This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man – the master of the world – does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society. (Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Commencement Address At Harvard, June 8, 1978)

a) When Solzhenitsyn mocks “a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man – the master of the world – does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems”, he is expressing one of the moral implications of Plato’s child ‘holding to both’. This logic is not some harmless ‘I-Thou’ wonderland where all difference is painless. Instead, if everything is seen to be shaped by this original complexity, this entails (in fact presupposes) the prior admission of the evil, blindness and moral limitation in me. The darkness that Eliot and Beckett say “shall be the light” does not thereby cease to be very dark indeed.

Eliot: “So the darkness shall be the light”
Beckett: “‘then gently light unfading”.

The World Split Apart segments continue here.