From the Times' latest, datelined Moscow:
Nearby was Anton Zimin, 26, an advertising copywriter, who said he was quite familiar with Mr. Solzhenitsyn but doubted that others in his generation were. He said people his age have lost touch with the struggles of their parents and grandparents."The problem is that now, it's all about consumption - this spirit that has engulfed everybody," Mr. Zimin said. "People prefer to consume everything, the simplest things, and the faster, the better. Books are something that force you to think, reading books requires some effort. But they prefer entertainment."
Last night, we had dinner with some dear friends from church, emigres from the former Soviet Union. None of us knew that Solzhenitsyn had passed; I wish we had, so we could have discussed it. Anyway, I asked N., who is not (yet) an American citizen, if he ever thought about going home. He said no, never. Back home, he explained, it's all about status and consumption, and religious life is all but gone.
"More than here?" I responded, incredulous. I mean, I knew there was a lot of this in the former Soviet lands, but I guess I had on my mind something like what Solzhenitsyn said in his 1978 address:
A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those produced by standardized Western well-being. Therefore 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 scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. 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.
N. said no, the materialism and consumerism and status-seeking is far worse in the former Soviet Union. The people, having been so deprived of ordinary comforts for so long, were not made stronger by it, but weakened, such that now they crave these things inordinately. My friend feels strongly that for all the very real problems in America, it's a far better place to live, from a spiritual and moral point of view, than where he came from.
Poor Solzhenitsyn. I think of him and Wojtyla in the same way, in this regard. John Paul II had hoped that the religious-based resistance the Poles showed to communism would avail them much as Western materialism arrived. I do believe he died sorrowful about this. These words, uttered by former Washington Post reporter Roberto Suro at the end of PBS's 1999 documentary on John Paul, could probably be applied to Solzhenitsyn too:
"At the end of the day, when you look at this extraordinary life and you see all that he has accomplished, you're left with one very disturbing question. On the one hand, the Pope can seem this lonely, pessimistic figure...a man obsessed with the evils of the twentieth century, a man convinced that humankind has lost its way...it's so dark and so despairing that he loses his audiences. That would make him a tragic figure. On the other hand, you have to ask: Is he a prophet? Did he come here with a message? Did he see something that many of us are missing? In that case, the tragedy is ours."
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When I lived in West Germany in the early 1970s, people were just beginning to enjoy real affluence - moving into homes with yards, buying their first washer-dryer combos, trading up from VW beetles, traveling extensively, etc. The urge to consume was overwhelming. And the West Germans already belonged to Western society. Imagine what it must be like now for those in the East - at least those who can afford to be Western-style consumers.
Emigres from the old Soviet bloc have often told me that access to "high" culture - literature, opera, ballet - was one of the main escapes people had from the subsistence level of day-to-day life. Now that modern consumer culture has arrived in Russia, it's not suprising that fine art, especially the darker side explored by Solzhenitsyn, is playing a less central role.
Two other Soviet-era escapes, sports and ironic humor, continue to thrive. Example:
Putin and the new president, Medvedev, go to dinner.
Putin: I will have steak.
Waiter: And the vegetable?
Putin: Steak for him also.
"Oh, c'mon. Portugal had a crassness in its society well before Salazar's regime fell. You think the those Red military putchists and the excess of Estoril sprung ex nihilo? As for Greece, within days of the Colonels departing, the newspapers had topless Page 3 girls, fer cryin' out loud." K
TR: Well maybe, it's not exactly my specialty. However I don't think they had the kind of rampant prostitution, alcoholism, and robber-baronism of Russia. Maybe you can prove me wrong on that.
"Agreed, Thomas, but isn't that a symptom of consumerist capitalism everywhere?" Rob G
TR: In its unrefined form perhaps. However I really think if you compare Russia now to the US or UK of fifty years ago, and not to the Tsars or Brezhnev or whatever, the US and UK come out less corrupt or crass. (Except maybe on racial matters, but Russia has its ethnic problems too)
You'd have to go back to the 1920s US to find a similar situation and even then the murder rate was not as high as modern Russia. The rate of belief in God and church attendance was also much much higher in the 1920s US than contemporary Russia.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/wtwtgod/3518375.stm
(I know that's the BBC, but other sources give similar figures)
Mark Sedgwick's book, mentioned by Andrew Low, needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt. Look at the Sacred Web's site where there's a review for some possible reasons why.
The central philosophical tension between premodern, largely traditional worldviews, and modern ones is the difference between an "ought" world view and an "is" world view. To put it philosophically, traditional worldviews have teleology, have final causes and formal causes in the Aristotelian sense (or "whys and whats" in the commonsense form), and thus they have "oughts." Modern science (starting with Descartes; made even more explicit in Newton's Principia, describe what "is" shorn of the "oughts" or the final causes, the telos, purpose, or end, which modern thinkers believe to be unknowable if not to be nonexistent.
This leads to one streak of conservatism, which still holds on the whys and the whats. This streak, ably presented on this blog by Rod, believes that there is a human nature; that being human means being a creature with a definable essence and a definable end. There are other schools of conservatism that are basically liberal, tending toward minimalism in government and libertarianism, which are simply in a marriage of convenience with the "why and what" school of conservatism.
The traditionalists, Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, for example, take this same idea and expands it beyond any given religious tradition, making it universal and perennial. There are defined revelations; they share a unanimous point of view on many essentials (they would say "all essentials" with a series of asterisks and explanations).
People like Solzhenitsyn, Wojtyla, Milosz, and others give voice to this same set of ideas (the whats and the whys) through various religious and cultural filters: Catholicism; Russian Orthodox romantic exceptionalism (perhaps) and so on.
The big tension, I think, for Rod and for anyone who considers him or herself conservative is to figure out what's non negotiable, and what's secondary and able to be changed. And the most important part of this lies in the place of individualism in a post-Enlightenment world: we're here, even if some believe we should not be; what parts of it are good, valuable, true; what parts are excessive or even untrue and harmful?
What's striking about Solzh, Wojtyla, Milosz, etc. is that, while in the service of something greater than their atomic selves, they were *profoundly* powerful individuals, even if their individualism was in the service of transpersonal or impersonal truth. They were impressive **individuals**, not merely mouthpieces.
This suggests that this age (apologies to those who dislike German philosophy) needs a form of individualism, even for those who distrust the extent to which the modern world is fragmentary and atomistic.
One last note (apologies for length): Erazim Kohak also fits into the Eastern European model. His "The Embers and the Stars" is an attempt to balance our post-Enlightenment way of life with the true nature of physical, natural reality, thereby finding human wholeness in our relation with nature. I would suggest that what Solzh and the others did for humans in relation to tyranny, Kohak is doing in relation to our tyranny over the natural world in a very quiet way.
Great post, PDG. Your one-paragraph summary of the central difference between modernists and premodernists is very good indeed.
"The big tension, I think, for Rod and for anyone who considers him or herself conservative is to figure out what's non negotiable, and what's secondary and able to be changed. And the most important part of this lies in the place of individualism in a post-Enlightenment world: we're here, even if some believe we should not be; what parts of it are good, valuable, true; what parts are excessive or even untrue and harmful?"
Correct. I've often used the analogy regarding the difference between supporting pillars and those which are merely decorative, or between walls which are load-bearing and those which simply divide rooms.
I shall look Kohak's book up.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/2470310/Sexual-harrassment-okay-as-it-ensures-humans-breed,-Russian-judge-rules.html
Whether this is a flaw in Russian culture or a sign of their new crassness I don't know. Here's some notable facts and quotes from it.
"100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped. Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors."
"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.
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