George Grant

Biography

George Parkin Grant (13 November 1918 – 27 September 1988) was a Canadian philosopher, university professor and social critic. He is known for his Canadian nationalism, a political conservatism that affirms the values of community, equality and justice and his critical, philosophical analysis of the social and political effects of limitless technological progress. As a practising Christian, Grant conceived of time as the moving image of an eternal order illuminated by love. Many of his writings express a complex meditation on and dialogue with the great thinkers of Western civilization including the "ancients" such as Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine of Hippo as well as "moderns" such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, James Doull, Simone Weil and Jacques Ellul. Grant distinguished between civilizations of antiquity in which people believed that sacred stories, rituals and myths revealed universal order and the civilizations of modernity that came into being with the rise of Western science, the rapid development of industrial technologies and the prevailing belief that human beings are free to create (or will) their own order. "We can hold in our minds the enormous benefits of technological society, but we cannot so easily hold the ways it may have deprived us," Grant wrote, "because technique is ourselves." He argued that the technological society has destroyed "the very systems of meaning" along with the language that expressed the highest human purposes. "Our vision of ourselves as freedom in an indifferent world could only have arisen in so far as we had analyzed to disintegration those systems of meaning, given in myth, philosophy and revelation, which had held sway over our progenitors." Grant vigorously opposed euthanasia, which he defined as "deliberately causing the death of someone who is not already dying," and abortion, except where the mother's life is in danger, or in psychologically traumatizing ins

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