Koestler's question-mark tipped with theological poison

THROUGHOUT the history of man's struggle to understand and control the world he lives in, science has been in conflict with religion. This was so, whatever men of science might personally have believed.

The rationalists used to dream that knowledge could, by itself, conquer superstition and mysticism.

But, in this century of stupendous scientific and technological expansion, the fundamental outlook of science, including physics itself, has been infected with scepticism and idealism.

For this is also the century of capitalist decay.

Religion in all its forms derives, not from ignorance, but from the continuation of class exploitation and oppression.

God's mystery of springs from order, not just of nature.

science believed that it would ultimately explain everything in the world-life and human thought included—in terms of the laws of motion of basic particles of matter.

These laws, essentially quantitative and mathematical, all the qualitative contrasts and transformations of living This mechanical world view could never be carried through consistently, as Engels forsaw. sought to keep the Arab tribes divided es in Damascus in his Rolls Royce. of the unions is bureaucratically controlled, and even used against the interests of the members, look towards changes in rules and procedure as a solution.

Many militant workers, frustrated and bitter at the way in which the machinery mark tipped with theological quantities, it calculates with velocities and masses, and at most with volumes. . . . In physics, however, and still more in chemistry, not only does continual qualitative change take place in consequence of quantitative change, the transformation of quantity into quality, but there are also many qualitative changes to be taken into account whose dependence on quantitative change is by no means proven. That the present tendency of science goes in this direction can be readily granted, but does not prove that the pursuit of this tendency will exhaust the whole of physics and chemistry' ('Dialectics of Nature' pp. 255-256.)

The attempt to reduce all phenomena to mechanical motion of identical particles was doomed to failure, and religion has not been slow to take advantage of every weakness of its old enemy.

'Beyond Reductionism' is an account of a symposium held in Switzerland last year. Some important figures biology, psychology and linguistics made contributions in which they discussed their dissatisfaction with the mechanistic approach and its inadequacy to cope with recent discoveries.

Several contributors stressed the importance of the conception of a 'system', especially in dealing with living organisms.

The behaviour of such an object is not sufficiently described merely in terms of the detailed courses followed by its constituent parts.

One of the participants in the symposium was von Bertalanffy, founder of the 'General Systems Theory', and the relevance of this approach to other fields of life science is Every major workers' struggle today involves a conflict with government, a political conflict.

Many of these ideas attack mechanistic methods of thought in ways which are quite acceptable to Marxism.

In the case of the paper by Piaget and Inhelder, 'The Gaps in Empiricism', the debt to Marxism is clearly conscious.

But two papers, J. R.

Smythies' on 'Aspects of Consciousness' and F. A.

Hayek's on "The Primacy of the Abstract, are openly idealist; and none of the 'BEYOND REDUCTIONISM' New perspectives in the life sciences Edited by Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies eminent scientists assembled seem to notice the contradicThis beconies understandable when we recall that the chief organizer and guiding spirit of the symposium was Arthur Koestler. This ex-Stalinist exnovelist became a professional anti-communist long ago.

But unlike many others in his profession, Koestler has worked to find theoretical weapons to use against Marxism.

Searching desperately throughout the length and breadth of world culture, his aim has been to make room for mysticism in the realm of In recent years, he has devoted himself to writing about science and especially biology, in order to demonstrate that there are things in heaven and earth that science cannot deal with. He always leaves his reader clutching a lethal question mark, tipped with A warning to ocal levels tied directly to the nonopolies and their 'productivity' plans. The purpose of an samun s campaigng must all Cranian'c camnainning munt surely be to take the union along this road?

In the 'Beyond Reductionism' symposium, he intervened from time to time in this spirit.

For example, when, in a discussion on evolution, it is pointed out that only a very small number of mutations are capable of producing a possible variant, Koestler asks:

'Do you realize that what you say leads to the conclusion that evolution is the fulfilment of a preordained programme, Hutchinson £3 10s. Review by John Crawford preordained by way of constraints?' (Page 82.)

While the scientists are trying to adequaciesapple with the inof mechanical materialism, Koestler is taking advantage of them to smuggle in the germs of a mystical extra-universal force guiding the movements of matter.

Koestler does this job with great subtlety.

But in the last paper, the psychiatrist Frankl gives the game away.

After criticizing those psychological theories which "nothing but reduce man to La machine or some other non-human model, Frankl turns to the question of suffering.

He remarks that 'suffering is ambiguous so far as its meaning may be localized in a dimension higher than suffering itself. This leads to the question whether the human dimension is the ultimate, the final dimension' (page 408). MIST CALE SToP

Because it develops inside a social order in its death agony, every advance made by science increases the danger it faces from religion in its modern guises.

Only Marxism can form the basis for victory in the struggle of materialism against idealism.

Marxism bases itself on the power of the working class to smash capitalism and rid the world of exploitation, the soil on which mysticism grows.

This revolutionary method of thought sees the world as it really is: matter in motion.

It seeks to grasp the processes of development of matter in their interconnection, instead of breaking them down into isolated and unchanging elements.

Movement, qualitative leaps, contradiction, struggle, are not regarded as unfortunate lapses which science must explain away, but as the essence of living reality.

Life and thought, not excluding Marxism itself, are the highest levels reached by the development of this essence.

Marxism goes beyond the old mechanical materialism, not only in understanding the material basis of its enemy— idealism—but also in grasping its own history materialistically.

In fighting for a socialist world, it prepares to release the movement of science from the shackles of private property and all the corruption which must accompany it and put it where it belongs, in the service of humanity.