By: Lindsey Williams
June 28, 1978 If Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the kind of man to grind his teeth he now must be puffing molar dust. It seems that everyone has missed the main point of his recent commencement address
June 28, 1978
If Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the kind of man to grind his teeth he now must be puffing molar dust.
It seems that everyone has missed the main point of his recent commencement address at Harvard University.
James Reston, resident liberal of the New York Times, was shocked at the Russian dissident's denouncement of the welfare state. William Safire, the Time's token conservative, found revealed truth in Solzhenitsyn's charge that the western nations have lost their courage.
The speech, essentially, was a religious sermon which the clergy has not recognized.
Not that the temporal conclusions supporting the message are unworthy of notice.
"Now, at last, technical and social progress has permitted the realization of the welfare state," said Solzhenitsyn. "When the modern western states were created, the following principle was proclaimed: Governments are meant to serve man, and man lives to be free and to pursue happiness. See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence.
"Every citizen has been granted freedom and material goods in such quantity and quality as to guarantee, in theory, the achievement of happiness.
"Habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for any living organism. Today, well-being in western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask."
Solzhenitsyn points to materialism, pornography, crime, violence, and sharp business practices as proof of the "moral decay" of the West. "Mediocrity triumphs," he said.
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press," said Solzhenitsyn. "There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East, where the press is rigorously unified: One gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the western press as a whole.
"Without censorship, fashionable trends of thought are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable. Nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd.
"This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation - a sort of a petrified armor around people's minds," Solzhenitsyn said.
All this led to a misunderstanding, in the West, of socialism. "Through intense suffering our country (Soviet Union) has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the western system in its present spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.
"A decline in courage may be the most striking feature an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The western world has lost its civil courage. To defend one's self, one must also be ready to die. There is little such readiness in the cult of material well being," said Solzhenitsyn.
"In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality. Kennan's advice to his own country to begin unilateral disarmament belongs to this category. If you only knew how the youngest of the Moscow officials laugh at your political wizards!
"The most cruel mistake occurred with failure to understand the Vietnam War. Members of the U.S. anti-war movement ended up involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there," declared Solzhenitsyn.
"Vietnam was a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small community half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?
"No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of will power," Solzhenitsyn emphasized. "Nothing is left but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal."
All of the foregoing brought Solzhenitsyn to the bottom line:
"In early democracies - as in American democracy at the time of its birth - all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. Freedom was given to the individual conditionally in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.
"Later all such limitations were discarded, in total liberation from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.
"State systems became increasingly materialistic," said Solzhenitsyn. "The West ended up truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but (individual) man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew ever dimmer.
"There is a disaster that has been under way for quite some time: The calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness. If humanism were right in declaring that man was born to be happy, he would not be born to die. His task on earth evidently must be more spiritual.
"It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then get the most out of them.
"It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life may become an experience of moral growth - so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it," Solzhenitsyn stated:
The Russian Nobel Laureate overstates his case, in my opinion. Yet, he puts his finger on a keypoint: ownership of private property and individual freedom has worked when human rights were balanced with human responsibility to a higher order. Without God there must be the State. Without either there must be anarchy.
The partnership of God and man is still our best bet.
Lindsey Williams is a Sun columnist who can be contacted at:
LinWms@earthlink.net
LinWms@lindseywilliams.org
Website: http://www.lindseywilliams.org with several hundred of Lin's Editorial & At Large articles written over 40 years.
Also featured in its entirety is Lin's groundbreaking book "Boldly Onward," that critically analyzes and develops theories about the original Spanish explorers of America.
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