The West

I have recently come across a very interesting speech by a famous Russian called Alexander Solzenitsyn (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1970, exiled from Russia in 1974). Our pastor quoted from it in the sermon on Sunday and it inspired us to track down the full text. You can find it HERE

It is a speech he gave to Harvard graduates in 1978 and in it he makes some criticisms of the western world and sets out why he would not recommend it as a model to cure the problems created by a socialist or communist state. It makes for interesting reading.

Here are some excerpts to get you thinking but you need to read them in context to really get what he is saying:

"When the modern Western States were created, the following principle was proclaimed: governments are meant to serve man, and man lives to be free to pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration). Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the morally inferior sense which has come into being duting those same decades. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still b etter life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Wetsern faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition permeates all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development."

In discussing a legalistic society he says: "Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. 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, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would souns simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the limit of those legal frames." He goes on to acknowledge that a society "without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed" but somethings more than just the law is required - when many of the laws were framed Christian morals and responsibilities were taken for granted.

"There are meaningful warnings that history gives a threatened or perishing society....The centre of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy. But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?"

"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 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 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."

"If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, 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. The ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but - - upward."

Whether you agree with everything he says or not, it is fascinating to consider where that journey has taken us over the last 30 years. I personally think that a lot of what he says still rings true.