Solzhenitsyn and Politics

As I implied in a post months back, one of the reasons I tend to steer clear of politics is best summed up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard commencement address. There, he warns against understanding reality in a purely legal way. That is, the legal level of reality becomes the predominant one, thus pushing the religious and spiritual levels to the fringes. And, as long as you are right according to "the letter of the law," no other considerations need to be examined. Here are his words:

People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

Throughout the rest of the speech, Solzhenitsyn continues to call for "voluntary self-restraint" as the way to save society from the mediocrity he mentions above. In a society governed by the rule of law, there must be sacrifice and temperance. Societies governed by an "objective legal scale" are indeed great, but do we dare to continue to promote such societies if all moral or religious law is forced out of the public sphere? Out of all discussions regarding public life?