In his piercing Harvard Commencement Address of 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the former prisoner of the Soviet Gulag who found freedom and truth within its strictures, offered a “measure of bitter truth” to his American audience. Solzhenitsyn referred to an “anthropocentric humanism” that had enveloped the West in the modern period and shaped the understanding many Americans had of science, technology, government, and what it means to be a human being. Such a “rationalistic humanism” can be seen, Solzhenitsyn announced, in the “practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him.”
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