Alexander Solzhenitsyn awarded a prize of the French Academy of Ethical and Political Sciences

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN AWARDED A PRIZE OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY OF ETHICAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCES

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Grand Prize of the Institute of France’s Academy of Ethical and Political Sciences in a ceremony on December 13 at the residence of the French Ambassador to Moscow Mr. Claude Blanchemaison.

The laureate devoted his speech to morality in politics, dwelling on consequences of the globalization threatening humanity. In them he sees an inevitable stage in the evolution of anthropocentrism. The humanistic anthropocentrism born in the depth of the Western European culture has made a negative impact on the development of the civilization and has cultivated the egoistic attitude to the world.

The crisis of humanism has increasingly revealed the frailty of moral ideas isolated form their religious basis. Speaking about an imminent political catastrophe, Solzhenitsyn noted that “we have been carried away by the ideas of freedom, but have forgotten that the wisest aspect of freedom is far-sighted self-restriction”. He also criticized the USA for the unwillingness to decrease the consumption of natural resources, thus decreasing the general percentage of the environmental pollution.

Present at the ceremony were Archpriest Nicholas Balashov of the DECR secretariat for church-society relations and Mr. Andrew Yeliseev of the DECR secretariat for inter-Christian relations.