At a Liberty Fund conference late last year, a new friend recommended that I read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 commencement address at Harvard. It was in large part his critique of Western, and especially U.S., society. I had read it decades earlier but had no clear memory of it. So I reread it twice.
Unlike her, I was not so impressed. He did put his finger on a number of upsetting trends in U.S. and I’ll mention a few. But:
. he was unduly pessimistic about how the Western world would fare,
. he was so unappreciative of the ways that some people use their freedom that it made me wonder if he wanted them to be free,
. he didn’t distinguish between “negative freedom,” a term I hate but that is used to refer to freedom from the initiation of force, and “positive freedom,” which is used to refer to the government taxing some to provide to others,
. and he was way too dismissive of increases in our standard of living.
Responding completely to his lengthy piece (lengthy, that is, for a commencement address) would take too much time and so I’ll hit the highlights. I’ll do it in two parts.
Because of the difficulty of writing his name each time, I’ll refer to Solzhenitsyn as AS.
AS starts by saying that he is a truth teller and that “truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.”
That doesn’t ring true to me. When I look at various (true) statistics about how the world is faring, for example, whether on war, crime, life expectancy, disease, nutrition, violence, and poverty, the news is that the world is getting better on all those dimensions.
AS makes a good point about Israel, writing that “it stands apart from the Western world in that its state system is fundamentally linked to religion.” Some of my friends who are more pro-Israel than I sometimes seem not to understand this. I point out to them that whenever I have heard Bibi Netanyahu speak (and I’ve heard a number of his excellent speeches), he has never referred to Israel without mentioning at least once that it is a “Jewish state.” It’s hard for me to be a fan of a country, whether it be Israel or Iran, that has a state religion. And no, this is not false equivalence. To say that two countries share something in common is not to say that they are equivalent. Differences in degree matter.
AS writes:
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a and sepa- rately, in each country, each government, each political party, and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression that the loss of courage extends to the entire society.
That’s hard to measure, but my casual empiricism says that this is true, and even more true than when he spoke 40 years ago. It was somewhat common, for example, to see people passionately defending the freedom of speech of those they disagreed with. That happens less so now and I think part of the reason is that some of those who would like to defend others’ freedom are cowardly.
Still, there are strong signs of courage everywhere. Think of the recent rescue of the Thai cave boys, for example, and for an excellent telling of that story, see this.
AS writes:
Now at last, during recent decades, technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations [for freedom]: the welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the morally inferior sense which has come into being during those same decades.
Here he seems not to distinguish between “positive freedom,” government granting us goodies, and “negative freedom,” our freedom to pursue our goals without others initiating force against us.
AS writes:
The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to this ideal, leading them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money, and leisure–to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. So who should now renounce all this? Why and for what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of common values, and particularly in such nebulous cases as when the security of one’s nation must be defended in a distant country?
Although AS was clearly critical of this “independence from many types of state pressure,” I like it, but, unfortunately, we have less independence from state pressure than we had then. Try carrying a bottle of wine through TSA, or forbidding them from touching or X-raying you, to take one of many possible examples.
As for “the security of one’s nation” having to “be defended in a distant country,” I think he’s talking about the Vietnam war, where the security of the United States was never at risk. In present times, even if you think our security is threatened by people in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran, the U.S. government actually has found over one million people willing to defend the United States.
AS writes:
Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law, and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required; nobody may mention that one could still be not entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice, and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint.
Really? This is a twofer. First, he seems to be dumping on the rule of law. Second, he’s right that many people think that if it’s legal, that’s enough, even if it’s wrong; but practicing self-restraint voluntarily is something one almost never sees? AS seemed to be observing a different society than the one I’ve observed. I would more like more self-restraint, but I regularly see people looking out for others’ well-being, whether it comes to smoking or playing loud music, to take two examples that immediately come to mind.
AS writes:
It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power, which, in fact, has been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
AS was writing in 1978 and what he said then wasn’t true and is even less true today. Try buying an imported truck, either then or now, without paying a 25% tariff. Try building a house in Pacific Grove without getting permission and try getting permission. Try cutting a damn 4.5-inch branch off a tree in Pacific Grove without getting permission–and paying steeply for that permission. And, OMG, try running a retail grocery store in major parts of California and bagging your customers’ groceries in plastic bags. Notice also that AS is vague about what people’s obligations are. It’s hard to evaluate without knowing.
Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is considered to be part of freedom, and theoretically counterbalanced by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.
I don’t know what he means by “moral violence.” My sense is that, whatever it means, it doesn’t include violence. There are motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror, and this is part of freedom. And yes, young people, and people like me, do have the right not to look and not to accept. I quit watching Breaking Bad, for example, because I found it so horrible. It’s true that it’s harder for young people to turn away. But here’s where I wondered whether he was calling for censorship and bans. I don’t know. I think he was purposefully vague. That, by the way, doesn’t sound courageous to me.
AS writes:
Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality, and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauperized and lawless Soviet society. (There is a huge number of prisoners in our [Soviet] camps who are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state, resorting to means outside of a legal framework.)
I’m not sure there was more criminality here than in the Soviet Union in 1978, but does AS realize that part of the reason might be the drastic penalties on criminality in the Soviet Union? Also, I wonder what he would think of the step-up in imprisonment since he spoke in 1978. Would he applaud it? I don’t know.
READER COMMENTS
R Richard Schweitzer
Jul 14 2018 at 12:47pm
We have just been treated to (inundated with) many “reviews” of the events of 1968 and various conclusions of the “consequences.”
Looking to the decade (1968-78) during which AS was forming the views in that speech, we might better understand the “judgements” in that context. I have kept a copy here someplace, but we will go with DH’s excerpts.
First:
That is not an implausible view of the trends in the “West” from about 1960, particularly in the U S, for the legislative (and increasingly judicial) creation of “positive rights” as Rules of Policy (which AS, like a great majority, conflates with LAW – as “letter of the law” [referred to below]); which Rules of policy (whether legislation or judicial didact) impose constructed obligations that displace human (individually [morally]) determined obligations.
That was a prescient warning; probably difficult to understand; likely because many did not (and still do not) wish to hear it or consider its requirements.
Next:
Here, a full generation (40 years) later we are observing throughout the “West” what appears to be at least a rejection by Societies of (or separation from) what had been (self-perpetuating?) “ruling classes” and the evaporation of a true “intellectual elite.” That is if we accept that sense of obligations by the members of a true elite at least marginally exceeds their sense of entitlements and privilege.
The oligarchies (“establishments,” “ruling classes,” etc.) that have operated the organizations of human capacities and efforts to meet need and wants, generated by “Western” societies, are falling, as “disconnected,” perceived failures (and dangers) – even at the costs of loss or damages to the organizations and their operations.
Next:
What can be read here is an observation of the trends begun long before 1978, but accelerating rapidly in that era, toward “positive law” (Rules of Policy) deployed in determining human relationships and the conditions of the circumstances in which they occur. The effects being to displace individual determinations of relationships and shaping of circumstances (and all that goes into those determinations).
These comments are probably more heavily influenced from the writer’s observations of events during professional assignments (at age 54 in’78) particularly in the period 1972 -79 in the U K and Ireland, but the continent as well – which work continued until 1990, rather than as a sycophant of AS thought and writings.
Oliver Sherouse
Jul 14 2018 at 5:29pm
That seems, more than anything else, to be the point of his speech. His assumption that what he means is good and important makes it bad persuasion, but his overriding argument is that what he means by that phrase is not integrated into western thinking.
R Richard Schweitzer
Jul 14 2018 at 9:26pm
Is it a stretch to understand demeaning conduct that violates morals as “moral violence?”
Using the examples: what are the objectives of pornography, depictions of cruelties, crimes and horror – all assigned their places in “liberty as freedom of expression?”
Are the objectives of those expressions to contend with the sense of “oughtness;” whether for material gain, personal aggrandizement, or just plain spite; to contend that nothing is humane and nothing should be deemed “offensive?”
Perhaps we might conclude that demeaning the humane is “moral violence.”
Brian
Jul 14 2018 at 10:10pm
David,
I can’t help but think that you have largely failed to understand most of what Solzhenitsyn is talking about, as if he is speaking language unfamiliar to you. Many of your responses are of the variety where he might say “The West is filled with the spirit of freedom” and you would respond “Now he wants us to believe in ghosts? I haven’t seen any evidence of ghosts! And what would a ghost of freedom be anyway?”
Now for some examples. When he says the truth “is almost invariably bitter,” he means, as he says in the previous sentence, that when people suffer under the illusion of thinking they know it, learning the actual truth is a bitter experience because they are being disabused of the falsehood they dearly held. He is about to subject his audience to this experience.
When he talks about the “decline in courage,” he is not talking about saving people from caves. He is, in modern terms, obliquely contrasting the moral courage of the “Greatest Generation,” which saved nations from Nazi slavery, with a cowardly generation that abandoned nations to the slavery of Communism under the guise of “peace” and “detente.” Having suffered under Communism, he sees the detente of the 1970s as Neville Chamberlain-like appeasement, but on a much larger and systematic scale.
(Please note that one can disagree with his analysis of the Vietnam-War response, but one can’t fault the accuracy of his comparisons given his premise. Nor is it relevant to talk about whether Vietnam posed a security threat to the US. Many isolationists in the 1930s argued that Europe’s Nazi problem was not our fight and posed no threat to the US. In that they were right–Nazi Germany could never have invaded or conquered the US. Solzhenitsyn would argue that the war was morally justified to save Europeans from Nazi slavery, and that the Vietnam War was similarly justified. Can this really be doubted, given that an entire nation has been subjugated for 50+ years to the economic and political abuse of the Communist ideology?)
And where does this decline in courage come from? Solzhenitsyn seems to blame it on the freedom in the West to pursue a morally vacuous “happiness.” This leads, he seems to say, to a legalism in which what is legal is moral and what is moral is legal. In a sense, I guess he is saying that the ease that comes with prosperity makes people morally lazy. Legalism becomes the easy approach to morality.
Again, one may disagree with his diagnosis, but it’s worthwhile to translate what he means into current situations. Consider hate speech, which many would agree is immoral. As a consequence of legalism, hate speech is specifically outlawed. But then it is turned around where opponents of certain kinds of speech try to label everything they don’t like as “hate speech,” as a way of silencing their opponents. I’m sure you agree that this trend is a serious threat to freedom of speech. Solzhenitsyn would say it is an inevitable result of the legalism that follows from a lack of moral self-restraint in using freedom. Do you deny that such threats to freedom have grown worse?
He give another example regarding the press, in a section you don’t quote:
“Enormous freedom exists for the press-but not for the readership, because newspapers mostly give stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too sharply contradict their own, or the general trend.”
He is talking here about today’s political correctness and polarization of the media, which everyone agrees is much worse than in the 1970s and acts as a serious threat to liberty.
He adds that “nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.” He is talking here of societal self-censorship, which is a growing problem and, again, a serious threat to liberty.
I could give many more examples. The point is that while one might not agree with some of his premises, it is undeniable that his speech gives a challenging (indeed, bitter) and trenchant analysis of many of the trends with which we are still grappling.
TMC
Jul 15 2018 at 12:27pm
Your comment about Israel may be a bit off. Jewish is both a nationality and a religion. Iran is 83% observant, the US 56% vs Israel’s 30%. I don’t see the state as anything but loosely linked vs Iran’s being de facto run by their religious leaders.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/maps-and-graphics/most-religious-countries-in-the-world/
I know you did not make it up, but it also seems odd that the state’s power to tax me is considered a positive freedom, no matter what they do with the money.
Good post though!
R Richard Schweitzer
Jul 15 2018 at 12:57pm
A further thought on:
Those observations, may be a bit “Strausian” predictions of the metastasis of that cowardice evidenced by responses (or lack thereof) of university administrators, faculties and trustees to events calling upon their responsibilities.
Hazel Meade
Jul 17 2018 at 12:42pm
I think by “moral violence against young people” he might be referring to taking sexual advantage of the young and inexperienced. Something which was fairly common in the 1970s, but today is largely regarded as sexual violence and is happily being expunged from society thanks to the #metoo movement. Society has progressed in some ways since the 1970s.
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