In conversation with Michael Ignatieff
I am visiting a friend who lost his wife six months ago. He is frail but unsparingly alert. The chair where she used to sit is still in its place across from his. The room remains as she arranged it. I have brought him a cake from a café that they used to visit together when they were courting. He eats a slice greedily. When I ask him how things are going, he looks out the window and says quietly, “If only I could believe that I would see her again.” There is nothing I can say, so we sit in silence. I came to console or at least comfort, but I can’t do either. To understand consolation, it is necessary to begin with the moments when it is impossible.
Michael Ignatieff has lived an interesting life, in different – but connected – worlds. A young journalist scouring over questions of disputed nationalism and civil war; an award winning novelist and non-fiction writer; an historian and Harvard professor; a politician and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada; President and Rector of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary (until the university was expelled from the country by Prime minister Viktor Orban); then back to his roots as a professor and writer… and Popperian.
At different moments, the theme has returned to Ignatieff, running lecture series, conferences, editing and writing books, about Karl Popper; and particularly about The Open Society. As much as the term means anything, he has been – and remains – an academic hero of mine, someone who stood-up for the right things in the hardest moments; courageous, principled and questioning.
I had been hearing the name for years before it meant anything to me, littered through the footnotes and references of the political science books I was studying in my undergraduate days. Then by happy chance I was looking to do some private reading on the war in Bosnia, and I picked up a copy of The Warrior's Honor. I was immediately stuck to my seat! Here was a professor of history from the fanciest of Ivy League schools, writing about a foreign civil war… and he was there in the blood and the mud and the horror! Instead of following the fighting from a soft bed in America, or a café in some safe neighbouring country, he camoed-up, travelled to the frontlines, slept in the trenches, dodged bullets and artillery, and spoke face-to-face with the ethnic warriors he wanted to document.
In many ways Ignatieff is now heading back to those earlier moments in his career, looking at them now through an ageing lens and the slow-growing prospect of the end of his own life. Asking himself questions about the meaningfulness of existence, the value already exacted and the value still waiting to be found, and how to approach the inevitable harder moments, when everything appears lost; when consolation seems impossible. In good Popperian tradition, things don’t start with a hopeless definition about that word consolation, but with a growing thought – bright, dominating, challenging – and a very human problem: “There is no true consolation in illusion, so we must try, as Vaclav Havel said, ‘to live in truth.’”
So is it true? Is only truth capable of consoling us? It is certainly capable of some heavy lifting: outside the gates of Kresty prison in 1938 a line of women is stretching around a bricked wall. It is Leningrad, it is winter, and everyone is desperately cold… and with each minute the line grows longer. They are waiting to see the men inside, their men, the men they love and lived with, until the Yezhov terror and the late night arrests took them away. The purges and the air of fear has done its job, and so the women whisper to each other, not knowing whom to trust, not wanting to draw attention to themselves, nor to their family on the other side of the wall. As Stalin’s regime swept millions from the face of the earth, these were the silent witnesses, cowed, scared, worrying, and the only proof that other people once lived.
As the frozen wind bites harder, one of the women softly exclaims “Can you describe this?” The crowd remains still and quiet, and then a slightly louder whisper answers “I can!” It was the poet Anna Akhmatova, in line at the prison to see her son, and as the two women caught eyes, a small, delicate smile appears on the first woman’s face. That smile did a lot! We know nothing about what happened to her or her family, only that it was likely heartbreaking, as were the times. But Akhmatova turned that small facial expression into poetry, and so she stood for a moment in time, for a faceless people, and for an inhuman tragedy; people who refused to be forgotten by history.
Over the next twenty years Akhmatova continued to suffer with and to write about and to immortalise the victims. These were people dragged to the limits of the human experience, driven to insanity with fear and hope. Most of them would never see their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons again, in fact as they waited outside the gates at Kresty the people they loved were likely already dead, or already transferred to some distant Siberian gulag. And they probably knew this. What else did they have? They could silently accept the ghostly new world they found themselves in, or they could reclaim the lost moral authority of their nation; futile as it might seem.
When everything has been taken away, and the prospects for change are so miserable, sometimes the only thing left to people is to stand as witnesses and wait – decades perhaps, lifetimes even, for vindication and for the madness to finally wash away. Life is also reclaimed in this way, looking back on the year he spent behind the fence at Auschwitz, with his family, his people, and himself on the edge of death, Primo Levi admitted that it was also “when he felt most fiercely alive.”
But more than anything, we were their consolation. Their hope was as much political as it was moral. As they ached through the most unspeakable pain, they were thinking about us. When people like Akhmatova and Levi put pen to paper, they were consciously writing to the future with a hard epistemological idea: the truth matters, the future can always be better than the past, progress is possible in every circumstance, and even if we never actually feel the consolation that we need so badly, that doesn’t mean that it will never come, never be vicariously felt by others: “they had suffered for a faith, not a belief in paradise or salvation, but instead a resolute conviction that hell existed and that they had an obligation to chronicle it.”
There is a sad tendency to approach history with a detached sense of apathy: it is lost, it is over, and the forces working through it – and over us – are too large to bother with. What will happen, will happen! As calming as this might be for some people – and even psychologically healthy, helping them to accept the horrible things that have come their way – it is also not true. History weighs impossibly over us all, but as Vaclav Havel noted, it “is not something that takes place elsewhere: it takes place here. We all contribute to making it”.
Havel knew this as much as anyone could. A leading figure in the resistance to communist rule, he could be heard across the underground radio stations of Czechoslovakia. When this was suppressed, he moved into publishing absurdist satires and plays. When the printing houses and theatres banned him, he moved again, this time into the heart of the political opposition, choosing to become more, rather than less prominent. He was arrested multiple times, constantly surveilled by the secret police, prosecuted, tortured, and then repeated. As a political prisoner he continued to write letters and push for change.
His last and longest prison sentence ended in 1983. Soon enough he was leading the Velvet Revolution which toppled the communist system, and “within seven years of leaving jail, he was president of his country.” What stuck with him most during the intermediate years, was a sense of failure. That he had let too many people down, too often. Just like the long arch of history, shame of this kind is a difficult thing to deal with, but it is not helped by imagining that it belongs to a previous self, or previous people. Optimism about the future comes from acknowledging error, not by avoiding it. By accepting the truth of your failures and living in a way that corrects them.
When you error-correct your own life in the hardest terms, external judgement mostly arrives as an old, neutral story; and the bits that don’t, as happy new visitors. Three years before leading his country to freedom and becoming president, Havel was asked by a journalist how he felt about the future: “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
When it comes to leading countries and suffering through darkness, Abraham Lincoln – and the consolation of war – deserves to be mentioned. A president of gratuitous empathy, Lincoln visited the barricades, talked with his soldiers, and carried their agony home with him; their young faces rippled by “the noise, the blood, and the terror.” And when they died, he wrote letters to their widows and to their orphans, knowing full well that nothing he said could change their heartache… he wrote anyway: “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss.”
The letters he received were of a different kind. Every day mothers’ and wives’ wrote to him pleading for clemency, hoping their imprisoned sons and husbands might be released, and not have to face the ultimate penalty for their desertion. Others simply begged him to end the war and allow the soldiers to return home. There was never a moment when Lincoln wasn’t aware of the horrible place he was leading his nation into, as well as the power he wielded over so many lives.
As this fog of suffering eased over him, Lincoln bit down on an unpleasant truth: “If war was to be waged…it must be waged with ferocious intensity.” He pushed hard into the back of Ulysses S. Grant and his army amassed at Richmond – the political commands and encouragement coming from the Oval Office giving away nothing of the internal torture of the man inside. The battle would run as long as it needed to, the Union forces would scrape and crawl and continue to pay a heavy price, just so that the enemy would have to pay a higher one.
The downward spirals of the human condition and of history, are always a weaker cousin of progress and improvement. One can only destroy or suppress; the other has an infinite vista of options and choices and possibilities and solutions and creativity before it. One is completely predictable; the other endlessly flexible, capable of being born anew each and every day. One fears the future; the other invents it. As the “terrible grandeur” of the Civil War reverberated inside halls of politics, and as confidence in the idea of America weakened, suspicions, deception, confusion, revenge and retaliation found momentum. And Lincoln was reminded each and every day just how little control any one man has over history, even a president: “I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
But truth is different! It reaches out between people, between nature and minds, and between the past and the future. If slavery really was the abomination that Lincoln believed it to be, then he would be more than just able to assemble a better fighting force, he would be also able to eventually convince the Confederacy of their mistakes. But first he would have to win, and he would have to do so with all the self-doubt and self-questioning that comes with the pursuit of truth and progress.
And so Lincoln spoke in universal terms. He could have easily – and must have been tempted to – define the war in terms of Southern provocations and Southern slavery, and with that dumping unbearable, but satisfying, condemnation upon his enemy. Instead he declared the cause of the war to be “American slavery”, an “offense” that every man and woman, North and South, needed to own and to bear and to take responsibility for. This was war fought not for the future of a nation and its people, but for a moral truth… and for all moral truths to come.
The consolation here must also be found in high principles. Success on the battlefield would end the war and stop the horror, but this wasn’t what Lincoln was fighting for. He knew that “these are not the days of miracles” – those were as distant to him – even in victory – as we are to him now. Lincoln understood that the South would need help to accept their defeat, that the North would need help to forgive the South for making the war necessary, and that both sides would have to learn to look across at each other equally… as victims in the swell of history and ignorance.
In the thick mist of a Paris night, two men – strangers – knocked on the door of Marie Rose Vernet. They carried another man in their arms, weak, exhausted, sick, and a fugitive. This was the height of the Jacobin terror, everyone was under suspicion, and the price of helping an outlaw would be the death of you both. They asked Vernet to shelter their friend until he recovered, and hide him from the guillotine. She had only one question: “Is he virtuous?” When told that he was, she had only one answer: “Then let him come”.
The man being carried had a mouthful of a name, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, and a prominent resume: secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences, deputy of the National Convention, a politician, a scholar, a mathematician, and now a criminal from his own revolution. Months earlier Condorcet walked proudly down the same Paris streets that he now hid from, wearing the new uniform of the National Guard, a prominent figure in the revolution.
Yet, whereas his fellow Guards wore a sword on their lapel, Condorcet chose an umbrella. For him, the fire and the violence were unpleasant necessities. Built upon the new sciences of probability, calculus and economics, the French republic that he dreamed of involved an end to superstition, to tribalism, to ignorance, and the “lackadaisical incompetence that had doomed the ancien régime.” Here was the hard-won opportunity not for change, but for liberation. He drafted legislation that would outlaw slavery across the French colonies, he published pamphlets arguing for equal rights for women, and he wrote the draft of the French constitution in 1792.
And it cost him! Condorcet’s aristocratic friends drifted away, issue by issue. The royal scientific societies retracted his honorary memberships, and then he committed the most unpardonable of sins: voting in the National Assembly to convict the King of high treason but not to execute him. If the revolution was to matter, and was to be worthy of the name, it should be different to what came before it, it should not kill its enemies. Growing anger within the Jacobins had found its flame – Condorcet’s draft of the new constitution was voted down, and the halls of politics were stormed for a second time; the moderates and their allies arrested.
Lucky to escape the mob, Condorcet recovered in Vernet’s quiet house. And as the months ran into years, he resumed an old project to stave-off his “sinking mood”. It began as a multivolume history of science, and grew into the encompassing story of progress and knowledge and growth: the “Enlightenment narrative”. He was trying to recast the revolution in its proper light, but also to explain what gave meaning to his own life, as well as what gave meaning to all humanity: problem solving and improvement.
Much too much negativity about the species had seeped into philosophy, and then into daily life. All change brings with it a new set of problems, but those problems are also soluble just as the previous ones were, and just as future ones will be. For all the inequality and disassociation that the rise of capitalism had brought, there was also more wealth, more choice, and much less actual poverty. In the paraphrased words of Adam Smith, “an average day labourer in England lived better than many an African king.”
Robespierre and the Jacobin terror were justifying their violence in the opposite terms, claiming to see a “fatal pattern” to history, and so were preventing the inevitable slide back into tyranny. Condorcet’s vision of the human condition, and its potential, was something very different; something for which he had the best theories of science and economics on his side. Rather than being defined by the trends and predictive twists of history, humanity renewed itself every day and bent only towards happiness and truth. Both of which can never be suppressed for too long, always wriggling free to find the light.
The revolution may have been slipping away, but it had not been in vain. It was a call to progress, and that call would soon again find its feet, if only men like him – and people like us – were willing to work for it. Coercion and bloody terror can never win for too long, for although they may consider (falsely) history to be on their side, truth never is: “The perfectibility of man is truly indefinite, and the progress of this perfectibility, from now onwards independent of any power that might wish to halt it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us.”
But dying is the end of something, and it is coming for us all. In the mid-twentieth century an old institution from the Middle Ages was reinvented by the English doctor, Cicely Saunders. Watching physicians, nurses, and patients struggle to retain their hope and sense of purpose, she had become fixated on the same philosophical question that tied Anna Akhmatova to Vaclav Havel to Abraham Lincoln to Marquis de Condorcet: the relationship between consolation and truth.
Saunders had seen the hard reality of death steal away the consolation of her patients, filling their final moments with fear and panic and worry. Wrapped-up in a foreign world of medical decisions and unnecessary procedures, these people lost hope as they died. They had more to accomplish, more to resolve, and the growing shadow of death didn’t have to diminish them. Saunders’ insight was to create an institution for palliative care, and most importantly, for consolation: the hospice.
Every patient was different, but in each and every case truth was important. Some people needed more easing and soothing than others, but “false hope was no consolation at all.” Perhaps the greatest failing of the medical establishment in this regard, was the inability of doctors to deal with their own fears around death: “many of them couldn’t tell patients the truth because they couldn’t tell themselves the truth.” The hospice instead built a community around respect for, and the individual needs of, patients, through an unflinching eye on death.
Instead of running from truth, and believing that our deaths must be lonely, unpleasant, and cold events, Saunders turned the institutional dial on this; returning purpose to our final days. Death rarely happens as isolated and deserted as poetry likes to imagine it – more often than not, death is among the most public and socially involved moments of our entire lives. Moments not just where the dying receive the consolation they need, but where they also are desperate to console the people they love and who they are leaving behind: “the giving of consolation was essential to the receiving of it.”
Sometimes what consolation needs most of all, is simply the opportunity for truth to settle comfortably in its own space. When Michael Ignatieff writes about his parents and their death thirty years ago, the words hit me as only true things can – knowing instinctively in that moment how it would feel when the same desolation eventually comes my own way: “They had been the audience before whom I played out my life, and with those two seats in the theatre suddenly empty, the play itself seemed to have little point.”
Separated from them in their last moments, Ignatieff’s parents died in hospital beds, leaving him “inconsolable” with “deep scars”. And when he writes things like “I wish my parents could have had a good death”, it savages the reader with shared compassion. But those last moments that could have been shared, last conversations and meaningful words that could have been spoken, last hands that could have been held, are not as lost as they seem. There was no time and no place for them to happen, and with that comes regret and a deepening of grief, but just as there is no such thing as an insoluble problem, there is also no such thing as an inconsolable situation.
We may be crippled and disabled by the sorrows of life, but this is always a temporary condition. If we cannot consciously find the appropriate place and background for consolation, our unconscious minds will often do the work for us, digging down into the “recesses of our souls”, recovering lost hope, and restoring meaning to a meaningless circumstance: “It is the most arduous but also the most rewarding work we do, and we cannot escape it. We cannot live in hope without reckoning with death, or with loss and failure.”
As the churches, mosques and synagogues empty out, it becomes obvious enough that consolation is losing its institutional setting. This is true… and it’s not. The buildings and the shared rituals are one thing – but the tradition that Ignatieff is a part of here is something much more important. When we struggle with notions of fate, and fight back against the very human impulse of resignation, we inspire others, consoling them as well as ourselves in the process. How lucky you are to have something exceptional enough to grieve for in its absence – it could have all been much worse, and it could all be infinitely better in the future. Our misery is never just our own… and never permanent.
I was struck by how emotional I was talking with Michael Ignatieff. I could hear in his voice, and his words, that he was too. As I write this now, there are soft tears collecting in my eyes. I am emotional again… but also, unmistakably, consoled!
*** The Popperian Podcast #16 – Michael Ignatieff – ‘Finding Consolation in Truth’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #16 – Michael Ignatieff – ‘Finding Consolation in Truth’ (libsyn.com)