1998 America
By Michael Novak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John O'Sullivan, Mark Steyn, John Lukacs, Edward Ericson, David Aikman

Almost exactly 20 years ago—on June 8, 1978—the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then living as an exile in Vermont, delivered an historic address at Harvard University. At a time when America was deeply mired in domestic and foreign problems, Solzhenitsyn presented a graduating class of future American leaders with a stern look at their society.

Two decades later, a spirit of triumph is sweeping America, flowing out of some remarkable mercantile and military successes. Yet beneath the surface, news events also offer sporadic glimpses of national moral corrosion.

With some extraordinarily mixed verdicts on the state of the American culture now in the air, we offer a look back at Solzhenitsyn’s piercing commentary. Following it are current reflections from some close observers of both Solzhenitsyn and the U.S.

Ultimately, we leave it to you as readers to sift out the places where Solzhenitsyn underestimated America’s vigor and self-healing powers, and those where he identified enduring menaces.

Excerpts from
"A World Split Apart"

By Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Well-being
When the modern Western states were being formed, it was proclaimed as a principle that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness.… During past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of that word which has come into being during those same decades.

In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: The constant desire to have still more things and a still better life [imprints] many Western faces with worry and even depression…. The majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this? Why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in a distant land?

Legalistic Life
…People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law, and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: This would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of….

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities.… Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses….

The Direction of Freedom
Today’s Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.

It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power, and it has in fact been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And what shall we say about the dark realms of overt criminality? Legal limits (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also some misuse of such freedom. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency—all with the support of thousands of defenders in the society….

This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man—the master of this world—does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime….

The Direction of the Press
Hastiness and superficiality—these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press.… Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Yet one would like to ask: According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? …Who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long, and with what prerogatives?

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the totalitarian East with its rigorously unified press: One discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press…. Unrestrained freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership, because newspapers mostly transmit in a forceful and emphatic way those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own….

A Fashion in Thinking
Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development. In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons—maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices….

Not a Model
I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall certainly not speak for such an alternative…. But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively.

…If our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points. Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smooth plane of legalism, as is the case in yours. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

All this is visible to numerous observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.

There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such as, 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?

Humanism and Its Consequences
…The humanistic way of thinking, which has 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 worshipping 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.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man.

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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 1,000 years. Two hundred or even 50 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…. 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.

An Unexpected Kinship
As humanism in its development was becoming more and more materialistic, it also increasingly allowed its concepts to be used first by socialism and then by Communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say, in 1844, that "Communism is naturalized humanism."

This statement has proved to be not entirely unreasonable. One does see the same stones in the foundations of an eroded humanism and of any type of socialism: boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attain the stage of anti-religious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach…. It is no accident that all of Communism’s rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: Common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The interrelationship is such, moreover, that the current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. Thus during the past centuries and especially in recent decades, as the process became more acute, the alignment of forces was as follows: Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to Communism. The Communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see Communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes. The problem persists: In our Eastern countries, Communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.

Before the Turn
…An autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness…has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.… On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: The split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.

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 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.

Closing
…We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

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.

Responses by:

Edward E. Ericson, Jr.

Are we creatures living under God’s heaven or not? How one answers that question still largely determines how one reacts to Solzhenitsyn’s address at Harvard. Solzhenitsyn gave a religious believer’s historical rendering of the spiritual decline in the West. To ask which of his criticisms of American culture have been borne out by events risks obscuring that general purpose.

The world has gone through a great watershed in the past two decades. The Soviet Union is no more, thanks in no small part to Solzhenitsyn himself. At Harvard his audience dictated that he speak about the West, but elsewhere he had been predicting that the Soviet empire would collapse of inner rot, if only the West stood firm long enough. In large terms, the world today is closer to his hopes than the pre-Reagan world was. Certain details in this speech now sound dated, though if it’s datedness you want, you should reread some of the anti-anti-Communist counterblasts the speech elicited. More striking is how well the speech holds up.

Maybe Dale Carnegie could have taught Solzhenitsyn a thing or two about how to win friends and influence people, but his goal was to help galvanize Western resolve. His means were like hitting the mule on the head with a board. He later admitted that, in his eagerness to get the West’s attention, he sometimes overstated its weakness.

Today it is particularly hard to credit that "the Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model." America bestrides the globe invincible. Poor people everywhere want what our skyrocketing stock market provides us. They willingly seek our procedural democracy. In our good times, Solzhenitsyn sounds too apocalyptic.

On the other hand, some cultural phenomena in his laundry list remain all too familiar: intrusive advertising, TV stupor, intolerable music, readily available pornography, excessive litigation, uniform fashionable views among the media, declining courage among intellectual and ruling elites, amoral diplomacy, mediocrity in public life, more rights than obligations. Even if we grant that Solzhenitsyn underestimated some inner strengths of ours, all these vexations have intensified. And they illustrate his major contentions that materialism can shrink the soul and that libertarianism can pass into libertinism.

So anxieties continue to bubble just under the complacent surface of American life. Is it healthy for a people to tolerate immorality in high places for the sake of luxuriating in creature comforts? Are our elections impervious enough to manipulation? Is the sense of civic duty required to defend one’s country—or even to vote—being inculcated into our children? For that matter, do the mtv-soaked young have the skills to read Solzhenitsyn’s speech while vacationing in Cancun, or the historical perspective to appreciate its context? (Do adults?) How confident are we that, despite falling crime rates, we won’t get looted if the lights go out again? As we export our electoral devices and our wealth-making ways, are we also exporting a soulless materialism? What will happen if boom goes bust?

The Harvard address remains relevant because it speaks to perennial needs of the human heart, needs that affluence cannot satiate. Pursuing private happiness does not produce the "higher meaning" our souls crave. Yet our elites dismiss such talk as the narrow political agenda of "social conservatism."

Solzhenitsyn urges the West to be more the West by reclaiming the spiritual virtues that made it pre-eminent. He reminds us of the "moral heritage of Christian centuries" which America’s Founders remembered. He warns us of our weakening hold on that heritage as, from the Enlightenment on, both East and West took to "worshipping man and his material needs."

Solzhenitsyn admitted that when he got out into the American heartland, it was easier to be sanguine about the influence "an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness" has on us. But about secular America, including Harvard, the question is not whether he was too pessimistic but whether he was too optimistic.

Edward E. Ericson, Jr., who is the "teacher in a faraway small college" referred to by Solzhenitsyn in his Harvard address, produced an abridged version of The Gulag Archipelago in collaboration with its author.

 

John O’Sullivan

The past, wrote L. P. Hartley, is another country. We are all cold warriors now, Strobe Talbott striding arm in arm with Robert Conquest, differing only in the tactics we would have applied to bring down the Soviet Union. Yet surely there was a time when "cold warrior" was itself a dismissive epithet, when liberal opinion discouraged the use of terms like "captive nations" and "evil empire," when Margaret Thatcher was usually "strident" and Ronald Reagan invariably "bellicose."

Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard lecture is a letter from that Abroad. His denunciation of Communism following his arrival from the Soviet Union had to be swallowed without complaint because of both his moral stature and his record of personal suffering. But when Solzhenitsyn turned his attention to the state of the West itself, he was quickly attacked as authoritarian, unfamiliar with democratic ways, extreme, and so on.

Yet reading the address two decades later, one is struck by how much of it was prophetically right, and how little seriously wrong, precisely because Solzhenitsyn was immune to the "mood" of the times. I caught two seriously questionable judgments, both of which I myself would have agreed with at the time. The first was that the West was suffering a permanent decline in courageous political leadership. True, courage is no longer held up as an ideal, as it was even as late as my own school days in the 1950s, and this fosters a cowardly society. But even as Solzhenitsyn spoke, both Reagan and Thatcher were in the wings.

The Harvard address remains relevant because it speaks to perennial needs of the human heart, needs that affluence cannot satiate.

—Edward Ericson

The second judgment which looks questionable in retrospect is Solzhenitsyn’s suggestion that human personality had weakened in the West while growing firmer and stronger in the East. Undoubtedly, some personalities in the East had grown steely under oppression—dissidents like Natan Sharanski, Vladimir Bukovsky, Yuri Orlov, Andrei Sakharov, and Solzhenitsyn himself. But one clear effect of Communism was to vacuum all decent human virtues out of most ordinary people, instilling only a desire for material advancement without effort, and leaving citizens wandering in a desert of nihilism. This human cost was concealed as long as the slaves of Communism had the freedom of the West to hope and fight for. But when the Soviets’ coercion was removed, the ground was prepared for the coarse, brutal, materialistic, and sponging environment that is post-Soviet society. Hence the sour joke that the recent history of Russia is like that of a man who made a bad start in life by murdering his parents, soon sank to robbing people in the streets, declined further to gossiping and telling lies, and eventually was so lost to shame that he would sometimes enter a room without knocking first. With all their many faults—see below—most human personalities in the West are still more honest, efficient, and self-reliant than that.

Now look at how much Solzhenitsyn got right. He portrayed a West that was being destroyed by that most subtle of all enemies: its own comfort and well-being. In such circumstances, a society or a human being may be kept on the rails by one of two forces: either internal moral and religious restraints, or some external discipline like a competitive rivalry. The first discipline had been abandoned in the West, where many citizens ceased to believe in the traditional God, either re-interpreting Him as an all-indulgent Deity, or more honestly adopting a comfortable humanism that made no demands on its adherents.

Solzhenitsyn’s complaint was an oversimplification; it described the moral state not of most Americans or even of most Europeans, but of the leading social classes on both continents (including the leadership of the mainline churches). Since then, a series of culture wars has broken out. But as those wars are still undecided, we cannot say that Solzhenitsyn was wrong.

On the disciplining value of an external rivalry, Solzhenitsyn looks more right now than he did then. Since the end of the Cold War it has become clear that that conflict helped keep us from the complete absorption in our own racial, sexual, and economic obsessions that has overtaken us since. America today sometimes looks like the gay community after its Stonewall revolt in 1969: With the threat of coercion removed, we are free to party.

And what a party! Oprah. Jerry Springer. Tabloid TV. The O. J. Simpson trial. The murder of Versace. And only slightly less violent—the fashions of Versace. In other words, we have a society dominated by the media, slavishly following fashion, and having only the law to guide us where our parents had customs, virtues, the fear of their neighbors’ opinion, and of course the fear of God. All this is soberly foreshadowed in Solzhenitsyn’s essay. That is not the whole truth about America—which is also marked today by healthy developments like falling crime rates and more disciplined budgeting. But it is an important part of the truth.

Still more remarkable as prophecy are those passages in which Solzhenitsyn rebukes Western triumphalism: "the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of the planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems." If triumphalism of this sort was muted then, it has become loud and boastful since the end of the Cold War. And it is potentially dangerous because it confuses human freedom with specifically Western (or American) institutions.

While people everywhere want to be free, they will use their freedom to shape their societies in their own image, not in ours. Over time, they may move in our direction as they learn more about our better selves through the mass media, education, the diffusion of cultures, travel, and so on—provided, of course, that we do not trample on their sensitivities by arrogance and by exporting our worse selves through the mass media, education, etc. These are not easy tasks. If we are to accomplish them successfully, Americans must learn to overcome what Solzhenitsyn calls "the Western incomprehension of other worlds." Either that—or build a bigger fleet.

John O’Sullivan, a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, is editor-at-large of National Review.

 

Mark Steyn

I never met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but we did have the same piano tuner. No big deal really, since the guy covers a vast swathe of the Upper Connecticut River Valley, where I perch on the New Hampshire bank, and where, on the Vermont side, Solzhenitsyn lived until his return to Russia in 1994. Since then, for celebrity tuning, my piano man has had to rely on the keyboards at Lebanon Opera House in Lebanon and Briggs Opera House in White River Junction, neither of which has seen an opera in decades but only various country/rock combos pumping out what Solzhenitsyn calls the "liquid manure" of Western culture.

What Solzhenitsyn never seems to notice, at least not in a Western context, is the resilience of the people.

—Mark Steyn

The important thing to remember about Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech is that it was given by a Vermonter. So when, after being asked if he could recommend the West as a model for his country, he says, "I would frankly have to answer negatively," the reasonable response is, "Are you crazy, man? You live in Cavendish, Vermont, for Pete’s sake!" Like most Granite Staters, I have fundamental differences with my Green Mountain neighbors over taxes, education, Ben and Jerry, and a zillion other issues. But compared to anywhere but New Hampshire—certainly compared to Mother Russia, Chechnya, Georgia, Romania—Vermont looks pretty good.

Alas, Solzhenitsyn is enough of a Soviet man that he seems to have absorbed the old Communist habit of discussing "the people" without the tedious bother of actually coming into contact with any of them. Real people—like his fellow townsfolk in Cavendish—are curiously absent from his speech. This helps to explain why, though everything he says is right in theory—indeed, his remarks about "TV stupor," press "superficiality," and "legalistic relationships," are unexceptional—yet here we still are, doing…O.K.

What Solzhenitsyn never seems to notice, at least not in a Western context, is the resilience of the people. Despite our descent into "the abyss of human decadence," the most popular forms of liquid manure in America are actually unchanged in their bourgeois sentimentality from a century ago: Today, "the people" enjoy Celine Dion singing the big ballad from Titanic, The Bridges of Madison County, "Touched by an Angel," and the like. The only difference is that, whereas a hundred years ago our betters told us to put down our parlor ballads and listen to Schubert, now they tell us we should be watching Natural Born Killers and The People vs. Larry Flynt. These films open to rave reviews and small loyal audiences in a handful of metropolitan fleshpots, but on general release across the country, they flop. When they come to Lebanon, New Hampshire, or Barre, Vermont, no one from Cavendish goes to see them. There is no commercial imperative to produce these films, only the dreary obsessions of our vulgarized elites.

Solzhenitsyn notes of Communism that "Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East." The key word in that sentence is intellectuals—which is why, in democratic America, it proved immensely easy to withstand the East. Even in hippy-dippy Vermont, no avowed Communist could ever be elected as Cavendish Town Clerk or School Board Chairman.

"West" and "East" are, of course, generalizations. Within the "West" there are vast differences between Continental Europe and the English-speaking world—and even between the British Commonwealth and the United States. But you can’t help but notice that those countries which attempt to insulate their peoples from rampant materialism and the barbarities of commercial culture are the ones sunk in the deepest slough of spiritual poverty. The obvious reason would seem to be that those societies which most regulate the media and consumer products tend to regulate everything else, too.

In my beloved but semi-socialist Quebec, for instance, the once-powerful Catholic Church has withered away in a generation, supplanted by the state. I spent this winter’s lethal ice storm on both sides of the border, and the contrast was instructive: On Quebec radio stations, almost every caller moaned that "the government" wasn’t doing enough; I never once heard that phrase on a northern New England station. Instead, stoic Yankee callers would offer to share generators, or dispense tips on how to use ice run-off to flush one’s toilet.

Why did Solzhenitsyn never see anything outside his door that he could commend as "a model to my country"? Perhaps because he rarely peered outside his door. The most striking thing about Solzhenitsyn’s place in Cavendish was the fence—not, as elsewhere, a low white picket, a decorative skirting for the clapboards and shingles. In an area where few lock their homes and many don’t even have keys, Solzhenitsyn had a formal security fence. In the early days, it was assumed he feared a midnight wake-up call from rogue kgb agents. But as time went on, it became clear that he was as much concerned to keep Vermont out. If Solzhenitsyn had wanted something to put on the mantel alongside his Nobel Prize, he could easily have won an Ugliest House in Vermont competition. There is, in other words, more than one form of spiritual poverty.

For 18 years Solzhenitsyn endured a sort of self-imposed cabin fever, which the up-market essayists who sought him out in Cavendish dignified as "reclusiveness." Not far away in Stowe, there’s another model of artistic exile—the Trapp Family Singers, refugees from the century’s other great tyranny. They never made much money from The Sound of Music, but they run a popular ski lodge and Elisabeth von Trapp still sings every Christmas on wdev radio. They at least understand the virtues of a culture secure in itself.

When Solzhenitsyn returned to Moscow, it was to a new dacha in a compound enclosed behind an eight-foot barrier, with the Moscow cable company supplying him with mtv, cnn, and all the other American TV he couldn’t receive in uncabled Cavendish. Perhaps, behind his steel door in a toxic society far more spiritually enfeebled than America, he regrets his speech. Maybe he realizes that the best anyone could hope for is that Russia turns out half as agreeable as the Vermont he never quite lived in.

As we Westerners like to say, you wanna get outta the house more.

Mark Steyn is theater critic for The New Criterion and movie critic for the London Spectator.

 

John Lukacs

Solzhenitsyn in his celebrated Harvard speech was both right and wrong. I thought that when I first read it 20 years ago, and rereading it now I think that even more.

By "right and wrong" I am not assuming the cautious stance of someone sitting on the fence. What he said about the state of culture in the West, about the power of the press and of publicity and of the "media," about the shortcomings of intellectuals, about the corrupting extensions of lawyers’ powers was right rather than wrong, and much of what he said about such matters in 1978 remains true today. Had he condensed his summary of the intellectual corruptions of the "West" even more, his philippic would have been even more stunning.

Stunning it is still. But then "stunning"—meaning something that both startles and deadens the senses—may be applicable to the following imaginary experience: Suppose that on a muggy spring afternoon we attend a boring and dishonest academic conference, or listen to speakers of Planned Parenthood, or to a neo-Marxist sociologist, or to someone from the American Civil Liberties Union. Bored to the gills, we wander across the street into a Russian Orthodox church where a full Easter Week liturgy is in course. Now we have walked into another world. The heavy clouds of incense, the black-bearded priests with their narrow blazing eyes, the roaring of the chants, the swelling organ and chorus of the believers—it is overpowering, and perhaps even uplifting. But, we do not know the language. This is the liturgy of a religion that is national and not universal; of a people who reject not only the cosmopolitanism of New York or London or Paris but, even more deeply, that of Rome; to whom the West, including 1,000 years of Western Christianity, is corrupting and alien.

I have been an admirer of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the very beginning. Decades ago I wrote that his appearance and his writing within the Soviet Union were veritable miracles, portents of hope that may affect, indeed change, the very history of that vast monstrous empire. He was not only brave; he was right. Another—allied—element in his work that impressed me was his increasing preoccupation with history. When I read his Gulag Archipelago, I found not too much in it that struck me as new about the history of Soviet police rule and its dreadful institutions. But the fact that a novelist found it to be his primary task to reconstruct recent history, to remind his people of what had really happened was, in many ways, telling.

But in his Harvard address and, alas, in almost all of the books Solzhenitsyn wrote during his 16 years of exile in the United States, there was less and less of the new. Some of the Slavophile writers in the nineteenth century, and the great Russian thinkers Berdyayev and Solovyev in the twentieth century, wrote profound and prophetic books about the corruptions and weaknesses of bourgeois capitalist civilization in the West. Solzhenitsyn, at Harvard, did little more than repeat their themes, concentrating on the superficial manifestations of mass culture. And his great shortcoming—from which Berdyayev and Solovyev were largely exempt—was his contrasting the materialism of the West with the spirituality of the East. "A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger…we [in Eastern Europe] have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience…have produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being."

Is that so? "The weakening of human personalities in the West," yes probably. But about the East his phrases amount to vacuous illusions, as the present personalities, the politics, and the social evolution of Russia today abundantly illustrate—alas.

"The ancient truth," Solzhenitsyn proclaimed at Harvard, "is that a kingdom, in this case our Earth, divided against itself cannot stand." Besides Solzhenitsyn, this was also proclaimed by such profound thinkers as Josef Goebbels, Joseph McCarthy, and Ronald Reagan (at least for a while). But the point is that the great divisions of mankind in the twentieth century were, and are, elsewhere. In 1989 the Soviets gave up—mostly because no one there believed in Communism any longer. To this, in a small but significant measure, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had indeed contributed.

There was a time when Solzhenitsyn had much—very much—to say. But like the Bourbons after Napoleon, Solzhenitsyn learned nothing and forgot nothing in the West. It now seems that Brezhnev and Co. were clever in letting him depart from Russia in 1974. There he may have had an ever greater role in opposing them, in bringing down the Soviet system. Alas, his 16 years in the United States did not do him much good. And now, returning to Russia, he has found few listeners.

Historian John Lukacs came to the United States from Hungary in 1946. His most recent book is A Thread of Years.

 

David Aikman

Shortly after he was forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Solzhenitsyn first astonished friends by predicting he would return to Russia in his own lifetime with his reputation restored, his books openly published, and any legal measures taken against him overturned. Solzhenitsyn was confident that Communism would ultimately collapse and enable him to return to his native land.

Of course, Solzhenitsyn was at the same time making dour public utterances on the poor moral and strategic condition of the West. He later admitted that his anxiety over the successes of Moscow’s global proxies in Indochina and elsewhere had rendered him more pessimistic than was necessary. The West, after all, not only survived, but prevailed over the great empire of the East.

Solzhenitsyn may have been off the mark at Harvard in 1978 when he spoke of a "decline in courage" and a "loss of will" in Western political circles. He did not predict the emergence of Ronald Reagan—but then neither did many others. Yet his barbed observations on the hollowness of much of America’s cultural and intellectual life were as ahead of his time as his prediction that he would return to Russia.

Where Solzhenitsyn may have been most ahead of his time was in skewering the litigious excesses of Americans. Abuses of legal processes were not a novelty in 1978, but the turning of major trials into TV spectator sports was not yet on the horizon. Lawyers as a whole are arguably less respected today in national life than ever before. It’s not just the circus atmosphere of the O. J. Simpson trial or the lurid details of Lorena Bobbitt’s knife-wielding. Rather, it is the suspicion among many Americans that the legal profession exists not so much to protect the rights of the common folk as to advance the cupidity of a handful. Even though Republicans swept into Congress in 1994 promising to rein in legal activism, no progress has been made. "Justice" in our legal system, many Americans believe, closely reflects which side has the highest-paid lawyers.

Yet Solzhenitsyn may have been overly pessimistic in his assumption that human nature’s inherent wickedness would bring a progression of evil in our free society. The avarice of tobacco companies, after all, has not triumphed over rising alarm about the health costs of smoking. Some of the more foolish educational experiments of previous decades have been reversed by diligent parents. Many communities have worked hard to reduce the number of divorces in their midst. Some "corrosions of evil" have been neutralized.

Solzhenitsyn’s most perceptive comments in 1978 were probably those directed against the media. At the time, most journalists deeply resented his criticism. Yet today many Americans have grown alarmed at the shallowness and sensationalism of American reporting. Even worse are our entertainment organs, where Solzhenitsyn’s fulminations against "TV stupor" and "intolerable music" now seem prophetic.

What, finally, is one to make of Solzhenitsyn’s bitter assaults on the "autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness" of the West? It could be argued that humanism in its most aggressively secular form is on the wane. High school students can now again voluntarily gather round schoolyard flagstaffs for prayer. Hundreds of thousands of fervent American men prostrated themselves in repentance last year on our National Mall, and even the "humanistic" press took respectful notice. Concern to restore the nation’s sense of decency and truthfulness in public life has grown stronger, rather than weaker, in the past two decades, with support even from some "humanistic" liberals.

This great experiment of a republic still has a long way to go to rediscover the moral self-confidence of its founders. But it seems to be on its way. If this turns out to be so, Solzhenitsyn will surely rejoice that in 1978 he underestimated us.

David Aikman is a former Time correspondent and author of the new book Great Souls, which includes a chapter on Solzhenitsyn.

 

Michael Novak

Perhaps it is a measure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s insight that 20 years ago he anticipated such recent American works as William Bennett’s tabulations of cultural decline, Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s "Declining Deviancy Down." He anticipated, as well, what many have begun to call the Fourth Great Awakening, for he wrote in his last sentence, "No one on Earth has any other way left but—upward."

It would be easy to point to the outcomes Solzhenitsyn did not predict, such as, within a dozen years of his address, the sudden disintegration of the Soviet empire. And it would also be easy, and fruitful, to sift through his criticisms of American moral culture for what was exactly on target and what, even though it had a point, did not quite hit the mark.

But I think it would be more fruitful to sift his words for the nuggets of gold often hidden within them. In many ways, America is still the least materialistic country on Earth, the most driven (sometimes to excess) by ideals and spiritual urges. Precisely because it attaches little importance to matter as matter, it is also the most ready to squander (as in war) acres upon acres of material things.

Nonetheless, some of America’s most important cultural elites—many of its top scientists—frequently parade materialistic commitments. Nearly every month we are bemused by another major article by one of them telling us that human existence is entirely the result of blind and impersonal chance, and that the human mind is entirely explicable in terms of materialistic determinism. Our elites might just as well be dialectical materialists, like the Communists. Which is Solzhenitsyn’s point.

Western humanism, Solzhenitsyn gently reminds us, once had a different source, not materialism, not chance. It certainly did for those 53 men who made themselves traitors to King George by signing their names to the Declaration of Independence. As witness to the purity of their consciences even as they violated their sacred oaths of allegiance, they pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, and appealed to their supreme and undeceivable Judge, the Providence who rules the affairs of men.

Because the God they worshiped is free, and made them in His image, the Founders knew that they had awesome responsibilities for being provident about their own destinies, and would be judged for how well they had employed their liberties. They believed it was their nature to be free, responsible, and self-governing. As Noah Webster and many another wrote, Judaism and Christianity made them republicans: taught them their imperishable dignity, showed them that they were endowed with inalienable rights. What Judaism and Christianity taught was also supported by nature and natural reason. The twin paps of Scripture and reason nourished the children of liberty.

How can a people incapable of self-government in their private lives succeed in practicing self-government in their public lives?

—Michael Novak

In this understanding of liberty—in this branch of humanism—a citizen’s autonomy is not atomic. Individuals do not make up their own laws, according to their own desires. In this understanding of liberty, autonomy is theonomy: At the center of the self is the presence of God. We carry within us our Creator and our Judge, our source and our final destination. To be one with God is to be more than we deserve to be, and yet have nonetheless been created to be. By contrast, to shut ourselves off from Him (which we are quite free to do) is to cut ourselves off infinitely and boringly short. This is, in fact, the very definition of Hell.

All this is implied when Solzhenitsyn describes the second humanism, the false one, that "autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness" that "has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects." The many such defects in religious bodies are certainly visible to irreligious humanists. Solzhenitsyn would like them to see similar defects in themselves, in human nature wherever it is found.

Against religious people, irreligious humanists make a strong case, but they tend to let themselves off easy, and to seize credit for everything good in the West. They see themselves as Light beating back the Dark, the Enlightenment dispelling the Dark Ages. This is the myopia Solzhenitsyn is trying to pierce. He hopes those who suffer from it might try looking at the world in a different way, if only as an experiment.

To be theocentric—a term the biographer of his religious life uses of Jefferson—is not to lose one’s freedom. As Jefferson wrote: "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time." To be theocentric is not to lose one’s autonomy. It is to find it infinitely enriched by its Source and its End. It is to see its meaning and its point. It is to gain a vocation to become far greater, larger, and more generous than we had before imagined. It is also to be reminded to become self-governing—governing our own passions, ignorance, interests, and inclinations, rather than being enslaved by them. For how can a people incapable of self-government in their private lives succeed in practicing self-government in their public lives?

On one central point, however, Solzhenitsyn is wrong. He writes too glibly that the West believes that humans have the right to "be" happy. Some superficial minds may believe that. But in America at least, our "creed," our Declaration, commits us only to the right to "pursue" happiness, and that is a different matter altogether.

To pursue happiness is consistent with the sense of a pilgrim people wandering in the desert toward that place where they might build "the City on a Hill," in search of the infinite things of God, where the deer drink from the cool waters.

To seek to build such a City is what it means, even amid the ruins and in a desolate time, to have no "other way left but—upward."

Michael Novak holds the Jewett Chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, JULY/AUGUST 1998