Strategies for Information Technology and Intellectual Capital Challenges and Opportunities Book

I really loved this book, much more than "Lament for a Nation." I feel like that earlier book may be so well-regarded just because it works hard to introduce philosophical topics the public may not have heard of, and also because it is arranged so pointedly around a single topic. "Technology and Empire" has much more to say about Canada's predicament, how we got to where we are today and what we might do about it.

So how did we get here? The first essay, on what it means to be a North American, is a great reflection on the subject. Grant points out that the forma of Christianity which dominated Anglophone North American culture was already the most modern form of that religion which had come out of Europe. As Charles Taylor points out in a similar essay, "Legitimation Crisis," whose gist may well have been inspired by Grant, Calvinism was already a "disenchanted" religion with an instrumental relationship to the world.

When this Calvinistic Christianity met the challenges of settler life, it produced a shallow practicality. Because it was shallow, it was protected for a long time from the nihilism growing throughout Europe. But it was inveterately shallow and uncontemplative, which was suffocating in its own right. (I was happy to hear him call us out on this.)

However, with the growth of the mass bureaucracy of the post-war state in both the USA and Canada, nihilism entered at last. It entered in the form of technocracy, power wielded through technique, including social science and psychology. These disciplines are founded on a nihilistic instrumental reason, one that recognizes only means and never ends.

The end of the essay is the best part, where in the space of a couple pages Grant uses this history to try to illuminate the troubles of the 60's. The Vietnam war shows the deep corruption of the technocratic state, and the fact that the US has become a morally rudderless world empire (with Canada explicit in its crimes, as he makes clear in the essay "The Fate of Canada.") Moreover, the nihilism and shallowness of North American culture have turned the youth towards depth at last, in the form of rock and roll.

His failure to discuss the genocide of Indigenous peoples makes this analysis less credible -- what kind of moral rudder have Canada and America ever had, if it allows that? But it nevertheless throws light on our present lives.

What I like about Grant in particular is that he doesn't just put together ideas; he is trying to come to terms with them emotionally. It clearly hurts him to believe that North American society is so thoroughly bankrupt, and indeed more or less lacking moral legitimacy. But he wants to come to terms with it and bring out of it conclusions that allow for action. He continually insists that, as bad as it seems, it always matters what we do.

This jives with his somewhat existential approach -- philosophy is not about abstract truths, it's about life as we live it. He is surprisingly Platonistic at times, but he approaches Plato through Leo Strauss, whose classicism is decidedly influenced by Heidegger and existentialism more broadly. Strauss ressurects the ancients the way Kierkegaard does Christianity, refusing to allow them to lose their bite and become objects of curiosity for the complacent. The result is that Grant comes across as more living, more passionate, and more personal than most 20th century philosophers. In particular, reading Charles Taylor after Grant is kind of claustrophobic. Even when he argues more or less the same thing, we seem so much more distant from life.

Overall, there is no one I have read who has better contextualized Canada than Grant. He has many flaws, the most important of which is his amnesia about Indegenous peoples, but what he offers is nevertheless irreplaceable.