There is a long history of “public intellectuals” in America. Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton all the way down to Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag. When I was a younger man, I became fascinated with the idea of a public intelligentsia. Not any specific person, but the idea of knowledgeable, erudite experts who wrote and spoke for public, rather than academic, consumption.
When YouTube became a thing and old clips that had previously been difficult to find became readily available to anyone with an interest, I devoured the seemingly extemporaneous words Noam Chomsky, James Baldwin, and countless other figures from before my birth. I watched their debates, their speeches, and I longed for a time I never experienced. This was all taking place in the time of the “New Atheists”: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and a few others. This was a few years before podcasts really took off, but these guys (and they were most often guys) gave lots of speeches and wrote lots of essays, and showed up on late night talk shows.
And something always felt….off. I was always let down by the modern versions of this thing I so deeply appreciated. I found their vigor wanting, and their positions questionable rather than stimulating. I admired their comfort with language, but their breath was outshone by their shallowness. Christopher Hitchens could always be counted on for a good turn of phrase, but his arguments seemed designed to sting rather than provoke consideration. These were the conversations for late nights, wine, and congenial disagreement rather than rigorous intellectualism.
It was easy to find the opinions of Christopher Hitchens regarding Mother Teresa, or torture, or Islam, or speech. But I often found these men to be able to say a lot without saying much at all. And what they often did say, though flamboyant, lacked in nuance and charity.
Public intellectualism is broad and all encompassing while often exhibiting an unimpressive level depth and consideration. Jordan Peterson will blather on endlessly about definitional considerations while failing to express a coherent position on everything from Beowulf to Joe Biden to dieting to Israel. And he has amassed an utterly incomprehensible audience over which he holds court.
The endless need for content paired with the seemingly inexhaustible affinity for disagreement has created a rich atmosphere for people to just talk. About everything. Endlessly. And we – oftentimes young white men – mindlessly consume it.
Though, I am not so young anymore.
Anyway, I think we have sacrificed depth of knowledge for breadth of content.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a name I knew prior to reading this book, but not one I could’ve told you anything about. It is a heavy name, carrying with it the ponderous weight of depth, complexity, and the mystery that comes from writing heady tomes appreciated by college professors and experts in boring documentaries on the Cold War.
If it’s not the topic of a 30 minute YouTube video (donate to my Patreon, like and subscribe, and be sure to click that bell icon), it is impenetrable.
On a personal note, you don’t realize how vapid educational content is until you try explaining to an aggressively intelligent 10 year old that mindlessly watching math videos on YouTube isn’t the same as “learning”, which I ineffectually tried doing a few days ago. And then I had to reflect on my own insatiable interest in science and history content while being comfortably in my 40s facing the existentially dreadful daily grind of an uninteresting 9-5 from which there is no escape, hope, or salvation.
What does any of this have to do with this book? Nothing. Everything.
We are missing out. That is the lesson I took away from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the Gulag after expressing a desire for the Soviet government to be overthrown. He spent a year imprisoned in various camps throughout Siberia. Freed from prison in 1953, but sent into exile within the Soviet Union. He was allowed to return in 1956 and began writing in secret, which eventually led to his writing this novel. Published in edited form in 1962, this book presented the Soviet Gulag system to wider world for the first time. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the book was not only published but distributed to schools throughout the USSR. It was the first officially permitted work of political literature to be allowed in the Soviet Union by a non-party member since the 1920s, and (along with his other famous work on the Soviet labor camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, has been credited by some as helping to bring down the entire Soviet system). This is monumental work of importance.
And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a moral giant of 20th century literature, and this work of rebellion under totalitarian control is the real version of what a lot of modern “public intellectuals” try to paint themselves as doing: speaking truth to tyrannical power at the risk of individual freedom. If you need an example of a voice for disaffected youth, this would be a good place to go.
There’s a YouTube creator named Dasia Sade who has a great video on how Eminem may have been the last cultural outlet for disaffected young white men, and as his voice has become less relevant in the political Zeitgeist, what this demographic has been left with is regressive, anti-intellectual, and dangerous: Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Charlie Kirk, and MAGA. If that argument holds water – and I think it might – then public intellectualism may have died off in America.
Which might make someone like Solzhenitsyn even more relevant, because his public condemnation of the Soviet Union from within the USSR itself might be a clue as to how intelligent public discourse can be reinvigorated in the United States.
Ironically, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s moral certainty has become a symbol for the modern Public Intelligentsia movement led by men like Jordan Peterson, who (in predictable fashion) mischaracterizes the personal accountability, moral courage and Jungian heroic confrontation with suffering of Solzhenitsyn’s story as a shining example of Western excellence. What he ignores is that Solzhenitsyn was writing from a specific Christian Orthodox and Russian nationalist framework and was often (especially later in life) critical of a Western secular liberalism focused on individuality and human rights.
Solzhenitsyn was a complex man. I don’t agree with everything he believed. But he was also a man coming from a specific place, and had clearly outlined beliefs that existed within the structure of his time and place. He publicly expressed his condemnation for how his world failed, and he did so from experience, serious thought, and rigorous public presentation.
There is much to admire in Solzhenitsyn, and this novel (specifically) is exceedingly important to both Russia and (more broadly) Western civilization. And it’s just….so nice to read an intelligent and knowledgeable person writing about the thing in which they have expertise in. I long for a time when so-called “public intellectuals” mainly did that.
And, I don’t know, maybe I’m looking at the past through rose colored glasses. But I can’t find Solzhenitsyn’s opinion on the Black Panthers, and Beatlemania, and the AIDS epidemic and the infinite number of things outside his purview.