Douglas V. LePan was a professor of literature and the principal of University College at the University of Toronto. He was also a poet, novelist, and diplomat. He studied at the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and Oxford University. During the Second World War, he served at the Canadian High Commission in London and then in the Canadian army in Italy. Prior to his academic career, LePan held numerous posts in the Department of External Affairs from 1946 to 1959, and is one of few Canadians to receive the Governor General’s Literary Award in both poetry and fiction. His novel, The Deserter, based on his experiences during the Second World War, won in 1954 and his book of poetry, The Net and the Sword, won in 1953. Before working at the University of Toronto, he was professor of English at Queen’s University. In 1998, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. His numerous other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lorne Pierce Medal of the Royal Society of Canada, and numerous honorary degrees. Later in life, LePan came out as a gay man.
In his lecture, LePan argued that the erosion of the moral bases of authority undermines responsibility and discredits those in positions of authority, robbing government of its effectiveness and authenticity. LePan described how the fast pace of modern change resulted in authorities resorting to numerical analyses and predictions based on data to inform their decisions, reducing human problems to statistical terms No models, he argued, could ever duplicate the fullness of human life. The reliance on data had created suspicion of those in power among ordinary citizens who perceived that the process of analyzing modern problems compromised their humanity by reducing them to series of numbers. From there, LePan turned to address the increasing spirit of revolt among the youth of the day: in the mid-1960s, he perceived, youth had gained a kind of cultural currency, and so had revolt. This revolt was not to substitute one social order for another, but rather a revolt against all forms of organized society. LePan ended by considered what was required of both the ruled and the rulers. The ruled, he suggested, needed to avoiding asking for too much from their government – by this, he didn’t mean an end to the provision of social security benefits or welfare, but rather that citizens needed to recognize the point at which the state or government could no longer intervene to improve human life meaningfully. The rulers, he thought, needed to see their task as creating a human environment that would allow all to reach their potential. This would require and support “an image of man, the critic and master of nature, and yet its finest testimony, with each of his organs bound oracularly to the cosmos as they appear in the old almanacs.”
Read or listen to LePan’s lecture below.
