Bad News Old Testament prophet

In June of 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered a harsh critique of the lifestyle of the West in a commencement at Harvard University. The 59-year-old Nobel Laureate, in words reminiscent of an Old Testament prophet, denounced not the Soviet system which we have been exposed to in numerous writings, but his new home, Western society. Since the speech was delivered by one of the foremost literary scholars and Russian dissidents of the day, many Americans, including the President, took serious note of the message.

Solzhenitsyn called his Harvard speech, The World Demands from the U.S. a Spiritual Blaze. He stated that a decline in courage may be the most striking feature an outside observer notices in the West today. He noted that, in ancient times, a decline in courage pointed out the beginning of the end for a culture. The habitual well-being guaranteed by the state does not encourage the rigorous self-denial needed to defend one's country. He further pointed out that our legalistic system has blinded us to voluntary self-restraint for the moral good, because everything is defined in great detail by the law: Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man's noblest impulses.

He stressed that it will be impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the support of a legalistic structure devoid of moral absolutes. He stressed that to defend oneself, one must first be ready to die. There is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.

Solzhenitsyn concluded that our rationalistic humanism, the proclaimed autonomy of modern Western man from any higher force above him, is failing. He pointed out that because Western civilization worships man and his material needs, everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods is left out. All our heralded achievements cannot redeem the moral poverty of twentieth century Western man. He closed by saying that the fulfillment of one's life should be the experience of moral growth, to leave life a better human being than one started it.

Good News Banishing Armageddon

Wars and rumors of wars, famine, drought, floods, plagues and pestilence - it's all beginning to feel a bit apocalyptic. This rhetoric of disorder, depravity and decadence is the lingua franca of faith communities. It expresses the doctrinal need to balance their bleak explanations of original sin with promises of rapturous redemption. The imagery of Armageddon has a dangerous evangelical quality which is liable to be used by warmongers to provide sacred authority to their secular enterprise.

It is time for a doctrinal regime change. There is nothing remotely apocalyptic about the present time. Rather, we are on the cusp of a most exciting and hopeful era, the age of enablement.

For millennia the man in the street, the woman in the field, the child down the mine, the publicans, sinners and invalids were collateral in the grand schemes of the high and mighty. Gradually they have been manumitted; the slaves are free, women vote, young people have a childhood and a charter, the mentally unstable given a place, the disabled access.

At home, a new social infrastructure is being put in place as the excluded take on ownership, through small-scale initiatives, with buddies, mentors, citizen advocates, careworkers, outreach, mediation services, personal advisers, community clinics, credit unions, grassroots multi-agencies. This is serious social capital and its "interest" is exponential. If Christ had been born this Christmas, it is unlikely that his parents would have had to seek sanctuary in a stable. There might not have been room at the inn, but there would have been many alternative refuges.
· Social Capital [Guardian UK]