George Grant: Technology, Liberalism and Nietzsche

George Parkin Grant is one of the most perspicacious thinkers Canada has ever produced. Grant’s language is prima facie deceptively simple if compared with thinkers like Harold Innis or Marshall McLuhan. As I began to delve further, however, I discovered that beneath the almost poetic simplicity lay an elaborate, deeply profound system of thought, a multivalent commentary on the western experience. I should add at this point that much of the criticism of Grant, directed primarily at Lament for a Nation, has been grievously unfair. And although this essay will not be taking issue with these criticisms I feel they are the result of piecemeal reading. There is this tendency to jump on passionate thinkers especially those who write in such a way that they can be reduced to catch phrases i.e. Nietzsche: “God is dead”. The first lesson learnt as a student of philosophy is to hold off on criticism until you have begun to grasp the thinker and his thought as a whole. Any philosopher worth his mettle will be working within a dynamic but defined system and it is this system which one should come to terms with. There is an organic unity which is always “debased”1 (to use Grants term interpreted oversimplification) if catch phrases are interpreted out of context. For example, there is the complexity of the term technology, a term we all know and feel we understand. Technology is a term which Grant interpreted within the modern western experience and thus, as all great thinkers are wont to do, made it his own. The complexity of this term is such that coming to understand it is one doorway into the thought processes of Grant. For even as “media” was a term McLuhan carried well beyond its conventionally recognized denotation, so too did Grant appropriate technology and add to it a world of connotation. From the very particular perspective of an English-Canadian Grant looked outward to view the latter as within the western tradition. Grant felt he was watching the inevitable

Bibliography: 1) Forbes, H.D., “The Political Thought of George Grant”, Journal of Canadian Studies Vol. 26 No.2 (1991) 2) Forbes, H.D., ed Toronto: Oxford University Press 3) Grant, George Parkin, Philosophy In The Mass Age, New York: Hill and Wang, 1960 -Lament For A Nation, Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1965 -Technology and Empire, Toronto: Anansi, 1969 -English Speaking Justice, Toronto: Anansi, 1974 -Technology and Justice, Toronto; Anansi, 1986 4) Taylor, Charles, Radical Tories – The Conservative Tradition in Canada, Toronto: Anansi, 1982