Solzhenitsyn delivered a hammer blow to the intellectual community of the last half of the 20th century, who had idealized the Russian experiment in secular humanism. George Friedman at Stratfor.com writes:
"It [Solzhenitsyn's' book, "Gulag Archipelago"] also served a dramatic purpose in the West when it was translated and distributed there. Ever since its founding, the Soviet Union had been mythologized. This was particularly true among Western intellectuals, who had been taken by not only the romance of socialism, but also by the image of intellectuals staging a revolution. Vladimir Lenin, after all, had been the author of works such as “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.” The vision of intellectuals as revolutionaries gripped many European and American intellectuals.
"These intellectuals had missed not only that the Soviet Union was a social catastrophe, but that, far from being ruled by intellectuals, it was being ruled by thugs. For an extraordinarily long time, in spite of ample testimony by emigres from the Soviet regime, Western intellectuals simply denied this reality. When Western intellectuals wrote that they had “seen the future and it worked,” they were writing at a time when the Soviet terror was already well under way. They simply couldn’t see it."
The western intellectuals were so enamored of communism that they accepted a nonexistent ideal and rejected the obvious truth. Intellectualism came to be seen in that light, the pursuit of agendas over the pursuit of truth. If that is Intellectualism, then why be for it? It makes more sense, common sense, rational sense, to oppose those who not only claim their agenda to be truth, but who ignore the obvious facts that are available to everyone.
Solzhenitsyn was critical in breaking the intellectual and moral logjam among intellectuals in the West. You had to be extraordinarily dense or dishonest to continue denying the obvious, which was that the state that Lenin and Stalin had created was a moral monstrosity.
In this sense, anyone who reveres truth will also revile intellectualist agendaism. And this will offend the intellectuals who will charge anti-intellectualism. The appellation "anti-intellectual" is the problem at hand, because to oppose the agenda of a band of pro-communist, Atheist, elitists is not the same as rejecting rational thought. Anti-intellectualism is in fact embracing rational thought and evidence, declaring true scepticism of irrational dogma emanating from the ivory tower, acknowledging that there is actually truth, and intellectualism is not it.
Anti-intellectualism is not equal to anti-rationality; conversely, Anti-intellectualism is rational, to the point that it requires justification of fiats issued by the self-proclaimed intelligentsia. In an interesting mirror reversal, the intelligentsia proclaim, "question authority", but are not interested in being questioned themselves. Such questioning is disrespectful and anti-intellectual.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn went the western intellectuals one better yet. Not only did he demolish the myth of the benign humanists in the USSR, he attacked materialism and secularism specifically.
"Solzhenitsyn saw the basic problem that humanity faced as being rooted in the French Enlightenment and modern science. Both identify the world with nature, and nature with matter. If humans are part of nature, they themselves are material. If humans are material, then what is the realm of God and of spirit? And if there is no room for God and spirituality, then what keeps humans from sinking into bestiality? For Solzhenitsyn, Stalin was impossible without Lenin’s praise of materialism, and Lenin was impossible without the Enlightenment."
But Materialism also grips the West:
"To Solzhenitsyn, the same principle that turned humans into obsessive pursuers of wealth turned them into vapid purveyors of shallow ideas. Materialism led to individualism, and individualism led to a culture devoid of spirit. The freedom of the West, according to Solzhenitsyn, produced a horrifying culture of intellectual self-indulgence, licentiousness and spiritual poverty."[emph added]
It is precisely intellectual self-indulgence, licentiousness and spiritual poverty that is not acceptable to non-elitist, rational people. This rejection is called anti-intellectualism, but actually it is intellectualist malfeasance that is being rejected.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a true intellectual, true to his perceptions of truth, values and destiny. And if these were entangled in an agenda, it was not an agenda of personal materialist aggrandizement, it was a vision of the ultimate nature of humans, Russian destiny, and God.
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