Ascent: Solzhenitsyn’s balancing act
By Benedict Wright
It is hard for me to imagine providing a fresh take on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Undoubtedly, his over half-century in public consciousness has seen innumerable reactions to his work ranging from admiration to indignation. Nevertheless, an author and critic of Solzhenitsyn’s importance and heterodoxy still calls for consideration. In the American context, Solzhenitsyn’s thought is especially useful for understanding a particular strain of thinking on the religious right, and he remains a touchstone for a certain kind of conservative intellectual. It is my hope here to use Solzhenitsyn as an inroad to expound and critique what I view as a well-intentioned but misguided intellectual position. Interested readers can listen this essay’s accompanying podcast here.
I. Introduction
Solzhenitsyn titled his memoir recounting his first years in exile from the Soviet Union Between Two Millstones, an apparent reference to the ostensibly opposite forces of communism and capitalism. I say ostensibly opposite since these two ideological millstones appeared to Solzhenitsyn to be in fact twin symptoms of a disease afflicting modern civilization. Experiencing firsthand the brutal absurdities of the Soviet system, Solzhenitsyn meticulously documented and condemned the actions of the U.S.S.R.—most notably in his magnum opus of non-fiction The Gulag Archipelago published in 1973. Later that decade he was exiled from Russia ultimately arriving in the United States.
In exile, Solzhenitsyn did not experience the west as a breath of fresh air nor hear in liberalism the chimes of freedom ringing. On the contrary, he observed a vapid, weak, and sclerotic society that shared many of the flaws of Soviet communism. In a series of speeches—the most famous of which was his 1978 Harvard commencement address—Solzhenitsyn articulated a sweeping critique of modernity that spared neither authoritarian communism nor liberal democracy. Both societies, he thought, had fallen prey to a humanist materialism that believed in the power of human law (and human law alone) to create a more peaceful and just world. With values rooted in utilitarian consequentialism (emphasizing results over virtues and ends over means), western civilization was on a path of technological destruction and moral decay. “Having established man—with all his shortcomings and greed—as the highest measure of all things, and having given ourselves over to the Material” said Solzhenitsyn in 1974, “…we have now clogged up the works amidst profuse pollution.” This pollution was both physical, a byproduct of insatiable gluttony and waste, and spiritual, the consequence of a human experience robbed of “a concentrated inner life.” For all their claims of equality and prosperity both socialism and liberalism were afflicted by a moral weakness making them powerless to withstand the tyrannies of wickedness and greed.
At bottom, the fatal mistake of modernity, for Solzhenitsyn, was abandoning a religious conception of the world and of human beings. And this mistake had rendered all subsequent political projects futile and perverse. This view is perhaps most clearly expressed in Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 speech accepting the Templeton Prize for Progress and Religion. In that speech he plainly asserts that the calamities of the 20th century are the result of a world devoid of faith in a higher power or belief in the sanctity of the human person. He says, “The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.” Soviet communism, with its explicit atheism, is the most egregious and obvious example of this fact for Solzhenitsyn. However, the supposedly free world is similarly driven by atheistic ideologies of materialism, consumerism, secularism, and legalism.
That last -ism, legalism, is critical for Solzhenitsyn and his particular objection to the modern project. Secular legalism, as Solzhenitsyn understood it, was the modern attempt to make law the supreme arbiter of morality. No longer deferring to virtue or considering the common good, people under legalism are cut off from their natural obligations to others. Instead, the law and legal relationships are meant to supersede those values and obligations in the name of fairness, individual rights, and judicial automaticity. To Solzhenitsyn, this is a raw deal. He declared in his Harvard commencement speech, “The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. When the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.”
Under secular legalism, injustice is no longer a question of personal choice or individual sin; rather, it becomes something systemic and political—a technical problem requiring a technical solution. Framed in this way, Solzhenitsyn argues, the human condition no longer contains an element of tragedy or admits of anything resembling original sin. It is on this point that Solzhenitsyn deploys an instance of what Albert Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction termed the perversity thesis (a characteristically conservative critique of a given political project): lacking a religious understanding of the human person, the modern legalistic project is doomed to fail at its expressed aims of creating a more just and prosperous world. And what is more, the outcomes have actually been profoundly damaging, a fact Solzhenitsyn thinks is apparent to anyone with eyes to see it. Modernity may have produced materially comfortable people, but they are “men without chests” as C.S. Lewis would say. Without a conception of human beings as moral actors with the freedom to make good and bad choices, the modern person is left weak, dehumanized, unaccountable, irresponsible, and in no position to actually better themselves or the world.
According to Solzhenitsyn, the humanist legal endeavor was predicated on hubris, forgetting the classical and religious assumption of the tragic fallibility of human beings and their political aims. For Christians, including Solzhenitsyn after his conversion in the 1950s, the tragedy of human political history can only be resolved through the intervention of God, and it will never be fully resolved in this life. Only after human history has played itself out will the hope instilled by the resurrection be ultimately vindicated. Christ says, after all, that his kingdom is not of this world. This notion of a perfect divine history distinct from a tragic human history is tied to an understanding of human beings as free and fallible creatures—an understanding that Solzhenitsyn thinks is anathema to the modern humanistic view. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn says that his time in the Gulag showed him that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.” He goes on to say,
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil form the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more. (my underline, italics in original)
Solzhenitsyn leaves unstated what kind of means—cultural or political—ought to be used “to constrict [the evil] within each person.” This is a notable silence that I will revisit shortly.
II. Going back?
Solzhenitsyn often said that in objecting to modern humanism and secular legalism he was not advocating for a return to the middle ages or some premodern theocracy. And in fact, he viewed the modern rejection of the middle ages as understandable, if not warranted. He claimed that “the turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal.” In his Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn rebuffed the label of conservatism, claiming that he was in fact advocating for (though never quite defining) an ascension beyond both the status quo of materialism and the excessive spiritualism that preceded it.
However, I argue that Solzhenitsyn, while not explicitly a nostalgic or conservative thinker, made a case that can be accurately described as reactionary. Or at the very least, his ideas can be easily utilized in the name of reaction and the maintenance of social hierarchy. Solzhenitsyn’s kind of conservatism hangs on a wager that somewhere between rule by law and rule by divine right lies a truly rational way of governing. This bet relies on the hope that human beings can change, can choose good, and are even inclined to do so. Yet at the same time, that ability can be halted right at the point of hubris, at the point of taking man as the measure of things. There is a tenuous distinction between a hope for social improvement and the “falsehood of all the revolutions in history.” Such a view apparently hangs together because of the introduction of the divine. It is supernatural aid which, if given the proper say, can build and orient the political realm just so. Bent on internal coherence, this ideology can point to any past failure to strike the balance and say it was too much of the world—that it was corrupted by human frailty and the temptations of the material. No historical example, be it the Inquisition, the French Wars of Religion, or the horrors of colonization, can undermine a belief in the possibility of a stable theological-political equilibrium. Yet paradoxically, achieving that equilibrium in this world turns out to not be the goal or even really possible. After all, this view holds, humanity using the blunt instruments of politics cannot achieve the kingdom of God in this life. And so, in one moment Solzhenitsyn’s view posits a kind of meliorism. And the next moment it quickly decries the perversity of the whole situation.
It is possible to see this balancing act in strains of the religious right today. The illiberal or post-liberal conservative movement (with which I identify the likes of Sohrab Ahmari and to a lesser extent Rod Dreher and Patrick Deneen) draws on the view that the political sphere is a critical battle ground, yet traditional politics are at the same time perverse and in need of super-political anchoring. In a 2019 First Things essay, Ahmari offers some advice to a post-fusionist right:
We need to restore the balance between liberty and responsibility, between personal freedom and an awareness of what freedom is for.
Populist and conservative-nationalist movements on both sides of the Atlantic are testing out a new politics of this kind, however inchoately or imperfectly. In the present moment, the new right’s most urgent priority is to resist efforts by liberals, both progressive and conservative, to oppose by underhanded procedural means the desire voters are expressing for a politics of the common good. In the long term, however, restoring Western freedom requires us to shore up a moral culture capable of inspiring a sense of responsibility, to rebind liberty to legitimate authority, to return the individual to his place as a member of the political community.
In this effort, we do well to remind our fellow citizens of the most fundamental limit of all: Man is made for more than this world, and his final destiny is in the hands of the Almighty.
Despite his overture to the “desire voters are expressing,” it is clear that Ahmari does not think authority comes from democracy (from the will of fallible human beings). Instead, it comes from above—that “legitimate authority” of the divine. Mimicking Solzhenitsyn’s balancing act, Ahmari gestures toward the importance of the “political community” but also maintains its “fundamental limit.”
III. A Reply
I find the position articulated by Solzhenitsyn and picked up by Ahmari to be limited at best and downright dangerous at worst. In my view, Solzhenitsyn is too quick to condemn liberal democracy, and he maintains some untenable tensions. What is more, I think he opens the door to barbaric opportunism and unsavory reactionary politics.
On the mild end of the spectrum, Solzhenitsyn presents liberalism and secular legalism in a sweeping straw-man fashion. He readily ignores the nuances and self-criticism that proponents of the modern liberal project have engaged in over centuries. To read Solzhenitsyn, one would think that the western intellectual landscape since the 1500’s has been an unexamined worship of materialism and individualism. One instance of nuance that I often turn to (although I can’t really blame Solzhenitsyn if he never encountered it) is the liberal idea developed by American Pragmatism and fully articulated by John Dewey. Rejecting both individualism and laissez faire capitalism, Dewey presented a view of liberalism that acknowledged the frailty of individual people yet maintained a hope in the cooperative potential of human beings working together. Forged in the progressive era, Dewey’s ideas grew out of a time when it was clear that political movements could combat entrenched hierarchies and pass laws oriented to the public good. Dewey consciously rejected utopian thinking and understood that the political realm could improve but could never perfect the human social situation. He maintained the core insight of liberalism (the insight that post-liberals seem to reject) that the state or public sphere is not meant to provide meaning or spiritual mooring for people. Instead, it is meant to ensure an environment where people can seek meaning and build culture for themselves. While Solzhenitsyn would have his own set of issues with Dewey and Pragmatism, this example surely complicates the black and white picture of liberalism that Solzhenitsyn tries to present.
Beyond containing an oversimplification of intellectual history, Solzhenitsyn’s critique is earnest but not entirely convincing. While many of his qualms with the modern world ring true to me, his proposals are vague and incomplete. Furthermore, the theological-political balancing act I described earlier is a feat of mental gymnastics that leaves me unconvinced and unsatisfied. Even if it were possible to establish a proper equilibrium—"between personal freedom and an awareness of what freedom is for” as Ahmari would say—it seems like it would be exceedingly difficult and all together unlikely. Looking to history, it seems far more likely that the guise of spiritual-but-not-theocratic would be used for the all too human ends we know so well: domination, hierarchy, and control.
That brings me to my strongest objection to Solzhenitsyn’s case. Despite his noble intentions, his political perspective can easily be put to the ends of pure reaction and rank opportunism. Indeed, as I see it, Solzhenitsyn lays out a shapeshifting political tool that in one moment can resist all social change citing the futile and perverse nature of human-founded politics, and yet in the next moment can defend its own political project in the name of the common good or divine authority. Again, history leaves me skeptical that such a tool could be benign. Rejecting legalism in favor higher ends may sound appealing—and of course legalism is not perfect. However, the alternative is just as scary if not scarier. Liberal democracy cannot produce utopia (it was never meant to), but at least it is designed to experiment, change course, and hopefully improve. It may lack the noble or aesthetic air of the society that Solzhenitsyn imagines, but I think that may be a compromise worth making. In a recent essay in Commonweal, critic George Scialabba employs Richard Rorty to advocate for this kind of compromise: “Criticisms of mass society and mass man swelled to a roar in the twentieth century: Durkheim, Spengler, Schmitt, Ortega, Lippmann, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, MacIntyre, Bloom, and many, many others.” I would count Solzhenitsyn among those many others. Scialabba continues,
Most of these criticisms I reject, not for their often-powerful diagnoses but for the illiberal prescriptions that usually accompany them. I agree with Richard Rorty’s admirably forthright solution to the supposed dilemma of democratic mediocrity: to wit, “even if the typical character types of liberal democracies are bland, calculating, petty, and unheroic, the prevalence of such people may be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom.” We can and should separate the private from the public, self-creation from tolerance, the pursuit of perfection from democratic politics.
Solzhenitsyn’s ideas are worth taking seriously. Some of his criticisms are compelling. But his alternatives should leave us wary if not afraid.