2010/15

Arthur Koestler: The Ghost in the Machine (339p.)

Arthur Koestler was one of the great minds of the 20th century, and wrote fiction in three different languages (The Gladiators in Hungarian, his anti-Stalinist classic -on par with Orwell’s 1984- Darkness at Noon in German, and from 1940 onward everything else in English), an autobiography in three parts (besides other works of autobiographical nature) the sum of which equals a brilliant Polaroid of 20th century man, essays on a wide variety of topics, and three major works of non-fiction, his ‘trilogy of the mind’, existing of The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation, and The Ghost in the Machine.

In The Sleepwalkers, Koestler traces the history of cosmology (from the Babylonians to Newton), and the rise of the tragic split between science and religion; in The Act of Creation, Koestler examines the act of creation, the processes underlying the creations of scientific and artistic geniuses alike. (In the words of Einstein himself: “The words of the language as they are written or spoken do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought [Hardie: let alone hypotheses deduced from experiments], which relies on more or less clear images of a visual and some of a muscular type.”)

In The Ghost in the Machine, Koestler sets forth a ‘holarchy of holons’ (Koestler invented the word ‘holon’), i.e. a system theory of hierarchies, as the best way to explain biological and social development, on both the individual and species level. He then proceeds with an analysis of Man’s predicament, attributing our species’ issues to a built-in conflict between our brain’s limbic and neocortical systems, an example of aforementioned biological development, but gone awry.

Koestler’s ‘trilogy of the mind’ is a staggering attempt at a sweeping synthesis, encompassing the domains of cosmology, science, religion, art, politics, and sociology; and to evaluate Koestler’s thinking on each of these domains against the developments in these domains since the publication of The Ghost in the Machine in 1967 would probably take me on a reading trip lasting a full decade. However I will be forever indebted to Koestler for helping me understand science’s true nature, for wanting to rid science of the stranglehold of scientific materialism and positivism. Because of his unorthodox views on biology and science, Koestler, together with Rupert Sheldrake and I believe Richard Lewontin, was once brandished as a ‘New Age biologist’, which I can’t agree with, because New Age is swim with dolphins and cure your cancer crap, and Koestler anything but crap.

Not only is the ‘trilogy of the mind’ a synthesis the likes of which I have never encountered before, we should not forget it was written by the man who wrote Darkness at Noon. In explaining difficult topics in the most lucid of manners, with every sentence the fruit of the pen of a master, Koestler has no peers: the gold standard in non-fiction writing.

The Age of Enlightenment, culminating in the French Revolution, was a decisive turning-point in the history of man. It was dramatized by Robespierre’s symbolic gesture of deposing God and enthroning the Goddess of Reason in the vacant chair. She proved to be a dismal failure. The Christian mythos had a continuous ancestry which can be traced back, through Greece, Palestine and Babylon, to the myths and rites of neolithic man; it provided an archetypal mould for man’s self-transcending emotions, his cravings for the absolute. The progressive trends and ideologies of the nineteenth century proved to be a poor substitute. From the point of view of material welfare, public health and social justice, the last hundred and fifty years of secular reforms certainly brought more tangible improvements in the lot of the common man than fifteen hundred years of Christianity had done; yet their reflection in the group mind was a different matter. Religion may have been opium to the people, but opium addicts are not given to much enthusiasm for a rational, healthy diet. Among the intellectual élite, the rapid advance of science created a rather shallow optimistic belief in the infallibility of Reason, in a clear, bright, crystalline world with a transparent atomic structure, with no room for shadows, twilights and myths. Reason was thought to be in control of emotion, as the rider controls the horse – the rider representing enlightened, rational thought, the horse representing what the Victorians called ‘the dark passions’ and ‘the beast within us’. Nobody foresaw, no pessimist ventured to guess, that the Age of Reason would end in the greatest emotional stampede in history, which left the rider crushed under the hoofs of the beast.