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In Defense of Technology: A Respectful Reply to Grant
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10681 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1986 |
3,521 Words |
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Frank Flinn
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Does the coming to be of technological civilization portend the final darkening of the idea of justice in the way the West lives, moves, and has its being in the world? Readers of George Grant's English-Speaking Justice often believe that is what he is saying. But Grant has warned his readers that he is speaking in terms of neither pessimism nor optimism. He is simply trying to uncover what is. And the principal reality that Grant believes he has uncovered is that there has been a darkening of clarity about justice both on the practical and theoretical levels in the age that defines itself as technological.
An important question is: what does Grant mean by technology? And an equally important question is: what does he mean by justice? There are no simple answers to these questions, as Grant has gone through various stages of thought in which his ideas about technology and justice have changed. A brief overview of those phases is in order.
Stages of Grant's Thought
The first phase of Grant's thought was summed up in Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959; reissued in 1966). In that book he tried to hold together the philosophy of Plato with the philosophy of Hegel, and to evaluate fairly the competing claims of Marxism and pragmatism in our times. Grant summarized the conflict between the ancients and the moderns under the terms "myth" and "history." He gathered under the term "myth" the ideas of nature as a cosmos, natural law, ethical limits to action, time as the moving image of an unmoved eternity and contemplation. Under the term "history" he gathered the notions of freedom, time as progress, limitless technological advance, and action. Both ancient and modern thought, Grant believed at that time, contained partial truths: "The truth of natural law is that man lives within an order he did not make and to which he is subordinate; the truth of the history-making spirit is that man is free to build a society which eliminates the evils of the world." Taken to its extreme, an attitude of pure contemplation derived from natural law theory can lead a person to indifference toward the real sufferings of this world. Conversely, the history-making spirit shows itself prone to the "temptation of the limitless," that is, that there is no categorical limit to what human beings may do, including the alteration of the human species.
Both European Marxism and American pragmatism, Grant felt, condone the technological domination of nature. But in the 1950s he thought that Marxism at least held on, if tenuously, to the tradition of the common good, while pragmatism seemed to be wide open to unrestrained "egalitarian technologism." In particular, Grant noted that North American Pragmatism had eviscerated the very language of the Puritan primal heritage. Referring to William James, Grant wrote, "…our language uses Protestant metaphors with a secular meaning." In contrast, Marxism clung to the ecstatic hope that evil was not necessary and could be eliminated. Despite these misgivings about the dynamic of technologism in the post-World War II geopolitical situation, Grant still held out the hope of reconciliation between freedom and law and justice and technology.
In his middle phase, beginning with the essays written in the 1960s, and later gathered in the volume Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969) and with Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965; later reprinted in 1970), Grant began
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