George Grant

Grant frequently grappled with the question concerning technology. We can see it in his engagement with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Ellul, Plato, and others. Technology is found in the very title of two of his monographs: Technology and Empire and Technology and Justice. Grant’s devastating all-encompassing critique of technology forms my own thought on the matter. Hypocritically, I refer to myself as a luddite, while I presently type this on my Apple computer with my iPhone sitting within easy reach. Nevertheless, I refuse to use most forms of social media, excluding a couple of academic sites, and my wife and I do not own a TV, nor have we given our children iPads or smartphones. In similar fashion to Nietzsche’s wild ‘prophet’ Zarathustra, since reading Grant (circa 2002) I have loudly proclaimed the woes of technology: it will destroy us. Many people think that I am somewhat ridiculous in this regard; albeit, in the last five years the dangers of technology are beginning to dawn upon the modern mind, and I may, debatably, appear less ridiculous than previously. Even though there is a growing awareness about the dangers of technology, few are familiar with Grant’s arguments concerning technology, and those who are may be tempted to dismiss them as overly conservative; he could come across as a curmudgeonly scholar who is trapped in the past. Here enters the interlocutor of this piece: Romano Guardini. Guardini’s view of technology shares much in common with Grant’s. Their diagnosis of the problem is similar, but Guardini’s prognosis extends beyond Grant’s because it is hope filled, and it is infused with hope because his approach is fundamentally theological. Unlike Grant, Guardini’s thought is profoundly shaped by the Christian doctrine of Creation and because of this he can propose a way beyond the impasse of the technological paradigm.

Appropriating a philosophical theory to illuminate a cultural comparison is contentious. Universalists may use an established metaphysical principle and defend, through its application, an explanation of a particular sociological or historical chain of events. For example, the power of reason to unleash freedom through time, or the rise of skepticism, have grounded specific interpretations of historical events. The relativists and post modernists have been disparaging of such efforts, often citing the social constructionist nature of everything. Any theory that purports to shed new light from outside the time, place, culture, race, gender, or discourse of the event is dismissed. This paper is an attempt to make a case that not all explanations are locked into an inescapable "perspective," and that the concept of culture can be addressed without being intellectually offensive. Dialectical reasoning will be the explanatory theory. The exploration of the Hegelian dialectic in relation to Canada and the Caribbean is not historical in intent. The main focus of defending dialectical reasoning as an explanatory theory will be the usefulness of such reasoning in understanding and promoting multiculturalism as a social phenomenon in two very different places. Not everyone thinks that Hegelian dialectical reasoning can be divorced from place and time. "Hegel and Haiti" by Susan Buck-Morss (2000) pursues Hegel's development of the master-slave dialectic. In the Philosophy of History, Hegel's argument about the march of reason through time being the key to unlock the grip of class domination and the subsequent promotion of freedom is accompanied by his rejection of slavery. She argues that his master slave metaphor (expounded in the Phenomenology) was inspired by the Haiti uprising (1804-1805). Here was a real example of the universal truth of man's pursuit of freedom. Yet

was the first French-language philosopher based in Canada to be known internationally, his is no more a household name in French than in English Canada -except in Quebec City. There, on 25 February 2006, three full pages of the Saturday issue of the local daily newspaper Le Soleil were devoted to a presentation of the "De Koninck Dynasty" of scholars, intellectuals and professionals, who have made their mark at Université Laval, in the Quebec City area, throughout the province, and beyond. The genealogical chart that covers the front page of the section shows the exponential spread of this prolific Catholic family over three generations of illustrious citizens, from the initial germ cell of a young Flemish couple who came to Quebec in 1934, when Charles De Koninck, having completed a dissertation on the philosophy of Sir Arthur Eddington at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, was invited by Université Laval to help set up its new Faculty of Philosophy. De Koninck's wife, Zoe Decruydt, is now in her nineties; De Koninck, who would have been one hundred in 2006, died in 1965 at the height of his glory. At the time, the philosopher was in Rome, a lone lay expert called by Pope Paul VI to actively participate in the deliberations of the Second Vatican Council on two burning social issues facing the Roman Catholic Church: freedom of conscience and birth control. This father of twelve was strongly in favour of the latter, and is said to have been on his way to deliver to the pope some impregnable Scholastic arguments for allowing

The following paper considers the relative novelty of Patrick Deneen's Regime Change in the context of contemporary American conservative thought. Deneen styles his project as "commongood conservativism", placing it alongside similar efforts by Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Ahmari to fashion a Catholic "integralism" that can transcend the contradictions of both left-leaning progressive liberalism and right-leaning neo-liberalism. However, as detailed in the paper, Deneen's vision remains compromised not merely by a vagueness about what his proposed "regime change" entails, but more seriously by a set of contradictory imperatives that he does not seem to have properly mediated. On the one hand, Deneen is a serious philosophical critic of modernity tout court, and thus focuses on liberalism on account of its tremendous (though contradictory) success in dislodging traditional beliefs and cultures across the board. On the other hand, Deneen is a very contemporary culture warrior, who believes that by replacing the current American liberal cultural and political elite with conservatives, a revolutionary "regime change" can restore those traditional beliefs and cultures, honouring the role of legitimate elites and what he believes is the ingrained conservativism of the "common people" simultaneously. However, it is the contention of this paper that such a marriage of philosophically radical critique of modernity and politically radical critique of liberalism is bound to fail, both because his proposed "aristopopulism" is fanciful and because the version of Catholic "integralism" which he attempts to build out of it is unable to reconcile its simultaneous desires to restore the past and uproot the present. Ultimately, Deneen is presented as a perfect example of what Emilio Uranga called a state of zozobra (or anxiety) in which the movement of one's thoughts become "oscillatory and pendular, moving from one extreme to the other, making simultaneous two instances while never sacrificing one for the other." As such, Deneen recapitulates, but does not escape, the aporias that have doomed previous iterations of the "conservative revolution", and which now define the perilous state of the American Right altogether. [The paper, originally written in 2023, concludes with an afterword that places its analysis of Deneen in the context of the emergence, as a Vice-Presidential nominee in 2024, of J.D. Vance, who cites Deneen as a major influence and has been endorsed by Deneen]

In a book titled How to be Alone, the American writer Jonathan Franzen bemoans the incapacity of the contemporary individual to find either a meaningful public space in which to participate, or the quiet comfort of solitude. Franzen is a writer of fiction, not philosophy, so his thoughts are not woven into any coherent account of modernity. Instead what one gets from his books is a sharp aesthetic feel for living in modern urban space. Technology, or rather the love/hate relationship that Franzen has with it, figures prominently in this aesthetic. Franzen tells funny stories about his resistance to the CD (for years he pirated from his friends' CDs and copied their tunes onto tapes), his scavenging in the streets of New York for cast off, thrown away objects like old chairs which he rescues and rehabilitates, and his senseless hanging-on to a manual typewriter. He also chronicles his own debilitating depression that he suffered for years, until he decided to move from a state of "depressive realism" to one of "tragic realism" (Franzen 2002, 93). Underscoring all of these ruminations are Franzen's efforts to live with technology and as its creature. Resigned, he writes: For better or for worse, ours is now a technological society, and whatever the benefits to the health and affluence of the upper half of society, it would be difficult to argue that either technology or the free market capitalism that is its Siamese twin has done much to solve the ancient problems of mortality and the world's unfairness (202). Death and injustice remain the perennial problems of the human condition.

Whereas Jacques Ellul's work on the role of myth in propaganda about the technological society has been largely overlooked, it presents an effective means to analyse the ways in which the information society is symbolically constructed. The French thinker's examination of mid-twentieth-century propaganda has much relevance in studying current rhetoric about the information revolution, global information infrastructure; and knowledge-based society. This article also discusses Ellul's views on the relationship between ideology and mythology.

Canada originally was put together by two groups of people who didn't have much in Common, but did not want to be Americans" The above words taken from a 1973 interview of George Grant present a remarkable irony: One of the most influential founding fathers of the "new nationalism' which arose with Canada's 1963 ouster of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and rise of a New Liberal Party under Walter Gordon, and Lester Pearson, is a man who never described what Canada is in any positive measure, but merely what it wasn't. Grant's influential, lie-ridden life's works culminated in his 1965 Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, and served as an attack upon the collective psyche of young Canadians who were in the midst of watching a post-JFK America fall under the influence of a British-steered imperial policy, and economic policy beginning with the war in Vietnam.

Grant (1918-1988) traced Canadian higher education's twentieth-century shift away from traditional liberal arts into training for careers in professions or bureaucracies, driven by a growing American influence. Education's philosophical underpinnings moved from idealism toward utilitarian progressivism. A Grant-type analysis indicates that the central problem facing Canadian Christian higher education is the cultural, political, and legal shift that favours increasingly radical forms of individual autonomy. CHEC's Challenges At least since 1976, church educators and school religious educators have been saying that Christian education faces a life-and-death struggle. John Westerhoff's Will Our Children Have Faith? was first, followed twenty years later by Marva Dawn's Is it a Lost Cause?, Thomas Groome's Will There Be Faith?, and Charles Foster's From Generation to Generation. Foster sees that church education is up against an adaptive challenge. Solutions to adaptive challenges come not by applying new routines or techniques, but through imaginative leaps. The originators

In the 1960s and 1970s, S. F. Wise wrote a series of articles arguing that the definitive influence on Canadian political culture was the conservatism of Upper Canada's Family Compact. Received wisdom at the time, endorsed by scholars like Chester Martin, Arthur Lower and Aileen Dunham, held that the crucial factor had been the liberalism of the Baldwins and others opposed to the Compact. Wise overturned the applecart: ' 'Two streams of conservatism met and blended in the two generations of Upper Canadian history before the Union," he argues in what is perhaps the best known of the articles in this collection, "Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition" (169-84). The first stream was the toryism of the Loyalist founders, and the second, the sophisticated conservatism of late eighteenth-century England. Wise rejected Creighton's claim that Canadian conservatism originated with Macdonald. Canada's true founders-for better or worse-were men like John Macaulay, Christopher Hagerman and John Beverley Robinson, the stalwarts of the Upper Canada oligarchy. It "was Macdonald's function to extend the values he had inherited from the Toryism of old Ontario to the rest of the country, in company with those thousands of Upper Canadians who took part in the peopling of the West'' (184). The 12 essays in God's Peculiar Peoples, 10 from the early period and two recent ones, make a formidable case for this thesis. The argument is always lucid, graceful and challenging. I am tempted to say that each chapter is better than the last. It will interest political scientists especially that Wise analyzes the legislative debates, institutional reforms, party organization, electoral verdicts and voting patterns as he builds his picture of Canada's early political culture. His articles on the sermon literature of the period, long recognized as classics, are included. Other chapters treat that perennial topic in the field of Canadian political thought, Canadian attitudes toward the United States. If the idea that toryism made Canada is familiar to many political scientists today chiefly through the work of Louis Hartz, Gad Horowitz and George Grant, all the more reason to welcome this volume. As the editors point out, Wise and Horowitz offer a "fascinating study in cultural synthesis" (xv). The two scholars, working independently, together "completed the foundations of the 'conservative-nationalist' historical paradigm." Wise "put flesh on the skeleton of of Horowitz's theoretical exposition." The excellent introduction by McKillop and Romney locates Wise in relation to both his predecessors and the political scientists and historians in the field of Canadian political thought today. Wise's paradigm has been the subject of considerable debate recently. Peter J. Smith, Robert C. Vipond and myself, all indebted to Wise, have attempted to modify his conclusions by fitting the discussion of Canadian political ideas into the larger picture of trends in modern political philosophy. Romney's own historical research makes an argument for the importance of the liberal tradition on new grounds, tracing the influence of the Reformers who campaigned for responsible government in the pre-Confederation period on Canadian legal thought after 1867. God's Peculiar Peoples could not have been published at a better time.

Canadian philosopher George Grant's claims that technological mastery, especially as it is founded on a degeneracy of the will, finds its starting point in Augustinian anthropology. This essay explores the Grantian critique and takes Augustine's account of sexuality as the point of focus, since some form of domination and instrumentality is arguably a necessary element of the Augustinian perspective on sexuality. Though an inconsistency is found in Augustine's language of "use" which gives some traction to the charge of mastery, his own account is considered as a potential remedy to the very problem that Grant wants to attribute to Augustinian Christianity.

ABSTRACTTaste, as a faculty of aesthetic appreciation, involves an individual, and yet assumes a community. In this article, a distinctly singular mode of being attuned to objects of taste is shown to be conditioned by the consent of others and by being-with others, thereby constituting what is named here an ‘aesthetic community.’ This idea of an aesthetic community is traced back to Kant's sensus communis and to Heidegger's notion of preservation: for both, it is the presence of a community that conditions aesthetic experience.

Though Charles De Koninck was the first French-language philosopher based in Canada to be known internationally, his is no more a household name in French than in English Canada – except in Quebec City. There, on 25 February 2006, three full pages of the Saturday issue of the local daily newspaper Le Soleil were devoted to a presentation of the “De Koninck Dynasty” of scholars, intellectuals and professionals, who have made their mark at Universite Laval, in the Quebec City area, throughout the province, and beyond. The genealogical chart that covers the front page of the section shows the exponential spread of this prolific Catholic family over three generations of illustrious citizens, from the initial germ cell of a young Flemish couple who came to Quebec in 1934, when Charles De Koninck, having completed a dissertation on the philosophy of Sir Arthur Eddington at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, was invited by Universite Laval to help set up its new Faculty of Philosophy. De ...

Study of Canadian anti-americanism through a comparison of its English- and French-Canadian variants. The text discussed are George Grant's Lament for a Nation (1964) and Pierre Vadeboncœur's Trois essais sur l'insignifiance (1983). Written four years after September 11 and two years after the start of the second Iraq War.

The aim of the present lecture course is to pinpoint a series of historical and philosophical turning points through which the problem of the will came to dominate the self-understanding of the subject, strengthening its claim to mastery over the world. Whether under the auspices of ‘spirit,’ the ‘Overman,’ or ‘technology,’ the subject of late modernity would come to understand itself as “the willing animal to whom nature must conform.” It is the hypothesis of the current lectures that the global reach of technology, which regulates our experience of phenomenality presently, must be understood as the “unbridled offspring of the transcendental turn in modern philosophy.”

David Peddle and Neil Robertson consider a longstanding debate between George Grant and James Doull about the nature of Canadian sovereignty. The authors investigate the philosophical differences that result in lamentation, on the one hand, and renewed allegiance to the idea of Canada on the other.

At the conclusion of Heidegger on Being and Acting, Reiner Schürmann points to the undertow, the expropriation at work in the appropriating event of being. Being, he argues, preserves time as epoch while at the same time cancelling and superseding it. Originary temporality, ...

ABSTRACTTaste, as a faculty of aesthetic appreciation, involves an individual, and yet assumes a community. In this article, a distinctly singular mode of being attuned to objects of taste is shown to be conditioned by the consent of others and by being-with others, thereby constituting what is named here an ‘aesthetic community.’ This idea of an aesthetic community is traced back to Kant's sensus communis and to Heidegger's notion of preservation: for both, it is the presence of a community that conditions aesthetic experience.

Charles De Koninck (1906-1965), founder of Laval University’s Philosophy Faculty, is best known not only in Canadian intellectual history, but in the history of Catholic thought for his book De la Primauté du Bien Commun contre les personnalistes. Le principe de l’ordre nouveau (1943). It marks the first time thinking from French Canada grabbed world attention, for being at the center of a controversy that mobilised Thomists for or against the most prominent Catholic thinker of his day that was Jacques Maritain. For it was deemed he was the one the book dared to aim at behind the anonymous designation of « personalists » in the text. If is true that personalists would successfully reshape the Catholic worldview in a sense consonant with some modern assumptions, and therefore deemed progressive. However popular De Koninck's critique may be on that count with the kind of traditionalist Catholics who reject Vatican II, the fact remains that he was the highest placed lay North American actor of the Council, and that he likewise took controversially liberal stances in the Quiet Revolution’s debates about secular education.As for the substance of the issues involved, the positions of Maritain and De Koninck are often seen as complementary by their admirers, who are often the same people; I was even asked to contribute an entry on Charles De Koninck to an Italian encyclopedia of XXth century personalists! As I argued there, Charles De Koninck does not deny that the dignity of the human person is tied to its nature as an organic whole with a capacity of deliberation, as Maritain insists, but simply adds that it has even more to do with the end that orients this freedom: to live in common with other beings within a larger whole ordained to the good of those of whom it is made up, in a harmonious diversity that expresses God’s perfection. This supreme created good is a common good that rests on the proper good of each insofar as it is not merely private, but diffusive of itself in the larger wholes of which it is part and which ensure it, whether they be of the order of nature or of culture. The person therefore does not transcend political society, as some personalists seem to suggest, for the latter is none other than a community of persons and of intermediate communities –not unlike Joe Clark’s definition of Canada as a “community of communities,” one might add. It is not to be confused with the State, which would then no longer serve the common good, being merely a super-individual. Every person also belongs to communities other than political, e.g. family, religious, etc., and to God who transcends all communities as the uncreated good of everyone, common to all. To ignore the primacy of the common good in the name of private goods that cannot be shared would therefore be tantamount to denying the dignity of the person, says Charles De Koninck, like his son Thomas in La dignité humaine. The debate continued well beyond its wartime context, especially in the Americas, which for the first time had gained center-stage in a debate of vital importance to the Roman Catholic Church.

To mark the centenary of Jacques Ellul and the 25th anniversary of The Ellul Forum,  seventeen veteran Ellul scholars and writers were asked to reflect on Ellul, his legacy, and their personal interaction with him and his ideas. My answer began thus: Around 1985, I became engrossed in the thought of Canadian philosopher George Grant, whose critique of Technique draws from Jacques Ellul's; that is when I read The Technological Society, during my graduate work on the origins of French Personalism. Days before flying to Europe to research my history dissertation, Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, the authority on such prewar "non-conformist" movements in France, pointed out to me that Ellul came from that scene. Delighted to learn of this direct connection between my Grantian concerns and French research interests, I resolved to include Ellul among the Personalist veterans I would interview.

To the end of enucleating George Grant's thoughts and philosophical leanings, either tacit or explicit, it is most illuminating to concentrate on five particular symbols which come, continuously, under his scrutiny through the breadth of his work. Each is approached from the differing the perspectives of different thinkers – certain of which are ultimately rejected for their incommensurability with Grant's own apprehensions. Those symbols are: Eternity, History, Providence, Necessity, and Freedom. This paper pursues the course of these five symbols as they reoccur in Grant's works.

The Context of our Question: Can humanity move from the Theocentric (God centered) to the Anthropocentric (human centered) without self-destructive Human Solipsism (enclosed self-reference)?

The contemporary context is essential to defining the subject of this Winter’s seminar on Aquinas’ Humanism. In consequence, although this context cannot be the direct subject of the seminar, I must say something about it at the beginning.

The unavoidable situation of our search for the place of the human is the fact, now established with the highest level of certainty of which modern hypothetical natural science is capable, that human activity has created a global warming, which, unless reversed, within less than a century, will have destroyed the conditions of civilized human life, and probably of human life itself. It also appears that humanity is not capable of, or not willing to, exert the corporate, primarily political will, which alone can counter this, and so, either by will, or the absence of it, humanity is self-destructing.

Abstract: In a paper published in 2016 in Philosophy Today, Thomas Sheehan attacked my book on Heidegger from 1999 (Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time; Berkeley: University of California Press; shortened and expanded German edition, Geschichtlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus in Heideggers Sein und Zeit, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2014). Peg Birmingham and Ian Alexander Moore, the editors of Philosophy Today, refused to publish a rejoinder of mine to Sheehan’s paper on me. In two papers that I had uploaded on my account with academia.edu in 2016 and 2017, I show that, misinterpreting – or, in more or less many cases, fraudulently misrepresenting – crucial notions, such as the ones in §65 of Sein und Zeit, and relying on an interpretation of §74 in Sein und Zeit that is as banal as it is philologically and hermeneutically arbitrary, naïve, and false, Sheehan’s critique of my book lacks any merit. I also point out some of the numerous insults or vulgarities in his paper. These two papers of mine and a short comment on Emmanuel Faye uploaded in 2018 are now part of Johannes Fritsche, On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan, in: Texto ! Textes et cultures, vol. XXIV, n°3, 2019 (www.revue-texto.net/).
In addition to these three papers, On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan contains a summarizing introduction also referring to five articles from 2019 by five different authors each of whom (along with other things) implicitly or explicitly confirms, or further explicates, an aspect of my interpretation, amongst them one Heideggerian, William Blattner. Many American interpreters, amongst them Sheehan, and I agree upon that §74, the center of the chapter on historicity, is the culmination of the entire book Sein und Zeit. In my view, in this section destiny raises its voice, calls upon Dasein to cancel society and re-realize the past community, the Volksgemeinschaft, and authentic Dasein submits to the call. By contrast, as it were in the spirit of the American ideal of the self-made man, virtually all American interpreters (including Birmingham and Sheehan) claim that authentic Dasein produce their individual fates and their common destiny by themselves. Blattner acknowledges my interpretation and the respective ignorance of the American interpreters.
Furthermore, in my view the design of the two Divisions of Sein und Zeit and the content of several of their sections reproduce the notion of history as decline and recovery shared by moderate and extreme Rightists at Heidegger’s time. By contrast, other than in Heidegger’s comments on the history of philosophy in §§ 6 and 44 American interpreters do not see in Sein und Zeit any theory of history, or reference to history, prior to §74. According to Dreyfus, for instance, in the sections on being-in-the-world and being-with-others Heidegger formulates Dreyfus’ theory of skillful coping and captures the constitutive need of conformity at the bottom of all human behavior, no matter where and when, by the concept of Abständigkeit (distantiality) in §27. As I have shown in 2003, Dreyfus’ interpretation of Abständigkeit is just simply for philological reasons wrong, and Heidegger means by Abständigkeit (or, by its modern, its fallen mode) competition in modern capitalism. Blattner acknowledges the first part of my interpretation, and works hard to develop an interpretation of the They that avoids, or waters down, the second one. See Johannes Fritsche, “Die Unhintergehbarkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel. Ein Beitrag zur Dreyfus-McDowell-Debatte mit Rücksicht auf Adorno, Benjamin und Heidegger“ (Aufklärung & Kritik 26[3] [2019], 47-68) for a critique of the basic presuppositions in Dreyfus‘ theory of skillful coping; a critique that equally applies to the corresponding basic presuppositions in Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Samuel Todes, and in which I show that, according to their theories, the individual behaves more subjectivistically than, in their view, the modern subject does.
On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan also contains the preliminary list of content, and drafts of some parts, of a book on which I am working, and in which I add some new points in support of my interpretation of Sein und Zeit and discuss the whole issue in the broader context of Heidegger’s philosophical development, his interpretations of the Greeks, his reception in Europe and the USA after 1945, and the hermeneutics of Heideggerians.
More than twenty years ago, at a conference on Reiner Schürmann’s posthumously published Des hégémonies brisées (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1996; Engl. transl. Broken Hegemonies, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), in October 1997 at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City, I had given a talk on the part on Plotinus in that “beast,” as he would call this book of his. In 2002, I had written an introduction to an edition of two lecture courses of Schürmann on Being and Time and on Heidegger’s Kant interpretations that Morgan Meis had planned (the former meanwhile published in Simon Critchley and Reiner Schürmann: On Heidegger’s Being and Time, London: Routledge, 2008). These two papers (which I had separately uploaded in 2018) make up the current document. The two “top-Heideggerians” in the USA that I mention at the end of the abstract of the first paper are Charles Scott and John Sallis.

THE POWER AND THE GLORY VI.
A THREEFOLD MIRRORING: PRIEST, POLICE LIEUTENANT, DENTIST

I. THE LIEUTENANT AND THE PRIEST
The Lieutenant mirrors the priest in The Power and the Glory from beginning to end.

II. THE DENTIST, THE  LIEUTENANT, THE PRIEST
The first words of The Power and the Glory name “Mr Tench” a dentist looking for a cylinder of ether, vainly sought, and, when not found, declared not worth the trouble: “It did not matter so much after all: a little additional pain was hardly noticeable in the huge abandonment.” (18) The archetypical pain-giver, the dentist, who also has a pain in the stomach (14, 214-7), is the first person to meet the Whiskey priest and he is equally there at the  end of the novel.


III. THE REASON FOR THE THREEFOLD
If the mirroring of the priest in the dentist were not essential to The Power and the Glory, the full extent of Graham Greene’s questioning of post Enlightenment secularity and its religious forms, including the Anglicanism of his family, school, and Oxford, would not appear. The battle with Catholicism is not ultimately between political-social-economic ideas. As Greene’s The Lawless Roads (1939), his Mexican travelogue, made clear, the embattled church in Mexico taught the social doctrines of the Papal Encyclicals of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, which were certainly not capitalist, and were taken up along with Marxist ones in Nova Scotia by Catholic, Anglican and Protestant  clergy. The Indians, peons, and the people en mass reopened the churches and forced the state to allow the return of bishops and priests.
That Greene is attacking the whole modern project which ties technology to science for the entire elimination of pain, because pain has no religious, theological, philosophical justification appears with the dentist, with whom, I repeat, The Power and the Glory opens. This brings the novel very directly into the most terrible questions of our society at present: entertainment by pornography or as pornography, the legalization of pot, mass psychic and social control / therapy by prescription and non-prescription drugs,  with the consequent drug / opioid crisis, on the one hand, and  Medically assisted death (MAID), on the other. To bring this out I quote again from Hegel with whom I began my comments on The Power and the Glory and from George Grant on Nietzsche.
George Grant in Time as History (most useful reading to prepare for both The Power and the Glory and The Mountain and the Valley) writes:

The last men are those who have inherited the ideas of happiness and equality from the doctrine of progress. But because this happiness is to be realized by all men, the conception of its content has to be shrunk to fit what can be realized by all. … The last men  will gradually come to be the majority in any realized technological society. Nietzsche’s description of these last men in Zarathustra has perhaps more meaning in us and for us than for his contemporaries who read it in 1883. “They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night: but they respect health. ‘We have discovered happiness’, say the last men and blink.” Or again, “A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at the last, for a pleasant death.”

Whereas Jacques Ellul's work on the role of myth in propaganda about the technological society has been largely overlooked, it presents an effective means to analyse the ways in which the information society is symbolically constructed. The French thinker's examination of mid-twentieth-century propaganda has much relevance in studying current rhetoric about the 'information revolution', 'global information infrastructure' and 'knowledge-based society'. Not only did he prove prophetic in his description of the increasing intensi cation of technique in various aspects of life, but also his work offers significant insight into the ways the integrally capitalist vision of 'global information society' is being publicized around the world. The promotion of new media on a transnational scale by government, industry and media can be usefully studied within a myth-based framework. Unlike other writers on myth and communication Ellul underlined the religious roots of myth, therefore drawing attention to the ancient origins of contemporary notions. He suggested that ideology in itself was not able to mobilize individuals, but was dependent on the psychological/spiritual force of myth to move people to action. Propagandists use networks of various myths, which operate interactively with each other to reinforce prevailing ideologies. This article uses a set of technological myths identi ed by Ellul (science, history, nation, work, happiness, youth and the hero) to show how they can be used in developing a framework to analyse and challenge current propaganda about information society. Such applications of the French sociologist's work on myth, propaganda and technological society will encourage the broadening of scholarly activity beyond the strictly positivist con nes of dominant social science.

One of the founders of the discipline of bioethics, Texan philosopher H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. entirely revised many of his positions in the wake of his conversion to Orthodox Christianity in the early 1990s.  This made me very curious to find out how his treatment of the key notions of nature and person might have changed in light of patristic theology, providing the impetus for the investigation this article will relate into the evolution of Engelhardt thought. For it makes it possible to compare within a single author’s corpus both the secular humanist principles and the Christian dogmatic tenets that the notions of nature and person bring into play within bioethics discourse. Not that patristic positions simply took the place of humanist standards for Engelhardt, as one might infer from the fact that he published in 2000 The Foundations of Christian Bioethics as though in echo to his famous 1986 treatise on The Foundations of Bioethics. It is more that he defined their respective areas of validity in the context of a society that is both post-Christian and post-modern, where no grand narrative can any more give substantial content to a common morality applicable to bioethical dilemmas. This is why I have focused on comparing the two editions of The Foundations of Bioethics: that of 1986 –prior to Engelhardt’s conversion, and that of 1996 –which followed it, requiring supplementation by The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, so as to provide traditional Christians with the substantial moral standards they cannot find in the thin modus vivendi of peaceable coexistence between “moral strangers” within the same political society that is, for lack of legitimate alternatives, the sole object of general secular morality as H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. understands it.

The course is a thematic overview of the 1960s, a decade that marked a turning point in Canadian politics, society and culture. The material focuses on four core themes: the critique of cold war geo-politics; the rediscovery of social inequality, the celebration of youth alienation, and the politicization of the family.

The course is writing-intensive; students will receive feedback on their writing, and will draw from that feedback on later assignments. The four essays are based on books from the 1960s – George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965), John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic (1965), Marshall McLuhan's War and Peace in the Global Village (1968), and Margaret Atwood 's The Edible Woman (1969) – that illuminate the core themes.

Innovations in filmmaking, particularly in documentary film, are an important part of the history of the 1960s. We will watch a film almost every week in class. The films are generally thematically linked to the lecture; they provide valuable material for the three essays and will be included in the take-home exam.

The 1960s are a pivotal event in the emergence of modern Canada. Much that was central and particular about the 1960s is forgotten, but much of what was new and shocking is ever-present now and therefore invisible to us. The aim of the course is to explore the period’s idiosyncrasies and engage with its legacy, and to foster thoughtful engagement in the struggles that arose out of the 1960s.