Gary Saul Morson in Commentary: Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead of recognizing how much he had missed when cut off from New York, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, this ex-Soviet dissident not only refused to accept superior American ideas but even presumed to instruct us. Harvard was shocked at the speech he gave there in 1978, while the New York Times cautioned: “We fear that Mr. Solzhenitsyn does the world no favor by calling for a holy war.”
For his part, Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that Westerners would not want to hear all he had learned journeying through the depths of totalitarian hell. “Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”
The West “turned out to be not what we [dissidents] had hoped and expected; it was not living by the ‘right’ values nor was it headed in the ‘right’ direction.” America was no longer the land of the free but of the licentious. The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. Having written a series of novels about how Russia succumbed to Communism, Solzhenitsyn smelled the same social and intellectual rot among us. He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient. We have continued to follow the path to disaster he mapped.
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose collects the most important speeches Solzhenitsyn delivered between 1972 and 1997.1 Inspired by various occasions—Solzhenitsyn’s winning the Nobel Prize, arriving in the West, and delivering that Harvard University commencement address, among others—these speeches convey a single message: Western civilization has lost its bearings because it has embraced a false and shallow understanding of life. The result is the accelerating decay of the West’s spiritual foundations. The very fact that the word “spiritual” sounded suspiciously outdated to so many intellectuals at the time shows how far the decay had already progressed. Sooner or later, Solzhenitsyn warned, Western civilization as we know it would collapse.
Solzhenitsyn would not have been surprised that, three decades after the collapse of the USSR, American intellectuals again find Marxist and quasi-Marxist doctrines attractive. Young people embrace “democratic socialism,” a phrase that Solzhenitsyn calls “about as meaningful as talking about ‘ice-cold heat.’”
Today we can ask: Why do so many cheer, or at least not object, when they witness mobs embracing the bloodthirsty and sadistic Hamas? Perhaps for the same reasons that young, pre-revolutionary Russians once celebrated terrorists who murdered innocent citizens? Having studied his country’s history, Solzhenitsyn foresaw the process that would lead to today’s chants of “globalize the intifada” and “any means necessary.” He repeatedly cautioned that Russia’s past may be America’s future.
How can it be, Solzhenitsyn asked, that so many Russians found the strength to “rise up and free themselves…while those [in the West] who soar unhindered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and fatefully, almost [seem] to crave slavery?” Why do crudeness of thought and the repetition of ill-understood slogans pass for sophistication? “I couldn’t have imagined to what extreme degree the West desires to blind itself,” Solzhenitsyn told a London audience in 1976.
Those who have reflected on Soviet experience, Solzhenitsyn advised, readily discern “telltale signs by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society.” Referring to the electrical blackout that struck New York in 1977, he identified one such warning: “The center of your democracy and your culture is left without electrical power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.” What would he say if he had seen the Antifa riots following the murder of George Floyd or the cowardly responses to today’s university encampments?
Solzhenitsyn discovered the root cause of the West’s decline in its assumption, shared by almost everyone with any influence, that life’s purpose is individual happiness, from which it follows that freedom and democratic political institutions exist to make that goal easier to attain. And so elections usually turn on the growth of an already abundant economy. Could there be a view of life less worthy of human dignity? America’s Founders acknowledged a higher power, but now the most “advanced” people have succumbed to “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.”
Acknowledging nothing higher than themselves, people overlook the evil in human nature. Original sin, what’s that? Sophisticates laugh at phrases such as “the Evil Empire” or “the Axis of Evil” because “it has become embarrassing to appeal to age-old values.” And so “the concepts of Good and Evil have been ridiculed for several centuries…. They’ve been replaced by political or class categorizations.” Crime and other ills supposedly result from readily amendable social arrangements and will inevitably give way to progress.
Like the Soviets, Westerners speak of being “on the right side of history,” as if progress were guaranteed and what comes later will be necessarily better. How readily such thinking seduced early-20th-century Russian (and Weimar German) intellectuals! And how vulnerable it leaves us to underestimating the evil that human beings can commit! “We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms only to find out that we are being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life” and our moral sense. People cannot even understand evil unless they recognize that it “resides in each individual heart before it enters a political system.”
“As for Progress,” Solzhenitsyn replied to self-styled progressives, “there can only be one true kind: the sum total of the spiritual progresses of individual persons, the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives.” For the hedonist, death looms as the terrible cessation of pleasures, but for spiritual people it is proof that, as Pierre, the hero of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, enthuses as he points to the sky: “We must live, we must love, and we must believe not only that we live today on the scrap of earth, but that we have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole.” Or as Solzhenitsyn argued in his Harvard commencement address: “If as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not a search for the best way to obtain material goods. . . . It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life’s journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.”
People can accomplish such moral growth not by self-indulgence but by its opposite, self-restraint or, as Solzhenitsyn also called it, “self-limitation.” Without that, they remain mired in the world of things and unable to see beyond the present moment. Après moi le déluge.
“If we don’t learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria,” Solzhenitsyn insisted, “we, mankind, will simply be torn apart as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth.” Voicing the overriding lesson of the Russian literary tradition, Solzhenitsyn told Westerners: “if personality is not directed at values higher than the self, then it becomes inevitably invested with corruption and decay…. We can only experience true spiritual satisfaction not in seizing but in refusing to seize: in other words, in self-limitation.”
The spiritual malaise of hedonism fatally weakens a society by leaving it unable to defend itself. “The most striking feature that an outside observer discerns in the West today,” Solzhenitsyn asserted in the Harvard address, is “a decline in courage,” which “is particularly noticeable in the ruling and intellectual elites,” presumably including his Harvard audience. Amid an abundance of material goods, “why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good, and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as-yet distant land?” People naturally say, “Let someone else risk his life.” European powers “bargain to see who can spend least on defense so that more remains for a prosperous life.” (Thirty years later, few European countries not on the Russian border meet the agreed-upon defense expenditure of 2 percent of GDP.) America bases its security primarily on its formidable arsenal, Solzhenitsyn noted, but weapons are never enough without “stout hearts and steadfast men.”
One step beyond unwillingness to defend one’s country is actual hatred of it. I thought of Solzhenitsyn’s warnings when I learned of campus mobs this year shouting “Death to America!” For Solzhenitsyn, that is where the cult of individual happiness, sooner or later, is bound to lead. Facing the slightest frustration, forced to endure a modicum of adversity, or exposed to a world of contingency and misfortune, those educated to regard individual good fortune as their due seek someone to blame. They readily embrace any fashionable ideology that divides the world into oppressed and oppressors, the innocent good people and the implacably evil. But as Solzhenitsyn famously observed in The Gulag Archipelago, the line between good and evil runs not between groups but “through every human heart.”
Why worry about external enemies when the real threat supposedly comes from another group or party at home? “Or why restrain oneself from burning hatred,” Solzhenitsyn asked, “whatever its basis—race, class, or manic ideology?” As in the French and Russian Revolutions, such anger feeds on itself. “Atheist teachers are rearing a younger generation in a spirit of hatred toward their own society.” From the perspective of 2024, it is easy to verify Solzhenitsyn’s prediction that “the flames of hatred” against one another are bound to intensify.
Society tears itself apart. Turning all questions into a matter of absolute rights makes amicable com-promise impossible, and it is the most privileged peo-ple, shielded from life’s inevitable disappointments, who are the most inclined to such thinking. Those raised in gated communities and preparing for lucrative professions are the first to express resentment and complain they feel “unsafe.” As Solzhenitsyn anticipated, “the broader the personal freedoms, the higher the level of social well-being or even affluence—the more vehement, paradoxically, this blind hatred” of America.
The specter—or rather, the zombie—of Marxism has returned because it divides the world into the damned and the saved. They need not be “the bourgeoisie” and “the proletariat” but can be any pair that conveniently presents itself. To the amazement of those who only recently escaped such thinking, “what one people has already endured, appraised, and rejected suddenly emerges among another people as the very latest word.”
Solzhenitsyn asked: Why does one country blindly embrace another’s catastrophic mistakes? Why can’t those mistakes become a cautionary lesson? “This inability to understand someone else’s faraway grief,” he pleads, “threatens to bring on imminent and violent extinction.”
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