The more things change, the more they stay the same.
That old saw kept popping to mind when I was reading “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025, 228 pages). Edited by his son, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the book includes his Nobel address and the 1978 Harvard speech as well as other speeches he delivered here in the West and in the former Soviet Union.
Throughout all these speeches, he returns often to the same issues that shocked his American audience 48 years ago at the Harvard graduation. Expecting the exiled writer to lambast communist Russia, Solzhenitsyn spent most of his time talking instead about the failures of America: the intellectual and cultural “idols of prevailing fashion,” the humanism that dominated both the Soviet Union and the West, the desire to embrace rights but without taking up the attendant responsibilities, and the decline of courage among “political and intellectual functionaries” who exhibit “decay, passivity, and befuddlement in their actions….”
There’s more, but you get the idea.
The speech is known as “The World Split Apart,” which some first interpreted as the divide between the liberal West and communism, but that’s not what Solzhenitsyn meant. The divide he described was not so much with political or economic systems, though that divide was real, but rather the modern-day canyon that separates the spiritual from the material. Of the future, he told the students and the others gathered that day, “it will demand from us a spiritual epiphany, an ascent to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where neither will our physical nature be condemned to perdition — as in the Middle Ages — nor will our spiritual nature, all the more crucially, be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.”
In a majority of the other essays, he sticks to this theme. Sometimes, as in the Harvard address, his meaning of “spiritual” isn’t always clear, yet in the book’s very next speech, the 1983 Templeton Lecture delivered in London, he begins with this thought regarding the brutality of Soviet communism: “More than half a century ago, while still a child, I heard several older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this happened.’”
That should be clear as glass.
In this address he does take to task more directly the atheism and faint-hearted religion that is so much a part of our public arena. He points out too that with the entire world focused almost solely on materialism and goods, the spiritual growth of the individual and of humanity itself will remain stunted.
Given the 21st century’s headlines and culture, Solzhenitsyn appears almost prophetic in looking into the future. In a 1976 address delivered over the BBC, during which he attacked the British government and Europe for its failure after both World Wars to check communism in Russia, he at one point said, “And what today of all Europe? — it’s but an assemblage of cardboard stage sets, amongst which people bargain to see who can spend least on defense so that more remains for a prosperous life.”
True then. True now.
He also points out the modern obsession with technology, the deleterious effects of radio and especially television, the damage done by pornography, a charge which seems quaint when compared to the online ubiquity of porn today. He predicted the “negative depletion of culture” if attempts were made to replace it with a “multiplicity of cultures.”
In the 1993 talk from which the book takes its title, he presciently noted, “Victorious technological civilization has simultaneously instilled in us a spiritual insecurity. Certainly its gifts enrich, but enslave us as well. All is interests, we must not neglect our interests, all is a struggle for material things; but an inner voice faintly prompts us that we’ve lost something pure, elevated — and fragile. We have ceased to see the purpose.”
He was speaking in 1993, the very year that the public gained access to the World Wide Web. Now, some 30 years later, we have critics like Jonathan Haidt, Freya India, and others pointing out the damage done, particularly to the young, by a screen technology which is changing the way we read, our abilities to concentrate, and even our capacity for thought.
If forced to condense the writer’s thinking behind all these talks, perhaps we should look to a question he raises rather than answers in this paragraph from his talk, “We have Ceased to See the Purpose:”
“Let us admit, even if in a whisper and only to ourselves, in the bustle of life at breakneck speed—what are we living for?”
Abandon that age-old question, Solzhenitsyn suggests, and we abandon our humanity. For him, to attempt an answer, to try and understand why we are here and why we doing as we do, is the first step toward sanity.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” minick0301@gmail.com .)