“Weber was brilliantly right to place [Benjamin] Franklin near the center of his account of English-speaking Protestantism. Incomparably less philosophic than Locke, Franklin illustrates the influence back from Protestantism into the ideas of the new worldly modernity. He may have had contempt for revelation in his sensual utilitarianism, but the public virtues he advocates are unthinkable outside a Protestant ethos. The practical drive of his science . . . takes one quite outside the traditionally contemplative roots of European science, into the world of Edison and research grants. In 1968 Billy Graham at the Republican Convention could in full confidence use Franklin in his thanksgiving for what the Christian God had done for America.

“The fact that such men have so often been the shock troops of the English-speaking world’s mastery of human and non-human nature lay not simply in the absence of a doctrine of nature into which vacuum came the Hobbesian account of nature (so that when revelation was gone all that was left was that account) but also in the positive content of their extraordinary form of Christianity. The absence of natural theology and liturgical comforts left the lonely soul face to face with the transcendent (and therefore elusive) will of God. This will had to be sought and served not through our contemplations but directly through our practice. From the solitude and uncertainty of that position came the responsibility which could find no rest. That unappeasable responsibility gave an extraordinary sense of the self as radical freedom so paradoxically experienced within the predestinarian theological context. The external world was unimportant and indeterminate stuff (even when it was our own bodies) as compared with the soul’s ambiguous encounter with the transcendent. What did the body matter; it was an instrument to be brought into submission so that it could serve this restless righteousness. Where the ordinary Catholic might restrain the body within a corporatively ordained tradition of a liturgy rhythmic in its changes between control and release, the Protestant had solitary responsibility all the time to impose the restraint. When one contemplates the conquest of nature by technology, one must remember that that conquest had to include our own bodies. Calvinism provided the determined and organized men and women who could rule the mastered world. The punishment they inflicted on non-human nature, they had first inflicted on themselves.

“Now when from that primal has come forth what is present before us; when the victory over the land leaves most of us in metropoloi where widely spread consumption vies with confusion and squalor; when the emancipation of greed turns out from its victories on this continent to feed imperially on the resources of the world; when those resources cushion an immense majority who think they are free in pluralism, but in fact live in a monistic vulgarity in which nobility and wisdom have been exchanged for a pale belief in progress, alternating with boredom and weariness of spirit; when the disciplined among us drive to an unlimited technological future, in which technical reason has become so universal that it has closed down on openness and awe, questioning and listening; when Protestant subjectivity remains authentic only where it is least appropriate, in the moodiness of our art and sexuality, and where public religion has become an unimportant litany of objectified self-righteousness necessary for the more anal of our managers; one must remember now the hope, the stringency, and the nobility of the primal encounter. The land was almost indomitable. The intense seasons of the continental heartland needed a people who whatever else were not flaccid. And these people not only forced commodities from the land, but built public and private institutions of freedom and flexibility and endurance. Even when we fear General Motors or ridicule our immersion in the means of mobility, we must not forget that the gasoline engine was a need-filled fate for those who had to live in such winters and across such distances. The Marxists who have described the conquest of the continent as an example of capitalist rape miss the substance of those events, as an incarnation of hope and equality which the settlers had not found in Europe. Whatever the vulgarity of mass industrialism, however empty our talk of democracy, it must not be forgotten that in that primal there was the expectation of a new independence in which each would be free for self-legislation, and for communal legislation. Despite the exclusion of the African, despite the struggles of the later immigrant groups, the faith and institutions of that primal encounter were great enough to bring into themselves countless alien traditions and make these loyal to that spirit. To know that parents had to force the instincts of their children to the service of pioneering control; to have seen the pained and unrelenting faces of the women; to know, even in one’s flesh and dreams, the results of generations of the mechanizing of the body; to see all around one the excesses and follies now necessary to people who can win back the body only through sexuality, must not be to forget what was necessary and what was heroic in that conquest.

“Now when Calvinism and the pioneering movement have both gone, that primal still shapes us. It shapes us above all as the omnipresence of that practicality which trusts in technology to create the rationalized kingdom of man. Other men, communists and national socialists, have also seen that now is the moment when man is at last master of the planet, but our origins have left us with a driving practical optimism which fitted us to welcome an unlimited modernity. We have had a practical optimism which had discarded awe and was able to hold back anguish and so produce those crisp rationalized managers, who are the first necessity of the kingdom of man. Those uncontemplative, and unflinching wills, without which technological society cannot exist, were shaped from the crucible of pioneering Protestant liberalism. And still among many, secularized Christianity maintains itself in the rhetoric of goodwill and democratic possibilities and in the belief that universal technical education can be kind, etcetera, etcetera. Santayana’s remark that there is a difference between Catholic and Protestant atheism applies equally to liberalism; ours is filled with the remnential echoes of Calvinism. Our belief in progress may not be as religiously defined as the Marxist, but it has a freedom and flexibility about it which puts nothing theoretical in the way of our drive toward it (or in other words as the clever now say, it is the end of ideology). In short our very primal allowed us to give open welcome to the core of the twentieth century — the unlimited mastery of men by men.”

— from George Parkin Grant, “In Defence of North America,” in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (House of Anansi, 1969)
A pdf copy of the essay may be downloaded here.

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