Nation: Is Solzhenitsyn Right?

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He reproves us for faults which would not be faults if he could talk to his neighbors in Vermont, to his fellow writers, his fellow men. We are irresponsible, he tells us. We put our freedom first, before our responsibility. But if he could talk to us, he would realize that we put our freedom first before our responsibility because we are a free people—because a free people is a people that rules itself—because it must decide for itself what its responsibilities are—because there is no one else to decide this for us —neither the state police nor a state church nor anyone.

If he could talk to us—if he had talked to us—he would know that we are not irresponsible, that we establish our responsibilities for ourselves, seriously, painfully often.

And the same thing is true of our national will, which Solzhenitsyn talked to us about at Harvard on that June day in the cool rain. We have lost it, he told us, as though he had questioned us and knew our minds. But he had not questioned us and he did not know our minds. It is less than 40 years since the Second World War faced us with an issue which would have torn us apart had we not been free and so answerable to ourselves and to each other. We resolved that issue. We reached an agreement with each other about what we had to do. We did it. We reached the highest point in our history. And we have not changed. We have not changed in that one generation and will not change in another or another.

If Solzhenitsyn had talked to us—to a few of his neighbors in that village in Vermont—three or four of those who respect and admire him throughout the country—he would not have spoken those sentences at Harvard. He would have learned that we know who we are and what we have to become. He would have learned that we have not lost our will as a people —that it is precisely our will as a people which makes us true believers in that human spirit for which he means to speak.

Daniel J. Boorstin: The Courage to Doubt

Now Librarian of Congress, Boorstin wrote the Pulitzer-prize-winning The Americans and the more recent The Republic of Technology.

We are lucky to be able to provide Solzhenitsyn a platform for his dyspeptic comments on us. George Bernard Shaw, who endeared himself to Americans by the pungency of his contempt, gave away the secret: "To rouse their eager interest, their distinguished consideration and their undying devotion, all that is necessary is to hold them up to the ridicule of the rest of the universe."

The quickie sociologist is apt to tell us more of his own problems than of ours. Since Solzhenitsyn's life has been unhappily shaped by hard distinctions and persecuting dogma, he is understandably tempted to overvalue those weapons. He has become his own kind of hard dogmatist. He has brought with him the crusade that has cursed the older world. He seeks unity, virtue, morality, uniformity, dignity and — above all — "the right not to know." But these have very little to do with the mixed virtues — the virtues of compromise, decency, self-doubt, experiment — the meandering quest for community that has tantalized our American world of second chances.