Much has been written on Alexander Solzhenitsyn over the last few weeks, but Harvey Mansfield’s reflections on the pointed Harvard speech , from the current issue of the Weekly Standard , are not to be missed. Some highlights:
In perhaps the most interesting and original of Solzhenitsyn’s insights in the Harvard speech, he notes the importance that Western democracies confer on legalism. Legalism is our substitute for virtue: You don’t have to distinguish good from evil and do good while avoiding evil; all you have to do is obey the law. This is a minimal requirement exacting only a form of behavior, not an attitude of soul. You do not even have to believe that you have a soul or are capable of “voluntary, inspired self-restraint.”Only this last quality, Solzhenitsyn says, can lift the world above materialism. It is voluntary because it must freely come from you, and yet be inspired by something higher than your bodily self. His formulation seems to restate courage in the terms of moderation, or to combine the virtues of courage and moderation. Courage is the restraint of one’s fear for the sake of what is noble, hence also the restraint of one’s appetite for material goods that diverts the soul from courage. With restraint of appetite comes abandonment of zeal for the principle of happiness in this world, the principle of materialism. For modern materialism has used its own inspiration—from below or perverted from above—to drive vicious actions that have the feel of noble sacrifice to the doer if not the recipient.
. . .I forgot to mention that courage in Greek is also the word for manliness. Which prompts me to assert that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a manly man if ever there was one. For us, he was Homer to his own Achilles, the best statement and explanation of himself.
Solzhenitsyn, as Mansfield emphasizes, was truly a “man of courage.” His physical courage helped him survive despite “intimidation, arrest, imprisonment, starvation, forced labor, [and] several types of torture.” His moral courage, it is fair to say, helped us survive.
