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#OTD 45 years ago at Harvard University, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked his audience with a searing indictment of Western liberalism and materialism: americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexa… 
"[I]n early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility."
"200 or even 50 years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West."
"A total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic ... man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer."
"The legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking" caused "a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century's moral poverty."
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