Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Witness

Got the news last night by radio that Solzhenistyn has died. This man, and John Paul II, are the towering moral figures of the 20th century. I'll be blogging more on him later today, but for now, here's a thought from Roger Kimball worth sharing:

[I]t is worth noting just how persistent is the temptation to excuse tyranny providing only that it comes from the left. There are few, perhaps, who would go as far as the odious Eric Hobsbawm. In 1994, Hobsbawm discussed the former Soviet Union with a television interviewer. What Hobsbawm's position comes down to, the interviewer suggested, "is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?" Hobsbawm: "Yes."

Probably there aren't many who would express themselves as baldly as Eric Hobsbawm. But the specter of statism-what Hayek, hearkening back to Tocqueville, called "the road to serfdom"-is a continuing threat, all the more insinuating today because less obviously brutal. How easy it is to forget, to neglect, to ignore that threat. Solzhenitsyn did an immense amount to bolster our memory, but creeping socialism is like the "sweet oblivious antidote" Macbeth craves for his wife. I recall the story Kingsley Amis tells in his Memoirs about the reception of Robert Conquest's classic indictment of Stalin's tyranny, The Great Terror. "For many years," Amis notes, the book was "ignored where possible or dismissed as propaganda.

Then, in 1988, favourable references to it began to appear in the Soviet media. . . . [A]n American publisher suggested a new edition of the book. "What about a new title Bob? We won;t pretend it's a new book , but a new titlte would be good. . . .

Bob answered in terms that get a lot of his character into small compass. "Well, perhaps, I Told You So, You Fuc**ng Fools. How's that?"

Solzhenitsyn, like Conquest, did tell us. Let's hope we have the wit to listen.

How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. 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 basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It 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 could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and 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 superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.