The personal is the historical

Michael Ignatieff has pulled our century apart. And found that it's about him.

"Technology was supposed to take my father's suffering from him. In the event it took him from us, to die alone in an intensive care unit."

Michael Ignatieff has tried hard to keep himself out of his history of the 20th century. But he has lived in it. So its history is his history. Even so, his personal life extrudes just once - and only for the two sentences quoted above - in the new series of Radio 4's award-winning review of the past 10 decades, 20/20, which Ignatieff takes over from John Tusa at its halfway point tonight.

Intellectuals tend to shy away from the personal; they are happier with ideas than with people. And the Canadian historian - best known for his smoothly cerebral performances on BBC2's former arts flagship The Late Show - is, in an age of jangling journalistic populism, shamelessly splendidly intellectual. So is his new series. And then, in its midst, come these two odd sentences.

On the television Ignatieff comes across with a cool self-certainty which some find irritating. In the flesh he is all engaging diffidence and searching self-doubt. "I didn't realise until I began, that when you have lived through an era, the history you relate will be your own personal history. Looking back, I realised that its public events had made much more impact on me than I had supposed. So one of the sub-themes was to historicise my own experience: every single death in my family - my mother, father, aunts and uncles - five in the last 10 years - have all involved me and my immediate family in making decisions."

At the beginning of the century death was a more daily visitor. A visit to a Victorian cemetery underscores the fact that one in 10 children died in infancy and half the population expected to die before the age of 45. "I'm beset by nostalgia and this series has to some extent cured me of it," he says. "You wouldn't want to check into an Edwardian hospital with appendicitis or with a child who had diphtheria. The improvement of medicine has brought new dilemmas - but they are dilemmas I want."

And yet at the end of the 20th century we experience the phenomenon of death in the family with more moral anguish. "Was I right to turn off my aunt's ventilator?" he asks. "I think I was, but the 20th century has brought freedoms which bring bitter and difficult moments."

Medicine is just one of the subjects he tackles. 20/20 takes a thematic approach rather than a chronological one. In addition to Suffering he looks, over the next five weeks, at Creating, Spending, Growing and Constructing. But from all the themes one big question emerges: have we made moral as well as technological progress? Are morality and technology, he asks, on a collision course?

The question is not restricted to the area of medical ethics. It is there in politics, economics, ecology and even architecture. The dreams of the great French architect Le Corbusier ended in the unnatural gravity- defying tower blocks of the Fifties and Sixties. The cathedrals of the early decades were the buildings of Chrysler, Hitler, Stalin which embodied the certainty that the world can be known and mastered. The Sixties brought the white heat of technology.

"That was the great false promise of modernity - that we can control our lives," says Ignatieff. But the technology that was supposed to make us safe and secure has instead created a world which is running out of control. The myth of the all-conquering scientist led us to expect one triumph after another. The idea of medical progress encouraged the idea of a utopia in which suffering would be abolished and death, if not abolished, would at least be postponed indefinitely." He is back to medicine again. "And yet the real enemy is disease. So why are we treating death? When is enough enough?"

Tentatively he tells the story of his mother's death. Of how, seconds after she died, a young doctor entered the room and said: "I think she needs more morphine." "My brother said: 'I don't think she needs anything now, doctor.' I resented the fact that he intruded at that moment. There was some sense in which my mother's death had been expropriated."

Perhaps that was inevitable in a century when death and birth have moved from the home to the hospital. But there is a sense also that medical advances have shifted us from a culture of endurance to a culture of complaint and still we can't find a meaning in suffering. So two-thirds of the health budget in a country like Canada goes on the terminally ill. The developed world has decided it needs to die with dignity while the Third World does not even have the wherewithal to live, with dignity or without.

One of the reasons many are disappointed in the 20th century is that we still have a 19th-century Darwinian notion of progress, as the historian Christopher Cook has said. Yet the rebellion of hippie culture, and later environmentalism, showed that there was a powerful counter-current to the consumerism that came to rescue capitalism.

"People have invested a tremendous amount of meaning in their belongings - a car is a woman, a car is freedom, and so on," says Ignatieff. "But part of them knows that in the end it's just a car." Even in a world of McDonald's values nobody believes that consumption provides the answer to the ultimate questions.

That said, the traditional forum for tackling such questions - orthodox religion - is crumbling too. Ignatieff is an agnostic and not disposed to be nostalgic about religion, but it did provide a space and a language in which people could reach to the transcendent once a week. "One of the odd things about the 20th century is how those considerations have been whisked out of public life."

Like death, religion has been privatised. There is no common public language. "You feel alone, whereas in religious cultures you have a congregation and the whole proscenium arch of ritual and meaning in which life and death was framed." So we are witnessing a gradual secularisation? "There has been an ebbing of public religious doctrine. But it's the waning of religious authority, not belief."

He detects a new, solitary, religious sensibility. "Scratch most individuals and you find some sense of the metaphysical." It may be pick-and-mix with a bit of Buddhism, a bit of Christianity and a bit of superstition but it is their own. If it is unarticulated or unformulated it is deeply believed. The religious impulse has gone into ethics, into the environment, into popular science, with all the interest in the Big Bang, and the international outrage over genocide which is a new thing in the 20th century. The ghost of religion has survived.

"In 1915 the Turks got away with slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Armenians; in 1994 when the Hutus did the same to the Tutsis the world intervened - inadequately and too late - but it intervened. That is moral progress of sorts. "

So we are back to progress. One of the great surprises for Ignatieff in making the series was to discover how much he needed a sense of progress. Without it, as some wag once put it, history is just one damned thing after another. "And then one begins to think," says Ignatieff, "that one's life is just one damned thing after another. I find I need the idea of progress more than I had supposed."

And if, after the grandiose project of modernism, the people who survive into the next millennium are suspicious of great schemes and certainties, or more sceptical, or just more conscious of environmental or other considerations, that may be no bad thing. "At the end of the century we're in a very unheroic, unPromethean, unromantic culture. But it may mean it's a better place to live. Perhaps this is not such a bad time to be alive."

Michael Ignatieff presents '20/20' on Radio 4 tonight at 7.45pm.