What do you think?
Rate this book
A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University, June 8, 1978
English, Russian (translation)
61 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
4 people are currently reading
325 people want to read
About the author
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
292 books4,148 followersalso known as
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)
Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.
This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.
Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)
Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.
This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.
Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews
September 18, 2019
We in America have long thought highly of ourselves. This feeling crested during the early Cold War, when most Americans believed that our “system,” our way of life, was superior to any other—especially Communism, but more broadly any based on any other values. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 because he was too famous to be killed. We initially praised him; he vigorously attacked Communism, and we assumed that meant he endorsed our American system. But he disabused us of that assumption in this famous speech, given as the Harvard commencement speaker in 1978. The reaction of the American elite was frothing fury, and Solzhenitsyn was cast out from polite society. Examining his speech now, forty years later, we can see what Solzhenitsyn got right, and what he got wrong.
Looking over a list of Harvard commencement speakers, it has been twenty-five years since any speaker was not a person of the Left. (The last was Václav Havel, in 1995.) It is inconceivable, of course, that someone like Solzhenitsyn could be invited to give a commencement speech, or any speech, at Harvard today. He would be deplatformed, probably by violence, if he spoke to five people in a private talk on campus. If Harvard’s mandarins had known the content of his speech, he wouldn’t have been invited even in 1978. He was not known as a man of the Right until this speech, which is why he was allowed to give it.
The split to which Solzhenitsyn’s title refers isn’t the split between the Soviet Union and what was once known as the Free World. Rather, it is to humanity as a whole, which is not, and never will be, a unified group, much less one unified around Western, that is, American and European, premises and values. “Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture . . . constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprise to Western thinking.” This basic truth was masked until very recently, because “modern Europe . . . seemed an overwhelming success, with no geographic limits.” Solzhenitsyn means colonialism, global territorial expansion, rather than cultural influence, and notes that the process has gone entirely into reverse, both in terms of success and in terms of the changed Western attitude toward those it formerly conquered, which “often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness.”
Solzhenitsyn saw that the West’s core belief about political systems was “that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice.” He rejects this. “But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds. . . .” He further rejects the then-fashionable theory of convergence, the idea that the West and Communism were growing toward each other. And he also rejects that anybody else can, should, or will adopt the American system, because it is defective in many ways, and not appropriate for other countries, now or ever. No wonder in his memoir released last year, "Between Two Millstones," covering his exile from 1974 to 1978, Solzhenitsyn notes that some in the audience started to hiss him at this point.
As we all know, this belief, that so-called liberal democracy was the “end of history,” a superior model for everyone, became nearly universal after Communism imploded in 1989. For three decades now the ruling classes of the West have tried, by one mechanism or another, to impose it on the rest of the world. In many places, most of all post-Communist countries, the ruling classes of the target countries have eagerly embraced, or at least mouthed embracing, liberal democracy. Where they have not, trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives have been spent to demonstrate why they must, if they know what is good for them. So it seems Solzhenitsyn was wrong, or would have seemed so ten years ago. But as the defects in liberal democracy, a flawed system that is neither democracy nor real freedom, become ever more obvious, and more and more people reject it, it has become evident that Solzhenitsyn was right that the American system is not desirable for others. It’s not even desirable for America.
But in his speech, he is just getting started. He piles on, explaining why America is defective as a model for others, and, in fact, just plain defective. First, he points out the loss of courage in the West (he says West, but as far as I can tell, from this point on he means America, just as when he says “East,” he means the Soviet Union). This is “particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites” (that is, his audience), who exhibit “depression, passivity, and perplexity.” Driving the spike home, he says “Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?” Solzhenitsyn attributes this lack of courage to a surfeit of “well-being,” by which he means that everyone has been guaranteed more than adequate material goods and, more importantly, “an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures.” He believes that the decline in courage comes from an unwillingness to risk “this precious life . . . in defense of the common good.” As fatal as it is, loss of courage is merely a manifestation of a deeper malady, an excessive, and legalistic, over-emphasis on individual rights. In America, “destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space.” The “abyss of human decadence” is supposedly limited by “the right not to look and not to accept.” But this is a false defense; “Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.” America pretends “man does not bear any evil within himself.” This is untrue.
Looking back at 1978, it was a grim time. Jimmy Carter was President. Urban crime was rampant. The social pathologies that have eaten away our foundations—abortion, divorce, illegitimacy, pornography, wage stagnation, drugs, promiscuity—had already sunk their teeth into America, courtesy of the ruling class’s acquiescence to Left demands. It was only a few years later, with Ronald Reagan, that the grim atmosphere receded. But the pathologies did not. They were merely glossed over, and they got worse, and worse, and worse, while we were told through the 1980s and 1990s that being able to buy more stuff every year made it OK, even if wages were stagnant for most people and the atomized neoliberalism of Gordon Gekko now emblematic of America, rather than the earlier achievements of Thomas Edison or the Apollo Program. It is perhaps no wonder that even under Reagan, in America Solzhenitsyn was a niche taste, since pointing out that America was continuing to rot from within, as he did, wasn’t a popular position.
Among the few positive things Solzhenitsyn says of America is that that “The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed.” This was true in 1978; it is mostly not true now. It is completely false in Europe, where, as Ryszard Legutko has brilliantly shown, “coercion to freedom” is the order of the day. The same thing is happening here, and with an additional aspect that Solzhenitsyn could not foresee, that “woke capitalism” would be used to impose conformism to leftist demands, and to cement leftist power, across huge swathes of society. Convergence has happened after all, and then passed beyond the middle point; it is far less dangerous for a businessman or academic to point out today in Moscow than in New York that gender dysphoria is a mental illness or that homosexuals can’t actually marry.
Compounding his sins, Solzhenitsyn next attacks the press. We have to remember that among the aspects of America we were proudest of during the Cold War was our supposedly free press, which, although monolithically leftist already by the 1970s, unlike today still attempted to maintain some veneer of objectivity, and was not controlled by the state as under Communism. He correctly identifies that “the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary.” This matters because the press, and also academia, moves in lockstep, not much different than “the totalitarian East with its rigorously unified press.” “Fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable. . . . Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.” Solzhenitsyn saw the cancer of political correctness long before everyone else. And then he wraps up this set of criticisms by saying, in essence, that they are just the tip of the iceberg, and he could add much, much more in the same vein, but he doesn’t have the time to go further.
Having rejected the West as a model, Solzhenitsyn is at pains to say that he does not believe that socialism is the answer; “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” It has, certainly, shattered Russia. But Russia retains one thing that the West does not. The West is in a state of “spiritual exhaustion,” and Russia, despite its chains, has remained spiritually strong. “The complex and deadly crush of life [in Russia] has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being.” Solzhenitsyn predicts, “The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model,” because “observers from all the worlds of our planet” can see this Western spiritual exhaustion. As I say, for decades he was wrong in this prediction. The shiny things promised by America, backed up by its coercion, caused many to adopt the Western model, including, in many aspects, Russia, where there has been little indication of widespread spiritual strength.
The West’s spiritual exhaustion leads to fantasies, such as “that the impudent Cuban expeditions to Africa would best be stopped by special U.S. courtesy to Cuba,” or that George Kennan’s demand for unilateral disarmament by America was anything but hilarious to the masters of the Kremlin. He attacks the American antiwar movement for abandoning the people of Vietnam and Cambodia to suffering and genocide. “Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?” (Oddly from our perspective, Solzhenitsyn’s examples of the effects of spiritual exhaustion are all in the foreign policy realm, rather than in the social realm that ultimately proved far more damaging to us.) Adding insult to injury, no doubt realizing his audience’s reaction will be “Hey, we’re not cowards, we won World War II,” Solzhenitsyn says “Western democracy has not won any major war by itself; each time it shielded itself with an ally possessing a powerful land army, whose philosophy it did not question. In World War II against Hitler, instead of winning the conflict with its own forces, which would certainly have been sufficient, Western democracy raised up another enemy, one that would prove worse and more powerful, since Hitler had neither the resources nor the people, nor the ideas with broad appeal, nor such a large number of supporters in the West—a fifth column—as the Soviet Union possessed.” I cannot even imagine the audience reaction to this, two sentences that kick out all the supports from some of the most cherished fantasies of America’s ruling class, while implying they harbor traitors. Then he warns against allying with China to defeat the Soviet Union, because China would ultimately turn on America, and “America itself would fall victim to a Cambodia-style genocide.”
This last, about China, now seems a little silly. At the time, with Nixon’s opening to China, it probably seemed like a plausible future. But what seems not silly at all is the idea that we could fall victim to a Cambodia-style genocide. It’s not imminent, perhaps, but there is no reason in principle why the American Left would not, if it gained full power, behave differently from Mao in the Cultural Revolution, or perhaps even from Pol Pot. Genocide, from the French Revolution onwards, has characterized the response of all triumphant Left movements to challenge, or perceived challenge, from within. Why should America be any different, since our modern Left is no different in its essence from any of those previous Left movements? When, for example, last week Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times columnist and one of the most prominent and powerful left-wingers in the country, could write without comment from anyone, discussing yet another book that predicts demographic disaster for conservatives, “It sounds almost messianic: the Republican Party, that foul agglomeration of bigotry and avarice that has turned American politics into a dystopian farce, not just defeated but destroyed. The inexorable force of demography bringing us a new, enlightened political dispensation.” This is the face of evil, glimpsed at an angle, as she hides her hands from us so we cannot see the knives she is grinding. It will be us or her.
Whatever we do with China, Solzhenitsyn says, America is losing the fight against Communism, and is paralyzed with numerous debilities. What can it do? It must regain 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 well-being.” How did America come to this pass? Was there a wrong turn or a particular mistake? No. And here we get to the core of the matter:
The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. 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 foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. . . . The [Enlightenment] way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. . . . Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.
[Review completes as first comment.]
Looking over a list of Harvard commencement speakers, it has been twenty-five years since any speaker was not a person of the Left. (The last was Václav Havel, in 1995.) It is inconceivable, of course, that someone like Solzhenitsyn could be invited to give a commencement speech, or any speech, at Harvard today. He would be deplatformed, probably by violence, if he spoke to five people in a private talk on campus. If Harvard’s mandarins had known the content of his speech, he wouldn’t have been invited even in 1978. He was not known as a man of the Right until this speech, which is why he was allowed to give it.
The split to which Solzhenitsyn’s title refers isn’t the split between the Soviet Union and what was once known as the Free World. Rather, it is to humanity as a whole, which is not, and never will be, a unified group, much less one unified around Western, that is, American and European, premises and values. “Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture . . . constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprise to Western thinking.” This basic truth was masked until very recently, because “modern Europe . . . seemed an overwhelming success, with no geographic limits.” Solzhenitsyn means colonialism, global territorial expansion, rather than cultural influence, and notes that the process has gone entirely into reverse, both in terms of success and in terms of the changed Western attitude toward those it formerly conquered, which “often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness.”
Solzhenitsyn saw that the West’s core belief about political systems was “that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice.” He rejects this. “But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds. . . .” He further rejects the then-fashionable theory of convergence, the idea that the West and Communism were growing toward each other. And he also rejects that anybody else can, should, or will adopt the American system, because it is defective in many ways, and not appropriate for other countries, now or ever. No wonder in his memoir released last year, "Between Two Millstones," covering his exile from 1974 to 1978, Solzhenitsyn notes that some in the audience started to hiss him at this point.
As we all know, this belief, that so-called liberal democracy was the “end of history,” a superior model for everyone, became nearly universal after Communism imploded in 1989. For three decades now the ruling classes of the West have tried, by one mechanism or another, to impose it on the rest of the world. In many places, most of all post-Communist countries, the ruling classes of the target countries have eagerly embraced, or at least mouthed embracing, liberal democracy. Where they have not, trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives have been spent to demonstrate why they must, if they know what is good for them. So it seems Solzhenitsyn was wrong, or would have seemed so ten years ago. But as the defects in liberal democracy, a flawed system that is neither democracy nor real freedom, become ever more obvious, and more and more people reject it, it has become evident that Solzhenitsyn was right that the American system is not desirable for others. It’s not even desirable for America.
But in his speech, he is just getting started. He piles on, explaining why America is defective as a model for others, and, in fact, just plain defective. First, he points out the loss of courage in the West (he says West, but as far as I can tell, from this point on he means America, just as when he says “East,” he means the Soviet Union). This is “particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites” (that is, his audience), who exhibit “depression, passivity, and perplexity.” Driving the spike home, he says “Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?” Solzhenitsyn attributes this lack of courage to a surfeit of “well-being,” by which he means that everyone has been guaranteed more than adequate material goods and, more importantly, “an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures.” He believes that the decline in courage comes from an unwillingness to risk “this precious life . . . in defense of the common good.” As fatal as it is, loss of courage is merely a manifestation of a deeper malady, an excessive, and legalistic, over-emphasis on individual rights. In America, “destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space.” The “abyss of human decadence” is supposedly limited by “the right not to look and not to accept.” But this is a false defense; “Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.” America pretends “man does not bear any evil within himself.” This is untrue.
Looking back at 1978, it was a grim time. Jimmy Carter was President. Urban crime was rampant. The social pathologies that have eaten away our foundations—abortion, divorce, illegitimacy, pornography, wage stagnation, drugs, promiscuity—had already sunk their teeth into America, courtesy of the ruling class’s acquiescence to Left demands. It was only a few years later, with Ronald Reagan, that the grim atmosphere receded. But the pathologies did not. They were merely glossed over, and they got worse, and worse, and worse, while we were told through the 1980s and 1990s that being able to buy more stuff every year made it OK, even if wages were stagnant for most people and the atomized neoliberalism of Gordon Gekko now emblematic of America, rather than the earlier achievements of Thomas Edison or the Apollo Program. It is perhaps no wonder that even under Reagan, in America Solzhenitsyn was a niche taste, since pointing out that America was continuing to rot from within, as he did, wasn’t a popular position.
Among the few positive things Solzhenitsyn says of America is that that “The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed.” This was true in 1978; it is mostly not true now. It is completely false in Europe, where, as Ryszard Legutko has brilliantly shown, “coercion to freedom” is the order of the day. The same thing is happening here, and with an additional aspect that Solzhenitsyn could not foresee, that “woke capitalism” would be used to impose conformism to leftist demands, and to cement leftist power, across huge swathes of society. Convergence has happened after all, and then passed beyond the middle point; it is far less dangerous for a businessman or academic to point out today in Moscow than in New York that gender dysphoria is a mental illness or that homosexuals can’t actually marry.
Compounding his sins, Solzhenitsyn next attacks the press. We have to remember that among the aspects of America we were proudest of during the Cold War was our supposedly free press, which, although monolithically leftist already by the 1970s, unlike today still attempted to maintain some veneer of objectivity, and was not controlled by the state as under Communism. He correctly identifies that “the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary.” This matters because the press, and also academia, moves in lockstep, not much different than “the totalitarian East with its rigorously unified press.” “Fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable. . . . Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.” Solzhenitsyn saw the cancer of political correctness long before everyone else. And then he wraps up this set of criticisms by saying, in essence, that they are just the tip of the iceberg, and he could add much, much more in the same vein, but he doesn’t have the time to go further.
Having rejected the West as a model, Solzhenitsyn is at pains to say that he does not believe that socialism is the answer; “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” It has, certainly, shattered Russia. But Russia retains one thing that the West does not. The West is in a state of “spiritual exhaustion,” and Russia, despite its chains, has remained spiritually strong. “The complex and deadly crush of life [in Russia] has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being.” Solzhenitsyn predicts, “The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model,” because “observers from all the worlds of our planet” can see this Western spiritual exhaustion. As I say, for decades he was wrong in this prediction. The shiny things promised by America, backed up by its coercion, caused many to adopt the Western model, including, in many aspects, Russia, where there has been little indication of widespread spiritual strength.
The West’s spiritual exhaustion leads to fantasies, such as “that the impudent Cuban expeditions to Africa would best be stopped by special U.S. courtesy to Cuba,” or that George Kennan’s demand for unilateral disarmament by America was anything but hilarious to the masters of the Kremlin. He attacks the American antiwar movement for abandoning the people of Vietnam and Cambodia to suffering and genocide. “Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?” (Oddly from our perspective, Solzhenitsyn’s examples of the effects of spiritual exhaustion are all in the foreign policy realm, rather than in the social realm that ultimately proved far more damaging to us.) Adding insult to injury, no doubt realizing his audience’s reaction will be “Hey, we’re not cowards, we won World War II,” Solzhenitsyn says “Western democracy has not won any major war by itself; each time it shielded itself with an ally possessing a powerful land army, whose philosophy it did not question. In World War II against Hitler, instead of winning the conflict with its own forces, which would certainly have been sufficient, Western democracy raised up another enemy, one that would prove worse and more powerful, since Hitler had neither the resources nor the people, nor the ideas with broad appeal, nor such a large number of supporters in the West—a fifth column—as the Soviet Union possessed.” I cannot even imagine the audience reaction to this, two sentences that kick out all the supports from some of the most cherished fantasies of America’s ruling class, while implying they harbor traitors. Then he warns against allying with China to defeat the Soviet Union, because China would ultimately turn on America, and “America itself would fall victim to a Cambodia-style genocide.”
This last, about China, now seems a little silly. At the time, with Nixon’s opening to China, it probably seemed like a plausible future. But what seems not silly at all is the idea that we could fall victim to a Cambodia-style genocide. It’s not imminent, perhaps, but there is no reason in principle why the American Left would not, if it gained full power, behave differently from Mao in the Cultural Revolution, or perhaps even from Pol Pot. Genocide, from the French Revolution onwards, has characterized the response of all triumphant Left movements to challenge, or perceived challenge, from within. Why should America be any different, since our modern Left is no different in its essence from any of those previous Left movements? When, for example, last week Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times columnist and one of the most prominent and powerful left-wingers in the country, could write without comment from anyone, discussing yet another book that predicts demographic disaster for conservatives, “It sounds almost messianic: the Republican Party, that foul agglomeration of bigotry and avarice that has turned American politics into a dystopian farce, not just defeated but destroyed. The inexorable force of demography bringing us a new, enlightened political dispensation.” This is the face of evil, glimpsed at an angle, as she hides her hands from us so we cannot see the knives she is grinding. It will be us or her.
Whatever we do with China, Solzhenitsyn says, America is losing the fight against Communism, and is paralyzed with numerous debilities. What can it do? It must regain 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 well-being.” How did America come to this pass? Was there a wrong turn or a particular mistake? No. And here we get to the core of the matter:
The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. 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 foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. . . . The [Enlightenment] way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. . . . Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.
[Review completes as first comment.]
April 25, 2024
Prescient. In 1978, Solzhenitsyn laments the poverty of the West: a decadent and spiritually flabby culture energized by mere wealth and material excess. The result is a soulless culture more interested in media than mercy, justice, and courage.
"The complex and deadly crush of life [in the East] has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being . . . After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music." (35-37)
"All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century's moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century." (51)
"The complex and deadly crush of life [in the East] has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being . . . After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music." (35-37)
"All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century's moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century." (51)
Read
July 14, 2024based
September 30, 2019
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, like a modern day Alexis de Tocqueville, was an astute observer of the American culture. This speech, given 41 years ago, was astonishingly perceptive and prescient.
This analysis by Charles is excellent:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
This analysis by Charles is excellent:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
July 16, 2025
Read this way back when.
I liked it.
I liked it.
Read
September 4, 2014Very short read, but thick. I'm going to have to set it aside and read it again in a few weeks. Weird how some of these things seem so prophetic.
November 20, 2018
Amazing, now read his works. Start with one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and go from there.
September 4, 2024
I get it.
February 28, 2026
My favourite of the trio of Eastern Europe dissident writings I did for political theory book club. The historical grounding and contextualisation of the culture of the west was insightful.
I have been thinking a bit about how we lack a sense of obligation (the idea that human rights require both freedoms and responsibility, but the west has overemphasised the freedom side). I want obligation. I want to voluntary accept self-constraint.
Quotes:
Features of Western society
- Lack of courage
- Focus on wellbeing
- Legalistic
If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: This would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: Everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames.
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man's noblest impulses
Today's Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints… it is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights but human obligations
There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.
The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression ofBut then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and the 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 higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.
And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that 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 one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century's moral. poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.
We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: The split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.
If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the president's performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.
If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; 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 is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but-upward.
I have been thinking a bit about how we lack a sense of obligation (the idea that human rights require both freedoms and responsibility, but the west has overemphasised the freedom side). I want obligation. I want to voluntary accept self-constraint.
Quotes:
Features of Western society
- Lack of courage
- Focus on wellbeing
- Legalistic
If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: This would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: Everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames.
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man's noblest impulses
Today's Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints… it is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights but human obligations
There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.
The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression ofBut then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and the 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 higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.
And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that 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 one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century's moral. poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.
We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: The split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.
If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the president's performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.
If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; 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 is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but-upward.
June 16, 2023
Harvard University might have expected a glowing appraisal of America and the west from a grateful Soviet exile. That would be too easy, instead he takes criticism of Communism as a given and takes aim at western failings. In 1978 the rot had already set in and has only compounded itself since. This truth teller from the totalitarian East had harsh words for a sensationalist, conformist western media and warned that enlightenment values wouldn’t be enough in tackling modern trials. He was on point.
Some choice quotes:
“Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society… they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?
The constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to this end imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to carefully conceal such feelings.
Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: Everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames.
This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man—the master of this world—does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society.
Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development.
socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.
In World War II against Hitler, instead of winning the conflict with its own forces, which would certainly have been sufficient, Western democracy raised up another enemy, one that would prove worse and more powerful, since Hitler had neither the resources nor the people, nor the ideas with broad appeal, nor such a large number of supporters in the West—a fifth column—as the Soviet Union possessed.
In the face of such a danger, with such historical values in your past, with such a high level of attained freedom and, apparently, of devotion to it, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.
The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.
Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.
In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.”
Some choice quotes:
“Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society… they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?
The constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to this end imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to carefully conceal such feelings.
Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: Everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames.
This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man—the master of this world—does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society.
Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development.
socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.
In World War II against Hitler, instead of winning the conflict with its own forces, which would certainly have been sufficient, Western democracy raised up another enemy, one that would prove worse and more powerful, since Hitler had neither the resources nor the people, nor the ideas with broad appeal, nor such a large number of supporters in the West—a fifth column—as the Soviet Union possessed.
In the face of such a danger, with such historical values in your past, with such a high level of attained freedom and, apparently, of devotion to it, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.
The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.
Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.
In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.”
July 28, 2011
A powerful use of the English language.
December 19, 2023
"He takes his place with the other two prophets of the Western tradition; one was forced to drink hemlock and the second crucified".---William F. Buckley on Solzhenitsyn at Harvard
"The Russian bureaucrats showed an unusual sense of humor to let this nut loose upon our shores".---Gore Vidal on Solzhenitsyn at Harvard
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's speech at Harvard did split the world, or at least the intellectual world, into two back in 1978, as those of us who heard it can attest. The reaction to his jeremiad was swift, rhetorically violent, and in many ways predictable. The New Philosophers in France feted him for confirming their hawkish stance on Soviet Communism and the decadence of the West. Bernard Henri-Levy pronounced him "The Dante of our time". Liberals and leftists thought him as crazy as the neocons who wanted a permanent war footing against a by-then absent Communist threat. Was Solzhenitsyn a modern-day Cassandra, correct in his prophecies but destined to be ignored? Or a nut job still living in a 1950s world of Manichean simplicity? After roaring against the lack of freedom in his homeland Lucky Alec went West and complained the United States suffered from too much freedom, producing a culture, and worse still, a foreign policy of " moral flabbiness". Alec Sol went right for the gonads. The sexual laxity of the West, "pornography, exhibitionism, sexual deviance", all pointed to modern man's chief weakness, a lack of restraint. (ESQUIRE magazine joked bitterly that Solzhenitsyn's motto should be "Let it all hang in!"). The West lacked the fortitude to both acknowledge and combat the threat from the East. The U.S. should have fought harder in Vietnam (!). The arms built up by the Soviet Union must be met by an even greater concentration of forces, including nuclear, to the west of the Elbe River. (This line would later be echoed by Andrei Sakharov.) Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address caused many in America to look inward and question their civilization, and that is what makes this address more than passing historical interest.
P.S. Post-Solzhenitsyn: This edition, alas, does not contain the "Responses to Solzhenitsyn", from allies and critics, found in others.
"The Russian bureaucrats showed an unusual sense of humor to let this nut loose upon our shores".---Gore Vidal on Solzhenitsyn at Harvard
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's speech at Harvard did split the world, or at least the intellectual world, into two back in 1978, as those of us who heard it can attest. The reaction to his jeremiad was swift, rhetorically violent, and in many ways predictable. The New Philosophers in France feted him for confirming their hawkish stance on Soviet Communism and the decadence of the West. Bernard Henri-Levy pronounced him "The Dante of our time". Liberals and leftists thought him as crazy as the neocons who wanted a permanent war footing against a by-then absent Communist threat. Was Solzhenitsyn a modern-day Cassandra, correct in his prophecies but destined to be ignored? Or a nut job still living in a 1950s world of Manichean simplicity? After roaring against the lack of freedom in his homeland Lucky Alec went West and complained the United States suffered from too much freedom, producing a culture, and worse still, a foreign policy of " moral flabbiness". Alec Sol went right for the gonads. The sexual laxity of the West, "pornography, exhibitionism, sexual deviance", all pointed to modern man's chief weakness, a lack of restraint. (ESQUIRE magazine joked bitterly that Solzhenitsyn's motto should be "Let it all hang in!"). The West lacked the fortitude to both acknowledge and combat the threat from the East. The U.S. should have fought harder in Vietnam (!). The arms built up by the Soviet Union must be met by an even greater concentration of forces, including nuclear, to the west of the Elbe River. (This line would later be echoed by Andrei Sakharov.) Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address caused many in America to look inward and question their civilization, and that is what makes this address more than passing historical interest.
P.S. Post-Solzhenitsyn: This edition, alas, does not contain the "Responses to Solzhenitsyn", from allies and critics, found in others.
March 31, 2019
I have read this a few times before and liked and still like Solzhenitsyn's confidence in bringing truth to light. As one who witnessed the effects of extreme socialism, he begs our nation to not let truth elude us by constantly seeking TRUTH. He empathizes, "truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter" and then warns the Harvard graduating class that they will likely find bitterness in his speech, but that the bitterness comes from a friend. Of course, the Berlin wall is down, we have put the cold war behind us (or have we?) and our world is not much different from then to now in the sense that socialism is still a thing.
Some of the principles: The welfare state has developed dangerous desires to have more and still more things and opportunities; the legal structure is lower than the moral standard, or in other words, people seek legality in thought and actions, not in truth or morals—the legal structure cannot defend against the corrosion of evil; rights are sought on a subjective scale--there is no stopping the pernicious mask of more and more rights; democracy creates mediocrity; destructive and irresponsible freedom creates decadence; the press is not responsible to anyone and is leading the public astray—the solution is to learn Truth; the press promotes a dangerous tendency to form a herd which shuts off successful development; a spiritual training of a higher power is the solution to all our problems; humanism is the root of all our moral poverty; "Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind to death."
His final thoughts are that we may be spared destruction by war if we change our lives, recognize a higher power than man, and experience constant moral growth.
Solzhenitzen is laying down First Principles and principles that are universally true for everyone. I will probably read this again and again.
Some of the principles: The welfare state has developed dangerous desires to have more and still more things and opportunities; the legal structure is lower than the moral standard, or in other words, people seek legality in thought and actions, not in truth or morals—the legal structure cannot defend against the corrosion of evil; rights are sought on a subjective scale--there is no stopping the pernicious mask of more and more rights; democracy creates mediocrity; destructive and irresponsible freedom creates decadence; the press is not responsible to anyone and is leading the public astray—the solution is to learn Truth; the press promotes a dangerous tendency to form a herd which shuts off successful development; a spiritual training of a higher power is the solution to all our problems; humanism is the root of all our moral poverty; "Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind to death."
His final thoughts are that we may be spared destruction by war if we change our lives, recognize a higher power than man, and experience constant moral growth.
Solzhenitzen is laying down First Principles and principles that are universally true for everyone. I will probably read this again and again.
March 17, 2023
This speech is frustrating because it feels like two speeches in one, or rather two major ideas within one speech, with each major idea not connecting to the other in a coherent manner and in some instances contradicting the other idea. One thrust of the speech concerns the weakness of American foreign policy vis-à-vis Soviet strength; American capitulation in Vietnam; and other instances of Western fecklessness. The “other speech’ is the one I’ve seen referenced many times, and which is extremely interesting: the manner by which both Western Capitalism and Communism and their respective fealty to a materialist mindset to the detriment of any spiritual commitments, create a situation where, paradoxically, the West and the Communist Bloc have more in common than might be thought.
The heart of this argument focuses on the absence of God and the absence of Judeo-Christian commitments in both cultures--politically, economically, artistically. The godlessness that is the sine qua non of communist ideology has now, unfortunately, also become ascendant in the West. Like many great thinkers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has a diagnosis that has become more accurate with each passing decade. He delivered this speech at the Harvard Commencement of 1978. Woe unto us were we to hear what he has to say at a Commencement Speech this spring. Forty-five years later and the deleterious effects of the West’s commitment to prioritizing, above all else, material well-being, consumerism, free markets not ordered to the common good, and a monopolized media made up of all manner of hacks and intellectual mediocrities have only made things worse. At the heart of this critique is Solzhenitsyn’s cri de coeur for moral courage from citizens of the West. And where might this courage come from and be replenished by? From belief in a transcendental God from whom each person receives a divine spark and to whom each person should aim to glorify by his decisions and actions.
The heart of this argument focuses on the absence of God and the absence of Judeo-Christian commitments in both cultures--politically, economically, artistically. The godlessness that is the sine qua non of communist ideology has now, unfortunately, also become ascendant in the West. Like many great thinkers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has a diagnosis that has become more accurate with each passing decade. He delivered this speech at the Harvard Commencement of 1978. Woe unto us were we to hear what he has to say at a Commencement Speech this spring. Forty-five years later and the deleterious effects of the West’s commitment to prioritizing, above all else, material well-being, consumerism, free markets not ordered to the common good, and a monopolized media made up of all manner of hacks and intellectual mediocrities have only made things worse. At the heart of this critique is Solzhenitsyn’s cri de coeur for moral courage from citizens of the West. And where might this courage come from and be replenished by? From belief in a transcendental God from whom each person receives a divine spark and to whom each person should aim to glorify by his decisions and actions.
May 14, 2024
As I grow older my opinion of philosophers goes steadily downhill. In college, I pored over those dense texts, convinced that here rested the fount of all knowledge and wisdom, the basis of our civilization. But why would these group of men be any less prone to mistakes and vanity, grandiosity and hot air than any other group of men? Perhaps even more so, because they, as a group, claim to be so superlative as to be advisers to the leaders of the world.
So Solzhenitsyn commits all the errors of his position. Or perhaps I should not accuse him of that since I do not know that he claimed that slot - just that our media crowned him with that title, so I thought, and that I accepted it as fact.
Not that he is wrong in what he accuses America and the Western world of in June of 1978. All that is still true today in 2024 - we are self-centered, we are materialistic, we do not think deeply, we do not think in terms of moral and spiritual growth as the point of our existence. And to fix these unsettling list of astounding incorrectness, Solzhenitsyn requires that we return to the moral heritage of our Christian centuries or suffer our own hellish demise. Man cannot be the center of our own existence, there must be a Supreme, complete entity to restrain man's passions and irresponsibility.
One way to look at it. But the author forgets that God is a fabrication of man, that his rules are administered by man. So how does that fallible, irresponsible, careless man now become capable of creating or administering the perfect guidance - to man. Not going to happen.
I've long felt that many philosophers are so distanced from regular people that they have no knowledge of them. They've been too busy being on that mountaintop thinking up great new ways that man should live that they haven't had the time to get to know humans at all. After all, why should that be necessary when the best mind is doing all the thinking?
In this
So Solzhenitsyn commits all the errors of his position. Or perhaps I should not accuse him of that since I do not know that he claimed that slot - just that our media crowned him with that title, so I thought, and that I accepted it as fact.
Not that he is wrong in what he accuses America and the Western world of in June of 1978. All that is still true today in 2024 - we are self-centered, we are materialistic, we do not think deeply, we do not think in terms of moral and spiritual growth as the point of our existence. And to fix these unsettling list of astounding incorrectness, Solzhenitsyn requires that we return to the moral heritage of our Christian centuries or suffer our own hellish demise. Man cannot be the center of our own existence, there must be a Supreme, complete entity to restrain man's passions and irresponsibility.
One way to look at it. But the author forgets that God is a fabrication of man, that his rules are administered by man. So how does that fallible, irresponsible, careless man now become capable of creating or administering the perfect guidance - to man. Not going to happen.
I've long felt that many philosophers are so distanced from regular people that they have no knowledge of them. They've been too busy being on that mountaintop thinking up great new ways that man should live that they haven't had the time to get to know humans at all. After all, why should that be necessary when the best mind is doing all the thinking?
In this
February 24, 2026
I first heard about Solzhenitsyn and this speech from my favorite podcast,
The Christian History Almanac
. Dan van Voorhis’s description intrigued me:
As someone with a distrust of all economic systems and political philosophies (“... the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.” — William Golding), I greatly appreciated Solzhenitsyn’s approach and his unwillingness to cater to his audience’s expectations. How easy it is for us to notice the specks in our brothers’ eyes while remaining ignorant of the logs in our own. I’m glad Solzhenitsyn chose to acknowledge the flaws of the country he was addressing at the time.
Related TBR List:
❧ “Live Not by Lies” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
❧ “Prosperity Breeds Idiots” by Francis X. Maier
❧ The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich
❧ The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Expecting a condemnation of the USSR and embrace of the West, the crowd heard nothing of it. Instead, [Solzhenitsyn] critiqued his old empire but the Western one as well... A comfortable form of Christianity that embraced the same materialism and what he called “legalism” or the idea that if the law says it’s good, it must be—the same kind of lie that led to the tragedies of the USSR.”
As someone with a distrust of all economic systems and political philosophies (“... the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.” — William Golding), I greatly appreciated Solzhenitsyn’s approach and his unwillingness to cater to his audience’s expectations. How easy it is for us to notice the specks in our brothers’ eyes while remaining ignorant of the logs in our own. I’m glad Solzhenitsyn chose to acknowledge the flaws of the country he was addressing at the time.
Related TBR List:
❧ “Live Not by Lies” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
❧ “Prosperity Breeds Idiots” by Francis X. Maier
❧ The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich
❧ The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
June 19, 2018
"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 is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism."
February 24, 2025
Still one of the most staggering diagnoses of contemporary America, and more generally, all of the societies which Augusto Del Noce termed "The Affluent Society".
Western democratic materialism has fatal blind spots that begin with Renaissance Humanism. Everything comes convulsing up into the light of Judgment Day, in which we now live.
We must recover our spiritual sight once more. Recover the mystics and the desert fathers.
For the 21st century is the fulcrum between the age of the Enlightenment and a new, far more metaphysical century, full of Stoics and monastics. There is no other solution to the crumbling farce of 'exclusive, secular humanism' whose specter now haunts our body of Representatives.
Western democratic materialism has fatal blind spots that begin with Renaissance Humanism. Everything comes convulsing up into the light of Judgment Day, in which we now live.
We must recover our spiritual sight once more. Recover the mystics and the desert fathers.
For the 21st century is the fulcrum between the age of the Enlightenment and a new, far more metaphysical century, full of Stoics and monastics. There is no other solution to the crumbling farce of 'exclusive, secular humanism' whose specter now haunts our body of Representatives.
December 14, 2020
This book is an absolute gem, probably shaped my view of the world now that I think back on it — read it a few years ago now. One of my absolute favourites.
With his superior writing Soljenitsyne describes in comparison the political, social and spiritual scenarios of the Western and Eastern societies pointing out why they each developed in their own ways and also what lacks in both.
Soljenitsyne’s simple yet precise, accurate and complete description and arrangement of complex theories results in a solid message that will certainly lay in the foundation of your perception of the world.
Rare book to find, but invaluable.
With his superior writing Soljenitsyne describes in comparison the political, social and spiritual scenarios of the Western and Eastern societies pointing out why they each developed in their own ways and also what lacks in both.
Soljenitsyne’s simple yet precise, accurate and complete description and arrangement of complex theories results in a solid message that will certainly lay in the foundation of your perception of the world.
Rare book to find, but invaluable.
March 11, 2023
"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only 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 be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most 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."
September 6, 2025
Earlier this month I read A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University, June 8, 1978 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It prompted me to want to seek out the book cited in the following quote: "The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death."
January 15, 2019
I don’t know if this was a mediocre translation or what, but I didn’t connect with Solzhenitsyn’s critique of Western Civilization. I agreed with him on several points, but I’m not entirely sure the past four decades support his arguments, which fall too much into the either/or camp. Despite the short length, I found my attention waning. Not recommended (but do read Solzhenitsyn’s phenomenal One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).
December 9, 2018
It's amazing how prescient Solzhenitsyn was when he said these things. It's well worth the listen for both the insights into the former Soviet Union as well as the multitudinous errors the West made while Communism grew. He also speaks to today's generation of spineless politicians. I listened to the original broadcast and it's well worth the hour.
December 22, 2025
Yet another White Russian lamenting the consequences of humanism and the West’s purported “lack of spirituality” (whatever that means). Well, the Solzhenitsyns, openly promoted by the West, have prevailed: they have been dominating Russian politics and discourse for decades, and it turns out that this much-vaunted “spirituality” was little more than a pretext for the appropriation of public goods by state-linked elites.
March 19, 2026
Disturbingly prescient, deeply insightful, and incredibly profound. A must-read.
“from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end”
~ Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University, June 8, 1978.
“from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end”
~ Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University, June 8, 1978.
January 15, 2021
Probably the single best introduction to genuine conservatism I’ve ever read. Even better that it’s available free and it’s very short.
It’s like getting slapped in the face by truth.
Cant recommend highly enough.
It’s like getting slapped in the face by truth.
Cant recommend highly enough.
April 12, 2022
Remarkable book on the western world from a rooted Eastern perspective!
It is written on 1978, but it is still mind blowing for today’s world, recommend it a lot!
Small and complex, the author treats on humanism, individualism, materialism, through history and from its neutral perspective.
It is written on 1978, but it is still mind blowing for today’s world, recommend it a lot!
Small and complex, the author treats on humanism, individualism, materialism, through history and from its neutral perspective.
April 4, 2020
His critique of humanism alone makes it worth the read.
July 27, 2020
Read for Mentoring in the Classics 6/20
September 9, 2020
It pleased me to both agree and disagree with various points made during the address.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews