Oct 5, 2024 08:26 PM
George Grant & conservative social democracy (nationalism & Platonic conception of justice)
https://www.compactmag.com/article/georg...democracy/
EXCERPT: Liberal praise of individual liberty and material progress, George Grant had concluded, was the only moral language that could sound a commanding note in our public realm—but it wasn’t the language that commanded him. His early epiphany that “we are not our own” led him to reject what he took to be the core tenet of modern liberalism: “the affirmation that our essence is our freedom.” Guided by the belief that to be human was to be an autonomous will, modern politics joined hands with modern technological science to push back the frontiers of anything that limited the exercise of that will.
The modern affirmation of the primacy of the will had implications for our understanding of justice that troubled Grant. With liberal modernity, justice becomes something human beings legislate for themselves in their freedom, in contrast to the Platonic conception of justice as “something in which we participate as we come to understand the nature of things through love and knowledge.” On this older view, justice was a set of practices and dispositions that contributed to the perfection of our nature. Being what human beings are “fitted for,” it directed us to the higher goods of virtue and contemplation and bade us to give other beings their due, what was properly owed to them. Within the Christian tradition, justice was especially concerned with protecting the most vulnerable members of society.
But modern thinkers rejected the claim that a thing’s nature could be a source of moral and political norms. The new mechanistic philosophy saw nature as a morally indifferent realm, governed by necessity and chance but subject to mastery by human beings once they armed themselves with knowledge of its workings. Grant drew on the insights of Heidegger and others to show that this view of nature was the foundation of modern science and technology. When nature is construed as nothing but resources—Heidegger’s “standing reserve”—to be pressed into service for ends dictated by the human will, how can it supply a standard of justice? In modernity, the human will to mastery becomes the ultimate legislator of our purposes.
The challenge for the founders of liberalism was to give a meaning and content to justice divorced from any conception of higher human purposes, which they believed would always be a matter of contention. Their solution was the social contract. Justice arises, the social-contract theorists argued, when autonomous individuals mutually agree to limit their conduct to secure the one thing any rational human being was said to prize above all: namely, comfortable self-preservation. Justice, on this account, is self-interested calculation.
But as Grant warned, the goal of comfortable self-preservation wasn’t enough to shield the weak from predation by the strong. After all, the Vietnam war was justified in terms of liberal ideology. The mightiest state on Earth was willing to rain fire on a small peasant country thousands of miles away because the Vietnamese didn’t want to be part of the liberal capitalist imperium. It was as though the self-evident superiority of the North American way of life licensed domination of countries that dared to reject it. Elsewhere, Grant said he was tempted to sum up the American ethos as “the orgasm at home and napalm abroad.” He also condemned the US Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which struck down legal restrictions on abortion, describing it as “a cup of poison to the lips of liberalism,” because its denial of rights to the unborn opened the possibility of excluding other categories of human beings from the protection of the law. He feared for the old, the infirm, the handicapped—for anyone whose claims might inconvenience us in our quest for ever greater quality of life.
If we view these consequences of liberalism as failings, it’s only because much of our contemporary morality still contains traces of premodern traditions of thought derived from the Bible and the classics. But liberalism, with its celebration of human autonomy, is the great solvent of every tradition that offers a roadmap through life other than the one projected by our strongest desires. Consequently, Grant anticipated that liberal societies would find themselves increasingly unable to resist the slide into illiberalism.
Grant left McMaster in 1980 to return to Dalhousie as a professor of politics, religion, and philosophy. He taught there until his death in 1988. His last collection of essays, Technology and Justice (1986), is an extended commentary on an aphorism from Simone Weil—“faith is the experience that intelligence is enlightened by love”—that opens into a rapturous meditation on how the transcendent good reaches us through the immediacy of the beautiful. At the time of his death, he was writing a book to answer Heidegger’s critique of Plato, a task he judged to be as pressing as it was daunting; only fragments of this final work were completed.
Liberalism, wrote Grant, was “fashioned in the same forge” as the will to technological progress. Aided by the drive to master human and nonhuman nature, liberalism promised to free us from the limitations of both nature and tradition. Dissolving all parochial loyalties, it ushered us into what Grant called the universal and homogeneous state, a phrase he borrowed from the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Looming on the horizon is a day when politics will be entirely replaced by impersonal administration, overseen by a managerial elite committed to mastering chance through the application of natural and social science. The global dominance of this technocratic rationality assured the demise of Canadian sovereignty, along with countless local cultures that could never hope to withstand the relentless dynamism of the modernizing juggernaut.
But even as he defended Canadian sovereignty, he regarded the nation as an instrumental good at best. We love our nation, he wrote, because it is our own, but the love of one’s own is only the first step on the ladder that culminates in a love of the good that transcends the local. As Simone Weil wrote, “we must make of our own country, not an idol, but a stepping-stone towards God.” Grant insisted that we come to love God, who is none other than goodness itself in his Platonic theology, only by first learning to love our own, for it provides our initial experience of being beholden to something greater than ourselves.
People sometimes speak of loving humankind or loving the planet, but these are pale and tepid abstractions compared to our love of the full-blooded people and things that give our lives texture and meaning. “People who are savagely bitter about their own, but love universal justice are often, to me, dangerous people,” Grant once observed.
Love of our own is what first opens us to the possibility of loving a good beyond ourselves. Our nation, family, friends, the local architecture, the local flora and fauna—these are not the “good in itself,” since they are only partial goods, local and particular, but through them we receive our first intimations of a perfection that can lure us, in the words of Saint Augustine that are inscribed on Grant’s tombstone, “out of the shadows and imaginings into the truth.”
It’s easy to scoff at this sort of language, but Grant would surely say that our derision reflects how impoverished our experience has become. Our view of the world as something to be mastered rather than loved prevents us from discerning, in its always partial and imperfect goodness, signs that the source of all being is benevolence. We experience this goodness most intensely and immediately in the people and things we love as our own... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.compactmag.com/article/georg...democracy/
EXCERPT: Liberal praise of individual liberty and material progress, George Grant had concluded, was the only moral language that could sound a commanding note in our public realm—but it wasn’t the language that commanded him. His early epiphany that “we are not our own” led him to reject what he took to be the core tenet of modern liberalism: “the affirmation that our essence is our freedom.” Guided by the belief that to be human was to be an autonomous will, modern politics joined hands with modern technological science to push back the frontiers of anything that limited the exercise of that will.
The modern affirmation of the primacy of the will had implications for our understanding of justice that troubled Grant. With liberal modernity, justice becomes something human beings legislate for themselves in their freedom, in contrast to the Platonic conception of justice as “something in which we participate as we come to understand the nature of things through love and knowledge.” On this older view, justice was a set of practices and dispositions that contributed to the perfection of our nature. Being what human beings are “fitted for,” it directed us to the higher goods of virtue and contemplation and bade us to give other beings their due, what was properly owed to them. Within the Christian tradition, justice was especially concerned with protecting the most vulnerable members of society.
But modern thinkers rejected the claim that a thing’s nature could be a source of moral and political norms. The new mechanistic philosophy saw nature as a morally indifferent realm, governed by necessity and chance but subject to mastery by human beings once they armed themselves with knowledge of its workings. Grant drew on the insights of Heidegger and others to show that this view of nature was the foundation of modern science and technology. When nature is construed as nothing but resources—Heidegger’s “standing reserve”—to be pressed into service for ends dictated by the human will, how can it supply a standard of justice? In modernity, the human will to mastery becomes the ultimate legislator of our purposes.
The challenge for the founders of liberalism was to give a meaning and content to justice divorced from any conception of higher human purposes, which they believed would always be a matter of contention. Their solution was the social contract. Justice arises, the social-contract theorists argued, when autonomous individuals mutually agree to limit their conduct to secure the one thing any rational human being was said to prize above all: namely, comfortable self-preservation. Justice, on this account, is self-interested calculation.
But as Grant warned, the goal of comfortable self-preservation wasn’t enough to shield the weak from predation by the strong. After all, the Vietnam war was justified in terms of liberal ideology. The mightiest state on Earth was willing to rain fire on a small peasant country thousands of miles away because the Vietnamese didn’t want to be part of the liberal capitalist imperium. It was as though the self-evident superiority of the North American way of life licensed domination of countries that dared to reject it. Elsewhere, Grant said he was tempted to sum up the American ethos as “the orgasm at home and napalm abroad.” He also condemned the US Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which struck down legal restrictions on abortion, describing it as “a cup of poison to the lips of liberalism,” because its denial of rights to the unborn opened the possibility of excluding other categories of human beings from the protection of the law. He feared for the old, the infirm, the handicapped—for anyone whose claims might inconvenience us in our quest for ever greater quality of life.
If we view these consequences of liberalism as failings, it’s only because much of our contemporary morality still contains traces of premodern traditions of thought derived from the Bible and the classics. But liberalism, with its celebration of human autonomy, is the great solvent of every tradition that offers a roadmap through life other than the one projected by our strongest desires. Consequently, Grant anticipated that liberal societies would find themselves increasingly unable to resist the slide into illiberalism.
Grant left McMaster in 1980 to return to Dalhousie as a professor of politics, religion, and philosophy. He taught there until his death in 1988. His last collection of essays, Technology and Justice (1986), is an extended commentary on an aphorism from Simone Weil—“faith is the experience that intelligence is enlightened by love”—that opens into a rapturous meditation on how the transcendent good reaches us through the immediacy of the beautiful. At the time of his death, he was writing a book to answer Heidegger’s critique of Plato, a task he judged to be as pressing as it was daunting; only fragments of this final work were completed.
Liberalism, wrote Grant, was “fashioned in the same forge” as the will to technological progress. Aided by the drive to master human and nonhuman nature, liberalism promised to free us from the limitations of both nature and tradition. Dissolving all parochial loyalties, it ushered us into what Grant called the universal and homogeneous state, a phrase he borrowed from the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Looming on the horizon is a day when politics will be entirely replaced by impersonal administration, overseen by a managerial elite committed to mastering chance through the application of natural and social science. The global dominance of this technocratic rationality assured the demise of Canadian sovereignty, along with countless local cultures that could never hope to withstand the relentless dynamism of the modernizing juggernaut.
But even as he defended Canadian sovereignty, he regarded the nation as an instrumental good at best. We love our nation, he wrote, because it is our own, but the love of one’s own is only the first step on the ladder that culminates in a love of the good that transcends the local. As Simone Weil wrote, “we must make of our own country, not an idol, but a stepping-stone towards God.” Grant insisted that we come to love God, who is none other than goodness itself in his Platonic theology, only by first learning to love our own, for it provides our initial experience of being beholden to something greater than ourselves.
People sometimes speak of loving humankind or loving the planet, but these are pale and tepid abstractions compared to our love of the full-blooded people and things that give our lives texture and meaning. “People who are savagely bitter about their own, but love universal justice are often, to me, dangerous people,” Grant once observed.
Love of our own is what first opens us to the possibility of loving a good beyond ourselves. Our nation, family, friends, the local architecture, the local flora and fauna—these are not the “good in itself,” since they are only partial goods, local and particular, but through them we receive our first intimations of a perfection that can lure us, in the words of Saint Augustine that are inscribed on Grant’s tombstone, “out of the shadows and imaginings into the truth.”
It’s easy to scoff at this sort of language, but Grant would surely say that our derision reflects how impoverished our experience has become. Our view of the world as something to be mastered rather than loved prevents us from discerning, in its always partial and imperfect goodness, signs that the source of all being is benevolence. We experience this goodness most intensely and immediately in the people and things we love as our own... (MORE - missing details)