A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics by Matthew W. Slaboch

Author:Matthew W. Slaboch [Slaboch, Matthew W.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780812249804
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2017-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

Spengler found Russia comparatively more difficult to assess than the West; it was, he claimed, an example of “pseudomorphosis,” a young culture that cannot grow while in the shadow of some older culture. Echoing the Slavophiles of old, Spengler said that Russia had gone off track with Peter the Great’s reforms; Russia was emphatically not the West, and Peter did not represent the Russian people.67 Peter’s Westernization campaign ultimately culminated in the October Revolution, but Lenin and his cadre spoke for the masses no more than Peter had. “The real Russian is a disciple of Dostoyevski,” Spengler claimed. Fortunately for those “real” Russians, the two-hundred-year period from Peter to Lenin was an aberration. Spengler predicted for Russia that “to Dostoyevski’s Christianity the next thousand years will belong.”68

Born the year that Volume 1 of The Decline of the West appeared, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) would have welcomed the coming to pass of Spengler’s prophecy for Russia. In a 1983 address, the Soviet dissident writer himself insisted that “no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.”69 As for the form this Christianity should take in his native land, Solzhenitsyn had three years earlier confessed in an interview that “the spiritual values of Dostoyevsky are closer to me than Tolstoy’s.”70

If Spengler and Solzhenitsyn shared certain visions of Russia’s future, they likewise held in common a particular view of the West. The West, Spengler declared, had entered a time of irreligion; in a culture-turned-civilization, spirituality played less of a role than did politics, economics, and technology. Solzhenitsyn shared this diagnosis of the West. But what was for Spengler a matter-of-fact observation was for Solzhenitsyn a cause for alarm. And whereas Spengler sat comfortably within the walls of his German study to make comparisons of a fledgling Russia and a dying West, the exiled Solzhenitsyn had firsthand experience of both worlds. A Tocqueville for the twentieth century, Solzhenitsyn used a long sojourn in the United States (1976–1994) to draw lessons for his homeland. His most famous commentary on the West vis-à-vis Russia is his 1978 commencement address at Harvard, “A World Split Apart.”

The Harvard address, although not of the same magnitude as Spengler’s two-volume tome, is illustrative of the themes that Solzhenitsyn took up in his nonfiction work. Moreover, it generated the same volume of discussion that The Decline of the West had done a half-century earlier. As an implacable critic of communism, Solzhenitsyn knew all too well the defects of the Soviet system. When authorities intercepted a letter of his that mocked Stalin’s leadership, they arrested him and sent him to the infamous gulag-run labor camps. Rehabilitated during the Khrushchev era, he won recognition in both the West and Russia for his realistic depiction of camp life in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which censors allowed to be published in 1962. But Communist Party leaders could tolerate only so much: they prohibited publication

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