Solzhenitsyn: Decline of the West

The day after Carter's speech at Annapolis, exiled Russian Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered his first major speech in three years. It was an extraordinary jeremiad, and its main target was not the Soviet system, whose evils he has vividly chronicled, but the West, where he has made his new home. At Harvard University's commencement, the 59-year-old Nobel laureate received a standing ovation as he was made an honorary Doctor of Letters. Then, like an Old Testament prophet, he denounced in an hourlong address such evils of modern American society as civic cowardice, immoral legalism, a licentious press, capitulation in Asia, and godless humanism. Excerpts from the speech:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and of course in the United Nations. Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

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 not quite worthy of man either. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society.

Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively.

Through intense suffering our country [Russia] has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. 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 by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century.

More than anywhere else, this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development [of independent thought]. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a far-away small college, who could do much for the renewal and salvation of this country, but his country does not hear him because the media are not interested in him.

How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? The mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. [An erroneous world view] became the basis for government and social science, and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous need to worship man and his material needs. However, 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. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West: a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer.

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