Jeremy Wayne Tate Profile picture
Sep 18, 2024 21 tweets 3 min read Read on X
It was professional suicide and he knew it.

When Solzhenitsyn took the podium at Harvard in 1978 to offer the commencement address he was dearly loved by the media and America’s elite.

When he finished he knew he would be an outcast for life.

Here’s what he said. 🧵 Image
1) Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
2) Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
3) A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days.
4) Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.
5) The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals.
6) Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
7) I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him.
8) But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours.
9) A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger.
10) There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen.
11) Only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria.
12) In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is.
13) And yet -- no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side.
14) 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.
15) All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th Century.
16) Not by coincidence all of communism's meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East?
17) Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism.
18) In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy.
19) Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.
20) If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

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More from @JeremyTate41

Oct 4
Today is the Feast of St Francis of Assisi

A thread on the beauty of Assisi, Italy 🧵 Image
1. The Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, begun in 1228, includes two churches (Upper and Lower) and a crypt with the saint’s remains.

Francis was buried on 25 May 1230 under the Lower Basilica, but its burial site remained a mystery until its rediscovery in 1818. Image
2. Assisi, in Umbria, is both the birthplace and resting place of Saint Francis, and its basilica dates back to 1228.

Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is an iconic Christian pilgrimage destination and serves as an important example of the Gothic style in Italy.
Read 16 tweets
Sep 27
Inside 15 of Earth’s most beautiful churches🧵

1. St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City
2. Sagrada Família, Barcelona

Gaudí designed the columns to resemble trees and branches.

The interior has no flat surfaces, and its ornamentation blends abstract forms of flowing curves with sharp, angular points. Image
3. Asam Church, Munich

This magnificent church was not commissioned but built as a private chapel by two brothers, dedicated to God’s glory and their own salvation.

Public pressure eventually compelled them to open it to the people.
Read 15 tweets
Sep 5
In 1987 American academia was rocked by the release of The Closing of The American Mind.

Bloom was the first to say out-loud what many already knew.

10 chilling quotes from The Closing of the American Mind. 🧵 Image
1) We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
2) Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise----as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
Read 11 tweets
Aug 31
The most beautiful abbeys on Earth 🧵

1. San Galgano, the abbey open to the heavens
2. Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey, France

Converted into a prison during the French Revolution, it underwent a magnificent restoration in the late 19th century.

Victor Hugo once said that Mont-Saint-Michel is to France what the Pyramids are to Egypt.
3. Sénanque Abbey, France

Lavender cultivation by the monks of Sénanque not only supports their livelihood but also transforms the abbey’s surroundings into a sublime landscape. Image
Read 15 tweets
Aug 8
The most beautiful college campuses in the US 🧵

1. Flagler College, FL Image
2. Berry College, GA Image
3. Notre Dame University, IN Image
Read 25 tweets
Aug 5
Five books that have been especially impactful for me in developing a love for classical education. 🧵

1) The Abolition of Man Image
1) The basic purpose for a why we educate has dramatically changed and what we have replaced the ancient telos with may unravel civilization itself. As soon as I finished reading The Abolition of Man I started over and read it again. This is a must read. Image
2) The Lost Tools of Learning is not a book. It is less than 30 pages and came from a speech Dorothy Sayers gave at Oxford in 1947. It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact it has had on the contemporary classical education movement. Image
Read 6 tweets

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