Man of Courage
MANSFIELD, HARVEY
Man of Courage Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008 BY HARVEY MANSFIELD Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a hero with the hero’s virtue of courage. He displayed courage, he refl ected on it....
...This was not so well received...
...Later, she had the temerity to send one of them to the subject and was rewarded with a short, personal letter from him praising her for “giving much to think about,” while of course keeping mum about the accuracy of her analysis...
...They require a virtue that is not explained or justifi ed in their principle...
...We see this problem in America today in the gratitude we express to our military...
...This part of the Harvard speech appears to anticipate what we call political correctness...
...Harvey Mansfi eld is the William R. Kenan Jr...
...The more radical materialism is more convincing because it is more consistent, and “the situation becomes increasingly dramatic” to the point where it is clear that the split in the world between democracy in the West and communism in the East is less terrible than the similarity of the materialist diseases that plagues the two sides...
...But at this distance from the event, to learn something useful, and to do him honor at his death, it makes sense to try to see what he was saying about courage...
...Some believed that, if he was not a crackpot, he was as wrong as one...
...Yet America does have defenders even though it does not understand them...
...The word “conservative” was used once to say that we in the West are too conservative...
...professor of government at Harvard...
...Courage in the raw, physical sense is the noble ability to control one’s fear and terror of bodily pains...
...But fi rst: A hero deserves hero worship, something between action and refl ection, and I begin with my own experience...
...Now, modern materialism is an attempt to avoid depending on virtue generally and, especially, on courage...
...they are our guardians...
...They risk their lives in harm’s way, we like to say...
...others that he should have been deterred by gratitude from speaking the sort of truth that he himself called “bitter” on a happy occasion such as a commencement...
...Courage enjoys “the situation [that] becomes increasingly dramatic,” the big picture shown to us in the Harvard speech that has us approaching “a major turn in history...
...It seems that materialism somewhat shamefacedly rests on the immaterial for its self-defense...
...He survived intimidation, arrest, imprisonment, starvation, forced labor, several types of torture—and, let us not forget, cancer...
...Courage is unphilosophic by itself, insofar as it is the unquestioning defense of whatever is one’s own...
...When Aristotle said that the noblest courage is to confront death in battle, he implied that society depends on this individual virtue...
...But one can never be courageous with such an attitude, for courage requires willingness to sacrifi ce one’s life for something higher, for a noble life...
...Liberals heard liberalism being assailed and jumped to the conclusion that this was a conservative speech...
...Courage likes the taste of bitter truth, which to it is bittersweet...
...But Solzhenitsyn had not come to praise, no, not even to praise Harvard...
...Still, it cannot do away with courage...
...Where was “sacred honor” in the fi rst paragraph of this wonderful document...
...He could have said the late sixties, and he was addressing Harvard professors, many of whom had recently shown great cowardice in allowing their university to be disrupted, even taken over, by students protesting against the Vietnam war...
...Solzhenitsyn paints with rough strokes, but clearly enough...
...Courage as a virtue practiced for its own sake is not undertaken to defend society, but society needs it and must cultivate and reward it...
...The display was for all to see, the refl ection was deep, diffi cult, and reserved...
...Which prompts me to assert that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a manly man if ever there was one...
...With restraint of appetite comes abandonment of zeal for the principle of happiness in this world, the principle of materialism...
...This is a minimal requirement exacting only a form of behavior, not an attitude of soul...
...Modern materialism rests on selfpreservation or the right to life, in which survival is paramount...
...That is why modern democracies have such diffi culty defending themselves...
...all you have to do is obey the law...
...Things did not turn out that way, and the West prevailed despite the weakness that Solzhenitsyn correctly pointed out...
...The speech was given in a mist on its way to rain, yet the audience, on the edge of its seats, listened carefully, eager to fi nd hope and hoping it would be something they already had...
...His formulation seems to restate courage in the terms of moderation, or to combine the virtues of courage and moderation...
...Under this idea there was no intrinsic evil and no higher task than to attain happiness on earth...
...It sounds like Plato’s Republic, except that, with us, appetite is the sovereign element...
...Only this last quality, Solzhenitsyn says, can lift the world above materialism...
...But what is the connection to courage...
...For us, he was Homer to his own Achilles, the best statement and explanation of himself...
...They do more than “serve...
...But that assumption was weakened as materialism became increasingly radical, taking the form of a scientifi c socialism and, fi nally, communism...
...In that picture, the Communist East is weak but the West is weaker...
...What I say now came from her...
...The military are the courage element in our community, at odds with the appetite element, but necessary to it...
...I forgot to mention that courage in Greek is also the word for manliness...
...This is the connection between physical and moral courage shown in the life and thought of Solzhenitsyn...
...For modern materialism has used its own inspiration— from below or perverted from above—to drive vicious actions that have the feel of noble sacrifi ce to the doer if not the recipient...
...The Declaration of Independence begins by setting forth rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and stating that all men are created equal...
...Too much for Harvard to accept and too much to judge here...
...Everyone respects this in him...
...If we all think alike, we will all be safe without having to defend ourselves...
...Moral courage is often said to be more diffi cult because it requires greater intellect, but it is harder to discern because it is frequently confused with zealous, strongly expressed partisanship by intellectuals...
...With me was my late wife, Delba Winthrop, also a hero worshipper, but one who wrote articles on Solzhenitsyn’s thought...
...Solzhenitsyn’s argument is that the two kinds of courage are not separate but connected...
...The obvious point of attention is his courage...
...The new age will have to revalue the spiritual without returning to the Middle Ages...
...It is voluntary because it must freely come from you, and yet be inspired by something higher than your bodily self...
...Courage is in our nature if only we look for it, but the next time it may not be ready to hand if we continue trying to suppress it...
...But it seems less valuable because it is not rare...
...Courage is the suppressed virtue of modernity, honored only in the breach of its principle...
...This means that our philosophers are free riders or parasites on our military...
...The Western mistake was to turn our backs on the spiritual—devotion to which had grown to excess and come to a natural end in the Middle Ages—and to embrace materialism with an opposite unwarranted zeal...
...In perhaps the most interesting and original of Solzhenitsyn’s insights in the Harvard speech, he notes the importance that Western democracies confer on legalism...
...He was, above all, a courageous man, defying his enemies to do their worst, which they did...
...but one should look also for the permanent value in how he lived and what he said...
...Happiness is to be understood as physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, and anything beyond these was left outside the attention of the state and society to the option of the individual, as if there were nothing higher than matter in human life...
...Quite a vision...
...Materialism is a doctrine that weakens humanity and thus deprives itself of strong defenders...
...I was witness to the great man’s great speech at Harvard on June 8, 1978...
...He mentions opposition to that war, but subordinates it to a mistake “at the root” of Western thinking, the idea of modernity that was fi rst born in the Renaissance and best expressed in the Enlightenment...
...You do not even have to believe that you have a soul or are capable of “voluntary, inspired self-restraint...
...It happened to be my older son’s day of graduation and my 25th class reunion, and we were treated to the most, unhappily the only, memorable commencement speech in my nearly 60 years at Harvard...
...Physical courage is easier to appreciate because it is more independent of circumstances...
...And in Solzhenitsyn’s introductory remarks, Harvard had its motto Veritas thrown in its face by a guest speaker who had to reassure the audience as he began that he was a friend, not an adversary...
...Honor is the inspiration of courage, and the sacred is immaterial and comes from above...
...A decline in the ability to control fear of pain leads to a decline in capability for selfdefense and to “the dangerous tendency to form a herd,” thus becoming subject to fashion...
...There was something in his speech to displease everyone...
...but conservatives had to endure a criticism of capitalism and of the West that did not exempt them...
...Yes, unlike us who face death by traffi c accident and “natural causes...
...But it needs and wants a meta physics to combat materialism and to call attention to the importance of human courage...
...Solzhenitsyn had both kinds...
...Where did this decline begin...
...But it ends with a vow in which the signers mutually pledge their sacred honor to one another...
...Back to this in a moment...
...Man of Courage Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008 BY HARVEY MANSFIELD Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a hero with the hero’s virtue of courage...
...Capitalism and communism are the two hostile parts of modernity, and the world is approaching a new major turn in history equal in importance to the founding of modernity in the Renaissance...
...Our philosophy is unworthy of our courage and cannot do it justice...
...And let me suggest to those with time to read The First Circle that he was as Greek as he was Russian...
...Our philosophers are not kings, but they are called intellectuals and they serve sovereign appetites...
...Legalism is our substitute for virtue: You don’t have to distinguish good from evil and do good while avoiding evil...
...For a time, in the American democracy at its birth, human rights were still considered to be the gift of God, so that freedom was given to the individual conditionally, under the assumption of a religious responsibility in him...
...Courage is the restraint of one’s fear for the sake of what is noble, hence also the restraint of one’s appetite for material goods that diverts the soul from courage...
...We, today, are in the habit of distinguishing two kinds of courage: The physical courage of facing and controlling the fear of bodily pains, and the moral courage of standing up against conventional opinion...
...But he also thought about courage, and made it the theme of his Harvard speech by denouncing the decline of courage in the West...
...it is a virtue in itself, even when exercised for a dubious end...
...The obituaries speak of Solzhenitsyn’s infl uence on his time, our time...
Vol. 13 • August 2008 • No. 46
