> But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.
I was in Eastern Europe before 1989. It was NOT a model, as he says, but there were indeed some compensating advantages. Since people weren't allowed to strive for material things (or have them), they put their energies into other things.
I have no idea what Solzhenitsyn's ideal society would be, but I appreciate hearing some genuinely different thoughts.
(I always wonder what kind of neighbor he was in Cavendish, Vermont! Did he make small talk with folks at the post office? Did he go to the high school football games? Would he help you with your gopher problem? etc.)
He's adopting a radically critical posture that is a bit missing from the Occidental perspective.
Radical critics do exist in the Occident.
But they don't focus on the same issues, and especially not on the moral issues.
They tend to focus on the systemic organization of the occidental society, explaining how systemic changes could change its course for the better.
In a way, he's insisting on the individual and he's striking some right chords.
But at the same time, as many critics of the occident, he refuses to ask himself for the reasons of its success...
It's one think to criticize it and explain what does not work.
But then, why does it work as a whole?
What's the catch?
44 Presidents before Trump grew up in our system and we have some idea what a religious experience could do to any of them. We have no idea how Trump would react to religion.
The left has a major movement to sacrifice their power in our flawed system in order to purge candidates who are uncertain on Palestine.
Actually, one thing he does not get - but it's difficult to criticize him on this, because his questions are not wrong... they feel... foreign in a way, so one thing is that the changes he's calling for... they take time ! A lot of time !
It's almost as if this text is about political epistemology in a way.
At least, that's how I relate to it.
Actually, I think I would have loved an exchange between him and Feyerabend.
I agree with you about today's right, but disagree strongly about the left. The left is, if anything, even more materialistic than the right. The belief that providing enough material goods will fix all problems is behind the left's disastrous push to have governments provide everything to everyone: welfare, health care, open borders, etc.
Solzhenitsyn primarily focuses in this speech, it seems to me, on there being a growing lack of subordination to a higher spiritual purpose in the West, similar to that in the East, both having predictable consequences in terms of the collapse and eventual destruction of those societies. (Materialism and “anthropocentricity” take over and life loses its meaning.)
The superficial shape of the collapse in the East (under Communism) is different to that of the West, but according to him both suffer from the same underlying disease.
When the Berlin Wall (accidentally) fell, I think it showed the West as far more durably attractive than the East was robust due to generational suffering.
So the question becomes China. Its dissidents do sound like Solzhenitsyn: the Chinese state successfully banned certain truths. But they have spirituality distinct from national suffering. And in 1978, you wouldn’t have seen the beginnings of materialism as well.
> For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its special character and therefore never understood it
The idea that Russia is a separate civilization with a great destiny is a cause of Russia's imperialism in Eastern Europe. That was true under the tsars, in the USSR, and it's true today.
Moreover, Solzhenitsyn's harping on the spiritual decay of the West brings to mind a modern post-liberal blogger. Solzhenitsyn was a contrarian, and this led to significant heroism, but it also prevented him from recognizing liberalism as a goal for Russia. And today, Putin's weird mix of far right larping, belief in Russia's special destiny, and throwback chauvinism could plausibly claim late-Solzhenitsyn as its progenitor.
Solzhenitsyn is almost unheard of by anyone under the age of 40 because the history of the cold war was recorded through an anti-capitalist lens. I'd venture most of what you know about it reduces to McCarthyism, heroic labor movements, some US support for death squads and dictators in central and south america, atrocities by US solders in vietnam, some student uprisings in france, and maybe some cartoon images of what factcat capitalists represent.
In the few short decades since the fall of the berlin wall, most western institutions are now headed by people who see themselves first as activists playing a role while dissolving national systems of oppression in service of global coordination. Usually in subordination to supra-national coordinating bodies like the EU, WEF, UN, World Bank, and other central committees designed to limit sovereignty and "freedom." There are reasons to believe there are some constructive possibilities in them, but without understanding what the people behind them are motivated by and intend, you can be relied upon to do nothing.
It's said that history is written by the victors, but in fact it's just the writing of history that is the measure of victory, where what people believe about themselves is the artifact of the stories and narratives they receive. e.g. "hearts and minds." It is the literal means of production of the idea of self. Are you the creation of a being whose intent is for you to thrive in harmony with others who appreciate and share that gift, and use its revealed will to produce offspring of your own toward whom you have similar intent, or are you an undifferentiated clump of cells actuated by need and a struggle over finite resources? The strategies of each are different, and persuading people that they are the latter lets you enslave them. Bladerunner 2049 deals with this theme pretty well. Beings raised without souls do what they are told for the pleasure of ones who are more aware.
If a word you use to describe this dissonant view is "problematic," I'd look hard at my memories and beliefs to find which ones were the effects of specific physical experiences and which ones were arrived at through ideas I had received, and how much of my ontology was just the iterated logic of a few received ideas. (Happy Sunday!)
Solzhenisyn's appeals to spiritual values seem quaint, but maybe they're useful for younger people trying to piece together what happened just before the narrative bubble they inhabit took hold in the west. When it clicks that separating your idea of self from a relationship to the divine dilutes your humanity and reduces you to the level of an animal, the motives of the people doing it should become absolutely clear. Good luck.
