Technology and Justice

By George Grant and Hugh Donald Forbes

Six magnificent and stimulating essays examining the role of technology in shaping how we live, by one of Canada’s most influential philosophers, now reissued in a handsome A List edition.

Originally published in 1986, the six essays that comprise Technology and Justice offer absorbing reflections on the extent to which technology has shaped the way we live now. George Grant explores the fate of traditional values in modern education, social behaviour, and religion, and offers his insights into some of the most contentious ethical deliberations of the past half-century.

In essays ranging in content from classical philosophy to the morals of euthanasia, Technology and Justice showcases Grant’s stimulating commentary on the meaning of the North American experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 1991
• ISBN: 9780887848773

George Grant

Dr. George Grant is the author of dozens of books, including the best-selling Grand Illusions. He is professor of moral philosophy at Bannockburn College, editor of the Stirling Bridge newsletter, coordinator of the Covenant Classical School Association, and instructor at Franklin Classical School, Knox Theological Seminary, and the Gileskirk School.

Book preview

9781487006679_cover.jpgTitle page: Technology and Justice by George Grant.

Also by George Grant

Philosophy in a Mass Age

Lament for a Nation

Technology and Empire

Time as History

English-Speaking Justice

Copyright © 1986 George Grant

Introduction copyright © 2019 Hugh Donald Forbes

First published in 1986 by House of Anansi Press Ltd. This edition published in Canada in 2019 and the USA in 2019 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Technology and justice / George Grant.

Names: Grant, George Parkin, 1918-1988, author.

Description: Originally published: Toronto : Anansi, ©1986.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20189067276 | ISBN 9781487006679 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Technology—Moral and ethical aspects.

Classification: LCC BJ59 .G73 2019 | DDC 170—dc23

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930413

Nietzche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship first appeared in Dionysius in 1979. Research in the Humanities first appeared in Humanities in the Present Day in 1979. The Language of Euthanasia was first published as Euthanasia in Care for the Dying and Bereaved in 1976. Abortion and Rights was first published as Abortion in The Right to Birth in 1976.

Series design: Brian Morgan

Cover design: Patrick Gray

Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council logos.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

To R.S.G. and J.R.P.

sine quibus non

Contents

Introduction to the A List edition

Preface

Thinking About Technology

Faith and the Multiversity

Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship

Research in the Humanities

The Language of Euthanasia

Abortion and Rights

A Further Note on Sources

Acknowledgements

Introduction

By Hugh Donald Forbes

George Grant was sixty-eight when

this little book, the last of his six short books, was published in 1986. He had spent most of his working life teaching philosophy and religion at two Canadian universities, Dalhousie in Halifax from 1947 to 1960, McMaster in Hamilton from 1961 until 1980, and then Dalhousie again until his retirement in 1983. His second book, Lament for a Nation (1965), had established his reputation in Canada as a nationalist, a socialist, and a contrarian conservative. (Grant had lamented the defeat of John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservative government in 1963 as the end of Canadian nationalism.)

Grant’s political writings in the 1960s made him the defining representative of what came to be called red toryism. The term was coined to describe Grant’s unconventional combination of familiar ideas that made him hard to fit into the standard political categories, but he could just as well have been called a blue liberal or a purple socialist.

In 1969, with the publication of Technology and Empire, a selection of his magazine and journal articles, it became clearer that practical party politics was not at the centre of Grant’s concerns. The essays in that book were written, he explained, out of the study of the history of political philosophy, and they revealed that he approached practical politics from a philosophical angle and that technology was at the heart of his reflections. But what is technology? The word defies definition: it exemplifies the meaningful use of words despite the impossibility of clearly defining their meaning. (With such words, we confront the mystery of language in our experience, since it provides not just the simple words we use to designate already distinguished things, as proper names and serial numbers do, but also the more puzzling words that have the power to constitute our experience by giving a clearer shape to vague impressions, as Charles Taylor has explained at length in a recent book.) Just as politics and history do not name any shared, definable concepts nor clearly designate any definite, isolated things, so also technology evokes in a quite rough and ready way a wide range of obscure questions, anxieties, and phenomena that have no clear boundaries.

Grant’s concerns were clarified in his next two books, Time as History (1971) and English-Speaking Justice (1985), based on public lectures orig­inally delivered in 1969 and 1974. Through discussions of Nietzsche’s scornful assaults on conventional pieties, on the one hand, and John Rawls’s complacent liberal egalitarian ethics, on the other, these books clarify the difficulty of explaining and defending a traditional understanding of justice given the growing influence of modern natural science and its practical applications on the societies and cultures of the Western world. Technology, these books suggest, is a more revealing name for the nature and sources of the difficulties we face than any of the other popular diagnostic labels, such as capitalism, modernity, relativism, or individualism. But it is not easy to say how any of these big words should be understood or why the things they highlight are problematic.

In the 1950s and 1960s, not much of real interest to Grant was being written in English about technology. Not surprisingly then, he gravitated to European writers, particularly Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger. In 1966, Grant wrote an enthusiastic review of Ellul’s 1954 book, The Technological Society, after its appearance in an English translation. It soon became apparent, however, that he was even more deeply impressed by the writings of Martin Heidegger, which he had discovered in the 1950s, a few years before Heidegger’s epochal masterpiece, Being and Time, was published in an English translation in 1962.

Grant’s extremely ambivalent fascination with Heidegger’s extraordinarily convoluted writings and what they bring out of concealment endured to the end of his life. In fact, he intended to use his leisure after his retirement to write a substantial book about Heidegger’s thought, showing its serious limitations, despite its crucial insights. Grant hoped to show that it distorts and obscures the traditions out of which it emerges. The book he planned would have contested Heidegger’s account of ancient philosophy and the Platonic Christianity that had been clarified for Grant by the writings of another European thinker of the first rank to whom he was also deeply indebted, namely, Simone Weil. Unfortunately, however, Grant was not in good health and he died in 1988, before completing this project or even being able to get it properly under way.

The present volume collects some of Grant’s most important writings from the 1970s. The first two essays, which make up more than half of the book, develop the approach to understanding technology announced in the first sentence of the Preface, which readers who wish to understand the book should ponder, although I suspect that many will brush past it because it will seem either clearly wrong or simply baffling. Grant suggests that technology can be understood as the modern paradigm of ‘knowledge’: behaviourist explanation in terms of algebra. We have real knowledge, it seems, when, finally having left behind merely factual description and subjective evaluation, we attain true explanation by showing how the behaviour (defined operationally) of the objects of interest, whatever they are (persons as well as things), depends (according to clear algebraic rules of functional and statistical dependence) on carefully observed prior conditions. (Causes must precede their effects, pushing them from behind, as it were: technology has no use for teleology, except perhaps in its politics.) This paradigm (or standard) of genuine knowledge (by contrast with mere untested theory, philosophical speculation, poetic imagination, value-loaded interpretation of meanings and purposes, ancient mythology, prevailing opinion, or trending superstition) is obviously only one element of what technology embraces, but it enucleates, as Grant might have said, one of its most important elements and makes it easier to bring other parts of it out into the open.

The third and fourth essays, which discuss the place of Nietzsche’s writings in contemporary higher education and the current practice of research in the humanities, clarify the implications of the technological paradigm for teaching and research in the cultural branches of the modern academy. The last two essays address two burning questions of justice — abortion and euthanasia — in the health and wellness departments of modern government.

An introduction to another person’s writings should not try to be a summary or critique. Grant had little respect for the "impertinent précis" written by academic authors who think they can say in fewer words what wiser men than they have said in more. It should be enough for potential readers to know that as a young man Grant was regarded by his elders as a person of unusual talents and promise and that at the end of his life he was generally recognized to be one of Canada’s most important and distinctive thinkers. What he wrote is again being made easily available, more than thirty years after his death, for a new generation of readers to read.

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HUGH DONALD FORBES is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, where he taught Canadian politics and the philosophy and methods of social science for forty years. He was educated at St. Paul’s College, the University of Manitoba, and Yale University. He is the author of four books and the editor of an anthology of Canadian political thought.

Preface

These writings centre around the

modern paradigm of knowledge: behaviorist explanation in terms of algebra. This account is at the core of the fate of western civilisation. Because the conquest of human and non-human nature is at the heart of modern science, I describe that science as technological.

In the first and second essays, I have tried to show why we should think of this account of knowledge as a fate and not something which in our freedom we can control. Because I continue to find it so difficult to understand this destiny, I have tried to think in terms of the Spanish proverb: Take what you want, said God — take it and pay for it. This obviously applies not only to individuals but to civilisations.

In this book, I have tried to think what we have taken and how we have paid for the discovery of that paradigm of knowledge. Under payment, I have singled out how such a paradigm has shaped our thinking about justice — justice not only in the sense of this or that act, but in the sense of what we think justice itself to be. In the first two essays I deal with that question in a broadly theoretical way; in the last two, in terms of immediate practicality.

It will be the last two essays, I suspect, which will raise objections. In capitalist democracy, differences about practice are seen as important, while theoretical differences are seen as people’s private business. It is of the very nature of technology that this should be the case.

All that I write proceeds from sustained discussion with my wife. In that sense, she is the co-author of my writing and explicitly named such in the articles about euthanasia and abortion. Dennis Lee is a generous friend who gives of his precious time to help me to think and to write more clearly. Larry Schmidt has shown me much care and help over many years. Ann Wall and James Polk have taught me what a publisher should be. With their different souls, they combine to make being published a pleasure rather than a pain.

Some of these essays have appeared in quite different form elsewhere, and a list of acknowledgements with thanks is given at the back.

George Grant

August 1986

Thinking About Technology

I

In each lived moment of

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