AT:
In June 1978 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement address at Harvard titled “A World Split Apart.” It was a speech devoted to the emergence of “different worlds,” including our own Western society. On one side of the divide is a freedom diverted to unbridled passion with the accumulation of material riches to be valued above all else. Man is the center in this equation, as there isn’t any power above him, resulting in a moral poverty searching for meaning.
In days after this speech, the Fourth Estate accused Solzhenitsyn of “losing his balance,” of representing a “mind split apart.” He thought one could say what one thinks in the USA, but democracy expects to be admired. The press argued “the giant does not love us.”
Was Solzhenitsyn right? He did use positive signs in the heartland. “Gradually another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small town, and robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing this speech.”
Now we have the luxury of examining the address forty years later. As I see it, Solzhenitsyn was “cautious” based on the way cultural conditions have unfolded over these four decades. The U.S. is preoccupied with material goals, a condition that has reached full efflorescence from the rationalist humanist tradition. The Higher Power to which Solzhenitsyn refers is in serial descent, having gone from more than 90 percent of the populace embracing God to about 70 percent, with the trend line in descent well established.
Accompanying this trend is a debasement in the culture disgorged from moral constraints. I find myself astonished by the fact that at the Tony Awards Robert De Niro, in the most vulgar fashion, attacked the president of the United States, the same De Niro who is the recipient of the president’s Freedom Award, the most prestigious award in the nation.
I am equally puzzled by the granting of a Pulitzer prize to Kendrick Lamar, a rap singer who invariably holds his crotch during performances. And I recognize a complete collapse in standards when Bob Dylan received a Nobel Prize, a prize denied to some of the literary luminaries of the twentieth century. What have we come to? more here
“Solzhenitsyn understood that if God is displaced by humanism any idea the human mind can conjure is possible.“
Once you disconnect God from morality, then “a smart lawyer”, or a succession of them, can make the most abhorrent practice seem just.
Anything is possible!
The title of the article is “Solzhenitsyn 40 Years Later”. I would call it “How Americans Saved the West by Electing Trump”.
I don’t care about “Hope and Change”, I pray for hope through change.
Linking to a speech by Solzhenitsyn.
Thoughtful and insightful catch MJA.
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
the problem w/ Solzhenitsyn is that he fell too much in love w/ his own words & started to believe himself the literary lion of the ages to the point where he deemed himself the destroyer of Communism & the guiding light of ‘the West’ … (not that he didn’t have a valid point of view, which he expressed quite well)
Solzhenitsyn could never speak at Harvard (or most any American university) in 2018; even if he made it past the administration’s roadblocks, the mob would shout him down.
My answer to the old question, “If you could talk with one person, living or dead, who would it be?”
I remember well the great American, William F. Buckley and his admiration of Mr. Solzhenitsyn.
I just wonder how many Jim Acosta’s in today’s world of so called journalists know who Buckley or Solzheniitsyn were?
moe tom
The author of the linked article asks?
“What have we come to?”
Thanks MJA.
IMPORTANT post.
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Seems to me this article could have been written in plain language to appeal to simple folk.