Grant wrote Lament for a Nation in anger at the fall of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was defeated in his re-election bid due to backlash over his refusal to accept US nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. According to Grant, Diefenbaker’s “actions turned the ruling class into a pack howling for his blood.” It was no ordinary political defeat, in Grant’s view. He believed that it signaled the end of Canada as a distinct political and moral project.   

But the lasting significance of Lament for a Nation rests not with its analysis of the forces that orchestrated Diefenbaker’s downfall — “the concentrated wrath of the established classes” — nor even with the author’s prognosis that Canada was fated to disappear, if not formally annexed by its neighbor, then so culturally and economically integrated with the United States as to lose its distinct identity. What has caused it to retain its relevance for more than half a century is what emerges in its later chapters, as it shifts gears from parliamentary drama to political philosophy and Canada’s fate becomes a case study in a much larger story about the modern world’s direction of travel.

Born in Toronto in 1918, Grant was destined to become one of Canada’s best-known philosophers, his reputation built largely on the fame of Lament for a Nation. He was educated at Oxford and served as an air-raid warden during World War II. Reeling from the horrors of war, he was led to Christianity by a profound religious experience in the English countryside. After earning his doctorate, he returned to Canada to begin his academic career as a self-described Christian Platonist, persuaded that it was the task of philosophy to analyze modern civilization from the perspective of the eternal moral order that our modern dynamism obscured.

When the Diefenbaker debacle unfolded in the summer of 1963, Grant was teaching philosophy and religion at McMaster University in Ontario. He was in the midst of research on the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, about whom he planned to write a book. Grant was so incensed by how the “wealthy and clever” Canadian elites had capitulated to American pressure that he put aside that never-completed Weil book to turn his full attention to writing Lament for a Nation. But one of the central themes of Weil’s mature thought became the pivot of his argument.

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For Weil, a clear-eyed view of the world must recognize the distance between necessity and the good. Even if certain historical events are necessary, she argued, that doesn’t make them good. Grant took this to repudiate a crucial tenet of modern progressivism: the belief that the forces driving history — including those forces driving Canada ever more tightly into the orbit of the United States — inevitably carry civilization toward higher stages of development. “If history is the final court of appeal,” Grant wrote, “force is the final argument.”

This point mattered to Grant because he believed the Diefenbaker affair had revealed the necessity of Canada’s disappearance, due to “the impossibility of building a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth.” Yet widening his gaze beyond the particularities of Canadian politics to examine the deeper currents of Western civilization, Grant concluded that Canada’s fate was sealed by the inner logic of modernity itself.

Around the time of Diefenbaker’s defeat, Grant wrote a major essay on the then-recent debate between the philosophers Leo Strauss and Alexander Kojève on ancient and modern tyranny. Strauss’s argument was another major philosophical influence on Lament for a Nation. Strauss dreaded the advent of what he took to be the ultimate modern tyranny, which he, borrowing Kojève’s language, called the universal and homogeneous state. This term names what Grant took to be the true end of modern politics, in both its Marxist and liberal guises.

This state is universal because it aims at a single, unified global order that renders international conflict impossible. It is homogeneous because all people enjoy formal equality, are essentially interchangeable, and serve a common purpose: the limitless expansion of human power over nature, including human nature. In Lament for a Nation, Grant argued that this state is the highest object of striving for the modern project. The United States occupies a central place in his analysis. As the nation most committed to open-ended progress, it is the “spearhead” of the universal and homogeneous state.

Western capitalism, in Grant’s view, was much more “progressive” than Marxism, since the followers of Marx still assume that human flourishing has a determinate shape that technological progress ought to serve. Liberal capitalism, in contrast, tolerates no checks on technological dynamism, which is why Grant anticipated the eventual victory of the West in the Cold War. Since liberalism holds the human essence to be our freedom to remake both the world and ourselves, any doctrine that imposes limits is rejected.

The universal and homogeneous state promises to deliver us from suffering, scarcity, and grueling toil through technological science. Yet its promise is double-edged, warns Grant, for a civilization whose highest purpose is technological mastery must culminate in global tyranny.

Local communities are among the first casualties. “Liberalism,” he observed, “is the ideological means whereby indigenous cultures are homogenized.” Along with these cultures goes the possibility of genuine excellence. Authentic nobility, he believed, can flourish only in societies shaped by traditions that orient us toward something higher than ourselves, but liberalism recognizes nothing higher than the human will.

Even so, the much-vaunted freedom liberalism promises can be exercised by most of us only in the private sphere. “Nobody minds very much if we prefer women or dogs or boys,” Grant wrote, “as long as we cause no public inconvenience.” But permissiveness in private is coupled with coercive uniformity in public, as politics in the classical sense disappears and debate over competing goods gives way to impersonal administration. Questions that once required political judgment are reclassified as technical problems to be solved by experts.

Grant couldn’t have known the particulars, but the logic is familiar to us from the Covid lockdowns. Genuinely political questions — such as how to weigh the protection of the vulnerable against the harm done to school children, community life, and people’s livelihoods — were displaced by the injunction to “listen to the science.” Disagreement was pathologized, debate was suppressed, and administration triumphed over politics.

Grant also foresaw that the project of mastery would inevitably turn inward, as modern science no longer confines itself to the transformation of non-human nature. It seeks control of heredity, psychology, and social life itself. Advances in biochemistry and the behavioral sciences give administrators a “prodigious power to universalize and homogenize.”

Long before the term “transhumanism” became fashionable, Grant foresaw a world in which human nature becomes raw material, as we “transcend ordinary humanity and produce creatures half flesh and half metal.” His argument dovetails with C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, another work that influenced him: the conquest of nature ends in the conquest of some human beings by others and ultimately in the abolition of the human.

Grant’s conclusion was bleak: conservatism is impossible in the modern age. Conservatism once meant guarding goods not subject to perpetual change — virtue, tradition, and a stable account of human nature. But technological civilization depends on continuous upheaval. Those who call themselves conservatives cannot govern without allying themselves with the very forces that dissolve what they claim to defend. Any hope they may have of political influence requires them to genuflect before a technological project that “produces such a dynamic society that it is impossible to conserve anything for long.”

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Given Grant’s somber pronouncement of the death of Canada, it’s ironic that the publication of Lament for a Nation in 1965 sparked an intense revival of nationalist sentiment. For a while, he became a darling of these new nationalists. Yet Grant disclaimed such a motive for his book. He insisted that it was not a political tract, but a work of philosophy, an attempt to understand the present in the light of truths that our present moment occludes. He later expressed regret that it “was written too much from anger and too little from irony.”

That Lament for a Nation still unsettles readers 60 years on is a measure of Grant’s prescience about the society he saw taking shape even then. The specific quarrels he anatomized have faded from memory, but the logic he uncovered has only intensified. The universal and homogeneous state is no longer merely a philosophical hypothesis. We encounter evidence of its coming to be at every turn.

Grant’s diagnosis is uncannily contemporary. In an era of global platforms, algorithmic governance, transhumanist visions, and a polarized but uniformly liberal political class, his account clarifies why our debates feel increasingly superficial. We conduct our arguments within a horizon that treats technological expansion as destiny, expert administration as neutral, and dissent as irrational. Lament for a Nation endures because the world it diagnosed has only become more fully realized in the intervening decades.

Yet Grant no longer stands quite as alone as he did in 1965. As the modern project he described becomes more fully realized, its costs become harder to ignore. There are signs of a renewed unease with a world that recognizes no goods beyond limitless technological expansion and the libertine possibilities it enables. There are revolts in the name of what has been lost.

Ironically, as the United States grows more nationalistic, Canada has moved the other way, its political identity defined by loyalty to the globalist order that Washington now challenges. Does that mean that the United States has ceased to be, in Grant’s phrase, the “spearhead” of the progressive modern project? Or has that project merely changed its institutional form, as the universal and homogeneous state now advances through the private power of corporate interests, based in the United States but with transnational reach, shaping speech, commerce, and social life with minimal public accountability?

No longer can the questions that Lament for a Nation presses upon us be dismissed as reactionary grumblings from a grumpy philosopher nostalgic for a vanished past. They articulate the disquiet felt by growing numbers of us as we survey the world around us.

But though there has never been a human culture that is anything but flawed, all lasting cultures in history have been rooted. That is to say, they have been tied down by, and to, things more solid, timeless and lasting than the day-to-day processes of their functioning, or the personal desires of the individuals who inhabit them. Some of those solid things are human creations: cultural traditions, a sense of lineage and ancestry, ceremonies designed for worship or initiation. Others are non-human: the natural world in which those cultures dwell, or the divine force that they worship or communicate with in some form.

We need these roots. We need a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than us, across both space and time, and we underestimate that need at our peril. In her book The Need for Roots, written in 1943, the French philosopher and reluctant mystic Simone Weil puts the case like this:

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future.”

Weil was writing from exile in England, as her homeland was still under Nazi occupation. She saw National Socialism’s perversion of the notion of rootedness, and the evil that was being done with it. But unlike many intellectuals of the Left, the Nazis’ racial tyranny did not lead her to reject the human need for roots in favour of some universalist flavour of “global justice.” She saw that notion for what it was: the same flavour of perfectionism that was leading the USSR to roll out a tyranny that matched that of fascism, right down to the barbed wire that surrounded the camps designated for those who did not fit into the model.

Weil saw beyond: when she looked at Hitler and Stalin, she saw two tyrants leading nations that had already been uprooted — by the industrial revolution, by Bolshevism, by the Great War, by the depression, by the wider process of modernity. Both men promised a return to, or a forward march towards, security, power and meaning through the imposition of a totalitarian ideology which they claimed would speak for the masses. Both delivered hell instead.

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Weil’s book was commissioned by the Free French in London, led by Charles de Gaulle. It was intended to be a manifesto for the renewal of France, and Europe, after the scourge of Nazism. Her prescription was radical. Europeans, she said, had been uprooted by industry, by the state and by an aggressive form of pseudo-Christianity (Weil was a sometimes reluctant Christian, but was scathing about official forms of the faith which had, she said, in most cases aligned themselves with “the interests of those who exploit the people.”)

Both state nationalism and state socialism were con tricks, according to Weil: exploiters of the people posing as their liberators. The “totalitarian idol” of grand world-saving ideologies such as communism and fascism was the scourge of the twentieth century. The whole game had to be junked, the terms redefined: “The only punishment capable of punishing Hitler, and deterring little boys thirsting for greatness in coming centuries from following his example,” she wrote, “is such a total transformation of the meaning attached to greatness that he should thereby be excluded from it.”

“A transformation of the meaning attached to greatness”: perhaps this has always been the task, and perhaps it has always been urgent. But it certainly is now. Our idols today are economic conquest, unending “growth” built on turning all life into “resources” for human consumption, scientism disguised as objective inquiry, manic forward-motion, and the same old quest for perfectibility. Charles de Gaulle, when he returned to France victorious, was an effective competitor in this game. He never read the book that Weil aimed at him.

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What did Weil mean by this “transformation”? Perhaps the answer explains why she is not as widely read as she should be. Her attachment was to the eternal things, and she could never be boxed in. She wrote in praise of God, tradition, roots, peoples and culture; but also of justice, freedom of speech and thought, honour and equality. She could be equally scathing about fascism, communism, established religion, liberal elites, capitalism and mass education.

One minute she is incinerating the “uprooted intellectuals obsessed with progress” who dominated the cultural elite of her time (and who have entirely conquered ours), assailing the Left for its contempt of the peasantry or asserting that “of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital … than love of the past.” But just when you think you’re dealing with a conservative Defender of the West, you read something like this:

“For centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. If in certain respects there has been, nevertheless, progress during this period, it is not because of this frenzy but in spite of it, under the impulse of what little of the past remained alive.“

Weil wasn’t wrong. We in the West invented this thing called modernity, and then we took it out into the world, whether the world wanted it or not. Once we called this process the White Man’s Burden, and exported it with dreadnoughts. Now we call it development, and export it via World Bank loans and the War on Terror.

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But — and here is the point so often missed, especially by the “progressives” currently leading the charge in the culture wars — before we could eat the world, we first had to eat ourselves. Our states and economic elites had to dispossess their own people before they could venture out to dispossess others. The ordinary folk of the “developed” West were the prototype; the guinea pigs in a giant global experiment. Now we find ourselves rootless, rudderless, unmoored in a great sea of chaos; angry, confused, shouting at the world and each other.

Furthermore, this process accelerates under its own steam, as Weil explained, because “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others”. The more we are pulled, or pushed, away from our cultures, traditions and places — if we had them in the first place — the more we take that restlessness out with us into the world. If you have ever wondered why it is de rigueur amongst Western cultural elites to demonise roots and glorify movement, to downplay cohesion and talk up diversity, to deny links with the past and strike out instead for a future that never quite arrives, consider this: they are the children of globalised capitalism, and the inheritors of the unsettling of the West, and they have transformed that rootlessness into an ideology. They — we — are both perpetrators and victims of a Great Unsettling.

This is not to say that “Western” people alone are responsible for the rolling destruction of culture and nature that is overwhelming the world. We may have set the ball rolling, but the culture of uprooting is global now, and was when Weil was writing. You can see it everywhere you care to look. India has been uprooting its adivasi (tribal) people systemically since independence; its government is currently trying to undermine the power and agency of the peasant farmers of the Punjab, and have triggered a rural rebellion by doing so. The Chinese state is increasingly looking like the most efficient machine ever invented for uprooting, resettling and controlling mass populations. The Indonesian state is systematically unsettling the tribal people of West Papua, in cahoots with a cluster of multinational corporations. African governments are corralling the last of the San people. This is what states do, all over the world. It’s the ancient human game of power and control, turbo-charged with fossil fuels and digital surveillance technology.

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For the past several centuries, this intersection of financial power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies has constituted an ongoing war against roots and against limits. The momentum of the “global economy” is always forward: it demolishes borders and boundaries, traditions and cultures, languages and ways of seeing wherever it goes, and it will not stop until the world has been entirely remade. Record numbers of people are on the move as a result, and as the population increases and climate change bites, those numbers will rise everywhere, churning cultures and nations into entirely new shapes — or, worse, no shapes at all — with all the consequent turmoil and conflict. Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer.

Plenty of people, of course, are quite happy with all of this, and have no time for Romantic Luddites like me when we lament it. Even we Romantic Luddites are here on the internet, lamenting, so perhaps the last laugh is on us. But we are, I think, desperately in need of real culture. We want to go home again, but if we even know where home is to be found, we see that we can’t return. And so a void is created, and into the void rush monsters: toxic imitations of our lost roots. Identity politics, newly rigid racial categories, extreme nationalisms, intolerant strains of religion, endlessly multiplying genders and “identities” constructed online with no reference to reality. The mono-ethnic identitarianism of the far Right or the diversity identitarianism of the far Left: take your pick according to your predilections and fears. But these fake roots can never replace the real thing and the result is an orgy of anger, iconoclasm and rising bile. Meanwhile, the machine of techno-modernity pushes on, relentless.

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In all the time I have spent with people who live in genuinely rooted cultures — rooted in time, place and spirit — whether in the west of Ireland or West Papua, I’ve generally been struck by two things. One is that rooted people are harder to control. The industrial revolution could not have happened without the enclosure of land, and the destruction of the peasantry and the artisan class. People with their feet on the ground are less easily swayed by the currents of politics, or by the fashions of urban ideologues or academic theorists.

The second observation is that people don’t tend to talk much about their “identity” — or even think about it — unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, it seems, the more you have probably lost. The range of freewheeling, self-curated “identities” thrown up by the current “culture war” shows that we are already a long way down the road that leads away from genuine culture.

When a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. Our current cultural — and spiritual — crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not dying — it is already dead. We turned away from a mythic, rooted understanding of the world, and turned away from the divine, in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands. Now, we are living in a time of consequences. Some day soon, we are going to have to look up and begin searching for what we have lost. I have a feeling that this process has already begun.

A longer version of this essay originally appeared at The Abbey of Misrule.