Nation: Is Solzhenitsyn Right?

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What Solzhenitsyn sees in the West is there to be seen, and it is tawdry and ominous: an anxious and frantic hedonism; a stress on individual rights without a corresponding emphasis on personal discipline or social responsibility; an intellectual culture given to exercises in autism and flights into fantasy. Solzhenitsyn speaks of a loss of "civil courage" in the West. He is right if he means intellectual and moral malaise, a loss of faith in precisely the habits of thought and behavior responsible for our most distinctive achievements — intellectual discipline, belief in the possibility of objectivity and public spirit, a respect for competence and simple enjoyment of the rare prize of liberty.

But Solzhenitsyn apparently does not have such things in mind. The heart of his criticism of the West is its secularism. The Middle Ages represented an "intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature." In revenge, we in the West "turned our backs upon the spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal." I do not read the past that way, and I read the present and future differently.

The Renaissance, modern science, the Age of Adventure, and capitalist enterprise were all revolts against the spiritual and intellectual oppressiveness of the medieval period. And it was the corruption of medieval religious institutions, the worldliness of the Vatican, the venality of monks and the materialism of priests that sparked the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. It is against this background that the transcendent role of seers and prophets like Solzhenitsyn is to be understood. What Solzhenitsyn has in his mind's eye is not simply that more of us should be religious. It is a theocracy.

Solzhenitsyn is right to remind us that we are divided from the Soviet system by profound moral disagreements and not only by political conflicts. But a large nation that adopts it as policy that it will never compromise with Evil, can pursue this task for any length of time only by exhausting itself, by killing its young and numbing the survivors, and by lifting the arts of savagery to the highest. Solzhenitsyn has been through something very much like Hell. His imagination is fixed on an image of Heaven. It is to be expected that when he turns to our halfway world he will see it in colors of flame red and dazzling white, and that the colors in between will seem to him to be illusions.

Theodore Hesburgh: Unpopular Truths

President of Notre Dame since 1952, Father Hesburgh was chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1969 to 1972.

Solzhenitsyn says that we in the West are fed by the media only that which is fashionable and popular. He then proceeds to feed us some highly unfashionable and unpopular truths: "There is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity ... Only moral criteria can help the West against Communism's well-planned world strategy . . . 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."