But the fundamental, intrinsic reason for culture’s ongoing decline, its petering out, is its secularization. For several centuries now, the minds of enlightened humanity have been increasingly captivated by anthropocentrism—more politely called humanism—which in the twentieth century risked morphing almost into totalitarianism. But a hubristic anthropocentrism can provide no answers to many of life’s vital questions, and the deeper these questions, the more helpless it appears. The spiritual component is being expunged ever more perniciously from the system of human conceptions and motivations. As a result, our entire structure of values, our understanding of man’s very nature and mission in life, has become distorted. Little by little, we’ve fallen out of sync with the rhythm and breath of Nature, of the Universe.

Link to speech in The New Criterion

The March 2025 edition of The New Criterion has one speech of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the upcoming University of Notre Dame Press release of We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which contains ten of his speeches delivered between 1972 and 1997. This particular speech was delivered on September 24, 1997 in a roundtable discussion after his election to the Russian Academy of Sciences.

I’ve had the book pre-ordered since I read Gary Saul Morson’s article “Solzhenitsyn Warned Us.” From Morson’s article:

We Have Ceased to See the Purpose collects the most important speeches Solzhenitsyn delivered between 1972 and 1997. Inspired by various occasions—Solzhenitsyn’s winning the Nobel Prize, arriving in the West, and delivering that Harvard University commencement address, among others—these speeches convey a single message: Western civilization has lost its bearings because it has embraced a false and shallow understanding of life. The result is the accelerating decay of the West’s spiritual foundations. The very fact that the word “spiritual” sounded suspiciously outdated to so many intellectuals at the time shows how far the decay had already progressed. Sooner or later, Solzhenitsyn warned, Western civilization as we know it would collapse.

You can currently read “The depletion of culture” for free at the above link.