Repentance and Self Limitation in the Life of Nations

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kmich
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Repentance and Self Limitation in the Life of Nations

Post by kmich »

This is follow up from my previous post a few days ago in the "The future of the US middle class" thread:
kmich wrote:
Doc wrote:As I said in my previous post more or less. This seems not to be because of the posters here but what is presently going on in the world. Not to worry, this too will pass. In the mean time as SM said we all have great seats. Even if it is to watch the drowning of a great many societies and cultures that seemingly cannot swim in the sea of modernity. Tomorrow is may even be us.
Yes. I would only add that when the world seems on fire that is likely best the time for our deep repentance and reflection, not necessarily for running about with our own hair on fire and reacting.
This is a more appropriate place for consideration of this topic. Many thanks to Doc for stimulating my reflection on this. While Solzhenitsyn is often reflecting below on the Russia of the late Soviet Union, I believe his message is universal and relevant, and perhaps critical for our times. A good place to start:

"REPENTANCE AND SELF-LIMITATION IN THE LIFE OF NATIONS"

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)

Selected excerpts:
“It is in our human nature to … apply ordinary, individual, human values and standards to larger social phenomena and associations of people, up to and including the nation and the state as a whole.”

“Whatever feelings predominate in the members of a given society at a given moment in time, they will serve to color the whole of that society and determine its moral character. And if there is nothing good there to pervade that society, it will destroy itself, or be brutalized by the triumph of evil instincts.”

“The gift of repentance, which perhaps more than anything else distinguishes man from the animal world, is particularly difficult for modern man to recover. We have, every last one of us, grown ashamed of this feeling; and its effect on social life anywhere on earth is less and less easy to discern. The habit of repentance is lost to our whole callous and chaotic age.”

“We start from what seems to us beyond doubt: that true repentance and self-limitation will shortly reappear in the personal and the social sphere, that a hollow place in modern man is ready to receive them. Obviously then the time has come to consider this as a path for whole nations to follow.”

“Add to this the white-hot tension between nations and races and we can say without suspicion of over-statement that without repentance it is in any case doubtful if we can survive.

“It is by now only too obvious how dearly mankind has paid for the fact that we have all throughout the ages preferred to censure, denounce and hate others, instead of censuring, denouncing and hating ourselves. But obvious though it may be, we are even now, with the twentieth century on its way out, reluctant to recognize that the universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations; … it cuts across nations and parties, shifting constantly, yielding now to the pressure of light, now to the pressure of darkness. It divides the heart of every man, and there too it is not
a ditch dug once and for all, but fluctuates with the passage of time and according to a man’s behavior.”

“Repentance is the first bit of firm ground underfoot, the only one from which we can go forward not to fresh hatreds but to concord. Repentance is the only starting point for spiritual growth.
“For each and every individual. “For every trend of social thought.”
“How can the nation as a whole express its repentance? Surely only through the mouths and by the pens of individuals?

“The nation is mystically welded together in a community of guilt, and its inescapable destiny is common repentance. We all bear responsibility for the quality of our government, for the campaigns of our military leaders, … for the songs of our young people.”

“The man who takes it upon himself to express the repentance of a nation will always be exposed to weighty dissuasions, reproaches, and warnings not to bring shame upon his country or give comfort to its enemies. … But it can happen that repentance is expressed not just once and momentarily by a single writer or orator, but becomes the normal mood of all thinking society. … The repentance of a nation expresses itself most surely and palpably in its actions. … This article is written for posterity with faith in the natural proclivity of Russians to repent, in our ability to find the penitential impulse in ourselves and set the whole world an example. … Repentance is among the most prominent Russian national characteristics. … But will it be easy for us honestly to remember all that when we have lost all feeling for truth?”

“If we now long to go forward at last into a just, clean, honest society—and there is a glimmer of hope that we do—how else can we do so except by repentance? We cannot convert the kingdom of universal falsehood into a kingdom of universal truth by even the cleverest and most skillfully contrived economic and social reforms; those are the wrong building blocks. … Only through the repentance of a multitude of people can the air and the soil be cleansed so that a new, healthy national life can grow up.”

“Unless we recover the gift of repentance, our country will perish and will drag down the whole world with it.”

“Repentance is only a clearing of the ground, the establishment of a clean basis in preparation for further moral actions—what in the life of an individual is
called ‘reform.’ And if in private life what has been done must be put right by deeds, this is all the more true in the life of a nation. … After repentance, self-limitation comes into its own as the most natural principle to live by. Repentance creates the atmosphere for self-limitation. … So far as I know, no state has ever carried through a deliberate policy of self-limitation or set itself such a task, but when it has done so at a difficult moment in some particular sector (rationing, for example), self-limitation has paid off handsomely.”

“The turn toward inward development, the triumph of inwardness over outwardness, if it ever happens, will be a great turning point in the history of mankind, comparable to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. This revolution will not be like earlier ones; it will be a moral revolution requiring both courage and sacrifice. The examination of all this does not lie within the scope of this present article….”
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Re: Repentance and Self Limitation in the Life of Nations

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The United States is Babylon and not the New Israel, but not in the sense that either the Rastafari or the End Timers understand it......

America is actually innocent of Revelation and reads scripture as badly as any unlettered people. American is the Land of Shinar. By her sole name and accomplishments is G_d to be impressed and to grant her a place in Heaven, no other Grace being asked. But the hosts of the Lord came and blew their sacred dog whistles; and though everyone spoke the same words, no one understood each other. Thus was their speech confounded, and soon will they be scattered across the face of the earth.........
She irons her jeans, she's evil.........
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Re: Repentance and Self Limitation in the Life of Nations

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Miss_Faucie_Fishtits wrote:The United States is Babylon and not the New Israel, but not in the sense that either the Rastafari or the End Timers understand it......

America is actually innocent of Revelation and reads scripture as badly as any unlettered people. American is the Land of Shinar. By her sole name and accomplishments is G_d to be impressed and to grant her a place in Heaven, no other Grace being asked. But the hosts of the Lord came and blew their sacred dog whistles; and though everyone spoke the same words, no one understood each other. Thus was their speech confounded, and soon will they be scattered across the face of the earth.........
Well, that is the sorry state of affairs. Most of us are really more concerned with impressing ourselves rather than God. If we try to impress God, we are only answered by the stony silence of the grave for all of our vanities. But are we fated to such spiritual disarray and disintegration across the face of the earth? Is there no hope? Does history have to run its course in just another ho hum decline and disintegration of another once “great” civilization?

Solzhenitsyn’s prayer is for something very new and different that could be a fundamental turn in history. A radical clearing of the ground of our lives that opens the heart in repentance and into a grace of renewal for each of us, our nation, and our world. While it may sound utopian to some, Solzhenitsyn was hardly an ingenue on the brutal realities of life and state power.

I really do believe that God's grace to answer Solzhenitsyn’s prayer is present for all of us; I have experienced it in my own life. To receive it though, we have to be willing to shut up and listen to the silence rather than our various whistles and constant chatter. We are then charged to us that space to confront the impoverishment of our moral imaginations and the radical, vulnerable presence of us and the other. That is a tall order that is hardly the business of our farcical parties and factions, but is something each of us is responsible for and ultimately will be held to account.

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Re: Repentance and Self Limitation in the Life of Nations

Post by Marcus »

kmich wrote:. . Is there no hope? Does history have to run its course in just another ho hum decline and disintegration of another once “great” civilization?

Solzhenitsyn’s prayer is for something very new and different that could be a fundamental turn in history. A radical clearing of the ground of our lives that opens the heart in repentance and into a grace of renewal for each of us, our nation, and our world. . .
"Christianity came into a world of divided loyalties -- races, classes, tribes, nations, empires, all living to themselves alone. It did not simply erase these loyalties; that would have plunged men into nihilism and cancelled the previous work of creation, and Jesus came not to deny but to fulfill. Rather, by its gift of a real future, Christianity implanted in the very midst of men's loyalties a power, which, reaching back from the end of time, drew them step by step into unity."

—Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future
Elsewhere Rosenstock-Huessy contends that the first thousand years after Christ saw the victory of one God over many, the second millennium saw the victory of one world over many. We stand now on the brink of the third millennium which will see one humanity out of many.

Patience . . . Solzhenitsyn's prayer was answered at Calvary . . .
"The jawbone of an ass is just as dangerous a weapon today as in Sampson's time."
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Re: Repentance and Self Limitation in the Life of Nations

Post by kmich »

Marcus wrote:Patience . . . Solzhenitsyn's prayer was answered at Calvary . . .
Patience, yes. A complacent passivity, no.
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Re: Repentance and Self Limitation in the Life of Nations

Post by Marcus »

kmich wrote:
Marcus wrote:Patience . . . Solzhenitsyn's prayer was answered at Calvary . . .
Patience, yes. A complacent passivity, no.
The Reformed Faith is anything but complacent . . Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda . . .


". . They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key."


—James Russell Lowell
"The jawbone of an ass is just as dangerous a weapon today as in Sampson's time."
--- Richard Nixon
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"I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels."
—John Calvin
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Re: Repentance and Self Limitation in the Life of Nations

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

Solzhenitsyn's thoughts may be the antithesis of our progress from the Enlightenment. I am familiar with those who would argue that this call for self-limitation is a way to re-enchant the world and send it back into ignorance and superstition. They would suggest that Solzhenitsyn was uncomfortable with the material facts of ambiguity and wished the world readopt another version of original sin as a cure to ambivalence and the conflicts that arise from it.

They would also wonder what is tangible about a mystical bond that we are supposed to ascetically order our lives around. Solzhenitsyn, and his backers, treat it as self-evident; but there is nothing self-evident about it. And assigning national characters with associated guilts is distinctly pre-modern and acts as an inescapable double-bind on individuals. A nation collectively guilty is unjustified and always indebted until her death. More troubling, they would be most troubled by who is able to divine which guilts are actually collective. This clerical class would be an imposition on the equality of all men and depend upon all conflicts and guilts to be irresolvable..
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Re: Repentance and Self Limitation in the Life of Nations

Post by Parodite »

I think repentance as in remorse or regret may work for people on a personal level.. with the knowledge that what is personal also has social components. Bit indeed it has connotations with sin and guilt which many people feel overreach what in actually can be said to be a personal and social responsibility or accountability.

Instead of burdening ourselves and each other with amounts of guilt and sin that would only bring joy to sadists or masochists respectively, a more workable approach could be in times of crisis: What the f*ck is going on.. and what can I do? To carry the world on your back at that point is only a hindrance.
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Re: Repentance and Self Limitation in the Life of Nations

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NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:Solzhenitsyn's thoughts may be the antithesis of our progress from the Enlightenment. I am familiar with those who would argue that this call for self-limitation is a way to re-enchant the world and send it back into ignorance and superstition.

I am familiar with those arguments. Solzhenitsyn was also declared a dangerous reactionary by Soviet authorities who made many of those same accusations. Those arguments, however, were frequently distorted and misleading. He did not construct an anti-Enlightenment return to the world of the Amish or of ancient healers. He did criticize the standard formulae of the Enlightenment as retrogressive and inadequate to meet contemporary challenges. He would likely have agreed with Alasdair MacIntyre that the Enlightenment period has been characterized by a complete confusion of different systems, all of them attempting to replace Christianity, and none of them succeeding, partly because none of them satisfactorily answered the question: what is the point of man? A point that Solzhenitsyn himself confronted during his imprisonment, “Lying there on a rotting prison straw, I realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe but the maturing of the soul….”

Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the notion that the answer to that question can be derived either from the brutal force of state power as in his own country or from what he perceived as the promotion of a hollow, materialistic narcissism in the West. He criticized what he perceived as a feckless soulless, superficial modernity without faith, courage, and history. He very much falls in the critical literary tradition of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. He was a literary figure within a sharply divisive political era, so misunderstandings and controversies among both his supporters and detractors would be predictable.
NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:They would also wonder what is tangible about a mystical bond that we are supposed to ascetically order our lives around. Solzhenitsyn, and his backers, treat it as self-evident; but there is nothing self-evident about it.
I cannot speak for his backers. Solzhenitsyn valued the soul of the individual, but saw its origin and support in the integrity of collective memory shaped by dialogics of mutual respect. This is bond that is not self-evident but requires the study, honor, and respect of common heritages and traditions. While the bond is historical, it is likely to be perceived as strange and mystical by many being a somewhat distinctly Russian cultural experience. Nevertheless Abraham Lincoln appealed to the same sensibility prior to the Civil War when he appealed to fractured nation, “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature…”
NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:And assigning national characters with associated guilts is distinctly pre-modern and acts as an inescapable double-bind on individuals. A nation collectively guilty is unjustified and always indebted until her death. More troubling, they would be most troubled by who is able to divine which guilts are actually collective. This clerical class would be an imposition on the equality of all men and depend upon all conflicts and guilts to be irresolvable..
Solzhenitsyn was not talking about some authority assigning some form of collective guilt. As he wrote in the Gulag Archipelago, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” As such, coming to terms with guilt must take place within each individual heart, and each individual's repentance, if commonly pursued, can weld together a common integrity and destiny. Repentance is to heal the sinful wounds of individuals for their renewal and salvation, and, if commonly shared, of nations. For Solzhenitsyn, individuals assign and determine the moral character of nations, not the other way around.
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