DEAR Bill:
Your philippic against Michael Ignatieff (Ignatieff has lost touch with Canada, by William Neville, Free Press, Sept. 15) struck me as absurd and inaccurate.
Ignatieff is a wonderful target for critics. He is so brilliant and he has written so extensively about many complicated things. His brilliance is easily "begrudged;" and his arguments can, in a political and journalistic age of talking points and shamelessly opinionated analysis and sloganeering, be cleverly parsed and taken out of context and flung in his face.
You argue with the help of Denis Smith's new book, Ignatieff's World; A Liberal Leader for the 21st Century? that Ignatieff is somehow out of touch with Canada because he has been away from the country for so long. His supposed lack of "feel" means, you say, that he does not understand Canadian values.
I noticed that you did not make much of Ignatieff's cosmopolitanism; his citizenship in the world; his travels in many countries; his direct experience of the things he writes about. This must stand for something in a future prime minister.
You emphasize what you think are the deleterious effects of his absence from Canada. Yet while he was away, Ignatieff wrote a book, Blood and Belonging, on nationalism and part of it was about Quebec. He visited the province and actually talked to real people. CBC, that maliciously un-Canadian of institutions, thought so ill of him that they invited him to give the prestigious Massey Lectures in 2000, The Rights Revolution, a large part of which was given over to his understanding of the rights revolution at work in Canada and its effect on our federation.
Your piece finds an all too easy solace in parochialism and fails to intelligently address the question of how indeed intellectuals understand the world. Canada is a huge place and so is our planet. Travel and residency allow us some direct experience though even that is necessarily limited. Each of us is circumscribed by our neighbourhood and province.
How then can we grasp the large questions of our time and history? In large part it is through books and journals and telecommunications and the Internet, and of course human imagination, all of them available to Ignatieff in Boston and London and you in Winnipeg. And how can we ever claim to write history if by definition, by your standard, we can never have been there. Your authority, Denis Smith, writes about Napoleonic times. Was he alive in such times? And insofar as he has now returned to writing about Canada, hasn't he been living in Spain?
Bill, I notice that in your own regular columns you offer categorical pronunciamentos about Afghanistan and Iraq, and Bush's Washington but I suspect that you have never been to any of these places. Essentially, then, your argument about Ignatieff's being away so long is really beside the point.
You conclude your article by alleging that Ignatieff is a devotee of the United States; your felicitous phrase is that he is "enthralled with the American empire." I have read six of Ignatieff's books and many of his articles and I find your conclusion baffling. I take it that you (or was it Smith) were maybe reading the other six that Ignatieff has written that I have not read!
Ignatieff's early work was on penitentiaries and the ethics of human needs. He wrote a fine novel, Scar Tissue, and a definitive biography of Isaiah Berlin, the influential Oxford liberal thinker. In the last 15 years he has been preoccupied by global politics, especially the rise of nationalism in the Balkans and Islamist terrorism since 9/11.
What I discern in what I read by him is a man of abiding liberal-democratic convictions who wants to see these principles triumph in the world. Mainly I sense his practicality and his desire for public polices that are effective in a world that is dangerous and complicated. He is clearly a partisan of internationalism, a supporter of international law and such doctrines as The Responsibility to Protect.
Yet, and here the influence of Isaiah Berlin is instructive, Ignatieff is convinced that no single principle can make sense of our world. You remember Berlin's use of Kant's aphorism: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight line can be made." Ignatieff always conveys a sense of a public intellectual grappling with the whole situation, realistically. His work is increasingly a flight from comfortable, single-dimensional abstractions.
History, we know, is a hard taskmaster. What can and must be done is never unambiguously obvious. Or, it is that history presents us with very difficult choices so that we cannot usually achieve all of the things that we value. And so we make tough choices; often they are ones informed by a sense of the lesser evil.
Above all, Bill, what I see in particular in Ignatieff and what you overlook is someone who believes that the dilemmas confronting the world will not be resolved without the United States. The Americans were crucial to winning the war against fascism and the Cold War as well. This view is not about his "enthrallment" to the United States but is an important element in a multi-faceted approach to global affairs. It is at least a sensible deduction about Canada's and the West's strategic position at this moment in history.
So Ignatieff, rightly, refuses to align with the visceral anti-Americanism in Canada that masquerades as Canadian values and which, I think, now informs so much of your own worldview. As he puts it: "Anti-Americanism is the patriotism of fools."
He is correct in this.
Cheerfully,
Allen Mills
Allen Mills is a professor of politics at the University of Winnipeg.
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