Grant’s anti-Creative Necessity of the World State and the Crushing of Quebec
By Matthew Ehret
In George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, a book which became the anthem for Canada’s “new nationalist” movement launched by Walter Lockhart Gordon and Vincent Massey, this Rhodes Scholar had already begun showing his adherence to the techniques of mind control elaborated by Aldous Huxley in the Brave New World blueprint for a New World Order when he wrote:
“The aspirations of progress have made Canada redundant. The universal and homogeneous state is the pinnacle of political striving. “Universal” implies a world-wide state, which would eliminate the curse of war among nations; “homogeneous” means that all men would be equal, and war among classes would be eliminated. The masses and the philosophers have both agreed that this universal and egalitarian society is the goal of historical striving. It gives content to the rhetoric of both Communists and capitalists. This state will be achieved by means of modern science- a science that leads to the conquest of nature.” [1]
Grant describes his view of the meaning of “conquest of nature” in the following paragraph: “Today scientists master not only non-human nature, but human nature itself. Particularly in America, scientists concern themselves with the control of heredity, the human mind, and society. Their victories in biochemistry and psychology will give the politicians a prodigious power to universalize and homogenize” [2]
Grant’s idea of the mastery of nature through the sciences has nothing to do with the increase of human potential as is obliged by the American System, but rather of “heredity manipulation, psychology and social control”. Grant’s notion has more to do of the mastery of slaves by masters than the mastery of nature by man. After dwelling on various obstacles to this world state, Grant addresses the problem of the Catholic French Canadian view of man which needed to be crushed as it was incompatible to his utopian model:
“French Canadians must modernize their educational system if they are to have more than a peon’s place in their own industrialization. Yet to modernize their education is to renounce their particularity. At the heart of modern liberal education lies the desire to homogenize the world. Today’s natural and social sciences were consciously produced as instruments towards this end…What happens to the Catholic view of man, when Catholics are asked to shape society through the new sciences of biochemistry, physiological psychology and sociology? These sciences arose from assumptions hostile to the Catholic view of man… Quebec will soon blend into the continental whole and cease to be a nation except in its maintenance of residual patterns of language and personal habit” [3]
Since the “sciences” of the imperialist that focuses upon psychology, biochemistry and social engineering are all based upon the rejection of the concept of mankind as a species endowed with a soul and made in the image of the creator, as is found at the heart of Catholicism, an amputation of these Christian principles from the Quebec culture had to be undertaken beginning with the educational reforms then being applied by Father Lévesque’s social scientists from Laval University assigned to overhaul Quebec with the 1960-66 `Quiet Revolution`. Rhodes Scholar Paul Gérin-Lajoie was assigned the role of creating the Quebec Ministry of Education for this explicit purpose.
Today’s Quebec nationalism is little more than Grant’s description of a society whose identities are found merely in their language and personal habits, but not in true progress and its causes.
(1) George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, McClelland and Stewart Ltd., Toronto, 1965, [2nd print with new introduction by Grant 1970], p. 53
(2) Op. Cit. p. 54
(3) Op. Cit. p.79 and 84