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The Ghost in the Machine

Arthur Koestler, #MeToo, and “the moral dilemma of judging others”

In preparation for a paper for the S-USIH Conference in November, I read a lot of Arthur Koestler this summer–and I read some about him, too. Koestler’s prose was good company. He had a gift for writing about ideas. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed spending much time with him in person. One essay I returned to more than once was “The Yogi and the Commissar” from 1942. It’s a good example of Koestler’s ability to capture concepts in figurative language. He begins by imagining a device able to break down the spectrum of “all possible human attitudes to Read more