Disaster!

An hour ago I made a post, checked the format, stuck a graphic on it and posted it.

A minute ago I realized I had forgotten to check the blog itself to make sure it all worked out properly (sometimes it doesn't).

Ten seconds ago I noticed that I had been beaten to the punch on the post's subject by the one just below it.

So here I am, with no idea what to do. I can't tell you about the Father Brown DVDs; you already know. There's nothing in my own life that could possibly be of relevance to this blog, beyond my having found a gentleman (Dominic Manganiello) at the University of Ottawa willing (and eager) to supervise my proposed MA thesis on GKC. I was planning a post on some of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but I'm nowhere near ready to do it just yet.

Well, maybe we can do something in that vein. Solzhenitsyn was (and remains, I suppose) a Russian academic and novelist of considerable talent, who has the uneasy distinction of being one of the first to bring to the West's attention the overwhelming gravity of the situation in the Soviet penal system. This distinction is an uneasy one, as I have said, because the picture he paints of that senseless and unforgiving world is substantiated, after the fashion of Dostoyevsky, by cold, hard experience. Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag in 1945 on an eight-year sentence for critical utterances on the subject of Josef Stalin, and both his personal experiences and subsequent research formed the basis of his penal masterpieces, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. He was released from the camps at last, enjoyed delicate success in the Soviet Union, and was eventually exiled (1974) shortly after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I'll have to leave his main body of work out for the moment, lacking any preparation to discuss it, but I will draw your attention to a lecture the gentleman delivered at Harvard in June of 1978. Although some of the political ramifications of it are dated, there is enough in this address to make us - even a Chestertonian us - stand up and take notice. He puts it right, for example, when he says, "how short a time ago, relatively, the small new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered peoples' approach to life." He is the President of Nicaragua.

When he continued, uttering the following, was he speaking of his own time, or was he speaking of ours?

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. 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. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction.

This misapprehension is at the heart of almost all of our Western misadventures, be they in the folly of secular vacuity in Europe or in jingoistic democratic capitalism in North America. In a very real sense, it is of course true that all we can do is measure others in relation to ourselves. It takes a superhuman effort to decontextualize to the extent necessary to produce real and hearty analysis (not just anyone can write The Everlasting Man, after all), and we must make allowances for those who are unable to do it. But the systems remain problematic regardless, and our collective combination of pride and myopia diminishes daily the possibility of doing anything about it.

On the decline of courage as a virtue in the West, he says:

[A] decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

A powerful and truthful statement, albeit one qualified by the fact of it having been said in 1978. Ours is a slow and languishing death, I suppose.

With an eye for paradox that should be familiar to our readers, Solzhenitsyn describes one of the terrible costs of Western liberty:

The individual's independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leading them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. So who should now renounce all this, why and for what should one risk one's precious life in defense of common values, and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country?

Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.

It continues in this vein, and is wonderful. There's much to be considered in his section on "Humanism and its Consequences." Are there areas about which we could argue? Certainly, and I encourage it. However, I am also happy to recommend Solzhenitsyn to anyone with eyes to read him, and look forward to reading further into his many and varied works. I will close with this excerpt from his section on "Legalistic Life," which has articulated beautifully a fierce, gut-based objection I have had with regards to our modern reality, but that I had not previously been able to put into words:

People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities.

Home run, Alexander.