Review by Ron Dart.

"Lament for a Nation
should be respected as a masterpiece of political meditation."
Peter Emberley
"Masterpiece is not a word to use lightly, but Lament for a Nation merits it.
William Christian

It is forty years this year (1965-2005) since George Grant’s
Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of
Canadian Nationalism took wings and left the press. It is most appropriate,
therefore, to reflect on this timely text and meditate on its perennial
relevance for Canadian thought and political life.

There is no doubt that Lament
for a Nation is a compact and succinct masterpiece. It says much in a few
pages. It is very much a tract for the times. Alex Colville, the well known Canadian painter, called Lament
for a Nation, a political novel. When this missive was published, the
arguments in it awoke and stirred many in the New Left and Counter Culture in
Canada to fight for what Grant seemed to think was passing away. Lament for a Nation has appealed to many
audiences for many different reasons, but the truths in it are as relevant
today in an age of globalization and an 9-11 imperial world as they were in
1965.

What, then, are the ideas and arguments in Lament for a Nation, and what can they
still speak and say to us?

The 1963 Federal election in Canada set the stage for Lament for a Nation. Tommy Douglas (NDP)
joined ranks with Lester Pearson (Liberals) to defeat John Diefenbaker
(Progressive Conservatives). Grant had pleaded with Douglas not to side with
Pearson. President Kennedy had backed Pearson, and Grant knew that if
Douglas tipped his cap to Pearson, this signaled a green light to Kennedy’s brand of
American imperialism and the defeat of Canadian nationalism. Kennedy despised
Diefenbaker, and although Grant was no uncritical fan of Diefenbaker, he did
stand by his nationalism against American imperialism.

Chapter I of Lament
for a Nation is a rapid overview of the liberal pack of wolves (academics,
journalists, politicians, business leaders) who turned on Diefenbaker. The
opening lines begin like this: “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”. The turn from Diefenbaker to Pearson-Kennedy was a turn
from a unique and indigenous Canadian nationalist way to the American liberal
and imperial way. Grant laments this choice by Canadians. He laments this fact
as a parent would the death of a child that was most loved Life will go on, of
course, but something is lost in the passing of what was loved and cared for,
something that offered life and hope. Diefenbaker offered such a nationalist
hope, but Canadians would have none of it. Most preferred Kennedy’s Camelot to
the True North. A vision was being lost, also, and Chapter I ends with the
opening lines of Hooker’s (16th century Anglican theologian) Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: “Posterity
may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as
in a dream”. There is more to Grant’s lament than merely the passing away of
Canadian nationalism, but in the early chapters of Lament for a Nation this is the main motif. Grant did not want
things to pass away as in a dream.

Chapter II takes Diefenbaker to task. Grant was no
uncritical fan of Diefenbaker, and in Chapter II of Lament for a Nation he clearly and succinctly summarizes many and
most of Diefenbaker’s foibles and failings, and they were many. Grant does
point out, though, Diefenbaker had inherited a Canada from William Lyon
Mckenzie King-C.D. Howe and Louis St. Laurent that had become a colony and
branch plant of the USA. Diefenbaker had to do battle both with those in the
Progressive Conservative party that longed for integration with the USA and
with the Liberal party. In short, he had a rather significant battle to fight
on a variety of fronts. “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”. It is these sorts of questions and answers to them that Grant
probes. Chapter II makes it clear that the questions raised about the fate and
future of Canada are complex, and Diefenbaker, in an imperfect way attempted to
answer such questions in a nationalist way that challenged Kennedy, the USA and
the Canadian colonialism of Pearson and Douglas.

If Chapter II in Lament
for a Nation highlights the fumbling, errors and blunders of Diefenbaker,
then Chapter III clearly articulates that Diefenbaker was a man of principle,
and he was toppled for such nationalist principles. The 1963 election was
fought on the issue of whether Canada would take warheads for Bomarc missiles.
Pearson, following Kennedy, said we should and would. Diefenbaker, much to the
anger and chagrin of many in his party, said a defiant and firm No to Kennedy’s
orders. This was just the tip of the iceberg, though. Diebenbaker had, again
and again, opposed and thwarted Kennedy’s plans for Canada. Diefenbaker had
questioned the way Kennedy had handled the Cuban missile crises, he had
initiated trade ties with Cuba and China when Kennedy had put a trade embargo
on them, and he refused to join the Organization of American States (a front
for American interests in Latin America). In short, Diefenbaker, as a
conservative, locked horns with Kennedy’s liberalism each step of the way.
Grant makes all this quite clear. If Diefenbaker had merely wanted power, he
would, like Pearson, have dutifully genuflected to Kennedy. He didn’t, and he
paid the price for doing so. “The defence crises of 1962 and 1963 revealed the
depth of Diefenbaker’s nationalism”. It was in these years that Canadian
nationalism was tested and found wanting. Canadians turned to the USA as their
great good place, and Diefenbaker did his best to warn Canadians that such a
Trojan horse could and would overwhelm the Canadian way. Chapter III is a
spirited and animated defence of Howard Green (who Grant has much affinity
with) and Diefenbaker. Diefenbaker was a tragic hero, but he was a hero
nonetheless. Grant walks the extra mile to make this quite clear for those who
only can see Diefenbaker in a negative way.

Chapter IV opens with these words: “in the light of
Diefenbaker, I would like to turn to the Canadian establishment and its
political instrument, the Liberal party”. The rest of the chapter tells the
tale of how the liberal vision of Canada, at essence and at core, is one with
the liberal vision of the USA. The Liberal party sees itself as the bearer of
such a liberal and progressive vision, and most liberals see the future and
fate of Canada as being one and the same (on most major issues) as the USA.
Grant makes clear how this annexationist and continentalist vision has been
brokered and furthered by the Liberal Party of Pearson-St. Laurent-King-Laurier
and tribe. This, in short, is the Canadian establishment, and these are their
aims and goals for Canada. A quote from E.P. Taylor sums things up quite nicely:
“Canadian nationalism! How old-fashioned can you get?”

Grant points out that there were two ways of opposing the
liberal integrationist vision with the USA: Castro and Cuba and De Gualle and
France. Canada was not likely to follow Cuba, but the Gaullist tradition had
some affinities with Sir J.A. Macdonald’s idea for the True North. But, since
the capitalist class in Canada are more American than Canadian nationalist, the
Gaullist tradition has as much chance of taking the lead in Canada as does Castro’s
experiment in Cuba. It is the Liberal party that has assumed liberalism is the
only political philosophy worth bending the knee to, and it is this creed and
dogma that liberals see themselves as making sure all Canadians live by. Is
there any option to liberalism and the sheer power of the Liberal party to make
sure Canadians this is the fate they must accept? Are we indeed at the end of
both history and ideology?

Chapter V moves the discussion from the many actors and
actresses who play their roles on the stage of history to the ideas and
ideologies that are the script and cue for such political thespians. Chapter V
moves Lament for a Nation to a
deeper, more demanding place. “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”. It is at this point that
we can see that there is much more at work in Grant’s argument than merely a
lament for Canadian nationalism. The lament goes much deeper.

Grant sees the modern era and ethos as dominated by
liberalism. This liberal creed and dogma emerged in the Reformation (as Grant
made clear in his earlier book, Philosophy
and the Mass Age). The deeper lament is about the passing away of the
tradition of the Ancients and the coming to be of the Moderns. Plato and
Aristotle, Augustine and Hooker, Swift and Coleridge had notions of the self
and society, of human nature and the good life that stood in opposition to
those like Locke and Hobbes, Paine and Jefferson. Grant makes plain the aim of
this chapter: “I must turn away from Canadian history to the more important
questions of political theory”. It is in this pivotal chapter that Grant makes
clear why he sides with the Ancients rather than the Modern way, and why he
sees the individualist and 1st generation liberalism of Locke,
Hobbes, Hume and Smith and the social and 2nd generation liberalism
of Rousseau, Kant and Hegel as kissing cousins. 1st and 2nd
generation liberals do disagree about the role of the state in bringing about
the good of the individual and society, but both agree that liberty, equality,
choice, and freedom are the core of the liberal way. The debate between 1st
and 2nd generation liberals is not so much about the principles and
premises of liberalism but more about the accessibility and implementation of
such principles for one and all. Grant makes it clear that such principles are
problematic, and, if unquestioned, lead to serious problems. Grant, more than
any other modern Canadian political philosopher, has dared to ask questions
about the matrix of liberalism. Chapter V in Lament for a Nation is a sustained reflection on the inadequacy of
liberal principles. If liberalism is flawed at the core and centre, what is the
Tory alternate?

Chapter VI takes a long and hard look at the roots of
Canadian conservatism. Grant makes it quite clear that the problem with a great
deal of Canadian English speaking political thought is that it has been shaped
by English liberalism. Canada was formed by many who came from England who had
affinties with Locke and Smith, Hume and Hobbes. The older and more organic
tradition of Hooker and Coleridge was waning at the time in England when Canada
was being founded. This means Canada, like the USA, shares a certain liberal
ethos. But, Canada, unlike the USA, still had a memory of an older, more
ordered tradition with an abiding concern for the commonweal. It is this
tension in the DNA and genetic code of English speaking Canada that makes
Canada quite different from the liberty loving Yankees to the south. Canada,
also, unlike the USA, walked the extra mile to preserve the French way of life.
Many of the French who settled in Quebec (and elsewhere in Canada) had opposed
the French Revolution of 1789. This meant that they, like the older English
High Tories, shared a certain view of the good and just life. The English
Tories and French Conservatives may have differed on some points, but both
agreed that they did not want to be liberals or Americans. The conservative
tradition in Canadian, therefore, brought together the French and English, to
oppose American liberal ideals and American imperialism. Grant makes it clear
in Chapter VI that the English in Canada, for the most part, have forgotten
their older Tory ties. He does suggest, though, that the French are much closer
to an older notion of conservatism. The roots of Canadian conservatism (English
and French) are much older and go much deeper into the Classical Tradition of
English liberalism (that finds its fullest expression and embodiment in the
USA). Grant is ready to concede that there can be some protest to bourgeois
liberalism, but even this can be co-opted by those in power. Grant had, in the
1960s, supported many in the New Left and Counter Culture. He stood by the side
of the New Left and the Counter culture in their criticisms of the Canadian and
American liberal bourgeois ethos. But, he had this to say as a form of warning:
“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. Joan Baez and Pete Seeger titillate the status quo rather than threaten
it. Dissent is built into the fabric of the modern system. We bureaucratize it
as much as anything else. Is there any reason to believe French Canada will be
any different? A majority of the young is patterned for its place in the
bureaucracies. Those who resist such shaping will retreat into a fringe world
of pseudo-revolt”. The Beats, therefore, might seem to be questioning the
status quo, but it is their anarchist fringe world and pseudo-revolt mentality
(grounded and rooted in liberal notions of liberty and individualism) that
makes them most American and easily co-opted. This is why Grant, at day’s end,
speaks a firm and solid No to the USA in either its liberal bourgeois or Beat
protest form: he saw them as different sides of the same liberal coin. At a
fundamental level, therefore, Grant disagreed with the political philosophy of
liberalism, and he thought the USA incarnated such a liberal tradition more
than any other state in the world. In short, Grant recognized that there are
those who think we have come to the end of history and ideology, but he still
can envision another way.

Grant is only too well aware, though, that the forces and
ideology of liberalism (as embodied in the USA and bowed before by Canadian
colonials and compradors) seems to be the necessary fate we must all, whether
we like it or not, live with. Is this, then, our fate? Are we doomed and fated
to be liberals, and is history (in terms of ideological battles) over and done?
How are we to live if liberalism is both our necessity and determined fate?

Chapter VII concludes this tract for the times. Chapters
I-IV dealt with Canadian history, political actors and party politics. Chapters
V-VI walked the reader into the area of political philosophy and theory. It is
from the realm of theory that the script is given to the actors who merely read
their parts in time. Grant questions, in these chapters, whether the script,
itself, might have some problems. Could the lines of liberalism, the play and
drama be written differently? Many don’t think so, and most oppose any fiddling
or altering with the script and text of liberalism. Chapter VII has a more
theological bent and orientation to it than the other chapters. Grant makes it
clear in Chapter VII that Hegel and his notion of history is the crown jewel
and centre piece of liberalism. Hegel had argued that liberalism fulfilled the
deepest longing of the human intellectual and political journey. God and
liberalism are ONE. Liberalism is, almost, in Hegel, divinely inspired and
ordained. If this is the case, and liberalism is the creed of the day that
cannot be questioned or doubted, then it is our fate that we must work within
the matrix of the liberal framework. But, Grant asks, is fate and necessity the
same as the GOOD? The Classical Tradition of the GOOD stands in a questioning
and interrogating opposition to liberalism. Chapter VII ends with this
question, therefore. “Liberalism was, in origin, criticism of the old
established order. Today it is the voice of the establishment”. Grant set
himself the task of questioning both liberal ideology and the establishment
class that defined and defended it. This made him, in some ways, an
uncomfortable prophet, and Lament for a
Nation a tract with many a parallel to the Jewish prophet Jeremiah who
wrote Lamentations. Grant attempts to
evoke notions of the GOOD, he points the way to such places and he wonders,
while doing so, whether there will ever be a turn to such a way? If liberalism
is our fate, then the GOOD might just be eclipsed.

Is Grant a cynic and skeptic, therefore? Does he see no
possibility of opposing and resisting the Moloch, establishment and matrix of
liberalism? Grant was asked in 1970 to write an Introduction to Lament for a Nation; he did so. It is in
this Introduction that he attempted to state his case against apathy, cynicism,
indifference and skepticism. It is interesting to note that in the Introduction
he refers twice to the Moloch of the USA. This was a term that was used by
Allen Ginsberg in his classic poem, Howl
(1956). There are close connections between Ginsberg and Grant in what they are
protesting against. Ginsberg’s Howl
and Grant’s Lament do share some
important affinities, and these do need to be explored. Lament for a Nation is, in many ways, the Canadian version of Howl. The fact that Grant uses the image
and metaphor of Molech as a way of depicting the American empire in his
Introduction to Lament for a Nation
highlighted his affinity with the New Left and the Counter Culture of the 1960s
and the 1970s, but, as I noted above, Grant was somewhat wary of the fringe
world and pseudo-revolt of the Counter Culture. Those like Ginsberg and clan
used and furthered the very principles of liberalism in their legitimate
criticisms of liberal bourgeois culture that the dominant classes in the USA
sought to defend.

Grant was neither a cynic nor pessimist, though. He insisted
and argued in his Introduction that action was better than apathy, and
political paralysis is not the answer. Liberalism might dominate (in a variety
of guises and appearances), but if history teaches nothing else it is that all
ideologies have their day. When such a day will come is beyond the ken of most,
but to sit down and fold the hands is not the answer. Grant ever pointed to the
GOOD, and encouraged one and all to look where his finger was pointing. The
language of optimism and pessimism must be set within a much larger and longer
historic context. When this is done, and the end of the journey is seen, there
is reason for hope and Grant was ever hopeful.

Sheila Grant (George Grant’s wife) was asked to write an
Afterword to Lament for a Nation in
1997. She made it clear that if Lament
for a Nation is ever going to be properly understood, a better reading and
understanding of Chapter VII is much needed. Sheila further unpacked Grant’s
discussion about necessity and the good, and argued that Grant was not a
pessimist. He believed in acting even when the odds seemed overwhelming, and he
lived from a source that went much deeper and was much older than liberalism.
The final few paragraphs in Chapter VII highlight what this source was and why
Grant turned to such a well to dip his bucket.

There is no doubt Lament
for a Nation is a political masterpiece and a missive of prophetic vigour
and depth. This tract for the times moves from the Federal election of 1963, to
Canadian-American relations, to political philosophy, to theology and back, in
the 1970 Introduction, to Canadian-American relations and the need for
Canadians to be ever vigilant about American intentions and the colonial class
in Canada that would make Americans of Canadians.

Lament for a Nation has many affinities with Ginsberg’s Howl, but even though Grant might lament
and Ginsberg howl at the imperial nature of the USA and the liberal bourgeois
ethos that underwrites such military industrial complex, Grant would see
Ginsberg, the New Left, the Beats and the Counter Culture of the 1960s and
1970s as more subtle agents of the liberal ideology that he sought to question
and interrogate. In fact, a close reading of life and writings of Allen
Ginsberg and George Grant would highlight how and why the Canadian High Tory
way shares some affinities with the Anarchist Left, , but, on substantive
issues, they part company on both the issues of philosophic principles and
political means. George Grant gives Canadians a uniquely Canadian way (both in
a philosophical and political way) of opposing the varieties of liberalism that
are smuggled into Canada, like a Trojan horse, by Americans. Beware, indeed, of
Americans when they come bringing gifts of either the imperial, liberal
bourgeois or protest type. To quote another Canadian, by way of conclusion,
“even the dissidents speak as members of the empire”(John Newlove).

rsd