For his part, Solzhenitsyn declined reporters’ questions about Russia’s current plight, an indication of his own disillusionment with the political establishment and his desire to concentrate on higher themes and aspirations. As he approached his eightieth birthday, he was more inwardly convinced than ever that politics was not enough. In his own work, he maintained that the spiritual or philosophical dimension was more important than the political.
First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position. It is defined by the current moment in time and the environment….
I must say that, among educated people, politics occupies far too great a proportion of time. All the periodicals, all the newspapers are saturated with politics, although many of the objects they are discussing are very transient and short term. Of course, everywhere in the world people do occupy themselves with higher themes, and not just writers, but they always have a narrow audience, sometimes even appear to be some strange group on the edge of things, peripheral. In truth, questions of higher spirit cannot even be compared to the sort of blinking frivolity of politics. The ultimate problems of life and death show the colossal nature of this difference even more. Modern mankind is characterized precisely by the loss of the ability to answer the principal problems of life and death. People are prepared to stuff their heads with anything, and to talk of any subject, but only to block off the contemplation of this subject. This is the reason for the increasing pettiness of our society, the concentration on the small and irrelevant.3
In fact, he maintained, it is the overemphasis on politics to the detriment of mankind’s grasp of spiritual or philosophical truth, that is at the heart of the modern dilemma. “Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the process loses his soul.”4
He then reiterated the theme at the center of his address to the International Academy of Philosophy five years earlier:
That which is called humanism, but which would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of life. Certainly it is hard to answer these questions for all, but for this irreligious anthropocentrism, this humanism, it is most difficult of all to answer such questions. We have arrived at an intellectual chaos, a crisis of the Weltanschauung. Not all understand this crisis, not all grasp its importance.
One example of this lack of grasp, Solzhenitsyn suggested, was the way that he is often accused of being a prophet of “doom and gloom”.
This is a consequence of the fact that people don’t read, they just glance through. For instance, let me give you another example: The Gulag Archipelago. There are horrific stories in there, but throughout that book, through it all, there comes through a spirit of catharsis. In Russia in Collapse, I have not painted the dark reality in rose-tinted shades, but I do include a clear way, a search for something brighter, some way out—most importantly in the spiritual sense, because I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians—so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read. It is an example of that hurriedness, that rushing quickly about. The current world is characterized by this hurriedness of glance, by this too hurried a glance, which is linked to this attempt to live everything as fast as possible.
Although Solzhenitsyn insists that politics must be subjugated to the higher goals of life, it is nevertheless true that he remains critical of both communism and consumerism. His criticisms, however, have spiritual, as opposed to political, roots:
In different places over the years, I have had to prove that socialism, which to many Western thinkers was seen as a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as “we include all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology”. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion.
Yet if Bolshevism was a bully, capitalism was a cad. Whereas the former crushed the human spirit, the latter corrupted it with comforts and, as such, was equally insidious. To illustrate the point, Solzhenitsyn stated that he would like to begin not with himself but with Pope John Paul II. “He simply said that the third totalitarianism is coming, the absolute power of money, ‘the inhuman love of the accumulation of capital for capital’s sake’…. I would summarize as follows: Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.”
In essence, he said, both systems have common materialistic roots and are therefore, of necessity, at loggerheads with Christianity. They are in opposition to the Christian position because they exist on totally different planes, on different levels. Neither system can “tolerate Christian commandments; they do not concern themselves with the spiritual sphere; they reject the spiritual sphere…. It is simply a life lived in a different dimension; the dimensions are separate.” Consequently, those Christians who succumb to the lure of materialism may understand Christianity, “but they don’t accept it with their soul”.
The hedonism inherent in a materialist view of life is an important component in the rise of consumerism and liberal morality. Another component is legalism, the juridical.
Current modernity boasts of the fact that everything is in accordance with “the law”. In modern society, if one is correct from the legal point of view, then no one will demand of him or her a higher level of moral action. A famous statement of modernity is “that which is not prohibited by law is permitted”, which is a rejection of applying a moral valuation to action. In truth, the legal measure, the juridical way of measuring, is lower than the ethical. It is the atmosphere of spiritual or soul-connected mediocrity. In the foundations of current Western morality, we have both hedonism and legalism.
In biblical terms, this juridical approach would be called pharisaical, and it has become the foundation upon which selfishness, the lowest common denominator of mankind, has been established in law as the highest common factor of modern morality. The moral essence of humanity has been forgotten, “so that now for the past few decades the most fashionable slogan is human rights”.
But human obligations, human duties, people forget. You cannot have rights without obligations. They must be in balance, if indeed obligations are not to be greater. Just as it is impossible to say to myself that I will breathe with my left lung, but I will not breathe with my right—they both need to work together—in such a way, duty and… right must go together. Our situation has become so twisted that we now even have the expression that there is an ideology of human rights. And what is that? That is anarchism, known for a long time, and so we are moving toward this anarchism.