In my sections of Christianity and Critical Thinking I ask students to listen to Solzhenitsyn’s 1976 speech, A World Split Apart, to discuss it in small groups and to write a series of brief comments on it. Here are a few of them.
1. He mentioned how there is no open violence in the East, but ideas dictated by fashion and mass standards frequently prevent people from giving their contribution to public life even without physical violence.
2. Solzhenitsyn suggested that the deep suffering of his country has affected the soul to the point of spiritual development that is so intense compared to the West, which is at the point of spiritual exhaustion and is almost losing its strong sense of the soul. This spiritual weakness contradicts the idea of Western superiority. After decades of suffering from violence and oppression, the East longs for higher things. What they have suffered he calls “an epic battle among great evils.” Sad that the West still doesn’t recognize it.
3. God provided man the desire to pursue him and his will, but it is our selfish thinking that has skewed those desires. Solzhenitsyn states that the West’s sole focus is on commercial interests.
4. Solzhenitsyn said that the earth divided against itself cannot stand. I didn’t understand where he was going with this until I listened to the entire speech. While I respect the need for government, I do not follow politics much. This speech helped me understand why I’m the way I am. There has to be a balance between government and an individual’s pursuit of faith. The Bible repeatedly talks about the call to be spiritually courageous. I am now left wondering whether the government is stifling that.
5. Solzhenitsyn argues that the pursuit of material values at the expense of spiritual values has created a spiritual emptiness and lack of purpose in life, which can lead to a sense of frustration and aggression. Our culture of consumerism encourages people to see others as objects to be used for our own satisfaction rather than fellow human beings deserving of respect and dignity.
6. The value placed on human rights and freedom in the West has resulted in the approval of moral violence as opposed to physical violence. The West has succeeded in creating a civilization where ideas are shared with no open violence, but the fashion of ideas has prevented the free exchange of ideas.
7. Our guest speaker from Ukraine told how the Ukrainian media disagreed with the Western media, specifically about which areas were the safest. Media can be dangerous as they control the expectations of people through any form of fear, sorrow, or altogether incorrect information, skewing the truth of issues so that people do not know what to believe.
8. With the East-West divide, each side had different views of traditions and trends. In the West, innovation is encouraged and no one is limited in showing, I think strikingly, the power of freedom in people’s thoughts and ideas. It pushes us to try new ideas and explore the unknown, while in the East, one would have no desire to explore the unknown because nothing could be done to change what has already been set in place.
9. Solzhenitsyn addresses the controlling aspect of legalism in the West, which has grown adept at following the letter of the law. While laws are essential for a well-functioning society and justice, failing to apply the spirit of the law stunts the full range of human potential. Scripture teaches us to take note of the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. The West, however, has a cold approach by applying the letter but failing to instill a deep set of true moral values.
10. The pervasive problem of deeply ingrained humanism is that it rejects both the inherent sinful nature of man and any purpose other than the pursuit of happiness. We worship mankind and our material desires. The state and society solely seek to meet the requirements of physical well-being and the accumulation of wealth. Over time society has shed its view of freedoms based on our existence as God creatures and has moved toward exercising freedoms for mere personal satisfaction and no larger purpose.
11. Our consumerism is only temporary and unsatisfactory. Our only way to gain true satisfaction is to look up and to turn to God. Solzhenitsyn notes that we ignore anything beyond physical well-being. Solzhenitsyn ends his speech, “No one on earth has any other way left but—upward.”