A Warning Our Society Ignored

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 He tried to warn us.  We didn’t listen.   This speech was given at a commencement exercise at a prestigious liberal university in the USA.  Please take the time to listen to it in its entirety.  A printed version of the text can be found here.


“…Today’s Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds…It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations…[Irreligious Humanism] has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life…”  -  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart,” Commencement Address, Harvard University, June 8, 1978


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