Dr. Peter Kreeft - A World Split Apart - 2015 Steubenville DFC

you before a certain day in June 1978 almost everyone in Western civilization was agreed that one of the greatest writers of all time certainly one of the greatest novelists was Alexander Solzhenitsyn frequently he was compared with just ESC and Tolstoy after that date almost nobody talked about him anymore except negatively I've never seen a reputation go down so suddenly as that of Sol Units in' because he delivered an address at harvard the commencement address which shook the foundations of Western civilization people felt insulted for weeks afterwards people talked about that speech I was there I did not talk literally with Saul units in but I did talk figuratively with cell units and I'd like to share some of my reactions to that speech and some of the quotations from that speech because I think it is one of the greatest speeches in the history of civilization so I'd like to talk about that in order to contribute a little bit to the survival of that very civilization the speech had an uncanny ability to speak almost telepathically to my mind every time he said something I would think of a question and he would instantly answer that question in the next line and in order to preserve that dialogue I'm going to have to do a very hokey thing I'm going to have to imitate cell unit Sion's voice which I can't do very well it was a rather throaty and deep voice and it had a Russian accent and I don't speak Russian so I'm going to have a very very fake Russian accent but you'll tell you'll be able to tell when I'm imitating cell units and I drove to Harvard from my home in nearby Newton with a dick who was a typical Harvard liberal whose reactions to the speech were I think typical Harvard reactions which in turn were typical moral secular establishment reactions we arrived two hours early to find a parking place only 12 blocks away after only 20 minutes of searching we were lucky over 20,000 people were crammed into Harvard Yard by the time the ceremony began that was the largest crowd there in anyone's memory despite the gloomy gray cold drizzling day it was June spring usually happens on a Friday in New England by the time the commencement address commenced ceremoniously it was no longer drizzling it was raining most of the crowd had brought umbrellas and raincoats or blankets against the chill before song Unison's address honorary degrees were presented to a man with an unpronounceable name FIM cha cha classy kutzia former president of Israel and - Bart Giamatti president-elect of Yale who would later become the Commissioner of baseball and to James Watson discoverer of the structure of DNA so these were important people then sell units inque Mon stage to thunderous applause he was tall and grizzly beard and wore a tweed coat he looked exactly as I thought a 20th century prophet would look his speech was delivered in Russian but amplified by an instantaneous English translation as the Boston Globe reported the next day quote solu newton was giving a tremendous standing ovation before he spoke during his speech he was interrupted about two dozen times by applause but there was some hissing especially when at one point he declared that the anti-war movement was involved in the betrayal of many nations throughout the day saul units and rest in a brown green high-button suit remained impact though obviously curious about Harvard he chatted with dignitaries such as governor Dukakis and Harvard president Derek Bok but he refused to talk to reporters after the requisite formalities the very first sentence of the speech seemed to divide the crowd striking joy into sum and fear into others the first line was Harvard's motto is very to us truth some heard this simple forward sentence like polite Gentry hearing a proletarian obscenity he said the T word right here in Harvard Yard how dare he others smiled like nostalgic lovers at the mention of a name it took only three more sentences for this philosopher in me to fall instantly in love with the mind of this prophet there for in these three short sentences he proved that he knew more about truth Harvard motto than Harvard did many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit as soon as I heard the sentence I suddenly understood a saying that I had previously dismissed as sentimentality where there is no love there is no truth I suddenly realized that this meant the same thing Pascal meant when he wrote in the Ponce's truth is so hidden and lies so well-established today that unless one loves the truth with passion one will never find it Zionism went on and even while it eludes us the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to misunderstandings and that sentence brought up from my memory banks Kierkegaard's point that even worse than forgetting the truth is forgetting that we have forgotten it so unasyn went on also true seldom is pleasant it is almost invariably bitter this third saying in cold up to my mind a third quote from Socrates is not the love of wisdom a practice of dying so in three sentences cell unison had shown me that he understood three of the rarest secrets of three of the wisest philosophers how can he keep this up there is some bitterness in my speech today - oh-ho I thought now you're in for it the establishment press tomorrow will crucify you for not smiling like a pop psychologist they'll reduce everything you say to your personal feelings see I could be a prophet too but I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend oh sure I thought bitterly they'll understand that line about as well as they've understood every other prophet I couldn't think of a single prophet who was not a friend misunderstood as an adversary my interior dialogue distracted me for a few minutes when my attention returned to the speech I noticed that dick whose face had not shared my appreciation at Sawle unit since first words was now smiling in agreement at his next words how short a time ago relatively the small new European world was ceasing colonies everywhere not only without anticipating any real resistance but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered people's approach to life on the face of it it was an overwhelming success there were no geographical frontiers to it Western society expanded a triumph of human independence and power all of a sudden in the 20th century came the discovery of its fragility we now see that the conquest proved to be short-lived and precarious and this in turn points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests but the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present-day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive there is this belief that all these other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments I looked around me and I now saw accepting looks on most faces in Harvard Yard but only until the profit let loose his next zinger which shot into the hearts of friends and foes alike like an arrow to trash Western civilization was fine but to trash it for its real vices was unacceptable a decline in courage is the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days of course I thought this outsider instinctively sees the truth about us that we do not see I polled the faces in the crowd most registered surprise and confusion courage why would he pick that out as the most striking feature of all and then the philosopher in me remembered the dictum of both Plato and Aristotle that without know without courage no virtue could be practiced for courage is the virtue that fights against all that is wrong and easy and for all that is right and hard and the wrong is usually easy and the right is usually hard why don't people in Western culture see that because they don't know we're at war I answered spiritual war holy war jihad they don't know the inner struggle they don't even know there is such a thing as an inner life cell units and then brought my wandering thoughts back to the point with another sudden stunning line from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end ooh so the loss of courage is not only disastrous it is apocalyptic I thought but I dared not voice this thought to dick he would label me with his favorite F word fundamentalist Solzhenitsyn was now developing a whole philosophy of political history to support his startling apocalyptic conclusion when the modern Western states were created the following principle was proclaimed governments are meant to serve man and man lives to be free and to pursue happiness now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations the welfare state every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness I thought he's talking about happiness in the stupid shallow sense of the word feeling good instead of being good you should clarify that Alexander as soon as I thought of that he did happiness in the morally inferior sense which has come into being during those same decades for the first of many times that day I started to wonder whether he was reading my thoughts in the process however one psychological detail has been overlooked the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to obtain them in Printz many Western faces with worry and depression though it is customary to conceal such feelings I nodded at this thinking of Americans greeting liturgy how are you fine how are you my mother just died my dog was run over and my mother-in-law is going to come to live with me the rest of my life and the IRS is auditing me but I'm just fine and how this liturgy of ours betrays our claim to honesty and candor and disobeys the first and greatest commandment of their public profits the pop psychologists not to suppress your feelings but to express them for this feeling this doubt about the very fundament of our lives happiness this has to be suppressed for of that doubt were faced and not resolved the probable result would be either conversion or deep depression but it could not be resolved without repudiating the secularist hedonist materialist individualist utilitarian yuppie philosophy that spawned it the philosophy that most of these educated people here in Harvard Yard believed the philosophy this Russian prophet was now exposing exactly like the little boy exposing the naked Emperor the individuals independence from many types of state pressure has guaranteed the majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about it has become possible to raise young people according to these new ideals leading them to physical splendor happiness and possession of material goods money and leisure to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment so who should now renounce all this why and for what I wondered how Sargent itza never expected to be understood by anyone but a saint if he used saintly language like renounce all this then he answered by using an analogy not from the Saints but from science even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism I noticed that dick was now listening with open eyes he was a psychologist and he respected empirical data and scientific analogies my thought went back to that offending word renounce then I heard it again as if song in essence words were echoing my thoughts not just vice-versa if one is only right from a legal point of view nothing more is required nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right and urged self-restraint a willingness to renounce one's legal rights and to sacrifice and selfless risk it would sound simply absurd one almost never sees voluntary self-restraint for the first time I clearly saw the connection between democracy and self-restraint I was still pretty young in 1978 and the connection is I suppose obvious only to older wiser and more experienced people without self-restraint without renunciation no democracy can survive for external laws alone might be enough to preserve order in a dictatorship but a free society cannot exist without free inner police in the spirit not just unfree outer police in the streets I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed but a society with no other scale but the legal one is not worthy of man either dick turned to me here and whispered he's demeaning the law the thing that protects the weak against the strong he should know better no he's not I replied didn't you hear what he said listen Sian it's ins next words confirmed my musings about the dependence of democracy on self-restraint Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence such as for example misuse of Liberty for moral violence against young people motion pictures full of pornography crime and horror it is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counterbalanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept life organised legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil see I whispered to dick the root of evil isn't society's laws so the solution to it can't be society's laws either dick replied you mean like censorship laws they're not the answer but he thinks they are I replied no he doesn't he's saying self-censorship is the answer no said Dec you need freedom too I said freedom from the state yes but not freedom to look good not freedom from the truth and then as if cell unison had heard our discussion about freedom he next addressed it such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about Julie but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent in human nature the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected strangely enough though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West and still there is criminality and there is even considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society see I whispered to dick that's the essence of legalism and that's the refutation of it I didn't hear any refutation dick whispered you're living in it right now I said well he said it's a heck of a lot better than Russia he'd never get a chance to make a speech like that in Russia there's no Free Press there and as if on cue Solzhenitsyn turned to the problem of the Free Press the press - of course enjoys the widest freedom we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan everyone is entitled to know everything but this is a false slogan characteristic of a false people also have the right not to know the right not to have their divine soul stuffed with nonsense and gossip hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press the press has become the greatest power within Western countries more powerful than the legislature and the executive and the judiciary one would then like to ask by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of a 20th century sentence sounded to me like a liturgical perfect formula dick size then lit up when saw units and followed with a point that appealed to the psychologist in him there is yet another surprise for someone coming from the east where the press is rigorously unified one gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press - it is a fashion there are generally accepted patterns of judgment without any overt censorship in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable nothing is forbidden but what is not fashionable will never find its way into some periodicals or books or be heard in colleges legally your researchers are free but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day there is no open violence as in the East however a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards I muttered to dick he's talking about what de Tocqueville called soft totalitarianism why doesn't he say something good about us they dick he will I answered and again as if on cue sajin 'it's in continued it is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world a way to successful economic development and having experienced socialism I will certainly not speak for it at this dick look little disappointed because he had a soft spot in his heart for socialism but should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West as it is today as a model for my country frankly I would have to answer no no I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of hours the entire crowd seemed to freeze in shock if communism should fall and Russia should turn to America as a this man would not rejoice incomprehensible even I wondered why he would say this and then he gave his equally incomprehensible reason for this incomprehensible opinion through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive the silence and shock continued not only were those happy hospitable our variants being insulted they were being insulted incomprehensibly what was he saying that America lacked and Russia had suffering why would anyone exalt suffering dick asked simply by the expression on his face sergeant Edson went on a fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger life's moral weight has produced stronger deeper and more interesting characters than those generated by the standard Western well-being what could be more obvious I whispered if you're writing a great novel who do you want to be your protagonist a Russian political prisoner or an American fashion model a scowl was dicks only answer and the profit moved inexorably in the direction of apocalyptic warnings there are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatening a threatened or perishing society such are for instance the decadence of its art or a lack of great statesmen there are open and evident warnings to the center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc the smooth surface film must be very thin then the social system quite unstable and unhealthy but the flight the fight for our planet physical and spiritual a fight of cosmic proportions is not a vague matter of the future it has already started the forces of evil have begun their decisive offensive you can feel their pressure and yet your screens and publications are full of proscribed smiles and raised glasses he knows I whispered dick scowled again he did not understand that the moral and spiritual struggle the jihad is the root of the social and cultural one the prophet confirmed this in his next words very well known representatives of your society say we cannot apply moral criteria to politics on the contrary only moral criteria can help there are no other criteria dick now shook his head right winger was his all-purpose left-wing formula for damnation my mound my mind now wandered into that wandered into the jungles of thought that had produced those two tangled plants the ubiquitous categories of left and right I've never found a clear formula that explains and distinguishes them I noticed vaguely that Solzhenitsyn was now talking about the one specific issue that most sharply distinguished the two camps in 1978 namely the Vietnam War I had never been clear or certain where I stood on that issue not because I knew little about the relevant principles but because I knew little about the relevant facts economic military and political I began to fear that saal unison was playing into the hands of his dovish critics now by giving them a reason for labeling him as just another right-wing Hawk and thus dismissing everything else he said but then as if in response to my thoughts he gave a strong moral argument against the doves who had protested the bombing of Cambodia he said the American anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from those people yes I thought I had never been able to understand how reasonable people can be pacifists in the face of massive evil like Cambodia's killing fields and then the Prophet presented us another puzzle if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half country how can the West's hope to stand firm in the future I wondered how could the nation that had defeated Hitler's great war machine have lost to Ho Chi Minh's ragtag bunch of jungle guerrillas against al Jennison seemed to be reading my mind for he gave the answer no weapons no matter how powerful can help the west until it overcomes its loss of willpower well of course the will to win is the crucial thing in sports and the will to live in hospitals and both in life the Vietnam War had been like a war between a hard little pin and a big wet noodle then came a sentence that leaped out like an arrow to defend oneself must one must also be ready to die there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being nothing is left then but concessions clearly this doctor was reading our symptoms in a bright light but how did we contract this disease again the answer came as soon as the question and the answer was not just political but philosophical in fact spiritual how did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness the mistake must be at the root at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was the first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment it became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher forces above him it could also be called anthropocentric with man seen as the center of everything that exists my thoughts now ran through a watercourse of courses what could be more radical than autonomy over against everything even God that was the first evil the evil of the devil refusal to surrender or submit to any higher will the issue had to be religious at root because God was the root if this was not true then all religion was a lie but if it was true then our relationship with that root had to be the root of all other relationships and of course the secular establishment could never be able to accept that and of course they would persecute this people as they had done to all the probably they would crucify such a person on a cross made of newspaper instead of wood this new way of thinking did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in men nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth another connection I thought the greatest good and the greatest evil the two greatest questions and there's a clear connection between the denial of evil and the naive exultation of human autonomy and freedom as automatically good one second later the Prophet explained this - that provided access for evil of which in our days there is a free and constant flow mere freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even has a number of new ones they won't like that line I thought but if there is evil then freedom cannot be automatically good that's why there are jails however in early democracies as in American democracy at the time of its birth all individual human rights were guaranteed because man is God's creature that is freedom was given to the individual conditionally in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility I knew that that was the fundamental difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution the difference was philosophical and ultimately religious and again the Russian prophet confirmed my thoughts 200 or even 50 years ago it would have seemed impossible in America that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims subsequently however all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries all the glorified technological achievements of progress including the conquest of outer space do not redeemed the 20th century's moral poverty whence all unison said that I looked at the faces of the children of the 20th century around me and it seemed to me that many were trembling on the brink of repentance they knew deep down that this prophets diagnosis of their disease was as unsparingly accurate as his observation of their symptoms dick protested but we're all still a lot better than communism as if reading our minds again the Prophet then dealt with this objection Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that communism is naturalized humanism this statement turned out not entirely senseless one does see the same stones in the foundation of AD spiritualize humanism and of any type of socialism and endless materialism freedom from religion and religious responsibility which under communist regimes reached the stage of anti religious dictatorship concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach this is typical of the Enlightenment in the 18th century and of Marxism not by coincidence all of communism meaningless pledges and oaths are about man with a capital m and his earthly happiness at first glance it seems an ugly parallel common traits in the thinking and way of life in today's West and today's East but such is the logic of materialism no protested dick no what I asked he says we're as bad as they are dick dick you know what Chesterton prophesied in 1929 know what he wrote the greatest angel will come not from Moscow but from Manhattan that's ridiculous maybe but maybe communism is dying and Manhattan ISM isn't and then the refugee from a life of communist torture suggested the same startling prophecy in our Eastern countries communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat it is zero and less than zero but Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy maybe in 10 years I whispered prophetically there will be more communists in Manhattan than in Moscow dick looked at me as if I was insane then came the prophets prognosis I am NOT examining here the case of a world war disaster there is a disaster which has already been underway for a long time I am referring to the calamity of AD spiritualize and irreligious humanistic consciousness we have placed too much hope in political and social reforms only to find that we were being deprived of our most precious possession our spiritual life this is the real crisis the split in the world today is far less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing both main sections how clearly he sees the world I whispered how could we all miss it no protested dick again we're humanistic and they're not then the profit refuted humanism at one stroke if humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy he would not be born to die since his body is doomed to die his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature I dare you to refute that argument I whispered to dick the match between our questions and songs and it's his answer was getting positively uncanny this was not a monologue this was dialogue of course he was not literally reading our minds but it felt exactly like that for I think he was reading the mind of our culture finally the Prophet came to his apocalyptic end if the world has not come to its end it has approached a major turn in history equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance I was swept up by the feeling of being in a great wave in the middle of a great turn of the tide I felt like a soldier on a battlefield when the Morning Sun has just burned off the fog today the Sun wore a beard finally dr. Saul Jonathan completed his medical analysis by offering his prescription we will have to rise to a new height a vision to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed but our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the modern era this ascension would be similar to climbing onto the next stage the next age no one on earth has any other way left but upward and then suddenly the Prophet was finished and the shocked applause rose around us like a flock of startled birds twenty thousand stood and cheered wildly as if this man were their Messiah and he had just stilled the rainstorm that was still falling from the sky to most of the twenty thousand the rain of ignorance had stopped for a moment but most of the dignitaries on and around the stage looked very uncomfortable as we started moving out I'm going to skip this a few days later I looked in the newspapers to see the reaction to sajin it's in speech and this in a sense was even more enlightening than the speech itself if you want a clear but scary prophecy of the future of our civilization read the discussion in the Boston Globe and the New York Times in the two weeks following cell units and speech let me give you just one or two examples of leading figures reactions to it the Boston Globe is it true that man is above everything is there no superior spirit above him asks all units and those are good questions but Sol units and went beyond questions to conclusions alas I thought the same ber irritates all these journalists el unit is not a skeptic like them like all enlightened and educated people he believes we can actually know truth how awful James Reston a very intelligent New York Times editorial writer quoted this sentence from the speech a fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger six decades for our Russian people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience unquote this from the author of the unspeakable tortures of the Soviet prisons and psychiatric wards by the way I hope you someday read some of Sol Unison's incredible things like one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich or a cancer ward or the Gulag Archipelago this Sol unasyn says is a fact which cannot be disputed and hears Reston's dispute the hell it can't sounds like a fundamentalist preachers sermon notes in the margin of a sermon point we care holler like hell I wondered which of two points Reston had misunderstood that Sol units and was claiming superiority not for the Russian totalitarian system but for the Russian spirit which courageously endured suffering or the point that suffering though physically bad can be spiritually good mr. Reston has never been in a concentration camp I think it is just possible that there may be something about suffering that he does not understand and Sol units and does two days later The Times read a lead editorial entitled the obsession of Sol units in' it said sonnets ins worldview seems to us far more dangerous than the easygoing spirit which he finds so exasperated the argument he raises is not new it goes back to the beginnings of the Republic and has never disappeared at bottom it is the argument between the religious enthusiasts sure of their relationship with God and the men of the Enlightenment trusting in the rationality of humankind I wondered what they meant by enthusiasts then I found out when they pinpointed cell unit sins prime crime it was a force that he believes in truth with a capital T how awful The Washington Post summarized sonnets ins intent as attacking tolerance and diversity these two things I think are the skeptics only remaining gods they're the only values you have left after you've denied all your principles the president's wife Rosalyn Carter took polite but firm issue with his derogatory remarks about Western culture mrs. Carter the first lady addressed the National Press Club in Washington and she denied that Americans are wallowing in materialism she said Alexander Solzhenitsyn says he can feel the pressure of evil across our land well I do not sense the pressure of evil at all quote erat demonstrandum I don't see the sky falling therefore Chicken Little is wrong Charles Kesler later wrote in the National Review it was startling sitting there with the graduating class that expected and alumni who remembered the traditional piety to hear an address that began Harvard's motto is very toss and then proceeded not to a eulogy of Harvard but a sobering examination of very to us truth after all the very idea that there is such a thing as objective truth is not much at home on college campuses nowadays I was cheered by the volume of public response for a while and the comments on the speech kept coming for weeks the public sensed that this speech was a touchstone for their whole culture and so did the media which suddenly decided that Salian it'sin was no longer in but out he had become an unperson they were dictating thought by fashion exactly as cell units in it said and they've been getting away with that con job ever since until we stopped them it's up to us you

Channel: Steubenville Conferences

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Keywords: Steubenville Conferences, Catholic, Franciscan University, Catholic Ministry, New Evangelization, Youth

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Length: 46min 29sec (2789 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2016