Political commentary

The Solzhenitsyn solution

Ferdinand Mount

There is an awesome sweep about Solzhenitsyn's speech at Harvard, an almost barbaric downrightness which takes the reader by storm, disarming his critical senses and making his 'Yes, but —' sound more than usually bleating. The denunciation rushes on at such a pace that the listener is swept along and, already rather out of puff, finds it hard to break in. We need a breather before we can pull ourselves together and begin to inquire exactly what it is that Mr Solzhenitsyn himself represents. What precisely are the qualities that he expects from a political system which Western societies at present fail to provide?

And the general impression that we derive most immediately from the speech is Solzhenitsyn's impatience. He cannot accept that liberties are bound to be abused and that it is the mark of a free society that it thinks carefully before placing legal restraints on these abuses in case the restraints may be more damaging than the abuses. His magnificent intolerance of evil crystallises into an impatience with societies which do not act swiftly and wholeheartedly to combat evil. But it is precisely these qualities of swiftness and wholeheartedness which have helped to produce the horrors of Stalin's Russia. There is always a temptation to see mirror images where there are only mirages. And yet it cannot be denied that there is something horribly familiar about that contempt for mere legalism, which permeates Solzhenitsyn's Harvard speech. The resemblance to the vulgarities of Marxist rhetoric cannot be ignored. Solzhenitsyn, it is said, is authoritarian in the tradition of the nicest Czars and of the Orthodox Church at its noblest. No doubt, but the tone of voice is still alien and — this is said only after careful thought —even a little sinister..

Nowhere do we find any sense of the difficulties of making laws, of resolving conflicts of principle. There is none of that hesitation or ambiguity which the play of constitutional liberty inevitably engenders. Parliamentary democrats have always been painfully aware of the shortcomings of their system; there is no judgment more widely quoted than Churchill's wisecrack that it is the worst system except all the others. Does Solzhenitsyn have the same doubts about his own political views? It may be said that we are dealing here with a spiritual perspective, not a political manifesto. Yet Mr Solzhenitsyn is a man of crucial political significance who does not shrink from extracting concrete political inferences from his metaphysical beliefs. And he anchors his critique of Western society in our most

typical political characteristic — the rule of law. We may, indeed must, confront his criticisms on a down-to-earth political level as well as on more rarefied planes.

Solzhenitsyn's underlying objection is that the Western system does not move with swiftness or certainty to deal with enemies of society: terrorists, pornographers, criminals, trashy media. And he is impatient with the spectacle of public opinion rushing to the defence of terrorists' human rights and of 'hasty and irresponsible' critics in Parliament and the press who force the 'statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country' to move cautiously and even timidly.

What he is really demanding is a quite different political system which would act with a gnostic confidence in its rightness, overturning statute and precedent, legislating retrospectively if need be and always with a high sense of purpose. Yet to introduce such a system would be to destroy precisely the virtues of the rule of law: that it is stable and impartial and that people know what it is. Terrorists do have legal rights. There is a right to free expression and a just and workable law against pornography is not so easy to frame. Statesmen ought to proceed carefully and to take account of their critics. Of course a society must defend itself to survive, but if it is to be worth defending, it must be scrupulous about its methods of self-defence. All this is implicit not only in the concept of constitutional liberty, but in the New Testament. Christianity denies that there exist certain privileged human beings who possess superior knowledge which will remove uncertainty and reveal the purpose and destiny of human life. Gnostics have always been condemned as heretics, as Shirley Robin Letwin reminds us in her fine essay on 'Conservative Individualism' (which stands out in Mr Maurice Cowling's remarkable collection of Conservative Essays — Cassell, £5.95).

Perhaps many Western faces are imprinted 'with worry and even depression', as Solzhenitsyn claims. But the only possible implication of his argument is that

Spectator 12 August 1978 they are worried and depressed because they are not being told what to do by some higher authority. And the further imPlication is that higher authority ought to see to it that they lead a more strenuous M°121 and spiritual life. While human beings in the West are becoming weaker, Solzhenitsyn says, in the East they are becoming fitille,r and stronger. 'Six decades for our peoPte and three decades for the people of Eastent Europe; during that time we have been, through a spiritual training far in advance oi Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those generated by stand' Western well-being'.sed The comparison that Solzhenitsyn evokes here is between the Russian dissidents, purified and hardened by the struggle to bear witness to the truth over years of stiffering,

worker watching trash on TV while slurping

and the slack-bellied American down his trashy TV dinner. Is this quite 'comparing like with like? Is there not also a danger in submitting to the same standard people faced with different challenges — the kind of danger courted by those who thought England had gone soft after the King and Country debate in 1933? And in what sense are the Russians more 'MO; esting' people? In a lesser writer this woulti sound like spiritual snobbery which is obviously not intended; and yet undoubtedlY there is here a coarseness of characterisation, an almost glib sliding from the individual to the general, which is not appropriate to a novelist of Solzhr 's

enits stature.

The West may have lost its nerve. We may be wallowing in a materialist morass, as, Solzhenitsyn says we are. But his claim that our freedom is to blame for our decadenCe raises more questions than it solves. WI_ have we only recently gone soft when sve have had mass democracy and a free pressf for more than a century? If our kind society is so frail and transient, how ha; long-established constitutional deal_ cracies survived such terrible wars, jag" tions and slumps? And if the times are bad for this kind of system, why did natiori. 5 like Portugal, Spain, Greece and which had previously enjoyed only relatively brief spells of constitutional &tot)" succeeded? sac'ee cracy, struggle so hard to get it back agattt and dance in the streets when they The whole of the Harvard spch,.i.s.. marked not only by a lack of sympathY the civic liberties of the West but also lo wilful determination to misinterpret tt.`„_ inevitable defects of their vt rilirtues.Ita is P°;Y that ible to agree with Solzhenitsyn live things are wrong with the way we without accepting that he has describe ussianprecisely what those things are anal ra's they have gone wrong. And

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come to the conclusion that the Is r

would be wrong to swap their sy _.,A ours, we may well conclude that while he be wrong to swap ours for his. fe de that we Wow"