Resisting the ideological Lie.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology by Daniel J. Mahoney, Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. 181 pp.

WHEN THE QUESTION "What is evil?" is posed to a class of undergraduates, it invariably elicits mention of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Conspicuously absent as a universal emblem of evil is Communism. Indeed, trendy students in Boston can today congregate at the downtown nightclub Pravda 116, which features a decor of red and a Communist-chic theme. The twenty-something crowds who gather at Pravda 116 are oblivious of the ideological evil extolled in the bar's theme. Bright young things, it is safe to say, would never locate their Saturday evening revelry at a Nazithemed bar. Where Nazism is only evil, Communism can be made "cool."

For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the identification of radical evil with the Nazis stems from a modern Manicheanism. As he writes in The Gulag Archipelago, "The Nuremberg Trials have to be regarded as one of the special achievements of the twentieth century: they killed the very idea of evil, though they killed very few of the people who had been infected with it." The Nuremberg Trials allowed absolute evil to be associated solely with the Nazis: the lesson mistakenly learned was that if the Nazis could be exterminated, absolute evil would also die. Evil, in short, could be eradicated from earthly existence if the enemies of human progress were vanquished.

According to Daniel J. Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn teaches us the decisive importance of understanding that evil exists in every human being, even as he offers hope for combating that evil. As Solzhenitsyn famously notes in Gulag, "... the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either--but right through every human heart--and through all human hearts." To deny this truth is to subscribe to the ideological Lie, which Professor Mahoney defines as "a radical or ontological falsehood that leads to the effort to overcome the natural order itself."

Ideology assails the human soul in an effort to overcome nature and remake human beings in the image of the state. Ideology operates first and foremost on the spiritual level. Our response to ideology, Solzhenitsyn argues, thus requires a spiritual stance. Modern--or, now, postmodern--man may either submit to the Lie or resist the Lie. His life is the lived response to the temptations of ideology. His soul may either ascend from ideology or be corrupted by it.

Mahoney's book is about the man Solzhenitsyn--his own stance against the Communist ideology that at one time enticed him and then overwhelmed his native Russia and one third of the world's population. Even more, the book examines the omnipresent spiritual, moral, and political dimensions of the ideological battle that are with us even in the wake of the demise of Soviet Communism. In exploring Solzhenitsyn's thought in seven brief chapters, Mahoney celebrates "a teacher of moderation, a chronicler of modern faith in progress gone awry, an anti-ideologue par excellence."

Solzhenitsyn teaches the possibility of an "ascent from ideology," Mahoney argues. With special focus on the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn's Harvard (1978) and Liechtenstein (1993) addresses, neglected parts of the massive cycle The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn's prescriptive writings on Russia, and his recently published prose poems, the book makes a compelling case for the consistency and the cohesiveness of Solzhenitsyn's thought. It shows with lucid analysis that Solzhenitsyn's writing--tethered to right reason--insists upon prudent political action.

"Relevance," however, rather than right reason is the totem of our opinion elite. According to many Western literati, and that group of political scientists formerly known as Sovietologists, Solzhen-itsyn is "irrelevant." He is seen as a great writer but a relic of a bygone era. His prescriptions for reform in Russia are wrong, and he has nothing of value to say to the West. Sovietologists now call themselves post-Sovietologists, but despite their change of title most of them pay insufficient attention to Solzhenitsyn's colossal role in the Soviet Union's collapse. Today, they and many others inside and outside the academy dismiss Solzhenitsyn as a reactionary crank.

Mahoney's book confronts this dismissive view by astutely capturing the challenge Solzhenitsyn offers to all serious human beings. Solzhenitsyn's primary project is not political, but the reinvigoration of the natural life necessary for human flourishing. Contained in that telos is a prudent political existence, but life, Solzhenitsyn insists, is more than progress in politics. Against the Progressive Doctrine (a term that Solzhenitsyn uses in Gulag) that sees the march of history carrying humanity forward to political salvation, Solzhenitsyn offers a moderate position, one that Mahoney characterizes as "classical realism."

Ideologues begin with a theory encompassing everything and impose it upon reality. Solzhenitsyn begins with the reality of imperfect human nature. He is not a totalizing theorist, but instead, as Mahoney suggests, writes as a "philosophic historian or a moral phenomenologist." Mahoney describes Solzhenitsyn's point of departure: "At the center of the order of things is the destiny, fate, and progress of the individual soul."

Individual souls are not the measure of truth, however, for as Solzhenitsyn states in his Liechtenstein Address, there exists "an unchanging Higher Power above us." Good and Evil co-exist in reality, and compete for an individual's allegiance; in no individual, however, do we see the elimination of evil. We should seek not after perfection based upon our own power--individually or politically--nor should we settle for the postmodern ennui that counsels complacency in the midst of great problems.

Mahoney thus suggests that Solzhenitsyn "combines Pascalian 'existentialism' with classical realism." Solzhenitsyn's concern for the individual never degenerates into the solipsism that characterizes much of modern and postmodern philosophy. Indeed, in his Liechtenstein Address, he laments that "Man has lost the sense of himself as a limited point in the universe, albeit one possessed of free will. He began to deem himself the center of his surroundings, adapting not himself to the world but the world to himself."

Exalting the individual self makes men incapable of dealing properly with death. Modern men--and postmodernists, too--forget, Mahoney writes, that "true self-discovery entails the fullest confrontation with the eternal questions rooted in the very structure of the world." When the individual is exalted as lord of all, Solzhenitsyn says, death becomes "the extinction of the entire universe at a stroke." Pascal's "existential" placement of man within the larger whole and the realism that recognizes the fixity of things are both important parts in Solzhenitsyn's thought.

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That Solzhenitsyn, with no postmodern irony, appeals to truth derived from nature and at the same time seeks to transcend modernity's radical individualism and cult of progress leads Mahoney to call him and the Czech dissident playwright and statesman Vaclav Havel "partisans of a postmodernist, posttotalitarian foundationalism." In the book's strongest chapter, "The Experience of Totalitarianism and the Recovery of Nature, "Mahoney ranges widely (from Thomas Hobbes to Havel to Leo Strauss) in portraying Solzhenitsyn as a postmodern apologist for natural rights.

Postmodernism seems most unplayful and downright angry in its many attempts to bury foundationalism once and for all. How then, is it possible to discover in Solzhenitsyn a postmodern foundationalist? Does he deserve to be called a postmodern thinker? Solzhenitsyn's searing critique of modernity's thoroughgoing anthropocentrism leaves modernity morally bankrupt. Scientism has supplanted science; progressivism has replaced an ordered understanding of progress. Modernity made the soul a slave to the body, even as medieval thought neglected the body in favor of the soul. A new balance--between body and soul--is possible, Solzhenitsyn seems to suggest, if men make moral concerns their chief aim.

Mahoney is a staunch defender of Solzhenitsyn's moral stance against the lie (indeed, recognizing the centrality of this stance is one of the major contributions of the book), but Mahoney identifies a potentially problematic aspect of Solzhenitsyn's thought in his idea that the theological-political problem can be resolved with a perfect balance of body and soul. This strain of "utopian spiritualizing" rarely reveals itself in Solzhenitsyn's thought, but Mahoney nonetheless cautions against it primarily because of its implications for politics.

Anti-foundationalist postmodernism is also radically antipolitical. "Literary politics" replace a robust understanding of regimes, especially as Aristotle taught. Mahoney does see in Solzhenitsyn's post-modern foundationalism a genuine appreciation of politics. He worries, however, that the "spiritualism" sometimes evident in Solzhenitsyn's writing could conflate the political and spiritual realms, for as woven together as are the two realms the differences between them must still be respected. It is a mistake, Mahoney argues, if Solzhenitsyn (and Havel) "expect their recovery of the natural world to become the direct and self-conscious basis of modern politics." Statecraft is soulcraft, but reviving souls does not ensure by itself a well-ordered polity.

So what does postmodern politics look like, for Solzhenitsyn? In The Red Wheel, Mahoney finds in a distinctly un-post-modern statesman, Pyotr Stolypin, a model for contemporary political action. Indeed, Mahoney calls the "Stolypin cycle" of August 1914 (the first of the five volumes in the massive cycle) "a veritable tractate on statesmanship." Stolypin's five-year stint as prime minister was marked by a moderation in the midst of Russian extremism that Solzhenitsyn sees as exemplary for then--and now--in Russia, and elsewhere.

A passage from November 1916 shows both Solzhenitsyn's admiration for Stolypin, and his prescription for politicians today: "The loud mouth, the big fist, the bomb, the prison bars are of no help to you, as they are to those at the two extremes. Following the middle line demands the utmost self-control, the most inflexible courage, the most patient calculation, the most precise knowledge." Prudence can be practiced. Solzhenitsyn teaches, only with that "most precise knowledge" of specifics (Mahoney's penultimate chapter discusses Solzhenitsyn's Tocquevillian defense of Russian local self-government). Prudence is the best antidote to ideology because it eschews abstraction.

To practice prudence--especially in postmodern times--requires courage. Wisdom, too, is necessary for good politics. Solzhenitsyn, unlike Leo Strauss, refuses to make morality instrumental to philosophy, Mahoney notes. Thus wisdom for Solzhenitsyn, and for Mahoney, too, is not reserved only for philosophers who hover above the moral and political realms. Temperance also is essential both for the statesman and the citizen, as Mahoney admirably outlines in his chapter on Solzhenitsyn's essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations."

"Repentance for internal and external sins is self-limitation's necessary but 'always difficult' precondition," Mahoney writes. Repentance is linked to magnanimity, and repentance--individual and collective--requires a humbling of oneself and one's nation. Humility and repentance--turning away from evil--demand responsibility, and self-limitation, what Mahoney calls the "'crown' of the moral virtues for Solzhenitsyn."

Solzhenitsyn's postmodern foundationalism requires no novel postmodern virtues. Indeed, classical and Christian virtues are everywhere evident in Solzhenitsyn's call for a renewed moral and political life. The ascent from ideology, in fact, depends upon these virtues. Solzhenitsyn is less an optimist--if we imagine optimism as confidence in purely human ability--than he is hopeful. Hope, of course, is a theological virtue. Yet Mahoney rightfully cautions us against seeing Solzhenitsyn as a prophet, for Solzhenitsyn's wisdom is not oracular revelation circumscribed by time and place. Rather, his ascent is built upon rational and universal truths of nature that are corroborated by Christianity.

By allowing Solzhenitsyn to speak above the din of those who dismiss him, Mahoney has given us a great gift. His interpretations of Solzhenitsyn's speeches, essays, and books, are especially incisive in recognizing Solzhenitsyn's significance for political philosophy, and political philosophy's postmodern task of grappling with ideological evil. Yet Mahoney does not read Solzhenitsyn only for his "relevance" today. Mahoney argues instead for the enduring, the permanent value of Solzhenitsyn's thought, for Solzhenitsyn, according to Mahoney, "affirms the primacy of the Good--he has confidence in the permanence of the Permanent Things--in the ultimate solidity of a natural order."

DAVID J. BOBB is Director of the Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence at Hillsdale College and a doctoral candidate in political science at Boston College.