Technology and Nationalism (review)

Marco Adria teaches communications and technology at the University of Alberta and has written an interesting book on his subject from the perspective of his region. After surveying the academic literature on nationalism, Adria focuses on the missile crisis of 1962, when the Diefenbaker government refused to acquiesce in the demand of the Kennedy government to have unlimited access for American bombers armed with nuclear weapons to fly over Canadian airspace during the Cuban Missile Crisis. George Grant’s defence of Diefenbaker, coupled with his opposition to the Vietnam War, occasioned Grant’s Lament for a Nation, which stimulated thought about the meaning and possibility of nationalism in Canada. Adria does not discuss Grant’s view that liberalism is the doctrine most suitable to technological and imperial expansion but cites Ramsay Cook and Jill Vickers saying that Grant’s defence of Diefenbaker was really a defence of ‘Anglo-Saxon civilization’ and omits Grant’s central criticism of Diefenbaker – namely, that ‘Canada was predicated on the rights of nations as well as on the rights of individuals’ and that Diefenbaker’s failure to see this fact about the multinational state of Canada ‘showed himself to be a liberal rather than a conservative.’ To be sure, Grant’s conservatism was the antithesis of the present government, formed from the right-wing Albertan Reform and Canadian Alliance parties. Grant was opposed to the National Energy Policy providing cheaper energy to central Canadians at the expense of Albertans, but the economic nationalism of the Trudeau years perhaps had its source in the Liberal Party being stung by Grant’s claim that it had transformed Canada into a branch plant of the United States. Readers might consult Darin Barney’s Prometheus Wired (2000), a source surprisingly absent in Adria’s bibliography, to find out why Grant accepted Heidegger’s view we are used by technology – used up as human resources, like natural resources – not independent of technology to use it as we will. Adria’s view that ‘Heidegger’s philosophic hermeneutics was for Grant a means through which the timeless truths and values of the world could be viewed’ is preposterous, as is manifest in Dennis Lee’s ‘Grant’s Impasse’ in By Loving Our Own (1990). Lee demonstrated why Grant found Heidegger’s thorough historicism so powerful that any access to eternity was problematic, and both Heidegger and Grant thought that to refer to art, philosophy, and religion as values is ‘subjectivizing’ of what is worthy of our attention and robs the highest of human endeavours of their dignity.

Adria has interesting chapters on the tension between regionalism and nationalism in Canada and on the role of radio in developing national and regional identities. Albertans have an identity which is distinctive but is not national, like that of the Québécois. He compares Ned Corbett’s promotion of both an educated citizenry and Canadian nationalism in CKUA in Alberta and the CBC with William Aberhart’s broadcasting of his Prophetic Bible Institute, which promoted Social Credit and Albertans’ awareness that they were ripped off by eastern financial institutions. Although Adria distinguishes deliberative democracy and an educative function of radio and television from the packaging of prejudices to please an audience that does not want to be provoked to thought (as talk radio or in Fox or Sun News), and although he recognizes that Corbett was contemptuous of Aberhart’s bombast, Adria finds much in common between Corbett’s and Aberhart’s methods and objectives.

Adria concludes with a stimulating chapter on the Internet and the future. He sees ‘the hyperpluralistic and fragmented’ character of Internet technologies as countering nationalism with both global and local concerns, linking new Canadians with the cultures of their homelands and the diaspora communities around the world, and thus thinks the Internet particularly suits the Canadian polity with the divergent attachments and loyalties of its citizens. Canada is an increasingly non-violent and tolerant society. As one watches the youth texting one another across dinner tables, one imagines that, for them, nothing...