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:kmich wrote: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.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.
"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.
“How can the nation as a whole express its repentance? Surely only through the mouths and by the pens of individuals?“For each and every individual. “For every trend of social thought.”
“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….”