Customer Reviews

Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Carleton Library Series)

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In the light of September 11th, many Americans are asking the rhetorical question 'Why do they hate us so?' This essay from 1965 brilliantly outlines the forces, in modern liberalism, that are antagonistic to local culture. The lament that it describes is a lament for a local nationalism that has been abandoned by its population in favor for the attractions of a global culture based on American values. These American values are the values of the modern culture, in which traditional values which provide meaning to life are abandoned for the ease which modern technology can bring. Traditional values which provided meaning but also constraints to human life and action are being abandoned according the this book view for a shallow notion of human freedom. This shallow freedom is the freedom to enjoy temporary conveniences at the expense of the ability to live life in compatibility with eternal principles. What meaning that modern life can provide are rationalizations of self-indulgence which will be adjusted to fit the needs of technology as it evolves in its self-defined way.

The book describes how Canadians have abandoned their traditional 'conservative' values in favor of the easy continentalist option of acquiring American wealth by accepting American values. The author describes how 1960s Gaullism in France was a reaction to the same forces. The same observations can be made today about the knee-jerk anti-Americanism in Europe and France in particular that is paradoxically based on the inherent attractiveness of American values. The American culture is becoming the world culture. It is dispossessing all other cultures that it encounters. This provokes a reaction among 'conservative' (which includes the globalization protestors who in this book's terms are conservative in respect to culture although they would see themselves as anarchistic, radical etc.) who fear that the cultures that they value are going to be lost to the forces of technic- `the one best way'.

I cannot do justice to this book which links these ideas into the flow of Western ideas. It shows the conflicts that of these differing sets f ideas in the works of philosophers and theologians. it does so in a manner that is very accessible to the general reader but has also provided a basis for research by professional philosopher's, political scientists etc. for the 37years since it was published.

This book is on a par with Jacques Ellul's 'The Technological Society.' It is a book that will be remembered and studied for hundreds of years. It uses as its starting point the issue of Canadian nationalism but its implications are universal. I wish that I could give it six stars.

This is an extraordinary book dealing with the pervasiveness of U.S. culture in Canada, and how Canadians have seemingly allowed their own culture and politics to be subsumed into American versions. Although written from a small-c conservative point of view, and in the 1960s, it remains an extraordinary book that will intrigue any person interested in Canada and US relations. In addition, Mr. Grant is a gifted writer; his fluent use of words in a serious political work such as this one, only accentuates his poetic capabilites.