Freedom on Steroids

What do Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Alex Rodriguez have in common? All of them were good enough to qualify for the Baseball Hall of Fame based on their statistics and physical abilities alone. However, in a misguided, unnecessary, and illegal attempt to gain an extra edge, these three players used steroids to enhance their performance. Undeniably, their numbers vastly improved and their careers were unnaturally extended, but the ramifications of their decision to circumvent the rules had devastating consequences.

Simply put, the only way these all-time greats will get into Cooperstown now is by buying a ticket. The same goes for Mark McGwire, Manny Ramirez, Gary Sheffield, and Sammy Sosa.

I share that illustration to make a point that was brilliantly articulated by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978. For those who may have forgotten his name, Solzhenitsyn was a Russian author and dissident who was an outspoken and relentless critic of Joseph Stalin and Soviet oppression. His first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962 and chronicled the experiences of a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp.

Solzhenitsyn’s best-known work was The Gulag Archipelago, a three-volume series written between 1958 and 1968 and published in 1973. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."

OK, back to the main point of this article, which is that freedom unleashed, unbridled, and unfettered can – and almost inevitably does – result in anarchy, societal decay, and rampant immorality. Why is that? Because in its purest form, freedom removes all societal restraints and pits one person against another without any care or concern for his fellow man.

Devoid of that common good, Solzhenitsyn told the graduating class at Harvard, “a constant desire to have still more things and a still better life” would consume them and cause both worry and depression. “This active and tense competition,” he said, “comes to dominate all human thought and does not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.”

When taken to its extreme, Solzhenitsyn believed, a prosperous and well-to-do populace will invariably choose selfishness over sacrifice if it means an even temporary lowering of its ever-higher standard of living. Liberty without conscience leads to licentiousness, which leads to lawlessness… and society crumbles under its collective weight when all guidelines and guardrails are removed.

“Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism,” Solzhenitsyn told his audience.

In the same address, Solzhenitsyn decried a system in which what is legal often trumps what is morally right and mutually beneficial. “Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: Everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames,” he said.

“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime,” Solzhenitsyn reminisced, “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 also less than worthy of man. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”

Bemoaning the lack of true statesmen, Solzhenitsyn said that “A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.”

Prophetically – as if he was gazing into a crystal ball and seeing 2024 with great clarity – Solzhenitsyn added that “The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”

Solzhenitsyn continued to look into America’s future and didn’t like what he saw…

“On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.”

“And what shall we say about the dark realms of overt criminality? Legal limits (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also some misuse of such freedom. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency—all with the support of thousands of defenders in the society. When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists’ civil rights.”

“This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man—the master of this world—does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected.”

For the sake of time and space, I have only covered (and summarized) about a third of Solzhenitsyn’s prescient speech at the end of which he was roundly booed by Harvard’s intelligencia. Maybe I will revisit the rest of his address next week. However, in the meantime, let me leave you with these closing words which he categorized under the heading of A Decline in Courage…

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts of boldness and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.”