A woman attending a recent lecture by Michael Ignatieff asked the author to give her one good reason why she should have children at a time like the present. She knew who she was addressing: the writer is already a global authority in the analysis of current events based on concepts such as despair, consolation and hope.
When Ignatieff published In Search of Consolation (Taurus) in 2021, the beginning of the end of the pandemic began to appear. Economists anticipated vigorous GDP growth and experts of all stripes predicted a humanity improved by the terrible experience.
Two years have passed and the Canadian intellectual continues giving interviews about his book, but the panorama has darkened. Added to the war in Ukraine and the resulting economic crisis are the outbreak of war in the Middle East, the worsening of the climate crisis and the distressing development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). And no one in his right mind will say that humanity has learned anything from covid, beyond scientific advances.
On Saturday the 8th, when the details of the terrorist actions of Hamas and the first Israeli bombings on Gaza were beginning to become known, Ignatieff spoke in public with La Vanguardia at the Hay Forum Seville. Also attending were the president of the Hay Festival, Caroline Michel (on stage), and the historian Antony Beevor (in the front row). Ignatieff was asked again the question of why have children...
“It's not that I don't understand that woman's motives,” the author reflected, “but it seemed like a strange comment to me. I was born in 1947. I am the son of parents who lived through the war and the American economic depression. Let's think about the women who gave birth in Berlin or Dresden in 1945, or in post-war Barcelona, women who gave birth in destroyed cities... we have to remember that then there were more births than ever. This makes me see that we have to learn a lot from the past, from those dark moments in which it was coherent to think that there was no hope, but, instead..."
“Therefore,” he continued, “hope in the future is closely linked to faith in the past. “We have to rebuild that continuity between the past and the future, now that the future is falling apart.”
Ignatieff's work traces an itinerary – from the Book of Psalms to Primo Levi – that demonstrates how politics, philosophy and the arts have been able to provide consolation in times of despair, a consolation from which hope for the future can be rescued. Hence the success of the book in a today that anxiously implores reasonable optimism. “Out of despair arises the feeling of needing hope,” he maintains.
Ignatieff avoids catastrophism about the development of Artificial Intelligence: “It's not that I think that human beings are wonderful, but I do believe that what we create we can understand and, therefore, we can control.” And he sees a future for quality journalism: “When I use social networks, I look for sources that know what they are talking about, like the New York Times or the Financial Times, and if I were Spanish I would look for a similar Spanish publication. We need someone to tell us which sources we can trust, restore the lost authority of the information system; This is like the law of the pendulum, and I believe the pendulum will return.”
But he does not hesitate to warn about the fragility of democracy when asked whether history favors this political system or not: “The vulnerability of democracy helps us and teaches us to appreciate it, we must fight for it and continue making it exist. Liberal democracy does not have to always exist, because history tells us that democracy can disappear in a second. Democracy is vulnerable. We can even use it to kill itself.”
But what most excites the Canadian writer and former politician – at least it was seen that way from the stage – is the capacity for consolation and hope that music brings us. In fact, it is difficult not to cry when reading the chapter he dedicates to Gustav Mahler's Songs to Dead Children, based on poems Friedrich Rückert wrote when he lost two of his children. Without having to listen to the music, Ignatieff's text, when read, resonates like notes played by secret keys located inside the body.
