Gandhis Whirlpool: Swimming against Destiny in India and Canada, a Reflection on the Question of George Grant

History teaches us that men who are in the whirlpool, except in the cases of individuals, will have to work out their destiny in it; but I do submit that those who are still outside its influence, and those who have a well-tried civilization to guide them, should be helped to remain where they are, if only as a measure of prudence. Gandhi, Indian Opinion, 21 May,1910. But what lies behind the small practical question of Canadian nationalism is the larger context of the fate of western civilisation. By that fate I mean not merely the relations of our massive empire to the rest of the world but even more the kind of existence which is becoming universal in advanced technological societies. What is worth doing in the midst of this barren twilight is the incredibly difficult question. George Grant, Canadian Fate and Imperialism, 1967.

A recent series of essays collected by Arati Barua, has thrown an intriguing spotlight on the work of M.K. Gandhi and the Canadian philosopher, George Grant.1 Although there are obviously many differences and asymmetries between the works of these two men, there are also intriguing resonances of vision that seem to echo across the cultural and civilizational divide and invite comparison. In what follows, I want to explore these similarities of vision, arising from very different contexts. Using Gandhis metaphor of the whirlpool, we can contrast his position outside the whirlpool of modern civilization (standing on his reformulation of traditional Indian civilization) with Grants position inside the whirlpool (working out his destiny from within an already advanced technological society). The contrast may provide mutual illumination on three important issues that arise in the work of both men: nationalism, modernity and technology.2 In their reflections on each of these issues we will hear the echo of Grants fundamental question, what is worth doing? This evokes the central problem of the ultimate good and end of human action in the modern worldsomething that also preoccupied Gandhi all his life as he pursued his path of karma yoga. It is, we may note, the ancient problem of both the Gita and the teaching of Jesus in the parables; for both Grant and Gandhi, however, it had taken on a new and pressing importance in the modern context. We may begin by enumerating some of the intriguing coincidences in the work of Gandhi and Grant. Both of them had a strong sense of historical destiny as modern civilization swept over their respective countries. Both of them bore witness toand attempted to resist--the overwhelming character of this transformation which both saw as rooted in the dominance of a technological viewpoint (and instrumental rationality) throughout the social and political order. Both of them, in their vision of ultimate human possibility, appealed to a renewed ethic in which love of the good (also inflected as Truth and God) would transform and purify knowledge into an instrument for good rather than for domination and self-destruction. Thus, Gandhi radically redefined the ancient eastern conception of the path of self-knowledge, arguing that it is possible when we identify ourselves with all that lives[realizing] God living in every one of us.3 The instrument of this knowledge, he insisted, is boundless selfless service. In a similar vein, but in the west, Grant carefully excavated and renovated a vision of the transformation of knowledge by love that was deeply embedded in mystical strands of both Christianity and Platonism. Thus he spoke of faith as the experience that intelligence is enlightened by love (following Simone Weil) and of the way in which our various journeys out of the

shadows and imaginings of opinion into the truth depend on the movements of our minds through love into the loveable.4 Such a transformation of knowledge by love, as we suggested, is the only way to raise again the problem of the ultimate good of human action in a technological world that, no longer knowing any limitation of the good, simply does everything it is able to do. This strategy of transforming knowledge through love has profound social and political implications in the concrete world for both Gandhi and Grant. It means a commitment to the good of all and the least one as Gandhi defined it with his concepts of sarvodaya and antyodaya; for Grant, it means a lifelong preoccupation with the problems of justice as the good that is due to each one and all.5 In any event, this is a very radical (or at least marginal) strategy in an age focused on the triumph of objectivity, instrumental rationality and the power politics. And indeed both thinkers have been marginalized as a result of it. Marginality can also be a mark of the prophet however, and, in that case, what is radical must be approached as the articulation of a different and perhaps forgotten language, one that is spoken from within a different paradigm. In an accompanying essayThe Liberating Coincidence of EmpireI have argued that this is precisely the case here. A mutually illuminating dialogue between the work of Gandhi and that of Grant on the issues of nationalism, modernity and technology can only occur if the framing argument or paradigm in which both thinkers work is clearly identified at the outset. The argument presented about this paradigm there can be briefly recapitulated here. Gandhis unique position, as we noted above, sought to understand and change the worldthrough self-control and self-realization. Ashis Nandy has identified this position as embodying the paradigm of a critical traditionalism. That is to say, it is a position that argues for renewing the primacy given to self-transformation in traditional culture as the path for social/political change. In this sense, it stood over against the modern turn to a technological-scientific method of controlling change through the manipulation of objective conditions.6 It is traditionalist then but critically traditionalist in that it insists that the traditional quest for religious self-transformation (moksha or salvation) can only be valid when it is grounded in the ethical activity of the individual, in the acts of selfless service. We saw above, that Gandhi links the religious self-transformation with ethical action in the social context. This means that religious knowledge is relative to its realization in the (ethical) practice (or praxis) of the individual and also in relation to the practices and claims of others. There is indeed an absolute truth, Gandhi argues, but it can be known only relatively (and then in the context of a broad social and political dialogue) and only through the demand for selfless service to the least (i.e., only through the transforming relation to the good which is loved in the concrete.) On the one hand then, Gandhi has brought about a creative transformation of the traditional understanding of religion in relation to individual self-realization (moksha) by tying it directly to ethical practice (dharma) and social-political action (artha). For example, in Hind Swaraj, he identifies the four traditional virtues necessary for selfrealizationchastity, poverty, following truth and fearlessnessas the virtues which are necessary for the passive resister (satyagrahi) for the service of their country (Hind

Swaraj, 94). Religious self-realization, morality and service are thus interrelated: For realizing the self, the first essential is to cultivate a strong moral sense Morality means the acquisition of virtues such as fearlessness, truth, brahmacharaya, povertyService is automatically rendered to the country in the process of cultivating morality.7 On the other hand, then, Gandhi argues that the only true possibility of social and political transformation (rajyaprakaran) in the modern context is through such individual moral self-transformation (atmadarshan).8 This is nowhere more clearly expressed than in Gandhis advice to a young man who questioned the ability of one person to make a difference in the struggle for Indias freedom: Emancipate your own self. Even that burden is very great. Apply everything to yourself. Nobility of soul consists in realizing that you yourself are India. In your emancipation is the emancipation of India. All else is make-believe. (Parel, Hind Swaraj, lxxiv). When this transformed traditional understanding is articulated with a critical edge in a modern, social-political form, as we shall see further below, it cuts against the grain of the modern understanding on several key issues: the meaning of nationalism, the character of modern civilization and the claims of technology. If one is to recognize the truly radical character of Gandhis critique of modern civilization from the time of his early work, Hind Swaraj, one may well begin by recognizing its radically alternative approach to the question of social and political change. In the light of this paradigm of critical traditionalism which identifies and highlights the alignment of the ethical, the spiritual and the political in Gandhis work, we can identify a similar alignment of the ethical good, claim of the transcendent Other and the demand for social/political action in the work of George Grant. Indeed it seems that Grants critical traditionalism has a very similar shape and a very similar purpose to Gandhis. Above all, it embodies the search for a deeper expression of the meaning and possibility of human action than is allowed for in the paradigm of advanced technological societies. At the same time, Grant as a philosopher is very clear about his location at the end of that philosophical tradition from Bacon and Machiavelli to Nietzsche that has created the west as an advanced technological society. In that context, he identifies himself as a dissenting witness to this modern civilization, alienated from its unanimity and vision of power as empire. In this way, he finds himself as someone who is searching for what has been lost, for intimations of authentic deprival and for all the intimations of the good which have become unthinkable in public terms.9 Through all this, Grant remains concerned about the divided state which characterizes the individual in modernity: the plush patina of hectic subjectivity lived out in the iron maiden of an objectified world inhabited by increasingly objectifiable beings... (A Platitude, 142). This divided state is, for Grant, the outcome of the philosophical tradition of the west, an outcome that issues in an ethically rootless, subjective freedom as well as an expanding

technological mastery that is turning political and social life into an increasingly objectivized sphere of violence. The vision of the whole and with it, the good itself, have been forgotten but, Grant argues, are not yet irretrievably lost. The language of good is not then a dead language, he argues, but one that must, even in its present disintegration be re-collected, even as we publicly let our freedom become very more increasingly the pure will to will (A Platitude, 141). Finally, even as we may identify the similarities between these projects of Gandhi and Grant, it is necessary to remember the different contexts in which their work emerged; here also, the crucial issue is that there should not be a reduction to the simplistic categories of east-west or developed-underdeveloped. Both Gandhi and Grant, in their deeper reading of modern civilization/modernity and its impact appealed to a more universal basis for understanding the human quest than either culture or economics; differences in cultures and traditions were significant and to be respected but they did not have the final word for either thinker. Moreover, it was precisely this universal basis for understanding human life that was under attack in modern civilization by the nationalism and economics of modern civilization that constituted, for both thinkers, a reduction and narrowing in perspective. Given this reading, to be developed further below, it is best to approach the difference in context between Gandhi and Grant in terms of their own metaphors. In terms of Gandhis metaphor, George Grant is in the whirlpool and working out his destiny in it. That is to say, he has already been uprooted by the tsunami of modern civilization such that he no longer has access to the ancient and well-tried civilization on which Gandhi counts. For Grant, the image of the barren twilight summed up his primary experience of alienation where, as he says, returning to Canada after the war, I had come home to something that never could be my home.10 In both cases then, there is a shift to what is felt to be the true basis of difference and distinction. The primary distinction for Gandhi is not between the English and Indians, or between the colonizers and the colonized, but rather between those embedded in a traditional civilization and those uprooted into the whirlpool modern civilization. Grant too, points out that it is not merely about the relations of our massive empire to the rest of the world but rather about the kind of existence which is becoming universal in advanced technological societies. Thus although they viewed it in a very similar way, Gandhi and Grant were in different situations with regard to the whirlpool of modern civilization and this difference will shape their different courses of action. Gandhi will defend a still vital traditional civilization from within, creatively adapting its resources to project an alternative to modernity. Grant, finding himself in a culture already caught in the whirlpool, must seek for strands of a tradition that have been lost orbecause of the history of North America as the continent of progressnever allowed to flourish in the first place.11 Both Gandhi and Grant are searching for a response based on a deeper and more universal current to the false universalities of modern technological civilization. Both of them are searching for this, however, through the resources that are local to their culture, which are, in Grants terms, autochthonous or indigenous, rooted in the soil and the primal of the culture. This approach, then, echoed in Gandhis concept of swadeshi, really engages in a

search for the culture that is being lost through the kind of existence which is becoming universal in advanced technological societies. Given this initial framing of differences and similarities, it is possible to sketch a comparison of Gandhi and Grant that will be mutually illuminating. We can now turn to examine this across three successive issues: nationalism, modernity, and technology.

Nationalism Redefined: Hind Swaraj and Lament for a Nation. We have already suggested that the baseline for comparison is expressed in Gandhis creative and radical approach to nationalism in Hind Swaraj. We can now explore this and contrast it with the position developed in Lament for A Nation. When Gandhi wrote this work on the return voyage to South Africa in 1909, he carried with him the text of Tolstoys Letter to a Hindoo written in 1908. Writing in that letter, Tolstoy offered his thoughts on the cause of Indian nationalism in response to a letter he had received from the militant and fugitive Indian nationalist Taraknath Das in Vancouver, Canada.12 In the letter, he made the startling assertion that it is not the English that have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves. This insight, of course, shifts the ground for the problem of nationalism away from simple attacks on the colonial power to the colonized themselves: how have we allowed ourselves to become enslaved and to what? This shift clearly shapes Gandhis approach in Hind Swaraj with its compelling argument for a non-violent and spiritually-rooted nationalism. It is swaraj, Gandhi says, when we learn to rule ourselves Such swaraj has to be experienced by each one for himself [sic] (Anthony Parel, Hind Swaraj, 2009, 71). Thus Tolstoys insight, combined with Gandhis own rich study of the Gita bore fruit in this radically new understanding of self-rule or swaraj. In this sense, swaraj, as Gandhi takes it up in this book, is an attempt to redefine the meaning of nationalism as such. In the context of the heated struggle for self-rule in India, Gandhi clearly wanted to shift the focus away from the concept of a nation defined simply in terms of European political model. That model of a dominant state and submissive populace is one that he finds dysfunctional on several grounds.13 For India then, he advocates the alternative model of a civic nation (or praja, in Gujarati) in which the individual is considered as a bearer of fundamental rights and as a subject capable of swarajself-determination and self-development (Parel, xv). Ultimately, then, the praja is based on this swaraj experienced by each one for himself. Gandhi links this conception of the nation not to the modernization of India (the railways, or the elite of doctors and lawyers) but rather to its prior existence as an ancient civilization, for, he argues, it is in the context of the ancient civilization that the capacities for both nationhood and swaraj are taught and nurtured. The parameters of the nation were set by the acharayas who traveled the country by foot, establishing both its geographical boundaries through places of pilgrimage and also its spiritual boundaries by teaching those whose hearts were aglow with righteousness [so that] they had the Ganges in their own home (Hind Swaraj, 48). This physical and spiritual basis for a

nation was the character of the civilization itself: they saw that India was one undivided land made so by nature and fired the people with an idea of nationality unknown in other parts of the worldso that any two Indians are one as no two Englishmen are. (Hind Swaraj, 48) Nationhood, in this sense, is built on the indigenous and autochthonous foundation of Indian civilization. Gandhi may well be romanticizing Indian history as to its spiritual character and anti-materialism, as George Woodcock suggests, but he is alsoin principle--uniting the ideals of this spiritual tradition with a pragmatic and political focus in the modern context.14 Besides, this is not a question of history in the Western sense, as a unilinear account of the events of the mighty, but something much deeper: he is not working from history as the doings of kings and emperors and as a record of wars but rather from history as the whole canvas experience of ordinary human existence, as an account of the life that still lives on, and is sustained by truth force (Hind Swaraj, 87). It must also be noted that Gandhi recognized the many profound defects that took place in this ancient civilization (the mistreatment of women, the exploitation of caste structures, and violence), but, he insists, nobody mistakes them for ancient civilization (HS, 69). Indeed, he insists, we may utilize the new spirit that is born in us for purging ourselves of these evils (HS, 69). The new spirit created by the dialogue of east and west is another expression of Gandhis critical traditionalism. The chief threat to nationhood defined in this sense is not simply the English as the colonial rulers of India, but rather the alternative and modern civilization which they embody and represent. Gandhi defines this modern civilization at the end of Chapter IV and takes up an analysis of it in Chapter V and following. We will examine this analysis in more detail in the following section. At this point, it will suffice to define this critique of modern civilization in relation to the problem of nationhood. Gandhi begins by clarifying that England as a nation, has also been affected by this new form of civilization: It is not due to any peculiar fault of the English, but the condition is due to modern civilization. It is a civilization only in name. Under it the nations of Europe are becoming degraded and ruined day by day (Hind Swaraj, 32). The destructive character of this civilization appears precisely in relation to the two central features of Gandhis understanding of nationhood: 1) it destroys the autochthonous foundation of the culture/or civilization on which England arose (see Chapter VI) and 2) it reduces the citizenry to passivity, removing the duties of selfrealization in moral action and service in civic action by making bodily comfort (kama) the sole object of life (purushartha), (HS, 34).15 Moreover, because it removes the ethical and religious objects of life, the mode of governance (artha) within the nation becomes highly exploitative: Formerly men were made slaves under physical compulsion now they are enslaved under the temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy. (HS, 35).

As we shall see below all of this is heightened by the role of technology or what Gandhi calls machinery, but the essential distortion brought by modern civilization consists precisely in removing the human being from the path of duty (HS, 65). The result of this is that the citizens true modes of participation in the nation--through ethical practice (dharma), self-realization and civic duty--become incapacitated and the self-destructive drive to pleasure dominates their actions. Naturally then, with a passive, non-responsible citizenship, the State becomes the dominant force in the nation as on the western European model. In this modern context, Gandhi argued, the state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form and swaraj, by contrast, must mean the continuous effort to be free of government control.16 We can simply note in passing that Gandhis conception of the nation based on this participatory citizenship was holistic i.e., it also included economic swaraj (based on the concept of the local swadeshi) as well as a kind of aesthetic betterment of social life or uplift embodied in his constructive program for education and village life. In summary then, Gandhis view of the nation is presented as an alternative to the model of nationhood embodied in modern civilization with its focus on growth, centralization and technology. Gandhi presents a view of the nation based on swaraj as the self-governing act of self-realization undertaken by each individual which is expressed in both ethical practice (dharma) and the civic virtues of its citizens. In such a nation, he argues, there is a balance of both rights and dutiesas well as a care for all others that is based on a freely accepted limitation of desire: Such a society is necessarily highly cultured in which every man and woman knows what he or she wants and, what is more knows that no one should want anything that others cannot have with equal labour. (HS, 182, quoting from an interview given in 1946) Gandhi presents this model of a nation of enlightened and ethical individuals as something that is realizable on the basis of the ancient civilization of India. Like Gandhi, Grant came to his reflection on the issue and problems of nationalism at a crucial time in the history of Canada. His early and most important work, Lament for a Nation (1965) was written on the occasion of a profound shift in Canadian political life toward what Grant felt was an increasing dependence on the political agenda of the American empire.17 Although Canada had grown peacefully out of its relationship with the colonial empire of England, its nationhood developed under the shadow of the United States in its growth to a position of world dominance and empire. The threat posed by this, Grant identified as an advanced technological society and he developed his understanding of Canada as a nation in contrast to that. Although his book, Lament for a Nation bears comparison with Hind Swaraj in that regard, its focus is different, in that it is a lament for something that has already been lost (as Grant felt), and not a program for national renewal as Gandhis text is. Yet Grant is lamenting an ideal of nationhood that has disappeared. Thus it is too simple to identify this as pessimism in contrast to Gandhis optimism; Grant does have a vision of the alternative to advanced technological society and his characterization of the nation of Canada also suggests some of the features that are worth attempting to recover.

In Lament and the more reflective essays that followed it (In Defense of North America (1965), Canadian Fate and Imperialism (1967) as well as the Preface of 1970), Grant presented a detailed analysis of the historical and sociological situation in Canada on which his lament for the nation was based. At the same time, he defined the vision of the nation that was at stake. He noted the unique situation of Canada in relation the American empire: We are not in that empire as the exploited colonies of South America, but rather with the intimacy of a younger brother status (Preface to Lament, 1970, Lxxi). He went on to speak of the ideal of Canadian nationalism: Our hope lay in the belief that on the northern half of this continent we could build a community which had a stronger sense of the common good and of public order than was possible under the individualism of the American capitalist dream (Preface, Lxxiii) Clearly that vision of a nation (which Grant identified with a conservative tradition) was something he judged no longer feasible given the pressures of an empire based on the liberalism of progress: The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada. As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth. The current of modern history is against us (Lament, 67). This vision of the nation was based on an independence from the American capitalist dream (and its individualism) and also on a stronger sense of the common good and public order. Yet it was not simply political or colonial power that prevented the realization of this national identity but something much more powerful: it was the colonizing reach of technology itself and its irresistible advantages to people: Those who want to maintain separateness also want the advantages of the age of progress. These two ends are not compatible, for the pursuit of one negates the pursuit of the other. Nationalism can only be asserted successfully by an identification with technological advance; but technological advance entails the disappearance of those indigenous differences that give substance to nationalism. (Lament, 75) Like Gandhi, then, Grant sees the true threat to nationalism in the character of modern civilizationor advanced technological society--itself. Further, he identifies its seductive-destructive hold over people who cannot refuse its advantages and hence elevate the value of freedom above the limits of the good, as he argued in his later work. The result is a passive and non-participative citizen. This sketch of an ideal of nationalism is quite parallel then, to that proposed by Gandhi at least in its outline. Grant does not yet have, however, a concept which could give shape to the alternative nation, such as Gandhi does with swaraj; indeed, the rest of his career will be a search for the basis of this kind of alternative basis for nation. What Grant means by the indigenous differences that give substance to nationalism points us to a further dimension of his analysis of the ideal of the nation which is important. Just as Gandhi wanted to define his ideal of nation in relation to the underlying characteristics of Indian civilization, so Grant is searching for something

deeper in the fabric of the culture which provides an alternative to the technological future. In this, we may see an extension of his ideal of nation. In his later essay, In Defense of North America, Grant looked into this deeper basis for a Canadian nation by trying to trace what he called the primal of the civilization that evolved in North America. A starting-point, he argues, is to recognize the continental location of Canada in North Americato exist as a North American is an amazing and enthralling fate (Technology and Empire, 15). There is not only a shared geography with America there is a partially shared history as former Europeans: From our beginnings there has been an ambiguity for us as to who we are...we are indeed Europeans. Imperially we turn out to the rest of the world bringing the apogee of what Europeans first invented, technological civilisation Yet those who know themselves to be North Americans know they are not Europeans. (TE, 16-17) This continuity-in-difference with European culture is the first crucial element in describing the Canadian/American primal; Grant distinguishes between Europe founded on the roots (or the primal) of Greek culture and later Mediterranean Catholicismand the North American culture that grew up here on a much narrower foundation: For us the primal is much different. It was the meeting of the alien and yet conquerable land with English-speaking Protestantsbut the Europeanness which remained for us was of a special kind because Calvinist Protestantism was itself a break in Europea turning away from the Greeks in the name of what was found in the Bible. (TE, 19) This non-Mediterranean Europeanness of the seventeenth century was important because it linked itself with both the new physical and moral sciences as well as with ethos of capitalism to create the basis for technological culture. Significantly, however, this non-Mediteranean Europeanness did not bring with it any of the limiting or balancing traditions that were present in Europefor example, the contemplative tradition of the Greeks or of Catholic Christianity. Because of this Grant can highlight the novelty of the destiny of America: The US is the only society which no history (truly its own) before the age of progress...(TE, 17). This lack of a history is really a lack of civilizational resources for alternative thinking. To a great extent this lack of a balancing or limiting civilizationto the progress of technological culture--also affects Canada, though as Grant noted, there was in Canada at least a desire to build a nation here on different roots. So the problem of the primal that shapes the possibility of the nation of Canada is, first of all, the lack of a deeply rooted tradition with resources in the ethical and spiritual dimensions. This at least, is to speak of the Europeans who came to the new continent, for Grant does not acknowledge the presence of such among traditions of the indigenous peoples themselves here (we shall return to this problem below). The second critical feature of the North American primal has to do with the evolution of a particular relationship to the land and the earth in general: All of us who came made some break in that coming. The break was not only the

giving up of the old and the settled but the entering into the majestic continent which could not be ours in the way that the old had been...none of us can be called autochthonous, because in all there is some consciousness of making the land our own... through a battle of subjugation. After that battle we had no long history of living with the land before the arrival of the new forms of conquest which came with industrialism (TE, 17) The outcome of this history of subjugating a hostile and alien land means that there is no historically positive relationship with the environment or the earth in the North American primalapart that maintained by the indigenous peoples, who were also subjugated by those who came.18 It is into this void that the economic drive for exploitation quickly grew. Again, there was not balancing or limiting tradition to the dynamism of technological prowess and therefore exploitation became the norm: There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object. Even our cities have been encampments on the road to economic mastery. (TE, 17). The problem of treating the environment as object or as resource for exploitation is now a deeplyseated norm in North America and it expresses this primal. The result of this analysis of the primal of North American civilization is Grants estimation of the lost opportunity for a nationhood based on political and moral courage over immediate economic advantage (TE, 70). The Europeans who came to North America did not bring with them a rich enough tradition to overcome this skewing of nationhood away from the common good and public ordernor did they see or recognize the presence of these traditions among the indigenous people who already existed on the continent. In the whirlpool of North America, Grant intimates, such traditions must now be sought from elsewhere andsomehowreestablished in the soil here. This, in one sense becomes the goal of all of Grants later work and reflection. Finally, it can be noted that Grants reflection has indeed led to a recognition of the essential nature of these indigenous differences which give substance to nationalism. What Gandhi called a well-tried civilization and what he promoted through the ideals of swaraj and swadeshi is precisely this local, autochthonous was of life as an alternative to that proposed in modern civilization. For both Gandhi and Grant this local is not absolute but it is an essential path to the good that is universal. Grant, in a later essay, Canadian Fate and Imperialism articulates this very clearly: In this era when the homogenising power of technology is almost unlimited, I do regret the disappearance of indigenous traditions, including my own. It is true that no particularism can adequately incarnate the good. But is it not also true that only through some particular roots, however partial, can human beings grasp what is good and it is the juice of such roots which for most men sustain their partaking in a more universal good (TE, 68-9) It is in this light, that one can recognize the true shape of his ideal of the nation and also of its parallel relation to Gandhis vision of a nation built on swarajas ethical practice embodied in social and political virtue. Like Gandhi, Grant recognizes that we learn about the good and find our path to it through a love of the concrete neighbour, and country: 10

To live in a world of these violent empires and in a satellite of the greatest of them, presents complex problems of morality. These problems may be stated thus. In human life there must always be place for love the good and love of ones own. Love of the good is mans highest end, but it is of the nature of things that we come to know and to love what is good by first meeting it in that which is our own--this particular body, this family, these friends, this woman, this part of the world, this set of traditions, this country, this civilization (TE, 73). This is the problem of morality when one lives in a world of these violent empires: the loss of an active citizenship (or swaraj) in which one can express and work for the good of ones own means a deep alienation, indeed, the loss of the path to the good itself. This is what Grant recognizes as having transpired in his own life: Man is by nature a political animal and to know that citizenship is an impossibility is to be cut off from one of the highest forms of life. To retreat from loyalty to ones own has the exhilaration of rebellion, but rebellion cannot be the basis for a whole life...To question the dominant world religion [progress] is indeed to invite an alienation far greater than simply political. (TE, 77) This alienation from ones own and thus also from the good, is what turns Grant not simply to rebellion but rather to a search for what has been lost through the dominance of the technological approach in modern civilization. This search is a critical traditionalist form of response to the experience of alienation.

The Problem of the Good and Modern Civilization We may turn now from reflection on the theme of nationalism to that of modern civilization, as Gandhi identifies it or advanced technological society as Grant names it. We have just seen how Grant identifies the alienation from a true participation in political life as one of central symptoms of the modern state; Gandhi diagnoses a similar state of passivity as the outcome of the centralization of power in the state. Yet it is crucial to grasp this isolation from the process of modern civilization for what it is: this is a non-participation in, an alienation from that kind of process, or activity in which the human has already been marginalized and the good or the ethical excluded. Thus this symptom of passivity and non-participation in turn reveals what is, for both men, a new and frenzied kind of activity in which the human being is being carried along toward a self-destructive end. Gandhis images for this activity of modern civilization portray it as dehumanizing and incapacitating for the human beingthe whirlpool, the vortex, disease, dreaming, intoxication, madness; yet they also highlight its mesmerizing and enticing quality: and so, one by one, he notes, we are drawn into the vortex (HS, 34). There is no denying the strength or the appeal of the modern, then, and this very strength of appeal masks and justifies its devastating effects. We shall see in the analysis offered by both men a portrayal of modernity as a triumph of that kind of freedom, power and mastery in which true humanity and true human needs are more and more bound, more and more subordinated. Their critique is, in modern terms, radical and systemic; its

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focus, however, is always from the point of view of human beings who have been alienated from meaningful action in the process, and on behalf of an ethic of selfresponsibility. We have already begun to describe Gandhis analysis of modern civilization and we may now amplify it briefly within this framework of a process of alienation. Above, it was noted that Gandhi chose very clearly to redefine the notion of the nation through his understanding of swaraj; it was not a question, he insisted, of seizing the power of the state but rather of taking responsibility for ones action, for personal and civic renewal. This was an attempt to shift the focus of the debate from colonialism to exploitation and power as such: India is being ground down not under the English heel but under that of modern civilization. It is groaning under the monsters terrible weight (HS, 41) Under this exploitative power, Gandhi argued, the English were also suffering as victims: This civilization is irreligion (adharma) and it has taken such a hold on the people in Europe that those who are in it appear to be half madthey keep up their energy by intoxication. They can hardly be happy in solitudeI can hardly give you an adequate conception of it. It is eating into the vitals of the English nation. (HS, 36-7) It is this modern civilization in turn which is the real root of the creation of colonialism through its energizing of the forces of trade and market: They wish to convert the whole world into a vast market for their goods. That they cannot do so is true, but the blame will not be theirs. They will leave no stone unturned to reach the goal. (HS, 40) Moreover, insofar as it is the desire for money that drives this colonial exploitation, it has also succeeded not just in ruling over the colonized but in thoroughly coopting their will to its viewpoint: Many problems can be solved by remembering that money is their God. Then it follows that we keep the English in India for our self-interest. We like their commerce, they please us by their subtle methods, and get what they want from us. To blame them for this is to perpetuate their power. (HS, 40) Finally, the perverse subtlety of this process of enticement by which people give up what is life-giving for the promise of riches which is never in fact fulfilled is not lost on Gandhi: But there is no end to the victims destroyed in the fire of civilization. Its deadly effect is that people come under its scorching flames believing it to be good. They become utterly irreligious and, in reality, derive little advantage from the world. Civilization is like a mouse gnawing while it is soothing us (HS, 42). In short, as Gandhi observes, to English you will see shortly that your intoxication is suicidal (HS, 113). Gandhis portrayal of modern civilization as an alienating and all-consuming

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process also, however, identifies its essential instability. His belief that the course of this civilization was self-destructive and that its falsity would inevitably reveal itself to those who participated in it, can be connected with his belief that it is a disease that is not incurable. All of these positions express the belief that such a civilization, which is based on false premises, is inevitably ephemeral (HS, 114); what is unnatural and contrary to the moral and religious nature of the human cannot ultimately triumph. This parallels closely Gandhis argument for satyagraha/non-violence in Chapter XVII: the force of love, soul-force, rooted in nature and proven by the ongoing survival of the universe is ultimate while history, as an account of the triumph of brute force and violence is merely an interruption of the course of nature, (HS, 88). Grant makes a very similar claim, arguing that modern civilization will not be able to sustain its belief that freedom alone is enough and that good is not a more ultimate force: we are never more sure that air is good for animals than when we are grasping for breath (A Platitude in TE, 141). Yet this argument that modern civilization is unnatural and for that reason unsustainable is only cogent when nature and natural limits are seen and accepted; and this is precisely what is made invisible by the viewpoint of modern civilization. This leads to a clarification of two important aspects of Gandhis position: 1) the concept of limit (and the virtue of self-limitation) as intrinsic to both nature and the human being is the key element in a true civilization and 2) the argument that since it is based on a denial of this premise, the viewpoint of modern civilization is thoroughly irredeemable. On the first point, Gandhi argues that our ancestors set a limit to our indulgences (HS, 66) and this has led to the tendency of Indian civilization to elevate the moral being (HS, 69). It is on this basis of the concept of limit that Gandhi argues for the intrinsic unity of duty-morality-self-knowledge: Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man [sic] the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves, (HS, 65) This key statement summarizes all the aspects of Gandhis complex position; duty, as the recognition and acceptance of limit, is a convertible term with swaraj as self-rule. We shall see below that this concept of limit is also the key to Gandhis approach to technology (as the rejection of ethical limit). For the moment it is important to recognize it as the basis on which the critique of modern civilization has developed. This leads to the second point, namely, that the viewpoint of modern civilization is irredeemable. Insofar as it rejects in principle the concept of an ethical or spiritual or natural limit to the pursuit of bodily welfare/ money, this modern viewpoint embodies the reverse of civilization (HS, 112) and is something which must be abandoned (HS, 112). Thus Gandhi argues East and West can only and really meet when the West has thrown overboard modern civilization, almost in its entirety; from Indias side, he insists, salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the last fifty years, (Letter to Henry Pollack, 1909, in HS, 129). It is crucial to recognize 13

that Gandhi is speaking of modern civilization as a world-view and set of principles here, or rather as a reduction of all principles to one: the incessant search for comforts and their multiplication. 19 This is the principle of material development that is, in principle, a rejection of limit whether in the form of human self-limitation (swaraj), civilization (as mutually accepted limitation of wants) and nature itself (as a limit to human freedom). All the actions that flow from this principle marginalize the human being and exclude the good. So while Gandhi acknowledges many of the insights that have been gained in the west and through its evolution toward modernity, he finds its viewpoint irreformable as such and insists that Europeans themselves will have to remodel their outlook, if they are not to perish under the weight of the comforts to which they are becoming slaves. (HS, 66, n. 127) We will see further his view that technology or machinery is the chief symbol of this view (HS, 106), but for now we can turn to the parallel reflections in Grants work. We touched above on Grants view of the character of advanced technological society and in particular in what he saw as its impact on the social and political order. The dominant worldview of progress, he argued, excluded the classical understandings of the good and hence the basis for ethical action. This led to a deep alienation from socialpolitical process as well as from the expression of the good in a love of ones own. In his later work Grant focused his attention on the philosophical evolution of modernity, trying to trace the path that had led to this impasse. In a short but programmatic essay, entitled A Platitude (19) he identified the two key elements that would define his approach to a critique of modernity: technique and freedom. These elements are intrinsically related and together, define the world-view of modernity: Technique comes forth from and is sustained in our vision of ourselves as creative freedom, making ourselves, and conquering the chances of an indifferent world. Our vision of ourselves as freedom in an indifferent world could only have arisen in so far as we had analysed to disintegration those systems of meaning, given in myth, philosophy and revelation, which had held sway over our progenitors (TE, 137). Freedom arises as an unquestioned and virtually absolute value in an indifferent world because, Grant argues, modernity has analysed to disintegration the systems of meaning in the traditional civilization in the West. This disintegration means that nature is no longer regarded as having intrinsic goods or limits but rather has become indifferent, a mere resource for the uses of freedom. Yet the outcome of this process of disintegration is felt most acutely in the area of ethical action: since all languages of the good except the language of the drive to freedom have disintegrated, there is no possibility of answering the question: freedom for what purposes? (TE, 138) As a result we are left with a new ultimate andunanswerable--question: what is worth doing with our freedom? While in traditional culture, freedom was enfolded in larger systems of meaning and therefore given direction in ethical and religious terms, it has now become

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an end in itself: As freedom is the highest term in the modern language, it can no longer be so enfolded. (TE, 138) The parallel with Gandhis analysis of the singular and unqualified drive to accumulate money/material comfort in modern civilization is clear here: both analyses identify a reductionist quality in the modern approach, and embody a rejection of any intrinsic limit. Gandhis focus on a one-sided materialism and Grants focus on an unqualified freedom to do or to will also agree in identifying the absolutist character of this world-view, where a single drive is given unlimited sway over human life. From that point, it is clear for both Grant and Gandhi that this world-view will be intrinsically violent and intolerant of alternatives. It is worthwhile to pursue Grants analysis further however, since its view of modernity from inside the whirlpool adds many complementary insights to Gandhis. Grant thought deeply about the elevation of freedom to this unchallenged position. By tracing its evolution in western philosophy to the watershed of Nietzsches philosophy, he was able to identify the fact that in order to replace the lost language of the good or of limit, modernity has developed the pseudo-language and conceptuality of value. 20 Values, Nietzsche recognized are not based on any intrinsic good or limit, rather, they are what our wills impose upon the facts. In other words, they are merely another expression of freedom in its claim to absolute dominance over nature. Thus they will not lead to any real limit or counter-balance with freedomnor could they possibly do so. At the same time, technology as a viewpoint on the whole namely, as the unfettered freedom to do whatever can be donealso emerges from this freedom. Here, Grant following Nietzsches insight (though in disagreement with it viewpoint) recognizes that what is given about the whole in technological science cannot be thought together with what is given us concerning justice and truth, reverence and beauty, from our tradition (English Speaking Justice, 77). The worldview that is given about the whole in technological science is the worldview of unfettered freedom in an indifferent world; from those premises the good (as well as justice and truth in the classical senses) cannot even be conceived. So despite the hopes to find some agreement on limitations through the path of values, Grant was very clear that such a process could never reinstate the claims of the ethical good or work to create a system of justice that would contain the reach of technological power. Throughout English Speaking Justice, Grant traces the evolution of the consensual and contractual tradition of justice in modernity and points out that it assumes all along an understanding of the individual as formed by the act of calculating its own self-interest. Yet in a social order based on power and the freedom to amass economic power in the hands of a few, Grant questions whether there will ever be enough common will or consensus about values, to truly limit freedom or direct toward the common good: Can his calculating individualism bring forth a doctrine of the common good strong enough to control the ambitions of these mammoths? Can the calculating individual be a citizen in such a world, or does this account of human beings only lead to individuals concerned with consumption--above all entertainment and the

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orgasm of consumption. (ESJ, 41) Grants conclusion is that the tradition of political liberalism based on the modern view of freedom and values moderated by consensus will inevitably be overwhelmed by the amassing of power through that other child of freedom, namely, technology: The assumption underlying contractual liberalism and underlying technology both come from the same matrix of modern thought, from which can arise no reason why the justice of liberty is due to all human beings, irrespective of convenience (ESJ, 85-86) At this point, his analysis identifies another crucial factor, namely, that in modern society, the claim of convenience (for the powerful or the majority) will always overwhelm both the common good and any intrinsic claim to justice on the part of the individual. Moreover since this convenience is expressed through more and more powerful technological forms of objectification (whether weapons systems or virtual systems), individuals will become more and more passive, subjects not of freedom but of the process of consumption. The systems, in short, come to enclose and dominate the individual; this, for Grant, is the inevitable outcome of a worldview in which the rise of freedom is based on the disintegration of all accounts of meaning and the good. What has been lost, can however still be articulated, as Grant points out. In the traditions of the west, before modernity inward and outward justice were considered to be mutually interdependent in the sense that inward openness to eternity depended on practice and just practice depended on that inward openness to eternity (ESJ, 85). This is a clear, western articulation of Gandhis account of swaraj as duty-morality-selfknowledge. Yet this tradition has almost disappeared in what Grant calls the great darkness of modernity and so, he insists, for all its achievement we in the west will now pay the price for our long tradition of taking the goods of practical confidence and competence as self-sufficiently the highest goods, (ESL, 89).

Machinery and Technique: The Symbol and Representation of Reality If the rejection of any limit to freedom of will is the key element in the analysis of modernity in both Gandhi and Grant, then the full expression of that principle is what Grant calls the technological representation of reality and it corresponding principle, namely, to do whatever can be done, (Technology and Justice, 16). For both Gandhi and Grant, technology was more than just an element within the phenomenon of modern civilization; it was its chief symbol (Gandhi) and our destiny (Grant). The meaning of these locations of the technological for each man can now be briefly examined. When Gandhi refers to machinery as the chief symbol modern civilization in Chapter XIX of Hind Swaraj, he identifies it as a whirlwind (wayaro), a net (sanchani jal) and a great sin and then continues to elaborate on it with the metaphor of

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a snake-hole: Machinery is like a snake-hole which may contain from one to a hundred snakes. Where there is machinery there are large cities; and where there are large cities, there are tram-cars and railways; and there only does one see electric light. (HS, 108) What is evident in this brief account is that Gandhi identifies clearly a process of technology whose unfolding has begun to encompass and reshape the structures of civilization. Like Grant, then, he sees technology from the outset not simply as a set of tools which the human being can use for good or ill but rather as a system in which human life has become ensnared. His argument that machinery is a great sin refers to this sense of machinery or technology as process and system. It is from this starting-point that Gandhis critique develops. On the most basic level, the process of mechanization is economically devastating for the poor: it is machinery that has impoverished India, Gandhi notes (HS, 105). On the one hand, it has debilitated the process of handcraft from which the masses of Indians lived and maintained a kind of dignity and, on the other hand, it has created, through the factory, a new way of exploitation and dehumanization of the poor (HS, 106). In outlining this account of machinery as a systemic transformation of work as independent handcraft, Gandhi is clearly laying the foundation for his later campaigns for spinning and khadi, as well as for the constructive work for village culture. He recognizes that it will be no easy task to do away with a thing that is established but articulates the principle that the non-beginning of a thing is supreme wisdom (HS, 107). If traditional activities are lost through the evolution of a machine culture, it will be very difficult to reinstate them. Again, in this argument about the system of machine civilization, Gandhi is laying the groundwork for his later position on an alternative model of economic development (based on swadeshi/the local)something that he promoted, in the end fruitlessly, to Nehru. The argument here is ultimately based on the same kind of ethical arguments outlined earlier, namely, that the process set in motion by the machine involves an unnatural and unethical dehumanization. Thus, in terms of economic development, he insists nature has not provided any way whereby we may reach a desired goal all of a sudden (HS, 109)without that is, creating further exploitation and dehumanization. Good (in distinction from machine-based economic growth), as he argues so clearly, travels at a snails paceThose who want to do good are not selfish, they are not in a hurry, they know that to impregnate people with good requires a long time. But evil has wings. To build a house takes time. Its destruction takes none, (HS, 47). In his later writings, this principled opposition to the system of machine civilization is something that Gandhi tried to qualify carefully, where he often noted that he was not opposed to machinery as such, but rather to the impact/use of machinery or the machinery craze, i.e., machinery as system. This ambivalence allows him to catalogue both good and bad effects of machinery, good and bad uses. On the one hand,

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then, he did note the destructive impact of the machine in war (these machines will blow off a million men in a minute) as well as its potential impact for good (such as would turn these waste lands into arable and fertile land) (HS, 162-3) On the other hand, he was very aware that most machinery in modern civilization was in practice an instrument of greed and the concentration of wealth (HS, 164). At the same time, he began also to deepen his insight into machinery as system and see that the issue of ultimate control of the process of human creation was at stake: Machinery is a grand yet awful invention. It is possible to visualize a stage which machines invented by man [sic] may finally engulf civilization. If man controls the machines, then they will not; but should man lose his control over the machines and allow them to control him then they will certainly engulf civilization and everything. (1931, HS, 165) In the end, Gandhi seems to have settled on a compromise by invoking his principle of limitationI am aiming, not at eradication of all machinery, but limitations (HS, 164). He saw the enslaving potential of the system but still hoped and trusted that it could be resisted by ethical choice: As machinery makes you its slave, we want to be independent and selfsupporting; so we should not take the help of machinery when we can do without it, (1940, HS, 166). The real question, as subsequent developments have shown, is whether this kind of principled resistance to machine civilization as system is possible and sustainable, even on the small scale. For example, can a pattern of non-consumption be developed in a consumer culture in a more than marginal way? Or, in the broader context, can we free ourselves collectively from the reliance on systems such as the international defense and weapons industrythe military-industrial complex? Behind these lies, of course, a more fundamental question--how effective is Gandhis path of swaraj as personal transformation in an advanced technological society? As we shift to Grants work on technology, we must note that he was reflecting from this much later stage of technological development and again from within the whirlpool of an advanced technological society. His stress is very much on technology as system in that regard and indeed his analysis extends the understanding of that systemic character of technology significantly beyond Gandhis position. He is building on the insights of several modern western thinkers in this regard, Jacques Ellul and above all, Martin Heidegger. These further insights are very much in continuity with Gandhis approach but they do reshape the character of the problem. In the first instance, Grants approach to technology builds on and extends his earlier analysis of the philosophical tradition, in particular that tradition which emphasizes the dominance of will/freedom and culminates in the work of Nietzsche. Indeed, the central effort of his work is to see how it is that modernity (or liberalism) with its affirmation that mans essence is his freedom and technology (as a union of knowing and doing that was previously unimaginable) arise from the same philosophical root:

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Isn't the question to understand exactly how the affirmation that man's essence is his freedom lies at the heart of technology, and how technology as something new leads human beings to define their essence as freedom? What has to be understood is that primal apprehension of being, out of which both liberalism and technology come. It is this which is difficult.21 The point is a crucial one for Grant. Modernity and the technological world-view arise together and are mutually dependent: they explain and justify each other as a new primal apprehension of being. Because of this proximity and absolute claim, he argues, the temptation is always to try to understand technology from within technology as a selfjustifying world-view. If this modernist-technological approach is located historically, however, it can be traced to a particular development within western Christianity (from nominalism through Calvinism to the North American primal). This was a novel and radical development within the western tradition, in which love and knowledge were intentionally separated and held apart (unnaturally, for Grant).22 The result of this led, more or less directly, to its culmination in the Nietzschean claim about absolute freedom noted above. Grants insistent argument is that technology comes from and must be understood as an expression of this philosophical position of liberal modernity. Only against this background can the extent of the claims of technology be grasped and only from this novelty can the systemic claims of technology be appreciated: When we represent technology to ourselves as an array of neutral instruments invented by human beings and under human control, we are expressing a kind of common sense, but it is a common sense from within the very technology we are attempting to represent. The novelness of our novelties is being minimized. We are led to forget that the modern destiny permeates our representations of the world and ourselves. The coming to be of technology has required changes in what we think is good, what we think good is, how we conceive sanity and madness, justice and injustice, rationality and irrationality, beauty and ugliness. (Technology and Justice, 32) Once the root of technology is located in the sweeping and philosophical novelty of this western philosophical tradition, its true character as the destiny of the west can be seen: We have bought a package deal of far more fundamental novelness than simply a set of instruments under our control. It is a destiny which enfolds us in its own conceptions of instrumentality, neutrality and purposiveness (Technology and Justice, 32) What Grant means by the destiny of technology must be explored further but we must first elaborate on this fundamental conception. Grant built his basic understanding of technology from the insight of Martin Heidegger. As a philosophical master of the history of western philosophy and above all of Nietzsche, Heidegger became a critic from within this tradition and recognized the profound narrowing and forgetfulness of being which had occurred within tradition. Searching for the deeper, classical understanding of being in the early Greeks, Heidegger returned to the modern context with a more radical critique of the contemporary model of knowledge as control and of the ever-tightening system of technology. As Grant notes, 19

He is speaking against a view of life in which we are totally summed up in technology, in which all our relations are relations to objects which we summon before us to give their reasons. Hes speaking against everything being controlled and in favour of waiting upon what is. We must not stand before what is in the relation of subjects who want to control objects. We must be open and wait upon it. 23 This classical portrayal of knowledge as contemplation of what isbeing open and waiting upon being--reveals by contrast, the closed and controlled nature of the knowledge of objects in the modern paradigm. This denial of the claim of being upon us is, in turn, what leads to the Nietzschean freedom over against an indifferent world of objects. Through Heideggers insight into waiting upon being and above all through Simone Weils very similar attention, Grant was able to re-imagine a form of knowledge, and a way of being that was distinct from the assumptions of the technological vision. The question waswhat place could be found for such a vision of being and the good, within the dominant paradigm of instrumentality, neutrality and purposiveness? Was it simply a marginal vision for mystics, or could it recover any purchase in the public and social domain? Grants real achievement, one could argue, came in seeing and articulating the systemic character of the technological paradigm and recognizing that it had become a destiny and a fate for the west. The modern paradigm of knowledge, Grant wrote in one of his last books, Technology and Justice, is a fate and not something which we in our freedom can control and that fate is at the core of western civilization (TE, 9). In a certain sense, this is a fait accompli and Grant feels resigned to it; he quotes the Spanish proverb Take what you want, said Godtake it and pay for it (TJ, 9). Grant therefore recognizes the all-determining power of our technological representation of reality: It is easy enough to recognize how much we have encompassed ourselves within our technology...If we have even a slight knowledge of the past we are aware that we can make happen what has never happened before, and we can have done to us what has never before been possible. At a higher level of attention we can recognize that our political and social decisions are interwoven with the pursuit and realization of technological ends (TE, 14-15) Technology not only provides and controls all means Grant recognizes, it has become truly self-perpetuating in the sense that decisions about the future of human life in the political and social realms are interwoven with the pursuit and realization of technological ends. Who, for example, questions any longer the need for power and the infrastructure for it (nuclear or otherwise)? Or, the need for massive arsenals of weapons for defense? Or, the unfettered globalization of the market? Or, the pervasive dependence on the virtual realm of the internet? The point is that we rarely see these systems from the outside, let alone ask ethically about their meaning. All of these are examples, then, where the pursuit and realization of technological ends have trumped the goods of the human being and community or the earth itself and led to a reshaping of the human community in destructive and self-destructive ways. Yet from inside the technological world-view they cannot even be questioned. In that sense, the technology has become our destiny and our fate; it is not just that there are no alternatives, it is that 20

we are no longer capable of thinkingconsistently and on a collective plane--in an alternative mode at all. At the same time we have reshaped our life in the West to accommodate the lifestyle demanded by the technology. The virtual world of the computer, for example, seems to articulate a freedom of choice, an achievement that is at the pinnacle of western technological achievement. Yet as Grant points out the achievement has a cost and a price that must be paid continually and that price is a reshaping of all human domains in technological forms. In answer to the nave comment that the computer does not impose the ways it will be used upon human freedom, Grant carefully enumerates the pre-conditions of the existence of the computer: Obviously the machines have been made from a vast variety of materials, consummately fashioned by a vast apparatus of fashioners. Their existence has required generations of sustained effort by chemists, metallurgists and workers in mines and factories. Beyond these obvious facts, computers have been made within the new science and its mathematics. That science is a particular paradigm of knowledge and, as any paradigm of knowledge, is to be understood as the relation between an aspiration of human thought and the effective conditions of its realization (TE, 21) Beyond this Grant insists: Computers can only exist in societies in which there are large corporate institutions. The ways they can be used are limited to those situations. In this sense computers are not neutral instruments, but instruments which exclude certain forms of community and permit others (TE, 25-26) His conclusion highlights the discrepancy between an apparent freedom and the inability to recognize its price in the form of a human destiny that has been reshaped: The phrase the computer does not impose misleads, because it abstracts the computer from the destiny that was required for its making...it is an instrument from within the destiny which does impose itself upon us, and therefore the computer does impose (TE, 23) Here then we have a paradigm for the essential dilemma of thought and action in an advanced technological society: on the one hand an expansive illusion of freedom to do which obscures from view the fact that this small space of technical freedom has been purchased at the price of a profound dehumanization echoing through many dimensions of social and political life. The cost indeed is a high one, and yet we barely acknowledge it as such any longer; this has become our destiny after all. In a later essay, Faith and Multiversity Grant summarizes the dilemma that remains once this problem of technological fate has been acknowledged: How is possible to think that the modern paradigm is sufficient to the needs of human beings? And yet how is it possible, in the midst of that paradigm and its stranger and wilder consequences, to reach into the truth that the world proceeds 21

from goodness itself? (TE, 70) Grant did find his way to reach into such a truth in the midst of the modern paradigm and its stranger and wilder consequences. In the end, he recognized that the challenge of alienation within advanced technological society is a challenge to the tradition of love which is the forgotten and excluded element in the modern paradigm, a challenge which will allow for its purification.24 Grant took the way of this courageous path toward the purification of love as a rather isolated but not silent individual in the west, something which cannot be explored further here.25 Yet it can be recognized immediately that it very much parallels Gandhis own penitential path of personal transformation toward nonviolence at the end of his life.26 It is also very much a western expression of what Gandhi seems to have meant by the self-transformation of swaraj. It is not yet time to assess Grants impact on the West as a thinker for our fate has not yet fully run its course and there are signs, partially hopeful ones, that we are recognizing again that this paradigm which has lead us to world dominance is not sufficient to the needs of human beings. For the moment we can note how Grant critically developed Gandhis thinking and insights on the dangers of technology as a technique embedded in an already exploitative economy. Technology, as a world-view which reshapes our ideas of instrumentality, neutrality and purposiveness, has, in effect, already transformed our self-understanding and become the destiny of the west. Furthermore, it is a destiny that is becoming globalized with such rapidity that it is already difficult to imagine alternative futures in a global sense. We may be very grateful for Grants attempt to give us a glimpse of the process, of the fate by which we are being carried along--while we can still see it, but we must ask whether that glimpse alone can have transformatory potential. Is it still possible for us to confront our fate consciously, let alone to alter it?

Conclusion Forty-four years ago, George Grant lamented the demise of Canadian nationalism. His lament had to do with nationalism in the traditional sense--namely, the loss of 'identity' in relation to our southern neighbour, but it also went far beyond that, anticipating not only the emergence of "the massive American empire" in its world hegemony but also the "fate of western civilization" as an "advanced technological society. In the face of those larger realities that have come to dominate the West and now the whole world, Grants lament raised the most difficult and most perennial question, 'what is worth doing?' We have attempted to identify the mutually illuminating parallels between the work of Gandhi and that of George Grant with reference to their common position as critical traditionalists. This position, we noted, embodies a strategy of radical dissent to modernity in its form as a global economic, political and socially-engineered civilization; it also is a critical analytic of the civilization. Clearly, these reflections can only be taken as the beginning of a study on this rich dialogue over the elements of nationalism, modernity and technology in the work of the two men. Yet the similarity of

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the paths along which they were led in their articulation of a dissenting vision of the human future begs some questions about the role and meaning of dissent and also about our destiny, as we have just noted. Even if they cannot yet be answered, these questions can bear some sharpening in conclusion. In their work and in their own lives, both Gandhi and Grant laid the focus on the starting point of personal transformation as the only effective point from which to confront the systemic and objectified forms of modern political and social control. Gandhis account of swaraj as a spiritual-ethical-political act is the baseline of this position. It is complemented from the western perspective by Grants account of intelligence transformed by love through a participation in the good. In both cases, as we have seen, this path of self-transformation involves self-suffering and sacrifice, a kind of penitential willingness to endure both marginality and the abusive power of the state and vested interests, in order to articulate and hold onto the truth (in Gandhis sense of satyagraha). Grant no less than Gandhi held this belief in self-denial as a path to truth. Is such a path of internalized, purificatory or penitential, suffering the logical or inevitable outcome of the marginal role of the radical prophet within advanced technological society? If so, what is its potential value in the dimensions of social and political life which both Gandhi and Grant valued so highly? Does it have any more role or impact than the inspiration of the isolated exemplar, the prophet who has stepped outside the paradigm of socially engineered consent to a planned future? Finally, if, as Grant has argued, the nature of system in the modern context is to reshape the paradigm of knowledge from within, then can the truth that is held to in this prophetic way, still be seen? And being seen, could it still inspire those within the whirlpool to change? We may also reflect on the question of the fate of those in the whirlpoolwhich is to say, more and more, effectively all of humanity. Gandhis ultimate hopefulness, we may recall, rested on two beliefsthe ultimate ontological character of love and truth in the world and the human ability to act ethically in response to it. Grant clearly holds a similar belief in the ultimate character of the good and the human ability to reach into that truth, to act on it and live from it. In this sense, it is clear that both Gandhi and Grant continue to hold open a small intellectual space for radical dissent, re-imagination of the future and a hope for the human good. What remains to be asked concerns the power of the good/ahimsa to still effectively disrupt the destiny of humankind. If human history has been set on a course toward a fate that is contrary to the reality of the universe and to the true needs of human beings, by what force can that now be changed, short of self-destruction? Can the good, or the power of being-as-love in which Gandhi trusted have any effective or positive impact in relation to collective human destiny? In what way can itstill, given the constraints imposed by global social order--work with or through human freedom? All of these questions, of course, circle around that same point, identified long ago by Gandhi, the point at which the power of human freedom may still become truly effective action and not simply make-believe: Emancipate your own self. Even that burden is very great. Apply everything to yourself. Nobility of soul consists in realizing that you yourself are India. In your emancipation is the emancipation of India. All else is make-believe. 23

This is still the best answer to the question of George Grant.

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Gandhi and Grant: Their Philosophical Affinities. Ed., Arati Barua. Delhi, Academic Excellence, 2010. 362 pages. 2 In an accompanying review essay, The Liberating Coincidences of Empire, we have identified these three issues as key to the common paradigm held by both Gandhi and Grant. This is explained further below. 3 Gandhi. The Essential Writings, Ed. Judith Brown. Oxford, UP, 2007, 41: The purpose of life is undoubtedly to know oneself. We cannot do it unless we learn to identify ourselves with all that lives. The sum total of that life is God. Hence the necessity of realizing God living within every one of us. The instrument of this knowledge is boundless selfless service. This radical redefinition of oneness of all being through service is possible on the basis of his reading of the Gita. More below. 4 On the first, see his essay Faith and the Multiversity, in George Grant, Technology and Justice, Anansi, Toronto, 1986, 38. On the second see, David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation, Anansi Toronto, 1997, 78: The close connection between Socrates and Christ lies in the fact that Socrates is the primal philosophic teacher of the dependence of what we know on what we love. In the central books of the Republic, Plato uses the image of the sun, the line and the cave to write of the journey of the mind into knowledge. In those images sight is used as a metaphor for love. Our various journeys out of the shadows and imaginings of opinion into the truth depend on the movements of our minds through love into the loveable. 5 See, George Grant, English Speaking Justice, (Anansi, Toronto, 1998). 6 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, with a Postscript, OUP, Delhi 2009, p. 62: The modern world view challenges the traditional faith that greater selfrealization leads to greater understanding of the not-self, including the material world. Modernity includes the faith that the more human beings understand or control the objective not-self including the not-self in the self (the id, the brain processes, social or biological history), the more they control and understand the self (the ego, praxis, consciousness). But modernity in turn had over-corrected for the staleness of the older vision when critical traditionalists like Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi began to emphasize the world views which, through self-control and self-realization, sought to understand and change the world.
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From a letter in 1909 to Manilal, quoted in Hind Swaraj, 94-95, n 194. Anthony Patel, Gandhi. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Centenary Edition. Editors Introduction, (Cambridge, UP, 2009), lxxiv. 9 From A Platitude in George Grant, Technology and Empire, Anansi, Toronto, 1986, p. 141: Any intimations of authentic deprival are precious, because they are the ways through which intimations of good, unthinkable in the public terms, may yet appear to us. The affirmations stands: how can we think deprivation unless the good which we lack is somehow remembered. 10 George Grant in Process, Essays and Conversations. Ed., Larry Schmidt, (Toronto: Anansi 1978), 67. 11 See in detail, Grants essay, The Fate of North America in Technology and Empire. 12 This story is recounted by Anthony J. Parel (himself writing from the University of Calgary in Canada) in his editors introduction to Gandhi. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Centenary Edition. Editors Introduction to 1997 Edition (Cambridge, UP, 2009), xli. 13 For example there is his lengthy critique of parliamentary democracy in Chapter V. But this reflects his belief in the ultimate principle of the conscience of the individual: It is a superstition and an ungodly thing to believe that an act of a majority binds a minority (Hind Swaraj, 90). It is also a recognition of the imbalance of such a civilization focused on rights and neglecting duties: We, therefore, have before us in England the farce of everybody wanting and insisting on his rights, nobody thinking of his duty (Hind Swaraj, 80). 14 George Woodcock, Mohandas Gandhi, NY: Viking, 1971, p. 60: Yet, if Gandhis views of the

Indian past were highly romanticized in their exaggeration of its antimaterialism, there is no doubt that in some other respects he himself was the final and perhaps the best product of what the old India extended into the modern world. In his development to the point of logical extremity of a philosophy of nonviolence he united the insights of ancient Jain holy men and modern Western thinkers 15 See Parels account of the four canonical aims of life (purusharthas) as the basis for Gandhis position in Parel, xxi-xxii. 16 See the quotations in Woodcock, 94 ff. 17 George Grant, Lament for a Nation. The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. 40th Anniversary Edition, 1997. 18 An awareness of the relationship with the indigenous peoples is clearly missing from Grants analysis and this is a serious absence. The evolution of a subsequent history in which the indigenous peoples relationship with the earth becomes a balancing part of the North American primal is indeed one of the most positive historical events in the history of North America 19 Hind Swaraj, 66, n 127:The incessant search for comforts and their multiplication is such an evil, and I make bold to say that the Europeans themselves will have to remodel their outlook, if they are not to perish under the weight of the comforts to which they are becoming slaves. 20 For this and the following see George Grant, English Speaking Justice, Anansi, Toronto, 1998, pp. 75 ff.,: Nietzsche calls Kant the great delayer...He delayed them from knowing that there are no moral facts, but only the moral interpretation of facts, and that these interpretations can be explained as arising from the historical vicissitudes of the instincts. Moral interpretations are what we call our values, and these are what our wills impose upon the facts. 79 21 George Grant in Process. Essays and Conversations, 141. 22 Ibid., 146-7: To understand technology requires that we try to understand what is the true relation between love and reason. Did western Christianity go wrong in its understanding of that relation? The whole attempt to understand modernity cannot be cut off from the attempt to understand both philosophy and Christianity and their relation. The temptation is always to try to understand technology from within technology.
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David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation, Anansi, 1995, Toronto, p. 127. Technology and Justice, 77: The web of necessity which the modern paradigm of knowledge lays before us does not tell us that God is dead, but reminds us of what western Christianity seemed to forget in its moment of pride: how powerful is the necessity which love must cross. Christianity did not produce its own gravedigger, but the means to its own purification. 25 See, The suffering of love: George Grant and Simone Weil, by Wayne Shephard in Two Theological Languages by George Grant and Other Essays in Honor of His WorkGrant, George , by Wayne Whillier (Edward Mellen Press, Toronto, 1990), 29: Grant is in complete agreement with Weil's understanding of a philosopher as one whose entire study is oriented towards salvation, and of philosophy as being concerned with bringing about a transformation in the orientation of the soul with a view towards the assimilation of the soul to God. This transformation, for Grant, is brought about by 'a continual negation of the self, a continual self-transcendence. To philosophize in other words is to practice self-denial; philosophy and detachment...go hand in hand. 26 See Patels comment lxx: His asceticism is a penitential expression of that pain: he wanted to suffer voluntarily in his person what the multitude suffered involuntarily in their personsso that their pain may be brought to a quicker end.