Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939-1970

R. Douglas Francis is a professor of history at the University of
Calgary and co-author of Destinies: Canadian History Since
Confederation.

Philip Massolin has provided an insightful study of the ideas of a group
of Canadian intellectuals who rose to prominence in the post–World War
II era. Included in his study are such luminaries as Harold Innis,
Donald Creighton, Vincent Massey, Hilda Neatby, George P. Grant, W.L.
Morton, Northrop Frye, and Marshall McLuhan. What united them, according
to Massolin, were shared values that included anti-modernism and
conservatism. They all opposed the modern age—defined as an urban,
industrial, technological, and consumer society, based on secular,
material, and scientific values as opposed to a belief in cultural
moralism and social meliorism—as essentially evil and leading Canada
into moral decline, not to mention into the arms of the most modern, and
therefore most evil, of nation-states, the United States. Massolin
marshals his evidence by examining the views of these intellectuals on
such issues as science and technology, trends in higher education,
cultural relativism, mass society, and democracy. In the end, Massolin
argues, this group left no lasting legacy, since their views were swept
aside in the wave of modernity.

Where Massolin’s study becomes problematic is in his attempt to place
these anti-modernists into a tory tradition. He defines such a tradition
as adhering to three notions: a sense of community over individualism; a
sense of “Britishness” over Americanism; and eclecticism by which he
means a random variant of conservative values that included a belief in
“law and order and the institution of the British Crown, opposition to
laissez-faire economics, and the staunchly conservative and
anti-revolutionary aspects of British toryism.” He claims that “the
effort to preserve the ‘good society’ unified the critics of
modernity as much as did pessimistic attitudes towards science and
technology or views on cultural and academic modernization.” Yet this
aspect of his study is not well developed. It is questionable whether
such individuals as Northrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan, and Harold Innis
are conservatives; on some issues, they appear to fit the mould but not
on other issues. Even as staunch a conservative as George P. Grant could
be considered radical in his political thinking, earning him the epithet
“red tory,” where the emphasis could be on either word. And for all
his ranting and raving against the dangers of technology and the
American empire, George Grant could be quite magnanimous in his views of
technology and even of the United States as evident in his article “In
Defence of North America” and his conclusion to Lament for a Nation.

What appears to unite these intellectuals is their fear of the future
in the modern age, as opposed to a common view of the past or a faith in
a tory tradition. In highlighting what these intellectuals had to say
about the modern age, Massolin has made a very valuable contribution to
Canadian intellectual history.