A World Split Apart.

Abrahamson, James L.

A World Split Apart

By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Reviewed by James L. Abrahamson, Contributing Editor

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html

To mark the August death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest of Russia's writers and a leading Soviet dissident, American Diplomacy seeks to honor his life by reconsidering the June 8, 1978, observations he offered to graduates of Harvard University. In "A World Split Apart," Solzhenitsyn, ahead of his time, looked beyond the East-West split, called attention to additional profound and alienating global rifts represented by the cultures of China, India, Africa, and Islam, and rejected the Western expectation that a divided world would soon painlessly converge.

For the most part, however, Solzhenitsyn expressed his concern for the state of the West, which he claimed had "lost its civil courage." Speaking of "each country, each government, each political party and of course the United Nations," he found the loss of courage "particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite," which he believed had led to widespread "depression, passivity and perplexity." "The American intelligentsia has lost its [nerve]," he told the graduates, "and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States." Almost speaking to the present day, Solzhenitsyn warned that "no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. ... To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal."

Tracing that decline, Solzhenitsyn began with the Enlightenment, which maintained that humans had no responsibility to any higher and spiritual force. Its ideals also contributed to the West's material well-being and belief in "almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment," both of which undermine spiritual development and render individuals unwilling to sacrifice or risk their lives--even in defense of their nation--because their "sense of responsibility to God and society [grows] dimmer and dimmer." Excessive legalism weakens the West internally as well when it defends perversion, grants unwarranted leniency to criminals, and undermines all attempts to limit "civil rights"--even those of terrorists. The news media, ignoring their moral responsibility for accuracy as they inform the public, have also contributed to that decline with shoddy reporting, release of government secrets, treating some criminals as heroes, and attempting to make all news sources conform to a common set of opinions.

Though now three decades old, Solzhenitsyn's words remain stunningly relevant to our day and situation. Having so very long ago been warned, the only question may be our willingness to at last heed his call and thus save ourselves from failing to meet the challenges of our day.