This year marks the 60th anniversary of Canadian philosopher George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, a seminal work that reshaped Canadian political discourse. Published in 1965, Grant’s critique of American cultural dominance and technological modernity challenged Canadians to reconsider their national sovereignty and identity. To mark the occasion, this summer, The Hub will feature a series of essays from big thinkers exploring the book’s enduring legacy and how its insights remain vital to understanding Canada and its relationship with the United States today.
During the last federal election, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre offered a crystallized definition of what he termed the Canadian promise: that anybody, from anywhere, could achieve anything.
It was a resonant statement, especially among younger generations for whom this promise “feels more like the Canadian vanishing fantasy.” Those voters swung strongly in favour of the Tories, believing that a Poilievre government would restore their hopes for home ownership, upward mobility, and unimpeded freedom of action within an undifferentiated mass of hyper-mobile strivers.
If you ever needed proof that Canadian conservatism has been conquered by the liberalism it should be resisting, this was it. It is also proof (as if more were needed) of George Grant’s tragic prescience.
Four years after Lament for a Nation, Grant published Technology and Empire, elaborating on the fate of nations colonized by the homogenizing force of technological modernity and the fate of souls residing under it. At the time of writing in 1969, Grant recognized that Canada—and Anglo-Canada in particular—had already abandoned its intellectual and psychological defences against this colonization, which flattens all national and indigenous distinctions.
The belief that Canada is a place comprising “anybody” from “anywhere” is close to an admission—delivered as a boast—that we are no longer a distinct people, nourished by a particular culture, belonging to a specific land.
People of diverse backgrounds can be included within a political community without compromising its cohesion, provided they share in the common culture. But a nation is, by definition, an exclusionary project, with borders both geographical and spiritual. A state that belongs to anybody or everybody belongs to nobody in particular.
What is our creed?
The mantra of anybodies from anywhere is doubtlessly intended as a message of inclusion. But inclusion into what? If we are now a creedal nation—where membership is defined by loyalty to a common purpose or ideal, without reference to a shared history, ancestry, language, culture, or national origin—then what exactly is our creed?
Grant would answer that ours is the religion of progress: “the belief that the conquest of human and non-human nature will give existence meaning.” It is a religion unencumbered by outmoded pieties or prejudices, hostile to the memories and symbols of our ancestors, destructive of indigenous traditions (including our own), and critical of all older, competing standards of human excellence and flourishing. Its horizons are entirely confined to this world: the highest objective of human life is found in material accretion and in having the freedom to satisfy our private individual desires. The realization of this freedom depends on mastery of technology, both practical and social, to remove impediments to human will and to achieve mastery over all matters of chance or fate. “To most Canadians,” writes Grant, “the central cause of motion in their souls is the belief in progress through technique.” But this creed is not native to us. At our founding, Canadian identity was defined in opposition to the religion of progress, at least insofar as it was embodied by the United States. They (the Americans) undertook a heroic rupture from the British Crown, while we cleaved in loyalty to it. They embraced a dynamic individualism, and we maintained a more robust doctrine of the common good. They embodied modernity, while our founding cultures—especially the First Nations and French-speaking peoples—were at least partially insulated from the ideological upheavals that birthed the modern age. They were, in a word, liberal, and we conservative. But as we were absorbed into the American imperium, we assimilated its spirit and its faith in progress. Turning back to the Poilievre slogan, the religion of progress seeks to allow anybody to achieve anything—and to be anything—unbounded by natural limits. The whole purpose of action, according to Grant, is “the building of the universal and homogeneous state—the society in which all men are free and equal and increasingly able to realize their concrete individuality.” A false god Our new religion is indifferent to the preservation of culture, meaning, or social trust, because it considers these goods to be replaceable through technology. When Grant speaks of technology, he is not just referring to the physical or computer sciences, whose products are things like hydroelectric dams, drugs, or 5G networks. It encompasses all those man-made instruments and structures by which we manipulate the world, including our systems of social organization, communication, and control. When charitable giving collapses, and when neighbours cease to know or care for one another, the impersonal bureaucracy of wealth redistribution can fill the void. When we are sad for lack of transcendent meaning, the pharmaceutical sciences promise a solution. If a woman has an unwanted pregnancy or if she desires a child but cannot conceive, technology has the answer in either case. Once the child is born, there is no need for networks of kin to help raise her, because the state administers and funds a vast network of institutional daycares. If learning, literature, and philosophy wither, then AI-powered large language models will do the thinking for us. When criminality and anti-social behaviour become too widespread, the solution lies in mass surveillance devices—or perhaps social credit systems linked to smartphones. Human culture, and the virtues it is meant to foster, are rendered obsolete, as all human problems are reconceived as being solvable through technique. The abundant resources now at our disposal give us the appearance of freedom in pluralism, says Grant, but it is illusory: we in fact “live in a monistic vulgarity in which nobility and wisdom have been exchanged for a pale belief in progress, alternating with boredom and weariness of spirit.” Unlike technology, which is external to us, an authentic culture is inseparable from us; it is the metaphorical soil in which we take root. It nourishes us, trains and inspires our affections, develops our habits, and provides us with the guideposts and life scripts that allow the great majority of us to lead meaningful and virtuous lives. Whereas technology exists to satisfy human appetites, culture exists to educate them. The loss of particular cultural roots impedes the cultivation of virtue and arrests the development of the full human personality. Consider one example: Grant writes that human beings are called to both love the good and to love one’s own. In a healthy society, these dual moral obligations are complementary: “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 what 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,” writes Grant. “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 sustain their partaking in a more universal good.” But the homogenizing force of technological modernity erases all distinctions and particular cultures; it leaves us unable to name, or to recognize, what is ours. The loss of a country, a culture, and a civilization to call one’s own is a profoundly alienating experience: it leaves a person adrift in the world. Unless they can find some other object to vest their piety and their hope, those virtues will wither and disappear. This is the fundamental problem with the religion of progress: for all its ingenious solutions, it cannot answer to the needs of the human soul, either in eternity or in this world.
