If there is one thing that 2020 has taught me, it is that the real
political and cultural divide in our country is not between Republicans
and Democrats, or even conservatives and liberals, but between
traditionalists and progressives.
At the core of progressivism is not the optimistic American belief
that things are improving and that our children can live better lives
than we did, but the belief that man is a perfectible product of
evolutionary forces. Rather than being made in God’s image and then
fallen, progressives believe we must throw off the shackles and
prejudices of the past in order to move forward to build utopia.
The traditionalist is not against growth and change, but he recognizes, as Edmund Burke did in his Reflections on the Revolution in France,
the danger of trying to remake society and man in the image of a new
ideology that radically redefines such words as truth, justice, and
equality. The progressive has no qualms about running roughshod over the
established beliefs, institutions, and mores of a nation if he can only
achieve his goals. At its most extreme, progressivism can justify to
itself any present-day atrocity as long as it claims to be helping usher
in a future brave new world of absolute egalitarianism.
The genealogy of progressivism runs from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
naïve belief in the noble savage to the bloody social engineering of the
French Revolution to the deterministic dialectical materialism of Karl
Marx, out of which arose the horrors inflicted on their own people by
Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Kim
Jong-Il. According to all these progressive leaders, history was moving
unstoppably toward their worker’s paradise, and anyone who sought to
hinder its arrival—by deed, word, or thought—was backward,
unenlightened, and, to use a cherished word of Marxist elites,
atavistic.
Since the true face of progressivism revealed itself in the French
Revolution, a number of brave critics have risen up to expose its
destructive pretensions and its false view of man. A short list of these
critics includes Burke, Alexis Tocqueville, the authors of the
Federalist Papers, Cardinal John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, T. S.
Eliot, George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, and Pope John Paul II. The critic,
however, who saw and understood the dangers most clearly, partly because
he suffered greatly at the hands of progressivism run amok, was
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The Man, The Writer, The Prophet
Born one year after the Russian Revolution, Solzhenitsyn was raised
as a loyal Soviet and even served as an officer in the army—until he was
arrested in 1945 for saying something negative about Stalin. He spent
eight years in the prison camps of the Gulag.
After
being released, he lived in exile in Kazakhstan, where he taught
physics. He later returned to Russia and published a novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
(1962), which he based on his experiences in the Gulag. Although he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970, when his literary
exposé, The Gulag Archipelago, appeared in the 1970s, he was forced to flee the country, eventually moving to the United States in 1976.
Hailed as a hero of democracy and freedom, Solzhenitsyn was invited
to give the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978. After
sincerely praising American freedom, Solzhenitsyn went on to criticize
Western secularism, rationalism, and materialism. His address lost him
the support of many in the media and academy, but it stands as a bold
witness to the poisonous excesses of the progressivist spirit.
Similarly, when he was awarded the Templeton Prize in England in
1983, his speech, which drew a straight line from godlessness to the
Gulag, caused him to be further labeled as old-fashioned, out of touch,
reactionary, and, yes, atavistic. Solzhenitsyn, ostracized by the
liberal thinkers who had once hailed him as a champion of freedom, lived
the life of a recluse in Vermont until, remarkably, he was allowed to
return to Russia in 1994, where he lived out the remainder of his long
life in peace.
Like Ivan Denisovich, all of Solzhenitsyn’s major novels incorporate autobiographical elements. The three-volume The Gulag Archipelago critiques and exposes both Leninism-Stalinism and Western secular rationalism. Cancer Ward is a profound meditation on death by an author who almost died of cancer.
The First Circle
is a conversation between inmates in a Soviet white-collar prison for
educated scientists, with one of the characters based on the author’s
own younger self as he moved from rationalism to religion. The
four-volume The Red Wheel
is a re-imagining of the Russian Revolution that blends fiction and
non-fiction, historical documents and Solzhenitsyn’s own incisive
analysis of how the “fated” revolution could have been avoided by
different choices on the part of free, volitional individuals.
Thankfully for those who are familiar with Ivan Denisovich
and the Harvard Address but have yet to work up the energy to read his
long, complex, circuitous novels, a collection of essays has appeared
that illuminates the many facets of Solzhenitsyn the man, the writer,
and the prophet.
Edited by David P. Deavel, co-director of the Terence J. Murphy
Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy at the University
of St. Thomas in St. Paul, and Jessica Hooten Wilson, Louise Cowan
Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West
explores Solzhenitsyn’s links to Russian culture, Orthodoxy, politics,
and other Soviet writers, as well as the influence that he and his
fellow Russians have had on twentieth-century American writers. Although
the collection is wide-ranging in its analysis, it’s especially
valuable for illuminating what Solzhenitsyn can teach us about the
dangers of progressivism today.
The Ideological Lie
In the opening essay, “The Universal Russian Soul,” Nathan Nielson, a
graduate of St. John’s College, quotes this passage from Solzhenitsyn’s
1993 speech “The Relentless Cult of Novelty”: “And in one sweeping
gesture of vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained
reality and sought the truth—is dismissed as next to worthless.
Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so it has
once again become fashionable in Russia to ridicule, debunk, and toss
overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and
compassion toward all human beings, and especially toward those who
suffer.”
Needless
to say, the fear Solzhenitsyn prophetically expresses here has been
realized in increasingly shameless attempts by American universities to
ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard our Western heritage as a prelude
to building an egalitarian, multicultural society, despite the fact that
the legacy they want to jettison has provided the sole foundation for
liberal democracy and individual freedom. Solzhenitsyn knew that no
stable future could be built on hatred of the past, since hatred of the
past inevitably leads to hatred of the self, not to mention hatred of
one’s neighbor and one’s society.
The two essays that follow, “The New Middle Ages” and “The Age of
Concentration,” are not analyses of Solzhenitsyn, but reflections by a
modern Russian novelist, Eugene Vodolazkin, who shares Solzhenitsyn’s
spirit and his mistrust of all progressive attempts to build a perfect
society.
“It is wrong to think of utopias as harmless dreams,” he warns.
“Combined with the idea of progress, utopian thought is a dream that
motivates action. It establishes a goal so lofty that it cannot be
reached. The more ideal it becomes, the greater the stubbornness with
which it is pursued. There comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of
blood.” In one way or another, all of Solzhenitsyn’s novels work out
just that terrifying cause and effect, ripping away the façade of
humanitarianism or revolutionary consciousness or classless equality to
reveal the beast within.
In that vein, David Walsh, professor of politics at Catholic University, locates in The Red Wheel
a central struggle “between those who seek to remake Russia in
accordance with their own idea of it and those who seek to submit to the
idea of Russia as itself the guiding principle of their action. It is
the difference between ideology and truth. The protagonists of ideology
are driven by the conviction of the superiority of their conception to
all that has existed. The servants of truth subordinate themselves to
what is required to bring what is already there more fully into
existence.”
What is at issue here is not only the destructive nature of
ends-justifies-the-means thinking, but the anti-humanistic arrogance
that invests Marxist ideology (dialectical materialism, economic
determinism, identity politics) with a sacred imprimatur for radically
remaking society.
In his analysis of The Gulag Archipelago, Gary Saul Morson,
Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern
University, considers a question that Solzhenitsyn asks himself: Why do
Shakespeare’s greatest villains kill only a few people while Lenin and
Stalin killed millions?
The reason, Morson explains, “is that Macbeth and Iago ‘had no
ideology.’ Real people do not resemble the evildoers of mass culture,
who delight in cruelty and destruction. No, to do mass evil you have to
believe it is good, and it is ideology that supplies this
conviction.” All of us are capable of small, independent evil acts, but
progressivism, by allowing governments to submerge their moral qualms
beneath a sea of ideology, unleashes that evil on all of society.
Joseph Pearce, who interviewed Solzhenitsyn in Russia in 1998 and
wrote an excellent biography, teases out Solzhenitsyn’s
anti-progressivism by contrasting him with Leo Tolstoy. Unlike Tolstoy,
Pearce argues, “Solzhenitsyn laments the modern ‘belief in eternal,
infinite progress which has practically become a religion,’ adding that
such progressivism was ‘a mistake of the eighteenth century, of the
Enlightenment era.’ Technological progress in the service of
philosophical materialism was not true progress at all but, on the
contrary, was a threat to civilization.” In his novels, Solzhenitsyn
drives these points home, not by offering philosophical disquisitions,
but by incarnating these ideas in the lives of flesh-and-blood
characters.
James F. Pontuso, Patterson Professor of Political Science at Hampden-Sydney College, offers an example of this incarnation. In The First Circle,
writes Pontuso, “Solzhenitsyn captivatingly captures the allure of
ideology in the character of Lev Rubin. Despite all evidence to the
contrary, including his own undeserved arrest and imprisonment, Rubin is
devoted totally and insensibly to the Communist cause. . . . Rubin
fails to acknowledge what he experiences; instead he accepts what he
chooses to believe. For him every crime committed in the present is
justified by the glorious future of peace, prosperity, and universal
brotherhood that Marx’s principles purport to bring about.”
Such is the power of Marx’s progressive ideology that Rubin discounts
his personal experience. If such self-deception in the name of ideology
sounds unbelievable, just think of the American politicians and media
people who, during the summer of 2020, watched businesses being looted and burned but could only see
peaceful protests in the name of racial justice and economic equity.
They are those who not only live and propagate the lie, but who come to
believe it themselves.
Perhaps the best summation of what Solzhenitsyn can teach us about
the dangers of progressivism is found in a reconsideration of The Gulag Archipelago
by Solzhenitsyn scholar Daniel J. Mahoney. “Central to Solzhenitsyn’s
moral and political vision,” he explains, “is the nonnegotiable
distinction between truth and falsehood. Solzhenitsyn’s target was
precisely the ideological Lie that presented evildoing as a historically
necessary stage in the fated ‘progress’ of the human race. He
always asserted that the ideological Lie was worse than violence and
physical brutality, ultimately more destructive of the integrity of the
human soul.”
I can think of no better analysis of the true legacy of 2020: Not the
Coronavirus itself, but the way it was used to justify the illegal
power grabs of bureaucratic, progressivist elites; not the riots
themselves, but the lie they were justified by (that America is riddled
with systemic racism); not the attacks on Donald Trump per se, but the
fact that his enemies in the government, media, and big corporations
were willing to tell any lie to take him down.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/29/alexander-solzhenitsyn-takes-on-the-progressives/
