One Day in the Life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Some 20,000 umbrella-carrying attendees witnessed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address on a rainy afternoon at Harvard University in the spring of 1978. Many among that number were no doubt dismayed as they listened to his speech translated into English idioms and phraseological equivalents. It was not what Americans expected from the Russian dissident and recipient of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature who had recollected the horrors of the Stalinist regime in The Gulag Archipelago and made them palpable through his novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward. The tenor of his address consisted not in a condemnation of communist totalitarianism in the East and a celebration of liberty and democracy in the West but in a blunt rebuke of materialism and its social and cultural ramifications.

Like all prophets, Solzhenitsyn was a rugged, grave man. He took the stage wearing an unassuming, drab brown suit, which clashed with the gay regalia of the event. He then dared to perturbate his audience by questioning its moral integrity and mercenary values. Essential to his speech was a miscellany of critiques relevant to the American way of life. He began with a politically incorrect appeal to the transcendental. “Harvard’s motto is Veritas,” he observed. “Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it.” With each of his carefully reasoned assessments, presented with a sapient scrupulosity “as a friend, not as an adversary,” he raged calmly against the defiers of truth’s light. In his final sentences he elaborated what was necessary to sustain the light of truth — namely, a reappraisal of values and a renewal of vision.

Solzhenitsyn deemed loss of courage to be the most salient characteristic of American culture, which he knew well from having lived in the United States since 1976 upon his expulsion from the Soviet Union two years earlier. Solzhenitsyn did not identify whom he associated with this loss; however, given the prominent leaders on the international stage at the time, one among them was likely U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The Carter administration exhibited precisely what Solzhenitsyn referred to as political “depression, passivity, and perplexity.” What he described as “self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice” characterized the administration’s disastrous underestimations in foreign affairs, which resulted in the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Evincing what Solzhenitsyn termed “a lack of manhood,” the administration cowered in the face of the Soviets’ preparations to invade Afghanistan, as it did when pro-Islamic Iranian student-protestors laid siege to the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans captive.

The loss of courage Solzhenitsyn ascribed to the West reveals itself presently in a civic and intellectual pusillanimity. It is particularly evident in the enfeebled language of progressivist academics who, in their willful denial that norms of behavior exist independently of psychological eccentricities, display what he called “an excess of obsequiousness.” Lest they be perceived as insensitive, morally uncourageous academics in humanities departments truckle to a regnant culture of intolerance, the apologists of which ridicule opinions that do not embrace cultural abnormality or that stem from paleoconservative or traditional sociological perspectives relative to sex, gender, and healthy human relationships in general.

The timidity that characterizes the professoriate of the American university leaves the impression on an outsider, as it left on Solzhenitsyn, that the entire institution has lost its nerve and sense of outrage. Solzhenitsyn’s rhetorical query concerning the history of civilization applies no less to the institutional elements that make civilization possible in the first place. “Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?” he asked. Whether public education, particularly in the humane disciplines and social sciences of higher learning, has the strength to save itself from moral insolvency, if not complete irrelevance, remains to be seen.

America, now more than ever, is mired in a provincialism not of country or county but of time and spirit. Its schools serve the vagaries of the demos. Its educators, full of passionate intensity, circumscribe young, impressionable minds in an intellectually narrow presentism. Its churches make man the measure of all things and fail to redeem the fallen world by summoning the eternal into the temporal. The religious seek to reconcile the sacred and the mundane at the cost of unconscionable compromise. They are reluctant to speak the truth of God and man, Veritas Christo, of which Solzhenitsyn in his exordium reminded the audience through the intentionally invocatory allusion to Harvard’s founding, if now truncated, motto, Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae. Nor do congregants appear sure just what that truth is. Their worship tends to be prosaic, their morality largely sentimental.

The loss of courage Solzhenitsyn discerned at the intersection of public and private life resembles what Plato envisioned as the epitome of radical egalitarianism: the father acquiescing to his children lest they shun him; the mother affecting their frivolous manners from fear of being thought dull or authoritarian; the child impudently contradicting his parents; the schoolmaster flattering his pupils; and the pupils despising their teachers and tutors. What Solzhenitsyn acknowledged 50 years ago remains acknowledgeable today: “There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.” Be they members of the clergy, the professoriate, or the local parent-teacher association, “they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.” Thankfully, he admitted, they are not threatened by open violence as he himself was before his forced deportation from Russia. In the West, however, “a selection dictated by fashion and a 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.”

Contributing to the stupefaction of the public, Solzhenitsyn observed, is one baneful aspect of the supposed good life: delusions of happiness that result in a false sense of well-being. Invoking the founding of his audience’s nation, he declared freedom to pursue happiness a mixed blessing. If it consists in something transcendent and ennobling, then happiness encompasses a worthy end. But if the pursuit of it disposes a person to a subjugating, if not morally vacuous, desire “to have still more things and a still better life” and “comes to dominate all human thought,” it “does not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.”

Solzhenitsyn’s implicit critique of consumerism is expressible only in metaphysical terms: The unbounded freedom in the choosing of worldly enjoyments that characterizes the West has eventuated in ontological nausea and teleological disorientation. “Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism,” he remarked. It weakens the species. “Today,” he added, “well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.” What he saw behind the façade was the accelerated grimace of getters and spenders whose being sub specie aeternitatis was anything but healthy.

Solzhenitsyn noted that unrestrained getting and spending of the kind he observed in the West had resulted in a society that determines rights and rightness according to the letter of the law without reference to a higher law that transcends materiality. Rarely heeded in what he called the legalistic life is the call for a renunciation of rights, for self-restraint — that is, in instances in which their wrongness is apparent. “Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of,” he noted. As a rule, “everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of legal frames.” He included two examples relevant to the dating of his speech: “An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: After all, people are free not to purchase it.” Upon these illustrations, neither of them exaggerated, he posed the question: Is it not “time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations”?

Solzhenitsyn understood the crisis of our time — namely, the failure of those who make, enjoy, and judge the constitutionality of laws to appreciate the dire consequences of denying the place of natural-law considerations in the ordering of public life. From such considerations derives what Martin Luther King Jr., writing from the Birmingham City Jail 15 years earlier, defined as a just law in juxtaposition with an unjust: “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God…. An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”

Solzhenitsyn and King, both subscribers to the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas, realized that to locate the natural law in either nature or the human mind is a fundamental mistake because, although nature and the human mind are law-abiding, they are not laws in themselves. Solzhenitsyn minced no words: “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 based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities [and] creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”

Despite their generally secularist disposition and probable aversion to serious religious discourse, Solzhenitsyn warned his listeners that where legalistic rationalizations trump moral interests and organize societal affairs, evil prevails and inclines freedom, or the illusion of it, toward itself. “This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually,” he elaborated, “but it stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man…does not bear any evil within himself, and all defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected.” He no doubt had in mind the concept of original virtue, promulgated by the likes of Jean Jacques Rousseau, which denies Original Sin, a concept rooted in the philosophy of St. Augustine of Hippo, who stressed the unregenerate, imperfectible nature of man.

Why, asked Solzhenitsyn, does crime burden the West to an unprecedented degree, despite the amelioration of conditions believed to inhibit human freedom? Why is there “considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society?” Implicit in his rhetorical questions was an answer likely unpalatable to most of those listening: Personal freedom, rightly construed, depends for meaning not on self-realization within the confines of the global economy in which man resides temporarily but on an ontology prior to self and society, a ground of being defined by a first and final cause in which, to paraphrase St. Paul, man dwells eternally.

Solzhenitsyn extended his interrogation of freedom in the West to the media, or what he referred to as the “press.” So long as it does not “infringe the letter of the law,” he noted, its apparatuses are free to distort; moral responsibility for distortion and disproportion obtains rarely and only in cases where misinformation is insultingly blatant. “Hastiness and superficiality,” he added, the “psychic diseases” of our time, are manifested in the press more than anywhere else in the public sphere: “In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature.” Its fodder, he rightly discerned, is sensationalism, and its modus operandi adheres to sensational formulas.

Precise was Solzhenitsyn’s insight into the sway of the media in the West: Of the powers that predominate, “the press has become the greatest…exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary.” Precise, too, were the questions he raised: “According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?” Solzhenitsyn understood and presented the press correctly as a phenomenon that serves the interests of the moment and the prejudices of constituents — that at once shapes and is shaped by the Zeitgeist: “Unrestrained freedom exists for the press, but not for readership, because newspapers mostly transmit in a forceful and emphatic way those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own.”

Solzhenitsyn understood that the press and its generally liberal constituents, who foster the illusions that God is but a desideratum for the unintelligent, that man is self-sufficient, and that civilization improves with every human impulse it unleashes and every traditional restraint it overthrows, are not the dominant force in American life. He saw them for what they are: tools in the hands of the actual dominant force, global corporations that wield economic power, power that is absolute in the new world order, power that the liberal intellectuals unwittingly serve by providing corporate advertisers in the so-called neutral market with illusions to package and sell for handsome profits. Solzhenitsyn revealed a doleful truth: Intellectual liberalism and liberal economics share an inner logic that prohibits a healthy unity of being with respect to a person’s relationship to the world, his Maker, his family, and others — a logic that leaves individuals ontologically confused and cosmically homeless.

Such confusion about ultimate concerns was for Solzhenitsyn evidence of the triumph of evil. For him evil is not a matter of superstition; it is a reality rooted in human hearts, in which a line divides it from good. “During the life of any heart,” he observes in The Gulag Archipelago, “this line keeps changing places; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish.” He himself witnessed firsthand evil’s manifestation in Russia’s attempt to realize the fundamental objectives of socialism enumerated by mathematician and historian Igor Shafarevich in The Socialist Phenomenon: the abolition of private property, the abolition of the family, the abolition of religion, and, finally, the abolition of the individual. With reference to Shafarevich’s study, for which he wrote the foreword, and to misguided Marxist apologists ensconced at American universities and colleges, Solzhenitsyn cautioned his audience that “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”

Solzhenitsyn’s auditors were perhaps less than comfited to hear his answer to their obvious question. “No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours.” He acknowledged and defined evil’s unique character in the West but maintained that the “forces of evil” had no less proved irresistible. “How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about?” he asked. His answer was that the inability to resist evil is a crisis attributable to a mistake in thinking from the beginning, to what he termed “the prevailing Western view of the world which was born of the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment.” This view “could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him,” or what Solzhenitsyn called “anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.”

In his commencement address at Harvard University, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn examined the disaster of modernity and the possibility of surviving it. The disaster he adumbrated is not one precipitated by world war, famine, or disease; it is one born of what he called “an autonomous, irreligious consciousness.” Its fallout consists in “too much hope in politics and social reforms,” which deprives us “of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.” This spiritual life is “trampled by the party mob in the East [and] by the commercial one in the West.” Whether we survive the disaster, individually and collectively, is entirely up to us, he insisted, but to do so “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.”

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