including all federal departments, judicial and quasi-judicial bodies and administrative agencies, and Crown corporations established by federal statute. 89 The O’Keefe Centre (now called the Hummingbird Centre) is an auditorium in Toronto used for concerts, opera, musical comedies, and other performances. What Grant had in mind was that the programming at the O’Keefe Centre was primarily non-Canadian in origin and middlebrow in content. 90 Edward Plunket Taylor (1901–89), businessman, was a leading figure in Canadian business circles as president of the Argus Corporation, a holding

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Lament for a Nation company he created after the Second World War and ran as president until 1969. In his acceptance speech at the Liberal leadership convention, 16 January 1958, Pearson stated that ‘the first step in restoring national confidence was to return to sanity in trade policies ... Those who had criticized the Liberals for not standing up to the Americans were now finding that talking up was not the same as standing up.’ See the Toronto Globe and Mail, 17 January 1958, p. 2. John Whitney (Jack) Pickersgill (1905–97), public servant and politician, entered the federal civil service in 1937, quickly becoming private secretary to Prime Minister Mackenzie King. He became Canada’s senior public servant (clerk of the privy council and secretary to the cabinet, 1952–3) before entering federal politics, serving in a number of portfolios in the St Laurent and Pearson governments. While the Liberals were in opposition (1957–63), Pickersgill was one of the most effective critics of the Diefenbaker government in the House of Commons. Fidel Castro (1927– ). See page 208, note 2. By ‘Gaullism’ Grant is referring to the combination of dirigiste and nationalist policies followed by the government of France during the presidency of General de Gaulle. The ‘National Policy,’ by which Canadian industrial goods were protected by tariffs from American competition, was first introduced by the government of Sir John A. Macdonald in 1879. Grant is incorrect in locating the Bennett ‘New Deal’ in the late 1930s. Prime Minister R.B. Bennett attempted to retrieve the fortunes of his Conservative government, which was nearing the end of its five-year mandate, by launching a so-called ‘New Deal’ for Canada in a series of radio broadcasts starting on 2 January 1935. Bennett promised a more progressive system of taxation, a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, a maximum work week, more regulation of working conditions, health and accident insurance, revised old age pension legislation, and improved programs for agriculture. The ‘New Deal’ was not implemented when the Conservatives lost the federal election in October 1935 to the Liberals under Mackenzie King. Cost-plus contracts were widely used during the Second World War, guaranteeing contractors profits over and above production costs. They were justified as a means of accelerating the output of goods for the war effort. See Robert Bothwell and William Kilbourn, C.D. Howe (McClelland and Stewart 1979), 176–8. Paul Edgar Joseph James Martin (1903–92), lawyer and politician, served in the cabinets of King, St Laurent, Pearson, and Trudeau. He was minister of health and welfare (1946–57) in the King and St Laurent governments,

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becoming secretary of state for external affairs (1963–8) when the Liberals under L.B. Pearson returned to power. Brian Brooke Claxton (1898–1960), lawyer and politician, served as minister of health and welfare (1944–6) and national defence (1946–54) in the King and St Laurent governments before retiring from politics to become vice-president and general manager for Canada of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. William John Bennett (1911–91), businessman, served as executive assistant to C.D. Howe at the Department of Munitions and Supply during the Second World War. In the 1950s, he became president of Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd, a Crown corporation responsible for producing uranium, as well as president of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. In 1960 he moved to the Iron Ore Company of Canada, becoming president in 1965. Norman Alexander Robertson (1904–68), public servant, diplomat, held a number of senior posts in the public service before becoming under-secretary of state, Department of External Affairs (1958–64). He was sympathetic to the anti-nuclear views of the minister of external affairs, Howard Green. Robert Broughton Bryce (1910–97), public servant, served as clerk of the privy council and secretary to the cabinet (1954–63). He succeeded in winning Diefenbaker’s confidence despite his having held the same post under Prime Minister St Laurent. In 1963 he became deputy minister of finance. The United States and Canada agreed to establish a permanent joint board of defence at a meeting between Prime Minister King and President Roosevelt at Ogdensburg, NY, on 18 August 1940. William Lyon Mackenzie (1795–1861), journalist, politician, and grandfather of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, led the abortive rebellion in December 1837 against the government of Upper Canada and was forced to flee to the United States, where he lived for ten years in difficult circumstances before being pardoned in 1849, when he returned to Toronto to resume his journalistic and political career. Mackenzie King was appointed head of the Department of Industrial Relations of the Rockefeller Foundation in August 1914 in the wake of a violent strike at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, a Rockefeller-controlled concern. His mandate was to study labour-management relations, but he soon became a close adviser to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. King’s success in improving labour relations in Colorado cemented a lifelong friendship between King and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. King remained with the Rockefeller Foundation, at the then impressive salary of $12,000 p.a., until

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Lament for a Nation 1918, enabling him to complete his study of labour relations and social policy, Industry and Humanity. De Gaulle withdrew France from NATO in 1966. See Brian Crozier, De Gaulle: The Statesman (London: Eyre Methuen 1973), 575. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins (New York: Simon and Schuster 1961). John Dewey (1859–1952), philosopher and educationalist, was a leading figure in American pragmatism. His writings on education emphasize learning through experience. For a popular exposition of his thought, see his Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Holt 1920; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press 1957), chapter 7, ‘Reconstruction in Moral Conceptions.’ See Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe: The Free Press 1960). Horatio Alger (1832–99), American Unitarian clergyman, achieved great popular success with a series of novels for boys which presented success as the product of hard work and perseverance. Sample titles are Ragged Dick (1867) and From Canal Boy to President (1881). George Washington (1732–99), soldier, was commander-in-chief of the rebel forces during the American Revolution (1775–83) and first president of the United States (1789–97). James Madison (1751–1831) was fourth president of the United States (1809–17). Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) played an important role in the American Revolution as aide-de-camp to George Washington (1777–81). Later, as secretary of the Treasury (1789–95), he placed the new Republic on a sound financial footing by creating a central banking system. John Adams (1735–1826), second president of the United States (1797– 1801), played a crucial role in the American Revolution, for example as the ‘colossus of debate’ in the Continental Congress on the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Thomas Paine (1737–1809), political agitator and writer, was born in England but travelled to Philadelphia in 1774. He wrote the enormously influential pamphlet Common Sense, which argued in favour of complete independence for the American colonies from Britain. Edmund Burke (1729–97), political philosopher and politician, supported the American colonists on the ground that they stood for traditional liberties that had been infringed upon by the British government. Burke, however, opposed the French Revolution because it stood for abstract ideas ‘stripped of all concrete relations’ such as property, religion, and traditional hierarchy, which he believed fundamental to the organic nature of society.

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112 For an elaboration of the argument presented here, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1953), chapters 5 and 6. 113 John Courtney Murray (1904–67). See page 253, note 5. 114 Quinton McGarel Hogg, 2nd Viscount Hailsham (1907–2001), lawyer and politician, was lord president of the Council and minister of science and technology (1959–64) in the Macmillan government. He renounced his peerage in 1963 in a failed attempt to become leader of the Conservative party and prime minister upon Macmillan’s retirement. 115 Milton Friedman (1912– ), economist, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics (1976), opposed the Keynesian emphasis upon fiscal policy (i.e., adjusting the level of government spending and taxation), arguing that government economic intervention in the economy should be focused on controlling the quantity of money. This so-called ‘monetarist’ view came to dominate economic policy-making in the last quarter of the twentieth century. His advocacy of ‘reasonable individualism’ has helped to define contemporary neo-conservatism in such works as Capitalism and Freedom (1962). 116 George Hogan, Jr (1928–66), Toronto automobile dealer, was an executive assistant to John Diefenbaker during the campaigns of 1957, 1958, and 1962. On 8 November 1962, when national vice-president of the Progressive Conservative party, he launched a public attack on the nuclear and Cuban policies of the Diefenbaker government. Upon the publication of Lament for a Nation, Hogan wrote to Grant protesting that he was not a Goldwater conservative. Grant accordingly removed the reference to Hogan in the second (1970) edition (Grant papers, George Hogan, Jr, to Grant, 21 March and 12 April, 1965). See also Ralph Hyman, ‘The Man behind the Man,’ Globe and Mail, 9 November 1962; Smith, Rogue Tory, 463–4. 117 In the American presidential election, 3 November 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson won an overwhelming victory over the Republican candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater. 118 Johnson embarked on an ambitious program of social legislation to achieve what he termed the ‘Great Society.’ 119 Although Grant’s point is correct, Goldwater actually won six states (52 electoral votes) to Johnson’s forty-four (486 electoral votes). See Leslie H. Southwick, Presidential Also-Rans and Running-Mates, 2nd ed. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland 1998), 660. 120 Gaius Marius (157–86 BC), Roman soldier and politician, was the leader of the Populares, who supported the power of the popular assemblies at the expense of the Senate, whose traditional rights were defended by the Optimates led by L. Cornelius Sulla (138–78 BC).

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Lament for a Nation G. Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), founder of the first line of Roman emperors, was the nephew of Marius’s wife and became the leader of the Populares. In 1791, under the pressure of the arrival of thousands of loyalists fleeing the United States after the American Revolution, Great Britain enacted the Constitutional Act, creating the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. Along with the creation of New Brunswick (1784) as a separate province from Nova Scotia, this was ultimately to lead to the British North America Act of 1867 establishing the Canadian confederation. House of Commons Debates, 3441 (5 February 1963). John Kenneth Galbraith (1908– ), economist and diplomat, was born and grew up in Iona Station, Ontario, but emigrated to the United States to do a PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. He was professor of economics at Harvard University (1945–75) and subsequently emeritus professor, and also served as ambassador to India (1961–3) during the Kennedy administration. Through such books as The Affluent Society (1958) and The New Industrial State (1967), he has been a key figure in shaping American liberalism. Sir Adam Beck (1857–1925), manufacturer and politician, was, as mayor of London, Ontario, made head in 1905 of a public inquiry that recommended the creation of a municipally owned, provincially financed cooperative distribution system, resulting in the creation of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission. Under Beck’s direction, this ultimately became a publicly owned system (Ontario Hydro). Beck’s activities were made possible by Sir James Pliny Whitney (1843–1914), lawyer and politician, during his term as premier of Ontario (1905–14), who received strong support from the Conservative evening newspaper, the Toronto Telegram, edited (1888– 1928) by John R. ‘Black Jack’ Robinson (1864–1928). Grant’s footnote, which calls Whitney ‘Sir Richard’ rather than Sir James, has been corrected. Joseph Howe (1804–73), politician and journalist, premier of Nova Scotia (1860–3) and lieutenant-governor (1873), was instrumental in the establishment of responsible government in Nova Scotia in 1848. Robert Baldwin (1804–58), lawyer and politician, along with Louis H. Lafontaine, succeeded in bringing about responsible government in Canada in 1849. In 1836 Baldwin expressed his ideas on responsible government in a letter to Lord Glenelg. This was probably the basis for his memorandum to the Earl of Durham, governor of Canada in 1838. See H.D. Forbes, ed., Canadian Political Thought (Toronto: Oxford 1985), 26–33. Sir Robert Laird Borden (1854–1937), lawyer, politician, Conservative prime minister of Canada (1911–20), directed Canada’s war effort during the First World War. At the Imperial War Conference of 1917, he succeeded

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in obtaining recognition of the dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth, and was primarily responsible for the recognition of Canada and the other dominions as autonomous at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. In 1914 Churchill held the position of First Lord of the Admiralty in the cabinet of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, which decided to declare war on Germany on 3 August 1914 because Germany violated Belgian neutrality, to which Great Britain was committed by treaty (1839). See The Republic, II, 372–5, where Socrates describes the transition to the luxurious state, whose resources no longer can support the needs of the inhabitants. ‘The country, too, which was large enough to support the original inhabitants, will now be too small. If we are to have enough pasture and plough land, we shall have to cut off a slice of our neighbours’ territory; and if they too are not content with necessaries, but give themselves up to getting unlimited wealth, they will want a slice of ours’ (II, 373, trans. F.M. Cornford). Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1844), poet and philosopher, was the most penetrating nineteenth-century critic of English utilitarianism, and a strong defender of traditional institutions such as the Established Church. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (1804–81), politician and novelist, was Conservative prime minister of Great Britain (1868, 1874–80). Leslie Miscampbell Frost (1895–1973), lawyer, politician, was Conservative premier of Ontario (1949–61). He was succeeded by John Parmenter Robarts (1917–82), lawyer and politician, as premier (1961–71). René Lévesque (1922–87), journalist and politician, premier of Quebec (1976–85). As minister of natural resources in the Liberal government of Jean Lesage, he was primarily responsible for the government’s decision to nationalize private electrical utilities to create Hydro Quebec. The expression ‘roi nègre’ (‘black king’) refers to the practice of European colonialist powers of choosing a local ruler to act as a puppet; Laurier had been simply an instrument, according to Lévesque’s view of Canadian history, of English-Canadian interests. Eric William Kierans (1914–2004), economist, politician, businessman, served as president of the Montreal Stock Exchange (1960–3) and minister of revenue (1963–5) and health (1965–6) in the provincial Liberal government of Jean Lesage. George Carlyle Marler (1901–81), lawyer and politician, was minister without portfolio and government leader (1960–5) in the Lesage government. For a succinct account of the impact of Kierans’s attack on the Gordon budget, see English, The Worldly Years: The Life of Lester Pearson, 1949–72, 273–6.

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134 Hamilton Falls, in Labrador, was renamed Churchill Falls in 1965 to commemorate Sir Winston Churchill shortly after his death. In 1969 protracted negotiations were completed between the provinces of Newfoundland and Quebec, on terms favourable to Quebec, leading to the development of a hydroelectric project completed in 1974. 135 The so-called ‘beat poets’ such as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who expressed their alienation from mainstream American life, were an important influence upon the young in the late 1950s, an influence that led to the term ‘beat generation.’ 136 Joan Baez (1941– ), American folk singer, was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement and an opponent of the Vietnam War. Peter (Pete) Seeger (1919– ), American folk singer, was a pioneer of the protest song in contemporary folk music and was for many years blacklisted for his left-wing views. 137 Henri Bourassa, La langue, gardienne de la foi (Montreal: Bibliothèque de l’Action Française 1918), 49. 138 Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), Hindu nationalist leader and pacifist, was the architect of Indian independence. He developed the practice of mass non-violent resistance and inspired several generations of pacifists around the world. He was assassinated in New Delhi on 30 January 1948. 139 ‘I remember.’ 140 Richard James Cardinal Cushing (1895–1948) was archbishop of Boston (1947–70) and appointed cardinal in 1958. He was known for his close ties to the Kennedy family. Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman (1889–1967) was archbishop of New York (1939–67) and appointed cardinal in 1946. Spellman was a religious conservative with strong anti-Communist views. 141 The Committee for Political Realism (Albert Breton, Raymond Breton, Claude Bruneau, Yvon Gauthier, Marc Lalonde, Maurice Pinard, Pierre E. Trudeau), ‘An Appeal for Realism in Politics,’ Canadian Forum 44 (May 1964): 33. 142 Ibid. 143 The Doukhobours, a Russian religious group that preached pacifism and communal living, rejecting secular governments, emigrated to Canada in 1898–9, settling in Saskatchewan. In 1908, under the leadership of Peter Veregin, most moved to southern British Columbia. A splinter group (founded in 1902), called the Sons of Freedom, engaged in civil disobedience primarily over the issue of compulsory education, which they strongly resisted for their children. Their nude parades during the 1950s led to arrests by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

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144 William Faulkner (1897–1962), author, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949 for his novels set in the American South. Morley Callaghan (1903–90), author, wrote novels and short stories that were mostly set in Toronto and Montreal, dealing with themes of sin and redemption. He won the Governor General’s Award in 1951 for The Loved and the Lost. 145 See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right, trans. J. Michael Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press 1995), 307 (# 164): ‘Nothing profounder can be said than Schiller’s words, “World history is a court of world judgment” (“die Weltgeschichte ist ein Weltgericht”).’ 146 Grant has here adapted the argument presented by Ivan Karamazov about the sufferings of the innocent, and their significance for divine justice, in one of his favourite novels. See Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David Magarshack (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1958), Book V (’Pro and Contra’), chapter 4, 282–6. 147 Goldwin Smith (1823–1910), historian and journalist, was a strong believer in the union of Canada and the United States; this position forms the basis for his Canada and the Canadian Question (1891). John Stuart Mill (1806–73), philosopher and social reformer, was a leading figure in British utilitarian thought. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59), historian and politician, was the leading whig historian of the nineteenth century. 148 ’In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world’ (Locksley Hall, l. 128). 149 At the time of the writing of Lament for a Nation, the Sifton newspapers comprised those under the control of the descendants of Sir Clifford Sifton (1861–1929), publisher and Liberal politician, whose flagship paper was the Winnipeg Free Press. The Southam chain, controlled by the descendants of William Southam (1843–1932), owned many newspapers including the Calgary Herald, the Ottawa Citizen, the Hamilton Spectator, and the Vancouver Province. 150 William James (1842–1910), philosopher and psychologist, was the author of many influential works, including Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr (1917– ), historian and public servant, was special assistant to President John F. Kennedy at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (1961) and the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. 151 Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI, l. 314

Introduction to the Carleton Library Edition (1970) of Lament for a Nation

In 1970 Grant wrote a new introduction to Lament for a Nation upon its publication in the Carleton Library series.1 A searching critique of what had happened to Canada in the previous five years, and of his own work in retrospect, it is also a response to some important criticisms. Grant begins by pointing out that the glamour of America as embodied in the Kennedys had faded before the realities of the Vietnam War, political assassination, and riots in the cities. Canadians had turned, however haltingly, to a nationalism which found some expression in the policies of the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who succeeded L.B. Pearson as prime minister in 1968.2 This resurgence of nationalism Grant saw as most evident among the young who ‘have a realistic suspicion of corporation capitalism, and this is after all the negative “sine qua non” of any nationalism’ (371). Nevertheless, the integration of Canada with the United States continues. Canada’s position as a ‘younger brother’ has meant receiving financial rewards from the Vietnam War, while avoiding the necessity of having to fight. This ambivalence underlying Canadian nationalism is overshadowed by the larger question of the fate of all nationalisms in the technological age. ‘What happens to nationalist strivings when the societies in question are given over, at the very level of faith, to the realisation of the technological dream?’ (371). Grant criticizes his own work on the ground of its failure to express the fundamental ambiguity of the English-Canadian tradition. The desire to build a society different from the United States had always been problematic. The liberalism that animated the founding fathers of the American republic also gained ascendancy in Great Britain in the nineteenth century at the very time that Canada was coming into being. Furthermore, the older British conservative tradition of the common good as opposed

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to capitalist individualism had already been defeated by the time it was inherited by Canadians: ‘The twentieth century was not a period in which it was wise to rely on British traditions as counter-attractions to the American dream. Yet these were what we had’ (373). Grant concludes by answering three important criticisms brought against him. The first is that he was lamenting the passing of ‘a British dream of Canada.’ Instead, he asserts that he was lamenting the romanticism of the dream of what Canada was and might be. He also denies that by proclaiming the defeat of Canadian nationalism he contributed to the very outcome he was lamenting; ridiculing ‘ignoble delusions’ is more important than sustaining other delusions even if they are noble. Finally, he denies that he is a pessimist, a term that should be reserved for a person’s view of the whole: It would be the height of pessimism to believe that our society could go on in its present directions without bringing down upon itself catastrophes. To believe the foregoing would be pessimism, for it would imply that the nature of things does not bring forth human excellence. (374)

Henry Roper

The Carleton Library has kindly suggested the reissuing of this book – ‘kindly’ because it is a book written out of particular events, and one therefore in which any general truths arise in the context of circumstances eight years old. It is a disadvantage these days for any general thesis to be tied to past events, because eight years seems more than a generation. Our memories are killed in the flickering images of the media, and the seeming intensity of events. There is weakened in us the simplest form of that activity of re-collection which Plato knew to be the chief means to wisdom. It may be well therefore to preface a new edition by asking the question: how do we stand in 1970 compared with 1963? The central problem for nationalism in English-speaking Canada has always been: in what ways and for what reasons do we have the power and the desire to maintain some independence of the American Empire? (It would be impertinent indeed to define what is the chief problem for Frenchspeaking nationalism.) On the surface it was certainly much easier in 1970 than it was in 1963 for Canadians not to want to be swallowed by

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the US. The years of the Vietnam war have been an exposition (a veritable Expo) of the American Empire. It does not take much intelligence or patriotism to be glad that one’s children are not drafted for that war. The mainland of that empire no longer seems so rewarding a place to live. Even the Canadian bourgeoisie can see the perhaps unresolvable racial conflict, the expansion and decay of its cities, the increase of military influence in constitutional life, the breakdown between the generations, the effects of a century of environmental spoliation, etc. etc. In 1963 we could swim or go fishing in Lake Erie without cleaning off the excrement. Today nobody can forget Cleveland. Such events make possible a nationalist appeal to many Canadian voters. And underlying the particular difficulties of the empire is the deeper anxiety as to the very possibility of the good life in a civilization ruled by the spirit of dynamic technique. This spectre is naturally enough glimpsed most often in the USA. Eight years ago such anxiety was considered nutty reaction; today it stalks the public world. During the missile crisis of 1963, the USA was symbolised for us by the Kennedys, who presented American imperialism in the liberal phrasing and middlebrow culture of Camelot. This attracted the Canadian bourgeoisie, who liked to believe that the society which so benefited them was also producing human excellence. How much closer were ‘Jack and Jackie’ to the culture of Forest Hill and Westmount than was the remembering rhetorician from Prince Albert. It was natural for the Globe and Mail to be dazzled by the Kennedys. The villains of my book have gone down before the crime of political assassination. Their instrument in Ottawa, Mr Pearson, has disappeared into whatever limbo awaits the ambitions of self-righteousness. In the US the dominant classes now find themselves in a situation which requires a tighter politics. They must content themselves with the clearer, if grimmer, technocratic skill of Mr Nixon, and even with the direct bourgeois selfdefence of Mr Agnew and Mr Mitchell.3 We are quite proud of our ‘show-biz’ technocrat in Ottawa, when the US can no longer afford that luxury. In such a situation Canadians are less impelled to rush headlong towards continental integration. On the surface there are many stirrings of nationalism. Indeed, nationalism has a clearer place, even in the present Liberal administration, than it ever had in the King, St Laurent, or Pearson eras of that party. Mr Trudeau’s policies may be inade-

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quate, vacillating, and tailored to please the dominant powers, yet they still show traces of care about Canada which could not have been present in Howe’s worship of the corporation, or in the capitalist ‘internationalism’ of Mr Pearson. Although Mr Trudeau seems willing to go along with the central Liberal tradition of never offending the large corporations on substantial issues, he seems more willing than his predecessors to ask those corporations to make small concessions to our supposed independence. Most hopeful is that among the young (sometimes in formal politics but more often outside it), the desire for independence is greater than for many generations. Unlike the generation of 1945, which scrambled into the corporations, they have a realistic suspicion of corporation capitalism, and this is after all the negative ‘sine qua non’ of any nationalism. Nevertheless, below the surface the movement towards integration continues. The immediate reason for this is our position in the empire. We are not in that empire as are the exploited colonies of South America, but rather with the intimacy of a younger brother status. We have all the advantages of that empire, the wealth which pours in from all over the world, the technology which comes to us through the multinational corporations. Yet, because we have formal political independence, we can keep out of some of the dirty work necessary to that empire. We make money from Vietnam; but we do not have to send our sons there. We are like the child of some stockbroker who can enjoy the fruits of his father’s endeavours by living the swinging life, but likes to exclude from his mind where the money comes from. Like most other human beings, Canadians want it both ways. We want through formal nationalism to escape the disadvantages of the American dream; yet we also want the benefits of junior membership in the empire. Unfortunately it is the dominant classes in our society who gain particularly from that membership. This general position has been put most absurdly by the Liberal leader in Quebec, M. Bourassa: ‘American technology, French culture’ – as if technology were something external (e.g. machines) and not itself a spirit which excludes all that is alien to itself.4 As Heidegger has said, technique is the metaphysic of the age.5 Lying behind the immediate decisions arising from our status within the empire is the deeper question of the fate of any particularity in the technological age. What happens to nationalist strivings when the soci-

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eties in question are given over, at the very level of faith, to the realisation of the technological dream? At the core of that faith is service to the process of universalisation and homogenisation. ‘The one best means’ must after all be the same in Chicago, Hamilton, and Dusseldorf. How much difference can there be between societies whose faith in ‘the one best means’ transcends even communist and capitalist differences? The distinction will surely be minimal between two nations which share a continent and a language especially when the smaller of the two has welcomed with open arms the chief instruments of its stronger brother – the corporations. Although our present political status gives us certain advantages over the US, it entails certain disadvantages. Life as little brother often leads to political naivety and even self-righteousness. We have not produced such a firmly defined opposition as have the United States. Not so many of us have been forced to look unflinchingly into the face of Moloch. In stressing this disadvantage, I do not imply the terrible Marxist doctrine that we can encourage great political evils because they are a necessity to later political good. The evil of this doctrine was exposed when the communists espoused, in its name, political polarization during the Weimar Republic. This book was written too much from anger and too little from irony. The ambiguity of the English-speaking Canadian tradition was therefore not made evident. Our hope lay in the belief that on the northern half of this continent we could build a community which had a stronger sense of the common good and of public order than was possible under the individualism of the American capitalist dream. The original sources of that hope in the English-speaking part of our society lay in certain British traditions which had been denied in the American revolution. But the American liberalism which we had to oppose, itself came out of the British tradition – the liberalism of Locke and Adam Smith – which was also to become dominant in England as well as in the US, and which reached its apotheosis and decadence there in the thought of Keynes and Moore and Forster.6 The sense of the common good standing against capitalist individualism depended in Englishspeaking Canada on a tradition of British conservatism which was itself largely beaten in Great Britain by the time it was inherited by Canadians. Our pioneering conditions also made individualist capitalist greed the overwhelming force among our élite. But such a spirit

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could not but express itself as continentalist from the time of the Annexation Manifesto to the present. Many Canadians – in church and state and education – worked against this spirit, and hoped to incarnate certain older traditions from western Europe. But one of the reasons their dreams were vain was that they tried to hold onto these things through Britishness, just at a time when western Europe was turning away from its pre-progressive past and surrendering to the same technological Moloch of war and peace which was to reach its height in the US. To put the matter crudely: the irony is seen when one contemplates the fact that in our century the British have abased themselves before American capitalism for the sake of beating the Germans, only to find after two supposed victories that the Germans are more important to their masters than they are themselves. The twentieth century was not a period in which it was wise to rely on British traditions as counter-attractions to the American dream. Yet these were what we had. I emphasise this failure in irony because many simple people (particularly journalists and professors) took it to be a lament for the passing of a British dream of Canada. It was rather a lament for the romanticism of the original dream. Only a fool could have lived in Toronto in the 1920s and 1930s without recognizing that any British tradition of the common good which transcended contract was only a veneer. Today, the British tradition means that Mr E.P. Taylor, who has given his life to integrating this country into the capitalist empire, still in the 1970s finds it impossible to pronounce the words ‘Kentucky Derby’ in the proper American fashion. A serious criticism of the book has been that to write in terms of inevitability (call it if you will fate) is to encourage the flaccid will which excuses the sin of despair in the name of necessity. By writing of the defeat of Canadian nationalism, one encourages in a small way the fulfilment of the prophecy. Most men, when in a weak position, need immanent hopes to keep alive their will to fight against odds. This has obviously been one of the great strengths of Marxists. Their belief that history was on their side has given them the strength to live with courage in times of difficulty and defeat. The accusation would be that I had no business to write of the defeat of Canadian nationalism because in so doing I may have encouraged it. To answer such a criticism would require a careful discussion of the

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idea of the noble delusion – that is, the doctrine that the health of any society depends on those who have practical authority being attached to virtue, and that this attachment can often only be sustained by opinions which are less than perfectly true. Whatever might be said of that doctrine, it clearly must be applied in writing with prudence – in the light of the circumstances at hand. We live in an era when most of our public men are held by ignoble delusions – generally a mixture of technological progressivism and personal self-assertion – all that is left of official liberalism in the English-speaking world. In such circumstances a writer has a greater responsibility to ridicule the widespread ignoble delusions than to protect the few remaining beliefs which might result in nobility. In an age when the alternatives often seem to be between planetary destruction and planetary tyranny (and when these alternatives are obvious products of the ignoble delusions of ‘the age of reason’), protecting romantic hopes of Canadian nationalism is a secondary responsibility. This criticism is related to a more important one. My writings have often been called pessimistic. The words ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ came into the tradition around the thought of Leibniz, and Voltaire’s rather shallow criticism of him. They were words describing men’s interpretation of the whole. I think the words should be reserved for this purpose and not used loosely about other people’s feeling states or particular predictions. It would be the height of pessimism to believe that our society could go on in its present directions without bringing down upon itself catastrophes. To believe the foregoing would be pessimism, for it would imply that the nature of things does not bring forth human excellence. Appendix: Letter to Stephen Bornstein (Published in William Christian, ed., George Grant: Selected Letters [Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996], 243–4.)

20 February 1967 Dear Stephen [Bornstein]: Thank you very much for your letter. I am complimented by your intelligent questions. I, of course, cannot answer them properly. Let me say two preliminary things. (a) I am primarily a philosopher,

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and one who has decided that modern political philosophy (that is, since Machiavelli) is, at its centre, false. Much of this I have come to on my own, but I have been enormously illuminated by the thought of Leo Strauss. To understand what I am saying one would have to understand Strauss, and that cannot be done easily. Of all his writings I would recommend his essay ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ in the book of that name.7 The essay was given in the city which was holy both to your ancestors and mine. (b) The little book I wrote about Canada people have taken as more important than it is. I wrote it because I was so angry that they had brought those horrible weapons into Canada, but it was not written as a practical political book, but to point to what always lies beyond and is more important than the political, namely the eternal order. Now your questions: 1. [Question: Why do you believe that socialism has not been an adequate means of reviving Canadian nationalism?] Socialism had been too often allied with a cosmopolitanism, which in practical effect led to us being swallowed up, not by an international society, but by American society. (See M.J. Coldwell8 and Frank Underhill.)9 Most socialists were just covert liberals. 2. [Question: To what extent have the beliefs and opinions of your two eminent grandfathers influenced your attitude towards Canada and its relationship to Great Britain?] Obviously, my grandparents influenced me, as I am sure yours did you. I was brought up in a world in which certain British things were taken for granted, but I soon found out what had gone wrong with British imperialism. I thought Ramsay Cook’s strictures on myself10 at this point were foolish because my ancestors were very much part of the liberal establishment, which I imply did not have enough brains to save their country. My relations spent their life pushing the careers of people like Pearson and Martin.11 I dealt with this kind of psychological determinism in the paper you heard me deliver at Toronto and which is coming out in Canadian Dimension.12 If they want psychological determinism, they would do far better to look at my relations with my mother. 3. [Question: What developments, in your opinion, turned you from the internationalism and optimism of The Empire: Yes or No? (1945) to

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the localism and pessimism of Lament for a Nation? What role has a change in religious convictions played in that process?] I wrote the piece about the empire when I was very young13 and when I was just first revolting from the liberalism in which I was brought up. I have found it very difficult indeed to understand the collapse of the English ruling classes since 1945. 4. [Question: To what extent is one justified in calling you a determinist and to what extent an economic determinist?] Determinism and freedom is a problem which arises from the Kantian way of looking at things. As I rejected that way of looking at things and think one can understand political things better through the eyes of Plato and Aristotle, I rejected the determinist-freedom controversy. No, I haven’t stopped beating my wife. 5. [Question: Do you think the epithet ‘red tory’ is suitable in your case?] The epithet ’red tory’ can only be used if you look at the practical part of my book and not at the philosophical. Horowitz14 was only concerned with the practical. I think philosophers are more likely to have sympathy with conservatives than with liberals, but, as I say in my book, modern conservatism comes out of modern assumptions as much as modern liberalism. Much of this labelling arises because people cannot distinguish any longer between ideology and philosophy. Ideology is the permitted form that philosophy often takes in this era. 6. [Question: If the Conservative party had been in power in the 1940s and 1950s, could the death of Canada have been prevented?] ‘Might have been’ questions are largely useless. I do think, however, that as far as English-speaking Canada went the Conservative party has cared about nationalism in a way that the liberals have not. These are poor answers, but I do insist that if my opinions are of any interest to anyone other than myself they must be understood in terms of philosophy. I hope we meet again sometime. Yours, George Grant

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Notes 1 Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, Carleton Library, no. 50 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1970), vii–xii. The Carleton Library series comprised books on Canada published under the editorial supervision of the Institute of Canadian Studies, Carleton University. 2 Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919–2000), lawyer and politician, entered politics in 1965 after a career as a journalist and professor of law at the Université de Montreal. He served as minister of justice (1965–8) before being elected as leader of the Liberal party and prime minister, holding office, except for a period of nine months during 1979–80, until 1984. Grant’s sympathetic attitude to Trudeau did not survive the crisis in October 1970, when his government invoked the War Measures Act. 3 John Newton Mitchell (1913–88), lawyer and politician, was attorney-general of the United States (1969–72) during the first Nixon administration. He was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury (1975) as a result of the Watergate scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation as US president in 1974. Spiro Theodore Agnew (1918–96), lawyer and politician, was governor of Maryland (1966–9) and vice-president of the United States (1969–73). He was forced to resign as a result of his prosecution for accepting bribes and falsifying tax returns. 4 Robert Bourassa (1933–96), politician, served twice as Liberal premier of Quebec (1970–6, 1985–93). Although a federalist, Bourassa was a strong supporter of Quebec autonomy and an advocate of the failed Meech Lake accord (1990), which recognized Quebec as a ‘distinct society’ within Canada. 5 See Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’) in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1977), 115–16. 6 John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes (1883–1946). See page 351, note 36. George Edward Moore (1873–1938), English philosopher, was professor of philosophy at Cambridge (1925–38) and editor of Mind (1921–47). He was the author of a number of influential books, including Principia Ethica (1903), in which he emphasized that philosophy should adhere to common sense. Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970), English novelist and essayist, was a defender of the liberal tradition in his volumes of essays such as Two Cheers for Democracy (1951). His novels include A Passage to India (1924). 7 Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (1959).

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8 M.J.W. Coldwell (1888–1974), English-born teacher and politician, was the leader of the CCF (1942–60). 9 Frank H. Underhill (1889–1971). See page 349, note 15. 10 See Ramsay Cook, ‘Loyalism, Technology and Canada’s Fate,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 5 (1970): 50–60. 11 Paul Joseph James Martin (1903–92). See page 360, note 98. 12 George Grant, ‘Canadian Fate and Imperialism,’ Canadian Dimension 4/3 (March-April 1967): 21–5. See pages 519–32. 13 George Grant, The Empire: Yes or No? (1945). See Collected Works, Volume 1, pp. 97–126. 14 See Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1968), chapter 1.

Letter to Rodney Crook

In this letter, Grant responded to an important challenge to his thought from a friend, Rodney Crook, professor of sociology at Dalhousie. The letter also appears in William Christian, ed., George Grant: Selected Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 231–3, and in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 219–22. Crook later published an article on Lament for a Nation entitled ‘Modernization and Nostalgia, a Note on the Sociology of Pessimism,’ Queen’s Quarterly 73/3 (1966): 269–84. Grant responded to the accusation of pessimism in his new introduction to Lament for a Nation in 1970 (368).

July 19, 1965 Dear Rod, Does the distinction between necessity and good really lead to the factvalue distinction? This seems to me the question: are all dualistic ways of thought the same? I think we can best start from what one thinks the moral judgment to be. My immediate difficulty is that I do not understand how Weber analyzed the making of moral judgments. (You could help me here with an account and with references.)1 I do think I understand what Kant says. What is the difficulty in that account for me (and with as great a thinker as Kant, one has to say that the difficulty may be that one has not grasped the doctrine) is that I do not understand the relation between freedom and reason in his teaching. On the one hand, the very idea of reason presents itself to us so that we know directly that certain actions contradict that very idea. It presents itself to us in the

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imperative mood – he indeed expresses that presentation with the word ‘Achtung.’ Yet at the same time, we self-legislate this commanding law of reason – and are capable of disobedience – that is, we are free in the sense that Weber means.(?) Did Weber take from Kant the idea of freedom without the idea of reason? As I see it, the great advantage of any dualistic system (Kant’s e.g.) is that it squarely faces the problem of suffering and does not swallow it up in any easy explanation. By this I mean that any position must start from a recognition that to exist is to suffer and in human terms it is to learn that we cannot have what we want. (See Plato, Christ, Freud etc.) In other words, from the human standpoint the first thing a philosopher must try and understand is what is the purpose (if any) in the fact that our immediate desires are broken and trampled on from the earliest age. Kant’s answer of duty – that is, of putting aside one’s immediate desires in the name of universal purpose seems to me a very great answer, and of course puts him in some sense squarely in the Christian tradition, the overwhelming power of which was to bring suffering into the Godhead – to be in fact the religion of slaves. (Let me say in parenthesis that your very wise criticism of a debauched Protestantism could, it seems to me, lead you off certain tracks important for the truth, if it leads you away from understanding the strength of Christianity as the religion of suffering. For, not only Christianity, but all the great religions, have great insights about the negation of desire as part of the human condition.) Of course, this account of the moral judgment for Kant had to go with the possibility of science – and that for Kant meant a nature freed from purpose. Therefore reason commanded us rather than nature giving us the law. Now it is at this point that I would like to write down why I cannot give a satisfactory answer to your question. I hope that it will not simply be of interest as my stage but raising some important questions. Looking back from Kant to Plato and Aristotle (for reasons part of which will be evident in the foregoing – but part of which would take too long in a letter) I am faced with an ambiguity. I think (but am not sure) that there is in Plato a much greater understanding of the suffering of man than in Aristotle. The transcendence of the forms (the criticism of which in Aristotle is badly parroted by nearly every modern student of philosophy with one year’s training – ‘Plato hypostasized concepts etc.

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etc.’) does appear to me very similar to Kant in the sense that the good by which we act comes to us somehow from beyond nature – call it if you will by that hated word supernaturally – and demands the death of worldly desires. All the psychological or sociological reductions of that position in the name of accusing it of repression, aberration, and perversion do not seem to me to get around its appeal for two reasons: (a) the meaning of the whole does not seem to be understandable in the light of evil in an immanent way; (b) the question of the meaning of the whole cannot easily be put aside either existentially or scientifically. The ambiguity this presents to me may be put historically in two ways: (a) I am not sure I am interpreting Plato correctly; (b) I am at last realizing that there are certain arguments on the Aristotelian side which I have not met and which mean that I have to study at a more than student level A[ristotle]’s ‘Ethics’ and ‘Politics.’ (a) The interpretation of Plato. At the beginning of the Republic there is the statement of Glaucon about the sufferings of the just man – I have always taken that to be a straight affirmation of the transcendence of the Good. Yet in a recent book of Strauss’s he mentions (and he has some weight with me) that this is in Glaucon’s mouth and is an exaggeration because we must not say that absolute justice and suffering go together.2 I presume he is speaking as an Aristotelian and that he implies that for them to go together would mean that there would not be an immanent political science of A[ristotle]’s variety and that it leads to that sharp distinction between law and right which is so characteristic of Kant and indeed of Protestantism. I see the point but consider it a more important point that, to repeat, in the light of the human condition the ultimate purpose must be transcendent. In other words, the traditional interpretation that Plato was concerned with was the justice of the wise man, while Aristotle was concerned with the justice of the wise man and the natural justice of common sense, I can see. This is of course very closely related to the fact that seems to me indubitable (however one interprets the ambiguous dialogues), that Plato differs from Aristotle in believing that theory can never be detached from the moral life, while Aristotle affirms the independence of theory from moral virtue. In a rather different way this same distinction seems to me possible to make between Kant and Hegel – and of course I am on the Platonic and Kantian side. Why? Because I do not think it is comprehensible that one could come to understand the ulti-

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mate purpose of things except in this way – otherwise is one not shallow about evil? A circle? Yet at the same time I am at the moment very much held by the argument ‘how can one have political philosophy, if you take the Platonic side – that is, transcendence?’ I would recognize the terrible tendencies towards obscurantism in any doctrines of transcendence. Yet once again, without such a doctrine I do not see that one is not led by the facts of evil to give up the idea of ultimate purpose. Now in terms of an acceptance of what I take to be the Platonic position, when one speaks of the separation of good and necessity one is speaking of that separation as it must appear to us here below. It does not imply that the order of necessity and the order of morality do not both proceed from the Good. Presumably, the beauty of the world which is manifested both in the order of necessity and in the order of morality may to the follower of Plato teach us more about the ultimate unity of those orders than Kant (in his wonderful Critique of Judgment) would say we are vouchsafed. But if my interpretation of Plato is right, he stands quite close to Kant as an agnostic. Socrates: ‘The philosopher is the man who knows that he knows not.’ Also Pascal: ‘We know too much to be sceptics; we know too little to be dogmatists.’3 Kant certainly says that in the preface to the 2nd edition of the 1st Critique. Beyond this, and here I know nothing – it is evidently possible according to the mystics to come to an understanding of the beauty of necessity as we submit to its afflictions and love others who are so submitted. But about that I must repeat that I know nothing. In my book (which was a popular book) I made clear that I spoke simply from the position of the person who must proceed in the practical life from the position that the order of morality and the order of necessity cannot be known as proceeding from the Good.4 This is a poor answer, but the best I can quickly do at the minute. Ever, George Grant

Notes 1 See, for example, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press 1946), 129–56.

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2 See ‘On Plato’s Republic,’ in Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally 1964), 137. 3 Plato, Apology, 21d; Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 434: ‘Who will unravel this tangle? Nature confutes the sceptics, and reason confutes the dogmatists. What, then, will you become, O men! who try to find out by your natural reason what is your true condition? You cannot avoid one of these sects, nor adhere to one of them.’ 4 Lament for a Nation, chapter 7 (346).

Notes on the Constitutional Question: A Memorandum Written at the Request of the Rt. Hon. John G. Diefenbaker

In the fall of 1965, Grant responded to a request from the Rt. Hon. John G. Diefenbaker, leader of the opposition and former prime minister, by sending him the following thoughts on the constitution. Prime Minister Pearson had called an election to be held that November. The letter was published in William Christian, ed., George Grant: Selected Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 234–8.

September 27, 1965 The Rt. Hon. J.G. Diefenbaker, The Office of the Leader of the Opposition, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario Dear Mr Diefenbaker, In the light of our telephone conversation of last Thursday, herewith are some notes on the Constitutional question which you asked for by the beginning of this week. I do not know whether they are of any help at all, but it has been a great honour to write them for you. Yours sincerely, George Grant

Notes on the Constitutional Question 1. The Crisis in Confederation In two years’ time we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding

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of our nation. Shall that centennial of Confederation be the occasion to offer thanks to those countless Canadians in all walks of life who have laboured to build this country? Shall it be a time for dedication to new tasks and new greatness? Or rather will it be a time of drifting and uncertainty – a time when we are filled with doubt about our country’s future? This is the question that all Canadians must ask themselves in the weeks that lie ahead. We cannot close our eyes to the fact that in the last 2 1/2 years uncertainty about our national destiny has been felt throughout the land. The chief cause of this faltering is the vacuum in the federal government at Ottawa. No nation can long exist without a national government which knows where it is going. There is a sense throughout the country that there is no hand on the tiller to direct our central government. It is strange that those who once talked so much about ‘stable government’ have been the very men who in the last years have abdicated the proper responsibilities of the federal government. It is strange, indeed, that we should now hear the election slogan ‘strong central government’ from just those men who in the last years are responsible for the vacuum that now exists in Ottawa. How can you have stable government when you abdicate your responsibility to be a national government? 2. The Conservative Party Is the National Party The Conservative party has always been the instrument for the building of a united Canadian nation. Macdonald and Cartier, Tupper and Tilley moulded Confederation in 1867 to establish a new nationality – a northern nationality.1 They built on the northern half of this new continent a nation friendly with our great southern neighbour – but distinct and different. They dreamed of a society in which men and women would know themselves as Canadians – something new and unique in the world. Macdonald knew what labour there was in building such a nation. He often quoted the words (of Daniel Webster). ‘Let our object be our country, our whole country and nothing but our country.’2 Today as much as then, it is the intention of the Canadian people to be a nation. It is the role of the Conservative party to give leadership to that purpose.

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3. Unity in Diversity The party of Macdonald and Cartier did not think that in such a nation all regions, all peoples, all cultures should be the same. They knew that one great purpose of Confederation was to preserve and maintain French culture on this continent. Cartier’s vision told him that only in the setting of this northern nation could the French fact be preserved in the new world. He stood for a united Canadian nation just because he knew that it was only in such a unity that the French Canadians could protect their way of life. ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’3 Today, just as much as a hundred years ago: Canada cannot do without Quebec; Quebec cannot do without Canada. And this has always been the Canadian way – the Conservative party’s way. As people from other lands have come to enrich this nation, they have not been required to give up their heritage. In the prairies and in the large cities of Ontario, to be a Canadian does not mean to give up your own traditions. It means to bring that heritage into a common loyalty – the loyalty to Canada as a nation. And so it is with the provinces and regions of this country. Who would want people from Nova Scotia and people from British Columbia to be exactly the same in character and culture? Yes, the Conservative party says one Canada; but one Canada which rejoices in its diversity. This is why we have built up our complex structure of federalised government. A great Canadian Conservative explained federalism clearly a hundred years ago. D’Arcy McGee said: ‘The principle of federation is a generous principle. It is a principle eminently favourable to liberty, because local affairs are left to be dealt with by local bodies, and cannot be interfered with by those who have no local interest in them, while matters of a general character are left to a general government.’4 4. Fiscal Aid to the Provinces and Municipalities It was because we believe in diversity that the Conservative government after 1957 substantially increased financial assistance to the provincial governments. Such a fiscal policy should continue in the years ahead. There are many things that the provincial and municipal levels of government can carry out much better than a centralised bureaucracy at Ottawa. The very basis of the Conservative idea of govern-

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ment is that local and individual initiative can get things done better than having things done for them from Ottawa. Leaders such as Robarts, Stanfield, and Roblin know the needs of their provinces, as Ottawa cannot.5 Because of its control over certain sources of tax revenue, the federal government must help the provinces and the municipalities to meet their responsibilities in the growing fields of education and with all the difficult problems which arise from automation. 5. The Calling of a National Constitutional Convention New circumstances require new negotiations. The federal structure of Canada is undergoing strain. It needs readjustments to meet the new technological revolution; it needs readjustments to meet the just aspirations of the people of Quebec. The Conservative government will therefore call a National Constitutional Convention. The Convention would be comprised of governmental leaders from the federal, provincial, and municipal levels of authority. When a country is dealing with the very arteries of its lifeblood, such negotiations must be undertaken by the elected representatives of the people at all levels – not by a Commission, the members of which have no elected responsibility. Nor can we settle the future fabric of this country simply in private negotiations from which the people are shut out. 6. Essential Federal Powers Must Not Be Compromised But there is one principle which must not be compromised in any negotiations. The federal government cannot surrender those powers which are necessary to the preservation and strength of this northern nation. The purpose of Confederation was to build a northern nationality. Such a nationality requires that certain powers remain without question in the federal government. Therefore no Conservative government can compromise these powers. To do so would be to betray the very purpose for which this party exists. To compromise the fundamental prerogatives of the national government would mean that Canada would become a series of disconnected regions, rather than a nation. Gradually and inevitably these regions would lose connection with each other and would fall into the orbit of the neighbouring regions to the south. Would this be in the interests of

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Quebec? For a hundred years, the men of little faith have been saying that this is what must inevitably happen to Canada. It is the duty of the Conservative party to see that it does not happen to our country. Certain national powers are obvious – external affairs and national defence. But even in these areas new questions loom in the immediate future. Canada and the United States are going to have to work out together the problems of their common North American living arrangements – particularly in such fields as our common need of fresh water for our industries and cities. This cannot be properly done without a firm and certain federal government which is determined to safeguard the interests of all parts of Canada. The federal government must be strong in the sense that it bears responsibility for the welfare of all Canadians – of each Canadian region. 7. The Abdication of Federal Power by the Present Administration The absence of proper federal authority is what must fill us with alarm at what has been happening in Ottawa in the last 2 1/2 years. We cannot know if these essential prerogatives are being bargained away in secret. What we do know is that the present government shows no willingness to stand up for its own authority when that authority is questioned. The abdication of its national responsibilities in essential matters by the present administration can only lead in one direction, if it is not checked. When federal-provincial relations take on the appearance of negotiations between foreign powers, the spectacle must surely sadden all patriotic Canadians. There is a close connection between the scandals which have beset this administration and their abdication of proper federal authority. We have had scandals before; but these scandals are different. Never before has anything so base as the international drug trade got as close to the very seat of federal power. Corruption in the past has never been as insidious as this. When an animal is weak, the vultures start to circle and to descend. And the same is true of governments. Rivard and Banks are men who know instinctively where weakness is present and how to make use of it.6 A federal government which is afraid to exercise its authority will be open to more and more of such occurrences. Furthermore, a government that comes to power in dependence on such corrupt forces can never hold the loyalty of young Canadians.

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Appendix: Two Other Letters to Diefenbaker (Published respectively in Christian, ed., George Grant: Selected Letters, 238 and 247–9.)

23 December 1965 The Rt. Hon. J.G. Diefenbaker, Leader of the Opposition, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ont. Dear Mr Diefenbaker: When I had the honour to interview you during the election, you told me some extremely interesting things about the relations of your government with President Kennedy. I write to express the hope that you will at some time put these matters on the record in writing. I know that with all your immediate duties such questions of history must seem less important. Nevertheless, I think it is very important that this be done for the sake of your own historical reputation, and for the sake of the country. The Liberal propagandists have been so unfair in attacking you that it matters very much that the truth you know should not be left unsaid. Did you notice, for instance, how gross some of the books about Kennedy have been regarding your position? I hope that some day you will be able to take the time for this activity, which would do so much for Canadian nationalism. Always my admiration and regards, Yours sincerely, George Grant

10 December 1968 Dear Mr Diefenbaker: I am sorry to have been so slow in answering, but have been ill since you were here. You paid me a great honour when you suggested that I might be your biographer. As the whole question raises very important questions for Canadian history, I hope you will not mind my writing to you about it at length.

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It seems to me that there are two separate questions involved: (1) As soon as possible there should be brought out with your stamp of authority, an answer to a lot of the nonsense that has been put around by prejudiced and unthoughtful journalists. Particularly two questions should be clarified: (a) the account of the relations of your government with the Kennedy administration and (b) what were the forces in the Conservative party which never accepted loyalty to yourself and were determined to hurt you? I think this should include not only an account of Camp’s machinations, but what had been going on for a long time before that, even when you were Prime Minister.7 These two questions, it seems to me should be dealt with right away because of their great impact on Canada’s continued sovereignty. (2) The biography is a different matter. I do not think it can be written for many years. In the present state of Canada, it is absolutely essential that you continue in the public realm and this will be so for many years. While this is so, the biography cannot be written. To put it quite frankly, I might easily predecease yourself. I think it is important now concerning the biography, that you make arrangements that all the papers and material are in the hands of totally reliable institutions and under the control of particular people whom you know you can trust absolutely. This leads me to suggest the following things: (a) If it were of any use to you, I could come up to Ottawa for several weeks and sit with a tape recorder while you put the history down in your own inimitable way. These tapes could then be put in some official place and only allowed to be heard under an order with your signature. If you thought the archives at McMaster would be a good place, we can have the arrangements that any tape or paper there could only be released under a triple signature of yourself, myself, and the archivist, or others whom you choose. (b) If beyond the tapes you were interested in writing something, it would be a great honour for me to do anything in assisting that process. I think it important that you arrange that your papers for now and always are put out of the reach of irresponsible and stealing hands. I had something to do with the Whitney papers (the premier of Ontario)8 and you would be surprised how many were stolen by the descendants of the Liberals who had fought the Ontario Hydro. We

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had to close them down and put them under control. I think the important thing in this matter is that you name people whom you trust. If you chose McMaster as a suitable place, we would be greatly honoured and the arrangements whereby you and your successors could remain entirely in charge of them could be worked out. This letter may seem to be too aware of potential dishonesty, but there are great public issues at stake and the interpretation of history always influences the future. For example, it is clear from Pearson’s recent lectures in England that he does not much care about the future of Canadian sovereignty.9 Thank you again for so honouring me by this suggestion. Please give my best regards to Mrs Diefenbaker, whom it was such a pleasure to meet. Hoping to hear from you in this matter. Sincerely, George P. Grant

Notes 1 Sir John Alexander Macdonald (1815–91). See page 349, note 20. Sir George-Étienne Cartier (1814–73), lawyer, railway promoter, and politician, was co-premier with Macdonald in the Union parliaments of 1857–8 and 1858–62. He dominated Quebec politics for a generation and was the most important French father of confederation. Sir Charles Tupper (1821–1915), politician, diplomat, was premier of Nova Scotia (1864–7) during crucial years leading to confederation, held various cabinet positions in federal Conservative governments, and finally became prime minister for eight weeks in 1896. Sir Samuel Leonard Tilley (1818–96), businessman and politician, was Liberal premier of New Brunswick (1861–5, 1866–7); he subsequently became a minister in Macdonald’s Conservative governments and lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick. 2 Daniel Webster (1782–1852), American orator and politician, concluded his Bunker Hill Monument address with these words on 17 June 1825. 3 ‘The more things change, the more they remain the same.’ 4 Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825–68), Irish radical, politician, journalist, poet, and historian, was probably the most eloquent father of confederation. He was part of the ‘Great Coalition’ with Macdonald and Cartier that led up to

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the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences and then confederation. He was assassinated at the age of forty-two. John Parmenter Robarts (1917–82). See page 365, note 130. Robert Lorne Stanfield (1914–2003), lawyer, politician, and premier of Nova Scotia (1956–67), was later national leader of the Conservative opposition (1967–76). Dufferin (‘Duff’) Roblin (1917– ), businessman and politician, was Progressive Conservative premier of Manitoba (1958–67). His administration was noted for upgrading highways, creating provincial parks, modernizing health and welfare agencies, restoring the use of French in education, and assisting private economic development. Lucien Rivard (1915–2002), convicted drug smuggler, escaped from prison in 1965 under circumstances that created a scandal for the Pearson government. The resulting report of a royal commission led to the resignation of Guy Favreau, minister of justice. Harold Chamberlain (Hal) Banks (1905–85), American trade union leader, was invited to Canada by shipping company interests, supported by the federal government, to form a rival union to the communist-controlled Canadian Seamen’s Union. Banks succeeded in making the Canadian District of the Seafarers’ International Union the dominant union in the shipping industry. However, his methods resulted in a federal government inquiry, which branded him a thug and a hoodlum. Convicted of conspiracy to assault, he escaped to the United States, where he remained until his death. Dalton Kingsley Camp (1920–2002), public relations executive, politician, and journalist, made an important contribution to Robert Stanfield’s election as premier of Nova Scotia in 1956 and was the Progressive Conservative party’s national president from 1964 to 1969, during which time he was instrumental in the deposition of Diefenbaker as the party’s leader. Sir James Whitney (1843–1914), premier of Ontario, 1905–14. See page 364, note 124. L.B. Pearson, Peace in the Family of Man (1969), the Reith Lectures for 1968.

Protest and Technology

This address was entitled ‘Revolution, Responsibility, and Conservatism’ when it was delivered at the Toronto International Teach-In held at Varsity Arena 8–10 October 1965. The CBC broadcast the speech on 10 October as ‘Revolution and Response’ on the radio series CBC Sunday Night; the Globe and Mail published excerpts on 12 October under the title ‘Stand on Guard for Independence’; and the entire speech appeared under the title ‘Realism in Political Protest’ in Christian Outlook 21/2 (Nov. 1965), later appearing with minor alterations as ‘Critique of the New Left’ in Our Generation 3/4–4/1 (May 1966): 46–51. The full text of the original address appeared again as ‘A Critique of the New Left’ in Canada and Radical Social Change, edited by Dimitrios I. Roussopoulos (Montreal: Black Rose Books 1973), 55, 57–61, and finally in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 84–90. The text presented here is a version Grant revised and published under the title ‘Protest and Technology’ in Revolution and Response: Selections from the Toronto International Teach-In, edited and with an introduction by Charles Hanly (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1966), 122–8. We have noted changes that might be thought significant. We include a letter Grant wrote to the editor of Christian Outlook on 29 December 1965 concerning their editorial comment on his address, and a note on Grant’s disagreement with the new left members of the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) on the question of civil disobedience at the Canadian parliament.

My position is that of a Canadian nationalist and a conservative. It is necessary to start here for the following reasons. To speak of the moral

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First page of Teach-In speech, 1965, edited by the author.

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responsibility of the citizen in general is impossible. The question depends entirely on the kind of regime in which he is called to live. The United States is a world empire, the largest to date. Its life at home is controlled by mammoth corporations, both private and public, and through these bureaucracies it reaches out to control a large portion of the globe and soon beyond the globe. The nineteenth-century idea of the democratic citizen, shaping the society be inhabits by the vote and the support of political parties, has less and less meaning in such an empire. In local matters, the citizen of an empire can achieve some minor goals, but he cannot shape the larger institutions or move the centres of power. Democratic citizenship is not a notion that is compatible with technological empires. Canada moves increasingly to being a satellite of that empire. Canadians live much of their lives under the same imperial bureaucracies. The economic and social institutions of Toronto are not much different from the institutions of Chicago. Yet despite the similarities there is a sense in which we still have more citizenship here than in the United States because we are still a smaller community and have some remnants of sovereignty, at the political level. Traditional democratic methods, the vote and support for political parties, have more meaning in our smaller sphere. And this greater degree of democracy might be truly useful to the world if we in Canada could use it to show that North American relations with Asia were not determined in Washington alone. It would be foolish to overestimate this possibility in the light of Canada’s cowardly acquiescence with American actions in Vietnam. To pass to the broader question of what it is to be a citizen in the Western empire in this era: Let me start by a consideration of the position of the new left in North America. This movement has public significance because of the role it played in the civil rights movement. I find myself in agreement with the account the leaders of this movement give of the inhumanity of the institutions of North America. When I read Professor Lynd1 in Liberation, speaking of the harm which the institutions of this society do to human personality both at home and abroad, I am in agreement with him.2 When I hear what Mr Savio3 in Berkeley or Mr Drushka4 in Toronto write about the inhumanity of our multiversities, by and large I agree with them. How can a conservative not feel sympathy with the outrage of the new left against the emptiness and dehumanization that this society produces? When the

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new left speaks, however, of overcoming these conditions by protest, I think they are indulging in dreams, and even dangerous dreams. The moral fervour that accompanies such dreams is too valuable to be wasted on anything but reality. When they speak as if it were possible by marching and sitting to turn North American society away from being an empire, protecting its interests in the world by increasing violence, I do not understand the source of their hope. When some of them speak as if the empires of the East were not moving in much the same social direction as the United States, I think they are deluding themselves. When they propose that our modern universities can be turned into human sources of enlightenment, I do not think they understand the role that the universities play in the imperial, technological system. I think they have not looked at our society closely enough. Their politics of hope and of Utopia – indeed with some of them another outbreak of the traditional form of the politics of the apocalypse – seems to me a kind of dream from which analysis should awaken them. They seem to think that these massive institutions which stifle human excellence can be overcome, and I think this arises from a profound misinterpretation of modern history. For several centuries the chief energies of Western society have been directed to the mastery of nature – at first non-human nature and now human nature. We now live in the era where that process moves quickly to its apotheosis. The motive of this pursuit was that by it men should be made free. Freedom was its rallying cry. And it is in the pursuit of this dream of freedom that we have built the mammoth institutions, international and national, in which we live. This pursuit of the mastery of nature has gained men great victories over natural necessity. Who can doubt that? But at the same time as it has produced these victories, it has subjected men to the forces of the artificial necessities of the technological society. ‘The further the technical mechanism develops which allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities. The artificial necessity of technologies is not less harsh and implacable for being much less obvious [sic] menacing than natural necessity’ (J. Ellul, The Technological Society).5 This is the crucial question about citizenship in this era: what is left of the citizen’s power in a society ruled by the technological apparatus? What I do not understand is why anybody should believe that by

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some dialectical process of history there should suddenly spring out of this technological system a free and humane society. First Western men and now men everywhere in the world are driving with enormous speed to construct this technological strait-jacket for mankind. By its very mammoth nature these institutions must limit the possibility of responsibility for the citizen. What evidence is there for believing that this system can be turned toward the ends of human excellence by protest? What reason have we for believing that the vast imperial structures will act toward each other and toward their neighbours in a nobler way than empires in the past? And now they have vast powers with which to pursue their ferocity. In the technological era masses of people and public opinion do not count politically as they did in the past. They can be controlled or destroyed. The empires may restrain themselves out of fear, but the small nations who are unfortunate enough to be caught between them will be ground between the millstones. And to speak about the institutions within the empires which I know best, the universities, what reason is there to believe that they can be diverted from the very purpose for which they exist? The modern universities exist, after all, to provide personnel to keep the whole technological apparatus going. That technological apparatus is now autonomous and produces its own needs, which are quite detached from human needs. Are such institutions, which are the very fabric of the modern quest, to be diverted from their end? The supreme example of the autonomy of technique is surely the space program. Vast resources of brains, money, materials are poured out in the US and in the USSR to keep this fantastic program proliferating. And it is accepted by the masses in both societies not only as necessary but as one of man’s crowning glories. One leader of the United States’ space program said that as we cannot change the environment of space, we will have to change man, and therefore we will have to produce beings with organs, half-flesh and half-electronic. If it can be done, it must be done and it surely will be done. This is what I mean by the autonomy of technique. The question whether technique serves human good is no longer asked; it has become an end in itself. There is a lot of talk among the new left about the present system of society collapsing because of its internal contradictions. What signs are there of this collapse? The American system with its extension into Western Europe seems to me supremely confident and to have the

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overwhelming majority of its citizens behind it. The same seems to be true of the Russian system and it will be increasingly true of the Chinese system. One immediate reason why I think the new left is deluded about what is happening in North America is because it has misinterpreted the events which took place in the southern United States. It says today: Look at our triumphs in the South. We will now carry these triumphs of citizen action into new fields of social revolution. What has been forgotten is that the powerful among the institutions of North America were more than willing that the society of the white South should be broken. The civil rights movement had behind it all the powerful forces of the American empire. It marched protected by federal troops, it had the blessing of the leading government figures, it was encouraged night after night over NBC and CBS. There was violence from the white South but the traditional South is not an important part of the American power élite. It will surely be a different matter when the protests are against some position which is dear and close to the American ‘liberal’ establishment. We have only to think about how much is accomplished by protests about Vietnam or nuclear policy. The widespread protests against the insane war in Vietnam have not stopped the massive escalations of the American government. Also the new left should recognize that in our society dissent and protest are easily bureaucratized. They can be taken into the system and trivialized. They can be made to serve the interests of the system they are supposed to be attacking, by showing that free speech is allowed. Liberalism is the ideology of the American system and it is an effective gelding knife against opposition. To state the foregoing is not to advocate inaction or cynicism. Nothing I have said denies for one moment the nobility of protest. Nothing I have said denies that justice is good and that injustice is evil, and that it is required of human beings to know the difference between the two. To live with courage in the world is always better than retreat or disillusionment. Human beings are less than themselves when they are cut off from political action. Indeed, one of the finest things about the present protest movements in North America is that they try to give meaning to citizenship in a society which by its enormity and impersonality cuts people off from the public world. Anybody who lives within a university must know that the students who care enough about the world to protest are much finer than those who are inter-

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ested in public affairs simply because they want to climb within the system and use it to gain recognition for themselves. Indeed, how much finer are those who protest than those who crawl through the university simply as a guarantee of the slow road to death in the suburbs. In our monolithic society the pressures upon the individual to retreat from the public sphere are immense. The new politics of protest have tried to overcome these pressures and to give new meaning to citizenship. Nobody should attack them for that. What I argue against is the politics based on easy hopes about the future human situation. The hope, for example, that some future transformation of power in North America is going to overcome the implicit difficulties of the technological apparatus, and that the North American society can in the future radically change its direction. Hope for the future has been the chief opiate of modern life. And nobody has been more responsible for ladling out that opiate than Marx.6 Demagogues on both sides of the Cold War peddle that opiate to justify every act of immoderation. Its danger is that it prevents men from looking clearly at their situation. It teaches them to dream dreams instead of coming to terms with facts. The most dangerous quality of the politics of Utopia is that its opposite side (and this it can easily become) is despair. If people have vast expectations of hope about a society such as ours, they are going to be disappointed, and then their moral fervour can turn rancid and bitter. Moral fervour is too precious a commodity not to be put into the service of reality. If protest is to be effective in this era, if we are to be successful in creating space for human spontaneity in the iron maiden of the technological apparatus we have created, then it is essential that those who are in the vanguard of the protest combine their action with the deepest and most careful thought. Action without thought will be an impotent waste of time. In this ferocious era, if we are to keep ourselves human and be effective citizens, then our first obligation is to be free, and, by free I mean knowing the truth about what is; to know what is so, without simplifications, without false hopes, without moral fervour divorced from moral clarity. If we do not ‘know the score’ in this era, we lay ourselves open to the innumerable public clichés so that what we are doing loses all touch with reality. The central Christian platitude still holds good. ‘The truth shall make you free.’7 I use freedom here quite differently from those who believe that we are free when we have gained mastery

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over man or over nature. It is even different from the simple cry for political liberty, ‘Freedom now!’ For in the long haul freedom without knowledge of reality is empty, and vacuous. The greatest figure of our era, Gandhi,8 was interested in public action and in political liberty, but he knew that the right direction of that action had to be based on knowledge of reality – with all the discipline and order and study that that entailed. Truth-seeking is, of course, hard to accomplish in this society. Our universities have at many points retreated from it into fact-gathering and technological mastery, into what is now called ‘the knowledge industry.’ Most of our social scientists have used the idea of a valuefree social science to opt out of the battle of what constitutes the good society. They spend their time in discovering techniques for adjusting people to the system. The philosophers have often opted out to play clever professional games. Much of the religious tradition seems a worn-out garment, not able to help in the search for truth. Above all, what may hold people from the search for truth is that the human situation in the totally realized technological world may be so unpalatable that we simply do not want to face it. If we do not face reality, we may be able to avoid despair and pessimism, but we also cut ourselves off from any chance of maturity and effectiveness. I have concentrated on North America because we in North America are inevitably in the forefront of the world. We are the society that has most completely realized the dominance of technique over every aspect of human life. Every year we are moving with prodigious speed to the greater and greater realization of that system. All other societies move at various speeds to the same kind of society we are now creating. We do not know yet the laws of this technological apparatus. Because that system is most fully realized with us, we are the first people who can look it in the face, and we are called upon to see it for what it is and not fool ourselves about it. We must face the laws of its necessity, its potential to free men from natural necessity but also its potential for inhumanity and tyranny. We must not delude ourselves and we must not throw up our hands. We must define our possible areas of influence with the utmost clarity. Where in this mammoth system can we use our intelligence and our love to open up areas where human excellence can exist? How can we use the most effective pressure to see that the empire of which we are a

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satellite uses moderation and restraint in its relations with the rest of the world? I end where I began, in agreement with the delegate from Cambodia, that our greatest obligation as Canadian citizens is to work for a country which is not simply a satellite of any empire. Appendix: Letter to the Editor of Christian Outlook The letter appeared under the caption ‘Readers’ Outlook’ in Christian Outlook 21/5 (Feb. 1966): 17; it is also included in William Christian, ed., George Grant: Selected Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 239.

29 December 1965 The Editor, Christian Outlook Dear Sir: In the November issue, in which you published a speech of mine, you also said, ‘In effect, he (G.P. Grant) seems to be suggesting that real change will only come about within the power structures of society, not over against them.’ It amazes me how such a deduction could be drawn from my words. I certainly think that real change is going to take place within the power structures, but it is going to be changed for the worse. I was not saying to the protesting young that they should not fight the present power structures. To imply that the present power structures will lead to change for the good is to misjudge completely their present activity in Vietnam. What seems to be implied in your editorial is that change for the good (e.g. progress) must happen. This proposition I would entirely deny. Yours sincerely, George Grant Appendix: Grant’s Disagreement with the New Left over Civil Disobedience at the Canadian Parliament9 1. Grant’s Notes for a Letter to Art Pape of SUPA about His Position on Civil Disobedience

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(SUPA had planned an action in Ottawa 26 February 1966 against Canadian complicity in the Vietnam War. Grant had discussed his possible participation with some of SUPA’s leaders, Art Pape, Tony Hyde, Ken Drushka, Clayton Ruby, Matt Cohen, Jim Laxer, and Douglas Ward. Grant met with about twenty-five SUPA members for two days of discussions about Canada and the Vietnam War. When SUPA leaders decided to include civil disobedience in the Ottawa action, Grant voiced his objections, leading to a parting of ways with SUPA.)

February 1966 To Art Pape A. Statement: I do not rule out civil disobedience at Parliament and say [I] will not do it. But I cannot give you a commitment to do it on such and such a date until it has been shown that Parliament will not respond to other approaches. B. Operation: If we are asking Parliament to do something, then we have to present them with very specific things to do and use at first all means of protest short of civil disobedience, – vigils etc. If there is no response or an inadequate response, and if one can then clearly have shown that Parliament is an accomplice in genocide, then I will go on to civil disobedience and the thesis[?] that Canada is an accomplice in genocide. But I won’t do it till the other carefully worked out tactics for getting Parliament to do something have been solidly worked for. C. Reasons: (a) You have been through this and say that Parliament is dead. I have not been through this and cannot take your experience. (b) I am a profound believer in constitutional government and will not commit civil disobedience till the other forms of protest have been tried – but I will do it if we are agreed about Canadian complicity in genocide. As I see the operation is going to be a much longer one, in my view I could see civil disobedience in May or June. The consequences of this are:

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(a) You may wish to break off co-operation and I will quite understand that. (b) If not, I am willing myself to [spend] much more time on the whole thing and to see it through over a much larger period and could say right now that I would be willing to commit civil disobedience if it becomes a necessary thing in the light of the failure to move Parliament by other tactics. (c) I recognize that I have wasted a lot of your time – by not being able to see this clearly. But that is just my failure and I am sorry. (d) I recognize that the young people who go along with you may only be willing to act if there is immediate civil disobedience. I am sorry about that – but cannot act otherwise. 2. Letter to Silhouette, McMaster University Student Newspaper (Published in Christian, ed., George Grant: Selected Letters, 240.)

22 February 1966 Mr Peter Calamai Editor in Chief, Silhouette McMaster University Hamilton Dear Sir: Recently, I have seen a printed document around the university in which my name is associated with the liberal doctrine of civil disobedience. I hope you will allow me to use your columns to disassociate myself from this doctrine. In a constitutional regime, civil disobedience should be a last resort and should only be used when the government is directly responsible for an undoubted evil. It is both foolish and irresponsible to propose civil disobedience as a threat to a government with which one wants to hold rational discussions to persuade it to change its policies. The terrible events which are unfolding in Vietnam are not going to be helped by denying the principles of constitutional government in Canada. Yours sincerely, George Grant Chairman

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3. Excerpt from Letter to Douglas Ward of SUPA 16 March 1966 Dear Mr Ward: ... The whole business about the operation expresses the difficulty of people working together who do not understand what the others are thinking about. I feel I was remiss not to have made clearer at an earlier stage how very different my view of the world, and how to act in it, is from people such as [Dimitri] Roussopolous. My failure at that point was, I think, largely caused by my desire to try and understand what it was that had produced such fine and fascinating people among the young as [Art] Pape, [Tony] Hyde, etc. I should have made clear much sooner the fact that there is a vast gap between those who think there is no alternative to action within the operations of constitutional government (even if that can include civil disobedience) and those who are essentially revolutionaries. I think also the confusion was caused on both sides by the deep horror of what is happening in Vietnam and the desire to do something about it. Well, the past is the past, and I have certainly learned a lot, although obviously there is not much point to that if it is at the expense of any possible effectiveness about Canada’s place in the world. ... Yours ever, George Grant

Notes 1 Staughton Lynd (1929– ), labour activist, professor of history, Yale University, and son of the American sociologist Robert Lynd (1892–1970), was a leading figure in the US civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. He later published The Other Side (1967) and Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution (1967). 2 Liberation was a pacifist magazine produced in New York City that played a leading role in the movement to stop the war in Vietnam. 3 Mario Savio (1942–96), student activist and physicist, led the protest at the University of California at Berkeley against the university administration and against the war in Vietnam.

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4 Ken Drushka left the Globe and Mail to become one of the Toronto leaders of the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA), a Canada-wide group which conducted anti-war activities and community organizing. Grant met with him and others in SUPA to discuss mutual opposition to the war. 5 Jacques Ellul (1912–94), professor of law and history at the University of Bordeaux and a noted theologian and lay member of the Reformed Church of France, was an active member of the Resistance during the Second World War and later served as mayor of Bordeaux. Among his books are The Technological Society (1964), Propaganda (1962), and Prayer and Modern Man (1970). 6 This statement about Marx was not in the original speech and did not appear in the Christian Outlook version. It was included in the Our Generation version. 7 ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’ (John 8:32). 8 Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948). See page 366, note 138. 9 For an account of Grant’s connection with the new left, see William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 254–61. See also Matt Cohen, Typing: A Life in Twenty-six Keys (Toronto: Random House 2000), 33–42.

Letter to the Globe and Mail: ‘Freedom Fighter’

Grant wrote this letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail in April 1965.

Dear Editor, In your news columns of March 30 the following sentence appears: ‘The Northrop F-5 Freedom Fighter, the light jet strike aircraft that Canada is building for its new mobile forces, has won its wings in Vietnam.’ I write in the hope that a phrase such as ‘has won its wings’ might be dropped from our vocabulary. It has the ring of knights in armour or of the early days of flying when individual fliers were pitting their skill against equals in the sky. In those days, terms with chivalrous connotations might be appropriate. The present use of aircraft in the southern part of Vietnam is against peasant opponents with no aircraft of their own. They are part of organized industrial might gaining its will against a largely unindustrialized people. Leaving aside the question of whether North Americans have to do this, we surely should eschew the use of romantic terms to describe this endeavor. That these aircraft are to be produced in Canada should make us even less willing to sugarcoat the purpose of their production. George Grant

Individuality in Mass Society

CBC Television broadcast this half-hour interview by Adrienne Clarkson1 on the First Person series, 2 June 1966.

clarkson: George Grant is a professor of philosophy and religion at McMaster University in Hamilton, and probably best known as the author of a controversial book on Canadian politics – Lament for a Nation. I asked George Grant if he agreed that society today was producing a faceless man. grant: I think this is a society that produces a very great sense of the individual’s individuality, you know, and subjective-hood, while at the same time the system outside is enormous and puts great pressure on people. But I don’t believe this thing of people becoming faceless in mass society. I think they’re becoming more self-conscious than they’ve ever been before, whether for good or ill being another matter. clarkson: Isn’t there an anomaly here: the sense of being free and being alone and yet being part of this enormous mass, as we are? grant: Well, people in the past didn’t have, I think, the same degree of self-consciousness nor were they faced as much with massive system. There were sort of institutions in between – family, churches, you know. And the family is more than just a mother and father and children, but a family with aunts, you know, the crazy old aunts and uncles around, and things like that. In an older society, from before the age of progress, there were many more institutions between you and the mass, if you know what I mean. People live in ... there was perhaps the village, the community and things like that. Well I think

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there’s now more the great sense of individuality and self-consciousness and the great big system. clarkson: Do you see this as a hopeful sign? grant: Do you mean by that do I see it as being good for human beings to live this way? I think the clever can live this way. But I think most people aren’t and I don’t think it’s very good to be ... You know I just think some people are and some people aren’t. But I think most people aren’t and they need these sort of intermediate institutions to give them roots and belonging in the world. And I think these intermediate institutions disappearing are very sad, very difficult for people. And particularly difficult, in a way, for women. clarkson: Why for women? grant: Because I think that the norms of the society are for very aggressive, dominant people, in a way. And it is this split for women which I think is very hard. Because I think not many of the race – either masculine or feminine – are meant to be very strong or outstanding. clarkson: You see a lot of students, and you must see them change. Do you feel that they are very different from you, presently? grant: This, of course, might be partly age, you know, but I think that recently I ... it may be just awareness of my own age ... but I am certainly aware that the students I meet – everything comes from their own freedom. Nothing is given to them. Again we get back to this business of tradition. They live in a world which they have to make, where it all depends on them. And a world which may seem to them very absurd. You know, a world where they’re pushed through the high schools, made to fit into the pattern. Then pushed in a much tougher way into the universities, and made to fit the pattern. Some of them are cracked by the system. I think this is what I would say about the modern world. At the same time, those people that survive it and keep their humanity through it, are more remarkable than certainly most of the people I ever knew in my generation. But then the price is very great, I think a lot go down. clarkson: Do you feel that in teaching in a department of religion, as you do, that you are in some way keeping the flame burning for some of the spiritual values that you see falling about you? grant: Well, I don’t see exactly spiritual values falling about me. I see

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a different set of spiritual values. I would see the very highly geared technological system as having its own spiritual values. clarkson: What kind? grant: Oh, control, mastery, you know, the mastery of nature and the mastery of human nature. These, I think, are the great values of this kind of system. Now I would say that one job of the kind of work I do in a department of religion is for people to look at other societies, early Christianity, Hinduism ... places that would have had very different views of what it was to be a man and to live in the world. For them to look at other societies and what the standards of success have been in those other societies is valuable for the young, yes? clarkson: Do you ever feel that you are running up against non-comprehension on the part of the young people who have grown up in suburban society as you place it (?) ... that they simply cannot reach out from where they are now – or are they longing to? grant: No, I would say that they are very ... because the best of them are, as I’ve said, very freed from any tradition. Therefore they are immensely open. You know, most people in the history of the race have lived within something they take as a certainty. And therefore they are not open to anything. I would say the best of these youngsters are no longer sure of the kind of virtues of the technological world. And therefore they are very open to look at other periods of history, because they are open in the sense that the virtue might fill their freedom in completely ... you know ... they don’t know how to fill their freedom. Here they have enormous affluence, enormous freedom, and they don’t know how to fill it. Therefore the cleverest of them are very much aware of looking at other societies, I think. And trying to look at human life in different ways. clarkson: You yourself are a practising Christian. Do you see Christianity as a message for the future or do you see it merely as something that you are holding back against yourself, a lighted area around you as a person? grant: Well, I don’t know. I’m not terribly interested in the future. I think, let me put it this way ... I would think that Western Christianity – and I emphasize Western Christianity – is really played out in the world. And I think that the forms of Western Christianity, I think Protestantism has largely gone. And I think in a way a lot which is happening to Roman Catholicism ... it’s very difficult to see what its

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future will be. This had nothing to do, to me, with the eternal truth of Christianity. I think the forms will just change and other institutions will incorporate those forms – or, perhaps the same institutions greatly changed. clarkson: What does it mean to you personally if the outward forms will change, because you belong as a person to a certain church? grant: I think the practice of a particular piety ... you know I like that word ... this is not a popular word in the modern world but it’s a Greek word I like ... the practice of a particular religion is necessary to human beings – necessary both publicly and personally. And therefore, I think that one must live in the institution which at that present moment seems to incorporate the best of the truth as you see it around you. And certainly I would never ... the forms of Christianity have within it the pearl of great price which is to me what it says about the nature of God. And therefore I would never leave it. I am a father of a family and therefore I would see that people like that must live in some kind of institution. However imperfect the institution may be at a particular time or place. I think societies are more held together by what they ultimately believe. Now I live in a society which is held together, above all, by a faith which I do not believe, namely the faith in progress. And that unlimited technological advancement will solve all human problems. Well I don’t believe that. But there are remnants left around me ... very strange remnants ... in this case the Anglican church which has in it some of the ancient truth and therefore I will live within it. clarkson: You talked about Western Christianity. By implication that means that there must be an Eastern Christianity as well. Is there a difference? Is there more hope for that? grant: Now I feel that Western Christianity has been very much on the side of Old Testament Christianity, which is very much taken up with the God of power. The interpretation of the doctrine of creation, for instance, was the interpretation of sort of the outpouring of God’s power – that’s creation. Now I would see the creation much more as withdrawal. The withdrawal of God. Because in the sense that, if God is perfect, the question must be why does he need anything other than himself? And how can people have any degree of freedom unless God has in some sense ... I would think of creation more as the withdrawal of God. And I would see the centre of

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Christianity as the Cross which is God’s absolute weakness. Now I think this element in Christianity, this element of weakness of God, has been lost in the Western world. And this is why Christianity has been identified with these violent nations like the English-speaking nations, the German nations, these people who went out and have been violent all over the world. clarkson: When you mentioned progress, you talked about it in relation to the technological advances that we are making in our society. And you said that progress was not a desirable thing in the way that it was going. What do you mean by this? How can we stop it? How can we possibly do anything about it? grant: I think the last question we can answer. I don’t think we can do anything about it. I mean, I think that, you know, for the last three hundred years, Western society has, with increasing immoderation, given itself over to the worship of mastery. I think that is, in a way, what is meant by what was expressed beautifully by Robert Oppenheimer, you know the physicist. He once said: ‘If something is sweet, you have to go ahead with it.’2 In other words, if something can be done, that it’s capable of being done, it will be done. And I think that you cannot possibly stop anything that ... you know, this is going to work itself out. The whole of society is so committed to the idea that unlimited technological progress will solve human problems, that there is no question of turning back. I would ask questions like: Is it true that man qua man is getting better in general? And it seems to me if you answer that I see no reason to believe that ... I see that some societies are better than other societies. And I would say that at some periods of history there have been better societies than other societies. You mentioned before two societies that seemed to be particularly terrible – the early industrial revolution and the society of the late Middle Ages when the plague was involved. But I would say that some societies are better than other societies. But I would say they come and go. I would say above all that there is something ... There is what I would call a nature of man. That man is directed to certain given excellences. You know, I don’t see man as an unlimited open possibility for the future. This is what I would mean by creation: Man is a particular form of being who is open to certain forms of excellence. And I don’t see why we should think that this is increasingly more open to man. I just don’t understand this.

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clarkson: George Grant: A man who views any simple belief in human progress with some scepticism.

Notes 1 Adrienne Clarkson (née Poy) (1939– ), broadcaster, publisher, and novelist, became Governor-General of Canada in 1999 after a distinguished career as an interviewer and presenter on CBC television. 2 See page 270, note 4.

Review of The Technological Society, by Jacques Ellul1

Grant published this review in Canadian Dimension 3/3–4 (March-April; May-June 1966): 59–60. The review also appears in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 394–8.

Two books by Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society and Propaganda, are the most important of all required reading for anybody who wants to understand what is occurring in the ‘advanced’ societies during our era. Modesty may require the words ‘in my opinion’ in the previous sentence, but I hesitate to qualify such praise of greatness by the subjective. Ellul is a professor of the history of law and of social theory at the University of Bordeaux. The Technological Society (called in French, La technique; ou, L'enjeu du siècle) was published in France in 1954. It was translated very ably (by John Wilkinson) and published by Knopf in New York in 1964. Propagandes was published in France in 1962 and in the US in 1965. The Technological Society lays down the broad lines within which Ellul understands modern society; Propaganda analyses one of the dominant forces shaping that society. For that reason this review will be concerned only with The Technological Society although Propaganda is more closely written than the former book and greatly illumines it. The thesis of great writing cannot be encapsuled into a few smooth phrases. The New Statesman or The New York Review of Books to the contrary, the purpose of reviewing is not to show that the reviewer is cleverer than the author. Ellul’s book is of 450 pages and all of it needs to be read. The point of this review is to persuade others to read this wonderful book, not to summarize it.

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Ellul defines technique as ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.’a Technique is not limited to particular examples, of which the most massively obvious is machines. Ellul includes within technique the sum of all rational methods used in any society, e.g., the police, propaganda, modern education, etc. He analyses (pp. 13–19) the leading definitions of technique found in modern sociological writing and shows that they are all too limited in that they do not take full account of the facts. He describes the character of technique in our society, how it has become both geographically and qualitatively universal, how it is self-augmenting and autonomous. To quote: ‘Self augmentation can be formulated in two laws: (1) In a given civilization, technical progress is irreversible. (2) Technical progress tends to act, not according to an arithmetic, but according to a geometric progression’ (p. 89). In my opinion, the most important part of the book is his account of how technique has become autonomous. What he means by autonomous is that technique is not limited by anything external to itself. It is not limited by any goals beyond itself. It is autonomous with respect to the areas of economics and politics - indeed throughout society as a whole. It is the creator of its own morality. ‘It was long claimed that technique was neutral. Today this is no longer a useful distinction. The power and autonomy of technique are so well secured that it, in its turn, has become the judge of what is moral, the creator of a new morality. Thus, it plays the role of creator of a new civilization as well. This morality – internal to technique – is assured of not having to suffer from technique. In any case, in respect to traditional morality, technique affirms itself as an independent power. Man alone is subject, it would seem, to moral judgment. We no longer live in that primitive epoch in which things were good or bad in themselves. Technique in itself is neither, and can therefore do what it will. It is truly autonomous’ (p. 134). From other writings it is clear that Ellul is a Christian, and in some of the wittiest asides of the book he speaks of how the dominant religious institutions and thinkers of today have beautifully adapted themselves to be servants of the new authority.b a The page notes are taken from the English edition of the work, Jonathan Cape London 1965, p. xxxiii. b North American admirers of Harvey Cox’s The Secular City would do well to read Ellul's asides on this matter. Flattery of the spirit of the age has become the chief end of contemporary North American theology. What an age to flatter!

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Nowhere is Ellul clearer than in dealing with the great liberal chestnut that technique in itself is never wrong, but only the use men make of it (p. 96 et seq.). The main bulk of the book is devoted to descriptions of how technique operates in the economic system, of its influence in the state and on the character of the state, and a long section on human techniques. One could wish that this last section was required reading for every behavioural scientist and particularly for those psychologists whose work is dominated by the assumptions of B.F. Skinner at Harvard.2 His final sections on ‘Technical Anaesthesia’ and on ‘Integration of the Instincts and of the Spiritual’ are particularly masterful. He ends his book with the following clear paragraph: ‘But what good is it to pose questions of motives? of Why? All that must be the work of some miserable intellectual who balks at technical progress. The attitude of the scientists, at any rate, is clear. Technique exists because it is technique. The golden age will be because it will be. Any other answer is superfluous.’ Ellul has been accused of pessimism and determinism, generally by liberals. They assert against him the following two dogmas of their faith: (a) that all will turn out well in the end and (b) that man's essence is his freedom, or in other words that man has the ability to make the world as he chooses. It is not my business here to point out the difficulty of asserting both these propositions at once. Ellul has evidently felt called upon to answer these charges which he does in his usually sparse way in the Foreword to the Revised American edition. ‘The probable development I describe might be forestalled by the emergence of new phenomena. I give examples – widely different, and deliberately so – of possible disturbing phenomena: ‘1. If a general war breaks out, and if there are any survivors, the destruction will be so enormous, and the conditions of survival so different, that a technological society will no longer exist. ‘2. If an increasing number of people become fully aware of the threat the technological world poses to man's personal and spiritual life, and if they determine to assert their freedom by upsetting the course of this evolution, my forecast will be invalidated. ‘3. If God decides to intervene, man's freedom may be saved by a change in the direction of history or in the nature of man. ‘But in sociological analysis these possibilities cannot be considered.

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The last two lie outside the field of sociology, and confront us with an upheaval so vast that its consequences cannot be assessed. Sociological analysis does not permit consideration of these possibilities. In addition, the first two possibilities offer no analysable facts on which to base any attempt at projection. They have no place in an inquiry into facts; I cannot deny that they may occur, but I cannot rationally take them into account. I am in the position of a physician who must diagnose a disease and guess its probable course, but who recognizes that God may work a miracle, that the patient may have an unexpected constitutional reaction, or that the patient – suffering from tuberculosis – may die unexpectedly of a heart attack. The reader must always keep in mind the implicit presupposition that if man does not pull himself together and assert himself (or if some other unpredictable but decisive phenomenon does not intervene), then things will go the way I describe’ (pp. xxviii–xxix). This answer incorporates in my opinion a valid methodology for any sociologist and has the added virtue of wit. Ellul's writing is informed by that quality which has belonged to the best writing about any subject, a quality for which the French have been notable in the West - a desire to see things as they are, founded on that belief which was most succinctly stated in the words ‘the truth shall make you free.’3 He wants men to understand that ‘the further the technological mechanism develops which allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities. The artificial necessity of technique is not less harsh and implacable for being much less obviously menacing than natural necessity’ (p. 429). He does not write of necessity to scare men, but to make them free. I certainly am freer for having read this book. My main criticism of the book concerns the section on ‘Historical Development.’ He fails to answer satisfactorily the historical question which seems to me essential: Why did the civilization of technique first arise in Western Europe? In this section Ellul gives a useful analysis of the immediate factors present in Europe from the sixteenth century that were favourable to the origin of technological civilization. But these causes do not seem to me sufficient to explain the events. The civilization of modern Europe came out of Western Christianity. Modern secularism is secularized Christianity and particularly secularized Protestantism. (One has only to compare the presuppositions of Lucre-

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tius with those of Bentham or Marx.) To understand Western Europe, one surely has to understand the difference between the Christianity that came to be there after the tenth century, with its intense interest in reforming the world, and the older Mediterranean Christianity. One indeed can see the origins of this difference in the break between Augustine and the earlier Eastern fathers.c What has come into the tradition between classical philosophy and modern philosophy is Biblical religion in its Christian form. Nobody has ever seen this with greater clarity than Hegel in the Phenomenology.4 To understand the origins of modern technique one must surely look more closely than does Ellul at its intimate relation with Biblical religion. In no spirit of impudent psychologising, but simply from his own words, I would deduce that Ellul’s lack of discussion at this point comes from a highly conscious and noble turning away from philosophy toward a sociological realism. Indeed his very turning away from philosophy is surely in part responsible for the greatness of his sociological writing. The danger of attempting philosophy is that one can be so taken up by the difficulties in knowledge of the whole that one is overcome by a vertigo which demolishes one’s ability to look at the world with steadiness. This is perhaps the reason why so few human beings have passed beyond that vertigo to the state where they are ‘spectators of all time and existence.’ It must have taken immense steadiness and courage to have maintained unflinchingly one's gaze on modernity as Ellul has done. The price of this steadiness may be en pleine conscience de cause to limit one's gaze. But why quibble about historical causes with the great? The answer to historical questions is not practically important compared to certainty of analysis about the immediacies of the present. Keats put perfectly my response to this book: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken.5

Not to have read this book is to choose to remain socially myopic when somebody offers you free the proper spectacles.

c See P. Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West (Oxford 1959).

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Notes 1 Jacques Ellul (1912–94). See page 405, note 5. 2 Burrhus Frederick Skinner (1904–90), behavioural psychologist, detailed his approach in Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). 3 John 8:32: ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ 4 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.M. Baillie (London: Allen and Unwin 1931). 5 From ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,’ lines 9–10.

‘How Deception Lurks in the Secular City’: Review of The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, by Harvey Cox

Grant published this review in the United Church Observer 28/9 (1 July 1966): 16–17, 26. Cox was an important figure for Grant in the 1960s because he exemplified the attempt to ‘modernize’ Christianity. The book was published in New York by Macmillan (1965).

At all times and places, Christians have wanted to communicate with those around them. It is the very nature of their faith to want to do so. To love is to pay attention to other people and this means to communicate with them. To pay attention to people is to recognize the society they are in and to communicate with them in terms of their world. North American Christians now live in the technological society – the world of electronics and mobility, of superhighways and super packaging. They live at the very centre of the Western empire. This world has come into being only recently – really only since 1940. The patterns of the churches’ life often seem outdated. They were developed from an age when North America was a simpler society and mirror the forms of that simpler society. This has produced among church people – particularly among certain clergy – a desire to modernize the church, to make it more appropriate for the purposes of communicating with the mass technological society. The desire to understand the world can, however, easily pass over into an acceptance of it. This is the fearful temptation which has always faced Christians. In the name of being plugged in to modern society they can easily throw away what standards they have with which to judge it. Indeed, some even justify this acceptance of the modern by saying there is no place for judgment in Christianity. But does the activity of love really mean the elimination of

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all standards of judgment? Must communication with secularization mean the acceptance of modernity? Nowhere is this dilemma more present than in Harvey Cox’s The Secular City. The enormous popularity of the book throughout the English-speaking world, not only among Protestants but among Catholics, expresses the desire among many young Christians to come to terms with the dynamism of modern society. Here at last, they say, is a book which recognizes the new world, and shows how the church can be made relevant to the great society. Cox’s book asks for a marriage between Christianity and the secular city. By that marriage Christianity will be able to impregnate modernity with the spirit of Christ. I think the question would be better put: in a liaison between liberalism and Christianity who is going to seduce whom? The first sentence of Cox’s book expresses the facts from which he proceeds: ‘The rise of urban civilization and the collapse of traditional religion are the two main hallmarks of our era and are closely related movements.’ Cox’s thesis is that Christians should welcome this process of secularizing, and should see the secular city as a great good. ‘Secularization’ is the process whereby man has taken his fate into his own hands and knows himself free to make the world as he chooses. Man has come of age in his freedom. He no longer lives as a slave of the old metaphysical and religious system which imposed restraints on that freedom. Cox celebrates this liberty which has produced the technological society. Indeed to Cox this secularization of the world finds its origins in the Bible. The dominion of man over the world was a product of authentic biblical religion. It taught men to partake in the creativity of God and thus to shape the world by reform. The age of progress finds its roots in that biblical activism and therefore should be gloried in by Christians. The great hero of Cox’s book is John F. Kennedy, who tuned in to modernity and knew how to get things done.1 Indeed what this book comes down to saying is that Johnson’s Great Society is the highest yet achieved by man.2 The Church should recognize that the modern age more than any other expresses in its very secularization the authentic voice of Christianity. As is typical of much contemporary theology, Cox’s book sees only the bad sides of the traditional church and nothing but the good sides of contemporary secularism. One does not gather that Cox is aware

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that the last 50 years have included a series of ferocious world wars. One would not gather that there has been a consistent growth of tyranny in that same period. Americans such as Cox can presumably argue that these less pleasant facts have been produced abroad and largely through such crazy ideologies as nazism and communism. However, this argument will hardly do. First, nazism and communism are undoubtedly religions of the scientific era. Their power is unequivocally related to the very collapse of traditional religion which Cox so celebrates. When the majority of men lose their traditional religion, they put a phony one in its place. And it is surely true that American liberalism is as much one of these surrogates as is communism. Secondly, Americans can no longer put the blame for the abuses of modern secularization on foreign shoulders. American liberals do well to remember that the only military use of atomic energy was carried out by their ‘secular city’ under a liberal president. One wonders whether the peasants of Vietnam are as ready as Cox to celebrate the glories of America as they are pounded by its high explosives and napalm. All the great ‘secular cities’ (European, American, and Russian) treat the ‘underdeveloped’ nations with ferocity when it seems necessary to their interests. Despite the propaganda factories the scale of that ferocity makes such attempts at altruism as the Peace Corps seem [as] inadequate as medieval alms-giving. To turn to the domestic, is life within the secular city as excellent as Cox describes? Are our technological societies really producing free men or are the masses given over to passive pleasure-seeking and the élite to a more and more ruthless pursuit of prestige and power? Are the multiversities of our society producing wise or even educated people, or are they becoming factories to turn out units who keep the technological system going? It is the claim of the liberals that the secular city will be a pluralist society, that is, a society where men will be free to pursue divergent aims in tolerance of each other. But is this happening? Isn’t the greatest of secular cities (the United States) turning into a monolithic tyranny in which the dominant aim in life is sophisticated vulgarity? What amazes one about Cox’s book is that all the negative sides of modern life seem to be smoothly forgotten. He seems to be confidently unaware of those domestic and international aspects of North American society which give one pause about its goals. But per-

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haps one is wrong to be surprised that Cox is so bland. It is an old American tradition to identify the American dream with Christianity. The criticism of Cox must, however, go further. It must question his whole account of Western history. He is correct in saying that the age of progress has much to do with Western Christianity. The ‘secularization’ of the modern era is quite different from that of late Rome, and the difference is that our secularization has taken place in a society whose religious roots are biblical. But this still leaves the question whether our modern secularized Christianity can be identified with the religion of the Gospels. In his desire to identify American liberalism and Christianity, Cox disregards the fact that the origins of modern liberalism come not only from the Bible but from a deep revolt against biblical religion. To mention some of the founders of liberalism – Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Mill – these men knew with crystal clarity that they were saying things in direct contradiction to what was said in the Christian and Jewish scriptures. Machiavelli asserted that all religions had a life span of from 1,666 to 3,000 years so that he could not predict when exactly Christianity would end. But he was perfectly clear that he was laying down the theoretical groundwork for an order of society in which Christianity could not exist. His liberal successors have increasingly attempted to make clear the nature of a society in which mankind would have no supernatural purpose. What worries me about Cox’s identification of liberalism and biblical religion is that he seems so completely unaware that the mainstream of liberalism has been hostile to Christianity. Cox thinks that modern liberalism can be impregnated with Christianity. However, the most influential of modern liberals have not thought this. The very centre of their belief was that man must eliminate the idea of a supernatural end from his mind. They saw Christianity as the enemy, because its doctrine of transcendent purpose was the cause of repression, neurosis, and exploitation. Does Cox agree with this? And if he does, what is left of Christianity without the supernatural purpose? Social work? Those Christians who take his book seriously may then be so softened intellectually that they could become an easy prey to the blandishments of liberalism. That the mainstream[s] of liberalism and Christianity are irreconcil-

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able can be shown at many points – indeed on nearly all the most important questions which men face. I will take only two issues: (a) the place of self-restraint in human life and (b) their different uses of the word ‘freedom.’ It is surely true that biblical religion made high demands on the self-restraint of the individual. Can one read the Gospels and say otherwise? I do not mean self-restraint simply in sexual matters, but restraint over the desires for power, prestige and wealth, etc. Nor do I imply by self-restraint the disregard of the emotions and desires, but simply that their fulfilment must be put in obedience to Christ. Nor do I mean by restraint the neurotic or world-hating variety, in the name of which liberals have often caricatured the Christian position. On the other hand, it is surely true that the emancipation of the passions and an optimism about the result has been a central tenet of liberalism. It is not accidental to our society that the young are encouraged to the emancipation of their passions and discouraged from any restraint. One can see this difference in the old and the new use of the word ‘inhibition.’ To the truly modern thinker, inhibition does terrible things to people. To the older tradition the distinction had to be made between natural and unnatural inhibition, and the former was necessary to the good life. Cox patches over this difference by a lot of talk about love. But the issue is not whether everybody is in favour of love. Traditional Christians, as much as modern ones, want a world in which men love each other. The issue is how loving is to be achieved. Liberalism, with its optimism about the results of the passions, has believed that when those passions are freed from restraint, people will love one another. Christianity has not believed that in an unrestrained world people will be good to each other. Loving is more difficult than that. I do not think one serves Christianity by patching over this profound difference. Christians now must live and raise their children in a world where unrestrained passion is more and more let loose. Are we to welcome this as man’s coming of age, and if we welcome it, what can be left to any doctrine of obedience? And what is the Christian life without a doctrine of obedience? In an era when we have built our iron maiden of external restraint around us in our technology, there is the natural reaction against all restraint. Christians may sympathize with

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the cause of this revolt and yet know that the unlimited freedom of the world of LSD, etc., is no adequate response. The word ‘freedom’ has become ambiguous in our society because it means so many different things to different people. Cox’s use of the word seems to me highly confused. The use of freedom in the Gospels surely means the ability of a human being to give himself to God. In the liberal tradition the word ‘freedom’ has meant something quite different. It has meant the ability of man to make himself and the world as he wants them to be. The very definition of man in liberalism is that his essence is his freedom; he is the source of his own being but the very definition of man in Christianity is that he is a creature; he is not the source of his own being. To liberalism, man is the measure; to Christianity, God is the measure. To liberalism man creates himself, and measures and defines the order which he makes. To Christianity, man is measured and defined by an order which he does not make. Wanting it both ways, Cox speaks of freedom under God. But to the liberal, once freedom is put under anything, it is not authentic freedom. If Cox wants to understand this, let him read that most consistent of moderns, Sartre.3 If the Christian is to be consistent, he cannot say that freedom is absolute, for the consequences of that are atheism. If the liberal is to be consistent, he must say that man’s essence is freedom or else he gives up his position. This is the great gulf fixed between them. The dead end of a Christianity which wants at all costs to come to terms with liberalism is the ‘God is dead’ theologians. To reject Cox is simply to reject flattery of the spirit of the age as the proper method of communication. But the question is still left: how should the Christian communicate? Christians are left with the question, because Christ is Christ and he does not allow us to turn away from the world or to retreat. How does one live effectively by the eternal gospel of Jesus Christ in an age when the majority of mankind have been seduced into thinking that gospel irrelevant? Certainly not by saying there is no eternal gospel. To say that Cox’s answer seems flimsy is not to deny that he is dealing with a central question. Nor is it to say that there is any easy answer. The answer will come out of much contemplation and anguish. John F. Kennedy was not the Messiah; he was a charming American imperialist.

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Notes 1 John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–63). See page 139, note 2. 2 Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73). See page 270, note 3. 3 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), French existentialist philosopher and novelist, wrote Being and Nothingness (1943), Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), and What Is Literature? (1949) in addition to Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).

The Value of Protest

Grant delivered this address at a Toronto demonstration for Peace in Vietnam on 14 May 1966. It appears to have been printed by the organizers of a major border protest to be held at Niagara Falls on 6 August 1966. It also appears in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 90–4.

The desire to stop the war in Vietnam should not be limited to people of any political party or any political philosophy. It should be common to all men who hate crime and injustice. And as Senator Fulbright has made clear, it should be common to all North Americans who have the long-range interests of this continent in their minds.1 All decent people, if they look at the facts, must know that what is being done in Vietnam by President Johnson and his legions is the waging of an unjust war, by atrocious means.2 It is war which can only be won by the terrible means of genocide. What the American government is saying to a country, thousands of miles from their shores, is that Vietnam must do what we want or it will be destroyed. Let us remember that the bombing of the northern half of the country is not as terrible as the bombing of the southern half. In the current year twice as many bombs as were dropped in the whole of the Korean War are going to be dropped in the southern part of Vietnam – the country the Americans are supposedly saving. A few months ago I met some American professors who were in favour of their country’s policy, and I asked them what was their policy for Vietnam and they said ‘We are going to pave it.’ That is, rather than let it out of the American grip, they will totally demolish its civilization. All the complex problems of international politics – the confronta-

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tion of the American and Chinese empires – the meeting of industrial and non-industrial cultures – do not cloak the central fact about the Vietnam War, which is this: we of this continent have in the last year unequivocally embarked on a policy which means the extermination of masses of the Vietnamese people. It is this which makes this war the most horrible thing that has happened in the world since the destruction of the European Jews. It is this fact which requires that all North Americans of good conscience should protest and protest till this war is brought to an end. The horrors of the twentieth century have been manifold; but this must be the worst one for North Americans because we are doing it. Canadians cannot escape from their involvement in this crime. Obviously, most Canadians want to use what independence we have left to keep ourselves from being any more directly implicated in that war than we already are. But morally our position is a queer one. In the same week that our prime minister makes a cautious move towards peace, another member of the government demands that Canada be given a greater share in the continental defence production. Indeed, Canadians may emphasize their independence, but such independence cannot deny our long-term deep involvement in the injustice which is being perpetrated. Canadians are finally and inescapably North Americans – members of Western society. That society as a whole – not only the United States – is losing any honourable reputation it had with the rest of the world, because of the conduct of this war. The longer this war continues the more terrible will be the whirlwind that Western men will reap because of it. You don’t have to be an anti-American to see this. That great American patriot, Senator Fulbright, has shown this in crystal clarity for all to see. The longer this terrible war is continued, the deeper and deeper becomes the legacy of hatred that Asians are laying up against all of us North Americans. Canadians who see beyond the ends of their noses should see this – whatever their political persuasion. Both conscience and self-interest should, therefore, unite to make us protest the continual escalation of this war. Canadians seem to be getting used to this war. Fifteen months ago the truly massive American escalation started. As it grows and grows, we seem more and more willing to take it for granted. To a society which wants continual new excitements it becomes more important

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whether two entertainers are kicked off a television show than whether we are massacring Asians. Who slept with whom nearly a decade ago seems to engage our prime minister’s attention more than this terrible calamity. Newspapers and television seek the new sensation in a society that cannot long pay attention to anything. And this lack of care seems worse in Canada than in the United States. For even as we seek a greater share in defence production, we say that Vietnam is not really our business; we can turn aside. One of the worst things about the affluent imperialism we live in in North America is that masses of people can be led easily from acquiescence to indifference about the terrible things that their society is perpetrating in other parts of the world. A country which will scream its head off about a television program and be silent about Vietnam is surely sick. Of course, there are many who care deeply about what is happening in this war – but who say to themselves ‘What is the use of protesting?’ Our protests do nothing and can do nothing against the determination of those who have the power in Washington. Look at what has happened in the last year. The teach-ins and marches and demonstrations of a year ago haven’t stopped the escalation of the war. Even the courage of Senator Fulbright and Senator Morse, in the greatest American legislative body, hasn’t done any good.3 The number of American troops and planes grows; the ferocity of the bombing in both the northern and southern parts of the country has increased in the last weeks. Even the demonstrations by the people of Vietnam in their own country do not seem to have swayed President Johnson. He is determined to get his way even if it means making the country a desert. More and more people say that in a technological society such as ours the actions and thoughts of the individual do not count and as the central executive in Washington is set on massacre there is nothing that can be done. But who can be sure that this is true? Let us look at what has happened in the last year. Who can say that if there hadn’t been widespread protests there would ever have been the hearings in the Senate or that those hearings would have been televised? And those hearings have evidently got through to a lot of voters and Johnson for all his consensus still has to face elections in November. Who can say that as powerful a figure as Senator Kennedy would have come out for negotiations with the National Liberation Front if he wasn’t aware that right throughout society there were people who hated the war and

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were aware of some of the facts of that war?4 Without the protests there would have been far fewer of such people. Even in Canada who can tell how much further this country would have been directly implicated in the war if politicians were not aware that there was deep suspicion of the American government’s motives right across this country? And let us never forget that there are powerful forces in this continent who push for Canada to be more deeply implicated in the prosecution of the war. The pain and impotence that one feels as the war mounts in ferocity must not blind us to the fact that without protest, we might be in an even worse position than we are. In every situation in human life it always matters what you do and this is a situation where protest must go on. Obviously, the first reason for protest is to try to stop the terrible things that are being done in Vietnam. But there is another reason for protest even if you can’t change events. We must keep alive in our society the recognition that there is a difference between lies and truth. Ours is a society where the most enormous pressure can be brought to hide the truth and to make lies seem like truth. The weight of television, press, and radio can be used to convince people that lies are truth. The liberal society keeps itself going above all by propaganda, by submerging people with propaganda. A society that feeds on propaganda soon cannot tell the difference between lies and truth. The kind of people who get to the top politically in a liberal society are those who have learned that if it helps their cause to say something they will say it even if they know it not to be true. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the speeches of Secretary of State Rusk and Vice President Humphrey.5 When one hears some of the things they have been willing to say about Vietnam, can one believe that they think they are telling the truth? Perhaps Humphrey is dumb enough and corrupted enough by his years of liberal rhetoric, but that cannot be the case with Rusk. Let me take the simplest fact about Vietnam. By the Geneva accords it was not meant that Vietnam should long be divided into southern and northern sections. Yet the American officials have continually spoken as if North and South Vietnam were separate countries and most people in North America now believe this. A society in which the difference between truth and lies disappears is a society doomed for debasement. Because you can’t make even fairly reasonable decisions if you can’t sort out facts from illusions. In

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private life this is what we call madness, when people can’t distinguish facts from illusions. And it is just as much madness when it applies to whole societies as when it applies to individuals. This is what happened in Germany – enough people came to believe illusions about the Jews. This is one service the protest movement must perform in this society. It must break through the curtain of lies and half-truths and tell what is really happening in Vietnam. For we will be truly lost if we bring up our children in a society where lies are not called lies. To finish, the worst thing about Vietnam is the terrible suffering of the Vietnam peasants; the second worst thing is the lies and perversion of the truth which is eating away at the soul of our society.

Notes 1 Senator James William Fulbright (1905–95), lawyer and law professor, served as US senator from Arkansas from 1945 to 1974 and as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the period of the Vietnam War. He was the recipient of the Onassis International Prize in 1989. 2 Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73). See page 270, note 3. 3 Senator Wayne Lyman Morse (1900–74), American lawyer, was an authority on labour arbitration and served in the US Senate from 1945 to 1969, first as a Republican, then as an Independent, and then as a Democrat in 1954. He was a strong opponent of the war in Vietnam. 4 Senator Robert Kennedy (1925–68). See page 211, note 2. 5 Dean Rusk (1909–94), educator and politician, was secretary of state under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson from 1961 to 1969. His works include Rights of Men and Nations (1968) and As I Saw It (1990). Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr (1911–78), professor and politician, became campaign manager for Roosevelt and Truman, mayor of Minneapolis, senator from Minnesota, and vice-president of the United States under Johnson (1965–9).

Two Televised Conversations between George Grant and Gad Horowitz1

These two half-hour conversations were broadcast by the CBC on 7 and 14 February 1966, the final two of a series of thirteen sessions, entitled as a whole ‘Ideals of Democracy and Social Reality.’ Roy Faibish of CBC Public Affairs prepared them for educational television in the series Extension.2 He enlisted Grant as host of the first seven programs (and guest on two others), and he asked Gad Horowitz to be host of the final six (and guest on one other). John Porter, J.H. Aitchison, Pauline Jewitt, John Meisel, Ramsay Cook, C.B. Macpherson, and Charles Taylor were among the other guests.3 In lengthy letters to Grant and Horowitz, Faibish asked the co-hosts to aim at an informal relaxed atmosphere in order to encourage a lively conversation or dialogue, to avoid the impression of a lecture or debate, but at the same time to bring current public and academic debates, into their discussions. Gad Horowitz had become prominent in Canadian academic and political circles because of his ideas on Canadian identity and his review article on Grant’s Lament for a Nation in Canadian Dimension. In this article, entitled ‘Tories, Socialists, and the Demise of Canada,’ Horowitz ‘explored Lament for a Nation in the light of his [Grant’s] own political philosophy,’ declaring Grant to be the prime example of the Canadian phenomenon of the ‘red tory’ at the ‘highest level,’ ‘a philosopher who combines elements of socialism and toryism so thoroughly integrated that it is impossible to say that he is a proponent of either one or the other.’ Horowitz urged Canada’s social democrats to learn from Grant’s understanding of Canadian nationalism while rejecting his ‘pessimism and determinism’ about possible outcomes. Faibish also hoped the hosts would continue the debate Kenneth McNaught outlined in his article in the August issue of Saturday Night about the conservative and nationalist challenge by Grant (and Creigh-

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ton and Morton) to the liberal understanding of Canadian politics and economy held by Underhill, Corry, and Dawson.4 McNaught claimed in his review that ‘the chief ground of difference [from US politics] is the existence of a genuine conservative tradition which has, until recently at any rate, placed a brake upon the pseudo-individualism of liberal capitalism and which has expressed its nationalism in terms of an organic and ordered society.’ Grant jotted down some ‘notes for a conversation with Faibish,’ declaring the most important point of the series to be: ‘how one combines the particular problems of Canadian nationhood with the universal problems of a technological society in which Canada is involved.’ He wished to know whether Faibish wanted the particular or the universal emphasized and whether Faibish knew that he, Grant, ‘was a conservative about modern social science,’ ‘not hopeful about technological society,’ and held the view ‘that no industrial society is likely to be egalitarian.’ He wondered whether he could assert his position and perhaps ‘attack’ his guests or instead should confine himself to ‘tentative discussing’ of the issues. Grant wrote an introduction to the complete series: When the Fathers of Confederation met a hundred years ago, they had one purpose – to build a northern nationality, that is, to build on this Continent an alternative society to the United States. And they went ahead and laid the foundations of that society. Now, nearly a hundred years later, Canada finds itself in a mixed situation. We are a fragmented nation and almost a satellite. We are fragmented in the sense that the various parts of the nation seem to be breaking up and those parts, many of them, seem to find their nearest connection in joining their nearest neighbour, their geographical nearness in the United States. And this lack of purpose in our national life does not only affect us in a sort of broad way, but affects us in dealing with our everyday problems, our problems of technology above all, the immense changes in our environment brought about through our scientific technology. We seem to have lost the ability to deal with this, and it seems to me that the first thing that we have to do is to look at what our society is like. If you are going to assess what you are going to be in the future, the first thing to know is what you are in the present, and this is what we are going to do on this program. We are going to look at our democracy, our democratic ideals; we are

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going to look at the reality of the power structure in Canada and beyond it, the whole North American Continent. We are going to raise questions about the possibility of this northern nationality of ours. And then in terms of that reality, we can ask the question, how do we go forward? Are we going forward in our Centennial Year as a nation, or are we going to go forward as a fragmented set of provinces that gradually become part of the United States.

THE CANADIAN CHARACTER AND IDENTITY Program 12, with Horowitz as host and Grant as guest.

announcer: What do we mean when we talk about the Canadian community? In what way is our society different from that of Britain or the United States? And how will the impact of technology and industrialization affect our goal of Canadian nationhood? In this series dealing with ‘Ideals of Democracy and Social Reality,’ our host Professor Gad Horowitz, discusses ‘The Canadian Character’ with his guest and co-host of the series, Professor George Grant, of McMaster University. horowitz: Mr Grant, a lot of people have begun talking about the English-Canadian nation as though there were such an animal. Many others insist that the English-Canadian nation is too divided within itself in terms of the various regions of English Canada for the use of such a term to be permissible. Where would you stand on this? grant: Well in some sense there has been an English-speaking – I like English-speaking better than English because there are all kinds of ethnic origins in this – there has been an English-speaking Canada because we have existed, and the remarkable thing is that, in the northern half of this Continent there has been for a hundred years or more a different society from the United States, and that needs some explaining. Now I think in recent years the difference between Canada and the United States has been getting smaller and smaller and we’re moving to the point where there may not be an English-Canadian nation. This is very much bound up with what happened in

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technological scientific society, but for all the differences – there’s obviously a difference between the Maritime Provinces, between the Prairies, B.C., and Ontario – but there has been a Canadian nation founded on something that did make it different from the United States. horowitz: How would you characterize the differences among these regions that you’ve mentioned? grant: Well of course this is infinitely subtle and could be talked about at enormous length. But let’s say that you start out and speak historically, let’s say you start out from Ontario. Certainly the people who came into English-speaking Canada, the first wave of Loyalists, both in the Maritimes and in Ontario, were people who had one thing in common with the French Canadian, – they did not want to be Americans. Here were both French-speaking people and Englishspeaking people who didn’t want to join the Great Republic. Now there was something positive in this. Why didn’t they want to join? What, in other words, didn’t they want to join? The French and English didn’t want to join for different reasons, but they both didn’t want to. I think the English-speaking Canadians didn’t want to join because they thought that this would break their roots with Western Europe, but this may not have been too greatly articulated. You know people who are active and busy don’t articulate things in an over-philosophic way. People who think about them, observe them later, can articulate their views, but people who are active and going out into pioneering countries and building houses, don’t articulate them as they haven’t got the time. But I would say the English-speaking Loyalists didn’t want to break with the British Crown; they didn’t want to break their roots with Western Europe, the way the French had broken their roots with Western Europe. The French Revolution meant the French Canadians broke their roots but they still kept their roots with Rome, this great central place in European civilization. English-speaking Canadians didn’t want to break, didn’t break, with their roots in Europe. They were largely people who hadn’t accepted the sort of liberal radicalism of the American Revolution in part, had they? Now this seems to me was the basis. Now then after this there were long acquisitions of different immigrants who came in waves to bring different things. They met different problems in the environment. When you think of the

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problems that arose in the Prairies, the people who went in there met certain environmental problems which were very similar to the American Plain problems, but they met them in a different way. I would say this, which is a cliché of Canadian history, but I think it needs saying, and I think this is the essential distinction between what happened in the United States and what happened in Canada. One of the great things is that where in the American West, the individual settlers went first and the individuals made the law; in Canada the law went first. You know, the national state had to act, Macdonald had to act to open the West so it wouldn’t be taken over by Americans. Therefore the national state brought law and order first, and law and order wasn’t sort of something that was worked out by the local citizens. The law came first. This is one thing that is very common all through Canadian history. I think W.L. Morton says something very real and true when he says that the difference between peace, order, and good government, which is in the BNA Act, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is in the American Constitution or the Declaration of Independence – I always forget which – but in the American declaration it is an individualistic one, less interested in law and order and community enterprise.5 And I think this is the difference between the American declaration and the Canadian one. And in the West this is certainly true. The RCMP went first. horowitz: Still in this rapid survey of regional differences in EnglishCanada, we really haven’t had too much to go on. The Maritimes are poorer. They have loyalism in their tradition. Ontario is richer; it also has loyalism in its tradition. The West is newer, more open, more free in a sense and more influence exerted by the ethnic groups. B.C., separated by the Rockies, is stronger and adept in politics, is a more modern type of British influence, but none of these regional differences are strong cultural differences. Why then all the talk about the terrifically divisive forces that prevent English Canada from becoming a nation? grant: I don’t think the divisive forces are really based on differences between the regions. I think they’re based on the regions’ pull to the south. Did you notice that Premier Bennett said the other day: ‘We don’t care where we get capital from as long as we get capital, and it’ll be from the United States.’6 Now that means that British Colum-

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bia and its enormous boom or Ontario and its enormous boom, I don’t think it’s so much division between regions as each of them being pulled to this great Colossus to the south, and I think this is far more the problem for the break-up. horowitz: At one time, you might say that English Canada was held together, from the Maritimes to BC, by a common shared loyalty to British institutions. grant: To a very, great extent I think it was. And when you think of this tremendous loyalty, I’ve talked to people who were called up in Cape Breton and Nova Scotia, and who enlisted in 1914. They marched off in droves to be slaughtered in France. And they still thought when they went to the War that Queen Victoria was reigning because they hadn’t had any news. When you think how English-speaking Canadians in 1914 and 1939 marched off to fight in these European wars, whether for good or ill, I think it shows you the colossal loyalty that there was to the British connection. horowitz: But this British ethos which held the English-Canadian region together is now almost completely gone. No new unifying forces have come in to replace it and so the pull of the United States begins to make itself felt in each of the separate regions. grant: Well the pull of the United States of course always existed insofar as there was a flow of people who just used Canada as a stopping point to go to the United States, and there was a flow of nativeborn Canadians. When you think of all the people who went off from the farms to become professors, doctors, lawyers and this kind of thing in the United States, there was always a pull to the United States, and a cultural pull back up, but it was countered by a British loyalty – I mean the British thing did provide a very great counter to it. But it is gone, and is gone I think because Britain’s role in the world ended. England is a great powerful and cultural force of the British Isles. It’s just stopped increasingly from 1914 on. horowitz: This is a very important point that you’re raising. What you’re suggesting is that the obstacles to unity for English Canadians aren’t so much their traditions, or their ways of thought differ very much – the only obstacle to the unity is a kind of negative factor that they haven’t set their minds to working out a replacement for the British connection and something that would hold them together.

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grant: I think that there are certainly forces that are leading to provincialism – economic forces. But I’m saying also those economic forces are related to regional forces in the whole of this continent. There’s the whole economic question, which H.A. Innis has shown so clearly, that when we were an exporter of raw materials, the whole flow of trade was east-west across this great continent as against the north-south now when we’re an industrial nation.7 This great east flow of the fur trade, the wheat and all when we were essentially a producer of primary products – this is gone. I am not saying this is the only thing in this, but I’m saying that it is certainly one of the things. You have at the same time the disappearance of the sense of being British or it doesn’t mean very much any more, and you have at the same time the other failure of the regions not having this unity of trade, and this leads to the divisions, it leads to the divisions of many levels. horowitz: Some people have suggested that what John Porter calls the British Charter Group is also at fault in not making an effort to bring the new Canadian into a new nation with a new set of values, that the attitude of the British in Canada to the new ethnic groups was tolerant, but tolerant in a contemptuous rather than accepting way: ‘We will allow you into the country; we will allow you to keep your quaint ethnic folk ways, as long as you swear allegiance to the Queen and behave yourselves.’ But there was no attempt to mould a new community to join with these new groups. grant: Well I think this is very true. You could only say that the élite group was British up ‘til about ‘39. Since then I would say that the élite group is largely American. I agree that when the élite group was British it had very little sense of using the immigrant as anything but cheap labour. But this is surely true of the same élite group in the United States. The immigrant groups just have to conquer their way out. Now after all when you think of the power of Protestant industrialists and how they exploited this flow of cheap labour to New York. Well the same thing is surely true of Canada. It’s true of the immigration in both parts from 1900 to say 1914, the western immigration of ethnic groups. They were widely and terribly exploited. I mean they were told every kind of lie in the book. Well in the same way the immigrant groups since 1945 have been terribly exploited and used, and very little thought has been given to inte-

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grate them. It’s been mainly an ethic of using them for cheap labour to keep the prosperity going. horowitz: There’s exploitation on both sides of the border but I think there is this difference where the Americans have beaten us very badly, and that is that the immigrant coming to the United States was given the sense that he was participating in the formation of a new society, in a great liberal experiment, and we haven’t given anything like this to our new Canadians. grant: We have to be able to say ‘Are we different?’ because people only become a nation insofar as they’re trying to realize something by being a nation. They are realizing something different from this great and powerful, more-than-nation empire, that lies to the south of us. But I think the great crisis – far more than this failure of Great Britain – the great crisis is for Ontario. horowitz: Well fine. Ontario is becoming industrial. Why should that make it any less Canadian? Why should that make it more and more American? Can’t there be un-American progress? Can’t there be unAmerican industrialization? grant: It seems to me that industrialism, first and foremost, killed local differences. You know industrialism homogenizes. The technological society homogenizes, makes people the same. And this is happening, I think, in Quebec as much as Ontario, but let’s concentrate on Ontario. Now it tore up the old Ontario. It destroyed the old rural – I mean Ontario was a society of rural people who sometimes agreed and sometimes fought with the commercial oligarchy in Toronto. The commercial oligarchy had a few protected industries, but largely made its money by exporting primary products to Europe. Now we have the great industrialized society, a mass society, and this it seems to me has destroyed local differences. horowitz: Do you think there is no difference? What about a suburb of Tokyo? Would you say there is any difference between a suburb of Tokyo and a suburb of Toronto and a suburb of New York? grant: I think people get more and more the same, although I think that obviously ours is going to be much closer because we’re so close and because our economic institutions are essentially continental institutions. We are run by private governments – that is what I call the great corporations – and a public government which organizes those private governments. The private governments –

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that is, the great corporations – are all continental, and therefore they are producing the same things; I mean they’re producing the same General Motors cars, the same Ford cars, and the same televisions, and the same everything. And in this sense, I think, this makes people very much the same. I think not only does industrialism make things the same, but it must destroy any conservatism, because industrialism must be orientated to the future, you know, to doing new, new things, dynamic, pushing, and all traditional societies have to get rid of their traditional values. horowitz: Now this is very interesting. On the one hand you say that technology erases all-over differences, makes everyone the same, kills conservatism, and you’ve said that it kills socialism too, and on the other hand ... grant: But I haven’t said it kills socialism. I haven’t said that yet. horowitz: Well we’ll get to it in a minute. On the other hand you say that people feel a need for the survival of certain traditional values, and they express it through the Church. This is the example you gave. But you are implying now that since people feel a strong need for the survival of traditional values, that there is a possibility of preventing progress from destroying everything. grant: Well now your second statement doesn’t follow from your first. I say that – taking the fullest use of the term – there is in human nature a need to be rooted, but this doesn’t say that technological society can’t destroy human nature, and can’t destroy the need. What I meant by the Church example is that people were looking for something permanent in this great change. But this may mean that the Church just gets weaker, and weaker and weaker. You see what I mean. horowitz: So you would see the ultimate success of the brave new world type of thing which will completely mould, control, and manipulate human behaviour? grant: I think we’re moving to that very quickly. One thing I’d like to say too, I think our society destroys any traditional values and this relates to nationalism too. You know, people are now moving in all the great corporations. They may be asked to go to Denver one day, to Montreal the next. This is not only true of business corporations, but this is just as true of the universities as you know. It’s just as true of nearly all things. The more advanced you get in technical skill in

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society, the more and more mobile you become. You are less rooted in a place and this seems to me to destroy the possibility of nationhood, because nations originally were institutions that grew up from a kind of love, not only of a particular place, but of the continuity of that place. I’ve often thought that the replacement for the nation in North America will be the big city. You know, people will sort of have a loyalty to the great Western empire, you know, stretching from perhaps the Urals to San Francisco, and then their rootedness will be from being Torontonians or Londoners or something like that. I used to believe this argument, but the trouble I find with it is that the people who run a town like Toronto don’t really have any loyalty to Toronto because they want to be in the next higher place – New York or Chicago – and this is true of Hamilton. Therefore you don’t have the leaders, the people who are given the power in society, the economic power, don’t really have loyalty to the societies they’re in. Therefore you can’t have this kind of city loyalty. The economic institutions are continental, and people don’t really have loyalties to their cities in the same way, the powerful people, that is. horowitz: Well from the point of view of a non-liberal, the picture described is a dark, even a terrifying one, but there is some small consolation that I feel and that is that you are describing something that will take a very very long time to work itself out. Because it is such a long-run prediction, it may also be wrong. So that when we address ourselves to more immediate and short-run problems, would you agree with me that it’s legitimate to lay these dark prophecies to one side, and see what we can do about preserving an English-Canadian nation separate from the American nation now? grant: Oh quite. I don’t think because you state this may happen, this is any reason to act ... I don’t think you should just view what is going to happen. I think it’s very important to preserve the Canadian nation and we should do everything to preserve it – and I think we have to. If you’re going to be realistic in preserving it, you have to face the kind of dark things I’ve been talking about, that’s all. horowitz: Well, if you’re talking to a typical, or average, or a representative denizen of urban southern Ontario, then, and you say to him, ‘This is what’s happening to you,’ and he answers, ‘So what! I like it’ what would your next step be?

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grant: There would be two steps. One is to try and show which is the main basic theoretical step which I didn’t go into very much, try to show the kind of society the United States is producing – denying certain forms of human excellence, and describing why we want to have a different one here. I would point out that it is very important as far as the rest of the world goes, Asia particularly, that we have an alternative society, that we aren’t one monolithic bloc, because the Americans seem to be failing dismally in their relations with Asia, and therefore if Canada could be a different society, it might be a little more enlightened in its relation to Asia, not having the same imperial power that the United States has. But I would say above all that it was possible to build a technological society that could be more ordered, that didn’t have to be based on individuals, the fight of each against each, that didn’t have to be ordered entirely on contractual relations, and that perhaps because of Canada’s past, we might be able to build a more ordered technological society, a society which isn’t as demanding on the individual and in that sense, as de-rooted as the great American society. That’s the kind of argument I would give. horowitz: But part of the task of saving the country is the task of persuasion isn’t it? And if you’re trying to persuade a British Columbian that he should maybe forego some short-run immediate advantages in terms of contact with Seattle, and put in their place contact with Fredericton or Halifax, the immediate utility of which isn’t obvious, you’ve got quite a job of persuasion to do. Nevertheless, you know that in some sense the British Columbian has a lot in common with the Maritimer – but how do you articulate it for the British Columbian? grant: Well I think you can articulate it through the past. But I think you have to articulate it above all in the moving towards the future because societies move towards the future. Though the past helps them move towards the future, the past is only a means of helping them move towards the future. I would say then the question is, what it matters to the quality of life in having a different society from the United States, and the possibility of a better society, and what it matters to the world that North America doesn’t be[come] one homogenized unit. horowitz: Well let’s get our teeth a little more deeply into this issue of

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the quality of life, which is the way you formulated it. Let’s stick with the representative British Columbian. Your answer would be, you have this in common with the people of Halifax and Fredericton, that together you can build here a society in which the quality of life would be better than it is in the United States. And then he turns around and says: ‘How? How better? Why better? In what respects better?’ grant: Well here I think one is straight into economic policy, in the sense that I do not see how technology is not going to require a much greater use of the public good against private enterprise. I would say that, in other words, you have to move towards something like a socialist society in which the public good takes precedence over the individual right to be free to use the resources they want to build the society they want, you know, a society based on the principle of speculative building and everything like that which we’ve had since the War. The only alternative to the American way of life that we have is a much more highly socialist view of life. You would have socialist management of technological society. Now ‘socialist’ is just a word. What I mean is a society in which the public good is much more emphasized against the rights of people to make money than it is now in the United States or in present-day Canada. I’d have no hesitation about that. horowitz: And let’s say that the British Columbian was really a tough cookie, and let’s say he said something like this: ‘This way of life, this money-making way of life has always existed in British Columbia. It’s always existed in Canada just as much as it has existed in the United States. You’re telling me that I can have a better quality life if it isn’t built around the central motive of money-making, but this is the only life I know, and I’m not about to give it up for something speculative. And the word “socialism” always reminds me of tyrannical bureaucratism.’ grant: Well you can say a lot of things about that. (a) you could say that in the past Canada has not allowed private enterprise so far; it hasn’t allowed this in the railways; it hasn’t allowed it in air: it hasn’t allowed it in hydro; it hasn’t allowed it in the CBC, broadcasting; it hasn’t allowed it in a lot of areas, Private enterprise hasn’t been allowed to make money out of a lot of areas in Canada, has it? So I would deny first that we have had a total commit-

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ment to private enterprise in Canadian life. There are a lot of areas where private enterprise has been excluded on nationalist grounds. But apart from that, I think that if a man said the highest good is the kind of buccaneering self-assertion which can be identified with certain forms of capitalism, then I think you have to go to the roots of his soul to convince him that many things are different from that.

A CANADIAN IDENTITY Program 13, with Horowitz as host and Grant as guest.

announcer: In what way is Canada different from the United States? Will it be possible to maintain a new and different society on the north half of our Continent, and how will we want to distinguish ourselves as Canadians? In this series dealing with ‘Ideals of Democracy and Social Reality,’ our host, Professor Gad Horowitz, looks at the components of a Canadian identity with his guest, Professor George Grant of McMaster University. horowitz: There is more than one way, Mr Grant, of looking at the history of English Canada and more than one way of interpreting the essence of English-Canadian society, if there is any such essence. Some people would argue very strongly that from the very beginning English Canada has been essentially American. Even the Loyalists, this interpretation would argue, were basically American Liberals with some important vestiges of toryism hanging around them. English Canada is a basically American society. It’s true that there have been certain un-American aspects about English-Canadian life, distasteful aspects, tory aspects, socialist aspects, but as the years go on, those aspects will fall away and disappear under the pressure of technological progress and industrialization, urbanization, under the pressure of continual cultural and economic integration with the United States. English Canada will become more and more an American society and this is, on the whole, a good thing. One of the things that is distasteful about English Canada to people who buy this interpretation, is that we have been a far less egalitar-

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ian society than the American society. We have placed much less emphasis than the Americans have on equality of opportunity for individuals to get ahead, for education, to rise on the social ladder. We’ve been much more tolerant of the fact of authority and class stratification, and as Americanization proceeds these old Tory aspects of English-Canadian life will disappear; we’ll become more and more egalitarian; more and more ordinary people will have an equal chance to educate themselves and to get ahead. Our overdone respect for authority will be replaced by [the] American’s insistence on individual freedom, and the right to criticize his betters, and the great society towards which the Americans are evolving will also be our future. Basically the emphasis is on equality of opportunity. The United States is the great land of equality of opportunity. Canada has displayed in the past a reluctance to follow the same path. It’s been more old-fashioned; it’s been in love with old-fashioned ideas about respecting your betters, respecting the law, and not being too anxious to get ahead. [The] Americanization of Canada for these people will mean that Canada will become a better place because there will be more equality of opportunity. grant: Well that certainly is the picture of what ... of the people who have really worked [for] and welcomed what has happened in Canada really since 1935 or 1940 – our constant movement towards integration with the United States. Now the first thing I say about it is the following. I don’t think the picture they have of the United States is a correct one. I think their picture is a nineteenth-century picture of the United States in which indeed social equality was a central and moving part of the American dream. But it was founded, as you say, on the philosophy of liberal individuals. Now, as I see liberal individualism in the United States meeting highly technologized societies, I see equality being destroyed. I see a society, a new kind of technological class society arising, you know, to replace [it]. People think of the class society always as a feudal class society, based on an agricultural society. But I see now in the United States a new kind of denial of equality by the meeting of liberalism and technology, but I don’t think liberalism can deal with technology. I think it falters and all that happens is liberalism just becomes the class ideology, the kind of religion that is abroad, the public talk. But the facts of technology are destroying equality in the United

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States, breaking it down. And I see the United States becoming a ruthless society highly classified, highly unequal, and therefore the first thing I would say about your vision is that these people who have always said that Canada is just behind the United States in the age of progress and that we should be moving towards the United States, don’t see what I would call the demonic factors in the age of progress. horowitz: I think most of these people, we’re calling for want of a better word, continentalists, might agree with you that the United States has been a class society, as all societies have been class societies, and that it isn’t moving towards a classless society. What these people emphasize isn’t equality so much as equality of opportunity, and they would stress very strongly that whereas in the United States a very high proportion of those who are able to get an education actually do go out and get that education; in Canada we educate our youth on a much less egalitarian basis than in the United States. I don’t know exactly what the figures are, but a far higher proportion of young people of university age are actually attending university in the United States ... grant: Quite, quite. horowitz: ... than in English Canada. grant: Education for what in the United States? I mean what can you have equality of opportunity for in the United States now? The goal, the top is either – you know, to be head of one of the powerful bureaucracies and the private corporations, or power in the great Washington public bureaucracy, or space science. You know, if you will pursue the ends that American society wants, it seems to me that the space race is a very clear case of the kind of end it wants. I heard a very wise man say the other day that people are going to the skies and going down to the bottom of the seas because they cannot stand the earth; they cannot stand to live in this technological earth at the moment. And I think that you have equality of opportunity if you will pursue those ends which are given by a technologically individualistic society, namely the conquest of the world, whether it’s through business or space science or something like this. But this is quite a different concept of equality of opportunity than they had in the nineteenth century where they thought if you had equality of opportunity, you were like John Stuart Mill, you would all become,

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you know, sort of dignified, educated men of letters, this kind of phony nonsense. horowitz: Well I think possibly most continentalists would consider the issue of the ends of society irrelevant. They would say that a technological society of some sort is inevitable and since we have a technological society, it’s important that people have the opportunity to develop whatever talent they have. They would say that in the United States a person of ability has his ability developed and brought out by the educational system, whereas in Canada ability is left undeveloped in the lower strata of the society, people aren’t given the opportunity to develop what they have in them to make a contribution to the society. This harms the society, prevents it from making progress, and it’s also unjust to individuals. grant: You know, when you say they don’t care about the ends of society, this is surely the whole question, isn’t it, as far as political thought goes? I mean this is the whole question of Canada. I mean the question of Canada is: Are we going to build an alternative kind of technological society to what they have in the United States? I mean the point surely is one can admit that technological society is inevitable and going to come and that nothing can stop it, you know. But surely there is some courage and political action in saying how we’re going to use it, what kind of a society that it’s going to be. What I’m saying about the United States is that they’re developing a certain kind of technological society which is to me a very ruthless kind of society. Did you see what General de Gaulle, one of the greatest practical men of this era, said the other day about the bureaucrats in the Common Market?8 He said that they were stateless, irresponsible technocrats. That is, that they are rootless people who are just pushing people around. And by technocrats and bureaucrats I don’t only mean people who work for the government, because you know in North America the leading bureaucrats work for private corporations like General Motors and General Electric and things like that. horowitz: Yes but there’s the matter, say, of equality of opportunity for an unskilled worker to become a skilled worker. grant: Oh I think this is absolutely essential, but I don’t think that there is anything in Canadian tradition that should prevent that, is there?

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horowitz: I think everyone would agree that if Americanization meant only progress in the sense of more equality of opportunity for individuals, Americanization would be a good thing. There would be no one who would express any fear about it. But Americanization does mean other things too. Equality of opportunity in itself may have undesirable side effects. One example has to do with a difference that some people have noticed in the past between American and Canadian societies, and that is that differences, ethnic differences and ideological differences, are much more tolerated in Canada than they are in the United States. We’ve begun talking in Canada not about mosaic but about our vertical mosaic, and this emphasizes the fact that the British Charter Group is on top and the other ethnic groups are confined to lower status rungs on the occupational ladder. It’s quite true that equality of opportunity would mean more opportunity for non-English or non-British Canadians to get ahead, but it would also mean that their cultural communities would be broken up, that cultural differences in Canada would disappear, and that we would all be homogenized culturally speaking in a melting pot. So that Americanization means simultaneously more equality of opportunity for new Canadians but less cultural freedom for new Canadians and less tolerance of cultural diversity in Canada. grant: Oh I would agree with this very deeply. I mean I think that the problem of modern technological society is how you belong in it, you know, what you belong to, how do you have roots and relations to places, other human beings, so that you know what you are in the world. Aren’t all places the same? And I think that certain things in Canadian traditions, for instance ethnic groups, one doesn’t want to destroy and make people all the same in the sense that do we want everybody to be, you know – is the perfection for everybody to be the chairman of General Motors? horowitz: Well I think that most people probably would take a view something like this that it’s very unfortunate that a sense of community, a sense of belonging-ness, disappears in a technological society, but that’s the way it is, and since that’s the way it is, all we can do is see that people have an equal opportunity to get ahead even if this means the erasing of ethnic differences among others. One of the other consequences of the Americanization of Canada on a slightly

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different plane, on the ideological plane, I think, would be the disappearance of that degree of tolerance that we have shown in the past for people who differ from us ideologically. We’ve had in Canada not a monolithic liberal society. We’ve had tories and socialists among us. There has been some sort of a dialogue among liberals, tories, and socialists. There’s been a high degree of tolerance for political heresy in Canada, but as we become Americanized, as toryism and socialism disappear, as everyone becomes attached to the liberal political religion, we will be increasingly less tolerant of political differences. We might not go to the extreme of having periods of McCarthy-ite hysteria, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up with some version of the House of Un-American Activities Committee, so that here equality of opportunity or Americanization seem to mean the disappearance not only of tolerance for ethnic differences, but the disappearance of tolerance for political differences. We’ll end up with a situation where liberalism is the Canadian political religion and anyone who has different political ideas is considered un-Canadian. grant: Of course liberalism in the United States and in this kind of demolished Canada you see in the future ... liberalism in the old days meant everybody should be free and there was something noble and fine in this. But the liberalism in the United States is related to intolerance because liberalism is only a kind of language or rhetoric that lies across the top of this massive monolithic society run by very great institutions which have to bring people to conformity in a certain sense. horowitz: And this ... this brings up another possible evil side effect of the Americanization of English Canada and that our foreign policy, which up until the present time, although it hasn’t been very different from the Americans’, it’s still [been] in a sense more calm, more rational, less hysterically anti-communist than the Americans’, but as we become more American and more liberal, we, I think, will absorb the perspectives of the Americans as far as international relations are concerned, and we also will begin to take the kind of monolithic religious liberal view of communism as the enemy of man. We will display in foreign policy, I think, the same, the same tendency to hysteria and irrationality as the Americans sometime display. Any type of mediating role that we’ve been able to play in

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the past on the world stage, I think in the future we will be incapable of playing if Americanization proceeds and if we become more and more American in our ways of thinking about politics. grant: I of course think this is one very fundamental reason for trying to ... [realize] ... this dream which is getting more and more limited but in which there is still a chance to achieve an alternative society in the northern half of this Continent in the relations of North America to the rest of the world. At the moment the Americans seem absolutely incapable of dealing with Asia on any sensible basis at all. I mean, to me the American society is now sort of like the great basic Roman society, and one of the good sides of Rome was that it maintained order in certain parts of the world and it allowed certain parts of the world to be ordered. But on the other hand it was ruthless and terrible – Rome was – in its destruction of things around it that it could not tolerate. And yet in a world one society has to tolerate other societies to some extent. And at the moment [because of] the Americans’ absolute inability to deal with Asia, it seems to me it is extremely important that in the northern half of this Continent we should have a society that can deal with Asia and have relations with Asia which are based on a different basis than this enormous imperial atomic power. horowitz: It’s a bit paradoxical though that the liberals who get most excited about the kind of thing Canada has done in international affairs, do not seem to realize that Canada has been able to play this role precisely because of the survival in Canada of non-liberal ideology such as toryism and socialism; therefore the necessity to tolerate them; therefore the creation of this kind of atmosphere here which trains people to try to understand people who think differently. At one and the same time the liberal wants these un-American vestiges in our life to disappear, and he expects us to be able to go on being as rational and tolerant as we have been in the past. grant: Yes, this is I think one of the ambiguities of the years from 1935 to 1957, when there was a lot of talk of Canada playing an independent role in the world. Now this often meant to them an independent role vis-à-vis Great Britain, rather than an independent role vis-à-vis the United States. But at the same time this was the era of Mr Howe9 when this society was being integrated into the continental corporation world, becoming a branch-plant economy of the

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United States, so that the possibility of an independent role was being overcome, and I would say, of course, that the upshot of this was the election of 1963 when the Liberal party that had always advocated very deeply the continental integration of this society economically, went ahead and advocated the defence integration with the bringing in of nuclear warheads. And so I would say it was at that point that the pay-off of the directions were brought together. And I think that you’ll find now that the foreign policy talk of these continentalists is much more than the recognition that we are a satellite and that a kind of sensible voice should be whispered in the ear of Washington occasionally. But of course the question is if you are a satellite, are you going to continue to have the people who have a sensible ear and who have any different opinions from Washington on this matter? horowitz: But surely the issue as far as state power is concerned is not only whether we’re willing to use the power of the Canadian state to improve peoples’ lives and so on, surely the question that may be of even more importance at this stage in our history is whether we are willing to use the power of our state in order to preserve the national interests of Canada. It’s possible to use the state planning power in order to further the process of cultural and economic integration. The question is whether our politicians: (a) have the courage; and (b) will find the people who have the knowledge ... grant: Quite, quite. horowitz: ... to discover ways of planning our economy and using the power of government in order somehow to reduce American cultural and economic influence to a tolerable level. grant: Right. horowitz: The tragedy is that whenever this issue is raised, people begin sneering about chauvinism, jingoism, and anti-Americanism. Perhaps some of our politicians have been at fault in not knowing how to present the issue correctly. But the issue is there. There is so little hard thought about it. There is so little willingness to tackle it, so little willingness to risk the embarrassment of being called an old-fashioned nationalist. grant: Quite, and of course there is lots of money around and lots of great skill in public relations, as we know from the advertising companies – but when something comes out on a nationalist tack – I

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mean you’ve seen this as far as a figure in Quebec – Mr Lévesque – Mr Lévesque has been ridiculed. You know, the picture of him given in English-speaking Canada is some kind of intellectual nut, you know, not of a person who is trying as clearly as he can to see that the French-Canadian economy serves the French-Canadian people, and is controlled in French Canada. But they’ve made him out some kind of crazy nut who is interfering in the wisdom ... and this of course has happened with English-speaking Canadian politicians. When they’ve talked about what the solution is, they’re made out to be crazy nuts. And therefore I think one must face how we start, ab initio, you know, from the very beginning to decide to let’s do this or do that. If you try any nationalist thing in Canada, you will be met by the most extremely and well organized forces of opposition, who have great power behind them to use the public opinion industry to make you out a fool. horowitz: Canada may be the only country in the world that has an é1ite which is – maybe I’m exaggerating, maybe I’m not, but Canada may be the only country that has an élite, a political and economic leadership that is committed to the disappearance of itself as a distinct entity ... So that by subjecting ourselves to too much American influence, we close doors to the future, we rule out the possibility of possibly developing better forms of existence here. They needn’t necessarily be socialist. Don’t you think this argument is a valid one and one which even the most convinced anti-socialist might agree with? grant: Oh I would agree. horowitz: Well on the other hand our dominant ideology has been liberalism perhaps even since the beginning and a liberal is almost automatically pro-American because the United States is the liberal society. This is why I sometimes doubt the realism of the kind of things we’re saying. Our majority has always been liberal. The strongest element in our political culture has always been liberal. In this sense the continentalist thesis as a prediction might have validity. There may be something like this inevitable tie-up of the English-Canadian society that already has a liberal component towards complete liberalization. When you put these two factors together, the strength of indigenous liberalism in Canada and the pull of the United States, it becomes awfully hard to see how

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English Canada can be sold on the idea of developing something new. And if English Canada isn’t sold on the idea of developing something new, then I think most thinking people would agree that there simply isn’t any reason for all this fuss and bother about maintaining an identity. grant: Well, I think one thing. There are certain things happening in American liberal society, certain vio1ences towards the rest of the world which I think may warn, which have only begun to emerge, and I think are emerging everywhere in the United States. I think the implicit violence you feel in some great big American towns seems to me is implicit in the very structure of the kind of society that the United States has developed. This may give some Canadians some pause in wanting to move directly in that direction, and it may turn them towards, you know, taking warning. After all the Americans are a much more advanced society than us, and I don’t use ‘advanced’ as meaning good – I just mean that they are far farther along in the way of what a liberal society becomes, and certain immense and tragic ambiguities and paradoxes and ironies are arising in that society, both at home and in its imperial job abroad. Now, whether this won’t give some Canadians pause, you know, about wanting to exactly follow the same pattern; therefore it won’t lead from this pause in wanting to do things that would make it different. This seems to me just a possibility.

Notes 1 Gad Horowitz (1936– ), political economist, taught political science at McGill at the time of these programs and later at Toronto. He contributed, with Charles Taylor and Cy Gonick, to the pamphlet Nationalism, Socialism, and Canadian Independence (Winnipeg: Canadian Dimension 1966) and published Canadian Labour in Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1968). 2 Leroy Abraham (Roy) Faibish (1928–2001), public servant, broadcaster, grew up in the West. He was an admirer of T.C. Douglas and legislative assistant to Alvin Hamilton (1957), and later was appointed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (1978). Patrick Watson recruited him to work as a television writer and producer for the CBC in the mid-1960s after the defeat of the Conservatives. He went to China with Watson and cameraman Erik Durschmied for a two-month film

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tour, which resulted in the ninety-minute film The 700 Million, broadcast in November 1964. John Arthur Porter (1921–79), sociologist, taught at Carleton University and published his most important work, The Vertical Mosaic, in 1965. James H. Aitchison, (1908–94), political scientist, was Eric Dennis Memorial Professor of political science at Dalhousie University, 1949–73. He had been a colleague of Grant’s in the 1950s and remained a close friend until his death. Pauline Jewitt (1922–92), educator and politician, was professor of political science (1955–74), and later president of Simon Fraser University (1974–8) and chancellor of Carleton University (1990–2). She was Liberal MP for Northumberland (1963–5) and later, NDP MP for New Westminster–Coquitlam (1979–84). John Meisel (1923– ), public servant and professor of political science, published important work on the 1957 and 1962 elections. He was later appointed head of the CRTC (1979–83) and taught at Queen’s (1984– ). George Ramsay Cook (1931– ), historian, professor of history at Toronto and later York. He published John W. Dafoe and the Free Press (1963) and Canada and the French Canadian Question (1966). Crawford Brough Macpherson (1911–87), political theorist and professor of political science, taught for four decades at the University of Toronto (1935– ). He published Democracy in Alberta (1953), The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), and The Real World of Democracy (1965). Charles Taylor (1931– ), philosopher and political theorist, was professor of philosophy and political science at McGill and a prominent activist in the New Democratic party in the 1960s. His many books include Explanation of Behaviour (1964), Pattern of Politics (1970), and Hegel (1975). Kenneth William Kirkpatrick McNaught (1918–97), historian, taught at United College of Winnipeg in the 1950s and later at the University of Toronto. He published A Prophet in Politics: A Biography of J.S. Woodsworth (1959) and, with Ramsay Cook, Canada and the United States: A Modern Study (1963). He had been a fellow student and fellow pacifist with Grant at Upper Canada College in the 1930s. William Lewis Morton (1908–80), historian, was professor of history at the University of Manitoba and Trent University. His books include Manitoba: A History (1957), The Canadian Identity (1961), and The Kingdom of Canada (1963). William Andrew Cecil Bennett (1900–79), merchant and politician, was Social Credit premier of British Columbia during a period of great economic expansion (1952–72). Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952), economic historian, political economist, and pioneer in communication studies, established with his early writings

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the ‘staples thesis’ as an approach to the understanding of Canadian political economy in such books as The Fur Trade in Canada (1927) and The Cod Fisheries (1940). 8 Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970). See page 201, note 6. 9 Clarence Decatur Howe (1886–1960). See page 47, note 1.

The Great Society

Grant delivered this address on the Great Society at the thirty-fifth annual Couchiching Conference. It was published in John Irwin, ed., Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions (Toronto: CBC 1967), 71–6, and in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 95–102.

First, what is meant by the Great Society? It is a vision of a society of free and equal men, to be realized through the application of certain principles. These principles are to be taken seriously because they are enunciated by President Johnson as determining the policies of the American government.1 These basic principles are, in essence, two: 1 By the application of those sciences which issue in the mastery of human and non-human nature it will be possible to build a society of free and equal human beings. 2 The application of these mastering sciences should be carried out by a system which can be quickly described as ‘state corporation capitalism,’ that is, by the co-operation of the public and private corporations. In stating these two principles it is useful to add that this continent is much the most advanced in the application of the sciences which result in the control of human and non-human nature. The chief reasons for this are that the dominating immigrant groups came from Western Europe, and it is in Western Europe that modern science and its mutually interdependent political ideas arose. The people with these ideas took over a continent of vast resources and unified the wealthy part of it under a modern system of government. When the

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second and greater wave of the technological revolution began to crest after 1945, the continent had not been ravaged by war and was ready both materially and in spirit to build a society based on this technology. In short, North America is far ahead in building a universal and homogeneous society of free and equal men, and since 1945 such a society can be considered not simply a dream but a possibility. One might proceed by pointing out the actual results of the application of the Great Society principles in our society and trying thereby to judge the principles themselves. To support distrust of these principles one could point at domestic and international phenomena which give one pause. One could describe the quality of life which is arising in the great megalopoloi; what life is like in the bureaucracies of the public and private corporations; the ruthlessness of the society to those who cannot succeed by the standards of prestige and acquisition; the impersonality and vacuousness of its educational institutions; the pursuit of titivation and shock in its artistic and sexual life; the derootedness of mobility and the impossibility of effective citizenship, etc., etc. It could be pointed out, also, that this society seems increasingly violent and masterful in its dealings with the rest of the world. I say this because I think it quite appropriate to judge the Great Society not only by its domestic but by its international actions. But as my job tonight is to talk about North America, I must avoid any implication that all the evils of the international order can be laid at the door of Washington. I do not intend to minimize the difficulties that any government of the American empire would have in its confrontation with the Soviet and Chinese empires. It must be recognized, however, that as the Great Society develops, it exercises extreme violence in its relations with the rest of the world. Look at the growing number of military regimes among the satellites of the American empire in South America and Africa. Above all we cannot disassociate what is happening in Vietnam from the principles of the Great Society. That ferocious exercise in imperial violence must surely be part of the evidence. Mastery extends to every part of the globe. Nevertheless, it is not through looking at these particular applications of principles that we come to a final judgment of these principles. Not only could the supporters of the Great Society point to certain good results, which would turn the debate to a simple listing of black and white, but with more force its supporters could claim that the bad

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results of the Great Society are but temporary aberrations or faulty applications of the principles, and will be overcome at a later stage on the road of progress. For example, if these supporters of the Great Society were Marxists (and even Johnson’s speeches are often good Marxism coated with Billy Graham), they could say that once the Great Society frees itself of the anomalies of the old capitalism, it will rid itself of many of its domestic anomalies.2 Again, they might claim that the impersonality of the big cities will be overcome by the more careful use of social science. We need more social science to cure the ills which science has created. Or, if they are liberals, they could say with the Vice-President [Hubert Humphrey] that once America is freed from the necessity of standing up against the aggression of a relentless communist imperialism, it will be possible for it to enjoy the full glories of the Great Society both domestically and internationally. In short the argument from results does not allow us really to get at the principles of the Great Society and to judge them as they are in themselves. The true issue in this discussion turns around the first principle of the Great Society as it was enunciated earlier. That was the claim, that, by the application of those sciences which lead to the mastery of human and non-human nature, we will be able eventually to build a society of free and equal men. This is the proposition that must be discussed. Before doing so let me say two things about it. (1) That proposition embodies the religion of this society. Religion means what men bow down to. And the great public religion of this society is the bowing down to technology. It is never easy to discuss the truth or falsity of a society’s religion when in the midst of that society. (2) This religion, which is most completely realized in North America but which is coming to be in all parts of the world, has deep roots in the most influential thought of the West in the last centuries. It is the essence of modern liberalism and that liberalism has been the dominating influence of modern thought for three or four centuries. We are living in the era when the great thoughts of Western liberalism are being actualized. For these reasons the question I am asking about this idea of technological progress and mastery is not whether it is going to survive. Certainly the mass of men cannot be turned back from the realization by argument. To debate whether this principle should dominate the future would be like debating whether water should run downhill. What I am questioning is whether societies dedicated to this pursuit of technolog-

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ical control are going to find it indeed a means to their final end; whether the application of this principle can in fact result in a Great Society of free and equal men, a society that promotes human excellence; or whether the nature of the means will not determine an end of quite another complexion. Modern science which issues in mastery arose above all from the desire to overcome chance. We find ourselves in a world where we are the victims of chance – chance which limits the possibility of our partaking in human excellence. We may be born with Down’s syndrome. Let me say here what I mean by human excellence. There are two purposes to human existence: to live together well in communities and to think. These two ends are distinct, because thinking is not simply a means for living together. I will not go into the conflict that often in actuality arises between these two ends. I mean by human excellence the realization in people of the various virtues necessary to the achievement of these two purposes. It is not accident that the modern experiment should have arisen in the religious ethos it did, in the sense that modern science is so closely related to charity. Science was turned from contemplation to mastery so that by the overcoming of chance the good life would be made open to all. Yet we should contemplate the ambiguity that in the achievement of that mastery we have built a monolithic apparatus which becomes ever more tyrannous. Tyranny is of course the greatest political foe of excellence. It denies both the chief ends of man – living well together and thinking. Let me illustrate: to overcome economic chance we have built our economic system. This leads to the birth of enormous numbers of people. The need arises to limit the population, both in what we call underdeveloped nations in the first stage of industrialization, and also in highly developed nations. Beyond quantitative proliferation, there is also the question of quality. Why should we leave to chance (and indeed as we all know to some very strange chances) the quality of people coming into the world. Modern scientific studies mean that sun and man need not longer generate men haphazardly. But both quantitative and qualitative control must mean enormously powerful institutions to exercise that control. Is a man who has to get a license to have children a free man? Of course what is replied here is that the modern masters will not control others by force (except when absolutely necessary) but by the use of the social sciences will adjust people so that

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they will want the socially useful. It is claimed that it will be possible to avoid tyranny by the inculcation of the truths of social science through mass communication. [For example, by] This Hour Has Seven Days.3 But will not this central thought-control be just as tyrannous as the old methods? If one believes that the needs of the soul are the most important, it will be more tyrannous. And beyond that the question remains whether adjustment to socially useful attitudes can be equated with the goodness once defined as the cultivation of the virtues. Can living together well be produced by mass propaganda or can it only be achieved by free men pursuing virtue through their own motion? Beyond living well together, the mass stimulation of socially useful attitudes can certainly not be [conducive] to the other end of man – thinking. To put the matter generally: can men live well together within the enormous institutions necessary to the massive overcoming of chance? To take but one point: I assume that one aspect of human excellence is to take part in the major political decisions of one’s community. Is this possible under modern institutions? Professor McLuhan suggests that the new democratic politics will consist in men learning the facts on an issue over television, and the regularly, perhaps daily, registering a plebiscite on a great computer system.4 This does not seem to me at all the same thing as the traditional partaking by the free man in political activity. Who will control the televisions? Who will decide what are the facts? Solitary men living in megalopoloi, not being able to know their leaders, pushing computer buttons, are not free men, nor equal men. To sum up: the overcoming of chance to which we are committed builds institutions which more and more negate the freedom and equality for the sake of which the whole experiment against chance was undertaken. And the ambiguity goes deeper: the building of the universal and homogeneous state by mastery was the chief ideal of Western liberal theory. If the achievement of that end can now more and more be seen as the achievement of tyranny, then the theory can not longer be accepted. I cannot in a short space deal with the difficulty with which we are left. Man has to overcome chance to some degree to form communities at all; yet the drive for the total overcoming of chance leads to tyrannies. What degree of the overcoming of chance is necessary for the good of society? The anthropologist Lévi-Strauss says that the best order for man was what we call the neolithic era in which man had

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gained sufficient control to build organic communities and to give him time to contemplate.5 I do not know what the answer is. Despite my diagnosis of potential tyranny, I am not advocating the dreaming of anti-social dreams. The immoderation of technique cannot be met by the immoderation of retreat from society. At all times and in all places it always matters what we do. Man is by nature a social being; therefore it is a kind of self-castration to try to opt out of the society one is in. There are going to be many wounds to be bound up in our world. Who cannot admire those young people who work among the Métis or who work for almost nothing in poverty projects, or who care for truth in the multiversity. When I read the new journal This Magazine Is about Schools, produced in Toronto by young men who care desperately that education be more than our provincial efficiency nightmare, and who are willing to forego the world of acquisition and prestige to produce such a magazine, I cannot doubt that such things are worth doing.6 Just because our fate is to live in a concrete empire – half garrison and half marketplace – we cannot opt for that mysticism (LSD or otherwise) which tries to reach the ultimate joy by bypassing our immediate relations and responsibilities in the world. Finally I would tentatively suggest that the virtue most necessary for this era is what I would call openness. This quality is the exact opposite of control or mastery. Mastery tries to shape the objects and people around us into a form which suits us. Openness tries to know what things are in themselves, not to impose our categories upon them. Openness acts on the assumption that other things and people have their own goodness in themselves; control believes that the world is essentially neutral stuff which can only be made good by human effort. Openness is a virtue most difficult to realize in our era as it requires daily the enormous discipline of dealing with our own closedness, aggressions, and neuroses, be they moral, intellectual, or sexual. To be open in any age to tyrannical control will above all require courage. Professor Grant, in Reply to Questions Technology is creating a global situation, very similar whether it be in Russian, in time in China, perhaps in India, as in the United States. I see the United States as the most advanced industrial society on earth.

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Therefore, what is coming to be in the United States is what is coming to be in the rest of the world. Now I do not see how you can have decentralization of power when you need enormous institutions to run things. I do not think you can produce General Motors cars without something like General Motors, whether it is privately owned or publicly owned. Now, let me say that tyranny is a very pressing problem, because in my view of life, the world is eternal, not created, and tyranny is a dangerous coeval with the world, with man, as cancer is a dangerous coeval with man. I think that there is no danger in stressing that. Now I do not, therefore, see how any revolution could replace centralized power in highly technological societies. I just do not see how it is going to happen. Modern Western man has been committed for three hundred years to the building of an enormous technological apparatus which is now spreading into the rest of the world. I think you can live perfectly well in a tyrannical regime. I am just saying that the technological era is coming and is going to be a tyranny. Now I would try and do everything I could to limit that tyranny. I do it by trying to teach things about ancient religions and philosophy at university. Other people do it by writing or going and working with the Métis. I would personally be much more interested in politics if I lived in French-speaking Canada but as I live in English-speaking Canada, which is a satellite of the Great Society, about all I can do is carry out my private duties and think my private thoughts. There is not much that anybody can do to stop this tyranny from being; one simply has to live through it. Let me say that I think if you have a highly technological society it has to be very largely corporate. This is why I have very great sympathy for what is going on in Quebec. I would point out that the Great Society is an idea that really grew in the United States. Let us start in 1932 with Roosevelt. Since 1932 the United States has become the greatest empire in world history, greater than Rome. In the last few years, it has been able to upset the government of Brazil, the government of the Argentine, been able to upset governments all over Africa – do you call that an empire? It seems to me to be indubitably an empire, although obviously a different kind of empire from the colonial empires the English and French had. The Nation magazine calls US action in Vietnam, ‘welfare imperialism.’

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We surely must face the fact that, as Marx said and as I have observed, social progress in America has always been impeded by great outbreaks of nationalism. On the other hand, a society that is committed to technology is committed to continual change. This is why other societies like the English do not commit themselves to technology; they did not want continual change. In the three religions I know best, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Greek religion, the intellectuals turned their backs on technology. The Greeks were aware there was such a thing as algebra, which is the basis of technological training, but they literally refused to allow it in their society. I imagine you would find similar objections from some of the Buddhists in Vietnam. They are terrified by what is coming, obviously, terrified of the technological society.

Notes 1 Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) and the Great Society. See page 270, note 3. 2 William (Billy) Franklin Graham (1918– ), American evangelist and Southern Baptist minister, is known for his charismatic, high-profile preaching crusades. 3 This Hour Has Seven Days was a weekly television program which ran from 4 October 1964 to 8 May 1966. Produced by CBC Public Affairs, the show achieved unprecedented popularity combining serious topics and satire, fast pace and innovative subject matter. 4 Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) taught English literature at Toronto (from 1946) and became the director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology (from 1963). Grant refers to Understanding Media (1964). See also The Mechanical Bride (1949), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), and The Medium Is the Message (1967). 5 Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908– ), French social anthropologist, taught in Brazil (1934–9), New School for Social Research (1950–74), and later in Paris. See The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949, translated 1969). 6 This Magazine Is about Schools was first published in 1966 as a radical educational journal. It continues to appear as This Magazine, a general interest leftwing periodical.

The Conservatives Must Put Canada First

This article appeared on page 4 of the Hamilton Spectator, 30 August 1967. We have removed the sub-heads.

The leadership convention of the Conservative party has all the makings of a great entertainment. The excitement of the race track will be combined with the drama of the theatre. The sheer difference of personality among the announced contenders will be capped by the presence of the old champion himself, whose role in the proceedings will be unpredictable up to the wire. By any standards this is a show worthy of centennial year, and it is certain that all the instruments of modern communication will open it wide for the gaze of the public. Yet it will be different from most spectacles, because something of the greatest importance will be taking place. Since the founding of this country, the Conservative party has been the chief political instrument of nationalism in the non-French parts of Canada. In the midst of all the entertainment and excitement, that party will be making the decision whether or not it is going to pick a leader which will allow it to fulfil its historic task. It is dangerous to over-simplify the political life of a complex society or to categorise too easily the character of Canadian political parties. Yet is a justifiable statement that over the last century the Conservative party has tended to be the nationalist party, while the Liberal party has tended towards continentalism. By far the most important fact of Canadian life is that we are spread out alongside the most dynamic nation on the face of the globe. Canadians have therefore had continually to remake the decision of Mac-

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donald, Cartier, and McGee to build on the northern half of this continent a sovereign nation clearly distinct from the USA.1 If we want to exist as a country, the continual renewal of this decision is essential. In both the Conservative and Liberal parties there have been honest nationalists and in both there have been elements advocating policies which would destroy the nation. But taking our century as a whole the nationalists have more predominated in the Conservative party; the continentalists more among the Liberals. The Conservative party stumbled in its destiny as the party of nationalism between 1935–1956. It was too identified with one region (southern Ontario) and with the claims of one economic interest (largescale business). Whatever may have been Mr Diefenbaker’s failures, he revived the party in every region of the country and made it clear that it was not the servant of one economic interest.2 If it is to fulfil its role in the 1970s as the instrument of sane nationalism, it must continue to be that kind of party. Ontario is the heartland of English-speaking Canada, but you cannot hold the nation together from one region. There are two obvious challenges for present-day Canada, plain for all to see. The first is the rethinking of Confederation to meet the deep sense among French-speaking Canadians that the present arrangements do not fulfil their chief requirement; that of preserving the French fact in the midst of an English-speaking continent. The second is to see that Canadians re-win control over the wealth of their own country. It is surely self-evident that a country that does not control its own wealth will not long endure as a sovereign nation. These two challenges are closely interrelated. If French-speaking Canadians see the rest of us obviously willing to sell the resources of our country for quick profit, how can they possibly believe that Canada is the best political means of preserving their own culture? Yet this is what they must believe if this country is to be preserved. To say that these are the big problems is not to say that there are simple answers to them. If there is one thing that all Conservatives should know, it is that political problems require complex answers and that these require intelligent leadership. It is within this context that Premier Duff Roblin appears the outstanding candidate for the Conservative leadership.3 There are other

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fine candidates, but his qualifications are outstanding. All his speeches and actions show him an intelligent and sane nationalist. He did not begin speaking of French-English relations in 1967, but has been making wise proposals about these national questions for a decade. As Premier of Manitoba he pushed through legislation giving the French minority its just rights in education. French Canadians therefore know him as more than a man of words. He has clear record as an efficient administrator concerned with the difficult problems of modern industrial life. To hear him speak is to know that he is a man of the high intelligence necessary for the complex national negotiations which lie ahead. Above all, the election of Roblin as leader would prove that the Conservative party has not forgotten the lessons of 1956. The party of nationalism cannot be led by a man who represents too obviously one region or one economic interest. To fulfil its historic role in the 1970s, it must be a national party, representing all regions and differing interests – ready above all to put Canada first.

Notes 1 Sir John Alexander Macdonald (1815–91). See page 349, note 20. Sir George-Étienne Cartier (1814–73) and Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825–68). See page 391, notes 1 and 4. 2 John George Diefenbaker (1895–1979). See page 348, note 14. 3 Dufferin (‘Duff’) Roblin (1917– ). See page 392, note 5.

From Roosevelt to LBJ

Grant published this article in The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S., edited by A.W. Purdy (Edmonton: M.G. Hurtig; New York: St Martin’s Press 1968), 39–41.

It is hard to contemplate the US with calm these days. The society of comfort and mental health has now its air-conditioned war, presented to us nightly on colour TV. (Air-conditioned, that is, for all Americans except the rural and small-town youngsters who have to do the ground fighting.) At least we did not see Auschwitz till it was over, and anyway it was not English-speaking people who were doing it. Nor can we look at the great republic as outsiders. Go to Stratford, Ontario to hail Canadian drama, but ask on the way which of the factories in Galt or Preston or Kitchener are making the anti-personnel pellets. ‘With Expo Canada came of age,’ but (please, Mr Drury)1 how much does the swinging city of Montreal make out of the defence sharing agreement? (How absurd anyway to have a fair in praise of twentieth-century man without a pavilion on the achievements of technological war.) To think of the US is to think of ourselves – almost. To think of the US is to remember one’s own life. My first political memory is Roosevelt’s inaugural in 1933 – being called in from playing in the spring floods and told by my father to listen to the great man on the radio.2 The creed of the schoolteacher’s family was optimistic liberalism, and, oh, with what hope and excitement one listened to FDR in the next decade. The patrician voice called out for a world in which the injustices of the European past would be overcome. It was a liberalism which made a deep appeal to Canadians, partly because underneath its universalism lay the call to the English-speaking peoples to rule the

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world. Decades later with what nausea one now listens to Roosevelt’s inheritors – the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, and Johnson.3 Yet one knows that these are the true inheritors of that siren voice, both in the society they have built at home and in the empire they have built abroad. The liberal journalists always maintain that America is sound at heart, and it is only the know-nothing reactionaries who lead it astray. Each liberal generation wins its victory over the isolationists, the Nixons, the Goldwaters, etc., etc.4 But it is those liberal victors who have, more than any others, been responsible for the society as it now is. To try to understand that fact is for me to try to understand the full measure of what it has been to be alive in this era – that is, to make a judgment of the age of progress. The old platitude must be repeated once again: the United States is the society with the least history prior to the age of progress. (Other societies rush fast to kill what they have, but they still have something to kill.) The basic moral teachers of the United States from Locke to Franklin and from Jefferson to Dewey have been morally shallow.5 To speak about religion, it is too long and complex a part of European history to describe here why Protestantism’s moral teachings have so readily served the deeper springs of modernity. Suffice it to say that the Protestantism of the US became increasingly a legitimizer of the age of progress and its liberalism. And look what that liberalism has done to the older religions of the later immigrant groups – Catholicism and Judaism. (The forlorn hope of Canada once was that from earlier European traditions, British and French, we would maintain moral roots which would allow us to deal more deeply with existence.) Indeed, the highest public hope in the United States was the belief in pluralism – that their society would be made of many streams and that as the society matured these streams would deepen beyond the shallowness of the pioneering moment. But the many streams have all been shallow, and instead of deepening they have been taken up into one great flood. The many shallow streams have widened into one great lake, the defining element of which is belief in affluence through technology. How can this society of affluence and freedom (freedom about any issue which does not question the basic assumptions) be responsible for the monstrous occurrences in Vietnam? It used to be said: American society may be banal and vulgar, but this at least saves it from the

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terrible perversions and romantic nihilism of a decaying Europe. But this argument will no longer do, because in the last years the society of affluence and freedom has shown itself capable, not of the maniacal genocide of Auschwitz, but of the bland, impersonal wiping out of an Asian people who could not otherwise be brought to do what American leaders deemed necessary. This is the hardest thing for liberals to understand: how this could arise out of the progressive society they had built. Here I would assert the ancient and forgotten doctrine that evil is, not the opposite, but the absence of good. If your moral roots lead you to exalt affluent technology as the highest end, out of the consequent vulgarity will come a use of power, when deemed necessary to comfortable self-preservation, which perpetrates evil from its very banality. For example, years of accepting manipulative social science have led Americans to seek solutions in pacification programs, the attendant cruelties of which are hardly evident to those who plan them. The emptiness of a moral tradition that puts its trust in affluence and technology results in using any means necessary to force others to conform to its banal will. To think ill of the dominant American tradition must not allow one to forget that which remains straight and clear among Americans themselves. Living next to them, Canadians should know better than most how incomplete are the stereotyped gibes of Europeans. The cranes and the starlings still fly high through their skies; sane and wise families grow up; people strive to be good citizens; some men still think. Above all, many Americans have seen with clarity the nature of that which chokes them and seek for ways to live beyond it.

Notes 1 Charles Mills Drury (‘Bud’) (1912–91), public servant and Liberal politician, was deputy minister of national defence (1948–55) and later served in the cabinets of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. 2 Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945). See page 351, note 35. 3 John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–63). See page 139, note 2. Senator Robert Kennedy (1925–68). See page 211, note 2. Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73). See page 270, note 3. 4 Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–94). See page 270, note 5. Barry Goldwater (1909–98). See page 352, note 39.

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5 John Locke (1632–1704), English political philosopher. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), American polymath, was a printer, publisher, author, inventor, scientist, and diplomat, and a leading figure in the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). See page 357, note 74. John Dewey (1859–1952). See page 362, note 106.

Qui Tollit: Reflections on the Eucharist

Grant probably delivered this sermon or speech in the late 1960s at McMaster University, according to Sheila Grant. It concerns the translation of the Latin word tollit, as it appears in the Anglican Eucharistic liturgy.

Whatever it may be and however we may define it, the Eucharist is the centre of Christian worship and Christianity is nothing if it is not worship. It is hard to imagine what a Christian would mean in denying that proposition. Therefore one must only write of the Eucharist in halting language and with the hope that God has at least partially freed those words from pride. We cannot stand above the Eucharist to judge and to define it. This is not only that all our thoughts are measured by the facts of the divine love. It is also that we are here dealing with the centre of tradition and a believer would have to be an extreme paranoid to deal with such matters in a more than tentative way. I propose to discuss the proper English translation of the verb tollit in the Eucharist. In the recent revision of the prayer book by the Anglican Church of Canada this word is once again translated as ‘takes away.’ Christ is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. In what follows I will suggest reasons why the word might better be translated ‘bears.’ This issue is inevitably theological because there is nothing in the original Latin word which would point indubitably towards either translation. What is at stake is our interpretation of Christ’s redeeming work. To start from the ordinary meaning of the English verbs: to take away our sins emphasizes what Christ does for us; to bear our sins emphasizes what Christ does. To put it another way, what happens to

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us is the taking away; what happens to Christ is the bearing. It would not be fair to say that ‘takes away’ is subjective and ‘bears’ objective and to imply that it is better in worship to emphasize the objective side. To say this is to deny the modern (that is, Kantian) uses of the words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective.’ Whatever kind of a person he may be, Christ is a person and his bearing of our sins is, therefore, subjective. The issue is not therefore between subjective and objective. Of course, in the mind of most worshippers at the Eucharist either translation of the word does not exclude both meanings. When we think of the lamb of God who takes away our sins, we think also of how it was done – the sorrow unto death, the bloody sweat, the scourging etc. etc. In his Mass in C minor, Mozart puts the qui tollit to music which catches in its staggering rhythm, the horror of the journey to Golgotha. And Mozart must be considered in some particular sense an authority on these matters because he once said that Protestants did not understand the meaning of the lamb of God. Those of us who are not Roman Catholics and who sometimes criticize the Roman Church for mythical elements in its liturgy which take our minds from the historical facts, should remember that there are not stations of the Cross in most non-Roman churches. The central argument for ‘takes away’ and against ‘bears’ depends upon the necessity in Christian doctrine of emphasizing the dependence of redemption on certain historical events. In the Anglican prayer book the words ‘by his one oblation of himself once offered’ insist upon this essential. The deed was done and it doesn’t need to be done again. We are able to say this even if we cannot specify what the deed exactly was. What we can say with certainty is that the truth of Christianity is inescapably dependent upon what Jesus Christ did that day in Palestine. [The typescript contained the following draft of the previous two paragraphs with an alternative ending:] Of course in the dizziness, the nausea, the confusion, [of] the mind of the worshipper at the Eucharist the translation of the words either way does not exclude both meanings. When we think of the lamb of God who takes away our sins, we should remember how it was done. The obedience unto death, the bloody sweat, the scourging etc. etc. etc.

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In his Mass in C minor, Mozart puts the qui tollit to music which catches in its staggering rhythm, the awful journey out to Golgotha. Those of us who are not Roman Catholic and who sometimes criticize the Roman Church for not emphasizing sufficiently the sheer historical dependence of our redemption, should remember that we have lost the worship of the stations of the Cross. The argument for ‘takes away’ against ‘bears’ must lie in the question of the sheer historical facts of redemption. In the Anglican prayer book the words ‘by his oblation of himself once offered’ cover this point clearly. The deed was done, once and for all. We must and can say this, even if we do not specify what the deed was that was done. If in Christianity there is salvation, it depends in one way upon the acts of that day in Palestine. Acts by all persons (whether divine or human) cannot be interpreted in terms of a reality other than themselves. They are not symbolic representatives of some other reality which conveys better than they do, what they are. This is because it matters absolutely whether they are done or not done. This is clearly true of human moral acts. When we choose to be just or unjust, that choice counts absolutely. If this is not so, there is no such thing as morality. Now we must apply this to the person of Jesus Christ, leaving aside how we define that person. His acts are not to be taken as unimportant and this is so quite apart from the question whether he was a redeemer. The Christian, of course, says that his work was to be the redeemer and that therefore these acts are of unique significance to other persons (let me say in parenthesis that they are not ever absolutely important). But it was work and work is always accomplished by acts that could or could not have been done. Indeed if Gethsemane is to be more than a charade, we must take those moments as moments of decision when Christ could have done otherwise – could have chosen not to redeem us. To say this in no way affirms or denies the divinity of Christ. That this is so, is wonderfully expressed by St Luke’s insistence that there was present the angel of the agony. Why it is essential to insist on this is that Christ’s acts are not symbols of the divine redemptive activity – they are that activity. Christ is not a mythical means of teaching us that God is love. To believe that Christ is only a symbol of God’s love is its ... It must inevitably result in the proposition ... [Text breaks off.]

Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America

Of the six essays which comprise Technology and Empire,1 four were previously published between 1963 and 1968. The introductory essay, ‘In Defence of North America,’ and the conclusion, ‘A Platitude,’ were written specifically for it, although the latter appeared under the title ‘Is Freedom Man’s Only Meaning?’ in Saturday Night shortly before the book was brought out by the House of Anansi in the spring of 1969.2 Two of the four earlier essays, ‘Religion and the State’ (1963)3 and ‘Tyranny and Wisdom’ (1964),4 both of which appeared in academic journals, underwent little revision, while ‘Canadian Fate and Imperialism,’ first published (1967) in Canadian Dimension, was extensively re-written.5 ‘The University Curriculum’ appeared in two parts (1967–8) in This Magazine Is about Schools as ‘Wisdom in the Universities’6 and then under a new title with a few revisions in The University Game (1968),7 a collection of writings on the contemporary university. Abridged versions of ‘Tyranny and Wisdom,’ ‘In Defence of North America,’ and ‘The University Curriculum’ were published by William Christian and Sheila Grant in The George Grant Reader, as was the complete text of ‘A Platitude.’8 Variants between earlier versions and the text of Technology and Empire will be found in the notes. Although written over a period of years, the essays form a coherent whole. From 1965 to 1969 the ever-expanding Vietnam War and the social upheaval it generated in North America preoccupied Grant. As he makes clear in the ‘Preface’ to Technology and Empire, he saw the entire English-speaking world as responsible for crimes which marked the ‘basest point’ in its history (480). He saw these developments as not simply the result of the American government’s decision to fight an unjust war. At a profound level the Vietnam catastrophe was the product of a relationship to nature, history, and human mastery that is deeply rooted in

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the Western tradition. Grant’s critique of Canada in Lament for a Nation had arisen from his reflection upon Diefenbaker’s failure to defend Canadian independence. In a similar way, he was led by the horror of Vietnam to consider the ‘gorgon’s face’ (480) presented by the English-speaking world’s complicity in the war, which revealed that Western technological civilization had renounced any sense of purpose as traditionally defined by notions of justice or the good, embracing instead the mastery of human and non-human nature. American aggression in Vietnam, like the other great catastrophes of the twentieth century, had made explicit that humans had lost any sense of an end that transcended history and that created moral boundaries within which they should live. The only ends were those created by humans themselves through the will. The price of this liberation of the will is, to use a phrase from a later essay, ‘oblivion of eternity.’9 ‘Tyranny and Wisdom,’ written in 1962 although not published until 1964, is important to the development of Grant’s thought about the nature of the modern state and the validity of classical knowledge. He had found in Leo Strauss a thinker who argued that the teachings of the ancients transcended their historical context. Although recognizing that tyranny in the ancient world differed from that of today, Strauss maintains that Xenophon’s treatment of the subject in his work Hiero provides more insight into contemporary tyranny than does modern social science.10 By contrast, Strauss’s opponent, the Hegelian Alexandre Kojève, defends the historicist view that truth was inseparable from the historical process and that history was leading inevitably and desirably to a universal homogeneous state. Kojève and his master, Hegel, believe that tyrannies are a necessary and inevitable part of historical progress and cannot be criticized on the basis of principles of an earlier time.11 Grant had always been ambivalent about Hegel; he had been revolted by the great philosopher’s acceptance of war as a necessary part of the evolution of human freedom. Strauss’s response to Kojève provided him with an antidote to Hegel by defending the universal applicability of classical wisdom. In ‘Tyranny and Wisdom,’ Grant raises a number of questions about the controversy between Strauss and Kojève, perhaps the most important of which is whether Strauss considered that his affirmation of the truth of Greek thought extended to revealed religion as presented in the Bible. Before it was published, Grant sent the paper to Strauss, who responded that it was ‘the most

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thoughtful statement about my intention that I have ever seen. It is both broad and deep. I am deeply grateful to you.’12 For Grant, the Strauss-Kojève debate was crucial because it had to do with the validity of ancient as opposed to modern knowledge as well as the question of ‘whether the universal and homogeneous state is the best social order’ (533). By contrast, his ‘Introduction’ to ‘Religion and the State’ in Technology and Empire seems designed to discourage the reader from taking the essay seriously. Grant states that he is including it for two reasons, both negative. The first is to reveal the futility of a conservative position as a theoretical standpoint, and secondly, to show how ‘hopes and prejudices, desires and vices, cloud the mind ... [on] important matters’ (504). When he wrote the essay, he had failed to grasp the nature of technological society, believing that classical and biblical truths could be sustained within it. ‘I could not believe that the only interpretation of Christianity that technological liberalism would allow to survive publicly would be that part of it ... which played the role of flatterer to modernity’ (505). These disclaimers aside, ‘Religion and the State’ contributes to Technology and Empire by raising questions which are not only central to Grant’s thought but illuminate the argument of the other essays. Can a good society exist without its members having a sense of a supernatural end? Is religious education necessary for the maintenance of the social order, and if so, what sort of religious education? Indeed, is there not a danger that religion will be taught, not because it is true, but simply because it is useful to a society in which secularism is the real religion? Grant makes no attempt to provide answers: ‘... it is better to raise objections to superficial solutions than to advocate passionate solutions based on confused principle’(506). These earlier essays, which raise questions of the nature of education, of the importance of religion to society, of the universality of classical wisdom, and the nature of the universal homogeneous state, form a prelude to Grant’s direct confrontation with the dilemma of living in a technological society in a time of an imperialist war. ‘Canadian Fate and Imperialism’ begins with a discussion of fate, and how the fate of Canada has been revealed in the light of Vietnam: ‘It is clear that in that country the American empire has been demolishing a people, rather than allowing them to live outside the American orbit’ (519). Canada, however, cannot escape that orbit; Canadians know that they are dependent upon being members of the ‘Western industrial empire’ (520). This is not sim-

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ply a matter of self-interest, but is a result of the belief that animates Canada as well as other Western countries, the belief in ‘progress through technique’ (520). Grant then explores the origins of the Western fate in the thinkers whose ideas led to the triumph of the age of progress. For Canadians their first participation in this age was as part of the British Empire, which they identified with liberal capitalism, and with freedom and justice. But the First World War exhausted not only Britain but Canada. The conscription crisis of 1917 pitted English and French Canadians against each other. An entire generation was destroyed in France. Neither Britain nor Canada retained the will to resist being drawn into the rising American empire. The United States, unlike Britain and France, had no traditions pre-dating the age of progress. American civilization exemplifies the idea that human evolution and technology are inseparable, and throughout the twentieth century it has moved towards imperial power. The existence of an aggressive Western empire, French, British, and now American, has led to an aggressive response in non-Western countries such as China. To Grant, the position of Canada as a satellite of the American empires creates terrible dilemmas. It is in the nature of human beings to love what is their own: ‘As the US becomes daily more our own, so does the Vietnam war’ (529). Vietnam is not simply the product of the policies of a particular administration, but of the very nature of the imperative of empire. Those who grasp this are pushed to the point where loving their own becomes difficult if not impossible in the face of great crimes. Their alienation finds expression in various ways, such as radical politics or, alternatively, dropping out. The most complete alienation, however, comes from questioning the religion of progress itself, the belief that the conquest of human and non-human nature gives meaning to life. Grant concludes by suggesting Canadians must be grateful for the limited independence their country does possess, for it means that they do not have to fight in Vietnam, but the question of Canada’s survival is one small part not only of the relations of the rest of the world to the American empire, but of the nature of existence in advanced technological society. In ‘The University Curriculum,’ Grant discusses the meaning and purpose of knowledge in the technological society within which Canadians live. Universities exist to provide personnel to manage a society devoted to the mastery of human and non-human nature, and the curriculum is

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designed to accomplish that purpose. Accordingly, the most important disciplines today are the sciences, particularly those which have not so much the pursuit of disinterested knowledge, but of a knowledge useful to the powerful. The separation of fact and value in disciplines such as sociology has led to their being effective instruments of social control, as well as teaching people that ethical judgments have no connection with knowledge, but are purely subjective, a matter of opinion. The humanities, whose practitioners for a time attempted to justify their studies by arguing that they provided the necessary perspective for making wise choices in an age of progress, now emulate the sciences by emphasizing non-evaluative study. ‘The cruder form of this justification has led those disciplines to become highly research-oriented, so that they could cover themselves with the mantle of science and Protestant busyness’ (567). The better form, such as the literary criticism of Northrop Frye, is at least based on a disinterested pursuit of knowledge, but at the price of retreating from any attempt to answer many fundamental questions. How can a non-evaluative practitioner make judgments about the truth, for example, of de Sade’s approach to sexuality as opposed to Tolstoy’s? Grant concludes ‘The University Curriculum’ by arguing that the rejection of the traditional idea of human purpose as found in classical philosophy and revealed religion has not meant the creation of a pluralist society. Modern liberal society is in reality monolithic. The destruction of what might be thought of as superstitions from before the age of progress has simply enthroned the technological ideal of mastery as the only reality: The tight circle then in which we live is this: our present forms of existence have sapped the ability to think about standards of excellence and yet at the same time have imposed on us a standard in terms of which the human good is monolithically asserted. Thus, the university curriculum, by the very studies it incorporates, guarantees that there should be no serious criticism of itself or of the society it is shaped to serve. (574)

The first essay in the collection, ‘In Defence of North America,’ is Grant’s most direct exploration of the ‘amazing and enthralling fate’ of those living on this continent. Despite their origins and continuing intellectual and spiritual influences, they know themselves not to be Europeans because their sense of themselves was altered through their

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experience of conquering a new land and creating a society that does not pre-date the age of progress. The spiritual tradition dominant in Canada and the United States has not been that of Greece and the contemplative side of Christianity, but Calvinism, itself a reaction against older traditions. The struggle for economic mastery of the continent failed to give those engaging in it an attachment to the land characteristic of older societies such as England and France. However, this rootlessness, combined with the individualist and empiricist tendencies in Calvinism, created an outlook well suited to perfect the technological society first developed in Europe. Protestant asceticism emphasized the control over physical passions but liberated humans to control nature. With the decline of religious belief, ‘the passions of greed and mastery were emancipated from traditional Christian restraints’ (487). The faith that remains is the belief in progress through technological change expressed in modern liberalism, which is monolithic in the public realm but allows, in the absence of a sense of principle transcending the unlimited human will, endless choices in the private sphere: ‘Some like pizza, some like steaks; some like girls, some like boys; some like synagogue, some like the mass. But we all do it in churches, motels, restaurants indistinguishable from the Atlantic to the Pacific’ (491). All problems in this world are to be solved by technique, through the ministrations of an army of experts. The culmination of this vision is a world will liberated from the restraints of the past in which no barrier will exist to humans’ exercising their wills. This belief is not confined to liberals but is part of the faith of the left, and of proponents of sexual liberation like Herbert Marcuse, for these varieties of liberation are only possible through mastery of human and non-human nature. Technological society is so pervasive that it is difficult for those living within it to judge the presuppositions upon which it is based. This is particularly the case for North Americans, whose traditions are practical and not contemplative, and where the decline of religious belief has led to the triumph of pragmatism and the defence of moral relativism by using the language of values: It has been wonderful to behold legions of social scientists wising up others about the subjectiveness of their values while they themselves earnestly preached the virtues of industrial democracy, egalitarianism, and decent progressive education; espousing, in other words, that liberalism which

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sees the universal and homogeneous state as the highest goal of political striving. (502)

The difficulty of North Americans developing a reasoned critique of their society leads to a retreat into art and sexuality, and at worst into nihilism. Grant again takes up this theme of deprivation in the concluding essay, ‘A Platitude.’ Humans in the West have been stripped of traditional beliefs that gave life meaning: ‘The enchantment of our souls by myth, philosophy, or revelation has been replaced by a more immediate meaning – the building of the society of free and equal men by the overcoming of chance’ (576). Although humans are now free, they have cast off any means by which they can judge the purpose and value of their freedom; they have unlimited freedom to make the world as they wish and no means by which they can evaluate the worth of their activity: We are back where we began: all languages of good except the language of the drive to freedom have disintegrated, so it is just to pass some antique wind to speak of goods that belong to man as man. Yet the answer is also the same: if we cannot so speak, then we can either only celebrate or stand in silence before that drive. Only in listening for the intimations of deprival can we live critically in the dynamo. (579)

However, Grant ends on a note of hope, seeing in humans’ awareness of deprival the possibility of an intimation of a language of good excluded by the exaltation of freedom in technological society. ‘The language of good is not then a dead language, but one that must, even in its present disintegration, be re-collected, even as we publicly let our freedom become ever more increasingly the pure will to will’ (580). Henry Roper

For S.V.G. and D.B.L.13 sine qua non PREFACE These essays are published together because they are all perspectives on what it is to live in the Great Lakes region of North America. They

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do not presume to be philosophy, but are written out of the study of the history of political philosophy. If they seem too austere, I would say that they were mostly written as the meaning of the English-speaking world’s part in the Vietnam war gradually presented its gorgon’s face. How could there be any public laughter for somebody whose life came forth from the English-speaking world, at a time when that world reached its basest point? The purpose of the art of comedy is to bring together justice and felicity. In the face of being party to that outrage one cannot hope to attempt that uniting. The reader’s indulgence is required because the way I use certain key words is often made clear in one essay and then assumed elsewhere. For example, what I mean by ‘liberalism’ (as a modern phenomenon) is explicitly defined only in the article on the curriculum (558). The phrase ‘the universal and homogeneous state’ is clarified in the essay ‘Tyranny and Wisdom’ (532) and used elsewhere in the light of that. The reading is also complicated by the fact that the essays are not arranged in the order they were written. Thus Professor Ellul’s definition of ‘technique’ is quoted in the article on the curriculum (558), while my criticism of that definition is implied throughout ‘In Defence of North America,’ the first essay in the book. G.P. Grant Dundas, 1969

IN DEFENCE OF NORTH AMERICA To exist as a North American is an amazing and enthralling fate. As in every historical condition, some not only have to live their fate, but also to let it come to be thought. What we have built and become in so short a time calls forth amazement in the face of its novelty, an amazement which leads to that thinking. Yet the very dynamism of the novelty enthralls us to inhibit that thinking. It is not necessary to take sides in the argument between the ancients and moderns as to what is novelty, to recognize that we live in novelty of some kind. Western technical achievement has shaped a different civilization from any previous, and we North Americans are the most advanced in that achievement. This achievement is not something simply external to us, as so many people envision it. It is not

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merely an external environment which we make and choose to use as we want – a playground in which we are able to do more and more, an orchard where we can always pick variegated fruit. It moulds us in what we are, not only at the heart of our animality in the propagation and continuance of our species, but in our actions and thoughts and imaginings. Its pursuit has become our dominant activity. And that dominance fashions both the public and private realms. Through that achievement we have become the heartland of the wealthiest and most powerful empire that has yet been. We can exert our influence over a greater extent of the globe and take a greater tribute of wealth than any previously. Despite our limitations and miscalculations, we have more compelling means than any previous for putting the brand of our civilization deeply into the flesh of others. To have become so quickly the imperial centre of an increasingly realised technological civilization would be bewildering for any human beings, but for North Americans particularly so. From our beginnings there has been an ambiguity for us as to who we are. To the Asians as they suffer from us, we must appear the latest wave of dominating Europeans who spread their ways around the world, claiming that those ways were not simply another civilization, but the highest so far, and whose claim was justified in the fact of power, namely that it could only be countered by Asians who accepted the very forms which threatened them. To the Europeans also we appear as spawned by themselves: the children of some low-class servants who once dared to leave the household and who now surprisingly appear as powerful and dominating neighbours masquerading as gentry, whose threat can only be minimised by teaching them a little culture. They express contempt of us as a society barren of anything but the drive to technology; yet their contempt is too obviously permeated with envy to be taken as pure. In one sense both the Asians and Europeans are correct. Except for the community of the children of the slaves and the few Indians we have allowed just to survive, we are indeed Europeans. Imperially we turn out to the rest of the world bringing the apogee of what Europeans first invented, technological civilization. Our first ways, in terms of which we met the new land, came with us from Europe and we have always used our continuing contact with the unfolding of that civilization. To this day many of our shallow intellectual streams are kept

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flowing by their rain. It was exiled Europeans with the new physical theory who provided us with our first uses of atomic energy. Our new social science may fit us so perfectly as to seem indigenous; but behind Parsons is Weber, behind Skinner, Pavlov, behind social work and psychiatry, Freud.14 Even in seeking some hope against the inhuman imperial system and some less sterile ground of political morality than a liberalism become the end of ideology, many of the most beautiful young turn for their humanism to so European a thinker as Marcuse.15 In a field as un-American as theology, the continually changing ripples of thought, by which the professionals hope to revive a dying faith, originate from some stone dropped by a European thinker. Yet those who know themselves to be North Americans know they are not Europeans. The platitude cannot be too often stated that the US is the only society which has no history (truly its own) from before the age of progress. English-speaking Canadians, such as myself, have despised and feared the Americans for the account of freedom in which their independence was expressed, and have resented that other traditions of the English-speaking world should have collapsed before the victory of that spirit; but we are still enfolded with the Americans in the deep sharing of having crossed the ocean and conquered the new land. All of us who came made some break in that coming. The break was not only the giving up of the old and the settled, but the entering into the majestic continent which could not be ours in the way that the old had been. It could not be ours in the old way because the making of it ours did not go back before the beginning of conscious memory. The roots of some communities in eastern North America go back far in continuous love for their place, but none of us can be called autochthonous, because in all there is some consciousness of making the land our own. It could not be ours also because the very intractability, immensity, and extremes of the new land required that its meeting with mastering Europeans be a battle of subjugation. And after that battle we had no long history of living with the land before the arrival of the new forms of conquest which came with industrialism. That conquering relation to place has left its mark within us. When we go into the Rockies, we may have the sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods

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of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are, and what we did. There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object. Even our cities have been encampments on the road to economic mastery. It may be that all men are at their core the homeless beings. Be that as it may, Nietzsche has shown that homelessness is the particular mark of modern nihilism. But we were homeless long before the mobility of our mobilised technology and the mass nihilism which has been its accompaniment. If the will to mastery is essential to the modern, our wills were burnished in that battle with the land. We were made ready to be leaders to the civilization which was incubating in Europe. The very use of the word ‘autochthonous’ raises another way in which we are not Europeans. Living undivided from one’s own earth: here is not only a form of living which has not been ours but which is named in a language the echoes of which are far from us. The remoteness of ‘chthonic’ from us measures our separation from Europe. Greece lay behind Europeans as a first presence; it has not so lain for us. It was for them primal in the sense that in its perfected statements educated Europeans found the way that things are. The Greek writings bared a knowledge of the human and non-human things which could be grasped as firmness by the Europeans for the making of their own lives and cities. Most important, Plato and Aristotle presented contemplation as the height for man. Until Nietzsche, Socrates was known as the peak of Greekness. To say this does not deny that there was for Europeans another primal – Christianity. Indeed the meeting of these two in men’s lives, the manifold attempts to see them as one, to bring together contemplation and charity, the fact that they were seen by some to be antithetical and so either one or the other condemned, the way that each was interpreted and misinterpreted in terms of the other and each used against the other in the building of a civilization which was new and which was neither, these inter-relations formed the chief tension out of which Europe was shaped. It is still possible for some Europeans to live in one or the other as primal although they are part of a civilization which is so alien from both. The degree to which the Greek was primal for Europeans can be

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seen in the fact that those theoretical men, from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, who delineated what modern Europe was to become when it was no longer explicitly Christian, made an increasing appeal to the Greeks as primal, while Christianity became for them either a boring, although necessary, convention, or an avowed enemy. Even as their delineation was founded on an increasingly radical criticism of Greek thought, they claimed to be rediscovering a more authentic account of what the ancients had meant than that held by their immediate predecessors; thus Machiavelli against the theologians, Rousseau against the English, Nietzsche against Rousseau and Hegel.a 16 Even such a modern revolutionary as St Just justified his use of terror by an appeal to classical sources.17 The ways of modern Europe have often been described as a species of secularised Christianity. However, the ambiguity remains: the formulations of modernity have often been made by men who claimed to be returning behind Christianity to the classics, and yet laid out a fundamental criticism of the classical accounts of science, art, politics, etc. And that criticism seems to have been influenced by the hidden depths of Biblical religion. Members of the civilization which initiated modern technology often now express a fear of the Americanization of Europe, and state that fear in their identification of the US with the pure will to technique. This may be an expression of their deeper fear that their own society in becoming sheerly modern has at last and perhaps finally lost touch with its primal and therefore perhaps with contemplation itself, and that thereby Europe, in its particularity, is no more. For us the primal was much different. It was the meeting of the alien and yet conquerable land with English-speaking Protestants. Since the crossing of the ocean we have been Europeans who were not Europeans. But the Europeanness which remained for us was of a special kind because Calvinist Protestantism was itself a break in Europe – a turning away from the Greeks in the name of what was found in the Bible. We brought to the meeting with the land a particular non-Mediterranean Europeanness of the seventeenth century which was itself the beginning of something new. a My understanding of this history is dependent on the writings of Mr Leo Strauss. To express my enormous debt to that great thinker must not, however, hide the fact that I interpret differently the relation of Christianity to the modern philosophers.

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To understand North America it is necessary to understand those Protestants and to understand particularly their connection to the new physical and moral sciences which were coming into being in Europe. Why was it that the new physical and moral sciences although not initiated by Calvinists, found a particularly ready acceptance among them, especially among the Dutch and the English? Weber enucleated the central practical relation between capitalism and the Calvinists as the worldly asceticism of the latter.18 His exposition of the essentials of that relationship is true despite its mistakes in detail and his lack of theoretical depth.19 Marxist historians have taken up the subject and written clearly of the relation between the new capitalism and Puritanism, particularly as the two were linked together in the parliamentary party during the English civil war. Because they were concentrating on the practical relation between religion and society, neither Weber nor the Marxists were concerned with the deeper level of the matter, which is the connection between Protestant theology and the new sciences. For example, more fundamental than the practical connections between capitalism, the parliamentary party, and Protestantism, lies the fact that the refugee Protestant theologians from the continent espoused so immediately the Baconian account of science and worked to make it influential in England. It is only possible to write here generally about the relation between Protestant theology and the new science. It sprang initially from one negative agreement: both the theologians and the scientists wished to free the minds of men from the formulations of medieval Aristotelianism, though for different reasons. Because of our present education, the criticism by the seventeenth-century scientists of the traditional doctrines is well known. They criticised the medieval teleological doctrine with its substantial forms as preventing men from observing and understanding the world as it is. The criticism by the theologians is less well known and less easily understandable in an age such as ours. They attacked the medieval teleological doctrine as the foundation of what they called ‘natural’ theology, and that theology was attacked because it led men away from fundamental reliance on Christian revelation. The teleological doctrine did this because it encouraged men to avoid the surd mystery of evil by claiming that final purpose could be argued from the world. Such mitigation led

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men away from the only true illumination of that mystery, the crucifixion apprehended in faith as the divine humiliation.b But beyond this common negative attack on the medieval science, there was in the theology of the Calvinist Protestants a positive element which made it immensely open to the empiricism and utilitarianism in the English edition of the new sciences. Troeltsch20 has described that element and its consequent openness: ‘Calvinism, with its abolition of the absolute goodness and rationality ... of the Divine activity into mere separate will-acts, connected by no inner necessity and no metaphysical unity of substance, essentially tends to the emphasising of the individual and empirical, the renunciation of the conceptions of absolute causality and unity, the practically free and utilitarian individual judgement of all things. The influence of this spirit is quite unmistakably the most important cause of the empirical and positivist tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, which today find themselves in it as compatible with strong religious feeling, ethical discipline and keen intellectuality as they formerly did in Calvinism itself.’c ‘Today’ for Troeltsch was before 1914, so that ‘strong religious feeling, ethical discipline and keen intellectuality’ must be taken as an account of the English-speaking bourgeois world before the adventures and catastrophes of the last half century, before the total collapse of Calvinism as an explicit social force. Indeed as Calvinism was more present in North America than in England as the dominant public religion, Troeltsch’s words apply more forcibly to this continent than to the home of Puritanism. This connection between the English-speaking Protestants and the b Luther laid down the whole of this with brilliant directness at the very beginning of the Reformation in some theses of 1518. ‘Thesis 19. He is not worthy to be called a theologian who sees the invisible things of God as understood through the things that are made (Romans I.20). Thesis 20. But only he who understands the visible and further things of God through the sufferings and the Cross. Thesis 21. The theologian of glory says that evil is good and good evil; the theologian of the Cross says that the thing is as it is. Luther, Werke, Weimar edition. Vol I, p. 354 It is surely possible to see the relation of such a theological statement to later German philosophy. c Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World, trans. W. Montgomery (Boston: Beacon Press 1958),162–3. (Originally published in English in 1912.)

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new physical and moral sciences is played down by those who point to the worldliness of thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke, as compared to the stern account of salvation found among the Calvinists. Such a contrast is indeed obvious but misses the nature of the connection. It is not that the new philosophers were held by the truth of Christianity. Protestantism was merely a presence in the public world they inhabited which was more compatible with their espousings than Catholicism. Rather the connection was from the side of the Protestants who found something acceptable in the new ideas so that often they were the instruments for these ideas in the world, almost without knowing the results for their faith. At the least, Calvinist Christianity did not provide a public brake upon the dissemination of the new ideas as did Catholicism and even sometimes Anglicanism. For example, Locke, so important an influence on our North American destiny, may well be interpreted as contemptuous of Christian revelation and even of theism itself. The comfortable self-preservation to which he thought men directed is hardly compatible with what any Christianity could assert our highest end to be. Nevertheless over the centuries it has been Protestants, both authentic and conventional, who have found his political and epistemological ideas so congenial. One of his great triumphs was surely that by the marvellous caution and indirectness of his rhetoric and by some changes of emphasis at the political level, he could make Hobbes’ view of nature acceptable to a still pious bourgeoisie. Most of us do not see how our opinions are gradually changed from what we think we believe, under the influence of ideas elucidated by others incomparably deeper and more consistent than ourselves. ‘Worldly asceticism’ was to become ever more worldly and less ascetic in the gradual dissolving of the central Protestant vision. The control of the passions in Protestantism became more and more concentrated on the sexual, and on others which might be conducive to sloth, while the passions of greed and mastery were emancipated from traditional Christian restraints. Weber was brilliantly right to place Franklin near the centre of his account of English-speaking Protestantism.21 Incomparably less philosophic than Locke, Franklin illustrates the influence back from Protestantism into the ideas of the new worldly modernity. He may have had contempt for revelation in his sensual utilitarianism, but the public virtues he advocates are unthinkable outside a Protestant ethos. The practical drive of his science beautifully illustrates what

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has been quoted from Troeltsch. It takes one quite outside the traditionally contemplative roots of European science, into the world of Edison and research grants. In 1968 Billy Graham at the Republican Convention could in full confidence use Franklin in his thanksgiving for what the Christian God had done for America.22 The fact that such men have so often been the shock troops of the English-speaking world’s mastery of human and non-human nature lay not simply in the absence of a doctrine of nature into which vacuum came the Hobbesian account of nature (so that when revelation was gone all that was left was that account) but also in the positive content of their extraordinary form of Christianity. The absence of natural theology and liturgical comforts left the lonely soul face to face with the transcendent (and therefore elusive) will of God. This will had to be sought and served not through our contemplations but directly through our practice. From the solitude and uncertainty of that position came the responsibility which could find no rest. That unappeasable responsibility gave an extraordinary sense of the self as radical freedom so paradoxically experienced within the predestinarian theological context. The external world was unimportant and indeterminate stuff (even when it was our own bodies) as compared with the soul’s ambiguous encounter with the transcendent. What did the body matter; it was an instrument to be brought into submission so that it could serve this restless righteousness. Where the ordinary Catholic might restrain the body within a corporatively ordained tradition of a liturgy rhythmic in its changes between control and release, the Protestant had solitary responsibility all the time to impose the restraint. When one contemplates the conquest of nature by technology, one must remember that that conquest had to include our own bodies. Calvinism provided the determined and organised men and women who could rule the mastered world. The punishment they inflicted on nonhuman nature, they had first inflicted on themselves. Now when from that primal has come forth what is present before us; when the victory over the land leaves most of us in metropoloi where widely spread consumption vies with confusion and squalor; when the emancipation of greed turns out from its victories on this continent to feed imperially on the resources of the world; when those resources cushion an immense majority who think they are free in pluralism, but in fact live in a monistic vulgarity in which nobility and

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wisdom have been exchanged for a pale belief in progress, alternating with boredom and weariness of spirit; when the disciplined among us drive to an unlimited technological future, in which technical reason has become so universal that it has closed down on openness and awe, questioning and listening; when Protestant subjectivity remains authentic only where it is least appropriate, in the moodiness of our art and sexuality, and where public religion has become an unimportant litany of objectified self-righteousness necessary for the more anal of our managers; one must remember now the hope, the stringency, and nobility of that primal encounter. The land was almost indomitable. The intense seasons of the continental heartland needed a people who whatever else were not flaccid. And these people not only forced commodities from the land, but built public and private institutions of freedom and flexibility and endurance. Even when we fear General Motors or ridicule our immersion in the means of mobility, we must not forget that the gasoline engine was a need-filled fate for those who had to live in such winters and across such distances. The Marxists who have described the conquest of the continent as an example of capitalist rape miss the substance of those events, as an incarnation of hope and equality which the settlers had not found in Europe. Whatever the vulgarity of mass industrialism, however empty our talk of democracy, it must not be forgotten that in that primal there was the expectation of a new independence in which each would be free for self-legislation, and for communal legislation. Despite the exclusion of the African, despite the struggles of the later immigrant groups, the faith and institutions of that primal encounter were great enough to bring into themselves countless alien traditions and make these loyal to that spirit. To know that parents had to force the instincts of their children to the service of pioneering control; to have seen the pained and unrelenting faces of the women; to know, even in one’s flesh and dreams, the results of generations of the mechanising of the body; to see all around one the excesses and follies now necessary to people who can win back the body only through sexuality, must not be to forget what was necessary and what was heroic in that conquest. Now when Calvinism and the pioneering moment have both gone, that primal still shapes us. It shapes us above all as the omnipresence of that practicality which trusts in technology to create the rationalised kingdom of man. Other men, communists and national socialists, have

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also seen that now is the moment when man is at last master of the planet, but our origins have left us with a driving practical optimism which fitted us to welcome an unlimited modernity. We have had a practical optimism which had discarded awe and was able to hold back anguish and so produce those crisp rationalised managers, who are the first necessity of the kingdom of man. Those uncontemplative, and unflinching wills, without which technological society cannot exist, were shaped from the crucible of pioneering Protestant liberalism. And still among many, secularised Christianity maintains itself in the rhetoric of goodwill and democratic possibilities and in the belief that universal technical education can be kind, etcetera, etcetera. Santayana’s remark that there is a difference between Catholic and Protestant atheism applies equally to liberalism; ours is filled with the remnential echoes of Calvinism.23 Our belief in progress may not be as religiously defined as the Marxist, but it has a freedom and flexibility about it which puts nothing theoretical in the way of our drive towards it (or in other words as the clever now say, it is the end of ideology). In short our very primal allowed us to give open welcome to the core of the twentieth century – the unlimited mastery of men by men. It may be argued that other later arrivals from Europe have so placed their stamp on North America as to have changed in essence what could come from that primal. But obvious facts about the power of Catholicism in our politics, or the influence of Jews in communications and intellectual life, or the unexpected power for continuance shown by ethnic communities, mean only that recent traditions have coloured the central current of the American dream. The effectiveness of Catholics in politics remains long after its origins in urban immigrant needs, but from the very beginning successful Catholic politicians have been particularly dutiful towards institutions, customs, and rhetoric which had been made by others before their arrival, and made from traditions utterly different from their own. In so far as Catholic contemplation ever crossed the ocean, it has been peripheral. Today when Catholics desiring to embrace the modern open themselves directly to the public liberalism, it looks as if even the few poor remnants of contemplation will die. For all the closeness to Jews to the American dream, it would be degrading to Judaism to say that it has been able to express its riches in American culture when the chief public contribution of Jews has been the packaged entertainment of Broadway and Hollywood, the

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shallow coteries of intellectual New York. As for pluralism, differences in the technological state are able to exist only in private activities: how we eat; how we mate; how we practise ceremonies. Some like pizza, some like steaks; some like girls, some like boys; some like synagogue, some like the mass. But we all do it in churches, motels, restaurants indistinguishable from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Even as the fissures in the system become apparent, leading its enemies to underestimate its ability to be the leader in modernity, our primal spirit still partially survives to give our society its continuing dynamism. The ruthlessness and banal callousness of what has been done in Vietnam might lead one to see North American events as solely self-interested nihilism of a greedy technological empire. But such an interpretation would not be sufficient to the reality. It must be remembered that the exigencies of imperialism have to be justified to the public (particularly to the second-order managers) under the banner of freedom and a liberating modernisation. When they cannot there is widespread protest of a kind that never existed during the European depredations in the non-European world. The Vietnam war is disliked not only because it is obviously a tactical blunder; nor only because most of us are ‘last men’ too comfortable to fight for the imperial power that buttresses that comfort;24 nor, simplistically, is it that television filters some of the ferocity to our living rooms; but also because the central dream still publicly holds, that North America stands for the future of hope, a people of goodwill bringing the liberation of progress to the world. The exigencies of violence necessary to our empire will increasingly make mockery of the rhetoric of that dream. The lineaments of our imperialism are less and less able to be dressed up in the language of liberal idealism to make them seem more than the affluence and power of the northern hemisphere. Nevertheless, as of now, the belief that America is the moral leader of the world through modernisation still sustains even the most banal and ruthless of our managers. At home the ruling managers move ‘towards the year 2000.’ It might seem here that the practical primal has become no more than the unalloyed drive to technological mastery for its own sake. It is this interpretation which allows certain Europeans to consider us a wasteland with nothing seriously human amongst us but that self-propelling will to technology. But this interpretation underestimates the very effectiveness of North America in the world, in its forgetting that it is men who

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make that drive. What makes the drive to technology so strong is that it is carried on by men who still identify what they are doing with the liberation of mankind. Our ruling managers are able to do what they do just because among sufficient of them technology and liberalism support each other as identified. It is this identification which makes our drive to technology still more dynamic than the nihilistic will to will which is emptied of all conceptions of purpose. It may be (to use the indicative would be claiming to have grasped the very heart of what is) that this drive to practicality moves to become little more than a will to mastery governing the vacuous masses. But this is not yet how we understand our present. The identification in our practicality of masterful interference and the building of a human world still filters through the manifold structures of managerial and scientific élites to be the governing faith of the society. All political arguments within the system, the squalls on the surface of the ocean (for example that about the rights of property in relation to the common good, between the freedom for some and the freedom for all) take place within the common framework that the highest good is North America moving forward in expansionist practicality. To think outside this faith is to make oneself a stranger to the public realm. Indeed the technological society is not for most North Americans, at least at the level of consciousness, a ‘terra incognita’ into which we must move with hesitation, moderation, and in wonder, but a comprehended promised land which we have discovered by the use of calculating reason and which we can ever more completely inherit by the continued use of calculation. Man has at last come of age in the evolutionary process, has taken his fate into his own hands and is freeing himself for happiness against the old necessities of hunger and disease and overwork, and the consequent oppressions and repressions. The conditions of nature – that ‘otherness’ – which so long enslaved us, when they appeared as a series of unknown forces, are now at last beginning to be understood in their workings so that they can serve our freedom. The era of our planetary domination dawns; and beyond that? That this is obviously good can be seen in the fact that we are able to do what we never could and prevent what we have never before prevented. Existence is easier, freer, and more exciting. We have within our grasp the conquest of the problem of work-energy; the ability to keep ourselves functioning well through long spans of life and above

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all the overcoming of old prejudices and the discovery of new experiences, so that we will be able to run our societies with fewer oppressive authorities and repressive taboos. To such comprehension the technological society is only in detail a terra incognita, as in its rushing change new problems arise which cannot always be predicted in advance. We therefore require the clearest minds to predict by understanding those which are on the horizon and to sort them out by calculation with courage. As we move ‘towards the year 2000,’ we need all the institutes of urban studies and of race relations, all the centres of economic development and psychological adjustment we can get. We will have to see how cities need not set affluence and squalor, private competence and public disorganization, against each other; how all can reach a level of educational competence to inherit the hope; how the young can be shown purpose in the midst of enormous bureaucracies; how banality need not be incumbent on mass culture; how neuroses and psychoses, which are so immediately destructive when power is great, can be overcome by new understandings of psychology and sociology, etcetera, etcetera. Add to these the international problems of how underdeveloped countries can be brought to share in the new possibilities by accepting the conditions of modernisation, how the greed of already modern societies does not hold the others in slavery, how mass breeding with modern medicine does not overwhelm them and us before modernisation can be accomplished, above all how the new military techniques do not explode us all before we have reached an internationalism appropriate to the age of reason. But these are difficulties of detail, requiring our best calculation to avoid, but not vitiating intrinsically the vision of the technological society as a supreme step in our liberation. Behind them lie the comprehension of this great experiment in the minds of our dominant majority as self-evidently good, that for which man has struggled in evolution since his origins in pain and chance, ignorance and taboo.d 25 d As is true of all faiths, this dominating modern faith has many different expressions of itself. Some of these formulations put forward a rather low and superficial view of what it is to be human, for example those of Daniel Bell or Marion Levy in the US or that of Edmund Leach in the UK. These formulations must not lead to the hermeneutical error of judging the truth of the faith from the crassness of a particular formulation. This would be as fair as judging the truth of Christianity from the writings of its most foolish theologians. The same modern faith has been expounded thoughtfully by many; by liberals, both positivist or existentialist, by Marxists, by Christians, and by Jews.

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Indeed the loud differences in the public world – what in a simplerminded nineteenth-century Europe could be described as the divisions between left and right – are carried on within this fundamental faith. The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats. This is not to say anything as jejune as to deny the obvious fact that our technological society develops within a state capitalist framework and that that will have significant effect on what we are and what we will become, particularly in relation to other technological societies developed under other structures. But amid the conflict of public ideologies it is well to remember that all live within a common horizon. Those of the ‘right,’ who stand by the freedoms of the individual to hold property and for firmer enforcement of our present laws, seem to have hesitation about some of the consequences of modernity, but they do not doubt the central fact of the North American dream – progress through technological advance. It may be indeed that, like most of us, the ‘right’ want it both ways. They want to maintain certain moral customs, freedoms of property, and even racial rights which are not in fact compatible with advancing technological civilization. Be that as it may, the North American ‘right’ believes firmly in technical advance. Indeed its claim is that in the past the mixture of individualism and public order it has espoused has been responsible for the triumphs of technique in our society.e Equally those of the ‘left’ who have condemned our social arrangements and worked most actively to change them have based their condemnation in both the 1930s and 1960s on some species of Marxism. This is to appeal to the redemptive possibilities of technology and to deny contemplation in the name of changing the world. Indeed domestic Marxists have been able as a minority to concentrate on the libertarian and Utopian expectations in their doctrines because unlike the Marxists of the East they could leave the requirements of public order to others. But however libertarian the notions of the New Left, they are always thought within the control of nature achieved by mode I use the term ‘right’ because I have written elsewhere of the impossibility of political conservatism in an era committed to rapid technological advance. See Lament for a Nation, 66–7. The absurdity of the journalistic use of the word ‘conservative’ was seen in the reporting of the recent invasion of Czechoslovakia when the term ‘conservative’ was widely applied to the pro-Russian Czech communist leaders.

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ern techniques. The liberation of human beings assumes the ease of an environment where nature has already been conquered. For example, at the libertarian height of Professor Marcuse’s writings (Eros and Civilization), he maintains that men having achieved freedom against a constraining nature can now live in the liberation of a polymorphous sexuality.26 The orgiastic gnosticism there preached always assumes that the possibilities of liberation depend on the maintenance of our high degree of conquest. Having first conquered nature, we can now enjoy her. His later One Dimensional Man is sadder in its expectations from our present situation, but technology is still simplistically described and blessed, as long as it is mixed with the pursuit of art, kind sexuality, and a dash of Whiteheadian metaphysics.27 Even the root and branch condemnation of the system by some of the politicised young assumes the opportunities for widespread instant satisfaction which are only possible in terms of the modern achievements. They want both high standards of spontaneous democracy and the egalitarian benefits accruing from technique. But have not the very forms of the bureaucratic institutions been developed as necessary for producing those benefits? Can the benefits exist without the stifling institutions? Can such institutions exist as participatory democracies? To say yes to these questions with any degree of awareness requires the recognition of the fact that the admired spontaneity of freedom is made feasible by the conquering of the spontaneity of nature. In this sense their rejection of their society is not root and branch. They share, with those who appear to them as enemies, the deeper assumptions which have made the technological society. Indeed the fact that progress in techniques is the horizon for us is seen even in the humane stance of those who seek some overreaching vision of human good in terms of which the use of particular techniques might be decided. Who would deny that there are many North Americans who accept the obvious benefits of modern technique but who also desire to maintain firm social judgment about each particular method in the light of some decent vision of human good? Such judgments are widely attempted in obvious cases, such as military techniques, where most men still ask whether certain employments can ever serve good. (This is even so in a continent whose government is the only one so far to have used nuclear weapons in warfare.) At a less obvious level, there are still many who ask questions about particular

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techniques of government planning and their potency for tyranny. Beyond this again there are a smaller number who raise questions about new biochemical methods and their relation to the propagation of the race. As the possible harm from any new technique is less evident, the number of questioners get fewer. This position is the obvious one by which a multitude of sensible and responsible people try to come to terms with immediate exigencies. Nevertheless the grave difficulty of thinking a position in which technique is beheld within a horizon greater than itself, stems from the very nature of our primal, and must be recognized. That difficulty is present for us because of the following fact: when we seek to elucidate the standards of human good (or in contemporary language ‘the values’) by which particular techniques can be judged, we do so within modern ways of thought and belief. But from the very beginnings of modern thought the new natural science and the new moral science developed together in mutual interdependence so that the fundamental assumptions of each were formulated in the light of the other. Modern thought is in that sense a unified fate for us. The belief in the mastering knowledge of human and non-human beings arose together with the very way we conceive our humanity as an Archimedean freedom outside nature, so that we can creatively will to shape the world to our values.28 The decent bureaucrats, the concerned thinkers, and the thoughtful citizens as much conceive their task as creatively willing to shape the world to their values as do the corporate despots, the motivations experts, and the manipulative politicians. The moral discourse of ‘values’ and ‘freedom’ is not independent of the will to technology, but a language fashioned in the same forge together with the will to technology. To try to think them separately is to move more deeply into their common origin. Moreover, when we use this language of ‘freedom’ and ‘values’ to ask seriously what substantive ‘values’ our freedom should create, it is clear that such values cannot be discovered in ‘nature’ because in the light of modern science nature is objectively conceived as indifferent to value. (Every sophomore who studies philosophy in the Englishspeaking world is able to disprove ‘the naturalistic fallacy,’ namely, that statements about what ought to be cannot be inferred solely from statements about what is.) Where then does our freedom to create values find its content? When that belief in freedom expresses itself seri-

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ously (that is, politically and not simply as a doctrine of individual fulfilment), the content of man’s freedom becomes the actualising of freedom for all men. The purpose of action becomes the building of the universal and homogeneous state – the society in which all men are free and equal and increasingly able to realise their concrete individuality. Indeed this is the governing goal of ethical striving, as much in the modernising East as in the West. Despite the continuing power in North America of the right of individuals to highly comfortable and dominating self-preservation through the control of property, and in the communist bloc the continuing exaltation of the general will against all individual and national rights, the rival empires agree in their public testimonies as to what is the goal of human striving. Such a goal of moral striving is (it must be repeated) inextricably bound up with the pursuit of those sciences which issue in the mastery of human and non-human nature. The drive to the overcoming of chance which has been the motive force behind the developers of modern technique did not come to be accidentally, as a clever way of dealing with the external world, but as one part of a way of thought about the whole and what is worth doing in it. At the same time the goal of freedom was formulated within the light of this potential overcoming of chance. Today this unity between the overcoming and the goal is increasingly actualised in the situations of the contemporary world. As we push towards the goal we envisage, our need of technology for its realisation becomes ever more pressing. If all men are to become free and equal within the enormous institutions necessary to technology, then the overcoming of chance must be more and more rigorously pursued and applied – particularly that overcoming of chance among human beings which we expect through the development of the modern social sciences. The difficulty then of those who seek substantive values by which to judge particular techniques is that they must generally think of such values within the massive assumptions of modern thought. Indeed even to think ‘values’ at all is to be within such assumptions. But the goal of modern moral striving – the building of free and equal human beings – leads inevitably back to a trust in the expansion of that very technology we are attempting to judge. The unfolding of modern society has not only required the criticism of all older standards of human excellence, but has also at its heart that trust in the overcoming of

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chance which leads us back to judge every human situation as being solvable in terms of technology. As moderns we have no standards by which to judge particular techniques, except standards welling up with our faith in technical expansion. To describe this situation as a difficulty implies that it is no inevitable historicist predicament. It is to say that its overcoming could only be achieved by living in the full light of its presence. Indeed the situation of liberalism in which it is increasingly difficult for our freedom to have any content by which to judge techniques except in their own terms is present in all advanced industrial countries. But it is particularly pressing for us because our tradition of liberalism was moulded from practicality. Because the encounter of the land with the Protestants was the primal for us, we never inherited much that was at the heart of Western Europe. This is not to express the foolish position that we are a species of Europeans-minus. It is clear that in our existing here we have become something which is more than European – something which by their lack of it Europeans find difficult to understand. Be that as it may, it is also clear that the very nature of the primal for us meant that we did not bring with us from Europe the tradition of contemplation. To say contemplation tout court is to speak as if we lacked some activity which the Ford Foundation could make good by proper grants to the proper organisations. To say philosophy rather than contemplation might be to identify what is absent for us with an academic study which is pursued here under that name. Nevertheless, it may perhaps be said negatively that what has been absent for us is the affirmation of a possible apprehension of the world beyond that as a field of objects considered as pragmata – an apprehension present not only in its height as ‘theory’ but as the undergirding of our loves and friendships, of our arts and reverences, and indeed as the setting for our dealing with the objects of the human and non-human world. Perhaps we are lacking the recognition that our response to the whole should not most deeply be that of doing, nor even that of terror and anguish, but that of wondering or marvelling at what is, being amazed or astonished by it, or perhaps best, in a discarded English usage, admiring it; and that such a stance, as beyond all bargains and conveniences, is the only source from which purposes may be manifest to us for our necessary calculating. To repeat, Western Europe had inherited that contemplation in its

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use of it theologically, that is, under the magistery of revelation. Within that revelation charity was the height and therefore contemplation was finally a means to that obedient giving oneself away. Nevertheless it was necessary for some to think revelation and the attempt to do so led theologians continually back to the most comprehensive thinkers that the West had known. Augustine spoke of ‘spoiling the Egyptians’ but in that use of philosophy to expound revelation, the spoilers were often touched by that which they would use as something they could not use.29 In that continual tasting of the Greeks, some men were led back to thought not determined by revelation, and therefore to a vision of contemplation not subservient to charity, but understood as itself the highest. As has been said earlier, the Calvinists claimed to be freeing theology from all but its Biblical roots and cut themselves off from pure contemplation more than did any other form of European theology – Catholic or Jewish, Lutheran or even Anglican. For the Calvinist, theology was a prophetic and legal expounding of a positively conceived revelation, the purpose of which was to make its practical appeal to men. Thus being in our origins this form of Protestant, thrown into the exigencies of the new continent, we did not partake of the tradition of European contemplation. And as we moved from that Calvinism to modernity, what was there in the influence of liberalism which could have made us more open to that contemplation? Indeed for lack of contemplation, American intellectual patriots have had to make the most of Emerson and Adams, James and Peirce.30 I know how distant from North Americans is the stance of contemplation, because I know the pervasiveness of the pragmatic liberalism in which I was educated and the accidents of existence which dragged me out from it. To write so may seem some kind of boasting. But the scavenging mongrel in the famine claims no merit in scenting food. Perhaps for later generations of North Americans it is now easier to turn and partake in deeper traditions than they find publicly around them. The fruits of our own dominant tradition have so obviously the taste of rot in their luxuriance. It may be easier for some of the young to become sane, just because the society is madder. But for myself it has taken the battering of a lifetime of madness to begin to grasp even dimly that which has been inevitably lost in being North American. Even to have touched Greekness (that is, to have known it not simply as antiquarianism) required that I should first have touched something

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in Europe which stayed alive there from before the age of progress through all its acceptance of that age. By touching Europe I do not mean as a fascinating museum or a place of diversion, but to have felt the remnants of a Christianity which was more than simply the legitimising of progress and which still held in itself the fruits of contemplation. By that touching I do not mean the last pickings of authentic theology left after the storms of modern thought (though that too) but things more deeply in the stuff of everyday living which remain long after they can no longer be thought: public and private virtues having their point beyond what can in any sense be called socially useful; commitments to love and to friendship which lie rooted in a realm outside the calculable; a partaking in the beautiful not seen as the product of human creativity; amusements and ecstasies not seen as the enemies of reason. This is not to say that such things did not or do not exist in North America (perhaps they cannot disappear among human beings) but their existence had been dimmed and even silenced by the fact that the public ideology of pragmatic liberalism could not sustain them in its vision. The remnants of that which lay beyond bargaining and left one without an alternative still could be touched even amidst the degeneracy of Europe’s ruin. They generally existed from out of a surviving Christianity or Judaism (neither necessarily explicit) which pointed to a realm in which they were sustained. I remember the surprise – the distance and the attraction – of letting near one at all seriously a vision of life so absent in day-to-day North America. I remember how such a vision inevitably jeopardised one’s hold on North America: how it made one an impotent stranger in the practical realm of one’s own society. But the remnants of such a Europe were only one remove from what was one’s own. It was the seedbed out of which the attenuated Christianity of our secularised Calvinism had come. To touch the vestiges of this fuller Christianity was a possible step in passing to something which was outside the limits of one’s own. Indeed until recently the very absence of a contemplative tradition spared us the full weight of that public nihilism which in Europe flowered with industrial society. The elimination of the idea of final purpose from the scientific study of the human and non-human things not only led to the progress of science and the improvement of conditions but also had consequences on the public understanding of what it was

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to live. But this consequence was not so immediately evident in our practical culture as it was to Europeans. We took our science pragmatically, as if its effect on us could be limited to the external. Thus it was possible for us to move deeply into the technological society, while maintaining our optimism and innocence. In the public realm, this optimism and innocence delayed the appearance amongst us of many of those disorders which in Europe were concurrent with that nihilism. It is well to remember that large sections of our population resisted the call to imperialism by the economic and political powers of the eastern seaboard, even when they welcomed the technological expansion which made it inevitable. Europeans (particularly the English) would do well to remember, now that they live in the full noon of that imperialism, how hard they worked to drag North American democracy to wider imperial pursuits. Until recently there have not appeared amongst us those public atheisms of the left and of the right which were central to the domestic violence of Europe in this century. The propertied classes of the right have remained uneducated until recently and so kept longer within the respectable religion of their tradition than did their counterparts in Europe. Liberals have ridiculed as hypocrisy the continuing religion among the propertied and even among the bureaucratic. When such traditions have gone, those ridiculers may miss the restraints among their rulers that were part of such traditions. For can there be any doubt that the bureaucratic ‘right’ must be more powerful in advanced societies than the left? For the last hundred years our optimism has been reaffirmed by generations of new immigrants who, whatever their trials, found in the possibilities of the new land the opportunity of affluence and freedom on its practical terms. This continuous entry of new families and new peoples busy fighting to partake in the North American dream perpetuated the vitality of the modern. Even as the language of Europe’s ‘agony’ began to penetrate our institutions of the intellect, we were able to use that language as if it could be a servant of our optimistic practical purposes. To repeat, what would North American rhetoric be without the word ‘values’? But even those who use the word seriously within theoretical work seem not to remember that the word was brought into the centre of Western discourse by Nietzsche and into the discourse of social science through Nietzsche’s profound influence upon Weber.31 For Nietzsche the fun-

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damental experience for man was apprehending what is as chaos; values were what we creatively willed in the face of that chaos by overcoming the impotence of the will which arises from that recognition of the consequences of historicism. Nietzsche’s politics (and he affirmed that the heart of any philosophy can be seen in its political recommendations) stated that democracy and socialism were the last debasements brought into the world by Christianity as it became secularised. The universal and homogeneous state would be made up of ‘last men’ from whom nobleness and greatness would have departed. Because of our firm practicality, North American social scientists have been able to use the language of values, fill it with the substantive morality of liberalism, and thereby avoid facing what is assumed in the most coherent unfolding of this language. The writings of Lasswell and Parsons were hymns to that innocent achievement.32 It has been wonderful to behold legions of social scientists wising up others about the subjectiveness of their values while they themselves earnestly preached the virtues of industrial democracy, egalitarianism, and decent progressive education; espousing, in other words, that liberalism which sees the universal and homogeneous state as the highest goal of political striving. They took their obligations to the indigenous traditions more seriously than those to the theoretical consequences of their sciences. Such a position could not last. The languages of historicism and values which were brought to North America to be the servants of the most advanced liberalism and pluralism, now turn their corrosive power on our only indigenous roots – the substance of that practical liberalism itself. The corrosions of nihilism occur in all parts of the community. Moreover, because our roots have been solely practical, this nihilism shares in that shallowness. The old individualism of capitalism, the frontier and Protestantism, becomes the demanded right to one’s idiosyncratic wants taken as outside any obligation to the community which provides them. Buoyed by the restless needs of affluence, our art becomes hectic in its experiments with style and violence. Even the surest accounts of our technomania – the sperm-filled visions of Burroughs – are themselves spoken from the shallowness they would describe.33 Madness itself can only be deep when it comes forth from a society which holds its opposite. Nihilism which has no tradition of contemplation to beat against cannot be the occasion for the

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amazed reappearance of the ‘What for? Whither? and What then?’ The tragedy for the young is that when they are forced by its excesses to leave the practical tradition, what other depth is present to them in which they can find substance? The enormous reliance on and expectation from indigenous music is a sign of the craving for substance, and of how thin is the earth where we would find it. When the chthonic has been driven back into itself by the conquests of our environment, it can only manifest itself beautifully in sexuality, although at the same time casting too great a weight upon that isolated sexuality. For those who stay within the central stream of our society and are therefore dominant in its institutions, the effect of nihilism is the narrowing to an unmitigated reliance on technique. Nietzsche’s equivocation about the relation between the highest will to power and the will to technology has never been part of the English-speaking tradition. With us the identity was securely thought from the very beginning of our modernity. Therefore as our liberal horizons fade in the winter of nihilism, and as the dominating amongst us see themselves within no horizon except their own creating of the world, the pure will to technology (whether personal or public) more and more gives sole content to that creating. In the official intellectual community this process has been called ‘the end of ideology.’ What that phrase flatteringly covers is the closing down of willing to all content except the desire to make the future by mastery, and the closing down of all thinking which transcends calculation. Within the practical liberalism of our past, techniques could be set within some context other than themselves – even if that context was shallow. We now move towards the position where technological progress becomes itself the sole context within which all that is other to it must attempt to be present. We live then in the most realised technological society which has yet been; one which is, moreover, the chief imperial centre from which technique is spread around the world. It might seem then that because we are destined so to be, we might also be the people best able to comprehend what it is to be so. Because we are first and most fully there, the need might seem to press upon us to try to know where we are in this new found land which is so obviously a ‘terra incognita.’ Yet the very substance of our existing which has made us the leaders in technique, stands as a barrier to any thinking which might be able to comprehend technique from beyond its own dynamism.

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RELIGION AND THE STATE Introduction This essay is included to illustrate two points: (1) the futility of conservatism as a theoretical standpoint in our era; (2) the degree to which hopes and prejudices, desires and vices, cloud the mind when one tries to think about important matters. Luckily the analogy between the fruits of one’s loins and the fruits of one’s pen cannot be carried too far. If a child grew up to be a fatuous adult, it would be a matter of sorrow; the survival of an obtuse writing is only a matter of amusement. The folly of this writing is that it did not grasp what the technological society really is. Therefore the general principles of political philosophy asserted in it have no possible application in the society to which it is addressed. This is fatal for an article on a practical matter. It is like those reforming women who go on delegations to tell our rulers that the foreign policy of our empire should be based on the principles of the United Nations. Their virtuous proposals have no point because they are abstracted from the situation as it is. Most of the general propositions appear to me true – (for example, that reverence rather than freedom is the matrix of human nobility). But to think there is point in saying any of these things as if they could have public relevance in the English-speaking world of the twentieth century is absurd. What caused this absurdity was the following: faced at an early age by the barrenness of the all-pervading liberalism, I had spent much of my life looking for a more adequate stance. In doing so I had touched wonderful truths from our origins in Athens and Jerusalem. But to write as if these could be ‘conservatively’ appropriated or publicly sustained in our present society showed that I understood this society so little as to have no business writing about it. To partake even dimly in the riches of Athens or Jerusalem should be to know that one is outside the public realm of the age of progress. The relation between society and the call to philosophy must never be seen as accidental, because only in and through what is now present for us can the most important questions make their appearance. Since our society is technological, those questions cannot appear if clouded by any ‘conservative’ hope. In saying this I do not deny that conservatism is a noble practical stance. Here point (1) and point (2) meet. Hopes and prejudices, desires and vices, come in to cloud thinking about what is. If one is raised in the North American dream, one so wants one’s society and its institutions to have potentialities for

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nobility. For example, I hoped for years that our ecclesiastical organisations (being the guardians of the beauty of the gospel) might continue to be able to permeate this society with something nobler than the barrenness of technical dynamism. I hoped for this when every piece of evidence before me was saying that it was not true. I could not face the fact that we were living at the end of Western Christianity. I could not believe that the only interpretation of Christianity that technological liberalism would allow to survive publicly would be that part of it (e.g. the thought of Teilhard) which played the role of flatterer to modernity.34 Beyond such foolish hope lay the vice of ambition. One wants one’s thoughts to be influential. Thinking in any era requires courage to sustain it. But courage always tends to fall over into ambition and as such corrupts the very thinking that courage must sustain. To want one’s thoughts about the practical to be influential can lead to this corrupting ambition. There would be little point in republishing this essay simply as an illustration of my own changes in thought or my particular vices, but something like this happens in all open thinking. In our age official thought exalts shallow positivist competence and the belief in mathematicising as the objective way. Indeed some of our potentially clearest thinkers turn to this triumph of algebra just because they want to be freed from the uncertainties of prejudice and desire which threaten open thought. By thinking only about what is mathematicisable they can abstract from themselves and their own ambiguities, into the safe light of the quantifiable object. The opposite to such positivist competence is openness to all that is. If such openness is to confront the shallow public competence, it must include an openness to the distortions of our social prejudices and our tortured instincts. This does not imply the current belief that either sociology or psychology is the magisterial science to philosophy or theology – quite the contrary. But if philosophy is to transcend sociology or psychology, it must hold within itself any proper therapy which comes from such sciences. To move ‘ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem’ involves continually bringing to consciousness all the distortions which are bound to be present from one’s individual and social history.35 The present controversy about the proper place of religious education in the public schools of Ontario has been argued with passion by the various parties to the debate.36 The presence of this passion is hardly surprising since the proponents on both sides have believed that they are defending important principles. On the one hand, those who advocate that there should be no formal religious instruction in the schools

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believe that they stand on the principles of liberalism – the division of state and church, the freedom of religious minorities, the right of the individual to work out his own opinions. On the other hand, those who advocate the continuation of religious instruction in our schools believe that they are defending the place of Christianity in our national life at a time of spiritual chaos and that Christianity is the pearl of great price upon which all that is valuable in Western civilization depends. In such a situation, the passion of the controversy is hardly unexpected. The intensity of the debate has not been matched, however, by an attempt on the part of the protagonists of either side to state systematically the principles which should govern the relation of religion to the state and an attempt to apply those principles to our present situation. The result is that the controversy has taken the form of a struggle for political power rather than a debate between members of a common society. It has, therefore, been marked by an absence of good feeling. This is perhaps to be expected in an age which more and more glorifies ‘decisiveness’ in politics at the expense of ‘thoughtfulness.’ But the price of decisiveness is often bitterness and surely nowhere is bitterness more to be eschewed than in questions of the social place of religion. The purpose of the present article is to raise doubts about certain of the arguments employed by both sides in the present controversy. Such an approach may be labelled as negative and unconstructive. It is surely the case, however, that in matters as fundamental as the role of religion in society, it is better to raise objections to superficial solutions than to advocate passionate solutions based on confused principle. In any case, it is the function of the practising politician to seek compromise solutions in different cases; it is the function of the philosopher to argue general principles. As a preliminary, it is necessary to state how the word ‘religion’ will be used in this article. The central controversy about the use of the word has been whether it should be confined to those systems of belief which include reference to a ‘higher’ divine power or whether it should be extended to include those beliefs which exclude any reference to such a power. I intend to use it in the latter and broader sense. The origin of the word is, of course, shrouded in uncertainty, but the most likely account is that it arises from the Latin ‘to bind together.’ It is in this sense that I intend to use it. That is, as that system of belief

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(whether true or false) which binds together the life of individuals and gives to those lives whatever consistency of purpose they may have. Such use implies that I would describe liberal humanists or Marxists as religious people; indeed that I would say that all persons (in so far as they are rational beings) are religious. It is impossible outside a treatise on the philosophy of religion to justify this broader use of the term as against the more limited one. I can, however, raise one difficulty about the narrower definition which leads to suspicion of its use. Are we not to call Buddhism, or Marxism, religions? Yet neither of these in their purest form make any reference to a ‘higher’ divine power. In terms of this usage, I will first raise a difficulty in the argument employed by those who advocate the elimination of religious instruction in the schools and then a difficulty in the argument of those who advocate its continuance. The most generally used argument of those who are against the present system of religious education is that the state should eschew any involvement in the religious opinion of its members because the modern democratic state is committed to pluralism of opinion. It is the function of the family in co-operation with various religious institutions (including private denominational schools, if necessary) to teach their own youngsters their particular religious tradition. The state should only interfere with religious belief when the opinions of some of its members threaten outright the safety of others or threaten the proper authority of the state itself. This removal of the state from the positive sphere of religious instruction is necessary to freedom of opinion and to the separation of church and state – mutually interdependent principles which are of the very substance of democratic government.a My criticism of this argument would be that it fails to come to grips with the fact that religion has a public as well as a personal role. If religion were simply a personal concern, the above argument would be irrefutable. But religion has more than a personal role because the state has an indubitable, if limited, interest in what its members believe. That such an interest exists can be demonstrated in the following way. a I do not intend to discuss here the historical problem of whether Canada is committed to the same interpretation of the principle of the separation of church and state as is the American republic. This has become now largely an antiquated question as our indigenous traditions have been worn away by the increasing waves of American imperialism.

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Constitutional government has an interest in maintaining public order with a minimum use of coercive power.b Indeed constitutional government can hardly continue to exist, if society has reached the point where the state can only maintain its proper authority (and through it, public order) by the widespread exercise of police power rather than by the free consent of the majority of its citizens. But the free acceptance of a certain minimum of public order on the part of the citizens depends on what those citizens believe to be true about their lives. For example, if citizens came to believe the religion that violence is an end in itself (as was the case with an influential number of Germans after 1890), they cannot be expected to remain loyal to constitutional government.37 Or again (and more apposite to our present situation in Canada) if citizens come to believe that their immediate desires must be satisfied even if it involves breaking the law and will therefore break the law unless they are afraid of being caught, this inevitably brings an increase in police power, to an extent which cannot but be inimical to constitutional government. The proposition may then be asserted that the state has an interest in the beliefs of its members in so far as those beliefs have bearing on the maintenance (and indeed perhaps even the improvement) of public order and on the authority of the state necessary to its survival. The constitutional state then has an interest in limiting pluralism of belief: that limitation being what is necessary to the continuance of constitutional government. The question arises: what beliefs are necessary to that minimum public morality without which constitutional government is not possible? Does this minimum morality rest upon belief in a higher divine power? It is serious difference of opinion about this last question which underlies our present dispute about public education and religion. For it is surely clear that if constitutional government can hope to exist without such belief among the citizens, then the state has no interest nor business in teaching the basis of piety in its schools. If, on the other hand, constitutional government requires b I have limited my argument to constitutional government because I take for granted that it is not necessary at this time in Canada to argue that constitutional government is superior to tyrannical government. Also, even though tyrannies depend to some extent on the beliefs of the members of the state, the dependence of the constitutional state is far greater because of its necessary hesitation to use coercion except as a last resort.

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such public belief from a large percentage of its members, then it is the duty and interest of the state to use its schools to support the continuance of religious tradition. Indeed the present controversy is not concerned with whether religion should be taught in the schools, but rather with what should be the content of the religion that is so taught. It is perfectly clear that in all North American state schools religion is already taught in the form of what may best be called ‘the religion of democracy.’ That the teaching about the virtues of democracy is religion and not political philosophy is clearly seen from the fact that the young people are expected to accept this on faith and cannot possibly at their age be able to prove the superiority of democracy to other forms of government (if indeed this can be done). The fact that those liberals who most object to any teaching about the deity are generally most insistent that the virtues of democracy be taught, should make us aware that what is at issue is not religion in general, but the content of the religion to be taught. Indeed I think that such liberal people are probably right that instruction in the faith of democracy should be carried on. In all times and places constitutional government is not necessarily democratic government. But in North America our very heritage of legal government is mutually interdependent with our heritage of democracy. Therefore it seems necessary that faith in that heritage should be widely taught. But let us be clear that not all parents take easily to such teaching. For instance, I, as a parent and a Christian, keep careful watch on the inculcation of this democratic faith among my children in case they should confuse their loyalty to a particular ordering of this passing world with the absolute loyalty which they owe to that which is beyond the world. Also I watch this inculcation in the schools, just as I watch their Sunday schools, to see that the myths proper to the young are not so crude as to be inimical to their growing faculty of rational judgment. Nevertheless I would start no campaign against the propagation of the democratic myth in our schools because I recognise that it may be necessary to the public good in the mass age. The foregoing illustration was used to make clear that the question presently at issue is not whether religion should be taught in the state schools but rather whether what is taught should include any reference to the deity. When the question is put in this form, it is clearly a difficult one. Does public morality rest on the widespread practice of

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piety? This question is difficult because it is so broad and because it is one which has divided the modern world at the subtlest level of principle. To put the matter historically: from the dawn of Western civilization until the nineteenth century the consensus was that piety was necessary to the public good. Any questioning of this assumption was the work of a small minority. To state the obvious, this opinion was strenuously held in the pre-Christian as well as the Christian era. In the last centuries this proposition has come under criticism by leading Western minds, and since the nineteenth century this criticism had filtered out from the élite to become part of the consciousness of large numbers of citizens. Indeed one fundamental mark of the worldly faith which is so prevalent in our age is the opinion that the public good requires the inculcation of socially useful passions, and that the inculcation of such passions does not in any sense require the encouragement of the practice of piety. This profound difference about what constitutes the basis of a constitutional public order underlies the present issue in Ontario far more deeply than differences about the proper relation of church and state. It is, however, quite impossible in the space of an article to describe fairly the arguments on either side concerning the matter. That the correct answer is not immediately evident is surely vouchsafed in the fact that political philosophers of the order of Plato and Spinoza can disagree on the question. I am not going to be as presumptuous as to reduce the subtle arguments on either side to a few platitudinous sentences and then quickly express my agreement with the tradition of piety. What is important in the present controversy is the recognition that disagreement about this matter is the basic cause of difference. It is however necessary to add the qualification which the older tradition appended to the proposition that the good ordering of society required the practice of religion. The older political philosophers such as Plato, the Jewish Aristotelians, or Aquinas, asserted that unassisted reason was able to perceive that without religious beliefs and actions no society whatever can last; but they also asserted that unassisted reason is unable to determine what the religious beliefs and practices should specifically be.c That is, without divine revelation men could not know c It is impossible in short space to discuss the concept ‘unassisted reason.’ I will therefore accept it to mean what it has meant generally in the Western tradition up to about 1700.

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what should be the public religion – let alone the true religion. It was indeed only the certainty on the part of most members of society and more particularly of most political leaders that divine revelation had been granted to the Christian Church that resulted in the fact that that religion was the public religion through most of the European era. This qualification leads to a distinction which seems to me essential for understanding society; namely, that between the true religion and the public religion. This distinction does not imply that all men think there is such a thing as the true religion or that those who think that there is such a thing are agreed as to its nature. Neither does it imply that all men think that there should be a public religion. It simply implies that some men have believed that they could know that there is such a thing as the true religion and that most societies (if not all) have not been entirely pluralist. This qualification also implies that when one particular religion is the public religion of a society, this is possible because a large percentage of the dominant classes in that society think it is the true religion. The right of religion to public status is therefore a right of tradition and based on particular circumstances. It is also true that when particular religions have claimed and received public status, the rights they have afforded members of other religions in that public domain have depended on the intrinsic character of the public religion. Those people who argue against the present arrangements seem to me sometimes confused as to whether they are appealing to the general principle that the good society does not need any widespread belief in a ‘higher’ divine power, or whether they are appealing to the qualification that reason cannot tell us which specific religion should be publicly encouraged. If they appeal to the first, then surely they must expect to meet the full weight of conservative opinion that piety is necessary to the proper ordering of society, and they have no right to accuse (as they have done) such opinion of being simply bigoted and superstitious. If, on the other hand, they appeal to the qualification, then they may expect much more wide support for their attack on the present arrangements. Their confusion of the two different arguments has added to the confusion of the present situation. For example, it is surely the case that religious conservatives can be much more sympathetic to the attack on the present arrangements launched by the Jewish community than to that launched by the liberal secularists.

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It is necessary to insist on this qualification because it is related also to the weakness in the argument used by some of my fellow Christians in defence of the present arrangement. This argument generally takes somewhat the following shape: (a) the good ordering of society requires religion; (b) the majority of Canadians are Christians and that therefore (c) the religion taught in the state schools should be Christian. As I have said, I do not intend to argue the truth of proposition (a), although there are very good grounds in political philosophy for asserting it and I myself believe it to be true. It is rather proposition (b) that needs very careful scrutiny. In what sense can the appeal be made that the majority and dominant section of the community are Christians? In such a difficult question the appeal must be to impressions. There is the Roman Catholic community and also the strong influence of the Protestant sects; both influences seem to be growing in the industrial communities (a fact occasioning surprise for progressive liberals). There is also the continuing tradition of rural Protestantism, supplemented by the rooted people in the towns, often professional, who follow what they have inherited. There is also the growth of suburban Christianity since 1945, the meaning and consequences of which are difficult to assess. On the other side of the picture there are the large number of industrial workers whose situation has left them indifferent to their past and who are indeed indifferent to nearly all the established institutions of society. More important is the fact that an increasing percentage of the educated classes have since 1914 been intellectually cut off from Christianity. This is not only because of the fact that the universities have become increasingly disseminators of secularist ideas, but because the very Weltanschauung of the Western world (in which the educated partake more than other parts of society) has been overwhelmingly secularist. Indeed the two factors go closely together. How could the universities be anything but disseminators of secularism, when one of their chief functions is the dissemination of the most recent ideas, techniques, and discoveries and these (particularly in the social sciences) have been overwhelmingly secularist? The result of this has been that among the educated classes of our society there is an ever increasing weakening of their participation in a real Christianity. This has not meant, of course, that many of the educated classes do not go to church. Of course they do, because they see with clarity the

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need of a moral and religious tradition in their society and in particular for their children. Two of the most successful and representative political leaders of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie in North America have well illustrated this position. Former President Eisenhower stated clearly during his term that he wanted American leaders to be religious, but he didn’t much care about the content of that religion. Premier Leslie Frost entered decisively in favour of religious education in 1961 when he made clear that religion in his opinion was necessary for the balanced ethical life in the mass scientific society.38 These two men have been politically representative of the responsible business-government élite who direct the state capitalism which presently determines the tone of our society and which is likely to continue to govern us in the years ahead. The majority of this class see clearly the need of religion in our society. As the religious side of them is the traditionalist side, they take for granted that the public religion will have something to do with Christianity. But they are not concerned with the clear definitions of theology about dogma and ritual which must continually be made by the Christian Church, and which alone can guarantee that the religion called Christian will in fact be Christian. That is, they are quite uncertain about the central question of Christianity – whether revelation of a decisive nature has once and for all been given. When they think of theology at all, they think of it as the vested professional interest of the clergy which the laymen have to put up with as best they may. This ambiguous relation to the Christian religion is well illustrated by what the representatives of this class have done about the relation of religion to education. The very government which revived religious education in our schools has done nothing in almost twenty years to see that there are trained teachers to carry out its program. The implication is that in questions of religion no careful training is necessary. Indeed our educated bureaucratic bourgeoisie seems to be divided between a minority (at the lower levels of power) who would substitute the religion of progress entirely for our religious past, and a majority who have some continuing traditional relationship with the religion of the past in a very attenuated form. It is here that the already described qualification of the ancient view of religion and the state comes into play. To repeat that qualification: unassisted reason is able to know that without religious beliefs and

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actions no society whatever can last, but reason is unable to determine which should be the particular public religion. This ancient position indeed seems to be embodied in the opinions of our present rulers. Many of them see the necessity of religion, but they are not in a position to take seriously the claims of Christian revelations. That is, they accept Christianity as the best tradition, but not as true. They are indeed in a similar position to the Roman aristocrats who attempted to defend the traditional paganism against the inroads of the new religion in the first centuries of our era. Some of their cleverest members, especially those who have taken seriously their training in the natural or social sciences, opt for the new religion of progress. Two conservative influences are at work here however: (1) ruling classes have always had a suspicion of their most advanced and theoretically clever members; (2) even some of the ruling class who think Christianity complete nonsense are hesitant in any opposition, either because they are truly agnostic and therefore put forward no opposition to religion and/or because they see the need of religion for social cohesion. Indeed our present situation is illuminated when one compares the position of the Roman Catholic Church with that of the large nonRoman churches. The Church of Rome can insist on the maintenance of its right that its members are educated in a Catholic ethos, because sufficient of its laymen support the authority of its clerics in the belief that the Christian revelation is central to the understanding of human existence, and that therefore revelation must be the binding force that holds the educational process in unity. It is indeed remarkable to compare the present situation, vis-à-vis education, of the Roman Church and the non-Roman churches. In October 1962 the Roman Catholic bishops of Ontario suggested to the government (along with other matters) that the ecclesiastical control of the education of Roman Catholic children should be extended to the high school level and that for its proper maintenance special Catholic Teachers Colleges should be established.39 This would round out the whole system of Catholic education at all ages. Compare this with the situation of the non-Roman churches, which find themselves in retreat from participation in the educational process at all levels. Church colleges hardly do more than keep their nominally Christian structure, etc., etc. This comparison is not made to express agreement with the Roman Catholic view of education or authority but simply to accentuate the obvious fact that the

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Roman Catholic hierarchy can press for extension at this time only because they carry the majority of their laymen with them, and they do this because a sufficient number of laymen consider Christianity true and therefore essential to education. To put it bluntly, Roman Catholic laymen will use the vote to effect their religious interests because they take those religious interests seriously. Protestantism is still a voting force to be reckoned with, but largely only in an anti-Catholic and predominantly rural form. If such an analysis be even comparatively accurate, two questions must be asked of those Christian leaders who defend strongly the continuance of Christian teaching in our state schools: (a) has the Christian Church the right to maintain that teaching? and (b) if it has the right, is it wise to insist on it? To the first of these questions only a qualified answer can be given. The second, in my opinion, can be answered negatively with some force. The difficulty of answering question (a) in a more qualified way is the confusion of belief in our present situation. As I have said earlier, the right of a particular religion to public status (within the conservative account of the matter) is a right of tradition, that is, a right based on the dominant ethos of a particular society. In our present situation the dominant ethos is extremely confused and therefore the right is difficult of definition. On the one hand, it is simply outdated to say that the dominant ethos of Ontario is Christian and therefore to grant as self-evident (as some do) the right of the state to teach that religion in the schools. On the other hand, it is equally foolish to deny the continuing power of the non-Roman Christian tradition in Ontario. I find the argument of those liberals who say that large numbers of nonRoman Christians in our society have no rights vis-à-vis their religion in the state schools simply not understandable. I think the following evaluation can fairly be made: in the newer and more highly technologized parts of Ontario, the fact of pluralism exists and therefore the non-Roman churches have little right to public status for their religion. In the more traditional parts of Ontario, they have a real right to public status. This last generalization implies why it seems to me unwise of Christian leaders to insist too strongly on their rights in the state schools. It is unwise because inevitably our society is becoming more and more technologized (if we exclude the possibility of catastrophe, the likeli-

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hood of which we cannot predict). Therefore, the increasingly dominant portions of our society will be those where the fact of pluralism must be unequivocally recognized. In other words, the traditionalist Christianity is going to be a wasting asset. The Church has always been too wise to rely on wasting assets. This loyalty to tradition is a wasting asset particularly in a state capitalism such as ours which is run by the bureaucratic élites in corporations and government. For by its very structure state capitalist bureaucracy teaches men that loyalty to anything other than a particular definition of efficiency is not a virtue. Bureaucracy such as ours is therefore by definition an environment where traditional loyalties are destroyed. The bureaucratic élites in our corporations have shown what little loyalty they feel for our nation. Is it likely that they will show it to the traditional religion? In such a situation the danger that the churches face is of finding themselves used by the state, and, because of that using, of compromising their ability to proclaim the supernatural Gospel to the young. States change (the modern word is ‘develop’). It is surely a likely bet that the educational policies of the state in Ontario will be increasingly secularised, outside the Roman Catholic sector. The danger of being used becomes the following. At the present moment the dominant elements in the state still want the teaching of the Christian religion in the schools, even while it is divided against itself by using the religion of humanity and progress as the cement at deeper levels of the educational process. In other words, the state wants religion in the schools but does not want it there seriously. In such a situation Christianity is in the schools more and more as a façade of tradition. But the façade serves the passing interest of the state without really serving the interests of the churches. When the state has become secularised, it will quickly free itself of its use of the church. The religion of humanity and progress will reign monolithically in the schools. In the meantime the churches may have persuaded themselves that their educational interests are sufficiently served by the maintenance of this façade of public education. In accepting the present superficial system they prejudice their case with the young because it says by implication that the demand of supernatural truth upon their intellects is limited to a few thin platitudes. The argument that it is not wise of church members to defend with intensity the present system does not however settle the question of the need for a public religion. Indeed there is only one group in our

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society to whom this question is easy of solution, namely the believers in the religion of progress, mastery, and power. Assuming their religion to be self-evidently true to all men of goodwill, they are forceful in advocating that it should be the public religion. They work for the coming of the universal and homogeneous state with enthusiasm; they await its coming with expectation. Such a belief, of course, appears nonsense to those of us (Christian or non-Christian) who hold the conservative principle that belief in a ‘higher’ divine power is a minimum public necessity if there is to be constitutional government. And it seems nonsense not only on the basis of what has been said about the matter in the traditional political philosophy, but also because of the evidence of the nature of the most advanced industrial societies. Has the secular state, and the religion of progress which dominates its education, led to widespread happiness in North America in the last forty years? How can we escape the fact that the necessary end product of the religion of progress is not hope, but a society of existentialists who know themselves in their own self-consciousness, but know the world entirely as despair? In other words, when the religion of progress becomes the public religion, we cannot look forward to a vital religious pluralism, but to a monism of meaninglessness. And what becomes of the constitutional state in a society where more and more persons face their own existing as meaningless? Surely the basic problem of our society is the problem of individuals finding meaning to their existence. The most important cause of the psycho-pathological phenomena, which are becoming terrifyingly widespread at all echelons in North America, is just that human beings can find no meaning to their existence. Neither the Freudian nor the Marxian descriptions or therapies can account for or cure these new psycho-pathologies. The religion of progress may have been able to kill Christianity in the consciousness of many, but it has not succeeded in substituting any other lasting system of meaning. In such a situation the question of the public religion becomes crucial in Western society. Marxism has proved a successful public religion in the USSR, but it will not adequately fulfil this function for more than another generation, as it is already being openly assailed by existentialist criticism and will not be able to withstand that criticism. The attempt by such men as Dr Erich Fromm to make a humane Marxism the religion of North America will surely be also broken by the existentialist criticism.40

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It will, of course, seem unfair to the exponents of secularism that I have called what they advocate a religion. They will deem it unfair because they think that what they advocate is a product of reason alone and therefore should be called philosophy and not religion. What indeed buttresses their belief on this matter is one of their own central assumptions: namely that in the modern age philosophy is going to fulfil the functions that in the past were fulfilled by both philosophy and religion. This assumption is itself part of the religion of progress and is denied by those (such as myself) who take their philosophy and religion from the older tradition. The older tradition says that philosophy and religion fulfil different (albeit related) roles in the lives of human beings and that the practice of both are necessary to the healthy life of a society. It says that not many men will become philosophers; but that all men are inevitably religious. It is on these principles that one is forced to distinguish (even when its proponents do not) between modern philosophy and the modern religion (namely that of progress). Another implication of this traditional principle is that religion has a more direct relation to the public sphere than has philosophy. When Plato first used the word ‘theology,’ he used it to describe an activity which was public in a way that philosophy was not. It is this distinction between religion and philosophy which leads those who accept it (whether Christian or non-Christian) to their dilemma in the present practical situation. On the one side of the dilemma there is the need of some public religion which is more than the ever-increasing externalizing of ourselves by the religion of progress. On the other side of the dilemma there is the fact that no religion at the moment can be taken unequivocally as the publicly received tradition of our society. Because of this situation, the proper claims of pluralism must be met in any constitutional state. In short, the dilemma is: there is need of a public religion, yet it is quite unclear what that public religion should be. It is the difficulty of this dilemma which makes those who grasp only one side of it so intransigent in their advocacies. Perhaps it is not possible to reconcile these claims at this stage of our era. If this should sadly be the case, then men who see the religious problem seriously will be forced to retreat from the public sphere and concern themselves simply with what they consider to be the true religion. The public sphere will then be turned over to the advocates of the

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religion of progress and mastery, to do what they want with it. This seems likely to be a necessity, but it can only be a sad one. For the surrender of this attempt at reconciliation not only implies an admission of the impotence of human charity, but also a total admission of the barren future of our civilization.

CANADIAN FATE AND IMPERIALISM To use the language of fate is to assert that all human beings come into a world they did not choose and live their lives within a universe they did not make. If one speaks in this way, one is often accused either of being pessimistic or of holding a tragic view of life. Neither of these accusations is correct. To say that one holds a tragic view of life would be to follow Nietzsche in thinking that Dionysian tragedy was a higher stance than that of Socrates; I do not think this.41 And the words ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ are surely most accurately used, following Leibniz, to describe what one thinks about the nature of things, whether the world is good or not.42 It is quite possible to use the word ‘fate,’ and to think that ‘nature’ is good, and not contradict oneself.43 It is in my opinion a sensible way to talk about events, though obviously it is far from the liberal dogmas within which most people are taught to think. A central aspect of the fate of being a Canadian is that our very existing has at all times been bound up with the interplay of various world empires.44 One can better understand what it is to be Canadian if one understands that interplay. As no serious person is interested in history simply as antiquarianism but only as it illumines one’s search for the good in the here and now, let me set the problem in its most contemporary form – Vietnam. What our fate is today becomes most evident in the light of Vietnam. It is clear that in that country the American empire has been demolishing a people, rather than allowing them to live outside the American orbit. The Americans are forced to that ferocious demolition because they have chosen to draw the line against the Chinese empire in a country where nationalism and communism have been in large measure identified. How does this affect Canadians? On the one hand, many Canadians, whether their moral traditions come from Judaism, Christianity,

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the liberal enlightenment, or a mixture, are not yet so empty that they can take lightly the destruction of a people – even in the case of Asians. On the other hand, the vast majority of Canadians are a product of Western civilization and live entirely within the forms and assumptions of that enterprise. Today the enterprise of Western civilization finds its spearhead in the American empire. In that sense our very lives are inevitably bound up in the meeting of that empire with the rest of the world, and the movements of war which draw the limits in that meeting. The depth of that common destiny with the Americans is shown in the fact that many Canadians who are forced to admit the sheer evil of what is being done in Vietnam say at the same time that we have no choice but to stand with the Americans as the pillar of Western civilization.45 Beyond this kind of talk is of course the fact that this society is above all a machine for greed, and our branch-plant industry is making a packet out of the demolition of Vietnam.46 Our involvement is much deeper than the immediate profits of particular wars. Our very form of life depends on our membership in the Western industrial empire which is centred in the USA and which stretches out in its hegemony into parts of Western Europe and which controls South America and much of Africa and Asia. Somewhere in the minds of nearly all Canadians there is the recognition that our present form of life depends on our place as second-class members of that system. By ‘second-class’ I do not imply a low status, because there are a large number of classes within it. It is much nicer to be a Canadian than a Brazilian or a Venezuelan, or for that matter an Englishman.47 Indeed our involvement in the American empire goes deeper than a simple economic and political basis; it depends on the very faith that gives meaning and purpose to the lives of Western men. To most Canadians, as public beings, the central cause of motion in their souls is the belief in progress through technique, and that faith is identified with the power and leadership of the English-speaking empire in the world.48 This then is why our present fate can be seen with such clarity in the glaring light of Vietnam. The very substance of our lives is bound up with the Western empire and its destiny, just at a time when that empire uses increasingly ferocious means to maintain its hegemony.49 The earlier catastrophes and mass crimes of the age of progress could

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be interpreted as originating entirely with other peoples, the Germans, or the Russians.50 They could be seen as the perverse products of Western ideology – national socialism or communism. This can no longer be said. What is being done in Vietnam is being done by the Englishspeaking empire and in the name of liberal democracy.51 Not only in our present but in our origins, Canada was made by Western empires. We were a product of two north-western empires as they moved out in that strange expansion of Europe around the world. It is essential to emphasize that they were north-western. Hegel’s language is here the clearest. He speaks of the germanische Geist, and in using those words he does not mean the German spirit.52 He means geographically those European lands whose rivers flow into the North Atlantic. He means the particular secularising Christianity which characterised those lands. He understands that the dominant spirit of the modern age is no longer in the Mediterranean peoples, but has passed northward and westward to the Abendland [the Occident]. If one is to understand Canada, one must understand the history of those empires – and not simply in terms of what they did, but in terms of the spirit which drove them to such enormous motion. If one is to pick the society where modernity first makes its appearance in a more than individual way, one must pick England.53 To understand English modernity one must look above all at that unique meeting of Calvinist Protestantism and the new secular spirit of the Renaissance. That secular spirit can be seen in the new physical science whose origins we identify with Galileo, and in the new moral science of Machiavelli. It was the liberals’ superficial interpretation of what we call the Renaissance to see such thinkers as a return to the Greeks, when they were a profound turning away from the ancients. The role of Calvinism in making possible the capitalism which has shaped the Western world has been described by Weber.a He sees with great clarity how Calvinism provided the necessary ethic for capitalism; what he does not understand is that deeper movement of the mind in which the Puritans were open to the new physical and moral science in a way the older a This question is discussed at greater length in the first essay of this volume. Professor G.E. Wilson54 has rightly pointed out to me that in emphasizing the importance of the English in this history, I have underestimated the importance of the Dutch.

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Christianity was not. You can see this acceptance taking place in the seventeenth century. At the end of the sixteenth century, Shakespeare writes: ‘to set the murderous Machiavell’ to school.’55 But during the seventeenth century, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke have achieved the terrible task of making Machiavelli widely respectable, and the new secular, moral, and physical science is particularly welcomed by the Protestants. The union of the new secularism and Protestantism brought forth the first great wave of social modernity in England and its empire. These days when we are told in North America that capitalism is conservative, we should remember that capitalism was the great dissolvent of the traditional virtues and that its greatest philosophers, Hobbes and Locke, Smith and Hume, were Britishers. In the appeal to capitalism as the tradition it is forgotten that the capitalist philosophers dissolved all ideas of the sacred as standing in the way of the emancipation of greed. For example, the criticism of any knowable teleology by Hume not only helped to liberate men to the new natural science, but also liberated them from knowledge of any purposes which transcended the economically rational.56 It is not surprising that North America was won by the English empire rather than the French. It is enough to read John Nef’s book about the differing uses of iron in England and France in the seventeenth century.57 Despite the work of Henri IV, Richelieu, and Colbert, France was not to the same degree an initiator of capitalism and modernity. The French who were left as an enclave on the shores of the St Lawrence came from an earlier tradition, before France had initiated the second great wave of modernity with Rousseau and the French Revolution. What is so endearing58 about the young French Canadians’ revolting against their tradition is that they sometimes write as if Voltaire’s Candide had come off the press last week instead of two hundred years ago. One’s enchantment is, however, limited by the knowledge that their awakening to modernity, which seems to them an expression of independence, in fact leaves them wide open to conquest59 by a modernity which at its very heart is destructive of indigenous traditions. Of course, many stylish French-Canadian liberals are quite clear that their espousal of the modern does not consistently include any serious interest in the continuance of their own traditions, including even language. Although the English who conquered North America were of a

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more modern tradition than the French left in their enclave, it must be remembered that there was always a strong losing party in all the great public events in which modernity put its stamp on English society. Progressivist historians do not write much about the losers of history, because belief in progress often implies the base assumption that to lose is to have failed to grasp the evolving truth.60 Nevertheless, the losers existed and they are worth reading now that we see what kind of society the winners have made. We can read what Hooker wrote against the Puritans and the society they would build.61 Above all, the views of the losing party can be found in the greatest of English prose stylists. Swift was a comic genius because he understood with clarity that the victory of the Whigs was not simply a passing political event, but involved new intellectual assumptions. In the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, Swift knew why he accepted the ancients against the new moral science of Hobbes and Locke.62 Though the empire of the English was the chief of the early driving forces towards modernity, many traditions from before the age of progress remained alive in parts of English society, and some of these existed in an inchoate way in the early English-speaking peoples of this country. It would be balderdash to imply that the early Englishspeaking leaders of Canada had a firm tradition like their French compatriots, or that they were in any sense people who resisted modernity with the clarity of Swift. Most of the educated among the Loyalists were that extraordinary concoction, straight Locke with a dash of Anglicanism. They were above all a product of the English empire, and the victory of modernity had long since been decided in favour of the Whigs. What can be fairly said, however, is that they were not so given over to modernity as were the leaders of the US, particularly insofar as the Americans had incorporated in their revolution a mixture of Locke with elements of Rousseau.63 The fact that the Canadians had consciously refused to break with their particular past meant that they had some roots with tradition, even though that tradition was the most modern in Europe up till the eighteenth century. Indeed, when one reads the speeches of those founders whom we celebrated in 1967, one is aware of their continual suspicion of the foundations of the American republic, and of their desire to build a political society with a clearer and firmer doctrine of the common good than that at the heart of the liberal democracy to the south. (One

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would never know this from what one reads about our founders in our liberal textbooks.) Nevertheless, having asserted these differences, what is far more important is to repeat that the English empire was a dominant source of modernity. The early Canadian settlers may have wanted to be different from the Americans in detail but not in any substantial way which questioned that modernity. I emphasize this for a personal reason. A couple of years ago I wrote a book about the dissolution of Canadian sovereignty. These days when psychologising is the chief method for neutralising disagreeable opinions, my psyche was interpreted as harking back in nostalgia to the British empire and old-fashioned Canada.64 This was the explanation of why I did not think that the general tendencies of modern society were liable to produce human excellence. In this era when the homogenising power of technology is almost unlimited, I do regret the disappearance of indigenous traditions, including my own. It is true that no particularism can adequately incarnate the good.65 But is it not also true that only through some particular roots, however partial, can human beings first grasp what is good and it is the juice of such roots which for most men sustains their partaking in a more universal good? Still, regret, however ironical, is not an adequate stance for living and is an impossible stance for philosophy. Conservatism is a practical stance; it must be transcended to reach philosophy.66 What I said in that book was that the belief that human excellence is promoted by the homogenising and universalising power of technology is the dominant doctrine of modern liberalism, and that that doctrine must undermine all particularisms and that English-speaking Canada as a particular is wide open to that doctrine.67 In the nineteenth century the European empires modernised themselves. Nearly all those aspects of their cultures from before the age of progress disappeared. The fact that England came into that century with a vast empire (despite its loss of the American colonies), and as the pioneer of industrialism, meant that it started with an enormous advantage over the other modernising empires. In some ways it was this sense of advantage and unquestioned power which made it indifferent to immediate political control in Canada. But after 1870 industrial and imperial competition was the order of the day and England threw itself into the wild scramble for more possessions and greater

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imperial control to counter the growing strength of its European rivals. The imperialism of the last half of the nineteenth century is modern man (man as Hobbes has said he is) realising his potentialities. The culmination of that European process was the war of 1914.68 Canada as always was involved in the general Western fate. Just read how English-speaking Canadians from all areas and all economic classes went off to that war hopefully and honestly believing that they were thereby guaranteeing freedom and justice in the world. Loyalty to Britain and loyalty to liberal capitalist democracy was identified with loyalty to freedom and justice.69 For example, I have met people from Cape Breton who were so cut off from the general world in 1914 that they thought that Queen Victoria was still reigning and took for granted it was their duty to fight for her. When one thinks what that war was in fact being fought about, and the slaughter of decent men of decent motive which ensued, the imagination boggles. As that war spelled out the implicit violence of the West, it also spelled out Canadian fate. First, it killed many of the best English-speaking Canadians and left the survivors cynical and tired. I once asked a man of that generation why it was that between the wars of 1914 and 1939 Canada was allowed to slip into the slough of despond in which its national hope was frittered away to the US by Mackenzie King and the Liberal party.70 He answered graphically: ‘We had our guts shot away in France.’ The energy of that generation was drained away in that conflict so that those who returned did not have the vitality for public care, but retreated into the private world of money-making. Canada’s survival has always required the victory of political courage over immediate and individual economic advantage. Secondly, English-speaking Canadians in the name of that brutal struggle between empires forced French-speaking Canadians to take part in a way which they knew not to be theirs. If Canada were to exist, English- and French-speaking peoples had to have sufficient trust to choose to be together rather than to be Americans. The forcing of the French by fanatics such as Sam Hughes and the culmination of that process in the election of 1917 meant that the French Canadians saw themselves threatened more by English-speaking Canadians than by the deeper threat to the south.71 Mackenzie King’s stand in the election of 1917 must be taken to his political credit, and God knows he needs

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credit somewhere.72 In saying that, however, one must remember that between the two great wars King and the Liberal party kept the flames of that hostility alive in Quebec so that they could take the full political benefit from it. The third great effect of that war in Canada was due to the policies of the ruling classes in Great Britain. In the face of the competition from other European empires, the British ruling classes acted as if their only hope of continuing power was to put their fate into the hands of the American empire. That process is epitomized in the career of Winston Churchill. High rhetoric about partnership among the English-speaking peoples has been used about this process. It cannot, however, cover the fact that Great Britain’s chief status in the world today is to do useful jobs for its masters and to be paid for so doing by the support of the pound and the freedom to provide entertainers and entertainment for the empire as a whole. The American empire may be having its difficulties with France and Germany, but it does not have them with Great Britain. Leaving aside the complex question of whether this status was the best that the English could achieve in the circumstances, it is clear that its effect on the possibility of Canada being a nation has been large. The elimination of Great Britain as an independent source of civilization in the English-speaking world greatly increased the pull of Englishspeaking Canadians to an identity with the centre of that world in the United States.73 It is an ambiguity of present Canada that some serious French Canadians now turn to France for support against the Englishspeaking technological sea. They so turn just as English-speaking Canadians can no longer turn to Great Britain for alternative forms of life to those which press from the south. This present turning is ambiguous because for so long English-speaking Canadians were told by French Canadians that we were not properly Canadian because of our connection with Great Britain. English-speaking Canadians now lean on similar criticism when the great general is welcomed in Quebec.74 The supremacy of the American empire in the Western world was important for Canada not only in the geographic and economic senses that our nation had to try to exist in the very presence of the empire, but in the much profounder sense that the dominance of the United States is identified with the unequivocal victory of the progressive spirit in the West. The older empires had some residual traditions from

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before the age of progress – the French more, the British less. The United States is the only society that has none.75 The American supremacy is identified with the belief that questions of human good are to be solved by technology; that the most important human activity is the pursuit of those sciences which issue in the conquest of human and non-human nature. Anybody who is in university today, and knows where he is, knows both that these are the ends for which the university exists and that the universities are becoming almost the chief institutions of our system. The gradual victory of the progressive spirit has taken place in interdependence with an enormous expansion of the Western peoples into the rest of the world. The era of modern thought has been the era of Western imperialism.76 Imperialism, like war, is coeval with human existence. But the increasingly externalised view of human life which is the very nature of the progressive spirit has given and will continue to give an enormous impetus to imperialism. As the classical philosophers said, man cannot help but imitate in action his vision of the nature of things. The dominant tendency of the Western world has been to divide history from nature and to consider history as dynamic and nature controllable as externality.77 Therefore, modern men have been extremely violent in their dealings with other men and other beings. Liberal doctrine does not prepare us for this violence because of its identification of technology with evolution, and the identification of evolution with movement of the race to higher and higher morality.78 Such a doctrine could not understand that an expanding technological society is going to be an imperialist society even when it is run by governments who talk and sometimes act the language of welfare both domestically and internationally. Among advanced liberals, this failure was compounded by the naive account in Marxism of imperialism as simply a product of late capitalism. In the case of the American empire, the vulgarity of the analysis can be seen in the assessments of the presidency of F.D. Roosevelt. The ‘right’ wing has accused him of being soft about American interests at Yalta; the ‘left’ wing has seen him as a lover of humanity whose untimely death prevented him from stopping the Cold War and building a world based on the principles of the United Nations. In fact under his presidency the US at last moved fully into the imperial role for which its dominant classes had been preparing since John Hay.79 Our modern way of looking at the world

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hides from us the reality of many political things; but about nothing is it more obscuring than the inevitable relation between dynamic technology and imperialism. Of course, what has happened in our immediate era is that the nonWestern nations have taken on Western means, both technical and ideological, as the only way to preserve themselves against the West. They now move from being simply the sufferers of Western dynamism to having an active imperialist role of their own. Indeed Russian and Chinese imperialism present an undoubted challenge to the West. There is equal distortion in the rhetoric of those who see the American empire as the sole source of violence in the world and in the rhetoric of those who see an essentially peaceful Western world defending itself against communism. Modern imperialism – with all its ideological and technical resources – may have been invented in the West, but it is not now confined to it. To live in a world of these violent empires, and in a satellite of the greatest of them, presents complex problems of morality. These problems may be stated thus. In human life there must always be place for the love of the good and love of one’s own. Love of the good is man’s highest end, but it is of the nature of things that we come to know and to love what is good by first meeting it in that which is our own – this particular body, this family, these friends, this woman, this part of the world, this set of traditions, this country, this civilization. At the simplest level of one’s own body, it is clear that one has to love it yet pass beyond concentration on it. To grow up properly is not to be alienated from one’s own body; but an adult who does not pay reverence to anything beyond his own body is a narcissist, and not a full human being. In many parts of our lives the two loves need never be in conflict. In loving our friends we are also loving the good. But sometimes the conflict becomes open. An obvious case in our era is those Germans who had to oppose their own country in the name of the good. I have known many noble Jewish and Christian Germans who were torn apart because no country but Germany could really be their own, yet they could no longer love it because of their love of the good. This is why the present happenings in Vietnam are particularly terrible for Canadians. What is being done there is being done by a society which is in some deep way our own. It is being done by a society

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which more than any other carries the destiny of the West, and Canadians belong inevitably to that destiny.80 Canada could only continue to be if we could hold some alternative social vision to that of the great republic. Yet such an alternative would have had to come out of the same stream – Western culture. Indeed our failure to find such an alternative is bound up with the very homogenising path of Western history. So we are left with the fact. As the US becomes daily more our own, so does the Vietnam war. The majority of North Americans do not seem to believe that love of their own and love of the good are exposed to stringent conflict in Vietnam. They assume that the structure of our society is essentially good, that it requires to be defended against aggression, and that it is against aggression that the American troops are engaged in Vietnam. They are either not much concerned with the actual history of the conflict, or else have been convinced by propaganda that there is a gallant country, South Vietnam, which is defending itself from aggression with American help.81 When a more explicit ideology is sought, the position becomes divided at one particular point. Are we to fear the Vietnamese and beyond them the Chinese because they are non-Western, or because they are communist? Is it the old Europocentric fear of the Asian hordes under Asian tyranny as a threat to the freedom and right which belong essentially to the West? Or is it because the Asians have taken on communism that they are to be feared? It is not easy to hold these two positions together for the reason that Marxism is an advanced product of the West which appealed to British industry, French revolutionary ideas, and German philosophy. Of course many people in North America no longer appeal to any ideology beyond our affluence. They take the line that it’s either them or us, and this position is wrapped up in Darwinian packaging which says that any means are permissible that allow us to protect our own. For a minority, the events in Vietnam must help push them over that great divide where one can no longer love one’s own – where indeed it almost ceases to be one’s own. Vietnam is a glaring searchlight exposing the very structure of the imperial society. Even if hopefully the violence there should ease off, the searchlight has still been cast on the structure. We can never be as we were, because what has been done has been done. Some could see the structure of that society before the last years, but Vietnam has been for many the means to a clearer analy-

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sis. It has had this result because here are obvious facts which cannot be accounted for within the usual liberal description by which the society is legitimised to its own members and to the world. Many liberals who do not find the events in Vietnam easy to stomach sometimes talk as if what were happening there were some kind of accident – if only that Texan had not got into the White House, etc., etc.82 Such a way of thinking is worthy only of journalists.83 Let us suppose that the American ruling class (through either of its political instruments) comes to see more clearly what a tactical error it has made in Vietnam and allows the war to tail off. It still governs the most powerful empire in the history of the world. It may learn to carry out its policies (e.g. in South America) more effectively and without such open brutalities. But it will have to have its Vietnams if the occasions demand, and we will have to be part of them. A profounder liberal criticism is made by those who say that the health of the Western empire is shown by the extent of dissent against war. They maintain that only the traditions of the West make such dissent possible and that that possibility shows us the essential goodness of liberal society. This argument turns on a judgment of fact – an extremely difficult one. Does this dissent in the West present a real alternative of action, or is it simply froth on the surface which is necessary to the system itself as a safety valve? I am not sure. I lean to the position that dissent on major questions of policy is impotent and that the Western system has in truth achieved what Michels84 called ‘the bureaucratising of dissent.’b The word ‘alienation’ has become a cliché to be thrown about in journalistic chitchat. Surely the deepest alienation must be when the civilization one inhabits no longer claims one’s loyalty. It is a rational alienation, and therefore not to be overcome by opting out of the sysb Since this was written, some of the evidence is in. Clearly the dissent over the war in the US had some effect on some decisions. It was not only the difficulty of winning the war which convinced the ruling class that the enterprise was a mistake, but also that too many of the influential young were being alienated from the purposes of the society by it. The dissent made this clear. No ruling class could afford to neglect such a circumstance particularly when its society was faced at the same time by a major racial crisis. But it would be wrong to carry the consequences too far. The Democratic party was punished by losing the presidency – but not by the dissenters, rather by the settled and unsettled bourgeois. Dissent was able to expose the folly of defending imperial interests in such a misguided way in Vietnam. But it cannot be effective in turning the US from its course as a great imperial power.

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tem through such methods as LSD and speed. The ecstasy therein offered is just another package which one buys from the system and which keeps people quiet.85 Indeed the depth of the alienation is seen in the ambiguity of the words ‘one’s own.’ To repeat, the events in Vietnam push one towards that divide where one can no longer love one’s own – to the point where the civilization almost ceases to be one’s own. Yet it is impossible to give up the word ‘almost.’ Think of being the parent or the child of a concentration camp guard. One would want to say: ‘This person is not my own,’ and yet one could not. The facts of birth are inescapable. So are the very facts of belonging to the civilization that has made one. It is this inevitability which leads to the degree of alienation and disgust which some people feel in the present situation. There is a distinction between those who in their alienation find political hope in loyalty to one of the other empires, and those who cannot find such an alternative. Sartre, for example, takes part in politics, but he takes part in it as seeking the victory of the Eastern empires, and is able to do so because of the freedom granted him in the Western world. Which of these two positions is more adequate turns on the following question of fact: whether the qualities common to technological empires are more fundamental than their differences. This is not the place to discuss that extremely difficult question. It is clear, however, that the person who says ‘no’ to his own and cannot substitute a hope in some other empire is in a position of much profounder alienation than those who can put their political trust elsewhere. A similar difference in alienation will be found between those who place expectation in changing our society by reform or revolution and those who do not.86 Those, such as myself, who think that the drive for radical change in this society tends only to harden the very directions the society is already taking, and who think of the source of revolutionary fervour as arising finally from a further extension of the very modernity which has brought us where we are, inevitably find it more difficult to know how to live in this society than those who have expectations from radical activity. Some people, particularly some of the young, will say that I have used a lot of words about the obvious.87 They may say that they have known since they began to think that this society is quite absurd and that sanity requires one to be either indifferent or hostile to it. Why

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write so long about what is so evident? However, finding that one is hostile or indifferent to a society may be a necessary discovery, but it is always an emasculating one. Man is by nature a political animal and to know that citizenship is an impossibility is to be cut off from one of the highest forms of life. To retreat from loyalty to one’s own has the exhilaration of rebellion, but rebellion cannot be the basis for a whole life. Like all civilizations the West is based on a great religion – the religion of progress. This is the belief that the conquest of human and nonhuman nature will give existence meaning. Western civilization is now universal so that this religion is nearly everywhere dominant. To question the dominant world religion is indeed to invite an alienation far greater than the simply political. Nothing here written implies that the increasingly difficult job of preserving what is left of Canadian sovereignty is not worth the efforts of practical men.88 However disgraceful has been our complicity in the Vietnam war, however disgusting the wealth we have made from munitions for that war, one must still be glad that Canadian forces are not fighting there. This is due to what little sovereignty we still possess. So equally our non-involvement in the imperial adventures elsewhere will continue to depend on the possible maintenance of some waning sovereignty. But what lies behind the small practical question of Canadian nationalism is the larger context of the fate of Western civilization. By that fate I mean not merely the relations of our massive empire to the rest of the world, but even more the kind of existence which is becoming universal in advanced technological societies. What is worth doing in the midst of this barren twilight is the incredibly difficult question.

TYRANNY AND WISDOM Introduction This essay attempts to introduce what is for me the most important controversy in contemporary political philosophy. Both the controversy and my comments on it may seem over festooned with the trappings of scholarship; but through them a question of magnitude arises. There is every reason to be suspicious of the trappings of scholarship these days. There is nothing phonier in

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our present universities than the exaltation of scholarship as if it were an end in itself. To be neuter before the question of good leads to that boasted neutrality in the multiversity which denies itself in its service of the modern state. Antiquarianism in the humanities has often been a means to cloak the fact that these studies have nothing significant to say about living in the technological era. Scholarship has, of course, always been a technique – a means through which men could come into the presence of the most serious questions. But when the thought that there are such questions has become dim in the positivist night, then scholarship becomes a technique serving no purpose beyond itself, and supposedly justifying its own existence. Research then becomes little more than an excuse for avoiding the ardours of teaching, and Walter Rathenau’s crack appears true: ‘There are no specialists, only vested interests.’89 This debasement of scholarship may turn people away from its benefits. The centre of true scholarship is the careful reading of what the wisest men have written about the most important questions. Both Strauss and Kojève have been scholars in that sense, and through that have moved beyond scholarship to that for which it is a means – wisdom. The question they raise in their controversy is whether the universal and homogeneous state is the best social order. This could only be discussed profoundly by those who had read what the wisest men in the past had written of tyranny and wisdom. Professor Leo Strauss’ book On Tyranny was published in 1948.a In 1954 a French translation was published with an accompanying essay by Monsieur Alexandre Kojève, entitled Tyrannie et Sagesse, and a reply to Kojève by Strauss.b In 1959 Strauss included his reply to Kojève in English in What Is Political Philosophy?c

a L. Strauss, On Tyranny – An Interpretation of Xenophon’s Hiero (Glencoe: The Free Press 1948). b L. Strauss, De La Tyrannie, Les Essais LXIX (Paris: Gallimard 1954). Hereafter cited as Les Essais. Strauss’ essay in this volume also includes his reply to Prof. Eric Voegelin’s criticism of his original work. His controversy with Voegelin is, however, not my concern in this paper. c L. Strauss, ‘Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,’ in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Glencoe: The Free Press 1959), 95–133. (Hereafter cited as What Is Political Philosophy?) In the English version of the essay, Strauss has cut out certain passages included in the earlier French version. These deletions do not radically change the English version. I regret them, however, because their inclusion in the French argument does bring out some of the implications in the controversy.

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My purpose in writing is not to give a summary of the controversy between Strauss and Kojève. Both men know better than I do what words are necessary to make clear what they mean. Modern academic writing is strewn with impertinent précis written by those who think they can say in fewer words what wiser men than they have said in more. In this paper many of Strauss’ and Kojève’s arguments will not be mentioned. Rather I intend to comment on certain propositions and arguments in that controversy which interest me because they appear to be fundamental to political theory. Nevertheless it is inevitable that I start by stating what the controversy in its most general form would seem to be about.d Strauss affirms that ‘Tyranny is a danger coeval with political life.’e He maintains that modern social science has not been able to comprehend modern tyranny. He recognizes that there are differences between antique and modern tyranny. ‘Present day tyranny, in contradistinction to classical tyranny, is based on the unlimited progress in the “conquest of nature” which is made possible by modern science, as well as on the popularization or diffusion of philosophic or scientific knowledge.’f Nevertheless to understand modern tyranny it is first necessary to understand ‘the elementary and in a sense natural form of tyranny which is pre-modern tyranny.’g Hiero is ‘the only writing of the classical period which is explicitly devoted to the discussion of tyranny and its implications, and to nothing else.’h Strauss’ primary purpose is therefore to write a proper commentary on that work. By proper I mean that he is concerned with explicating what Xenophon wrote, not with his own thoughts about it. But it is clear that in doing this he affirms by implication that classical social science can understand tyranny in a way that modern social science cannot. It is this assumption in Strauss’ commentary which Kojève makes explicit in his essay. Strauss in his reply to Kojève confirms that this is his contention. d What an author has written at one place is inevitably illumined by what he has written at another. It is therefore impossible to write of Strauss or Kojève without having in mind their other writings. Nevertheless in this paper I will stick as much as possible to their writing about Hiero. When their doctrine about a particular matter is taken from elsewhere, this will be made clear in the footnotes. e On Tyranny, l. f What Is Political Philosophy? 96. g On Tyranny, 2. h Ibid., 1.

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Kojève never argues with Strauss about his interpretation of Xenophon. He continually uses the term Xenophon-Strauss in a way which makes clear that Strauss has correctly interpreted Xenophon’s doctrine. He also agrees with Strauss that contemporary social science does not understand tyranny and in particular the relation between tyranny and philosophy.i Kojève nevertheless rejects the classical solution to the definition of tyranny; indeed he rejects classical political science in general. In its place he affirms the truth of Hegel’s political theory as being able to describe tyranny correctly and indeed all the major questions of political theory.j 90 Strauss does not question that Kojève has interpreted Hegel correctly. I will therefore use the phrase HegelKojève in this essay. The centre of the controversy is then whether classical political science or modern political science (as perfected in Hegel) can the better understand the relation between the tyrant and the wise man or indeed any of the basic political questions. In stating that the issue of the controversy is between classical and Hegelian political science, one must avoid a possible misunderstanding which if entertained would prevent one from taking Strauss seriously. Strauss affirms both that present-day tyranny is different from ancient tyranny and that classical social science understands tyranny in a way that no modern social science can. From such statements the obvious question arises: how could the ancients understand something which did not exist in their day? (Such a question will be particularly

i When I use the adjective ‘modern’ about political philosophy, it is used generally to describe the political philosophy of Europe since Machiavelli. When I use the adjective ‘contemporary’ about social science, I mean these studies as they are generally practised in our day, particularly in North America. As this paper is concerned with the differences between Strauss and Kojève, it will not be concerned with their criticisms of contemporary social science. j As I write chiefly for English-speaking readers, it is necessary to state here that Kojève’s Hegel is not the gentlemanly idealist of the nineteenth century who became the butt of the British ‘realists’ in this century. To Kojève the essential work of Hegel is The Phenomenology of Spirit. His Hegel is atheist and his thought contains all the truth implicit in existentialism and Marxism. Since his lectures of the 1930’s Kojève has exerted a profound influence on the contemporary existentialists in France. As the popular North American usage of ‘atheist’ is unclear, I will use it in this paper in the sense that Kojève used it in his Introduction. I am not certain whether Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel is correct; but I am quite certain that Kojève’s Hegel is incomparably nearer to the original than such English interpretations as those of Caird, Bosanquet, and Russell.

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pressing for those social scientists whose intellectual outlook may be briefly described as ‘historicism.’ Indeed historicism may prevent such scholars from even reading Strauss’ arguments.) The apparent inconsistency is resolved in this way: Strauss says that what distinguishes modern tyranny from ancient tyranny is the presence in the modern world of a science that issues in the conquest of nature and the belief in the possibility of the popularization of philosophy and science. Both these possibilities were known to the ancient philosophers. ‘But the classics rejected them as “unnatural,” i.e., as destructive of humanity. They did not dream of present day tyranny because they regarded its basic presuppositions as so preposterous that they turned their imaginations in entirely different directions.’k In terms of this historical assertion, both Strauss’ affirmations can be made. Classical political science was not familiar with modern tyranny, but it was familiar with the assumptions which distinguish it from antique tyranny. Strauss is obviously asserting the classical view that tyranny is a form of government common to all ages and that the political philosopher can have knowledge of what is common to these governments of disparate ages so that he can correctly call each of them tyrannies. The contemporary social scientist may criticise such a position, but his disagreement is a philosophical one. It does not arise from an obvious mistake about the facts on Strauss’ part. It is difficult to know where to plunge into the controversy. Such uncertainty is inevitable once the incipient political philosopher has recognised that his study cannot avoid being metaphysical and that therefore he must try to learn from those who can think more widely and consistently than himself. For whatever else may be said about the philosophers who related their doctrine on political matters to their desire to have knowledge of the whole, among the best of them there has been a monumental consistency which related their doctrine on one issue to what they taught on all others. Both Strauss and Kojève have studied the masters with great care and therefore know in detail the political teachings of the metaphysicians. They are both aware of the wide extent to which the difference between classical and Hegelian political teaching involves a difference of doctrine on nearly every major issue of political theory. Indeed to state the obvious, the controk What Is Political Philosophy? 96.

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versy implies throughout a difference of opinion about the object and method of philosophy, in the more than political sense of that word.l I do not want simply to check off these differences in detail, yet on the other hand I do not feel competent to define the central principles which divide classical from Hegelian metaphysics. For these reasons I take the plunge into the controversy at the point of a concrete political teaching. Kojève affirms that the universal and homogeneous state is the best social order and that mankind advances to the establishment of such an order. The proof of this is according to Kojève found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and Kojève sketches the argument of that book in a few pages of his essay.m From that sketch his account of the proper relation between tyranny and wisdom emerges. Alexander, pupil of a philosopher, was the first ruler who met with success in realising a universal state, that is, an empire of which men could become citizens not simply because of their common ethnic or geographic background, but because they shared a common ‘essence.’ And that essence was, in the last analysis, their sharing of what modern men call ‘civilization’ – the culture of the Greeks which was for Alexander the culture of reason itself. But according to Hegel-Kojève, Alexander, as a Greek philosopher, could not overcome the distinction between masters and slaves. Thus his universal state could not be homogeneous – a society without classes. The distinction between master and slave was only overcome as a consequence of the Semitic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). For the West this culminated in Saint Paul. To quote: It is the idea of the fundamental equality of all those who believe in a single God. This transcendental conception of social equality differs radically from the Socratic-Platonic conception of the identity of beings having the same immanent ‘essence.’ For Alexander, a disciple of the Greek philosophers, the Hellene and the Barbarian have the same title to political citizenship in the Empire, to the extent that they HAVE the same l It is interesting that the paragraph at the end of Strauss’ reply to Kojève, in which he describes the difference between the classical and Hegelian accounts of the nature of philosophy, is not included in the English version. Perhaps it is not too rash to infer that Strauss did not include it because of the general lack of interest in metaphysical questions among English-speaking intellectuals. m Les Essais, 266–80.

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human (moreover, rational, logical, discursive) ‘nature’ (= essence, idea, form, etc.) or are ‘essentially’ identified with each other as the result of a direct (= ‘immediate’) ‘mixture’ of their innate qualities (realised by means of biological union). For St Paul there is no ‘essential’ (irreducible) difference between the Greek and the Jew because they both can BECOME Christians, and this not by ‘mixing’ their Greek and Jewish ‘qualities,’ but by negating them both and ‘synthesizing’ them in and by this very negation into a homogeneous unity not innate or given, but (freely) created by ‘conversion.’ Because of the negating character of the Christian ‘synthesis,’ there are no longer any incompatible ‘ qualities,’ or ‘contradictory’ (= mutually exclusive), ‘qualities.’ For Alexander, a Greek philosopher, there was no possible mixture of Masters and Slaves, for they were ‘opposites.’ Thus his universal State, which did away with race, could not be homogeneous in the sense that it would equally do away with ‘class.’ For St Paul on the contrary, the negation (active to the extent that ‘faith’ is an act, being ‘dead’ without ‘acts’) of the opposition between pagan Mastery and Servitude could engender an ‘essentially’ new Christian unity (which is, moreover, active or acting, or ‘emotional,’ and not purely rational or discursive, that is ‘logical’) which could serve as the basis not only for political universality, but also for the social homogeneity of the State.n

The union of the political ideas of universality and homogeneity could not however result in the universal and homogeneous state becoming a realisable political end when it came into the West as part of Christian theism. That religion did not suppose such a state to be fully realisable in the world, but only in the beyond, in the kingdom of heaven. Homogeneity based on faith in a transcendent God could only lead to the conception of the universal and homogeneous Church, not to a universal and homogeneous state. For the universal and homogeneous state to be a realisable political end, Christian theism had first to be negated. This negation was the accomplishment of modern philosophy – an accomplishment of such men as Hobbes and Spinoza which was completed by Hegel. Modern philosophy was able to secularise n Ibid., 273–4. The English translation of Kojève’s essay is by Michael Gold. This translation has now been published with Strauss’ writings on the matter. See Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, revised and enlarged edition (Glencoe: The Free Press 1963).

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(that is, to rationalise or transform into coherent discourse) the religious idea of the equality of all men. Thus the idea of the classless society, then, is a derivative of the Christian religion because modern philosophy in negating the Christian religion was aware of the truth present in that which it negated. Thus the universal and homogeneous state became a realisable political order (because of modern philosophy) and has been, is, and will be made actual by rulers. Indeed whatever else should be said of Kojève’s sketch of Western political history, it is surely accurate to affirm that the universal and homogeneous state has been the dominant ideal in recent modern political thought, not only among those who have recognised their debt to Hegel but among many who would scorn Hegel’s philosophy. Indeed the drive to the universal and homogeneous state remains the dominant ethical ‘ideal’ to which our contemporary society appeals for meaning in its activity.91 In its terms our society legitimises itself to itself. Therefore any contemporary man must try to think the truth of this core of political liberalism, if he is to know what it is to live in his world. The need to think the truth of this ideal remains even as its content empties into little more than the pursuit of technical expansion. It is Kojève’s contention that Hegel’s comprehension of the implications of asserting that the universal and homogeneous state is the best political ideal was complete in a way not present in any other political philosopher. This sketch indicates the proper relation between politicians and philosophers, according to Hegel-Kojève. Only by discursive, philosophic reflection can a person become completely aware of the given historical situation at any moment. But the philosopher who is completely aware of the given historical situation must distinguish between that situation and the ideal. This distinction between the actual and the ideal leads to the negation of the given historical situation by struggle and work. This practical negating has always been accomplished by political tyrants. There would thus be no historical progress if philosophers did not instruct politicians in the meaning of actual historical situations. Equally there would be no philosophical progress if practising politicians did not realise the teaching of the philosophers in the world through work and struggle. This doctrine is, of course, of central significance in approaching the Hegelian dialectic. Philosophy is always

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the account of actuality as it has become in any particular epoch, including the contradictions of that epoch.o Therefore philosophy cannot hope to reach any conclusions which transcend the social situation of its age. Progress in philosophy, then, depends on the contradictions of a particular epoch being overcome by struggle and work, and this is always centred in the work of particular tyrants. Any other view of philosophy presupposes that philosophy is concerned with timeless concepts or, in other words, with an ahistorical eternal order. The belief that philosophy is concerned with the eternal order is based on the fundamental error of classical logic that being is eternally identical with itself. Kojève’s motto could be the famous tag of Hegel’s: Was die Zeit betrifft, so ist sie der daseiende Begriff selbst.92 The fundamental assumption of Hegelian logic (that being creates itself throughout the course of history and that eternity is the totality of all historical epochs) is only taken seriously at the level of politics in the recognition of the dependence of philosophers on the activity of tyrants. Kojève returns again and again in his writings to the point that Hegel alone has recognised fully the relation between the modern negation of theism and man’s freedom to make the world (history). Only in the radical negation of theism is it possible to assert that there is progress – that is, that there is any sense or overall direction to history. This progressive and atheist interpretation of Hegel illustrates and in turn is illustrated by the doctrine that progress in philosophy and the successful practice of wise tyrants depend upon each other. One related facet of this interdependence between wisdom and tyranny is Kojève’s assertion that the realisation of the universal and homogeneous state will involve the end of philosophy. The love of wisdom will disappear because human beings will be able to achieve wisdom. For Kojève, this realisation of wisdom has been first achieved in the writings of Hegel. But this appearance of the Sage had to be preceded by the action of that tyrant (Napoleon) who established the basis of the universal and homogeneous state. According to Kojève, Hegel o It is quite impossible to describe here how the term ‘contradiction’ can be applied to society as well as to thought in the Hegelian logic – namely the aspect of Hegel’s political teaching which has been most influential in Europe and at the same time most scorned among the philosophers of the English-speaking world. For a series of clear essays in which Kojève’s account of Hegel is discussed see R. Queneau, (ed.), Etudes Hégéliennes (Neuchatel, 1955).

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has produced the book (Bible) of wisdom which has definitely replaced the one with that title which we have had for two thousand years.p This implies that for Kojève the events of 1830–1945 and after have been simply the completion in the world of that universal and homogeneous state which was initiated in one geographic area by Napoleon and which was completely understood by Hegel. Such an interpretation of Kojève would explain why he has used his philosophic talents simply to expound Hegel and why he has devoted most of his energies to the practical world. Strauss’ most general criticism of this account of Western history is that it is based on the assumption that the universal and homogeneous state is the best social order. That is, according to Strauss, the Hegelian philosophy of history is essentially an attempt to interpret Western history so that the two propositions ‘the universal and homogeneous state is the best social order’ and ‘this social order will be built by man’ will be shown to be true. Before proceeding to describe his arguments further, I must comment on what this general criticism by Strauss shows about the form of his argument as a whole. It is clear that in saying that Hegel’s philosophy of history depends upon a universal proposition about all social orders, Strauss is speaking within the assumptions of classical philosophy; namely, that political philosophy stands or falls by its ability to transcend history, i.e., by its ability to make statements about the best social order the truth of which is independent of changing historical epochs and which therefore cannot be deduced from any philosophy of history which makes positive statements about the historical process. But this assumption about political philosophy is in turn dependent on the assumption that the Socratic account of philosophy as a whole is true. Strauss also knows that for Hegel-Kojève the truth about the best social order is not prior to an interpretation of history and could not be known except at a certain epoch. This truth is reached by an argument which appeals to an interpretation of the sum of historical epochs which in totality, for the Hegelian, constitutes eternity. For the Hegelian, political philosophy does not stand or fall by its ability to transcend history, but rather by its ability to comprehend all history. Strauss knows that the difference between Hegel and the classics about the place of ‘history’ in the whole depends upon and illusp Les Essais, 277.

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trates a profound difference between them about the object, method, and standpoint of the study of philosophy in a more than political sense. The question may then be asked: why does Strauss criticize Kojève from within an account of philosophy which Kojève does not accept? Why then does he not argue about the fundamental difference as to the nature of philosophy rather than the implications which follow from this difference concerning the proper relation between tyranny and wisdom? The answer to this clarifies the limits of Strauss’ intentions. His first concern is not to refute Hegelianism but to show that the classical account of the relation between tyranny and wisdom is required by the classical account of philosophy; that is, that there is consistency between what the classics say about the whole and about politics, and that therefore classical political philosophy is not to be judged as a first phase of the subject, which has been left behind as mankind has progressed. Should this seem a limited task, it is perhaps worth pointing out that it is a necessary preliminary to the more difficult matter of being able to say that the political teaching of the classics is true in a way that modern political teaching is not. Also the need of this preliminary is particularly pressing for anyone who wishes to encourage the serious study of the classics in our era, when the doctrine of progress still influences the political beliefs of even the sophisticated. In such an era it is extremely difficult for men to contemplate the possibility that the political teachings of an ancient civilization could even be studied seriously, let alone in the light of the possibility that they are sounder than those of our day.q Beyond this primary task, Strauss’ secondary purpose is to show that the universal and homogeneous state, far from being the best social order, will be (if realised) a tyranny, and therefore within classical assumptions destructive of humanity. Modern political philosophy, q That the first purpose of Strauss’ argument is to stress the consistency between all aspects of classical philosophy might well have been made clearer. The difficulty of understanding his purpose is indeed increased for English readers by the fact that he does not include in the English edition of his work the last paragraph of the French edition, in which his purposes are beautifully described. Elsewhere in his writings Strauss has criticized historicism in its late-nineteenth-century form and shown the consequences of such a doctrine for the scope of political science. At no point in his writings has he, however, argued at length with Hegel’s claim to have included history within metaphysics, and with the resulting relation between concepts and time.

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which has substituted freedom for virtue, has as its chief ideal (and an ideal which it considers realisable) a social order which is destructive of humanity. The relation of Strauss’ second purpose to his first is evident. If the assumptions of modern political philosophy can be shown to lead to the dehumanizing of people, there is reason for scholars to take a more careful look at classical political philosophy than has generally been the case in the age of progress. Strauss first argues that the universal and homogeneous state will not provide reasonable satisfaction for men, even on Hegelian assumptions about the objects in which men find the highest satisfaction. Strauss points out that, according to Hegel-Kojève, men find the highest satisfaction in universal recognition: Men will have very good reasons for being dissatisfied with the universal and homogeneous state. To show this, I must have the recourse to Kojève’s more extensive exposition in his Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. There are degrees of satisfaction. The satisfaction of the humble citizen, whose human dignity is universally recognised and who enjoys all opportunities that correspond to his humble capacities and achievements, is not comparable to the satisfaction of the Chief of State. Only the Chief of State is ‘really satisfied.’ He alone is ‘truly free’ (p. 146). Did Hegel not say something to the effect that the state in which one man is free is the Oriental despotic state?93 Is the universal and homogeneous state then merely a planetary Oriental despotism? However this may be, there is no guarantee that the incumbent Chief of State deserves his position to a higher degree than others. Those others then have a very good reason for dissatisfaction: a state which treats equal men unequally is not just. A change from the universal-homogeneous monarchy into a universal-homogeneous aristocracy would seem to be reasonable. But we cannot stop here. The universal and homogeneous state, being the synthesis of the Masters and the Slaves, is the state of the working warrior or of the war-waging worker. In fact, all its members are warrior workers (pp. 114, 146). But if the state is universal and homogeneous,‘wars and revolutions are henceforth impossible’ (pp. 145, 561). Besides, work in the strict sense, namely the conquest or domestication of nature, is completed, for otherwise the universal and homogeneous state could not be the basis for wisdom (p. 301). Of course, work of a kind will still go on, but the citizens of the final state will work as little as possible, as Kojève notes with

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explicit reference to Marx (p.435). To borrow an expression which someone used recently in the House of Lords on a similar occasion, the citizens of the final state are only so-called workers, workers by courtesy. ‘There is no longer fight nor work. History has come to its end. There is nothing more to do’ (pp. 114, 385). This end of History would be most exhilarating but for the fact that, according to Kojève, it is the participation in bloody political struggles as well as in real work or, generally expressed, the negating action, which raises man above the brutes (pp. 378n., 490–492, 560). The state through which man is said to become reasonably satisfied is, then, the state in which the basis of man’s humanity withers away, or in which man loses his humanity.r

Strauss’ criticism of Kojève then proceeds to a profounder level with the assumption of the classical philosophers that it is in thinking rather than in recognition that men find their fullest satisfaction. The highest good for man is wisdom. This being so, if there is to be satisfaction for all in the universal and homogeneous state, it must be that every human being is capable of systematic philosophical thought which alone, according to the classics, can lead to wisdom. Indeed Strauss affirms that the classical realisation that only the few are capable of pursuing wisdom is central to the classical account of politics and indeed of human history as a whole. The classics thought that, owing to the weakness or dependence of human nature, universal happiness is impossible, and therefore they did not dream of a fulfilment of History and hence not of a meaning of History. They saw with their mind’s eye a society within which that happiness of which human nature is capable would be possible in the highest degree: that society is the best regime. But because they saw how limited man’s power is, they held that the actualisation of the best regime depends on chance. Modern man, dissatisfied with utopias and scorning them, has tried to find a guarantee for the actualisation of the best social order. In order to succeed, or rather in order to be able to believe that he could succeed, he had to lower the goal of man. One form in which this was done was to replace moral virtue by universal recognition, or to replace happiness by the satisfaction deriving from universal recognir What Is Political Philosophy? 128–9.

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tion. The classical solution is utopian in the sense that its actualisation is improbable. The modern solution is utopian in the sense that its actualisation is impossible. The classic solution supplies a stable standard by which to judge of any actual order. The modern solution eventually destroys the very idea of a standard that is independent of actual situations.s

Here again one sees the combination of Strauss’ two purposes. The showing forth of the classical position as consistent combines with the description of modern theory as including assumptions which are destructive of humanity. Here also can be seen the complex of interrelated questions which need to be thought through if one is to judge about the main issue of the controversy. The classical assumptions about the dependence of man make it clear that if the universal and homogeneous state were to be realised, it would be a tyranny and indeed the most appalling tyranny in the story of the race. Strauss ends his essay with a description of that tyranny: It seems reasonable to assume that only a few, if any, citizens of the universal and homogeneous state will be wise. But neither the wise men nor the philosophers will desire to rule. For this reason alone, to say nothing of others, the Chief of the universal and homogeneous state, or the Universal and Final Tyrant, will be an unwise man, as Kojève seems to take for granted. To retain his power, he will be forced to suppress every activity which might lead people into doubt of the essential soundness of the universal and homogeneous state: he must suppress philosophy as an attempt to corrupt the young. In particular he must in the interest of the homogeneity of his universal state forbid every teaching, every suggestion, that there are politically relevant natural differences among men which cannot be abolished or neutralized by progressing scientific technology. He must command his biologists to prove that every human being has, or will acquire, the capacity of becoming a philosopher or a tyrant. The philosophers in their turn will be forced to defend themselves or the cause of philosophy. They will be obliged, therefore, to try to act on the Tyrant. Everything seems to be a re-enactment of the ageold drama. But this time, the cause of philosophy is lost from the start. s Ibid., 131–2.

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For the Final Tyrant presents himself as a philosopher, as the highest philosophic authority, as the supreme exegete of the only true philosophy, as the executor and hangman authorised by the only true philosophy. He claims therefore that he persecutes not philosophy but false philosophies. The experience is not altogether new for philosophers. If philosophers were confronted with claims of this kind in former ages, philosophy went underground. It accommodated itself in its explicit or exoteric teaching to the unfounded commands of rulers who believed they knew things which they did not know. Yet its very exoteric teaching undermined the commands or dogmas of the rulers in such a way as to guide the potential philosophers toward the eternal and unsolved problems. And since there was no universal state in existence, the philosophers could escape to other countries if life became unbearable in the tyrant’s dominions. From the Universal Tyrant, however, there is no escape. Thanks to the conquest of nature and to the completely unabashed substitution of suspicion and terror for law, the Universal and Final Tyrant has at his disposal practically unlimited means for ferreting out, and for extinguishing, the most modest efforts in the direction of thought. Kojève would seem to be right although for the wrong reason: the coming of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy on earth.t

Commentary I comment on two matters alone in the tangle of questions which make up this controversy. (A) Strauss’ assertion that the classical political philosophers considered the possibility of a science that issues in the conquest of nature as ‘“unnatural,” i.e., as destructive of humanity’ and that therefore they turned their minds away from it, is clearly a proposition of consequence for political philosophy. Obviously it should also be a proposition of immediate practical interest for any person living in modern industrial society. This assertion demands answers to two questions: (i) Is this a true statement about the writings of the classical philosophers? and (ii) If it be true, were they right in so thinking? In regard to the first question of fact Strauss gives three references in t Ibid., 132–3.

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making the assertion. He asks the reader to compare Xenophon’s Memorabilia Ii.15 with Empedocles, fragment III. He cites Plato, Theaetetus 180c7–d5.u The inference which Strauss draws from Xenophon appears to me indubitable: that Socrates considered the practical application of physical philosophy to the control of nature to be ‘meddling’ in a way that men should not and in a way that Empedocles had suggested that men could and ought. Nevertheless as soon as that is said, it must be emphasized that most modern scholars have not stated that the classical political philosophers turned their back on a science issuing in the conquest of nature. Presumably they do not draw the same inferences from these passages as does Strauss. Indeed it is clear that a matter of this consequence cannot be settled solely by an appeal to individual texts. What is at stake in this question of fact can perhaps be clarified by stating Strauss’ position in contradistinction to that of the Marxists.94 On one point of fact the Marxists and Strauss are in agreement: the classical philosophers did turn their backs on a science issuing in the conquest of nature. To the Marxists, the Greek philosophers turned their backs on technological advance because they wished to perpetuate the aristocratic society in which the majority of human beings served a minority through peasant and slave labour. The classical conception of philosophy and science, as the attempt to understand the eternal causes of all things, was the response of an aristocratic class desiring to perpetuate the social order most acceptable to itself. The theoretical standpoint of Greek science, admiring the contemplation of necessity, was related to the fear that the practical applications of science would destroy the privileged positions of those who were enabled to have leisure because of the work of the masses. But for the Marxists the liberation of all mankind from alienated labour is a goal that those who are so alienated will necessarily pursue. This liberation can only be based on the domination of the realm of necessity by human freedom. Therefore the Platonic account of science held by aristocrats who had turned their backs on the domination of nature is patently inadequate, and the society in which it was prevalent was doomed to collapse. The basic Marxist assumption is that the domination of nature by human freedom is the indispensable condition of the u Ibid., 96.

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liberation which all men seek. In short the Marxists agree with Strauss that the classical philosophers turned their backs on a technological science; they disagree about the Greeks’ reason for so doing. The degree to which class interest was conscious or merely a product of ‘false consciousness’ has largely been left unsettled by the Marxists. In terms of this language of ‘the realms of necessity and of freedom’ Strauss’ position asserts an eternal and unchangeable order in which history takes its place and which is in no manner affected by the events of history. The realm of freedom is no more than a dependency of the realm of necessity. For Strauss the attempt to dominate the realm of necessity, far from being the condition of universal human satisfaction, implies the impossibility of true human excellence. He argues as follows: philosophy is the excellence of the soul. There cannot be philosophy in this sense unless there is an eternal and unchangeable order. But the belief that one can dominate the realm of necessity is to deny any eternal order which transcends history and in which history takes its place. Therefore the desire to dominate necessity leads to the denial of the possibility of human excellence. This account of necessity and its relation to the pursuit of technological progress is also related to what I quoted earlier from Strauss: the classics did not consider universal human satisfaction possible because of human dependence and weakness. Also such an account of necessity is related to the very different account of human action found in the classics as compared to the moderns. Strauss refers to that classical account when he writes: ‘modern man as little as pre-modern man can escape imitating nature as he understands nature.’v The Kantian account of human freedom, as an Archimedean point outside of everything given, is clearly quite foreign to the classical way of considering human action. Such a wide difference of doctrine illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing the quaestio facti (did the classical philosophers think thus?) from the quaestio juris (were they right to think so?). The fundamental nature of the presuppositions involved for a contemporary commentator in examining the quaestio juris may so dominate the mind as to make difficult the objective scrutiny of the quaestio facti. On the one hand, it has been possible for modern scholars to believe that there could be no cogent reasons for turning one’s back on so obvious a good v L. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe: The Free Press 1959), 298.

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as the conquest of nature, and so to read the Greek political philosophers as if they were a preparation for the greater wisdom of the age of progress. On the other hand, it would be possible to say that Strauss is reading into these references from the Greeks a clarity about their rejection of the conquest of nature which is not present in their writings, and that he does so because of his concern to show a consistent alternative to the modern conception of the science of nature. The justification of Strauss’ assertion of fact cannot be expected to be found solely in the scrutiny of any particular text.w 95 Having said this, however, I must emphasize that the question of fact requires more elucidation than Strauss gives it. It requires, for instance, some discussion of Greek mathematics. Strauss’ thesis at this point is based on the assumption that what the Greeks turned away from was not inventions in general but the use of science for such inventions. ‘Such use of science is excluded by the nature of science as a theoretical pursuit.’ x But to understand such a statement as this it would be necessary to understand Greek geometry and what those Greeks who were philosophers thought geometry was and also what place geometry played in Greek religious practice before Aristotle. As a student of religion, it is quite clear to me that geometry had for the educated Greeks an essentially religious significance, but what that significance was I have not sufficient knowledge of either their geometry or their religion to understand as yet. One could wish, therefore, that even if Strauss did not include a discussion of Greek geometry in his text that he had included references to scholarly writings which would illuminate what he says about Greek geometry and its relation to their philosophy and religion.y 96

w The question here must be related to Strauss’ doctrine of hermeneutics: read the works of any great philosopher with the certainty that one is not in a position to understand better what the philosopher is saying than he is himself. ‘I do not know of any historian who grasped fully a fundamental presupposition of a great thinker which the great thinker did not grasp.’ See ‘On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,’ in What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe: Free Press 1959), 228. This remark of Strauss is made in answer to Professor G.H. Sabine’s criticism of him which includes the following statement: ‘There are presumptions implicit in ... “the climate of opinion” of any age that no contemporary ever fully grasps.’ Ibid., 228. x Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 299. y For an essay on this matter which reaches a similar conclusion see Simone Weil, Intuitions Pre-Chrétiennes, A propos de la doctrine pythagoricienne (Paris: La Colombe 1951).

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To turn directly to the quaestio juris, I will state in simple language what Kojève and Strauss seem to be saying about society and technology. According to Kojève, unlimited technological progress is not worth pursuing for its own sake. It should serve human interests beyond itself because it should be pursued until there is no more work for men to do. According to Strauss, modern men are committed to unlimited technological progress. Here it may be mentioned that in the age of space investigation Strauss’ account of modern men seems more accurate than Kojève’s. It would appear to me that technological progress is now being pursued not first and foremost to free all men from work and disease, but for the investigation and conquest of the infinite spaces around us. The vastness of such a task suggests that modern society is committed to unlimited technological progress for its own sake. My difficulty in comprehending Strauss’ position lies not then in giving some meaning to the idea that the dominant leaders of our society are committed to unlimited technological progress, but rather in understanding what it meant to the classical political philosophers not to be so committed, and even more in understanding what it would mean not to be so committed in the contemporary world. Strauss makes three other points germane to this subject. (1) ‘The classics were for almost all practical purposes what now are called conservatives. In contradistinction to many present day conservatives, however, they knew that one cannot be distrustful of political or social change without being distrustful of technological change. Therefore they did not favour the encouragement of inventions, except perhaps in tyrannies, i.e., in regimes the change of which is manifestly desirable. They demanded the strict moral political supervision of inventions; the good and wise city will determine which inventions are to be made use of and which are to be suppressed.’z To ask the question, by what criteria the rulers of the good and wise city were to make these determinations, or did in fact make these determinations, would, I presume, draw from Strauss the reply: by that virtue and piety which are described in the leading classical books on moral and political philosophy. The issue then returns to the completeness, adequacy, and concreteness of that teaching. Strauss’ z Thoughts on Machiavelli, 298.

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position would be easier to understand if he would explicate the classical teaching on this matter. (2) The second point can best be made by quoting from Strauss directly: The opinion that there occur periodic cataclysms in fact took care of any apprehension regarding an excessive development of technology or regarding the danger that man’s inventions might become his masters and his destroyers. Viewed in this light, the natural cataclysms appear as a manifestation of the beneficence of nature. Machiavelli himself expresses this opinion of the natural cataclysms which has been rendered incredible by the experience of the last centuries. It would seem that the notion of the beneficence of nature or of the primacy of the Good must be restored by being rethought through a return to the fundamental experience from which it is derived.aa

(3) Strauss’ third point concerns the proper role of the philosopher in a society the majority and dominating minority of which believe in unlimited technological progress. He states by implication that the philosopher who recognises that society is committed to such an unwise pursuit must not fall into the temptation of escaping into anti-social dreams.bb In a sentence at the end of his French essay Strauss writes of Kojève and himself: Mais nous y avons toujours été attentif, car nous nous détournons tous deux, en apparence, de l’Être pour nous tourner vers la tyrannie, parce que nous avons vu que ceux qui manqúent de courage pour braver les conséquences de la tyrannie, qui, par conséquent ‘aut humiliter serviebant aut superbe dominabantur,’ étaient forcés de s’évader tout autant des conséquences de l’Être, précisément parce qu’ils ne faisaient rien d’autre que parler de l’Être.cc 97 aa Ibid., 299. bb This point is made in a review by Strauss of a book by Yves Simon as found in What Is Political Philosophy? 306 et seq. cc Les Essais, 344. What Strauss and Kojève have been attentive to is their different hypotheses about philosophy. Strauss’ Latin tag in this sentence is an adaptation of Livy’s remark about the masses. It also indicts individual men such as Martin Heidegger. I have not translated this passage because I wish strongly that Strauss would include it in any reissue of his English essay.

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These three comments of Strauss help to make clear what he considers the classical political philosophers’ views of the proper relation of society and technology. The difference between them and the views advocated by Kojève is of course too deep for it to be possible to argue their respective merits in the course of an article. Nevertheless there is one argument on the modern side which the interests of charity require should be presented. It is the following: no writing about technological progress and the rightness of imposing limits upon it should avoid expressing the fact that the poor, the diseased, the hungry, and the tired can hardly be expected to contemplate any such limitation with the equanimity of the philosopher. Strauss is clearly aware of this fact.dd One could wish however that he had drawn out the implications of it in the present controversy. It is not by accident that as representative and perceptive a modern political philosopher as Feuerbach should have written that ‘compassion is before thought.’98 The plea for the superiority of classical political science over the modern assumptions must come to terms with the implications of this phrase in full explicitness. As the assertion that charity is more important than thought is obviously of Biblical origin, his point leads directly to my second area of commentary. (B) The second comment I wish to make concerns the interpretation which Kojève and Strauss place on the history of Western thought and in particular their interpretation of the relationship between the history of philosophy and Biblical religion.ee The issue is clearly present in the controversy. At the beginning of his essay Strauss summarizes the gist of the only valuable criticisms of his writing on Hiero (namely those of Voegelin and Kojève): ‘Is the attempt to restore classical social science not utopian since it implies that the classical orientation has not been made obsolete by the triumph of the Biblical orientation?’ff The understanding of the controversy therefore requires an understanding of what they both mean by the Biblical orientation. To repeat, Hegel’s moral-political teaching is definitive for Kojève and it claims to be a synthesis of Greek and Biblical teaching. The

dd L. Strauss, ‘On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,’ Social Research, June 1946. ee When I use the word ‘Biblical’ in this essay, I use it as a common term referring to the religion of the Old and New Testaments. Any possible fundamental differences between Judaism and Christianity will neither be discussed nor assumed. ff What Is Political Philosophy? 96.

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Greek morality of honour is the morality of the master, and it meets its antithesis in the morality of the slave basic to Biblical theism. The synthesis of these is found in the absolute morality of The Phenomenology of Spirit, in which the dialectic of master and slave, and the argument which follows from it, achieve that synthesis. The centre of Kojève’s argument is the superiority of Hegelian social science over the classics, because the former included in itself the understanding of the morality of the slave which is central to Biblical theism and which is a higher moral standpoint than the morality of the master. Hegel’s political doctrine was a rationalizing, i.e., a secularising of Biblical theism, and its synthesising with the Greek morality of honour.gg Strauss on the other hand interprets Hegel’s moral-political teaching as founded on Machiavellian or Hobbesian teaching. He maintains that the teaching about master and slave is directly based on Hobbes’ doctrine of the state of nature. That is, Hegel as much as Hobbes constructs his political doctrine on the assumption ‘that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints or as a being that is guided by nothing but a desire for recognition.’hh But the Hobbesian doctrine of the state of nature cannot be reconciled with the conception of nature common to the classical political philosophers, who asserted the beneficence of nature or the primacy of the Good, nor indeed with the piety of Greek religion. If this be so (and I think it is), then the Hegelian account of Western philosophy and its relation to Biblical religion is clearly not true, because it is not possible to synthesise Socratic and Hobbesian politics. But the question still remains whether the Machiavellian and Hobbesian politics are at least in part a result of the Biblical orientation of Western society. For an answer to what Strauss thinks of this question it would be necessary to comment in detail on his books on Hobbes and Machiavelli, and this of course cannot be done here.ii Nevertheless it is possi-

gg These few words must be read along with The Phenomenology of Spirit and Kojève’s commentary on it. Hegel’s work must also be read in the light of his early writings about Christianity. hh What Is Political Philosophy? 111. ii Strauss’ book on Hobbes was published in 1936 and his book on Machiavelli in 1959. It is a fair inference therefore that his maturer doctrine on this matter will be found in the later book. It is also worth stating that Strauss was led to the study of Hobbes from Spinoza, and particularly from Spinoza’s methods of Biblical criticism.

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ble to say something about the question within the limits of what Strauss says in this controversy. Strauss maintains that the political teaching of Hegel-Kojève is based on the substitution of universal recognition for the classical goal of moral virtue as the most satisfying object of human striving. Indeed he asserts that the desire among modern political philosophers to actualise the best social order was influential in the lowering of their vision of that highest goal, so that this actualising would not be impossible. This has led in modern political theory to the emancipation of the passions and an unfounded optimism about the effect of the movements instigated by the passions. Strauss writes: ‘Syntheses effect miracles. Kojève’s or Hegel’s synthesis of classical and Biblical morality effects the miracle of producing an amazingly lax morality out of two moralities both of which made very strict demands on self-restraint. Neither Biblical nor classical morality encourages us to try, solely for the sake of our preferment or our glory, to oust from their positions men who do the required work as well as we could. Neither Biblical nor classical morality encourages all statesmen to try to extend their authority over all men in order to achieve universal recognition.’jj This makes clear that Strauss does not identify the Biblical orientation with the emancipation of the passions, so characteristic of modern moral philosophy since Spinoza. Yet the rejection of the Hegelian account of the relation between modern philosophy and Biblical religion still leaves one with the question of what that relation has been. This question cannot be avoided by a thinker such as Strauss, who is attempting to restore classical social science. The impossibility of that avoidance can be seen in one platitudinous generalisation: one difference between all European philosophy up to the twentieth century and classical philosophy is that the former was written by men who lived in a society permeated with Biblical religion. An historian has recently written, ‘By the middle of the thirteenth century, a considerable group of active minds ... was coming to think of the cosmos as a vast reservoir of the energies to be tapped and used according to human intentions.’kk 99 If this statement is true, and if (as I have already quoted jj What Is Political Philosophy? 111. kk L. White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1962), 133–4.

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from Strauss) ‘Modern man as little as pre-modern man can escape imitating nature as he understands nature,’ then clearly the question arises as to the connection between the religion of Western Europe and the dynamic civilization which first arose there, the spread of which has been so rapid in our century. This is the civilization which in the opinion of both Strauss and Kojève tends towards the universal and homogeneous state. Comment A about technology is therefore intimately related to comment B about the Biblical orientation. The question as to what Strauss understands by the relation of philosophy to Biblical religion must be prefaced by one obvious but necessary caveat. Just as philosophy has always been problematic to itself, so equally Biblical religion is not an easily definable entity, either for those who conduct their life of worship within its terms or for those outside it. We cannot write of Biblical religion as if it were something so obviously given that such concepts as ‘theism,’ ‘creation,’ ‘revelation’ etc. have some common meaning from which further debate can proceed. Indeed both Jewish and Christian philosophers on the one hand and secular philosophers on the other have often increased the difficulty of understanding the past by writing as if the entity ‘Biblical religion’ was a clear and distinct idea. To use religious rather than philosophical language: is Christianity a worldly or an unworldly religion?ll Within the Christian tradition, believers have obviously interpreted their religion in both these ways and in varying compromises. Is Christianity fundamentally oriented to history or to eternity?mm Moreover there has always been a wide disparity of theological opinion in the Christian tradition about the relation of the Biblical doctrine of the Fall to the classical doctrine of the beneficence of nature. Or again, is or is not Christianity’s moral position rightly described as that of the slave? I raise these obvious

ll I speak here of Christianity, rather than of Judaism, because it is less impertinent to raise dilemmas about one’s own allegiance than about other peoples’. mm There is in our era in both Catholic and Protestant theological circles a strong emphasis on Christianity as an historical or worldly religion. The way this is expressed seems often little more than an attempt to justify both Christianity and our present dynamic industrial civilization. This combined justification may be wise but it is certainly not easily reconciled with what one reads in the Greek Fathers or even for that matter with the work of the father of Western theology. See St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Book 22, para. 24.

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points for the following reasons: in asking what Strauss thinks about the role of Biblical religion in Western history, I am also asking what he considers Biblical religion to be. The effort to understand Biblical religion is as much a philosophical task as to understand its relation to the pursuit of wisdom. For instance, what has been said above in criticism of Hegel is not simply that he fails to synthesise Greek and Biblical morality, but that he holds an incomplete and one-sided account of Biblical theism itself, and that certain errors in his political philosophy stem from that misinterpretation. To turn to the question itself, I can only state that Strauss’ writing shows a remarkable reticence whenever he writes of Biblical religion, and particularly about the authority that the Bible should have for Western men. He writes with sympathy of Maimonides (a philosopher whom he considers more profound than Spinoza).100 Also in a lecture delivered in Jerusalem he has stated: ‘Nowhere else has the longing for justice and the just city filled the purest hearts and the loftiest souls with such zeal as on this sacred soil.’nn But beyond such general statements, I find it impossible to know whether he thinks there is in the Bible an authority of revelation which has a claim over the philosopher as much as over other men. Nor can I tell, on the other hand, whether he thinks that such an assumption of authority must be for obvious reasons inimical to the claims of philosophy. Indeed there are in his writings occasional passages where he shows contempt for certain forms of Biblical religion.oo Reticence on such an important subject by as subtle and definite a writer as Strauss must be taken as indicative of an implied position. His work as a whole has been concerned with a careful rediscovery of the teachings of the past so that political philosophers will not simply accept the contemporary presuppositions. About other aspects of the tradition he speaks unambiguously. It is perhaps not unwise to hazard an explanation for this lacuna. This does not entail any such folly as the seeking out of some irrational explanation based on the assumption of a fuller knowledge of Strauss’ psyche than he has himself. The twentieth century has already had its bellyful of such impudent psychologizing. Rather I mean to state cernn What Is Political Philosophy? 9. oo Ibid., 23.

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tain propositions which Strauss affirms to be true and draw from them a conclusion which would explain his reticence. According to Strauss, one of the essential truths of classical political philosophy is that all men are not capable of becoming philosophers. Indeed nothing is more essential for the proper ordering of society than that this distinction in nature should be understood and preserved. Also he agrees that the health of the social order can be based only on piety and virtue, and not on socially useful passions, as is presumed by most modern political philosophers. Taken together these two statements imply that in any passably good social order there will be among the majority some practice of religion. Indeed he makes clear that one of the essential points on which modern political philosophy broke with the classical teaching was in its belief: ‘Philosophy is to fulfil the function of both philosophy and religion.’pp It is also the case that in the Western world what remnants of sacred restraints still linger in the minds of men are most often connected with the practice of the two religions, Judaism and Christianity, which alone are indigenous to the Western world. Therefore, even if Strauss should in fact think that the Biblical categories have been in part responsible for a false and therefore dangerous conception of nature among modern philosophers, he would not necessarily think it wise to speak openly or forcibly about the matter. He is a philosopher, and not one of those who consider it their function and their joy to ‘enlighten’ the majority by undermining their trust in the main religious practice which is open to them. Moreover, no writer has so emphasised the various reasons why philosophers have maintained and will continue to maintain a distinction between their exoteric and their esoteric teaching.101 Strauss’ reticence about Biblical religion puts him at a disadvantage in his argument with Kojève. Kojève’s account of the place of Biblical religion in Western history is quite explicit. Strauss is able to criticise (and in my opinion with success) that account of Western history. Because he does not speak clearly about Biblical religion, however, he is not able to state, except by implication, his own account of that history. Indeed, I would go farther. Since Strauss is attempting the remarkable and prodigious task of restoring classical social science, how can he maintain his reticence at this point? pp Thoughts on Machiavelli, 297.

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THE UNIVERSITY CURRICULUM102 The curriculum is the essence of any university. It consists in what students formally study at all stages from the undergraduate to the research professor. It determines the character of the university far more than any structure of government, methods of teaching, or social organisation. Indeed, these latter are largely shaped by what is studied and why it is studied. The curriculum is itself chiefly determined by what the dominant classes of the society consider important to be known. Members of the dominant classes make the decisions which embody the chief purposes of any society, but their very dominance is dependent on their service of those purposes. The primary purpose in Canadian society is to keep technology dynamic within the context of the continental state capitalist structure. By technology I mean ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.’a The dynamism of technology has gradually become the dominant purpose in Western civilisation because the most influential men in that civilization have believed for the last centuries that the mastery of chance was the chief means of improving the race. It is difficult to estimate how much this quest for mastery is still believed to serve the hope of men’s perfecting, or how much it is now an autonomous quest. Be that as it may, one finds agreement between corporation executive and union member, farmer and suburbanite, cautious and radical politician, university administrator and civil servant, in that they all effectively subscribe to society’s faith in mastery. The phrase ‘state capitalist structure’ is necessary because although the pursuit of a dynamic technology is now a worldwide religion, it is carried on within a different structure in North America than in Asia or Eastern Europe. That system is based primarily on coordination of power between private and public corporations and can best be called ‘state’ or ‘corporation’ capitalism. By ‘continental’ I mean that the Canadian structure can only he understood as a satellite of the broader imperial system.b a See J. Ellul, The Technological Society (London, 1965), xxxiii. b Because the US is an imperial power and Canada is not yet entirely integrated into all the purposes of that empire, the garrison-state qualities in the American educational system are not yet as advanced in Canada. Not only do we have no draft, but fewer military needs have to be served by the universities, whether in research or teaching.

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The chief purpose of the curriculum in Canadian universities is, then, to facilitate the production of personnel necessary to that type of society. Because there is such agreement about the chief goal of society, there is a vast consensus about the principles of the curriculum. Debates take place about the government of the university, about humane existence within it, etc., etc., but not about what it concerns a human being to know. So monolithic is the agreement of society about ends, so pervasive the ideology of liberalism which expresses that agreement, that the question about knowing cannot be raised seriously.c When a student first arrives at university, the curriculum may appear a set of arbitrary and incoherent details. This is so only at the surface. In fact, it can be understood in terms of the powers and purposes of our society. The foregoing generalisations would, of course, require careful application in the case of any particular university. For example, the phrase ‘dominant classes’ cannot be easily specified. It is clear that the governments of the provinces (i.e., the professional politicians and the educational civil servants) have an increasing influence over the curriculum as compared with that held by the representatives of the private corporations on the Boards of Governors. But the question cannot be dropped at this point, because that leaves unclear the relation of professional politicians and civil servants to private corporations in a state capitalist society. And the situation varies in various parts of Canada. The relation between provincial governments and private corporations varies greatly in Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. (Because of the different traditions in Quebec, this article is not concerned with FrenchCanadian curricula.)103 Boards of Governors which include the rulers of Brazilian Traction will be more formidable exercisers of power than boards composed of local civil servants and worthies.104 Or, another illustration of the need to specify: the old-fashioned literary education (classics, modern history and literatures, the history of philosophy) still maintains some prestige at the University of Toronto. The weight of tradition carries on in an established university for several generations, with the result that the curriculum may reflect the ideas of a class which is no longer dominant outside its walls. Only slowly and often c I mean by liberalism a set of beliefs which proceed from the central assumption that man’s essence is his freedom and therefore that what chiefly concerns man in this life is to shape the world as we want it.

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almost imperceptibly do curricula respond to the powers and purposes of the society. The chief job of the universities within the technological societies is the cultivation of those sciences which issue in the mastery of human and non-human nature. It is clearer to describe the sciences according to their part within this purpose of mastery than by the older rubric of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ which described the sciences according to whether their subject matter was concerned with the human or the non-human. For example, biochemistry may be said to be concerned with the chemistry of life and therefore be included under natural science. It is in fact concerned more and more with humanity – indeed with the very roots of humanness. What could be more a ‘social science’ than one which opens the possibility that sun and man will no longer generate man? The fact that the categories ‘natural’ and ‘social’ are no longer adequate divisions can be seen in the necessity of a new category, ‘the health sciences,’ under which much of the work of biochemistry must fall, and which is a mediating category between natural and social. Also, psychology (traditionally a social science) is now largely taken up with questions which once would have fallen clearly within physiology. At the same time, the understanding of the physiology of the human brain must mean, in its direct relation to mastery, that modern psychology is as much a social science as it ever was. Indeed, the modern unity of the sciences is realized around the ideal of mastery. And this is not negated by the necessary proliferation of new specialisms, ‘biophysics,’ ‘chemical physics,’ etc., etc., etc. The proliferation of division is accompanied by the equally necessary proliferation of the interdisciplinary unit which holds the studies together around the varying means of mastery. It would, of course, be absurd to deny that the pure desire to know is present in many modern scientists. In my experience, such a desire exists in the community of natural scientists more than in any other group in our society. Also, I would assert on principle that such a desire belongs to man as man. What I am saying is that in North American science the motive of wonder becomes ever more subsidiary to the motive of power, and that those scientists still dominated by wonder have a more difficult time resisting the forces of power which press in upon them from without their community. For example, the recently established Science Council of Canada is surely intended to integrate

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the scientific community into the pragmatic purposes of the private and public corporations. It is this growing victory of power over wonder which is the basis of the proposition that the modern sciences can best be understood as a unity around the idea of mastery. The job of producing personnel who know something about the control of human and non-human nature requires teaching and research at many levels from the highly theoretical to the immediately utilitarian. Those who study mathematics in its most formal mode sometimes assert that they have little interest in the relation of their studies to its uses. It is hard to deny, however, that the privileged place of mathematics in modern curricula is related to the fact that algebra (employ if you will a more modern name) has uses in the technological society. Von Neumann and Wiener were not exactly neglected by the powerful.105 There are some physicists whose cosmological investigations seem far from the practical and whose intention is clearly the pure desire to know. Nevertheless, the interdependence of modern physics and the technological society is evident to common sense. Oppenheimer, who spoke often and eloquently to his admiring scientific colleagues about the beauty of science as a contemplative discipline, still made clear that putting nature to the question is of the essence of modern science when he said the terrible words: ‘If an experiment is sweet, one must go ahead with it.’106 Moreover, the theoretical physicists are increasingly out-numbered in their community by research teams whose work is more immediately applicable to the conquest of nature. Physics and chemistry and biology departments must aid in the production of an enormous range of personnel reaching out from their own discipline towards other faculties of the university, particularly medicine and engineering. They must train experts to advance knowledge by research in their increasingly complex subjects. They must produce enough specialists to maintain the tradition in the high schools. They must teach as much of their subject to engineers, doctors, subsidiary therapists, etc., as is necessary for the practice of these professions. They must introduce their subject in general courses for the undergraduate community as a whole. Indeed, on the one side the basic science departments must in their membership narrow down to increasingly detailed concentration on one facet of their complex science, so that the university proliferates with new divisions which have

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in some sense fragmented off from the original unity of the subject; on the other hand, they broaden out to wider and wider reaches of the population who need some understanding of basic science if they are to exist as personnel in our society.d 107 Yet, both the narrowing of subject matter and the broadening of clientele are results of the same principle: the purpose of education is to gain knowledge which issues in the mastery of human and non-human nature. Within the last hundred years, it has become increasingly clear that the technological society requires not only the control of non-human nature, but equally the control of human nature. This is the chief cause of the development of the modern ‘value-free’ social sciences. Here again, the distinction must be made in the work of departments such as sociology and psychology between the function of expanding that knowledge which gives control, and the need to produce innumerable personnel who apply current knowledge. A society in which there are more and more people living in closer and closer proximity will need enormous numbers of regulators to oil the works through their knowledge of intelligence testing, social structures, Oedipal fixations, deviant behaviour, learning theory, etc. The old adage about the need for more science to meet the problems that science has created will be illustrated in the proliferation of these techniques. The same applies to the more traditional science of economics. The household is now imperial and its management requires innumerable accountants, whether they call themselves econometrists or doctors of business administration. For the social scientists to play their controlling role required that they should come to interpret their sciences as ‘value-free.’ This clarification has been carried out particularly by sociologists, and, indeed, it is inevitable from its very subject matter that this science should be magisterial among the social sciences. The use of the term ‘value’ and the distinguishing of judgments about values from judgments about facts enables the social scientist to believe that his account of reality is objective, while all previous accounts (which were not based on this distinction) were vitiated by their confusion of normative with factual d Paul Goodman has often made the point that much of the academic training required of the young is not necessary for the practice by which they will earn their living. The degree to which Goodman’s point is true in opposition to my account could only be decided by a detailed description of various occupations and the degree to which their practice is dependent on knowledge of the various sciences.

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statements. It is not appropriate in this writing to describe the history of the idea of ‘value-free’ social science as it came to be in the European tradition, particularly under the influence of Kant and Nietzsche, and was so elegantly formulated by Weber.108 Nor is it necessary to describe how it has been reformulated in liberal Protestant terms by such men as Parsons and Lasswell,109 to suit the American scene.e What is important to understand is that the quantification-oriented behavioural sciences which have arisen from this methodological history are wonderfully appropriate for serving the tasks of control necessary to a technological society. Indeed, where the fact-value distinction was originally formulated by Weber as a means whereby the academy could hold itself free from the pressures of the powerful, it has quickly become in North America a means whereby the university can make itself socially useful. Social sciences so defined are well adapted to serve the purposes of the ruling private and public corporations. Indeed, the distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value has been thought to be favourable to a pluralist society. The common or objective world would be that of facts known scientifically, leaving men free to choose their values for themselves. However, this distinction has worked in exactly the opposite direction towards the monism of technological values. From the assumption that the scientific method is not concerned with judgments of value, it is but a short step to asserting that reason cannot tell us anything about good and bad, and that, therefore, judgments of value are subjective preferences based on our particular emotional make-up. But the very idea that good and bad are subjective preferences removes one possible brake from the triumphant chariot of technology. The rhetoric of pluralism simply legitimizes the monistic fact. The ‘value-free’ social sciences not only provide the means of control, but also provide a large percentage of the preachers who proclaim the dogmas which legitimize modern liberalism within the university. At first sight, it might be thought that practitioners of ‘value-free’ science would not make good preachers. In looking more closely, however, it will be seen that the fact-value distinction is not self-evident, as is often claimed. It assumes a particular account of moral judgment, e To describe this intellectual movement whereby the YMCA and Nietzsche were brought together would require an art beyond me – that of comedy.

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and a particular account of objectivity. To use the language of value about moral judgment is to assume that what man is doing when he is moral is choosing in his freedom to make the world according to his own values which are not derived from knowledge of the cosmos. To confine the language of objectivity to what is open to quantifiable experiment is to limit purpose to our own subjectivity. As these metaphysical roots of the fact-value distinction are not often evident to those who affirm the method, they are generally inculcated in what can be best described as a religious way; that is, as doctrine beyond question. I do not mean to imply any insincerity on the part of those teachers who preach this doctrine. Throughout history the best preachers have often been those who thought they were talking about universally selfevident facts. Nor should it be implied that our multiversities ought not to fulfil this legitimizing role. Class liberalism is the ideological cement for a technological society of our type. Its sermons have to be preached to the young, and the multiversities are the appropriate place. That the clever have to put up with this as a substitute for the cultivation of the intellect is a price they must pay to the interests of the majority who are in need of some public religion. And the fact-value distinction is the most sacred doctrine of our public religion. To turn to ‘the humanities’: their place in the curriculum is difficult to state because many different accounts of their purposes are given by their practitioners, and some of these accounts seem remote and disconnected from the age in which we live. Indeed, in thinking about the humanities, the intellectual uncertainty faced by those who grow up in this era becomes most apparent. The root form of this uncertainty lies in the question as to what of importance can be known other than that which is given in those sciences which proceed from quantifying and experimental methods. Because of the difficulty of this question, a short word about the past is here required. In the antique world, it was assumed (and that assumption was most fully articulated by Socrates) that the purpose of education was the search through free insight for what constituted the best life for men in their cities. Such education was reserved for the few, because free insight was possible only with leisure, and the ancient world could only achieve leisure for some. Such education was concerned not only with human concerns but with the non-human, because it was thought that man could understand what was best for himself and the

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species only if he understood the cosmos as a whole. All the arts and sciences (and the word ‘science’ meant any systematic body of theoretical knowledge) depended on the highest science, philosophia, which was thought to give one knowledge of the whole or at least openness to the whole, in the sense of openness to the most important questions. When this scheme of education was taken over by civilizations dominated by some form of Semitic religion, it was not altogether changed. The belief that there had been given divine revelation which told men what was most important for them to know meant that the free insight of philosophy became subservient to that revelation. Yet, such civilizations, whether consistently or not, often maintained philosophy in the curricula as the way that educated men could make that revelation intelligible to themselves and others.110 The liberal arts continued to be seen as a preparation for that philosophy. Whatever the tension between philosophy and revelation in Western society, education under their combined rubric was directed to knowledge of man’s highest end. It is not possible in this article to state how or why the quantifying and experimental methods have become dominant in the sciences, or how this development is related to the freeing of the particular sciences from the magistery of philosophy or to relate both these to the falling away of any belief in revelation. What is important in the present connection is to insist that these occurrences have put in question (a) whether there is any knowledge other than that reached by quantifying and experimental methods, (b) whether, as such methods cannot provide knowledge of the proper purposes of human life, the very idea of there being better and worse purposes has any sense to it, (c) whether, indeed, purpose is not merely what we will in power from the midst of chaos. The effect of these questionings on the humanities could not but be enormous. In the last hundred years in Europe, a series of justifications of humane study arose in the light of the crisis produced by the age of progress. Each of these passing justifications made certain particular studies dominant for their particular hour. For example, Dilthey’s distinction between Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft led to the enormous concentration on the study of history as that which would fulfil the role which once had been played by the traditional philosophy and theology.111 By studying history men could understand the

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alternatives of the past, see where they were, and be enlightened to choose where they were going. The humanities became the sciences of the human spirit which culminated in that new subject, the philosophy of history. This position was in turn destroyed by Nietzsche when he showed that history could not, any more than God, provide men with a horizon within which to live. In terms of this critique, Weber taught that a humane and scientific sociology could fulfil the magisterial role.112 Over the century these various justifications have had their necessary moment, but as they have succeeded each other, the humanities have become a smaller and smaller island in a rising lake. The drowning lake was the ever more clearly formulated assumption that all the important questions can be solved by technological means. The North American situation both followed and differed from Europe. In the older world, institutions and traditions which incarnated the old philosophical education could not be quickly swept away. Even such thinkers as Nietzsche and Russell, who were in different ways criticizing out of existence the old moral and religious basis, still in some deep sense believed and depended on the contemplative tradition the remnants of which they were demolishing. As we can see from our present situation, the Calvinist pioneers were building in English-speaking North America a society which would be more completely and quickly dominated by technology than any other. Yet, at the same time, the absence of philosophy in North America meant an absence of the extreme forms of nihilism. North American society was till recently both more innocent and more barren than Europe. In so far as there was a public or popular justification of the humanities in North America, it could be heard in those endless convocation addresses under which men suffered from 1900–1950. ‘The humanities will teach us to choose whether we will use our immense technical power for good or ill’ etc., etc. This justification was allied with the general progressive hope that as technology advanced, men in their leisure would share in the riches of culture. (What exactly these riches were was rarely specified.) It was also sometimes allied to the democratic belief that all men should share in their governing and that for them to do so would require an education which would transcend the simply technical. Indeed, in many liberal minds widespread university education was seen as fulfilling the role which had been played by revelation in the once dominant Calvinist Protestantism. When revelation no

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longer appeared to be a fact to the powerful classes, the hope appeared among some that the humanities in the universities would teach men the best purposes. This popular hope could never be realized for the following reason: those who knew the humanities professionally were aware of what was going on in Europe. The best of them knew that social thought was methodologically dominated by ‘historicism’ and ‘the fact-value distinction.’ Historicism was the belief that the values of any culture were relative to the absolute presuppositions of that culture, which were themselves historically determined, and that therefore men could not in their reasoning transcend their own epoch. The factvalue distinction led generally to the conclusion that there was no rational way of knowing that one way of life was nobler than another. Those who studied the humanities were led to a great uncertainty about what constituted the good life, and whether this was a real question at all. The public hope that the humanities would fulfil a positive moral role was, therefore, vitiated by the fact that the best professionals of these disciplines did not see their activity in this way. Indeed, it is a fact of North American history that the spread of professional teaching in the humanities has been a means whereby the scepticism of Europe has penetrated the more innocent traditions of North America. The professional practitioners of the humanities have justified their studies quite differently from the popular rhetoric. They have increasingly said that the humanities are non-evaluative sciences. The cruder form of this justification has led those disciplines to become highly research-oriented, so that they could cover themselves with the mantle of science and Protestant busyness. An enormous amount of energy and money has been channelled into research projects. In English literature there are many great factories pouring out editions, commentaries, and lives on all but the minuscule figures of our literature. (The equivalent of the expensive equipment of the scientists are the rare manuscript libraries.) If one has a steady nerve, it is useful to contemplate how much is written about Beowulf in one year in North America. One can look at the Shakespeare industry with perhaps less sense of absurdity; but when it comes to figures such as Horace Walpole having their own factory, one must beware vertigo.113 The difficulty in this research orientation is that whereas research in the progressive sciences produces discoveries which the public see as useful, this is not so in the humanities. The historian may claim that all the careful work

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that goes into small areas can be justified as useful in that it makes up the totality of a mosaic from which those who are educated in the discipline may better know the past and so make more prudent judgments in the present. He may even claim that the formal discipline of Namierian history is in itself a good training for potential rulers.114 Both these justifications may be true, although the proof of this would require a discussion of the place of historical judgement in the training of rulers. What is, however, paradoxical at the practical level about the vast apparatus of modern historical scholarship is that it exists in an age when it is increasingly believed that the race has little to learn from human existence from before the age of progress. We may be grateful that this contempt for the past has not yet penetrated the ranks of academic historians, who therefore remain the chief brake on the simply modern in our multiversities. Nevertheless, the role of brake is a very minor one compared with the pre-progressive role of the humanities. The justification of the humanities as sciences takes a deeper form than simply concentration on research. Scholars turn more and more to the practice of non-evaluative analysis. From literary criticism this can be well illustrated in the work of Northrop Frye, in which the study of literature becomes a classificatory science with the claims to objectivity and progress which go with such a science.115 In a rather similar way, the study which still uses the name of ‘philosophy’ has made itself into a particular science, with its own particular rigours, concerned with the analysis of language, methods, and thought. Indeed, in so far as philosophy moves beyond this non-evaluative analysis it is concerned with what has been done under its name in the past, and this history is more and more seen as a series of inadequate logical formulations which can be corrected in the light of advances in analysis. Non-evaluative analysts see their activity as essentially self-justifying. They are moved by the pure desire to know; for example, the sheer joy in mastery over such a diverse field as literature. This gives the humanities freedom from the crude pressures of society, as can be seen by comparison with the popular justification of the humanities which has been described earlier. In the popular account, the natural scientists were supposed to know so that they could provide material techniques; the teachers of humanities were supposed to know so that they could be purveyors of values. In both cases, the pure desire to know was considered subsidiary to some public end outside the subject itself. Nonevaluative analysis has exalted cognitive power and has brought back

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into the disciplines rigour which was often lacking when professors of literature and philosophy were surrogate preachers. Although it must be granted that non-evaluative analysts can, at their worst, fall into the snobbishness of an impractical mandarinism, they have saved the humanities from an empty antiquarianism. They are interested in the understanding and mastery of literature as a living activity and in the practice of linguistic clarity as important in the present. Nevertheless, the consequences of this approach must be insisted upon. Non-evaluative analysis cuts men off from openness to certain questions. Let us imagine a student who is studying the works of Tolstoy and de Sade under the guidance of an intelligent and sensitive practitioner of non-evaluative analysis. He can be taught to understand much about their writings, what is being said and how it is being said and the dependence of these on very complex traditions. As in some sense both authors are writing about the proper place of sexuality in human existence, the student can be taught to anatomize the similarities and differences in what the authors say about sexual ‘values.’ From such study the student will learn what two remarkable men have thought about the place of sexuality in human life. Yet, because the study is a non-evaluative science, what would seem to be the most important question cannot be raised within the study: that is, whether de Sade or Tolstoy is nearer the truth about the proper place of sexuality. In the same way in ‘philosophy’ the study of ethics tells one much of how language is used and can be used consistently in ethical discourse. But it no longer claims to be concerned with what are the highest possibilities for men. Such studies are impotent to lead to what was once considered (perhaps and perhaps not naively) the crucial judgment about ‘values’ – whether they are good or evil. Their scholars have gained their unassailable status of mastery and self-justification by surrendering their power to speak about questions of immediate and ultimate meaning – indeed generally by asserting that such questions only arise through confusion of mind. Such a position provides immunity within the academic fortress, but it can still be asked whether the impotence of mind towards meaning is man’s necessary condition. Be that as it may, the central role of the humanities will be increasingly as handmaiden to the performing arts. To repeat, the dominant ethos in the society is provided by an autonomous technology. But the space programme, necessary imperial wars, and the struggle for recognition in the interlocking corporations can provide purpose only for a

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small minority. Purpose for the majority will be found in the subsidiary ethos of the fun culture. It will meet the needs of those who live in affluence but are removed from any directing of the society. One is tempted to state that the North American motto is: ‘the orgasm at home and napalm abroad,’ but in the nervous mobile society, people have only so much capacity for orgasm, and the flickering messages of the performing arts will fill the interstices. They provide the entertainment and release which technological society requires. The public purpose of art will not be to lead men to the meaning of things, but to titivate, cajole, and shock them into fitting into a world in which the question of meaning is not relevant. The humanities in the universities will become handmaidens in this task. This will not mean that they will be weak in numbers or prestige or resources because their task will be great. Enrolment in serious science courses is falling off in the Englishspeaking world. The reason for this seems to be that the courses are hard and demand more attention than many students consider worthwhile. It is difficult to know what percentage of the race (outside possible genetic manipulation in the future) are intended for the intellectual difficulty of a modern scientific education. Even the mathematical demands on lower order technicians may be greater than can be met. In a society where it is easy to earn one’s living, why should people drive themselves to the pressure of such an education? But our society requires that more and more of its members be kept in educational institutions for longer and longer periods. Popularized humanities, handmaidens of the performing arts, will provide, along with a simplified sociology, the education easy enough to occupy the time of many. Beyond this immediacy, however, lies a nobler reason for the care about art and the humanities in this era. When truth in science seems to teach us that we are accidental inhabitants of a negligible planet in the endless spaces, men are forced to seek meaning in other ways than through the intellect. If truth leads to meaninglessness, then men in their thirst for meaning turn to art. To hope to find in the products of the imagination that meaning which has been cast out of the intellect may, in the light of Socrates, be known to be a fruitless quest. Nevertheless, it is a thirst which is the enemy of tyranny.116 If we are to live in the modern university as free men, we must make judgments about the essence of the university – its curriculum. If such

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judgments are to be more than quibbles about detail, they must be based on what we think human life to be, what activities serve human fulfilment, and what place higher education should play in encouraging the realisation of these activities. As soon as this is said, however, the tightness of the circle in which men find themselves in modern civilization becomes evident. For on one side of the picture, most men have given up not only the two great accounts of human excellence in the light of which Western men had understood the purpose of existence (the one given in philosophy, the other in revealed religion), but also the very idea of human existence having a given highest purpose, and therefore an excellence which could be known and in terms of which all our activities could be brought into some order. It is now generally assumed that the race has meaning (call it if you will purpose) only on the condition that we view ourselves as purposive and that none of these views are truths concerning the nature of things, but only ideologies which we create to justify our man-made purposes. There is no objective purpose to human or non-human nature which men can come to know and in terms of which the various occasions of life can be ordered. Purpose and value are the creations of human will in an essentially purposeless world. Yet it is not simply this absence of the idea of objective human excellence which constitutes the tightness of the circle in which we live. For on the other side of the picture, it is not to be thought that just because the dominant intellectual position of the age is that there is no highest purpose, the public realm is in fact able to do without such a conception. The political aspect of the liberal criticism of human excellence was the belief that unfettered by ‘dogmatic’ and a priori ideas of excellence men would be free to make the world according to their own values and each would be able to fulfil his individuality. Ideas of purpose and indeed of a highest activity were superstitious strait-jackets – not only the enemies of an objective science, but of the free play of individuality. Their elimination through criticism was the first step towards building a pluralist society. Yet pluralism has not been the result in those societies where modern liberalism has prevailed. Western men live in a society the public realm of which is dominated by a monolithic certainty about excellence – namely that the pursuit of technological efficiency is the chief purpose for which the community exists.117 When modern liberals, positivist or existentialist, have criticised the

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idea of human excellence, they may have thought that they were clearing the ground of religious and metaphysical superstitions which stood in the way of the liberty of the individual. Rather they were serving the social purpose of legitimizing the totally technological society by destroying anything from before the age of progress which might inhibit its victory. Modern liberalism has been a superb legitimizing instrument for the technological society, because at one and the same time it has been able to criticise out of the popular mind the general idea of human excellence and yet put no barrier in the way of that particular idea of excellence which in fact determines the actions of the most powerful in our society. The mark of education is claimed to be scepticism about the highest human purposes, but in fact there is no scepticism in the public realm about what is important to do. The fact that in our society the demands of technology are themselves the dominating morality is often obscured by the fact that the modern scientific movement has been intimately associated with the moral striving for equality. Mastery over the world would enable men to build a society in which all members would be freed from the tyranny of labour and for the benefits of leisure – the greatest of which was education. Leisure is only possible with the division of labour. But the division of labour without modern mastery resulted in inequality – particularly the grossest inequality in leisure. The noblest expectation of the age of progress was to overcome that limitation by building a society in which all men would come to have leisure through the mastery that science would make possible.f In the egalitarian faith it was believed that with leisure all men would be open to philosophy and science, and so be able to choose rational goals for their own lives and for their communities. With such a hope (never more unequivocally present than in nineteenth-century America) the problem of public education became pressf It is here that the profound connection can be seen between the age of progress and Western Biblical religion – Judaism and Christianity. The centre of these religions lay in revelation which was a kind of knowledge concerning the most important matters, and which made all men in some sense equal by their potential openness to it. It was similar to the philosophical contemplation of the classical philosophers in that it dealt with the most important matters; it was different in that openness to it depended on faith. Can the modern belief in equality be understood apart from the change of emphasis (concerning man’s highest activity) from contemplation to charity, which came with the dominance of Christianity? As has so often been said, the beliefs of the age of progress are a form of secularised Christianity.

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ing. This great hope has sustained this continent morally until recently, and is still often used as the rhetoric to obscure the emptiness of the curriculum to all but the claims of mastery. I cannot describe here the complex history of how the progressive hope in American education was gradually emptied of all content except means to technological regulation and expansion. It is a long and complex road from the liberal Protestant believers of Massachusetts to the end of ideology. The rift in the lute can be seen early from the fact that as vigorous an exponent of the American morality as William James could say: ‘Yes, yes, we must have large things first, size first; the rest will come.’ Men such as Dewey had been profoundly influenced by Rousseau and his desire to give educational content to the life of the equal citizen; unlike Rousseau, they had an unlimited faith in the conquest of nature as the means to a more than formal equality. They did not pay attention to the side of Rousseau’s thought in which he asserted that progress in the arts and sciences inhibited egalitarian virtue.118 The demands of the increasingly complex apparatus have dissipated the dream of modern liberalism which sought through education to give substance to equality. The mastery once thought of as a means becomes increasingly the public end. To take a recent example: The optimistic Freudianism, so popular a faith among the enlightened, understood the central means to maturity to be the coming to terms with the history of gratification of our various orifices. Whatever the incompleteness of this Rousseauian Freudianism as an account of human excellence, it is clear that it claims to be a doctrine of individual and social happiness which must be achieved in a more than technical way. Its proponents such as Erikson show it as more than simply the servant of mastery.119 It is, however, a far cry from such sexual humanism to the behaviourist psychology which now dominates our universities and which is geared to produce regulators who will fit the masses into the system by largely mechanical means. The humane if limited purposes of American Freudianism were not appropriate to the immensity of the institutions necessary to the overcoming of chance. The pressing need to regulate and control those institutions meant that the means of Freudian psychotherapy were too inward and individual, too chancy and too expensive to be used for any more than the privileged few. What was required, and what will be forthcoming, are immediately applicable techniques for

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the control of human nature on a grand scale. This requires the turning of the academic study of psychology to its present behaviourism. The tight circle then in which we live is this: our present forms of existence have sapped the ability to think about standards of excellence and yet at the same time have imposed on us a standard in terms of which the human good is monolithically asserted. Thus, the university curriculum, by the very studies it incorporates, guarantees that there should be no serious criticism of itself or of the society it is shaped to serve. We are unable seriously to judge the university without judging its essence, the curriculum; but since we are educated in terms of that curriculum it is guaranteed that most of us will judge it as good. The criteria by which we could judge it as inadequate in principle can only be reached by those who through some chance have moved outside the society by memory or by thought. But so to have moved means that one’s criticisms will not be taken seriously from within the society.g 120 It would be presumptuous to end by proposing some particular therapy by which we might escape from the tight circle of the modern fate. The decisions of Western men over many centuries have made our world too ineluctably what it is for there to be any facile exit. Those who by some elusive chance have broken with the monolith will return to the problem of human excellence in ways too various to be procrusteanly catalogued. The sheer aridity of the public world will indeed drive many to seek excellence in strange and dangerous kingdoms (as those of drugs and myth and sexuality). In such kingdoms, moderation and courage may be known by the wise to be essential virtues. But when such virtues have been publicly lost, they cannot be inculcated by incantation, but only rediscovered in the heat of life where many sparrows fall. Much suffering will be incurred by those who with noble intent follow false trails. Who is to recount how and when and where private anguish and public catastrophe may lead men to renew their vision of excellence?121 g This is not to deny that there will be all kinds of criticism of the university from within itself. How it should be governed, how the students should be treated as persons, whether research is sweeping away good teaching? etc., etc. Such criticisms are immensely welcomed because they serve as evidence that the society is still free and forward moving. The President of the University of Toronto praised the Macpherson report as ‘radical.’

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In the realm of the academic, one of the essential therapies will be the reliving of buried memories of what the greatest, whether Western or Eastern, have known of human excellence. This rediscovery of the past will not be accomplished by those who view it as the task simply of technical scholarship, unrelated to what we are now; but by those who in many aspects of their lives, political, sexual, religious, etc., seek in the past the truth which they have here found wanting. Nor will such search be confined to particular disciplines, the specialists of which see this past as their private preserve. All sorts and conditions of students will find in a multitude of subjects means to transcend the aridity of the technological tradition. These means may be realised most openly and nobly by those who spend their lives in the most modern studies. Philosophy may be regained by those immersed in understanding the immediacies of the public world; reverence rediscovered in psychiatric researches. It is possible, nevertheless, to assert one criterion by which all the potential therapies may be judged.122 Do they mitigate the division which comes forth from the modern vision? Do they help to overcome the way that we envision ourselves as ‘creative’ freedom and all else as objects either useful, threatening, or indifferent? In its political context that division has led us, in our very drive to universalise freedom, to build the acme of the objective society which increasingly stifles the spontaneity of those it was built to free. The division widens so that it has almost killed what little remains of those mediators – common sense, reverence, communities, and art (perhaps even finally sexuality) – which are the means for us to cross the division separating ourselves and our habitations. At any time or place it is a strange destiny to be a ‘rational animal’ – and indeed strange that there should be such – but the loss of these mediators makes that strangeness almost unbearable by tearing apart that which we are – rational animals. Socrates’ prayer for the unity of the inward and the outward was spoken in an antique world, the context of which it could not be our historical business to recreate. Yet the fact begins to appear through the modernity which has denied it: human excellence cannot be appropriated by those who think of it as sustained simply in the human will, but only by those who have glimpsed that it is sustained by all that is. Although that sustainment cannot be adequately thought by us because of the fragmentation and complexity of our historical inheritance, this is still no

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reason not to open ourselves to all those occasions in which the reality of that sustaining makes itself present to us.

A PLATITUDE123 We can hold in our minds the enormous benefits of technological society, but we cannot so easily hold the ways it may have deprived us, because technique is ourselves. All descriptions or definitions of technique which place it outside ourselves hide from us what it is. This applies to the simplest accounts which describe technological advance as new machines and inventions as well as to the more sophisticated which include within their understanding the whole hierarchy of interdependent organisations and their methods. Technique comes forth from and is sustained in our vision of ourselves as creative freedom, making ourselves, and conquering the chances of an indifferent world. It is difficult to think whether we are deprived of anything essential to our happiness, just because the coming to be of the technological society has stripped us above all of the very systems of meaning which disclosed the highest purposes of man, and in terms of which, therefore, we could judge whether an absence of something was in fact a deprival. Our vision of ourselves as freedom in an indifferent world could only have arisen in so far as we had analysed to disintegration those systems of meaning, given in myth, philosophy, and revelation, which had held sway over our progenitors. For those systems of meaning all mitigated both our freedom and the indifference of the world, and in so doing put limits of one kind or another on our interference with chance and the possibilities of its conquest. It may be said that to use the language of deprival is to prejudice the issue, because what has gone can more properly be described as illusions, horizons, superstitions, taboos which bound men from taking their fate into their own hands. This may be the case. What we lost may have been bad for men. But this does not change the fact that something has been lost. Call them what you will- superstitions or systems of meaning, taboos or sacred restraints – it is true that most Western men have been deprived of them. It might also be said that the older systems of meanings have simply been replaced by a new one. The enchantment of our souls by myth,

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philosophy, or revelation has been replaced by a more immediate meaning – the building of the society of free and equal men by the overcoming of chance. For it is clear that the systematic interference with chance was not simply undertaken for its own sake but for the realisation of freedom. Indeed it was undertaken partly in the name of that charity which was held as the height in one of those ancient systems of meaning. The fulfilment that many find in the exploration of space is some evidence that the spirit of conquest may now be liberated from any purpose beyond itself, since such exploration bears no relation to the building of freedom and equality here on earth. What we are can be seen in the degree to which the celebration of the accomplishments in space is not so much directed to the value of what has actually been done, but rather to the way this serves as verification of the continuing meaning in the modern drive to the future, and the possibility of noble deeds within that drive. Be that as it may, the building of the universal and homogeneous state is not in itself a system of meaning in the sense that the older ones were. Even in its realisation, people would still be left with a question, unanswerable in its own terms: how do we know what is worth doing with our freedom? In myth, philosophy, and revelation, orders were proclaimed in terms of which freedom was measured and defined. As freedom is the highest term in the modern language, it can no longer be so enfolded. There is therefore no possibility of answering the question: freedom for what purposes? Such may indeed be the true account of the human situation: an unlimited freedom to make the world as we want in a universe indifferent to what purposes we choose. But if our situation is such, then we do not have a system of meaning. All coherent languages beyond those which serve the drive to unlimited freedom through technique have been broken up in the coming to be of what we are. Therefore it is impossible to articulate publicly any suggestion of loss, and perhaps even more frightening, almost impossible to articulate it to ourselves. We have been left with no words which cleave together and summon out of uncertainty the good of which we may sense the dispossession. The drive to the planetary technical future is in any case inevitable; but those who would try to divert, to limit, or even simply to stand in fear before some of its applications find themselves defenceless, because of the disappearance of any speech by which the continual changes involved in that drive

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could ever be thought as deprivals. Every development of technique is an exercise of freedom by those who develop it, and as the exercise of freedom is the only meaning, the changes can only be publicly known as the unfolding of meaning. I am not speaking of those temporary deficiencies which we could overcome by better calculations – e.g. cleverer urbanologists – failures of the system which may be corrected in its own terms. Nor do I mean those recognitions of deprivation from the dispossessed – either amongst us or in the southern hemisphere – who are conscious of what they have not got and believe their lack can be overcome by the humane extension of the modern system. Also, in listening for the intimations of deprival either in ourselves or others we must strain to distinguish between differing notes: those accidental deprivals which tell us only of the distortions of our own psychic and social histories, and those which suggest the loss of some good which is necessary to man as man. As I have said elsewhere, thought is not the servant of psycho-analysis or sociology; but a straining for purification has the authority of the Delphic ‘know thyself,’ and of the fact that for Socrates the opposite of knowledge was madness.124 The darkness of the rational animal requires therapy, and now that ‘philosophy’ sees itself as analysis, men who desire to think must include in their thinking those modern therapies which arose outside any connection with what was once called philosophy. This inclusion of what may be health-giving in psycho-analysis and sociology will be necessary, even within the knowledge that these therapies are going to be used unbridledly as servants of the modern belief that socially useful patterns of behaviour should be inculcated by force. Anything concerning sexuality will serve as an example of the distortions I am trying to describe, because such matters touch every element of fantasy and the unconscious in ourselves, so that judgments about good are there most clouded by idiosyncrasy. For example, if a man were to say that the present technical advances were so detaching sexuality from procreation as to deprive women of a maternity necessary to their fullest being, his statement might be suspect as coming from a hatred of women which could not bear to see them free. To take an example from myself, a sophisticated and lucid sociologist has asserted that I was saddened at the disappearance of the Canadian nation into the American empire, not because of my written reasons from political philoso-

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phy but because of my biographically determined situation.a I belonged to a class which had its place in the old Canada and could find no place for itself in the new imperial structure. Or again, I know that my thinking about modern liberalism is touched by a certain animus arising from tortured instincts, because of the gynarchy in which I came to know that liberalism. Thought may first arise from the ambiguities of personal history but if it is to stand fairly before the enormous ambiguities of the dynamo, it must attempt to transcend the recurring distortions of personal history.125 To listen for the intimations of deprival requires attempting a distinction between our individual history and any account which might be possible of what belongs to man as man. Yet even as one says this, the words fade. The language of what belongs to man as man has long since been disintegrated. Have we not been told that to speak of what belongs to man as man is to forget that man creates himself in history? How can we speak of excellences which define the height for man, because what one epoch calls an excellence another does not, and we can transcend such historical perspectives only in the quantifiable? Aren’t such excellences just a crude way of talking about values, pretending that they have some status in the nature of things beyond our choosing? We are back where we began: all languages of good except the language of the drive to freedom have disintegrated, so it is just to pass some antique wind to speak of goods that belong to man as man. Yet the answer is also the same: if we cannot so speak, then we can either only celebrate or stand in silence before that drive. Only in listening for the intimations of deprival can we live critically in the dynamo. Whether there are intimations of essential deprivals which are beyond elimination by the calculations of the present spirit is just what must remain ambiguous for us, because the whole of our dominating system of thought denies that there could be such. When we sense their arising, at the same time we doubt that which we sense. But even among some of those who use the language of sheer freedom as protest, there seems to be heard something different than the words allow. Because they have been taught no language but the modern, they use it a R.K. Crook, ‘Modernization and Nostalgia – A Note on the Sociology of Pessimism,’ Queens Quarterly, 1965.

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not only to insist that the promises of the modern be fulfilled, but also to express their anguish at its denials. Any intimations of authentic deprival are precious, because they are the ways through which intimations of good, unthinkable in the public terms, may yet appear to us. The affirmation stands: how can we think deprivation unless the good which we lack is somehow remembered? To reverse the platitude, we are never more sure that air is good for animals than when we are gasping for breath. Some men who have thought deeply seem to deny this affirmation: but I have never found any who, in my understanding of them, have been able, through the length and breadth of their thought, to make the language of good secondary to freedom. It is for this reason that men find it difficult to take despair as the final stance in most circumstances. Deprivation can indeed become absolute for any of us under torture or pain or in certain madnesses. We can be so immersed in the deprival that we are nothing but deprivation. Be that as it may, if we make the affirmation that the language of good is inescapable under most circumstances, do we not have to think its content? The language of good is not then a dead language, but one that must, even in its present disintegration, be re-collected, even as we publicly let our freedom become ever more increasingly the pure will to will. We know that this re-collection will take place in a world where only catastrophe can slow the unfolding of the potentialities of technique. We cannot know what those potentialities will be. I do not simply mean specific possibilities – for example, whether housework will be done by robots, how far we can get in space, how long we can extend the life span, how much we can eliminate socially undesirable passions, in what ways we can control the procreation of the race, etc., etc. Some of these possibilities we can predict quite clearly, others we cannot, or not yet. But what is more important, we cannot know what these particular possibilities tell us about the potential in the human and the non-human. We do not know how unlimited are the potentialities of our drive to create ourselves and the world as we want it.126 For example, how far will the race be able to carry the divided state which characterises individuals in modernity: the plush patina of hectic subjectivity lived out in the iron maiden of an objectified world inhabited by increasingly objectifiable beings? When we are uncertain whether anything can mediate that division, how can we predict what men will

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do when the majority lives more fully in that division? Is there some force in man which will rage against such division: rage not only against a subjectivity which creates itself, but also against our own lives being so much at the disposal of the powerful objectifications of other freedoms? Neither can we know what this unfolding potentiality tells us of the non-human. As we cannot now know to what extent the non-human can in practice be made malleable to our will, therefore we also do not know what this undetermined degree of malleability will tell us of what the non-human is. Is the non-human simply stuff at our disposal, or will it begin to make its appearance to us as an order the purposes of which somehow resist our malleablizings? Are there already signs of revolts in nature? Despite the noblest modern thought, which teaches always the exaltation of potentiality above all that is, has anyone been able to show us conclusively throughout a comprehensive account of both the human and non-human things, that we must discard the idea of a presence above which potentiality cannot be exalted? In such a situation of uncertainty, it would be lacking in courage to turn one’s face to the wall, even if one can find no fulfilment in working for or celebrating the dynamo. Equally it would be immoderate and uncourageous and perhaps unwise to live in the midst of our present drive, merely working in it and celebrating it, and not also listening or watching or simply waiting for intimations of deprival which might lead us to see the beautiful as the image, in the world, of the good.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi 1969). Saturday Night 84 (March 1969): 31–3. Queen’s Quarterly 70 (1963): 183–97. Social Research 31 (1964): 45–72. Canadian Dimension 4 (March–April 1967): 21–7. This essay was reprinted in Paul Denham, ed., The Evolution of Canadian Literature in English, 1945–1970 (Toronto: Holt Rinehart and Winston 1973), 100–9. 6 ‘Wisdom in the Universities, Part One,’ This Magazine Is about Schools 1 (Autumn 1967): 70–85; ‘Part Two,’ 2 (Winter 1968): 52–7. 7 ‘The University Curriculum,’ in Howard Adelman and Dennis Lee, eds, The University Game (Toronto: Anansi 1968), 47–68.

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8 William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 191–9, 267–79, 399–406. In the case of ‘The University Curriculum,’ Christian and Grant used a further version which appeared under the title ‘The University Curriculum and the Technological Threat,’ in W. Roy Niblett, ed., The Sciences, the Humanities and the Technological Threat (London: University of London Press 1975), 21–35. This is the version in Technology and Empire, with the references having a specifically Canadian content removed. 9 ‘Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship,’ in Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi 1986), 95. 10 Leo Strauss, ‘Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,’ in What Is Political Philosophy and Other Studies (Glencoe: Free Press 1959; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988), 95–133. 11 Ibid., 108–12. 12 Leo Strauss to George Grant, 20 June 1962, quoted in William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994), 225. 13 S[heila] V[eronica] G[rant] and D[ennis] B[eynon] L[ee]. The Latin phrase, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, is translated as ‘absolutely necessary’ or ‘indispensable.’ Sheila Veronica (Allen) Grant (1920– ) was Grant’s wife and close collaborator. Dennis Lee (1939– ), poet, essayist, and editor, edited Technology and Empire for the House of Anansi Press. He and Grant were also personal friends. For his role in the production of the book, see Christian, George Grant, 272–9. 14 Talcott Parsons (1902–79), American sociologist, was a professor of sociology at Harvard. His book The Structure of Social Action (1937) was important for bringing the ideas of Weber and Durkheim into the mainstream of American sociology. Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–90). See page 405, note 2. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936), Russian behavioural physiologist, was known chiefly for his development of the concept of the conditioned reflex. 15 Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). See page 179, note 11. See also notes 26 and 27 below. 16 Leo Strauss (1899–1973). See page 132, note 5, and page 219, note 3. 17 Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (1767–94), French revolutionary leader, had a significant impact on the course of the French revolution with his single-minded radicalism. In 1791 he published The Spirit of the Revolution, in which he expressed his cult of ‘virtue’ and his yearning to regenerate France morally through reformed political institutions. At first an advocate of conciliation on the Committee of Public Safety, he later demanded the destruction of the counter-revolutionary, the corrupt, and even the merely indifferent. He was guillotined with Robespierre on 28 July 1794.

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18 See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s 1958), chapters 4 and 5. 19 Grant perhaps had in mind the work of Christopher Hill. See, for example, Hill’s Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Schocken Books 1958). 20 Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), German theologian and historian, taught at Bonn, Heidelberg, and Berlin. He is best known in the English-speaking world for The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (1912). His sociological typology of church, sect, and mysticism remains influential. His work addressed the problem of normative values in a historically conscious age, and he attempted to demonstrate the irreducible validity of the religious consciousness. 21 See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s 1958), chapter 2, ‘The Spirit of Capitalism.’ Benjamin Franklin (1706–90). See page 469, note 5. 22 Billy (William Franklin, Jr) Graham (1918– ). See page 462, note 2. 23 George (Jorge) Santayana (1863–1952), Spanish-American philosopher, critic, poet, and novelist, was born in Spain but moved at an early age to the United States, where he studied at Harvard, becoming a professor of philosophy there (1889–1912) before moving to Europe, eventually settling in Rome (1924). Although he wrote in English and published in the United States, he always remained a Spanish citizen. His works include The Life of Reason (1905–6), (rpt. in 1 vol., New York: Scribner’s 1955), which provides (238–40) a discussion of the difference between Catholic and Protestant atheism. Although an atheist, Santayana was sympathetic to Catholicism; Catholic scepticism gave rise to the glories of the Renaissance, while the decay of Protestant belief produced ‘Absolute Egotism ... in the shape of German speculative philosophy’ (ibid., 239). For his view of New England Protestantism in decay, see his only novel, The Last Puritan (New York: Scribner’s 1936). 24 For the concept of the ‘last man,’ see Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I,‘Prologue,’ #5. 25 Daniel Bell (1919– ), American sociologist, worked as a journalist for twenty years and then taught sociology at Columbia and Harvard. In his many writings, he used sociological theory to reconcile what he believed were the inherent contradictions of capitalistic societies. His The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960) was enormously influential and controversial. Marion Joseph Levy (1918– ) was professor at Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. His works include

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Technology and Empire The Structure of Society (1952) and Modernization and the Structure of Societies (1966). Sir Edmund (Ronald) Leach (1910–89), British social anthropologist, studied under Bronislaw Malinowski and was inspired by the structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss. His works include Rethinking Anthropology (1961). Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud: (Boston: Beacon Press 1955). Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press 1964). By ‘Archimedean freedom,’ Grant is referring to Archimedes’ apocryphal boast: ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.’ St Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991), 123 (Book VII): ‘And I had come to you from the Gentiles and fixed my attention on the gold which you willed your people to take from Egypt, since the gold was yours, wherever it was.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), American poet, essayist, Unitarian preacher, and noted lecturer. Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918), American historian, grandson and great-grandson of American presidents, is best remembered as the author of The Education of Henry Adams (privately printed 1906, published in 1918) and Mont St-Michel and Chartres (privately printed 1904, published 1913). William James (1842–1910), American psychologist and philosopher, became a leader of the pragmatic school of American philosophy through such works as Pragmatism (1907) and The Meaning of Truth (1909). Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), American philosopher, influenced James, Dewey, Royce, and others, but his philosophy did not become well known until the posthumous publication of the Collected Papers of C.S. Peirce (8 volumes, 1931–58). Max Weber (1864–1920). See page 18, note 4. See also note 108 below. Harold Dwight Lasswell (1902–78), American political scientist, was known for his promotion of a scientific approach to political analysis drawing on the ideas of Marx, Freud, and the modern Machiavellians such as Pareto, Mosca, and Michels. His works include Psychopathology and Politics (1931) and Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How (1936). For Talcott Parsons (1902–79), see note 14 above. William Seward Burroughs (1914–97), American writer, wrote experimental novels such as Naked Lunch (1966) and Nova Express (1964), based on his experiences as a drug addict. Grant probably read Naked Lunch, which contains sexual episodes which were shocking by the standards of the 1960s. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ (1881–1955), French biologist and philosopher, tried to integrate Christian theology with theories of evolution. The

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French edition of The Phenomenon of Man appeared in 1955, and The Future of Man in 1959. ‘Out of the shadows and imaginings into the truth.’ This phrase of John Henry Cardinal Newman is inscribed on the stone marking Grant’s grave in Terence Bay, Nova Scotia. See William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994), 372. Grant is referring to the controversy that followed publication of a proposal by the Roman Catholic bishops of Ontario in October 1962 that ecclesiastical control of the education of Roman Catholic children in state-supported schools be extended to include the high-school level. For the proposal, see the Globe and Mail (Toronto), 29 October 1962. See ‘Memorandum of the Anglican Bishops Concerning the Roman Catholic Hierarchy’s Brief on Education,’ pages 224–6 in this volume. Perhaps Grant had in mind here Emperor Wilhelm II and his circle. In 1890, Wilhelm II dismissed Otto von Bismarck as chancellor, leaving himself free to pursue an inconsistent and aggressive foreign policy without having to confront a strong figure willing to stand up to him. Leslie Miscampbell Frost (1895–1973). See page 365, note 130. For the text of the brief prepared by the Roman Catholic bishops of Ontario and submitted by the English Catholic Education Association of Ontario to Premier John Robarts and the members of the Ontario Legislature, see the Globe and Mail (Toronto), 29 October 1962, p. 9. Erich Fromm (1900–80). See page 253, note 4. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, sections 12–15. Cf. the version published in Canadian Dimension 4 (1967) (hereafter cited as CD): ‘The words, tragic and comic, are about forms of art and should only be used very loosely to describe events or attitudes to events’ (21). See, for example, The Monadology and Other Writings, translated with introduction and notes by Robert Latta (London: Oxford University Press 1968), page 248 (in ‘The Monadology’) and page 417 (in ‘Principles of Nature and Grace’). See also Théodicée (1710) (Theodicy, edited and abridged, with an introduction, by Diogenes Allen [Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons 1966]), in which the principles of Leibniz’s optimism are fully expounded and defended. Cf. CD, 21: ‘I use the word “fate” and believe that nature is good, and do not think to speak thus is contradictory.’ Cf. CD, 21: ‘The fate of most of us here is to be Canadians. I wish to speak of one aspect of that fate – namely that the existence of this country has always been bound up with the interplay of various world empires.’ Cf. CD, 21: ‘... the pillar of strength of western civilization.’ Cf. CD, 21, where this sentence was followed by: ‘(Let me say in parenthesis

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Technology and Empire that there is something immensely funny about poor old Paul Martin waggling off to Moscow as the independent broker of peace, as if the Russians could take our non-involvement seriously.)’ Paul Joseph James Martin (1903–92). See page 360, note 98. Grant is referring to Martin’s visit to the Soviet Union in November 1966, when he had discussions with Premier Alexei Kosygin and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko about possible conditions for ending the Vietnam War. See Paul Martin, A Very Public Life, Vol. 2 (Toronto: Deneau 1985), 443ff. Cf. CD, 22: ‘It is much nicer to be a Canadian than a Brazilian or a Venezuelan.’ Cf. CD, 22: ‘To most Canadians, the central cause of motion in their souls is the belief in progress through technique, and that faith is identified with the power and leadership of the English-speaking empire in the world. The culmination of the age of progress is identified with its apotheosis in the United States.’ Cf. CD, 22: ‘This then is why for thinking Canadians our present fate can be seen with such clarity in the glaring light of Viet Nam. It is the knowledge that the very substance of our lives is bound up with the western empire and its destiny just at a time when that empire uses increasingly ferocious means to maintain its hegemony.’ Cf. CD, 22: ‘... the Germans, the Russians or the Chinese.’ Cf. CD, 22: ‘What is being done in Viet Nam is being done by the Englishspeaking peoples.’ G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover 1956), 341 ff. Cf. CD, 22: ‘To speak very shortly and elliptically about this, if one is to pick the society where modernity first makes its appearance in a more than individual way, one must pick England.’ George Earle Wilson (1890–1973), professor of history, Dalhousie University (1919–69). Wilson had been a pupil of Grant’s father, W.L. Grant, when an undergraduate at Queen’s, and had been a pacifist during the First World War. As dean of arts and science at Dalhousie (1945–55), Wilson was instrumental in hiring Grant in 1947 after his rejection for the position of warden of Hart House because of his pacifism during the Second World War. Wilson shared Grant’s reservations about research-oriented universities, believing that the purpose of education was to lead students to pursue wisdom by reflecting upon ultimate questions. He was, accordingly, sympathetic to Grant’s approach to the study of philosophy at Dalhousie. See Henry Roper, ‘The Lifelong Pilgrimage of George E. Wilson, Teacher and Historian,’ Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society Collections 42 (1986): 139–51.

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55 Henry VI, Part 3, act 3, scene 2. 56 This sentence is omitted in CD. 57 John Ulric Nef (1899–1988), professor of history, University of Chicago, was an influential student of early industrialization. The reference is to his book Industry and Government in France and England, 1540–1640 (1940; rpt., Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1964 ), 98–101. 58 Cf. CD, 22: ‘What is so enchantingly sweet about the young French Canadians ...’ 59 The sentence ends at this point in CD. The rest of the paragraph was probably inspired by the election of Pierre Elliott Trudeau as prime minister in 1968. Grant disliked Trudeau for what he considered to be a shallow cosmopolitanism and lack of sympathy for French-Canadian traditions and nationalist sentiment. 60 Cf. CD 22: ‘... because belief in progress often implies the base belief that to lose is to be wrong.’ 61 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 2 vols (London: J.M. Dent 1907), Vol. 1, Preface, 124–45, ‘Of the Dangers of the Puritan Movement.’ 62 See Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, a critical edition with an introduction and commentary by Hermann Josef Real (Berlin: Gruyter 1978). 63 Cf. CD, 22: ‘... the Americans had incorporated in their revolution a mixture of Locke and the French Revolution.’ 64 Grant is referring here to R.K. Crook’s essay on Lament for a Nation, ‘Modernization and Nostalgia: A Note on the Sociology of Pessimism,’ Queen’s Quarterly 73 (1966): 269–84. Cf. CD, 23: ‘Ontario’ in place of ‘Canada.’ See also Robert Blumstock, ‘Anglo-Saxon Lament,’ Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 3 (1966): 98–106. 65 This and the following sentence do not appear in CD. 66 This sentence does not appear in CD. 67 Cf. CD, 23, where this paragraph ended with the following omitted sentence: ‘British and American followers of Locke were not much different.’ 68 Cf. CD, 23: ‘... the insane war of 1914.’ 69 Cf. CD, 23, where this sentence is omitted. 70 Cf. CD, 23, where the words ‘to the US’ are omitted. 71 Sir Samuel (Sam) Hughes (1853–1921), teacher, journalist, soldier, and Conservative politician, was minister of militia (1911–16) in the government of Sir Robert Borden and as such played an important role in organizing Canada’s military effort during the opening years of the First World War. Administrative incompetence and scandals forced Borden to dismiss him from office. Grant is referring to Hughes’s strong support of conscription in the face of French-Canadian opposition during the federal election of 1917.

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72 In the federal election of 1917, fought over the conscription issue, Mackenzie King, unlike many prominent English-Canadian Liberals, supported Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s opposition to conscription. 73 The remainder of this paragraph is omitted from CD. 74 Grant is referring to President Charles de Gaulle’s visit to Canada in 1967, when he made his notorious ‘Vive le Québec libre’ speech on the 24 July from the balcony of the Montreal City Hall. After being publicly rebuked by Prime Minister Lester Pearson, he cut short his visit and returned to France. 75 Cf. CD, 24: ‘The United States is the only society on earth that has no indigenous traditions from before the age of progress.’ 76 Cf. CD, 24: ‘The era of modern western thought ...’ 77 Cf. CD, 24: ‘The dominant tendency of the western world has been to consider the nature of things as dynamic, knowable and controllable as externality.’ 78 Cf. CD, 24: ‘The tawdry words of Teilhard de Chardin about the inevitable movement of the race to an omega point of perfection well express this liberal doctrine. One can hear it in this country in less explicit form from Professor McLuhan. All of this hides from us the fact that a dynamic society must be an imperialist society.’ The remainder of the paragraph is omitted from CD. Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–80). See page 462, note 4. 79 John Milton Hay (1838–1905), journalist, historian, poet, diplomat, US secretary of state (1898–1905). Hay was a strong supporter of the SpanishAmerican War (1898), calling it ‘a splendid little war.’ The war resulted in the United States’ becoming an imperial power through the conquest of the Philippines. 80 Cf. CD, 24, where the remainder of this paragraph reads: ‘... which more than any other characterizes the culture of the West, and Canadians belong inevitably to that culture. I would be the first to say that Canadian destiny was to be an alternative society to the U.S. in North America, but it was an alternative coming out of the same basic stream-out [sic] of western culture. Indeed as Canadian life has developed we have failed to provide an alternative. As the U.S. becomes daily more our own, so does the Viet Nam war.’ 81 The following sentence is included at this point in CD, 24: ‘If U Thant, the Pope, De Gaulle and Niemoller cannot convince them that these are not the facts, who can?’ U Thant (1909–74), Burmese diplomat, was secretary-general of the United Nations (1962–71). Martin Niemoller (1892–1984), German First World War submarine commander and Lutheran pastor (1924), was a leader of the Church opposition

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to the National Socialist regime, a pacifist, and president of the World Council of Churches (1961). Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73), thirty-sixth president of the United States (1963–9), who was responsible for the escalation of the war in Vietnam that began in 1964, was a Texan. Cf. CD, 25, where the sentence ‘Have they looked clearly at the nature of this war?’ is replaced in this text by ‘Such a way of thinking ...’ to ‘... and we will have to be part of them.’ Robert Michels (1876–1936), German-born Italian political sociologist and economist, formulated the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ in his Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1911). According to Michels, as a result of this ‘law’ large organizations tend to be dominated by their leaders and so are ‘oligarchies’ rather than ‘democracies.’ Cf. CD, 25: ‘The ecstasy offered by Dr Leary is just another package which one buys from the system ...’ Timothy Leary (1920–96), psychologist and author, was a lecturer at Harvard before becoming a leader of the 1960s counter-culture through his advocacy of the use of psychedelic drugs in such books as Psychedelic Experience (1964) and Politics of Ecstasy (1965). This paragraph is omitted from CD. Cf. CD, 25: ‘Some people, particularly some of the young, will say that I have taken a lot of words to make a fuss about the obvious.’ Cf. CD, 25, where this paragraph is as follows: ‘Nothing I have said implies in any way that the job of preserving what is left of Canadian sovereignty is not worth the efforts of practical men. It is plainly valuable to limit the extent that Canadians are involved in the imperial adventures in Asia and South America; to see if we can, as a North American nation, take a more moderate stance to other countries; to work for the French-English co-operation which is our sine qua non; perhaps even to score a few minor victories in the control of our resources and economy, without which no sovereignty is left. Is one not glad that Canadians are not actually fighting in Viet Nam? This is due to what sovereignty we still possess. But what I am saying is that the small question of Canadian nationalism must be seen within the general context of the fate of western civilization. By that fate I do not mean merely the relations of our massive empire to the rest of the world, but above all the kind of existence which is becoming universal in advanced technological societies.’ Walter Rathenau (1867–1922), German statesman, economist, and industrialist, brilliantly organized Germany’s war economy during the First World War. He believed unfettered capitalism was passé, advocating cooperation

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Technology and Empire between management and labour under the direction of the state to assure that all would benefit from industrialism. Rathenau’s internationalism, support for social democracy, and Jewish origins made him hated by the extreme right, and he was assassinated while serving as foreign minister in 1922. Edward Caird (1835–1908), Scottish philosopher, was the leader, along with T.H. Green, of the neo-Hegelian or British Hegelian School. Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), British Hegelian philosopher, taught ancient history at Oxford. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), English philosopher, social critic, and political activist, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature (1950). For Grant’s view of Russell, see ‘Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell,’ in Collected Works, Volume 2, pp. 34–48. The four sentences from ‘Indeed ...’ to ‘... expansion’ are not in the Social Research (1964) version (hereafter cited as SR). ‘As for time ... it is the existent notion itself.’ See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977), 27. See G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover 1956), 19: ‘The general statement ... of the various grades in the consciousness of Freedom – and which we applied in the first instance to the fact that the Eastern nations knew only that one is free; the Greek and Roman world only that some are free; while we know that all men absolutely (man as man) are free ...’ See, for example, Alban Dewes Winspear, The Genesis of Plato’s Thought, 2nd ed. (New York: Russell 1956); and George Derwent Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1973). George Holland Sabine (1880–1961), American political philosopher, taught at Stanford, Missouri, Ohio State, and Cornell. He was the author of a widely used textbook, A History of Political Theory, which appeared in four editions from 1937 to 1973. Simone Adolphine Weil (1909–43), French philosopher and mystic, was a philosophy teacher, political activist, and an essayist on philosophical, social, and religious questions. She was one of the key influences in forming Grant’s thought. See David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi 1995), 172–87. ‘But we have always been attentive to this, for we both, in appearance, turn away from Being in order to turn toward tyranny, because we have seen that those who lack courage to brave the consequences of tyranny, who, consequently, “either a humble slave or a haughty master,” were forced quite as much to escape the consequences of Being, precisely because they

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did nothing else but speak of Being’ (French translation by Christopher Elson). The Latin quotation within the quotation is from Livy, History of Rome, Book 24. The full sentence reads: ‘This is the nature of the mass: either it is a humble slave or a haughty master.’ See Livy, with an English translation, Vol. 6, trans. Frank Gardner Moore (London: Heinemann 1940), 257. The sentence mentioning Heidegger does not appear in SR. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), German philosopher, was a critic of Hegel and his followers, who defined humanity by the reasoning faculty. He argued for a ‘new philosophy’ in which humans are distinguished from lower animals by the passions, particularly the emotion of compassion or love, which leads to the ‘unity of I and thou.’ See Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred H. Vogel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1966), 51–5. Lynn Townsend White, Jr (1907–87), internationally known medieval scholar, taught history at Princeton, Stanford, and UCLA. Leo Strauss, ‘Maimonides’ Statement on Political Science,’ in What Is Political Philosophy? 155–69. Maimonides or Moses ben Maimon (1135–1204), Spanish philosopher, was the most eminent of the medieval Jewish thinkers who attempted to find a synthesis of Greek, especially Aristotelian, philosophy and Jewish monotheistic religion. See also Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1965 [1930]). See Leo Strauss, ‘On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,’ in What Is Political Philosophy? 219–32; and Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952). The version published in two parts in This Magazine Is about Schools (henceforth cited as TM) under the title ‘Wisdom in the Universities’ is prefaced with the dedication: ‘To Dennis Lee – In Gratitude.’ See TM 4 (1967): 70. The sentence in parentheses is not included in the text in the versions published in TM and The University Game (henceforth cited as UG) but as a footnote. Brazilian Traction, Light and Power Co. Ltd, now known as Brascan, is a Canadian natural resources and financial services company originally created to develop hydroelectric power and other utilities in Brazil. Grant is making oblique reference to Henry Borden (1901–89), lawyer and businessman, who was president of Brazilian Traction (1946–63) and chairman of the University of Toronto board of governors (1964–8). John von Neumann (1903–57), Hungarian-born American mathematician, taught at Princeton and was the director of the Electronic Computer Project (1945–55). Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), American philosopher and mathematician, taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the Second World

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Technology and Empire War, he was concerned with mathematical aspects of communication and control engineering. He developed unifying principles which cut across many disciplines and could be stated mathematically in his Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). In the TM and UG versions this sentence reads: ‘Oppenheimer expressed one side of the relation when he said ...’ Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67). See page 270, note 4. Paul Goodman (1911–72), teacher and writer, gained considerable influence during the 1960s through his anarchist critique of youth and schools in urban society. His most popular books were Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (1947, with his brother, Percival Goodman) and Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (1961). See Max Weber, ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy,’ in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free Press 1949), 49–112. For Talcott Parsons and Harold Lasswell, see notes 14 and 32 above, respectively. In the original version published in TM and UG, Grant included a footnote: ‘It is not necessary to discuss here the conflict which often arose in western civilisation between the claims of revelation and of philosophy to provide knowledge about the best way to live. See “Jerusalem and Athens,” Leo Strauss, Commentary, June, 1967.’ Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) taught at Basel, Kiel, Breslau, and Berlin. He is best known for his epistemological analysis of the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ or cultural sciences. His works are collected in twelve volumes as Gessammelte Schriften. See Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences. Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717–97), English writer, connoisseur, and collector, wrote The Castle of Otranto, which initiated the vogue for Gothic romances, and was a prodigious and witty writer of letters. ‘Namierian’ refers to the school of historians influenced by Sir Lewis Namier (1888–1960). Namier emigrated from Poland to England in 1907 to study at Oxford. He became professor of modern history at the University of Manchester (1931–52). Namier and his followers emphasized a rigorous and detailed analysis of events and institutions, particularly parliamentary elections, to reveal the motivations of politicians; he believed that ideas had little influence on the course of historical events. His most influential book was The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929). Herman Northrop Frye (1912–91), Canadian literary critic, was educated at the University of Toronto and at Oxford. He became professor of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto, in 1939, remaining asso-

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ciated with Victoria until his death; he became chancellor in 1978. In the works which brought him international renown, such as Fearful Symmetry (1947), a study of William Blake, and Anatomy of Criticism (1957), he argued that literature is explicable in relation to a coherent pattern of symbols and archetypes. These ideas were given their final formulation in his study of the Bible, The Great Code (1982). Grant’s review of this work will appear in a later volume of the Collected Works. The first part of the TM version ends, part two beginning with the following paragraph. See TM 5 (1968): 52. In the versions published in TM and UG, Grant included the following footnote: ‘Marxists argue that capitalism inhibits technological advance in the name of the rights of property, and therefore that it is not true to say that the chief purpose of our society is technological advance. An analysis of this matter cannot be undertaken in this article. For some preliminary remarks see Lament for a Nation, Toronto 1965, 54–67.’ Rousseau developed this argument in his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality among Mankind (1755). See also his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750). Erik Homburger Erikson (1902–94), American psychoanalyst and professor, was born in Germany of Danish parents. He emigrated to the United States (1933) after graduation from the Vienna Psychiatric Institute, where he studied under Anna Freud. He held a number of academic positions before becoming a professor at Harvard (1960–70). His best-known works are Childhood and Society (1950) and Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958). Undergraduate Instruction in Arts and Science: Report of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Instruction in the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto (University of Toronto Press 1967). The chairman of the committee was Crawford Brough Macpherson (1911–87), Canadian political theorist and professor of political economy at the university from 1935 until his death. Macpherson received international recognition with the publication of his book The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962). See Claude Bissell, Halfway up Parnassus: A Personal Account of the University of Toronto, 1932–1971 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974), 183ff, for an account of the events surrounding the production of this ‘revolutionary document,’ which recommended that the system of honours courses at the University of Toronto be abolished. In the TM version, this sentence reads: ‘Who is to recount how and when and where private anguish and public catastrophe may lead some men to become wise?’ See TM 5 (1968): 57. This paragraph differs from that in the TM and UG versions. See TM 5

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Technology and Empire (1968): 57, and UG, 68: ‘It is possible, nevertheless, to assert one criterion by which all the manifold attempts at therapy may be judged. Do they help men to find that nature is good? Such a criterion may seem so universal as to provide no specifications. Yet this is the fact that modernity has made clear by its denial. Human excellence can be rediscovered only by those who are able, even in the midst of this present, and “en pleine conscience de cause,” somehow to assert the beneficence of nature.’ Originally entitled ‘Is Freedom Man’s Only Meaning?’ in the version published in Saturday Night 84/3 (March 1969): 30–3 (hereafter cited as SN [1969]). Cf. Sophist 228d; Xenophon, Memorabilia I, ii50; III, ix, 6. In SN (1969) this sentence reads: ‘Thought ... but if it is to stand fairly before the enormous ambiguities of the dynamo of technological society ...’ Cf. SN (1969), 33: ‘We do not know how unlimited are the potentialities of our drive.’

‘Technology and Man’: An Interview of George Grant by Gad Horowitz

Gad Horowitz1 interviewed Grant at his Dundas home about Technology and Empire, taking up a suggestion from Cy Gonick, editor of Canadian Dimension. The interview first appeared in Journal of Canadian Studies 4/3 (Aug. 1969): 3–6, and later it was published as ‘Horowitz and Grant Talk,’ in Canadian Dimension 6/6 (Dec. 1969–Jan. 1970).

horowitz: What do you mean when you describe our society as a technological society? grant: I mean that this is a society in which people think of the world around them as mere indifferent stuff which they are absolutely free to control any way they want through technology. I don’t think of the technological society as something outside us, you know, like just a bunch of machines. It is a whole way of looking at the world, the basic way Western men experience their own existence in the world. Out of it come large organizations, bureaucracy, machines, and the belief that all problems can be solved scientifically, in an immediate quantifiable way. The technological society is one in which men are bent on dominating and controlling human and nonhuman nature. horowitz: And out of this dominating, aggressive relationship with nature grows a situation in which human beings are prevented from existing truly as human beings. Their lives are shaped to conform to the requirements of technological progress. They thus become subordinated to their own technology. How do you mean this? In what ways can we see it? In what ways are we as human beings damaged by the technological relationship with nature? grant: I think that fundamentally, we don’t quite know what has hap-

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pened to us. What I try to say in my book is that we must try to think what it is to live in modern North America.2 We who have walked the streets of the great metropolis, and seen the giant wars of this century, and live in highly organized institutions which determine us more than we determine them, must feel the need not only to live but to know, to think our living – otherwise we are at the mercy of it. And it seems to me at the moment that we are at the mercy of the technological machine we have built, and every time anything difficult happens, we add to that machine. We have more science to answer the difficulties that science itself has created. Now this predicament is too enormous in the history of the race to permit one to say: I’m against it, or I’m for it. The main thing, you know, in my life, is just to see what it is. Technology is the metaphysics of our age, you know, it is the way being appears to us, and certainly we’re rushing into the future with no categories by which we can judge it. horowitz: Do you think that the young rebels on the left are as blind as we are? Or do you see foreshadowed in the new movements among the young a more conservative attitude toward technology – perhaps a tendency to return to some notion of the good, and to get away from the notion of empty freedom as the destiny of man? At some points in your writings I get the feeling that you have very deep sympathies with these currents on the left. At other times you seem to identify these currents with the very society they’re struggling against. For example, at one point you say that radical protest only hardens the direction the society is already taking. grant: Well, you know, obviously one has to make a lot of distinctions among the new left. This is a very large general term for a lot of people. And I know some of them and read the writings of others and watch some on television. horowitz: Well, let me specify then, if I may. I am referring to the type of revolt that is demonstrated by so-called Yippies, and the type of new left ideology that expresses itself in the work of someone like Marcuse.3 We can forget about Maoists and people like that. grant: One person who has moved me very much is the Yippie Abbie Hoffman.4 I think Hoffman is an example of a human being who is trying to reach beyond the categories of the Western world and to partake of true being. I meet a lot of students who are like this, and I think they’re some of the finer and nobler people who are trying to

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get apprehensions of the good in the deepest way. But in some of them I also find an enormous utopianism, and I think utopianism always clouds the mind. Now I think when you’re young, you have more right to have your mind clouded, you know, just because you’re young. As I’ve said, one has to make a very great many distinctions among them, but I think a lot of them are searching how – in a very tough, tight, twilight society – they can find what I would call noble deeds. And that seems to me the deepest and richest thing you can do. I think there were an enormous lot of noble deeds in Chicago, when they showed up the Democratic party for what it was.5 Now Marcuse is a highly intelligent Marxist. As such he believes in the modern religion of progress. He and those who think as he does speak as if all the difficulties of technological society can be overcome immediately in and through the further development of technological society. Marxism is, after all, a part of the modern experiment, and what I’m questioning is the whole of the modern experiment. horowitz: I think there is a complexity in Marxists of the type that Marcuse represents that perhaps you don’t acknowledge sufficiently. You say that these people, although they rebel against the technological society, themselves have great faith in the modern experiment and expect it to issue in happiness. But actually what is expected of technological civilization by someone like Marcuse is that it transcend itself, by producing a new type of human nature – one that isn’t oriented towards the mastery of human and non-human nature, but rather a more passive, contemplative, receptive orientation towards nature and true community among human beings. grant: Yes, but first, Marcuse says, we must conquer nature. We can then enjoy it, we can live in polymorphous perversity. That is accepting that we will first have had to have conquered nature, absolutely. But the question I raise is this: doesn’t the conquering of nature mean that the streams of spontaneity in man, the possibility of noble deeds, the possibility of philosophy, the possibility of religion, the possibility of art – may not all these be gone? I would say that Marcuse hasn’t read Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s enormous criticism of the modern experiment was that it would lead to a society of last men, men who want a kind of trivial happiness that would eliminate nobility and greatness.

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horowitz: But do you think that nobility and greatness must always rest on suffering, draw on suffering? Do you think that Marcuse and his ilk are trivial? That they forecast and in effect demand a kind of empty happiness devoid of effort and therefore of meaning? grant: This of course is a fantastically difficult question, and I don’t know my way through it. I certainly don’t like the tradition that in any way says: suffering is good in itself. You know, it seems to me that we suffer simply because we have nervous systems. Suffering is a fact of nature. You know the biblical tradition has a certain view of suffering in it, but I want to absolutely speak out against the view, which is a debasement of that biblical tradition, that suffering is necessary to good. Because I don’t believe that. No, I don’t believe it, but I do believe that the conquest of nature, in the sense of the total overcoming of chance in the world, will cut men off from nobility and greatness. The modern tradition has said: if you can overcome chance, absolutely, you will eliminate suffering. But the total overcoming of chance, the overcoming of the world, leaves the world a banal place full of bored and tired people. horowitz: I think a young new leftist would say that it is not the total overcoming of chance that is involved, but rather the total overcoming of the human suffering which is necessitated by repression and by domination. So that chance and even strife will remain, but not the type of suffering that emerges precisely out of the distortion of the human organism and the human psyche to suit the requirement of the machine. Now this is precisely the type of suffering that you want to do away with is it not? grant: Well, you know, anybody must be a son of a bitch who doesn’t want to overcome suffering. You know, clearly, there are causes of social and individual repression, the overcoming of which we associate with Marx and Freud. And clearly Marcuse has tried to combine Marx and Freud in his book Eros and Civilization. He thinks that a society which is directed by passion will be a good society. Now here again my mind isn’t absolutely clear. I entirely accept the lesson of the psychoanalytical tradition, which is that you have to overcome the useless torture and the crazy repression of our human instincts. On the other hand, I’m also held by the ancient tradition that human greatness and nobility are not possible without the virtues of moderation and courage. And this in some sense must mean

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the overcoming of passion. I think that the questions which need thinking out enormously are these: Why does one inhibit and torture oneself for bad reasons? And on the other hand, what inhibitions of the passions are essential? You know, even to read a book one has to moderate one’s instincts for those minutes and concentrate. What inhibitions of the passions are rational and finally liberating? This is the kind of question I’m trying to think about at the moment. It’s an enormously complex question. I just haven’t reached a sufficiently careful summation. horowitz: Let’s move out of these deep waters, if we may, and get back to something we were talking about earlier on. How do you as a Canadian respond to your location near the centre of the technological civilization, a location which is so burdensome for you? grant: Years ago I produced lots of children, and therefore I’m responsible for them – you know, I have to earn my living. And sort of carry out the ordinary activities of being a father. That’s just given to me, that’s just the situation I find myself in. Second, the thing I want to do is to think very deeply about what is. And therefore I have to have enough money to support my family and I have to try and get it in such ways that I can have some time for thinking. As a result of these two needs I have to live in certain institutions, because I don’t see any alternative. And so I make – as you know most people do – all kinds of compromises. I live in a very large multiversity, I earn my living in that multiversity. I have to make compromises with that multiversity. Thomas More has said something which naturally appeals to my nature: ‘When you can’t expect the good to happen, try and prevent the very worst.’6 horowitz: As a Canadian faced with the world as it is, living in the world as you see it, what do you think ought to be the first priority for those who seek social change in this country? Is it wise to concentrate on independence as the first priority – in order to remove us from the immediate influence of the American technological empire? Or should we see ourselves rather as citizens of that empire and participate in the general struggle within it for the loosening up of technological repressions and rigidities? grant: I don’t see and I haven’t for many years seen much sign of a desire on the part of English-speaking Canadians to be independent. The dominating classes in English-speaking Canada want a

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little superficial, shallow independence. I think you can see this in the recent meeting of Trudeau7 and Nixon.8 I think we will be passing into an era which will be sort of an era of good feeling, and become more and more integrated into the empire. Now as a person who just doesn’t like that happening, I still see it happening and I don’t see much I can do about it. You know, as I’ve said for my own life, I’m interested in doing a particular thing. And I think there are all kinds of things people should do, but I think people should recognize that they’re in the empire and that the question of independence isn’t going to be fought for very deeply. I think the great question for people, whether they’re Canadians or Americans in North America, is how you live in the midst of the technological monolith. Many people are so entranced and in love with it that they don’t know what it’s depriving them of. I think that young people, if they’re going to know what richness of life is, must be aware not just of what it is they gain from this monolith, but what it is depriving them of. horowitz: What did you mean when you wrote that radical protest in some ways only hardens the directions the society is already taking? grant: Well I think radicals have to be enormously careful of this. There are some things which simply must be protested, like the Vietnam war. But radicals must free themselves from their hopes of the weakness of this society. I think American society is enormously powerful. And I think certain forms of protest can bring about a closing down of certain forms of liberty which have been present in this society up until now. Now one cannot expect sense from many people and there are going to be all kinds of mistakes made by protesters with very virtuous motives. But I think they should be aware that they can make some institutions in the society much, much tougher by their protests. You know, I think a lot of radicals have been brought up under progressive education in prosperous suburbs in prosperous families, and they don’t know how tough society can finally get. horowitz: Of what use is the cultural revolution of the moment? I’m thinking of what some people call the new sensibility or the new morality – the different attitude to interpersonal relationships and social obligations that is found among the young, the extreme of

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which would be represented by Leary’s ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out.’9 grant: Well I find among a lot of the young that they have very deep and very rich and very beautiful human relations, and I think that this is absolutely great. I think, mind you, that some of the human relations of absolute freedom are only possible for the very strong, and are terribly hard for some of the weak. And you know I’m enough of a traditional person that I don’t see how the deeper human relations are possible in the long run without some responsibilities. But you know I find far more responsibility among a lot of young people I meet than among the successful and quite violent members of the technocratic and bureaucratic masses in the suburbs. I find them much more human, much more gentle to each other. horowitz: Do you think the cultural revolution may be the way out of the technological trap? Is it leading anywhere or is it mere futility? grant: ‘Leading anywhere?’ Not if you mean change of the society as a whole. The society is given over to mammoth technological institutions and there are certain requirements given in the nature of these institutions that you cannot escape. But it is, luckily, a very rich society, therefore a lot of people can drop out and take its benefits while living outside it. I don’t think this is a very deep response, but it may be a necessary response for some people at some moments. horowitz: To the extent that people do confront the technological reality around them and think what it means and what it deprives them of, it would seem to me that there would be an increasing tendency among them to react along the lines of ‘decentralization,’ if not ‘drop out.’ There seems to be a movement in many different areas of life these days which uses decentralization as its slogan. Do you think it’s possible to mount an effective movement towards decentralization within the technological society? grant: I think people who try and make new, living institutions – you know, family schools, other forms of institutions – in this society are just magnificent. And more power to them. In our educational system I see nothing but an enormous centralization going on. I sit on committees through my work in the university which show me how the whole system in Ontario, from the beginning of education to the

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end, is being tightened and computerized. Now there is going to be a kind of external attempt to make that kind of system rather charming – an attempt that I identify with Mr Trudeau. He will take the system as it is but try and gloss it over with charming human relations and all this kind of thing. I don’t think it’s going to work. I hope there’s enough being in people that they won’t like this very centralized educational system. But the centralized educational system is coming. Everything I see points in that direction. Now I think that the people within the established system will make compromises with the movement for decentralization, but I don’t know how deep the compromises can go, because the necessities of technique impose the need for centralization. The people who attempt to build institutions outside this system are magnificent, but I think they’ll have a terribly difficult life.

Notes 1 Gad Horowitz (1936– ), professor of politics at the University of Toronto, published Canadian Labour in Politics (1968). See page 452, note 1. 2 Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi 1969). 3 The name ‘Yippies’ referred to the followers of activists Abbie Hoffman, who published books such as Revolution for the Hell of It (1968) and Steal This Book (1971), and Jerry Rubin, who published Do It: Scenarios for the Revolution. Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). See page 179, note 11. 4 See note 3 above. 5 Demonstrations at the Chicago Democratic Convention 1968. 6 Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) was the author of Utopia. 7 Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919–2000). See page 377, note 2. 8 Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–94). See page 270, note 5. 9 Timothy Leary (1920–96). See page 589, note 85.

‘The Practice of Politics’ and ‘Thought about Politics’: The George C. Nowlan Lectures

Grant delivered the second series of George C. Nowlan Lectures at Acadia University on the 16th and 17th of October 1969. Until their appearance in the Collected Works, the lectures were unpublished.

Lecture I Mr Chairman, Mrs Nowlan, President Beveridge, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is a great honour to be asked to Acadia. Both Acadia and the university to which my loyalty is given, McMaster, were nurtured by the same branch of the Christian Church. My life is lived within loyalty to another branch of the Church; but living at McMaster has taught me about the Baptists. It has taught me that their great contribution is to remind men to stand up to and not be afraid of, the powers of this world. I hope both Acadia and McMaster will continue to live in that spirit, because never have the powers of this world been so strong as in our time, and what is particularly dangerous, never have they carried such charming and seductive smiles on their faces. It is a particular honour and pleasure to be asked to speak in memory of George Nowlan.1 He was a man who stood four-square in that tradition of common sense and moderation which is the best that Canada offers the world, and which is today often questioned by the shriller and more swinging voices of our great metropolitan centres. He was a conservative, not in that foolish sense the word has come to be used in the USA as signifying those who exalt the rights of private property so that they can do what they want at whatever expense to the common good; but in the sense that it is used in our BNA Act,

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which sets out to establish in its fine words ‘peace, order and good government.’ He was a conservative in the sense that he knew that public life was made better by good feeling among men, and that questions of difference among people were made better settled by common sense than by ideology. This moderate spirit is not something easily kept alive among politicians in a age of extremity such as ours. Let us hope that in Canada the common sense and moderation of men such as George Nowlan will be our prevailing form of politician, rather than the Governor Reagans, the Mayor Daleys, and indeed the Bobby Kennedys.2 I may be allowed to put it this way. This year I earn my living by teaching the young about Aristotle and about Nietzsche -two thinkers of the very highest order – but extraordinarily different in the tone of their rhetoric. Aristotle, starting from trust and confidence, speaks in the restrained language of practical wisdom. Nietzsche, starting from anguish and chaos, speaks in the unforgettable but unrestrained language of tragedy. I am sure that George Nowlan was close to the practical wisdom of Aristotle and far from the crisis-rhetoric of Nietzsche. I hope my words which are said in memorial lectures to him will follow the same course. It is difficult, however. In these days of crisis in Western civilization one may seem to be superficial in promising the virtues of moderation and common sense – and in not raising the extremities which our situation draws forth. My subject is the relation between the practice of politics and thought about politics. This is an important question in a very immediate sense, because of the fact that in North America the education industry has become probably the most important industry of our continent – whether for good or ill. And in those great hearts of that industry – our modern multiversities – what are known as ‘the social scientists’ become even more important, and among those social scientists a central group is called the political scientists – those whose function, presumably, is to think clearly about politics. Moreover, those scientists not only do their job of trying to think about politics, but more and more move into the realm of practical politics, as advisors to practising politicians, whether in government or opposition. The Kennedys really started the business with their Galbraiths and Schlesingers as integral parts of their circuses (call them if you will, courts.)3 Therefore, the question of the relation of thought about poli-

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tics to its practice has become an immediate question and one that needs to be thought about. To ask about the relation between thought about politics and the practice of it, we must ask three questions: ‘What is thought?’ ‘What is practice?’ and ‘What is politics?’ To start from the third, ‘What is politics?’ I like the way of putting the question ‘What is the political?’ What events do we look at when we start to think about politics, what events are excluded? Some are clearly excluded under any sensible definition – that Mozart is a supreme artist does not seem to me under any possible definition a political statement. Most of us would start from a common-sense judgment that the political has to do with government at all levels. Politics has to do with the state. But I must here bring up a grave difficulty – which may appear simply academic – but which is important. To say that the political has to do with the state is to imply, if we are not totalitarians (and let me say in parenthesis that I will not argue before decent men the case against totalitarianism – that is taken for granted) – if we are not totalitarians, we imply that there are some things that may have to do with the state and some that do not. To say that some events are political and to mean anything, is to say that some events are not. In modern ways of thought we express this by saying that there is a difference between ‘the state’ and ‘society.’ Some human facts have to do with the state; but there is a wider human entity called society and there are social facts which are not political. For example, we don’t want education or religion to be controlled directly by politicians and therefore we say that at its heart, knowing (which is the essence of education) is not a political act. The distinction between state and society is so grounded in our modern way of thinking, that few of us think outside it. But we are immediately faced with a difficulty about such a distinction. The Greeks, from whom come the very words ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ and who first thought about politics consistently, did not make the distinction between ‘the state’ and ‘society.’ Politics was that which had to do with the polis – and the polis was the political community and the political community was the community which included all communities within itself, while itself being included by none. For example, the political community included the community of the family. That is why the Greek word polis is completely misinterpreted

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when it is translated by modern men as ‘city-state.’ In such a translation the distinction between ‘state’ and ‘society’ is implied and political is made out to be that which has to do with the state. One can see the difference between what the political means for us and what it meant to the founders of the word when we remember that Plato says that the most important political fact in any polis is the way that music is taught to the young. Can we imagine Mr Stanfield, Mr Douglas, or Mr Trudeau, or for that matter any modern political scientist, saying that?4 I do not raise this complex theoretical point at the beginning of my words just to confuse, but rather to make the point – in asking the question what is the relation between thought about politics [and] its practice – the very centre of that question, what is the political, is not itself certain and is part of the very search of thought. We must be careful that we do not think that we are sure what the political is, because, if we do, we may miss the ambiguity of what it is to live at this time. Of one thing I am certain: we live at a time when the modern project lies about us in ruins. What do I mean by the modern project? I mean that attempt by the European peoples (and we in North America as their inheritors) to build a society on the principles of secularized Christianity. This experiment has come to its apogee in the technological society we inhabit. What do I mean then that it lies around us in ruins? I mean that in its very achievement it has become clear that most men falter as to what they think is true, and just and beautiful – so that they live in confusion. If you doubt this: just go to the theatres, cinemas, and galleries of the modern world and ask yourself what standards of the beautiful hold in modern society. If you doubt this: go into the chaos of any metropolitan centre in the West and see how clear we are about what is just. If you think we are not in confusion about truth: spend your life in one of our multiversities and try to find that conception of truth which would give unity to the babble of voices (the bigger and the more modern the multiversity the greater the babbled confusion). I say this not to be depressing – but to make clear that in the general confusion there is confusion about the nature of the political. Therefore let us not start from any certainty that we are clear as to what the political is. Of course in our modern world the chief practical reason why there is confusion about the political is because more and more of what has been traditionally political has come to be simply administrative. Let

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me give an example of this difference: if a policeman gives traffic tickets on the basis of whether the offender committed an infraction, we would call his action administrative. If on the other hand he gave out tickets to people because they were Baptists, negroes, hippies, or conservatives, this would be a political act. More and more of our life is given over to the simply administrative. The fight for the continuing power of the parliament as against the cabinet and the civil service is a fight for the power of the political as against the administrative. One of the reasons people like myself distrust the Liberal party in Canada is that it is the party of administrators who seem to turn all political questions into administrative ones. The distinction between the political and the administrative seems to me to give us a clue as to what the political is. The political is finally that which has to do with war – what men in the last analysis will fight about – whether in the domestic or the international field. It is that about which men will fight either within a community or between communities. This is not a popular account of the political in these utopian days – but it seems to me true. Let me illustrate what I mean from Canadian life. There have been three main political issues in Canadian history. (1) The perennial relation between rich and poor – whether within geographic areas or between geographic areas. (2) Whether Canada was going to be a sovereign state on the North American continent. (3) Whether the Englishspeaking and French-speaking communities were going to live together within one nation. The first two of these are no longer political questions in the most elemental sense. State capitalist society has in Canada overcome the class struggle to the point where there is not going to be war between the rich and the poor – perhaps sporadic conflict but not war. The question of whether Canada is going to be a sovereign state has been settled. We clearly are a satellite of the US which will go along with the US on all essential matters. We are no Cuba or even a Czechoslovakia.5 But on the third question there is the possibility of conflict. That is why the French-speaking/English-speaking question is the only truly political question in our society at the moment. To take this definition further. I think it illustrates why in our society the political is being eaten up by the administrative. There is conflict in the world because there are certain situations that some men want to

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change or to preserve, while others want to prevent such changing or preserving. In our French-Canadian case, there are some French Canadians who want to preserve the French fact on this continent and know that it is menaced by English-speaking North American culture. They want to preserve this French fact because it appears to them a good. That is, in a final sense the political has to do with what is a matter of potential conflict, and the ultimate basis of conflict is a division as to what is good. But in nearly all the world today there is no conflict about what is the highest good. The highest good is thought by the vast majority of men to be the building of the totally realized technological society by the overcoming of chance through the use of the natural and social sciences. That is something put beyond politics because it is not a matter of conflict – because everybody agrees about it. The political occurs in disagreement about means. For example, should the realized technological society be brought in under state communism or state capitalism? Or to put it in a non-ideological way, should the totally realized technological system be brought in under the control of the English-speaking empire, or should power be divided among the [countries of the] northern hemisphere, or should even some of the countries of the southern hemisphere have some power over their own realization of technological civilization? Questions such as these are still political because they are still sources of conflict. But the central question of rival purpose is not political because almost nobody doubts that this is man’s highest pursuit. It transcends the political, because it is a good about which men are in agreement. Only a few peripheral fools such as Abbie Hoffman and myself would raise doubts.6 Most of the activities of the private and public corporations are directed towards this end. They are considered simply administrative because all agree about them; there is, therefore, a movement in our society towards the disappearance of politics. Indeed the whole modern project of progress has from its beginning believed that in the end there would be a disappearance of politics. The end towards which the modern project was directed was the universal and homogeneous state – the world-wide society of free and equal men in which all would be ruled by the knowledge of science and philosophy to which they were open. As all men are open to the dictates of reason and these dictates would lead them to agreement about what was good, there would be no conflict and thus no politics. Lenin, who as a Russian took up with

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enthusiasm the modern dream a century after it had come to bloom in Europe, put the matter clearly when he said that in an advanced technological state, ruling would be so simplified that it would be open ‘to every illiterate.’ ‘Under socialism,’ he wrote, ‘all will rule in turn and quickly get used to the fact that no one rules.’7 To transcribe this into my language, there will be no politics, because ruling will simply be a matter of simplified administration. Lenin got over this dream when he was faced with the exigencies of being in charge; and certainly in the West nobody of sense thinks that administration is simple. But still the thought remains that the chief questions are administrative rather than political because there is certainty (that which is beyond doubt) about what is the chief end of man, the building of the totally realized technological society. Let me put in the ambiguous words of Martin Heidegger. He says that the greatest danger to man is not the threat of nuclear war but the time when there would be no threat of nuclear war.8 What he must mean by that is surely that that time would come about, only when the competing empires had disappeared and there was one world state. Then there would not even be politics in the sense there now is as potential conflict about means between competing ideologies and competing races. There would be peace on earth but at the price of the end of all noble and great deeds. The universal and homogeneous state would eliminate all political problems – but it would be achieved by a tyranny making man sub-human. I would certainly say that a chief mark of the danger that modern technological society presents us with is just the disappearance of politics in the fact that all problems are seen increasingly as simply administrative. The end of politics would be the end of man’s openness to his highest potentialities. When the George Nowlans and the Senator Dirksens are replaced by the McGeorge Bundys and the Brezhnevs, we will have moved nearer to the greatest tyranny that has ever been.9 To say that politics is that which in the last analysis has to do with war – domestic or foreign – is of course not to imply that it is about war. One of the best recent aphorisms about politics was Everett Dirksen’s remark that ‘the oil can is mightier than the sword.’10 The work of practising politicians must be in most instances to prevent conflicts from becoming violent – of the broker who mediates away conflict. What I am saying is that the difference between the administrator and the politician is that the politician is the being who must

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deal with those problems which have as their horizon war – and that those problems, within that horizon, are problems of principle; they are the problems in which the deep questions of the meaning of human life are at stake practically. That is why the practising politician has one of the noblest human functions and why those who scorn him from the safety of their private lives only show their shallowness. As example, let me take again the question of French Canada. There are many English-speaking Canadians who say, what is all the fuss about? Why don’t the French just settle with the continental system of the great corporations and be as comfortable and prosperous as the rest of us. Many French Canadians, particularly of the business community, say the same. But why many of the leading French Canadians will not settle, is because they know to do so would be to throw away what they are – their particular selves – to throw away their manhood, in the right and beautiful use of the term, their virility. There is some good to be preserved which cannot be preserved simply by administrative means. Therefore it is a political question. I am not going to turn here to the fascinating question of what is told us about human nature and destiny – what is told us about being as a whole – when we say that the horizon of politics is always war. That raises the deepest metaphysical questions, questions which far transcend political philosophy, questions which I am only just beginning to be able to think about. But in turning away from such depths, let me draw as reminder from them one point. Behind political philosophy always lies that which is more important and more abysmal, philosophy, that raises questions not only about the human things – but about the mysterious whole in which the human things are but a part. To turn to thought about politics, the same tendencies in our society which are turning practical politics into administration are having the same kind of effect on thought about politics. Thought about politics in our universities is more and more directed simply to technical and administrative problems. This is seen in the dominance of behavioural political science. It is seen in the fact that that behavioural political science is ever more becoming simply a branch of Weberian sociology. To state clearly why the chief modern way of thinking about politics is behavioural political science, it would be necessary to go back into the history of Western civilization in the seventeenth century, and see why it was the scientists freed their sciences and made them indepen-

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dent of philosophy. That is not possible in the present connection. Suffice it to say that in the original arising of thought in the West – that is, among the Greeks – philosophy and science were not distinguished. Science just meant consistent and careful thought about anything. Philosophy was thought about the whole. It has been almost the chief mark of the modern intellectual tradition to believe that thought about any particular realm of being could only be successful if it was freed from philosophy. This occurred first with the sciences which were the earliest of the modern era – what we now call the natural sciences, physics, chemistry, etc. (Although it is well to remember that as late as the eighteenth century, physics was often called natural philosophy.) As the social sciences have developed in the last century, they have equally demanded that their maturity required independence of philosophy. The result of that long process is what we see today in most North American universities – we have departments of political science and they are above all concerned with what is called behavioural political science. What are the particular marks of that behavioural political science? The most striking characteristic of behavioural political science is the distinction made between facts and values. Values are what human beings say ought to be in the world; facts are what is. The distinction means that only questions of fact and no questions of value can be settled by science or by human reason in general. Political science is concerned then with what actually happens in politics; it is not concerned with what are legitimate and what illegitimate ends in politics – because these questions are beyond the purview of reason and therefore have no place in science. Let me say first about this position why it seemed such a liberation to those who first held it. (I think this is a good place to start from for the following reason.) When I see that the most striking characteristic of modern social science is the distinction between facts and values, I am initially appalled because implied in that position is the idea that human reason cannot judge between what are good and bad ends in human life. For example, it cannot say that a man who dedicates himself to benefiting the human race can be known to be better than the man who gives his life to amassing wealth at other people’s expense. That is nihilism and I am appalled by it. But I am faced also with the fact that this distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of

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value is the dominating intellectual position among the social scientists of our universities. Therefore I cannot rest with simply being appalled by it; I must try and understand why this belief is held and found liberating by those who hold it. That is why I start from trying to see why men hold this belief. I think the answer is the following. The idea that the clearest human minds could know what were the highest purposes of human life seemed to imply that certain ‘dogmatic’ and ‘a priori’ ideas of human excellence would be given official sanction so that the individuals of that society would not be free to follow their individuality and to live their lives as they wanted. The free society demanded that reason should not be able to judge that certain human ends are higher in themselves than others, because if a hierarchy of ends was asserted this would immediately put limits on the freedom of the individual and the possibility of building a pluralistic society. It must be remembered that the deepest rhetoric of the North American establishment is the belief that we live in a pluralistic society in which the individual is free to pursue his own life. No remark of Mr Trudeau’s was more popular in our society than his appeal to that liberalism when he said ‘the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.’11 The attack on the idea that human reason could know what were good and what bad ends for man was based on the implication that such ideas of human excellence were superstitious strait-jackets – not only the enemies of an objective science, but the free play of the individual. The assertion of the fact-value distinction was the first step towards building a pluralist society. The second reason was of course that any teleological view of man or of anything else in the world stood in the way of objective science. First physics and later geology and biology under the influence of such men as Lyell and Darwin had become objective by being freed from teleology.12 The social scientists desired also to be objective scientists and this required the elimination of all teleological ideas; and in the science of human things this required the fact-value distinction. This desire for objective science one sees at its noblest in the work of the greatest modern social scientist, Max Weber. He wanted his study of social things in the university to be free of the ideological pressures of the outside world, so that it could be objective. He did not want his social science to be the servant of the hot passions of the world –

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whether the ideology of democracy or of communism, of property or of Bismarckian conservatism. It was in the name of an independent and objective social science that he laid down the idea of a value-free social science – that idea which is now dominant in our universities in behavioural political science.13 Yet as soon as these things are said, it must also be said that the result of the fact-value distinction in political science has been to turn nearly all thought about politics in our universities into technical thought and thereby make it a servant of the powers of this world. This happens in the following way. Behavioural political science is interested in objective facts, generally the quantifiable. It therefore proceeds to search out all kinds of facts by all kinds of methods – voting studies, surveys, computerization, etc. But these facts are turned over to the practical men of our society for use. As discussion of ends (or as they call them values) must be eliminated from their science, there is no reason to say why it is better that those facts be used by decent rather than by wicked practical men. Indeed their science has nothing to say about who are decent and who not. Indeed, to go further, it seems to me clear that pluralism has not resulted in those societies where modern liberalism (with its belief in the fact-value distinction) has prevailed. Anybody who says that North America is a pluralist society seems to me deluded. We live in one of the most monistic societies that has ever been. The reason for this is that all societies deplore a vacuum about the common good. We live in a society the public realm of which is dominated by a monolithic certainty about the common good (call it if you will, human excellence). That monolithic certainty about the common good is the belief that the pursuit of technological efficiency is the chief purpose for which the community exists. When modern liberal social scientists have criticised the idea of human excellence and built their science on the basis of the fact-value distinction, they may have thought that they were clearing the ground of religious and metaphysical superstitions which stood in the way of the freedom of the individual in a pluralistic society, and working for the independence of an objective science. But in fact they have served the purpose of clearing out of the way any ideas of the common good which denied its identification with the totally technologized society. This is not to say that some of this behavioural social science does not produce some useful findings – useful, that is, in the sense of

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allowing the private and public corporations to get some things done efficiently. It is concerned with how things work and it has sometimes discovered how some things work in the area of politics. But by its very nature it is technical in the sense that it has to do with means. I define technique in the words of Jacques Ellul in his book The Technological Society – one of the few truly noble books of our era. He writes: ‘By technique I mean the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.’ That is, thought about politics in our universities is coming to be concerned only with means – not with ends. But as I have defined politics earlier, it is that field of human activity upon which the horizon of war is present, just because in it the ultimate questions of what are the highest ends for any community are raised. That is, just as I have said that the practice of politics is more and more becoming administrative rather than political in our society; so equally in thought about politics what is coming to be is the victory of technical calculation over the deeper questions. But in both spheres this operates against the true world of politics. Let me point out one result of this technologizing of thought about politics. The result is that thought about politics is fast becoming an appendage of sociology. As thought about politics is no longer concerned with thought about the ends – (call them, if you will, the common good) – but with thought about means, the community comes to be understood as a kind of receptacle within which groups and individuals act; society becomes the resultant of the actions of individuals and groups. The political community, which is the community qua acting, or acting through its government, comes to be thought of as an appendage of society. And that being the case, political thought becomes an appendage of sociology. It is pleasantly amusing that political science departments, in becoming behavioural, have become their own gravediggers – because they have made themselves an inferior study – a study dependent on sociology. If you cut out the idea of the common good, sociology must be the dominating science. Let me trace out one consequence of the technologizing of thought which has come to be in our era – namely the revolt against it which has characterized all the student rebellions in the US. The connection may be made in the following way. Around 1960, Daniel Bell, a leading American sociologist, wrote a book called The End of Ideology. In that

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book he described how the age of conflict about ends was over and how we were entering an age which would only be concerned about means. We had passed beyond that foolish stage of our past when men argued and fought about final purpose. All could now agree about purposes – namely the increasingly technologized society – and in the universities men would think about means; how to organize the cities, how to organize the Vietnam war, etc. etc. But suddenly, just after that book was written (The End of Ideology) the society of the US has been thrown into real political conflict for the first time in years, and this conflict is really political because at its heart are some people who challenge en pleine conscience de cause the ends of American society. There is much to be said about the student revolt, which it is not my business to say here. But one thing about it which must please a conservative such as myself is that its deepest leaders know that they are raising questions of politics – that is, questions of ultimate human good – which the multiversities had by neglect thrown out from their midst. Abbie Hoffman, who is now being tried in Chicago for his part in the riots which disrupted the Democratic convention, once made what is in my opinion the cleverest and cruellest aphorism yet to come out of our dull-witted North American society. He defined liberalism as, ‘God is dead and we did it for the kids.’14 What a perfect definition of my generation of intellectuals in North America. And let me say how apposite that aphorism is to my subject. To say that political thought has simply to do with means and not with ends is to say that God is dead. Because what we mean by God is the ultimate end. That is why a person [like] myself has sympathy for much of the student rebellion. A lot of it may be misguided and foolishly utopian; but in its best exponents is the demand that political questions in their real sense be raised again. These questions had been excluded from the multiversities by the liberal establishment, who maintained that our society was only faced by technical questions of administration. This debt we owe to the young. Let me also say that once the deepest questions of human nature and destiny are thrown out of the multiversities, there is a danger to society when they are raised outside the confines of the university – that is, outside the long tradition of reason, which it is the central purpose of any good university to keep alive in the world. Here we would do well to remember what happened in the German universities. The

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Germans were the first to build multiversities – that is, universities in which technical scholarship was exalted above truth in the name of the fact-value distinction. The German scholars did their technical scholarship and did not hold on to the great questions (call them if you will, mysteries) of truth. The result was that many of the most ardent young looked outside the universities where raucous voices were dealing with just those questions, dealing with them under the form of ideology rather than under the form of reason. The result was that the most ardent of the young became open to the voices of ideology, whether national socialist or communist. The fact that our liberal establishment has become technologized and has excluded from the university the great questions of human nature and destiny, means that we are open to the same danger – that the most ardent young will look for them in the dangerous public world of ideology. One thing that all shrewd practising politicians and political philosophers can agree upon is, surely, that ideology is the most dangerous and disruptive force acting against sane political judgment. For the old classical tag is true that ‘corruption of the best is the worst’ and ideology is the corrupt form that philosophy and religion takes in the wild restlessness of the modern era.15 To sum up: I have been trying to say that in modern North America politics as the central human activity is being eroded away both because its practice is being eroded by the simply technological and because thought about it is being turned into a technique. The destruction of politics in this sense can only lead to an increase of tyranny – the greatest worldly danger that man always faces, at whatever time and whatever place he may be. Tomorrow night I will proceed to discuss what possible palliatives there are to this danger. Lecture II It may appear strange to say that in this age men are forgetting the political. Has there ever been an age so taken up with politics, where men have expected so much from politics? Indeed in this age men have committed the great folly – in the great ideologies of ...[?] – of seeking salvation through politics. If, as I said last time, the political is always that which has on its horizon war, this has been the age of the most

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brutal wars and none more brutal than that which North Americans are now waging. As Nietzsche said about this concentration on politics: The morning paper is the modern morning prayer.16 We look to the news of the day as that which is most needful. But to say that one is concentrated upon something is not to say that one is aware of its essence. What I have been saying is not that there isn’t a concentration on the practice of politics or that there is an absence of talk about it in the universities, but that in this practice and talk somehow the essence of politics is not present. I mean about politics what the greatest English artist of this century, D.H. Lawrence, meant about sexuality. As he said over and over again, ours is a civilization with an enormous concentration on sexuality; but it is a civilization in which the essence of sexuality is not often present for men and women. This is exactly what I mean about politics. To know the essence of an activity or indeed of a thing is to know above all what it is fitted for [or] what its work is. I know the essence of my dog when he is in the woods with me – I know what he is fitted for. And if one does not know what an activity is fitted for, it begins to lose its proper place in the whole scheme of our existence. To say that this is a hectically political age is just to say that what politics is fitted for has grown dim for us. On the one side, those who make politics into a surrogate religion, who give their worship to a party or a state (surely as I have said one of the greatest absurdities), do not know what politics is fitted for. On the other side, those who would reduce politics to administration or to technique equally do not know what politics is fitted for. Its essence is not present for them. It is not surprising that the essence of many human activities has become darkened for us in this age. For our species now faces the moment when we become masters of the earth and perhaps beyond the earth. Let me say that the more I think about that moment – think and think and think – I do not believe that we can overestimate the crisis that that means for mankind. And part of that crisis is that the essences of all the great and small human activities are not present for us. Art, sexuality, worship, thought, politics, economics – what those activities are fitted for – has become dimmed in the mind of Western men. Perhaps the question which is most central here – a question I would raise but not dare to try to answer – is whether the attempt to overcome chance which has been the basis of our mastery did not

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include from its very origins that oblivion to eternity which leaves us uncertain as to what anything is fitted for. But to turn away from that deep question, the deepest modern question, and to go back to the immediate point of these lectures: If I am right that the essence of politics is not much present for us, what can be done to make it more present for man both in the practice and in thought? In turning to that question, let me say first that I cannot propose anything at all specific. One of the worst parts of the North American tradition is the idea that if something is wrong there must be some immediate solution to it. We all know the kind of thing: ‘Dr Salk discovered a preventative to polio; we must find a preventative to war, racism, etc.’ This is one of the causes of the barbarous politics of Lyndon Johnson. To think that way is to turn from the depth of the sheer crisis of modernity – the crisis in which we find ourselves masters of the earth. To think that there are easy solutions to that crisis is to trivialize it, and every time we trivialize it we exacerbate it. Because at the very heart of that crisis is the fact, as Nietzsche incomparably saw, that men are becoming trivial. They are turning away from the very few centralities which always are necessary for nobility. If I may be allowed to be personal: this summer as I thought about words I should say here that would in any way be nearly good enough to do honour to George Nowlan, it became clearer and clearer to me how imperfectly I was able to think through the question of the relation between the practice of politics and thought about politics in our present world. Yet I am arrogant enough to think that this uncertainty in my mind is not simply my own failure, but arises from something shared by all those who attempt to think it – the complexity and profundity of the present crisis in the occidental world – which indeed the occident has brought to the whole world. Therefore in what follows please do not expect any vaccines from me. Words in memory of a practising politician who was a conservative in the nobler sense of that term should not include any such solutions; because it is surely the first mark of any conservatism worth its salt to know that there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of living. Life is not a business which has to meet its costs. To turn to practising politics – that is, the art of politics – what Plato called the royal art – because it was the highest, the most important art. I do not think I am qualified to say how among the practitioners of

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that art, a clearer apprehension of what that art is fitted for can be brought back. I am not qualified because it has not been my destiny to be a practitioner of that art – and the art must be improved by those who practise it. But it is clear to anybody who contemplates that art, where its present difficulties arise from. Bismarck said: ‘Politics is the art of the possible.’17 A German friend of mine has written a book called, What Makes Politics Impossible?18 The contemporary politician is on one side pushed by the demands of sheer administration which become greater and greater as technological expansion demands more and more interference in our lives from government. At the same time the politician is pushed by the mounting needs of the mounting number of his constituents. He is pushed at the same time by the new instruments of communication – television, etc. and the journalists and public relations men who manipulate these media for their ends – he is forced to explain his actions publicly in the language suited to the lowest common denominator of the masses. The politician is the person who is at everybody’s disposal. He has to be a good administrator at a time when administration proliferates; he has to placate constituents who have been taught by the age to believe they have more and more rights to more and more; he has to placate the vested interests of the corporate élite; he has to be a popular entertainer over the television who provides the alleviation from boredom that the McLuhanites demand from the television.19 In the midst of this how can he be expected to keep the common good in mind or see that the administrative machine serves political, not simply administrative ends? Two examples: (1) I do not for a moment think that the politicians who run the present government of Ontario want to set up a tyranny, but they are in fact setting up an educational system, so computerised, that it can hardly fail to be tyrannous. They are just forced to. If there weren’t places in schools and universities for the population explosion in Ontario, the government would be voted out of office. To avoid that they have to set up a school and university system which has to grow so fast that it can only survive as it becomes a computerised bureaucracy. The result of this is on the one hand growing student discontent and on the other a revolt of bourgeois taxpayers who don’t want to put up the money for institutions which become centres of unrest. And so on and so on. The man caught in the middle is the politician – in this

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case a very moderate and decent politician, Mr Robarts, forced to policies leading in a direction I am sure he does not like.20 (2) A different and controversial example. However I may disagree about detail, I agree with the central thesis of the recent book of Mr Robert Coates the Nova Scotian MP. A man whose trade was the debased profession of advertising and public relations was able through alliance with private corporate power in Toronto to bring down the leader of a great political party (I will not be so polemical as to say the greatest) against the wishes of the majority of the elected political representatives of that party.21 I do not say this to imply that the leader of that party was without faults. I am sure he had many. I say it just to illustrate the vulnerability of the politician. A public relations man who had never been elected to public office could destroy a politician who had been elected over and over again and who had brought his party to power after decades of being out of office. How or whether practising politicians will be able to hold onto the essence of the political in the current situation I do not know. That is a question with which people who attempt to practise that royal art will have to come to terms. What I think I do know is that those who do succeed will be people who have some hold on tradition – and I mean by tradition above all those who have a community and who have some touch with religion. With his usual brilliance, Nietzsche said that the mark of the modern and its nihilism was above all homelessness. People who come out of a community, however limited (and it is well to remember that all communities are limited), learn from those communities an order of common sense and moderation which I have earlier said are the central requirements of the practising politician. Let me also say that metropolises such as Toronto cannot be communities. One sad consequence of this is to say that the more our population is concentrated in these metropolises, less of our representatives are likely to be people with tradition. Concerning my mention of religion, let me only say that by religion I do not mean ideology. Indeed, as I have used the term ‘ideology’ many times and it is in my opinion one of the central marks of the modern world, I will now attempt to say what it is and to distinguish it from religion and from philosophy. Before the modern era, men in the West believed religion and philosophy were different but that they both were necessary to the

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good society. One mark of the modern era is to believe that philosophy should not only play its old role, but that it should also take over the role once played by religion. This was chiefly caused by the modern liberal and egalitarian belief that all men were open to reason in science and philosophy. This is in my opinion nonsense. Because it is nonsense, the need for religion continued to be felt by men and women in a world where it was publicly claimed that philosophy had taken its place. To fill the void of that situation there came to be ideologies. Ideologies are then surrogate religions whose proponents pretend they are philosophies. The three great examples of our age are communism, national socialism, and American liberalism. They do such harm in the world because they confuse the proper places of reverence (call it, if you will, religion) and philosophy in human life. As modern, they would deny that reverence is necessary to human life, but as surrogate religions, they slip reverence in – but it is reverence for something not truly worthy of reverence – the state, the race, the nation, etc. Those of us who are Christians would say that they are idolatrous in the worst sense of that word. On the other side, they claim to be rational, scientific, and philosophic, and therefore claim to give new knowledge of what is happening in the world, when in fact they do not. In these senses they are destructive of common sense and moderation. The only defence against them for people who live in the practical world is some kind of partaking in a real religion. But as religion is getting weaker in our society, the defence of men against the virus of ideology is weakened. Ideology is one of the demons that has arisen out of the depths at the time when the age of progress has destroyed philosophy and religion (call it, if you will, reverence). To use the language I used before, to know something’s essence is to know what it is fitted for. I would say that all men are fitted for reverence and some men are fitted for thought. As all men are fitted for reverence, reverence will be the matrix out of which springs human nobility among practical men. Therefore some central reverence to that which is beyond self or society will be the most powerful factor which will keep men sane in the practical jobs that face them in this tense and dynamic era. In case I should be misunderstood, I do not mean by reverence anything dull and boring. To be reverent does not exclude having a sense of humour or being cunning. Mozart is to me the

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supremely reverent artist and he is a genius of the comic. Politicians at all times and places have to be cunning, devious, and filled with a sense of the comic – in this era more than ever. To turn to what I know more about – thought about politics, let me say that the great predicament of our era is that the methods and purposes of political science have become technical just at a time when what is required of them is thought which quite transcends the technical. The present requires from us above all the rethinking of every segment of human life in the light of technological civilization. The reason for this is that technological civilization has put in question every horizon in which we can think about all the central requirements of human life – as I have said, it has put in question what we mean by sexuality, art, religion, thought, politics, economics. The meaning of these activities has become ambiguous and from that ambiguity more than from anything else the restlessness, the chaos, the disasters of this era arise. The only way to overcome ambiguity is the re-possession in thought of what these activities are fitted for. Yet in our era thought about politics turns away to a technical practicality which as I have said can best be seen in behavioural political science. In saying this, let me be clear that I have no objection to political scientists working for governments, royal commissions, political parties, etc., etc. – using their practical skills to help solve the practical problems of our era. Nor do I have any objection to practical courses being taught in the universities. Students need to know how the governments of Canada, the US, the Soviet Union, etc., work; they need to know about how political authority is operative in metropolises as distinct from small towns, etc., etc. Nothing I say would contradict the obvious wisdom that we must always start in education with the known and the simple and ascend from that to the principles; or what the Greeks called the archés. What I do mean, however, is that when this practical research work for private and public corporations becomes of first importance for the faculty members and the training of further [future?] research workers becomes the chief end of teaching, then the highest and most pressing need of this era, to rethink all aspects of human existence in the light of technology, is forgotten; and that is what has happened in our multiversities. (In parenthesis let me say that often in human life the highest and most pressing are in conflict. If the highest for me is to think, I still

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have to drop that highest in the name of the most pressing, and take one of my children to the doctor when they break a bone.) But in this present case, the highest, which is to think the whole, is also the most pressing – because the chief cause of the growing chaos in North America is just that we have lost our way in thinking what anything is fitted for. As this kind of thought is both the highest and most pressing for our era, I will spend the rest of this lecture trying to say what I think it is. To talk about thought about politics or political philosophy – must be first to speak of thought or philosophy. Because political philosophy is a species of the genus philosophy. But this is of the greatest difficulty. The technological era – the era [in] which we have become master of the planet – has made all human activities ambiguous for us. And the higher the activity, the more ambiguous it has become. As philosophy is a very high activity (I leave aside the extraordinarily difficult question whether it be the highest), it became opaque to us. And I mean really opaque. What I mean by really is that there is no turning back to some account of thinking or philosophy from the end to find there a satisfactory answer to our problem of re-possessing what our activities are fitted for. For all the homage I would pay to Plato and Aristotle – the founders of political philosophy – for all the lesser homage I would pay to Aquinas or to Kant or to Hegel, I mean by ambiguity of thought that none of the answers which may with difficulty be found in those great thinkers, can provide the complete solutions for us. As soon as this is said, however, let me note the much more important point that clearly nobody will ever begin the task of re-possessing thought unless he has immersed himself in what thought has been in such thinkers as Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, etc. And this is true not only because these men were great thinkers, incomparably greater than any of us could be if we were granted a thousand years of life; but even more because we must not think of these thinkers as past or passed away. We cannot by-pass those thinkers because their thought is the very substance of the question now presented to us, the ambiguity of what thinking is, the ambiguity for us of what politics is fitted for. The most absolute naivete about time is to take the past as in no sense present. For example, Plato’s account of the politeia is that which should be most immediately present for us when we are pondering what the political is fitted for. A naive account of time as past (what is

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done) present (what is here) and future (what is yet to be) takes away the ability to think of anything in any deep or serious way. To say that our task is to think what politics is and that no past thinker can entirely fulfil that task for us, must not be taken to mean that there can be any way into that question in its fullest ambiguousness except through a rethinking of what the greatest thinkers of the past have thought. Yet I must insist again that we cannot overcome the ambiguity we are presented with in the modern era, by any return to the past. I hope you will allow me to insist on that here because I am sick of being called in the press a conservative or even reactionary thinker. In practical life, for example, the life of the politician, conservatism seems to me a noble stance. If it is true conservatism (and not just the defence of the property rights of the greedy), it may be the best stance for the politician in this era. It produces common sense and moderation in a restless and dynamic age given over to change for change’s sake. But let me say that conservatism is not a possible stance if one’s chief task is not the practical but thought. Just as the thinker who wishes to think what the political is fitted for has to overcome that liberalism of progress which is the public ideology of our continent, he also has to overcome any belief in a return to some past. Why? Because if he thinks that any return to some thinker of the past is possible – even to the greatest thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, or Hegel, incomparably greater as I have said than anything he is capable of – then he will not face the obscurity which comes with the situation of mastery. And the facing of those ambiguities in their ambiguousness must be the first step in trying to think what human activity is fitted for. Political science has become technical just because its practitioners do not face the fact that the political has become obscure for us in the technological age. Because they are confident, they feel free to proceed with their work of making voting studies, advising royal commissions, etc. The only definition of thought in the modern world which seems to re-grasp thought properly is that in Heidegger’s Was Heisst Denken (which has been translated as What is called thinking? but which I believe would have been better translated as What calls forth thinking?). He says there that thinking to the Greeks was: ‘to let it lie before you and let it take your heart.’22 Leaving aside what he means by the ‘it,’ let me concentrate on ‘the letting lie before you’ and ‘the taking to heart.’ ‘The letting lie before you’ is letting that which you want to

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think be in [your] presence as it is and with no will on your part to change it. When we love a person or a place, they are present for us with no desire on our part to change them by any action of our wills. This is what Heidegger means by thinking without willing. The exact opposite of this is that calculation, so common in our age, in which we think about something only for the purpose of changing it. ‘How to win friends and influence people’ meant how to calculate about people so that we can use them for our purposes not how to win friends. To let something lie before you is to think it without any desire to change it. On the other hand, ‘the taking to heart’ side of Heidegger’s definition of thinking means that that thinking is not outside concern. To take something to heart means that it has the most central importance for one – that one is not detached from it as one is detached from an object which stands over against one. To take something to heart is just the opposite of thinking about something as if it were an object, concern about which we could choose or not choose. When one combines the ‘letting lie before you and taking to heart,’ one overcomes that distinction between subjective and objective thought which has plagued all modern philosophical and scientific movements and at the same time one overcomes the simple distinction between thinking and practice. The full scope of such thinking we will not know until we start to do it. In a period when the three great traditional ways to truth for Western man, science, philosophy, theology, have all become ambiguous for us for differing reasons, can anyone believe that the re-possession of thinking can be anything but uncertain and dark. One thing I am sure is that it will be a thinking that will engage the whole man. This is surely what Heidegger means by ‘taking to heart’; it will be a thinking that will overcome the subject-object distinction which has had its usefulness for Western man but has now become the plague of all our science and philosophy – that which above all else stands between us and thinking what anything is fitted for. I know also that this will be a long and difficult effort carried out over many generations by many men. As I have said, not to know what anything is fitted for is nihilism. That nihilism is the chief mark of what is at the heart of the intellectual life of the Western world. The overcoming of that will be a long process dependent on many men. But that length is no reason to delay. As Wittgenstein quoted from one of the great rabbis – ‘If not now, when?’23 To

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use the ancient language would be to describe this kind of thought as the attempt to see all activities as parts of that whole to which man of all the beings on earth is alone open. As politics is the royal art, there will be no human activity whose function is more important for us to repossess. At the moment in the disillusion of the Western world, there are those who seek to think the whole in an abstract way – what one might call [a] debased mystical way which excludes the political – the Maharishi, the Zen Buddhists, etc. – these are phony solutions for the West. Neither do I mean by thinking any turning away from any of the empirical, of the practical life, the whole range of the world which lies before us. If I may be allowed to illustrate from my own life: I am not easily given to thought [which] has come to me late in life. I would say that the Vietnam war more than anything else taught me to begin to think the political. How was it that my own (because in some sense to any English-speaking person, the US is his own) could be doing these appalling things? It was in the light of that crime that I began to try to rethink the political. That is, I do not mean by thinking anything that is abstracted from the most pressing world of events. To say that the task of those who think about politics is to transcend the technical and to rethink every aspect of life in the technological age, is indubitably to imply that the universities must in some sense turn inwards if they are to fulfil their proper task. This is an unpopular doctrine these days. University people have gained comfort and ease and prestige by turning out to the public world. The flow of research grants and busyness which comes from turning out is what has made the multiversity. And this doctrine of turning out is not only popular among the established order of the multiversity, the administrators and the consulting professors, but equally with the radical students who wish to change society. The establishment men have made the university serve technocratic society as it is; the radical students want the university to serve the society by becoming the centre of reformation or revolution. I have more personal sympathy for the Mark Rudds than the Clark Kerrs because the former are young.24 But I think both are wrong. The work of the university (what it is fitted for) is neither to be a servant of the present society nor a centre for overturning it, but a place where young and old will have the chance to think and think and think. What is the most important to be thought is the rethinking of what things are fitted for.

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Of course, I must say that I am not such a fool as to think this is going to happen. The great multiversities are not going to become sources of thought – rather than of the techniques and consultations from which they gain such prestige and such wealth. I agree, largely, with Ellul that technique has become autonomous and automatic and that as the multiversities are a chief instrument of technological civilization they will go on serving that technical drive.25 Nor am I optimistic that many of those who have revolted against the multiversity will want anything more than a few structural changes and will turn from the courage of revolt to the long and disciplined job of rethinking. So much of the endurance and steadiness of purpose necessary to that thinking is going to be wiped away by the destructiveness of the drug culture. Neither reaction, nor revolution is going to meet the depth of the crisis with which man is faced in becoming master of the planet and beyond. But to say this rethinking is not going to happen widely in our institutions is in no sense to imply any lack of hope. Realism about immediate expectations is always good; ultimate pessimism is usually only self-pity and self-indulgence. Can we hope? The most authoritative thinker of Western Christianity, St Augustine, described the world once in a Mediterranean metaphor. He saw it as an oil press into which the olives were put to be destroyed and from which came oil. What must give hope is the fact that the modern world becomes ever more such a press – the sheer tumult and chaos of our society, the sheer deadeningess of its institutions will force themselves down on men, so that they have no alternative but to turn to the task of thinking. There will grow up hidden universities within the multiversities. The sheer size and wealth of the powerful multiversities mean that they cannot be well organized and within the interstices of these disordered institutions people who are subtle will be able to find corners where thought will be possible. Though I am a strong believer in Canada keeping what little independence it has left, I think at the moment the possibility of such thought is more evident in the US than in our society. Being the most advanced technological society, they are caught in the oil press and from the wasteland of their tradition a trickle of oil begins to appear. Let me refer you to the article on ‘Education and the Technological Society’ in the October 9th edition of the New York Review of Books by Schaar and Wolin – far deeper than the kind of things we are

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getting in Canada – just because they have been squeezed by the pressure of what it has been to teach at Berkeley.26 I do not think that this kind of rethinking one should expect to be influential in an immediate sense. It will not seem important to society; nor will it be able to compete with the voices of the communications industry. As a wise man has said, ‘Because thought seeks the light, it shuns the limelight.’27 What I have been saying about the relation between the practice of politics and thought about politics I would sum up shortly thus: At this moment in time, let the practical realm of politics fulfil its function of being practical; let the universities fulfil their function of thinking. Immediately I must say I do not mean by this that university professors should not be practising politicians. One of the best things of my life has been my right to call Professor Aitchison of Dalhousie a close friend and he was leader of the NDP in this province. I think it is splendid when a professor decides to become a practising politician. But what I have been saying is a question about function not about one man dividing his life between various functions, something which we all do all the time. I see at the moment a confusion between the function of the practical and that of the contemplative so that neither fulfils its role properly. Modern behavioural thought about politics is directed towards results [obtained] by objectification and which are there to be used by the most powerful groups. Thought becomes ever more a servant of the practical as it is technologised. And it must be remembered that such technologising of thought about the human things is more disturbing for us than in other fields such as physics because we are the objects of that thought, we in our most comprehensive activity. On the other side of the picture, the realm of the practical men practising the royal art is in its turn invaded by thought – in the base form I have called ideology. One thing that is clear these days is that the practising politician, if he is to be very successful, has to carry around with him at least the language of ideology. The world of the communications industry (which includes the university) forces on the practising politician his use of ideology. As I have said, ideology is the great enemy of the virtues of the politician, courage, moderation, and common sense. The politician plus ideology equals the demagogue. And I do not mean by demagogue someone who shouts. With the television, the demagogue may speak gently. The inversion of the ends of politics by ideology is just as much a false relation between thought and prac-

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tice as the turning of thought into technique is an invasion of thought by practice. What I have been arguing for in these lectures is a return of both spheres to their proper independence in which both are doing what they are fitted for. That this will happen is unlikely in a restless era such as ours. Indeed the inversion of thought and practice and the consequent confusion of their roles lies deep in the centre of that modern thought from which has come the technological age. The one source of hope is that the confusion of that age lies before us so evidently that some men will start the rethinking of that inversion. To say this, I am afraid, is not to offer any defined solutions, but simply to advance certain cautious platitudes. But the question of how it is best to live in the technological age – the question which must resound as incomparably the most important – is of such difficulty that any defined solutions are likely to be shallow. Despite Descartes, thought is not the enemy of common sense and because of this the practising politicians and the political philosophers stand together as against technicians and the ideologues.

Notes 1 George Clyde Nowlan (1898–1965), lawyer and politician, represented the federal riding of Digby-Annapolis-Kings for the Progressive Conservative party (1948–65) and was minister of national revenue (1957–62) and minister of finance (1962–3) in the Diefenbaker government. 2 Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911–2004), actor and politician, was fortieth president of the United States (1981–9) and formerly Republican governor of California (1966–74). Richard Joseph Daley (1902–76), lawyer and politician, was mayor of Chicago (1955–76) and known as ‘the last of the big-city bosses.’ He attained great power in national Democratic politics. Robert Francis Kennedy (1925–68). See page 211, note 2. 3 John Kenneth Galbraith (1908– ). See page 364, note 123. Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr (1917– ). See page 367, note 150. 4 Robert Lorne Stanfield (1914–2003). See page 392, note 5. Thomas Clement ‘Tommy’ Douglas (1904–86), ‘social gospel’ Baptist minister and premier of Saskatchewan (1944–61), was the federal leader of the NDP (1961–71). He is known as the ‘Father of Medicare’ in Canada. He brought Medicare to Saskatchewan (1959–62) after a fight with striking

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The George C. Nowlan Lectures doctors, and, as leader of the NDP in Ottawa, he pressed the governing Liberal party to implement Medicare and other social programs during the 1960s. Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919–2000). See page 377, note 2. Fidel Castro (1927– ). See page 208, note 2. Alexander Dubcek (1921–92), Czech political leader, led the Prague Spring liberal reforms in Czechoslovakia (1968–9) in defiance of the Soviet Union. Abbie Hoffman (1936–89). See page 602, note 3. We are unable to find the source in Lenin’s writings. See Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address,’ in Discourse on Thinking (1959), translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row 1966), 52: Concerning American Nobel laureate Wendell Stanley’s statement in 1955 that life will be placed in the hands of the biochemist, Heidegger says,‘We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little. For precisely if the hydrogen bombs do not explode and human life on earth is preserved, an uncanny change in the world moves upon us.’ Everett McKinley Dirksen (1896–1969), lawyer and politician, and Republican senator from Illinois (1950–69), supported conservative policies but also played a crucial role in securing passage of liberal legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. McGeorge Bundy (1919–96), public servant and educator, was one of the main architects of US foreign policy during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Under Johnson, he was a forceful advocate of expanding the Vietnam War. Leonid Ilich Brezhnev (1906–82), Soviet statesman and Communist party official, was, in effect, the leader of the Soviet Union for eighteen years (1964–82). Senator Dirksen made his famous remark in 1964. Trudeau’s remark on 22 December 1967 was: ‘The State has no place in the nation’s bedrooms.’ Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875), British geologist, is most famous for his great work The Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation (3 vols, 1830–3). He had an enormous influence, most notably on the young Charles Darwin. Charles Robert Darwin (1809–82), British biologist, argued in The Origin of Species (1859) that species were the modified descendants of earlier forms, not immutable creations. Max Weber (1864–1920). See, for example, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in H.H.

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Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press 1946), 129–56. See page 602, note 3. Hoffman gained widespread media attention for his courtroom antics as a defendant in the ‘Chicago Seven’ trial (1969), in which he was convicted of crossing state lines with intent to riot at the Democratic party’s national convention in Chicago in 1968; the conviction was later overturned. The Latin is corruptio optimis pessima, but it may have originally been Greek. An illegible short statement about Hegel was inserted at the beginning of this sentence. Otto Von Bismarck (1815–98), Prussian statesman, made this remark 11 August 1867. It is quoted in his Complete Works, vol. 7 (1924). We were unable to trace this book or identify the German friend. See page 462, note 4. John Parmenter Robarts (1917–82) was Conservative premier of Ontario (1961–71) during a period of enormous growth in education building and spending in the province. Robert C. Coates, The Night of the Knives (Fredericton: Brunswick Press 1969). Dalton Kingsley Camp (1920–2002). See page 392, note 7. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? translated and with an introduction by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row 1968), Part II, Lecture IX, 208ff. The original was Was Heisst Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1954). The great rabbi, Hillel, said ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?’ We were unable to find Wittgenstein’s use of the statement. Mark Rudd (1943– ), student activist, was the militant chairman of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter at Columbia University in April 1968 during the civil disobedience against the university’s cooperation with the military through its role in the Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA). Clark Kerr (1911–2003), university administrator, was president of the University of California (1958–67) during the period of the student-led ‘free speech movement’ at the Berkeley campus. He initiated and oversaw the UC’s greatest era of expansion, creating the prototype of the ‘multiversity’ and a symbol of the liberal academic establishment. He published The Uses of the University in 1963. Jacques Ellul (1912–94). See page 405, note 5. John H. Schaar and Sheldon S. Wolin, New York Review of Books, 9 October 1969.

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27 Leo Strauss concludes his essay ‘Liberal Education and Mass Democracy’ with the words: ‘Liberal education seeks light and therefore shuns the limelight.’ See Robert A. Goldwin, ed., Higher Education and Modern Democracy: The Crisis of the Few and Many (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co. 1967), 96. The essay also appeared with the title ‘Liberal Education and Responsibility’ in Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books 1968).

George Grant and the Department of Religion, McMaster University

President George Gilmour of McMaster University asked Professor Paul Clifford to found a department of religion in 1959. The Baptist divinity school could no longer provide sufficient courses in the study of religion for the general student body in the context of major expansion and greatly increased public support, though Gilmour and Clifford expected that the fledgling department would at first rely on divinity courses and teachers. It took a few years for the new department of religion to work out its specific identity as distinct from the divinity school on one side and the philosophy, history, and social science departments on the other. Clifford hired Grant in 1961 with the request that he teach courses that would attract students from the history, philosophy, and political science departments. He also assured Grant that he would be able to teach Christianity as a Christian in the general context of ‘opening of the minds of young people to fundamental religious questions,’ as Grant put it. The large numbers in those early years in the introductory course, ‘Philosophy and Religion 1A6,’ show that the new department was responding to a strong and growing demand by 1960s students. We have selected six items, including one letter, two interviews, one talk, one paper, and one retrospective interview, to shed light on Grant’s experiences and thoughts about teaching McMaster students, shaping the department’s curriculum, and discussing the study of religion in Canada during the 1960s.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Letter to Paul Clifford, 1962 2. Two interviews in the Hamilton Spectator, 1966

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3. Paper on the academic study of religion for the Royal Society, 1967 4. Talk on the study of religion, circa 1967 5. Thoughts on the area of study ‘Western Religious Thought,’ circa 1969 6. Interview about department, 1975

LETTER TO PAUL CLIFFORD Grant wrote this early letter about the new department’s curriculum to his chairman, Paul Clifford, after his first year of teaching and after the third member of the department, Eugene Combs, had been hired.1 In 1960–1 the curriculum included ‘New Testament,’ taught by President Gilmour and H.W. Lang, ‘Comparative Religion,’ by L.C. Kitchen, and ‘Old Testament’ and ‘Homiletic,’ by Clifford. The calendar for 1961–2 continued with those courses and added, for Grant, ‘Science and Religion,’ ‘Christianity, Philosophy, and History,’ and ‘Church and State.’ Clifford taught the introductory course, ‘Religious Studies 1A2,’ which had an enrolment of six hundred students.

July 9, 1962 Dear Paul, Herewith are some comments related both to our joint article and to the department in general. As will be clear from them, I find difficulty in writing my part of the joint article till I am clearer about the department in general. As founder and head of the department you have obviously thought more about these matters. It is only since the end of term that I have begun to think about what we are doing and my head is buzzing with unsolved difficulties. I am clear about what we should be doing here in relation to those students who will take one or a couple of courses in religion as part of their BA. We introduce them to the fundamentals of the Christian tradition by way of general courses in the Old and New Testaments, Christian belief, Christian ethics, etc. I am also clear about my part in what we should be doing in ‘the frontier areas’ (although I see some technical difficulties of doing this in relation to particular areas such as politics, etc.).2 But my lack of clarity becomes evident when I try and think

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about what we want honours students in religion to know. This lack of clarity is present because I think (as I know you do) that the department must move decisively towards an honours programme as soon as possible. The cause of my uncertainty is what should be the content of that honours curriculum. I do not think we should publish our joint article till we have decided broadly on an answer to that question. In passing, I am not at all sure that it would be wise to start with an honours programme in ‘Philosophy and Religion.’3 There is much to be said, it seems to me, for starting with our own honours programme and branching from that to joint programmes. In what follows, therefore, I am thinking of an honours programme in ‘Religion’ – not a joint one. It seems clear to me that the foundation of such a curriculum is a clear factual knowledge of Christianity – that is, a knowledge of Judaism and the New Testament. As subsidiary to this there must be some factual knowledge of the Mediterranean civilization and its traditions (other than the Semitic) which were brought under Christ by the Fathers. Obviously, also, in a later year when the student has some knowledge of Western religion he must look at the other religions of the world. But it is exactly when we pass beyond this point that the difficulties arise. What do we want the students to have mastered beyond the Old and New Testament again? We certainly want to be more than a department of Semitics. My uncertainty at this point is four-fold. 1. Up to this point we have material that no other department can cover. Beyond this point we start overlapping with other departments, e.g. Philosophy and History, etc. We, therefore, must distinguish our role from theirs. (For instance, as sympathetic a colleague as Dick Jones asked me how we distinguished our role from the Department of Philosophy, and I could not give him a clear answer.)4 2. Beyond these foundations we have so many alternative ways open to us, just because of the riches of the Christian tradition. Do we, for instance, want our honours students to have some knowledge of (a) The early Greek and Latin Fathers. (b) Medieval Christianity. (c) The Reformation. (d) Christianity’s meeting with the Enlightenment. (e) Christianity and contemporary civilization.

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Or is this too much material and in approaching the matter this way are we just imitating the Department of History? If we do not approach the matter in this historical way, what is our criterion? I, for instance, would be competent to teach an honours course about St Augustine looking back at the Greek Fathers and forward to the Medieval Church. But is this the kind of material we want the honours students to deal with? 3. We must have a curriculum which is broadly acceptable to our colleagues. Most of them will accept anything we do about what may be called the phenomenology of religion – Western and otherwise. But when we pass beyond that phenomenology to the truth of the matter I think we must face the fact that we step on a vast variety of prejudices – particularly that of ‘objectivity.’ (In this connection, I agree wholeheartedly with what you say in the last part of your article about commitment, but I am inclined to think that we might be doing harm to the cause of the department by publishing at this point so frank a statement on the matter.) I would say that a rather large number of our colleagues would deny the possibility of ‘philosophical theology’ – let alone any theologizing from within the acceptance of revelation. Clearly all three of us in the department think that God has revealed himself (though we may differ in minor ways about our interpretation of this fact) but do we as a department in deciding on the honours curriculum make the assumption that revelation has happened? If we do, this obviously distinguishes us from all other departments in the Arts and Science faculty. Quite frankly, I see difficulties in both ways of proceeding with or without this assumption. 4. To what functions in life are we training those who are honouring in religion? Some indeed will just be taking the honours course as general education. This, however, is not a sufficient answer in our highly technical society. Of course, the answer to this fourth point is closely related to what content we want in the curriculum. I am sorry to bother you with all this, but I don’t seem able to proceed with our joint article till we have had some discussion of these questions. I think it will be very important to make it a three-fold discussion with Combs. Ever, George Grant

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TWO INTERVIEWS ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT OF RELIGION Charles Wilkinson, the church editor of the Hamilton Spectator, interviewed Grant about the McMaster Department of Religion. The interview appeared in two parts on 19 and 26 March 1966. (We have removed the Spectator’s sub-heads in the text that follows.)

WHAT KIND OF LIFE IS THE BEST LIFE? McMaster students probe religion’s meaning for human race, ask What is life for? Q: Dr Grant, how long have you been head of the department? A: I am not head, Mr Wilkinson, I am chairman, and I have been since Dr Paul Clifford left last year. Q: How long has the department been in operation? A: Four years. Q: Is this the only one of its kind in Canada? A: No, there are two others, one at the University of British Columbia, and one at Sir George Williams University, Montreal. Q: They followed McMaster? A: Yes. Q: Yours is a distinct department, and has an MA course? A: Yes, we give half degrees in religion – that is, BAs as part of the arts and science faculties – and we give honours courses with other departments. Then we give an MA and a PhD, in what we call the religious sciences. Q: What would you say is the idea behind the origin of this department? It’s not supposed to be basically religious as such, is it, in the form of propaganda or denomination? Is it more to do with history and philosophy? A: Religion has been one of the great phenomena of human existence in all parts of the world, and our business is to study and see what the meaning of religion has been for the human race. Q: And the department does not specialize in any particular denomination? It’s very broad in its scope? A: All the human beings who teach in it belong to different religions

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themselves – some are Protestants, some Catholics, some Jews, some Hindus, some may have no religion. But the point is to ask students to look at what men have thought about religion throughout history from the earliest days until today in the very many different parts of the world. Now we think obviously as Western human beings. We think a great deal about what has made Western religion what it is – that is, essentially Semitic religion, Judaism and Christianity. But we are also specializing here in looking at the other great alternative to the religious tradition, which is the religion of India, and above all, Hinduism. I think one of the things which has surprised a lot of people has been that in days such as these, when religion is in low ebb in some circles, this apparently is a very popular course. Well, the thing is that we live in North America in a society where most of us have less tradition than any other society which has ever existed on earth. Therefore, the particular religious traditions in which most people in the history of the race lived, no longer hold as many people. This is particularly the case with people who have been brought up in large cities where the roots have broken down more than elsewhere. These are the kind of people who want to look at the religious history of the race so that they can see better where their place in it belongs. The course is popular, would you say, beyond the expectation of those who founded it? You were here at the time of Dr Clifford, I believe? Clifford really started it. It was his idea, and I was the first person he got here. Now I think it is true that young people who are in a society where traditions are disappearing think more about what they should believe because it isn’t given to them. Now I am not saying this is good or bad. In some ways, traditional societies have great advantages where people are given what they believe, but this is a society with fewer and fewer roots and, therefore, the young have to think about these questions because the truth isn’t given to them in the older way.

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Q: Does that mean in your experience, that young people, especially of university age, are basically not only curious but really very interested in religion and related problems and topics? A: Well, that depends upon what you mean by religion. I think they are interested in how they should live, and in what the universe is about. They are interested in what, if anything, one should pay one’s allegiance to. Now these are the kinds of questions which seem to me what one would call religious questions. Now the word ‘religion’ often connotes for young people an order which is imposed on them from outside. Q: Worship services? ‘Do this, and don’t do that’? A: Yes. Now I myself believe this has its place in human life. But I think this generation of students are people which nothing can hold which is external to their own freedom. Therefore, the best of them want to look and see what life is for, how they ought to live, what kind of life is the best life – all these kind of questions. If one opens up to them what mankind in the past at its best – and particularly the Western past, also the Eastern past – have thought about these matters, then obviously young people are interested in knowing these kind of answers. Q: In this department they can get a survey of the whole field of religions, major religions? A: Of course, this is much too enormous a field for us yet to have built up. We have to specialize on some things. For instance, the whole area of Far Eastern religion, you know Chinese and Japanese religion, we haven’t touched yet, because we feel that as far as Asia is concerned, India was the very great creative place for Eastern religion. Therefore we have started out specializing very much on India and Hinduism. Now we will have to move out to get people who know about Far Eastern religions. Also, we have concentrated more on India, rather than on Islam, because Islam is, in a strange way, a branch of Judaism, as Christianity is, just historically. They branched out of this, and therefore, we wanted rather to specialize at first on a religion like Indian religion which is so very

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different from Western religion. But we will gradually move into these areas as our staff builds up. A person taking the course and getting an MA, what would his degree be? We have followed the title which is the French and German way of talking, which is to talk about these things as the Religious Sciences – that is, a study of these religions as one would study anything as a systematic body of knowledge. This is the proper way, it seems to me, to study things in an Arts and Science faculty of a non-denominational university. Now this is the improper way to study them in a Divinity College where you are training people to be ministers or priests, where people are living their lives in a particular system. In our course, anybody can believe anything they want, and when they come in, they just have to study these things as they would study other areas of human history. This does not mean that all of us, as human beings who teach, and all the students, don’t have our own convictions, obviously. And if any student asks me what my view of life is, I would tell him. And we have to be able to discuss with students, but not in the same context as you would where you were training people to be the priests or ministers of a particular religion. Then the average student taking this course would also take many of the other arts’ subjects? Oh yes, at the undergraduate level, that is, for the BA. They could just take one or two or whatever they chose. Then, if they were taking an Honours BA program, we would ask them to study history at the same time, or philosophy, so that they would get a broad perspective on human life. We still need people who, in their university education, are not necessarily technically trained for any particular job, but who have taken a broad perspective of life. Therefore, when they go out into the practical world, they can go on taking a broad perspective, which helps people to make better, practical decisions. Do you think that many of the students who graduate from this course will take up work that is really nothing to do with religion? I would think that of those who are undergraduates, many of them

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might take it as people study history as a preparation for law, or as they study other things as preparation for social work. I think many students take this course just because they want to know something about what this has been, and they may not go on to graduate work. Graduate students who have passed beyond a general education to specialize more clearly in this subject will obviously become teachers of this themselves. Q: You don’t get the impression that any of them take it because they think it might be easy, say, compared with other subjects. A: I don’t see how it could be. The greatest and most difficult thing to understand about men altogether are the very complex things they have believed as to the nature of the universe and what they ought to believe and these are very hard things to understand. It is a very complex thing to study.

THE CLEVER YOUNG ARE JUST FILLED WITH QUESTIONS Is life empty? God dead? Why suffering? Q: Do you feel that if the churches had more time for teaching, they would wish to deal with some of this type of work that is being done by the Department of Religion? Or is it far too vast for them in the time at their disposal? A: I think the church’s chief job is to get people to worship God, and that that remains the central and basic undertaking of the church – worship. Now in a modern period where people are highly technically trained, there are more lay people who want to think about their religion. I think it is very good for lay people who want to think about their religion, as long as it doesn’t prevent them from practising it, which is the essential thing. Q: Do you think it does, sometimes? A: Well, I think ‘thought’ can always have its negative moments. Q: Inhibit actions, you mean? A: Yes. It often inhibits bad actions, but it can also inhibit good actions. I think the churches have a very different function.

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This is a secular university, and the job of a secular university is for the promotion of study and thought about all matters. Our job is the promotion of study and thought about the religions of the world. Such departments as ours are becoming very widespread in the United States, and are becoming more widespread here. I think this kind of study cannot but affect the churches, but I am not quite sure we are at the stage yet to know how it will affect them. Basically it will affect laymen, we presume, rather than clergy? I don’t know. I think people often underestimate the clergy. Throughout the history of the race, clergy have often thought very deeply about these matters. The people you are training will not, in many cases, become clergymen? They will be very highly informed laymen? Of course, we get some students who will go on and take theological education afterwards to become clergy. But your courses could not lead to ordination? Oh, no. After all, only particular churches can ordain people, and as I have said we have people of all religions here, so it is not our job to ordain. You have questions, I believe, after your lectures. Do you get any impression that students generally are basically troubled about the ferment in religious ideas just now? I think students, as a whole, are living in an incomparably more complex era. People of the previous generation cannot possibly begin to understand how complex. Those of us of the earlier generation were brought up in an era when certain things were fixed in tradition. Throughout the history of the race most men have not lived by thought; they have lived within the fixed context of particular traditions. Now I think North America, in particular, is a place where the fixed context of tradition can very little hold youngsters any more. For instance, in regard to this movement which is getting a lot of publicity these days, about ‘God being dead,’ I think this is a very strange way of talking.5 ... For a lot of the young brought up in the traditionlessness of the suburbs, the question of whether there is God or not (whether the Divine is, is the way I would like to put it) is a meaningless question.

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Therefore, insofar as they are concerned, subjectively God is [dead]. When you ask me about the young, I would say there are a vast number of young for whom the traditional religious questions have no longer any meaning. They are being put in a new way by new people, often within the drama and the literature of the modern, the extremely alienated drama and literature, and desperate drama and literature, of the modern era; but these are, in a certain sense, what I would call religion questions. After all, one can’t forget that the religion that has had the most numbers of people in it of any religion in the history of the world, Buddhism, is, I think, to use this language, unequivocally atheistic. It doesn’t have the conception of God in it. What I am saying is that religious questions are questions really of ’what is my life ultimately all about?’ Now I think it is true that the young are asking questions about this kind of matter within a context that people of an earlier generation, who were more traditionally bound, find it often very hard to understand. But this is the kind of society we have created, a very mobile technological society where everything is in change. If you have everything materially in change, you are going to have all religions, moral, atheistic, all other traditions in change. This is one of the things which is inevitable about a technological society. But I suppose the important thing is that the young people are still asking the questions? They are not disinterested? Well, I think it is the nature – I would be here a follower of Aristotle – I think it is the nature of man to be an animal who speaks, and to speak is to ask these questions, in a certain sense. It belongs to a man to ask these questions and nothing that anybody can do will ever produce a society where they are not asked. Do you think that people will always be asking questions in every generation? I think that because we are rational animals, and the universe is a mystery to us, many, many, in any generation will try to give their attention to contemplating the mysteries of what it is to be a man – and by man, I mean man or woman. Dr Grant, what are the functions of the Department of Religion?

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A: There seem to me to be two duties in the department, and to use modern language, one of those duties is scholarly and the other is what I would call existential. Now the scholarly duty is to produce people who know a lot about particular subjects. It is important in society that there are people who know in depth the clear factual material about what has happened religiously in the past; and that is an essential thing in this department. I would now mention the second duty: religion is not a subject that you are outside of. For instance, if you are studying matter, life, you can study it more objectively because you are not as involved in it. But religion is something, in the way I have defined it, of how one ought to live? What is ultimately so about things? Religion is something in which, a human being who studies it, his own life is involved. The answers he gets influence his life. Therefore, we are not only concerned in the scholarly questions of training people who know a lot about Indian religion, a lot about Jewish religion, a lot about the effect of religion on the recent history of Europe. We are also interested in the young thinking about ’What is the truth of all this?’ ’What is the meaning of all this?’ And when you say the meaning of something, you mean the meaning of it for one’s own life. In this sense, the study of religions – we have called them the Religious Sciences – the objective scholarship passes over into a kind of existential involvement in the questions that are thereby asked. Q: Do you have to do anything to stimulate questions in the young? A: The clever young are just filled with questions. The difficulty sometimes is for the teachers to be wise enough to answer them sensibly. In a university, in a way, it is a band of people studying together. The people who are professors are not only teachers, but they are trying to find out more and become wiser people themselves. I don’t think one has to have any difficulty for students to raise questions. They raise them automatically, because they are in their minds. And they are in the teachers’ minds, too, because the mystery of the universe is a mystery not only for the students but for the teachers.

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Q: Do these questions fall into any particular pattern that is significant? A: There are certain particular questions, it seems to me, about the nature of life and what it is to be a human being, which the twentieth century raises in a particular way. I think that the 20th century is the first century in the history of the world, or perhaps the first century since the Roman Empire, when not only a few people can consider life meaningless, but masses of people can consider life meaningless. The possibility of life being empty is not something that is open only to a few, as it was in the past, but is open to masses. Therefore, these kinds of questions are asked by students. There are questions being asked in the 20th century that are being asked in a particularly strong and pungent form in a department like this. Q: Such as questions as that would arise out of the ‘God is dead’ philosophy? A: This kind of question is continually asked. Q: Do you and the other members of the faculty feel you are able to give answers that satisfy the students reasonably well? A: Well, I suppose what one would say to that is, that insofar as one had answered questions for one’s self about certain matters – and this would vary among all members of the department – one would give the best answer one has for one’s self in one’s own life, and these will vary. Of course, there are some questions which would seem to me to have been with man since the beginning, such as the questions of evil and suffering, and things like that, which one can move into more and more deeply and see. But whether there is an utterly satisfactory answer to them is another matter. In other words, there is no ultimate answer to the ultimate questions. It is a never-ending progression. It seems to me that the modern existential philosopher Marcel makes a distinction which I think is a good distinction. He makes the distinction between problems and mysteries.6 Problems are those questions to which there is a possibly finite answer. Mysteries

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are those questions which one contemplates and ever sees within a larger and deeper framework. If somebody asks me the question in our department, ‘In what year did Buddha die?’ that is a problem which can be answered historically immediately. If somebody asks me, ‘If God is, what is the meaning of evil?’ then that is a question that it takes a whole lifetime to begin to understand some of the limits of that question. Each answer would lead to another question? Quite, quite. You are Anglican, I understand? I am. What do you visualize for the future of such departments, not here, but in other universities? Do you feel that this system will expand as it has done in the United States? In other words, do you see a good future for this in other universities? Yes, I think that in, as I have said before, our very traditionless society, it is important that young people think about these kind of questions. Therefore I hope that there will be departments in which people can study, along with younger and older people, the nature of these extremely difficult questions.

THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN CANADA Grant’s address to the Royal Society of Canada was published in Scholarship in Canada, 1967: Achievement and Outlook, Symposium, presented to Section II of the Royal Society of Canada in 1967, edited by R.H. Hubbard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Society 1968), 59–68. Grant had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1964. In his chairman’s report to the president for 1966–7, Grant stated that ‘much of the time of the department has been spent in meetings deciding matters of academic principle and in making choices between alternative means of proceeding. The proper nature of a department of religion will be discussed by the chairman at the Royal Society of Canada in June 1967.’ In his report one year prior, he had mentioned the role of members of the department in the founding of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion in Sherbrooke in the summer of 1966.

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In a Western context, it is necessary to distinguish the study of religion from that of theology. My task is to deal with the former. Biblical religion has centred round the assertion that a unique revelation of deity has been given to man, and that this revelation concerns what is most important for a man to know: the purpose in obedience to which he can alone fully realize himself. Within that tradition, theology is primarily concerned with the attempt to think systematically about that revelation and its relation to all else. All else (including what man can know about the divine through his free insight) is by definition subservient to that magisterial fact. Christian and Jewish organizations must carry on a wide variety of theological investigations (and the literary and historical studies which are necessary prolegomena) in the educational institutions they govern. Those theological studies must proceed from the purpose of making clear the central truth which it is the function of ecclesiastical bodies to proclaim to their members and to the world. Be that as it may, most Canadian institutions of higher learning are not related to ecclesiastical bodies. Most students and professors in Canada do not think that a unique revelation has been given which is magisterial in all questions of truth. Most universities are governed within charters outside this assumption and are financed by governments which do not assume that the purposes of education should be formulated in that light. The theological needs of particular religious bodies cannot be met within the walls of such universities. Theology continues to be taught within some older European universities, but this is because certain assumptions from before the age of progress are still allowed effect within those institutions. Such is not the case in the usual English-speaking universities of North America. At the same time, as one of the purposes of a university (or even ‘multiversity’) is to attempt to understand the nature of what is, and as some form of religion seems to be coeval with man, it is necessary to try to understand religion. It would be impossible within a short space to state in what sense some form of religion is coeval with man. To do so would require a discussion of the complex issue of what is and what is not ‘religious,’ i.e., a definition of religion or, if you prefer it, the most useful way to use the word in systematic discourse. To raise this question at more than an empirical level would require a discussion of the antique affirmation that reverence is the matrix of human nobility and

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the denial of that proposition by the dominant tradition in modern philosophy and science. For my present purposes, in saying that some form of religion is coeval with man I assert no more than that it is at least as difficult to speak about human activity fully without using the word ‘religion’ (or some synonym) as it would be to forgo the words ‘literature’ or ‘politics.’ Not to include religion is to cut out of the university the study of one segment of what it has been and is to be human. This is what has largely happened from the 1920s to the 1960s in the universities of this country. The study of theology having been relegated to divinity colleges, the study of religion is now virtually excluded from the universities. The result has been that the study of religion is absent, while the university community comes more and more to live within the basic assumptions of modern liberalism – itself a religious faith. This in turn has resulted in an immense parochialism in both time and space. At this point it may be argued that the study of religion is carried on in various departments, and that there is no need of a specialized department of that name. I would agree with the first statement as being obvious but disagree that the second is a necessary inference from the first. My reasons follow. Religion must of course be studied in terms of psychology, sociology, philosophy, and political science. Classics departments must study Greek and Roman religion and French scholars can understand neither Pascal without understanding Jansenism nor Voltaire outside the religion of the Enlightenment.7 The list is long and often obvious, but such facts do not imply that there should be no department the specialized function of which is to study religion. The reason for this is that in order to understand anything it is extremely important to avoid the methodological error of reductionism which in our era is found in many accounts of knowing. An understanding of the works of Raphael, Shakespeare, and Mozart requires departments of fine art, literature, and music more than departments of sociology and psychology. Equally, an understanding of the thought and action of the Buddha and of Christ (or lesser figures such as Pythagoras and Calvin)8 requires departments of religion as well as sociology and psychology. Otherwise there is a tendency to reduce these figures to tame confederates of transitory hypotheses. Weber has taught me much about the religion of my ancestors; but is it not reductionism to claim

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that sociology should have the final word on Puritanism? Freud has thrown much light on religion, but I think the student of religion has just as much right to say that Freud has not said the last word on Moses as has the art historian to object to the completeness of Freud’s vision of Leonardo, or the political scientist to his account of Woodrow Wilson.9 The present tendency to reductionism is related to the attempt of various studies to assert their rule over other disciplines. In one decade the final truth about man is to be found in psychology; in the next in sociology. This union of reductionism and academic imperialism may be illustrated in the writings on Japanese society of Professor R. Bellah of Harvard University.10 His ultimate judgment on the various Japanese religions seems to be that they are pathological forces restraining the Japanese from the obvious course of becoming modern Americans. Such reductionism (allied in this case with a high sense of Western superiority) does not seem to me to foster a clear understanding of religion. It is for this reason above all that the study of religion must be carried on in specialised departments as well as in a fragmented pattern. Other subjects have been the victims of reductionism, but none more than religion in our era. The proper study of religion has indeed to sail successfully between the Scylla of covert indoctrination and the Charybdis of reductionism. Such a course will be no easier than that of Odysseus, but to refuse to attempt it in our modern multiversities will be to exclude something which is essential to the understanding of man and his place in the universe. It is only in the last few years that departments of religion have arisen in Canadian universities. To say this is to exclude from my discussion such specialised bodies as the Institute of Islamic Studies founded at McGill by W.C. Smith, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at St Michael’s in Toronto, and the departments of Near Eastern studies such as that at the University of Toronto.11 To do so is in no sense to discount their fine achievements. I also exclude the study of religion in our French-speaking institutions because of their very different history. I must further exclude any discussion of the problem in such English-speaking universities as Windsor which have originated in the Roman Catholic tradition. In the light of these exclusions it would be fair to say that the three established departments in Canada at the moment are at the University of British Columbia, Sir George

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Williams, and McMaster. At some others there are departments either small or incipient. That there are soon to be many more is clear from the extent of my correspondence this year with universities which are discussing the principles on which the study of religion should be established. As all this represents a new departure in our universities, any history of the work done in Canada would be thin. We have not produced a Harnack, an Eliade, a Festugière.12 It therefore seems more profitable for me to continue by discussing some of the problems raised in such studies. II The heart of any university or department is its curriculum. The curriculum expresses what the department considers its subject to be. What should be the curriculum of a department of religion, at both undergraduate and graduate levels? The chief difficulty here is the enormous range of the material in both space and time and the great differences in that material. It ranges from the religious practices of small, even pre-literate tribes (I dislike the words ‘primitive religion’) to Buddhism or Christianity, which have been at the centre of great civilizations and undergone immense permutations throughout their history. To understand any small aspect of these phenomena requires many disparate skills. Beyond the large number of religions there lies the question of what phenomena in any given situation should the student be concerned with. To take a modern case: it is clear that the painting of Rouault has something to do with religion; but are not the sermons of Schlesinger Jr on Kennedy also religious, albeit debased?13 The primary answer so far, as the undergraduate curriculum goes, should in my opinion be based on two general assumptions. 1. An undergraduate must acquire some knowledge of the religious history of the West, which means at least some knowledge of Biblical religion, i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and the modern movements which have been reactions to these religions, and yet in terms of them. It is here that theology both ancient and modern should be in the curriculum, because it is a particularly important aspect of Western religion. This knowledge of Western religion may, however, be just the hardest starting point for students. A majority of them think they know what Christianity is and have rejected their version of it; a minority also

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think they know what it is and have accepted it. In both cases their knowledge is usually inaccurate; and yet they are no longer open to facing their inaccuracies, because of their assurance that they already know. 2. Concurrently the undergraduate must investigate some other great tradition which answers some of the religious questions in at least a superficially different way. The key word here is ‘great.’ What I mean by it, negatively, is that the whole Western tradition should not be compared with some fairly parochial religion which makes little claim to universality, such as, for example, that of the Ojibways. We should require the student to immerse himself in the history and claims of one of the great living religions which has had widespread and lasting influence on large areas of the world. This to my mind means either Hinduism or Buddhism. I exclude Islam because of its common Semitic roots with Judaism and Christianity, which therefore makes it a less valuable means of comparison. It is for this reason that the department of which I am a member has concentrated on the study of Hinduism. The University of British Columbia concentrates on Buddhism. I do not think it is difficult to work out the further details of the undergraduate curriculum from these two principles. Let me make two comments, the one on the first principle, the other on the second. (i) Concerning the study of Western religion, the chief difficulty may be that of fairness. It is always difficult to be fair about that which is in some sense one’s own. This difficulty may be illustrated from the history of our own department. The usual titles for primary courses in these areas have been ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament.’ But to use them is to assume something not immediately evident from the subject-matter. There are many students who want to know something about the origins of Christianity but who think that to call its historical records ‘The New Testament’ is to beg the question. This may indeed be the most adequate name for these documents, but such an assumption cannot fairly be built into the curriculum of a department of religion. We have therefore called these studies ‘Christian Origins’ and, in the case of the Old Testament, ‘Ancient Hebrew Religion.’ This is obviously not just a matter of linguistic convenience, but one that raises the whole question of fairness and objectivity. By this, however, I do not imply that the teachers involved should not be believing Christians or

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Jews. The person who has no standpoint is non-existent, and those who pretend to have reached an Archimedean point on matters such as these are deluding themselves. I think it is splendid that a practising Christian or Jew should teach about these matters, because he is likely to have a particular sympathy for the seriousness of the issues involved. What I am concerned with here is the curriculum and not the standpoint of the teacher. The curriculum must not proceed from the assumption that any particular religion has a privileged status in the nature of things. On the other hand, in its impartiality it must resist falling backwards into an inverted snobbery about our own tradition. (ii) Concerning other great religions, I am sure that it is necessary as soon as possible to give up the term ‘Comparative Religion.’ It has been so abused as to be no longer of any use. In the past, detailed courses on Western religion were usually followed by one survey course on all other religions from the so-called ‘primitive’ to those of all the non-Western civilizations of the world. Some superficial textbook such as Bouquet or Noss was used.14 Such a course was called Comparative Religion. It was generally taught within the assumption of Western superiority, either the superiority of Christianity or (more recently) of the progressive West. But Comparative Religion does not really mean the study of all religions except Christianity. Also, to compare things properly one must first have some knowledge of the objects compared. Is Theravada Buddhism basically the same as Christianity and are they both in essence really the religion of the Peace Corps? Students who have had one course in the old Comparative Religion generally tell me that this is so. Western superiority, whether based on a false interpretation of Christianity or on progressive dogma, is not the best stance from which the religious phenomena of the world can be understood. The difficulty over curriculum is greater at the graduate level. It is rooted in the following tension. On the one hand, one must wish not only that PhD candidates should know something about many religions but that they should have considered, for example, the relation between the concept of dharma and that of natural law or of the similarities of, and differences between, Indian nihilism and that of Nietzsche. If the department is to be more than a set of disparate specialisms, this common interest in universal questions must be present. If one wishes merely to produce area specialists, this is best done in such bodies as

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the Institute of Islamic Studies or in departments of Near Eastern studies. I have known men learned in Sanskrit who have been quite indifferent to the truth or falsity of the complex religious affirmations made in the Vedas or Upanishads. Literary and historical scholarship should not be the final object of departments of religion. On the other hand, we all know what arduous discipline is required in order to know anything about any serious subject and what careful linguistic and historical method is necessary before one can speak with any authority about a great religious tradition. Departments of religion must clearly eschew vague generalities that do not come from disciplined learning. In order to speak definitively of ancient Hebrew religion one must know Ugaritic, Accadian etc., and to understand the origins of Christianity one must be steeped in the Jewish and Hellenistic worlds. One must remember that apart from the difficulties of Sanskrit and Pali, there are more texts in Indian history than in the whole religio-philosophic Western corpus. An understanding of contemporary Western religious life requires an immense body of reading in history, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. How is one to meet the dual needs of educating both specialists and those who have also thought comprehensively about religion? There is no obvious formula for overcoming this tension any more than in any other subject. I would mention, however, two practical questions in which the issue is raised. Let me illustrate from what I know best, the PhD programme in the religious sciences which we have instituted at McMaster.a For our graduate comprehensive examinations, we have chosen six periods in the history of religion which seem especially significant. In the light of his thesis the candidate must choose three of these periods in which to be examined. What is important for my present topic is that if the candidate’s specialism is in the modern period, he must choose one area from the ancient world and vice versa. For example, we have at the moment a candidate working chiefly in the sociology of North American religion, who will be required to write a comprehensive examination on Indian religion up

a The choice of the title Religious Sciences for our graduate programme follows the European nomenclature, les sciences religieuses or Religionswissenschaft. The word ‘science’ is obviously used in the older and wider sense. Whether this usage will be acceptable in the North American academic community remains to be seen.

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to AD 1000 and to have to have a knowledge of Sanskrit. His study of India should provide a perspective from which to view modern phenomena. The other obvious question turns on the practical problem of faculty. Any department must include specialisms such as the origin and history of Christianity, Eastern religions, the sociology of religion, etc. Beyond these lie less necessary choices. Is one, for example, to hire a specialist in Zoroastrianism? At the graduate level the choices must obviously be made so that concentration is achieved in those areas chosen for PhD study, and these must always be limited. It is to be hoped that in this matter of concentrations the universities of Canada will cooperate rather than compete. It would be pretentious for anyone near Toronto to attempt to duplicate the work of the Pontifical Institute. But besides these obvious points about faculty there is the subtler one. If departments of religion are to be more than a set of disparate specialisms there must be a common interest among the faculty in the universal questions raised by religions. This is not easily achieved. It is difficult to exaggerate how hard it is for somebody raised in the Upanishadic tradition to partake in modern Western education or for somebody educated in North America to learn what he should from those educated in the traditional Indian manner. Yet how can a department of religion be properly constituted if it does not include faculty and indeed graduate students from these different forms of education? III This brings me to the second main point I wish to make about the way that the academic study of religion should be pursued. This point is well expressed in the title of a paper by Professor W.C. Smith to the newly formed Canadian Society for the Study of Religion. The title of Smith’s paper is: ‘The Dilemma of the Professor of Religion: Communication of Objective Data and Personal Presence.’ That one wants, first and foremost, objective scholars ought to go without saying.b Nevertheless, though the academic is the first criterion of appointment, it is not the only one – for the following reason. The fact that one is a Roman b I have noticed that some wish to use departments of religion to provide an extra chaplaincy. Chaplains and professors of religion are, however, not identical.

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Catholic, Marxist, Buddhist, positivist etc., does not have such an immediate effect on the study of, say, physics as on the study of politics or religion. This factor in the very structure of a study should be recognised in the composition of departments. A balanced department should make evident through its various members the manifold ways of responding religiously. It is a salutary experience for undergraduates to face in their teachers a variety of religious responses. In the last few years there has been a graduate student at McMaster who is a Brahmin educated in the traditional way. It has been good for our students to be forced to recognise that he responds to the facts of work, art, sex, death, politics, the family, etc., differently from the norm of southern Ontario or indeed of the Western world. To meet this otherness in the flesh is more immediate learning than to hear in the classroom that Pythagoras asserted that he could remember ten of his previous existences. It is salutary not only for undergraduates. The Brahmin and I have worked together on the religious import of a great American text: James’s The Golden Bowl. We both knew the text intimately. The surprising thing was not the different import the book had for us, but how little any dialogue could overcome the sheer difference of attitude about the nature of things that was manifest in our approaches to the text. I am not implying here that the meeting between men of Eastern and Western education must end in deadlock, nor that there are, in the language of Collingwood, absolute presuppositions which divide men of different civilizations in a way which cannot be overcome, nor yet that there may not be universal men who can overcome any division.15 I simply assert that it is good that faculty and students should be faced in the academic environment with what is, at the level of common sense at any rate, an unequivocal religious otherness. This should not be done in a self-conscious way which leads faculty members to feel that they are playing the role of the resident Protestant, the resident Nietzschean, or the resident Jew. Nevertheless it must be recognised that the understanding of religion requires making explicit in oneself the claims in one’s own reverence and that this requires opening oneself to the reverences of other men. The word ‘dialogue’ has been spoilt these days by over-use, but it is still the best word for the crucial activity of a department of religion. Indeed it must be recognised that for all the need of linguistic and historical competence such scholarship cannot be the final standpoint in the

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study of religion. It is here, inevitably, that the resources of theology and philosophy (without here specifying their proper relation) must be available. Indeed, scholarly objectivity itself will be better served when the issue of claims and faith is in the open. When this issue is repressed in the name of neutrality, it is likely that awareness of the complex differences in the phenomena themselves will suffer and therefore also the scholarly objectivity which the neutrality was supposed to protect. It need hardly be said that dialogue such as this is not cheaply achieved. To conclude. Openness is both the purpose for which the study of religion exists and the quality which should be incarnated in its practice. The present North American intellectual tradition unites a narrow and monolithic certainty with a diffuse and querulous uncertainty. On the one hand positivist technocracy, itself a species of morality and religion, stamps its purposes on our society. On the other hand, those who find such a position inadequate must encounter difficulty in distinguishing what truth can still be maintained from the older tradition. The work of Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Weber must leave any educated man uncertain as to the exact positive meaning of our traditional morality and religion. The result is that we in the humanities and social sciences are left to face the certainty of technocratic positivism, just as we find ourselves ambiguously disposed to what in the West has transcended such a vision. In this situation one small means to health is to open oneself to what the race in many times and places has thought about the purposes of human life and how these apprehensions have been lived out in particular civilizations. To be open is to look at these responses not simply as necessary preparations for our fuller moment but perhaps as alternatives to or completions of it. I am grateful that I face the modern world not only with the immediacy of a shattered Western tradition but with what is given in such words as physis, politeia, daemon. I am sure the same is true of those who look seriously at the Upanishads or the Gita, at Buddhism, or the origins of Christianity. Openness to possibilities such as these is one of many academic means of standing outside the parochialism of our modern monolith and perhaps of finding some traces of firmness in the shifting subjectivity pressed in upon us by our confused intellectual present.

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RELIGION Grant wrote down this short talk about religion on six pages of legalsized foolscap. We don’t know where or to whom he delivered it. Sheila Grant believes he probably wrote it in 1967 or 1968.

Religion is a human activity. Some people study what that activity is in a university, just as in the university people study what political activity is. But also in the world people do the activity often without much thinking what they are doing. I know politicians who just do politics without much thinking what they are doing. Let me say that in a society it is more important to have politicians being good politicians – than to have them being good political scientists. Though clearly there may be some connection between society having good political scientists and having good politicians. It is more important for the society to have people practising good religion than to have religious scientists – but also the clear study of religion may help people to do the activity better. But when one starts to study religion one wants to know what it is one is studying. In all sciences there is the movement from popular common sense to system, and this arises when the common-sense understanding no longer serves. Common sense might say that religion is what people do in churches and synagogues – worship God. But then we see other phenomena in other places and times – we see a lot of activities in other parts of the world – activities we class together and call Hinduism or Buddhism or ‘primitive religion’ – and we know that these are religious activities, and we know that we have to pass beyond our popular conception of religion. And this may happen not only in distant places and times, but in our immediate life. (Story of Ernie and ‘you can’t stop progress.’ This was indeed the religion of Ontario. Kerr and news of James Dunn’s death. He was in the sanctuary. Sir James Dunn had mana. Wealth was his religion.)16 Now at this point one might say that religion has to do with what people these days call the ‘value systems’ of individuals and societies. What people most firmly value in any society may be called their religion, and one can study how that value system affects and is affected by other aspects of the society; how the publicly avowed value system

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is related to the value system by which people indeed live. One can study how particular value systems come to be in time, and how they are changed; one can study what if anything is common to all value systems everywhere. These kinds of questions within this account of religion we can generally say are included under subjects called the sociology of religion, or the psychology of religion. (Aristotle example.) But this account of religion as the value systems of individuals and societies does not seem to me adequate, because of the following argument. We move to another level when we study the religions; we at some point are likely to ask why we should do this rather than something else, and we begin to ask not only about value systems in general, but about our own. Why should we do this – why should we do that? And if we are not content with the answer, that it is completely arbitrary or absurd that we should do this rather than that, (that is, if we are content with existentialism), then we have to ask what kind of a world is it and what is worth doing in that world. That is, in our intellectual life, our life of study, we have to ask as much as in any other part of our life, what is worth doing. That depends for me on the primal question: what kind of a world is it? Now when we start to think about the world and human experience, we find that there are some things that we want to change, and some things we want to be just as they are. Now I think it is this division which tells us what religion is. It is the human activity in which we experience something and do not want it to be otherwise than what it is. Let me illustrate: when we are in love, we do not want the other being to be different from what he or she is. To be in love is to be enraptured by what another being is. Or in the very greatest works of art, Homer or Mozart or Tolstoy, what makes them great is just that we do not want them to be any different from what they are. I would say then that the religious act at all levels is just this: the experience of anything when one does not want it to be otherwise. Now in this account, the question of all levels is very important. Nearly all people have some experience of the beautiful – they do not want this human being or this landscape to be different (although there is much that they do want to change). It has been said in the West that the highest religion belongs to those who can accept the whole as good. One reason we have exalted Jesus Christ is because of his acceptance of his appalling fate as good.

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Now let me quickly state certain implications of this definition. (Include extra page, marked [1].) [The page to be inserted is missing.] (2) How is action possible in terms of this definition? This is the difficulty which Marx has so well expressed. He agreed pretty well with my definition of religion and then said it was the opiate of the people, because by making people want things as they are, we prevent them from changing the world. As Bakunin said: ‘If God existed, we would have to destroy him.’17 But I would say about this that there is in Marx an acceptance of things as they are, because things are leading to a time when all will be as it should be – that is, God is the future. Also I do not see that my definition excludes action. Let’s say one loves a child for what he is – he needs food if he is to be that which one loves, and for food action is needed. What action for example, to use the modern jargon of helping others, should we use towards other people in order to help them be what they are by nature, not as we want them to be? What disgusts me about actions seen in any other way is when helping others is done to make them what the helper wants. What is surely so disgusting about Vietnam is that the Americans think they are helping the Vietnamese when really what they are doing is making them be what the Americans require them to be. It is no accident that the Vietnam War is carried on by a liberal President who thinks he is a liberal. The third implication of my account is that it defines religion in terms of otherness, not in terms of the subject. This is why ultimately I do not like the definition of religion as the value systems of individuals and societies. The use of the word ‘value’ always suggests that it is something that we make, rather than receive. In the fact-value distinction there is the idea that facts are given or objective, while values are the creation of the human mind. To use an analogy: to think one can understand religion in this way is like thinking one can understand love equally well from the act of masturbation as from the act of intercourse. To define religion subjectively has this profound disadvantage. Religion is subjective in that it is the experience of wanting something not to be otherwise; but religion is always concerned not with itself, that is, with the experience, but with the object known in that experience. Fourth and last, with any account of religion one is left always with the supreme question of [residue?] and that is the question which in

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the West is called theodicy. That is, how is any religion possible in the light of the evil which surrounds us? It is this problem more than any other which leads one to deny that there could be anything that one does not want to change. How can we want everything to be the way it is, when the way it is includes Vietnam? Though this is very pressing for us in this ferocious era, we must recognize that it is a problem coeval with human existence. Man being open to the whole is open to the evil, which may allow him to say that the whole is not good. Let me put it this way: I have said that a religious act would be when we are enraptured by another person, not to desire them to be otherwise. Yet this requires another act: We know that any moment they may not be at all. How do we make the religious act of not having it otherwise that somebody we would not have otherwise – should be mortal[?]

ACCOUNT OF THE AREA OF STUDY ‘WESTERN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT’ This report or account was probably written in 1969 or 1970 for presentation to AGCAP (Annual General Curriculum Assessment Process). A copy of the original typescript, containing written editorial changes by Grant, was found in his papers, though it seems likely that other professors in the area would have contributed to the preparation of the document.

The section of the department under the rubric ‘Western religious thought’ has been the most difficult to build into a form appropriate to the study of religion in a university setting. This difficulty exists for two reasons: (1) It is harder to study in an objective way that which has shaped ourselves and our world than so to study the religions of other peoples, and (2) there is great uncertainty as to what is presently taking place in the Western religious tradition. We have gradually come to define our chief task as the attempt to explicate the relation of the traditional ‘religions’ of the West to the multiform criticism of those traditions which have dominated religious thought since the Enlightenment. It is clear that most undergraduate and graduate students (as indeed most professors), when coming to the complex prob-

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lems of religion in our present world, are presented with the question of what truths remain from our Western past in the light of what has become evident in the modern sciences (including the social and historical), arts, and philosophy. In such a conception of ‘Western religious thought’ the word ‘religious’ cannot be confined to those spokesmen of the great public ‘religions’ of the West. For example, it is clear that thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Whitehead, although critical of Western ‘religion,’ are themselves religious thinkers in that they have shaped what men pay reverence to in our civilization. Therefore, it is necessary that those studying ‘Western religious thought’ in a context appropriate to a university should not be confined to thinkers such as Barth or Rahner, who are explicitly religious in the sense that they are theologians of particular ‘religions,’ but should try to understand what is coming to be in Western religiousness through the general flow of thought. In the definition of this area there has necessarily been close interaction with the area called ‘religion and modern society,’ which is concerned particularly with the social sciences. The division of labour and the inter-relation between these two areas is a close and continuing one, made possible because all members of the department are concerned that these two areas do not fall apart into the shallow division between ‘thought’ and ‘society,’ in such a manner that the department’s unifying theme of religion is lost. Also the department as a whole is convinced that the right way to study religion in the modern world must be in a comparative setting, so that students do not study only in terms of one tradition (e.g. Christianity outside any knowledge of Asian religions). It has therefore been necessary that our work in the West should not only be open to students whose chief field of concentration is the West, but that it should be helpful to students from other areas. It has been a difficult matter of experiment to reach a curriculum appropriate to such a task. In the graduate area we decided in 1968 that we would only accept thesis proposals on subjects since Kant. Any such cut-off in temporal terms is arbitrary, but it was a way of making clear that we are concerned with Western religious thought in its modern context. This does not eliminate preparatory courses concerning periods before Kant. It is a fair generalization that up to the present our students whose earlier training was in Roman Catholic institutions are

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particularly in need of courses in recent thought, while those from other institutions often need to improve their training in thought from before the age of progress. The research of faculty members in such an area involves the broadening of their sense of who are the most significant thinkers, and the detailed task of understanding what those thinkers say about religious questions. Division of labour is necessary, because although each faculty member should try to be aware of the general sweep of Western religious thought, each should be specialists in significant currents of that flow. Examples of such currents are the relation of the metaphysical tradition to religion from Kant to Whitehead, the complex relation between Biblical religion and recent German thought, the significance of modern logic and linguistics for religious belief, the recent developments in theological method etc. The influence of such modern movements for both Judaism and Christianity falls within our interest. It is best when students choose their topics for theses in connection with staff members who have shown their knowledge of particular subjects in their writings. Thus one of our theses, ‘The concepts of deity in Ramanuja and Hartshorne,’ was possible because of J.C. Robertson’s understanding of the ‘process’ thinkers as well as his connection with the study of Asian philosophy and religion in the department. The thesis on ‘S. Weil’s critique of the Old Testament’ was possible because the student was aware of G.P. Grant’s study of Weil and because of A.E. Combs’s interest in the modern significance of the Bible. Sustained and systematic writing is the best way to attract competent students. This presents a difficulty for this area, because writing on such subjects is likely to come later in life than achievements in historical and literary scholarship.

INTERVIEW ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT OF RELIGION The interview appeared along with others in R in R 5/1 (Dec. 1975). R in R was a newsletter produced by Department of Religion graduate students and some members of the faculty. Simon Gadsden and Michael Penny interviewed Grant, and John Field did the transcription.

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(1) Grant: The Department of Religion was entirely Paul Clifford’s idea. He saw that McMaster was changing over from being a Baptist University to becoming a secular one. He worked for the establishment of a Department of Religion so that in the new context the great questions which we call religious, should be continued to be asked in the new university. He knew that they would have to be asked in a different setting than they had been in the past at McMaster, and that this setting would require a great deal of definition. He was quite clear that theology in Canada (unlike in Great Britain or the European countries) had been excluded from the new universities and isolated into theological colleges which were primarily concerned with the training of clergy. He wanted to find some way in which young people would be opened to the ultimate religious questions without transgressing the assumption of a secular university. (2) Question: Why did you come? Grant: I came because Clifford asked me and because I was immensely impressed by his understanding of the problems of the modern secular university. I had just resigned the chairmanship of the Department of Philosophy at York University because I had found that York was going to be under the control of the University of Toronto for several years and that that meant that I would have to teach philosophy within the vulgar definition of that subject then current in the University of Toronto. For many years I had watched departments of philosophy in North America become more and more departments of logistics. Because of my experience at York I was not sanguine about the possibility of building a department of philosophy in Canada which would be adequate in leading young people to think deeply about human existence. Indeed, I would make a clear distinction between philosophy and religion of the kind which is made in the writings of Plato. Nevertheless, that distinction does not imply that the study of religion is not philosophical. Professor H.G. Gadamer understood this so clearly when I first met him. He asked what I did and I replied that I was a professor of religion but considered myself philosophical. He replied that he understood.18 In North America, most philosophers who would not accept the analytical dominance have been drawn into departments of religion, of literature, of political science, etc. What seemed to me important in coming to McMaster was to build a department where undergraduates and graduates would have time to

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contemplate the mysteries of human existence within the widest context. (3) The chief difficulty we had at the beginning was that of definition and the persuasion of the general university community that that definition was suitable as part of a modern university. Many professors believed that they transcended their religious bias and that religion was an essentially prohibitive force to persuade people from illicit fornication and other vices. Combs, Clifford, and myself had to persuade the general university community that it was a serious study proper to a university. We had to clarify our own minds about what we were doing in the sense that we had to steer between the scylla of a sterile ‘objective’ positivism and the charybdis of religious propaganda. For example, clearly it would be futile to have a department composed entirely of ‘scholars’ who were entirely outside any of the religious questions they were discussing. At the same time as this was so, we had to make clear that any student who came into any classroom was not in any sense forced to any opinion which he had not reached on his own steam. We had to have a curriculum which did not make any assumptions about the truth of any religion and yet it had to be a curriculum not necessarily taught by religious eunuchs. (4) The first substantive problem was to see that Asian religion had its proper place in the Department. Professor Clifford found Paul Younger and he in turn found Dr Arapura, who in turn found Dr Jan. We clearly could not deal equally with all the non-Western religions and we decided that we would start from the central Indian tradition and of course in this start we were very lucky to get Dr Arapura to come here. We decided early that anybody who was coming to study religion in the modern world must be forced to look at two greatly different traditions. Clearly, one of these traditions had to be that which the Western world had inherited, and the other tradition which had come out of India and spread beyond it. (5) It soon became clear to the Department that in the situation at McMaster, it was necessary to have not only an undergraduate but a graduate programme. No department was taken seriously at McMaster which did not have a graduate programme. This was enormously helped by the then Dean of Graduate Studies, M.A. Preston, who saw the possibilities here, and saw clearly that there was no comparable graduate programme in English-speaking Canada. The careful work-

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ing out of the graduate programme was accomplished, above all, by Drs Younger and Combs. (6) Whether it is possible to develop a proper Department of Religion in a university such as McMaster still remains to be seen. Whether the vision that Paul Clifford had of a department in which the great religious questions would be opened to undergraduate and graduate students has been realized is a moot question. Perhaps the degree of expansion which we went for and the degree of concentration on graduate students has pushed us in the direction of producing ‘specialists without spirit.’19 The opening of the minds of young people to fundamental religious questions can easily be made subsidiary to the production of historicist scholarship. Clearly the education of scholars is one end in any university. Society needs scholars as it needs carpenters, postmen, doctors, etc. But also clearly to meet the needs of young North Americans in their present dilemma, a department of religion must pass to that which quite transcends scholarship – namely thought.

Notes 1 Paul Clifford founded the department in 1959–60, relying on the curriculum of the Divinity School in the first two years. Grant was hired for the 1961–2 session, and Eugene Combs in the summer of 1962. 2 With the phrase ‘the frontier areas,’ Grant is referring to the department’s attempt to interest students in philosophy, history, and political science departments in religion courses. 3 The department’s introductory course was called ‘Philosophy and Religion’ until 1966, when it was changed to ‘World Religions’ to distinguish it from both the Divinity School and the Department of Philosophy. 4 Richard Jones was a professor in the Department of Geology. 5 Grant is referring to American theologians Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, who had just published Radical Theology and the Death of God. They revived Nietzsche’s claim that the idea of God has lost its credibility, maintaining that we await new guidance in the void left by God’s absence. 6 Gabriel Honoré Marcel (1889–1973), French philosopher, dramatist, and critic, became a Catholic in 1929. His work includes Being and Having (1935) and The Mystery of Being (1951), where he makes the distinction between problems and mysteries.

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7 Blaise Pascal (1623–62), French mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, was perhaps the most famous of the Jansenists. Jansenism, named after the theologian Bishop Cornelius Jansen of Ypres (1585–1638), emphasized the necessity of divine grace and predestination for salvation. Voltaire, pseudonym of François Marie Arouet (1694–1778), Parisian writer, a central figure in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and author of many works, including Candide. 8 Pythagoras (sixth century BC), Greek philosopher, sage, and mathematician, established a religious community in southern Italy that emphasized moral asceticism and purification. His mathematical and musical discoveries pointed to the discovery of nature through numbers. John Calvin (1509–64), French Protestant reformer and theologian, preached a severe predestinarianism and founded a theocracy in Geneva in 1541. He and Martin Luther were the two most influential theologians of the Protestant Reformation. 9 Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), statesman, educator, writer, and twentyeighth president of the United States (1913–21). See Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Twenty-eighth President of the United States: A Psychological Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1967). 10 Robert Neelly Bellah (1927– ), sociologist and educator, taught at Harvard and Berkeley. His works include Tokugawa Religion (1957) and Beyond Belief (1970). 11 Wilfrid Cantwell Smith (1916–2000), professor of religion, taught at McGill, Harvard, and Dalhousie. His works include Methodological Issues in Religious Studies (1974), Towards a World Theology (1981), and On Understanding Islam (1981). 12 Adolph von Harnack (1851–1930), German Protestant theologian, is known primarily for his work on the history of the Church. Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), professor of the history of religions at Chicago, published The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954), Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958), and The Sacred and the Profane (1959). André Jean Festugière (1898–1982), French specialist in the history of Greek thought and religion, published Socrate (1966) and Les Trois Protreptiques de Platon (1973). 13 Georges Rouault (1871–1958), French painter, lithographer, and poet, was a leader of expressionism in France. His painting often had a religious intensity, resembling stained glass in its use of colour and shape. Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr (1917– ). See page 367, note 150. 14 Alan Coates Bouquet (1884–1978), historian of religion, published Christian Faith and Non-Christian Religions (1958) and Sacred Books of the World (1959). John Boyer Noss (1896–1980) was the author of Man’s Religions (1949).

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15 Robin George Collingwood (1889–1943), English philosopher and historian, spent most of his life teaching at Oxford. Grant is referring to The Idea of History (1946). 16 According to Sheila Grant, when Grant commiserated with a man in Dundas, called Ernie, whose gas station (and livelihood) had just been taken away from him, he responded, ‘You can’t stop progress.’ Sir James Hamet Dunn (1874–1956), financier and industrialist, was a major benefactor of Dalhousie University while Grant was teaching there. Mana: a Polynesian word for objects with supernatural power. 17 See Michael Bakunin, God and the State, with a preface by Carlo Cafiero and Elisée Reclus (New York: Mother Earth 1888). Bakunin had quoted Voltaire saying, ‘“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” For, you understand, “the people must have a religion.”’ (17). He then ‘reverses the phrase of Voltaire’ and says that, ‘if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him’ (28). Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814–1876), Russian revolutionary, was the chief propagator of nineteenth-century anarchism, along with Proudhon. 18 Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), German philosopher, studied with Martin Heidegger. In Truth and Method (1960) and other works, he developed his theory of hermeneutics, exploring the nature of understanding and interpretation. He taught in the McMaster Department of Religion for one half of each year during a five-year period in the 1980s. 19 Grant refers to Weber’s quotation of Goethe in his well-known discussion of ‘the iron cage’: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart: this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’ See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s 1958), 182.

Course Lectures at McMaster in the 1960s: A Selection

Grant’s papers included just over a hundred lectures and parts of lectures prepared for his classes and seminars during the 1960s. He wrote the lectures on legal-size foolscap and delivered them to students in ‘Philosophy and Religion 1a6’; ‘Myth and Reason’ (originally ‘Myth, History, and Reason’) variously designated 3k6, 4k6, and, as a graduate course, 6k6; ‘History and Religion 3d3’; ‘Politics and Religion 3h3’; ‘Comparative Religion 3b2’; and ‘Christian Ethics 2c3.’ He taught two new graduate courses towards the end of the decade: ‘The Relations between the Western Religious Tradition and Technology,’ designated as ‘Religion 775’ (1967–8 and 1970–1); and ‘Nietzsche: His Account of Religion,’ designated as ‘Religion 762’ (1969–70). We found no surviving lectures for two other graduate courses Grant was listed as teaching, ‘Philo to Augustine,’ designated as ‘Religion 704’ (1966–7), and ‘Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher: Their Philosophies of Religion,’ designated as ‘Religion 773’ (1967–8). We have selected a sample from these graduate and undergraduate lectures to give readers a glimpse into Grant’s classroom in the first decade at McMaster. From the graduate lectures, we have chosen two from the ‘Nietzsche’ course and one from the ‘Technology’ course. We have chosen two lectures from the first-year introductory course, ‘Philosophy and Religion,’ eleven from the ‘Myth and Reason’ course, and one lecture from ‘Politics and Religion.’ One-half the surviving lectures were from ‘Myth and Reason.’ A complete list of the undergraduate lectures and fragments that are not published here is included at the end of the section. Those chosen for publication are listed in the tables of contents for each course. We have selected some of the lectures and excerpts for their interest and merit, and others for their possible historical and biographical inter-

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est. They illustrate some elements of Grant’s curriculum and his approach to teaching at the time he was writing Lament for a Nation and the essays later published as Technology and Empire. He was reading Ellul, Nietzsche, Voegelin, Heidegger, and Weil, while deepening his understanding of Plato and Christianity. The selection should not be considered representative of Grant’s whole curriculum; very few graduate lectures from the 1960s have survived, for example, and some undergraduate courses are poorly represented. Professor Paul Clifford founded the Department of Religion in 1959, two years before he hired Grant in 1961. The department grew rapidly in response to a very strong demand from students in the early 1960s. Grant found students were open to ‘fundamental religious questions’ and to his unusual approach to philosophy and religion. He continued to teach Plato as he had done at Dalhousie, adding now a more thorough exploration of myth and the Greek religion. He welcomed what he saw as the freedom to teach as a Platonist and to teach Christianity as a believer. As he put it, he was able to teach ‘from inside’ these traditions, in contrast to the scholarly or ‘objective’ examination of religious phenomena ‘from outside.’ He explained, of course, to his students that he respected their right to their own beliefs, and he encouraged them to think for themselves. He did not expect them to conform to his views in order to obtain good grades. Arthur Davis

GRADUATE LECTURES Table of Contents 1. Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1969 2. A Lecture on Nietzsche, 1969 3. Modern Technology and Religion, 1970 Thus Spake Zarathustra (1969) Grant delivered the Massey Lectures on Nietzsche in 1969. They were published later by the CBC as Time as History. This graduate seminar from the course ‘Nietzsche: His Account of Religion’ was held during the period when Grant’s engagement with Nietzsche was at its uppermost point.

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Generally I like to keep on the surface in classes and to hide myself and other people – not only to hide my ignorance, but also yours. And also most people need mediators between each other – except for very rare occasions. Even the body can be a mediator. The surface is a mediator. But it is not possible with this book. Here is the authentic statement of modernity, towering like a mountain peak above all other statements. Not only an incredibly deep statement – so that we need all that we are to begin to penetrate it – but extraordinarily laid before us ‘en pleine conscience de cause’ – in all its extremity – an abysmal statement. Reading it last night and this morning, it came to me as never before what is meant by the title of the book, Beyond Good and Evil. Let me say that we need all the greatest of the past to understand it. For example, it comes to me in reading a passage – a remembrance of 15 years ago when I used to read Plato’s most difficult writings – that Plato in the Sophist said that the philosophers were the dogs and the sophists were the wolves, and here Nietzsche quite openly reverses this – the old thinkers who are no good are the dogs, Zarathustra is a wolf. But beyond this, and in as much as there is for me a height beyond Plato – as there indeed is – to read this section one must go beyond that height – for in the section ‘On Redemption’ is found the staggering fact – the only place I know in writing – the deepest attack on Gethsemane and Golgotha.1 Obviously one rarely wants to speak of these events by which all other events are judged (though let me say in parenthesis that I do not think that the existing Western account of what happened there is a sufficient account) – one rarely wants to speak, not only because it has been spoken about too often, too badly, but because what is there is there; and one does well to remember what the greatest Western account of the matter [Bach’s St Matthew Passion] does at that point; the contralto simply says: ‘see – look – rest.’ But clearly before the passage in ‘On Redemption’ one cannot rest in this silence because of Nietzsche’s amazingly presented denial of the truth which is there presented. We have therefore no alternative but to turn away from the surface – although I am very loath to do so. [Text breaks off.] One other caveat before [a student] introduces the class to Book II. I have insisted that if we are to understand Plato’s writings we must

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understand the form which the writing took. If we are to understand the Gospels, we must understand their form – something terribly lost in modern scholarship whether about Plato or Christ. Now to speak vulgarly[?] – I do not mean by this that the medium is the message.2 What matters finally is the truth. But so equally with Nietzsche – as last time we talked of a very difficult aspect of the message – indeed that the word ‘cause’ is an inadequate word for will – indeed an abysmal doctrine – but we must all the time refer to the form of this extraordinary writing. I am therefore very glad that Book II will be introduced by [student] who has great sensitivity and has given much thought to those difficult matters. [Pages 6,7, and 8 of the notebook: fragmentary questions about student papers and their positions on Nietzsche.] In response to [student’s paper] I spoke, as it were, in two parts. (1) As against Western Christianity I tried to say what it seems to me Christianity is. (2) As against Nietzsche’s doctrine I tried to say what it appeared to me – so terrible that a doctrine of redemption should be achieved by putting us beyond good and evil – how in trying to seek reconciliation, which all men seek, Nietzsche claims in the section on redemption to have achieved it – or to be on the way to achieving it – but it is achieved by what is to me the atrocious price of saying men must pass beyond good and evil. To put these two together just let me say that they are connected for me in the following way. It appears to me that it is just Western Christianity with its accounts of individuality, freedom, and the will which lead straight to Nietzsche’s formulation of the question. To put the matter this way once again: Nietzsche does not seem to me anti-Christian, but his formulations seem to come out of Western Christianity. Therefore in rejecting Nietzsche’s abysmal rejection of the limits of good and evil, I am in some sense taking the prodigious and to some unconscionable step of questioning Western Christianity. Let me put it this way: Fellini and the Satyricon: ‘the Christian myth over – we are waiting for another.’ (Let me say for those of you interested in films, there is the best review of a film I have ever read by Moravia of Fellini, in the current New York Review of Books.)3 My response to Fellini’s statement is:

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(a) Christianity is not a myth. It is the way things are. (b) Fellini is right in saying that Western Christianity is over. The consequence of saying these two is clear. But [two students] asked me how I used the language of good – that is, how I thought the thought that man qua man lives within the limit of good and evil. Now there are many ways in our tradition of formulating that language – one could say the formulations that come from Plato and those that are from Aristotle, and a variety of manifestations of these as they are blended with Judaism and Christianity. I would call Kant’s great formulation one of the latter. Now to say that there are many formulations is not to say that all are equally true; for example, this year it has become very clear to me why I think Aristotle’s formulation of the language of good is quite inadequate as compared with that found in the dialogues of Plato. That is why Aristotle’s criticism of Plato fails at the core. Now it would take many books to elucidate (1) why I think the language of good and evil is a limit within which men live, and (2) to sort out the various and numerous ways of using the language of good and evil ... I cannot do this here in this short space. There is, however, one writer, as I have said, who expresses with incomparable clarity the position I hold. Indeed I would never have reached that position without her as my teacher. Therefore I thought I would answer the questions by giving you references to where in her work you may find what is to me the true way of using the language of good and evil. Let me also say something else as preliminary, and certainly this is the most intimate thing I have ever said in a classroom. I am very loath to state these references for the following reason. What is said in these books seems to me the truth. That is, when the chips are down, this is what I think about what is, and no criticism of it has ever convinced me. Yet at the same time it is not something I am able to live by. That is, I obviously do not think it is true in the sense of truth in Plato, in which desire and reason must be one. That is, for ten years I have been in the very horrible position of thinking this position to be true and yet turning away from it. Why do I make this rather egocentric remark? Because the following is true: ‘Human nature is so constituted that any desire of the soul in so far as it has not passed through the flesh by means of actions and atti-

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tudes which correspond to it, has no reality in the soul. It is only there as a phantom.’4 That is, the supreme truth of Christianity – the Incarnation – everything divine has to come to us by passing through our flesh. That is, this doctrine, which I think to be true, I do not consent to it, because I do not consent to it passing through my flesh. Therefore there is something very strange in my passing this doctrine on to you as true, when I do not consent to it in desire. Indeed, there is one saying in the Bible which is indubitable: ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’5 (And I make bloody well certain that I do not.) It is because of this situation that I am always extremely loath to say what I think. Nevertheless, herewith are these references, the very core of her thinking. (French and English – Lots in the library.) [Pages 13 and 14 in notebook: a detailed bibliography of Simone Weil’s writings in the original French editions.] [Pages 15, 16, and 17 in notebook: fragmentary questions on Nietzsche’s text.] ... There is a danger in discussing a particular teaching, as if one could abstract it from the way it is presented. As in works of art it is a foolish doctrine to distinguish form from content. It is also in philosophy – though of course in art the union of the universal and the particular which is the beautiful makes it impossible to pull it apart – in philosophy [it is] easier. Yet in the very form of philosophic teaching at its highest in such thinkers as Plato and Nietzsche – the form may be saying something essential to the teaching. The dialogues – and beyond the dialogue form in general the particular circumstances of each dialogue. Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus [for example]. So equally with Zarathustra. Why was this written in this form and what does each particular word and groups of words mean? Of course absence of linguistic training hinders. If anybody has anything he wants to say of this later – let him say it. Of course one thing that is clear is that the form has something to do with the fact that this book, to use Christ’s words, is a Way and a Life as well as a Truth (whatever any these words may mean to Nietzsche).

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Let me use my own language to describe what I mean by a teaching being a Way as well as a Truth. For example, if one looks at Aristotle in a certain way, one can see that in his ethical teaching the hierarchy of goods proceed from the hierarchy of being ... From that a certain kind of rationalism can result – let us know what is and then we can know what is worth desiring. The Way and the Life proceed directly from the Truth. [Student] [talked about this] at the beginning of the class. Now Nietzsche does not follow this, not only because of his modernity. Not only, that is, because he proclaims the end of the era of rationalism – not only because modern reason has shown us that there is no hierarchy, indeed shows us that it is itself an instance of will. This indeed shows us the very ambiguity of the language of To Be. He scorns[?] it not only, it seems to me, because he believes that he must talk of the fight[?] for man in a chaotic sense. He must talk of the fight for man when man is understood as a totally temporal being. But also because he is aware of that in the tradition (and this is above all exemplified in Plato) which has always seen the very ambiguity of the relation of desire and reason in human beings. (Let me say two things in parenthesis: [a] I find this extremely hard to say clearly, and [b] I want to say it quite free from all existentialist language because what I am saying is not existentialist – yet can easily be confused with it.) Let me put this then, rather, in the form of a question. Why has it been thought in the tradition that what we know is dependent on what we desire – though obviously on the other hand what we desire can be determined also by what we know? I will say a lot about that but it could only be preliminary because I have not altogether thought out the question. It certainly turns at its heart on the central belief of asserting something which we might call intellectual desire. We all know that in the modern world this doctrine [is] very hard to think – the falling apart of reason and desire. On the one hand in our society reason as techne builds an ordered world without spontaneity. On the other hand the extreme outbreaks of irrational spontaneity – the theatre etc – the two held apart. But leaving that question aside let me just say that the very greatest documents of the Western world are always statements of therapy as well as of cosmology – the two held together. And this is certainly

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what this document intends to be and this may have something to do with its form. [Pages 21, 22, and 23 in the notebook: fragmented questions mostly responding to Nietzsche’s text.] A Lecture on Nietzsche A lecture for the same graduate seminar, it was given before the published version of Time as History was available. Students had access to typed pages of the radio talks.

Now what do I mean? (What I mean is said indirectly in these lectures [Time as History], but let me repeat.) Leaving aside in general the relation of reason and revelation, and excluding in particular a popular modern solution – the Barthian – let me say broadly that the tradition was right in saying that we could not do theology without metaphysics. Now what Nietzsche says relentlessly and at its simplest is that reason tells us we must be atheists – the very reason that was brought to its first and clearest point exactly by Christianity (and its nature of intellectual probity) has shown us that any honest man must be an atheist. And I think Nietzsche speaks the truth when he says this. Truths are provisional. It identifies reason with modern reason. If you do that, then I think what he says is true. I do not do that. Let me draw three inferences from this: (1) All the efforts to believe in theology on the basis of the modern accounts of reason fail – because they do not come to grips with what Nietzsche says. I include [in] that, modern Catholic and Protestant attempts, Whitehead, etc. Reason in the deepest modern account of it teaches us to be atheists. Therefore, if for what ever causes we reject that, we must seek another account of reason than the modern. Let me say that this is the fundamental thing I have learned from my long study of Leo Strauss. (2) To say this is to say nothing about Nietzsche as a religious man. I am talking about theology (in the Western sense of that word) and about theism and atheism – not about possible religious elements in

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Nietzsche or ... Christian understanding in Nietzsche – I speak about theism and theology. (3) To speak of another tradition of reason other than the modern is to speak of classical philosophy. And in so speaking it would be quite false to imply that the classical account of reason must lead to theism – obviously Aristotle was no theist. What Plato was is too deep and too dark and much more important than Aristotle – but I could not discuss that here. All I want to say is that Nietzsche seems to me the height of modern reason and he sees it as unequivocally atheist and that I do not believe any post-Nietzschean thinker has surmounted him. Those who have tried to unite modern reason with theism have done so generally just by disregarding Nietzsche – particularly the English-speaking tradition. They have done it by falling back on faith in liberalism. But the English-speaking world can no longer ... in that faith. It’s totally muddled with contradictions. What I meant by ‘it’s a disgrace to call America a wasteland’ is not that it is not – that is a matter for debate – but it is a disgrace for a man who was for even a short while a member of the National Socialist party to call something else a wasteland – he better be paying attention to his own country. Modern Technology and Religion (1970) A lecture given to a graduate seminar in a course called ‘The Relations between the Western Religious Tradition and Technology’ (‘Religion 775’). Grant relied on Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger to articulate the essential features of the technological society or technique. His question was about what technology is and what has happened to the good in its wake. Grant taught the course first in 1967–8. During the course, the class worked on a translation of Heidegger’s essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology.’6

General Remarks Techne7 – a general subject around which to see where we are – but don’t be disturbed; learn at your own pace. I am aware above all what an extraordinary, difficult thing it is to know what is going on in the

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modern world. I am also aware all the time that many people who are trained in the theological or philosophical traditions just do not know what is going on in the modern world – so that their thought is far from able to grasp what is with the claims they make about being. On the other hand, many people teaching in modern social science have no knowledge of what riches there are in what was thought, theologically and philosophically, before the age of progress. For example, David Easton – who he is – nobody there from the department of religion but myself – on the other hand what he said – a justification of Weber’s view of rationality as if it were great.8 Learning – [one] must do it at one’s own pace, must do it one’s own way. I can point out places to learn, which may be helpful, [or] may not. Some may help some – not others. For example, a discussion of Ellul’s theology may help some – not others.9 The great thing about learning is to keep one’s proper independence and yet not stop listening to the other –sometime[s] [a] waste, sometime[s] not. I want to say now, as clearly as I can, why, in a department of religion, I am insisting on your looking at Weber and Marx with such intensity and why I insist on them. It is not that Weber is a sociologist of religion. It is not only that Marxism is the way, the most influential way, that Western civilization has exerted its ideological influence on the East. Let me say about that, that Dr Arapura tells me that some Eastern people admire Marxism because it appears an attack on Western Christianity in its materialism.10 But that is a very shallow view. Marxism is at its centre, Biblical religion ... Marxism and Hegelianism from one side are the very core of secularised Christianity – as Weber’s positivism is from another. And this leads me to the heart of what I want to say. I teach and write about techne because in doing so it seems to me one can go to the heart of what we are as modern North Americans. Technique is not something external to us – it is not what Ellul says it is alone – it is ourselves – the will to dynamism among Western men and the sudden check to that dynamism as some see the catastrophes of that will.11 But let me say that one cannot know that, unless one really comes face to face with it. If one, rather, simply accepts that dynamism as given – as liberals do – or if one simply turns away from that dynamism into some supposedly religious ghetto, in either case one will

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simply not know that modern dynamism and thereby be possessed by it either in acceptance or equally in rejection. And to know what it is we must look at these thinkers who in thinking what it was within the modern assumptions of what it was, not only helped to bring it to be, but helped to bring it to be by saying what it was and I think Weber and Marx are two of such thinkers in other words. Modernity is too enormous a human experience which has brought into the light certain human potentialities which were hidden. It is too enormous to respond to it either in any easy acceptance or rejection but above all in understanding. Let me also say that when I said that these last few classes (Ellul’s theology, Marcuse, Teilhard, and Lévi-Strauss)12 were to talk of the ways in which people could live with technology, I myself was essentially interested in seeing through what they said about that to the deeper question what technique is. That is the essential question to me, not the other. The trouble about asking the question How does one live with technique? is that in asking that question one sees technique as something external to us – ‘means out there’ – but that is just exactly how not to see it. That is exactly how to be so unaware of it that one is it. ... ... Now why a course on technique in a religion department? On technique, clear – philosophy comes from the suffering of astonishment. What an astonishment my life-time has been – technique the chief source of that astonishment. Therefore obvious to try and think what it is. But why in a religion department? Now one can start from where I started, namely the two facts: (1) a Western creation, (2) the centre of the West a particular form of religion. Biblical religion in its rejection of Christianity. And we have discussed at various points historically what is the relation in the influence of coming to be of modernity of the two forms of the West, revelation and philosophy. On the one hand we have seen, if anybody has seen anything, that for modern technique to come to be, there had to be a change in how men conceived reason from the ancient conception of reason one finds in Plato and Aristotle to that relation one finds in Kant and Hegel. At all levels – mathematical reason, political reason, aesthetic reason, etc. Why I single out the philosophers is that in them the attempt is made by the greatest – that is, men such as Plato and Kant – to think reason in all its manifestations.

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Now if that were simply the case we could say that the centre of the question of technique is to see the difference between ancient philosophy and science and modern philosophy and science. But we come then to the obvious question, what was the great event between these two Western accounts of reason? It was the coming of Christianity into the West. And we have to ask what was the relation of that to this change in the conception of reason. And as we face what the modern philosophers were saying – I think we can say that one sees in them a kind of secularised Christianity – not entirely but at many points. Locke and J.S. Mill, Hegel, even indeed Nietzsche, Heidegger. And as we look at the ideologies that come out of them, three great Western ideologies which interlock: (a) communism, (b) English-speaking liberalism, (c) national socialism.13 In parenthesis let me say again clearly what I mean by ideology – as distinct from philosophy or religion. Modernity came to believe two propositions: (a) philosophy could not only do its traditional job, but also what religion did; (b) philosophy and science open to all men. Put these together and you get that modern phenomena – ideology. They are related to great philosophies – examples – but in their popular forms. Communism and liberalism very much secular Christianity as ideologies. And even in a more indirect way certain sides of national socialism. And in the core of these ideologies you see technique and reliance on technique as at the centre – the will to will. But at a deeper level than this a course on technique is central to a department of religion for the following reason. As I have written elsewhere, the great mistake in looking at technique is to think of it as something external to us.14 Something we can choose to use for good or ill. It is ourselves in a very deep sense. It is the will to will. Now when I use the word ‘religion’ (a poor modern word), I mean ‘reverence.’ A department of religion in my opinion should be concerned with what men at all times and places have reverenced, have looked up to. Now the question therefore is, if the height for man is the will to will, does this deny the possibility of reverence? Now if the height for man is the will to will – if what he looks up to is that – can we call this reverence – or is its relation to reverence analogically the relation between the act of love between two people and masturbation? Let me say a word about this in relation to this department. More

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than any other person, I am responsible, whether for good or ill, that there is in McMaster, a great secular university, a department of religion, in a way there are not at other Canadian universities – very deeply. And the question is very much on my mind whether it is possible to be successful really in having a department of religion in a great modern secular university – or whether it does not go against the very grain of modern secular academia. One is allowed scholarship – but not the question which is surely the central question of any real department of religion: ‘What is worthy of reverence?’ because what is perhaps central to modern technique is the destruction of reverence. Therefore is it an impossible task to have a department of religion in a modern university? I do not know. Now to return to this course, let me say there have been three central questions this year: (a) what is modern technique? (b) what are its historical origins? And (c) how should we live amongst[?] it? Let me also say that none of the writing we have read this year satisfies me as to ‘what is technique’ or the other questions – though they are all ultimately related. I think the clearest writing on ‘what is technique’ is the Heidegger writing – particularly the passage from where he uses the word Gestell to the passage about Heisenberg.15 And let me say that the passage about Heisenberg is closely related to what Strauss says in the three waves of modernity and in his other writings.16 But let me say that Heidegger’s writing is not satisfactory to me for one clear reason. He has not written, except in speeches which he now repudiates by not including them in the official list of his writing, about the relation of thought to politics. Now let me say that I use the word ‘politics’ not here in the Greek sense but as a synonym for morals. That is, he has not thought in my language the relation of thought to practical reason. Now I do not mean by this that he cannot answer the third question – but that this failure means that he cannot think sufficiently the first question. Now this is where I think Ellul comes in. I do not think Ellul has thought certain things as deeply as Heidegger, but I think he has thought politics much more deeply – what is the nature of practical life? And I do not mean by this that he can think question three better than Heidegger – though that is so – but rather that he can think what is technique in certain ways more deeply than Heidegger.

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But where Ellul fails in my opinion is the following: at a deeper level, he is not able in my opinion to relate in any possible fashion, in any relation, what is given him from revelation and its relation to thought, [to] his thinking. It is at that theoretical level that in my opinion he fails and the chief consequence of that, as far as I am concerned, is not that he fails to be able to say what thinking is – but because this relation is inadequately expressed. What he receives from revelation is in my opinion not what is given in revelation. And I have chosen my words very carefully. But to say this is not to say that he has not thought the practical realm with consummate greatness. Isaiah Berlin used to say – let us attempt to put the matter more obscurely.17 Ellul in my opinion can think the good and freedom very clearly – he cannot think the necessary, or necessity, sufficiently clearly. Now the second question, historical origins. There we have many complex interwoven themes. I have learnt a lot from many people. Strauss and Klein expound the philosophical and linguistic roots of modernity brilliantly.18 I think there is also much to be learnt from Weber, Foster, Troeltsch, etc.19 I think where we failed this year (and it was my failure) was in two main ways: (a) we did not turn back sufficiently to these roots from before the Reformation. I have quoted in Technology and Empire, and this was not simply a theoretical change.20 I would relate this to such questions as the Investiture Controversy in politics.21 And we should have turned to the theoretical and practical questions of what is vulgarly called the Middle Ages and what came to be there about the nature of reason which was radically different from ancient reason. What were the previous amazing steps in medieval thought out of which such masters as Galileo and Machiavelli came? This is extremely difficult because in the popular ideology of our day both Galileo and Machiavelli seem to be arguing against the Church. But the point is that more essentially they were arguing against Aristotle and that had implicitly been already done both practically and theoretically in the Middle Ages. (b) The second failure: we did not look at Marx and Freud with sufficient clarity. Difficult because it has become an ideology in both cases. But they are both the great public attackers of the rationalist tradition – and we should have seen them more deeply. Nietzsche is a greater thinker than either and a greater attacker of the tradition of rational-

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ism. But they are the great popularisers of anti-rationalism and we should have looked at them more clearly. Last point – I want to make the best thought I have ever had about technique shortly. I start from the assumption that the height for man is what in Latin is called amor fati. I do not mean this as Nietzsche thought it because Nietzsche is thinking it along with the finality of becoming – only I clearly do not.22 Amor fati is for me that which forms together – philosophy and revelation. If you are interested in what I mean by this, I will say it in what I say on Thursday when I speak in public about Simone Weil23 ... This is where I end because I cannot think beyond it.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 1a6 Grant shared responsibilities with Professor Clifford and Professor John Mayer from philosophy for the introductory religious studies course, which often included a rather large number of students (200–400). The calendar for 1962–3 described the course as ‘an introduction to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, its meeting with Greek thought, and the philosophical questions that have arisen against the background of the Enlightenment to the present day.’ Grant was asked to teach Plato and Christianity. The designation ‘Philosophy and Religion’ locates these lectures in the early 1960s since the course was renamed ‘World Religions 1a6’ in 1967 and described as ‘an introduction to the study of religions through an examination of selected religious traditions, such as Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, other types of religious phenomena, and the modern theories and criticisms of religion.’

Table of Contents 1. Plato and Greek Civilization 2. On the Universals or Forms Plato and Greek Civilization I said last day that in the thought of Plato, the meaning of Greek civilization is most completely aware of itself – that in the thought of Plato

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we see what Greek civilization at its height – thought of the nature and destiny of man. And because this is so you will be able to look at Greek civilization through this one book we are going to study, the Republic, and from it try and grasp the heart of Greek religion and philosophy. Now to do this one must talk today of the history of Greek civilization up to Plato and the way I am going to talk of this is to try and look at the questions of Greek history through the eyes of Plato and try to show what he thought the meaning of that history to have been. And I am going to do this by asking the question What were the difficulties in Greek civilization for which Plato is looking for an answer in the Republic? Books are written for specific purposes and this book and his other writings are written to find solutions to certain problems which had arisen in Greek civilization. The owl of Minerva only takes its flight at twilight.24 Therefore in describing these problems one can both (a) begin to understand the Republic and (b) see what was the meaning of Greek history. Now there were three essential crises which were indubitably present and I want to talk of each of these three and then of the relation between the three. The three crises are: a religious one, a political or moral one, and a scientific one. (a) The religious crisis. It is essentially this. The traditional mythical religion of the Greeks no longer holds its sway over the minds of educated men and Plato recognises the truth of this. Yet he recognises that men are essentially religious and that therefore it is necessary to see what is the essential truth of religion. Some Greeks – [threw out] the baby with the bath water. Plato is much more serious[?] than this – he wants to state what is the essential truth of that religion. Now to understand this crisis it is necessary to discuss two things. (1) what was the traditional mythical religion of Greek society? and (2) why did it no longer hold the minds of educated men in Plato’s day? (1) Greek religion. Now the study of Greek religion is a very full lifetime study and a very complicated business. I am only going to speak about it generally. What is myth? When I say Greek religion is mythical what do I mean? What I mean by myth is the following. An immediate experience of existence in its totality – which reveals to man his own

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mode of being in the world. Add new definition – cause and principle. [See ‘Principles’ lecture.]25 I have given you that definition of myth so that you will have some idea of what it means – because the discussion of myth is one of the central ideas of modern thought – 20th century thought [out of] the 19th century – the myths of the 19th century – communism a great myth [for example]. Now of course it is impossible to describe the vast variety and forms of Greek religion. It is a whole study in itself. But one finds it at its fullest and most remarkable in the poetry of Homer – and particularly the Iliad – it is always strange to me that in many ways the greatest poem of Western history stands at its origin. Let me illustrate what I mean by the mythical in the Iliad. Paris has stolen Helen from Menelaos. And in the battle for Troy, Hera, the goddess of family and social order, is ranged against the Trojans for the Greeks – Aphrodite or Venus – the goddess of love is for Paris. The great neutral force of sexual love in all its numinous power is ranged against the social force of family order – and these numinous forces are apprehended directly. The chthonic order or the sacred was apprehended directly. And of course this mythical consciousness was in the Greeks of a very high order. Now of course in all religions there are very high and low manifestations of the same religion. In all religion one must distinguish between the popular piety – which always tends toward superstition and idolatry – and the reflective piety – which at its highest seeks union with the very being of God. Now in Greek religion there is a very great deal of both – but one must not judge it simply by the lower. Essence of the religion – (i) yearning for perfection, (ii) desolation of man here below. Let us look at the achievements of this mythical religion. For let us recognise that the achievements of Greek civilization are the achievements of this religion and only of this. In this mythical religion – all activity is religious – therefore we can judge the power of the religion by its achievements. Let me mention two. (Perfection realised – speak of) (A) Communities of law – gradually developed – that their society should be ruled by just law – a law conforming to the divine order. These gradually developed in Greece out of this mythical religion – a very high [?]ality of justice and nobility.

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(B) Art. It is not my business here to give you an account of art in Greece – but this is surely true that the sheer beauty of the Greek world has never been surpassed – Acropolis – the abstract building. Venus – the human body divinized. And for a mythical people all art was religious – the drama – and a very high level as it [?] – we learn by suffering in Aeschylus. This also in the Iliad (Simone Weil)26 – what is most amazing in that poem is its complete equity – it does not take sides – the terrible suffering of the war and the anguish of human life is seen from tenderness of both sides – the rule of force and right over the beautiful is described. I have for instance always had the idea that the Trojan war in which the early Greeks destroyed a higher civilization – out of this experience – much of their tremendous sense of justice appeared. Now I could talk for a whole year about the greatness of Greek religion in its early and mythical form – but I must pass on to the second question – why could it no longer hold the minds of educated men in Plato’s day? And there is of course one general answer to that question – the mythical apprehension of reality in its immediate hold over our minds is always and inevitably challenged by thought – that is, when men come to the exercise of their reasons, they start to criticize their immediate or mythical apprehension of reality. When man develops critical judgment and technical skill, man can no longer apprehend the forces of the universe as direct experience, he begins to relate himself to reality differently – to examine it in a new way – in what we would call a philosophical, scientific-critical way – (the word ‘criticism’) logos – mythos. Hitherto reality is a direct experience given in the great immediate ways which we call myth – now man begins to detach himself from this immediacy and to be able to study in thought not only his environment – that is, what is external to himself – but himself. He becomes aware of the coherence of cause and effect, whole and part, means and end. He sees himself no longer as simply involved in a play of natural and divine powers, which are related to ceremonial and magical rites, but he sees things around him as natural objects which he can understand and use – and he sees his own life as something that he can begin to understand by thinking about it. This change from mythical to rational consciousness is like the change from being a child to an adult. Ontogeny recapitulates phylog-

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eny. Thought you see is the dawning of self-consciousness – Pascal and [the] thinking reed.27 Now why the Greeks and the Jews are the two great peoples of the West is that they are the two peoples who broke with the mythical civilizations – Israel broke through its capacity for revelation – the Greeks by systematic thought or what we call philosophia. You will find in Cornford’s Before and After Socrates some short accounts of the dawn of philosophy and science in Greece and I will speak more of them when I come on to the second crisis of Greek civilization – the crisis of science. But let me say about it in relation to the crisis in mythical religion this. When the criticism of thought first comes for a society or indeed for a man, its first result is largely destructive – for when it first arises – thought simply destroys all that it touches. And in 5th century Greece this was the immediate result. Thought simply tore in and cut to ribbons the traditional religion, the morality – the whole way of life of the Greeks. Now this did not happen among all men – but among the educated classes and what happens first among educated classes eventually affects all. This was characterized by a group of philosophers called the Sophists (you can read about them in Cornford p. 38 et seq). You will find examples of them in the Republic. The greatest of them was Protagoras. His ideas are summed up in certain phrases. ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ – challenge to the old religion. (I think it was Xenophanes who said if dogs and horses could make gods they would be made as dogs and horses.) ‘Pleasure is the good’ – attack on the old morality of justice ... That is, the Sophists were thought in its destructive or negative moment – and particularly destructive of the traditional religion. Now Socrates and Plato come into the crisis of the destruction of that first wave of critical thought – in its intense form. And they saw that their attitude to it could not be simple – either simple acceptance or rejection. They were both thinkers of the highest order – thought was a divine activity – the pursuit of truth was the centre of existence. Therefore they could not be simple reactionaries who turned their backs on thought and tried to recreate the world of pre-thought or the mythical. This was a nonsensical idea for them. Socrates [was] put to death for impiety.

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On the other hand, the sheer negativity and criticism of thought was for them not enough. Thought had to pass from being merely destructive to be able to say what was the truth of life. And both Plato and Socrates recognised that in the old religion great truths had been incorporated. Truths that were necessary to the fullest form of life. Socrates [is] always shown as a figure deeply in worship. That is, Socrates and Plato were in a position where they had to reach a view of the universe that would include all the truth of the traditional religion – but which would be thought rationally. This is the religious crisis out of which the Republic arises religiously. On the Universals or Forms Grant attempts to make Plato’s case for the truth of ‘forms’ or, as Grant prefers, ‘universals.’

Plato starts from the belief there is such a thing as knowledge and wants to know what it is. It is difficult to see how man cannot start from that proposition ‘there is knowledge’ because if one starts from the opposite ‘there is no knowledge’ one is asserting ‘I know that I cannot know’ but to assert that is itself knowledge. A complete scepticism is silence. As soon as one speaks, one is asserting something. And inevitably the question arises ‘what is knowledge?’ When I say I know something to be true, what do I mean? This is Plato’s question. Difficulty – knowledge about knowledge Now I want to look at certain of the propositions from which Plato says, and from which he reaches the view, that knowledge is knowledge of what he calls universals or forms. Point 1. Let us start from the distinction between universal and particular. We speak of whatever is given in sensation, that is, through our senses, as a particular. In opposition to this, a universal will be anything which may be shared by many particulars. E.g. whiteness – the word will be applicable to a number of particular things. Or justice – the word will be applicable to very different acts, or beautiful to very different objects – Rembrandt etching, Mozart sonata, Chartres cathedral. When we examine words, we find that nearly all words other than proper names stand for universals. No sentence can be made up with-

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out at least one word which denotes a universal. The nearest approach would be some such statement as ‘I like this’ – ‘like’ [is] a universal. The question is then: what are universals? And this is one of the questions Plato is concerned with. Point 2. Plato believes that the objects of sense perception have certain characteristics which render it impossible that they should be objects of knowledge. Thaetetus. Now I have already spoken in an earlier lecture of how the surest and clearest of the sciences – mathematics – cannot be said to be about the world of the senses – points, lines etc. The central point Plato is here making is that sensible objects are changeable and yet knowledge is not changeable – therefore knowledge is not about changeable objects. It is clear for instance that in practice we do not [?], when we do perceive something by the senses, take that as any proof of its reality. For in dreams and hallucinations we have an experience of perceiving things which is entirely indistinguishable, as far as the experience goes, from perceiving what we call real objects. Yet we dismiss everything that we perceive under these circumstances as unreal. But in accepting some and rejecting the rest of what we perceive we must have some principles of selection. The objects of sense are always changing. They are indeterminate and indefinite – they are not the objects of knowledge. To repeat he has known from his study of mathematics that the objects of mathematics are not sensible objects (that is, objects given to sense) and yet mathematics is the clearest and most determinate knowledge. That is the point I have been making – that sensible objects are not fully real – because they are not entirely intelligible. Point 3. Plato is interested in reaching the same certainty about moral and aesthetic questions. That is, questions about what is good, and questions about what is beautiful. We say that this is beautiful or that is beautiful. But how can we make the judgment that this is beautiful or that is beautiful unless we know what beauty is? So with justice – also the same argument. What beauty and justice are universally and not simply in this particular case, is the universal – beauty or justice. From these kinds of points Plato draws the conclusion that what is real, what is the object of knowledge, is the universal. Now here I must raise a question of terminology. These objects which are most real – Plato sometimes calls these by the technical term ‘idea.’ But this is an unfortunate translation into English. For when we

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use the term ‘idea,’ it does not convey to us something which is real, as objectively real. We think of ideas as subjective – ‘it is just my idea.’ But this is exactly what Plato does not mean by ‘idea’ – He means that of which reality is made – that which is. Therefore for our modern English – the better word is ‘universal.’ Cornford uses the word ‘Forms’ – but I prefer universals. In this view what are particulars? Particulars are beings which partake of universals. An act is just insofar as it partakes of the universal justice. A statue is beautiful insofar as it partakes of universal beauty. A man is a man in that he partakes of manhood etc., etc. Now as this will probably seem a strange teaching, let me try to put it in another way. These universals are principles of order in our minds and in the world. Knowledge, Plato would say, is a relation between a knower and a known. It presupposes that the mind is intelligent and that the world is intelligible. But how is this possible? Because both the mind and the world partake of these universals. The universal is then that which makes the mind intelligent and the world intelligible. Let me put it another way. When a human being starts to think about the world and himself, he is confronted with a mass of unrelated particulars – that is, with plurality, many-ness, or disorder. And he achieves understanding insofar as he finds that what seemed disorder is really order – he brings things into unity. Now he first does this in particular spheres, in particular sciences – such as ethics, or biology, or law, or physics. And he does this by knowing what is universally true about these areas, e = mc2, for example, by knowing what is universally true of mass. The universals according to Plato are those entities which make possible that we can have knowledge of these spheres. They are principles of unity or intelligibility which make the sciences possible. They are those entities that make possible that what at first seemed disorder came finally to be known as order – that what first seemed mere plurality or many-ness really also manifests unity. Mozart – at one moment – eternity. That there is knowledge, Plato would say, is first the nature of our words to look for unity and the nature of things to exhibit unity. Let me put it simply in terms of what it is to define something. The definition of anything is the statement of what makes it that and not something else. E.g. A triangle is a three-sided rectilinear figure or wealth is that which has value in exchange. Now let us take the triangle. We go from the three-sided rectilinear

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figure to something wider, figure in general. Definition is always in terms of wider and wider universals. But the world is not made up simply of compartmentalised subjects, says Plato. Each aspect of what is, is part of a wider whole. And this is what philosophy is to Plato, it is to seek what unity it can find, not in this department of being or that, but in the nature of things as a whole or in being as a whole. Therefore philosophy seeks to know that principle of unity upon which all depends; that is the highest object of knowledge. He describes this in Chapter XXIII [Republic] as that highest principle of unity or universal in terms of which all other universals are themselves known in unity, that is, in their proper order of subordination and superordination. The Good – the One. The ultimate unity Two arguments for it in essence (a) from theoretical reason – or from knowledge (b) from practical reason – or from morality from desire (a) I have already given the argument there is knowledge. It implies that the mind is intelligent and the world intelligible. How is this possible? It is possible because both the mind and the world proceed from the same principle, the Good. (b) As I said last day, reason is the ruler of the soul. It gives us the idea of happiness which [is] more than simply the quantity of pleasures. It gives us that idea of a highest good or summum bonum in which not this or that part of us will find satisfaction but in which the soul itself will find its completeness, a universal good in terms of which all particular goods can be judged. That object of all our desire is what he means by the Good. Dante28 A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa; ma già volgeva il mio disio e‘l velle, sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

Power failed high fantasy here; yet swift to move Even as a wheel moves equal, free from jars,

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Already my heart and will were wheeled by love, The Love that moves the sun and the other stars. Translation: Dorothy L. Sayers

MYTH AND REASON Grant originally called the ‘Myth and Reason’ course ‘Myth, History, and Reason’ (1963) and described it as ‘a discussion of the differing conceptions that Western men have had about the place of myth and reason in apprehension of reality and the influence of these differing approaches on what they have conceived human history to be.’ ‘History’ was dropped from the title in 1967 because the topic was too large for one course. The course was a fourth-year seminar (4k6) with some graduate students also attending (6k6). Grant taught it for five years. Important texts included Mircea Eliade’s Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, Fustel de Coulanges’s The Ancient City, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, along with Plato’s Phaedo, Phaedrus, Euthyphro, and Symposium and various texts on Greek religion and Platonic scholarship.

Table of Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

The Beautiful Itself Vietnam and the Study of Greek Religion and Philosophy Remarks before Studying the Phaedo Lecture on the Phaedo Apollo and Dionysius Myth and Art in the Modern World Orphism and the Pythagoreans Why Study Myth and Reason? – Second Lecture The Principles of Existence Given by Myth Socrates as a Religious Man Euthyphro – Socrates on the Myths and the Gods

The Beautiful Itself A lecture given as part of the study of the Symposium in the ‘Myth and Reason’ course.

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(1) [I] was stupidly ironic. (2) [My] reason for being so – in the barren twilight no phony certainties – nothing about which I do not know. Nor to speak easily about the greatest. (3) But I cannot leave it there. Therefore I am going to speak about the beautiful itself. What is so difficult are the two following points: (1) This which is there – which suddenly dawns to consciousness, comes to consciousness – what is it? It is not of this world. Whatever it is, it is not something which is the same as the beautiful things or creatures of this world. It is universal beauty. Yet it is – in the sense that though it appears to our consciousness it is not our consciousness. Indeed if we relate what is said here to what is said in the Republic – it is the cause of the possibility of our consciousness.29 In that sense it is in a much fuller way than we are. It is always. (2) This which is always is not something which we infer – but which is met. The language is the language of immediacy. In the Western world the proper word here is ‘mysticism’ – and please I want nobody in this class to use that word in a loose sense. What is meant by mysticism – this and nothing else – is the immediate appearance of the eternal to human beings. ‘Immediate’ a negative word – not through a mediator. To me this table appears immediately. On the other hand to me the being of God is mediated through inference. Or again the fact that constitutional government is preferable to tyrannical government is not known immediately but through inference – the proper influences of political philosophy. Now as this second [point] is to me the source of my great unwillingness to talk of this passage, I want to emphasize this – the Beautiful itself is talked of here as dawning immediately to consciousness with complete certainty. It is not talked of as something we infer – as, for example, in my own case, the arguments for God’s being are arguments from which I infer that God is. We go from human activities to infer the good of those activities – God. No, here, to the philosopher, the eternal beautiful appears directly. To put it this way, the immediacy of sense and the mediacy of argument or inference or logos here becomes one. What is described here is our overcoming of that distinction. Now this second reason is why I

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am so unwilling to speak of this – because it has not occurred for me. I am not saying that intimations of what such an occurrence would be have not appeared, but the actual occurrence has not.30 My reaching for the eternal is through the images of it which appear to me through justice and knowledge and beauty – but only as images – the same kind of images that in this passage of the Symposium Plato says are preparations – necessary preparations – but what they are according to Plato preparations for – has not occurred. Now the immediacy of this occurrence – mysticism – and the possibility of its being phony or manipulated is why official Western Christianity has been so hesitant and suspicious, why it has adopted Aristotle more officially than Plato; and why one is very hesitant to speak of it. Best example – Simone Weil. George Herbert’s poem – Christ came down and possessed my soul.31 [Text breaks off.] Now I want to say first two things of why we as moderns are so suspicious of what is said here in the Symposium. There are many reasons but I think those two take us to the heart of the matter. (1) To be, in the highest sense, for most modern men, is to exist, that is, to be, in the manner in which man is – that is, to be, in the highest sense, is to be subject to mortality. Yet here it is unequivocally said that to be, in the highest sense, is to be always – to be, not subject to time or change or death. In this passage this is unequivocally asserted; the Beautiful Itself is a form of what is, which is, always. This is not the way modern men think about what is. It is not by accident that the contemporary thinker [Heidegger] who is to me the best thinker should have as his most famous book – the subject Being and Time. (2) But there is a second reason for this suspicion which goes deeper and which is put best by the great thinker of the modern world, Nietzsche, ([a] contemporary modern [is] Heidegger) and which comes to most of us through Freud’s influence. It is this: that the condition of the highest human excellence is that human beings remain in their being fully loyal to the earth. That is, that the condition of the highest human excellence is that there is nothing beyond the world which is our first concern. Biblical faith in God or the ideas as the good

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of the world lead us to other-worldliness and asceticism which alienated men from this world and is only pursued as an art – and escape – because we are unwilling to face the terrifying and perplexing character of the world. Therefore we cushion ourselves from the terrifying world – by positing the Beautiful itself – beyond the world. But this turning from our life as it is in the world is an escape, and an escape which holds us from the highest human excellence. This is what Nietzsche means by Dionysius, this loyalty to the earth. [Text breaks off.] Now I have wanted to mention these two modern ways which turn us from looking at the Beautiful itself – because only as we look at these considerations face to face can we decide what is after all the only final reason for studying Plato – Is there the Beautiful Itself? [Text breaks off.] Now as I said last time, the ideas make their appearance in Plato’s writing always in relation to some subject – in the Republic in relation to politics – The Idea of the Good, the idea from which all the other ideas find their proper order of subordination and superordination – that which is the cause of our being, our knowing, our desiring. In Phaedo (next) the ideas appear in relation to death and in that austere[?] dialogue the prisoner leaps to lose his chains.32 But in Symposium they appear in the company of wine and celebration – they make their appearances in relation to eros. In parenthesis – let me say that is why those two dialogues must be seen together, the affirmation and denial which [are] both present in the way that Plato has laid down. A.H. Armstrong’s article puts this very simply but well.33 Indeed as I said last time the Idea of the Good is here called the Beautiful Itself just because the way here described is affirmative as well as negative. The beauty of the bodies of the laws and institutions, of the sciences is affirmed as well as negated. Indeed the very dialogue is of life itself in its setting and in its participants. Therefore, as the ideas make their appearance in relation to eros or desire, I am going to discuss them in relation to eros, very shortly.

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Let us look at the dialogue for a moment as the account of the perfection of eros, and say something about the ideas in relation to that. Let me do so by talking about those philosophers both ancient and modern who have denied that there is anything eternal which is loveable – those thinkers who in a rather loose sense can be characterised as materialists, and let us see what they say about eros. In the ancient world let us take Epicurus, who believed that the good of the world was the flight of the atoms in the void. For Epicurus, philosophy, which leads to that conclusion, also leads us to the conclusion that desire is the cause of our pain and that, therefore, philosophy leads us to hold ourselves aloof from eros. Philosophy acts against eros. There is no union between eros and philosophy – indeed there is no connection between them. Philosophy is not the perfection of eros but its denial. There is something eternal – the atoms and the void – but they are not loveable. It would be interesting to apply this to modern thought and its view of eros – but that would distract from this. Therefore I return to the ancient. In the Symposium it is clear that there is what is eternal and loveable – the Beautiful itself – or the Idea of the Good. Love and thought do not counteract each other – but are united in the vision of the Beautiful Itself. Love can be perfected – it can be led[?], that is, to its satisfaction which does not deny thought like the modern accounts of eros, nor does it have to be killed, as in Epicureanism, by thought. Or to put it the other way round, thought does not have to subdue eros or surrender to it – but perfects itself in the perfecting of eros. And by thought I do not mean simply what I would call theoretical reason but also practical reason – because the perfecting of eros requires the virtues of moderation, courage, justice if we are to become wise. Now in the Symposium and in this speech of Socrates it must be said that the affirmative is emphasised – we mount through the various forms of love to the perfecting of love in the vision of the Beautiful Itself. It may be that what is abstracted from here is the side of eros which must be negated in this journey. That is so nobly described in Phaedrus (253d et seq) which you would do well to read, and which I wish we had time to read this year – the account of the soul as a chariot. In that account there is not sentimentality or optimism about the

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emancipation of eros. And even more wonderfully we will proceed next week to read Phaedo, in which indeed the eros for life is itself mortified. What I can say then in short about the Beautiful Itself is that for Plato it is always and that for some men in philosophy it can come forth as a direct presence for them – in which presence eros is perfected. I can also say that the description of the way seems better than any other description I know – that in the beautiful things and persons and institutions and studies of this world I can see intimations of what he means by the Beautiful Itself – the Idea of the Good – that indeed the concept of the perfecting of eros can have no meaning outside the positing of the Beautiful Itself – that indeed there would be no directing of eros – no way of knowing how we can put our multitude of desires into any proper hierarchy of subordination and superordination without some dim intuition of that posited, or to put it even more simply, how we could be drawn to become better if it were not so posited. What I can’t speak of and which held me silent last day is its appearance to us as a presence – for I have not gone that far, and indeed this age is one when much stands in the way of those even preliminary stages of the way without which this X [X used by Grant evidently to indicate the nameless, not to mean Christ as in other passages], according to Plato, cannot appear to us in all its majesty. I can, in short, say that in my clearest mind I must posit something which is eternal and loveable – but that it has never appeared to me directly. [Text breaks off.] I am willing to say more to questions about what I have said – If there are none let us proceed to Alcibiades’ speech.

Vietnam and the Study of Greek Religion and Philosophy Excerpt from a lecture for the ‘Myth and Reason’ course.

I have today to try to state clearly what this course is about. Let me say first that I find it well nigh impossible these days to think of Greek reli-

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gion and philosophy in the light of the events in Vietnam. Why? It is the worst ever? In the light of this catastrophe [it is] very difficult to conceive turning one’s mind to these ultimate issues. Yet we must. Indeed, just because of it, we must. If this is the upshot of what Western civilization is, if this is the upshot of its religious, moral, political assumptions – if this is American liberalism in the world, then one must say there is something at the very roots of our society, that is, about its presuppositions. And those of us who live in its midst must try and give ourselves not only to the immediate – hatred and fight against what is going on – but try to see where our thought has been wrong. So we must have the courage to try to look beyond the modern – though I find it almost impossible to do so. Now let me say first in assessing what the course is about that it is different from an easily defined course for the following reason, that a study like this is not usually in [the] curriculum of the West. It is therefore different from Descartes to Kant or History of Europe since 1789. Western men in the age of progress have, as I have said, so scorned the traditional or mythical religion that they only studied it for antiquarian interest or as a delusion from which man had been rescued or at its most positive as a preparation for Greek philosophy which was itself a preparation for modern science and ideology. Therefore, in fact, such courses were not much given – therefore, in giving it, it is important to say what it is about. This indeed [is] why there can’t be a textbook in this course and why indeed I so quickly[?] spoke of secondary books concerning Plato the other day. Most of them were written within the assumptions of modernity and therefore, it seems to me, very much misinterpret both Greek religion and philosophy. Let me take as an example of what I mean a book which deals with the exact subject which is ours, F.M. Cornford’s From Religion to Philosophy. A member of this class said that the subjects we are dealing with in this class are treated at length in this book, and doesn’t this book open up the subject? Now indeed Cornford worked hard and long at the history of Greek religion and philosophy and many of you will have read his commentaries on Platonic dialogues. Certainly he knew more about the details of Greek religion, and philosophy, and literature than I will ever know, or anybody in this class will know. Therefore shouldn’t we treat this first book of his with the greatest seriousness

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and indeed perhaps find in it a textbook. Indeed we should look at it – but what do we find when we look at it? We find that the study proceeds from the following statement of the problem. Problem, read preface (page v). [ ‘... a new spirit of rational inquiry asserted its claim to pronounce upon ultimate things which had hitherto been objects of traditional belief. What I wish to prove, however, is that the advent of this spirit did not mean a sudden and complete breach with the older ways of thought.’], Well and good, that is our problem. Then he proceeds to look at the early scientific philosophers. Cosmology of Anaximander, one of the early scientific philosophers. Page 11, read: ‘Like Anaximander [most of the early philosophers, as we shall see later, regard the order of the world as moral or just ... Yet the conception is one that could never occur to innocent scientific curiosity, looking out with uncoloured vision upon the world our senses show us. It is certain that both Anaximander and his readers had already in their minds some traditional representation of the order of Nature, as familiar to them as it is strange to us, which the new theory only restated in rational terms.’] To Cornford it is ridiculous or preposterous to believe the order of the world is moral or just. Therefore the problem for him is to find as an historian why these philosophers and scientists – indeed the originators of the great Western rationalism tradition – should have believed this obviously preposterous idea. Therefore, he takes the step of saying that these philosophers and scientists were not simply breaking away from the mythical religion they inherited and its moral tradition, but that they took over from that religion this idea that the order of the world is moral and just. Therefore, one has to study this earlier religion to understand them. And in proceeding to study that subject he has to state how did this idea, that the order of the world is moral and just, come to be. Now to do this he first has to say what morality is. And to do that he uses the account of morality put forward by the French sociologists of religion, Levy-Bruhl and Durkheim34 (followers of Weber). Moral ideas are collective representations (if you want to read their works and Cornford’s description of them) coming from the religion of the Greeks which was itself a product of totemism and because of this morality and because people at this stage were not capable of distinguishing between their own moral customs and the world and the world and them, they trans-

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posed their own moral customs into the nature of things – and so powerful was this collective representation that they remained basically in the consciousness of the philosophers and the scientists even after they no longer were held by the religion in which the collective representation was imbedded. So that those men went on holding the preposterous assumption that the order of the world was moral and just. In terms of this schema he goes on to describe the history of Greek philosophy using such phrases as page 125 top [‘These imaginary objects, souls and Gods, are made of the same stuff; their substance is simply the old sympathetic continuum, more or less etherealised’] and dividing Greek philosophy into two traditions (a) scientific (b) mystical etc. etc.35 Now in commenting on this work, I do not want to criticize it in detail – but simply to say, how does he know that the assumption that the order of the world is just is preposterous? And clearly the answer [that] comes back [why] that he thinks it is preposterous, is that he partakes in the assumptions of modern philosophy and science in a very explicit way, modern English liberalism. The Cornfords and the Dodds – the centre of English liberal intellectual life.36 Now I am not saying to you, you shouldn’t read books with such assumptions. Of course, you should. But in reading them you should understand that their underlying assumptions are not classical scholarship – but modern philosophical assumptions – and that looking at the material through those eyes they see something very different from what I would see. And let me also say that looking at the material through those eyes leads them also to a strange conclusion. Because of the assumption they are saying that the great Greek thinkers suffered a very great error about a central issue of human life. But why should one study the thought of people who are known from the beginning to be wrong about the most important matters? The classics departments have been their own grave-diggers. They were studying things to expose the errors in them. But the trouble is that most people just aren’t, and rightly aren’t, interested in studying the past if it is a record of error. And let me also add that my return to study the classical philosophers is not reached from studying first classical philosophy but in seeing that the modern assumption that the order of the world is not just – an assumption that one sees in Hobbes etc. has led to such appalling

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results that I begin to wonder whether there may not be something in the opposite. [Grant ends the lecture with a list of books, including, in addition to Cornford, Dodd, Harrison, Murray, and Crombie, the German and French scholars such as Friedlander, Schaerer, and Voegelin who are less prone to the assumptions of English scholars.]37 But above all we have to look at the Platonic documents themselves. If we are doing more than antiquarianism, then we must see these, themselves ... [Text breaks off.] Remarks before Studying the Phaedo Excerpt from a lecture for the ‘Myth and Reason’ course.

Introductory Lecture Two great deaths This extraordinary writing fills me with an even greater sense of my own ignorance than the Symposium. And let me say that there are large parts of it I do not understand. (Humility, not despair.) And as one can only understand the whole as a collection of parts – let me make clear that I do not understand the whole. A very great mystery this dialogue – ... Nevertheless the alternative in life is not between knowing everything and knowing nothing – therefore let us press on – ... ... Now let me start by saying we are at an advantage. Plato has told us what the dialogue is about – in letter XIII (authenticity I accept) – it is the [one] called the dialogue on the soul. He does not say that the dialogue is about the death of Socrates – but about the soul. And this great subject is put in the place where it is most likely to [be] listened to, because it is related to the philosopher’s death. And one surely must remember that the death of Socrates must have been a very central crisis in the life of Plato. Indeed in that absolutely, consummately ironic remark at the beginning – ‘I believe that Plato was ill’ – we may have a sign that this crisis

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was of a total kind for Plato – which for awhile turned him from existence – unable to take existence. And remember there is one thing that I have not said sufficiently strongly about Plato’s writing – and which is here surely present – the refusal to highlight – the refusal to write in the style which at its best we may call Dostoevskian and at its worst Tennessee Williams – There is, above all, restraint in Plato – and restraint about the bad things – the evils of the world. Why that is so is another matter for another time. But here the discussion of the soul is put in the context of the death of Socrates and this certainly says that the soul is a subject of great importance to Plato. And the very importance of this is seen in the fact [of] how in the dialogue with consummate literary skill, what we would call the existential and the theoretical are throughout the dialogue [brought] into closer and closer unity. Let me illustrate – the prisoner and his chains (B...’s Hymn)38 Socrates good humour – then a theoretical argument – then more existential – then theoretical – and as we get to the end the two are in closer unity. At the height of the dialogue Socrates’ account of his own intellectual life is central to the theoretical argument. One of the greatest pieces of intellectual history ever written. And indeed at the end of the dialogue Socrates’ existence and his thought are at one in the way that he meets death. In fact if one wants to see what philosophy is for Plato – here is the place to see it. It is not in intellectual exercise and criticism – a way of earning one’s living. I have an acquaintance who is very good at analytical philosophy – but he considers that this activity has very little to do with how one lives. In his personal existence this acquaintance just lives at the level of the ordinary bourgeois North American – and this is indeed how most modern philosophers consider what they do – a particular technique like other techniques – and most modern philosophers scorn the idea that they can teach others or themselves what is a good life. But here, in Phaedo, is a startling unity between theoretical argument and life. Socrates’ approach to his own death is at one with his arguments. Now we will see in a while that the ideal way to face death is one of the central marks of what a civilization thinks of what is and that there are many different interpretations of what death is. And saying that there is unity between Socrates’ thought and his life is not to say that his approach to life is the true one. All I am saying is (a) that this unity is there, and (b) that this unity tells us that philosophy is not

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simply critical analysis but a way of life. Indeed whatever the strange word ‘religion’ means – philosophy is in this sense a religious activity for Socrates. The next thing that hits one on the surface of this dialogue – and one of my chief points I have wanted to make to you in studying any writing, is never to get away from the surface – never try and understand the real content of any writing as if its surface – that is, the way it displays itself – is not important. One of the first things that strikes one about this dialogue is its extreme asceticism. In writing of the soul he not only writes of the death of Socrates, but he writes of a very austere life – a life of grave self-discipline – a life where every pleasure must be carefully guarded against. Philosophy is the practice of dying and that dying is not only to think out what death is, but indeed to die to the world of life throughout one’s life. It is surely highly appropriate that we should be studying Phaedo during Lent. Let me say immediately in speaking about this – how little I know of what this means. However much I know of Plato, I obviously haven’t learnt the teaching of Phaedo. Si monumentum requiris circumspice.39 – I am a soft lover of comfort and am paying the price of that softness. Therefore there is both a certain shame and a certain awe in studying the asceticism of this dialogue. And let me say – which is more important than my confession – that many of you will also find this extreme asceticism difficult to understand and perhaps unsympathetic. But let us face that it is there and unequivocally there. Let us remember that we are all products of the modern era and that central to the modern era is the emancipation of the passions. Again si monumentum requiris circumspice – the television – at every point of our lives we are told to emancipate the passions – how many parties have I been to where people are accused of being inhibited – but let us face the fact that for Plato inhibition is necessary for philosophy. And this emancipation of the passions is more and more penetrating Christianity. As Christian leaders try to play footsie with modern liberalism – for example in the Honest to God kind of writing40 – and what I call Christianity’s flattery of the spirit of the age or historicism. It becomes popular to praise the emancipation of the passions – Bothwell’s sermon.41 But whatever we think of this – let us remember that in the ancient world – Jewish or Greek – there was little belief in the emanci-

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pation of the passions. The view of paganism behind Christianity – with its love of sex. Gore Vidal’s Julian42 – but as Julian was appealing to Platonism, he was aware of Phaedo and this is the most austere of documents. Now this must make us compare Phaedo with Symposium – and many people have made the comparison – life and death. In the Symposium philosophy is identified with the drinking of wine as having its origin, however, controlled in the love of other people. But as Friedlander says, this great distinction between Phaedo and Symposium is not to be overstated – because in both cases the purpose of it is the yearning for the Good – for the beyond.43 But let me point out that there is a distinction between the two and that means at least one thing, I think. In the 7th letter Plato has said clearly his reasons for not putting his writings in the form of a set doctrine – and I have talked a lot about dialogues.44 And each dialogue is an aspect of existence in its very formed being. Both Symposium and Phaedo are necessary – that is, neither is the full story. Some people have loosely talked as if Phaedo was world-denying and Symposium world-affirming. I do not like this distinction – but it must be clear that if it is a good distinction, then to Plato both must be asserted and the whole truth about life must include them both. It should also teach us in a very direct way that we should not seek too easily from any of the dialogues something which we call Platonism and which is a kind of summary of his teaching. Each dialogue is part of the whole – and to speak about what he is speaking of – that part – in this case the soul – he has to abstract from the whole – (as, for example, in Euthyphro in writing about piety he abstracts and does not speak of the soul). One of the most hidden secrets of Phaedo is what he is abstracting from here. But whatever the answer to that complex question we must be aware that in writing of the soul he is not writing of everything. Now to turn to the dialogue. Lecture on the Phaedo Grant argues that Phaedo is an example of Greek spirituality in contrast to modern spirituality. He talks about Plato’s account of our yearning for perfection in contrast to Aristotle. He gives his understanding of the ten-

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sion between two tendencies in dualistic thought, to denigrate the world as imperfect and to praise it as an image of the eternal. He considers the section of the Phaedo dealing with Plato’s search for a language that includes the truth of science and the truth of religion. He concludes with a consideration of the relation of Speech (logos) and reality for the Greeks.

I want to say something about the Phaedo which will be intelligible. It is an extremely complex and brilliant piece of writing and I do not expect for the examinations that all of you will deeply understand it. Now I do not expect from this course that you will become experts on Greek science, or religion, or philosophy – what I want you to understand [is] that here is a profound spirituality of a kind of extraordinary difference from our own. As you know, it is a spirituality which I find more true than modern spirituality. But my opinion is not what matters – the point is for you to get some vision of what it is, so that you can have something against which to compare the spirituality of this age. Perhaps you might see that this is quite close to the form of spirituality itself – from which all forms of spirituality may be judged. Now if we speak of Greek spirituality, we can at least hazard this kind of generalization that, of the writings we possess, we see it very profoundly thought in the Platonic writings and nowhere perhaps more clearly thought than in this dialogue on the soul. Now I have emphasized that Plato by the use of the dialogue never gives his own opinion and that, as you will have seen from this dialogue, Socrates is often in a wonderful way very tentative so that one of the things that has kept the Platonic writings such an enormous force right throughout the history of the race since his day – in some ways a much more potent influence than the systematically expanded thought of Aristotle – is the refusal of the writings to commit themselves to a closed system, so that the writings can be taken in many ways and for many purposes. Nonetheless I want to hazard one very broad statement about what emerges from the Platonic writings which after many years I think is true and which is useful because it ties together what was said earlier about archaic religion in the earlier part of the course. Let me state it in the famous quotation of Plato’s from his Timaeus about time – he says that time is the moving image of eternity.45 Now this is the view that

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the world which comes to us inchoately through our senses, is a world which by its very nature points to its perfection beyond it. That is, this world is an image of the eternal world. A.H. Armstrong has a good word for this; he calls it the ‘iconic’ view of the world. That is, ‘that things are neither valuable “in themselves” nor valueless “in themselves” but carry, simply by being what they are, a worth and significance, which is given to them from something which is other, but not alien, which is their own proper perfection, and more, and which remains for ever when they pass away.’ (Armstrong, Platonism)46 Let me say (a) that this seems to me the basic understanding from which the doctrine of forms proceeds, and (b) that in saying this about Plato you are saying why what he says is so like what Eliade says about the nature of archaic man, that the archetypes are more truly what matters than the passing events. Now it seems to me it is this vision of the world as an image world which points beyond itself to its own perfection which is the heart of Platonic spirituality and which is absent from our vision of the world. (Parenthesis – it is this craving for perfection and seeing the world as the image which makes us yearn for that perfection, which is the mark of Platonic writings as against Aristotelian writings. See Erich Frank, American Journal of Philology 1940.)47 Let me also say here as an aside, which I think is of great significance, that the worldly philosophers have always said that this craving for perfection, which is to me the very mark and centre of all which we might call religious, is just an inability on the part of those who hold it, a dissatisfaction with the world as it is – an inability to cope with world as it is – and therefore a neurosis. What people like myself say back, is that this craving – this hunger for perfection – is not neurotic, is not simply an inability to cope with the world as it is (though indeed we are all full of that) – but arises from the fact that throughout the world it is seen as an intimation, an image in which darkly that perfection is partially seen, so that the hunger is hunger because the bread (and I use that word en pleine conscience de cause) which will fill it, is given partially to us in the beauty of the world – that is, the world as an image of that perfection which we crave. But more of this when we speak of the Symposium. Now let us say as one more generalization before we get down to the passage in the Phaedo, that this vision of the world as image –

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image of the eternal – leads those who go with Plato sometimes to talk two ways about the world and we will often find within Plato’s writings themselves these two directions. But for those who want to see Plato in his true significance [we] must see both sides of this tension. On the one hand, if you see the world as a mere image of the eternal, [you] may seem to put the world at a lower point than most of us would like to. Because the things of the world are but an image of the eternal – we can fall into the position of saying that the things of the world are corrupting the eternal – and regarding matter as the cause of evil. This goes often with the myth (an essentially dualistic myth) about the fall of spirit into matter. Some of the gnostics of the early Christian centuries fell into this position. And because in the Phaedo Socrates is meeting his death, some people have interpreted this dialogue in that way. But this position contradicts Plato – the forms, or the archetypes, are the archetypes of this world and they are that which give rational form to this universe. Therefore how can [one] want to be in the eternal order and hate this one – because in doing so – one is hating the principle of this order. It is this which surely Socrates is saying when he speaks against suicide. How can one affirm the eternal order which is the principle of this world and then say this world is all corruption? This is one side of the tension. The other side of the tension is surely that as this world is an image of the eternal good – one comes to love the image – one comes to love the beauty of the world – in, for example, the art and science of this world – one’s love of persons – one’s love of passing political institutions, one’s country etc. But there is also in Plato a profound understanding of how passing and transitory all the beauties of the world are and that just because we can see in them an image of the eternal excellence – we must not forget the very transitory nature[?] We must be aware of all the evils (political and personal) which beset us here among the images. That is, the images for all their beauty and goodness must not be things that we can rest in – because they do not fully satisfy our hunger. So at this level we must not ever overestimate the world as a source of the fulfillment of our hunger. Now having said these great generalizations I want to go on to that part of the Phaedo dealing with his own education.48 This is said in answer to Cebes as to the cause of generation and decay. Now let me say what I said last day to [student] – if we take the divi-

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sions religion, science, philosophy – as human activities and activities in which we employ language – most of us humans in any period of history are apt to use language in one part of our lives which is not consistent with what we use in other aspects. It is only the very great who are capable of using language which is the same in all parts of their life. Now in our period of history, all of us are in a world where the dominating language is the language of a particular form of science (I will not here define what particularly characterizes modern science). Now that science has not only made philosophy its errand boy – most of the philosophy of the modern world follows that of a man such as Quine and believes that the purpose of philosophy is the logic of the sciences, that is, clearing up the logical messes that particular sciences get into.49 But also, and this is more important for this class on religion – it is a science that has grown up with assumptions that are in some ways alien to the basic assumptions of the traditional religion of the West. So that the dominating power of this science has a deeply disintegrating effect on the traditional religion. Now many people (including many of the cleverest scientists) take the position of having it both ways – as scientists they use one language – as religious people they use the other and just avoid the difficulty by living divided lives and achieve this by not thinking of the division. But this intellectual schizophrenia is not possible for those who want to do more than practise their religion but think it to be true. To use the example I used last day, What becomes of us intellectually when we use the word ‘soul’ in our religious practice but must rigidly exclude it from our intellectual life? Now Plato is obviously trying to use one language that can be used for all purposes. Let me say clearly about the Greek scientists before Plato (and I want to say this without you having to understand the history of Greek science) that the discovery of geometry by Thales would not but put Greek religion into question. When one discovers that there is such a thing as rigorous knowledge as Greek geometry was – one must begin to ask oneself what is the difference between knowledge and the mythical beliefs which held the society together and one begins to use systematic thought to [illegible] ultimate issues. (The obvious analogy is: in all our lives when we start to think, we start to question what has been given us in our traditional beliefs inherited from our families and our society.) The empire of the mythical world with its priests and cults was once and for all questioned by the growth of systematic thought.

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Yet as I have said so often, this world of the mythical had incarnated in itself great understanding of the nature of human life – very remarkable understanding of the nature of human morality – the whole idea of the virtues and the very remarkable partaking of the beautiful. To say that science necessarily led to the questioning of the mythical religion is in no way to say that that mythical religion was nonsense. It had taught men how to build cities with justice – that is, law, morality, and art. On the other hand, to speak quickly, the great benefits of knowledge which had come from the physical philosophers, above all that great benefit, the attempt to know the truth of things, had somehow, as Socrates says in this passage, not been able to know the truth of the human things of law, morality, and art. The question Socrates faces and which he talks about is then how can we reach a language which takes into itself what is valid in the new science – but which also includes in itself the truth about human things? That is, he is looking for a means[?] which will include within itself the old religion and the new science. Now what does he say in this passage? Socrates first is silent for a long period – turning inwards and thinking for a long time. When he starts to speak, he talks of a crisis that happened a long time ago in his youth – and what was that crisis? What he wanted when he was young was to discover about any particular thing or happening what was the cause of its coming into being, that is, its generation, what was the cause of its passing away, that is, its disintegration – and what was the cause of its being the way it was. But he could not find any answers to these questions either in his own mind or in the tradition. He could not find any answers in the physical philosophers (physis is nature – 18th century natural philosophers. Chair at Edinburgh in natural philosophy)50 – not even in Anaxagoras. Wonderful passage 98c et seq read: [... I found the man [Anaxagoras] making no use of Mind, not crediting it with any causality for setting things in order, but finding causes in things like air and aether and water and a host of other absurdities. It seemed to me that his position was like that of a man who said that all the actions of Socrates are due to his mind, and then attempted to give the causes of my several actions by saying that the reason why I am now sitting here is

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that my body is composed of bones and sinews, and the bones are hard and separated by joints, while the sinews, which can be tightened or relaxed, envelop the bones along with the flesh and skin which hold them together; so that when the bones move about in their sockets, the sinews, by lessening or increasing the tension, make it possible for me at this moment to bend my limbs, and that is the cause of my sitting here in this bent position.]51

Now I think it is clear from that passage what it is he objects to in the physical philosophers and I would point out that the question that theory cannot answer is in a certain sense given to him out of the religious tradition. Why does he want an answer in terms of ultimate purpose? That I would say arises out of the religious tradition. But what is much more difficult to understand is what he says is the method he came to – It is difficult to understand because it is very foreign to the method of modern science. And I would say in parenthesis that I am going to talk about what he says from 99d et seq., not that I expect all of you to understand it – or that it is necessary for the exam – of course not – but for this reason. In talking in this class I have continually said that there is a difference between classical and modern ways of looking at things. And here is expanded in brilliant form the Socratic view of science which is quite different from the modern or post-Galileo view of science. Many people interpret the Greek philosophers as full of great truths – but unfortunately without the benefit of modern science. What I am saying here is this is not so (as I said about the Cornford book). Here is an alternative vision of what is the task of science. Perhaps we might also say (though this is extra) that modern science has had enough effects on the modern world that we might question its methods. Anyway this, what Socrates says is the method he found, was necessary to answer the questions he was asking about the generation, disintegration, and being of any particular thing or happening. That is, the answer to the question, what are things – the way they are? He uses the words ‘to be responsible for’ – and that is the word ‘cause.’ Read 99d. [... I felt that I must be careful not to meet the fate which befalls those who observe and investigate an eclipse of the sun; sometimes, I believe,

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they ruin their eyesight, unless they look at its image in water or some other medium. I had the same sort of idea: I was afraid I might be completely blinded in my mind if I looked at things with my eyes and attempted to apprehend them with one of other of my senses; so I decided I must take refuge in propositions, and study the truth of things in them.]52

‘I must have recourse to theories’ [this Hackforth translation has it as ‘I must take refuge in propositions’; the R.S. Bluck translation has ‘I should take refuge with definitions’] – I think a better translation would be ‘take refuge in spoken words’ (The Greek – [eis tous logous kataphugonta] as you know I am no expert – but I have consulted).53 (See Klein – ‘Aristotle’ in Ancients and Moderns for what follows.)54 Now what he is saying is the following. If we look directly at what presents itself to us in an everyday world – at things and their properties – at human actions and behaviour, we are risking being blinded, as people who observe the sun directly during an eclipse, rather than looking at its image more indirectly. And this blinding may happen to investigators of nature who look at the world directly. To avoid being blinded he is going to take refuge in spoken words – and he is going to do this by exchanging questions and answers with himself and others and in their search for the truth of things. That is, what he implies is that the reasons for things being as they are – are to be found in the spoken word. Now I think this says unequivocally where his science is quite different from modern science with its empiricism, that is, its investigation of the things directly. (I may say to [student] that I prefer this way of talking about this rather than the distinction between induction and deduction which she used last day.) Now to make this at all clear, I must turn to speech and its relation to nature and how it is thought about by Socrates – because otherwise this will be quite meaningless to you. What follows may seem to you elementary but I think it is fundamental. The word for speech is logos in Greek and whatever else the word logos many come to mean, as in St John’s Gospel or elsewhere, the principal meaning of the word logos is speech. I have said before that the word ‘theology’ means to me speeches about the gods or God. I mean by biology or geology speeches about life or about the earth. This is

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presumably what [a recent speaker] meant when he said that ‘the purpose of the university is to understand the meaning of words and to contemplate systems.’ He makes true speeches about the earth as professor of geology. Now what do we mean by speech? (Here I owe above all to Jacob Klein.) See article on Aristotle.55 By speech is meant ‘a sequence of words uttered by somebody in such a way as to be understandable to others.’ ‘To understand’ refers first and foremost to speech. When we hear somebody say something, we can say ‘I understand what you are saying’ or ‘I do not understand what you are saying.’ We may in fact be wrong and not understand when we say we do – or vice versa – but as is clear, misunderstanding involves something we call understanding. But the question is what is it that we understand when we hear somebody speak? Not simply the sounds in themselves which issue from the mouth. We hear those noises. But hearing is not understanding. That is why we do not understand speech in a foreign tongue. What the Greeks say is that in a way that is extremely hard to understand, the sounds carry with them – or perhaps we could say represent – something else – that which makes us understand when we do understand. The speaker transposes what he means in sundry words and the hearer who understands reverses that process in reaching back and putting the words back into intended meaning. That is, the source of the fact that we can speak understandably and listen understandably is that a said word or combination of words refers to units of which our understanding is made up. The intended meaning is what the Greeks call noesis, concepts. Logos means speech and that which can be and is being understood in speech – speech and that which is understood in speech are never held apart for the Greeks. That is why both Plato and Aristotle think of man as an animal who possesses the ability to understand the spoken word both as he uses it and as he listens to it as others use it. Now I could digress here and say how differently we conceive words than this. How much more arbitrarily we conceive words. I would also digress [as to] why in the old education there was so much concentration on the literary education. Hannah Arendt says what is wrong with modern education is that it does not take words seriously. etc. etc.56 But that is another matter.

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For the Greeks logos – speech or logoi – the speeches cannot be detached from understanding. Speech then at its clearest and best presents to the understanding of the listener what the speaker himself understands. Now that is the first step to follow. But the second step is I think very much more foreign to us who are moderns because we so often think of an environment and us – both man-made and not manmade – as alien. But I have spoken in talking about the Greeks’ gods and Greek art how what is and man in the ancient world is much more immediately apprehended. For the Greeks the concepts (noeta) presented to us in speech stem not from the speaker – but from the things and happenings spoken about. Our spoken language is partaking of all that exists around us. In other words that which lies around us – the sky, the stars, the trees, the buildings, society itself – speaks a kind of language, a language which we can partake of. The early scientists always spoke of the book of nature – as if nature was itself something that spoke a language. And what Socrates is saying in this passage is that it is the task of men to translate that language of things into the audible language of human words. Man has his logos and nature has its logos and for man to know is to translate the logos of nature into the audible language of words, that is what science is. This is what Socrates sees, why the discipline of dialectic is necessary so that we can go through years of history to translate and interpret the language of things and of happenings into the audible language of words. Language has become differentiated in terms of my earlier definition of myth. If I may also say in parenthesis, this is surely why so many of the Socratic dialogues are hostile to the rhetoricians who train the politicians because they are interested in language to give some men control over other men rather than for the use of language to read the book of the world. Now as far as I have spoken about the logoi – the speeches, what I have said about the undertaking of that disciplined speech whereby we can come to read the book of the world to understand what it is that makes something what it is – what I have said could refer equally to the disciplined speech of Aristotle which is called his logic – or what communication and conversation calls dialectic. But as we all know, who study any of the history of philosophy, it is

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just here that Plato and Aristotle disagree – the famous difference as to the status of the forms. And I should have at this point left myself time to talk about the question why the Socratic-Platonic answer is that when we try and understand the nature of things we are so aware of their imperfection, perishability, transitoriness, that they are always images that point beyond themselves – that we can never rest in the thing itself – but go beyond to that eternal order above – the things themselves. This would be to speak about the relation of the speeches – the logoi – whether the human or in things themselves – to the forms – This very very difficult question. But I have not. Let me simply sum up very quickly. When he is asked the difficult question by Cebes – the purpose of his reply is to show that the soul is not of the nature of those things which are generated and which perish or whether it is of another nature, that is, which in this life now[?] can raise itself to the plane of the eternal and wrench itself out of the plane of those things which are born and perish. In so far as it can participate in the forms it must be. I think for these arguments what is said in Guardini’s commentary on the Phaedo in the paperback The Death of Socrates is very good.57 Go on next day to the strange myth at the end and the closing scene with [student]. Apollo and Dionysius On Nietzsche’s contribution to the understanding of Greek religion in his Birth of Tragedy.

I want to speak today of a famous interpretation of Greek culture and of its religion that has had a very great influence in the modern world. It is the comparison between Apollo and Dionysius made by Nietzsche. Nietzsche sees the essence of Greek culture as the meeting and conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. You can find this in Nietzsche’s amazing book The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (page 109).58 You will find this also in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Der Untergang des Abendlandes – when civilization sets (Describe the book).59 That book – which is an extraordinary mixture of

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genius and craziness – expresses the Greek world as the Apollonian spirit and Western culture as the Faustian spirit. Now my purpose for talking about this is not to talk of Nietzsche and Spengler (Though do remember, from Nietzsche comes ‘the death of God’). Nor is it to talk of the Germans – the highest and lowest in the Western world. Nor its influence on aesthetics. It is because it gives one enormous insight into the nature of this religion. While I speak, bear in mind the accounts of Apollo and Dionysius in Guthrie.60 What do they mean by saying that classical culture at its heart is Apollonian? Apollo is the God of order and society and light – indeed of civilization in the sense that civilization is the imposition of order on the primal chaos of the world. He came to be identified with the Sun god, day as against night. Reason has always been identified with light – and Apollo the god of ordering reason at Delphi. [In] the Medea Jason says I brought you into the light of Greek culture out of the dark world of superstition of Chalcis. And above all the very symbol of classical spirit is the nude statue in itself – perfect – static – geometric – all body – all unity – all steadiness – and Apollo is the god of their art. Compare Parthenon and Chartres – Apollonian and Faustian. Yearning for the infinite – as against the completeness – order – perfection of the Parthenon. (Show here pictures [crossed out].) One can compare here the differential calculus of the Faustian with the Euclidean geometry of the Apollonian. The word ‘soma’ – utterly body to the Homeric gods and heroes they are utterly their own body (psyche – soma) – their blood is them – there is no such thing as personality. Now above all – whatever else we may say about the Greeks – what is fascinating about them is the sheer light of reason in their culture and in this sense we can indeed call them Apollonian. In this view of Greek religion the Homeric religion of Olympus was imposed on an older and darker religion from before. Homeric or Olympian is a break across the darker and more terrible religion before it. Across the terrors and horrors of existence was spread the light and order of Olympian religion. The old religion of darkness and blackness of witches and chthonic deities of lust and death were overcome by the gods of light and order – chief of which was Apollo. Nietzsche puts it well. See Herbert Marcuse’s [account of] Nietzsche.61 Order and life and

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light and civilization was imposed on the terror and darkness, death and chaos which lies at the heart of existence. Now in such a picture who is Dionysius? – Dionysius is the revolt of the Greeks against the Apollonian spirit. All the side of existence that is repressed and held back from consciousness by the Apollonian spirit is freed and loosed in Dionysius. Dionysius coming in from Thrace and meeting the ordered world – all that is not present in the Olympian gods. He is not mentioned in Homer. He is above all the god of ecstasy – He is the bringer of wine that great source of ecstasy for man. He is the god of the orgasm – unlimited and absolute sexuality. He is the god of excitement. He is the god of suffering and death. He is the god of night and darkness and wildness. The Bacchae – the goat – the phallus – the wine – suffering and ecstasy go together. Quote p. 112.62 The great word of Apollonian ethics is sophrosyne – moderation – too negative a word to translate. An acceptance of one’s place in the world as a human being – nothing in excess – the golden mean. It is a beautiful virtue and indeed one that a Dionysian such as myself only has come lately to recognize – temperance. But this is the very negation of ecstasy and the search for ecstasy is the very negation of it. Oedipus – a man climbs and climbs – the ecstasy of power. And it is in this sense that we can see Apollo and Dionysius as a kind of schism across Greek culture. Apollo can be seen as the very centre of Greek culture – but Dionysius as the break with order – the return to chaos – ecstasy – death – wine – the orgasm as absolute – the terror and the horror and the wildness that lay deep in the heart of things. And Nietzsche sees Greek tragedy which is to him the absolute height of the Greek experience and which is entirely, of course, religious – as in its essence and origin Dionysian religion meeting with the deep Apollonian tradition. It is the original beast dances of the Dionysian cult put in the form of the static Apollonian masks. As you know, it was not until Aeschylus that there were three characters on the stage. As you know, the Greek drama was originally the satyr or goat plays of the Dionysian cult. And it is perhaps a true tradition that the central Greek heroes in their suffering – Oedipus, Prometheus – were just masks of the original suffering and dying god Dionysius. (In parenthesis let me say how

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much relation there was in early Christianity between Dionysius and Christ.) But leaving aside this – if one looks at the drama – the meeting there of the wonderfully static, ordered beauty of the Sophoclean hero with the terrible dark black stories – the House of Atreus, Agamemnon etc. Oedipus – The horror and terror and ecstasy of human existence are there too. The revelation – Oedipus at Colonus. Orestes and the foes of Apollo – and one last thing I would say: the acceptance of the world in the Apollonian spirit – the body is what it is, the being of the world is what it is – accepted, ordered – a being in the world – an acceptance of it which is part of Greek ethics. Dionysiac is seeking the meaning of the world beyond and through nature which in some sense tries to escape it in ecstasy. Now as I say I do not at this point [want] to say what I think about Nietzsche’s account, but I will show what I think by one remark. It is clear or will be clear that for me the height of Greekness is found in Socrates. But it is clear that Nietzsche thought that Socrates was the great disaster to the Greek world. What Nietzsche says is that the height of Greekness was Attic (that is, Athenian) tragedy, this perfect blending of the Apollonian and Dionysian. But according to Nietzsche Socrates rejected or destroyed that tragic understanding of the world and replaced it with what he called the philosophical understanding of the world. Let me read you as it is beautifully put by Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes, pp.6–7.63 How we proceed ... Myth and Art in the Modern World Today I am going to talk of what myth has meant to modern man. Now I must admit that in talking about myth we must be careful of analysis. It can be dissecting a body that is dead and thinking we are catching the principle of a living body. As a better analogy: Let us say as musicologists we analyse Mozart’s clarinet concerto. We learn more about its structure, the way it is done – but this is not the same as our participation in it when we listen to it – this analysis may indeed lead us to participate at a higher level – but it is not a substitute for that participation – however much we analyse that structure, do we get to the heart of the great mystery of the making of the work of art itself?

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And let us be clear that as far as myth is concerned – the second stage, our participation, is the difficulty – how are we to participate in the archaic myths? Moreover, let us admit that analysis and participation often work against each other. To analyse something is to stand outside it. To participate is to be inside. To speak personally – I have been from the earliest days an analyser – a stander outside – and I am sure this can vitiate participation. Now analysis is important to human life but as I have said there are many things one can never accomplish except by participation. This is why the expression is used ‘being in love.’ Let me take an example which I am sure you will recognize is not used for propagandist purposes. One goes to the Eucharist and is outside it, one analyses while one is there – I see the sociological and psychological make-up of everybody there – one can see what is done. I really often in church can analyse the sociology of Dundas, the history of the Christian liturgy, the psycho-pathology of suburbia, the contradictory statements within Anglicanism, the worthy nature of the clergy, the structure of my own family, the unsure way I and others in the congregation present ourselves to the world etc. etc. But then one goes just occasionally when one is in it, when one is taken up into the very passage of love between God and God – when just for a moment one is a vehicle of God’s love for himself – the very process in between – the hypostasis of the Trinity. The same place, the same occasion but what an entirely different understanding of what is occurring. Now I do not want to go further in the complex question of analysis and participation – But let us remember that our analysis of the myths of other peoples must not lead us to lose all sense of participation. Sophocles and Eleusis – as illustration. Now in the modern age myth has been popularly used as the word ‘untrue tale’ – it was that which was opposed to reality – the Warren Commission’s use of the word myth.64 Now let me say that this modern man’s common-sense use of myth – which comes out of the Enlightenment – owed much to Christian civilization. Christianity in its polemic against the ancient world had distinguished between the fables of the pagans and what had happened in the two Testaments. But modern scientific man went further: he said that myth was a kind of primitive science. It was the way that primitive man explained the causes of things before the arising of science. It sought

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to answer the question why something had happened. When a storm came up it was not that there was an air disturbance but that Poseidon was angry. The nineteenth-century positivists thought that myth was primitive man’s science. The most consistent account of this is in Comte’s account of the three ages of man: (a) religious, (b) metaphysical, and (c) scientific. Now that man can through science know the causes of what happens in a purely immanent way, there is no need for the older explanations. Mythology explained events by saying that some divine figure was the cause of what happens. Metaphysics gave up the personalized explanation but really left the spirits in nature by using such explanations as soul – but modern scientific man now knows that he can understand the causes of things without such hypotheses – he can explain things in terms of positive facts – that is, in terms of what we can know and is finally related to sense data. All previous explanations come from fear – (fear of natural phenomena that one cannot control) and this leads to these futile mythical explanations. Mythology was seen as primitive man’s primitive science before the human mind had evolved to the point where he could understand things scientifically and see the world for what it is. What they said, and indeed still say, is that the scientific man – the modern man – thinks of the [myths?] this way. Are they not the outbreak of the repressed mythologizing which is part of the very being of man? I would not see Nazism as an atavism which we will eventually be able to condition out of man – but rather as a perverted outbreak or revolt of nature against its too long repression. Germany was the most highly technologized society in Europe and what does technological society depend on? (a) the mastery of the non-human by man’s reason, and (b) the mastery of the irrational forces in man by man’s reason. Talk about the Protestant Ethic – the need to produce highly disciplined people who are able to run the high degree of organization and control which makes the mass society possible. That is, industrial society cuts off man from man – from nature – in his work and in his life. A totally man-made event. Even sun and man will no longer generate man. But it also cuts off man from his own instincts – and I do not mean by instincts only the sexual. In fact in our society there is an over-emphasis on the sexual – because all possible

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other vehicles for the instinctual are cut off and therefore the whole pressure of the instinctual is placed on the sexual. I think D.H. Lawrence [was] good on this – the over-sexuality a mark of our cutting off. In such a situation there are crises, explosions, eruptions of nature against this too great control and these eruptions are almost bound in their public form to take perverted forms. And this is how I would see Nazism as a perverted eruption of the instinctual which had been repressed in technological society. Now where does this take us as far as myth goes? I would say the following: I would say that above all it shows us that our interpretation of what myth is will depend on what we say about what man is as a whole. If we see man as modern political philosophy has seen him – as a being whose destiny was to establish the age of reason on earth – then we will see myth essentially as the positivists see it – as a kind of infantile science that we have now passed beyond – demythologizing and modernity. But, and the but is difficult – because there are many alternatives to this – and therefore I will simply say that if you do not accept this but see human nature in a different way, you will see myth in a different way. And that way I will now begin to characterize – and in doing so I hope it will be clear how I disagree with the positivistic account of myth. Let me start from a description of G. van der Leeuw in Religion in Essence and Manifestation and in this description most historians now agree – he describes it as a verbal celebration of a sacred event – all the myths are that.65 Now let me point out about that, several things. What is it that distinguishes a myth from a tale or legend? Let me say first that a myth can become decadent when it no longer holds people. It then becomes a tale or a legend. And what is the difference? – it becomes decadent when it no longer is for the person experiencing it an experience of existence in its totality which reveals to a man his own mode of being in the world. (Repeat – Eliade’s words.) Now what is involved in this? (a) ‘the event’ is somehow a universal event – that is, the myth cannot be particular or private – that is, the events must be seen in some form as universal events – that is, the personages in the events must be acting in an exemplary manner – that is, in a manner which is universal in the sense that it shows people how to act – existence in its totality. And (b) the myth is only a myth and not a

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legend or a tale when it is apprehended by the whole man – that is, it teaches a man his own mode of being in the world – all of him – It’s appeal must be to the being of man – his whole being must be grasped by it. Let me go further. This is why art and the production of artists, the work of art, is in some sense like myth (This is not a course in aesthetics, but ...) If you will allow me for a few moments [on] the faculty [of] psychology – we can look at man as a rational animal. That is, he apprehends the world both as sense and intellect. Now within that the most extraordinary and difficult aspect of man is his imagination – for it is the point where sense and intellect meet. The imagination is neither a purely intellectual nor sensual faculty of the soul. It is where they meet and it is in the work of art that our imaginations are illumined. Form and emotion in art – some people like form – and some emotion in art – and this [is] supposed to be the classical/romantic distinction – but this [is] nonsense. As Coleridge says neither of the two poles but the maximum of both and this is why art is a wonderful consolation for us – it brings into harmony the intellectual and sensual parts of the soul (I use this word advisedly rather than self) – a particular consolation.66 If we have been overindulgent in intellectual activities or in sensualism, it brings us back into order. If our animal and rational nature is divided – it purifies consciousness. The great works of art in some sense teach us of existence in its totality and even of our own mode of being in the world. In the great work of art universal elements are always present, and this is why we participate in the work of art. Let me take an example from the modern theatre – Lear – I went to it with an elderly lady, a rather foolish and ugly woman – face transfigured – she had taken upon herself the mystery of things. Suffering, death. In reading, listening, watching, looking we are in art entering into the universal order – we participate in the universal order. But at the same time it is utterly particular. No work of art is any good in which the individual – the particular – is lost. We are in Lear not only engrossed in the real mystery of suffering and death – we are concerned with the individuals, Lear and Gloucester. Illustration from War and Peace – the scene with the mother and daughter (in Rostov [family])67 – the daughter goes into the bedroom – particular utterly realised – and yet universal.

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The scene between Brieger and Usmiani about Renaissance madonnas.68 [German scholar, friend of family, met at Oxford, a wonderful lover of art, visited in Halifax, met Professor Usmiani, classicist, said painters just painted their current mistress, probably true but missing the point.] What makes a Raphael or Fra Filippo Lippi madonna so wonderful is the perfect unity of the particular and the universal. Pavlova and dancing.69 Now it is this unity of the particular and the universal which we find only in art which makes art the means whereby most people come to the truth. They can be taught by art in a way that they cannot be taught simply by the absolutely universal which is philosophy. If we are (as I think we are) particular beings with the capacity for the universal – but with a tremendous stake in our particularity – then it is very hard for us to partake directly in the universal – either intellectually or morally – but it is in the beautiful – which in its perfection is the complete unity of the particular and the universal – that we can begin to grasp the universal. Let me illustrate: Sophocles’ Antigone, the play Antigone – tells the story [of] Creon and Antigone – Creon – the claim of public order – Antigone – the claim of the individual in the light of the highest gift of conscience through religion. Let me say that there would be no tragedy if you see Creon just as a tyrant – or Antigone a silly girl. There are here two partial truths or rights in a head-on crisis. Now the point I am making through the example of Antigone is that if one studies political philosophy one soon discovers that the state has rights against the individual however illumined is the conscience of the individual and one also discovers that the transcendent truth of the soul as given in the individual must morally lead him in moments of the highest illumination to be willing to disobey the state and that therefore the just organization of society must try to take these two principles into consideration and that for that to be possible a large percentage of society must be aware of these principles. But most men in society are not in a position to study political philosophy and so come to an understanding of its principles and indeed some who are in a position to study political philosophy are not capable of understanding its truths. But a vast number of people in society are in a position to go to the play and are able to understand and be engrossed in the sheer intensity of the situation between Creon and

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Antigone and in the sublimity of Sophocles’ art to be so taken up into that situation that they see in that situation directly the universal principles of political philosophy. They see (through the crisis situation brought into perfection), with the artist, the universal. Example: Going to Lear – Western Ontario burghers. That is, we can generalise from this that in any society the chief way that most men can learn of the universal is through the beautiful and they apprehend the beautiful in their imaginations in which the particular of sense and the universal of reason meet – beautiful not at all a class thing – it is that to which all are open. Now let us apply some of this to the question of myth and try and understand what myth is by talking of its sameness and difference from the great work or art. [Text breaks off.] Orphism and the Pythagoreans This lecture is subtitled ‘Simone Weil and the Hunger.’70

Last day, [I was] lecturing on initiation. Now we come to the contents of Orphism and [the] Pythagoreans. Now here I must give a lecture which is from a different standpoint than objectivity – for the following reason and I put it simply. Plato was a follower of Orphism and Pythagoreanism. In my study and my life I have come to the conclusion that on all essential questions I have found Plato to teach the true doctrine. Therefore I must assume that Orphism and Pythagoreanism were at the very least filled with the truth and I cannot in that sense speak of them from outside. I must in a word speak of them from inside in just the same way that, if I was speaking of the Gospels, I could not simply speak of them as history and literature – but as the documents of perfection – that is, as those documents in which I find the way, the truth, and the life. All through this course I have tried to make the difference between speaking from inside and outside. Let me illustrate about Orphism. People come across the doctrine put in modern words that the body is the tomb and that man’s hope in Orphism is so to put away the world

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of space and time and think only of the beyond. Now many modern scholars looking at this say what a strange doctrine. And probably most of them being modern liberals would say that worldly life can be made good in itself and therefore they seek explanations of this doctrine. Such explanations as the sociological explanation that in times of social upheaval many people have what they call ‘a failure of nerve,’ and not being able to withstand the upheaval and chaos of this world put their trust in the beyond. Or else they would have psychological explanations of the hatred of the flesh etc. etc. Now such explanations are what I call outside. They are objective in the sense that they treat Orphism as an object outside them and proceed to analyse. But in so far as I think about the mystery religion of the Greeks, I think it is true – it teaches me the way, the truth, and the life – therefore I am inside it. Therefore I must talk from inside. Now before talking from inside and saying what I think it is about, let me speak of two difficulties which may prevent you from understanding what I mean. The first difficulty is for any of you who may be Christians. The difficulty arises in this way. Christianity often defined itself in the early centuries as something against the paganism of the ancient world and it often defined itself as essentially a Semitic or Jewish religion. Therefore many people who have learned Christianity in this form will say: are you not being then anti-Christian in saying that Orphism and Platonism or the Pythagorean brotherhood are for you [?] with the truth? Are you not saying you are a pagan? Now let me say unequivocally and once and for all in this class: Christ is for me perfection. The Gospels and particularly the Gospel of St John are the documents of perfection, Christ being perfection – that is what I mean by God. Therefore nothing can stand between or lessen my adoration – To say Christ is perfection – one can surely go no further. This is final, settled, absolute for me. When one has looked upon perfection, there one is. But let me make certain historical distinctions. Christ came into a Roman world which had broken once and for all the spirituality of the Greeks (and in parentheses let me say that there is a sentimentality abroad that true spirituality will survive force – that the good cannot historically be wiped out. This is not so. The pure good is defenseless against force and can be wiped out. Therefore historical traditions of spirituality can be wiped out as if they had never been. Let us not be

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sentimental about this unequivocal fact.) The paganism against which Christianity had to contend was largely a very debased form of spirituality and it seems to me that in large measure the Christians were right to contend against it. But of course they did not entirely contend against it. I have quoted before St Clement of Alexandria’s statement about the Gospels. (Quote)71 They understood that the gnosis of Christianity was not an absolutely unique gnosis but led back to all the roots of spirituality of the past. To understand that let me just ask you one question. What on earth would be the meaning of the history of the world outside Christ and the Jews if that was the one tradition of spirituality that meant anything? Now I do not want you to go into the very vexed and complex question of the relation of the Greek and Jewish elements in Christianity. This is an extremely complex question which would require another course and a lifetime of study. Let me say this – which is simply my own view of it. Christianity in the West has consistently and increasingly, starting with Augustine, defined itself as essentially a Semitic religion. All I can say is that Semitic religion or what Christians call the Old Testament seems to me in many ways a very dangerous and unspiritual and false religion. It is not my place or purpose here to say why. But in so far as this is true, I consider Christianity to have been false when it so defined itself. As against that I see Christ as the perfection and completeness of all that Greek spirituality was expressing. Now the second and minor difficulty which is related to the first. The account I am giving of Greek spirituality takes Plato as the end of a long tradition, perhaps not even the greatest of that tradition but the documents of it which for one reason and another have survived. But this is not how modern Western people who are interested in Plato look at it, and for the following reason. When people who are interested in the history of the West look at this tradition, they are apt to say: from the Greeks we got science and philosophy, from the Jews our religion. That is interpreting the Greeks in the way that many of the men of the Renaissance did. They interpret the Greek contribution as essentially humanist – that is, interested in man – and in doing so they take the Greek religion as something extra which somehow was preliminary and pushed aside by the rise of reason in Greek philosophy. Let me give you an illustration of what is said in such an account. Pythagoras. This strange and hardly remembered figure – enough is

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known of him to know that he was a great geometer and a great religious teacher. Now how modern people so often interpret him is that in the Pythagorean tradition what is important [is] that these two aspects fall apart and what comes to us is Pythagoras as the founder of geometry. To a modern, mathematics and religion are quite separate. But surely it is the distinction religious teacher-mathematician which is false when applied to Pythagoras. The geometry in itself was a means of religious purification (in a way I will speak of later). Geometry was seen as a mediation between man and the divine. The geometry was religious and when Plato speaks of Pythagoras (Republic 600 a-b) he speaks of him essentially as a religious teacher and the two were not separate. Remember that what was written over the door of the academy. – Let no one enter who is not a geometer.72 Now in this sense I am not looking at Greek spirituality as if out of it came philosophy (essentially irreligious) and that is why we study it as a preparation for our philosophy. I am looking at Greek spirituality as if it was a total thing – interested in every way with how man can know God – that is, what are the means of mediation by which men know God. Now to speak about what I think was the essence of that spirituality. Let me say that it was a very ancient thing historically. When we say that Orphism came into Greece in the sixth century or that Pythagoras lived around the era 540–510 BC – let me not raise the question of origins – certainly in Egypt from Crete, in Mesopotamia, perhaps Persia and Zoroastrianism, perhaps via Thrace. Let us not even speculate on its relations with India and early Hindu spirituality. I am not an historical scholar and perhaps we will never know where it came from – does it matter very much compared to the knowledge of the truth which is in it? Let me also say that what I am going to say about this is not something I could have discovered for myself. I owe it mostly to a writer who I spend my life studying – Simone Weil – and I consider her an inspired writer in that she claimed at the end of her short life of thirtythree years that she had finally been possessed by Christ. And I accept after studying her writings and her life that her claim was true. Some of her writings have been translated into English but most are only in French. You can find a lot of her writings on this matter in English – Intimations of Christianity – and there is a very difficult essay therein on the Pythagorean doctrine. An approach but only an approach to her

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thought could be found in Waiting on God. See her writings in Letter to a Priest (trans.) which is her reasons for not being a Roman Catholic. Let me say that when I say I could not do it for myself I do not mean that one can just read her writings and see immediately what is involved. I could not have even considered that what she said was true if I had not previously been concerned with Plato ... and with something else. It has taken me most of my life at this point to see that the very greatest formulations of the human condition by the moderns were somehow wrong. And when I say wrong I mean in my case not so much just philosophically wrong as theologically wrong. If I am honest what I found about modern philosophy was not only its results in the modern world – but the fact that it could not be reconciled with what I have called the perfection of Christ. And when I speak of modern thought I mean modern thought at its most masterly in such thinkers as Kant, and Hegel, and Marx. I used to read Plato as if his doctrines were a preparation for reading Kant. It was only after I had seen that this was not adequate – one had to look at the Greeks as if what they were saying was true – that I could move to really taking Simone Weil seriously. I put in this piece of autobiography for the following reason: we live in an extremely complex world in which the tradition is very broken and therefore in which it is very hard to apprehend the truth. One has to go back to the roots again (in this sense be radical in the true meaning of that word) and the point of teaching is not in any sense to try and teach [you] to parrot the propositions by which I live – but to try to persuade some of you to go back to the roots for yourselves. Let me be quite explicit. None of you in this class should feel that to do well you have to agree or indeed to disagree with anything I say; how I will judge you is how much by reading the books I suggest you are able to go back to the roots. Now with all this as preliminary let me try and say something about this spirituality. (1) Let me start from the proposition ‘All desire or love is a desire for good’ – this seems essential in this Greek spirituality. We will find it in Plato’s Symposium 200 et seq. Human beings are at their centre what they are, despite everything else, what man is, this desire for good. What we are is this desire, this is what makes a human being, this point of desire or love. We do not possess good – but what makes [us]

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something rather than nothing is this desire for that which we have not. It is the desire for good – for goodness one might say pure and unalloyed – for perfection. This is what it is to be a human being – this is the first point. (2) Yet the Greeks seem prodigiously aware that that which we long for – that perfection – that complete good – is absent from the world of space and time. This is the condition of human misery – that we desire – we long for that which is absent from the world – or as Simone Weil would say absent here below. That is, the position of man in space and time is a luminous point of desire for that perfection which is infinitely distant from us in our condition – human misery – and supernatural perfection. ‘I have been ceaselessly torn by the perfection of God and the affliction of man and the relation between the two.’73 (3) In this position according to Simone Weil the thought of Greek religion must be seen as the attempt to span that distance between ourselves and God. That is, the idea of mediation A = B B = C /A = C.74 The mystery religion, the philosophy, the science, the moral purifcation, the desire for justice, the art Quote 46, para 3.75 Why Study Myth and Reason? – Second Lecture In the first lecture, Grant had answered the question about what the course of study was, the study of the two chief means by which it was said in the West that we come to apprehend the divine: revelation, which we associate with the Jews, and philosophy, which we associate with the Greeks. Christianity, he said, can be seen as the blending of and the refusal to blend these two traditions.

[On the] ‘Why’ question. I ended by distinguishing antiquarianism as a motive for studying the ancients and the general motive that they can teach us about the nature of the good life in the here and now. Antiquarianism kills – [it has] no meaning – what has happened to the classical studies. The only point is that if these writers teach us something real and important about the here and now. This is why the serious study of them has died out in the age of progress. Because people came to believe there was an advance in what men know and that therefore there was not much

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need to study what people had thought in the past. The most recent was the highest and therefore what was most important to study was the most recent. Now it may be said [by some] (in parenthesis) that what I have said is just wrong in fact. Is it not so that the modern world is more interested in history and archaeology than ever before in history? Yes this is certainly so. Every American university – dig, dig, dig. I will avoid in the name of good taste the Freudian account of such activity and admit its presence. Yes it is true that modern society is interested in antiquities. It is concerned with the factual discoveries of the lives of these societies – but it is not concerned with the question of whether the highest teaching of the ancients had anything to tell us of what is true. Not at the heart of our education – general culture but not the truth – that [truth] is social science. How can it be so understood? The Age of Progress – that man was evolving and all those early stages were but stepping stones on the way to higher consciousness.76 These people might be studied but only as stepping stones on the way up to the temple that was us – modern civilization. Therefore if one was to know of the good life, one did not study them. And this is surely a valid and useful question. Why if, as I have affirmed, the central purpose of all education is to teach us about the good life – what is the good life for man and society – why should one turn back several thousand years – why not start in the here and now – is not this our first concern? Now my answer to that would be the following. (a) We do not start the study of what constitutes the good life from scratch – but we come into the world and life in the world as part of a society and indeed a civilization. (Society and civilization – explain.) And what constitutes a civilization and the societies within that civilization but above all certain basic monolithic presuppositions about the nature of things – and above all of human good for the individual and society? And these presuppositions are present in us from the very beginning even from our mother’s milk. (If any of us are lucky enough these days to get anything as natural as mother’s milk.) Let us take ourselves. We are all members of the society of Western Ontario or at least the Great Lakes region – which is now the most ‘dynamic’ (dynamic = feverish) (may I point out in parenthesis that dynamic is a hooray word in the modern era) part of Western civilization. And Western civilization is a particular civilization, the particular

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civilization that arose in Western Europe three or four centuries ago, and the presuppositions of which were brilliantly piloted [?] first by such men as Machiavelli and Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, later by such thinkers as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx etc. That is, the civilization of progress, the civilization of mass industrialism – culminating in electronic culture. (Space travel – the new conditioning, social science etc.) And as I have said that civilization is not accidental – its massive amazing accomplishments are based on certain fundamental presuppositions about the nature and destiny of man – presuppositions which were brought to consciousness in the West by certain philosophers whom I have mentioned. And what I am insisting on is that those presuppositions are flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone – and of this whether you have read or even heard of Hobbes and Rousseau. These are in a certain sense ‘the religion’ of our era. I use religion here to signify what people believe apart from thought having taken it in from the very form of their growing up. What they bow down to – their religion – technology – Ellul. Let me illustrate. Probably the central presupposition or central religious affirmation of the society we inhabit is the presupposition that ‘a science issuing in the conquest of nature serves good.’ This is a presupposition of our way of life which is (a) based on such thinkers as Hobbes and (b) it is a presupposition that makes our society, and (c) it is a presupposition that we assume almost without knowing that we assume it. Now what I am saying in general then is that when young people start to speculate about the nature of the good life – they start not from nothing, but from these monumental presuppositions. They generally argue within them not outside them. For example let us take young people who are either extreme liberals, followers of Erich Fromm77 who dash down from Cornell to improve the society of Mississippi. Or, on the other hand, young people who are conservatives who read the National Review, are followers of Senator Goldwater.78 These two types of young people probably think of themselves as very different from each other in what they believe – yet probably both believe that a science issuing in the conquest of nature serves good. That is, they both think within the presuppositions of modern mass society and find it impossible to conceive thinking without. Now that is the first stage in the argument and obviously true.

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The second stage is more difficult. It is that, in my opinion, there is something wrong – radically wrong (at its roots) with the civilization of modernity. And that this wrongness is not simply superficial but lies in the fact that modern civilization has made false presuppositions about the nature and destiny of man. Now there is no reason why you should follow me in this opinion or understand why I hold it. The main thing you must realize in my teaching is that I make it. Ellul – The Technological Society. To explain why I make this presupposition would require an account of my whole life and thought and that cannot be done here. What I would point out simply as evidence pointing in the direction of my opinion is that there does seem something wrong with our civilization. Let me speak of this simply quickly at the most general level. (a) Internationally, Western civilization in our era has been a society of the greatest violence and brutality the world has ever known. And let us remember that this ferocity and brutality did not come out of other societies threatening the West but out of the very centre of the West itself. And that these Eastern societies that seem to us today so much to threaten us with violence (e.g. China) only do so in so far as they have been westernized by Western science and philosophy. Let us not forget that Marx is modern Western thought par excellence. (b) Nationally, we are becoming aware that the society of affluence does not seem to lead to a noble human society. Indeed the very presupposition of the West was that a science issuing in the mastery of nature, and this in an affluent society, would produce a good society. The US, Russia, England, Germany – the greatest modern societies all believe this and as [for] the most advanced of them technologically – the US – we see there a mass society without nobility of life – a lawless society of self-seeking – a society whose art is a mixture of pornography, vulgarity, and despair – a society of greater and greater quantity and less and less quality. On both these counts, internationally and internally it is not necessary to accept my opinion that the presuppositions of modern civilization are false – but it is possible to begin to hold them in suspension as it were – that is, to say that we will not necessarily hold them as self-evidently true. But once one does that, one begins to think of this Western civilization of mass industrial society not as absolute but as a particular historical set of circumstances and one begins to speculate where it came

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from and what it was. And as soon as one does that, one begins to see that it arose particularly in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries and that it arose in clear and firm rejection of certain of the presuppositions of another civilization, the civilization of the antique world – that is, particularly the civilization of Greece. If we look at the view of politics that exists in the modern era, that view that has been formulated by such people as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx – we see that it was formulated clearly by them as a criticism of what the ancient classical writers such as Plato and Aristotle had written on the subject. So with science – Galileo, Bacon, Descartes etc. etc. So also with all the fields of morality, of art etc. So we find that if we are to understand the modern presuppositions because of their suspected failure, we cannot only accept but must try to understand, we can perhaps best see them by comparing them with the presuppositions of the other society – against which and in many cases in contradiction to which they were themselves formulated. I will go on – but I don’t want to go on without raising questions about what I have said. The Principles of Existence Given by Myth A lecture on what myths are for those who live within them.

Now obviously the difference between art and myth is twofold (a) the sacred event has happened in primordial times and (b) that event has been and is shaping the world now and above all shaping the lives of those who live within the myth. Now in the light of that comparison with art and having distinguished myth from infantile science I can now proceed to say what I think myth was – you must judge what I say for yourself – but this is to me the most important of all I will have to say this year. I will start by our definition – what I have reached by my studies over the last weeks: Myth is the way that men come to partake in the principles of existence when their language is still undifferentiated. Now this requires two points of explanation so that you will understand what I mean. ... Now what do I mean by the principles of existence?

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Let me say before starting that my great hint as to the nature of myth came in reading Jung and Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, pp 4–9 (one does not have to read much) – but [I] have taken it much farther.79 Let us look [at] what we mean by principle by distinguishing it from what a modern scientist [means] by cause. Let me start from examples of several Greek myths (Larousse Dictionary of Mythology – translated and good for the facts) [Passage on the myth of Hyacinth omitted.] Let me take a more important myth – the myth which the Athenians celebrated at Eleusis – the myth of Demeter and Persephone – the rites of which I have said Sophocles said allowed men to face death. The story of the myth – [see] the [Larousse] classical dictionary 212 – or as it [has] been wonderfully put in English by Milton – Bk 4 line 268 of Paradise Lost.80 Now I do not wish at this point to analyse all the ideas that stream from that myth – winter and spring if the grain does not die – lifted above that into rebirth (Easter and spring have always been together) beyond that into the divine maiden and above all the mother – stabat mater – the mater felix et dolorosa – the endless undifferentiated streaming images from the myth I will talk about another time. What I am using it here to illustrate is the meaning of the word ‘principle.’ This myth, if we limit it just to spring and winter, does not explain to us in terms of science how and why the grain is grown. It does not tell us of the earth growing and of the sun and its turning – it does not tell us how the seed generates in the earth – it does not tell us of the need for fertilizer – or the breeding of grains. That is, it does not tell us how the whole process works – what natural science is concerned with. But rather it takes the great process of the seasons and puts the process into a whole beyond itself in terms of which it can be seen as meaningful – the whole process can be seen as part of the whole great cosmic process. And when the myth is lived through in the cult or rite – the person who lives it through participates in the very meaning of the cycle birth, death, rebirth. This does not mean that the person who lives through this can explain the growing of wheat as a graduate of Ontario Agricultural College – who is concerned with the causes of

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agriculture – but he is led to understand the meaning of the seasons in the cosmic whole. Let me take this distinction between the modern use of cause and the ancient use of principle further. Story of Tillich and the tree. [Tillich was said to have responded to a companion admiring a tree in Central Park: ‘The tree in itself I cannot know.’] Tillich an ultra-modern – a demythologizing theologian as a follower of Kant. What he meant was that we can as scientists know a lot about how the tree works – how it grows from the acorn to the full tree – how it responds to its environment etc. But what the tree is in itself we cannot know – that is, we can know how the tree works – but we cannot know (a) what it is as a whole – nor its place and purpose in the whole scheme of things. We can know that it was planted here by accident or by a human agent – how it grew and what was the cause of growing. But what it is to be a tree – or why in the whole scheme of things there are trees, this we cannot know. Now the last two questions are what I mean by the principles of the tree – to use German language – the good of the tree’s being – and it is to these questions that the myth addresses itself. Now if this was a course on philosophy alone and not on the philosophy of religion, I would here discuss at length what the Greeks said about cause and principle – aitia and archai = cause and principle. Plato and Aristotle identify cause with principle because they take cause to include all the questions about the tree – not only how it works (or as they would say, its efficient cause or the cause of its existence) (piece about nature [perhaps a piece Grant read to the class]). But modern science has taken cause to mean how it works and therefore uses cause in this limited sense and therefore, using the modern language, I will also use cause in that way and distinguish it from principle which I take to mean, as I said last time, what tells us of existence in its totality and reveals to a man his own mode of being in the world. Let me read to you what principle meant in the ancient world as distinguished from the modern word ‘cause’ in a scene of the greatest existential import. Socrates is talking about why he is voluntarily accepting the hemlock in Phaedo 98c and he distinguishes those who seek only the cause and not the principle of human being there. Read. [See above, page 709.] The principle is the fundamental good of his actions. But it is also the fundamental good of the tree. That is why we

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say God is the 1st principle – the fundamental good of everything that is. Now what I am saying is that the myths are ways of expressing the fundamental good of things. Now in this sense they are not, as I said, a pre-scientific science – because they do not seek the causes of things in the way that modern science seeks the causes of things, tries to understand how things work – so that we can work them for our benefit. But rather to seek the principles of existence – what the tree is in itself and why there are trees at all. Let me illustrate again because this point is important and I am taking all my illustrations from Greek – not from [other] traditions or areas. Dionysius or Bacchus – whom we will later read about in Guthrie’s book – and any of you who may be Christians go slowly here because remember that the early Christians often called Christ Dionysius. Whatever else Dionysius is, he is the god of the grape – and through the grape of drunkenness – and through drunkenness of ecstasy – and through ecstasy (standing outside oneself) of music or poetry – and through ecstasy of death. He was a dying and sacrificial god. Now let us think only of the grape and of ecstasy. Now Dionysius does not explain the physiology of how wine intoxicates men – or anything that a modern physiologist, sociologist, or psychologist could tell us of the problem of alcoholism. But what he does is say the ultimate meaning of wine in human existence. He tells both of the liberating quality of the grape and also of its terrible destructive potential. For we must remember that Dionysius is not only a god of light – but a terrible god of darkness. In Euripides’ play The Bacchae the women led by a mother under the influence of ecstasy tear the son – the King – apart with their hands. Dionysius does not explain to us the way the grape works – but its meaning both as light and dark for human life. Because it takes the grape and sees it for what it is in itself and its meaning in the whole – that is, its divine meaning. Where may I ask are men and women allowed to participate in the principle of ecstasy as in the cult of Dionysius? So with the principle of femininity and masculinity – so indeed with the principle of the hermaphrodite – with the meaning of the earth and of the sky – of suffering and deprivation – of the family and of the city. The principles of these existences were given in the myth. Go and look

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at the Aphrodite or Venus from Melos in the Louvre. The goddess of beauty and of love – look at her image – the most famous and rightly the most famous of the Greek statues – and remember her origin as described by Hesiod. The race of Titans were born of the marriage of earth and heaven, Uranos and Gaia. Uranos tried to prevent his children from emerging out of the womb of the earth but eventually his youngest son Kronos (chronology) took a sickle and cut off his father’s procreative organ and threw it into the sea and from it out of the foaming waves there came Aphrodite. Think of the sea as the source of all life and then look at the crest of the wave in foam as one of the perfect beauties and then if you are to see from any woman who knows what femininity is swimming in the sea, and then understand how the myth ... [Text breaks off.] Socrates as a Religious Man An excerpt from a lecture on the Phaedrus about Socrates as a religious man, though he calls traditional religion into question in some respects.

... Indeed for our purposes in this course this dialogue [Phaedrus] must be central – the culmination of our work – for the simple reason that it is the most religious document of all Plato’s writings. Not only in the setting (which I talked about last day), the fact that the place is a place of myth, that the cicadas are singing, that the beneficence of nature is so extraordinarily present, and that in that beneficence nature can be seen as a kind of instrument through which the divine reaches towards us. But there is more than that, the whole dialogue is strewn with religious undertones. Quite apart from the great central speech. Let me take four things [in order] of increasing importance. (a) He covers his head when he has to speak of base love in the first speech. What a wonderful religious act. For let us be clear, where there is not shame there is not religion. Modern philosophy which has replaced religion with philosophy has no shame. Shame is always neurotic. Now of course there is neurotic shame. But is there not such a thing as real shame?

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(b) He has a daemon. I have talked of this. (c) Socrates later says that the act of homosexual love is forbidden. Now ‘forbidden’ is a word surely of the deepest religious undertones – as far as religion in its negative moment goes. Indeed I would say that there can be no religion unless there are those acts which are forbidden – that is, something beyond ourselves constrains us. Modern philosophy in denying religion has said that society can be held together by socially useful passions – and that it does not depend on sacred restraints. Sacred restraints are now seen as taboos. This is the modern language used to free men’s minds from sacred restraints. (d) And by far the most important. Socrates prays. And let us not have any doubt in the matter that religion stands or falls by whether you think prayer is a valid activity. Eric Koch – story (CBC – Augustine program?)81 I could not pray when I was a modern philosopher. I thought I was a Christian but I could not pray. Modern philosophy uses the word ‘God’ but it is really the wholly free human being – the ideal of humanity. Therefore in praying we are really talking to ourselves. That is why I could not pray. But Socrates prays – that is, [there are] things[?] beyond us – into whose hands we can commit ourselves. The forms are not abstractions but realities. Nevertheless not as I will – but as You will.82 Ultimate question not philosophy and piety but philosophy and prayer – and how they are combined. Now I think this is very important when one looks at this course as a whole. Let me put it this way – the greatest modern philosopher Hegel put the religious consciousness high in the list of consciousness. But it was finally transcended by philosophy. Philosophy takes up into itself religion so that at the highest point of manhood religion has been passed beyond. And they interpreted the Greeks in this way – Out of the mythical world – the world of religion – there came philosophy and when this arose there was no need, real need, for religious consciousness – because it was overcome. Caird. The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers takes Phaedrus out of its setting.83 Now my interpretation in this class, and indeed it has become increasingly clear to me as I go along that this interpretation is wrong. For although Socrates is a philosopher or in some sense the philosopher, he remains a religious man. Now let me say that this is not only

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in the sense that religion is for the many but not for the philosophers because Socrates is a philosopher and also a religious man. Philosophy does not overcome religion and transcend religion. Now indeed Plato is supremely aware that religion and the world of myth is the way that most men apprehend the divine. This is vouchsafed by the fact that in his last book, The Laws, which is his practical book (The Republic – ideal) he returns deeply into the myth. The good city which can be founded – not the ideal city – is entirely the religious city. And though the tenth book of The Laws gives some natural theology or what we might call philosophical theology – the city is entirely in the myth. Ordinary life must be impregnated with the mythical. But this is not the central point I am making – I am not saying that religion is for the masses – philosophy is for the few and that this is Plato’s position – and this is certainly how the moderns have interpreted Plato. But this is not adequate to Socrates – here is Socrates who covers his head – who prays – that is, a religious man – a man concerned indeed first and foremost to know himself and therefore not concerned with the scientific account of the myths (229 d-e) but Socrates is the man whom the Delphic Oracle says knows himself and he remains a religious being. [Text breaks off.] Euthyphro – Socrates on the Myths and the Gods ... And ... do remember that modern philosophy in its relation to religion has said one thing above all. It has said philosophy will, now that man has come of age, fulfill the roles that in the past were fulfilled by two different human activities, philosophy and religion. And in saying that it has made philosophy itself something very different from what it was for Plato or the Greeks. Be very careful of trying to abstract any simple philosophic teaching from these dialogues. Now to turn to Euthyphro. Last day I started from 6 a-b where Socrates stated the following.84 Now on a course on myth and reason we are at the heart here. What is Socrates saying? He is not attacking all myths – but he is saying that

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some are nonsense because they accuse the gods of immorality and it is false to accuse the gods of immoral actions. And one must remember here, as in the Republic, he is referring to holy Homer as well as to others. Therefore he is striking at the roots of the traditional religion. Not that he is attacking all of it – but in attacking some of it, he implies that he is aware of criteria by which it can be judged whether an action can be known to be moral and immoral. Where do these criteria come from? This is what I expected you to ask. Because here the question is entirely open. [Page missing.] ... myth is under attack in general as well as in particular – because it is said that its contents are to be judged by criteria that do not come from myth. Where in fact do they come from? And once it is said there are criteria by which the truth or falsity of myths must be judged which do not come from myth, myth is made ultimately subordinate to whatever it is judged by. Now two further points about this: (a) In this passage Socrates is clear, as we must be clear, that this is why he is going to be tried. He has attacked traditional religion at its heart. Expand. Period of failure of nerve in Athens – return to traditionalism – 2 forces uniting in attack. Gorgias and Euthyphro. (b) Can we not – and this is important for those of you who study religious questions at many points of history – draw some kind of analogy between this situation and the situation that often [has] arisen in arguments between certain kinds of Biblical theologians and philosophers? Karl Barth, for instance, says that we cannot use the petty standards of human thought to judge of God’s dealings with man.85 For God all things are possible – we cannot judge here by criteria of our reason. Revelation cannot be judged by reason – and the philosophers who try to do so are guilty of blasphemy – in the same way that to the Athenians Socrates is guilty of blasphemy. But in case we think or draw the conclusion that Socrates is simply and solely here showing that he rejects the old myth because it is untrue, we can remember that in other dialogues he is defending some of the old religion in so far as he defends it ruthlessly and with much greater force than he uses here against Euthyphro – against the enlight-

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ened sceptics, as for instance in his proof in Theaetetus that man is not the measure or in Protagoras or Gorgias etc. etc. or in the Laws (716c) where he says that ‘God is the measure of all things.’ And where at the end he sees absolutely the importance for man of life with the myth. To engender sceptical agnosticism among the people is to degrade them. Ironic tolerance towards the old myths in a way [that] shows no tolerance of enlightened scepticism. And indeed directly in this dialogue the point is driven home with all force in a part we have not yet talked about (11e et seq where piety or reverence is made part of justice – Let us translate the Greek word dikaiosune – as wider – perhaps morality) that is, reverence or piety is unequivocally said to be part of the full life for man. Therefore what is being said is at least this. The traditional religion will not do without criteria by which we judge it and yet what is also being said is that reverence is a central part of the good life. Reverence is the matrix of human nobility (piety and reverence). Therefore what is also surely behind the dialogue is the question – what should we reverence? what are the gods? From whence come these standards or norms (if you like this modern language) by which we are able to judge of the truth or falsity of stories about the gods? Now another thing that I think you have not sufficiently got and which is implied in what I have already said. Let us start from what I have said that the old myths, even if they must be judged, are treated with incomparably greater tolerance than the way the sceptics are treated in the Gorgias, for example. Surely this is seen in this dialogue. Euthyphro is not treated with comtempt – though he is seen as rather foolish – he is never treated as Callicles is treated in the Gorgias as the very lie in the soul – the identity of tyranny and scepticism. (Parenthesis – how modern liberal now sees scepticism as the friend of the free society – Plato does not – he unequivocally ties scepticism and tyranny together in the Gorgias.) And I think we can see naive tolerance and even approbation [in the way] that he treats Euthyphro in the fact that Euthyphro goes a long way to approaching the truth. Now to speak of this I must go beyond where we have gone in the text – but this is about the dialogue as a whole so that we can talk about it now. Look at 14c. Here Socrates is saying you are getting nearer and nearer – but then the rest of the dialogue after that part is Euthyphro dropping away to where he was at the beginning and

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finally he breaks up the dialogue – not Socrates. 14c [is] the dramatic height. [Burnet, 20–1; 139–40.] Where is the logical height? Now in going as far as Socrates goes here he is showing a closeness to Euthyphro and I would express that closeness in the following way. The traditionally religious person may move to philosophy in a way that the enlightened sceptic will not. Because there is something in reverence that may lead to contemplation or theoria as we might call it. It is a knowledge that man is not the measure. This compounds to a truth I have seen in my life. This would seem to me one reason why modern philosophy is its own gravedigger because it says that philosophy is to take over the task of religion – it attempts and has attempted to attack religion – to destroy it. But in so far as it succeeds, it kills in the young their desire for philosophy as theory or contemplation – and leaves only philosophy as criticism – that is, philosophy as clearing up the logical messes left round by the scientists – but finally the scientists do not care whether their messes are cleared up and so philosophy disappears – as it has almost disappeared in all modern societies. This rather difficult but true argument is why I am a professor of religion. But leaving aside the modern consequence – let us not think that Euthyphro is treated with contempt – he is treated with ironic tolerance, he is sometimes recognized as not very clever, he is treated with sadness at the end when religion turns its back on philosophy, but he is told at the dramatic height of the dialogue that he has nearly made the breakthrough into philosophy and when one compares it with Socrates in the Gorgias facing the sceptics: Polus and Callicles – where he uses outright contempt. Where he says to Polus ‘hush’ – don’t say such a thing as moral nihilism. He is extremely aware of the consequences of moral nihilism. The last point I would like to make about this small dialogue is how through the series of definitions that move up to a height where Euthyphro nearly gets the point and then down again to the inadequate piety – we might say the unholy piety in which the relations with the divine are seen as in a business transaction – behind it all is a view of the world which must be seen (Sir William Mulock and piety as a business transaction).86 Let me start to put this view of the world in the following way. In the talk about care and service in the dialogue, Socrates makes clear

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that we cannot talk of service of the gods in the same way we talk of care and service of horses, dogs, cattle, even man, because in the latter case one cares for these beings or does them service so as to improve them, to make them better – but it is not possible to make the gods better, it is not possible to improve them. And Euthyphro and Socrates both agree that it is not possible to improve the gods – without stating why it is not possible. But the reason is implied: the gods cannot be made better because they are already good. What then is service to the gods? It is to work for the same purpose as theirs ([found?] our politics). Now it is not argued here or proved but just asserted that the gods are good. Now let me refer back to what I said about the Homeric gods. The Homeric gods I said appear to me to be the eternal principles of nature. And let me refer back to a lecture I gave about Cornford’s book about the coming of philosophy out of myth and where as a modern Darwinist he asks how the Greeks could ever have believed such an evidently ridiculous idea that nature was good – because as a modern man he thought of nature as either indifferent or hostile to morality. And let me refer forward to Plato’s Republic, which some of you have read, in which the final principle of everything is the Good, the radiating power of which sustains all in being. Or to a dialogue which you haven’t read, the Timaeus, where he speaks of the demiurge (which is God in so far as he creates the world) and it is made clear that he can only create what is good and well ordered. And let me remind you of what I said about the difference between the words ‘the gods’ and our Western use of the word ‘God.’ God for Plato would be the Good or the One – the final principle of all things. And let me look forward to the last dialogue we will read, Phaedrus, where in the myth there given the gods are seen as lower than the eternal world of the Good. Now in terms of this it is clear to me that to Socrates [the gods] are in some sense personifications of the immanent principles of order in the world – that which gives inner structure to the world of nature – that which gives nature its measure. Piety, or as I would call it, reverence, is part of justice – it indeed may be as I have said the matrix of all morality – because we can only act well in so far as our actions are attuned to the very nature of things and we are attuned to the very nature of things by paying reverence to the eternal principles of order

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in the world which are apprehended in the myth as the gods. To put it negatively what is wrong with Euthyphro’s account of the gods is that it is an account which leads to lack of order and measure among the gods – but this must be wrong – because the gods are in themselves the principles of order as they appear in religion. Let me also say that this whole position is hard to understand for modern man (1) because we do not think nature is good and find it extremely difficult to understand how people could think that it was, and (2) (more important) our whole account of morality and what it is to act morally is so entirely different from the Socratic account of it. (i) our account [of] freedom – expand, (ii) their account [of] virtue – conforming to a given order[?] – not making the world. (Expand.) But clearly reverence is a virtue if man’s proper way of life is to act according to an order which he does not make but is given – then he must show reverence to that order.

POLITICS AND RELIGION Grant taught ‘Politics and Religion 3h3’ in the 1963–4 year. It was listed in the calendar as ‘a study of the relation between politics and religion based on Augustine, Troeltsch, Nietzsche, and A.D. Lindsay.’

Table of Contents 1. Positivism [the only lecture that survived from this course] Positivism A lecture on the origins of the fact/value distinction and modern social science in Kant and Weber, with a critique of Voegelin’s account of positivism.

Facts and Values Positivism Now the argument of Voegelin has come in the last chapter to the point where he has said that gnosticism in Marxism is the greatest danger to

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the world and that its danger is increased by the liberal gnosticism in the English-speaking nations which would not stand up against it.87 And I raised two points, (1) that in my opinion positivism in its most clearly thought forms is a more complete gnosticism than Marxism, and (2) that positivistic distinctiveness had gone further in the English-speaking nations than Voegelin recognized. Now clearly to dispute the first point would require an analysis of both positivism and Marxism. Positivism takes us back to the first chapter. Now it is rather Voegelin’s purpose in the book ... to go into the roots of positivism – all its [?] historical roots. (They are too deep, too numerous, too obscure for any ease of intellectual relation.)88 That would take a long series of lectures. It would require long training in philosophy and history which none of you have. Let us return to what this course is called, ‘Politics and Religion.’ It is the attempt to show how various [?] of religion have withered[?] politics and we have used Voegelin because he is a thinker who is supremely aware of the religious as well as the philosophic elements in the tradition. That is, I expect you for the exam to understand Voegelin, nothing beyond that. But in the first chapter Voegelin singles out Max Weber as a central figure in positivism and the central point of Weber that for an objective sociology we must be clear to make the distinction between judgments of facts and judgments of value. So to illustrate what that means in Voegelin, I will talk of Weber and what that distinction means. Let me make two simple preliminary caveats[?]. (a) This distinction is everywhere in our society and you who will instruct people in religion will have to be aware of its presence. That is, it is more than a simply philosophic opinion now – it is a widespread popular opinion. For example, so many people think: science tells us about what is – the facts. Religion – art – morality tell us what values we should live by. They put the coating on the reality. So many people support the churches on this basis. The churches are not telling us about what is – that God is, that He ought to be worshipped in Jesus Christ – No, the church is teaching us values, to be kind, good, etc. It is science which teaches us what is. The same with the university. Dean of Engineering – and the [?]. So with art. Art is not teaching us about what is, but good and pleasant values. It is made by man. What is, is taught us by science. So even with philosophy. In other words this distinction is everywhere and you must recognize that it is the way people patronize[?]

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religion ... Unless Christianity is telling us about what is – it is nothing – let’s face it. Professors of religion teach nice values. (b) Social Science positivism – that is, Weber – is particularly important for the following reason. It is the philosophy – positivism – of modern science. Now modern science may be described negatively as having had its greatest successes by eliminating the idea of purpose from nature. 1. 2. 3. 4.

In physics – not too terrible In biology – harder to take but not yet bad In psychology – the idea of purpose [taken] from man In sociology – the idea of purpose [taken] from society – the worst of all because society, in my opinion, more important than any individual – and to say that society can be understood without the idea of purpose is very gloomy.

Now when I say ‘without purpose’ let me make clear what I mean. Of course modern psychology says that man makes his own purposes – but they can ultimately be understood in terms of physiology – of the brain determining the mind. Of course sociologists say that society is full of purpose but purposes are determined by the social system. Now in this sense positivism in the social sciences is more deadly for our species than in the physical sciences – because it applies to ourselves. Now in Max Weber. If you want to know about his extremely interesting life etc., read From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Gerth and Mills Oxford 1946). It starts with a charming[?] biographical sketch – great book of great influence, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But I want to talk about his method. And of course his method goes back as does so much modern philosophy to the greatest of modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant, and so for the rest of the way I want to speak about Kant and how he laid down the basis of modern social science positivism. And as this positivism is so attacked by Voegelin and has been by myself, I want to show what a great defence can be made for it. One must remember that one can only criticize a position when one has seen it for what it is at its best. Now the difference between judgments of facts and judgments of values is made by Kant for two reasons, (a) to defend the objectivity of

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science, and (b) to defend the sanctity of morality. Now we are apt to think of positivism as essentially defending science and keeping moral values out of science – so that science can be perfectly objective. And we see positivism as an attack on morality. But to Kant the distinction between judgments of fact and of value originated first as much in the protection of morality as in the protection of science. Let me show this argument ([See] A Study in Ethical Thinking[?] – D.M Mackinnon.) Kant’s argument is based here on his interpretation of the moral judgment. (I have turned back from that to Plato – but let’s see the power of that against Plato.) Moral judgments are always in the imperative mood, not the indicative mood. A moral statement, that is, a rule uttered to guide a choice. You ought to do this – fear of God (hypothetical and categorical imperatives). Now he says that you cannot deduce from any statement of fact – a statement that you ought to act in this way. This is what is called, in modern philosophy, the naturalistic fallacy – which, put in its clearest form is that we cannot reach an imperative conclusion, without at least one imperative premise. You cannot, in other words, move from what is to what ought to be. Because what ought to be is bringing something new into reality – and what is new cannot be deduced from what is. This is Kant’s criticism of the classical ethics of the Greeks. What the Greeks – that is, Socrates – say is something like the following: when one has knowledge, one knows that the universe is like this – that is, it says for example that a human being will find happiness in justice. The just life is the happy life, therefore be just, because in being just you are in harmony with the very justice of the universe. Now, says Kant, what is wrong with the classical account of morality: It makes all morality eudaemonistic – that is, pursuing happiness. But to say that all morality is the pursuit of happiness is to deny that there is any morality. It confuses the categorizing of the good – with the right. Let me show what he means. To say that an action is good is not to say it is right, says Kant. Let’s take an example: A person for a pure motive does something for somebody else that has disastrous consequences for that other person. Now according to Kant that action is right but it is not good. Or on the other hand somebody gives a great deal of money to a good cause for the sake of getting his name in the

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papers or being made lieutenant-governor etc. That is a good action but not a right action. Now one has to distinguish moral or right actions according to Kant from good actions. This is where the classical moral philosophers failed – because they did not understand this distinction. And why is this distinction between good and right actions essential? Because we must make a distinction between those actions which are good and done with right motive and those actions which are good which are done without the right motive. This does not mean to Kant that they are done with the wrong motive. Moral/immoral/amoral. That is, an action is right only if it is done for the motive of duty alone. That is, a right action has to be freely chosen, self-legislated, as Kant says. Now to apply this to the question of judgments of fact and judgments of value. Kant, I repeat, is not arguing simply that this distinction has to be preserved for the sake of science – but above all for the sake of morality. Why? If we say that we can deduce from our knowledge of the universe how we ought to act – we would be denying our freedom and this is exactly what classical ethics did. By metaphysics we can know what the universe is and from that we deduce how we should act – but we are determined[?] by our knowledge. Virtue is knowledge, but that denies there is any authentic freedom. If we know that justice or the good is the [?] arbiter of everything – then there is no question about being good. This is why Kant says that he is denying reason to make room for faith – His most famous remark in the 2nd preface to the Critique of Pure Reason. Faith makes authentic freedom[?] possible. And this takes us back in two ways to earlier difficulties with Voegelin. (a) I pointed out that Voegelin seems to have forgotten that Christ and the disciples were not philosophers – but simple fishermen, a tax collector, a carpenter, that according to Christianity the highest truth is vouchsafed not to the philosophers. Now Kant’s account of the moral judgment shows how this is possible. The waitress not stealing a tip – the highest act. The greatest scientist is in no better or higher position. Egalitarianism vs hierarchy in Christianity and not in classical philosophers. Kant the ..p..[?] philosopher of equality. Protestantism – the priesthood of all believers. That is why Protestantism and positivism have in their early days gone hand in hand – and this in Voegelin’s language [is] the extreme agnosticism of that faith, always agnostic, acting in the dark, the dark world that we celebrate from. My God, My God ...89

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(b) I would point out also that Kant’s account of the moral judgment as command – goes with the Semitic religions. The [ten] commandments – imperatives. ‘Thou shalt not’ – not ‘do this so that you will be happy’ as in Greek ethics. But just ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘thou shalt not’ – imperatives. In short, according to Kant if you are going to preserve the moral judgment of right as the free acceptance of a command, we cannot have metaphysics. We have on the one hand science – and on the other morality. That is Weber. Now indeed social science positivism often forgets that and simply sees itself as guarding[?] science – but in its origin it was a guarding of a Protestant view of the moral judgment. Now therefore a criticism of it would require above all a criticism of Kant’s account of the moral judgment in the v...[?] of Plato’s view of the moral judgment. I happen to think that such an argument can be made. But (a) I think Voegelin is not adequate in dealing with Weber – because he is not adequate in dealing with Kant and not adequate with Kant because not adequate with Protestantism. I think he is not adequate in dealing with Protestantism because when he is dealing with the Greeks and Christianity he does not seem to me adequate in dealing with the question of the relation of revelation to classical philosophy. And he is not adequate with that because when he sees, which is quite true, the close sameness between Biblical revelation and classical philosophy, he does not emphasize properly their great differences. And let us remember that it was traditional Protestantism, that is, the Protestantism of Calvin and Luther, that most unequivocally stated the unequivocal difference between Biblical revelation and faith and philosophical illumination and knowledge. Let me say that I think Voegelin’s book is a noble book, nonetheless, and we have to take its arguments with the highest seriousness. But let me say that the tradition in the West is so confused that those of us who want to point it out and see what is true in it and what is false in it, have an enormous subtle and highly difficult task.

LIST OF MCMASTER LECTURES AND FRAGMENTS The following list includes all the 1960s and 1970s lectures found so far that do not appear in the foregoing selection. The numbers identify particular documents. The titles follow Grant’s own headings or the first line

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of the text. The numbers of pages of the original (legal-size foolscap) are given in square brackets.

Philosophy and Religion 1a6 This course was taught jointly with Clifford and Mayer (philosophy) (1962–3, 1963–4, 1964–5), with Combs (1965–6), and with Combs, Going, and Greenspan (1966–7).

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 11a 12 13 14 15 16 17

Syllabus – Philosophy and Religion 1a6 (1966–7) [3] Introduction to Course on Plato [3] Lecture 1 – The Greeks [5] Lecture 2 [8] The Fate of the City-State [4] Intrinsic and Extrinsic Justice [4] Final Lecture – The Modern World (Lecture 12?] [9] Glaucon and Adeimantus [Lecture 6?] [5] Fragmentary Lecture on Dialogues [Lecture 3?] [6] Lecture on the Universals [Lecture 8?] [5 pages typed] Books on Augustine [earlier course?] [2] Augustine Lecture 1 [earlier course?] [4] Augustine – City of God [4] 1st Lecture – ‘At the beginning ...’ [5] 2nd Lecture [4] Lecture on the Forms or Universals [9] The Republic [2] Greeks on Nature [page 1 missing] [5]

Myth, History, and Reason 3k6, 4k6, 4f6(?) and Myth and Reason 6k6 (as graduate course) 1 2 3 4 5 6

1st Lecture [7] Lecture 2 [11] Lecture 3 [4] ‘As it seemed to me perhaps rightly ...’ [7] ‘The sameness and difference of ... art ...’ [2] Aristophanes and Socrates [7]

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7 Nature. Physical Philosophy [3] 8 Note about Body in Phaedo [3] 9 Phaedo Introductory Lecture [6] 10 ‘I have today to try to state clearly ...’ [6] 11 Eliade Questions [2] 12 Symposium [4] 13 Symposium: The Beautiful and the Good [2] 14 The Beautiful and the Good [5] 15 Phaedrus ‘It is certainly ...’ [4] 16 Phaedrus Speech [2] 17 Phaedrus ‘(1) Exam’ [2] 18 Introduction to the Platonic Writings [6] 19 Thrasymachus [possibly 1950s?] [4] 19a Fragments on Nietzsche [4] 19b Fragments on Euthyphro [8] 20 Gorgias [5] 21 (2) Myself and Stephansson [starts page 3] [5] 22 Last Lecture on What Is Myth [1] 23 ‘Now what do I mean ... existence.’ [starts page 2] [7] 24 Agnosticism [1] 27 ‘My mistake last time ...’ [4] 28 The Republic [4-line fragment] 29 Empedocles [1/2-page fragment] 30 Mimesis [1-page fragment] 31 The Soul [1-page fragment] 32 ‘Now let us take this and look ...’ [3] 33 The Beautiful Itself [8] 34 Orphics and Pythagoreans (Simone Weil and the Hunger) [page 7 missing] [8] 35 Fragment on Myth [starts page 2] [2] 36 Initiation [4] 37 Language [2] 37a First Lecture on Guthrie [8] 37b Fragment on Christianity [1] 38 Keats [3] 39 Apollonian and Dionysian [13] 40 Lecture on Myth [8] 41 Myth in General [9]

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Lecture on the Phaedo [14] Two Lectures on the Break from the Myth [10] Euthyphro [8] Typescript – Plato’s Laws (Notes and Comments); Notes on Myth and Reason and on Eliade’s Book [11] 46 First Lecture Second Term [6] 47 Fragments in File 12 48 Religion 4k6 Exams for 1967 and 1969 Church and State (1961–2) 1 The Grand Inquisitor [3] 2 The Christian View of Politics [2] 3 Dostoevsky [3] History and Religion 3d3 or Religion and History or Philosophy of History 1 2 3 4 5 6

Lecture 1 [3] Lecture 2 ½ [4] Marx [9] Facts and Values – Positivism [15] Time [5] Marx [3]

Politics and Religion 3h3 Comparative Religion 3b2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Last Lecture [3] Zoroastrianism [5] China and India – Difference [4] Hinduism [2] Islam – Second Lecture [1] Buddhism [2] Myth in General and Demythologizing [4] Buddhism – Several Preliminary Remarks [3] Islam [4]

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10 The Origins of Religion (Bouquet) [4] 11 Fragment on Noss [2] 12 Lecture 1 [4] 13 Jainism [1] 14 Hinduism [1] 15 Lecture 4 [2] 16 Lecture 6 [5] 17 Hinduism – ‘logic of the social sciences’ [4] 17a Fragment on Dharma [starts on page 2] 18 ‘Questions – how could people have believed this ...’ [6] 19 Lecture 2 [4] 19a Judaism [fragment] [1] 19b Fragment on Recollection in Meno [1] 20 Symposium, Phaedrus [4] 21 The Buddha [5] 22 Fragments in File 10 Christian Ethics 2c3 (1962–3) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Lecture 1 [2] The Just War in Modern Circumstances [8] Fragment on Sexuality in Theology [1] Lecture 2 [fragment] [1] Jessop [fragment] [1] What I Am Doing [2] Christian Morality [from earlier Gospels 1a2] [3] War and Christian Ethics [2] Christianity a Religion Not a Morality [2] Question of the Mass Society [3] Christian Revelation Applied to Concrete Cases? [5] Punishment [9]

Notes 1 ‘On Redemption,’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin 1966), 137–42. Grant perhaps refers to Nietzsche’s doctrine that the Western account of ‘redemption’ and

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Course Lectures at McMaster: A Selection the attendant notions of good and evil are characterized by ‘revenge against time and its “it was.”’ See also chapter 4 of Time as History, entitled ‘Nietzsche: Revenge and Redemption,’ 42–56. Grant was not fond of McLuhan’s work. He sometimes referred to followers as ‘McLuhanatics,’ using the term coined at the University of Toronto for McLuhan’s students. Alberto Moravia, ‘Dreaming up Petronius,’ translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal, New York Review of Books, 26 March 1970, pp. 40–2. The quotation is from Simone Weil, ‘A Theory of the Sacraments,’ included, in a different translation, in Gateway to God, ed. David Raper (London: Fontana 1974), 65. The original French passage is in Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu (Paris: Editions Gallimard 1962), 135: ‘La nature humaine est ainsi agencée qu’un désir de l’âme, tant qu’il n’a pas passé à travers la chair au moyen d’actions, de mouvements, d’attitudes qui lui correspondent naturellement, n’a pas de réalité dans l’âme. Il n’y est que comme un fantôme. Il n’agit pas sur elle.’ In his review of Pétrement’s biography of Weil, to be published in Collected Works, Volume 4, Grant wrote that ‘she was not only a thinker but a saint, and the unity between justice and truth lies at the heart of her teaching. She taught that any desire which has not passed through the flesh by means of appropriate action remains a sentimental phantom, and in saying that she affirms that our apprehension of the most important truths depends on the justice of our lives. One therefore wants to know what kind of a life produced a teaching so terrible in its demands.’ Hebrews 10:31. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated and with an introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Harper 1977), 3–35. The Greek word techne means art or making. David Easton (1917– ), prominent Canadian political scientist at the University of Chicago, developed a systems analytical approach to the understanding of politics. He published The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (1st ed., 1953) and A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965). Max Weber (1864–1920). See page 18, note 4. With the phrase ‘Weber’s rationality,’ Grant refers to his justification of ‘value-free’ social science. Jacques Ellul (1912–94). See page 405, note 5. Dr John Arapura, a close colleague and friend, taught Indian philosophy at the McMaster Department of Religion. Grant states in his preface to Technology and Empire: ‘Professor Ellul’s definition of “technique” is quoted in the article on the curriculum (page 113),

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while my criticism of that definition is implied throughout “In Defence of North America.”’ (‘The University Curriculum’ was written in the early 1960s, and ‘In Defence of North America,’ just before the 1969 publication of Technology and Empire.) Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). See page 179, note 11. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ (1881–1955). See page 584, note 34. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908– ), French social anthropologist, was enormously influential in shaping the study of myth. He published a four-volume study called Mythologiques (1964–72). Grant is drawing on Leo Strauss’s essay ‘The Three Waves of Modernity,’ a work he considered important enough to circulate among his graduate students. The essay can be found in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1989), 81–98. See ‘A Platitude’ in Technology and Empire: ‘We can hold in our minds the enormous benefits of technological society, but we cannot so easily hold the ways it may have deprived us, because technique is ourselves’ (576). See ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row 1977), 300–5. Heidegger cites Heisenberg’s lecture ‘Das Naturbild in der heutigen Physik,’ in Die Künste im technischen Zeitalter (Munich 1954), in which he (Heisenberg) describes a ‘process of growing resignation’ about the shrinking, in modern physics, of causality into what Heidegger calls ‘a reporting – a reporting challenged forth – of standing-reserves that must be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence.’ Sir Isaiah Berlin (1912–97), Russian-born British philosopher, taught at Oxford after 1932, including during Grant’s time there in the late 1940s. Grant was fond of citing Berlin’s phrase when making the point that a simple, clear explanation might be an inadequate one. Leo Strauss (1899–1973). See page 132, note 5, and page 219, note 3. Jacob Klein (1899–1978) met Strauss at Marburg in 1920 and later taught at Chicago and St John’s College. He published with Strauss on mathematical and philosophic questions. Michael Beresford Foster (1903–59) wrote The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (1935), A Mistake of Plato’s in the Republic (1937), Masters of Political Thought (1941), and Mystery and Philosophy (1957). Grant visited Foster in England when he was writing his thesis, and also returned often to Foster’s essays on creation and politics. See Cameron Wybrow, ed., Creation, Nature, and Political Order in the Philosophy of Michael Foster (1903–1959): The Classic Mind Articles and Others with Modern Critical Essays (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press 1992).

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Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923). See page 583, note 20. 20 The quotation in Technology and Empire: ‘By the middle of the thirteenth century, a considerable group of active minds ... were coming to think of the cosmos as a vast reservoir of the energies to be tapped and used according to human intentions’ (L. White, Medieval Technology and Social Change [Oxford: Oxford University Press 1962], 133–4). 21 Pope Gregory VII in 1075 condemned investiture of priests by the secular authority, represented by the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV. 22 See Grant’s account of Nietzsche’s doctrine in Time as History, 54–6. 23 Grant is referring to ‘Introduction to Simone Weil,’ originally written as a public lecture in 1963 and revised in 1970, evidently for another public event. 24 Grant refers to Hegel’s famous dictum. See T.M. Knox, Philosophy of Right by G.W.F. Hegel, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1958), 13. 25 Grant’s new definition of myth in his lecture on principles is: ‘Myth is the way that men come to partake in the principles of existence when their language is still undifferentiated.’ See page 731. 26 Grant here is referring to Simone Weil’s pamphlet The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill 1956, 1962). 27 Blaise Pascal (1623–62), French mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, made the statement to which Grant refers: ‘Man is no more than a reed, the weakest in nature. But he is a thinking reed’ (Pensées, vi.347). 28 Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ‘Paradiso,’ canto 33. 29 Republic 508b. 30 Grant must have been assuming that his experience in 1941, which he called later his conversion, could be called an intimation rather than an immediate experience of God. 31 Simone Weil reported the experience that Christ had possessed her one day while she was reading the poem ‘Love (III),’ by George Herbert (1593– 1633): Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eye’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning if I lacked anything. ‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here’; Love said, ‘You shall be he.’ ‘I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,

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I cannot look on thee.’ Love took my hand and smiling did reply, ‘Who made the eyes but I?’ ‘Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame Go where it doth deserve.’ ‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘who bore the blame?’ ‘My dear, then I will serve.’ ‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’ So I did sit and eat. 32 The third verse of ‘Jesus shall reign where’er the sun’ (1719), by Dr Isaac Watts (1674–1748), contains the line ‘The prisoner leaps to lose his chains’: Blessings abound where’er he reigns; The prisoner leaps to lose his chains; The weary find eternal rest, And all the sons of want are blest. Grant brings the hymn together with the prisoners chained in the cave. 33 Arthur Hilary Armstrong (1909–97), Gladstone Professor of Greek, University of Liverpool, published An Introduction to Ancient Philosophy (1947) and Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy (1964). Grant probably refers to Armstrong’s article ‘Platonism.’ See note 46 below for the source. 34 Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1857–1939), French philosopher and anthropologist, was professor at the Sorbonne from 1899. He published How Natives Think (1910), Primitive Mentality (1922), and Primitives and the Supernatural (1931). Émile D. Durkheim (1858–1917), pioneer French sociologist, taught at Bordeaux (1887–92) and at the Sorbonne (1902–16). His works include Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897), The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), and Sociology and Philosophy (1924). 35 Francis Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (New York: Harper 1957), 125. The phrase appears in chapter 4, ‘The Datum of Philosophy,’ and chapters 5 and 6 are entitled ‘The Scientific Tradition’ and ‘The Mystical Tradition.’ 36 Francis Macdonald Cornford (1874–1945) was professor of ancient philosophy at Cambridge. See page 219, note 5. Charles Harold Dodd (1884–1973), Norris Hulse Chair of Divinity at Cambridge, published The Authority of the Bible (1955) and The Bible and the Greeks (1964). 37 Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), British classical scholar and professor of

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Course Lectures at McMaster: A Selection classical archaeology at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her works include Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Themis: A Study in the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), and Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. George Gilbert Aimé Murray (1866–1957), Australian-born British classical historian and translator. His published work included many translations of Greek plays and Five Stages of Greek Religion (1913). Ian Crombie (1917–). See page 218, note 1. Paul Friedlander (1882–1968), René Schaerer (1901– ), and Eric Voegelin (1901–85). See page 219, note 6. See note 32 above. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice: ‘If you seek his monument, look around you.’ A motto written by Sir Christopher Wren’s son on the arch of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, which his father designed. John Arthur Thomas Robinson (1919–83), English Anglican theologian and Bishop of Woolwich (1959–69), published Honest to God (1963), which he described as an attempt to explain the Christian faith to modern man. John Charles Bothwell (1926– ), Anglican clergyman, served as priest in Grant’s parish of Dundas as well as parishes in Toronto, Vancouver, and Oakville; was appointed Canon of Christ Church Cathedral in Hamilton (1963); Coadjutor Bishop (1971) and Bishop of Niagara (1973); and Archbishop of the Province of Ontario (1985). Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr (1925– ), American novelist and essayist, wrote the novel Julian (1964) as if it were the emperor Julian’s autobiographical journal and memoir. See Paul Friedlander, Plato: An Introduction (New York: Harper and Row 1958), 64: ‘These three paths [Symposium, Phaedrus, and Phaedo] may be called the path of knowledge, the path of love, and the path of death. Yet they are ultimately one and the same. For love and death lead to knowledge, and knowledge, in turn, is nothing without love and death, which complete it.’ See Plato’s Epistles: A Translation with Critical Essays and Notes, by Glenn R. Morrow (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill 1962), 215–50. Timaeus 37d: ‘But he took thought to make, as it were, a moving likeness of eternity; and, at the same time that he ordered the Heaven, he made, of eternity that abides in unity, an everlasting likeness moving according to number – that to which we have given the name Time’ (Plato’s Timaeus, trans. F.M. Cornford [New York: Macmillan 1959], 29). See A. Hilary Armstrong, ‘Platonism,’ in Ian Ramsey, ed., Prospect for Metaphysics (New York: Unwin 1961), 107. Erich Frank (1883–1949), German philosopher. The essay Grant treasured

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was ‘The Fundamental Opposition of Plato and Aristotle,’ in American Journal of Philology 61 (1940): 34–53, 166–85. See Phaedo 95a-99d, in R. Hackforth, ed., Plato’s Phaedo (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1955), 121–32. Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2002) studied under Whitehead and taught philosophy at Harvard. His works include Mathematical Logic (1951) and Word and Object (1960). One example is Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1901), physicist and mathematician, who was appointed to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1860. Hackforth, ed., Plato’s Phaedo, 126. Ibid., 133. John Burnet suggests: ‘It is not easy to translate logous here; but at least it is highly misleading to speak of concepts (Begriffe), nor is there any justification in Plato’s writings for contrasting Socratic logous with Platonic eide. It is just in logou that the eide manifest themselves, and what Socrates really means is that, before we can give an intelligible answer to the question “what causes A to be B,” we must ask what we mean by saying “A is B”’ (John Burnet, ed., Plato’s Phaedo [London: Oxford University Press 1911], 100). See Jacob Klein, ‘Aristotle: An Introduction,’ in Joseph Cropsey, ed., Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss (New York: Basic Books 1964), 50–67. Klein’s discussion of speech, including Grant’s quotations, begins on page 53. Compare ‘The Disclosure of the Agent in Speech and Action,’ no. 24, chapter 5, in The Human Condition (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor 1959), 155– 61. Compare also ‘The Crisis in Education,’ in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin 1977), 173–96. Romano Guardini, The Death of Socrates: An Interpretation of the Platonic Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo (Cleveland: World Publishing Co. 1962). Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ and ‘The Case of Wagner,’ trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House 1967). See especially section 18. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Wien: Baumuller 1918–22); The Decline of the West (New York: Knopf 1962). See William Keith Chambers Guthrie (1906–81), The Greeks and Their Gods (1956). Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press 1966), 119–24.

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62 Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ and ‘The Case of Wagner.’ Page 112 refers again to section 18. 63 Leo Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes (New York: Basic Books 1966): ‘The peak of man hitherto is that manner of life that found its expression in Greek tragedy or, more precisely, in Aeschylean tragedy. The “tragic” understanding of the worlds was rejected and destroyed by Socrates, who therefore is “the most questionable phenomenon of antiquity,” a man of more than human size: a demigod. Socrates is the first theoretical man, the incarnation of the spirit of science, radically unartistic or a-music: “In the person of Socrates the belief in the comprehensibility of nature and in the universal healing power of knowledge has first come to light.” He is the prototype of the rationalist and therefore of the optimist, for optimism is not merely the belief that the world is the best possible world, but also the belief that the world can become the best of all imaginable worlds, or that the evils that belong to the best possible world can be rendered harmless by knowledge: thinking can not only fully understand being, but can even correct it; life can be guided by science; the living gods of myth can be replaced by deus ex machina, i.e., the forces of nature as known and used in the service of “higher egoism”’ (6–7). 64 Earl Warren (1891–1974), American politician and jurist, became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1954, presiding over a court that was noted for its liberal policy on civil rights. He was appointed chairman of the federal commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Warren Commission has been accused by many of distorting the truth of the case, but Grant is presumably referring to the modern use of the word ‘myth’ in the report, assuming it to mean ‘an invented story.’ 65 Gerardus Van der Leeuw (1890–1950), Religion in Essence and Manifestation, 2 vols, trans. J.E Turner, with appendices to the Torchbook edition incorporating the additions of the German edition by Hans H. Penner (New York: Harper and Row 1963). 66 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. and introd. by George Watson (London: Dent Everyman 1906), XIV, 168–74. 67 See ‘Natasha’s bedtime talks with her mother,’ in Book Six of War and Peace, The Maude Translation, ed. George Gibian (New York: W.W. Norton 1996), 396–8. 68 Mirko A. Usmiani (1912–2001) was a professor in the Classics Department at Dalhousie (1955–77). Peter H. Brieger (1898– ) published Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy (1969), and Art and the Courts: France and England from 1259 to 1328 (1972).

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69 Anna Pavlova (1885–1931), Russian ballerina, was world famous for her dancing with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe and in works of her own. 70 Grant refers to a passage from Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Collins 1959), 162: ‘The soul only knows for certain that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty.’ 71 Clement of Alexandria, properly Titus Flavius Clemens (c.150–215), early Greek theologian at the catachetical school of Alexandria, published ‘The Exhortation to the Greeks,’ in which he makes an eloquent case for Christ: ‘What then is the purpose of this instrument, the Word of God, the Lord, and the New Song? To open the eyes of the blind, to unstop the ears of the deaf, and to lead the halt and erring into the way of righteousness; to reveal God to the foolish men, to make an end of corruption, to vanquish death, to reconcile disobedient sons to the Father. The instrument of God is loving to men. The Lord pities, chastens, exhorts, admonishes, saves, and guards us; and, over and above this, promises the kingdom of heaven as reward for our discipleship, which the only joy He has of us is that we are saved. For wickedness feeds upon the corruption of men; but truth, like the bee, does no harm to anything in the world, but takes delight only in the salvation of men. You have then God’s promise; you have His love to man: partake of His grace’ (‘The Exhortation to the Greeks’ in Clement of Alexandria, trans. G.W. Butterworth [Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1919, 1940], 15). 72 The words over the door of the Academy were: Ageometrëtos mëdeis eisito. According to Heidegger, ‘these words do not mean that one must be educated in only one subject – “geometry” – but that one must grasp that the fundamental condition for the proper possibility of knowing is the knowledge of the fundamental presuppositions of all knowledge and the position we take on such knowledge.’ See ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,’ in Basic Writings, 254. 73 Grant paraphrases a statement of Simone Weil that is contained in a letter to Maurice Schumann in Gateway to God, 64. 74 Simone Weil describes the idea of mediation as follows in her essay ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine,’ in Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (London: Ark Paperbooks 1957): ‘It is impossible that the disposition or arrangement of two of anything, so long as there are only two, should be beautiful without a third. There must become between them, in the middle, a bond which brings them into union. The most beautiful of bonds is that

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Course Lectures at McMaster: A Selection which brings perfect unity to itself and the parts linked. It is geometrical proportion which, by essence, is the most beautiful for such achievement. For when of three numbers, or of three masses, or of any other quantity, the intermediary is to the last as the first is to the last [should be ‘it’], and reciprocally, the last to the intermediary, as the intermediary to the first, then the intermediary becomes first and last. Further, the last and the first become both intermediaries; thus it is necessary that all achieve identity; and, being identified mutually, they shall be one’ (157). Grant may possibly have meant paragraph 3, page 46, of Gateway to God (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1952), which is a passage taken from the New York notebook on the desire for good: ‘All the desire which nature has placed in the human soul and attached to food, drink, rest, physical comfort, the pleasures of the eye and ear, and other human beings, should be detached from those things and directed exclusively towards obedience to God.’ Grant here had written the following: ‘Keith MacDonald and Kant story. See implications of the story. (Some will call it evolution and some call it God.)’ Unfortunately we don’t know the story. Keith MacDonald was the physicist he met while interviewing for the CBC. See ‘Exchange with Keith MacDonald, and Two Talks Given to Scientists’ (111–33). Erich Fromm (1900–80), German-American psychoanalyst, was professor of psychiatry at New York University (1962– ). His works include Escape from Freedom (1941), The Art of Loving (1956), Marx’s Concept of Man (1966), and The Nature of Man (1968). National Review is a conservative American bi-weekly review founded by William F. Buckley. Barry Morris Goldwater (1909–98) was the senator of Arizona (1952–87) who became the unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate (1964) when he was decisively defeated by Lyndon Johnson. He was the spokesman for right-wing Republicans in their campaign against big government. He published The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) and Where I Stand (1964). See C.G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Princeton University Press 1949), Prolegomena 4–9. Kerényi cites Bronislaw Malinowski on myths as reality lived, not tales told. He then discusses the primordial principles (archai) behind the causes (aitia) in the experience of myth: ‘We have found the exact expression for this: behind the “Why?” stands the “Whence?,” behind the aition the arche. More strictly still, there is no initial question at all in mythology any more than there is in archaic Greek philosophy, nothing but the direct unquestioning return to the archai, a spontaneous regression to the “ground.”’

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80 Lines 268–72 from Book IV of Paradise Lost: Not that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers, Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis Was gathered - which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world – (The English Poems of John Milton, H.C. Beeching edition [London: Oxford University Press 1940], 188) 81 Grant is referring to a half-hour CBC program on Augustine produced by Eric Koch. It was the second of a four-part television series on ‘four great philosophers who have had a considerable influence on Western civilization,’ broadcast 19 July 1961 for Educational Television’s Explorations. Grant wrote the script for the dramatization (in which the part of Augustine was played by Percy Rodriguez). The story Grant apparently told about Koch is unknown. Augustine is praying as the program begins: Too late have I loved you oh beauty, so old and always new. Too late have I loved you. You were with me and I was not with you. I sought you in the world and could not find you. You called and cried and burst through my deafness. You flashed, you shined and you scattered my blindness. I have tasted and still hunger and thirst. You touched me and I burn for your truth. See Augustine, Confessions (London: Penguin 1961), Book X, chapter 27, 231–2, with a different translation by R.S. Pine-Coffin. 82 Luke 22:42: ‘Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.’ 83 The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers: The Gifford Lectures, 1900– 1, 1901–2 (1904). Edward Caird (1835–1908), Scottish idealist philosopher, was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow (1866–93) and master of Balliol (1893–1907). 84 See Plato, Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, edited with notes by John Burnet (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1924), 7; 114–16. 85 Karl Barth (1886–1968), Swiss reformed theologian, was the leading exponent of crisis theology, or dialectical theology, which emphasizes the contradiction between God and the world as revealed in scripture. 86 Sir William Mulock (1844–1944), educator and cabinet minister, brought Mackenzie King into public life as the deputy minister of labour (1900–5). As vice-chancellor of University of Toronto (1881–1900), he helped federate the denominational and professional colleges into the cooperative university. He was chancellor from 1924 to 1944. 87 See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1952), chapter 6, ‘The End of Modernity,’ section 3, 173–8.

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88 Henry James, in a preface to The Aspern Papers, recalls a scent in Florence: ‘The air of the old-time Italy invests it, a mixture that on the faintest invitation I rejoice again to inhale – and this in spite of the mere cold renewal, ever, of the infirm side of that felicity, the sense, in the whole element, of things too numerous, too deep, too obscure, too strange, or even simply too beautiful, for any ease of intellectual relation’ (‘The Aspern Papers’ and ‘The Turn of the Screw’ [London: Penguin 1984], 27). 89 Mark 15:34: ‘And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Grant took this cry as a kind of archetype of the truth that humans do not know the will of God.

Appendix 1 Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

The list was compiled by Arthur Davis and Peter Emberley from CBC records and from Dr Grant’s letters. It is as complete as available records allow.

49/11/01 ‘On Human Happiness’: A talk on the radio series Points of View. 52/12/16 ‘On Waiting on God’: A review on radio of Simone Weil’s book Waiting on God. 52/

[full date unavailable] An appearance on the radio series Critically Speaking.

54/06/02 A first appearance on the television quiz program Fighting Words, with moderator Nathan Cohen, in which participants must identify the authors of, and discuss, controversial quotations. During most of the period from 1952 to 1962 the television programs were repeated on radio station CBL two days after the televised version. 54/10/26 ‘Charles Cochrane’: A thirty-minute talk on the radio series Anthology. 55/08/19 ‘The Atomic Age and the Mind of Men’: A talk given at the Couchiching Conference and later broadcast on CBC radio. 55/11/09 ‘Jean Paul Sartre’: A talk given on the radio series CBC

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Wednesday Night, later published in Architects of Modern Thought. 56/08/27 Another appearance on the television series Fighting Words, with the radio version two days later. 58/01/06 ‘Philosophy in the Mass Age’: A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the first of nine talks later revised and published as Philosophy in the Mass Age. 58/01/13 ‘The Ancient and the Modern World’: A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the second of nine talks. 58/01/20 ‘Natural Law’: A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the third of nine talks. 58/01/27 ‘The Rebellion of Enlightenment’: A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the fourth of nine talks. 58/02/03 ‘The Ethics of Marxism’: A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the fifth of nine talks. 58/02/17 ‘A Criticism of the Progressive Spirit: Middle Class Morality’: A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the sixth of nine talks. 58/02/24 ‘The American Pragmatic Spirit’: A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the seventh of nine talks. 58/03/03 ‘The Limits of Freedom’: A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the eighth of nine talks. 58/03/10 George Grant answers questions from listeners: A talk on the radio series University of the Air, the last of nine talks in the ‘Philosophy in the Mass Age’ programs. 58/11/05 `Dostoevski': A talk given on the radio series CBC Wednesday Night, later published in Architects of Modern Thought. The series was introduced by John A. Irving.

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59/01/11 An appearance on Fighting Words, with the radio version two days later. 59/02/08 An appearance on Fighting Words, with the radio version two days later. 59/03/05 ‘Belief’: A sixty-minute program prepared from interviews by George Grant of Miss Bessie Touzel, Dr Keith MacDonald, Dr Victorin Voyer, Dr Wilder Penfield, Mr W.J. Bennett, Robertson Davies, Mrs Viola Halpenny, and Mr Archie Bennett on the television series Explorations. 59/10/18 An appearance on Fighting Words. 59/12/27 ‘Christ, What a Planet!’: A ten-minute talk on the radio series Our Special Speaker, reviewing the year 1959. 60/01/10 An appearance on Fighting Words. 60/05/22 An appearance on Fighting Words. 61/01/10 An appearance on Fighting Words. 61/07/12 ‘Four Philosophers, Part 1: Plato – Belief and What It Is’: A thirty-minute television drama with commentary by George Grant on the series Explorations. 61/07/19 ‘Four Philosophers, Part 2: St Augustine – Belief and What It Is’: A thirty-minute television drama with commentary by George Grant on the series Explorations. 61/07/26 ‘Four Philosophers, Part 3: Hume’: A thirty-minute drama with commentary by George Grant on the series Explorations. 61/08/02 ‘Four Philosophers, Part 4: Kant’: A thirty-minute drama with commentary by George Grant on the series Explorations.

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61/11/21 ‘Carl Gustav Jung’: A thirty-minute talk on the radio series CBC Wednesday Night, later published in Architects of Modern Thought. 61/12/18 ‘What Is History?’: A thirty-minute talk on the radio series University of the Air, in which George Grant is one of three professors discussing E.H. Carr’s six talks. 62/09/?

‘On Peter Fechter’: A short talk on radio about a man who had been shot while trying to cross the Berlin Wall.

63/01/08 ‘The Best of All Possible Beasts’: A panel discussion on the human brain and the computer in the field of memory was held, with George Grant, two physiologists, a neurosurgeon, and DrKeith MacDonald, a physicist, on the television series Science Review. 63/10/07 ‘Crime and Corruption’: A talk on the radio series Preview Commentary, later published in Christian Outlook. 65/06/27 ‘The Future of Canadian Nationhood’: A defence by George Grant of the thesis of Lament for a Nation on the television series Venture. 65/10/10 ‘Revolution and Response’: A speech delivered to the University of Toronto International Teach-In on the radio series CBC Sunday Night. 65/10/21 ‘Talking with Diefenbaker’: A television broadcast with George Grant talking with John Diefenbaker on the series Political Telecasts. 65/11/21 ‘Power and Society’: A program with George Grant as host and Professor John Porter as guest on the series Extension – Educational Television. 65/11/28 ‘Power in Practice’: A program with George Grant as host and Professor John Porter as guest on the series Extension – Educational Television.

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65/12/05 ‘Leadership and Power’: A program with George Grant as host and Professor J.H. Aitchison as guest on the series Extension – Educational Television. 65/12/12 ‘The MP and Parliament’: A program with George Grant as host and Pauline Jewett and Gordon Fairweather as guests on the series Extension – Educational Television. 65/12/19 ‘Politics and the Professor’: A program with George Grant as host and Pauline Jewett as guest on the series Extension – Educational Television. 65/12/26 ‘Politics in Society’: A program with George Grant as host and Professor John Meisel as guest on the series Extension – Educational Television. 66/01/02 ‘Parties in Canada’: A program with George Grant as host and Professor Gad Horowitz as guest on the series Extension – Educational Television.(On 9, 16, 23 and 30 Jan., the series continued with Gad Horowitz as host and Ramsay Cook, Charles Taylor, and Brough Macpherson as guests.) 66/01/07 George Grant talking to graduate students about Lament for a Nation and Canada on the radio series 1967 and All That. 66/02/07 ‘Political Action in Canada’: A program with Gad Horowitz as host and George Grant as guest (co-host) on the series Extension – Educational Television. 66/02/14 ‘A Canadian Identity’: A program with Gad Horowitz as host and George Grant as guest on the series Extension – Educational Television. 66/02/20 Segment (g) about the Edmonton Teach-In on Canadian Identity with George Grant among the speakers on the television series This Hour Has Seven Days (Program 42). 66/06/02 George Grant is interviewed by Adrienne Clarkson about

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the effects of modern technology on man’s ideas, on the television series First Person. 66/07/30 The radio broadcast of the Couchiching Conference, ‘Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions,’ includes George Grant. 66/07/31 The radio broadcast of the Couchiching Conference, ‘Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions,' includes George Grant. 66/08/07 ‘Comments on the Great Society’: Excerpts from a speech by George Grant delivered at the 35th annual Couchiching Conference: ‘Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions.’ The speech was published in Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions, ed. John Irwin (Toronto: CBC 1967), 71–6. 66/08/14 ‘The British Fact’: George Grant is among those interviewed by Larry Zolf in a thirty-minute program on the series Compass. 67/01/01 George Grant talks about Canada, Lament for a Nation, and Diefenbaker, on the television series Sunday. 67/03/09 A program which includes extracts from an address by George Grant on nationalism in the modern world on the radio series Second Century Week. 67/08/13 George Grant talks about Duff Roblin and Dalton Camp on the television series The Other Eye. 69/11/12 ‘Massey Lectures’: A thirty-minute talk on the radio series Ideas, the first of five, later published by the CBC as Time as History. 69/11/19 ‘Massey Lectures’: A thirty-minute talk on the radio series Ideas, the second of five, entitled ‘Time as History.’ 69/11/26 ‘Massey Lectures’: A thirty-minute talk on the radio series Ideas, the third of five, entitled ‘Time as History.’

CBC Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant

769

69/12/03 ‘Massey Lectures’: A thirty-minute talk on the radio series Ideas, the fourth of five, entitled ‘Time as History.’ 69/12/10 ‘Massey Lectures’: A thirty-minute talk on the radio series Ideas, the fifth of five, entitled ‘Time as History.’ 69/12/17 ‘A dialogue in which Dr Grant’s theme and the suggestion that God is dead are discussed and challenged by theologian Dr Charles Malik ... a Lebanese diplomat ...,’ on the radio series Ideas as a sequel to the ‘Time as History’ programs. This dialogue was not included in the book Time as History, but it is included in the set of long-playing records issued by the CBC for their International Transcription Service. 71/12/07 ‘To Be a Tory’: George Grant is among those interviewed by Larry Zolf in this one-hour documentary on the Tories in the television series Tuesday Night. 73/01/28 ‘Lessons of Vietnam War’: A phone-in discussion of the lessons Canadians have learned from the war, on the radio series Cross-Country Check-Up, includes comments by George Grant. 73/08/05 Ramsay Cook interviews George Grant on the Second World War, French-Canadian nationalism, and the problem of feeling at home in a homogeneous technological world, on the television series Impressions. 73/10/10 A program includes George Grant discussing Lament for a Nation, Canada, Lester Pearson, and ‘mental health state’ on the radio series This Country in the Morning. 74/03/05 A program on the need for changing attitudes: George Grant on the gross national product in the light of reevaluated goals, the James Bay Project, and Quebec, on the television series Canada Tomorrow.

770

Appendix 1

75/03/27 ‘The Technological Imperative’: The fourth of five lectures in the ‘Beyond Industrial Growth’ series on the radio series Ideas. The lecture was originally delivered at the University of Toronto on 31 Jan. 1975, and later published under the title ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used,’ in Beyond Industrial Growth, ed. Abraham Rotstein (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976), 117– 31. A revised version of this same essay appeared as ‘Thinking about Technology’ in Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi 1986), 11–34. 77/10/20 Segment (e) of a ninety-minute program. Peter Gzowski interviews Peter Newman, Dalton Camp, and George Grant discussing Diefenbaker’s memoirs on the television series 90 Minutes Live. 80/02/13 ‘The Owl and the Dynamo’: A one-hour profile of George Grant produced by Vincent Tovell and narrated by William Whitehead on the television series Spectrum. 87/05/31 ‘George Grant Profile’: Linden MacIntyre reports from Halifax on the television series Sunday Morning. Clips of George Grant on Canada, Diefenbaker, Vietnam, abortion, Mozart, technology, conversion, walking in the park, and the fact that he is a believer not a pessimist. 88/02/13 ‘On the Morgenthaler Decision’: A five-minute talk on the radio series Commentary. Sheila Grant says letters requesting copies of the script came in from all over Canada. 88/09/28 ‘Tribute to George Grant,’ by David Cayley, during hour three of the radio series Morningside. 88/10/02 ‘Reflections’: Tributes to George Grant and bp Nichol, with clips from the 87/05/31 program, on the television series Sunday Morning. 89/08/24 ‘Tribute to George Grant,’ by David Cayley (repeat of 88/ 09/28) on hour three of the radio series Morningside.

Appendix 2 Editorial and Textual Principles and Methods Applied in Volume 3

The purpose of the edition is to provide readers with a complete collection of reliable reading texts. Editorial interventions identify the sources of the writings; explain Grant’s allusions to persons, places, and events; and describe any changes made to the writings during the preparation of the volume. They consist of headnotes, annotations, and a chronology of Grant’s life. A general index of names and topics will be provided for each of the volumes of the edition. Copy-Text The material included in this volume did not pose difficult questions regarding the versions that ought to be chosen as copy-texts, that is, the ones closest to the author’s intentions and preferences. No substantially different earlier versions of these particular writings have survived, as far as we know. Hence the copy-texts consist of the works as they were published and unpublished writings as they were found in Grant’s papers. Accuracy of the Text We have corrected the human and mechanical errors that occurred in the process of scanning the documents into computer files. In addition, we have checked the original sources of Grant’s quotations for accuracy. Headnotes We have provided short headnotes for each piece of writing to identify its source and date. For the special cases of Lament for a Nation and

772

Appendix 2

Technology and Empire, we have provided more substantial introductions. We have also written a longer headnote to introduce the selection of lectures. All headnotes are in sans serif type to distinguish them from Grant’s writings. Annotations Annotations are intended to supplement and clarify Grant’s references as unobtrusively as possible. The notes have been kept concise. They identify persons, events, or places that might puzzle or confuse some readers. Again we ask for patience from readers who may find that some of the notes give information that seems obvious to them. Our information has been drawn from many sources, but we are especially indebted to The Canadian Encyclopedia: Year 2000 Edition, editor in chief James H. Marsh (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1999), which has been of invaluable assistance. In Lament for a Nation and Technology and Empire, where many annotations appear along with Grant’s original notes, we have reproduced Grant’s as footnotes and set ours as notes at the end of each work. Notes that explain revision and emendation of texts as well as minor textual notes are included in the annotations. Appendices There are two appendices in this volume. The first contains a list of CBC broadcasts, which extends in time from the 1950s to the 1980s; the second contains this account of editorial principles. Correction, Regularization, Standardization, and House Style When we judged that absolutely no question of meaning was at stake, we silently corrected minor typographical and punctuation errors in Grant’s texts. Whenever we judged that a correction might affect the meaning of the text, the error has simply been flagged with [sic]. We have corrected mistakes that obviously occurred because of an oversight by either Grant or the typists who prepared the original works. For example, Grant regularly used the expression ‘that is’ without a

Editorial and Textual Principles and Methods: Volume 3

773

following comma. We have added commas in such cases. Grant’s frequent slip, ‘loose,’ has been corrected to ‘lose.’ In some cases we have retained Grant’s spelling and punctuation because we judged they were essential parts of his voice and presentation in the time and place he was writing. We have kept his spelling of words with -ise endings that now tend to be -ize endings – with the exception of ‘civilization.’ All instances of ‘judgement’ have been changed to ‘judgment.’ Apart from the exceptions mentioned, texts adhere to the University of Toronto Press house style. We have used the inverted style for dates. Single quotation marks are used; quotation marks are removed from displayed quotations; punctuation is placed inside closing quotation marks in accordance with the prevailing modern practice; dashes are removed when put beside a comma; periods have been removed from abbreviations such as ‘Dr’ and ‘St’; hyphens are added or removed in accordance with current practice; and, finally, the serial comma is used. Such regularization, standardization, and house-style emendations have been done silently, without annotation. Selection of Unpublished Work This volume required some difficult decisions concerning which lectures should be selected for publication. The final selection is a compromise that reflects the work and advice of many readers over a considerable period of time. Preparation of Handwritten Material The handwritten manuscripts prepared for this volume are passages from Grant’s notebooks and lectures he delivered to his McMaster classes in the 1960s. The editors worked with photocopies of the originals found in Grant’s study. Sheila Grant deserves special mention for her indispensable contribution interpreting Grant’s sometimes difficult handwriting and fathoming his meaning. We have checked the finished text against the original by having one person read the original while another corrected the computerized version.

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Index

Abbott, Douglas Charles, 351n.37 Accadian, 653 Adams, Henry Brooks, 499, 584n.30 Adams, John Quincy, 319, 362n.109 Adenauer, Konrad, 199, 362n.109 Adler, Mortimer, xvii, 49, 64n.2, 66 advertising, 28; conspicuous consumption and, 33 affluence: and freedom, 468 age of progress, 475–6; crisis produced by, 565; modern, 314–15; US history and, 478, 482; and Western Biblical religion, 572 Agnew, Spiro Theodore, 370, 377n.3 Aitchison, J.H., 431, 453n.3, 628, 767 Alexander the Great, 61, 537, 538 Alger, Horatio, 319, 362n.108 alienation, 530–2 Altizer, Thomas, 665n.5 American Empire, 281, 461, 520; Canada as satellite of, 476, 607 American Revolution, as conservative, 319 analytical psychology, of Jung, 182 Anderson, Professor F.H., 4, 7 Anglican Church: and Catholic Church brief on education, 224–5; and education, 10–18; translation of tollit in the Eucharist, 470–1

Annexation Manifesto (1849), 301, 326, 357n.73, 373 ‘Appeal for Realism in Politics, An’ (Canadian Forum), 337 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 71, 76, 79– 81, 86, 90, 623; on religious belief, 510 Arapura, John, 664, 752n.10 Archimedean freedom, 584n.28 Aristotelianism, 485 Aristotle, 5, 10, 43, 67, 76, 77, 81, 90, 107, 250, 276, 376, 623–4; Augustine on, 142; contemplation, 483; Greek religion before, 549; modern thinkers on, 345; rhetoric, 604; of the suffering of man, 380–1 Armstrong, A.H., 755n.33 Arrow program, 298 Asia-US relations, 441 Athens, 504 atomic energy, 482. See also nuclear weapons Augustine, Saint, 90, 140–50, 417, 627, 636; City of God, 145; Confessions, 147; on revelation, 499; television script for CBC Explorations, 140–50 Austin, J.L., 71 automation, 29–30, 46; disappearance of the work ethic and, 319 A.V. Roe of Canada, 356n.69

776

Index

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 670 Bacon, Francis, 134, 522 Baez, Joan, 334, 366n.136 Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 17, 659, 667n.17 Baldwin, Robert, 328, 364n.125 Bank of Canada, 286, 351n.38 Banks, Harold Chamberlain ‘Hal,’ 388, 392n.6 Baptists, 603 Barth, Karl, 661, 761n.85 Barzun, Jacques, 57, 64n.1; on Encyclopaedia Britannica, 49–53, 63 Basinski, Z.S., 126, 132n.10 Bassett, John, 290, 353n.49 Beck, Sir Adam, 328, 364n.124 Beck, L.W.: commentary to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, 90 Beckett, Samuel, 278, 349n.19 Bedson, Derek, 277, 348n.12; and St John’s College, 9 behaviourism, 169, 574 Bell, Daniel, 493, 583n.25; The End of Ideology, 84, 614–15 Bellah, Robert Neelly, 649, 666n.10 Bellamy, Edward, 174, 180n.16 Bennett, Archie, 765 Bennett, R.B., 283, 290, 309, 350n.30, 360n.96 Bennett, William, 311, 361n.99 Bennett, William Andrew Cecil, 435, 453n.6 Bennett, W.J., 765 Bentham, Jeremy, 417 Bergmann, Gustav, 75–7; Meaning and Existence, 75; The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, 75 Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 753n.17 Berlin Wall: death of Peter Fechter near, 202–3

Bertrand, Guy, 291 Bismarck, Otto, Prince von, 301, 358n.76, 619, 631n.17 Board of Broadcast Governors, 290 Boer War, 292 Bomarc missiles, xix, 295, 298, 356n.69 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 540, 541 Borden, Henry, 591n.104 Borden, Sir Robert, 328, 364n.125 Bornstein, Stephen, xxiv, 374 Bosanquet, Bernard, 590n.90 Bothwell, John, 222, 756n.41 Bo tree story, 230, 243n.2 Bouquet, Alan Coates, 652, 666n.14 Bourassa, Henri, 291, 335–7, 353n.52 Bourassa, Robert, 371, 377n.4 Bracken, John, 283, 350n.30 Brahmin, 655 Brascan (Brazilian Traction, Light and Power Co.), 241, 282, 289, 591n.104 Brazil, 238 Brazilian Traction. See Brascan (Brazilian Traction, Light and Power Co.) Brezhnev, Leonid, 609, 630n.9 Brieger, Peter H., 758n.68 Brinkley, David, 281, 350n.26 Broad, C.D., 92 Bronowski, J.: The Western Intellectual Tradition, 91 Brown, Norman O., 172–5, 179n.12; Life Against Death, 171 Bryce, Robert B., 311, 361n.100 Buddha, 243n.2, 648 Buddhism, 97–8, 189, 462, 651; and Jung, 185; religion and, 507 Bultmann, Rudolf: This World and the Beyond, 103–4 Bundy, McGeorge, 609, 630n.9

Index Burke, Edmund, 319, 326, 362n.111 Burnet, John, 757n.53 Burroughs, William Seward, 502, 584n.33 Butler, Samuel, 249, 253n.2 Cahn, Edmond, xxiii, 248–53, 253n.1; The Moral Decision, 248; response of to Grant’s review of The Predicament of Democratic Man, 252–3; The Sense of Injustice, 248 Caird, Edward, 590n.90 Cairns, David: A Gospel without Myth, 104 Calamai, Peter, 403 Callaghan, Morley, 340, 367n.144 Calvin, John, 648, 666n.8 Calvinism, 11, 478, 488–9; capitalism and, 521; revelation in, 566–7; theology of, 486–7. See also Protestantism Camp, Dalton, 390, 392n.7, 768, 770 Campsie, J.S., 272 Camus, Albert: Resistance, Rebellion and Death, 93–4 Canada: -Asian relations, 441; as a branch-plant society, 282–3, 305–6, 340; and the Commonwealth, 300; corporate power in, 22; and nationalism, 274; -US differences, 433–5, 436, 443–9; -US relations, 295, 474; Western industrial empire and, 475–6 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. See CBC Canadian Dimension, interview, xxiii Canadian Forum, 193–4 Canadian identity, 433–52 Canadian Labour Congress, 20 Canadian National Railways (CNR), 286, 327, 351n.38

777

Canadian Pacific Airlines, 290 Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, 654 capitalism, 24, 288; continental, 306, 311; corporate, xviii–xix, 21, 37; criticism of, 26–8; failures of, 30–1; and indigenous societies, 322; individualistic, 40; inequality in, 28–9; international, xviii; and liberalism, 310; market, 21; money and power rewards in, 33–4; and Protestant ethic, 319; state, 21–2 capitalist imperialism, 307 Carnap, Rudolf, 70, 75, 132n.7 Carr, E.H., 766 Carson, Rachel, 57, 64n.5 Cartier, Sir George-Étienne, 385, 386, 391n.1, 464 Castro, Fidel, 204, 205, 208n.2, 274, 295 Castroism, 309 Catholic Church, 512, 514; on education, 224–5, 514, 585n.36 Catholicism, 86, 409; and Jung, 187; and Quebec, 276, 334–8; in the US, 467 Catholic laymen: voting power of, 515 Cayley, David, 770 CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 286, 290, 327, 352n.38, 353n.48; Architects of Modern Thought, 181; ‘Augustine,’ xvii; ‘Belief,’ 131n.1; broadcast list (1950s–1980s), xxiii; CBC Sunday Night, 393; Explorations, 111, 140– 50, 151–62; First Person series, 407; ‘Kant,’ xvii; Massey Lectures, xxi; and Pearson, 344; on Peter Fechter, 202–3; Preview Commentary, 209–10; radio and television broadcasts

778

Index

by Grant, 763–70; Science Review, 111 CCF (Commonwealth Co-operative Federation), 20, 283 chance: overcoming of, 497–8, 573, 576–7, 598, 608 Chang Chen-Chi: The Practice of Zen, 98 Chicago, 597, 615 China: disarmament and, 214 Chinese empire, 519 Chisholm, R.M.: Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, 93 choices: in the private sphere, 478 Christian Church, 513; revelation, 511 Christianity, xxi, 651; age of progress, 572; American Dream and, 422; and Gnosticism, 102–3; growth of suburban, 512; origins of, 100–4; as the religion of suffering, 380; traditionalist, 516 Christian progression: of therapy, 163–4 church and state: Augustine and Boniface arguing about, 145–7; on separation of, 140–50 Churchill, Gordon, 292–3, 354n.53 Churchill, Sir Winston, 301, 321, 328, 366n.134; and the US, 526 Clarkson, Adrienne (née Poy), 412n.1, 767; Grant interview with, 407 class systems: dominant classes, 559; North America, 39; Soviet Union, 39 Claxton, Brooke, 311, 361n.98 Clement of Alexandria, 759n.71 Clifford, Paul, xxiv, 272, 633, 634, 637, 638, 663–5, 665n.1, 669, 682 CNR (Canadian National Railways).

See Canadian National Railways (CNR) Coates, Robert, 620, 631n.21 Cohen, Matt, 402 Cohen, Nathan, 763 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 522 Cold War, 399; consequences of, 24–6 Coldwell, M.J.W., 375, 378n.8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 329, 365n.128 Collingwood, Robin George, 655, 667n.15 Colombo, John Robert, xviii, 347n.4 Combs, Eugene, 634, 636, 662, 664, 665, 665n.1 common good: and public order, 372 Communism, 84, 86, 421; imperialism of, 307 Conacher, Desmond John, 194 conscription crisis, 292, 354n.54 conservatism, 325–9, 439; Plato on, 329; of the US, 321–3; vision of, xix Conservative party, 286–7; and business élite, 22–3; constitutional convention call, 387; fiscal aid to provinces and municipalities, 386– 7; and Great Britain, 282–3; King’s theory of politics, 36–7; and nationalism, 463–5; as the national party, 385; unity in diversity, 386 constitutional government: and public order, 508–10 contemplation: tradition of, 498– 500 continental capitalism, 23, 306, 311 continentalism, 300, 309–10, 341–4, 373; and Liberal party, 463–4 Conze, E.: Buddhist Scriptures, 98 Cook, Ramsay, 375, 431, 453n.3, 767, 769 Copleston, F.: History of Philosophy, 91

Index Cornelius Jansen of Ypres, 666n.7 Cornford, Francis Macdonald, 218, 219n.5; Before and After Socrates, 686; From Religion to Philosophy, 697, 755n.35 corporation capitalism, 283, 287, 306, 318, 371, 558 corporations: as governments, 241–2; private, 22, 558; public, 558 Cosa Nostra, 209 cost-plus contracts, 360n.97 Couchiching Conference: The Great Ideas Today: 1961, xxiii; Great Societies and Quiet Revolutions, 455–62; The New Europe – 1962, 198–201 Cox, Harvey, xxiii; The Secular City, 419–24 Coyne, James, 288, 352n.44 Creighton, D.G., 293–4, 355n.58, 431–2 crime: and corruption, 209–10 Crook, Rodney, xxiv, 379 crown corporations, 289 Crowther, Geoffrey, Baron, 61, 65 Cuba, 355n.59; American-Soviet disarmament, 212–14; and Canadian defence policy, 297, 299–300; and Catholicism, 204–8 Cuban Crisis, 295–6, 370 cultural revolution, 600–1 curriculum: humanities, 564–6; science, 560–4, 570 Cushing, Cardinal Richard James, 337, 366n.140 Dalai Lama, 112 Daley, Richard Joseph, 604, 629n.2 Dante Alighieri, 690, 754n.28 Darwin, Charles, 42, 345, 612, 630n.12, 656 Davies, Robertson, 765

779

Dead Sea Scrolls, 100–2 decision: and intention, 307–8 defence crisis (1962–3), 273, 284, 294, 300, 313 De Gasperi, Alcide, 199, 201n.6 de Gaulle, Charles A.J.M., 199, 201n.6, 213, 301, 446, 588n.74; nationalism, 274–5, 310, 324; on NATO, 313; ‘Trojan Horse,’ 358n.80 Democratic party, 597 de Sade, Marquis, 477, 569 Descartes, René, 68, 629 Dewart, Leslie, xxiii, 204–8, 208n.1; Christianity and Revolution: The Lesson of Cuba, 204–8 Dewey, John, 88, 92, 317, 362n.106, 467; influence of Rousseau on, 573; John Dewey: His Thought and Influence, 91 Dewey, Thomas, 210, 211n.2 Diderot, Denis, 50, 54, 64n.3 Diefenbaker, John G., xviii, xxiv, 48, 48n.2, 238, 277–81, 283–302, 314, 321, 324, 326, 328, 331, 344, 348n.14, 464, 474, 766; and British North America, 301; defence crisis (1962–3), 273, 284; electoral defeat of, 271; Grant as Diefenbaker’s biographer, 389–91; Grant’s notes on the constitutional question for, 384–91; loss of control of Conservative party, 283; nationalism of, 280, 284; opposition of wealthy to, 272, 277–8; populism of, 285 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 106, 592n.111; study of history, 565 Dirksen, Everett McKinley, 609, 630n.9 disarmament: American-Soviet, 212– 14

780

Index

Disraeli, Benjamin, 329, 365n.129 Dodd, Charles Harold, 755n.36 Dollard, John, 169, 178n.5; Personality and Psychotherapy, 168 Donne, John, 249, 253n.2 Douglas, Thomas Clement ‘Tommy,’ 4, 606, 629n.4 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec, 301–2, 358n.79 Doukhobors, 338–9, 366n.143 Drew, George Alexander, 283, 289, 296, 350n.31 Drury, Charles Mills ‘Bud,’ 466, 468n.1 Drushka, Ken, 395, 402, 405n.4 Dubcek, Alexander, 630n.5 Dugdale, Dr, 123–4 Dundas, Ontario, 221–2 Dunn, Sir James, 657, 667n.16 Dunton, Davidson, 126, 132n.10, 359n.88 Duplessis, Maurice, 291, 304, 332, 334, 353n.50 Durant, Will: The Dawning of the Age of Reason, 315 Durkheim, Emile, 755n.34 Easton, David, 752n.8 Eccles, Sir John Carew, 56, 64n.4 economy: downturn in, 29–30, 48n.2; French Canada, 451 Edison, Thomas, 488 education: Christian tradition, 12–14; city and, 240; and equality, 47; mass, 17; in Ontario, 619; progressive, 573; and religion, 508; Roman Catholic and non-Roman, 514; and Roman Catholic Church, 224–5; Russian, 33 ‘Education and the Technological Society’ (NY Review of Books), 627

Einstein, Albert, 44, 129 Eisenhower, Dwight, 117, 205, 208n.3, 297; on religion, 513 Eliade, Mircea, 96–7, 650, 666n.12; Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, 96 Ellul, Jacques, xxiii, 405n.5, 614; definition of technique, 480; Propaganda, 413; technological society, xxi, 627; The Technological Society, 413–17, 614 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 499, 584n.30 Empedocles, 547 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 66; memorandum on, 49–63 Encyclopédie française, L’, 58–9, 61 English-speaking Canada, 433–4; essence of, 443 equality: arguments against, 43–6 equality principle, 38–9, 40–3 Eranos Yearbooks, 183 Erikson, Erik Homburger, 593n.119; optimistic Freudianism, 573 Ernie (gas station owner), 657, 667n.16 Erskine, John, 123, 125 Essene sect, 100–1 Estal, Martyn, 218n.2 ethics: of individual responsibility, 29–30 European Common Market, 301, 358n.83 evil: as the absence of good, 468; language of, 672; St Augustine on, 147–9 Ewart, John Skirving, 222, 223n.4 existentialism: French, 93; German, 94, 103; and Protestantism, 106 External Affairs, Department of, 312 Faibish, Roy, 431, 432, 452n.2

Index Fairweather, Gordon, 767 Farrer, Austin: The Freedom of the Will, 88–9 Faulkner, William, 340, 367n.144 Favreau, Guy, 392n.6 Febvre, Lucien Paul Victor: L’Encyclopédie française, 58-9, 64n.6 Fechter, Peter, 202–3, 766 federalism: cooperative, 304, 337 federal powers: abdication of, 388; Conservative party and, 387–8 Fellini, Federico, 671–2 Fenichel, Otto, 178n.4; The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, 168 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 366n.135 Festugière, André Jean, 218, 219n.6, 650, 666n.12 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 552, 591n.98 Field, John, 662 First World War, 292, 328; conscription crisis, 476, 587n.71 flag: Pearson and the, 304; Red Ensign, 359n.86 Fleming, Donald, 287, 290, 351n.33; nationalism of, 284–5 Forsey, Eugene, 20 Forster, Edward Morgan, 372, 377n.6 Foster, Michael Beresford, 753n.19 Fournié, Édouard, 113, 131n.2 France: disarmament and, 213 Frank, Erich, 756n.47 Franklin, Benjamin, 467, 469n.5, 487 Fraser, Blair, 279, 349n.22 freedom: ambiguity of, 424; of the individual, 323; and meaning, 576; and myth, 230–6; progressive idea of, 316–18; and reality, 399–400; and reason, 379–80; slogan of, 323; and technique, 578 French Canada: and Confederation,

781

304; Conservatives and, 290–2; culture of, 275–6; economy, 451; and federalism, 607–8, 610; nationalism of, 331–5; tradition of, 310–11 Freud, Sigmund, 58, 169–73, 175, 181–2, 184–9, 191, 482, 598, 649, 656; break with Jung, 182; Civilization and Its Discontents, 165, 186; on the family, 239; psychoanalysis and, 164–7; on the unconscious, 184–5 Friedan, Betty, 244n.4; The Feminine Mystique, 234 Friedlander, Paul, 218, 219n.6, 756n.43 Friedman, Milton, 323, 363n.115 Fromm, Erich, 249–50, 253n.4, 760n.77; Marxism of, 517 Frost, Leslie, 330, 365n.130; and religious education, 513 Frye, Northrop, 477, 592n.115; nonevaluative analysis of, 568 Fulbright, James William, 426–8, 430n.1 Gadamer, H.G., 663, 667n.18 Gadsden, Simon, 662 Galbraith, J.K., 27, 327, 364n.123, 604 Galileo: secular spirit of, 521 Gandhi, Mohandas, 336, 366n.138, 400 Gaullism, 309 Gautama, Siddhartha, 243n.2 Gellner, Ernest, 78–9; Words and Things, 78 genetics: and man-made man, 261–5 Gilman, R.B., 221–2, 222n.1 Gilmour, George, 633 Gilson, Étienne, 79–82; The Elements of Christian Philosophy, 71, 79, 104 Ginsberg, Allen, 366n.135

782

Index

Glassco Commission (Royal Commission on Government Organization), 289, 352n.45 Globe and Mail: Diefenbaker and, 277 Glover, Edward, 165, 178n.2 gnosticism, 101–3; orgiastic, 170–1, 175–8, 495 Gödel, Kurt, 113, 116, 131n.3 Goldwater, Barry, 275, 286, 323–4, 352n.39, 467, 760n.78 good: deprivation and, 580; language of, 672; socialism and, 31–2; technology and, 527 Goodman, Paul, 562, 592n.107 Gordon, Walter, 288, 304, 332, 352n.43 Goulart, João (president of Brazil), 244n.6 Graham, Billy, 60, 457, 462n.2, 488 Grant, George: accepts position at McMaster University, xvii–xviii; ‘American-Soviet Disarmament,’ xxi; ‘Canadian Fate and Imperialism,’ 475, 519–32; CBC radio and television broadcasts, 763–70; ‘Christian Ethics,’ 751; ‘Church and State,’ 750; ‘Comparative Religion,’ 750–1; ‘Conceptions of Health,’ xxi; on Dalhousie, xviii; and the Department of Religion, McMaster U., 633–65; ‘History and Religion,’ 750; ‘In Defence of North America,’ 477–8, 480–503; Lament for a Nation, xix–xx, xxii– xxiii, 271–367, 669; Lament for a Nation (Carleton Library Edition Introduction), 368–78; lecture on ‘Apollo and Dionysius,’ 713–16; lecture on ‘Euthyphro – Socrates on the Myths and the Gods,’ 737–42; lecture on ‘Modern Technology

and Religion,’ 676–82; lecture on ‘Myth and Art in the Modern World,’ 716–22; ‘Lecture on Nietzsche,’ 675–6; lecture on ‘Orphism and the Pythagoreans,’ 722–7; lecture on ‘Positivism,’ 742– 7; lecture on ‘The Principles of Existence Given by Myth,’ 731–5; lecture on ‘Socrates as a Religious Man,’ 735–7; lecture on ‘The Beautiful Itself,’ 691–6; lecture on the Phaedo, 703–13; lecture on ‘Vietnam and the Study of Greek Religion and Philosophy,’ 696–700; lecture on ‘Why Study Myth and Reason?’ 727–31; letter to Stephen Bornstein, 374–6; letter to Paul Clifford, 634–6; letter to Rodney Crook, 379–82; letter to Le Devoir, 196–7; letter to editor of Christian Outlook, 401; letter to editor of Silhouette, 403; letter to the Globe and Mail: ‘Freedom Fighter,’ 406; letter to Douglas Ward, 404; McMaster lectures and fragments, 747–51; move to Dundas, Ontario, xviii; ‘Myth and Reason’ course, 691– 742, 748–50; The New Romans, 463– 4; notes on letter to Art Pape on civil disobedience, 401–3; notes on the constitutional question for Diefenbaker, 384–91; Nowlan Lectures, xxi, 603–29; ‘On the Universals or Forms,’ 687–91; ‘Philosophy and Religion’ course, 682–91, 748; ‘A Platitude,’ 479, 576–81; ‘Plato and Greek Civilization’ course, 682–7; ‘Politics and Religion’ course, 742–7, 750; ‘The Practice of Politics,’ 603–16; ‘Protest and Technology,’ 393–404;

Index ‘Religion,’ 657; ‘Religion and the State,’ 475, 504–19; resignation from York University, 5–6; review of (Cahn) The Predicament of Democratic Man, 248–53; review of (Cox) The Secular City, 419–24; review of (Crombie) Plato on Man and Society, 215–18; review of (Dewart) Christianity and Revolution: The Lesson of Cuba, 204–8; review of (Ellul) The Technological Society, 413–17; review of Fountain Come Forth, 221–2; review of (Moir) Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841-1867, 109–10; review of (Pearson) The Four Faces of Peace, 245–6; review of Thought: Papers Given before the Learned Societies of Canada,1960, 193–4; sermon for student service, McMaster Divinity School, 134–9; ‘Simone Weil and the Hunger,’ 722–7; Technology and Empire, xx, xxii–xxiii, 669; ‘Thought about Politics,’ 616– 29; Thus Spake Zarathustra, 669–75; Time as History (Massey Lectures), xxi, 669; on Toronto, xviii; ‘Tyranny and Wisdom,’ 474, 532–57; ‘The University Curriculum,’ 476– 7, 558–76 Grant, R.M.: Gnosticism and Early Christianity, 102–3 Grant, Sheila, xxiv, 66, 112, 255, 770 Great Books of the Western World, 90 Great Society, 455–7 Greekness: Grant and, 499–500 Greek religion, 462 Greeks: state and society, 605 Green, Howard, 292–3, 295–300, 312–

783

13, 328, 354n.55; foreign policy of, 273; internationalism of, 302 Green, T.H., 590n.90 Greenberg, Moshe: The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, translator, 99 Green (friend of Kant), 159–61 Gregory VII (pope), 754n.21 Grube, George, 20 Guénault, Anthony Michael, 123–4, 126, 133n.10 Guindon, Hubert, 193 Gusdorf, Georges, 132n.8 Gzowski, Peter, 770 Haam, Ahad, 100 Hall, E.W.: Philosophical Systems, 79 Halpenny, Viola, 765 Hamilton, Alexander, 319, 321, 362n.109 Hamilton, Alvin, 289, 292, 352n.46 Hamilton, William, 665n.5 Hamilton Spectator: interview, xxiii Hampshire, Stuart: Thought and Action, 87–8 Harkness, Douglas, 292, 295, 298, 354n.53 Harnack, Adolph von, 650, 666n.12 Harris, Louis, 297, 356n.67 Harris, Walter Edward, 351n.37 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 755n.37 Hart, H.L.A., 84–5, 250, 254n.6; Causation in the Law, 84 Hay, John Milton, 527, 588n.79 health: and disease, 163; Freudian concept of, 170 Hebb, D.O., 118, 132n.9 Hees, George, 292, 354n.53 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xxi, 67, 68, 171–2, 174, 191, 261, 320, 340, 345, 381, 484, 538, 540, 552–4,

784

Index

623–4; -Kojève controversy, 474–5, 534–7, 541, 543, 554; The Phenomenology of Mind, 417; The Phenomenology of Spirit, 537; political doctrine of, 553, 556; political theory of, 535; on tyrannies, 474; on Western empires, 521 Heidegger, Martin, xxi, 132n.8, 371, 624–5, 630n.8; Essays in Metaphysics, 94; An Introduction to Metaphysics, 94; on nuclear war threat, 609 Hellyer, Paul, 295 Hendel, C.W.: Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume, 90 Henri IV, 522 Herbert, George, 754n.31 Herzberg, Gerhard, 124, 126, 133n.10 Hill, Christopher, 583n.19 Hinduism, 189, 462, 651 Hiroshima, 127 historicism, 535; language of, 502 Hobbes, Thomas, 320, 345, 422, 538; doctrine of the state of nature, 553; on Platonic doctrines, 218; social modernity of, 522–3, 525; view of nature, 487–8 Hoffman, Abbie, 596, 602n.3, 608, 615, 631n.14 Hogan, George, Jr, 323, 363n.116 Hogg, Quinton McGarel, 321, 363n.114 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr, 249–50, 253n.3 Homer, 658 homogeneity, 339 Honoré, A.M.: Causation in the Law, 84 Hook, Sidney: Dimensions of Mind, 89 Hooker, Richard, 280, 321, 329; on the Puritans, 523

Horowitz, Gad, xviii, 376, 452n.1, 767; ‘Technology and Man’ interview, 595–602; television script for CBC Extension, 431–54 Howe, C.D., 22, 47n.1, 196, 199, 241, 285, 290, 299–300, 303–7, 310–11, 449; and continental capitalism, 281–3; continentalism of, 274 Howe, Joseph, 137, 328, 364n.125 Howlett, Leslie Ernest, 124, 126, 133n.10 Hughes, Sir Samuel (Sam), 587n.71; and French Canadians, 525 human excellence, 574–5 humanism, 12–13; secularized, 224–5 humanities: fact-value distinction, 564, 567; historicism, 567; nonevaluative analysis, 568–9; and the performing arts, 569 Hume, David, 68, 82, 320; and capitalism, 522 Humphrey, Hubert H., Jr, 429, 430n.5, 457 Huntley, Chet, 281, 350n.26 Husserl, Edmund, 93, 108, 132n.8 Hutchins, Robert, xvii, 59, 62, 64n.1, 66; on Encyclopaedia Britannica, 49, 53–6 Hutterites, 338 Hyde, Tony, 402, 404 ideology: politicians and, 628; religion and philosophy and the term, 620–1 immigration, 437–8 imperialism: Western, 527–8 individuality: in mass society, 407–12 industrialism: need for specialists, 37–8; and regionalism, 438–9 inhibition: use of the word, 423 Innis, Harold Adams, 437, 453n.7

Index

785

Institute for Philosophical Research, xvii, 49, 61, 66 international capitalism, 305, 332 Ionesco, Eugene, 278, 349n.19 Irving, John A., 764 Islam, 651

Asian religion, 183, 190; break with Freud, 182; collective unconscious, 184–6, 188; life of, 182; Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 186; The Psychology of the Unconscious, 182; on Western religions, 188–9

Jackson, Andrew, 342 Jackson, Eileen, 229, 243, 243n.1 Jahoda, Marie, 179n.7; Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health, 169 James, E.O.: The Ancient Gods, 96 James, Henry, 88, 762n.88; The Golden Bowl, 655 James, William, 344, 367n.150, 499, 573 Jan, Dr, 664 Jaspers, Karl, 92 Jefferson, Thomas, 86, 250, 319, 331, 342, 357n.74, 467 Jeffress, Lloyd A., 132n.4 Jerusalem, 504 Jesus Christ, 648; and the cross, 230; meeting between Pilate and, 134– 9; story of the cross, 243n.2 Jewett, Pauline, 431, 453n.3, 767 Jews: and American culture, 490–1 Johnson, Harry G., 193 Johnson, L.B., 257, 270n.3, 275, 323–4, 426, 428, 455, 457, 467, 589n.82; Great Society, 420; politics of, 618 Johnson, Samuel, 63 Jones, Ernest, 165 Jones, Richard (Dick), 635, 665n.4 Judaism, 99–100, 651; age of progress, 572; in the US, 467 Julian of Norwich, Lady (or Dame) (English mystic), 200n.1 Jung, Carl Gustav, 99, 181–91, 760n.79; archetypes, 185–6, 188; on

Kafka, Franz, 239, 244n.7 Kant, Immanuel, 67–8, 84, 90–1, 105, 128, 261, 320, 623, 661, 662; Critique of Pure Reason, 156; freedom and reason, 379–82; The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 159; morality and, 154–6; and science, 153–6; television script for CBC Explorations, 151–62; value-free social science, 563 Kaufman, G.D.: Relativism, Knowledge and Faith, 105–6 Kaufman, Yehezkel: The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, 99 Keats, John, 417 Kelsen, Hans, 250, 253n.6 Kennedy, John F., 135, 139n.2, 232, 245, 293, 295, 297–300, 324, 342, 344, 355n.59, 370, 389, 420, 424, 428, 467, 650 Kennedy, Robert (Bobby), 210, 211n.2, 604 Kerényi, C., 760n.79 Kerouac, Jack, 97 Kerr, Clark, 626, 631n.24, 657 Keynes, John Maynard, 301, 351n.36, 372 Khrushchev, Nikita S., 212, 214n.1, 262, 270n.5 Kierans, Eric, 332–3, 365n.132 King, W.L. Mackenzie, 48n.4, 222, 223n.3, 272–4, 280, 292, 308, 310– 13, 361n.103, 370; and French Can-

786

Index

ada, 526; Liberal party, 283; theory of politics, 36; and the US, 525 Kitchen, L. C., 634 Klein, Jacob, 753n.18 knowledge industry, 399–400 Kojève, Alexandre, 539–46, 550–5; place of biblical religion, 557; -Strauss controversy, 474–5, 534–7, 541–6, 550–7; Tyrannie et Sagesse, 533; on universal homogenous state, 474 Kraemer, Hendrick: World Cultures and World Religions: The Coming of Dialogue, 98–9 Lang, H.W., 634 language, 71, 72, 77; of good and evil, 672 Laos, 296 Lashley, K.S., 113, 115–16; Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, 131–2n.4 Lasswell, Harold Dwight, 502, 584n.32; value-free social science, 563 Laurendeau, André, 359n.88 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 332 Lawrence, D.H., 617 Laxer, James, 402 Leach, Sir Edmund (Ronald), 493, 584n.25 leadership: and state capitalism, 34–5 Leary, Timothy, 589n.85, 601 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 374; optimism and, 519 leisure, 40, 46; Aristotle on, 43; and division of labour, 572 Lenin, Vladimir, 48n.5, 608–9 Leonardo da Vinci, 649 Leo XIII: encyclical letter ‘Aeterni Patris,’ 80

Lesage, Jean, 276, 304, 333 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 5, 173, 180n.14 Lévesque, René, 276, 332–4, 337, 365n.131, 451 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 459, 462n.5, 753n.12 Levy, Marion, 493, 583n.25 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 755n.34 Lewis, David, 20 liberalism, xx, 322–4; and American imperialism, 271; and capitalism, 310; and Christianity, 422–3; class, 564; definition of, 480; founders of, 422; ideology of, 558; logic of, 317; modern, 571–2; pluralism and, 571; pragmatic, 499; as voice of establishment, 344 Liberal party, 607; and business élite, 22–3; and the Canadian establishment, 302–3; and continental integration, 273–4; and continentalism, 463–4; King’s theory of politics, 36–7 liberal society: as monolithic, 477–8 Liberation magazine, 393, 404n.2 linguistics, 70, 75, 78; science of speech, 112 Locke, John, 320–1, 323, 372, 422, 467, 469n.5, 487; social modernity of, 522–3 logic: analytic philosophy, 69 Long, Marcus, 5–6 Lucretius, 416–17 Luther, Martin, 145, 486, 666n.8 Lyell, Sir Charles, 612, 630n.12 Lynd, Staughton, 395, 404n.1 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 342, 367n.147 McClellan, John Little, 210, 211n.2

Index McClelland, Jack, 347n.4 MacDonald, David Keith Chalmers, xxiv, 111–12, 126, 131n.1, 133n.10, 765, 766; correspondence with Grant, 119–25, 127, 130 Macdonald, Sir John A., 137, 294, 328, 349n.20, 385, 386, 435, 463–4; National Policy, 309; and threat to nationalism, 279 McGee, Frank, 293, 355n.56 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 386, 391n.4, 464 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 320, 345, 375, 422, 553; modern Europe, 484; moral science of, 521–2; natural cataclysms, 551 MacIntyre, Linden, 770 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 361n.102 McKeon, Richard Peter, 60, 65n.7 Mackintosh, W.A., 194 Maclean’s magazine, 308 McLuhan, Marshall, 459, 462n.4, 752n.2 McMaster University: PhD program in the religious sciences, 653 Macmillan, Maurice Harold, 301, 321, 329, 358n.79 McMurray, William, 221 McNamara, Robert, 299, 357n.72 McNaught, Kenneth, 431, 432, 453n.4 Macpherson, C.B., 431, 453n.3, 593n.120, 767 MacPherson, Murdo, 283 Madison, James, 319, 321, 362n.109 Mailer, Norman, 171, 173–4, 177, 179n.10 Maimonides: Strauss on, 556 Malevez, L.: The Christian Message and Myth, 104 Malik, Charles, 769 Manion, Robert James, 283, 350n.30

787

Marcel, Gabriel Honoré, 645, 665n.6 Marcuse, Herbert, 172–5, 179n.11, 478, 482, 494; Eros and Civilization, 171, 495, 598; Marxist, 596–8; One Dimensional Man, 495 Mardiros, Anthony M., 194 Marius, Gaius, 363n.120 Marler, George, 332, 365n.132 Martin, Paul, 311, 360n.98, 375, 586n.46 Marx, Karl, 12, 170–3, 191, 266, 316, 318, 320, 345, 399, 417, 422, 462, 544, 598, 656, 659, 661; on pretechnological societies, 21; view of technology of, 228–9 Marxism, 93; and equality, 41–2; religion of, 507, 517; and Strauss, 547–8 Marxism-Leninism, 92 mass communication, 459 mass education, 17 mass society, 24–6; consumption as goal of, 276, 341; hierarchies of power in, 39–40; individuals in, 25–6; industrial, 16; North America as, 24; psychotherapy and, 164– 7; scientific revolution, 20; socialist theory and, 36; solitariness in, 236; state capitalist power of, 24; technological revolution, 20 Maugham, W. Somerset, 124, 125 Mauriac, François, 112 Mayer, John, 682 Mazlish, B.: The Western Intellectual Tradition, 91 Meinong, Alexius, 93, 108 Meisel, John, 431, 453n.3, 767 Mendelssohn, Moses, 100 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 88 messianism, 84 Michels, Robert, 530, 589n.84

788

Index

Mill, John Stuart, 132n.7, 342, 367n.147, 422, 445 Miller, Henry, 180n.17 Miller, Neal, 169, 177, 178n.5; Personality and Psychotherapy, 168 Milton, John, 303 Mind (journal), 78 Minifie, James M., 272 Mitchell, John Newton, 370, 377n.3 moderation: virtue of, 265–6 modernity: communication with secularization, 420; English origins of, 521–4; Grant on, 490–1; meaning of, xx; psychotherapy, 170 Moir, John S., xxiii Moore, George Edward, 372, 377n.6 Mora, José Ferrater: Philosophy Today – Conflicting Tendencies in Contemporary Thought, 92 morality: classical and biblical, 552– 4; of Kant, 154–6 Moravia, Alberto, 671, 752n.3 More, Sir Thomas, 599, 602n.6 Morse, Barry, 151 Morse, Wayne Lyman, 428, 430n.3 Morton, William Lewis, 432, 435, 453n.5 Moses, 649 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 44, 278, 471, 472, 605, 621, 648, 658; The Magic Flute, 119 Mulock, Sir William, 761n.86 Murphy, Neville Richard, 218, 219n.5 Murray, George G.A., 756n.37 Murray, J. Courtney, 250, 253n.5, 320; We Hold These Truths, 86 myths: and Greek religion, 669; and reason lecture, 668; as system of meaning, 230–3 Nagel, Ernest: The Structure of Sci-

ence: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, 70 Namier, Sir Lewis, 592n.114 Namierian, 592n.114 national articulation, 284 nationalism, 279–80, 284–7, 369, 370– 1; and Conservative party, 463–5; and corporate mobility, 439–40; of Diefenbaker, 280; in France, 274; of French Canada, 291–3, 331–5; of O’Leary, 288; and socialism, 375; US, 462 National Liberation Front, 428 ‘National Policy,’ 360n.95 National Research Council Symposium: second talk to selected scientists, 125–9; ‘Speech: Some General and Incoherent Comments,’ 111–19 National Review, 760n.78 Nation magazine, 461 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 298–9, 302, 313 naturalistic monism, 99 ‘natural’ theology, 485 nature: control of, 478; man-made man, 258–60 Nazism, 421 NDP (New Democratic party), xxiii, 20, 331, 628 necessity: and goodness, 340–1 Nef, John Ulric, 587n.57; and capitalism, 522 new left, xx, 396–8; civil rights movement, 393, 398; distinctions among, 596–8; on Grant’s ‘Protest and Technology,’ 393; nationalism of, 271 Newman, Peter, 205, 208n.4, 279, 770 Newton, Sir Isaac, 152, 161n.1 New York Review of Books, 671 Nichol, bp, 770

Index Niemoller, Martin, 588n.81 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxi, 190, 617, 656, 661; on Christianity, 484; course, 668; graduate seminar on, 669–75; on history, 566; on homelessness, 483, 620; Indian nihilism and, 652; man as trivial, 618; Marcuse and, 597; politics and, 502, 617; power and technology, 503; rhetoric, 604; on tragedy, 519; value-free social science, 563; and ‘values,’ 501–2 nihilism, 611; European, 500–3; homelessness as mark of, 483 Nixon, Richard, 262, 270n.5, 370, 467, 600 non-human nature: Calvinism and, 488 NORAD (North American Air Defence Command), 295, 355n.59, 355n.60 Norstad, Lauris, 295, 297, 312, 356n.62 Noss, John Boyer, 652, 666n.14 Nowlan, George Clyde, 290, 353n.47, 629n.1; Grant on, 618–19; lectures, 603–29 nuclear weapons, 295, 298, 344; crisis of 1962–3, 274; defence policy, 304; Heidegger on, 609 OAS (Organization of American States), 299, 357n.73 Oedipus, 230, 243n.2 O’Keefe Centre, 359n.89 O’Leary, Grattan, 288, 352n.42 Ontario Hydro, 286, 327, 351n.38 Oppenheimer, Robert, 258, 266, 270n.4, 411, 561 optimism: and innocence, 501 organized labour: leaders, 23; real

789

wages of, 29; voting power of, 37–8 Origen, 10, 18n.3 Osler, Sir William, 222, 223n.4 Paine, Thomas, 319, 362n.110 Pali, 653 Pape, Art, 401, 402, 404 parenthood: consequences of, 267–9 Parsons, Talcott, 482, 502, 582n.14; value-free social science, 563 Pascal, Blaise, 63, 382, 648, 666n.7, 754n.27 Paul, Saint, 537, 538 Pavlov, Ivan, 482 Pavlova, Anna, 759n.69 Peace Corps, 421 Pearkes, George, 292, 299, 354n.53 Pearson, Lester B., xviii, xxiii, 245–7, 279, 282, 289, 294–5, 299–300, 302, 306–8, 315, 321, 340, 342–3, 368, 370–1, 375, 384, 391; defence policies of, 273; and the flag, 304 Pearson, Maryon, 356n.70 Pearson, Patricia, 356n.70 Pearson, W.B., 126, 133n.10 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 88, 499, 584n.30 Penfield, Wilder Graves, 56, 64n.4, 765 Penny, Michael, 662 pessimism and determinism: of Grant, 431 Peterson, E.W., 126, 133n.10 phenomenology, 93 philosophy: analytical, 70, 72, 75–7; ancient, 346; of Kant, 152; moral, 82–3, 86–9; political, 82–6; and religion, 518, 668, 682–91; survey of, 66–94; and theology, 14

790

Index

Pickersgill, John W. (Jack), 308, 360n.92 pipeline, 290; debate, 283, 351n.32 Plato, xxi, xxii, 10, 67, 76, 261, 265, 276, 369, 376, 623–4, 663, 669–74; Augustine on, 141–2; on chance, 119; on conservatism, 329; contemplation, 483; doctrines of, 215–18; on mental illness, 232; modern thinkers on, 345; music and the young, 606; Phaedo, 217, 695, 700– 7; on politics, 618; and public order, 510; Republic, 4–6, 159, 686– 7; of the suffering of man, 380–2; Symposium, 691–6; teaching of, 136; Theaetetus, 547; theology, 518; on the truth of forms, 687–91 Platonic progression: of therapy, 163–4 Playboy magazine, 319 Plotinus, 176; Augustine on, 142 pluralism, 570; in a constitutional state, 518; in society, 611; and values, 563 Poland, 307 political: rethinking the, 626 political philosophy: interpretation of, 319–21; Lament for a Nation as work of, 271; technological society, 504 political power: and religious education, 506 political science: fact-value distinction, 613 politics: King’s theory of, 36–7; practice of and thought about, 603–29; and religion lecture, 668 Popper, Sir Karl Raimund, 217, 219n.4 Portalié, E., 90 Porter, John, xxiii, 431, 437, 453n.3, 766

pragmatism: and decline of religious belief, 478 Pravda (Russia), 100 predestination doctrine, 488 Preston, M.A., 664 Preston-Thomas, H., 126, 133n.10 private enterprise: and the public good, 442–3 protest: politics of, 399; radical, 596, 600; value of, 426–30 Protestant ethic: and capitalism, 319 Protestantism, 11, 81–2, 319, 322, 380–1, 409; Calvinist, 566; control of the passions in, 487; from Europe, 484–5; and existentialism, 106; myths of, 232; and the new ideas, 487; rural, 512; of the US, 467; voting power of, 515 Protestant secularism, 109 psychiatry, xxi psychoanalysis: and modern social theory, 171 psychoanalytical tradition, 598–9 psychology: behaviourist, 573 psychotherapy, 164–7; Freudian, 573 public good: assumptions, 510; against private enterprise, 442 public order: and common good, 372 public schools: religious education and, 505–6 Puritanism: and new capitalism, 485 Pythagoras, 648, 666n.8 Queen’s University, 312 Quine, William van Orman, 72–6, 132n.7, 757n.49; From a Logical Point of View, 72; Word and Object, 70, 72 Rahner, Karl, 661 Ralston, J.L., 354n.54

Index Ramsey, I.T.: Freedom and Immortality, 104–5 Randall, J.H.: Aristotle, 90 Raphael, 648 Rathenau, Walter, 533, 589n.89 Reagan, Ronald Wilson, 604, 629n.2 Red Ensign flag, 359n.86 red tory: Grant as, 376, 431 regionalism, 434–7 Reich, Wilhelm, 173–4, 177, 179n.9; Character Analysis, 171; Einbruch der Sexualmoral, 171; The Function of the Orgasm, 171 Reichenbach, Hans: Modern Philosophy of Science, 70 religion: academic study of, 646–56 religions: ancient, 95–7; archaic, 187; Asian, 183; as defined for ‘Religion and the State,’ 506–7; of democracy, 509; Eastern, 97–9; and equality, 41; mythic, 187–8; as necessity to human beings, 410; and philosophy, 6–7, 68–9; practice of, 510; of progress, 514, 517, 518–19, 532, 597; of the scientific era, 421; and society, 485; survey of, 94–108; theory of, 104–8 Republican convention (1968), 488 revelation: Augustine on, 499; and biblical religion, 647; in Calvinist Protestantism, 566–7; Christian, 485, 511, 514; from Western Europe, 498–9 Richelieu, Cardinal, 522 R in R newsletter: interview with Grant, 662–5 Rio Tinto, 282 Rivard, Lucien, 388, 392n.6 Robarts, John, 224, 330, 387, 620, 631n.20 Robertson, J.C., 662

791

Robertson, Norman, 311, 361n.100 Robinson, John Arthur Thomas, 756n.40 Robinson, John R. ‘Black Jack,’ 328, 364n.124 Robinson, Judith, 277, 348n.13 Robinson, Richard, 218, 219n.5 Roblin, Dufferin ‘Duff,’ 387, 392n.5, 464, 465, 768 Robson, J.M., 126, 133n.10 Rockefeller, Nelson A., 135, 139n.2, 312 Rockefeller family, 467 Rodriguez, Percy, 140 Rogers, Bruce, 140, 151 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholic Church Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 285–6, 293, 312, 324, 342, 351n.35, 461, 466–7; presidency of, 527 Ross, Sir David, 218, 219n.5 Ross, Murray, xvii, xxiv; letters to on York curriculum, 3–8 Roth, Leon, 99–100; Judaism – A Portrait, 99 Rouault, Georges, 650, 666n.13 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 83, 160, 320, 345, 422, 484, 523; influence of on Dewey, 573; and modernity, 522 Roussopolous, Dimitri, 404 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 304 Royal Society of Canada: Grant’s address to, 646–56 Ruby, Clayton, 402 Rudd, Mark, 626, 631n.24 Rusk, Dean, 429, 430n.5 Russell, Bertrand, 6, 78, 92, 132n.7, 590n.90; on education, 566 Rutherford, Ernest, 127

792

Index

Sabine, George Holland, 590n.95 Salinger, J.D., 97, 189, 191 Salk, Jonas, 618 Sandys, Duncan, 301, 359n.84 Sanskrit, 653 Santayana, George (Jorge), 490, 583n.23 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 88, 424, 425n.3; Critique de la raison dialectique, 93; politics and, 531 Sauvé, J.M.P., 291, 353n.51 Savio, Mario, 395, 404n.3 Schaar, John H., 627, 631n.26 Schaerer, René, 218, 219n.6 Schilpp, P.A.: The Philosophy of C.D. Broad, 92 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr, 343–4, 367n.150, 604, 650 scholarship: debasement of, 533 Scholarship in Canada, 1967: Achievement and Outlook, Symposium, 646 science: manipulation and control of modern, xx; and philosophy, 68–9; and propagation of the species, 255–8 Science Council of Canada, 560–1 scientific method, 73 Scott, Frank R., 20 Second World War, 292 secularism, 12–13, 420; Protestant, 11; as religion, 475, 518; in universities, 512 Seeger, Pete, 334, 366n.136 separatism, 332 sexuality: Freud on, 165–6; Lawrence on, 617 Shakespeare, William, 134, 648 Sharp, Mitchell, 241, 244n.8, 282, 311 Simcoe, John Graves, 221 Skinner, B.F., 415, 418n.2, 482, 582n.14

Skybolt program, 301 Smith, Adam, 320, 372 Smith, Goldwin, 342, 344, 367n.147; and capitalism, 522 Smith, W.C., 649, 654, 666n.11 Snow, C.P., 199, 200n.2 Social Credit movement, 293 socialism, 439; belief in equality in, 38–9; Marxism and, 317–18; moral doctrine of, 35–8; and nationalism, 330–1, 375; and state capitalism, 26; and toryism, 431 social science, 227–8, 243; value-free, 562 society: and public religion, 511, 513; social problems in, 228–9; and the state, 605 sociology: social control and, 477 Socrates, 129, 382, 519, 570, 687; on education, 564; on knowledge and madness, 578; peak of Greekness, 483; on philosophy and control of nature, 547; prayer of, 575 Soviet Union: and US disarmament, 212–14 space program, 397 Spellman, Cardinal Francis Joseph, 337, 366n.140 Spinoza, Baruch, 68, 176, 345, 538; liberalism and, 422; and public order, 510; Strauss on, 554, 556 Stalin, Joseph, 48n.5; on equality, 39 Stanfield, Robert, 387, 392n.5, 606 state: and public religion, 514; and society, 605 state capitalism, 26, 34–5, 281, 286, 317; and liberalism, 319; structure of, 558 Steacie, Edgar William Richard, 124, 126, 133n.10

Index Stenius, E.: commentary on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 91 Stenzel, Julius, 218, 219n.6, 220 St James Anglican Church, Dundas, Ontario, 221–2 St John’s College, Winnipeg: convocation address, 9–18 St Just, Louis Antoine Léon de, 484, 582n.17 St Laurent, Louis, 274, 370 Strachan, Bishop John, 221, 223, 223n.2 Strauss, Leo, 6, 132n.5, 234, 346, 375, 381, 484, 541–57, 758n.63; and biblical religion, 557; on freedom and necessity, 548–9; influence of, xxi; -Kojève controversy, 474–5, 475, 534–7, 541–6, 550–7; on Plato, 217– 18, 219n.3; ‘The Three Waves of Modernity,’ 753n.13; on tyranny, 474; On Tyranny, 533, 534–6; What Is Political Philosophy? 533 Strawson, P.F.: Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, 77–8 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 631n.24 Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA), 393 Suez crisis, 284, 301, 356n.71 Sutcliffe, E.F.: The Monks of Qumran: As Depicted in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 101 Suzuki, D.T., 189, 191; Studies in Zen Buddhism, 98 Swift, Jonathan, 523 Tait, Peter Guthrie, 757n.50 Talmon, J.L., 83–4; Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase, 83 Taylor, Alfred E., 218, 219n.5

793

Taylor, Charles, 431, 453n.3, 767 Taylor, E.P., 306, 340, 359n.90, 373 technique: autonomy of, 397, 414 technological change: inventions and, 550–1 technological society, 492–4, 503; change in through progress, 478; control of human nature, 562; Grant on, 474–5; meaning of to Grant, 595–6; modern liberalism and, 571–2; and technique, 576; tyranny of, 460–1 technology, 24–6, 330; age of, 371; course, 668; definition of, 558; era of, 397; globalization of, 460–1; homogenization through, 275–6, 372; and liberalism, 490–1; and mass society, 11–12, 16–17; in multiversities, 622–23; principle of equality and, 46; and state capitalism, 281 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 106–8, 505, 584n.34, 588n.78; The Divine Milieu, 106–7; The Phenomenon of Man, 106–7 Tertullian, 10, 18n.2; fundamentalism of, 143 Thant, U, 588n.81 therapy: systems of, 163–4 This Hour Has Seven Days, 459, 462n.3 This Magazine, 462n.6 This Magazine Is about Schools, 460, 462n.6 thought: Heidegger’s definition of, 624–5; as technique, 629 Tilley, Sir Samuel Leonard, 391n.1 Tillich, Paul, 106 Timaeus, 756n.45 Time magazine, 204–5, 281, 308 Tolstoy, Leo, 477, 569, 658 Toronto Star, 343

794

Index

Touzel, Bessie, 235, 244n.5, 765 Tovell, Vincent, 770 Toynbee, Arnold, 98–9, 108, 189, 192 Troeltsch, Ernst, 486, 488, 583n.20 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, xxiii, 20, 276, 368, 370–1, 377n.2, 587n.59, 600, 602, 606; individual freedom, 612 Tupper, Sir Charles, 385, 391n.1 Ugaritic, 653 Underhill, F.H., 277, 279, 342–3, 349n.15, 375, 432 Union Nationale, 291 United Kingdom: free trade with Canada, 301; Liberal victory and, 321 United Nations: Philosophy in the Mid-Century, 93 United States: affluence through technology in, 467; age of progress and, 478, 482; and Cuba, 204–5; and democracy, 342–3; integration with, 287; as the liberal society, 451–2; organized crime in, 210; and Soviet disarmament, 212–14; supremacy of, 526–7; and USSR, 295. See also American Empire universal and homogeneous state, 479; definition of, 480; public religion, 517; social order and, 533; tyranny of, 609 universalisation, 372 universalism, 339 universities: curriculum, 558–76; fact-value distinction in, 616; humanities, 564–70; secularism in, 512 University of Toronto, 559 Unnik, W.C. van: Newly Discovered Gnostic Writings, 102 Urmson, J.O.: The Concise Encyclopae-

dia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers, 71 Usmiani, Mirko A., 758n.68 Valachi, Joseph, 209, 211n.1 values: and facts, 235, 611; and freedom, 496–7; language of, 478, 502, 564; and pluralism, 563; in the progressive society, 237–8; of society, 229–30; standards of human good, 496; and technology, 227–43 Vickers, Sir Geoffrey, 48n.3, 242 Vico, Giambattista, 345 Victoria, Queen, 436 Vidal, Gore, Jr, 756n.42; Julian, 703 Vietnam War, 296, 370, 461, 519–21; anti-Americanism and, 271; and Canada, 476, 528–32; gorgon’s face of, 480; Grant on, xix–xx; protests, 398, 426–30, 600; and social upheaval in North America, 473 Voegelin, Eric, 170, 179n.8, 218; on Hiero, 552 Voice of Women, 299, 356n.70 Voltaire, 374, 648, 666n.7 Von Neumann, John, 561, 591n.105 Voyer, Victorin, 765 Wald, George, 255, 269n.1 Walpole, Horace, 567, 592n.113 Ward, Douglas, xxiv, 402, 404 Warren, Earl, 758n.64 Washington, George, 319, 362n.109 Weber, Max, 11, 18n.4, 109, 482, 612, 648, 656; Calvinism and capitalism, 485, 521; on Franklin and Protestantism, 487; freedom and reason, 379–80; on the humanities, 566; value-free social science, 563; and ‘values,’ 501 Webster, Daniel, 385, 391n.2

Index Weil, Simone, 590n.96, 662, 752n.4, 754n.31, 759n.74, 763; explication of the Divine, xx Weiss, Paul, 85–6, 255, 269n.1; Modes of Being, 71; Our Public Life, 85 Western Christianity, 409–10 Western Europe: revelation, 498–9 Western religious thought: area of study, 660–2 What Makes Politics Impossible? 619 White, Lynn Townsend, Jr, 591n.99 Whitehead, Alfred North, 92, 495, 661, 662 Whitehead, William, 770 Whitney, Sir James, 328, 390 Wiener, Norbert, 561, 591n.105 Wilhelm II, Emperor, 585n.37 Wilkinson, Charles: interviews about the Department of Religion, 637– 46 Wilkinson, John, 413 Wilson, Edmund, 100 Wilson, George Earle, 521, 586n.55

795

Wilson, Woodrow, 649, 666n.9 Winters, Robert H., 282, 350n.29 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 71, 78, 91, 114, 132n.6, 625 Wolin, Sheldon S., 627, 631n.26 Wolpe, Joseph, 179n.6; Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition, 169 women: and the family, 239; in North America, 234 Xenophon, 534; Hiero, 474, 534–5; Memorabilia, 547; Strauss-Kojève controversy, 535 Yippies, 596, 602n.3 York University, 66, 282; curriculum, 3–8 Younger, Paul, 664, 665 Zarathustra, 670 Zen Buddhism, 97–8 Zolf, Larry, 768, 769