Chapter 4 of The Nobel Lecture on Literature by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, translated by Thomas P. Whitney

 4

From time immemorial the human being has been structured in such a way that his world-outlook, at least when not induced by hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his own personal an group life-experience. As the Russian proverb says: "Believe not your own brother -- believe, instead, your own blind eye."

    This is the healthiest foundation for understanding one's surroundings and for one's behavior in them. And through all those long ages when our world was so mysteriously, remotely separated, before it was crisscrossed by unifying lines of communication, before it was transformed into a united and tremulously beating clump, people were guided unerringly by their own life-experience in their own limited locality, in their own community, in their own society, and in the end in their own national territory In those times it was possible for individual human eyes to perceive and accept a certain common scale of values: what was recognized as being average, as being improbable or unlikely, as being cruel, harsh; what was regarded as being beyond all bounds of evil-doing; what was honorable; what was deceit. And even though widely scattered peoples lived in different ways, even though their scale of social values might be astonishingly at variance, just as, in fact, their systems of weights and measures were at variance, these differences surprised only infrequent travelers, and were collected for publication in various journals as curiosities which held no danger for a still un-united humanity.

    But then, in our most recent decades, humanity has imperceptibly and suddenly become united -- hopefully united and dangerously united. So that a concussion or an infection in one part is almost instantly transmitted to other parts, which sometimes have no immunity at all against it. Humanity has become united -- but not as a community or even a nation used to be united in a state of stability; not as a result of gradual life-experience, not through the sight of one's own EYE which in the proverb was jocularly called blind, not even through one's own native and comprehensible language -- but instead, in spite of and across all the obstacles and barriers, by the international radio and press. Down upon us rolls a tidal wave of events. In one brief moment half the world learns of their appearance, but the standard for measuring these events, for evaluating them -- in accordance with the laws of parts of the world unknown to us -- is not and cannot be carried by the ether or in newspaper columns: these standards have been established and accepted for too long and in too special a way in the isolated lives of separate countries and societies. They cannot be communicated instantaneously. And in different regions different, particular hard-won scales of values are applied -- and judgement is delivered uncompromisingly, boldly, solely on the basis on one's own particular scale of values and without regard for the scales of others.

    Though there are not necessarily a multitude of such scales in the world, there are at least several: a scale of values to be applied to events close at hand and a scale to be applied to events far distant; a scale to be applied to old and developed societies and a different one for those which are young and undeveloped; one scale for societies that are well-off and quite another for those that are not. The dividing lines on the different scales are so startlingly different from each other, so varied in color, that they hurt the eyes, and so as not to feel the pain we brush aside those scales of values which are not our own as if they were madness, as if they would lead us into delusion -- and we judge the world self-confidently on the basis of our own domestic scale of values. As a result, the things which seem to us to be larger, more painful, more insufferable are not those that really are so -- but those that are closest to us. Everything distant from us, everything that does not threaten to roll across the threshold of our home this very day, is seen by us with all it's moans, groans, stifled screams, destroyed lives -- even when millions of victims are involved -- as being by and large endurable and existing within tolerable dimension.

    On one side of the scale, amid persecutions which yielded nothing to those of ancient Rome, hundreds of thousands of silent, unheard Christians sacrificed their lives for their faith in God. And in the other hemisphere a certain madman (no doubt not the only one either) dashed across the ocean to FREE us from religion with a blow of steel directs at the pontiff! On the basis of his own scale he undertook to make this decision for all the rest of us!

    What on one scale of values seems from a distance to be and enviable and blessed freedom, on another scale, close up, is perceived as a regrettable compulsion obliging us to overturn buses. What in one region would be dreamed of as a totally improbable prosperity and well-being, in another arouses outrage as savage exploitation that calls for an immediate strike. Various scales exist for natural catastrophes: a flood which takes two hundred thousand lives seems a less important event than some accident in our own town. There are different scales for insults to persons: in some places even an ironic smirk or a gesture of dismissal is humiliation, which in others cruel beatings are regarded as being just as forgivable as a bad joke. There are different scale for punishments and for evil deeds. According to one scale, a month of arrest, or of exile to a rural area, or confinement in a "punishment cell" where the prisoner is fed on white rolls and mild, shakes the imagination and floods the columns of the newspapers with rage. And on another scale, prison terms of twenty-five years and punishment cells with ice on the walls in which prisoners are forced to undress down to their underwear, and insane asylumns for healthy people, and shots fired by border guards into innumerable unreasonably people who are always for some strange reason trying to escape -- all these things are quite ordinary and excusable. And the heart is particularly at ease with that exotic land about which in fact nothing at all is really known, whence no news at all of actual events reaches our ears, except the tardy and trivial conjectures of a few correspondents.

    And for this dichotomy, for this dumbfounded incapacity to grasp someone else's far-off grief, one cannot reproach human eyesight: that is the way the human being is. But for humanity as a whole, packed into once single clump, such mutual lack of understanding carries the thread of a quick and stormy death. Given the existence of six or four or even two scales of values, there can be no united world, no united humanity: we will be torn apart by this difference in rhythm, this difference in oscillation. We will not survive on one Earth, just as no man can survive with two hearts.