Why has the western world shown such loss of will in defending itself from radical Islamic terrorism? Why, indeed, do substantial numbers of peopleparticularly those who view themselves as intellectualsendlessly make excuses for belief systems and terrorist movements whose values are completely at odds with their own stated valuesand even romanticize these systems and their followers? I think some clues can be found in a forgotten novel by Arthur Koestler.
The Age of Longing
Hydie sipped at her glass. Here was another man living in his own portable glass cage. Most people she knew did. Each one inside a kind of invisible telephone box. They did not talk to you directly but through a wire. Their voices came through distorted and mostly they talked to the wrong number, even when they lay in bed with you. And yet her craving to smash the glass between the cages had come back again. If cafes were the home of those who had lost their country, bed was the sanctuary of those who had lost their faith.
Through her friend Julien DeLattre, Hydie is introduced to a number of Paris intellectuals and and East European emigres. Members of the former group are mostly in denial about the danger of a Soviet attack…many of them have indeed convinced themselves that Communist rule wouldn’t be all that bad. For example, there’s Professor Pontieux (modeled on Sartre)…”He did not believe that the Commonwealth of Freedomloving People had solved all its problems and become an earthly paradise. But it was equally undeniable that it was an expression of History’s groping progress towards a new form of society, when it followed that those who opposed this progres were siding with the forces of reaction and preparing the way for conflict and warthe worst crime against Humanity.” Vardi, another intellectual, says that if he had to choose between the (American) juke box on one hand, and Pravda on another, he isn’t sure which he would pick.
Madame Pontieux, modeled on Simone de Bouvoir (with whom Koestler had a brief affair) is less ambiguous about her choice among the alternatives. “You cannot enter a cafe or a restaurant without finding it full of Americans who behave as if the place belonged to them,” she complains to an American official. When the Russian emigre Leontiev suggests that France would not survive without American military support, pointing out that “nature abhors a vacuum,” she turns on him:
“I am surprised at your moderation, Citizen Leontiev,” Madame Pontieux said sarcastically. “I thought you would tell us that without this young man’s protection the Commonwealth army would at once march to the Atlantic shore.”
“It would,” said Leontiev. “I believed that everyone knew that.”
“I refuse to believe it,” responds Madame Pontieux. “But if choose one must I would a hundred times rather dance to the music of a Balalaika than a juke box.”
(The French intellectuals Koestler knew must have really hated juke boxes!)
Julien is romantically interested in Hydie, but she is not attracted to him, despite the fact that he seems to have much to recommend hima hero of the French Resistance, wounded in action, and a successful poet. On one occasion, she tells him that she could never sleep with him because they are too similar“it would be like incest”..on another occasion, though, she tells him that “what I most dislike about you is your attitude of arrogant broken-heartedness.” Parallel to Hydie’s loss of religious faith is Julien’s loss of his secular faith in the creation of a new society. He does not now believe in utopia, or any approximation to same, but he does believe in the need to face reality, however unpleasant it may be. Hydie argues that the Leftists of their acquaintance may be silly, but at least they believe in something:
“Perhaps they believe in a miragebut isn’t it better to believe in a mirage than to believe in nothing?”
Julien looked at her coldly, almost with contempt:
“Definitely not. Mirages lead people astray. That’s why there are so many skeletons in the desert. Read more history. Its caravan-routes are strewn with the skeletons of people who were thirsting for faithand their faith made them drink salt water and eat the sand, believing it was the Lord’s Supper.”
At a diplomatic affair, Hydie meets Fedya, a committed Communist who works for the Soviet Embassy. She is powerfully attracted to him: things get physical very quickly and, from Hydie’s point of view, very satisfactorily. (Fedya is one of Koestler’s best-developed characters. His boyhood in Baku is vividly sketched, and Koestlerhimself a former Communistdoes a good job in showing how a political faith can become core to an individual’s whole personality.)
The affair blows up when Fedya humiliates Hydie sexually in a way that could only have occurred to a Dialectical Materialistand, indeed, humiliation was not Fedya’s intent, he was “only” attempting the demonstrate to her the truth of Pavlovian conditioning as an explanation for human behavior. Hurt and furious, she pours out her heart to Julien…who now feels free to tell her the truth about Fedya, a truth he felt unable to divulge while Fedya was Hydie’s lover.
Fedya’s real job, underneath his diplomatic cover, is to collect lists of namesthe names of the key people to be killed or imprisoned immediately after the Soviet invasion. Hydie is, of course, horrified, and is particularly appalled that so many people already knew about Fedya’s activitiesand did nothing to stop themwhile she was blissfully unaware.
Julien tells her, as does her father the Colonel, that nothing can be done about Fedya because of diplomatic immunity and because the French government does not want to create an international incident by deporting him. Refusing to believe this, Hydie arranges a meeting with a senior French security official. The improbably-named Jules Commanche (who, like Julien, is a hero of the French Resistance) also tells Hydie that nothing can be done, and that if she attempts to make an issue of it, the Soviets and their fellow-travelers will simply paint her as nothing more than a hysterical jilted lover. Hydie remains unwilling to accept the conclusion that Fedya must be left alone to continue his activities:
“How can you, a Frenchman, say that it is not a crime when a man walks around marking down your compatriots with a pencillike a man branding cattle for the slaughter-house? Don’t you seedon’t you see what is waiting for you?”
Commanche, who had half risen, let himself slump back into the chair. He no longer tried to conceal his exasperation.
“Are you really so naive, Mademoiselle, as to imagine that we know less about these things than you do? Do you think that we were unaware of Monsieur Nikitin’s activities, of of your affair with him, if it comes to that? And as for your somewhat patronising remark about what ‘waiting for us’myself, my family, my friends, in short, the French peopleallow me to refuse to discuss it, in order to avoid embarrassing you.”
“Me? I don’t understand?…”
“Well, we both know what is waiting for you. A comfortable airliner, when things get hotand some nostalgic regrets for the sunny cafes on the Champs-Elysees…”
For his own part, Commanche plans a heroic but militarily-futile death in resisting the coming Soviet invasion: he does not wish to survive what he sees as the inevitable destruction of European civilization. After sharing his own sense of hopelessness with Hydie, he asks her for a date, which she rejects.
In an anguish of anger and despair, Hydie buys a gun and goes to Fedya’s apartment. After asking him for a drink, she draws the weapon and tells him why he must die.
He summoned all his patience and self-discipline for a last attempt to bring her back to reason. He forced himself to make his voice patient and gentle; and, after the first few words, its sound made him indeed regain his calmand even feel a kindly pity for the unhappy fat-legged girl.
“Listen, please,” he said. “We have talked about these matters often before. You don’t like that we make scientific studies of human nature like Professor Pavlov. You don’t like revolutionary vigilance and lists on the social reliability of people, and discipline and re-education camps. You think I am brutal and ridiculous and uncultured. Then why did you like making love with me? I will tell you why and you will understand…”
“I am not a tall and handsome man…There are no tall and handsome men who come from the Black Town in Baku, because there were few vitamins in the food around the oilfields. So it was not for this that you liked to make love with me…It was because I believe in the future and am not afraid of it, and because to know what he lives for makes a man strong…Of course many ugly things are happening in my country. Do you think I do not know about them?…And what difference will it make in a hundred years that there is a little ugliness now? It always existed. In a hundred years there will be no uglinessonly a classless world state of free people. There will be no more wars and no more children born in Black Towns with big bellies and flies crawling in their eyes. And also no more children of the bourgeoisie with crippled characters because they grew up in a decadent society…I am not handsome, but you have felt attracted to me because you know that we will win and that we are only at the beginningand that you will lose because you are at the end…That is why I was not afraid of your little revolver, because you can’t have the courage to shoot me. To kill, one must believe in something.”
Nevertheless, Hydie pulls the trigger…
One one level, this book is sort of a romance novel, with the theme “chicks like self-confident guys.” This is no doubt true, but emphasizing this point wasn’t Koestler’s main reason for writing Age of Longing. Koestler’s deeper theme is that the decline in religious belief in the West (and Koestler himself was certainly no traditional religious believer) has created a hunger for faith which will likely be filled by those who carry their convictions with great certainty. As Jules Commanche explains to Hydie:
“You cannot cure aberrations of the political libido by arguments…Now the source of all political libido is faith, and its object is the New Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Lost Paradise, Utopia, what have you. Therefore each time a god dies there is trouble in History. People feel that they have been cheated by his promises, left with a dud check in their pocket. The last time a god died was on July 14, 1789, the day when the Bastille was stormed. On that day the Holy Trinity was replaced by the three-word slogan which you find written over our town halls and post offices. Europe has not yet recovered from that operation, and all our troubles today are secondary complications. The Peopleand when I use that word, Mademoiselle, I always refer to people who have no bank accountsthe people have been deprived of their only asset: the knowledge, or the illusion, whichever you like, of having an immortal soul. Their faith is dead, their kingdom is dead, only the longing remains. And this longing, Mademoiselle, can express itself in beautiful or murderous forms, just like the frustrated sex instinct…Only the longing remainsa dumb, inarticulate longing of the instinct, without knowledge of its source and object. So the people, the masses, mill around with that irksome feeling of having an uncashed check in their pockets and whoever tells them ‘Oyez, oyez, the Kingdom is just round the corner, in the second street to the left,’ can do with them what he likes.”
A few thoughts on Commanche’s speech and its applicability to our times…
First, I think I disagree with Commanche/Koestler that loss of belief in personal immortality is of the essence here. Indeed, Fedya is an atheist, but his faith is strong. What matters more (from a societal standpoint) is the belief in the society’s moral authority, in its future, in its system of symbols. And it is specifically these things that have been systematically undermined by so many forces in our society and especially in academia. (When people with PhD’s are willing to accept the idea that gravity is a “social construct”see The Sokal Hoaxis it any wonder that many ordinary people feel disoriented?)
Second, I think that while our present problem does involve people chasing new gods and promulgators of new faithsGaia-worship, Obama-worship…our more serious problem involves those who are no longer seeking and have abandoned themselves to cynicism. I find Hydie, as drawn by Koestler, to be a fairly appealing person, despite her naivete and self-centeredness. I suspect that a present-day Hydie would be much less likeable. I’m reminded of some lines from Kipling, in which he describes the fall of a soul into Hell:
The Spirit gripped him by the hair, and sun by sun they fell
Till they came to the belt of Naughty Stars that rim the mouth of Hell.
The first are red with pride and wrath, the next are white with pain,
But the third are black with clinkered sin that cannot burn again.
There are probably more people now at the clinkered sin that cannot burn again stage than there were when Koestler wrote.
Julien, in explaining to Hydie why he cannot write anymore, says:
Fallen angels don’t write poems. There is lyric poetry, and sacred poetry, and a poetry of love and a poetry of rebelling; the poets of apostasy do not exist.
The book ends on a note of almost unredeemed darkness:
Her thoughts travelled back to Sister Boutillot standing in the alley which led to the pond…Oh, if she could only go back to the infinite comfort of father confessors and mother superiors, of a well-ordered hierarchy which promised punishment and reward, and furnished the world with justice and meaning. If only one could go back! But she was under the curse of reason, which rejected whatever might quench her thirst without abolishing the gnawing of the urge; which rejected the answer without abolishing the question. For the place of God had become vacant and there was a draught blowing through the world as in an empty flat before the new tenants have arrived.
Sixty years later, I think we now begin to see who the New Tenants might be, and it is not comforting knowledge.
Hydie’s (pre-Fedya) sexual frustration is, of course, symbolic: it reflects the West’s loss of self-confidence, but it can be interpreted at a more literal level as well. Does a societal loss of self-confidence also play out at the individual level of attraction or lack of same?
A commenter at this blog reported that a significant number of female British medical students have been converting to Islam. This writer, herself a Muslim, says that “Since 9/11, vast numbers of educated, privileged middle-class white women have converted to Islam”…she identifies these converts as including women at “investment banks, TV stations, universities and in the NHS.” Her concern is not that they are converting to Islam…something I’d presume she would applaud…but that they are converting to “the most restricted forms” of the religion. (And it is, of course, among the believers in the most absolute form of any religion or political system that one is likely to find the most obviously self-confident believers.)
David Yeagley, the American Indian who blogs under the traditional name Bad Eagle, has quoted a Cheyenne saying: “A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” The link from the preceding paragraph suggests that in Europe, at least, there are more than a few female hearts on the ground concerning the future of Western civilization.
I don’t think Koestler’s protagonist would have been attracted to a fundamentalist Muslim in the way that she was drawn to the communist Fedya. The gap in values would have been far wider: while Communism is a bastard child of the Enlightenment, radical Islam is counter-Enlightenment, and does not make the kind of universalist, humanitarian, and secular promises that the Communists madethe cruelty is closer to the surface.But the loss of Western self-confidence has greatly accelerated since Koestler wrote, and today’s Hydies are unlikely to share the educational and religious depth of the woman Koestler imagined.
I said earlier that the book ends on a note of almost unredeemed darkness…Koestler does permit his readers a small glimpse of hope. One of the book’s characters is the British nuclear physicist Lord Edwards, known as “Hercules the Atom-Smasher” because of his powerful physique. Edwards/Hercules is a Communist sympathizer and fellow-traveller who has repeatedly modified his views on the expanding-universe question to conform to the latest “politically correct” edicts from Moscow.
In this passage, Lord Edwards is talking with the French poet Navarin. It has now become clear that the Soviet invasion is imminent.
“So what are you going to do?”
As Navarin looked at him with an uncomprehending smile, he added in a grunt:
“I mean if you are invaded.”
The poet arched his eyebrows in surprise at the Englishman’s awkward manner of formulating the question, and answered in a tone of explaining to a child that the earth is round:
“In the case of conflict, which could only be caused by Imperialist provocation, the duty of every democratic-minded person is to support unreservedly, unhesitatingly and unconditionally the Commonwealth of Freedomloving People.”
“Hmm,” said Hercules. He said nothing for a while…then unexpectedly he wagged a finger in front of Navarin’s face and grunted:
“I call that treason.”
Navarin thought he had misunderstood Edwards, whose French accent was abominable.
“I beg your pardon?” he asked, with his ravaged cherub’s smile.
“I call that treason,” Hercules the Atom-Smasher shouted over the rattle of the wheels; then with a deep contented sign that seemed to release his chest from some long-standing oppression, he settled back into his corner, and decided then and there to go once more into that wretched question of the expanding universe; but this time in the light of purely mathematical evidence.
Earlier CB comment threads here and here.
A discussion of the book and this post at Shrinkwrapped
Kipling finishes his poem well, too. Carrying the word is the point of Chicago Boys, no?
Go back to Earth with a lip unsealed””go back with an open eye,
And carry my word to the Sons of Men or ever ye come to die:
That the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one””
And the God that you took from a printed book be with you, Tomlinson!
“the unhappy fat-legged girl”: a significant point, I suspect.
Richard Fernandez has has done an excellent job describing this,
On the American side of the Atlantic, Rukmini Callimachi has a long piece in the New York Times describing how a “lonely” American girl was gradually converted to Islam by an ISIS interlocutor on the Internet. “Alex, a 23-year-old Sunday school teacher and babysitter, was trembling with excitement the day she told her Twitter followers that she had converted to Islam.”
The only Muslims she knew were those she had met online, and he encouraged her to keep it that way, arguing that Muslims are persecuted in the United States. She could be labeled a terrorist, he warned, and for now it was best for her to keep her conversion secret, even from her family.
I also linked this about a year ago.
The West is filled with millions of people like Alex, all of them waiting for Someone. They are the product of a multi-decade campaign to deliberately empty people of their culture; to actually make them ashamed of it. They were purposely drained of God, country, family like chickens so they could be stuffed with the latest narrative of the progressive meme machine. The Gramscian idea was to produce a blank slate upon which the Marxist narrative could be written.
An (on the balance very favorable) NYT review of the book from 1951. I doubt if anything like it would be likely to appear in that publication today.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/02/specials/koestler-age.html
Not sure why Rovere thinks Hydie is such an improbably character. “Briskly erotic” is not a term I’d use to describe someone who has the thoughts quoted at the beginning of my post.
I think Mike K is onto the deeper truth. It does matter what you believe, not just that you believe. In the longer term what you believe is predictive of the outcome, especially corporately.
You can not long create the viability of liberty without a consensus on morality that has an objective reference and is based on humanity’s true relationship to our Creator and His revealed truth. C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity), Francis Schaeffer (How Should We Then Live), et al.
Death6
We always come back to what works because what works is true. The narratives of the long and difficult journey toward a promised land, that God loves us and tests us, that Christ died sacrificially – surely these can and often have led to better lives. And that’s a pretty secular way of looking at it. (Death 6 is right spiritually but also practically – these models work for better lives here.)
On the other hand…religious belief, and specifically Christianity, do not seem to be *guarantors* of a social climate favorable to individual liberty. The deeply-devout Russia of the Czars was scarcely more a free society than the atheist Russia of the Communists. The almost universal Catholicism of Italy did not prevent Mussolini. And while several leaders of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany were indeed Christians, the Catholicism and Lutheranism of the majority did not prevent them for going along with…and in many cases actively supporting…Hitler.
Consider the case of Israel…obviously not a Christian country, but a mix of Judaism and secularism. Ginny and Death6, would you argue that Israel cannot long-term sustain itself as a free society because of absence of Christianity, or would you view Judaism as an equivalent?
“On the other hand”¦religious belief, and specifically Christianity, do not seem to be *guarantors* of a social climate favorable to individual liberty.”
Whoever said it did?
The state is jealous and wants to be in total control of everything. It is a rare place where the Church was able to stand as a second pole of power until modern times. Certainly not in Russia–the fact that it was an occupied and terrorized country for most of the Middle Ages forced a certain unity of social power structures that led to the authoritarian nature of government there for the last several centuries.
Italy wasn’t a country until very recently, so the state was a relatively fresh new thing. Ditto for Germany, of course.
England is unique in that the Church was powerful and distinct from the government, through some combination of Norman obstinacy towards Rome, and an occupied people’s obstinacy towards the Normans, until Henry destroyed it.
Judaism is unique as well, of course. There’s no reason most Jews should have particular loyalty to the state, given their history.
“until Henry destroyed it”: but he didn’t. He simply appointed himself Pope of the English Church.
Won’t speak for Ginny, but I would say that the values that came out of the Reformation were more closely aligned with those of the first century churches than had developed in the later part of the Roman period and the Middle Ages. As such they were a great guide for family and small community structure and more importantly provided a stable and necessary philosophical basis for individual liberty.
My view is that stable liberty is the great motivator of human progress, but that it can only function long term where there is a common moral code that holds to a standard of mutual respect and consistency based on the value of human life and equal protection of the law. Christianity, as revealed in the fundamental themes of the Bible, provides such a basis. I view Christianity as the prophetic fulfillment of the Old Testament. Jews would take issue with me on that, but we would find much common ground on the moral imperatives and God-Mankind relationship we take from Scripture. This Biblical moral and God-Mankind relationship is an ideal so in practice it is possible and even probable that it can in name be perverted and used by manipulators for power schemes and personal gains. Liberty then becomes more unequal and the moral consensus no longer holds the Biblical standards as its ideal.
I think Francis Schaeffer makes a good case that the history of Western civilization from the Middle Ages to present can be well understood as a continuing struggle between those who value liberty based on the Biblical foundation of who Mankind is in relation to God and those who believe that Mankind themselves through their own beliefs can govern themselves by rational interaction and knowledge based on strictly observable particulars. He terms this secular humanism and it can be traced in the main all the way back to the Hellenistic world view, at least.
The reason the humanists, such as the French Republicans of the Revolution, have such a struggle in keeping their liberty-based social systems together is that they have no sufficient basis for a moral consensus of mutual respect and equality before the law. Utility is insufficient where moral hazard is great. Congressional exemptions from their legislation comes to mind. The moral fabric of a largely humanistic free society is weak and easily set aside when confronted by great strains, either internal or external.
A Biblical foundation is not sufficient to immediately result in the flowering of liberty and human progress, but it is necessary for such a system to endure, especially when great stress is present. No Western society or state has ever been, or likely to ever be, fully based on a Biblical consensus or fully a humanistic consensus. There is an on going struggle within each person and among people who are on the full spectrum possible. As the balance in beliefs and influence fluctuate, the society will see it’s institutions and social fabric change.
As for Israel, I believe the Biblical fundamental God-Mankind relationship and moral basis is consistent throughout the Old and New Testaments. Perhaps the revelation of the New Testament is less ambiguous, at least to me. I would say that Israel has the same issue the rest of the West has. It has largely lost the Biblical moral basis for its practice of liberty. I agree that it has become more humanist and this has increasingly eroded its ability to resist both internal and external pressures. Perhaps it has the advantage of a clearer view of the alternative presented by Islam and there is a significant, if minority, Biblically aligned remnant within their society.
At some point quantity may overcome quality and that might have happened sometime ago to Israel had we not subsidized their defense, made it known we would be their cavalry and had they not developed a nuke capability with a will to use it as needed. With the obvious weakening of our consensus to defend Israel and with Iran’s nuclear adventures, we may see in the not too distant future the breaking of Israel morally and then physically.
Death6
What you wrote was actually very logical. But, what about this?
suppose you composed a catchier title? I mean, I don’t wish to tell you how to
run your blog, however suppose you added a title to possibly grab a person’s attention?
I mean Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Summer Rerun: Sleeping with the Enemy is kinda
vanilla. You might peek at Yahoo’s front page and see how they
create article headlines to get people interested.
You might try adding a video or a related picture or two to
grab readers interested about everything’ve written. In my opinion, it could bring your posts a little livelier.
Ha, I thought ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’ *already* added more sizzle than, “Book Review: Koestler’s ‘Age of Longing'” or something like that.
It’s true, though….many Internet marketers have developed the art of creating titles that are almost impossible not to click on…I’ve done it myself even when I knew it was stupid.
Let’s see…how about
‘Learn the one surprising reason why this girl preferred sex with a sinister Russian agent’
or
‘Paris, the City of Love. Only one man could satisfy her deepest longings.’
But maybe we don’t have to go all the way…I mean, be that radical…there probably *are* ways we could make the titles more inviting. More use of images/videos is also probably worthwhile, though in this particular case I can’t think of what image would fit, other than maybe a cover image from the book.