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Narrative C haracter of Christian Social l lliU s
N i xon ’s legal gymnast ics to claim innocence in his interview with Frost was
in a sense truthful—
truthful in that he honestly did not know of any other moral framework
by which to judge himself, truthful in that no other armature of principle
was available to him on which to mold an understanding of his charac
ter. One searched for a hint of something in his character, some shred
of belief or awareness, that might have given him the strength and the
foothold—a motive—to act differently; but, save for the misgiving that
his strategy might backfire, no such motive was there. . . . And yet if
one asked onself what that foothold of belief might have been, there was
no ready answer—only a prickling of dread. Each of us may have a
sense of principle which he has generated himself, or has drawn from
his particular background, but that is not a satisfactory answer here.
What is called for is principles that can be pointed to as the mainstays of
the culture, principles of which no disparate individuals but the society
is the custodian. What is needed is something that could be called a
tradition. Individual ethics can be very fine, but they cannot survive for
long if they are not reinforced by the society, and even while they last
they can have little public significance if they are not echoed in the
general moral awareness of the world in which their possessor lives.
Perhaps such an awareness does exist, but, if so, it has become so
obscured that we cannot be sure what it is, or even whether it is there at
all. Under these circumstances the only way in which we can clearly
distinguish ourselves from Richard Nixon is by our view that the legal
system is inadequate as a moral tradition. Unlike him, we are not at all
comfortable when the legal system is made to assume this role. And we
become even more uneasy as it occurs to us that there may be nothing
sounder available to us.15
That our society has been brought to such a pass is no surprise to
Solzhenitsyn, as he thinks it is the inevitable result of a social order whose
base is the humanism of the Enlightenment, which presupposed that intrinsic
evil did not exist, nor did man have any higher task than the attainment of his
own happiness. “Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of
material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler
and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social
system, as if human life did not have any superior sense.” 16 But such pre
sumptions are profoundly false and any politics founded on them can only
lead men to destruction, for
if humanism were right in declaring that man is bom to be happy, he
would not be bom to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on