“Let us admit, even if in a whisper, and only to ourselves: in this bustle of life at breakneck speed – what are we living for?” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose”, Lichtenstein, 1993
As we might deduce from the title, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s essay “The Shallowing of Freedom” does not attack freedom per se. Indeed, as a longstanding reader of Solzhenitsyn, this reviewer can testify that the famed anti-Communist dissident’s commitment to freedom is, if anything, far more pronounced than what we find among most contemporary Western writers. Rather, Solzhenitsyn’s point was that freedom is an abstraction, and as such must be situated within a real, lived context. In practice, given the extraordinary diversity of cultures, talents, wealth, and personalities, it is hard to see how any two human beings could enjoy the identical opportunity of exercising freedom.
And when proponents of liberal democracy extoll the “freedom” of the 21st–century post-Western world, they usually gloss over the fact that many can be manipulated by propaganda, advertising, and fashion without the slightest use of force. Psychic pressure and media brainwashing may be subtler than physical coercion, but subtlety makes them no less real.
For his part, Solzhenitsyn argued explicitly that the media age has given rise to a distorted and truncated understanding of freedom. In the aforementioned fourth essay of We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: The Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, we find him explicitly rejecting the “laissez-faire” understanding of liberty:
Freedom! – to cram commercial litter into mailboxes, into the eyes, ears, and brains of people, into telecasts (so that it’s impossible to watch a single one with a sense of coherence). Freedom! – to impose information, taking no account of the right of individuals not to receive it, of their right to peace of mind. Freedom! – to spit into the eyes and souls of passersby and drivers-by with advertising. Freedom! For publishers and film producers to poison the young generation with depraving filth.
Solzhenitsyn’s catalog of abuses continues for about a page. Were he alive and still writing, of course, he would undoubtedly add remarks about the freedom of social media moguls to hook adolescents with smartphones.
Again, one problem in treating freedom is that the word is an abstraction, one which can only have meaning within the context of a culture. Even if liberal mores, political correctness, and “hate-speech” codes mean that Westerners now have less scope for candidly discussing questions like immigration and nationality in the public square, it is certainly true that we are now accorded much more freedom to pursue the deviant extremes of sexuality.
Nor is it any good blaming such shifts on “the left,” as Conservatism, Inc. would have it. While Solzhenitsyn was certainly no friend to Blue State sensibilities, in “The Depletion of Culture,” he explicitly argues that socialism is not the only culprit vis-à-vis the undermining of freedom.
More deeply, what stifles the dignity of the free-willed human person are
utilitarian requirements, whether they flow from socialist-communist compulsion or from the market principle of sale and purchase. Recently John Paul II suggested that, following in the footsteps of the two totalitarianisms with which we are well familiar, a Third Totalitarianism now draws near: the absolute power of money, along with the rapt veneration of that power by many. A shallowing of culture has come to pass from both the breathless haste of this worldwide process and the financial motivations that propel it […] All-encompassing comfort has led the unprepared – and they are many – to a hardening of the soul.
Let us concede that the “rapt veneration” of money is found even in Catholic circles. When it comes to the goals of Catholic education, for instance, high-status careers and the dream homes, designer clothes, and sports cars that accompany them typically take precedence over the heritage of Western civilization. Such money-worship goes hand-in-hand with superficiality (e.g. Disney’s all-American Hunchback of Notre Dame, which “corrected” Victor Hugo’s story by giving it a happy ending). There is no room in the consumer society for tragedy, which means that the consumer is increasingly incapable of coping with reality.
It is worth emphasizing that the volume in question lives up to its name by including Solzhenitsyn’s best-known speeches. There is much controversial material within, and no doubt Catholic World Report readers will take exception to some of the man’s particular political judgments. Advocates for Ukraine will be put off by his 1993 claim that conflicts would ensue because formerly Soviet nations had embraced “fallacious Lenin-drawn borders”. This reviewer finds Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of foreign-policy realist George Kennan just as unpersuasive as Solzhenitsyn’s admiration for Ronald Reagan is excessive.
Yet the point of reading is not to concur with everything an author says but to stimulate reflection, and a close reading of this powerful collection will do just that. There are as many themes as there are essays, and each one relates to some perennial issue with the challenges of post-modernity. In his Templeton Lecture, Solzhenitsyn attributes Soviet totalitarianism to atheism; in his “Reflections on the Vendée Uprising,” he compares the egalitarian fanatics of the French Revolution to the Bolsheviks; in his “Nobel Prize Acceptance” he explains how genuine art offers us shelter in the timeless realm of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
Most controversial of all his public presentations, the Russian dissident’s 1978 “Harvard Address” scandalized his Ivy League audience by suggesting that American journalists had on occasion “misled public opinion through inaccurate information or wrong conclusions,” or even “abetted mistakes on a state level.” In retrospect, of course, commentary of the sort that Solzhenitsyn made at Harvard looks like a cross between darkly humorous understatement and a Sophoclean prophecy.
As America is increasingly overshadowed by a new global dystopia, we might consult a poet who outlasted its predecessor.
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: The Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn
Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series
Notre Dame Press, 2025
Hardcover, 228 pages
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The question should be asked, “Who are we living for?”
“Freedom, just around the corner for you;
but, with truth so far off, ¿ what good would it do ?”
Bob Dylan (RAZ)
Jokerman
Brilliant selection. I remember the line from 1983, but could not quite glimpse the full profundity until today. Jokerman is not a masterpiece, but it has that wondrous line. Nice pick!
the photocopying of money since we’ve been taken off the last remnants of the gold standard have made some people very rich while others it has basically ruined – in many ways.
“…we are now accorded much more freedom to pursue the deviant extremes of sexuality.”
This is because the end goal of the atheist materialist, overpopulation alarmist globalists is the objectification of the human person.
“When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker Himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.” – Pope Benedict’s Christmas Address 2012
https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/benedict-defends-traditional-family-in-christmas-address-to-roman-curia
With wealth comes expenditure on what gives pleasure. W Sidgwick’s utilitarian morality of common sense comes into play. Likely the catalyst from emphasis on the spiritual to the material sensual post WWII.
Catholicism’s internal diminution occurred during that period of immense wealth and leisure prior to Vat II. And a likely reason for calling the Council. Solzhenitsyn’s observations on freedom range from revolution in France, the first true cultural national revolution, model for the Bolshevik in Russia. Solzhenitsyn shows some flaws in his thought pointed out by Saylor, the fake drawing of national lines including Ukraine, excessive Reagan admiration – even the great aren’t perfect.
Nonetheless, Sayler’s sketch of Solzhenitsyn reveals that in a multicultural multi ambition [now multi identity] culture freedom cannot be equally exercised. That insight draws out the conclusion that to have true freedom one must surrender some of his own. That brings to bear the message of Christ.
In his lecture The Depletion of Culture, Solzhenitsyn argues that the erosion of freedom cannot be attributed solely to socialism. More deeply, what stifles the dignity of the human person are “utilitarian requirements,” whether imposed by socialist compulsion or the market principle of sale and purchase. This insight anticipates what John Paul II, reflecting on the legacy of totalitarian ideologies, once described as a looming third totalitarianism: the absolute power of money and the cultural veneration of that power, which leads to what he called a “hardening of the soul.”
For historians like Ernst Nolte and philosophers such as Augusto Del Noce, the connection between Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism is essential to understanding the twentieth century. Both systems, though opposed on the surface, share a common root in atheistic materialism. The Nazi extermination camps, in this view, are not a radical departure from the Gulag, but a parallel manifestation of the same metaphysical rupture: the rejection of God and the enthronement of man—as race or as class—as an absolute. Del Noce goes further, suggesting that the century divides into two distinct phases: the “sacred,” marked by secular millenarianisms (communism, Nazism, and, in part, fascism), and the “profane,” defined by a consumerist society undergirded by scientism and the quiet but relentless spread of atheism.
In this sense, Solzhenitsyn’s warning forms part of a wider moral tradition that includes Tocqueville’s notion of soft despotism—the loss of true liberty not through violence, but through comfort, distraction, and the withering of conscience. Echoes of this warning can be heard in several of the great public speeches of the last half-century: John Paul II’s address in Warsaw in 1979 and at the United Nations in 1995; Mother Teresa’s stark words at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994; Benedict XVI’s 2011 Bundestag speech on the foundations of law; Elie Wiesel’s haunting Nobel lecture; Václav Havel’s 1990 address to the U.S. Congress. Each, in different ways, reminds us that a society that loses the sense of transcendence also loses the ability to bear suffering, to accept tragedy, and ultimately to remain free.
Solzhenitsyn understood that the crisis of liberty is not merely political but spiritual. Once natural and divine law are elided—first at the level of principle, then at the level of law—the inevitable result is the curtailment of the freedom of the weakest: the unborn, the elderly, the socially expendable. Legal positivism, political liberalism, and moral relativism may promise autonomy, but when they sever law from truth, they create the conditions for a subtle but pervasive despotism—one all the more effective for being cloaked in the rhetoric of rights and progress.
This is the tragedy of the postmodern West: no longer threatened by gulags or camps, it has become vulnerable to the more insidious tyranny of comfort, novelty, and noise. In a society that no longer knows what man is for, freedom itself becomes unintelligible.
Well said Mr. Giosue.
The erosion of freedom can ALWAYS be traced back to sin. That’s the essential paradoxical dilemma of the human condition: when we sin we always think we are gaining more freedom (to exercise our will). Yet, always is it the case that whenever we sin we are less free than at the start. If you want to be truly free, follow Christ who told us that only if we give up our lives will we find our lives.
14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to: “lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law — a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen.”
Sadly an idealization of externals (that always involve conflict; often cruelty). But, crucially, as highlighted by dear Jerry Salyer, there IS an answer to the existential question: “What ARE we living for?”
Followers of Christ, across the world, and through the centuries adhere to a very different uderstanding. “Since you have been brought back to life with CHRIST, you must look for the things that are in HEAVEN, where CHRIST is sitting at GOD’s Right Hand. Let your thoughts be on heavenly things not on the things that are on the earth.” Colossians 3:1-2
Heaven understood in Ethical Encounter Theology is ‘The Matrix of Right Ethics’.
How to mesh our loyalty to heavenly spiritual values with the (turbulently inconsistent) socio-political realites that obsessed Solzhenitsyn . . ?
Two comments above, by dear DR, provide the simple truth . . .
Think: the commandments for a seriously Catholic Christian contain all that Moses gave PLUS their fuller & far more powerful framing, by Jesus Christ. For example:
As our God, Creator & Saviour, Christ understands all of humanity’s need for lawfulness; & for the power of God’s commandments, understood as universal gift.
More than 70 years ago, I was catechised by wonderfully Christ-loving Marist sisters, who explained humanity’s essential need to know God’s Commandments.
Later, as an adult, lecturing & researching in Africa, Asia, Europe & the USA, I found it effective to link the main Commandments to our 5 plus 5 fingers.
It also makes a fun way to embody and memorize the love of God in giving us such an infallible prescription for our happiness; written on our own digits.
HAND ONE
Thumb: “With all my heart, mind, body and soul I will worship the one God who is LOVE, revealed by Jesus Christ.”
Index Finger: “I will have no other god nor any idol; not my family; not myself; and certainly not money.
Middle Finger: “I will not use God’s name profanely; I will not swear oaths, for my ‘yes’ is yes and my ‘no’ is no.”
Ring Finger: “I will keep the Sabbath Day holy, in the way Jesus taught us.”
Little Finger: “I will honour my mum and dad.”
HAND TWO
Thumb: “I will love every person and not hurt or kill anyone, nor think evil of them, nor hate or take revenge.”
Index Finger: “I will maintain sexual purity and faithfulness in thought, word and deed.”
Middle Finger: “I will not steal; I will not rob others of their reputation.”
Ring Finger: “I will not tell lies, deceive, nor cheat.”
Little finger: “I will not covet for God in Christ is providing all I need”.
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Notes
In Exodus 20:1-17 and in Deuteronomy 5:6-21 the Semitic Ten Commandments reflected Jewish cultural belief in the cleanness of the right hand (the first five commands) and the uncleanness of the left hand (the second five commands). Tough in those days to be born left-handed!
Remaining true to Moses’ original, today’s Catholics can hold these Commandments with a positive, personal, ecumenical, and egalitarian hermeneutics, extended by Christ’s New Testament teaching of love; easily memorized for today’s visually-oriented young people.
A common resolve among Church leaders at all levels to get every Catholic parish, every Diocese, and all the Roman Curia back to honouring & obeying these divine treasures graciously given us by God would surely transform our worldly society, instead of the world’s ungodly spirit radically polluting the Church (Catholic, Orthodox, and Other) as we see everywhere these days.
Is there anything more eternally basic than the Divine:
“If you love Me, obey My commands to love God and love others as yourself.”
How can the commandments be obeyed if they have not been taught & memorized?
This is not a limited Christian perspective. It’s given for the sake of Catholic believers. YET who could deny the whole of our global society would benefit enormously if every Catholic & Christian (apparently, there’s billions of us) lived & taught by this brilliant, Christ-anointed way of behaving.
Surely, the proper answer to all of Solzhenitsyn’s many complaints.
Ever in the love of King Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
We could add that billions of Catholics & other Christians pray the ‘Our Father’ (‘The LORD’s Prayer’) trillions of times each year.
“YOUR Kingdom come; YOUR will be done on earth as in Heaven” – surely the greatest intercession. Yet, what do we mean by Heaven? What do we mean by GOD’s will on earth?
In all my years, I’ve never heard a sermon explain that Heaven is the eternal ‘place’ where GOD’s commandments are unfailingly, joyfully obeyed by all.
In praying for GOD’s will on earth, I’ve never heard it explained that we’re asking for that joyfilled obedience to comprehensively come into effect among us, here.
Surely, it’s ineffectual when those billions praying have no idea what they’re requesting. Bereft of informed intention to do our best to be obedient to GOD’s commands, our ‘Our Father’ prayers, no matter how passionate, are surely hot air?
Our LORD taught, again & again: obedience to GOD is the key to The Kingdom of Heaven. Not mindless repetition, or even mindful repetition, not pomp & circumstance, not sacrifice, not great works and miracles – even when done in His Name, not conquest of the whole world, but simply, universally, every heart intent on obeying GOD’s commands: that will be Heaven on earth!
“If you love Me, obey My commands!” Isn’t it time for The Church to teach this . .?
I believe Mr. Giosue has most faithfully conveyed Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
As to the author’s comments on the Ukraine War, there is no reason given to doubt AS’s observations about Lenin redrawing Ukrainian boundaries.
Indeed, Lenin’s later successor Kruschev gifted Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, as all can see by a momentary internet search.
Among the criticisms Solzhenitsyn aimed at “the freedom-loving Western allies” in his 1976 BBC Radio Address (entitled “If One Doesn’t Wish to be Blind”) was “… when millions of Soviet citizens dared to flee from their oppressors…the Western allies – and you British not least among them – treacherously disarmed them, bound them, and handed them over to the Communists for annihilation (in the labor camps of the Urals, where they mined uranium for the atomic bombs aimed against you yourselves!).
Dear CiM, good history but it needs an appendix! e.g. Solzhenitsyn advocating with Putin the concept of a holy Slavic nation (irrespective of what the people who live there desire); (irrespective of all the lives already lost, young men crippled, families destroyed, wealth wasted, and societies wreaked).
S was very good at presenting us with highly literate accounts of what is awry; yet an abject failure at arguing for what is able to make everything good.
Personally, can we even think of such as Christian or Catholic or Orthodox . . ?
This also raises the question of why people are obsessively interested in wars & hateful acts and have scarcely a moment to contemplate Christ’s path of love.