Student protests. They’re here again. Demonstrations, sit-ins, occupations of administrative buildings, tent encampments, placards, shouting, cursing, destruction of university facilities. Some of us are old enough to remember the late 1960s and early 1970s. I finished high school in a quiet Midwestern town that was home to a state agricultural college that had blossomed into a quiet university: Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Students and town inhabitants were concerned about the Vietnam War; television news reminded us of it every night, and Fort Riley, a few miles away, was funneling soldiers there, but most of us were more interested in the college basketball team and its sudden run of victories than in national or foreign affairs.
In 1968, I left for a college near Chicago, but over the next several years, student demonstrations and street riots erupted across the country: race riots in Detroit and Harlem, war protests in Washington, D.C., snipers on rooftops picking off the firemen and policemen sent to quell arson fires in Indiana; in my hometown, student arsonists burned down a Kansas State gymnasium. There were underground revolutionary groups like the Weathermen, who were quite willing to use violence. The immediate causes of student unrest were, in some ways, different then, but the instigators look remarkably the same these days. And, now as then, graduate teaching assistants, lecturers, adjunct professors, and tenured professors often support, even foster, student protests. Ideologies, from Marxism to feminism to anti-colonialism and Derrida’s deconstructionism had been festering and developing on campuses for years while Judeo-Christian ethics were being abandoned.
Silent & Compliant
Recently, I reread Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s marvelous novel Cancer Ward. I’d forgotten how Solzhenitsyn, like Dostoevsky before him, reveals a wide range of ideologies current in his day by way of his characters. Toward the end of the novel, we get to know a librarian who is about to be operated on for rectal cancer. His name is Aleksei Shulubin. After the Communist Revolution, he had become a university teacher in Moscow. Oleg Kostoglotov, the novel’s main character (who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, had spent years in a concentration camp for political dissent and had also contracted cancer), gets into a conversation with Shulubin.
It was early spring, and Oleg Kostoglotov was dragging his ailing body around the hospital grounds to find some sunlight and get out of the crowded ward of cancer patients. On one of the pathways, he spots his fellow patient Shulubin, “sitting on a wretched-looking, backless narrow-plank bench.” Because of Shulubin’s rectal cancer, the man is “perched on his thighs.” He “seemed to be bent backward and forward at the same time, his arms stretched out and his interlocked fingers clasped between his knees. Sitting there, head bowed, on the lonely bench in the sharp lights and shadows, he looked like a monument to uncertainty” (434). Shulubin had once been quite certain of his convictions, a true believer in the Communist Revolution, who was willing even to condemn those he knew to be innocent if the Party called for it.
But with time, Shulubin has begun quietly to question the Party’s outrageous claims: “What sort of person do you have to be to believe?” he asks Oleg. “What sort of man are we talking about?”
Suddenly all the professors and all the engineers turn out to be wreckers, and he believes it! The best Civil-War divisional commanders turn out to be German and Japanese spies, and he believes it! The whole of Lenin’s old guard are shown up as vile renegades, and he believes it! His own friends and acquaintances are unmasked as enemies of the people, and he believes it! Millions of Russian soldiers turn out to have betrayed their country, and he believes it all! Whole nations, old men and babies, are mown down, and he believes it! Then what sort of man is he, may I ask? He’s a fool. But can there really be a whole nation of fools? No, you’ll have to forgive me. The people are intelligent enough, it’s simply that they wanted to live. (438)
Oleg debates him, tells Shulubin he’s being too harsh. But the old man doesn’t back down.
How did this “true believer” survive all those years of political oppression under Stalin and his sycophants?
I saved myself only because I bowed low and kept silent. I kept silent for twenty-five years—or maybe it was twenty-eight. . . . First I kept silent for my wife’s sake, then for my children’s sake, then for the sake of my own sinful body. But my wife died. And my body is a bag full of manure—they [the doctors] are going to drill a hole for it on one side. And my children have grown up so callous it’s beyond comprehension. (441)
He looks back on his life. He had graduated from an agricultural academy, then did advanced work in historical and dialectical materialism, i.e., communist ideology.
I was a university lecturer in several subjects, and in Moscow at that. But then the oak trees began to topple. . . . Professors were being arrested by the dozen. We were supposed to confess our “mistakes”? I confessed them! We were supposed to renounce them? I renounced them! A certain percentage managed to survive, didn’t they? Well,
I was part of that percentage. I withdrew into the study of biology, I found myself a quiet haven. But then the purge started there as well. . . . We were supposed to give up lecturing. I withdrew even further, became an assistant. I agreed to become a little man!
They were destroying textbooks written by great scientists, they were changing the curricula. Very well, I agreed to that too; we would use the new books for teaching! They suggested we reshape anatomy, microbiology and neuropathology to fit in with the doctrines of an ignorant agronomist and an expert on horticulture. (441–442; he means Trofim Lysenko, the scientist who dominated Soviet biology until the fall of Khrushchev in 1964)
Eventually poor Shulubin retreated into being a librarian in a remote province. Even there, “librarians receive secret instructions from the authorities: for the destruction of books by this or that author . . . so we stuff the books into a stove. Into the stove with all your genetics, leftist aesthetics, ethics, cybernetics, arithmetic . . .” (442).
What of Us?
Of course, modern universities in the United States don’t yet have one totalitarian political party to spread abject fear across the whole educational system, but can’t we see the pattern emerging? Fear for one’s livelihood, reputation, and family shuts up those who oppose the doctrines of the current educational system. With more power, that system would surely manifest an even greater intolerance for opposition of any kind.
In the 1980s, after I had returned to college at the University of Kansas (just 90 miles away from once-quiet Kansas State University), the curriculum was in a continuing state of flux. Eventually the normal requirement for virtually all students to take courses in Western civilization was abandoned. Our literary and intellectual historical roots were no longer considered a necessary part of a liberal education.
Shulubin, who had tried so hard to avoid the ire of Stalinism, ended with a crisis of conscience. Yet even then, he admitted he would not be speaking a word of this to Oleg if he didn’t expect almost certain death after his coming surgery. He had, he knew, found a sympathetic ear in Oleg, so he now poured out his sorrow and rage. How could an entire society bow to ever-changing ideologies that have killed their own devotees? Were they all fools? You could, Shulubin suggests, forgive young people; they don’t yet have the experience to understand what’s happening, but for the rest? For men and women like himself, who recognized the deception and intolerance and hatred? Fear was the reason; the driving necessity of protecting one’s own sorry, cancer-filled body.
His dressing gown hung on him like a pair of helpless wings. . . . He relaxed his posture and began to speak more calmly. “I wonder, what is the riddle of these changing periods of history? In no more than ten years a whole people loses its social drive and courageous impulse. Or rather, the impulse changes the sign from plus to minus, from bravery to cowardice.” (443)
This mystifies Shulubin, for he recalls the courage of those young revolutionaries willing to sacrifice their lives for the Revolution. Yet so many of them, once the Revolution had thrown out its enemies, succumbed to cowardice.
The discussion goes on, page after page. At one point Oleg thinks Shulubin is advocating Christian Socialism because he has rejected hatred as a building block of revolution and is trying to embrace “mutual affection,” love. But no, even though Shulubin’s argument for “ethical socialism” seems to be largely based on Christian principles, Shulubin has been persuaded that Christianity is an old superstition best left behind. The ideologies he has lived with and suffered through all his life still infect his thinking and blind him to the Christian principles Solzhenitsyn himself eventually embraced.
And what of us? In ten years, where will we be? Where will the young radicals take their stand? Which enticing opportunity will lure them again to the streets? Is it even possible that our educators will be willing to open their minds and hearts to the sources of our ethical foundations and not get caught by the idealistic slogans of the next wave of afterthoughts?
Soviet communism persisted for decades after Solzhenitsyn published his novel. He himself was exiled again; this time he was not sent to Kazakhstan but was booted out of the country (the party couldn’t execute a man who had just won the Nobel prize for literature for his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). Solzhenitsyn found refuge in the United States, where he continued his attack on communist ideology but also refused to succumb to American ideologies he saw as ominous. In his famous speech at Harvard in 1978, he criticized the failures of Western culture, for which he was roundly denounced by liberal academics and media near and far. Gary Saul Morson, professor of Russian literature at Northwestern University, recently wrote of Solzhenitsyn’s speech and its criticism of the college protesters of his day. Comparing Solzhenitsyn’s day with our own, Morson writes:
There is no crime that cannot be justified by ideology, principles, or the latest enlightened ideas. “Revolution,” “social justice,” and other magic words confer license to indulge or applaud our basest impulses. Neither Dostoevsky nor Solzhenitsyn would have been surprised at Hamas raping, torturing, and mutilating women before killing them, or at young Americans, even those whom Hamas would enslave or murder, shouting “I am Hamas!”
The Greater Suffering
Oleg Kostoglotov and Shulubin finally end their conversation. “It wasn’t easy for Shulubin to get up from the position he was in” (448). Of course this is, as was the earlier scene where he appeared “so twisted that he seemed to be bent backward and forward at the same time,” a graphic picture of Shulubin’s moral and mental state as a human being. But the cancer of fabricated ideologies has struck both men so thoroughly that they can scarcely imagine a way out. “They dragged themselves along very slowly. All around them was the lightness of spring, but gravity weighed heavily on both men. Their bones, the flesh that remained to them, their clothes, their shoes, even the stream of sunlight pressed upon them heavily and burdened them” (448).
Shulubin leaned on his new friend Oleg as they shuffled along the paths that led to the staircase of the cancer ward. Both men had confronted the evils of a godless ideology. Oleg ended up feeling that, though he himself had suffered much, he at least had not bowed to lies, had not renounced his friends and colleagues as, he conjectures, two or three out of every five prisoners did. At least he had held onto some measure of his human dignity and integrity, so he sees that Shulubin, who did succumb, did renounce his convictions, did burn books, did lie, has actually suffered more profoundly:
Shulubin replied, his voice empty and flat, growing weaker and weaker, “Yes, I did. I renounced everything, and I went on thinking. I stuffed the old books into the stove and I turned things over in my mind. Why not? Haven’t I earned the right to a few thoughts through my suffering, through my betrayal?” (448)
But the cancer of Leninism and Stalinism had done its insidious work. It had metastasized through an entire society and spread around the world, bringing riots and murder and in some cases war to China, Spain, South America, and even the United States, where students howled in the streets and beat down doors and burned down college buildings.
How quickly a country can throw off its heritage, tear down its statues and its statutes, abandon the curricula that lead to the virtues necessary to sustain a successful democracy. Students still look for meaningful lives, but in so many universities today they find a plethora of ever-shifting alternatives that are burying our traditions. Others, in education, business, and the media, are willing to bow down and repeat the denunciations, the shouted slogans, and quite often what they must know to be lies to maintain their houses in the suburbs and their precarious footholds at the office.
Yet surely there are still some who, like Solzhenitsyn, are willing to rediscover the ancient paths where the good way is and assert the truth.