Ideas - Massey at 60: Michael Ignatieff on how human rights language has shaped Canadian politics

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Twenty-four years ago, Massey lecturer Michael Ignatieff delivered five talks that explored the powerful rise of the language of 'rights' in Canada and other industrialized nations. Michael Ignatieff speaks with former IDEAS host Paul Kennedy to reflect on his talks — and how the rights revolution continues to shape politics today, often in unexpected ways. *This episode is part of an ongoing series of episodes marking the 60th anniversary of Massey College, a partner in the Massey Lectures.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. In these lectures, I want to talk to you about a fundamental change that's come over us in our lifetime. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. I'm calling this change the Rights Revolution to describe the amazing way in which rights talk has transformed how we think about ourselves as citizens, as men and women, and as parents. It's been nearly 25 years since Canadian writer and historian Michael Ignatieff

delivered his massy lectures on what he called the rights revolution. Rights are something more than dry, legalistic phrases. Because they represent our attempt to give legal meaning to the values we care most about, dignity, equality, and respect, rights have worked their way deep inside our psyches. Across his five talks, he explored the powerful rise of the language of rights in Canada and other industrialized nations from the 1960s till the time of his masses in the year 2000. When a person long crushed by oppression stands up and demands her right to be heard, we all feel a deep emotion rise within us.

And that emotion is the longing to live in a fair world. Rights are the chief means by which human beings express this longing. That longing to push against oppression remains deeply embedded in modern politics. But Ignatieff argued in his lectures that while the language around rights has done a great deal to deepen and widen our democracy, it has also, despite the best of intentions, threatened to drive us apart. Pierre Trudeau believed the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would bring us together, yet the results haven't worked out that way. Many of the Supreme Court's rulings on charter appeals have been divisive.

More broadly, the rights revolution sometimes seems to have fragmented the political community into aggrieved victims' groups, each seeking its rights at the expense of the other. More than two decades after delivering his lectures, Michael Ignatieff sat down with former Ideas host Paul Kennedy to take stock of his own ideas and the current state of the rights revolution. It was part of a series marking the 60th anniversary of Massey College, one of our partners in the Massey Lectures. On this episode of Ideas, you'll hear that conversation,

along with excerpts from Michael Ignatieff's original lectures. The first chapter, the first lecture, confronts the rights revolution, which you depict as something that is very Canadian, but also something that Canada has to show the world. Canadians may not realize it, but along with all the other things we export to the world, we also export our rights talk. It was a Canadian law professor from Montreal's McGill University, John Humphrey, who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Is it still true that Canada has something to show the world? Is the world ready to listen to a lesson that Canada might have? Tough questions. Let me go backwards and then forward to those questions.

I have taught universal human rights and the fact that the rights cultures of each country is so different. But you really have to because one of the things you want to say about rights is a little counterintuitive. International human rights define the rights we have as human beings. The pure humanity in this room. But the weird thing about that is that no one has ever seen a pure human being. You're a female person. Vous êtes francophone. Vous avez suivi un certain trajet dans votre vie.

Vous êtes une femme particulière. Et très distinguée, d'ailleurs. Voilà. Kate Govier, next door, is also a woman, but with a very particular history, more rooted in other places and on we go and there's this very complicated dialectic in other words between what is universal to us what we share and what is distinctive and it's the same thing with

national rights cultures. That is, beneath them is an instinct that there are some things that all human beings ought to have, but how it's inflected in each country is very different. And getting to Canada, our rights culture is very, very distinctive because of the certain key facts about us, which are that British common law, French civil law, the history of the conquest,

and then recently, with huge impact, Aboriginal law. And these are just, they make it all different. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for all its formidable abstraction, is actually an attempt to universalize Canadian social democracy as it stood in the bright dawn of victory after 1945. Many of the provisions of the Declaration, including those for medical insurance, unemployment compensation, and paid holidays,

may not be as specially realistic as an agenda for social rights in the nations of the third world, but they certainly encapsulate a very Canadian dream of social decency. When you look to the South, and we do this all the time, I've taught in the States and did my degrees in the States and love the United States in a way that makes it slightly unpopular in Canada sometimes. But they are really weird about rights. I mean, you know, Second Amendment, you know, right to bear arms, give me a break. You know, I mean, just for Canadians, it seems, you know, a very odd idea.

And we have a different culture in relation to women's rights and the rights of the unborn child and all that. And abortion comes out very different. And we are all familiar with this, but it ends up creating a very different political culture, a very different sense of what rights are and how they work. And so to your question, these are some of the things that make us distinctive. The British, American, and French rights traditions have enormous prestige, but they have limited applicability beyond Western Europe and North America because individualist rights regimes don't capture the dilemmas faced by societies that are both multi-ethnic and multinational, that is, composed of founding minorities who require, as a condition of

continuing membership in the state, the recognition of their rights to language, in the state, the recognition of their rights to language, education, and self-government. These are the dilemmas for which Canadian rights talk is uniquely suited. Our legal culture has roots in the three great legal traditions of France, Britain, and America, and yet we do not carry the baggage of an imperial past or the menace of an imperial present. So we have few enemies and many friends, and yet we also have the problems to which the world needs answers. And do we have something to say to the world? One of the things that's interesting about the world, despite globalization, despite 90 years of the moral universalism implied in human rights, rights cultures and political cultures are incredibly self-enclosed. And people, the Americans couldn't care less what happens up here and rarely look north.

The British think that's a colony that we left behind a long time ago. We haven't got anything to learn there. The French have their own, you know, mission civilisatrice, and they still want to civilize us. I'm caricaturing in a pretty exaggerated way. But people aren't listening very closely to Canada. But they are listening in some places. I went to New Zealand,

which I commend to you, and I wasn't off the plane, groggy with jet lag, before people wanted to talk to me about Aboriginal rights in Canada. Because of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand, they were incredibly well informed about, and they had a strong sense that there's an aboriginal international around the world and canada is part of it and their settlement with aboriginal peoples goes through a treaty which is essentially the constitution of the whole country the treaty of waitangi so it's not the same as us at all but boy do we have a conversation with new zealand and i think we also have a similar conversation with australia and so so it goes so those are places where we have something to say

i think sometimes canadians get very anxious about nobody's listening to us anymore we used to be such a big deal in the world and i think that's misunderstanding what's going on. The provincialism of the political cultures of each country is a paradox of globalization. We're in one world, yes, but our political instincts remain structured by the histories of the countries we come from. And that's just true everywhere. And so our willingness to listen and learn to others is actually constrained for everybody. In other words, we don't have a particular problem that nobody listens to us. The Danes think that. Nobody listens to the Danes. Or the Norwegians think, well, they listen to us because we're so bloody rich and we have this fantastic wealth fund. But that's one of the disappointing things about globalization

is the paradox that we're not learning as much from each other as we might. We need to look more closely with a little less self-congratulation at the gulf between what the rights revolution has promised and what it has actually delivered. Just ask aboriginal peoples. They've had their treaty rights acknowledged at long last, but does that make life better on native lands than it was 50 years ago? Has the aboriginal renaissance in our country cut into the suicide rate among teenagers on northern Ontario reserves? I doubt it. Nobody would claim that having these rights has made matters worse,

but nobody is confident that it's made things better. Rights talk may even have become a substitute for reform. More intellectual and moral attention has been given to treaty rights and aboriginal self-government than to the often appalling social conditions on reserves. Aboriginal rights doctrine grows more subtle, and the elites, the professors, the policymakers, and aboriginal politicians who have mastered this doctrine are making a good living out of rights talk. But are things getting better in Davis Inlet and Burnt Church? To the people in these communities, rights talk remains just talk. Cynics observing this process might almost suspect that elites talk not in order to make things happen, but so that they can sustain the illusion that things are changing for the better.

It's not even clear that everybody is getting more rights. Some people are losing theirs. Ask organized labor, for example. They'd say they have fewer rights and less power than they had 50 years ago. Too many workers have no job security, no pension rights, no holiday rights, and they're working too many hours. This is the dark side of our affluence. It's not true that everyone has benefited or benefited equally from the rights revolution.

One of the things that comes out of the first chapter very clearly, and I think it's an important message, is that this is a complex question. Rights are not simple. It's not sort of, they're good, you know, we call them motherhood and apple pie. I'm in favor of rights. Who isn't? But they come with double-edged swords and two sides of the coin all the way through and those are the things you'll unpack in the rest of the lectures

yes i i think we do rights no favors if we don't understand the complex moral world that they put us into rights and democracy are in a highly conflictual relationship. And the thing I have been saying for a long time in my written work is that there's a very sharp distinction between the right and the good. And example, you know, the greatest good there is, is love. It's the thing we will die for, is to love and to be loved. But it's not a right. You have no right to demand love of anybody. So what's the point of saying that? culture in which rights language becomes the only language you use, you're missing a whole

bunch of goods, human goods, solidarity, love, compassion, kindness, civility, don't cash out in the language of rights very well. The other thing is, and people say this all the time and they're not wrong, rights are highly individualist. My right versus your rights. And so they don't, they're not a nice warm bath that pulls us all together in common civility. They can be very divisive. And I think we have all paid a price in our politics for having rights talk, monopolize the language of politics in ways that cause other goods to drop away.

Peter Robinson Is it a good thing that rights talk has become the primary language of contemporary politics? What happens when disputes between Canadians, the stuff of politics, become conflicts of rights. In the old days, if you will pardon a generalization, politics was about interests. Now, interests can always be traded, but rights cannot. We've got too much invested in them for that. We think of them as trumps. Give me my rights is not an invitation to compromise. It's a demand for unconditional surrender. When a claim is turned into a right, it doesn't necessarily make it easier to settle.

It may, in fact, make it harder. Some people say politics has got a lot shriller since rights talk took it over. It's made our personal life shriller, too. The personal is political was a notable feminist slogan, but when personal behavior is politicized, moral absolutism sometimes takes over. In democratic societies, neighborhoods and community associations often succeed in reconciling collective belonging with individual autonomy. But that's the test of whether they're successful. Communities are valuable to the degree that they articulate individual goals and aspirations,

to the degree that they allow individuals to accomplish goals they could not accomplish alone. Group rights to language, culture, religious expression, and land are valuable to the degree that they enhance the freedom of individuals. Now, this suggests that when group rights and individual rights conflict, individual rights should prevail. The basic intuition of rights talk is that each of us is an end in ourselves and not a means to an end. This is because each of us wishes to frame our own purposes and achieve them insofar as we can. These purposes are valuable to us because they are expressive as well as instrumental. When we achieve them, we express our identities, as well as serve our interests.

That's why agency is so valuable to us. I don't think this individualism is Western or time-bound. It's just a fact about us as a species. We frame purposes individually in ways that other creatures simply do not. So when you engage in rights talk, you're committed to a certain kind of individualism. This has its limits. Part of the complexity of the way you look at rights,

things are often their opposite. And with the rest of the lectures, I jotted down what I thought were sort of the titles, basically. Difference versus uniformity. Equality versus distinction. Macro versus micro. That's how you view rights. Rights are their opposites, almost.

You have to consider the opposites before you can acknowledge the reality of it all. Yes. The equality difference stuff is, I think, is tormenting us. I think we all believe, and I certainly believe, that the rights revolution, this transformation of rights in Canada and around the world, has done tremendous good. I remember when I think about being an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in 1965 when I came in, I knew no gay people at all, which means I knew no one who explicitly avowed that they were gay. Everybody was in the closet. We forget, you know, this weekend I was asked by one of my former staffers to officiate at his wedding to the man he loves. I mean, it's a big deal. And it's very moving to me to think

that that's happened. It's also moving to think about reforms to divorce legislation, reforms to marriage law that have changed things for women and changed them forever for the better. And we can go on down the road. And some of the changes in aboriginal law are the use of rights to provide recognition of what we've done wrong but also what has to change in our vision. And all of this is in service of equality, and all of it is unequivocally a good thing. But it leads to a whole set of consequences that are very complicated, because people don't want, it turns out, recognition of their equality as individuals.

They also want recognition of their differences. Recognition is a very Canadian idea since it was a Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, who first put it into common parlance among political philosophers. To recognize someone in common speech is to put a name to a face, to single him or her out from the crowd. To be recognized is to emerge from anonymity, to be seen and acknowledged for what you are. When you're recognized, you cease to be a nobody, and you become a somebody in someone else's eyes.

Groups are fighting for a similar kind of recognition. They want the majority to recognize them, to see them anew, to acknowledge that they're equal, not only in law, but also in moral consideration. Equality of rights is the precondition for recognition, but it's not sufficient to ensure it. When individuals and groups seek recognition, they want their equality recognized, but they want their differences acknowledged as well. Now, the whole difficulty about recognition

turns on the question of whether it means acquiescence, acceptance, or approval. When a majority grants a minority rights, is it required to acquiesce, accept, or actively approve the practices of the group? Certainly, gay groups, for example, are asking not just for toleration, but for approval. And approval does seem to follow from the idea of equality. But does equality of rights necessarily require equality of approval? The majority has conceded equality of rights to homosexuals. But this seems not to imply approval, merely reluctant tolerance.

But this seems not to imply approval, merely reluctant tolerance. In the era of the rights revolution, demands for equal rights have become demands for approval. Indeed, it might even be claimed that anything less than full approval denies the excluded individual or group recognition of his or her status as an equal. But there's a problem here, and it's colloquially called political correctness. One fundamental critique of the rights revolution is that it engenders a coercive culture of ritualized insincere approval. When every excluded group is demanding both equal rights and recognition, the majority can feel it's being compelled to accord moral approval to practices that at best it only tolerates. So political correctness becomes a code word for a new kind of moral tyranny, the tyranny of the minority over the majority.

Now whether these constraints on public speech are actually a form of tyranny is another matter. Anyone with a memory knows that coarse, offensive, and demeaning remarks about women and gays were commonplace in the male culture of recent times. Creating a culture where groups are freed from the dismal drizzle of these remarks can't be regarded as a serious constraint on the free speech of those attached to these stereotypes. So on balance, the idea that the rights revolution ends in coercive political correctness seems misconceived. Yet closing down a culture of casual and ill-considered abuse is quite different from moving the culture towards full-hearted approval of same-sex activity and positive

discrimination in favor of women. Rights equality changes moral culture because groups demand recognition. As they do so, they force sexual majorities beyond toleration towards acceptance and then approval. So long as this process is negotiated, so long as it's not presented as a unilateral demand for surrender, rights equality can be followed successfully by full recognition. But if the majority feels coerced into according approval rather than just toleration, the result is likely to be a backlash. People want recognition of being black.

They want recognition of being gay. They want recognition of being female. They don't want recognition as equal individuals. That's the dry, soulless individualism for which liberalism is so much reproached. What they want is recognition of group and collective identities. And so the equality revolution that the rights revolution represented has empowered an assertion of difference and collective identity that many of us experience as fragmenting and highly divisive. And we're really struggling with this. In the campuses of the United States, the Supreme Court has ruled that affirmative

action that identifies applicants for admission to universities on the basis of race is a violation of the rights of individuals. The right of an individual who applies to a university to have their case for admission determined irrespective of race. What's not to like about that? Well, affirmative action did tremendous good for a lot of minorities in the United States. But there's an example where the rights principles are kind of blown up. And now we have admission policies in the United States that have to be race blind. Turns out, however, that it is admissible to base admission on the basis of economic circumstances. So we might get to a place, which I would like a lot, in which the only thing you care about is whether your family is poor.

If your family is poor, white, black, green, blue, or brown, you've got a shot to get in. That might be a better, but that will generate other difficulties. So we're struggling with the balance between individual rights and group recognition, and we haven't got that stuff right. And it's a tremendous source of conflict in our politics right now. The rights revolution of the past 40 years has made inequalities of gender, race, and sexual orientation visible, while the older inequalities of class and income have dropped out of the registers of our indignation. Abundance has awakened us to denials of self while blinding us to poverty. We idly

suppose that the poor have disappeared. They haven't. They've merely become invisible. There's little doubt that the rights revolution of the 60s is the product of the most sustained period of affluence in the history of the developed world. The old virtues, the old limits, have lost their legitimacy. The new virtues, self-cultivation, self-indulgence, self-development, have acquired the force of moral imperatives. This is the context that explains why the old moral economy of self-denial began to lose not only its economic rationale, but its moral dignity as well. You're listening to a conversation between former Massey lecturer Michael Ignatieff and the former host of Ideas, Paul Kennedy.

Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more.

I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley. The list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. The idea of rights implies that my rights are equal to yours. If rights aren't equal, they wouldn't be rights,

just a set of privileges for separate groups of individuals. The essential purpose of any political community based on rights is to protect that equality on behalf of everyone. What holds a nation together, then, is this commitment we each make to treat all individuals the same. Canadian intellectual and historian Michael Ignatieff is a professor and former president and rector of Central European University. He delivered his Massey Lectures in the year 2000. His series was called The Rights Revolution, and in one of his talks, he zeroed in on the notion of equality.

in one of his talks, he zeroed in on the notion of equality. Now, the trouble with equality is that no one actually wants to be treated just like everybody else. We want this as a baseline, but we also want more. Each of us wants to be treated equally and to be recognized as different. We want other people to acknowledge us as individuals and as members of groups, to recognize the status that goes with being somebody special. In private life, we usually get this recognition, but we also want our distinctiveness recognized in public. As citizens, we want public officials to pay attention to us as individuals with particular needs.

Reconciling the demand that we be recognized as individuals and simultaneously treated as equals is not easy. As part of a series marking the 60th anniversary of Massey College, one of our partners in the Massey Lectures, Michael Ignatieff sat down with former Ideas host Paul Kennedy. The purpose of this entire series is to look at the lectures that were delivered in the past and try to bring them into the future and see where we are. And I take it you're giving a good report card for quite a few things there. Things have come a long way with gay rights, with women's rights, with indigenous

rights. But there is the other side of that is that they've also regressed in some ways. Not necessarily in Canada in a big way, but that could happen. In the United States, the laws you're just talking about were overturned by a Supreme Court that was stacked. And therefore, one would assume the Supreme Court as the sort of legal authority over the entire country should have the right and actually the knowledge or the

ability to to know what to do how to decide what is right and they didn't or they decided what was wrong i think just what everybody i know would argue that that was a mistake where does it put us in our report card yeah i sometimes think i'd like to do a kind of the rights revolution revisited 25 years later and kind of think about your question in a kind of extended systematic way. Because I'm a liberal, small liberal. So the rights revolution, when I stand back from it, is the thing that post-war liberalism did. It's the achievement. It's what we got right.

that post-war liberalism did. It's the achievement. It's what we got right. The emancipation of individuals who'd been oppressed by their status or their gender or their race or whatever. I mean, this was good work. Most modern societies are conflictual. Class against class.

Interest against interest. Men against women. interest against interest, men against women, workers against employers. In this, Marx was deeply right. Rights are there to help adjudicate these conflicts, and the adjudications are never final. Indeed, the longing for finality is a reactionary delusion, as is the longing for national unity, consensus, and a quiet life. Rights bring conflicts out into the open, but there are ways in which they also help us to resolve them. First, rights talk can show opposing groups that there is right on the other side. In this way, people's understanding of what is at stake in a conflict slowly changes.

Instead of a battle between right and wrong, the conflict begins to be seen by both sides as a battle between competing rights. At first, this may only reinforce self-righteousness, but after a while, when one side realizes that the other has a rights claim too, compromise can become possible. Rights talk clarifies disagreements and creates the common language in which agreement can eventually be found. Rights consciousness also creates the grounds for understanding what kind of community we

are, and in so doing helps us to keep the show on the road, that is, binds us together as a people and as a country. For the key ideas of Wright's talk are that we are all deliberative equals, that each of us has a right to be heard about the public business of our country, that no one's claims can be silenced and denied simply by the fact of who they are. This ideal of deliberative equality, the commitment to remain in the same room talking until we resolve our disputes and to do so without violence, is as much unity, as much community, as modern life can afford. The key point here is that rights talk, by creating this idea of deliberative equality, has widened the democratic conversation of societies like ours. I grew up in a Canada

where the conversation of the country was firmly in the hands of a political and economic elite. Since the 1960s, the rights revolution has brought to the table whole new groups that were never heard before, and the debate about what kind of society this should be has become noisier, less controllable, and more democratic than it ever was before. For this, we have to thank the rights revolution. For this, we have to thank the rights revolution. The unexpected historical boomerang effects of it are the things that I'd like to think about now. That is the sense of the social fragmentation that is beginning to occur. in which you do have people saying that there's a collapse of empathy,

a collapse of faith and belief that a man can understand a woman, a woman can understand a man, a white can understand a black, a black can understand a white, an aboriginal can understand a non-aboriginal, a non-aboriginal can understand. There's a sense that we've lost the premise of universality that sustains empathy. That is that we are different. The differences are incorrigible. They're what we love and should value, but they have become bell jars that have got us enclosed in prisons of identity that are very difficult for us to get out. We've got some languages that are reflecting a collapse of our belief

that we can reach across difference. And that's a surprise to me. eyes to me. Now I want to shift the focus to another category, human rights, the ones that derive from the simple fact of being human. Imagine asking someone who he is only to have him reply, I'm a human being. It's not much of an answer. If he replies, I'm a Canadian, you know who you're talking to. And the basic problem with human rights is that it's not clear what community the rights refer to or what actual remedies they confer. Of course, someone will immediately reply that the community to which human rights refers is the human race. But what kind of community is that? Moreover, what kind of identity is it? As a matter of fact, we never encounter human beings as such in our daily lives, only determinate members of particular races, classes,

professions, tribes, religions, or communities. When they present themselves to us and we to them, difference is the focus. Their names, their places of birth or origin, their individual beliefs and commitments. Human differences are what define us, not the humanity we supposedly share. The problem of what kind of identity our human identity actually is has bothered thinkers for a long time. The French revolutionaries sought to universalize the idea of human rights in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1791. Writing some years after the French Revolution, that wise old reactionary Joseph de Maistre remarked that he'd met a lot of people in his life, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese,

men and women, rich and poor, but he'd never actually met a man with a capital M. The British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, writing in the same era, said much the same. The British philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, writing in the same era, said much the same. What we call human rights, he called nonsense on stilts, meaning that he just couldn't see whose rights these were exactly and how they were supposed to be enforced. And if you can't enforce a right, what's the point of having it? If all human beings were safely ensconced within political communities that accorded them basic rights, then Bentham and Demest's point would be conclusive. In reality, rights-respecting societies are a rare, even endangered species.

In the real world, billions of human beings live in despotic regimes or in collapsed or failed states where nothing is secure. They need human rights because those are the only rights they've got. This helps us to see human rights as a residual system of entitlement that people have irrespective of their citizenship, irrespective of the states in which they happen to find themselves. Human rights are the rights men and women have when all else fails them. Yet human rights alone are not enough. In extreme situations, we need extra resources, humor, compassion, self-control. These virtues in turn must draw on a deep sense of human indivisibility, a recognition of us in them and them in us,

that rights doctrines express but in themselves have no power to instill in the human heart. I thought what would happen when we have recognition of equality, that we would have more reaching across the barriers of difference. And I think in some sense, it's more fragmented now than it was. But you got to be careful here. I said 20 minutes ago that when I was 21, I didn't know any gay people. They didn't have the right to speak and affirm their identity at all. So you got to be careful here. I don't want to indulge a kind of facile pessimism. The center doesn't hold. It's all falling apart. We're all lost in mutual acrimony. And not true. It's much more complicated than that.

The Rights Revolution was a very good thing, in my view, unequivocally a good thing. But we have to live with some of its consequences, which have been divisive and perplexing. And that's why I should do Rights Revolution Revisited. revisited. Inevitably, the rights revolution and the sexual revolution that went with it produced a backlash. Since the mid-1970s, conservative politicians and social analysts have been arraigning the liberal reforms of the 60s and condemning their consequences. The backlash has reversed the usual conservative position on rights. Conservatives used to be strong exponents of individual rights, since rights define the limits of state intervention, and conservatives were anxious to set limits on the power of the

post-war state. Liberals, on the other hand, used to be more hostile to individual rights talk because some rights, especially property and privacy rights, were invoked by conservatives to resist crucial liberal objectives, such as the establishment of graduated income tax and the creation of a welfare state. The revolution in family life is one factor that's turned this alignment upside down. Now conservatives say that rights have gone too far, while liberals, like me, are trying to stay the course of a rights agenda. The problem with liberal rights talk, conservatives argue, is that it individualizes people. Once people start speaking about their rights, they start counting

the costs of all relationships with other human beings that involve sacrifice. And family life is based on sacrifice. Parents devoting years to the care of children when they might prefer to be furthering their own interests, and husbands and wives devoting themselves to each other when other persons and possibilities beckon. The conservative argument has something to say for it, but not much. Conservatives are wrong to suppose that rights talk invalidates sacrifice itself. Even we heartless liberals need intimacy, and we know that we cannot have intimacy without sacrifice. These sacrifices, both moral and material, are worth bearing when they're born mutually. There's something unique about your biography as a Nath Massey lecturer.

You'd spent much of your life in England before coming back to Canada, delivering the lectures, and then off you go to Hungary. What did that experience teach you, again, about this book, about these lectures? I went to Hungary because I was asked to be the president and rector of a wonderful institution called Central European University, which was a graduate school in the humanities and social sciences, set up after 1991 to do something which I think was a very good idea, which is you can't have a free society unless you have a free university. And so George Soros put some money into this place, and a bunch of crazy Hungarian intellectuals helped him to build this institution. And I came

in in 2016 when it was firmly ensconced in Budapest and built up a good international academic reputation. And then Viktor Orban then basically decided that his re-election campaign in 2018 depended on finding a big enough enemy to mobilize his base. And the biggest enemy that you can find in Hungary is George Soros, who's a Holocaust survivor, the richest Hungarian who ever lived, and a very prominent defender of liberal causes. Orban had no conceivable grounds for questioning our academic quality, but he went after us and used legislation to render this university illegal, in effect. And we fought it for two or three years, and eventually, you know, what's that

country and western song? You fight the law, but the law won, you know what I mean? So we fought the law, and the law won, and we ended up in Vienna, which is where I live now. And I had to move a university across a national frontier in the middle of COVID. And I learned a couple of things that I think are relevant. One of them is that Hungary is nominally a democracy. Viktor Orban is not a dictator or a tyrant. He won four straight elections and then used, this is the point, use democracy to demolish democracy. And everybody who's seen that, you've seen that once, you never forget it. You win a majority and you then hobble the Supreme Court, sell off the media to your cronies, hobble all the regulatory agencies. You use majority rule to take apart

every counter-majoritarian institution that keeps people free in a society. And once you've seen that, you look at your own democracy with new eyes. You begin to realize that this is another thing liberalism, for all its other faults, got right, which is democracy is not majority rule. Democracy, a liberal believes, is power checking power to keep the people free. And that's the vision of democracy that Orban hates. And he goes after universities because we are one of the counter-majoritarian institutions that keep a society free. And our job is epistemically crucial in a world of digital media and the test of time. Create new knowledge. And critically assess the truth claims or the evidence claims in the public discourse.

And it makes a university an extremely important institution to democracy. And Orban understood that better than most liberals is what I'm saying. And he went after the last freestanding institution in the country, the last institution that mustered any kind of intellectual or conceptual opposition to this vision of democracy. And it taught me a lesson about the fragility of democracy, the ease with which the counter majority institutions of a society can be weakened, and so we lost. The rights revolution hasn't launched us on a slippery slope towards nihilism and social collapse. We're simply trying to live by the twin ideals of equality and authenticity, to fashion lives that reflect our choices and do not depend on

thwarting the lives of others. There's much that we could do better, and we'd better acknowledge sooner rather than later that we can't have it all. If we want to be treated equally, we'll have to treat others equally. And if we want our children to respect us, we'll have to respect their need for rules and order. What I think cannot be changed is our sense of ourselves as free agents, the idea that we have duties to ourselves as well as to others, that no one is there to serve, honor, obey, and suffer in silence. As Isaiah Berlin once said, freedom is a chilly virtue. It isn't justice, equality, or a quiet life. It's merely freedom. And almost everybody is frightened of it. And almost everybody would restrict someone else's freedom if they could

get away with it. Freedom is not the only moral virtue, and it's not the only moral priority, but it happens to be the precondition for all the others, because an agent who is not free cannot be a responsible person at all. If we value responsibility, then we need to have the courage to embrace our freedom, because it's the very condition of self-respect and hence the very basis of an authentic life. The rights revolution has been in the service of freedom and we need to have the courage to continue with it until we can genuinely say

that everyone shares its benefits and not just its costs. It's fascinating because I think what you said in 2003 is more true in 2023 than it was when you said it. It's also more difficult to imagine it and conceive it. I think we're going to open for questions from the floor. We're open for questions from the floor. We're open for questions from the audience. Professor Ignatieff, I was wondering, since your book came out, The Rights Revolution came out, and since you're sort of speculating about maybe theoretically kind of revisiting it in your mind, or maybe even writing about it again, have there been

other thinkers or other writers that you've read subsequent to when you wrote the piece that would have altered how you perceived some of the issues you dealt with? I think what would make me revisit the rights revolution is not so much subsequent academic discussion in books, Not so much subsequent academic discussion in books, but just my sense of how anguished we are in 2023 about some of these conflicts between equality and recognition between individual rights and recognition of group difference, group identities that are making us question whether we can really understand each other and live together and build tissues of connection. And what makes this hard to think about is going back to my, what I said earlier, we have a nostalgia or someone of my generation has a nostalgia

for how well we got along in the old days, how much comedy, civility, and empathy there was in the Canada of my youth. Well, remember what I also said. I didn't know a single gay person in 1965. What was comedy and civil was a world in which difference was suppressed. So we can't go back to that lost world because it wasn't a world you want to go back to.

It was the bad old days, not the good old days. But there has been a fraying of commonality and common enterprise that concerns me, and it's not just in Toronto or in our, it's also the weakening of the bonds of the Federation itself, but that's another. So if I revisit it, I want to try and find a way to reflect about why we're so, why we're struggling with what is it we have in common? What is it that holds us together is kind of the question I want to understand better. Why is it that the rights revolution has left us feeling more apart than I ever expected when I gave those lectures originally? We may not agree with each other about rights, but we do know how to work together. So our arduous constitutional experience has taught us that countries can endure and cohere even on the edge of a rights precipice.

And that should teach us that what holds us together is deeper than rights and constitutions and political deals in back rooms. We're held together by what we do every day. We're also held together by memory and by the attachments to land and neighborhood, people and places that are dear to us. These ties are deep, and so there's no reason to despair. We simply agree to disagree. Thank you. The 2000 Massey Lectures were produced by Philip Coulter. This episode was produced by Annie Bender and is part of a series marking the 60th anniversary of Massey College, one of our partners in the Massey Lectures. Thanks to Massey College and former principal Nathalie Desrosiers.

Technical production, Danielle Duval and Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.