Here is the other one of Jessica’s from Christmas week on Neo, regarding Solzhenitsyn. The first is here. It is not comfortable reading, and given the topic it should not be. I do think it is both relevant and correct, and does outline, perhaps some of the unease we feel at the moment. In any case, the two posts were designed to go together, and they hold up immensely well, so enjoy.
The last few days we have been looking at two voices from the East – President Putin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn; in many ways they are far apart as you could want, but in another not; they both offer a critique of Western consumerism which derives from Russian Christian sources. Putin may be doing this for a number of reasons, but the origin of his criticism is the same as Solzhenitsyn’s – which is the conviction that man is not at the centre of his own universe; whether Putin believes it, who can say? That Solzhenitsyn did is clear.
One of the most potent points Solzhenitsyn makes is that:
in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.
When America’s Founding Fathers separated Church and State they did not do so because they were atheists or thought Christianity wrong, they did so because they did not want one Church to dominate in their society; they do, indeed, seem to have assumed that man would be bound by the responsibilities which the Christian faith laid upon him; realists, they did not think man would always live up to these, but they did not see freedom as license; can we now say that of ourselves and our leaders? What is it which binds us?
Here, Neo often excoriates modern political leaders for what is essentially their lack of courage and morals. By that last he isn’t just talking about sex, he is talking across the range of things which ought to bind leaders: a concern for honesty, integrity and truth. Modern political leaders seem to have discovered that these things can be dispensed with, as long as it is not done ostentatiously; and they wonder why the electorate is disillusioned with them and their leadership?
Solzhenitsyn’s critique is a Christian one:
There is a disaster, however, that has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.
Of such consciousness man is the touchstone, in judging everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes that were not noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our day we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity, which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.
For a true understanding of man’s real destiny, God is essential:
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.
But if we refuse to recognise this, or think it of no importance, then we shan’t see any reasons for exercising any self-restraint save for that imposed by the law – and if the law is the only guide we have, then we have become a society without a spirit of self-sacrifice or restraint:
People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law. 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 sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames.
It seems here that this light from the East says much about where we are as a society, and why there is, in all quarters, a feeling that we have somehow taken the wrong turning. Maybe it takes men speaking from a society which took the wrong turn for many generations to see this. It may well take more humility than we have to be told it and to learn from it. But when a Russian President says:
We know that there are more and more people in the world who support our position on defending traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilisation in every nation for thousands of years: the values of traditional families, real human life, including religious life, not just material existence but also spirituality, the values of humanism and global diversity
then we can either point fingers and say who is he to talk? Or we can ask whether there is not something in what he says from which we might learn? The choice is ours.
All Along the Watchtower 
The original idea of secularism was of two different realms, Church and State. Although they necessarily overlapped there remained distinct areas in which one was not permitted to interfere with the other. During the Enlightenment, however, the Absolutist State emerged as the most perfect vehicle for delivering Enlightenment ideals. There was no realm over which the State did not have full authority.
Today’s version of secularism is essentially the continuation of Absolutism but by other means. It therefore follows that no values are accorded legitimacy save those licensed by the State itself and it does not recognise a higher source of values than itself. The State is a material entity seeking to achieve material ends through the use of power wielded by sinful and corruptible men. Unless a realm exists which is beyond its power then Absolutist States will descend more or less slowly, depending on the strength of Christian cultural values, to the level of pure materialism. For which reason religious liberty and conscientious objection are central needs for a healthy society.
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Yes, I think so as well, and very well stated. I’m comfortable with the idea of a secular state, but without God in the mix we do end up in authoritarianism.
It can, of course, also go the other way, with equally bad results, such as (at least some) of Islam shows.
The idea works, but balance must be maintained.
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I think the idea of secularism essentially arose because the 11th Century Church resisted the Emperor when he took it upon himself to appoint bishops. The point established was that both Church and State had limits to their authority. A point which contemporary secularists have rather lost sight of.
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Could well be, beyond my knowledge. Boy, is that the truth though. Trouble is, most of the church seems to have signed up to the other side.
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“When America’s Founding Fathers separated Church and State they did not do so because they were atheists or thought Christianity wrong, they did so because they did not want one Church to dominate in their society; …”
I thought part of the purpose was to avoid one particular church allied to the state from dictating the faith of other Christians.
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Not really, both behemoths, Virginia (CofE) and Massachusetts (Cong), and some others had state churches, and in theory, still could, although there would be trouble because it might conflict with other amendments.
Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Church (which is where the wall argument comes from) did note that as a benefit however. Note that it was to protect the church from the state and decidedly not vice versa.
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Probably I should add to this that prior to the civil war, and to an extent until World War I, the federal government was simply not very important to the average citizen, who most likely never dealt with it at all. Most people were much more concerned with their state governments. There was a reason for the old formulation “These United States.”
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NEO – I read the lecture by Solzhenityn that you linked to in the last post.
I honestly don’t think much of the ‘spirituality’ of someone who thinks that America should have put more resources and incurred more deaths in the Vietnam war.
I could argue against so much of what he wrote in that lecture – but when I got to the part where he stated that America pulled out of Vietnam too soon and regarded this as a sign of moral weakness, I basically switched off and decided that I couldn’t be bothered.
Whatever spirituality he possessed, I wouldn’t call it Christianity; he wasn’t a Christian (i.e. he wasn’t in the number of the Saviour’s family).
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Don’t know that I agree with you, Jock. Vietnam was won, the ARVN was doing just fine with supplies and lessening air support from us, and aid of course. Then Congress shut off all assistance, making all 58K of our deaths meaningless. It was moral cowardness, on the part of Congress, to not see the job through. We saw the same thing in Iraq, except this time it was Obama.
How good a Christian he was, I’ll leave to God. I saw him speak once, and he sure looked and sounded like one to me.
But that’s OK, Jock. You just learned one of the reasons a fair number of Americans don’t trust Washington, the useless sacrifice of our friends and family.
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I don’t know so much about the particulars of the Vietnam situation; just that the Christian principle is that we (Christians) are very negative about war and we only ever consider it as a very last resort. I know enough about Vietnam to understand that the situation did not meet the criteria.
Neither did the situation in Iraq. I remember discussions with my Iraqi acquaintances back in 2004 – people who had been forced out of Iraq because they had been political activists, who were very keen to see regime change and were very keen to see a western style liberal democracy established. They were all very disappointed with the American – British approach; war was (in their opinion) precisely the wrong way to go about it.
In Solzhenitzyn’s his rant against the West, he seems to be particularly annoyed by the fact that the press is so rubbish. I don’t know which papers he was reading, but I remember the London Times back in 1979 (when he was writing) was a very good newspaper with a high quality of journalism.
The impression I got from his lecture was of somebody who, in order to find out about the society he had moved to, had tuned into, and soaked up, the worst of trash American television – and then he imagines that somehow this is what Western society is like and somehow this reflects Western values. He doesn’t talk about the Western society that I have ever been part of – in the sense of the people whom I meet and talk to in real life.
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Not many of us will argue that it was not a particularly just war, although one could argue it fit the requirements. Iraq, I’ve come to that conclusion as well, but once started, indeed most of the fighting is over, it’s even less moral to run away.
Perhaps the Times was, and up until the last couple of years, I liked the Telegraph myself. But I cannot remember an honest, straightforward, objective paper here, with two rather marginal exceptions, The Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor, and that was in the early seventies, when even the Economist was pretty good.
No, he doesn’t talk about the society I live in either, but he does talk about the society in New York, Washington, and likely Westminster. And that is the trouble, in my view.
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