By Tara Ross

Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn once spoke of the “decline in courage” that he thought characterized the West. “The Western world has lost its civic courage,” he told a class of college graduates. “[The] decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.”

The effects of this decline in courage, in Solzhenitsyn’s view, were pervasive. “Political and intellectual functionaries,” he noted, “exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.” Although these intellectuals may exhibit “occasional outbursts and inflexibility” when dealing with “weak governments” or “countries that lack support, . . . they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.” In short, they forget that “from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end.”

Solzhenitsyn’s words were part of the commencement address that he gave at Harvard University in June 1978. Naturally, the issues confronting Solzhenitsyn’s audience were different than the concerns of today. As Solzhenitsyn spoke, Jimmy Carter was still President. The issues of the day included Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the Iron Curtain, and other aspects of the Cold War—specific policy questions that no longer confront Americans. Yet the problems underlying these issues bear an eerie similarity to modern-day concerns. Solzhenitsyn’s address, meant to hit one generation with a hard truth, remains an equally forceful wake-up call for Americans today.

Life in the West is almost too good, Solzhenitsyn theorized. People have individual freedom, material wealth, and the ability to pass these blessings on to their children. “So who should now renounce all this,” he queried, “why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?” His words echo the attitude of many war critics today. Many Americans now, as then, dismiss the need for such displays of courage. They forget that freedom is not free. It must be defended, and the cost to individuals can be very great, indeed. Those who fail to recognize this reality denigrate the sacrifices of our men and women overseas.

Yet Solzhenitsyn was not done speaking hard truths to his 1978 audience. Not even close. Individuals are too prone to prioritize their own interests, even when doing so harms the nation. Indeed, he argued, “[t]he defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals.” Solzhenitsyn cited an example that is particularly appropriate today: “When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights.” The media, Solzhenitsyn concluded, are among the worst abusers of this freedom. “[W]e may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan ‘Everyone is entitled to know everything.’” Today, The New York Times and the ACLU often still feel justified in such actions, citing the First Amendment. Sometimes, they are right. But all too often, their tunnel-visioned focus on the rights of the individual leads them to undermine the national good.

Solzhenitsyn’s solution? Perhaps, he observed, “[I]t is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”

Solzhenitsyn’s words remain recommended reading, powerful even 28 years after they were spoken. The specific events of 1978 may be largely in the past, but the problems that Solzhenitsyn cites and the principles that he then espoused remain applicable today. Today, as then, many in our nation lack courage. They can’t persevere when the going gets rough or things do not turn out as well as expected. They are selfish, too wrapped up in the small comforts of their world. They are uneducated about their world and their government. They probably prefer to read People or US Weekly rather than The Federalist Papers or The Wall Street Journal. Worst of all, they no longer seem to understand the concept of individual sacrifice for the greater good—a concept that our founding generation understood all too well.

Such a state of affairs is tragic. If Americans continue down this path for another 28 years, the challenges of our time will be difficult—if not impossible—to overcome.

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