Solzhenitsyn's Line Through Every Human Heart Is Where Conservatism Starts

Every utopian plan has the same secret first page. It says: the problem is those people. The landlords, the bankers, the heretics, the bourgeoisie, the wrong sort. Remove them, and the rest of us will be as good as we always knew we were. It is a wonderfully flattering idea, which is why it has been tried so often and why it has ended so badly every single time.

One man spent a decade learning, in the worst place on earth, why the first page is wrong. He came home and wrote it down. What Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn found is not a political slogan. It is a fact about human beings, and a conservative is simply someone who has taken that fact seriously. Let me lay it out properly.

The man and the book

Solzhenitsyn was a captain in the Soviet artillery in World War II. In February 1945, military censors read his private letters to a friend, which contained critical remarks about Stalin. He was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the camps, followed by internal exile. He was released and rehabilitated after Stalin's death. In 1962 the journal Novy Mir published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a short novel about a single day of a prisoner, and the Soviet Union briefly allowed a glimpse of its own camps.

The glimpse did not last. Solzhenitsyn kept writing, and in 1970 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Gulag Archipelago, his three-volume investigation of the camp system built from the testimony of hundreds of former prisoners and from his own memory, was published in Paris in 1973. In February 1974 the Soviet government arrested him, stripped his citizenship and put him on a plane to West Germany. He lived in exile in the West, from 1976 in the United States, until 1994, then returned to Russia, and died in 2008.

Hold on to the sequence: he was a believer in the system as a young man, a prisoner of the system as a middle-aged one, and its most effective witness thereafter. He earned the right to the sentence this post is about.

The sentence

In the chapter titled "The Ascent," Solzhenitsyn describes the moment in the camp when he realised that he might himself have become one of the oppressors. He had been an officer who believed he was one of the good ones. And from that recognition he drew a conclusion that has become one of the most quoted passages of the twentieth century: the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, not between political parties, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.

I am paraphrasing closely, rather than giving you a quotation I might get a word wrong, and I would ask you to read the passage in the book itself. The meaning is not in doubt. The struggle between good and evil is not a war between groups of people. It runs through each person. Every one of us contains both the capacity for cruelty and the capacity for mercy, and the ground on which they meet is not a border but a battlefield inside us.

Four terms to fix before we argue

• Utopia: a plan to build a society so well designed that human conflict and want disappear. The word, coined by Thomas More in 1516, means "no place."
• Original sin: the Christian teaching, drawn from Genesis 3 and developed in Romans 5, that human nature is fallen: every person is born inclined to put himself first. It is a claim about everyone, not a verdict on anyone.
• Pessimism: the belief that things will go badly whatever we do.
• Realism: the belief that people are what they are, and that good institutions must be built for people as they are.

The whole post turns on the last two. Conservatives are accused of pessimism. They are in fact realists, and the difference matters.

The argument in numbered premises

1. Evil is found in every human being. This is the observation Solzhenitsyn made in the camps. The cruellest guards were not a separate species; many had been ordinary people, recruited and rewarded. The prisoners were not saints; many turned informer for a larger bread ration. If the line ran between classes, you could sort people and be done. It does not, so you cannot.
2. If evil is in everyone, it is in the people who will run the new order. The reformer is not exempt. The planner, the commissar, the committee, the enlightened despot, each carries the same flaw as the people he plans for. This is the point utopians cannot admit about themselves.
3. Power magnifies whatever is in the person who holds it. A man with the authority to arrest and the assurance he is on the side of history has fewer checks than any private citizen. Concentrated power is therefore the most dangerous thing a society can build.
4. Therefore a good society limits power rather than hoping for good rulers. It divides authority, requires consent, protects the rights of the individual against the state and builds a system whose safety does not depend on the virtue of any one person.
5. A society should also cultivate the virtues in individuals, because no system can fully replace character. If the line runs through every heart, then the work of moral formation, in family, church, school and community, is a public necessity, not a private hobby.

Those five steps are the entire intellectual structure of a certain kind of conservatism. The first two are an observation. The third is a historical generalisation. The fourth is the Constitution. The fifth is the case for the family and for religion.

The Founders already knew it

Solzhenitsyn did not discover this; he rediscovered it at a price. The Americans who wrote the Constitution had worked it out from Scripture, from Hobbes and Locke, and from their own experience of power.

In Federalist No. 51, James Madison put the whole argument in two sentences:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

That is steps one through four in a single breath. Men are not angels. The people who govern are men. So the framework must "oblige it to control itself," in Madison's words, by dividing power among branches whose ambitions check each other. The Constitution is an engineering response to the line through the heart. The separation of powers, the Bill of Rights and federalism are what a society builds when it believes the premises above, as discussed in Montesquieu Warned That Liberty Dies Where One Hand Makes and Enforces Law and Ordered Liberty Is Not a Contradiction, It Is the Only Kind That Lasts.

Compare the contrary view. The thinker most associated with the confident one is Rousseau, who held that man is born good and corrupted by society, and who proposed that a properly constituted "general will" could remake citizens. Take the premise that man is naturally good, add a state that embodies the general will, and you have the logic of the revolutionaries who followed. See Rousseau's General Will Is the Idea Behind Every Power Grab for the People. If the problem is the institutions, then the solution is to seize and rebuild them, and anyone who stands in the way is, by definition, defending corruption.

The record of the new man

That brings us to the history, which is the cruel test of the premises.

The French Revolution of 1789 promised liberty, equality and fraternity and, within four years, produced the Terror, in which the revolutionary government executed thousands of its own citizens in the name of virtue. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 promised bread, land and peace and produced, under Lenin and then Stalin, the secret police, forced collectivisation and the camp system that Solzhenitsyn documented. Mao's China, the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia, North Korea and Cuba each promised the creation of a new human being, a selfless collective person, and each built a state that killed or imprisoned the old kind in order to make room.

The pattern is the same everywhere: a diagnosis that locates evil in a class or a group, a program that removes it, and a state with unlimited power to carry the program out. The step that is missing every time is the one Solzhenitsyn insisted on: the people carrying out the program are not exempt.

One more fact from the camps deserves attention. Solzhenitsyn saw that most of the people who did terrible things did not think of themselves as evil. They had an ideology, which supplied justifications, and ideology, he wrote, gives the evildoer the justification and the long-term resolution he needs. A person who thinks he is serving the future will do almost anything. A person who knows his own heart is divided will hesitate. That hesitation is the thing that saves lives. See Every Totalitarian Regime Went After the Family First, and Not by Accident for how those regimes treated the institutions that teach it.

The strongest objection: this is just pessimism

Here is the objection, put as fairly as I can. You say human nature is flawed. That is a counsel of despair. If people cannot be improved, there is no point in trying to make a better society. Progress has happened: slavery ended, women got the vote, medicine conquered diseases. A theory that says nothing can change is refuted by history.

The objection is worth taking seriously, and it fails for four reasons.

One: the claim is not that nothing can improve. It is that human nature does not change, and that improvement comes through restraint and habit, not through transformation. Abolition was a moral victory won by people who appealed to a truth about every person's dignity: the same Christian and natural-rights tradition that holds that all are fallen also holds that all are made in God's image. See Made in God's Image, the Idea Behind Every Claim to Human Dignity. The two ideas are a pair. Because each of us is of infinite worth and each of us is capable of grave wrong, no one should hold unchecked power over another.

Two: realism is the basis of hope, not its enemy. The engineer who assumes steel can fail builds a bridge with a safety margin, and the bridge stays up. The architect who assumes steel cannot fail builds a bridge that collapses. Conservatives are the first kind.

Three: the optimist's remedy is more dangerous than the pessimist's diagnosis. If you believe humanity can be perfected, then every obstacle to perfection is an enemy of the human race, and measures that would be unthinkable against ordinary opponents become acceptable against enemies of progress. The conservative, who believes no group of people is wholly good, is the one who objects to the Terror.

Four: it describes the record. The regimes that held the line through every heart, the constitutional republics with divided power and the freedom to worship and dissent, produced a great deal of progress. The regimes that tried to produce a new man produced mass graves. If the question is which view has been tested, the answer is: both, and we have the results.

What it asks of the individual

Solzhenitsyn's view has a corollary that conservatives sometimes skip. If the line runs through everyone, it runs through me. The conservative critique of power is not a licence to point at the other side. It begins at home.

In his Harvard commencement address of June 1978 he said that the West had grown in legalism and had thinned in the spiritual life that makes free institutions work, and that the defence of freedom needs more than rights, it needs the courage and the moral strength to use them well. You may think he was too severe on the West. But the point stands, and it echoes what John Adams said in 1798 in a letter to the Massachusetts militia: that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. A free society needs people who can govern themselves first. See Self-Government Starts With Governing Yourself, the Founders Insisted and Chesterton Called Tradition the Democracy of the Dead, and He Was Right.

A small word of humour is allowed here, because there is a very large gap between the utopian's confidence and reality. Every utopian community in history lasted until the first argument about who does the dishes. The plan for a perfect society has never survived contact with a committee. That is not an accident. It is the line through the heart, appearing on schedule at the first meeting. For a satirical version of what happens when a state plans for perfect people, there is A Thought Experiment, the Nation That Planned Breakfast From One Office.

The case in brief

1. Solzhenitsyn's discovery in the camps was that good and evil do not divide people into classes or parties; the line runs through every human heart.
2. If evil is in everyone, it is in the rulers, and power magnifies it, so the right response is limited, divided and accountable government, which is what Madison wrote into Federalist No. 51.
3. Regimes that promised a new man by removing the wicked class, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks to Mao, concentrated unlimited power in fallible hands and produced terror.
4. The charge of pessimism fails: the same tradition that sees human frailty sees human dignity, and realism about the first is what protects the second.
5. The line runs through me too, so the work begins with self-government, in family, church and community.

What you can do: read Federalist No. 51 in full tonight, and then read the chapter "The Ascent" in The Gulag Archipelago from your library, so you have both texts in your own hands.