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.