“The Problem Is Conformity. Hope Must Survive the Truth”: An Interview with Michael Ignatieff

Ignatieff arrives for the interview straight from Spain’s Congress of Deputies, where he just met with one of the country’s leading politicians. The meeting wasn’t on his schedule; he was invited at the last minute. He’s due to give a lecture in just over an hour, yet he never seems rattled. When I ask how his day has been, he blurts out, “A terrible day.” He quickly catches himself and adds, “But a very interesting one.” Ignatieff will turn eighty next year, but he’s anything but old. At one point, after hearing one of my questions, he falls silent for a few seconds that feel like an eternity. He isn’t slow on the uptake. He’s simply thinking the answer through, and he refuses to fall back on canned responses. Born in Canada, he has taught at some of the world’s leading universities, including Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of Toronto. But his has hardly been a typical academic life. Over the years he has been a television host, a columnist for British newspapers, a member of Parliament, and the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party. A historian and international affairs analyst, he confronts one question head-on in his recent books: What kind of hope is possible in the world we live in?

You argue that the real danger to freedom—to freedom of thought and freedom of opinion—is not so much the tyranny of the powerful as the desire to be liked, to win approval. Does that mean freedom requires people with a strong sense of self?

Yes. The greatest obstacle to freedom of thought is our desire to be liked, our desire for approval. We want people to hear what we say and think, “Isn’t he smart!” In free societies, the biggest problem is our conformity. And our conformity comes from wanting the approval of the people around us.

Freedom condemns you to loneliness. It condemns you to disagreement; it condemns you to saying, “No, I don’t agree with you.” It creates tension and stress, even in a relationship or a group. Freedom of thought has always been hard, and it has always been unpopular. That’s why we love it, that’s why it matters, that’s why we care about it.

How can we teach young people to think for themselves? How can we teach them to think independently?

I’ve been teaching for twenty-five years, and I think I’ve learned one thing: you shouldn’t talk at students without listening to them. Listen to them. You teach best by listening. And you teach best by telling them what they don’t want to hear. They want you to tell them they’re right, and you have to say, “Wait a minute. Why do you say that? Doesn’t it contradict…?”

Socrates understood this. Socrates asked the questions people didn’t want asked, and that’s why they ended up killing him. So teaching people to think independently means listening and then questioning. Listening and questioning. It also means admitting when you’re wrong: questioning your own authority as a teacher. Saying, “I was wrong last week.” It means practicing humility, and that’s hard. I’ve been trying to think for myself for almost eighty years. I don’t know how many times I’ve had an original thought that was truly my own, or how many times I’ve really thought for myself rather than simply repackaging other people’s clever ideas. I have a very strong desire to be liked, to win approval, and I can’t promise that I’ve always thought for myself. It’s the hardest thing in life.

In one of your recent books, you link hope with skepticism. Why?

Because the language of hope has been badly corrupted. There’s a lot of false hope out there: “I’m going to stay positive! Let’s look on the bright side!” But the world is hard, so hope has to be earned. Hope has to survive disappointment; hope has to survive its encounter with the truth. I don’t think you can be hopeful unless you’ve tested it with skepticism.

False hope is the worst kind. It’s terrible, for example, to tell someone who has just been diagnosed with a terminal disease, “Look on the bright side—maybe there’ll be a cure.” Stop right there! Someone with a terminal diagnosis wants you to respect what has happened to them. They don’t want cheap hope; they want you to understand what they’re going through.

We often comfort people best not by offering them hope, but simply by saying, “I’m here for you. I’m listening.” That’s what gives hope: not what you say, but simply showing up—being there, so that the person doesn’t feel alone. We’re comforted by people, not by doctrines or ideas. And they can comfort us without saying a word, just by letting us know we’re in this together.

For many people, the values of modernity are no longer self-evident. Is this crisis connected to the crisis of democracy?

Intellectuals talk about a crisis of modernity. But I think if you talk to ordinary people—and you see this in any airport, any bar, any vacation spot—most people love modernity: cheap flights, cheap vacations, cheap consumer goods. So there’s a side of modernity, especially the freedom it offers, that people love.

And then there’s the frightening side of modernity: sudden economic shifts that leave you out of a job, immigration that threatens your sense of belonging… If you’re religious, you ask yourself, “Why doesn’t anybody go to church anymore?” So modernity is an argument about modernity itself, and an attempt to balance what is obviously wonderful against what is frightening.

And that plays out in democracy. In a democracy, we argue about how to make modernity less frightening. But I don’t think any political party wants to go back to a time before modernity. We’re all trying to master it. And I don’t think it can be mastered. You can live with it, but you can’t control it. That’s why modernity can feel exhilarating, but sometimes it feels like we’re on a roller coaster that’s going too fast.

Why have we returned to a world where might makes right seems to be the only rule in international relations and in social life alike? How did we get here?

I don’t know whether we’ve gone back or whether we’ve simply arrived. Ever since Thucydides wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC, we’ve understood that in international politics, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. The period after 1945 was an exceptional moment. The unconditional defeat of Nazi Germany, and the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States that made it possible, opened a window for building an international order that would stabilize competition among the great powers. That has worked for eighty, ninety years. And now it’s crumbling.

It has worked for eighty or ninety years because it served the interests of the strong. The strong have always dominated our world, but it suits them to follow certain rules. The threat of nuclear war helped keep the strong playing by the rules. But now we’re in a very different world, with three predators: Russia, China, and the United States. All three are fighting for dominance. We have a declining power, the United States, facing a rising one, China. That’s a story as old as Thucydides. And there’s a third power, Russia, which isn’t really a power at all, but it has nuclear weapons. It’s a legacy power, a holdover from the past.

All of this adds up to a very unstable situation. Europeans have depended on American power, and suddenly they’ve started realizing, “We’re on our own in this world.” Europe is afraid of being alone in this world, face-to-face with a declining nuclear power like Russia, which has no way to expand and grow except through conquest and war. It has no economic muscle to speak of. It’s a scary world.

Predators need rules too. That’s why I hope that, over time, the predatory powers will be forced to come up with new rules: to control AI, to control nuclear weapons, to control satellite weapons in space, to keep international travel safe, to prevent weapons from being used to cut off the internet. There’s a whole range of areas in which it will be in the great powers’ interest to start making rules again. So I’m not all doom and gloom. But right now we’re standing in the ruins of the order created in 1945, and we haven’t yet built anything to replace it. I think we’ll have to do it.

Is the power these “predators” have gained connected to the dissatisfaction, frustration, and sense of emptiness that ordinary people feel? Is there a link between the micro level and the macro level?

That’s a great question. The micro level ignores the macro level. The micro level is someone who gets up at 6:30 a.m. every morning, makes breakfast, gets the kids ready for school, drops them off, hopes they’ll be safe, comes home, makes dinner, talks with their spouse, watches a movie, and goes to bed. People living that life don’t think about the macro. And it’s not because they’re stupid. It’s just that there’s nothing they can do about the macro, so they focus on what they can do at the micro level. But every so often, at the micro level, people watch the macro world fall apart, and they get scared. They simply don’t know what to do. They don’t know whom to trust. They don’t understand what’s going on. I’ve spent my whole life trying to understand the big picture, and I still don’t get it! So how is an ordinary homemaker supposed to understand it? It’s not that they are stupid. It’s that this is far too big for all of us, because the pieces of that big picture are falling apart.

And then people get scared and hand more power to whoever is in government.

Yes! There are two aspects in which the two levels collide. One of them is the environment: wildfires. For example, suddenly you think, “It’s been 104 degrees for three weeks.” That’s the macro breaking into the micro. Another example: I have a cough, and then I find out it’s a virus, something called COVID, which started 8,000 miles away in China, and suddenly people are dying from it. All of a sudden, the macro bursts into the micro, and this really frightens people. So you turn to your government and say, “Protect me.” And the government tries to protect them. European governments tried to protect their people and spent enormous sums doing it. Frankly, I think they did a pretty good job.

Now we have a new example of the macro colliding with the micro and scaring people. The macro—artificial intelligence—is starting to break into the job market, and suddenly you’re out of a job. It’s happening to me. I mean, until last year I was teaching at a university. You can’t trust anything students write anymore, because you don’t know whether they produce it themselves. This is devastating for the professor-student trust. This is catastrophic for the whole educational process, and we don’t know how to resolve it.

Scores on the international PISA assessments are falling because of these machines; attention span is shortening, and reading comprehension is getting worse. So, another example of the macro crashing into the micro: A parent looks at their children and thinks, “These kids can’t read, because all they do is stare at this.” So the macro and the micro keep colliding in our lives, and the government is caught in the middle, trying to protect the micro, though sometimes to no avail.

You describe yourself as a nonbeliever, yet you say the Book of Job can help us live a better life at this moment. Why?

The Book of Job is one example, but St. Paul’s letters are another example. In May the Pope published his encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica humanitas, which is one of the best works written on these issues. I’m a historian, and we’re talking about traditions of thought that go back thousands of years. There’s a core of wisdom in them. A secular person like me doesn’t need to believe in God to be inspired by this language.

Some people think you can’t really read the Bible unless you believe in the Christian or Jewish message. I disagree. The Book of Job is the most unflinching examination of why there is evil in a world created by God. Why is there suffering? It’s all there in the Book of Job. So if you’re asking yourself, “Why am I suffering? Why is there evil? Why do people tell me there’s a God when I feel alone?” you should read the Book of Job.

I wrote a book about consolation, On Consolation, because I think it’s essential that we don’t lose sight of the deeper wisdom rooted in religious faith. Whether we are believers or not… Forget about it; that’s not the point. The point is: Can we learn? Can we learn from Job, from St. Paul, from St. Augustine, or from the Fathers of the Church? Yes, we can.

And can we learn from the papal encyclical on AI? Of course we can, because the Pope says that Catholics have spent 2,000 years reflecting on what it means to be human, and this will help us think about AI. The Pope is right about that, so let’s listen to what he has to say.