Consistency

"...the current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in the competition."

I recently reread Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address of 1978. It was a watershed evaluation of the decadence of Western culture seen through Russian eyes, and was not well received by the American liberal intelligentsia. Let me summarize two major emphases in the address. 1) Secular humanism has become the basic philosophy of both Western democracies and Eastern Soviet Communism. In the West it manifests itself as crass materialism and decadent freedom. In the East it expresses itself economically and politically. The secular humanism of both cultures represents a rejection of God, that is, a higher power that makes man significant apart from the state. 2) Communism is the most perfect and consistent expression of secular humanism, its culmination. In any culture war, the most consistent world-view will win. Therefore, says Solzhenitsyn, the West should fear Communism. The West simply does not have the courage to withstand Communist intensity, especially since the American intelligentsia is intrigued with it. The West cannot fight Communism because she is carrying the same disease.

So what happened? We have not feared the Soviet system since the Reagan era. Did consistency win? If we listen to the Western Press, plain old American democracy, freedom, and capitalism conquered the Communist beast. The lust for pepsi, pornography, Wrangler jeans, and toilet paper without a queue overcame the quest for the workers’ paradise; proof that in a contest among the seven deadly sins, greed will consistently trump envy. That’s the Western take on it. But as a romantic, I prefer to believe that the poetic Christian soul of Mother Russia could not be crushed, and remained more consistent in itself than its persecutors. I’m opting for that unless I get more data.

Of course we face a more direct and brutal consistency now. It is not secular, or humanistic, but intensely religious, giving divine sanction to an utterly simple directive. It does not require subtle exegesis to understand "death to the great Satan." Can our secular society out-consistent that? I have heard men in authority declare that the great enemy of our freedoms is fundamentalism (any fundamentalism, including the Christian variety). Their reason for this is interesting: "Any man who is willing to die for something is willing to kill for it." A huge assumption, given that Christians have generally preferred martyrdom to murder. That statement says much more about the speakers than about the object of their dislike. How can such a pusillanimous attitude stand in the face of a man who will joyfully blow himself into heaven with an igniter button? Even if we take Solzhenitsyn's much fairer version (any man who is willing to die for something will defend himself), where is the will in secular humanism against such consistency?

The fact is that secular man has no place in his understanding for such commitment. It is not the shahid that frightens him as much as the passion behind him. Again, where is there anything on this earth that can be more consistent than that?

Such consistency can be found only within the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. She understands passion without murder, commitment that opens arms to the world rather than closing against it. She knows that God's enemies are not necessarily hers; she knows that her death is for the life of the world (Schmemann). She has always outlived the ruthless and been there for exhausted cultures who were trying to remember who they were. It is time for the church to evaluate her own consistency.