A World Split Apart (I)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,
Thursday, June 8, 1978

I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates.

Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things which at that time appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I then said...

A World Split Apart
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much profounder and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand.
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KMB's comments:


Solzhenitsyn develops this point more in the next section, but let’s begin here with what I think is a key component (though not the entirety) of what he is driving towards. We’re familiar with the concept of worldview. I want to expand the way we think about the concept so I’m going to trade the term for another that I hope more precisely gets to the heart of things: Mythic-view.

“Worldview” is too small a term (in one sense) to get at what Solzhenitsyn means because the nature of the split involves cosmic universals. Likewise, the term “meta-narrative” seems too small because “narrative” sounds academic and bland. “Meta-Epic” might be better, emphasizing the grand importance into which it ties the society it owns. Solzhenitsyn’s divide has to do with a Mythic or Epic view of a people’s origins, destiny, and power / history. Or to put it a different way, it has to do with the way a people answer the questions: “Who are we and where did we come from?” “Where are we going?” and, “What are we about and what do we do while we’re here?”

What Solzhenitsyn saw in 1978 (earlier, in fact) was a West that had rejected the Mythic-view that drove its ascendency, and with it, rejected the idea of Mythic-view itself. Without a Mythic-view the West was (and is) steeped in the material and relativistic. As such, the West also dismisses or ignores the Mythic-view within other major cultures and relates to them in purely material, relativistic terms. Thus “the split is a much profounder and much more alienating one.” As a result, the West interprets world events in primarily political terms, and responds with either diplomacy or arms proliferation.

Here’s a sketchbook example:

Beginning with the “Lost Generation” and continuing on through the Beatniks, Hippies, Slackers, GenXers, etc, Westerners have been on a quest to “find themselves.” In other words, the West is chiefly characterized by confusion about origins, destiny and power: “Who am I, where am I going and what am I about? I don’t know.”

That hasn’t happened elsewhere. Russians, for example, have a strong Mythic-view that shapes their lives. “Who are we? We are Russians, an ancient, glorious people. Where are we going? Towards further greatness. What are we about? Furthering Russian greatness.”

I may be oversimplifying somewhat, but generally speaking, strength, fortitude and the unrelenting march toward greatness pervade the Russian consciousness and the majority of Russians give themselves over to those things that promote actualization of that Mythic-view.

The Soviets leveraged that aspect of the Russian psyche to amass power and were successful until everyone inside Russia, even some who had ascended in the Party, realized the exploitation. Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher galvanized Western resistance in a way that challenged the Soviets at that fundamental level, the Mythic level. They did use a combination of diplomatic, economic and militaristic means as tools, but the focal point of the resistance was moral. At a time when the West in general had rejected a Mythic-view, Reagan and Thatcher personally retained a deep Mythic sense and rallied the West around it by drawing us into their grand (Mythic / Epic) vision of the Evil Empire behind the Iron Curtain in mortal conflict with the Shining City on a Hill.

To recap: The Soviets ascended to power by exploiting the Russian Myth and then, when history had moved such that they could no longer credibly prop themselves up on it, they collapsed under pressure from a source that drew its strength from a another Mythic-view.

However, though the Russians dealt periodically with exploitation of their Mythic-view by losing confidence in it, they never gave it up. In the last ten years, strong leaders have risen in Russia that have bolstered in the national Myth; hence, recent tensions between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and Europe.

In the eyes of the West where the Mythic is rejected, these recent plays are misinterpreted as being about political power. Some see it as primarily a problem surrounding natural resources, namely oil and natural gas. Others see it as a play to rebuild the Soviet Union. But I would submit that both views grow out of the split Solzhenitsyn identifies. Russia’s actions are only superficially about political power. Fundamentally, they are driven by the Mythic-view that Russians hold of themselves.