In the world of American scholarship on Solzhenitsyn, the names don’t get bigger than Daniel Mahoney’s. With that in mind, you can imagine how much his quite favorable review of Live Not By Lies means to me. This is deep. Excerpts:

As Rod Dreher demonstrates in his vitally important new book, Live Not by Lies, no such soul-searching or chastening of progressive illusions followed the anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989, or the collapse of the Soviet Union a few years later. Instead, democratic euphoria was combined with a continuing erosion of the pre-modern moral capital that gives modern liberty a more elevated appreciation of the meaning of life, as well as of the purposes of human freedom. In the last half century or so, a therapeutic culture has replaced the “reality principle” with the “pleasure principle,” as Freud called them. Respect for transcendent principles has also given way to a new cult of the autonomous self.

As moral self-limitation gave way to hedonism and hyper-individualism, and as civic spirit declined, democracy became more and more associated with an assault on all institutions and traditions that connected freedom to spiritual elevation and humanizing self-restraint. New and ever more militant ideological currents demanded social justice (i.e. doctrinaire egalitarianism of the most aggressive sort), cultural emancipation (e.g. same-sex marriage and gender ideology, with more and more exotic forms of “emancipation” to come), and the denial of objective truth. All of this is done in the name of the social construction of human nature and the linguistic construction of social reality. Social-justice warriors, gender theorists, and postmodern theorists of various stripes deny the very idea of a natural order of things and wish to silence or cancel all who continue to affirm its reality.

The demands of the Woke have become increasingly coercive, including the curtailment of the speech—and even employment—of those who question their reckless social and cultural agenda. Dreher speaks freely of an increasingly ascendant “soft totalitarianism.” In the present circumstances, such an appellation does not strike this reader as particularly hyperbolic. Like the totalitarians of old, the new totalitarians wish to erase historical memory and to rewrite history according to the willful ideological demands of the moment. They are cruel, vindictive, and moralistic, and thus incapable of acknowledging human frailty and fallibility. Their worldview in principle has no place for forgiveness, repentance, and civic reconciliation. Politics for them is war by other means—and perhaps not just other means.

More:

I end this review with a quotation from René Girard that stood out as I read Rod Dreher’s timely book. As many readers know, Girard had famously written on the mechanisms of scapegoating and victimization built into the structure of “mimetic desire,” as he called it. Near the end of his life, he gravely noted that, “The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill . . . has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.” Girard thus provides an exact, lapidary description of our new situation. This striking formulation helps illumine the timeliness of Live Not by Lies. Not only Christians, but all “dissidents” and men and women of good will need to give serious thought to the ways they might resist the regnant ideological lies all around us. In this task, Rod Dreher’s “manual” will remain indispensable for what might be a long time to come.

Read the whole thing.I can’t do justice to the depth of this review unless I quote long passages. Let me point out that Prof. Mahoney says, in these slightly critical lines:

Dreher’s perspective, which leans toward the apocalyptic, must be supplemented by tough-minded thinking and prudent action. I do not believe Dreher’s perspective is unduly alarmist, but I do believe it needs to be leavened by a sense that civic deliberation and action can help us resist the totalitarian tide.

That’s a fair and necessary comment. It brought to mind the words, from the book, of the Solidarity trade union activist Zofia Romaszewska, in the interview I did with her in Warsaw urged — emphatically — me to tell young Americans to organize now and fight back, giving not one inch to the soft totalitarians. From the book:

Today, at eighty, Romaszewska, now a grande dame of the anti-communist resistance, still retains the spark and tenacity of a street fighter. After five minutes of speaking with her in her Warsaw flat, it’s clear that any commissar faced with a firebrand like this woman would have no chance of prevailing.

Romaszewska is fierce on the subject of, well, solidarity. She sees the danger of soft totalitarianism coming fast, and urges young people to get off the internet and get together face-to-face to build resistance.

“As I see it, this is the core, this is the essence of everything right now: Forming these communities and networks of communities,” she says. “Whatever kinds of communities you can imagine. The point is that the members of that community must be very supportive of one another, no matter what comes. You don’t have to be prepared to give your life of the other person, but you do have to have something in common, and to do things together.”

I just went back to the transcript of the Romaszewska interview. I wanted to use more of her words in the book, but wasn’t able to squeeze them in. She also said that conservatives should not be discouraged by the left controlling all the high ground:

This is a very good reason for conservatives to roll up their sleeves and get to work. … In Poland, we used to lament all the time that the left controlled the media and cultural institutions, but finally we stopped lamenting and got to work. You have to have strong nerves, and be very decisive in building groups. This is very important.

I think she is talking there about the post-communist period, but I’m not certain from my notes. Wojciech Kolarski, the Polish secretary of state, told me about Zofia Romaszewska and her late husband Zbigniew:

Mrs. Romaszewska is an example of the generation that brought freedom to Poland. I believe that she is a symbol, as well, of involvement – that you should get involved in public affairs, and not only focus on your personal career and personal success. That you can always make a sacrifice for others. And [she and her late husband] both symbolize fidelity to ethos and ideas. In 1989, after Poland regained its independence, many people who were active in the Solidarity trade union movement forgot about that ethos of solidarity. But the Romaszewskas stayed faithful to that ethos all the time.

Bearing Prof. Mahoney’s criticism in mind, if I had it to do over again, I would have included these lines, simply to give people hope that they can change things.

Here is my obligatory request that you pre-order the book, which will be published on Tuesday September 29. The link in the previous sentece will take you to a page where you can choose to pre-order from a number of major booksellers (e.g., Amazon, B&N). If you want to pre-order a signed copy, pre-order exclusively from small indie bookseller Eighth Day Books by clicking here.

Another book you should order, along with mine: Dan Mahoney’s The Idol Of Our Age: How The Religion Of Humanity Subverts Christianity. 

Prof. Mahoney is a master of Solzhenitsyn studies, and here, in 2017, at Hillsdale, he lectures on Solzhenitsyn and the gulag: