Word: solzhenitsyns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...humanism "rooted in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when "we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive zeal." Such materialistic development, he added, impels us inevitably from liberalism to radicalism to socialism, and finally to Communism. Even if we are spared war, Solzhenitsyn concluded, we face another calamity- "a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness...
Quite a rap at Western democracy, particularly the U.S. version. How valid are Solzhenitsyn's criticisms? TIME asked eight Americans-all members of "the ruling groups and the intellectual elite " that Solzhenitsyn was scolding-to respond...
...same thing is true of our national will, which Solzhenitsyn talked to us about at Harvard on that June day in the cool rain. We have lost it, he told us, as though he had questioned us and knew our minds. But he had not questioned us and he did not know our minds. It is less than 40 years since the Second World War faced us with an issue which would have torn us apart had we not been free and so answerable to ourselves and to each other. We resolved that issue. We reached an agreement with each...
...Solzhenitsyn had talked to us-to a few of his neighbors in that village in Vermont-three or four of those who respect and admire him throughout the country-he would not have spoken those sentences at Harvard. He would have learned that we know who we are and what we have to become. He would have learned that we have not lost our will as a people -that it is precisely our will as a people which makes us true believers in that human spirit for which he means to speak...
...lucky to be able to provide Solzhenitsyn a platform for his dyspeptic comments on us. George Bernard Shaw, who endeared himself to Americans by the pungency of his contempt, gave away the secret: "To rouse their eager interest, their distinguished consideration and their undying devotion, all that is necessary is to hold them up to the ridicule of the rest of the universe...