…destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil. (Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Commencement Address At Harvard, June 8, 1978)
Notes:
a) It will be necessary to consider what “the corrosion of evil” has to do with “boundless space”. Wherever bounds and limits are absent (or should be absent, or are really absent even though they don’t seem to be absent, or are in the process of becoming absent, etc etc), we are in the presence of the logic of the giants and the gods for whom “true reality” is singular and seamless.
b) Our “the persisting blindness of superiority” has led to “the misuse of liberty for moral violence”. This closes us off from “a way to [genuinely] free spiritual development”, therefore from “the essence of other worlds”, therefore from “the full range of human possibilities”.
The World Split Apart segments continue here