Although written in 1978, Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address still ranks as one of the best moral critiques of Western culture and irreligious humanistic consciousness.
For the complete article go to the Columbia University website.
...I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering
my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having
experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly
will not speak for it. ...
But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my
country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its
present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country
has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present
state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life
which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening. ...
The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your
screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?
...George Kennan, say: we cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus
we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in
the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well planned
world strategy.
Humanism and Its Consequences
How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline
from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of
direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance
with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a
sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past
centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the
Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the
basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or
humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him.
It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.
The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had
come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical
nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and
embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which
had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it
see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western
civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond
physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and
characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state
and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for
evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least
solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.
However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual
human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the
individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the
heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have
seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply
for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were
discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian
centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming
increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights,
sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and
dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking
has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political
impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer
space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late
as in the Nineteenth Century.
One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of
any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility,
which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on
social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. ...
The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an
enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes.
When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism
has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western
intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it
so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East. ...
As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There
is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to
the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.
...
On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the
concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.
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. In the East, it is destroyed by the
dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate
it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the
disease plaguing its main sections.
If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die.
Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature.
It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to
obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment
of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth,
so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It
is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is
astounding. ...
It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment.
Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.
Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life
from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and
human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is
it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in
the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual
integrity?
If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in
importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual
upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our
physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our
spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.
This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has
any other way left but -- upward.
Thursday, June 8, 1978
For the complete article go to the Columbia University website.
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