There is a passage in True Patriot Love, Michael Ignatieff’s new book about successive generations of extraordinary men in his mother’s family, in which his uncle, George Grant, comes to terms with being a Canadian.
Grant, who would later become famous in his native country as the author of Lament for a Nation, was thriving at Oxford in the years after the Second World War, but he couldn’t deny the tug of home. “I love England,” Grant told his mother, “and think it is the greatest country on earth—but Canada is in one’s heart—in a way that this country can never be.”
Reading that plain-spoken, almost plaintive, expression of patriotism from so long ago, one has to wonder if Ignatieff ever experienced a similar moment of his own. If he did, it must have hit him when he was much older than his Uncle George was when he realized how obstinately Canadian he was at the core.
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Grant returned from Oxford as a young academic and made his name as Canada’s most public conservative philosopher, bemoaning the rise of American dominance, secularism, and technology, and eulogizing the passing of the old Christian, small-town Canada.
Ignatieff answered the call of home only in late middle age, when he decided to take a stab at Canadian politics, surprising many who had assumed he was settled permanently into an enviable expatriate existence, first in England and then New England, which his success as a writer had won him.
His new book is sub-titled “Four Generations in Search of Canada,” but “Four Generations in Search of a Reason to Be Canadian” would have been better. Like Ignatieff, all three of the forebears he writes about could easily have made it in the British or American big leagues.
The chronicle starts with George Munro Grant, Ignatieff’s great grandfather, an influential early advocate of Confederation, who wrote Ocean to Ocean, the first account of a trip across Canada. His son, Ignatieff’s grandfather, was William Lawson Grant, a formidable educator as principal of Upper Canada College, who exemplified a brimming confidence in Canada’s potential after World War I. Then came George Grant, the unrelenting, disillusioned believer in a Canada he feared had ceased to exist.
Ignatieff proposes patriotism as the sustaining motif in this grand lineage that reaches down to him. On one level this is merely a convenient way to package campaign fodder for a man who, after all, hopes the next federal election will make him prime minister.
Yet there’s more to it than that. Ignatieff’s attempts to defend patriotism as a motivation are more interesting than any stump speech. Without quite saying so, he’s finally addressing the question that certain highly educated, frankly ambitious Canadians have puzzled over ever since he defied their expectations by returning to Canada in 2005: Why give up a Harvard professor’s chair, a regular pulpit in the New York Times Magazine, a loyal British fan base—all for dreary old Ottawa?
Ignatieff makes an attempt at defining the patriot, whose abiding loyalty is to country, by contrasting him with the cosmopolitan, whose attachments don’t run to flags and anthems. This is a risky gambit for him, since it’s bound to remind readers that the pre-politics Ignatieff—public intellectual, best-selling author, novelist and screenwriter—epitomized the latter category. “The best argument on the patriotic side is that cosmopolitan attachments depend upon the security that countries provide,” he writes. “Anyone who doesn’t think he needs a country, anyone who believes they are beyond the local attachments of the national state, ought to visit a refugee camp.”
Ignatieff has indeed visited some. So perhaps this particular cosmopolitan came to realize that his passport mattered only when he saw first-hand what it meant to be stateless in a hard world. It’s patriotism as a self-preservation calculation. However, Ignatieff also lays claim to a warmer sentiment. “With love of country, you have to keep it simple,” he asserts. “You love what you love, and that’s good enough for you.”
Now that sounds more like a politician with an instinct for the lowest common voting denominator. But don’t worry—that breezily reductive voice takes over True Patriot Love only in spurts. For the most part, this book carries enough of the subtlety of Ignatieff’s writing from before he became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada to hold a reader’s attention. His evidently genuine fascination with his family tree elevates the narrative.
The steady current that runs through the book is the way the Grant men are always trying to imagine a Canada worthy of their own impressive capacities. If this were just a matter of personal aspiration playing out, the pursuit might soon grow tedious. But there’s something more universal at issue here: the question of whether public life can be made to matter as much in a second-tier country like Canada as in a first-tier cosmopolitan centre.
It’s a doubt that should resonate for anyone who has had second thoughts about settling for, say, Toronto rather than New York, or Bonn rather than Berlin, or maybe even Sydney rather than Shanghai. Anyone who wonders why Ignatieff came back.
