On the teachings of George Grant

Abstract

One of Canada’s greatest public intellectuals, George Grant (1918–1988) studied history as an undergraduate, focusing on concepts and themes rather than minutiae. That same intellectual disposition surfaced later at Oxford, where he had gone on a Rhodes scholarship to study law. Returning to Oxford after the war, he left law to study theology, earning extra money by writing historical articles on Canada for Chambers’ Encyclopedia. Even after becoming the most prominent Canadian philosopher of his time, Grant maintained he always thought like an historian. Reactivating the historical thinking of George Grant can encourage ‘becoming historical’.

Keywords:

• George Grant
• public intellectual
• postsecular
• religion
• Canada

Notes

^1. ‘The nineteenth-century German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel’, Toews (2008, 175) reminds, was among those who imagined the ‘past as a foreign country’, and one ‘that could function as a model and norm for the present. But for Schinkel, the past lived in the present through all of the historical forms in which its principles had been transfigured and passed on through time. To think historically was not to make an imaginative leap into a past world, but to view oneself within the flow of time in which historical forms were in a constant process of making and remaking.’ For Schinkel, those forms were architectural; I have long argued that they can also be curricular, evident in this current effort to reconstruct the present through ‘reactivating’ the thought of George Grant.

^2. See Smith (2014) and Wang (2014). Both summon ‘wisdom traditions’ to recast the present moment.

^3. This was Harold Innis’ fear. ‘One of Innis’ most bitter memories of the First World War period’, Watson (2007, 235) explains, ‘was the propaganda that had sent idealistic Christian youngsters into the horror of trench warfare. While this had largely been a wartime phenomenon, he now confronted a situation where US propaganda was to be cranked up and continued as a permanent feature of peace under the banner of the Cold War.’ Now, it is rationalized by the so-called ‘war on terror’.

^4. In the United States today, businesses brazenly endorse education as job preparation. There is no mention of citizenship in the full-page advertisement in The New York Times signed by Alcoa, Bayer, Boeing, BP, Dollar General, Dow Chemical, Dupont, Eli Lilly, Exxon Mobil, GE, General Mills, Harley-Davidson, Intel, ManpowerGroup, McGraw-Hill, Microsoft, National Defense Industrial Association, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Rockwell, State Farm Insurance, Taco Bell, Texas Instruments, Time Warner, US Chamber of Commerce, Xerox, and others: ‘As business leaders, we believe ALL American children have a right to an education that prepares them to be successful in a competitive global economy. We also understand that in order to compete in a knowledge-based, global economy, we must improve the academic performance of our students’ (Signatories 2013, February 12, A7). The Obama administration plans to rank colleges by tuition, graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and use this ranking to influence federal financial aid to students (Stewart, 2013, September 14, B4).

^5. On February 18, 1932, George Counts, a Teachers College sociologist, challenged the annual meeting of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) to articulate a critique of the social order so that their students could confront the misery and injustice of Depression-era America. In small groups, those present considered Counts’ question – ‘Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive?’ – as other conference presentations were canceled. Later published as an article and expanded into a pamphlet, Counts’ speech sparked an ongoing debate regarding the relationship between school and society. Schools inevitably indoctrinate, Counts insisted, and it was essential for educators to counter antidemocratic propaganda (see Perlstein, 2000, 51, 55). Tomkins (1986, 191) reports that ‘very few Canadian school reformers’ advocated Counts’ views.

^6. At Dalhousie, Christian (1996, 136) tells us, ‘Colonel Laurie was a powerful figure… chairman of the [University] board.’ For Grant, he was the latest of a line of businessmen, despite ‘benign intentions, pushed and pulled, caressed and bullied, to transform the university into an appropriate instrument to serve the needs of the progressive capitalist societies of North America’ (Christian, 1996, 136).

^7. When Dalhousie’s President announced his intention to create a graduate school, especially for the sciences, Grant led the fight against it in the university senate, but the cause was lost, leaving him discouraged: ‘probably they won’t care about real & effective teaching in Arts. My department has 30 students with me the only full-time teacher & they call that philosophy. The physics department has 8 times as much spent on it as on philosophy barring equipment. Dalhousie is going to be a technical college. So there is little hope of getting real philosophy done here. So it makes me want to go’ (quoted passages in Christian (1996, 142)). ‘The affair’, Christian (1996, 143) reports, ‘revealed to him starkly and immediately how powerful were the science departments, especially when they were supported by the businessmen on the board, how they could consume the resources of the university, and how incomparably weaker was a department like philosophy.’ Now we take that for granted; six decades ago on campuses across North America, today’s reality was established.

^8. Because it was not at this time compelling in Canada, Islam was not. The cultural significance of Islam to North America – to Canada in particular – has much increased since Grant’s death, and not only due to increased immigration. Heightened in the years since Grant’s death is Benhabib’s (2006, 171) concern that the ‘increasingly hostile security environment’ and the ‘reality’ of ‘fundamentalist Islamic terrorism’ in Europe would mean that ‘pan-Europeanism may not result in heightened cosmopolitan consciousness but in a new form of chauvinism, heavily interlaced with racist attitudes toward the Muslim world.’ Never mind that, as John Ralston Saul (2005, 279) observed, ‘Islam, the religion that most concerns the West these days, is fundamentally open and has a more flexible history than Christianity.’ That history is obscured by present perceptions that, Butler and Spivak (2007, 99–100) note, ‘Islam… is contaminated by reactive gender politics and “terror”’. The former impacts not only women, Ruthven (2009, 54) points out, but contribute to practices not exactly forefronted in popular histories of Islam: boy concubinage and pedophilia. Although liwat or lavat (sodomy) is condemned in the Qur’an, Ruthven (2009, 54) continues, ‘homosexual relationships between older men and boys were tolerated, not least because they posed a lesser threat to the patriarchal order than unregulated heterosexual interactions’. Would that fact recommend Islam to contemporary religion – or queer studies – curricula?

^9. It is not only the acknowledgment of being ‘behind enemy lines’ that requires caution and solitude (Pinar, 2012, 238), it is study – with its traces of a sacred pursuit – itself. After a period of public engagement, Grant himself realized that withdrawal was indicated. In January 1968, he wrote to friends of his need ‘to be far away within myself… I know that a certain period of my life has come to an end and that I must reform myself to move on – but in doing that I have to retreat away from conversation with people – even those who are most meaningful and most interesting to me’ (quoted in Christian, 1996, 267). As the reference to ‘reform myself’ implies, solitude can be an opportunity for subjective reconstruction (Pinar, 2012, 207).

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Notes on contributors

William F. Pinar

William F. Pinar is Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia. He has also served as the St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed Professor at Louisiana State University, the Frank Talbott Professor at the University of Virginia, and the A. Lindsay O’Connor Professor of American Institutions at Colgate University.