"I think he would ask that we define our terms..."

From a just posted National Catholic Register interview with Joseph Pearce about the new edition of his biography, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile:

The Soviet Union disintegrated in the late 1980s, early 1990s, and most of the world believes that communism is pretty much dead and no longer a threat. Do you think that if Solzhenitsyn were alive today, would he be at ease with that assessment?

I think he would ask that we define our terms.

In one sense, of course, the secular fundamentalist experiment which was the Soviet Union floundered and fell after almost a century of bloody excesses culminating ultimately in the killing of tens of millions of people. But it did flounder and fall in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But what we’re really talking about here is big government, and big government animated by a secular fundamentalist philosophy. In other words, ultimately, that enemy is still very much present and we are still in danger of lurching blindly in a belief that problems can be solved by big government and that problems that are caused by the lack of God can be solved by a godless response.

So in that sense the lessons haven’t been learned, and the lessons haven’t been learned in the West, absolutely, that we could be lurching toward a secular fundamentalist big government, regardless of whether or not it quotes Karl Marx, it’s basically of the same spirit. That’s exactly what Solzhenitsyn was getting at in his Harvard address — that the spirit that unites communism and decadent materialism in the West is this secular fundamentalist materialism, this atheism at the root of politics and the root of society and how that leads ultimately to a culture of death.

Read the entire interview (authored by John Burger), "Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the Culture of Death" (Dec. 11, 2011). And read my May 20, 2011, Ignatius Insight interview with Joseph about the same book:

Comments

[Dan Deeny]

Superb! I have printed this and plan to copy it to give to one of my supervisors. Several days ago she said that the current high school generation would make the world worse. I disagreed and said that they are more opposed to the abortion business than the older people (I am 63.) She replied that, while she would never have an abortion, she thought women had the right to control their own bodies. I left it at that and went on break. The work place may not be the right place to discuss the culture of death. This lady might be open to an indirect approach. I am amazed by how many decent, ordinary women have accepted the abortion business much the same way this lady has.