SOLZHENITSYN'S PROPHECY
On June 8, 1978, a man with a craggy
face and a beard came to Harvard University, where I was then a graduate
student, to give the annual commencement address. The man was not a
Harvard graduate. He was not a professor. He was not an American. He did
not speak English. His address, given in his native Russian with
simultaneous English translation, was not universally well-received. I
suspect that some Harvard officials regretted their decision to invite
him to speak.
The man’s name was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was a brilliant
novelist who had spent several years as a political prisoner in the
gulag in the Soviet Union. He was a strong Orthodox Christian and a
fierce critic of atheistic communism and Soviet tyranny. His writings
had exposed the corruption, cruelty, and injustice of the communist
regime that had come to power in Russia in the Bolshevik Revolution of
1917 and would remain in power until 1989—a regime that had enslaved its
own people and reduced those of many other nations to serfdom under
puppet governments. It was a regime as totalitarian and as murderous as
the Nazi regime in Germany, which the U.S. and Britain had allied with
the Soviets in World War II to defeat.
In 1978, the Cold War was raging, and the U.S. was still reeling from
its humiliation in the disastrous war in Vietnam. Anti-Americanism was
flourishing both abroad and at home. Many Americans—particularly young
Americans—had lost faith in their country, its institutions, its
principles, its culture, its traditions, its way of life. Some proposed
communism as a superior system; many suggested what came to be known as
“moral equivalency” between American democracy and Soviet communism. By
1978, to suggest such equivalency had become a mark of
sophistication—something to distinguish one from the allegedly backward
hicks and rubes who believed in the superiority of the American to the
Soviet system. There were many such “sophisticated” people at Harvard.
And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to Harvard to confront them and others.
His speech was not, however, an encomium to America or the West. On
the contrary, it was a severe critique—one might even say a prophetic
rebuke—and a warning. Of course, Solzhenitsyn did not argue for the
moral equivalency, much less the superiority, of the Soviet system. He
hated communism in all its dimensions and he loathed the gangsters who
ruled the Soviet empire. What he faulted America (and the West more
generally) for was its abandonment of its own moral and, especially,
spiritual ideals and identity.
He viewed the West’s weakness, including its weakness in truly
standing up to Soviet aggression, as the fruit of the materialism,
consumerism, self-indulgent individualism, emotivism, and narcissism—in a
word, the immorality—into which we had allowed ourselves to sink.
Solzhenitsyn, the (by then) legendary human rights activist, warned
America and the West that we had become too focused on rights and needed
to refocus on obligations. We had come to embrace a false idea of
liberty, conceiving of it as doing as one pleases, rather than as the
freedom to fulfill one’s human potential and honor one’s conscientious
duties to God and neighbor.
At the heart of this moral confusion and collapse, Solzhenitsyn
argued, was a loss of faith, and with it the loss of a particular
virtue—the virtue of courage.
Here are Solzhenitsyn’s own words:
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. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable
among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an
impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there
are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence
on public life.
I submit to you today that, despite the American victory in the Cold
War (for which we should all be grateful) and the collapse and
disappearance of the Soviet Union, nothing has changed that would
diminish the force or relevance of Solzhenitsyn’s words. The virtue we
lack—and it is an indispensable virtue—is courage. And we must recover
it. Our young men and women must regain it—not to defend us from a
hostile foreign power armed with nuclear weapons, but to protect us from
a far more dangerous foe, a truly deadly enemy: our own worst selves.
At
all times and in all places all of the virtues are needed. No virtue is
superfluous or dispensable. But it seems that at any given time in any
particular society there is a particular virtue that is lacking and
therefore desperately needed. Moreover, because the virtues are
integrally connected to one other—they are like a network—the loss of
any one virtue tends to weaken and imperil all the others. Or worse, the
loss of a given virtue threatens to turn other virtues into engines of
vice.
Take, for example, the virtue of compassion. It is an
essential virtue—like the others. It can move us to work selflessly and
even heroically for the good of our fellow human beings—especially those
who are needy or suffering. We cannot do without it. We rightly praise
the compassionate for their good deeds in caring for the least, the
last, and the lost. But consider what can happen when compassion remains
strong but other virtues, such as love of truth and justice, have
eroded or disappeared. Operating by itself, in isolation from the other
virtues, compassion can motivate every manner of evil—from the killing
of the unborn in abortion to the killing of the disabled and the frail
elderly in euthanasia. We can convince ourselves that kindness calls for
these things.
Well before the Nazis gave eugenics a bad name,
well-intentioned, decent, compassionate people in places such as
Germany, England, and the U.S. embraced eugenics, precisely out of a
sense of compassion. It was they, not the Nazis, who invented the
doctrine of
lebensunswertes Leben—“life unworthy of life.”
Because they did not want people to suffer, they supported mandatory
sterilization for some classes of persons and even “mercy killing” for
those whose lives they considered so burdensome as to be “not worth
living.”
We live at a time of great moral confusion. If anything,
our situation is worse today than it was when Solzhenitsyn visited
Harvard in 1978. There has been, to borrow a concept from Friedrich
Nietzsche, a “transvaluation of values” in many spheres. What is
good—such as marriage considered precisely as the conjugal union of
husband and wife—has been redefined as bad. What is bad—such as sexual
immorality of a wide range of types—has been redefined as good. To
defend the conjugal understanding of marriage and traditional ideas
about sexuality and morality is to be accused of “hatred” by people on
one side of the political divide today. To welcome the migrant and the
refugee is to court being accused of disloyalty to your country by some
on the other side. To stand up for the sanctity of human life in all
stages and conditions, beginning with the defense of the precious and
vulnerable child in the womb, is to risk being labeled a “misogynist.”
To speak out for religious freedom and the rights of conscience is to
invite being smeared as a “bigot.”
It is not pleasant to be
subjected to these types of abuse and defamation. And these days it goes
well beyond unpleasantness. To speak moral truth to cultural power is
to put at risk one’s social standing, one’s educational and employment
opportunities, one’s professional advancement; it is to place in
jeopardy treasured friendships and sometimes even family relationships.
And the more people, in reaction to these threats, acquiesce or go
silent, the more dangerous and therefore more difficult it becomes for
anyone to speak the truth out loud, even if they know it in their
hearts. Anyone who succumbs to the intimidation and bullying—anyone who
acquiesces or goes silent out of fear—not only harms his or her own
character and fails in his or her Christian duty to bear faithful
witness to truth, he or she also makes things harder for others. We owe
it not only to ourselves to be courageous, but to our brothers and
sisters too. And because we owe it to ourselves and others, we owe it to
God.
Our own worst selves are our unvirtuous selves. Our own worst selves
are our selves when we lack the self-mastery that possession of the
virtues—including the virtue of courage—makes possible. Our own worst
selves are slaves—not to alien masters, but to our own weaknesses and
wayward desires. Our own worst selves are what we are encouraged by so
much of our culture today to be. When we are our own worst selves, what
we seek are ephemeral and ultimately meaningless things, such as
pleasure, status, social acceptability, wealth, power, celebrity—things
that are not bad in themselves, since they can be used for good ends,
but things that are not good in themselves, either. And they can lure us
into supposing that—and acting as if—they were. When we are our own
worst selves, we fail in our duty to bear faithful witness because a
desire for ephemeral things and a fear of losing them paralyzes us.
When we are our own worst selves, we lead lives that are marked by
those vices against which Solzhenitsyn railed forty years ago:
materialism, consumerism, self-indulgence, narcissism. We place the
focus on doing as we please, no matter what we please; getting what we
want, no matter what it is we happen to want. Instead of seeking what is
true because it’s true, what is good because it’s good, what is right
because it’s right, we seek what we desire, for no better reason than
our happening to desire it; indeed, we fall into the profound moral and
philosophical error of imagining that the human good consists in the
satisfaction of human desires.
Thus it is that we rationalize our failing to behave like rational
creatures—creatures blessed with the powers of reason and freedom—and
our behaving instead like brute animals, slaves of our passions. By
definition, slaves to passions can never be masters of themselves; and
no one who lacks self-mastery can practice and exemplify the virtue of
courage. Courage always presupposes a willingness to sacrifice oneself
for others or for something higher; someone who is not master of
himself, someone who cannot rise above his own wants, desires, and
passions, can never give himself to, or live for, others, or give
himself to, or live for, something higher. Self-mastery is a
precondition of the willingness and ability to live self-sacrificially.
One cannot give oneself to others if one is not first master of oneself.
Lacking self-mastery, one simply has nothing to give.
The Christian story is all about self-giving, self-sacrificial
living—and dying. God himself sends his only begotten Son to us, in our
sinfulness, to be our Redeemer and Savior by a supreme act of
self-sacrificial love. We, as disciples of Jesus, are to model our lives
on his, emptying and sacrificing ourselves for others. Bearing witness
to truth, no matter the cost.
I have suggested that Solzhenitsyn saw a connection between the
decline of courage and a loss of faith. Five years after his Harvard
address, in a 1983 speech accepting the Templeton Prize in Religion, he
stated this in the most explicit terms. The title of the speech could
not have made the point more clearly. That title was “Men Have Forgotten
God.” Here is its opening paragraph:
As a survivor of the Communist Holocaust I am horrified to
witness how my beloved America, my adopted country, is gradually being
transformed into a secularist and atheistic utopia, where communist
ideals are glorified and promoted, while Judeo-Christian values and
morality are ridiculed and increasingly eradicated from the public and
social consciousness of our nation. Under the decades-long assault and
militant radicalism of many so-called “liberal” and “progressive”
elites, God has been progressively erased from our public and
educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of delusion,
perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity.
Thirty-five years later, who can deny the truth of Solzhenitsyn’s
lament? Today, the cultured despisers of Christianity and
Judeo-Christian values do not speak of communism or its ideals—communism
having been discredited by Soviet gangsterism. They speak instead of
“liberation” or of “equality,” by which they seek to marginalize and
stigmatize the principles of Judeo-Christian morality and justify acts
and practices that contravene those principles. And they are certainly
aggressive—moving, to cite just one of many examples, from the
legalization of abortion, to the demand for its approval and even public
funding, to the insistence that people or institutions—including
religious institutions such as Catholic hospitals—who refuse to perform
or refer for abortions be made to suffer professional or civic penalties
or disabilities.
What is behind all this? According to Solzhenitsyn, the moral decline
of the West has behind it the same factor that produced the horrors of
communism, namely this: “Men have forgotten God.” People worship
themselves, deify their own desires, fall into an idolatry of the self,
because they have forgotten that there is something—indeed
someone—higher. They have forgotten God. And absent faith in God, how
can they—how can we—muster the courage to bear bold witness, as
Solzhenitsyn himself did, to Christian values in an increasingly hostile
culture and world? How can there be courage in the absence of faith?
Fear is a powerful emotion—a very powerful emotion indeed. Faith alone
can overcome it.
When people forget God, when they come to suppose that they don’t
need Him or His grace and guidance, when they fall into the hubristic
error of imagining that they are too smart and sophisticated to believe
in Him, a catastrophe always ensues.
This was no novel insight or discovery of Solzhenitsyn’s. It is the
central teaching and theme of the prophets—all prophets, and not just
the Biblical ones.
In March of 1863 another man with a craggy face and a beard spoke to
the American people words of critique and prophetic warning of precisely
the sort spoken by Solzhenitsyn at Harvard and in his Templeton
Address. Abraham Lincoln, reflecting on the catastrophe of the Civil War
and on its causes, issued a Proclamation of a National Day of Prayer
and Fasting. What he said in that proclamation was, in a sense, echoed
by Solzhenitsyn, and we would do well to heed it today. Indeed, we fail
to heed it at our mortal peril. Here are Lincoln’s words:
Whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own
their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins
and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that
genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the
sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all
history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. And,
insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals
are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not
justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates
the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our
presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a
whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of
Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and
prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other
nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the
gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched
and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness
of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior
wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have
become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and
preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!
It has been 155 years since Lincoln wrote those words. And yet, it is
as if he wrote them yesterday and directed them to us today. Yes, as a
culture, as a people, we have forgotten God. That is reflected in our
laws, in the edicts of our Supreme Court, in our public policies, in our
news and entertainment media, in our schools and universities, in our
economic and cultural institutions, on the streets of our cities, and
even, alas, in many homes. We “have vainly imagined, in the
deceitfulness of our hearts,” that our “blessings were produced by some
superior wisdom and virtue of our own.” And, as a result, we find
ourselves in the condition so accurately and brutally diagnosed by
Solzhenitsyn.
But what has been forgotten may be remembered. What has fallen into
decay can be renewed. What has been lost can be rediscovered. But for
these things to happen, those who remember God and sincerely seek to do
His will must look to Him for the grace necessary to be His courageous
and faithful witnesses—to be, in the words of another modern prophet,
Pope John Paul II, “signs of contradiction” to a world that has
forgotten God. This, allow me humbly to say, is your mission. You must
remember God to a world that has forgotten him. By the example of your
lives, as well as by the words of your mouths, you must be the salt and
light that repairs what is broken and points the way to true freedom for
those who have fallen into forms of slavery that are all the more
abject for masquerading as liberation.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and
director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and
Institutions at Princeton University.
