History can make fascinating reading if it is not too utterly negative or depressing. Your Alexander Solzhenitzyn makes a strong case for the indominability of the human mind and spirit.

It is important to understand and learn from the horrors that have scourged mankind since the beginning of time. Consider, only for example, every aspect of that crimson totalitarian Swastika which infected and nearly devoured both western and eastern Europe. Once past the horrible butchery of half the world, and the Zyklon-B gas chambers, it becomes important to understand the minds and the thinking of those who actually wanted, and designed and executed, the self-destruction of a continent.

To understand this, study not only history, but the history of the peoples who participated in it, and the history of their trade, which is the history of economics, and the history of their thinkings, which is the history of philosophy.

Philosophy? Which ones? The same ones you study: the Greeks, the medievals, the Rennaissance men, the contemporaries of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Aristotle. Plato. Socrates (Plato). Abelard. Aquinas. Descartes. Bacon. The British rationalists. Marx. Engels. James. Bertrand Russell.

To understand, you study the structure of philosophy; you learn to evaluate, compare and classify various theories of ethics, logic, metaphysics, epistemology and so forth which are supposed to explain why we behave the way we do, or why we ought to.

In America the prevailing Pragmatist philosophy (James) dictates that we don't subscribe wholeheartedly to any one integrated, internally consistent philosophy, in contrast to the way many of you Soviets do.

Instead, we pick at the remnants of each and every philosophy, if historically it seemed to "work" for a little while, or if we just happen to like it for no particular reason at all. Then, with this patchwork assemblage of the choicest carrion, we bind it together into the whole vulture with the magic glue of faith in the healing powers of the great unknown.

We can call this our "credo", and, just as with any other religion, we don't have to discuss it with our neighbors. We can just invoke the name of the credo to guarantee both a hushed and reverent silence, so our inconsistencies can't be aired and ventilated in public.