George Grant and Love: A Comment on Ian Box's “George Grant and the Embrace of Technology”

Abstract

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke laments the death of the age of chivalry, with all its resonances of courtly love and the Holy Grail, and heralds the triumph of the sophisters, calculators and economists. Burke was one of the few who both understood and regretted the portentous changes that were occurring in the European political order. Nonetheless, Burke saw clearly that love (or, to use a word charged with Platonic significance, the erotic) was ceasing to be an important political force, and that a narrow rationality was replacing it. At the same time as the man of practical wisdom was announcing the tragic death of the old order, his great contemporary Mozart was preserving in his sublime music all that this order had, at its best, embodied.' But Burke was right, and in the politics and art of the succeeding two centuries2 love was increasingly trivialized to the point where it has become simply an emotion; for Mozart it had been, in contrast, the central fact of human existence. Grant's attempt to retard, arrest and reverse the triumph of the calculators lies at the heart of everything that he has written. He is, of our contemporaries, the supreme lover, the consummate erotic man. As with Mozart, love is not merely a theme in his work, it is the central subject. Lament for a Nation is revealed as a book about love in its