Another Great Critic Gone....

We only achieve a comprehensive understanding of ourselves when we share the thoughts of those outsiders who in some fashion transcend our perspective on our national condition. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one such.

Alexis de Tocqueville detailed the endless, incestuous slide of Democracy toward a total preoccupation with egalitarian minutiæ.

.....and here we are.

Alistair Cooke, although he embraced America enough to become a citizen, roundly criticized what he called our "-love of show."

....ditto

Solzhenitsyn is at least as important as the other two, attacking the West's moral decay forty years ago in his 1978 Harvard commencement address:

"It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. 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. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."

Not to slight the press:

"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.' But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information."

It's popular to characterize such critics as just curmudgeons. In Solzhenitsyn's case, nothing could be further from the truth:

"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. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward."

You tell 'em.