Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
I started reading this book on May 15th. The funny thing about this book is that I once owned a copy (with the cover pictured at left, which is different from the library copy that I show below). But, back when I was getting ready to move and trying to thin out my books, it was one of the books that I apparently decided I did not need to keep and I donated it, along with many others, to my local library. It was just an old paperback, I didn’t remember where or when I’d gotten it, and I knew nothing about it or about its author.
Then I recently came across information about it that made me very much want to read it, but alas, it was gone.
So I got a copy from the library to read. 
And I finished it on May 24th. And I loved this book! I made many notes, thinking that if it was my book, I would have highlighted a number of passages. I decided to go down to the library store to see if they might have my donated copy (or any copy) for sale, in which case I would buy it back. But I couldn’t find it. Oh well. At least I was able to read it though, and I am glad I did.
First, for background, here is what Amazon.com says about this book:
Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler’s modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s.
During Stalin’s purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the party he has devoted his life to. Under mounting pressure to confess to crimes he did not commit, Rubashov relives a career that embodies the ironies and betrayals of a revolutionary dictatorship that believes it is an instrument of liberation.
A seminal work of twentieth-century literature, Darkness At Noon is a penetrating exploration of the moral danger inherent in a system that is willing to enforce its beliefs by any means necessary.
As for my notes, there was a lot in this book that I found very profound and thought-provoking.
As the character Rubashov ruminates over the idea of “the ends justifying the needs” in the context of history he says:
“… The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.
“But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history’s absolution.
“It is said that No. 1 [i.e., Stalin] has Machiavelli’s Prince lying permanently by his bedside. So he should: since then, nothing really important has been said about the rules of political ethics. We were the first to replace the nineteenth century’s liberal ethics of ‘fair play’ by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century. In that also we were right: a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means. We introduced neo-Machiavellism into this country; the others, the counter-revolutionary dictatorships, have clumsily imitated it. We were neo-Machiavellians in the name of universal reason – that was our greatness; the others in the name of a national romanticism, that is their anachronism. That is why we will in the end be absolved by history; but not they …
“Yet for the moment we are thinking and acting on credit. As we have thrown overboard all conventions and rules of cricket-morality, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic. We are under the terrible compulsion to follow our thought down to its final consequence and to act in accordance to it. We are sailing without ballast; therefore each touch on the helm is a matter of life or death.
…
“…For us the question of subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the law of historical credit; it was our law.
“History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prematurely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves.”
Then in another section, another character, Ivanov, says to Rubashov:
“My point is this, …one may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions. That is the first commandment for us. Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery. To sit down and let oneself be hypnotized by one’s own navel, to turn up one’s eyes and humbly offer the back of one’s neck to Gletkin’s revolver – that is an easy solution. The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears. …”
Ivanov then says:
“I don’t approve of mixing ideologies. …There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community – which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. …Do you know, since the establishment of Christianity as a state religion, a single example of a state which really followed a Christian policy? You can’t point out one. In times of need – and politics are chronically in a time of need – the rules were always able to evoke ‘exceptional circumstances’, which demanded exceptional measures of defence. Since the existence of nations and classes, they live in a permanent state of mutual self-defense, which forces them to defer to another time the putting into practice of humanism…”
Later, as Rubashov again tries to find some reasonable ground on which to stand, he reflects:
“…We seem to be faced with a pendulum movement in history, swinging from absolutism to democracy, from democracy back to absolute dictatorship.
“The amount of individual freedom which a people may conquer and keep, depends on the degree of its political maturity. The aforementioned pendulum motion seems to indicate that the political maturing of the masses does not follow a continuous rising curve, as does the growing up of an individual, but that it is governed by more complicated laws.
“The maturity of the masses lies in the capacity to recognize their own interests. This, however, presupposes a certain understanding of the process of production and distribution of goods. A people’s capacity to govern itself democratically is thus proportionate to the degree of its understanding of the structure and functioning of the whole social body.
“Now, every technical improvement creates a new complication to the economic apparatus, causes the appearance of new factors and combinations, which the masses cannot penetrate for a time. Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization. Hence the political maturity of the masses cannot be measured by an absolute figure, but only relatively, i.e. in proportion to the stage of civilization at that moment.
“When the level of mass-consciousness catches up with the objective state of affairs, there follows inevitably the conquest of democracy, either peaceably or by force. Until the next jump of technical civilization – the discovery of the mechanical loom, for example – again sets back the masses in a state of relative immaturity, and renders possible or even necessary the establishment of some form of absolute leadership.
…
“The discovery of the steam engine started a period of rapid objective progress, and, consequently, of equally rapid subjective political retrogression. The industrial era is still young in history, the discrepancy is still great between its extremely complicated economic structure and the masses’ understanding of it. Thus it is comprehensible that the relative political maturity of the nations in the first half of the twentieth century is less than it was 200 B.C. or at the end of the feudal epoch.
…
“…The new economic system which has taken the place of the old is …incomprehensible to them. The laborious and painful rise must start anew. It will probably be several generations before the people manage to understand the new state of affairs, which they themselves created by the [Russian] Revolution.
“Until then, … a democratic form of government is impossible, and the amount of individual freedom which may be accorded is even less than in other countries. …”
Finally, as an example of Rubashov’s discussion above, there is, at one point in the book, an individual whom Rubashov meets in prison and on asking what he has done to be there, this individual tells him:
“I was unmasked as a reactionary at the pricking of the children. Every year the Government sends a commission out to us. Two years ago, it sent us papers to read and a whole lot of images of itself. Last year it sent a threshing machine and brushes for the teeth. This year it sent little glass pipes with needles, to prick the children. There was a woman in man’s trousers; she wanted to prick all the children one after the other. When she came to my house, I and my wife barred the door and unmasked ourselves as reactionaries. Then we all together burnt the papers and the images and broke up the threshing machine; and then a month afterwards they came to take us away.”
All in all, I found this book to be a very interesting glimpse into a period of history about which I have known very little. I have never really understood Communism or the Soviet Union much at all, although I grew up with the knowledge of it (as a threat, for the most part). The discussions in this book about history and politics, morality and ethics, have been very enlightening for me and very worthwhile. (And I may need to add this book to my library so that I once again possess it!)