Many of the Solzhenitsyn obituary writers on the left have felt obliged to dwell a little on his post-Cold War politics (which, if they had been paying attention, were the politics he had had before then).  The gist of it has been, “Yes, he was a great and heroic man, but can you believe all the crazy things he said?”  Ross has a perceptive post on how the treatment of Solzhenitsyn’s “mystical reactionary” side misses that Solzhenitsyn was a great dissident and writer because he was the “mystical reactionary.”  As Ross says:

From the Timescomplaining about his “hectoring jeremiads” and puzzling over his willingness to criticize “democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers” as well as Communists, to Christopher Hitchens griping absurdly about the “ayatollah-like tones” of his famous Harvard commencement address (the equivalent of comparing Chesterton to Franco), the coverage has often involved a Gopnikesque attempt to seal off the Good Solzhenitsyn from the Weird Solzhenitsyn, and to insist that the eloquent foe of Marxist tyranny can be celebrated even as the mystical reactionary is dismissed. 

This is close to what I was saying yesterday.  In many cases, the obituaries of the famous departed are occasions for self-congratulation and the reinforcement of political norms.  The reason why many of the obituaries have tried to separate the aspects of Solzhenitsyn’s career that the American mainstream admires from those that it finds troubling or dangerous is part of an effort to make clear that Solzhenitsyn was great insofar as he agreed with the American mainstream and was eccentric, irrational and ridiculous when he did not.  That it was actually almost the reverse–that his anticommunist dissent and literary accomplishments were in a way the least important things about him and his agreement with our mainstream was almost accidental when it happened–is just one more way in which Solzhenitsyn remains poorly understood even by those, including Hitchens, who give him grudging admiration.  Moreover, it was Solzhenitsyn’s willingness to reject Western intellectual fads (including, broadly speaking, the Enlightenment) in the conviction that they all partook of the same distorted understanding of human nature and our relationship with God that enabled him to see so clearly through the falsehoods of the most extreme anthropocentric views.

I would take issue with Ross’ equation of Gopnik’s likening Chesterton to Franco and Hitchens’ comparison of Solzhenitsyn to an ayatollah.  The second seems to me to be much worse and I think it is intended to be.  First of all, equating the two does a disservice to Franco, who was, for all of the excesses ever committed by the Nationalist regime, never so fanatical.  Further, when compared to what is said by actual ayatollahs, Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address was a mild, friendly rebuke.  This is the old Hitchensian move of conflating strong religious and moral conviction with coercive fanaticism and then declaring that faith must always lead to oppression.  In this way one of the world’s foremost dissidents can be perversely aligned with an oppressive tyranny.  Ross notes that this comparison is absurd.  However, the other comparison between Chesterton and Franco is not so much absurd as it is inaccurate.  Chesterton probably would have sympathized with the Nationalist cause (as did Belloc and many English literary Catholics who lived to see the Civil War) because he would have understood–correctly–that theirs was at least in part the cause of Catholicism against her enemies.  That wouldn’t have made him the same as Franco; it would have made him a Catholic.  Chesterton probably would have come to similar conclusions as Belloc, for whom

Spain’s civil war merely confirmed him in his realization that the capitalist and the communist alike have always hated any Catholic society far more than they have ever hated each other.    

What is even more strange from my perspective is that Solzhenitsyn’s “mix of Christian humanism, Russian nationalism, and deep skepticism about modernity” is considered politically incorrect.  Of course, my perspective is fairly unusual, so that might account for my puzzlement, but aside from the issue of nationalism Solzhenitsyn’s “politically incorrect” views might very easily be mistaken for the views of a significant number of 20th century conservative intellectuals and writers.  Solzhenitsyn tended to take his critiques farther than others, but this was evidence of his freedom from the imposed constraints that he lamented when he was discussing the quality of Western intellectual life.  Granted, if he had stayed in the United States and not gone back to Russia, I can see how his Russian nationalism might have seemed odd, but he did go back and he was and always remained a Russian.  His Russian nationalism seemed to many in the West to be unattractive, but when you consider that there were, are, three unequal political forces in Russia–the remaining communists, the small batch of liberal “reformers” and authoritarian nationalists–it was unremarkable that he should express Russian nationalist views when the alternatives were obviously anathema to him.  For that matter, the Russian experience in the ’90s, which Solzhenitsyn likened to the Time of Troubles, made nationalists out of a vast majority of Russians.  To then complain that he took positions consistent with this view from his criticisms of Yeltsin’s ineffectual rule to his condemnations of the attacks on Serbia to opposition to NATO expansion is a bit like complaining that he was, in fact, a Russian and Orthodox.

With the recent talk that Eric Cantor, the House Minority Deputy Whip from Virginia, is being seriously considered as McCain’s VP selection, it seems to me that it is a distinct advantage for Cantor that he engaged in scurrilous attacks on Obama’s position on Israel.  If the last couple of weeks has shown anything, I would think it would have shown everyone that it is clear that the McCain campaign is going to be as unscrupulous as it has to be, and Cantor has already distinguished himself as an attack dog on McCain’s behalf.  Far from being a liability, Cantor’s willingness to push the dishonest party line portaying Obama as anti-Israel is a feather in his cap in GOP circles.  The real question is whether McCain wants to be the first nominee since Mondale to name a current House member as a VP nominee.  (Bob Dole had the misfortune of choosing a former House member in Jack Kemp, and that didn’t exactly work out well, either.)  This is what I have never quite understood about the conservative enthusiasm for nominating Rob Portman, John Kasich or Chris Cox, among others, since none of them really brings the sort of executive experience that is going to give voters confidence to support the Republican ticket with such an aged nominee in the top slot. 

This is not to fault the current or former House members in question, but simply to drive home the point that even Eric Cantor does not really offset an Obama selection of Gov. Kaine, because Kaine is a governor and Cantor is just a House member.  More to the point, a McCain selection of Cantor is a signal of desperation and fear that Virginia is really in danger of being lost.  Whether or not Virginia is competitive (it is), the impression that McCain is on the defensive and is doing its utmost just to hang on to states that haven’t voted Democratic in over 40 years will probably cripple the ticket going into the fall.  Choosing a Pawlenty or someone similar says that the campaign will be contesting the Midwest and conceding nothing in the South, and it will add a governor to the ticket to offset any executive experience Obama may add with his choice.  The good news for McCain is that he will be able to find out Obama’s selection some time in advance of his own.  Obama can rest a little more easy in the knowledge that all GOP options are more or less unappealing.

As some of my relatives say, for the love.  Timothy Noah often excels at embarrassing himself, but he joins a select crowd of overreacting liberals with his latest item, which declares that this silly “Is Obama too skinny for his own good?” article also has a racial subtext.  This is very much like the overheated response to “Celeb” or “The One”–rather than simply laughing off these ads and articles as ridiculous, Obama’s supporters and many media figures seem to be deadly serious about stressing the cunning, super-secret deployment of racial messages in both.  Whether it is Perlstein hallucinating Nazi propaganda film homages or Gergen detecting racist tropes or Noah discerning skinniness as the latest one of these tropes, the responses have managed to make the various targets of their criticism seem sane, well-balanced and serious by comparison.  Meanwhile, looking back over recent episodes of The Daily Show, I was amused to find that Jon Stewart and his crew had made the exact same comparison between Obama and Moses that supposedly implied (according to Gergen) that the McCain campaign was accusing Obama of not knowing his place.  The response to these things is very simple: mock them for their stupidity, and stop investing them with the importance that their creators want you to give them.

His childhood was a peripatetic journey through Kansas [bold mine-DL], Indonesia, Hawaii and beyond. ~David Brooks

The first place on this list is a small but curious error, and one that might be subtly encouraged by Obama’s first national ad of the general election in which he talks up his grandparents’ Kansas roots.  While virtually every profile of the candidate remarks on his mother‘s home in Kansas, and the phony controversy over Obama’s birth certificate takes for granted that everyone agrees his birthplace is supposed to be (and was) in Hawaii, there is an idea that seems to be circulating that he spent some time as a child in Kansas.  This simply isn’t true, anyone who has spent any time following Obama’s career knows it isn’t true.  How does it get included on the list?  It’s not as if his non-Kansan childhood is a mystery, since it was remarked upon when he was campaigning in Kansas earlier this year when he made his first visit to his grandfather’s hometown.       

This would be almost entirely irrelevant, except that this serves as a useful example of how small, easily avoidable errors creep into prominent discussions of his biography and create the basis for other false claims on the grounds that we “don’t really know” who Obama is.  If the most basic, readily confirmed facts seem to be in dispute, when there is actually no dispute about them, the room for rumors and bizarre claims grows.  The supposedly “elusive” Obama is not really “elusive” at all, but for some reason people keep insisting on making him into this incomprehensible, protean figure who cannot be fully known.  The information is all there in the public domain, and his biography is as well-known to us as any candidate’s in recent memory (does anyone remember hearing even once about where Bob Dole went to elementary school?) thanks to his own autobiographical work, but somehow we are supposed to believe that his identity “eludes” us.  It would probably seem much more clear if everyone discussing his biography would be a bit more attentive to basic claims about where he lived and grew up.

Last night I read the sad news that Solzhenitsyn had passed away.  Besides being a great writer and an important dissident against the Soviet government, Solzhenitsyn was an impeccable moral witness against the corruption that went with great power and wealth no matter the regime or ideology.  It was this outstanding conviction, which became increasingly more tied to religious experience and Orthodox spirituality over the course of his life, that marked him out as one of the great men of the last century.  It was this same conviction that ensured that fewer and fewer people truly understood him, because he was unwilling to adopt the various fads, as he called them, that prevailed in the West just as he had been unwilling to accept the lies of the Soviet regime.   

Fiercely anticommunist, he did not make the common errors of so many anticommunists.  These usually involved praising individualism and making unqualified apologies for liberal democracy and capitalism, and furthermore urging the adoption of Western models throughout the world as if to mirror the communist desire for global uniformity.  The famous 1978 Harvard commencement address to which Dan linked on the main blog contained powerful warnings against the idea of enforcing one model on the entire world that many Westerners continue to embrace even now:

But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick [bold mine-DL].   

Something else that many Westerners have had difficulty understanding is Solzhenitsyn himself.  Though he cannot be reduced to a mere inheritor, he was part of the Russian intellectual tradition to which Dostoevsky and the Slavophiles before him belonged, and the same pressing concern they had with spiritual and moral goods threatened by the ravages of ideology and rationalism is evident in his writings and speeches.  Solzhenitsyn’s critique of a legalistic way of life, which he made in his Harvard address, has deep roots in the Slavophiles’ combination of admiration for the material accomplishments of the West and the simultaneous repudiation of the spiritual and intellectual culture that fostered them.  Like the Slavophiles and Dostoevsky, he did not wish any more of the modern Western experience on Russia:

But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.

Of course, this conviction was only deepened and made more powerful by the ruin that the attempt to impose such a model on Russia in the ’90s, and it was during this period when many of Solzhenitsyn’s remaining American admirers began to reject him.

Instead of the constant pursuit of rights codified in law, Solzhenitsyn counseled restraint and the practice of virtue, and he found the the legalistic attitude to be opposed to both:

Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: Everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames.  

The celebration and expansion of freedom at the expense of obligation also draws Solzhenitsyn’s stern judgement:

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. 

His ringing condemnations of materialism are among the most obvious examples of his spiritual and fundamentally theocentric vision, and here again his affinities with the Slavophiles are clear.  As with them, Solzhenitsyn held that moral renewal and spiritual regeneration are the means to combating the corrupting effects of materialism:

Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism. 

What is so remarkable about Solzhenitsyn’s address thirty years later is how critical he was of George Kennan in particular, who was perhaps one of the few Americans who genuinely understood and respected Russia and the Russians and whose attitudes were generally more in line with Solzhenitsyn’s own than any other American of his generation.  In retrospect and at a distance from the immediate post-Vietnam moment, Kennan’s opposition to the war in Vietnam has been by and large vindicated and Solzhenitsyn’s warnings of a “hundredfold Vietnam” seem the least persuasive part of his address.  It may not have been as clear in the late 1970s because of certain policy disagreements, but in the post-Cold War era these two exceptional men were much closer to one another than they were to most of their own countrymen, and both have passed away in the first decade of this century having been poorly understood for much of their careers.  In the end, the limited ability of many Westerners to understand Solzhenitsyn properly, to appreciate him as more than the literary master and Soviet dissident (categories that are very comfortable and ultimately flattering to Western assumptions), stems ultimately from the inability or perhaps unwillingness to understand Russia both past and present.   

Update: Andrew Cusack has an exemplary obituary of Solzhenitsyn here.

Appealing to the crowd is not a good argument for one position or another, but it is interesting how many more voters (53%) believed Obama’s “dollar bill” remark to be actually racist than found the ridiculous “Celeb” ad to be so (22%).  That would suggest that I vastly underestimated the potential backlash against Obama for toying around with these sorts of thinly-veiled accusations of race-baiting, and I am genuinely surprised by how strong the reaction is.  I speculated that this sort of thing might not go over well with the general electorate, even as I was pretty sure that the media would eat it up, but I could not have imagined how badly it would be received by the public. 

What I find even more remarkable is the idea that anyone could interpret Obama’s comment as being racist.  It is now “racist” to hint that others are going to use a candidate’s race against him?  Does that make any sense?  Do 53% of likely voters really think Obama making an obvious reference to his race (one so obvious that you have to think your audience morons to deny it) is racist?  If so, can we officially declare that the word has no more meaning, or at least that for the most part it is trotted out whenever we want to refer to something as Very Bad?  Obama’s remark may be many things, but of all the words I can think of to describe it racist is not among them.   

What doesn’t surprise me is that the response to the “Celeb” ad breaks down for the most part along racial lines, as a majority of black voters regard the ad to be racist, while less than a fifth of whites and just 14% of “other” take that view.  The numbers are to some extent simply flipped concerning Obama’s remark, but even 44% of black respondents said that the comment was racist.  What we seem to be seeing in the results to both questions is an intensely negative reaction to McCain’s ad among the groups that give him his greatest support, but an even broader, more negative reaction against the claim that McCain was engaged in race-baiting.  Added to this is the confusion, encouraged by the bizarre phrasing of the question about Obama’s statement, between accusing someone of race-baiting and racism.  

Obama’s strongest supporters are, as usual, rallying against any slight against their candidate in the most overwrought way possible, while Obama’s blunder of a remark seems to have given a green light for just about everyone who is not favorably disposed towards Obama to pin him with a very damaging label.  Having been shielded by a friendly press and overprotective, hypersensitive supporters for most of the year, Obama seems to have become very careless.  In making an incendiary charge (his opponents will engage in race-baiting) that was also false (to the extent that he blamed McCain by name for it), he may have done the kind of serious damage to his campaign that all of the other controversies, both real and manufactured, and all of the spurious but widely-circulated claims against him have failed to do.

I keep seeing this ridiculous McCain ad being approvingly circulated on conservative blogs, and I am more than a little baffled at how stupid his campaign thinks we are.  The ad claims that Obama is somehow neglecting or ignoring Latin America, as if it were wise for McCain to remind conservatives of his enthusiasm in this area, and it assumes that Latino audiences and the press are both so oblivious that they don’t know that Obama gave a Latin America policy speech in May.  There were problems with the speech he gave, but he has certainly paid some attention to the region.  Understandably, McCain wants to cut into Obama’s lead among Latinos, and he probably thinks he should be able to win over as many as Bush did, but must everything these people do be so unreservedly ill-informed, lame and clueless?

McCain is not exactly a details guy. ~Chuck Todd

He is so very much not a “details guy” that he often doesn’t know the details of his own proposals, repeatedly makes errors when discussing specific aspects of vital foreign policy questions, and makes statements that contradict his own plans.  To say that he is not one for details takes for granted that he is at least competent when speaking in broad terms, but this isn’t true, either.

Not content with being shown to be foolish once before, the Maistre-basher responds with a trivial post that cites a pejorative characterization from Encyclopedia Britannica, which I suppose is the old-fashioned version of being a Google pundit.  The introduction to this translation of Maistre’s Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon contains the following details that are worth considering:

In 1784, when Joseph’s younger brother Xavier and some other young gentlemen in Chambery began organizing a project to launch Savoy’s first hot-air balloon…it was Joseph who was sent to Geneva to consult the celebrated physicist  Benedict de Saussure on the technical details.  He was also drafted to write the “Prospectus” to enlist subscribers to finance the project, which succeeded with a twenty-minute ascent in May 1784.  From Maistre’s diaries we know as well that while in exile in Lausanne in 1793 he found time to take lessons in “experimental physics.”…As will be apparent to any reader of his mature works, including the Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon with its citations and references to an impressive number of figures in the history of science, Maistre became one of the most many-sided and best read men of his generation.

But because it flatters the prejudices of ignorant materialists, Maistre must have hated science because his politics and religious views are not the same as theirs.  Never mind the foolishness of the claim linking modern American conservatsm to Maistre.  Unfortunately, the American conservative admirers of Maistre can probably be counted on one hand, and in this we are not exactly representative of the contemporary movement. 

Now it is true that Maistre apologetically attributed the rise of modern science to Christian culture, and believed in a harmonious relationship between theology and science, but in this he was espousing a long-standing Christian understanding of the complementary relationship between revelation and science.  In calling him a philosopher of science, I may have given the impression that his entire career was concerned with such questions, and that would be misleading.  Nonetheless, certainly he was a philosopher who was reasonably well-educated and interested in the modern science of his day and its moral and philosophical implications.  Claims to the contrary are presumably the product of simple ignorance about the man in question. 

P.S.  Further in the introduction, the translator cites a study of Maistre by Larry Siedentrop, who said:

It is knowledge of science and its effect on philosophy that takes Maistre beyond the theories of Vico and Burke.

Via Reihan, Fukuyama makes some sense on Kosovo and broader foreign policy questions.  Once again, I would also add my usual objections to the use of the word autocracy to describe the governments of Russia and China.