Split Worlds and Fake News
On June 8, 1978 the Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a Harvard graduation speech entitled “A World Split Apart” on the topic of world crises. This speech kindled a firestorm of critical comment in the Western press. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the speech, the National Review has republished, in its June 25, 2018 print edition, Solzhenitsyn’s own reaction to the ensuing Western commentary. His reaction was written during the autumn of 1978. In his view, the crises themselves, as well as the critical reception of his speech, underscore “the ancient truth that a kingdom - - in this case, our Earth - - divided against itself cannot stand.”
It would seem advisable to meditate upon this speech and its aftermath in order to draw lessons, if possible, for the contemporary phenomenon of “fake news,” which is a neologism used to refer to fabricated news, which has no basis in fact but which is nevertheless presented as being true. For Solzhenitsyn, the Western commercialized press (journalism or news media generally) presents current events and commentary with an overriding concern to remain within the letter of the law, within conventional bounds of taste that will not damage sales or advertising, and without any journalistic responsibility to the readership or to history. If Solzhenitsyn could have had access to the vocabulary of 2018 while writing in 1978; then, arguably, he might have substituted “fake news” for the “Western commercialized press.”
Solzhenitsyn had served with distinction as an artillery officer for the U.S.S.R. in World War II. However, in February 1945 he reportedly made an unguarded remark critical of Stalin and was sent to a Gulag camp until Stalin’s death in 1953. He remained in internal exile until Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, whereupon Solzhenitsyn was “rehabilitated” in 1957. Since Solzhenitsyn’s experience was commonplace, and since Khrushchev was attempting a liberalization of sorts, in 1962 Khrushchev approved the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch about life in a Soviet concentration camp. However, Khrushchev died in 1964, and by 1974 Solzhenitsyn had been exiled again, this time to West Germany. In 1976 he moved to Cavendish, Vermont. He gave his celebrated Harvard speech in 1978, returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994, and died in 2008.
In the Harvard speech, Solzhenitsyn noted that the split between world powers coexisted with another, more profound split in ways of life. Historically speaking, only a short time ago, “the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, … the conquests proved to be short-lived, … but the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold … [that societal development requires] pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life.” However, Solzhenitsyn found that the Western states have become an amalgam of welfare state and consumerist society, which do “not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.” While he agreed, based on his own bitter experience in the U.S.S.R., that a society without an objective legal code is terrifying; he also asserted that “the defense of individual rights … [has rendered] society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals … [and that] life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil,” ranging from immoral movies to the inordinate concern that rooting out terrorism will impinge upon terrorists’ civil rights.
Solzhenitsyn found it incomprehensible that “though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime.” He linked the misuse of freedom for evil with society’s humanistic, but false, presupposition that man is master of the world and is without taint of evil. He was astonished that those in the West who are most dissatisfied with their society do not rail against a false humanism but rather drift towards socialism. Noting with approval Shafarevich’s demonstration that socialism “leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind unto death,” Solzhenitsyn told his Harvard audience that “the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive … [characterized as it is] by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.” This calamity stems, he continued, from an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness. In contrast, Solzhenitsyn was looking for “a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.”
In his response to the Western critical disapproval of his speech, Solzhenitsyn said that he was surprised, not by the newspapers’ attacks, but by their obtuse nature. Initially, the press was apoplectic in its denunciation of the speech as the reactionary ravings of an unhinged soul in thrall to Orthodox mysticism, if not indeed of “a mind split apart.” Others said that Solzhenitsyn was ungrateful for his asylum and that some patriotic American should step forward to grant this Nobel laureate the additional prize of a one-way airline ticket back to the U.S.S.R. Solzhenitsyn responded that he had been naïve to believe that he had found a society that did not require flattery as a precondition for free speech. Moreover, he believed that the initial criticism betrayed rank hypocrisy: It was acceptable for him to proclaim, “Live not by lies” while living in the U.S.S.R. but not while living in the West.
As more readers’ reactions to the speech were printed by what Solzhenitsyn referred to as “the heartland press,” the tone of the discussion became more varied and comprehending. Among the later responses that Solzhenitsyn collected was the comment that “the Washington Post may smile at the Russian accent of Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s words, but it cannot detract from their universal meaning.”
If Solzhenitsyn were alive today, then he might well counsel that more attention be paid to what he would regard as the real issues of socialism and spirituality. Such redirection of attention would ipso facto tend to crowd out the contention over the second-order issue of “fakeness.” But of course, Solzhenitsyn lived in a print world in which there was some editorial control over the quality of the debate. In the Internet era, there is no such editorial control; and one is left with the manipulation of sources (alleging fake or non-fake status) rather than the marshaling of arguments (adducing historical evidence) as the basis for what passes as reasoned debate. Now, more than ever, Solzhenitsyn would flee from the Western world with its appalling “commercial advertising, TV stupor, and intolerable music.”