IN DEFENSE OF SOLZHENITSYN

...and we remember, with proper caution, the ugly results of attempting to enshrine one ideal by punishing any dissident political or religious views...

...What he said was not, granted, an encouraging view of the West...

...Solzhenitsyn is as hard on simple-minded conservatives as he is on simple-minded liberals...

...A food-product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his product to make it last longer...

...The 20th century collapse of colonial e~tablishme.nts has revealed the fragility and arrogance of this viewpoint, he believes, and he goes on to challenge the idea that the planet should imitate Commonweal: 553 Western economic and"political structures...

...It is not necessary to agree entirely with Solzhenitsyn to know that he speaks with an authority which his own history has forced on him, an authority which comes from the effort to speak clearly in a bad time...

...As a consequence, we do not use our freedom responsibly...

...Schlesinger, with the understandable delicacy of a liberal who once talked d~fferenfly, refers to Vietnam as an example of "excess," as if what happened there had to do with high spirits,or depression, or enthusiasmwrongly placed...

...On colonialism, for example, Solzhenitsyn is hardly a mourner for tbe rregime...

...As wrong as I believe him to be in some particulars, his essential pointuthat the West is spiritually sick and suffers from a profound loss c~ will--seems to me correct...

...The unexamined assumption in Solzhenitsyn's speech is one which goes to the center of every debate about the relationship of power and righteousness...

...after all, people are free not to buy it...

...Where there is no higher obligation, where legality is the highest goal and nothing else is required, people are encouraged to operate "at the extreme limit of the legal frames....An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention for a new type of energy in order to prevent its use...

...but it seems to be the ,West which is least capable of entertaining the idea of real good or real evil, in this century of all centuries...

...I try to live a removed life and may be naive, but encountering the belief that all ideas are really equal (as opposed to the belief that no idea may be forced down another's throat short of a direct threat to survival, and then for no reason more noble than the minimal human desire to keep breathing)--thiswas something of a shock...

...In the May issue of the radical Evangelical magazine Sojournersan exiled Ugandan Protestant minister, F. Kepa Sempangi, offers his impressions of our soc:ety's will, its sense of what matters: "Hennab ArencR has written that Western education removes conviction...

...He must be taken seriously--the suffering to which he is a witness demands at least that much respect...

...It was not reactionary Russian Orthodoxy but rather Schlesinger's idol, the liberal and pragmatic Kennedy, who got us into Vietnam up to our necks, and the old New Dealer Johnson who shoved us in over our heads...

...Rather than enforce a positive ideal, liberal democracy has preferred to limit its enforceable morality to the absolutely necessary ingredients for living together~an assumption that murder, rape, theft, and violations of written contracts are to be punished, with almost everything else left to the individual...

...and Britain and other Western powers have squeezed out, ~hey continue to do business with Amin, and business isn't suffering at all...

...The ideal may be admirable, but Solzhenitsyn is not impressed with its fruits...

...It may in fact be true that defeat in Vietnam has, in strategic terms, made us vulnerable...

...and the very week Britain condemned the murder of Dora Bloch, a plane loaded with whiskey left Britain for Uganda...

...This view is downright wrong, but Solzbenitsyn is, even here, close to a nerve which must be exposed...

...He really wouldn't admit to that...

...His perceptions are indeed limited by his being Russian, and by his having gone through a particular agony and not the general kind you sympathize with from a distance...

...I am afraid that he means by mysticism the whole dimension of the spiritual~the belief that the spiritual realm is re~dly the dominant one, and that other realms, in a proper view of things, are to be judged in its light...

...No religion or philosophy is to be pushed at the expense of others, under our system...

...Along with rejecting the idea of an enforceable ideal way of living, liberal democracy has recently, in practice, rejected anything higher than a toleration of nearly 1 September 1978:5.~4...

...and liberals usually blush at the word "evil," preferring words like "mistake" and "excess...

...There are people with the vote who think this way...

...It is even more important to .point out that it was not for moral reasons that we entered Vietnam, and it was not for moral reason-- but rather out of a kind of boredom---that we left it...

...It involves a tie which he apparently believes should exist between a good way of living, a true and moral appreciation of human duty, and government...

...I agreed with her-I do think some ideas are better than others...

...It is this emphasis on the spiritual, the insisten=e that there is something higher and more important than those things our system has canonized, which disturbs Solzhenitsyn's critics...

...Because of this unreal vision, we are likely victims for an enemy with a more collected and focused sense of the way the world works...

...It might work, if we had an appreciation of the tragic...

...I asked him to consider the distinction between believing an idea to be fight, and forcing it on others...

...For this reason, the generally easy dismissal of Solzhenitsyn's remarks to Harvard's recent graduates is a disturbing thing...

...Sempagni points to the fact that despite all the condemnations the U.S...

...The man was without irony...

...Then .one professor teaching the c/ass jo!ned the argument...

...You say that all ideas are not equaluthat's the kind of thinking that gave us the crusades and the inquisition...

...Is it the job of the state to ensure a morally decent life through mechanisms which are, at base, coercive...

...everything that doesn't leave blood on the walls...

...The U.S...

...When critics of Solzhenitsyn's speech have paid attention to the fact that what he has to say is as far from standard conservative opinion as it is from liberalism, they tend to call Solzhenitsyn a slavophile, the latest prophet of the brilliant but flawed tradition which saw some hope for universal salvation in the superior insight of the unspoiled Russian soul...

...The relations between Uganda and the Western world since Amin has come to power give great weight to this claim...

...You don't have to agree with the whole of Soizhenitsyn's speech to find this quick dismissal curious...

...Schlesinger was especially troubled by Solzhen~tsyn's "mysticism," and the New York Times worried editorially that Solzhenitsyn "believes himself to he in possession of The Truth...

...and this emphasis is the heart of his message...

...In one way or another every society does this, but demo:ratic nations have done this by proscribing as limited an area of behavior as possible...

...It should in practice be possible to see democracy as a major negative insight into human character:we are safer from tyranny when no one person or group can claim a right to all the power...

...Perhaps this benign and tolerant view of human possibility is in fact not enough to build a civilization on...

...And it will simply be impossible to survive the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure...

...In his essay on Solzhenitsyn, John Lukacs wrote of "the dissolution of habitual civilization...

...Solzhenitsyn sees America's defeat in Vietnam as a bad thing, and he places respons~ility for the Cambodian genocide at the feet of the antiwar movement...

...Solzhenitsyn said that the current sFlit between the Communist bloc and liberal democracy can't be solved by pragmatic liberalism's "enlightened self-interest...

...imports and exports are jolly at both ends...

...ricer who recently escaped from Uganda told me that nothing keeps Amin in hysterical laughter longer than the ideological repudiations uttered by the West...

...To charge that this is simply the usual conservative line is a kind of whistling in the graveyard...

...Western society is limited by an individualism which sees legal limits as the only ones, a vision which emphasizes rights at the expense of duties...

...but whatever it may be it would be, without a depth deeper than its use to someone, too shallow to sustain a common life...

...helps Amin's military...

...A similar short-circuit seems to have happened in the minds of people who can't see that when Solzhenitsyn says what he says about press freedom--that it has been used carelessly--he is not therefore tailing for censorship...

...These viewpoints are not the standard conservative ones, nor would many conservatives agree with Solzhenitsyn's assertion that "the constant dedre to have still more things and a still better life, and the struggle to attain them, imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings...

...He meant wha~ be said, the way Anita Bryant means things...

...When this toleration of a number of competing ideas becomes itself an ideology-when we find ourselves saying that all ideas are equal, that Plato and Tom Snyder are in there competing for public attention, everything notional and marketable, or valueless--when we get to this point, we have a new and dangerous thing going...

...I don't think it is at all...

...A student objected that I seemed to be saying that some ideas and vatues are better than others...

...What did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn say at Harvard...

...Is Solzhenitsyn's commencement address really just stand.JOHN O^gVEY is the author o] Saints for Confused Times (Thomas More Press).ard conservative rhetoric...

...I was invited recently to speak to a university class, and at one point in the discussion (which was about values and culture) I suggested that there might be a need for solitude and reflection before anything like "a value" could be formed.., otherwise we are in danger of being sold something, something in the air, something of value to a ruling class...

...and replies to Solzhenltsyn ranged from Rosalynn Carter's silly proof that the We~stis not spiritually sick after all, as he had claimed (people do volunteer work in hospitals, she pointed out), to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s little instruction to Solzhenitsyn in the Washington Post: "He must understand the irrelevance of his grand vision to a democratic and libertarian society...

...What Solzhenitsyn says about the West is not a peculiar Russian discomfort...

...If Solzhenitsyn seems at moments to exhibit selective indignation, we should give him the grace we offer victims of the Nazis...

...but the argument remains impressive to those who depend on their readers' ignorance of the slavophiles, and to all of those who don't want to face the complications involved in understanding what Solzhenitsyn is really saying.What he is saying is that in losing its spiritual bearings, a society "which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is scarcely taking advantage of the high level of human possibilities...

...It may be unkind to recall this episode in the 'history of American liberalism, btl.t it would be stupid to forget it...

...and when be says that freedom is not the highest human possibility it does not mean that he is calling for more authoritarianism (this is an obscene interpretation of the words of a man who has suffered so much from authoritarianism), any more than his concern for spirituality is a desire for theocracy...

...When democracy itself becomes sufficient, when it is not grounded in a deeper sense of what we expect of people, and feel obliged to give to them, we are building a house on air...

...He is rather trying to put the stretching of the human wiil into its place, and suggest--with the authority suffering has given him every right to suggest--that human will has its limits...

...What he says about the Western sickness is also apparent to other suffering people...

...Active and tense competition permeates all human thoughts without opening the way to free spiritual development...

...He knew I was Catholic and I guess expected me to spring to the defense ofecclesiastically sponsored atrocity...

...his claim that we face a unique evi,l is understandable, given the fact that he has looked at one of heirs other faces, no less Satanic because it comes under more fashionable auspices...

...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, criticism of Solzhenitsyn on Vietnam-is especially hard to take...

...Remember that the New York Times worries that Solzhenitsyn thinks he is in possession of the truth (I suppose they are secure in thinking that they ate not) and that Scldesinger uses mysticism as a bad word...

...For all thaL Russian particularity, I wonder how many of Solzhenitsyn's critics have read Dostoevsky's The Possessed in recent years, and how many of them could have failed to think of our sixties...

...It is not that there is nothing wrong with the Harvard address...

...If you believe the press reports, he condemned freedom and happiness, opposed a free press, and suggested that almost any sort of authoritarian government is superior to democracy...

...He didn't do this . . . in ratA, it seemed he couldn't . . . and when I asked him whether he didn't really think in his heart of hearts that Hitler's ideas were really inferior to Socrates' ideas, he waffled...

...The reduction of Solzhenitsyn's thought to simple nationalism was refuted two years ago by John Lukacs's essay, "The Meaning of Solzhenitsyn" in Commonweal...

...The West took its colonies "not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising the conquered peoples and denying any possible value in their approach to life...

...Since the Renaissance, the West has been in a spiritual decline...

...Many of his critics are, I ~hink, unwilling to face in a more honorable and straightforward fashion the dangers he points out...

...After the English broke diplomatic relations, he asked, 'Is there any less whiskey in the parlor?'" Commonweal: 555...

...Most liberal commentators professed to find the performance a bit dull, standard reactionary rhetoric...

...What did he say...

...Dismissing him as conservative or "mystical" is like whistling in the graveyard "In the face of what he has to_ say," Alfred Kazin wrote of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in a recent issue of Esquire, "we should be more terrified than we are...

...it has proclaimed an unreal autonomy, the freedom of human beings from any force higher or greater than human will...

...She was genuinely surprised: "You don't really mean that," she said...

...Sempangi writes, "A high ranking army of...