Forty-five years ago, anti-communist dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn caused a stir at Harvard with a famous commencement speech deploring the decadence of the West. The rivalry of the Cold War was not as neat as it appeared, he said. The liberal West, by making man and his desire for material satisfaction the measure of all things, was becoming a spiritual desert not unlike the Communist world:
One does see the same stones in the foundations of an eroded humanism and of any type of socialism: boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of anti-religious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism’s rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.
The West had become cowardly and ruled over by “legalistic” elites without morality. The erstwhile master of the world was becoming the slave of its former colonies.
Solzhenitsyn’s oracular pronouncements ring even truer today. Western “scientists” fancy themselves miracle workers who are beyond reproach, and they are treated as such by intellectual elites and much of the population. Despite its uncontested material prosperity, the West is so enervated that many are captivated by the prospect of their own destruction. Western nations have welcomed the steady replacement of their peoples and cultures as “progress.” COVID, before it became hysteria, was an entertainment that filled many a void in people’s lives. When an eerie smog enveloped the northeastern United States earlier this month, quite a few got carried away with morbid speculation of a looming apocalypse.
A short-lived “coup” in Russia this weekend was the latest fascination of jaded Westerners.
Overnight, liberals became partisans of a foreign mercenary group headed by Putin’s former chef, who had pledged to march on Moscow. But the feverish anticipation over such a bold venture, unheard of in today’s world, was nonpartisan. An information blackout did not stop Putin’s more passionate critics from declaring his demise. Putin himself, in a speech to the Russian people attacking the “criminals,” compared the attempted “coup” to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. And then, as quickly as it began, it was over without an ounce of blood spilled.
The eventless-ness of the postwar world has taken its toll on the human psyche. In his famous review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell credited Hitler with this psychological insight: human beings want not only to have comfort, pleasure, and security, but occasionally, to experience pain, difficulty, and danger. It is quite natural for the Ukrainians to want the Russians out of their country. What is strange is the West’s ideologization of this object, for which it is prepared to risk everything, even nuclear war. Possibly the West wants to be put out of its misery, without knowing it.
If the world is spared fiery destruction, the alternative is to trudge aimlessly through an endless winter. Western leaders have become hectoring dictators, caught up in endless exhortation. Toward what goal? “Democracy,” they say. “Equity.”
What have been the fruits of these idols? Oppressive ennui, mediocrity, and evils that multiply faster than the human imagination can reckon. The political freedoms once associated with Anglo-American liberalism, such as free speech, are now an illusion, replaced by a purely libertine conception of “freedom.” The blasphemous worship of sexual exotics and racial minorities is enforced by the world’s most powerful government. What could be worse than world war, you ask: How about a 1,000-year-long celebration of sodomy?
Not since the days of the Roman Empire have Christians faced so fearsome and obdurate an enemy.
Solzhenitsyn predicted that a consanguinity between Western liberalism and communism meant the former would inevitably lose to the latter and its undiluted offering of utopia, but the totalitarian evolution of “liberal democracy” since the fall of the Soviets has rendered the distinction meaningless. Western “democracy” has become a powerful force for evil in the world, one that ruthlessly lowers the horizon of man to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Propaganda portraying Putin as the valiant foe of an atheist empire has found sympathy among disaffected Westerners for a reason.
After the “coup” in Russia, the consensus in the Western media is that Putin looks weaker than many imagined, but this is likely a mixture of truth and typical Western self-congratulation. Before rushing to write obituaries for its enemies, Western “democracy” should ask how much time it has left in the sun. It is ultimately a question of whether Western man can be reduced to a brute with no destiny beyond his next meal.