Solzhenitsyn, Spengler, and the History of Ideas

Intellectual history has always been something of a Cinderella of an academic subject. The attempt to capture the contingent influences upon ideas as they progress through society, and the quicksilver pace of their movements and transfigurations, is both too hard and too simple to do. Too hard, because it takes a very firm grasp of an era and its perspective to depict the history of an idea in a satisfying way; too easy because any charlatan can have a go.

Proper intellectual history, like other parts of the discipline, also requires both an interest in the subject matter and a willingness to place it in bad light that is often quite difficult to do. Many histories are born of obsessions, and have at their root some aimed love or misplaced passion, and who would turn on the object of their desires at some fundamental level and still look at themselves of a morning?

I've been thinking a lot this week about the contingencies that affect thinkers. If one happened to be a conservative, patriotic and frustrated individual of an isolated sort, in one age you could look to Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a moral exemplar.

Solzhenitsyn has been taken at his word, as many fundamentalists of an orthodox bearing often are in the west. He's seen by many as the sort of man who can prove a fear that has lurked in the western mind since around 1054, when Christendom's major split occurred on the back of the west's rediscovery of the trinitarian idea of heresy. We may have microwave ovens and more than a potato to put in them the modern expression of the fear goes; but they have morals and fists and will use both.

Had he challenged the Soviet system a few years before he did, or a few years afterward, Solzhenitsyn might have been forgotten. His principal protest against Stalin's regime, for instance, came in 1945. Twice decorated, and therefore a war hero, he managed to offend Stalinists and to be sent to a prison camp, and ultimately to 're-education' in Kazakhstan. Six years earlier, his thought-crimes and his lack of medals may have seen him shot and forgotten; seventeen year later, under Nikita Khruschev, he was allowed his voice.

23 years in prison is a long time to survive and to not recant, to not give in, and to avoid the vagueries of fate and association. It is the sort of time in which a basic moral determination to oppose a materialist culture can avoid any of the embarrassments and desires that may have rendered it flawed and otiose. Exposed earlier to the world, and to a shorter and easier imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn could have lost the adamantine purity he grew and was associated with.

Those 23 years were also a period that saw the west move into the beginnings of what Christopher Lasch would no doubt have called a crisis of narcissism. It wasn't just that people were ready to oppose the Soviets for the idea of Solzhenitsyn by 1970; it was that people were prepared to doubt the libertinism and solipsism that followed upon the great boom which was ending by 1973, and giving way to stagflation.

If Solzhenitsyn had been released and exiled to, say, Vermont in 1964, would he have ever achieved the status he had by the seventies, when western intellectuals and working people, for different reasons, were prepared to listen to his coruscating critique of their society? What would have happened had he encountered the sort of middle-class, comfortably raised 'thinkers' who dominate public intellectual life today, rather than men raised on war and the great depression to whom Henry V was a true tale of what happens to men when they kill for the state?

Solzhenitsyn, of course, became the archetype of Holy patriotic Russia. He became such a symbol because anticommunists were looking for one. They found, briefly, a version in the Mujahedin of the 1980s. Those were held to represent the triumph of faith over soviet materialism by breathless and slightly stupid journalists; but they couldn't long carry western hopes and sensibilities as well as Solzhenitsyn.

Yet how far at the end were his views separate from Oswald Spengler, who was viewed as a little bit of a huckster and fraud by the fifties?

Spengler, remember, shared many of the same views as the Russian. The German was almost four decades older than Solzhenitsyn, however, born on the other slope of industrial modernity, and in Bismarck's Reich too. The author of The Decline of the West, Spengler became obsessed with the idea of the social decline of civilisations, and sought to mix collectivism and authoritarianism in order to achieve some sort of synthesised community not unlike that which Solzhenitsyn moralised about.

Spengler's gloom led him to mysticism, and to a flirtation with Nazis which they ultimately did not reciprocate because most of them saw themselves, in true, only slightly perverted Rousseauian form, as representing progress through recession and the reversal of modern civilisation.

Like Solzhenitsyn, his rejection of liberalism was banned and censored, but unlike him he was never required to do any hard labour, or exiled beyond the bookshops of Munich, the Harz Mountains, and Italy. As an original paleoconservative, his themes were those of Solzhenitsyn; decline, collapse and retreat to te scaffolding of identity. He influenced Malcom X, John Dos Passos and Joseph Campbell, and the Christian form of the sickness of antisemitism, as with Solzhenitsyn, led his thought into all sorts of contortions.

Was it just that Spengler, as a critic of the Nazis, became unnecessary when their revolution moved to devour their citizens and then the world, or was it that, because he was dead, his works could not bear the personalised weight that those who could have used him as a conservative symbol of defiance would have placed on him? If, in some counterfactual world, the bureaucratic, corrupt and ultimately suicidal Nazi state had somehow survived the early nineteen forties, would Spengler be remembered as Solzhenitsyn is now?

I think not. Spengler was fundamentally unable to offer anything but a self-referential observation of decline in which any piece of evidence proved itself. He did so in tones which reached at objectivity, despite his essentially partisan nature, and doomsaying can only go so far, especially if doom does not arrive. Sartre and Heidegger claimed the brutal force of the 'inevitable' future for themselves in the twentieth century; Spengler could point, were he to defy Karl Popper and point to anything at all, only to failure and death. Who would have followed that? Being the St Paul of the suicidal upper middle classes is hardly a position of world-shaking leadership.

Spengler also allowed his gloom to displace the hope that must reside in any worthwhile understanding of the best of humanity, which I do not think Solzhenitsyn did. If the latter had done, he would not have raged so much at the world so that it might improve. Despair is a sin for the perfectly good reason that it is useless and destructive, and its near twin, certainty, is of course almost as apt to lead one past all sorts of opportunities in gloomy ignoral. In the end, Solzhenitsyn could celebrate a motherland; Spengler could only embrace a grave.

It is odd. Solzhenitsyn once talked of the inevitable attraction of the best and worst of Germany and Russia, and yet he saw in it hope, and the possibility of creativity and life, whereas Spengler, from what was a more privileged position, saw only 'lesser races' who were to be feared because their awareness of their inferiority would give rise, eventually, to their revenge in attacks on the west. They both loved Beethoven, both heard Bach; but one can't help thinking that Spengler had his revolutions per minute on the slowest, dreariest setting.

Christopher Lasch, whom I think of a lot, saw narcissism in western societies as the product of an ideational fear ; a need to be afraid in order to justify one's own existence that then drove one into seeing and dealing with fears. Therein lies the difference, ultimately, between Solzhenitsyn and Spengler.

The latter was the only prophet in his own mind who had seen the end of his German world; the former was a man who knew to accept what he could not control. Solzhenitsyn ultimately chose residence in his faith in God and in the possibility of a future, even when he was forced to write on cold stone walls.

As in operation Barbarossa, though Spengler was not a Nazi, the snobbery and villainy of a theory based on the idea of high culture and its menaces pales and collapses in comparison with such faith just as Hitler's war machine collapsed in the fields and under the horizons of the great Steppe.

Some people, like Constantine, look at the cross and see a broken body they want to avenge, or nails that will eventually hang us all; others see a suffering defiance of death and power and empire that could lead on to life. Perhaps because the orthodox church never fully accepted an equal and indistinguishable trinity, the idea that Christ hung on but could not have known what he would become led to a different veneration of the cross, and a different mixture of hope and mawkishness than Spengler's ultimate mistrust of humanity.

Comparing the two, like a comparison of Trotsky and St Augustine, who both had a theory of mind centred around trinities, though Trotsky's was Freudian, is an exercise in what intellectual history can show. It points to a moral purpose to reason. That purpose, or emergent lesson (if you prefer) is that of the utility of hope, and of the inseparability of hope from love and faith in something that can bear the weight of a human life.

Learning that lesson, which Solzhenitsyn never forgot, lifted him above the paleoconservatives who wish to claim him only for the limitation of spirit, and offers those of goodwill on the left a chance to see him in the hope which that group often pay lip service to. Solzhenitsyn, in the end, was not a theorist of what could not be done, or the terrors of the approaching night; he was a man who in his prayers at least suggested the approach of morning and was strong enough to believe in it.

The picture at the top of this blog is of Donegal, which I believe to be one of the most beautiful places in the world.