Are we Awake?

The following is a brilliant historic perspective for today appreciated by almost no one; Solzhenitsyn tells us why. 

Ignat Solzhenitsyn gave his talk at the 2026 ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) Conference in London, which took place from June 23 to June 25, 2026. Our son, Nathan, sent us this link.

His speech, titled “He Predicted the Collapse of the West in 1978 (and Nobody Listened),” focused on reflecting on his father Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s historic address and warning on Western civilization.

I was so impressed with his talk that I transcribed it (25 June 2026). In 1978 Jimmy Carter was President.

The West has been a Model.

It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world the way to successful economic development, even if undermined recently by chaotic inflation.

Now the West is moving toward Socialism

However many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their society, deride it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. And this causes many to sway toward the false and dangerous current of socialism. I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative.

Socialism Destroys the Need for God

Socialism of any style and hue leads to a comprehensive destruction of the spiritual essence of man into a leveling of mankind unto death. But should I be asked instead whether I would propose the West such as it is today as a model for my country for Russia I would have to answer frankly no I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours–given the fecund [fruitful] spiritual development already experienced by our country through profound suffering during the 20th century, the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not appear enticing. If our society were to be transformed into yours it would mean an improvement in certain aspects but a deterioration in others, some of them especially precious. After suffering decades of oppressive violence the human soul longs for something higher, warmer and purer than what is offered by today’s mass western lifestyle introduced to us by a calling card by the revolting assault of advertising by television stupor and by intolerable music.

What Caused the Decline in the West and Removing God?

How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turning points in its development has it veered off course? No, it does not seem so. The West kept advancing ever forward in accordance with its proclaimed course hand in hand with dazzling technological progress and suddenly it found itself in its present state of weakness. It remains then to search for a fault at the root at the very foundation of thought of the modern age. I refer to that prevailing Western world view that was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for all political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentrism, the idea of man as the center of existence. The turn affected by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion having become intolerable through their despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of his spiritual one. But our ensuing headlong dash from the Spirit toward matter was itself excessive and in commensurate.

Making the World believe there is no devil.

The humanistic way of thinking which had proclaimed itself our guide did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor any task higher than the quest for earthly happiness. And it fashioned the dangerous tilt toward the worship of man and his material needs into the basis of modern Western civilization. Everything beyond physical well being and the accumulation of material goods, all

other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature were left outside the attention of state and social systems as if human life had no higher purpose. Thus breaches were left open for evil and its drafts blow freely today.

Freedom does not solve the Problem unless we include God

Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human existence and in fact poses a number of new ones. And yet in early democracies as in American democracy at the time of its birth all individual rights were recognized on the premise that man is God’s creature that is freedom was given to the individual conditionally under the assumption of his continuous religious responsibility such was the heritage of the preceding millennium just 200 or even 50 years ago. It would have seemed impossible in the West that an individual be granted unbridled freedom with no purpose simply for the satisfaction of his cravings. Subsequently however all such limitations have eroded throughout the West and there has come to pass a final emancipation from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.

Materialism has become god.

State systems have become ever more consummately materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man even to excess but man’s sense of accountability to God into society has grown utterly faint. In recent decades the legalistic egoism of the Western worldview has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a severe spiritual crisis and a political impasse and all the technological achievements of our fabled progress including the conquest of outer space cannot redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty which no one could have imagined as recently as the 19th century. Yet another catastrophe is already very much with us. The catastrophe of an autonomous irreligious humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth, an imperfect man who has never been free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity and dozens of other vices. Thus the errors misperceived at the beginning of the journey now take their revenge.

Materialism has robbed many of their spiritual inner life.

That journey since the Renaissance has enriched our experience but we have forsaken something whole, something supreme, which once delimited both our passions and our irresponsibility. We threw all our hopes into political and social reforms only to find that we were being robbed of our most precious possession: our inner life. It is being stamped out by the party mob in the east by the commercial one in the West. This is the fearsome essence of the crisis not just that the world is split apart but that its major shards are stricken with a common melody. If as claimed by humanism Men were born only to be happy He would not also be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death his task on earth must evidently be more spiritual not to gorge on everyday life, not to search for the best ways of obtaining material goods and then to consume them eagerly.

What is our Moral Responsibility?

But to bear perpetual earnest duty so that one’s entire life journey may become above all an experience of moral ascent to leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to reappraise the scale of widespread human values and to marvel at its present ineptness to cling today to the ossified [hardened] formulas of the Enlightenment is retrogressive. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our age even if we are spared destruction by war life will inevitably change so as not to perish. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and human society: that Man is truly above everything and is there no supreme spirit above him. Is it right that man’s life in society’s activities should be defined by material expansion above all? And is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral inner life. If the world hasn’t approached its ruin it has surely reached a turn in history equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

What is needed is a spiritual Epiphany

It will demand from us a spiritual epiphany—an assent to a new height of vision to a new level of life where neither will our physical nature be consigned to perdition as in the Middle Ages nor will our spiritual nature all the more crucially be trampled upon as in the modern era. This ascent is akin to scaling the next anthropological stage and no one on Earth has any other way left but upward.

My Thoughts:

Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). There is no other way to ascend “upward.”

David W. Allan