Ignatieff as Idolater and as Politician

In a recent interview, Michael Ignatieff, the ‘human rights guru’ now running in Monday’s election for MP of the Canadian constituency Etobicoke-Lakeshore said

‘What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian…I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the US. Even as a spectator I didn’t really get what people there cared about.’

This is a very revealing statement regardless of your interest in Canadian politics. Ignatieff has been at the forefront of the human rights debate, championing the humanitarianism of the 1990s (in books like Warrior’s Honor, Blood and Belonging and the more qualified though no less committed Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry and Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond). In January 2003, amidst the heated debates over whether to invade Iraq, Ignatieff wrote a long editorial in the New York Times Magazine called ‘The Burden’ arguing the moral necessity of liberating the Iraqis. Ignatieff’s guiding light, which is representative of a broad school of thought transcending partisan divisions, is that the United States has a moral responsibility to save others and act in their interests – to empathize with them on the basis of universal commitments and human understanding.

It is strange, then, to read that a man who wrote so consistently against nationalism, and for universal empathy, is suddenly saying about countries he has spent many years in ‘I didn’t really get what people there cared about’. What happened to universal empathy, boundary-less humanitarian consciousness, and Ignatieff’s connection with the suffering of others? More to the point, how exactly did Ignatieff spend decades ‘understanding’ the needs of victims he’d never met and yet never figure out what the people around him cared about? No doubt some of this is Ignatieff posturing, trying to defend himself against the criticism that he is not really Canadian and just parachuting in to Canadian politics. But even more, it seems Ignatieff is finally acknowledging that matters are rather more complicated once you get involved, rather than gaze from afar and on high.

The point is not that politics is always unethical and therefore ‘below morality’, but rather that political commitment is different from moral commitment. Politics is about taking sides, where your side may not always do the most ethical thing, and occasionally must do what is necessary, but you support it anyhow. (Ignatieff himself does not appear above doing what is necessary to ensure his own nomination against intraparty opponents – see the end of this article). Political commitment also entails getting directly involved in engaging others in debate and convincing them of your position – taking them seriously as thinking and acting beings. Ignatieff’s inability to understand what those around him cared about was not simply a personality quirk on his part, but reflected that way his ethical commitment was in fact the pose of a snobby elite, standing above the fray and looking down from on high.* He became the ethical individual, proselytizing the good word of intervention abroad, only by detaching himself from the domestic politics of countries he’s lived in for decades. As Ignatieff beats his retreat back to earth, it is worth recalling that he and his ilk did a great deal to re-enchant American military power in the post-Cold War world.

*As Corey Robin (a speaker at our February teach-in) noted in his book Fear: History of a Political Idea and 'The Fear of the Liberals', Ignatieff's predicament is shared by a whole class of opinion-setting liberals.