Is Solzhenitsyn Right?

Not since Secretary of State George C. Marshall outlined the plan that was to raise Europe from the ashes has a commencement speaker stirred as much attention as has the exiled Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Both speeches were delivered in Harvard Yard, something of a symbol of the Western spirit of inquiry and humanism. The two speeches were separated by 31 years--but also by an immeasurable philosophical abyss. Marshall in 1947 was calling on the U.S., the world's supreme democracy, to turn its resources and energies to the rescue of an exhausted, endangered continent. Solzhenitsyn in 1978 was scourging the U.S. for spearheading the decline of the West.

Now living near Cavendish, Vt., the Nobel prizewinning novelist attacked American democracy, whose restrictions have, in his view, ensured that "mediocrity triumphs. " He chided the U.S. for "a decline in courage," particularly "among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite"--a point that must have stung his audience. He spoke scathingly of America's intoxication with "habitual extreme safety and well-being "; its devotion to the letter of the law, which paralyzes the country's ability "to defend itself against the corrosion of evil"; the absorption of the Western press with "gossip, nonsense, vain talk."

In the East, he said, people "are becoming firmer and stronger, " while in the West they are being sapped by "today's mass living habits ... by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music." His message: "No weapons ... can help the West until it overcomes its loss of will power ... To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material wellbeing. "At the heart of these problems, as he sees it, is the "rationalistic humanism "rooted in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when "we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive zeal." Such materialistic development, he added, impels us inevitably from liberalism to radicalism to socialism, and finally to Communism. Even if we are spared war, Solzhenitsyn concluded, we face another calamity-- "a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness."

Quite a rap at Western democracy, particularly the U.S. version. How valid are Solzhenitsyn's criticisms? TIME asked eight Americans--all members of "the ruling groups and the intellectual elite " that Solzhenitsyn was scolding--to respond.

Charles Frankel: An Image of Heaven

Assistant Secretary of State under Lyndon Johnson, Frankel is a professor of philosophy and public affairs at Columbia and head of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.

What Solzhenitsyn sees in the West is there to be seen, and it is tawdry and ominous: an anxious and frantic hedonism; a stress on individual rights without a corresponding emphasis on personal discipline or social responsibility; an intellectual culture given to exercises in autism and flights into fantasy. Solzhenitsyn speaks of a loss of "civil courage" in the West. He is right if he means intellectual and moral malaise, a loss of faith in precisely the habits of thought and behavior responsible for our most distinctive achievements -- intellectual discipline, belief in the possibility of objectivity and public spirit, a respect for competence and simple enjoyment of the rare prize of liberty.

But Solzhenitsyn apparently does not have such things in mind. The heart of his criticism of the West is its secularism. The Middle Ages represented an "intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature." In revenge, we in the West "turned our backs upon the spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal." I do not read the past that way, and I read the present and future differently.

The Renaissance, modern science, the Age of Adventure, and capitalist enterprise were all revolts against the spiritual and intellectual oppressiveness of the medieval period. And it was the corruption of medieval religious institutions, the worldliness of the Vatican, the venality of monks and the materialism of priests that sparked the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. It is against this background that the transcendent role of seers and prophets like Solzhenitsyn is to be understood. What Solzhenitsyn has in his mind's eye is not simply that more of us should be religious. It is a theocracy.

Solzhenitsyn is right to remind us that we are divided from the Soviet system by profound moral disagreements and not only by political conflicts. But a large nation that adopts it as policy that it will never compromise with Evil, can pursue this task for any length of time only by exhausting itself, by killing its young and numbing the survivors, and by lifting the arts of savagery to the highest. Solzhenitsyn has been through something very much like Hell. His imagination is fixed on an image of Heaven. It is to be expected that when he turns to our halfway world he will see it in colors of flame red and dazzling white, and that the colors in between will seem to him to be illusions.

Theodore Hesburgh: Unpopular Truths

President of Notre Dame since 1952, Father Hesburgh was chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1969 to 1972.

Solzhenitsyn says that we in the West are fed by the media only that which is fashionable and popular. He then proceeds to feed us some highly unfashionable and unpopular truths: "There is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity ... Only moral criteria can help the West against Communism's well-planned world strategy . . . We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life."

These spiritual themes are ageless, reminiscent of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Berdyayev, Pasternak. They are not headline grabbers, but subjects for serious meditation if one is to escape the moral mediocrity of the times. For this reminder of our best heritage, we can well be grateful to a man new to us as a neighbor, somewhat isolated, knowing us by television (ugh), but sharing our deepest hopes for a better life in time and in eternity.

Archibald MacLeish: Our Will Endures

Distinguished educator, Pulitzer-prizewinning poet and playwright, MacLeish was Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944 and Assistant Secretary of State from 1944 to 1945.

Ever since Tom Paine, the American people have had the counsel and advice of friends from abroad in the long American debate about the purpose of the Republic. Was our Revolution, as Jefferson believed to his life's end, a "signal of arousing men to burst the chains," or was it simply a War of Independence, as John Adams kept saying? Tom Paine was on Jefferson's side in that. Was it "the Union" we were struggling to preserve, as Webster thought, in the years before the Civil War, or was Mr. Lincoln right at Gettysburg? Scores of English writers told us what to think about that issue. And now that we are a great power, leader of the free world in its confrontation with the most powerful and repressive police state in modern history, the debate goes on and the counsel and advice go with it. Are we responsible for the revolution of mankind which our Revolution launched? Solzhenitsyn spoke to us of that at Harvard at a great commencement under crimson banners in the June rain.

Solzhenitsyn is one of the most admirable men alive--a fine novelist, which means a trained and disciplined observer of the realities of human life--a man of noble spirit and unrivaled courage--a truly heroic figure who has suffered something close to martyrdom for his convictions. But Solzhenitsyn, unlike many of his predecessors in earlier generations, knows little of our American lives or of ourselves. His concern, understandably, is with his native country in its agony. He is an exile from the state police, an exile of the human spirit.

And he judges the Republic as such an exile would. Are we prepared, he asks, to oppose the tyranny which now rules Holy Russia and all the East of Europe? Are we prepared to risk our lives in such a struggle? Have we the courage? Or are we so softened by our generation of affluence, by our secular indifference to the human spirit, that we dare not fight? But though he asks these daring questions here--at Harvard--in a village in Vermont where he now lives--he is not truly here to ask them. He sees few Americans, speaks little English, and what he knows of the Republic he knows not from human witnesses but from television programs, which present their depressing parody of American life to him as they present it also to us but with this difference--that we know the parody for what it is.

He reproves us for faults which would not be faults if he could talk to his neighbors in Vermont, to his fellow writers, his fellow men. We are irresponsible, he tells us. We put our freedom first, before our responsibility. But if he could talk to us, he would realize that we put our freedom first before our responsibility because we are a free people--because a free people is a people that rules itself--because it must decide for itself what its responsibilities are--because there is no one else to decide this for us --neither the state police nor a state church nor anyone.

If he could talk to us--if he had talked to us--he would know that we are not irresponsible, that we establish our responsibilities for ourselves, seriously, painfully often.

And the same thing is true of our national will, which Solzhenitsyn talked to us about at Harvard on that June day in the cool rain. We have lost it, he told us, as though he had questioned us and knew our minds. But he had not questioned us and he did not know our minds. It is less than 40 years since the Second World War faced us with an issue which would have torn us apart had we not been free and so answerable to ourselves and to each other. We resolved that issue. We reached an agreement with each other about what we had to do. We did it. We reached the highest point in our history. And we have not changed. We have not changed in that one generation and will not change in another or another.

If Solzhenitsyn had talked to us--to a few of his neighbors in that village in Vermont--three or four of those who respect and admire him throughout the country--he would not have spoken those sentences at Harvard. He would have learned that we know who we are and what we have to become. He would have learned that we have not lost our will as a people --that it is precisely our will as a people which makes us true believers in that human spirit for which he means to speak.

Daniel J. Boorstin: The Courage to Doubt

Now Librarian of Congress, Boorstin wrote the Pulitzer-prize-winning The Americans and the more recent The Republic of Technology.

We are lucky to be able to provide Solzhenitsyn a platform for his dyspeptic comments on us. George Bernard Shaw, who endeared himself to Americans by the pungency of his contempt, gave away the secret: "To rouse their eager interest, their distinguished consideration and their undying devotion, all that is necessary is to hold them up to the ridicule of the rest of the universe."

The quickie sociologist is apt to tell us more of his own problems than of ours. Since Solzhenitsyn's life has been unhappily shaped by hard distinctions and persecuting dogma, he is understandably tempted to overvalue those weapons. He has become his own kind of hard dogmatist. He has brought with him the crusade that has cursed the older world. He seeks unity, virtue, morality, uniformity, dignity and -- above all -- "the right not to know." But these have very little to do with the mixed virtues -- the virtues of compromise, decency, self-doubt, experiment -- the meandering quest for community that has tantalized our American world of second chances.

Solzhenitsyn's own experience seduces him to hope that the cure for evil totalitarianism -- which does not tolerate people like him -- may be a good totalitarianism which will ban "inaccurate" journalists, will keep "pornography, crime and horror" off the television screen, and will protect consumers against the free market. But how?

Whatever he may tell us of himself, he says very little about us. He has missed the point. This immigrant nation attests the novel possibility that people can be held together, their community strengthened and deepened, not by homogeneity but by diversity. The courage we inherit from our Jeffersons and Lincolns and others is not the Solzhenitsyn courage of the true believer, but the courage to doubt.

George Meany: No Voice More Eloquent

President of the AFL-CIO since 1955, Meany was the first official of any major U.S. organization to invite Solzhenitsyn to speak after his abrupt expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974.

I am proud that it was the AFL-CIO that provided Alexander Solzhenitsyn with the first major platform for his speeches to the American people. We forget how violently Solzhenitsyn provoked the knee-jerk minds of the day, immersed as they were in an unhealthy mixture of post-Viet Nam guilt and a fashionable anti-anti-Communism emanating not only from the left but from American businessmen hell-bent on trade with the Soviet Union.

I do not agree with everything he says, but I would urge the knee jerkers to tread warily. His prophetic voice has turned out to be righter than their cliches of yesterday. Opponents of the Viet Nam War will not like to hear that "members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there." Nor will certain journalists want to hear these questions: "What sort of responsibility does a journalist have? If he has misled public opinion or the Government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of recognition and rectification of such mistakes?" Like it or not, Solzhenitsyn is right.

I would agree with Solzhenitsyn's charge that the West has experienced a decline in courage. I do not believe this decline is as deep or pervasive as Solzhenitsyn sometimes implies, but there is no doubt that American policy toward the world's totalitarians has been excessively accommodating in recent years.

No man who has passed through the intense moral experience of the gulag can emerge to find the moral sensitivity or responsiveness of the West adequate. But I do not think that we are spiritually exhausted or that any exhaustion can be ascribed to our material progress. Labor's contribution to this progress has been large and indispensable, and I cannot recognize any incompatibility between material and spiritual wellbeing.

Finally, I agree with Solzhenitsyn that the East should not model itself on the West. But that is not the issue in world politics today. The issue is whether the people of the Soviet Union, of China, of Cuba and of the other totalitarian countries can win the right to decide for themselves what model they wish to follow. Fundamentally, this is an issue of human rights, of freedom. In the struggle to win these rights, no voice has been more eloquent or effective than Alexander Solzhenitsyn's.

Sidney Hook: Above All, Freedom

A senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, Hook is emeritus professor of philosophy at New York University.

I wholeheartedly agree with the moral and political values expressed in Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address. I share many of his political judgments as well. My disagreements with him are mainly philosophical. Commitment to freedom and a humane society does not require acceptance of a religious faith or subscription to any theological or metaphysical creed. Morality is logically independent of religion. To be sure, a free society is one that cherishes religious freedom, but this embraces not only a right to believe but a right to disbelieve.

Solzhenitsyn speaks in the tradition of Dostoyevsky, who taught that if man did not worship God, he would worship the devil or himself in the form of Caesar. This is a dubious ground for the pluralistic beliefs essential to a democracy. Organized religions in the past have supported despotism, and some churchmen in our own time still do.

In political life freedom conflicts with freedom; for example, the right to know may conflict with the right to privacy. That is why I agree with Solzhenitsyn that we cannot make an absolute of any specific good or freedom except the freedom of intelligence. Solzhenitsyn calls upon the West to stress obligations gather than rights. Our overriding obligation must be to "the moral obligation to be intelligent."

Solzhenitsyn has been falsely accused of calling for a holy war against Communism. He is in fact calling for a resolute defense of freedom as our best hope for an honorable peace. We should have learned by now that peace at any price means abject surrender to brutal aggression. In essence Solzhenitsyn's view is no different from President John Kennedy's early declaration about freedom or from that of Winston Churchill.

Solzhenitsyn is right in his denunciation of the double standard of morality that prevails in the academy. Contrast the silence about the genocide in Cambodia and about repression in Cuba and Viet Nam with the stormy agitation about South Korea or South Africa. Solzhenitsyn is right in decrying our failure of nerve. He is saying that any society that makes mere survival the be-all and end-all of life will sacrifice everything that makes life worth living. He is warning us that whoever values comfort, property or security above freedom when it is threatened will lose not only their freedom but their comfort, property and security, too. It is a message worth taking to heart.

Jerzy Kosinski: The Disenchanted Pilgrim

A Polish novelist who became a naturalized American citizen in 1965, Kosinski won the National Book Award in Fiction in 1969 for Steps, and is also the author of The Painted Bird.

Am I, a child of European fascism, a survivor of Hitler's Holocaust, a student in Stalin's spiritual gulags, ready to reject the freedom I have enjoyed in this nation for 20 years because Solzhenitsyn tells us that here "the defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals"? Am I, who have passed half of my life at the mercy of totalitarian authority, really to feel that my personal freedom in this country is now endangered because, as Solzhenitsyn regrets, "a statesman who wants to achieve something important or highly constructive has to move cautiously and even timidly"? Am I, who came of age in Eastern Europe in the period of inflicted morality, really to fear danger "to the human soul" from what Solzhenitsyn calls "today's mass living habits"? Am I not here the master of my soul?

Sharing with Solzhenitsyn a despair over the millions who perished in totalitarian hands (including all but three members of my once numerous family), I nevertheless believe that he has failed to comprehend that often democracy is at best a shifting state between the tyranny it overthrew and the tyranny it might become. Even though freedom, tolerance and other qualities might be termed democracy's adjusted faults, these are by far to be preferred to the rigid correctitude of totalitarianism. Like a writer's work, freedom exists only when it is constantly interpreted -- even misinterpreted.

Barbara Tuchman: America's Savonarola

Historian and author, Tuchman won Pulitzers for The Guns of August and Stilwell and the American Experience in China 1911-45.

Solzhenitsyn is a type of Isaiah, the angry prophet who arises when mankind is seriously misbehaving to denounce the age and its sins. People like to be scolded, especially when their conscience is bad -- as it is in this last quarter of the terrible 20th century. This explains the Solzhenitsyn cult. He is fashionable; he is our Savonarola. I do not believe everything he says about Western society, although it is useful to hear his strictures; they make us think. Relatively speaking, however, I think America has good qualities, perhaps less operative now than they might be, but inherent, nonetheless. I would rather live in America than anywhere else I could think of-- and so, evidently, would Solzhenitsyn.

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