The second time I read Michael Ignatieff’s 'The Rights Revolution' it had occurred to me I had read it a first time – it had made such a lasting impression on me. Pity: thanks to a recent reissue of his book, I now have two copies taking up space in my library.
Ignatieff, if you do not already know, is a political liberal. He argues in his new introduction (already out-of-date, and rather backwards in my opinion, as if politics exists in a vacuum): “The fundamental problem facing humanity is political.” Not climate change (which knows no political borders), not the apparent clash of civilizations (to which he contributed), not the conflict between poor and rich nations (Che Guevara he is not) – and not the economy, the latter which he even fails to mention, demonstrating the paucity of his thought. (Shall we anticipate another revised introduction?) The world, according to Ignatieff, needs “order and freedom,” spoken like a true nineteenth-century conservative liberal, the two most active ingredients for political life, from which all true global solutions will follow.
The apparent need for “order” might explain Ignatieff’s lack of support for Dion’s pre-prorogued coalition of Liberals and New Democratic Party, backed by the Bloc Québécois. The so-called “disorder” represented by possible but temporary unity with the NDP, otherwise known as the Jacobins, runs counter to Ignatieff’s gene pool, which is why Ignatieff was last to sign the agreement. Consider his previous support for Margaret Thatcher against the striking Miner’s union of Britain in the mid-1980s. And as he makes quite plain in 'The Rights Revolution': “I prefer the evils of capitalist individualism to the evils of collectivism.” Absent is any sense of a ‘middle ground’ which so identified Canadian thinking throughout much of the twentieth century: individualism is “just a fact about us as a species,” this coming from an historian. (The French Revolutionaries, too, omitted freedom of assembly from their first Declaration of the Rights in 1789). In other words, Ignatieff sacrificed the integrity of Parliament because his sense of individual “difference” (not necessarily a bad thing) had no affinity with the union guys, which was unfortunate for the rest of Canada. He is indifferent not to personal but to public freedom when it interferes with Liberal party interests as he sees them.
Consider another revealing quotation: “Doing something serious about inequality means infringing on property rights,” and here Ignatieff conflates - and almost voids - two diverse traditions of rights, the latter classical and the former presumably more radical. John Locke could not have said it better in the seventeenth century, but then the propertied few were considered a bulwark against the abuses of liberty. (And who really cared about the socialistic “Diggers” forerunners of the NDP today, a group Ignatieff neglects, because he likes to think the rights revolution began with his generation, the boomers of the 1960s.) Today, relatively many more in society are “propertied” (if we ignore the homeless) but there was still an abuse by the state when Parliament was prorogued. Property rights encouraged liberalism, historically speaking, but today’s Liberal party is not protecting the propertied (and unpropertied) from the state. Ignatieff can go on about how democracy (which he does not clearly define or analyze) perpetuates inequality, and curiously he does not seem to think of this as a problem. But even worse, he is not sensitive to the bigger difficulty: how Canadian democracy seems unable to protect itself from arbitrary rule, the likes of Harper’s abuses as we see now.
'The Rights Revolution' is fixed on rights but what about responsibilities? According to Ignatieff’s deft dismissal, “a liberal culture does not obliterate responsibility: it presumes them.” However, I am not convinced by his self assurance. The number of times his lectures discuss “rights” dwarfs the dozen or so times he mentions “responsibility.” It was the French thinker Simone Weil (she died at age 34), in 'The Need for Roots' (a profound WWII era work that appealed to socialists - and to conservatives), who offered a deeper understanding of “order” and “liberty,” ideas which begin her book on our “Duties” (a word one rarely finds in Ignatieff’s text ). In Ignatieff’s chapter on “Rights, Intimacy and Family Life” almost everything is considered a “sacrifice” (of rights) yet nothing is a “duty” (unless it is to yourself), and I find here a sense of imbalance which is disconcerting. Note that Ignatieff also does not mention the word “obligation”. Weil argued (with mankind very much in mind) that the idea of a right “implies the possibility of making either a good or bad use of it,” a notion Ignatieff admits. Rights can be abused, to put it simply. However, as says Weil, an obligation is “always, unconditionally, a good from every point of view.”
The notion of rights is originally Roman, not Greek, and serves the American neighbours to our south very well, and from his prestigious position at Harvard Ignatieff comes across as a kind of modern-day (but blue-blooded) Thomas Paine. Ignatieff has made his living on the marketplace and offers mainstream ideas, and he appears rather taken in by various national dogmas (or shall we say paradigms?). For the British, he wrote about his mentor Sir Isaiah Berlin, the exemplary historian of ideas, himself a subtle blend of various traditions and quintessential English liberty, a conservative liberal and admired Oxford icon. For the Americans, Ignatieff curried to their exceptionalism, the mix of nations and their beacon of democracy to the world – regardless of cost. And I can see why certain members of the Liberal party have fawned over him: he mimics the Trudeau legacy in their eyes, and he gives further articulation to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Today Ignatieff presents Canada as a model to the world, but at the same time also admits to a “semipermanent political crisis” since the 1960’s – a self serving notion. I am also tempted to ask: how does he know? And what damage has he already incurred, passively, in his brief tenure? “Probation” indeed.
In reissuing 'The Rights Revolution' in 2007, originally delivered on CBC Radio in 2000, one wonders whether Ignatieff has reread his words. The words expedience and hypocrisy come to mind in light of his “intellectual” activities on Iraq: “The first presumption I have argued against in these lectures is that the language of rights is an apologia for force. I am committed to the language of rights for precisely the opposite reason: because it mandates limits to the use of force.” But in extending his “rights revolution” to Iraq and in his clear and ample support of President Bush’s Holy War (Oily War?) against Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and all that, from which he was only extricating himself officially in 2007, while still a newly minted Liberal, suggests Ignatieff looks for more than just truth. This ivory tower figure is surrounded by barbed wire, and his missions tend on the opportunistic. Today Ignatieff boasts he has friends in the Obama White House. Let’s not forget he had a friend – the President - in the Bush White House, too, whom he visited. Ignatieff gravitates to power, rather than critiques it.
Carelessness is another feature of 'The Rights Revolution'. On the one hand he is platitudinous when he says “law is supposed to be the expression of popular sovereignty,” and I find it striking that there is no mention of “parliamentary sovereignty” – something that seems to have been sacrificed over the recent months, partly because Ignatieff likes to read the polls, rather than lead them. On the other hand he comes across as primitive (and lacks foresight) when he talks about “the babbling, incontinent inhabitant of a psychiatric ward or nursing home.” Here Ignatieff demeans both the mentally ill and the aged in one stroke, putting his opinion in the same league as Mark Twain’s dated “Injun Joe.” But there is no doubt even former Harvard academics will fall victim to old age (often considered a second career) assuming they are well enough to live that long.
As Budget Bill C-10 (and all its baggage) cruises through Parliament, without meaningful criticism by the Ignatieff Liberals, Opposition falls to others. Harper succeeds because he is like the character Zelig in the Woody Allen film of the same name, who assimilates the physical characteristics of the people around him: first John Howard (the war on Iraq), then Duceppe (“Distinct Society”), then Bush (the environment) and now Obama (the environment). He could not assimilate Dion, who was too unlike a typical politician, so he attacked him. Ignatieff, who is so liberal he can be considered a conservative, and perhaps also because he is coy when it comes to power, is now emulating Harper, who as we now know has not an original mind. The end result: two Parliamentary party leaders assimilating one other. Among the rights that Ignatieff does not articulate in 'The Rights Revolution' is the Canadian right to a Parliamentary Opposition, and in neglecting to do so this esteemed man continues to condemn the public.
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