A Yearning For The Hearth

The following quote comes from a lecture delivered by the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1978, although it could have been delivered yesterday. Solzhenitsyn was an exile from communist Russia and became a leading critique of both it and the west.

Legalistic Life

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. 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. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

Can democracy exist without Christianity? That question might seem glib or factitious, or the kind of thing you’d hear from a radio pastor on the AM dial at an hour when broadcasting comes cheap. But stick with me.

It seems to me that the modern liberal democratic state is turning into a frightful thing. While it has no designs of empire as such, as nation-states once did, they nevertheless conquer, coerce and enslave. The difference is that it is now we who are the object of their aggressions and our lives the territory into which they seek to expand. Not that their motives are necessarily purely malevolent. Look what’s happening in the name of ‘freedom’ in the United States. And in the name of ‘peace and order’ in the United Kingdom. At some point the cure is worse than the disease.

And yet for all the power the state has and exercises, this power is essentially coercive. In a quasi socialized society like most western nations the state also manipulates capital, but when it comes to power, it is basically coercive. Of course we need that, we need rules and structure and those need to be enforced. Untempered though, it is a ferocious and terrible thing.

The retreat of the church has contributed to the hegemony of the state; for hundreds of years the church and state existed in tension with one another, now the church has little or no voice and all authority rests with the state. (The theocracies of the Islamic world offer an interesting contrast, where the state is fused with the religious authority and creates another fearful coercive entity)

The evaporation of church authority means that the state is set doing things its not well suited to doing. When it comes to building and maintaining communities, or restoring broken ones the state can only (1) punish wrongdoers or (2) reallocate capital. Of course, these only compliment the real work of building and fixing communities. Look at the social problems in the US and Canada. Dumping everyone in jail doesn’t work. Neither does dumping money on them. The state is out of ideas. The church is the proper body to put to work here - and there are churches all over the place doing good things - but as a society we’ve decided that ‘religion’ is a personal matter and any presence in the public sphere is inappropriate and dangerous. What we will come to see is that the church’s absence from the public sphere is far more dangerous that its presence ever was.

In Europe there’s been a huge news story about Max Mosley, the head of Formula 1 racing. The man was photographed taking part in a nazi-themed sex orgy, and the pictures ended up in the newspapers, causing huge embarrassment for the whole F1 world. He’s recently been ‘exonerated’ (as though that’s possible) in British courts - winning a case against the gossip rag that broke the story. What stuck me is that there exists in our society no organ to say “this is shameful and wrong.” The paper that broke the story - a typical rubbish celebrity one - is the closest thing that exists to a moral conscience.