In THAT controversial 1978 Harvard graduation address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn presented a thesis which, although it is not so frequently remarked upon, is probably accepted by many scholars today. In fact, The New Yorker quoted it, early last year, as perhaps offering a clue to the events in Iran.
The Nobel Prize-winning novelist had observed: “Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking.’’ He lamented the persistent belief that such areas as Russia, China, India, or the Moslem world would somehow follow the Western path toward modernization:
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