Solzhenitsyn Reconsidered II
Winthrop, Delba
"Solzhenitsyn Reconsidered II" - reader is conscious of it all the time - acquired in the Gulag Archipelago, where, being totally deprived of freedom in earthly terms, he came to understand what constituted...
...In contrast, the philosopher Sidney Hook holds that in his concern with a Supreme Complete Entity Solzhenitsyn is "profoundly, demonstrably, and tragically wrong...
...Rumor has it that he knows more English than he allows, but Solzhenitsyn is not given to spending time "chatting at filling stations...
...Or one might have recourse to what is known of Solzhenitsyn's deeds and to his other writings...
...To my knowledge Solzhenitsyn has never proclaimed himself to be a prophet, and the language of neither the Commencement speech nor his other writings can fairly be termed prophetic...
...True, he has contended that the only a l t e r n a t i v e to Communism for the Russian people at this time is Orthodoxy...
...But on its face this statement no more evokes worship of the Christian Trinity than intellectual appreciation of the Platonic Good, the Aristotelian nous, or the Parmenidean One...
...Now with the consensus pack after him, and with his Western readers, to sustain their interest, requiring variety, and the crazed expectations of an illusory kingdom of heaven on earth such as he cannot possibly provide, his immediate worldly prospects must be considered uncertain, Yet there is no sign of his own courage and determination faltering...
...r e a d e r is conscious of it all the t i m e - - acquired in the Gulag Archipelago, where, being totally deprived of freedom in earthly terms, he came to understand what c o n s t i t u t e d true freedom, the glorious liberty of the children of God about which the Apostle Paul speaks so eloquently...
...To think about the profundity of liberalism's difficulties is to have begun our ascent...
...For he is required by law to submit to Congress within weeks of his taking office any changes he wishes to propose in the budget requests left behind by the outgoing Carter administration...
...These together would siphon something like $61 billion out of that $107 billion automatic tax increase...
...Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses, and Six Later Reflecttons, edited by Ronald Berman...
...In moments of weakness and distress," he writes, "it is good to tread closely in God's footsteps...
...Laws that were to "command all the virtues" were replaced by mere "hedges...
...Carter's defeat at the polls...
...And that means that, as outlays are currently projected for next year, the new administration would be looking at a $50 billion deficit...
...Justice can be done only when the truth is known, and Solzhenitsyn's not yet completed multi-volume history of the Russian Revolution is meant to bring to light truths that are "universal, and even t i m e l e s s . " Ronald Berman a r g u e s that Solzhenitsyn's true greatness as a writer lies in his ability to understand and depict human life in its political context...
...He uses the words " s p i r i t " and "spiritual" in as many senses as we do--not only as the locus of religiosity, but as intellect, as the animation of a people or an individual, and as that which leads us to suspect that there is more to a human being than a body with m a t e r i a l needs and physical p l e a s u r e s . And for all his insistence that our world find a place for the principle of soul, he could not reject more emphatically a religion that contravenes nature by contemning the body's needs and desires altogether...
...And the Democratic Congress, like a child after a tonsillectomy . b e i n g told that ice cream is not only not bad for him but is positively salubrious, only too eagerly accepted the new president's request to pump unneeded billions into an economy already rapidly recovering from its recent slump...
...comfort from the parallel fact that, in the absence of any change in our tax laws, federal revenues will increase by as much as $107 billion next year, nearly half ($47.4 billion) of which will come in the form of higher individual income tax payments...
...From the array we learn more about the foibles and follies of liberal intellectuals than we do about Solzhenitsyn...
...Liberalism's claim to be universally true and beneficial is belied in a world split apart...
...Ronald Berman can cite as many Western sources as Richard Pipes can cite Slavophiles...
...William McNeill is only mildly and briefly upset by the whole issue of perspective and cultural relativity because he thinks Sohhenitsyn's central proposition is that a nation needs " a unifying ideal or myth"--not a universal truth--to sustain its will...
...He also believes that Solzhenitsyn agrees that it is possible to ground the political institutions of a "liberal, pluralistic, constitutional democracy" on various religions which grow, that is, converge on the basis of their common principle of S olzhenitsyn is referred to by most commentators as a "prophet...
...To assert that Solzhenitsyn is a latterday Slavophile, implying that this is all we need to know to understand Solzhenitsyn and his speech, is at best a diversion...
...Most of the contributors implicitly dismiss James Reston's contention that the speech is "the wanderings of a mind split a p a r t , " but they acknowledge that "A World Split Apart" is complex and in need of explication...
...Solzhenitsyn has said that a non-Communist authoritarian regime would be best for Russia now because in her thousand-year history Russia has had only eight months experience with constitutional government...
...Michael Novak, who welcomes the Commencement speech as "the most important religious document of our time," can do so only because he interprets Solzhenitsyn's lament for the loss o f " t h e concept of a Supreme Complete Entity" as a demand for the return to religion and a "theocentric" society...
...McNeill expects us to be saved by a nihilistic assertion of Western will in the name of nothing more than a myth...
...The recently published book, Solzhenitsyn at Harvard," is at once too much and too little...
...Combining Soviet-bred fears and American ways once again, Solzhenitsyn has improved upon Samizdat with the Xerox machine he keeps in his living room...
...Let me cite THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 17...
...Reagan take much "Except as otherwise noted, all figures in this article are taken from Office of Management and Budget, Supplemental Summary Fiscal Year 198l Budget, J u l y 22, 1980...
...In Solzhenitsyn's case, however, we have some license to make the attempt, for he has informed us in his writings that his every action is deliberate...
...96-344...
...It is one man against the Kremlin, which might seem hopeless odds, but when that one man is Solzhenitsyn, against all the odds he must win, since, as he concludes his splendid Nobel Prize lecture: "One word o f truth outweighs the world...
...He has made his home in exile in the United States, and we cannot 'suppose that he did so because Vermont is the only place in the non-Communist world that resembles Mother Russia...
...In THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 15 truth-seeking...
...He has said, " R e l i g i o n should make an a p p r o p r i a t e contribution to the spiritual life of the nation" (whatever "appropriate" means...
...Our scholars leave Western statesmen dumb before those who still wish to see and hear what Solzhenitsyn calls "a proud, principled and open defense of freedom...
...Do your duty...
...The epithet, in any case, is unwarranted...
...According to Hobbes, man is naturally free...
...A statesman is not required and is hardly permitted to think about the common good...
...Why do those who cannot abide Solzhenitsyn's defense of the Vietnam war, because they regard the war as an attempt to impose our ways on another people, not extend their cultural and political relativism to Russia...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 Laws, when good, are as few and as limited in scope as possible out of respect for the presumption of natural liberty...
...He goes on: Where would I be, in a few days t i m e - - in jail or happily working at my novel...
...If the preservation of one's own body is one's greatest (and most justified) concern, how could it ever be reasonable to risk one's life for any person or principle...
...Well, thanks largely to Solzhenitsyn, the world now does know all about it, but his battle with "them" goes on...
...I could have enjoyed myself so much, breathing the fresh air, resting, stretching my cramped limbs, but my duty to the dead permitted no such selfindulgence They are dead...
...When he cannot choose his audience, he can still choose what to say to it...
...Those then are the very general dimensions of the FY 1982 budget problem with which the President-elect will have to wrestle even before his inauguration next January...
...Unfortunately, Novak's cheerful characterization of Solzhenitsyn's position requires Sohhenitsyn to have lost the understanding of what a revealed religion is...
...His analysis of the West is strikingly similar to that of the enduring darling of American social scientists, Alexis de Tocquevilte...
...The issue is whether Solzhenitsyn is right or wrong, not who has taught him to pose the questions he raises...
...Nor has Solzhenitsyn promoted organized religion, much less theocracy, in the West...
...He does not urge a return to either the Middle Ages or the early optimism of the Enlightenment...
...Many of the early pieces exhibit unreasoned outrage, and most of the later ones are displays of academic expertise...
...In any case, what Solzhenitsyn has read about the West is not decisive, for if (as the old saying goes) "truth is one," the same truth can be discovered anew in any time and place...
...But in such a condition of perfect freedom, life would be so intolerable that men would consent to government and laws to limit their natural freedom...
...See Solzhenitsyn's "The Courage to See" in the Fall 1980 issue of Foreign Affairs...
...Although Hobbes' doctrine does not require a petty materialism in everyday life (one is still free to indulge the "lust of the mind" for knowledge), the common desire for material well-being is likely to be ubiquitous...
...Since these details are at best sketchy and, in any case, do not account for the content and tone of the Harvard speech, more s a t i s f y i n g explanations must be sought...
...Ford had submitted before leaving office...
...Or, finally, one might rely, as have most, on one's expert knowledge of the Soviet and Russian dissident traditions from which Solzhenitsyn has emerged...
...Solzhenitsyn's demeanor, which offends most of the contributors to Solzhenitsyn at Harvard and even its publishers, complements his argument, for he personifies a quality which is antithetical to the spirits of both Christianity and liberalism, but is the peak of Classical virtue: megalopsychia--greamess of soul, or pride...
...Solzhenitsyn holds that the precariousness of the West's existence is due to a mistake at its very root: the "rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy" that became the basis of its political and social doctrine...
...The issues involved in this change are at the core of what is, according to Will, "the most ancient and honorable theme of Western political philosophy...
...Solzhenitsyn has no more pretensions than any social s c i e n t i s t who makes p r e d i c t i o n s on the basis of his data and thus speaks " T r u t h . " In fact he has fewer pretensions, for all he does is to state the choices open to us and account for their being our choices...
...Each religion begins with its own non-negotiable truth, and none needs to seek what it already has...
...9.50/$5.00...
...Unhindered, human bodies would move not toward "a Supreme Complete Entity," but toward the various objects of their desires, the continual attainment of which might be called happiness...
...We do know in addition that he is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and we have no right to doubt his piety...
...All opinions compatible with the metaphysical dogma of this "humanistic autonomy," that the first principle is the individual human body, are tolerable...
...As Kesler suggests, the deepest meaning o f " a world split apart" is a world in which the natural unity of body and soul is denied and the needs of one or the other neglected...
...God alone knows...
...The contributors to Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, even the ones without Harvard pedigrees, are all respected representatives of that tradition...
...The only consensus is that somebody's interests be served...
...Four years earlier President Carter seized the occasion to propose what we now know to have been disastrous changes in the FY 1978 budget that Mr...
...In fact, they savor criticism only from the Left...
...If Solzhenitsyn is not a prophet in the usual sense, then surely he is a theocrat...
...To treat one speech as if it revealed the heart and mind of a man is always a questionable endeavor...
...The most obvious political defect of liberalism, as Hobbes and his critics anticipated, is that it cannot sustain military courage...
...I prayed...
...We do not know what Solzhenitsyn has read...
...He laments the fact that we ha,ce lost the "concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility...
...Because Hobbes' doctrine is grounded on a universal fact of human nature, it should be universally applicable...
...It is on this "seemingly fantastic violation of the law of the conservation of mass and energy" that he has based all the activities on behalf of his old Zek comrades he so movingly describes in The Oak and the Calf In the course of describing them he tells more about hims e l f than has been revealed in his other writings, and more about the Soviet regime, its inner reality, than any other book I know of in the vast literature dealing with the October Revolution and its consequences...
...But as George Will, Kesler, and Ronald Berman suggest, the real issue is whether Solzhenitsyn knows Western ideas, particularly those on which modern Western politics are grounded...
...I f Solzhenitsyn's critics cannot have him as a theocrat, they would at least have him as a partisan of autocracy or authoritarianism...
...What is required of us to hear the Harvard speech is not an openness to prophecy, but a willingness to consider that many t r u t h s about our politics and culture are indeed bitter...
...Liberalism is transformed into the welfare-statism or socialism and finally the nihilism of liberal intellectuals only when they try to elevate the vulgar passions for equality and material wellbeing to principle...
...How amazed and incredulous I should have been as a young journalist in Moscow in the early thirties, given to pottering about the anti-God museums which then proliferated in the USSR, if someone had told me that half a century later one of the very finest products of the regime would be writing in this strain...
...Who is the winner...
...When President-elect Ronald Reagan sits down with his advisors to consider budget recommendations for the first fiscal year of his administration, he will be forced to confront--as policy maker rather than campaigner--a set of facts that may well make him wish he had gone into some other line of work...
...Delba Winthrop SOLZHENITSYN RECONSIDERED II...
...Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, DC...
...In the second Gulag book, in the wonderful c h a p t e r called "The A s c e n t , " he even refers thankfully to his time in the labor camps as having brought him this illumination, and I truly believe that he would have found it more congenial to resume his old Zek existence rather than to watch, as he has had to do in his compulsory exile, the continuing surrender to "them" of whatever power, authority, and influence still pertains to what we go on calling Western civilization...
...And Hobbes insists that it is true as well as salutary...
...That Solzhenitsyn believes our most fundamental danger to be intellectual, not military, has been made perfectly clear in his two recent statements in Foreign Affairs, as well as by the fact that he chose as his forum a scholarly journal...
...He does not speak with haste or waste...
...Solzhenitsyn's explicit recognition of the obvious fact that some authoritarian regimes are better or worse than others cannot be construed as a recommendation of either variety...
...A man in his sixties with a sober awareness of human mortality and a burning desire to complete his l i f e ' s work, Solzhenitsyn spends his days writing...
...The result, with which we are only too bitterly familiar, is the unprecedented inflation of the last three years--a result which, more than any other factor, led to Mr...
...If the finding of similarities and tracing of influences is to be at all fruitful one must have a firm grasp of what it is one is about to reduce to its antecedents...
...But Governor Reagan campaigned all this year on a well-conceived pledge to cut income tax rates by 10 percent across the board and to provide business with some form of accelerated depreciation...
...The principle of modern Western politics, he says, is "that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness...
...By this he seems to mean that events in his life forced him to infer some purpose to it...
...Nor will Mr...
...The most chilling of them is this: J u s t to keep pace with inflation, federal spending in fiscal 1982 will have to be almost $72 billion higher than it is this y e a r ' - - a n amount that includes no new domestic programs and no improvement in our national defense beyond what has already been programmed...
...So far is Solzhenitsyn from urging the West to adopt authoritarian ways that he criticizes the American press for subverting our representative institutions while it wields power irresponsibly...
...In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the very principle of law in Western civilization underwent a radical change...
...The principle "what the law does not command, it forbids" became "what the law does not forbid, it permits...
...Solzhenitsyn speaks not of a personal god to whom we necessarily owe obedience, but of an intelligible principle of order...
...Government serves man by securing peace and preservation...
...It is also said of Solzhenitsyn that his "rantings" can be disregarded because he does not know the West...
...In finding Solzhenitsyn's criticism of Western legalism rooted in Slavophile objections that laws tend to be all letter and no spirit, Berman overlooks a crucial fact of Western legal history...
...The world must know all about it...
...House Document No...
...Rather, he leads a life of isolation no serious scholar or writer could fault except out of envy...
...The authoritarianism he recommends for Russia is, moreover, a curious one, for it would be ruled by law and incorporate the principle of separation of powers...
...Delba Winthrop is a lecturer at Harvard University...
...Rather than demonstrate Solzhenitsyn's error, however, Hook asserts (without demonstration and contrary to all experience) that mankind can agree to unite in the defense of freedom and morality without any agreement about "God, immortality, or any other transcendental dogma...
...Thus Solzhenitsyn understands liberalism better than liberals do, for just such a principle was articulated by Thomas Hobbes, proponent of modern liberal politics whom Solzhenitsyn has recently attacked in Foreign Affairs magazine...
...The danger in being content with tracing influences is apparent in Harold Berman's otherwise intelligent and interesting essay...
...Yet he has never urged the Soviet leaders to do more than tolerate all religions (as do we...
...But common opinion notwithstanding, Solzhenitsyn is not a theocrat...
...the American Establishment...
...Perhaps Solzhenitsyn did not offer this objection in the Commencement speech because he wished his audience to think about the most urgent common good for the sake of which all liberals can unite--the survival of the West and thereby of humanity...
...The morality of modern liberalism is nothing more than obedience to the laws that make peace possible...
...Only Ronald Berman, the literary scholar and editor of this volume, and Harold Berman, the expert on Soviet law, have used Solzhenitsyn's other works in their'arguments...
...There is a multitude of lessons buried in that brief melancholy history...
...Solzhenitsyn vs...
...h i s ideas of culture and politics . . . are the work itself...
...To the extent that they have failed to appreciate or to understand Solzhenitsyn's argument they lend credence to his thesis: Liberalism cannot sustain liberalism's noblest aspirations, and liberalism is consequently not enough...
...He is said to take pains with the religious education of his children (as did many of our parents...
...You are alive...
...One might shed some light tSolzhenitsyn has not publicly rued his choice, but he has recently acknowledged a misjudgment: He thought Americans desired and appreciated criticism...
...He has felt sufficiently endangered to have built a large unattractive fence around his property, and he went to a Cavendish town meeting to apologize for the fact...
...his memoir Solzhenitsyn does say that his life has a "higher and hidden meaning" of which he had to be reminded by " t h e Supreme Reason which no mere mortal can at first understand...
...Kesler also leads us to recall that only the Classical world (which Solzhenitsyn neither praises nor criticizes here, but of which he shows an appreciation in his writings) strove for such wholeness...
...Elsewhere Solzhenitsyn has voiced a more fundamental objection to Western constitutional democracies: Western constitutional democracy invariably means party government, and party government is rule on behalf of a part or in its interest...
...We cannot defend liberalism without an awareness of its weaknesses as well as its strengths...
...Of Solzhenitsyn's deeds little is known other than what he has told us in Gulag, The Oak and the Calf, and rare interviews...
...14 THE AMERICANSPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 on it by means of textual exegesis, but of the contributors only Charles Kesler has attempted this (and acquitted himself quite well indeed...
...either he is unfamiliar with it or his own cultural bias blinds or blurs his vision...
...Karl 0 'Lessker is senior editor of The American Spectator and Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University...
...Tile Commencement speech, we may assume, was altogether his choice.t He undoubtedly chose to examine the fundamental principles of liberalism at Harvard because Harvard is the symbol and bastion of liberalism's noblest aspirations...
...That it remains so was eloquently reaffirmed by Harvard's President Derek Bok that same day...
...Q00~06~oO~QgI900QQO~0QmOQ~ggOOOOOOQ~ODQO~00Q0oQ0~IQO0Q00o0Q~m0QQQ~O~Q0O0o~O00Q0Q00OQ~OQO~OO~00~0m00060~OQQ~QQOtgQQQ~OD0OQm~g00O0O0~0OOmOOOQ O Karl O'Lessker THE REAGAN BUDGET A budget for the candidate who said, "The Time is Now...
...His l i f e ' s purpose, he has come to understand, is to speak and act with political intent, for example, to do his best to ensure that justice is aided with the publication of Gulag...
...None of the heroes of his novels and stories are religious, or at least their virtue does not presuppose piety...
...Religion can therefore be tolerated in a modern polity only when the faithful no longer take religion and its possible truth seriously...
...Having lost any measure of man but his state of preservation, they become incapable of making a reasoned distinction between noble and base aspirations.~ Solzhenitsyn advises us, his friends, that "no one on earth has any other way left but --upward...
...To be sure, if balancing the budget were the new administration's fondest desire, this 17.8 percent rise in revenues would look delectable, because the budget would then finally be in balance--and neither the President nor Congress would have had to lift a finger to accomplish that...
...Unfortunately, the most common ones seem the least justified...
...However minimal these laws might be, modern politics does not require--nay, forbids--individual appeal to any higher moral or religious principles...
...It consists of a t r a n s l a t i o n of Solzhenitsyn's June, 1978 Harvard Commencement address ("A World Split A p a r t " ) , a dozen early reactions and responses to the address, and several f u r t h e r reflections...
...Since prophecy is less in vogue with the intellectual establishment than with the moral majority, the appellation is not meant as a compliment...
...But here too their assertions lack a firm foundation...
...A political science that has become contemptuous of universal doctrines is blind to the nature of Marxist regimes as well as liberal ones...
...Before World War II and Gulag he had been trained in mathematics and physics, but surely none of the contributors to this book believe that all human beings stop reading and thinking once they have their diplomas in hand...
...When he elaborates on his hopes for the spiritual r e g e n e r a t i o n of the Russian people he speaks of the school, not the Church...
Vol. 13 • December 1980 • No. 12
