2023 writings Archives - Michael Ignatieff

Universal Values at Bay

Michael Ignatieff — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 13:38:13 +0000

The moral universalism enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights obliges us to recognize the humanity of others and the reality of their suffering. If that doctrine sounds naive in today’s world, it is because we have allowed malignant spoilers to smother this foundational intuition.

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Isaiah Berlin – The promise of freedom

Michael Ignatieff — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 08:27:25 +0000

Berlin would have warned us against hubris and intolerance, but also against fatalism. In the battle to come, history is on no one’s side. The outcome of this struggle over who owns the meaning of freedom will come down, as it always does, to the eternal question that decides history’s shape: who is prepared to fight hardest for what they believe.

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Epistemological Panic, or Thinking for Yourself

Michael Ignatieff — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 08:50:18 +0000

Thinking for yourself has never been easy, but the question of whether it is still possible at all is of some moment. The key ideals of liberal democracy—moral independence and intellectual autonomy—depend on it, and my students will not have much experience of either if they end up living in a culture where all of their political and cultural opinions must express tribal allegiance to one of two partisan alternatives; where they live in communities so segregated by education, class, and race that they never encounter a challenge to their tribe’s received ideas, or in a society where the wells of information are so polluted that pretty well everything they read is “fake news”.

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