What's Tony Thinking

Life Harder? A Voice from the Past

Thank you to the many of you who responded to my question, “Is Life Harder Now?” in my last blog. I will be sharing some of your insights later this week. And its not too late if you want to put your oar in the water on that one and share with me your thoughts on “Is Life Harder Now?”

In the meantime, a voice from the recent past, that of Alexandra Solzhenitsyn, may have something to say to us and to the “is life harder now” question. On Sundays, Douglas Murray, editor of the British journal The Spectator does a column for The Free Press titled “Things Worth Remembering.”

This week he recalled Solzhenitsyn’s famous Harvard commencement address of 1978. As Murray notes the audience expected the exiled author, recently immigrated to the U.S., to hail his new home and its wonders, while continuing to excoriate the Soviet Union. Instead, and to the discomfort of many, Solzhenitsyn trained his Jeremiah-like critical faculties on the U.S. itself.

Then and now, I found Solzhenitsyn’s remarks quite moving. Also quite challenging. As Murray points out, Solzhenitsyn  anticipated a good deal about our current situation. His voice is also, in the contemporary context, a strange one. Why “strange”? Because Solzhenitsyn was uncompromising in asking more of human beings than an insistence on their own rights and comfort. He had no space at all for our culture of complaint and never-ending grievance.

In reference to our question, “Is Life Harder Now?” one suspects Solzhenitsyn would scoff and dismiss our complaints  as an indication of our self-absorption. Here are some excerpts from Murray’s column. I encourage you to read the whole piece. Murray writes,

“The speech was titled ‘A World Split Apart,’ and, to say the least, it did not meet with universal praise. Many of the Americans who heard it thought Solzhenitsyn’s assessment of contemporary America inadequate, off-kilter—ungrateful. But what was he to do? He was in the business of telling the truth and nothing else.

“Some of his criticisms of life in the West came from a distinctly Russian place—for example, the absence of deep faith. ‘The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer,’ . . .

“He was coruscating when it came to the ‘legalism’ that had eclipsed the old culture of virtue in Western society. And he was equally coruscating when railing against what we would now call groupthink.

“’Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges,’ he said.

“How embarrassing,” observes Murray, “to have been an American—a soon-to-be graduate of the nation’s most prestigious university, or, better yet, an esteemed professor or dean at that university—and to be forced to listen to a Soviet exile, a man who could not even speak to his audience in English, lecture them about their many shortcomings. (Those criticisms probably wouldn’t have stung had they not been so true.)

“Perhaps most memorable was what Solzhenitsyn said about the West’s “decline in courage.” It was a moment worthy of Pericles . . .  In his speech, Solzhenitsyn implored his audience to reclaim their strength, their courage, to recall that they were here not to live comfortably—not to succumb to ‘the cult of material well-being.’

“Western thinking has become conservative,” he declared. “The world situation must stay as it is at any cost; there must be no changes.” The God revealed in the Bible and in Jesus Christ delights, of course, in upsetting such status quo, nothing changes, arrangements.

It is impossible for me to imagine either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, or most any other contemporary political leader, suggesting that our comfort and our personal/ group rights aren’t the be-all and end-all.

Solzhenitsyn suggests a quite different way of coming at the “Is Life Harder Now?” question. Maybe life today — in the West — is harder not because of material privation or the suffering inevitable in mortal existence, but because they’re no larger framework of meaning or transcendent purpose? Human being are meaning seeking creatures, but our sources of moral and spiritual meaning are neglected and forgotten.

Too many live without a sense of vocation, of a call from God upon our their lives. The Christian answer to life’s meaning has never been forgiveness only, but grace and forgiveness with a call to truth and service to God and our neighbor attached.

Solzhenitsyn spoke of “the cult of material well-being.” Today, “wellness” has become a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S. But “wellness” and “a sense of well-being” remain elusive. We’ve overdue to re-think what “wellness” and “well-being” really mean, what they involves and what they require of us.