Александр Исаевич Солженицын
The Harvard address given in June 1978 by the famed Soviet exile-literatus Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (may he rest in peace) is one of those works which ought to be read carefully, and repeatedly, by anyone inside or outside the modern West of 2012 seeking to understand its pathologies. Solzhenitsyn’s critiques of the Western ‘free’ press, of Western law, of Western politics and of Western economy – though indeed they come from a friend – are biting; however, because they come from a friend, they are well-intentioned and mostly correct (calling to mind the Qazaq saying, ‘дос жылатып айтады; душпан күлдіртіп айтады’ – ‘your friends will make you cry; it’s your enemies who make you smile’). To be sure, Solzhenitsyn was prone to some hyperbole. Coming as he did from the horrors of the gulag and from the constant drumbeat of disinformation surrounding him, he was wrongly convinced of the unity and resolve of the entire Communist bloc; this led him honestly and forthrightly, though nonetheless mistakenly, to fault America’s lack of resolve (rather than the Soviet-Chinese split) for the brutal massacres in Pol Pot’s Cambodia in the wake of the Vietnam War. But his underlying point is one which deserves to be read, and to be made, over and over again – for it rings just as true forty-four years after it was made.
The blind optimism and the faith in human self-sufficiency in modern Western thinking has led, in Solzhenitsyn’s estimation, to a form of cowardice: because human evil was considered a deviation rather than a norm, it could not criticise or reflect upon itself, let alone correct itself. Since human perfection was considered attainable, the doctrines of self-satisfaction and the equality of all opinions became preferred to the classical doctrines of self-examination and the equality of all persons before God. Since freedom was an immanent quality inherent to humankind rather than being a transcendent quality given conditionally by a higher power, choice became enshrined as sacrosanct and the content of the choice was increasingly regarded as irrelevant. (In effect, that meant that political reformers and crusaders were subject to every manner of critique and ridicule, whilst every manner of public depravity and amoral calculation came to be greeted with – at best – fatalistic toleration.) Spiritual ends were discarded for purely material ones, thus leading to a tendency in Western culture to discount all sins but sloth, and to discount all virtues, leaving the sins of avarice, lust and envy in their place. The Christian praxis and ‘moral heritage’ of ‘mercy and sacrifice’ was regarded as the barbarism of a benighted and violent past. The primacy of the state and the primacy of the letter of the law led to the political struggle we see now between the champions of ‘negative liberty’ from the state, and of ‘positive liberty’ guaranteed by the state – both of which are dependent fully upon the state and upon a reductively materialist conception of human welfare, whether they acknowledge that or not.
For the Orthodox Solzhenitsyn, this philosophy was an utter dead end. (There is a reason, after all, why he detested Boris Yeltsin so utterly.) The higher goals of human endeavour which he saw being ‘destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party’ in Soviet Russia fared little better in the United States, where ‘commercial interests tend[ed] to suffocate’ them. In international affairs, he noticed a creeping cowardice and lack of resolve wherein American officials tended to amorally calculate the cultivation of powerful and wealthy friends, but are prone to ‘explosions of anger and inflexibility… when dealing with weak governments and weak countries’. See even now how we deal with the likes of nations like Afghanistan, like Iraq, like Libya, like Syria and like Iran which we have hopes of isolating – and how we capitulate so readily to the whims of Saudi Arabia with its vast wealth and regional power, and its sneering disdain for human dignity. A misguided generation of technocrats who do have the sense that they are missing something their grandparents possessed go abroad seeking demons to slay, but find only rodents – over whom they proceed to puff out their chests and proclaim their moral superiority. Solzhenitsyn’s opposition to American interventions (see also here) in Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan and in Iraq are not inconsistent at all with his earlier condemnations of American lack of resolve in Vietnam; indeed, they spring from the selfsame roots. He underwent no ‘conversion’, as so many American commentators would have it, to Russian nationalism; indeed, by all accounts the remembrance of his venerable, philosophical, philhellenistic motherland was the wellspring of his opposition to the Soviet regime.
Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the modern Western ‘free press’ is also damning in its prescience. In 1978, broadcast television was still the primary mode of transmission of information; cable news was still a twinkle in Ted Turner’s eye (CNN being founded two years later). He very astutely noted the tendency in the Western press that being first beats being right, and that speaking to superficial fashions and dependence on ‘sensational formulas’ would take precedence over in-depth analysis. The great spectator sport of our time, the gladiatorial indulgence of the public, is the constant left-versus-right, Democrat-versus-Republican banter, which sadly even those claiming to be above the fray (Mr Stewart, I’m looking at you here) subscribe to and depend upon for their daily bread. All issues are reduced to one dimension; all problems reduced to easily-allocated blame; all solutions reduced to catchphrases and politically-convenient bromides. (To be sure, one side is far and away more guilty of cynically exploiting this game than the other, and this fact deserves to be pointed out, but that doesn’t change the wrongness of the game itself.)
I consider it a very sad neglect of my own self-education that I had until recently failed to understand or appreciate Solzhenitsyn, and that I have not yet read enough of Solzhenitsyn’s published works. However, I do intend to correct this oversight as soon as may be – The Gulag Archipelago is next on my reading-list. It is my hope that my gentle readers will likewise give the late literary giant the benefit of the doubt!
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