news blurb...Mansfield on Solzhenitsyn

from theweeklystandard: "we were treated to the most, unhappily the only, memorable commencement speech in my nearly 60 years at Harvard."

"The Western mistake was to turn our backs on the spiritual--devotion to which had grown to excess and come to a natural end in the Middle Ages--and to embrace materialism with an opposite unwarranted zeal. Under this idea there was no intrinsic evil and no higher task than to attain happiness on earth. Happiness is to be understood as physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, and anything beyond these was left outside the attention of the state and society to the option of the individual, as if there were nothing higher than matter in human life."