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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MAY 20, 1983
PAGE 8
Finally, here are a few excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's speech at the Guild
hall, as reported in the May 11 TIMES of London:
Dostoevsky warned that "great events could come upon us and catch
us intellectually unprepared."
That is precisely what has
happened. And he predicted that "the world will be saved only
after it has been possessed by the demon of evil." Whether it
really will be saved we shall have to wait and see.... But it has
already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind,
triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth.
...The West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss.... Atheist
teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a
spirit of hate for their own society. Incitements to hatred are
coming to characterize today's free world.
It seems more and more apparent that...the noose on the neck of
mankind draws tighter and more hopeless with every passing
decade, and there seems to be no way out for anyone--neither
nuclear, nor political, nor economic, nor ecological...• Our life
consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest
of worthy spiritual growth.
The Debasing of Character in the Western World
This world's criminologists, having long since discarded the Bible for any
guidance in their postulations, have come up with one the6ry after another
to try to explain the root causes of crime. The fashionable explanation for
some time, of course, is that crime is caused by shortcomings in society,
such as poverty or injustice. Individual responsibility--character--gets
short shrift these days.
But by coincidence, two social scientists have
recently arrived at somewhat similar conclusions about the social climate's
effect on crime. Those conclusions, notes Rec M. Christenson writing in
the May 4 WALL STREET JOURNAL, won't be welcomed in many quarters. Here are
excerpts from this lengthy article entitled "When Crime Declined for a
Century--and Why":
Writing in the Winter 1983 issue of THE PUBLIC INTEREST,
Harvard's James Q. Wilson suggests that America's declining
public concern with "character training" over the past .§.Q years
may have played � significant pa ri in our recent .high crime
rates.
Recalling the "exceptiona y high and sustained levels
of crime characteristic of the emerging cities of the 1830s and
1840s," he describes the many-pronged effort, beginning around
1840, to deal with the problem by promoting character develop
ment. Wilson believes the resurgent churches, alarmed by the
crime wave and the high rate of alcohol consumption (10 gallons
per person per year in 1829), played an important part by stress
ing the importance of self-control. But he adds that "popular
literature emphasized the values of thrift, order, industrious
ness, sobriety, the mastery of passions..." and sought to incul
cate the young with a regard for their "duties and obligations."
(Although Prof. Wilson does not mention it, this was also the
period in which the McGUFFEY READERS, stressing moral principles
and self-discipline, were being widely adopted by the public