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Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's on liberalism - gone too far?
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Written By mayank - 5 February, 2009
Democracy Mangalore Analysis violence Language and Culture
These were the comments made by the renowned Russian Author and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. A World Split Apart — Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University, June 8, 1978.
”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 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 feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and it has in fact been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
"On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.” ”And what shall we say about the dark realms of overt criminality? Legal limits (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also some misuse of such freedom. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency —- all with the support of thousands of defenders in the society. When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights. There is quite a number of such cases.”
”Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. 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 dangerous herd development.
"In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons —- maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. An example is the self-deluding interpretation of the state of affairs in the contemporary world that functions as a sort of petrified armor around people’s minds, to such a degree that human voices from seventeen countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will be broken only by the inexorable crowbar of events.”
”How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. 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 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 pro-claimed 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 of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But 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 subtle 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 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.”
"On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.” ”And what shall we say about the dark realms of overt criminality? Legal limits (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also some misuse of such freedom. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency —- all with the support of thousands of defenders in the society. When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights. There is quite a number of such cases.”
”Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. 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 dangerous herd development.
"In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons —- maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. An example is the self-deluding interpretation of the state of affairs in the contemporary world that functions as a sort of petrified armor around people’s minds, to such a degree that human voices from seventeen countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will be broken only by the inexorable crowbar of events.”
”How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. 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 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 pro-claimed 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 of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But 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 subtle 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 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.”
COMMENTS
s_yajaman - 6 February, 2009 - 02:53
Mayank,
Please break that up into paragraphs to enable us to read it.
Srivathsa
I hope educated people would not get carried away by pseudo-intellectual and ultra-liberal thoughts that the individualistic and selfish present day west professes. The west itself has declined from it past glory to modern day moral bankruptcy.
I hope educated people would not get carried away by ideas of preservation of cultural heritage through irrational rejection of all things Western as 'Moral Bankruptcy'. I hope educated people try to emulate the West in terms of discipline, strength of character, cleanliness, honesty and non-hypocrisy, to name a few. I hope educated people do not fall into the trap which says that our culture is sooo superior that anything Indian is automatically much better than the West, and instead gain some measure of discretion and honesty which enables them to see what is good within us and what is bad and inexcusable.
s_yajaman - 6 February, 2009 - 10:22
There is saying in Buddhism - "To each man is given the keys to the gates of heaven, the same keys open the gates to hell".
The problem is not with freedom or democracy or alcohol. If we want to we can use it sensibly or abuse it. The problem is with us. it's like blaming a car for accidents.
World over this is an ongoing battle between conservatives and liberals.
Srivathsa
You ask: "How do you assume that I don't protest arracks, liquor barons creating hell for villagers?"
I was expecting you to say this, in fact I was almost 100% sure. When you assume that I, or people with a liberal outlook in general, do not protest X, Y or Z, even I can assume that you do not protest the stuff which I have mentioned. This tiresome game of "Hey, why are you not protesting THAT, why only THIS" can be played by two.
Mayank, you're the one going by "Spicy media reports". It is plain that you know absolutely nothing about the reality of life in a village in India, even today. There are about 1200 million people in India, out of whom 750 million stay in villages. You are certainly not aware of how deeply entrenched notions of caste, women inferiority, etc. are. Urban slums contain 200 million people more. There are SCORES of MILLIONS of cases of brutality and domestic violence in India. You are simply unaware of the immense progress we still need to make in social terms. But hey, maybe this is a good thing from your point of view - we are still a very very long way off from becoming "liberalized", you can rejoice in the fact that it will take decades for several hundred million people to even realize that there is actually a life of the "liberal kind".
One more kind of question I hear often, is this one: "What are you doing to stop this if you protest it, why do you simply type, why don't you do somthing?"
You have asked me a question on those lines here, very much as expected. Well, I could again turn the question around like I did in my above post. But instead of answering a question with another question, I will tell you just one thing: if each one does his own tasks well, India will be a developed nation. I see idiots breaking the signal daily, I don't go up to them and pick a fight with each one. I see fools throwing garbage out of their cars daily, I don't go around trying to slap them. I do no such thing myself, and try to ensure that no one in my family does. And I would chide and argue with a friend who does. Everyone cannot be a policeman or a social activist. This simple point is something that people do not understand, and put forth questions like: "Why are YOU not DOING something about the problem".
Most of these people who pontificate about "Indian Culture" and the "moral fabric of society" (whatever that means) have never been to a pub in their lives and think it is some den of vices, and start bringing in drugs, adultery, teenage pregnancy, and every other conceivable crap into the discussion . Bangalore has had pubs for 150 years now. In the Bangalore of the 1990s, there was a healthy and vibrant pub culture in Bangalore, the "Pub City". No one had any problems then.
I suggest you come with me to a pub one day, and try a light beer. At the very least, you will then have a basis (can I call it authority) to write your posts.
And a tip: In future, try using the 'Rich Text Editor' to type in comments (you can see the link just below the comments box). You can put in newlines and separate paragraphs and your posts will be much more readable.
I was expecting you to say this, in fact I was almost 100% sure. When you assume that I, or people with a liberal outlook in general, do not protest X, Y or Z, even I can assume that you do not protest the stuff which I have mentioned. This tiresome game of "Hey, why are you not protesting THAT, why only THIS" can be played by two.
Mayank, you're the one going by "Spicy media reports". It is plain that you know absolutely nothing about the reality of life in a village in India, even today. There are about 1200 million people in India, out of whom 750 million stay in villages. You are certainly not aware of how deeply entrenched notions of caste, women inferiority, etc. are. Urban slums contain 200 million people more. There are SCORES of MILLIONS of cases of brutality and domestic violence in India. You are simply unaware of the immense progress we still need to make in social terms. But hey, maybe this is a good thing from your point of view - we are still a very very long way off from becoming "liberalized", you can rejoice in the fact that it will take decades for several hundred million people to even realize that there is actually a life of the "liberal kind".
One more kind of question I hear often, is this one: "What are you doing to stop this if you protest it, why do you simply type, why don't you do somthing?"
You have asked me a question on those lines here, very much as expected. Well, I could again turn the question around like I did in my above post. But instead of answering a question with another question, I will tell you just one thing: if each one does his own tasks well, India will be a developed nation. I see idiots breaking the signal daily, I don't go up to them and pick a fight with each one. I see fools throwing garbage out of their cars daily, I don't go around trying to slap them. I do no such thing myself, and try to ensure that no one in my family does. And I would chide and argue with a friend who does. Everyone cannot be a policeman or a social activist. This simple point is something that people do not understand, and put forth questions like: "Why are YOU not DOING something about the problem".
Most of these people who pontificate about "Indian Culture" and the "moral fabric of society" (whatever that means) have never been to a pub in their lives and think it is some den of vices, and start bringing in drugs, adultery, teenage pregnancy, and every other conceivable crap into the discussion . Bangalore has had pubs for 150 years now. In the Bangalore of the 1990s, there was a healthy and vibrant pub culture in Bangalore, the "Pub City". No one had any problems then.
I suggest you come with me to a pub one day, and try a light beer. At the very least, you will then have a basis (can I call it authority) to write your posts.
And a tip: In future, try using the 'Rich Text Editor' to type in comments (you can see the link just below the comments box). You can put in newlines and separate paragraphs and your posts will be much more readable.
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