Publisher’s Note: Soviet dissident, gulag survivor, and Gulag Archipelego author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent two decades in Vermont after escaping the Soviet Union. Here, in his 1978 commencement address at Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn warned the West to reinvigorate what he called “civil courage,” which he perceived to be the antidote to totalitarianism and a bulwark for individual liberty, democracy and human rights. Thanks to a Vermont neighbor for sending along this Quillette meditation on the importance of his 1978 Harvard address at this addled civilizational moment for US. Excerpted below – read the whole article at the link above.

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?” – AS, 1978

“If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge: We shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the modern era.” – AS, 1978