George Parkin Grant (1918-1988)As every Canadian should know, the Supreme Court’s Morgentaler decision twenty years ago today struck down as unconstitutional the then-existing Criminal Code abortion law.  Since then, Canada has had no legislation regulating abortion beyond that applicable to any surgical procedure.  Doctors are free to perform abortions up until the time of birth.  (That no Canadian doctors are willing to do late-term abortions does not alter the fact that no legal impediment exists.)

Since the Morgentaler decision, Canada has, as David Warren puts it, "the world's most radical abortion regime".

The title of my post comes from a 1988 essay by Canadian philosopher and professor George Parkin Grant (at right), written in reaction to the Supreme Court ruling.  As we have seen in the intervening twenty years, what Dr Grant wrote is truer than ever today.

The Triumph of the Will
George Grant

The decision of the Supreme Court concerning abortion could be seen as comedy – if it did not concern the slaughter of the young. Any laughter is quelled by a sense of desolation for our country. Yet the comedy too must be looked at to understand our political institutions. The comedy arises from the fact that the majority of the judges used the language of North American liberalism to say "yes" to the very core of fascist thought – the triumph of the will. Their decision is a good example of Huey Long's wise dictum: "When fascism comes to America it will come in the name of democracy." The court says yes to those who claim the right to mastery over their own bodies, even if that mastery includes the killing of other human beings.

Indeed, the advocates of abortion have shown since the decision how much they are believers in the triumph of the will, when they "demand" that the government "must" immediately guarantee access and payment for all abortions. That is, the state must pay for these processes, even when they are not medically necessary. The triumph of the will realises itself when its advocates understand that the individual will is only liberated to its full power when it can dominate the state.

As a political philosopher and professor of political science, Dr Grant does not use the word "fascist" lightly.  To say that the fundamental principle of fascism is the triumph of the will raises the question: Exactly what does "will" mean in this context?

In Christian thought, will meant "appropriate choosing by rational souls", but in modern thought, influenced by technology, it means something quite different: "mastery of ourselves and the world".

Nietzsche understood this.  "Life itself is the will to power", he wrote, meaning, says Grant, that

will is power itself, not something external to power. What makes Nietzsche such a pivotal thinker in the West is that he redefined "will" to make it consonant with modern science. "Will" comes to mean in modernity that power over ourselves and everything else which is itself the very enhancement of life, or, call it if you will, "quality of life." Truth, beauty, and goodness have become simply subservient to it.

Grant is not saying that those who support abortion on demand are advocates of fascism.  He is saying that this is what politics becomes when large and powerful groups find meaning in getting what they want most deeply at all costs.  The weak and powerless are the losers.  Liberalism itself is turned against justice.

"The Triumph of the Will" was first published in The Issue is Life: a Christian Response to Abortion in Canada (1988), ed. Denyse O'Leary, now out of print.  It has been re-printed in The George Grant Reader.  Unfortunately, the full text does not appear to be available online.

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