Liberalism: the other God that failed
by John Gray, UnHerd:
While Arthur Koestler was awaiting execution after being captured and sentenced to death by Francoist forces as a communist spy during the Spanish Civil War, he had a mystical experience. Formerly a Marxist materialist who believed the universe was governed by “physical laws and social determinants”, he glimpsed another reality. The world now seemed instead as “a text written in invisible ink”.
The experience left him untroubled by the prospect of his imminent death by firing squad. At the last moment, he was traded for a prisoner held by Republican forces. But the epiphany of another order of things that came to him in the prison cell stayed with him for the rest of his days, informing his great novel of communist faith and disillusion, Darkness at Noon (1940), his later writings on the history of science, and a lifelong interest in parapsychology.
Koestler was a pivotal figure in the post-war generation that rejected communism as “the God that failed”— the title of a celebrated book of essays, edited by the Labour politician Richard Crossman and published in 1949, to which Koestler contributed. The ex-communists of this period followed a variety of political trajectories. André Gide, another contributor to the collection, abandoned communism, after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1936, to become a writer on issues of sexuality and personal authenticity.
The rise of post-truth liberalism
Other ex-communists became social democrats, while a few became militant conservatives or lost interest in politics completely. Stephen Spender, poet and novelist and author of Forward from liberalism (1937), morphed into a cold-war liberal. James Burnham, a friend and disciple of Leon Trotsky, rejected Marxism in 1940 to reappear as a militant conservative, publishing The Suicide of the West: the meaning and destiny of liberalism (1964) and eventually being received into the Catholic Church. All of them became communists in a time when liberalism had failed. All were able to return to functioning liberal societies when they abandoned their communist faith.
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