come_to_think | Entries tagged with koestler

I've been reading The Age of Longing (http://come-to-think.livejournal.com/12193.html; http://come-to-think.dreamwidth.org./12180.html) once again. Of course, being by Koestler, it is full of arguments. In one of them, in Paris, a defected Russian has told his French friend that he is about to redefect to the Communist Party & return to the USSR, having been wooed by the Party after the death of Stalin. His friend is appalled:

     "You have written three books to prove that the future is not theirs[...]."

     "I have also given dozens of lectures on the subject. Self-deception is a powerful motor.[...] But once the motor stops, it is dead."

     Julien gave no answer. Vardi continued:

     "You may of course ask how I know that I am not the victim of a new self-deception of the opposite kind. But I have gone into that carefully. Self-deception is always accompanied by wishful thinking. Wishful thinking means hope. Since I have stopped fooling myself, my mood is not one of hope but of resignation. Hence it cannot be based on self-deception."

I bought my present copy in 1965. (It has just begun to fall apart.) At some time between then and now, I wrote in the margin:

*A common mistake. Resignation is a comfort, & as such can be as tempting, & as illicitly so, as hope. There is no feeling or motive accompanying a belief that can guarantee its truth. (No, M. Descartes, not even the feeling of clearly & distinctly perceiving a thing.) Nothing matters but evidence.

I have not changed my mind about that.

Current Mood: self-satisfied
Current Music: Most recently, songs from the 1890s

Reading: Thieves in the Night, by Arthur Koestler (1946). First read, 1957; reread partly for sentimental reasons, partly for perspective on the current Israel--Palestine mess.

A novel set in the Jewish community in Palestine, 1937--1939. Koestler himself lived there for a couple of years in the late '20s; he had been recruited to Zionism by a dueling fraternity in Vienna, and went there in the hope of settling in a kibbutz, but, like most things in Koestler's life, that didn't work out. However, he remained sympathetic to the Zionist cause, and wrote two books --- this one, and a nonfiction historical--political one, Promise and Fulfilment --- during the period when the establishment of the State of Israel was being debated. It is said that he had some influence on the eventual decision by the UN to partition Palestine and recognize the Jewish state.

Tho partisan, the book gives the arguments on all sides (Jews, Arabs, and Brits in all their various stripes, violent & nonviolent) --- remembering typical arguments was Koestler's strong point. If you want to imagine why you might want to be a terrorist, this is a good book to read. (If you want to imagine why you might want to be a torturer, you can read Darkness at Noon by the same author.) Here is the end of one argument:

"This is not a discussion but a spiral nebula," puffed Moshe. "It is heated, vaporous, and has no beginning and no end. If I understand rightly, Joseph has just discovered that the Government of Mr. Chamberlain would like to get rid of us. We know that. We also know that they can't. We have become too strong. We are no longer a promise on a piece of paper, but half a million men, one third of the country's population and more than two thirds of its economy. They let us down when the Arabs started shooting. We have shot it out with the Arabs and have proved that we are a match for them. We know our strength and have no need to get hysterical. We have built up what we have acre by acre and cow by cow. I for one know what my job is: to buy another acre and another cow. Good night."

The Israelis, you will have noticed, still attach great importance to Facts on the Ground.

Altho the book improved my political sophistication when I first read it, its greatest impact on me, as a communist, at the time was in its description of kibbutz life. At various crises in my youth I was seriously tempted to immigrate, but never had the courage to make an approach. When American communes sprang up, however, it was only a matter of time before I joined one (Twin Oaks, 1972--1981). It turned out that I, like Koestler, did not have the grit to be useful in building community over the long term. It has also since turned out that such experiments, tho they would be immensely beneficial if they flourished, have not been successful in providing an alternative economic model or in remedying the deficiencies of the family as an institution for propagating the species in the industrial age. They have been tolerated in many countries, including the US, and in Israel they were actually part of the establishment (in both senses), but they have not been able to overcome our tribal instincts or the premium that modern cultures place on mobility.

As to the Zionist experiment, I think in hindsight that it was badly mistaken of the Jews to reinsert themselves into the atavistic category of "nation" and into a region that was already an ethnic pest zone. However, by reading Koestler's book you can see why it seemed sensible at the time, even to people who in principle were hostile to nationalism.

The result is that the Israelis are now part of a problem that, as far as I can tell, has no solution, if by "solution" you mean a possible outcome of a kind that decent people might wish for. What is peculiar about ethnic pest zones (the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, much of Africa) is not that they contain wicked and foolish people, but that wicked and foolish people hold the balance of power, because everyone has ample reason to mistrust the enemy and to continue to give the enemy reason for mistrust. (I would be delighted to be proved wrong about this. Has any region in that situation ever escaped it? I suppose one could argue Britain, and conceive some hope for South Africa.) It is unreasonable to expect people on either side to be reasonable. Fortunately, I am not a politician and do not have to deal practically with that agony. In thinking about such things I can therefore amuse myself with two desperate fantasies:

(1) IIWD: What would I do if I were dictator --- if everybody concerned suddenly said "Mr Fineman, we are sick of this; tell us exactly what to do, and we will do it"?
(2) LEIO: What is the least evil imaginable outcome (however improbable) in the actual situation?

IIWD: Recombine Palestine (Israel & the occupied territories) and Jordan into a UN mandate coterminous with the original British mandate. Give it a republican government subject to UN oversight and a permanent international occupation force sufficient to keep the peace. Move the UN headquarters to Jerusalem. Guarantee rights of the various religious and linguistic communities, but forbid vengeful propaganda.

LEIO: "Jordan is Palestine". Israel annexes the so-called occupied territories and drives out most of the Arabs, mostly into Jordan. The only thing that can be said for this is that it would probably be less hideous than the status quo. It would also be a terrible crime, comparable to the so-called rectification of frontiers in Europe following W.W. II. And it would not lead to peace in the long run; it would only encourage the worst people in Israel to agitate further expansion (and, of course, to multiply vengeful motives on the other side). An important branch of Zionism, called Revisionism --- an ancestor of the now dominant Likud --- for almost a century has called for a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan (it even has a song about it).

I have occasionally indulged a much nastier fantasy about such zones: a salutory hoax. Invent, in some detail, a secret UN plan to demarcate the zone and sterilize it with hydrogen bombs; then arrange for leaks. No sane person would believe such a thing, but the people who might believe it are the ones who most need demoralizing.

Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: Most recently, banjo

There is a well-known rule of thumb that if you were actually involved in the events described in a newspaper story, you will notice an average of one mistake per paragraph (and the paragraphs are short). Arthur Koestler was a journalist, and I have noticed evidence of reporterlike haste in his books, on rare occasions where I happened to know better. Browsing again, the other day, in Darkness at Noon, I discovered the following spectacular example toward the end, where Rubashov has been worn down by lack of sleep:

An inscription came into his mind which he had read on the gateway of the cemetery at Errancis where Saint-Just, Robespierre and their sixteen beheaded comrades lay buried. It consisted of one word:

Dormir --- to sleep.

Previously, I had thought: If I am ever in Paris again, I will go and see that. But then it occurred to me that there would surely be a picture on the Web. So I looked it up, and what did I find? Rubashov (and Koestler) could not have read any such thing. The cemetery no longer existed at the time of the events in the novel; in the mid 19th century the skeletons were dug up & moved to the catacombs, and the site was built over; all that remains there now is a commemorative plaque on one of the buildings. Also, it was not "the cemetery at Errancis"; Errancis was the name of the cemetery, not its location. Also, the inscription is supposed to have consisted of two words: "Dormir. Enfin!" (To sleep. At last!), and it is not certain that it existed.

Koestler was living in Paris at the time he wrote the book, but he couldn't be bothered to check that bit of local color. To be fair, he wrote it in German, and some of the errors may be due to mistranslation; also, he was preparing at the time to run for his life, so he had an even better excuse for haste than journalists do in general.

Likewise, in his autobiographical volume The Invisible Writing, there is a substantial section on Bertolt Brecht (Koestler was living in Berlin in the years around 1930). It contains the following:

Brecht's greatest success, Die Dreigroschenoper, was a modernisation of Gay's Beggar's Opera.... One of its refrains, which compressed Brecht's message into a single formula, became a catchphrase in pre-Hitlerite Germany: 'First comes my belly, then your morality'. (Denn erst kommt das Fressen, und dann kommt die Moral.)

The empty words "Denn" & "und" are not in the song. They do not affect the meaning, but they do spoil the meter, making it certain that Brecht was not actually remembering the tune when he wrote this. He remembered an impression, and filled in the facts.

I trust his impressions --- I imagine he can be relied on to describe the atmosphere of the many places & times he went thru, and most particularly the typical arguments people were having. But as to the telling details, you had better look them up.

Current Music: Most recently, Wench Work

Reading: Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, by Michael Scammell (2009)

Bought & read because Arthur Koestler has been a tall figure in my intellectual landscape since he & George Orwell cured me of fellowtraveling in my adolescence (early 1950s). I have returned frequently to his many autobiographical books as well as Darkness at Noon, Arrival and Departure, Thieves in the Night, and (an oddity of mine, it turns out) The Age of Longing. I did not, however, keep up with him in his move to philosophy and science during his later years (except for The Sleepwalkers). Thus, this book rounds out my acquaintance with him, both in filling in what he left out in his own extensive accounts, and in describing the sometimes crazy excursions he made after I stopped reading him.

The process is often distressing. Scammell is skeptical of accusations that Koestler was a "serial rapist", but abundantly documents that he treated his women meanly & had far more of them than he deserved. I am sentimental about sex, and the news that someone got laid (whether in fact or in fiction) regularly improves my opinion of the human race; but in this book, for the first time, I got tired of hearing about it. Of course, one must remember that such behavior is prompted by some widespread vileness in human nature, that in his times & places society largely seconded that vileness, and that fame greatly increases the temptation to indulge in it. (The same can be said about his record as a serial drunken driver --- he spent a good deal of time in prison, but not, alas, for that.) Koestler seems to have gotten his start on abusing women in a poisonous relation with his mother.

As I have hinted, I was disappointed to learn that The Age of Longing was not numbered among Koestler's best works, and that he himself regarded it as a failure. I have found it immensely instructive (even more so than Darkness at Noon) and in parts beautiful. I first read it in my undergraduate years, when its frank description of the hero's impotence with a whore caused it to be passed around at Caltech. True, its satire on the atmosphere of the early Cold War makes it a period piece; but I trust the author, as in all his work, to have rendered faithfully the kinds of arguments people were having in that milieu, and that is always valuable, because we all tend to forget how silly we can be. Also, his vignettes of various characters & situations have for me an intense charm. I am grateful to Scammell for quelling my suspicion that the book had been subsidized by the CIA, with which Koestler turns out to have been on bad terms at the time.

Scammell is unsympathetic with Koestler's late dalliances with parapsychology & other such stuff with the stink of superstition about it, and I am more so. They seem to be due to the same cause as his many services to decency: disillusion with the murderous cults of reason that arose from the French Revolution & its sequelae. Koestler traces them back to the conflict between Kepler the mystic and Galileo the scientist. There is some irony to that. Galileo (we learn from The Sleepwalkers) called Kepler a crackpot. He was right about that; but Kepler was right about the orbit of Mars being an ellipse (pretty near), and if you are doing astronomy, being right about the orbit of Mars is more important than being right about who is a crackpot. Koestler took Kepler's side (indeed, even identified with him: "K = K") and blamed Galileo's tactlessness for starting off science on a collision course with religion. Newton, on the other hand, kept his eye on the ball. He extracted Kepler's three laws of planetary motion from his mass of gaudy nonsense, combined them with Galileo's astronomical discoveries & insights into mechanics, and thus --- after inventing the necessary mathematics --- provided a beautiful and useful theory, all without bothering to insult any bishops. With that synthesis in hand, it was rather desperate of Koestler to inscribe "Back to Kepler!" on his banner. There are plenty of cogent reasons for being skeptical about claims to scientific rigor in political theory, without disturbing Kepler of his rest. A temperate discussion may be found in "The Case Against Intellect", Chapter VI in The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun (1959).

For all that, he did a lot of good and brightened my life.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: Most recently, Peter Bellamy