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“ The virtue we lack — and it is an indispensable virtue — is courage . And we must recover it .”
into which we had allowed ourselves to sink . Solzhenitsyn , the ( by then ) legendary human rights activist , warned America and the West that we had become too focused on rights and needed to refocus on obligations . We had come to embrace a false idea of liberty , conceiving of it as doing as one pleases , rather than as the freedom to fulfill one ’ s human potential and honor one ’ s conscientious duties to God and neighbor .
At the heart of this moral confusion and collapse , Solzhenitsyn argued , was a loss of faith , and with it the loss of a particular virtue — the virtue of courage .
Here are Solzhenitsyn ’ s own words : “ A decline in courage may be the most striking feature , which an outside observer notices in the West in our days . The Western world has lost its civil courage , both as a whole and separately , in each country , each government , each political party , and , of course , in the United Nations . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite , causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society . Of course , there are many courageous individuals , but they have no determining influence on public life .”
I submit to you today that , despite the American victory in the Cold War ( for which we should all be grateful ) and the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union , nothing has changed that would diminish the force or relevance of Solzhenitsyn ’ s words . The virtue we lack — and it is an indispensable virtue — is courage . And we must recover it . Our young men and women must regain it — not to defend us from a hostile foreign power armed with nuclear weapons , but to protect us from a far more dangerous foe , a truly deadly enemy : our own worst selves .
At all times and in all places , all of the virtues are needed . No virtue is superfluous or dispensable . But it seems that at any given time in any particular society , there is a particular virtue that is lacking and therefore desperately needed . Moreover , because the virtues are integrally connected to one other — they are like a network — the loss of any one virtue tends to weaken and imperil all the others . Or worse , the loss of a given virtue threatens to turn other virtues into engines of vice .
Take , for example , the virtue of compassion . It is an essential virtue — like the others . It can move us to work selflessly and even heroically for the good of our fellow human beings — especially those who are needy or suffering . We cannot do without it . We rightly praise the compassionate for their good deeds in caring for the least , the last , and the lost . But consider what can happen when compassion remains strong but other virtues , such as love of truth and justice , have eroded or disappeared . Operating by itself , in isolation from the other virtues , compassion can motivate every manner of evil — from the killing of the unborn in abortion to the killing of the disabled and the frail elderly in euthanasia . We can convince ourselves that kindness calls for these things .
Well before the Nazis gave eugenics a bad name , wellintentioned , decent , compassionate people in places such as Germany , England , and the U . S . embraced eugenics , precisely out of a sense of compassion . It was they , not the Nazis , who invented the doctrine of Lebensunwertes Leben —“ life unworthy of life .” Because they did not want people to suffer , they supported mandatory sterilization for some classes of persons and even “ mercy killing ” for those whose lives they considered so burdensome as to be “ not worth living .”
We live [ in ] a time of great moral confusion . If anything , our situation is worse today than it was when Solzhenitsyn visited Harvard in 1978 . There has been , to borrow a concept from Friedrich Nietzsche , a “ transvaluation of values ” in many spheres . What is good — such as marriage considered precisely as the conjugal union of husband and wife — has been redefined as bad . What is bad — such as sexual immorality of a wide range of types — has been redefined as good .
RENEWANATION . ORG 11