Solzhenitsyn: Apocalypse now

Are you sure you don't want to change the title of your book to Solzhenitsyn cons?

Here was I was, ready to type something against this, and Atrios does it for me, in a pithy statement:

"I've long been somewhat puzzled by the widespread belief in the inevitability of worldview-affirming apocalyptic scenarios."

I'm unsure what Mr. Dreher's details are about the oncoming calamities, but he sure seems to anticipate the gleeful casting out of the atheists, socialists, sodomites, believers in "scientism," and other undesirables to make way to the resurgence of his understanding of God.

This is by no means limited to one ideology - Howard Kunstler has remarkably similar views, coming from a leftish perspective - but they both share that same understanding that, soon, the gods they prophesize about will come to sit and judge, and find their opponents wanting.

I *do* think we have a spiritual problem in our society, one that makes up for its empty shell in consumerism and escapist nonsense. What I don't think is that we need to get to the Old Time Religion of before the "late Middle Ages," where Solzhenitsyn all-knowing priest keep an impoverished serfdom in ignorance and suffering.

Surely there must be a another way, between thoughtless materialism and medieval religiousity. I'll grant Rod this -- maybe this kind of dramatic doom-mongering is just what we need to rattle the apathetic majority to *something* beyond spending more than they have. I just don't share his energetic anticipation for some downward spiral into barbarism.

DU

I love this kind of apocalyptic rant. Honestly, I find it very refreshing and invigorating. It has the ability to crystalize so much of the things that have gone wrong in our culture and kind of slap us in the face with it, in the hope that we will shake ourselves awake and take life seriously for a change. Somehow only a real crisis can do that and so in a sense, a real crisis would actually be a blessing.

Instead we just daydream on as human dignity is constantly degraded and we just sit slurping at our flesh pots. Ugh.

But somehow I don't believe the big crisis that would motivate us as a society to live in accord with our dignity is really going to come in our lifetimes. Instead there are the minor quotodian crises that come into our lives as individuals, and are only seen as infinitely meaningful by those who are alert to them. The daily choices about mundane things (no I won't sleep with you, even though I would like to. No, I won't cheat on that bill you've undercharged me on. Yes, I'll make that umpteenth sacrifice for my elderly mom who doesn't really appreciate it) are the locus of the real apocalyptic battlegrounds of our day.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't give one a bit of a rush to think of the real crisis finally being manifested in a way everyone can see, where everyone must make the decisive choice of which side they are on, and all of us digging in for the final battle. Just so long as it doesn't distract us from the real battles we must face this very day, such visions can be quite helpful.

Although, we should be a bit humble about saying "Bring it on!" As our president recently learned, perhaps such statements over-estimate our ability to confront un-fettered forces of evil. Better to say "Come Lord Jesus".

Here's a question: why is it that (in modern Western society) the expression of individual autonomy and freedom is ever-more glorified, yet at the same time more and more things are accepted as excuses for a person not acting autonimously? "Poverty is the root of all crime," "he can't help it, his dad was an alcoholic," "it's in his genes, he's hard-wired that way," "he came from a broken home," "you wouldn't understand, it's a black thing," etc., etc. When did free choice get divorced from resulting consequence? It just seems strange that as the cult of choice expands, the number of excuses to explain away those choices expands as well.

"When did free choice get divorced from resulting consequence? It just seems strange that as the cult of choice expands, the number of excuses to explain away those choices expands as well."

When I was in college I called it "secular demon possession." It never caught on. Feel free use it, but give me credit. If you don't, I'll just chalk it up to a root cause. :-)

Frank

Sometimes I think the major purpose of liberals is to provide conservatives with the reasons not to commit suicide.

Yes, Solzhenitsyn sounds pretty much like any number of rural conservatives in Europe who are watching the Agrarian Age and Industrial Age dwindle and flicker. I'm actually struck by how unoriginal he is and how shallow and blind he is to how true democratization- incremental devolution of real power down the social pyramid- works out in history. Sure it's a messy and horrifying thing- as soon as a class of people are sufficiently freed, they ignobly go out in pursuit of their material needs and resentments and settle scores with their supposed historical enemies. As the Communists did throughout, as the Soviet Union did in 1945. As Solzhenitsyn did himself after 1950 or so.

But to observe it clearly and in detail and for sufficient generations, score-settling isn't the historical end point. I've seen a lot of older people come to claim, in despair, that it is in fact an eternal condition. But it seems like heating with wood or beating of children and wives or anti-Semitism. Those were once imagined to be eternal conditions too, even though the rational arguments against them could not be refuted either. We were supposedly that inherently evil that these could not be plausibly diminished. (We seem cruelly condemned to slow improvement overall, though, despite all the conservatives' resistance and insistence on their own evil.)

If Solzhenitsyn's own art is about 'attempting to reveal the Divine plan', I have to say it hasn't struck a whole lot of people as compelling. His fame is built on exposing a particular variety of inhumanity and history prior to 1974. His work after that seems a lament that the clock can't be turned back to 1917.

Jillian: I'm actually struck by how unoriginal he is and how shallow and blind he is

Yes, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, pretty much Michael Savage with a beard. Good lord.

Jillian makes some interesting points, but I think the critique offered there is too shallow. Granted, people seek greater political and economic freedom and that these are things that can contribute greatly toward human flourishing. But they aren't ends in themselves - they are only good to the extent that they contribute to a real integrally human life.

To the extent that our culture does a poor job of helping people to grasp the higher things of life, economic and political freedom can also be used to degrade and make it more difficult to become fully human. The real question is "what is freedom for?" We seem incapable of answering that question because as a society we reject the idea that there is a true answer to the question of human goods.

True there are communities that can help people on their way to the proper use of freedom, but these communities do seem to be having a rather difficult time these days. In the absense of such assistance many people seem to have a difficult time getting beyond the most shallow understandings of the ends of human life. That's why I really doubt Jillian's conclusion that we are just inexorably pushing on toward greater progress every generation. It all depends on what you mean by "progress"...

Which reminds me of the movie I started watching last night - Idiotocracy. Has anyone else caught this movie? I only saw the first hour or so before heading to bed, and it is quite crude and offensive. It's 500 years in the future and humanity has lost all sense of rationality and transcendence (to put it mildly). I think it's quite in line with the thought of old Solzh, may God rest him.

Some people dismiss "apocalyptic" language and others seem drawn to it for peculiar reasons. For still others, reference to our times as apocalyptic ones is compelling because of the nature and scale of events of the past hundred years, commencing with the "Great War" and related conflicts (e.g. the Armenian massacres). I'd refer the curious to Harvard University Press's book The Black Book of Communism, from a few years ago. Bob Dylan, a few years before Solzehenitsyn's Templeton address, sang, "So much oppression, can't keep track of it no more," but books such as the Harvard edition help us to gain a sense of the magnitude of man-wrought calamity in our times. Even if it was "necessary" to drop the atomic bombs, a discussion I don't mean to prompt here, one can only imagine what, say, Thmas Jefferson and George Washington would have thought, of the prospect of the new nation wreaking such havoc, and on people who did not directly threaten it, no less. And of course warfare is just one apocalptic phenomenon. The one that perhaps haunts me most is the one Jesus identifies when He says that in the last days "the love of many will grow cold" (St. Matthew 24:12). Look around you, isn't that as apt a summation as could be of our times?

I'd be interested in what my occasional sparring partner Franklin would have to say about this saying of the Lord's.

Just loving your family and trying to protect them is practically a revolutionary action in a time when popular culture, including education, would diminish their humanity.

Thanks, Franklin. I hear you saying that "perfect fear casts out love," which I suspect is the converse of the Biblical saying that "perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18).

To come back to Solzehnitsyn, with a point I don't remember having seen:

Christians will be drawn to think of Christian martyrs (not the Islamic suicide-bomber type of "martyrs") when they think of perfect love that casts out fear. One remembers that St. Athanasius, in On the Incarnation, could base part of his apologetic for the truth of Christianity on the notorious bravery of Christian martyrs.

Well, Solzhenitsyn must often and often have thought of the Christian martyrs in the Soviet era (something, note well, that was still going on when he delivered the Templeton Address). He almost /had to/ believe that so much suffering for the truth, must one day raise a harvest of spiritual benefit to his land. Of course there has been some turning to Christian faith in post-Soviet Russia, but also a great deal of turning to consumerism, etc. It must indeed have been enormously disappointing to the man.

I have nothing substantive to add at this point, but I wanted to extend my appreciation to everyone on this thread for the civility of the discussion. Release the combox hounds!

Regarding Andy Hartzell's skepticism of the 9/11 hijackers motivations:

Just because someone says he's doing something in the name of God/religion or for that matter in the name of "the American way" does not make that claim true. People clothe all kinds of nastiness in the gauziest garb of religion, nationalism, patriotism, and so on. Because of this, critics of Bush on the left and the right are correctly outraged at some of the seemingly unAmerican activities his administration has sanctioned: torture, dissolving of certain civil liberties, and so on. And I think the critics on both sides have a really strong point when they claim he betrays what being "American" means.

This leaves unanswered the question on Bush's own motivations, as well of those of Cheney and the cabinet ministers. But the point still is true: just because you're wrapped in the flag, or in martyr's garb of your religion, does not automatically mean that your act is *for* that cause.

This even applies to seeking martyrdom for good reasons, something I think that the "avocatus diaboli" in Vatican sanctity cases knows well. As TS Eliot has the bishop Becket say in his play "Murder in the Cathedral" "The last temptation is the worst treason/ To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.

Bravo. Well said. And oh how ugly this artistry is, and the culture from where it spawned.

One of the great things about this blog is how the comments section provide such an unpolished and unrelenting view of the liberal mindset for those without TV. It's so obvious we shall eat and drink and be merry until the end. Orwell: "To our death!"

"I'm actually struck by how unoriginal he is and how shallow and blind he is to how true democratization- incremental devolution of real power down the social pyramid - works out in history."

One really needs few words to marvel at the arrogance and intellectual provincialism Jillian displays here, her utopianism, and worse.

But I suppose I understand what makes her capable of such breathtaking arrogance: under her paradigm, one can't really judge this as arrogance or utopianism, or anything really. It just is. It's simply a series of words in a world devoid of meaning.

I think Houghton's being too harsh on Jillian. However her statement

"But it seems like heating with wood or beating of children and wives or anti-Semitism. Those were once imagined to be eternal conditions too"

Does seem pretty naive. Child and spousal abuse may not be defended in the developed world, but they certainly still occur. Anti-Semitism has declined, but in most Muslim countries a majority have an unfavorable opinion of Jews. It's not limited to Muslims though, in Poland 27% have an unfavorable opinion of Jews and in Russia it's 26%. In 2006 28% of Jordanians blamed "the Jews" for bad relations between Muslims and the West while in 2005 60% of Jordanians believed "The Jews" were the greatest influence on US foreign policy. In 2005 Poland 15% stated "the Jews" were the greatest influence on US policy and in Germany 12% did. (Pew Research)

I don't really agree with Solzhenitsyn's statements, but they're in line with a Russian Orthodox tradition. Russia is in many ways a bit of a chauvinistic society that deems itself, somewhat rightly, to have preserved a greater degree of Christian tradition. So its view of Western mores and history is at times negative. And I think what he says about the "pursuit of happiness" is not precisely wrong as in the culture's are built on that even if the laws aren't. So there's some tendency toward hedonism and alienation. Russia from Dostoyefsky onward sees itself as saving us from that. However Sayyd Qutb felt the same about Islam. Not that Solzhenitsyn is anything like Qutb, but his idealized vision of Orthodox Russia is not too much more realistic than Qutb's vision of the Caliphate. Solzhenitsyn's vision is no doubt a more noble one, morally and spiritually, but I think it is still unrealistic and downplays the negatives. Russia has many good qualities, but I think at times Solzhenitsyn (and Dostoyefsky) are extreme in their praise of its root culture or its role as an example to others. They're nationalists and if you're not a Russian I think it makes sense to take their nationalism with a grain of salt.

(And I'm aware Ross is of some branch of Russian Orthodox, but that's how I see it)

"Sometimes I think the major purpose of liberals is to provide conservatives with the reasons not to commit suicide." Jillian

TR: Rod is unusual. I would go so far as to say very unusual. (American conservatives who like France and have a life history of converting to Catholicism then Orthodox is a demographic pretty much limited to him, so far as I can tell)

In most studies church-going conservatives are happier and more optimistic than liberals. And in many ways rightfully so. America is a country that for the last 140 years has had no revolutions, civil wars, or invasions. The two main parties have remained the same in that period. We have a greater rate of churchgoing than most developed nations and more rural life than many of them. Although at base America is steeped in a kind of libertinism and radicalism, in actual reality it's a fairly conservative nation.

Liberals on the other hand tend to worry more. Especially about environmental collapse, sexism, homophobia, AIDS, death, and the general fact the world is imperfect. A conservative doesn't expect the world to ever become perfect, is skeptical even of improvement in some cases, so is happy with any improvement that arrives.