Philipp Blom in conversation with Michael Ignatieff: ON CONSOLATION. Finding Solace in Dark Times

When we lose someone we love, when we suffer loss or defeat, when
catastrophe strikes—war, famine, pandemic—we go in search of
consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the
language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern
vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of
religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient
religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has
increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the
therapeutic.


How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief?
In a series of lapidary meditations on writers, artists,
musicians, and their works—from the books of Job and Psalms to
Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, and Primo Levi—esteemed writer and
historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity
have looked to each other across time to recover hope and
resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the
courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue
unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present,
movingly contending that we can revive these traditions of
consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of our
precarious twenty-first century.


Michael Ignatieff, Rector Emeritus and currently
Professor of History at the Central European University in
Vienna, is the author of several acclaimed books, among them The
Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (2017), Fire and
Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (2013), The Lesser Evil:
Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004), Human Rights as
Politics and Idolatry (2001), The Rights Revolution (2000),
Isaiah Berlin (1998), Scar Tissue (1992. He writes regularly for
the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the London
Review of Books.
His most recent book On Consolation. Finding Solace in Dark Times
was published by Metropolitan Books, New York, in autumn 2021
(ISBN 9780805055214; available also as e-book) and a German
translation – Über den Trost in dunklen Zeiten – by Ullstein
Verlag (ISBN: 9783550201981)


Philipp Blom is Historian, Author, Journalist
and Translator





Recorded at Kreisky Forum, May 18, 2022