Re-evaluating Arthur Koestler

A Drinker of Infinity by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 2007: An interesting take on Arthur Koestler and Darkness at Noon

So [author Arthur] Koestler’s imaginary reconstruction of how Rubashov was persuaded to confess, to which he brought his own intimate knowledge of how people thought and acted who had made the Party their whole life, was entirely new and original. Koestler’s solution to the puzzle was that Rubashov, and those like him [portrayed in Darkness at Noon], confessed not because of any physical torture (though Rubashov is deprived of sleep, a technique that interrogators did use in obtaining confessions) but because it was logical for them to do so. All their adult lives, they had believed that the end justified the means; moreover, and crucially, they had delegated to the Party the exclusive right to judge both end and means. Who were they, then, to object when the Party decided that it needed to sacrifice them, irrespective of whether they were guilty of anything?...

Some on the right have unfairly criticized Koestler, claiming that Darkness at Noon implies that subtle argumentation, rather than crude torture, obtained the confessions at the Moscow trials. But nowhere in the book does Koestler suggest that harsher methods to obtain confessions did not play a role—quite the contrary—or that the methods used in Rubashov’s case characterized every case. Rather, his novel is philosophical, plausibly pointing to the terrible logical and practical consequences of the belief that the ends justify the means, when those ends have been preordained by authority, whether of history, the great leader, or even God.

Darkness at Noon was probably the most influential anti-Communist book ever published, more important (in practice) even than Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four....

It is precisely because Koestler’s life and work so deeply instantiate the existential dilemmas of our age that he is a fascinating figure, unjustly neglected, and too often dismissed as a sexual psychopath. He was not a naturally good man (far from it), but he was struggling toward the good by the light and authority of his own intellect; unfortunately, as Hume tells us, reason is the slave of the passions, and Koestler was an exceptionally passionate man.