Political commentary

Are we really too free?

Ferdinand Mount

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's speech at Harvard in June has just been reprinted in full in The Times (26 July), and in the current issue of The Tablet. British readers now have the chance to evaluate for themselves what is without doubt the most comprehensive attack in recent years on the present state of Western society from the most formidable source. Yet, as Christopher Booker pointed Out in his absorbing two-part essay in the Spectator, it has so far provoked only a scrappy and querulous response.

According to Solzhenitsyn's admirers, this is because people in the West are delighted to hear him denounce Lenin, Stalin and all their works, but we are less pleased to hear ourselves described as unhappy, cowardly, decadent and materialistic, for that is what we are. Solzhenitsyn's behaviour is unguestly; we are not accustomed to being lectured by refugees. The very unease and irritation with which those who might have expected to find themselves in sympathy with Solzhenitsyn reacted, up to and including the President's wife, showed how close to home he had struck.

Perhaps so. And yet there may be other reasons. We are accustomed to great men who fight heroically in a totally just or even a totally mistaken cause; but it is difficult to articulate the suspicion that a very great man may be 85 per cent right and 15 per cent muddled; heroism has an allor-nothing quality to it. Besides, pygmies who are conscious of their stature know how ridiculous they look kicking at a giant's shins. There is a not wholly discreditable reluctance to say to someone who has suffered so much and achieved so much that he may not quite have thought this particular matter through to its conclusion.

The Harvard text deserves study on its own, not as a corollary or appendix to Solzhenitsyn's majestic denunciations of the USSR and not as a sacred text elevated above criticism by the genius of its author.

Although the speech's main indictment is the spiritual decline of the West, its framework is political; contrasts are made between two political systems and between the lives people live in each as a result. And what strikes Solzhenitsyn most about the political system in Western countries today is its legalism: 'The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws . . . 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.'

Again and again in the speech, Solzhenitsyn returns to this theme; the law is too cold and formal; it creates a mediocre society; a legalistic structure cannot be proof against the trials of this threatening century; 'mechanical smoothness' is demeaning; legalistic thinking induces paralysis and prevents people from seeing the size and meaning of events. Of course, Solzhenitsyn reminds us that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one and that socialism is no alternative. '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.'

At first sight, this impression is a little odd. Most political animals in the West are more worried about the decline of the rule of law and the rise of government by diktat, although law continues to play a far more conspicuous part in American politics than in Western Europe. But considered as a contrast with the Communist world, Solzhenitsyn's impression is right. Scarred and dropsical though it may be, the rule of law remains the most characteristic feature of Western politics.

But that is quite different from saying that people in the West live by nothing but the letter of the law or that in the uttermost depths of their souls they recognise no other authority. Solzhenitsyn's most extravagant generalisation is that 'one almost never sees voluntary self-restraint'. Almost never? No institution or community can survive five minutes without a continuous routine flow of voluntary restraint between its members, which has nothing at all to do with the legal code. Self-restraint is essential to life in a family or a pub or a club or even in the House of Commons. Self-restraint is at the heart of the idea of civility, and without it a society enjoying limited government would not merely be imperfect, it would be utterly destroyed.

For every occasion on which a trade union branch, say, pushes its demands to the limits of the law, there are even today a hundred other branches and a thousand other occasions in which the demands are limited by custom or prudence, and this is not because trade unionists are heroically restrained but because the system of bargaining would otherwise have collapsed long ago. The idea that trade unions today are greedier and more ruthless in their methods than they were in the 1920s or even in the nineteenth century is shaken by the most cursory examination of trade union history.

Is it fair to suggest that Solzhenitsyn may be over-influenced by what he reads in the

newspapers which, because of their professional duty to report the extraordinarY, necessarily concentrate on cases where the customary practices of self-restraint have broken down — vicious lawsuits, wildcat strikes, crimes of violence and greed? It is not only in their freedom to be vulgar and trivial that the Western media contrast so strikingly with the Communist media which, because they are bound to support the regime, are more inclined to report cases of workers who have cut short their leisure to double the turnip crop. In attacking the materialism of Western life, Solzhenitsyn completely omits anY mention of the sacrifices that people make for their families or of the network of clubs and charities and committees which, for most people, add a voluntary dimension to community life that is just as important as the official collectivities of government an.d the welfare state. Even the anecdotal ell' dence that self-restraint is declining from the standards of some previous golden age, ,has, like the crime statistics, to be treateo with considerable care. It may be that nowadays we actually expect more self-restraint — from parents, from teachers, from trade union leaders, from stockbrokers. Or it maY not. But to jump from responsible apprehension to the sweeping allegation that 'one almost never sees voluntary selfrestraint,' is just the kind of slapdash sensationalism which Solzhenitsyn so deplores in Western newspapers and TV. Our malaise demands rather more careful consideration.

Solzhenitsyn's claim that 'everybody III the West operates at the limits' of the legal framework is a cliché of the consumer movement, as are the only two examples he gives: an oil firm which buys the rights to an invention in order to prevent its use and the food manufacturer who 'poisons his pro: duce to make it last longer.' The reality Is that very few of the former cases are to be found, the everlasting light-bulb and the eternal razor-blade being the old chestnuts, because there is usually more money t° made by production than by suppression. As for the latter, you are not 'legally blameless' if you poison people. Moreover, the very successes of Ralph Nader and the consumer movement demonstrate that peoP1e,. in the West do not accept that the letter or the law is the only criterion. So does the obloquy hurled at the Distillers ComParlYf for their part in the distribution thalidomide. Throughout the Harvard speech, SO1zhenitsyn seems determined to understand the whole purpose of limited

to government. We may have been wrong

rope off large portions of our lives as nature reserves in which error and failure a!! allowed to roam unchecked by authority; but if it was wrong, it was a purposeful ali! considered mistake, not a sign of uric° scious decadence.

This is the first of a two-part discussion of Solzhenitsyn's speech at Harvard.