The Trail of the Dinosaur

By Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler's publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests. The Trail of the Dinosaur gathers some of his best-known essays and speeches.

The Trail of the Dinosaur , first published in 1955, contains a great deal of Koestler's thinking for the first ten years after the war – a 'farewell to arms' as he wrote in his preface. These essays deal with the political questions that obsessed him for the best part of a quarter of a century.

The essays in 'The Trail of the Dinosaur' cover the decade 1946–55-the early or classical period of the Cold War. In that confrontation the West was on the defensive, and the majority of its progressive intellectuals were still turning a benevolently blind eye on Soviet foreign policy and the facts of life behind the Iron Curtain . In the dramatic contest between Whitaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, which has been called the Dreyfus Affair of our century, progressive opinion stood firmly behind Hiss. And when, in the New York Times, I took Chambers' part, I became, if possible, even more unpopular among self-styled progressives than I had been before.

In 1937, during the Civil War in Spain, I spent three months under sentence of death as a suspected spy, witnessing the executions of my fellow prisoners and awaiting my own. These three months left me with a vested interest in capital punishment-rather like 'half-hanged Smith', who was cut down after fifteen minutes and lived on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781448214167

Arthur Koestler

ARTHUR KOESTLER (1905–1983) was a novelist, journalist, essayist, and a towering public intellectual of the mid-twentieth century. Writing in both German and English, he published more than forty books during his life. Koestler is perhaps best known for Darkness at Noon, a novel often ranked alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four in its damning portrayal of totalitarianism.

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THE TRAIL OF THE DINOSAUR

Arthur Koestler

Contents

Preface to the Danube Edition

Preface to the First Edition

I. The Challenge

The Challenge of our Time (1947)

Land of Virtue and Gloom (1946–7)

Land of Bread and Wine (1948)

The Candles of Truth (1949)

The Seven Deadly Fallacies (1948)

Chambers, the Villain (1950)

II. Diversions

The Future of the Novel (1946)

A Rebel’s Progress (1950)

Judah at the Crossroads (1954)

The Boredom of Fantasy (1953)

The Shadow of a Tree (1951)

III. The Failure of Response

The Right to Say No:

I. Manifesto (1950)

II. Two Methods of Action (1950)

III. An Outgrown Dilemma (1950)

A Guide to Political Neuroses (1953)

The Trail of the Dinosaur (1955)

Footnotes

A Note on the Author

Preface to the Danube Edition

The preface to the first edition of The Trail of the Dinosaur is dated February, 1955, the preface to Reflections on Hanging, October 3 of the same year. That year marks a turning point in my curriculum as a writer: a farewell to politics and a return to my earlier interests, as a student, in psychology and the sciences of life. The end of the first preface mentioned reads: ‘The bitter passion has burnt itself out; Cassandra has gone hoarse and is due for a vocational change.’ The ‘bitter passion’ refers to the disillusioned ex-Communist’s attitude towards the Stalinite regime of totalitarian terror, the sufferings it inflicted on the people under its rule, and the threat it represented to the rest of the world. To refer to oneself as a hoarse Cassandra may sound like self-dramatisation, but so many hostile critics had called me that name so insistently that I felt justified in adopting it for once.

The essays in The Trail of the Dinosaur cover the decade 1946–55—the early or classical period of the Cold War. In that confrontation the West was on the defensive, and the majority of its progressive intellectuals was still turning a benevolently blind eye on Soviet foreign policy and the facts of life behind the Iron Curtain (see ‘The Seven Deadly Fallacies’). In the dramatic contest between Whitaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, which has been called the Dreyfus Affair of our century, progressive opinion stood firmly behind Hiss. And when, in the New York Times, I took Chambers’ part, I became, if possible, even more unpopular among self-styled progressives than I had been before. The intellectual climate of that period was even worse in France, and provided the background for The Age of Longing—the novel which is published in the Danube Edition simultaneously with the present volume.

The Trail of the Dinosaur was meant to be the end of this involvement, and its preface amounted to a kind of public vow to that effect. I have actually managed to keep to it, with a very few occasional lapses. The ‘vocational change’ announced in the passage quoted above resulted in a trilogy (The Sleepwalkers—The Act of Creation—The Ghost in the Machine) which attempted a scientific analysis of the creativity and pathology of man. Those three books took over ten years to write; but nobody who has led a politically active life can sit for ten years at his desk in scholarly quietude. Thus from time to time there were bursts of hectic activity, and the first of these was devoted to the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, which was launched by the late Victor Gollancz, Canon John Collins and myself on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1955, when I paid a visit to Gollancz’ country house. It took fifteen years to achieve its aim, and even at the time of writing these lines there are forces at work, backed by the majority of the public, which advocate a return of the hangman. This, however, is not the main reason for including a substantial part of Reflections on Hanging in this collection. It was originally intended as a pamphlet, but grew into a full-sized book as I became more and more fascinated—and horrified—by the historical, psychological and philosophical background and implications of the death penalty in general, and its theory and practice in England. Thus Reflections on Hanging became, for better or worse, an essay on a lurid, but significant, aspect of English cultural history.

A.K.

London

March, 1970

Preface to the First Edition

1

The essays, lectures and broadcast talks in this book date from 1946 to 1955 and are a sequel to a previous collection, The Yogi and the Commissar, completed in 1944. At that time the Western world lived in the euphoria of approaching victory, and the pessimistic forecasts in that volume were almost unanimously rejected as fantasies of a morbid imagination. In the ten years that have passed since The Yogi and the Commissar was published, all its pessimistic and seemingly absurd predictions have come true, but none of its optimistic and seemingly plausible ones—few and cautious though the latter were.

2

‘The typical career of the French politician’, I wrote some years ago, ‘reads like a book, from left to right.’ Though I am not a French politician, the evolution reflected in these essays could be regarded as a confirmation of that rule—if the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ still possessed any concrete political meaning. One of the submissions of the present volume is that they have lost that meaning, and that man, if he is to survive, must shift the focus of his eyes to more vital questions.

This book, then, is a farewell to arms. The last essays and speeches in it that deal directly with political questions date from 1950, and are now five years old. Since then I felt that I have said all I had to say on these questions which had obsessed me, in various ways, for the best part of a quarter-century. Now the errors are atoned for, the bitter passion has burnt itself out; Cassandra has gone hoarse, and is due for a vocational change.

London

February, 1955

I. The Challenge

The Challenge of our Time

a

(1947)

I would like to start with a story which you all know, but it will lead us straight to the heart of our problem.

On the 18th of January, 1912, Captain Scott and his four companions reached the South Pole, after a march of sixty-nine days. On the return journey Petty Officer Evans fell ill, and became a burden to the party. Captain Scott had to make a decision. Either he carried the sick man along, slowed down the march and risked perdition for all; or he let Evans die alone in the wilderness and tried to save the rest. Scott took the first course; they dragged Evans along until he died. The delay proved fatal. The blizzards overtook them; Oates, too, fell ill and sacrificed himself; their rations were exhausted; and the frozen bodies of the four men were found six months later only ten miles, or one day’s march, from the next depot which they had been unable to reach. Had they sacrificed Evans, they would probably have been saved.

This dilemma, which faced Scott under eighty degrees of latitude, symbolises the eternal predicament of man, the tragic conflict inherent in his nature. It is the conflict between expediency and morality. I shall try to show that this conflict is at the root of our political and social crisis, that it contains in a nutshell the challenge of our time.

Scott had the choice between two roads. Let us follow each of them into their logical extensions. First, the road of expediency, where the traveller is guided by the principle that the End justifies the Means. He starts with throwing Evans to the wolves, as the sacrifice of one comrade is justified by the hope of saving four. As the road extends into the field of politics, the dilemma of Captain Scott becomes the dilemma of Mr. Chamberlain. Evans is Czechoslovakia; the sacrifice of this small nation will buy the safety of bigger ones—or so it is hoped. We continue on the straight, logical metal road which now leads us from Munich No. 1 to Munich No. 2: the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939, where the Poles go the way the Czechs have gone. By that time the number of individual Evanses is counted by the million: in the name of expediency the German Government decides to kill all incurables and mentally deficients. They are a drag on the nation’s sledge and rations are running short. After the incurables come those with bad heredity—Gypsies and Jews: six millions of them. Finally, in the name of expediency, the Western democracies let loose the first atomic bombs on the crowded towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and thus implicitly accept the principle of total and indiscriminate warfare which they hitherto condemned. We continue on our logical road, which has now become a steep slope, into the field of party politics. If you are convinced that a political opponent will lead your country into ruin and plunge the world into a new war—is it not preferable that you should forget your scruples and try to discredit him by revelations about his private life, frame him, blacken him, purge him, censor him, deport him, liquidate him? Unfortunately, your opponent will be equally convinced that you are harmful, and use the same methods against you. Thus, the logic of expediency leads to the atomic disintegration of morality, a kind of radio-active decay of all values.

And now let us turn to the second alternative before Scott. This road leads into the opposite direction; its guiding principles are: respect for the individual, the rejection of violence, and the belief that the Means determine the End. We have seen what happened to Scott’s expedition because he did not sacrifice Evans. And we can imagine what would have happened to the people of India had Mr. Gandhi been allowed to have his saintly way of non-resistance to the Japanese invader; or what would have been the fate of this country had it embraced pacifism, and with it the Gestapo with headquarters in Whitehall.

The fact that both roads lead to disaster, creates a dilemma which is inseparable from man’s condition; it is not an invention of the philosophers, but a conflict which we face at each step in our daily affairs. Each of us has sacrificed his Evans at one point or another of his past. And it is a fallacy to think that the conflict can always be healed by that admirable British household ointment called ‘the reasonable compromise’. Compromise is a useful thing in minor dilemmas of daily routine; but each time we face major decisions, the remedy lets us down. Neither Captain Scott nor Mr. Chamberlain could fall back on a reasonable compromise. The more responsible the position you hold, the sharper you feel the horns of the dilemma. When a decision involves the fate of a great number of people, the conflict grows proportionately. The technical progress of our age has enormously increased the range and consequence of man’s actions, and has thus amplified his inherent dilemma to gigantic proportions. This is the reason for our awareness of a crisis. We resemble the patient who hears for the first time, magnified by a loudspeaker, the erratic thundering of his heart.

The dilemma admits no final solution. But each period has to attempt a temporary solution adapted to its own condition. That attempt has to proceed in two steps. The first is to realise that a certain admixture of ruthlessness is inseparable from human progress. Without the rebellion of the Barons, there would be no Magna Carta; without the storming of the Bastille, no proclamation of the Rights of Man. The more we have moral values at heart, the more we should beware of crankiness. The trouble with some well-meaning ethical movements is that they have so many sectarians and quietists and cranks in their midst.

But the second and more important step is to realise that the End only justifies the Means within very narrow limits. A surgeon is justified in inflicting pain because the results of the operation are reasonably predictable; but drastic large-scale operations on the social body involve many unknown factors, lead to unpredictable results, and one never knows at what point the surgeon’s lancet turns into the butcher’s hatchet. Or, to change the metaphor: ruthlessness is like arsenic; injected in very small doses it is a stimulant to the social body, in large quantities it is deadly poison. And today we are all suffering from moral arsenic poisoning.

The symptoms of this disease are obvious in the political and social field; they are less obvious but no less dangerous in the field of science and philosophy. Let me quote as an example the opinions of one of our leading physicists, Professor J. D. Bernal. In an article called ‘Belief and Action’ recently published by the Modern Quarterly, he says that ‘the new social relations’ require ‘a radical change in morality’, and that the virtues ‘based on excessive concern with individual rectitude’ need readjustment by a ‘change from individual to collective morality’. ‘Because collective action is the only effective action, it is the only virtuous action’, says Professor Bernal. Now let us see what this rather abstract statement really means. The only practical way for Tom, Dick or Harry to take ‘effective collective action’ is to become a member of an army, political party or movement. His choice will be determined (a) by his nationality, and (b) by his political opinions or prejudices. Once he has joined the collective of his choice, he has to subordinate his ‘individual rectitude’ to the interests of the group or party. This is precisely what, for instance, the accused in the Belsen Trial did. Their excuse was that they had to service the gas chamber and push the victims into it out of loyalty to their party, because their individual responsibility was subordinated to collective responsibility. Counsel for the Defence of Irma Grese could have quoted verbatim Professor Bernal’s reflections on ethics—though politically Bernal is a staunch opponent of Nazism and supports, to quote his own words, ‘the theories of Marx and the practice of Lenin and Stalin’. His article actually contains some reservations to the effect that there should be no question of ‘blind and obedient carrying out of orders’, which, he says, leads to the Führerprinzip. He does not seem to have noticed that blind obedience plus the Führerprinzip are nowhere more in evidence today than in the Party to which Professor Bernal’s sympathies belong. In short, I believe that much confusion could be avoided if some scientists would stick to their electrons and realise that human beings do not fit into mathematical equations. And it should be realised that this is not an abstract philosophical quarrel, but a burning and very concrete issue on which it depends whether our civilisation shall live or die.

Let me return to my starting-point, the dilemma between expediency and morality. In the course of our discussion, the symbolic sledge of Scott’s small party has grown into the express train of mankind’s progress. On this train expediency is the engine, morality the brake. The action of the two is always antagonistic. We cannot make an abstract decision in favour of one or the other. But we can make temporary adjustments according to the train’s progress. Two hundred years ago, during the train’s laborious ascent from the stagnant marshes of feudal France towards the era of the Rights of Man, the decision would have been in favour of the engine and against the brake. Since about the second half of the nineteenth century our ethical brakes have been