By Francis X. Maier .

Jacques Ellul, the French Protestant philosopher, sociologist, and theologian, famously argued that technology evolves autonomously. In effect, technology shapes society more than society shapes technology. He warned that humans become servants to efficiency and technical progress. Ellul also worried that technology undermines human freedom by promoting uniformity and reducing moral choices. Ultimately, he was concerned that technology becomes an end in itself, overshadowing human values.

In his book English Speaking Justice, the Canadian political philosopher George Parkin Grant critiqued modern liberalism and technological society along similar lines. He argued that even by its own standards, liberal society is unjust. He focused on how technology and liberal values shape our concepts of justice, and he examined how those values often undermine community and ethical life. In essence, he suggested that the pursuit of individual rights and technological progress often leads to a loss of deeper moral values.

Grant is the man I want to talk about this week. But here's a confession: With a few minor tweaks from me, AI wrote both of the previous two paragraphs. And it got the factual content therein more or less right, without the burden of my having to think about any of it. The program I used is Perplexity. I had a very pleasant editorial meeting with its algorithms, and Perplexity itself generously suggested that Ellul and Grant "might have mixed feelings" about my using it as a shortcut for avoiding any actual work. Which implies that machines, too, can be ironic. More on that in a moment.

Meanwhile, back to Grant. Summer is typically a time for rest and light reading. Yet for anyone more inclined to a challenge - for anyone seriously interested in understanding how our civilization got where it is - the work of George Parkin Grant (1918-1988) is an invaluable resource. He was a keen historian, an engaging writer, and a compelling cultural analyst.

Grant was that peculiarly Canadian creature (now extinct) known as a Red Tory. A committed Christian, he was morally and culturally "conservative." In other words, he actually believed what he claimed to believe, and allowed a Biblically-rooted faith to inform his public life. He opposed both euthanasia and abortion, and was a strong defender of Canadian national identity and its distinct history and culture in the face of American continental dominance. He was also a fierce critic of both the Vietnam War and the damage inflicted on the human spirit by an overconfident and idolatrous cult of technological progress.

In his lecture "Temporality and Technological Man" (collected here), Grant noted: "When Marx wrote of changing the world, he still believed that changing was not an end in itself, but the means to a future society conducive to the good life for all. . . .For all his denial of past [including Biblical] thought, he retained from that past the central truth about human beings - namely that there is, in man, a given humanness that it is our purpose to fulfill."

In contrast, Grant argued, today's secularized, technology-centric culture treats the human will as the only real source of meaning, and change itself as the ongoing proof of that meaning. It implicitly denies any end state, higher purpose, or inherent nature to our species. And this, in turn, destroys human dignity in the name of exalting it, by providing material benefits that only serve as temporary anesthetics for a deeper emptiness.

In his essay "Religion and the State" (collected here), Grant asked

Has the secular state, and the religion of progress that dominates its education, led to widespread happiness in North America in the last forty years? How can we escape the fact that the necessary end product of the religion of progress is not hope, but a society of existentialists who know themselves in their own self-consciousness, but know the world entirely as despair? In other words, whe...