Jeremy Geddert: Liberty without liberalism
For George Grant, liberty was an inheritance, not a weapon, writes Guest Contributor Jeremy Geddert.
As the sixtieth anniversary year of Lament for a Nation comes to a close, we arrive at the fifth instalment in our series on George Grant.
Grant never saw liberty as a way to break free from the traditions we inherit. He understood it as the freedom to act responsibly within those very same inheritances.
Freedom is not a blank cheque that allows individuals to do as they please, but the result of taking responsibility for our place within a larger whole, defined by the roles, institutions, and moral boundaries laid down by the generations that came before us.
It is a discipline we must work at every day, and one that is rooted in the way of life and world we inhabit. Societies that forget this become brittle and lose the capacity to sustain a sense of purpose from one generation to the next.
So as the anniversary of Lament slips quietly by, the question remains: will conservatives recall the kind of liberty that once made for such a durable nation?
Will they take responsibility for carrying forward the legacy that was left to us?
Part V
Jeremy Geddert is associate professor of political science at Assumption University.
On December 9, Haida Chief Jason Alsop publicly impugned the process for the recent pipeline MOU, which involved Canada and Alberta but not his nation. His evidence? Indigenous nations went back “thousands and thousands of years,” while Canada is only a “young country.”
The Liberal government has not pled guilty to the charge of impetuosity, but the court of public opinion remains in session and divided. And on this charge, Liberal governments have been providing incriminating testimony for a while.
Pierre Trudeau’s modern Canadian constitution, which refounded the Laurentian vision of Canada, is just over forty years old. Justin spent his time decrying even that regime as a genocidal post-national state, which explains his muted and apologetic leadership of the “Canada 150” celebrations.
Earlier Liberals, like the Mackenzie King and C. D. Howe duo, might have celebrated Confederation as our drier version of America’s liberal social contract. But if the Fathers of Confederation showed up at the party sober and eighty years late, King and company likely wouldn’t have exactly trumpeted their 1867 vintage as well aged.
Can any honest liberal really answer the charge that Canada is a baby nation? Why should a liberal celebrate any nation for its advanced age, when the point is to advance individual human liberty against the strictures of hoary tradition? If the proudly British Canadians of 1867 were really liberals, did they actually make it harder for us to recognize the value of our British inheritance?
George Grant thought so. But his real lament was that too many British Canadians couldn’t recognize their own conservative tradition, a tradition that reached back to the ancient Greek and Christian origins of political thought, refined over two thousand years.
If Grant lamented the decline of British Canada, he wasn’t mourning the liberal Britain that his Laurentian readers remember.
If Grant decried the onslaught of imperial America, he wasn’t bashing the Christian America his left-leaning champions abhor.
And if Grant embraced the Tory national hope for Canada, he wasn’t praising the reflexive anti-Americans who devoured Lament for a Nation without digesting it.
Grant, unlike many of his readers, started with theology and philosophy. Grant’s political fans often misread him because they wanted human equality liberated from traditional Christianity, and craved technology freed from classical wisdom. Grant’s progressive readers were moderns, who wanted to liberate the will from the old restraints of God and nature.
If this was the liberation they saw in the British Empire, it wasn’t the liberty of Grant’s classical Britain.
Grant’s Britain was a Britain of liberty, not of liberalism.
From the Magna Carta of 1215 on, Britain pioneered political liberty through a system of checks and balances. But these checks and balances were not just a competing clash of wills between Parliament and King. They were a recognition that with great power came great responsibility.
Kings were sovereign, yet answerable to God. Parliamentarians could compel kings, yet be turfed by voters. Judges could interpret statutes, yet were bound by common law precedent. Ordinary people could press their case to a judge, yet remained subject to all three branches of government.
Yes, each particular actor (king, MP, judge, petitioner) had a liberty to make decisions in a particular area of life. But nobody was radically free to ignore justice and morality, any more than a parent is free to neglect a child. This was the liberty of Plato and St. Augustine, Grant’s philosophic and theological guides.
This classical Christian idea of liberty would take another step with Richard Hooker (1554 to 1600), who provided Grant with the opening epigraph of Lament. According to Hooker, the Crown rightly devolves the liberty (and responsibility) of deciding legal cases to a judge. But the Crown does not devolve this role simply to check its own power. It does this because another actor is better fit for the role. A judge can interpret the law better than a king.
The same goes for every other actor. The King can negotiate treaties better than you, you can raise your kids better than your lord, your lord can run the estate better than a judge. You have the liberty because you have the competence and thus the responsibility to exercise it well. You don’t check your privilege, you embrace it.
But where does this competence come from? Not from striking out on your own, like Robinson Crusoe sailing out to claim his fortune on remote islands. Rather, from growing into it as part of the role you are privileged to inherit.
The role of each party (judge, lord, father, king) comes with a particular inheritance (common law, land, kin, sovereignty). This inheritance instils a sense of pride, not an unhealthy pride in the role itself, but a healthy pride in a job well done. This pride helps you to uphold the legacy that you have inherited, and also to build the inheritance that you will pass on to your successors and descendants.
As a result, everyone’s role has a past and future meaning, unlike today’s demeaning “bullshit jobs,” where the present seems to drag on forever.
And when everybody plays their role well, it builds something bigger. Like players on a football team, the roles are varied, but each role fits an organic unity with a common goal.
To live fully, each person has to fit themselves within the order they inherit but do not make themselves, or as Grant put it, to “recognise that I am not my own.” A promising linebacker becomes his best self by playing the role the coach gives him, which might include grunt work on special teams. It does not include inciting a locker-room revolt against the coach.
We are more freely ourselves when we play a role in a shared and meaningful human practice. Just ask a practising psychologist, or anybody who reflects on another wasted evening of doomscrolling.
George Parkin Grant inherited a role as the grandson of George Monro Grant, principal of Queen’s University, and of George Parkin, headmaster of Upper Canada College. He would grow into their roles of educator and Laurentian nation-builder. But he would also recover a part of their own inheritance that they had forgotten.
Grandson Grant would rearticulate the Canadian identity of classical British liberty, and in doing so, would expose how the Laurentian elite was collapsing into a self-defeating liberalism. Needless to say, his critiques ring even louder today.
Grant identified Hooker’s concept of responsible British liberty in Canada’s very DNA. English Canada was conceived in 1783, when a newly British colony lacking many actual Brits would welcome tens of thousands of Loyalist Tories from no longer British America. These Tories had refused to stay in Revolutionary America, because that republic had been founded on modern Lockean liberalism.
Instead, they “appealed to the older political philosophy of Richard Hooker.” Their inheritance was classical liberty, and they were loyal to it. (The story of French Canada has its own distinctives, but it likewise rejected the liberalism of the Revolutionary French Republic.)
In Grant’s words, “It was an inchoate desire to build, in these cold and forbidding regions, a society with a greater sense of order and restraint than freedom-loving republicanism would allow.” This British North America “didn’t have to be based on individuals, the fight of each against each, … [it] didn’t have to be ordered entirely on contractual relations.”
This credo might not fit on a protest sign, but that’s exactly the point. It’s not a teenage revolt against authority, it’s a mature recovery of what we know in our bones.
Almost alone in the New World, Loyalists and their allies bravely rebuilt the classical British edifice. They crafted our public and civic institutions to embody this sense of liberty as responsibility to a higher order. They built such a quietly solid foundation that later generations could and would take it for granted.
Amid plentiful land, they enabled not a scramble for vast slave estates, but parcelled out small farms to cultivate a widespread middle class. Our land was not a mere step on the road toward liquid capital, but a new family trust that was legally hard to sell to land speculators.
We respected our authorities, and in turn, our Mounties became worldwide icons of fortitude and rectitude. Our frontier was generally established with treaties and settled by farm families, not seized with bayonets and patrolled by outlaws.
We combined old-fashioned religious belief with surprisingly gracious coexistence. After flashpoints like the Riel trial, we soon elected both Anglo and French Catholic prime ministers.
Our populist movements didn’t try to tear down our institutions, but to gain admission to them. We generally resolved our disputes as neighbours, not as litigants.
We decreed official national holidays, not to evade personal toil but to celebrate a common inheritance. We came together to commemorate Armistice and honour Victoria, to observe Good Friday and celebrate Easter.
We taught Latin to our high school students and classical literature to our university students. We respected the role of students enough to protect their education from marketability, and respected the role of blue-collar workers enough to protect their jobs from social stigma.
Our marriages stayed intact, for better or for worse. Children grew up with fathers, and in turn respected their authority.
We bravely fought republicanism in 1812, when our own land was attacked, and fascism in 1939, even when it wasn’t attacked. (Even a principled objector like Grant enlisted out of duty, and his sufferings were redeemed in finding a wife and rediscovering his faith.)
Our politics featured raucous debate without demonization of the “loyal” opposition as traitorous, let alone taking up civil war against them. Our elections were not existential struggles distracting us from the real business of life, let alone dividing families over Thanksgiving dinners that were meant to stimulate what Roger Scruton calls the first conservative virtue, gratitude.
Every one of these elements enabled a positive Canadian identity, instead of the “negative valence” of contemporary anti-Americanism. We weren’t raising barns and families to score cheap political points against Americans. But when we did gaze abroad, we found America to be lacking in every single one of these measures.
Our classical liberty gave us a healthy civic pride that connected us to our own past and future, rather than a loud nationalism that required continual reassertion of an exceptionalism among nations. We inhabited a liberty that we had shown ourselves worthy of, rather than grasping a perpetually insecure liberalism that we had won and thus could again lose.
When we fought, it was for King and country, not to make the world safe for liberalism.
This liberty gave us both the responsibility and the virtues to live out our inheritance, rather than liberating us from our past or offering illusory promises of a utopian future. Our liberty freed us from having to invent our own meaning, from having to justify ourselves as “creators,” from having to bear the weight of a radically unknown world. It offered meaning. And it pointed toward ultimate meaning.
Ultimate meaning, as Grant wrote at the end of Lament, could only come from the “eternal order.” But if there is an eternal order, there must be grounds for hope. Thus, Lament cannot be a true lamentation.
Grant’s political hope had to lie in the revival of a meaningful classical and Christian liberty, one that would open up, not close off, the path toward ultimate meaning.
This was Grant’s true British Canadian inheritance. It remains ours to take up.
Jeremy Geddert is Associate Professor of Political Science at Assumption University. His books and articles explore modern rights-based liberalism, American conservatism, Canadian Arctic sovereignty, the Tory tradition, and George Grant. He writes on Substack at The Laboratory.
