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Solzhenitsyn versus Modern Materialism
by el cid
10/26/2009, 12:11 PM #

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This is an excerpt from First Things by RJ Neuhaus............and the Hayak quote is icing on the cake.

Through much of the commentary on the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn last August, there was the repeated intimation—and sometimes vulgar assertion—that, after his return to Russia in 1994, he descended into crotchety old age and irrelevance. This is not new. The same complaints were loudly heard more than thirty years ago when he gave that “controversial” commencement address at Harvard. There he said, among other things: “Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?” Such reflections were met by both embarrassed silence and cries of outrage. Who is he to presume to preach to us about the spiritual wreckage of our culture?! And to do so at Harvard, the shining campus on a hill that glows with the achievements of the brightest and best the world has ever produced. The answer is that he was one of the relatively few giants of the last hundred years, a man whose moral courage, literary genius, and uncompromising devotion to his calling alerted millions to the higher possibilities in being human. Through his years in the earthly hell of the Soviet prison system, to the publication of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, and, later, the multivolume Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn challenged the world to look unblinkingly at the good and, with relentless specificity, the evil of which we are capable. In this he offended the good taste by which we protect our pitiable conceits and dirty secrets. In the September 2008 issue of the New Criterion, Roger Kimball lifts up another factor that made Solzhenitsyn so very unacceptable to most of our intellectual class. He showed that communism and Nazism were but two sides of the same evil coin. “The myth of communist ‘idealism' was, and perhaps still is, a hardy perennial. George Steiner, reviewing Gulag Archipelago in the New Yorker in 1974, typified the attitude of the left-wing Western intellectual: ‘To infer that the Soviet terror is as hideous as Hitlerism,' Steiner lectured, ‘is not only a brutal oversimplification but a moral indecency.'” At least communism meant well; the pity is that it employed such brutal means, and the greater pity is that it failed. The left-wing historian Eric Hobsbawm was asked by an interviewer whether his position doesn't come down to “saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified.” To which Hobsbawm unhesitatingly answered “Yes.” Kimball worries whether America, now in the grips of “crowd politics” rallying to utopian promises, might be headed in the direction of what Friedrich Hayek, following Tocqueville, called “the road to serfdom.” I hope, as he no doubt hopes, that he is wrong about that. One way to ward off that dreadful prospect is to have indelibly imprinted upon our minds the life and literary legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.