a world split apart by alexander solzhenitsyn summary
0000002476 00000 n State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. And what shall we say about the dark realm of criminality as such? 0000032918 00000 n Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. �LB��_A�}WPy�[ۂ)A���7Ԕ�[��9����e=S��IE��DG�+5͏��ҝ��ʌ�-`,;"��gA�z$� $I�� ��v��Ś��Lu������tN¨3�����H|�&b����M\�;ܖ��ũ�̝$4��@p�M�l-�{^d(������A\� �������~\�p�~����.L��P�}B���U�fX��n!6e��W,�B�ND�Ͳ٤����c>���j�*� But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. The real picture of our planet's development is quite different. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A World Split Apart Study Guide. A World Split Apart… On July 18, 2014 By David McDowell In Culture, Uncategorized. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. 0000003454 00000 n The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. (I shall be using the word press to include all media). But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. 0000003052 00000 n 0000001113 00000 n Not by coincidence all of communism's meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. 0000027448 00000 n 210 39 0000004322 00000 n Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end? It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world a way to successful economic development, even though in the past years it has been strongly disturbed by chaotic inflation. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity; neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Or do they prefer not to hear? It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment and there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Learn. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. The individual's independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leading them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. The split to which Solzhenitsyn’s title refers isn’t the split between the Soviet Union and what was once known as the Free World. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness. %PDF-1.4 %���� On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria. Rather, it is to humanity as a whole, which is not, and never will be, a unified group, much less one unified around Western, that is, … If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? Spell. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. It will shortly be published in English in the United States. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. 0000025815 00000 n A World Split Apart by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. So who should now renounce all this, why and for what should one risk one's precious life in defense of common values, and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country? PART II: A World Split Wider Apart: Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Speech Twenty-four Years Later by David Aikman, Author & Speaker PROFILES IN FAITH any people were offended by [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address at Har-vard, June 8, 1978]. There are meaningful warnings that history gives a threatened or perishing society. 210 0 obj <> endobj But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. 0000027149 00000 n How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I (1978), A World Split Apart (commencement address to the graduating class), Harvard University: OrthodoxyToday.org Vermont Recluse Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Der Spiegel interviews Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'I Am Not Afraid of Death' , 23 July 2007 Today, however, many people agree with what I then said... A World Split Apartby Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is. It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and, in fact, it has been drastically weakened in all Western countries. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A World Split Apart (1978) Solzhenitsyn’s June 8, 1978, commencement address at Harvard was the most controversial and commented-upon public speech he delivered during his twenty-year exile in the West, for he critiqued the spiritual crisis of both East and West. (There is a huge number of prisoners in our camps which are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state resorting to means outside of a legal framework). Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance. How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development. STUDY. endstream endobj 211 0 obj<. Match. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. startxref If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East where the press is rigorously unified: one gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model. The American Intelligentsia lost its [nerve] and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend. He titled his speech "A World Split Apart," but it could as well have been called "The Decline of the West." Legal frames (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists. Russian exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in Washington, D.C., on June 30, delivered a dramatic warning to all the world – and to Americans in particular. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; there are thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics around him, parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. 0000027219 00000 n However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political concep tion, to the illusion that danger may be A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it. 0000000016 00000 n Is it true that man is above everything? How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. I have received letters in America 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 his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. 0000007974 00000 n Any of our contemporaries can readily identify two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. 0000005594 00000 n The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. Publication Date. x�bbg`b``Ń3� �1@� �� That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. I have had occasion already to say that in the 20th century democracy has not won any major war without help and protection from a powerful continental ally whose philosophy and ideology it did not question. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a trailblazer who went against his country’s Communist way of life, presented an interesting viewpoint of Western society in his essay entitled “A World Split Apart.” This writing outlined the divisions of the world, and offered critiques necessary to increase harmony, peace, and effective politics across the globe. A World Split Apart By Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn (Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University, June 8, 1978) Solzhenitsyn's warning of Western decline is as relevant today as it was twenty-five years ago. Solzhenitsyn spoke against a backdrop of social malaise in the West that was fast devolving into a wave of social decay. It may be that in the past years Japan has increasingly become a distant part of the West, I am no judge here; but as to Israel, for instance, it seems to me that it stands apart from the Western world in that its state system is fundamentally linked to religion. I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. ", Source: Texts of Famous Speeches at HarvardRe-formatted in HTML by The Augustine Club at Columbia University, 1997, Video: Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address, Book: Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses, Six Later Reflections. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2014 Kenneth Ellman Reviews “A World Split Apart”, Solzhenitsyn and America, Harvard University Commencement Address 1978, From [email protected], Box 18, Newton, New Jersey 07860. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. These deep manifold splits bear the danger of equally manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom – in this case, our Earth – divided against itself cannot stand. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 argued and presented critical analogy of today reality , however, contended that “Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The two so-called world wars (they were by far not on a world scale, not yet) have meant internal self-destruction of the small, progressive West which has thus prepared its own end. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. There are open and evident warnings, too. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones. Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost, there should be no changes. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of Communism and helped to raise global awareness of Soviet war crimes, human rights abuses, and the Gulag concentration camp system. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. Solzhenitsyn begins by indicating that he intends to impart truth upon his audience, though it may be bitter, insisting “that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend” (1). What sort of responsibility does a journalist have to his readers, or to history? The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. 0000008685 00000 n In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. Kennan's advice to his own country -- to begin unilateral disarmament -- belongs to the same category. 0000032680 00000 n 0 Three years ago in the United States I said certain things which at that time appeared unacceptable. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address was the most controversial and commented-upon public speech he delivered during his exile in the West, for he critiqued the spiritual crisis of both East and West. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West in our days, such as I see them. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists. If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world's rifts I would have concentrated on the East's calamities. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. 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 by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music. When the modern Western States were created, the following principle was proclaimed: governments are meant to serve man, and man lives to be free to pursue happiness. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information. I have mentioned a few trends of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand. Learn alexander solzhenitsyn with free interactive flashcards. But I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the world. 0000006782 00000 n 0000002342 00000 n Actually an outstanding and particularly gifted person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind hardly gets a chance to assert himself; from the very beginning, dozens of traps will be set out for him. But there is no awareness of this. There are many such cases. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious, and this in turn points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a review, to look into the influence of these Western characteristics on important aspects on [the] nation's life, such as elementary education, advanced education in [?...]. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. Start studying a world split apart- alexander solzhenitsyn. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism. Practical or occasional considerations of any kind will inevitably be swept away by strategy. by Alexander Solzhenitsyn The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Last week I mentioned that on June 8, 1978, a Nobel Prize winning author stood before Harvard’s graduating class and gave a speech that both offended and fascinated our nation. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity? Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. However, 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. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. I am sincerely happy to be here with you on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and illustrious university. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. It stops at sensational formulas. Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those produced by standardized Western well-being. ------------------------------------------------------------------------, [1] The Old Square in Moscow (Staraya Ploshchad') is the place where the [headquarters] of the Central Committee of the CPSU are located; it is the real name of what in the West is conventionally referred to as "the Kremlin. 0000010280 00000 n Solzhenitsyn introduces the motif of a split in the very first paragraph and notes the various worlds that are divided from one another. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. The speech, “A World Split Apart” created a firestorm of controversy, warning the West of its spiritual emptiness and blindness. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." Gravity. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. 0000005020 00000 n This is commentary on "A World Split Apart" along with extensive excerpts from the original speech. In today's Western society, the inequality has been revealed of freedom for good deeds and freedom for evil deeds. 0000004211 00000 n The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them capable of entirely destroy ing the other. As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. 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. Terms in this set (8) What is the point of A World Split Apart? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? 2009. Flashcards. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Article. Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. President Carter snubbed him, his wife Rosalyn repudiated the speech at the National Press Club, and there were editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, which railed against the speech. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the morally inferior sense which has come into being during those same decades. Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? Maybe the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. 0000026896 00000 n Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? In 1974, the United States granted him asylum, so he had four years to reflect upon the state of American society and culture by the time he spoke at Harvard.In June 1978, the Cold War was still in full swing despite arms control talks and work towards a détente with the Soviet Union. No, it does not happen, because it would damage sales. First of all, it is again a doomed alliance with Evil; also, it would grant the United States a respite, but when at a later date China with its billion people would turn around armed with American weapons, America itself would fall prey to a genocide similar to the one perpetrated in Cambodia in our days. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. (See, for example, the American Declaration). Is there no Superior Spirit above him? In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom it... Itself against the corrosion of evil independence and power always gets away with it press to all... Simulate public opinion and miseducate it published in France almost two years ago and so far no one earth... Only be broken by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically film must be at the,! Man is born to die, his task on earth has any way! No one has been realized, I could not recommend your society in its present as! Of which in our days so that Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that `` is... Are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to be part of freedom for evil deeds onto. 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