So I will be trying to be a “master teacher” at the University of Houston on Thursday and Friday. Some of the events are open to you, as you can see here.
Thanks to the work of a genuinely legendary teacher, Ross Lence, the University of Houston has a great (largely great books) honors program.
On the question of whether America is worse off after its victory in the Cold War, I will deploy what I think is the great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s most penetrating speech — “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose” — which he gave before the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein 1992.
I sure have “sampled” a lot from this speech, sometimes without remembering that was what I was doing, in my various writings on education.
1. Solzhenitsyn writes of “the howl of existentialism” that lurks just below the surface of our happy-talk pragmatism about our material pursuits. We howl because we lack the words that correspond to our truest and deepest personal experiences. We howl because the foundation of said pragmatism really is loneliness all the way down.
2. “Man has lost a sense of himself as a limited point in the universe, albeit one possessed of free will. He begins to deem himself the center of his surroundings, adapting not himself to the world but the world to himself. And then, of course, the thought of death becomes unbearable: It is the extinction of the entire universe at a stroke.” Think here, of course, of the anti-extinctionism of the transhumanists, which is an extreme form of the general tendency of our autonomy freaks to identify being itself with me. It’s my indefinite sustainability that’s the real issue here!
3. Certainly, “nothing so bespeaks the current helplessness of our spirit, our intellectual disarray, as the loss of a clear and calm attitude toward death.” It’s impossible to really know or love without accepting — without subconsciously raging — against death. And it’s impossible, as the dissidents Solzhenitysn and Havel say, to truthfully separate intellectual freedom from courageous deeds, from the willingness to surrender one’s own life to that which gives life meaning.
4. “There can be only one true Progress; the sum total of the spiritual progress of individuals; the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives.” So political, economic, and technological progress must be judged according to how they contribute to or detract from “true Progress.” Certainly, “all hope cannot be pinned on science, technology, or economic growth.”
5. So: “It is time to stop seeing Progress (which cannot be stopped by anyone or anything) as a stream of unlimited blessings, and to view it rather as a gift from on high, set down for an extremely intricate trial of our free will.” Technological progress can be understood to be, most of all, as a demanding “gift” that might contribute to our true progress as an “intricate trial,” a test that we may or may not pass in subordinating the “how” of technology to the “why” of properly human purpose, of being free and relational beings living in the truth under God.
6. For now: “The victory of technological civilization has also instilled in us a spiritual insecurity. Its gifts enrich, but enslave us as well.”
7. The main cause of the enslavement? We think “All is interests, we must not neglect our interests . . . ” The result: “We have ceased to see the purpose.” It’s not that we don’t have interests, but each of us is so much more than a being with interests. Thinking of oneself as being with interests and nothing more is, for some, a way bragging about one’s individual freedom from spiritual illusions and aristocratic despotism. But it’s actually an affirmation of the slavish denial of free will in favor of material determination. No one who lives in the truth thinks primarily in terms of interests.
There’s a lot more, and I will be talking about the 1978 Harvard Address too.