As the KGB fumed at his efforts on behalf of imprisoned dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was preparing a speech that would incur the wrath of the world’s other superpower. On June 8, he delivered the commencement address at Harvard University, during which he condemned the Western world as being morally bankrupt. “It is time, in the West,” he said, “to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.” The triumph of rights over obligations had resulted in a destructive and irresponsible freedom, leading to “the abyss of human decadence”. He cited the “misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror”, which illustrated the inability of the West to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.8
Solzhenitsyn singled out the media for particular scorn, criticizing the press for its shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people so that its readers were having “their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk”. Having been misrepresented on numerous occasions himself, he seemed to relish the opportunity to strike back against media distortion: “Hastiness and superficiality—these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.” The media, he maintained, had become “the greatest power within the Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary”. Yet its power was deeply undemocratic: “According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?”9
Having vented his spleen on the media, he turned his critical attention to the West as a whole, stating that Russia could not look to the West as a model to emulate.
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…. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.10
These glittering trinkets of trash-technology were the ephemeral effects of a materialist philosophy born out of the anticlerical impatience of the Renaissance: “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 proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the centre of all.”11 This was a development of the view he had endeavored to convey at the press conference in Spain. By turning its back on the scholastic philosophers and enthroning itself as the highest authority and judge in the universe, mankind had sown the seeds of its own malaise:
The humanistic way of thinking, which has 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 worshipping man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler 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.12
The results of such humanism were evident for all to see. The world was in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse, so that all the celebrated technological achievements of progress could not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty.
Solzhenitsyn then expounded the philosophy of sacrifice and self-limitation he had learned in the labor camps. If, as claimed by the humanists, man’s only purpose was to be happy, he would not have been born to die. “Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spirituaclass="underline" not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption.” On the contrary, the purpose of life must be linked to the fulfillment of a higher duty “so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it”.13
Perhaps the most memorable observation of any of the ten to fifteen thousand people who endured the drizzly rain to hear Solzhenitsyn speak was made by Richard Pipes, professor of history at Harvard University and former director of its Russian Research Center: “We had heard a devastating attack on the contemporary West—for its loss of courage, its self-indulgence, its self-deception. It was as if the speaker, a refugee from hell, had excoriated us, denizens of purgatory, for not living in paradise.”14
Solzhenitsyn’s speech sparked a storm of protest in the media. The Washington Post on June 11 accused him of grossly misunderstanding Western society, while the New York Times two days later believed that “Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s world view seems to us far more dangerous than the easy-going spirit which he finds so exasperating…. Life in a society run by zealots like Mr. Solzhenitsyn is bound to be uncomfortable for those who do not share his vision or ascribe to his beliefs.”15 On June 20, Rosalynn Carter, the US President’s wife, attacked Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech during a speech of her own, at the National Press Club in Washington, claiming that there was “no unchecked materialism” in the United States.16
As of old, there were a few friendly voices straining to be heard above the general discordant din of Solzhenitsyn’s growing army of foes. George F. Will, a syndicated writer with the Washington Post, compared Solzhenitsyn to an Old Testament prophet who allowed no rest and who stirred a reaction that revealed the complacency of society. Will accused Solzhenitsyn’s critics of intellectual parochialism, suggesting that “the spacious skepticism of the New York Times extends to all values except its own”.17 Compared with the narrow-minded parochialism of his critics, Solzhenitsyn’s arguments were, Will observed, broadly congruent with the ideas of Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Thomas More, and Edmund Burke. Perhaps the New York Times would have dismissed these eminent thinkers as zealots like Mr. Solzhenitsyn who had nothing of importance to say to the modern world.
The controversy surrounding the Harvard address dragged on for several weeks, crossing the Atlantic on July 26, when The Times decided to print the entire text of Solzhenitsyn’s speech. Several letters were published in response, most of which seemed singularly to have missed the point. Only one, from a Mr. R. J. Berney of Norfolk, appeared to appreciate “its depth and clarity of vision of our, the Western world’s, ‘easy, easy’ extinction of the human spirit”. It was a speech of penetration which illuminated the real challenge, real life, real hope. Mr. Berney contrasted Solzhenitsyn’s address with a speech by the British Prime Minister James Callaghan, which had been printed in The Times on the same day. Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s prescient warnings, Callaghan’s speech “woos us still further into the cosy hold of that funeral conveyance, the modern Western democratic state, in whose death throes we feel no pain, just nothing”.18