Solzenitsyn: An American Prophet

I have written before of Alexandre Solzhenitsyn and I have written before about Douglas Murray and his weekly Things Worth Remembering column in the online publication, The Free Press. This past Sunday Murray focused on Solzhenitsyn's 1978 address to the graduating class of Harvard University. As Murray relates, it was not a comfortable message:

One might have expected Solzhenitsyn to lavish the Americans with praise, to talk about the splendor of America, the generosity of spirit, the freedom, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, all that. And one might have expected Solzhenitsyn to contrast this idealized America with his homeland—to turn his penetrating gaze, once again, on the Soviet Union.

But he had done that. Everyone knew where he stood on the USSR.

Instead, to the great discomfort of many in the audience at Harvard, he focused on the West—and, in particular, on the United States.

***

Many of the Americans who heard it thought Solzhenitsyn’s assessment of contemporary America inadequate, off-kilter—ungrateful. But what was he to do? He was in the business of telling the truth and nothing else.

Murray's account is timely, even as the speech to which he refers -- A World Split Apart -- is now 46 years in the past. In this regard, like biblical prophets, Solzhenitsyn mixed prediction and rebuke. He was not merely saying that something was coming, but that it was already here and would become even more evident in the future:

The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of utterly destroying the other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. These deep manifold splits bear the danger of equally manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom—in this case, our Earth—divided against itself cannot stand.

***

There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

***

The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.

*** The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones. And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century. *** If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the president’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism. ***

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.

This ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but—upward. [emphases added]

Even as Solzhenitsyn was speaking, the very institution at which he was speaking, as with the myriad others like it, was being infected with the mind virus of communism. I know it is unfashionable to refer to communism in the 21st Century. After all, has not capitalism toppled communism everywhere? Isn't even the CCP bowing to capitalistic principles to keep itself afloat? The answer is "no," the fundamental spirit that adopts communism, socialism, Marxism, or crony capitalism to aggregate power to itself remains alive.

Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec authored the recently released book: Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Unhumans describes the evil spirit to which Solzhenitsyn referred and details its fulminations in history from the French Revolution, to the Russian Revolution, to Spain, to China, and in a grey war within the West:

And there is one conclusion: We're in a new revolution right now.

But this is not a book about ideology or politics. Unhumans reveals that communism, socialism, Marxism, and all other radical-isms are not philosophies but tactics—tactics that are specifically designed to unleash terror on everyday people and revoke their human rights to life, liberty, and property. These are the forces of unhumanity. This is what they do. Every. Single. Time.

The American Declaration of Independence asserted that man was created by God, and man created the State; each man was accountable to God; each state was accountable to the people who empowered it. The unhuman spirit maintains that there is nothing above the collectivized spirit of man embodied by the State and that the individual spirit of a man is worth no more than the numerator "1" over the denominator of the sum of all mankind. This is the same spirit to which George Orwell referred in his dystopian novel, 1984:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

It is important for us all to realize that our American Constitution was never designed to defeat evil. It was designed to disaggregate power to limit the effects of evil. And having ceded more and more power to our central government we have defeated the sage counsel of our Founders. And the entire West, through its growing globalism, is centralizing power on a global scale.

If we are to reclaim power over the State we must reclaim power over our individual selves. That is a spiritual, not a political, conception. It is revival, not revolution. Solzhenitsyn had been in the gulag and he could see where we are going unless we defeat unhumanity by embracing our status and obligation as created beings.

"It will demand from us a spiritual blaze.... "