There was more to disturb the self-satisfied intellectual elite. Surely
faculty members at Harvard must have gnashed their teeth in the face of this
remonstrance: "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted
boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of
human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence
against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and
horror." According to Solzhenitsyn, life organized around laws and the
individual has shown an inability to "defend itself against the corrosion of
evil."
Solzhenitsyn did not spare the media's role in the decline of the West. He
said the media's constant parroting of the maxim "everyone is entitled to
know everything" is "a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people
also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The
right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain
talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this
excessive burdening flow of information."
Again, this was 1978, just two years after Ted Turner created WTBS, just six
years after HBO was launched in Pennsylvania. Today, cable programming is
filled with the vain, the vulgar and the vacuous and Solzhenitsyn's critique
rings even more true in 2008.
Solzhenitsyn loved America, but said he couldn't recommend it in its present
state as a model for his country: "Through intense suffering our country has
now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western
system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look
attractive."
There's plenty more and every student and politician - indeed, every
American - ought to read, or re-read the speech. It was a sobering and
prophetic address and contains far more substance than anything we'll hear
at the upcoming political conventions.