Clif Clemotte: Why not deliberately build a better Canada?
Lessons from George Grant on order, nation-building, and 'folding' institutions towards the good, writes Guest Contributor Clif Clemotte.
In the ongoing debate within Canada’s conservative movement about the proper role of the state, institutions, and deliberate nation-building, Without Diminishment’s series on George Grant returns.
At the heart of Grant’s political philosophy lies a deceptively simple insight: the circumstances we inherit, whether tools, technologies, laws, or markets, are never neutral. They are always deliberately applied, or “folded”, towards particular ends and particular goods.
This “foldedness” means that every institution, policy regime, and built environment nurtures certain forms of human life while extinguishing others. In a vast country shaped by economies of scale and technological imperatives, Canadian conservatives cannot content themselves with defending an abstract “freedom” that abandons local particularity to the mercy of entropy.
What would it mean today for conservatives to build deliberately, locally, and towards goods that enable a flourishing common life?
Part IV
Clif Clemotte is a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati.
Canada’s conservative political tent has always spread over multiple traditions and local political cultures. While much of modern Canadian conservatism identifies with small government and economic libertarianism, it is appropriate to conserve also Canada’s other visions of both nationhood and conservatism.
As we mark sixty years since the publication of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, it is fitting to supplement the many anniversary essays on Lament by also revisiting Grant’s other works. In exploring his greater legacy, Canadians, and Canadian conservatives in particular, can rediscover a rich source of timely insight, especially at a time for nation-building.
Over his professional lifetime, Grant repeatedly revisited the theme of technology in society, with a particular interest in the ways in which technology shapes our self-understanding as individuals and societies, with a particular focus on the local character of human nature.
A core theme in Grant’s political philosophy was his basic argument that our available knowledge and choices are fundamentally defined and constrained by the circumstances in which we live. We not only apply ourselves to our circumstances, our circumstances necessarily apply themselves to us also.
The word ‘applied’, Grant notes, ‘means literally “folded towards”.’ Accordingly, the circumstances, people, institutions, tools, histories, neighbourhoods, to which we are applied, and which apply themselves to us, must be understood as carrying an ‘openness’ or ‘foldedness’ towards specific ends, and thus towards kinds of goods. Our circumstances, including our tools, are not ‘neutral instruments’, but rather are laden with values.
For a society to flourish, then, its fundamental institutions and traditions must be ‘folded’ towards flourishing, no fundamental institutions and traditions can be neutral. Much of the value of a thinking society lies precisely in the ability to adjudicate between circumstances and their goods. But to evaluate these institutions and traditions, one must first be aware of their non-neutral ‘foldedness’ towards specific kinds of goods.
This awareness, Grant notes, is often lacking, especially when our circumstances are folded away from, and even against, local human particularity.
In a country as vast as Canada, economies of scale are unavoidable, and often reflect good business sense. After all, a free market economy is one of the many institutions forming Canada’s foundational intellectual inheritance.
However, Grant worried that technological societies are so fully structured around economies of vast scale as to diminish local human choice. For instance, a society structured around vehicle ownership is necessarily structured around large corporations, whose political power then outweighs that of local enterprise and communities.
Even more basically, a society structured around vehicle ownership may inadvertently displace a society structured around walking and human scale. For these and similar reasons, our institutions and tools are indeed not neutral, being instead ‘instruments which exclude certain forms of community and permit others’.
This dependence of communities upon instruments, including the instruments of governance, need not be negative. Ideally, our instruments will be ‘folded’ towards freedom and a wholesome society. For Grant, our nation-defining concepts are structured by its background language and culture.
It is revealing that one of his best works of political philosophy, and in my view, the source of his most important philosophical contributions, is simply titled English-Speaking Justice; even a concept as fundamental as justice must be understood through its context, and not just through timeless universals.
Fortunately, Canada’s founding ideals are strongly ‘folded’ towards the ‘generic form’ of liberalism which Grant considered indispensable to flourishing. He could be more optimistic than his critics are willing to grant.
So what lessons can we learn from Grant as conservatives?
First, of course, preserving our institutions, traditions, and history is essential, as these circumstances illuminate the goods that our nation is ‘folded’ towards. But it is insufficient that conservatives merely preserve what is received, and conservatism must be more than inertia.
Grant’s second, deeper lesson to conservatives is a counterweight to the common conservative disposition against change: rather than embracing the emergence of spontaneous order, conservatives must be reminded actively to build societies and institutions pre-folded towards goods. Neither building by emergence nor building for neutrality can be a lasting foundation for a nation.
Drawing lessons from Grant’s philosophical principles need not entail endorsing all his policy preferences. As an example, I return to my remark that free markets are themselves institutions we inherit from the Anglophone political tradition.
A free market is the product of centuries-long accumulations of healthy practices, common currencies, and collective action, all of which required difficult work against inertia.
A similar observation applies to the marketplace of ideas. For a society’s best ideas to flourish, it is not enough to simply wait for emergence from entropy. Instead, quality must be cultivated, a task which ought to be met by our universities, though it often is not. Order structured by the long view is the necessary precondition that enables the illusion of spontaneity, an illusion which, in a nutshell, reflects an underlying ordered liberty.
Importantly, intelligent planning does not entail centralised planning.
It is worth noting here that Grant’s lifelong opposition to centralised planning is a timely caution against the managerial tendencies of progressives and non-liberal ideas alike.
Nonetheless, smart planning in policy choices is essential, especially at the local level. For instance, permitting a Walmart within minutes of a block of corner stores will needlessly eliminate the corner stores with all the certainty of gravity. Similarly, permitting a relatively spontaneous emergence of road networks and housing construction seems a certain path to a society of atomised households, a logical product of entropy.
As Canada’s conservatives step up to their role in nation-building, it is important that they build towards particular goods. This is not new, and several signature conservative policies already have done so.
The federal Conservatives’ child benefit programme is one example, their more recent proposal to mandate high-density housing zones near transit hubs is a second. And Grant’s lessons are particularly salient to the latter, as Canadians unleash a new wave of home-building, home-building must be ‘folded’, at least minimally, towards beauty and holistic local societies if it is to feel human. In this way of prioritising local goods over placeless universals, federalism has its purpose.
The Conservatives’ task in nation-building, then, is to identify tangible future goods towards which we can build, and to do so explicitly. Both identification and building will require action against inertial spontaneity, even when aided by preserving Canada’s good foundational traditions.
Grant’s insights can guide us with a balanced, human, and genuinely conservative framework for building an ordered society structured towards freedom in flourishing, without diminishment of either.
Clif Clemotte is a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, pursuing a PhD in philosophy of science and an MS in applied economics.
