Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Cal Thomas, co-founder of the Moral Majority long ago, has a column about Alexander Solzhenitsyn that spells out his anti-liberty views. It's certainly true that Solzhenitsyn was a courageous man for speaking out against the horror of Stalin's gulags and communist oppression; unfortunately he harbored a great many authoritarian tendencies himself and viewed liberty with suspicion whenever it allowed someone to do something he found morally objectionable.
Thomas writes of a speech that Solzhenitsyn gave at Harvard in 1978. Thomas' screed is full of the usual cheap shots at the "intellectual elite" -- as was Solzhenitsyn's speech -- that we are used to hearing from the misological right. Like this:
There was more to disturb the self-satisfied intellectual elite. Surely faculty members at Harvard must have gnashed their teeth in the face of this remonstrance: "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror." According to Solzhenitsyn, life organized around laws and the individual has shown an inability to "defend itself against the corrosion of evil."
*yawn* This could have been quoted right out of Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah or any number of other books by moral authoritarians. All such screeds have a very simple translation: "I don't like that other people are free to do things I don't like." Phrases like "moral violence against young people" are a pseudo-intellectual cover for the zeal to control the behavior of others. And it continues:
What about America's emphasis on individual rights? Solzhenitsyn said the result has been to ignore the welfare of the many: "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."
I would argue that human rights and human obligations are synonymous. We are obligated, by virtue of demanding our own liberty, to protect the liberty of others. That is our primary obligation, to respect the right of others to make choices that we don't like when those choices do not undermine our own equal right to do the same. Only when those choices are in conflict does "society" - i.e. the government - justly get involved.
Solzhenitsyn and Thomas would no doubt call this "moral relativism," but that is a hollow argument. It is, in fact, merely the assertion of a moral absolute that they disagree with, the assertion that it is immoral to deny others the right to self-determination within the boundaries of the equal rights of others.
Politics
Comments
By "society" these people mean themselves. It's all about augmenting their own power over others in the garb of right wing populism.
Posted by: Wes | August 19, 2008 10:06 AM
"We are obligated, by virtue of demanding our own liberty, to protect the liberty of others."
This is possibly one of the best 'sound bites' you have ever written...and I completely agree.
Posted by: GeekCyclist | August 19, 2008 10:44 AM
I usually can't make it through the first paragraph of a Cal Thomas column without tearing my hair out.
So what would Thomas prefer - government mandated limits on individual freedoms as practiced in, say, the SOVIET UNION??
Or perhaps Saudi Arabia would be more to his liking, since old Cal doesn't seem to be too fond of atheism. Lots of good, old-fashioned religion in Saudi Arabia. Ooops! Wrong brand of religion?
I guess we'll have to turn the clock back to the early colonies, you know, circa the Salem witch trials.
Posted by: ZacharySmith | August 19, 2008 12:44 PM
I was under the impression that Thomas had repudiated the Christian right at one point. He evidently has not abandoned its rhetoric, in any case.
Posted by: Sadie Morrison | August 19, 2008 12:55 PM
Cal Thomas gives the lie to that old saw about even a broken clock being right twice a day.
Posted by: democommie | August 19, 2008 1:18 PM
With respect to liberty, I agree with you in principle, but I can't help thinking there should be a law against Cal Thomas's combover.
Posted by: Dr X | August 19, 2008 2:38 PM
Cal Thomas is misusing liberty to commit grooming violence against us! The fate of Western Civilization hinges on our ability to stop this destructive and irresponsible freedom!
Posted by: jpf | August 19, 2008 2:54 PM
"We are obligated, by virtue of demanding our own liberty, to protect the liberty of others."
This could be used as an argument against conscientious objection to the draft.
Posted by: Bill in NC | August 19, 2008 3:20 PM
Solzhenitsyn's indictment of Soviet oppression was right on the money, but that hardly makes him infallible on what makes for a good society. He always pined for the departed days of Tsarist Russia where the "better" people, such as the Tsar, the nobility, the landowners, and the Russian Orthodox clergy, got to tell everybody else in Russia what was what and subversive Western values like religious freedom and social mobility were suppressed. Little surprise that he thought the advent of Vladimir Putin and the return of paranoid anti-Western authoritarian government and a xenophobic Russian Orthodox power structure was just peachy.
Posted by: knutsondc | August 19, 2008 4:34 PM
"Solzhenitsyn and Thomas would no doubt call this "moral relativism," but that is a hollow argument. It is, in fact, merely the assertion of a moral absolute that they disagree with, the assertion that it is immoral to deny others the right to self-determination within the boundaries of the equal rights of others."
What's wrong with moral relativism? It happens to be a fact - nothing is inherently moral or immoral, and only perception provides the ethical shading. All rights and morals are arbitrary, but this doesn't stop them from being a bloody good idea, as commonly agreed notions of conduct and legality that stem from biological imperatives...
Anyway, the enemy of your enemy is far from necessarily being your friend, and whilst Stalin was pretty evil insofar as that word has meaning, his enemies need not be saints, supporters of liberty, etc. Fascinating stuff though, certainly. As knutsondc notes, it seems to be halcyon-era moralising - the view that things were better in the past, and that it should therefore be emulated. In America, it always seemed to be the 1950s that was the halcyon era, except when it actually was the 1950s, of course.
Posted by: AlWest | August 19, 2008 5:38 PM
I read "The Gulag Archipelago" a few years ago, and it remains one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read.
Then I read his later books/speeches about the West. Sadly, Soltzhenitsyn didn't understand the liberal democratic definiton of liberty at all, and felt perfectly comfortable criticizing something he didn't understand. Knutsondc hits it right on the head- Solzhenitsyn hated Stalinism because it was the antithesis of the old tzarist regimes, and because it was irreligious- not because he yearned for a more liberal idea of freedom. Soltzhenitsyn would have been happy as a clam with a strict ultra-conservative theocracy.
It's strange to admire someone so highly for standing up against monstrosity, only to learn later that his reasons for standing up are opposed to what would be your own.
"My secret police are better than your secret police because my secret police work for GOD."
Posted by: Tyler | August 19, 2008 5:47 PM
ZacharySmith opined:
So what would Thomas prefer - government mandated limits on individual freedoms as practiced in, say, the SOVIET UNION??
Well, let's take a look at what Thomas quoted from Solzhenitsyn again to be sure:
"Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror."
Ah, yeah. Funny how certain social conservative attitudes towards "human decadence" dovetail nicely with Stalinist ones, isn't it?
Or perhaps Saudi Arabia would be more to his liking, since old Cal doesn't seem to be too fond of atheism. Lots of good, old-fashioned religion in Saudi Arabia. Ooops! Wrong brand of religion?
Actually, I suspect Cal would like Saudi Arabia a lot, except for one thing: he just wants his religious police to be armed with copies of the Bible, not the Koran. Some difference.
Posted by: Chris Krolczyk | August 19, 2008 7:11 PM
We aren't very good at understanding that there are more than two viewpoints. Aleksandr Isayevich was anti-Soviet so therefore he liked the US! And when he didn't, we felt betrayed and confused.
Posted by: The Ridger | August 19, 2008 7:38 PM
Freedom is fine unless you enjoy it too much.
Posted by: Robski | August 19, 2008 8:32 PM
To me a more interesting criticism of Solzhenitsyn is what others have mentioned here-- a yearning for the old days of the Czar. But it's also worth noting that people institute models of governance that they are kind of familiar with.
For example, the Soviets used elements of the old Czarist and Orthodox bureaucracy -- they could hardly do anything else and run the country. The GRU/KGB was modeled on the old Czarist secret police. ANd even the idea of socialism that Lenin proposed, I think, shows a lot of monarchist influences, if in a rather odd way. Stalin's programs of moving nationalities around was taken right from the Czar's playbook as well. (Stalin was just a lot more organized about it, but some of that is because he had access to a more sophisticated bureaucratic apparatus).
Solzhenitsyn suffers, I think, from a similar problem. He couldn't imagine a really democratic society, and doesn't understand it well. I'd describe him as a right wing nationalist. I always thought Sakharov had a better grasp of what democratic governance in Russia might look like. But he was a scientist who had traveled a lot in the West already.
Posted by: Jesse | August 20, 2008 7:37 AM
"Moral relativism" is the position that moral facts exist, but they are relative to the convictions, traditions, and practices of a person (less common) or group of people (more common) being judged (less common) or doing the judging (more common). It's a bad metaethical position for a few reasons, but I suppose it is important to note here that very few philosophers take it seriously. Indeed, it's usually used as a criticism as in, "Your position is bad because it collapses into moral relativism." A subset of conservatives, and religious conservatives in particular, like to label a lot of things as moral relativism that they think they disagree with that have nothing to do with moral relativism proper as a means of criticizing them.
Left2Right once had a pretty good discussion on various things people tend to conflate with relativism. Here is a cached version of it:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050428031031/http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/04/what_moral_rela.html
It's worth reading if you have the time.
On an aside, it's also worth pointing out that most on the left who identify as relativists really are usually closer to a some semi-coherent form of non-cognitivism, which, while I disagree with, is much more respectable. Most liberals, like most conservatives, haven't given very much thought to meta-ethical questions about the nature of moral obligations. And without taking appropriate philosophy classes or doing a fair amount of independent study, it is rare for a person to have formed anything like a coherent system of ethical thought. When most people comment on metaethical issus, it comes across in a series of ambiguous, unsharpened comments that vaguely lean towards more thought-out ideas. You end up with well-meaning liberals who, if they thought about it more, might be an expressivist or something, but instead end up calling themselves moral relativists. Then I have to put my face in my palm.
Posted by: Jason S. | August 20, 2008 8:40 AM
It was not those preyers. It was my wishing on a star that really did it...
Posted by: George | August 20, 2008 9:06 AM
I'll hold my hand up as a moral relativist. More accurately, I'll say that although my standards of morals don't change, how close people are expected to adhere to them does based upon their society.
To use one example: Slavery.
A man owned half a dozen slaves (and no, I don't mean BDSM and consenting). He makes sure they are always well fed and wearing good clothes, and seldom has them whipped - and never simply because he feels like it. He tries to encourage his friends to do likewise.
I'm not going to have a high opinion of that man - but if he was an ancient Roman, he doesn't stand out much and was probably a fairly decent man. People owned slaves - and he treats them decently. If he lived in the late 18th century, he should probably know better - the abolitionist movement was getting underway and I'll be harsher about him than I would about the Roman who behaved exactly the same way. And if he lived in the 20th century, I would want to know exactly why that scumbag owned slaves in the first place.
Posted by: Francis | August 22, 2008 5:50 AM
Solzhenitsyn was a very "odd duck". Maybe his "odd duckism" had something to do with his spending so long in wretched gulags. I don't know. Interestingly, he was "lionized" --- in the former Soviet Union --- for writing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was the book that made him famous in the first place. Not only was he "lionized", but he was "lionized by Nikita Khrushchev, who wasn't exactly a supporter of liverty himself. But he did hate Stalin. Or wanted to show that he did. In any case, once Khrushchev fell, so did Solzhenitsyn, and I think he got mad as hell and wouldn't take it any more. Or something. Anyway, he hended up being "lionized" by the West, because he was "against" the Soviet Union. But what he really ended up being was a "Slavophile", sort of a supporter of "holy Russia" and all that. Once the Soviet Union broke up, he became essentially irrelevant. As for Cal Anderson, like many so-called "conservatives", he's looking for another Cold War to fight, I think. Too bad he doesn't have Solzhenitysn around any more to cheer him on.
Anne G
Posted by: Anne Gilbert | August 23, 2008 7:00 PM