There are simply no guarantees of democratic order. There is only the inherited belief that violence can kill democracy and that violence endangers everyone, especially those who would use it to defend democracy itself.
How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of portraits of writers, artists and musicians searching for consolation—from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, and Primo Levi—writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of the twenty-first century.
Democracies cannot function without some shared truth: the truth that we should live in peace with each other, that we should try to understand each other as best we can, that we should obey just laws and change unjust ones peacefully; and that we should share the land we love together.
Once founded in a moment of revolutionary upheaval, democracies must manage their legacy: to ensure that revolutionary violence, sanctioned as a sacred necessity at the beginning, does not legitimize violence when democracy faces a moment of crisis, deadlock or extreme polarization.
The populist revolt against mainstream politics highlights tensions between majority rule and rule of law that are intrinsic to any version of democracy worth defending. Provided these questions are debated and resolved within the institutions of democracy itself, then the conflict is not a negative phenomenon, but a positive one, a sign of the inherent vitality of democracy.
Trevor Harrison was emblematic of [that] youthful optimism. In 2006, just out of Queen’s University, he showed up in my office on Parliament Hill.
Russia tried to crush the will of the people in Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 and Warsaw in 1981, and failed each time. Kyiv in 2022 will be the same – the question is how long it will take, and at what cost.
