True Patriot Love (14 page)

It was not a pose but the beginning of a decisive change in his life. He explained to her that he had to study theology because “my need for God is … overwhelming.”

This need for God had changed him. And England had changed, too. He renewed his friendship with Mrs. Lovett and welcomed the Labour victory of July 1945 as a victory for Bermondsey. But he did not share the enthusiasm of his socialist friends for the new government. His ever-deepening religious faith was convincing him of
the futility of salvation through politics. This lofty fatalism about the relevance of political action was already deeply embedded in his intellectual makeup by 1945.

He continued to think of England as the civilized, ancient alternative to the brutal new empires of America and Russia, but as 1945 turned into 1946 and 1947 and he ploughed along with his doctoral dissertation, Canada began to pull him home. He told his mother, “I love England—and think it is the greatest country on earth—[but] Canada is in one’s heart in a way that this country can never be.” Yet finding work at home for a young man with an unfinished doctorate proved difficult. Burgon Bickersteth and the Masseys proposed him for the position of warden of Hart House, the campus student centre at the University of Toronto, then filled with returning veterans. The committee considering the appointment decided they couldn’t select someone who had not served. George was philosophical. “You cannot have the plums after being a pacifist.” Nicholas Ignatieff, then returning from Britain after service in military intelligence, was chosen instead. George accepted a job teaching philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax and, after marrying Sheila Allen, who was to deepen his faith and to strengthen his convictions, he began his career as a Christian conservative philosopher in Canada.

Despite having broken with the family on the issue of service to king and country, he remained faithful to the
Parkin and Grant heritage in other respects. He continued to subscribe to his father’s and grandfather’s essential belief that Canadian identity could not survive without a British core. But already in his twenties, he was giving the family credo a new inflection: conservative, religious, hostile to progress, modernity and liberalism. This was a substantial act of revision, even falsification, of his own heritage. His grandfather Grant, together with Sandford Fleming, had welcomed the leading technologies of the age—the railway and the undersea cable—as tools for nation building. George himself had been left Sandford Fleming’s watch, the first watch, he liked to tell interviewers, that Fleming installed with twenty-four-hour time. George valued the watch but not what it signified. Technology of this transformative sort was no longer progressive. He had seen what high explosives could do to an air raid shelter, and he never again associated technology with progress.

He revised his own pacificism, but he did not revisit his view that the war had laid bare the essentially inhuman dynamic of industrial capitalism. The war experience left him convinced that technology had become the master, not the servant, of the human soul.

He also came to believe, through the spiritual crisis he experienced during the war, that Christian faith was the core of his being and that Western civilization could not be redeemed without a return to faith. This view of modernity was deepened by his reading of the French philosopher
and thinker Simone Weil. Though they never met, she too had been in wartime London and, like him, had been tormented by the conflict between a pure Christian pacifism and her awareness, as a Jew fleeing occupied Europe, that she must do something to confront evil. Her war work, her attempt to provide de Gaulle’s free French with a blueprint for postwar reconstruction in France, was a book called
The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind
. It was first published at the end of the war, after her death in 1943 in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Ashford, Kent. The book’s message paralleled George’s conviction that a war-wounded world could be healed only by returning both to community—local, particular, rooted—and to faith—Christian, transcendent and purifying.

Under the influence of Weil and his wife’s strong religious belief, George came to conclude that the family’s original faith—pious, earnest Presbyterianism—had been the spine that had sustained both its patriotic love of Canada and its insistence that Canada must resist the lure of American ideals and greed. Once this spine of faith had dissolved, the family tradition degenerated into an empty, secular liberalism that offered no resistance to American influences. Whether this was true or not did not matter. What mattered was that he believed it and drew the conclusion that it was up to him to salvage the family’s intellectual
inheritance from the shallow liberal conformity into which it had subsided.

Another decisive factor that shaped the evolution of George’s thought after the war was the changing place of Canada in the world. The Canadians of his generation forged in the crucible of wartime London—Ritchie, Pearson, the Masseys, his sister, the Ignatieffs—returned to the peacetime world with a deep sense that Canada mattered. Anyone who had lived through wartime London and the Canadian part in victory—from Dieppe through Juno, through the liberation of Holland—knew that we were a serious country, with a serious part to play in the making of the postwar world.

Because George, like them, had lived in London at the height of Canada’s brief moment—after Dunkirk but before Pearl Harbor—it came as a shock that the United States had emerged the victor and that Britain was subsiding into war-ravaged decline. This changed everything the Grant family had assumed about the place of Canada in the world. Canada’s fate had been tied to the fortunes of the British Empire. What would it do now as the mother country found herself eclipsed by the American ascendancy? As George settled into the prosperous Canada of the 1950s, teaching at Dalhousie and then at McMaster University, he was appalled that the Canada he had grown up in—Protestant small town, British, virtuous—was being swept away by a surge of continental integration. To
his dismay, much of central Canada began to look like anywhere in the United States, with the same highways, gas stations and supermarkets. Instead of questioning whether this tide of continental integration was a good thing, Canadians seemed to embrace it. And worst of all, the Liberal Party of Canada, led by C.D. Howe, Louis St. Laurent and Mike Pearson, appeared to welcome rather than resist the Americanizing tide. It was especially bitter to see old friends like Pearson appearing to abet the assimilationist drift.

In 1963, George’s mother, Maude Parkin Grant, died at eighty-two after five years lost in the white desert of Alzheimer’s disease. By the end, if she acknowledged him at all, she mistook her son for her father, George Parkin. The woman he had called his anchor, the last living connection with the Parkin and Grant tradition, was now gone.

Two days after her death, the Liberal Party, led by Mike Pearson, combined with the other opposition parties to bring down the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker. The issue on which Diefenbaker fell was his refusal to allow American nuclear weapons—the Bomarc missile—on Canadian soil.

In another single, defining moment—the death of his beloved mother, the severing of the last link with the ancestors, the perceived sellout of Canada by an old friend and the introduction of American weapons onto Canadian soil—Grant saw what he must do. Over the next year, he
composed
Lament for a Nation
, a ninety-seven-page polemic that was, as he put it, “a celebration of … the memory of that tenuous hope that was the principle of my ancestors.” Diefenbaker’s fall was the pretext, but the deeper source of the essay’s extraordinary rhetorical power was his sense that a great tradition of patriotic identification with Canada, central to his being, had been betrayed by those, like Pearson, whom he had once considered friends.

The thesis of
Lament for a Nation
was simple and stark. Canada had gone from colony to nation to colony, from imperial subservience to Britain to imperial subservience to the United States. In the process, it had lost its identity and its soul. Its disappearance was only a matter of time.

But this was not all. The new empire of capitalism and commerce subverted all the smaller, local and provincial attachments that once went by the name of love of country. In the era of technological modernity, love of country was a sentimental and retrograde illusion. A place like Canada could no longer serve as an object of love and longing.

Lament for a Nation
appeared the year I began my undergraduate career at the University of Toronto. I rebelled against this pessimism then, as I do today. But George Grant’s pessimism lays down the gauntlet. There is no easy answer to the challenge he posed—for he asked, as no one had ever done before, Is Canada still possible?

He defended Diefenbaker and the Conservatives, he said, because, unlike the Liberals, “the character of Canada
as British North America was in their flesh and bones.” He added that many men in the Conservative Cabinet had been men of the 1939 war, as if this was proof of their loyalty to Britain, conveniently forgetting that he had been the pacifist and that “the ambitious little bureaucrat”—his acidic description of Pearson—had been a man who had served in both the First and Second World Wars. George was equally scathing about Pearson’s men—who now included his brother-in-law, George Ignatieff, who had married Alison in 1945—calling them acquiescent servants of American imperialism. Ignatieff, who had preceded George Grant as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol and was now working in the Canadian foreign service in Ottawa, did not enjoy George’s remark that “the officials of External Affairs had mostly been educated in the twilight scepticism of Oxford liberalism.” In George’s hands, “liberalism” became a catch-all term of abuse, a synonym for value-free secularism and supine acquiescence to the American takeover.

To the world outside the Grant-Ignatieff families,
Lament
was a masterpiece of rhetorical invective, accusing the entire civil service establishment of Liberal Ottawa of a
trahison des clercs
, a betrayal of Canada to the Americans. Inside the family,
Lament
was seen as a reckless reckoning, with slights imagined and real, going back to wartime London.

Canadian socialists and left-wingers loved the book’s denunciation of the civil service, the branch-plant economy
and the dependence of the Canadian capitalist class on their American masters. For all the left-wing rhetoric—which had been a feature of George’s thinking since his time among the socialists and communists of Bermondsey—
Lament
’s real purpose was to reappropriate the family tradition as a defence of a conservative Christian Canada. He sought to channel the voices of the ancestors, but in doing so, he gave them his own voice alone. Neither his grandfather nor his father had ever been so uniformly negative about the Americans, so hostile to science and technology and everything that went by the name of progress. His grandfather Grant had opposed trade reciprocity with the Americans in the election of 1891, but his father, William, had been in favour of it in the election of 1911. To say that the family spoke with one voice—against economic integration with the United States—was never true. To say that Canada could only be conservative or it could not exist had never been the ancestral doctrine. But in George’s act of ventriloquism, the ancestors spoke, and they spoke in support of
his
vision of Canada.

In doing so, however, George emptied the tradition of any capacity to inspire hope and faith in the country’s future. If Canada could exist only as a conservative country, and if liberals had sold it out to the Americans, with the complicity of most Canadians, what hope remained? Precious little. He had voided the ancestral traditions of what had been central to them, namely a faith
that Canada could shape and master its own destiny. If politics and political action were futile, where were Canadians to look for salvation? George took refuge in his own religious faith, forgetting that this consolation was not necessarily available to most of his readers. The concluding paragraph of
Lament
ended in a note of otherworldly bleakness:

Those who loved the older traditions of Canada may be allowed to lament what has been lost.… Multitudes of human beings through the course of history have had to live when their only political allegiance was irretrievably lost. What was lost was often something far nobler than what Canadians have lost. Beyond courage, it is also possible to live in the ancient faith, which asserts that changes in the world, even if they be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within an eternal order that is not affected by their taking place.

Lament
’s last line is a quotation from Virgil:
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore
. “They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.” If the ancestral traditions were calling us ever more faintly from an ever-increasing distance, then politics in Canada was finished, and all that was left was the consolation of faith.

Only politics wasn’t finished. Everywhere anybody looked in 1965, the year
Lament
appeared, a generation of students and radicals was trying to stop the war in Vietnam. I invited my famous uncle to address a teach-in at the University of Toronto in 1965. I vividly remember the impression made by this gigantic figure, who appeared like a bearded patriarch, though he was only forty-six at the time. He stood before a crowd of five thousand people in Varsity Arena and announced, “I speak as a Canadian nationalist and as a conservative.” We should rage against the dying of the Canadian light, he told the crowd, but we should be under no illusions that it is dying. Even if the war in Vietnam could be ended, the impulses that had created the war—the American drive for imperial mastery propelled by the liberal faith in technology—were woven so deep into the psyches of even those who opposed the war that purging North American civilization of these imperatives was futile. Holding on to the vestigial, minor differences that distinguished Canada from the United States was hardly worth the political effort. He concluded that speech in 1965 with a dark admonition.