Nation: Is Solzhenitsyn Right?

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Finally, I agree with Solzhenitsyn that the East should not model itself on the West. But that is not the issue in world politics today. The issue is whether the people of the Soviet Union, of China, of Cuba and of the other totalitarian countries can win the right to decide for themselves what model they wish to follow. Fundamentally, this is an issue of human rights, of freedom. In the struggle to win these rights, no voice has been more eloquent or effective than Alexander Solzhenitsyn's.

Sidney Hook: Above All, Freedom

A senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, Hook is emeritus professor of philosophy at New York University.

I wholeheartedly agree with the moral and political values expressed in Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address. I share many of his political judgments as well. My disagreements with him are mainly philosophical. Commitment to freedom and a humane society does not require acceptance of a religious faith or subscription to any theological or metaphysical creed. Morality is logically independent of religion. To be sure, a free society is one that cherishes religious freedom, but this embraces not only a right to believe but a right to disbelieve.

Solzhenitsyn speaks in the tradition of Dostoyevsky, who taught that if man did not worship God, he would worship the devil or himself in the form of Caesar. This is a dubious ground for the pluralistic beliefs essential to a democracy. Organized religions in the past have supported despotism, and some churchmen in our own time still do.

In political life freedom conflicts with freedom; for example, the right to know may conflict with the right to privacy. That is why I agree with Solzhenitsyn that we cannot make an absolute of any specific good or freedom except the freedom of intelligence. Solzhenitsyn calls upon the West to stress obligations gather than rights. Our overriding obligation must be to "the moral obligation to be intelligent."

Solzhenitsyn has been falsely accused of calling for a holy war against Communism. He is in fact calling for a resolute defense of freedom as our best hope for an honorable peace. We should have learned by now that peace at any price means abject surrender to brutal aggression. In essence Solzhenitsyn's view is no different from President John Kennedy's early declaration about freedom or from that of Winston Churchill.

Solzhenitsyn is right in his denunciation of the double standard of morality that prevails in the academy. Contrast the silence about the genocide in Cambodia and about repression in Cuba and Viet Nam with the stormy agitation about South Korea or South Africa. Solzhenitsyn is right in decrying our failure of nerve. He is saying that any society that makes mere survival the be-all and end-all of life will sacrifice everything that makes life worth living. He is warning us that whoever values comfort, property or security above freedom when it is threatened will lose not only their freedom but their comfort, property and security, too. It is a message worth taking to heart.

Jerzy Kosinski: The Disenchanted Pilgrim

A Polish novelist who became a naturalized American citizen in 1965, Kosinski won the National Book Award in Fiction in 1969 for Steps, and is also the author of The Painted Bird.