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. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.
This piece is a critique from the position of friendliness; Solzhenitsyn is attempting to point out America's flaws in order for it to be more consciously aware of them, and to then fix those flaws and improve society.
The reaction of the American elite was frothing fury, and Solzhenitsyn was cast out from polite society.
She had lived through World War II as a young woman. AMAZON BARNES & NOBLE GET WEEKLY BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS: Email Address Subscribe. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever.Facing such a danger, with such historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and apparently of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about?
Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the morally inferior sense which has come into being during those same decades.
There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life.
And then there is the fact that one would be hard-pressed to find any entity with higher administrative costs than that of government – which is to say that governmental redistribution of wealth is about the least efficient form of charity.The fact is that “extreme” individualists can neglect their responsibilities of generosity without affecting anyone else’s ability to meet their own. startxref And here we get to the core of the matter:The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. 210 0 obj <> endobj Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West, and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. Is it true that man is above everything? The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. I see two world powers capable of destroying each other; yet you imagine that the split is something that can be remedied by proper balance or diplomacy.
The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.
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