RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/solzhenitsyn_40_years_later.html
Herbert London is president of the London Center for Policy Research

In June 1978 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement address at Harvard titled “A World Split Apart.” It was a speech devoted to the emergence of “different worlds,” including our own Western society. On one side of the divide is a freedom diverted to unbridled passion with the accumulation of material riches to be valued above all else. Man is the center in this equation, as there isn’t any power above him, resulting in a moral poverty searching for meaning.

In days after this speech, the Fourth Estate accused Solzhenitsyn of “losing his balance,” of representing a “mind split apart.” He thought one could say what one thinks in the USA, but democracy expects to be admired. The press argued “the giant does not love us.”

Was Solzhenitsyn right? He did use positive signs in the heartland. “Gradually another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small town, and robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing this speech.”

Now we have the luxury of examining the address forty years later. As I see it, Solzhenitsyn was “cautious” based on the way cultural conditions have unfolded over these four decades. The U.S. is preoccupied with material goals, a condition that has reached full efflorescence from the rationalist humanist tradition. The Higher Power to which Solzhenitsyn refers is in serial descent, having gone from more than 90 percent of the populace embracing God to about 70 percent, with the trend line in descent well established.

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/06/great-bohemian-cultural-revolution-enemies/

The proselytisation of postmodernist theory, according to Jordan Peterson, is less an emancipatory project than intellectual charlatanry and the relinquishment of individual responsibility. If a truth is validated by its teller’s enemies, the Canadian academic is right on the money.

Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos contains the kind of advice the parents and teachers of Baby Boomers were keen to impart to us all those years ago, advice that we weren’t so keen to hear: “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” (Rule 1), “Make friends with people who want the best for you” (Rule 3), “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world” (Rule 6), “Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie” (Rule 8), “Be precise in your speech” (Rule 10), and so on. They all sound like the message of some black-and-white television comedy from the 1950s. 12 Rules for Life, by my reckoning, is about seventy years too late.

It was one-time Quadrant editor Roger Sandall who, in The Culture Cult (2000), characterised the modern-day Left as less Marxian than bohemian. The 1960s social revolution was not so much against the bourgeoisie who owned and controlled the means of production as against bourgeois or Christian mores, which we might define as anything from traditional morality and workaday sobriety to enlightened patriotism. Everything, in other words, the Beatles and their acolytes circa 1963–69 wanted to discard. Sandall put it this way:

… it is certainly true that bohemianism is more deeply hostile to the values of the bourgeoisie than Marxism ever was. To understand why this is so, remember Ben Franklin’s useful virtues—temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, chastity and humility. Some of these values are compatible with social democracy. One or two of them found a place in the Communist world. But none are compatible with bohemia.

Peterson self-identifies as a British-style classical liberal, and yet so much of what he writes and says are the contemplations of an anti-bohemian conservative:

Because children, like other human beings, are not only good, they cannot simply be left to their own devices, untouched by society and bloom into perfection … This means they are much more likely to go complexly astray if they are not trained, disciplined and properly encouraged. This means that it is not just wrong to attribute all the violent tendencies of human beings to the pathologies of social structure. It’s wrong enough to be entirely backward.

The reader encounters an entreaty on Franklin’s useful vir