What moral values do humans hold in common? As globalization draws us together financially, are our ideals converging or diverging? Specifically, are human privileges becoming a global ethic? These were the queries that led Michael Ignatieff to go on a three-year, eight-nation journey in search of answers. The Ordinary Virtues presents Ignatieff’s discoveries and his interpretation of what globalization-and resistance to it-is carrying out to your conscience and our moral understanding..READING MORE about The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Purchase within a Divided World

Through dialogues with favela dwellers in Brazil, Southern Africans and Zimbabweans living in shacks, Japanese farmers, gang leaders in LA, and monks in Myanmar, Ignatieff found that while individual rights may be the language of states and liberal elites, the moral language that resonates with most people is that of everyday virtues: tolerance, forgiveness, trust, and resilience. These regular virtues are the moral operating-system in global towns and obscure shantytowns as well, the glue that makes the multicultural experiment work. Ignatieff looks for to comprehend the moral framework and psychology of these core beliefs, which privilege the neighborhood over the universal, and citizens’ promises over those of strangers.

Regular virtues, he concludes, are antitheoretical and anti-ideological. They can be cheerfully inconsistent. When order breaks down and conflicts use, they are easily exploited for the politics of fear and exclusion-reserved for one’s own group and rejected to others. However they are also the key to curing, reconciliation, and solidarity on both an area and a global scale.