Einstein in Theory The Scientist as Public Intellectual by Gertrude Himmelfarb
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/einstein-theory_935071.html?page=1
This year is the centenary of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the occasion for revisiting that momentous discovery by paying tribute to one of the most famous scientists of modern times. Steven Gimbel’s brief book is a welcome contribution to that event, placing Einstein in his “space and times,” as his subtitle has it. “It was relativity,” he declares, “that made Einstein Einstein”—that gave the scientist the authority (the standing, a jurist might say) to pronounce on public affairs. Sixty years after his death, Einstein still enjoys that authority. The current issue of an English journal, in a discussion of the war against ISIS, quotes at length (and critically) a 1947 article by Einstein on the Cold War. And as I write, a Washington Post article on the Middle East peace process cites Einstein on the futility of repeated experiments, concluding, “This applies to Gaza.”
The biographer of Einstein has to cope with this Einstein—the post-history, so to speak, of his hero, who ventured out of his natural terrain and acquired a new persona—as well as the prehistory of his hero—the genesis of the ideas that went into the theory that “made Einstein Einstein.” The latter is the more challenging because there was little in his background and early years to foresee a theory so novel and abstruse.
Born in 1879 to an assimilated German-Jewish family—Albert was a secularized version of Abraham, the grandfather after whom he was named—he was sent to a Catholic school in Munich, where he was the only Jewish child in his class. Bullied by his classmates and harshly treated by the teachers, he hated everything about school and learned, he later insisted, nothing. The high school, the gymnasium, was no better. What education he received was from reading on his own and from his uncle, an engineer, who introduced him to the mysteries of mathematics. His unruliness and inattentiveness in class and his difficulties with the other students and teachers have given rise to the “myth,” as Gimbel puts it, that Einstein was autistic. The myth was not entirely unwarranted. As a child, he had “developmental problems” and “issues” with speech, and as a youth, was inept in conversation, socially awkward, inappropriately dressed, and had the affinity for music and visual images rather than language that is characteristic of autism.
When his family moved to Milan, Einstein, at the age of 16, joined them, and to continue his studies in German, he attended the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich. (He was admitted after failing the first entrance exam.) Neglecting classes, misbehaving, and flouting the social conventions, after four years, he barely passed the final exam (he scored next-to-last). Physics was his favorite and best subject, but, lacking a recommendation from his teachers, he failed to get an assistantship to a physics professor or even a private tutoring job. The situation became more difficult when his girlfriend, Mileva, a fellow student, got pregnant. She returned to her home in Serbia to give birth to the child, and came back to Zurich leaving the child behind. (This episode was entirely unknown until well after Einstein’s death.) In 1901, the offer of a job as a patent clerk in Bern permitted them to marry—an unhappy marriage, as it turned out, although it produced two sons to whom Einstein was devoted. They were eventually divorced, leaving Einstein free to marry (happily, this time) another schoolmate, his cousin Elsa.
In this unlikely atmosphere, Einstein somehow persisted in his study of physics. In a memoir, he explained that his interest in that subject had been inspired by two childhood events. He was 4 or 5 when he was shown a compass and realized that the needle always pointed north because it was governed not by any visible or empirical force but by a simple, rational, irrefutable rule. The other epiphany occurred at the age of 12, when he came upon a book on Euclidean geometry, which demonstrated that the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, although not on the face of it evident, could be proved without doubt.
“This lucidity and certainty,” he recalled, “made an indescribable impression upon me.” It was in this spirit, without a professional position or credentials, that he took on the “very revolutionary” project, as he described it, of transforming physics. The theory of relativity in 1905 did just that, overturning the structure of Newtonian physics with a radically new concept of matter and light based purely on reason.
Recognition from the scientific community came slower than he would have liked, but it did come, and with it one professorial post after another: in Zurich, Prague, Zurich again, and finally, in 1914, the most prestigious of all, Berlin. It was there, two years later, that he published the general theory of relativity. This is not the place (nor is this reviewer competent) to describe the theory itself, except to commend Steven Gimbel for reconstructing it so lucidly—and in the context of the “space and times” in which Einstein became something more, or other, than the inventor of that theory.
It is ironic that Einstein should have returned to Germany at the very outset of World War I, remaining there for its duration and beyond. Germany was the country he had denounced as authoritarian and militaristic as a youth, when he publicly tore up his passport and renounced his citizenship. It was the same Einstein who returned, a maverick in science who soon became a maverick in politics. While almost 100 intellectuals, including some of his colleagues, issued a manifesto supporting the war, Einstein was one of four who signed a counter-manifesto protesting against nationalism and calling for a “universal, world-wide civilization.” He also took an active part in an organization promoting a “United States of Europe,” which was regarded as sufficiently subversive to be shut down by the government.
Einstein’s return to Germany was also the occasion for his asserting himself as a Jew. It was not until then, he later wrote, that “I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew, and I owe this discovery more to Gentiles than Jews.” In fact, it came as no discovery; it was just another stage in his recognition of a Jewishness that, in one form or another, had always been with him. Although his family, like so many German Jews, was thoroughly assimilated, his parents were sufficiently respectful of their people and heritage to have a religious relative give the boy lessons about Judaism even in that Catholic school. Perhaps as a rebellion against the school, at the age of 8 he declared himself an orthodox Jew, committed to observing the Sabbath and the rules of kashruth. We are not told if, or how, he managed to keep to that regimen while living in a non-observant home and going to a Catholic school. In any case, at the gymnasium four years later, he “de-converted,” so to speak. The Euclidean geometry that initiated him into a scientific world governed entirely by reason, reinforced by the reading of popular scientific books, resulted, he later wrote, in “a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking. . . . Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment.”
What he did discover in Germany was a denigration of Jews, even among scientists and intellectuals, that gave him a heightened appreciation of his Jewishness—not as a religion, to be sure, but as a culture; even, he ventured to say, a nation: “Not until we dare to see ourselves as a nation, not until we respect ourselves, can we gain the respect of others.” But it was a special kind of nation he had in mind, defined by morality rather than polity.
The bond that has united the Jews for thousands of years and that unites them today is, above all, the democratic ideal of social justice, coupled with the ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men. . . . My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power.
This was not quite the nationhood most Zionists had in mind. Einstein shared their idea of Palestine as a refuge for persecuted Jews—not, however, as a homeland reserved for them but as a safe area where they could live in peace with their neighbors. He also valued it as a center of Jewish learning and culture, to exemplify the “intellectual striving” that he saw as the essence of Judaism. It was for this purpose, for the establishment of a Hebrew University, that Einstein exerted all of his efforts. Some of his admirers hoped that he would join the faculty. He never intended to do so, but he did take an active role in fundraising campaigns. The first of these, a much-publicized trip in 1921 with Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization, brought him to New York, where he discovered what, for him, was a new breed of Jews, East European immigrants: “These men and women still retain a healthy national feeling; it has not yet been destroyed by the process of atomization and dispersion. I found these people extraordinarily ready for self-sacrifice and practically creative.”
A visit to Palestine two years later introduced him to two other varieties of Jews: the “incredibly lively people” of Tel Aviv, who had created out of nothing “a modern Hebrew city with busy economic and intellectual life,” and, in painful contrast, the people in Jerusalem praying at the Western Wall, “dull-minded tribal companions . . . men with a past but without a future.” In this context, “tribal” sounds pejorative, but it is entirely favorable applied to the settlers as a whole: “I greatly liked my tribal companions in Palestine, as farmers, as workers, and as citizens.” The land was not very fertile and would not accommodate very many Jews, but colonization would succeed in making the country a “moral center.”
While Einstein’s reputation was being acclaimed abroad (and rewarded with generous lecture fees), life in Germany was becoming more disagreeable, the antisemitism more overt. His work was denounced, even by some of his colleagues, as “Jewish science.” In 1931, he began to spend winter semesters at the California Institute of Technology. He was there, in January 1933, when Hitler took power, and he never returned to Germany. For Einstein, as for so many German Jews, the United States became a place of refuge. He was especially pleased to receive an offer to join the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which was devoted entirely to theoretical science. It was there, as a resident scholar and American citizen, that he spent the rest of his life.
But it was not a tranquil life, for once again Einstein found himself at odds with his colleagues at home and associates abroad. While he was developing a unified field theory that would advance upon the general theory, quantum mechanics was taking physics in a new direction. So, too, his relation to the Zionist movement became problematic with the emergence of Revisionist Zionism, which sought just that statehood he had forsworn and which was prepared to use military force to achieve it. The new Zionism violated not only Einstein’s sense of a proper, peaceful Zionism but also of a proper, peaceful world order. He had earlier, in response to the threat of the First World War, declared himself a pacifist. Now Zionism and pacifism were at a crossroad, and his Zionism lost on two counts—because it was nationalistic as well as militaristic. Yet his esteem among Zionists was such that at the death of President Weizmann in 1952, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion offered the presidency to Einstein, in spite of their differences. Einstein graciously thanked him and firmly declined.
Pacifism created problems for Einstein with his fellow scientists as well. Worried by the prospect of atomic weapons wielded by Nazis, he wrote and cosigned a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 urging America to take the initiative in nuclear research. But he did not seek to be involved in what became the Manhattan Project, and was not invited to do so, largely because of his political views—his pacifism, primarily, but also his advocacy of socialism as against the “anarchy” and immorality of capitalism. (He was high on J. Edgar Hoover’s subversive list for both reasons.) He supported World War II as “morally justified” against Nazi aggression, but he also vigorously supported the cause of conscientious objectors. And he opposed the Cold War with the Soviet Union as a war for nuclear supremacy that might well end with the “annihilation of all life on earth.” (He later regretted writing that letter to Roosevelt.)
Einstein was not an innocent preaching the virtues of pacifism. On at least one occasion he expressed qualms about it. Gimbel mentions Freud, in passing, as having a novel “picture of the human mind,” and as one of those Einstein proposed for a larger role in the Hebrew University. (They were both members of the first board of governors of the university.) More notable is a public exchange of letters between them in 1932. A private note accompanying Einstein’s letter suggests that he had read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, published two years earlier, which elaborated upon the “death instinct” that played so large a part in the human psyche.
It was this theory that prompted Einstein’s query: “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” As one “immune from nationalist bias,” he told Freud, his own answer was simple: the establishment of “a legislative and judicial body to settle every conflict arising between nations.” This was no mean goal, for it would require the unconditional surrender by every nation of its liberty—“its sovereignty, that is to say.” This raised other questions. Why was it that men succumbed with “such wild enthusiasm” to wars that could cost them their lives? Could it be that there was, in man, “a lust for hatred and destruction” that would induce that ultimate sacrifice? Finally, there was the practical question: “Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?” He was speaking, he hastened to add, not only of the “so-called uncultured masses” but of the “so-called intelligentsia” as well, who were just as apt to yield to that “collective psychosis.”
Freud’s response was hardly reassuring. Reminding Einstein of his own recent work on that subject, he regretfully concluded that “there is no likelihood of suppressing humanity’s aggressive tendencies.” Any attempt to replace brute force by the ideal of right was doomed to fail because “right is founded on brute force and even today needs violence to maintain it.”
There was another question, however, that intrigued him and, he hoped, would not shock Einstein: “Why do we, you and I and many others, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of life’s odious importunities?” Freud’s own answer might have surprised, even shocked, Einstein:
With pacifists like us, it is not merely an intellectual and affective repulsion, but a constitutional intolerance, an idiosyncrasy in its most drastic form. And it would seem that the aesthetic ignominies of warfare play almost as large a part in this repugnance as war’s atrocities.
Pacifism as an “idiosyncrasy,” an “intellectual” and “aesthetic” repulsion against the “ignominies” of war—this was not Einstein’s pacifism, and certainly not a pacifism that might appeal to the “intelligentsia,” let alone the “uncultured masses.”
Freud concluded by apologizing to Einstein for a letter that would surely disappoint him. Einstein, in turn, thanked Freud for a “truly classic . . . altogether magnificent” letter, and for his courage in pursuing the truth and professing his convictions. That response was dated December 3, 1932. By the time the correspondence was published the following year, Hitler was in power and Einstein was in exile. Two thousand copies of Warum Krieg? (Why War?) were published in German and another 2,000 in English. Einstein may have been disappointed but not deterred. Pacifism continued to be one of his major public causes.
Einstein had come a long way from the physicist to the social activist. It is as if, displaced by quantum mechanics from the center of physics, he found a new calling in politics. But perhaps not entirely a new calling, for he was now seeking a rationality in society akin to the reason he had so passionately sought in physics. A famous quotation from Einstein is his response to a rabbi who asked him whether he believed in God: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all Being, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of man.” The rabbi was pleased to think of this as “a scientific formula for monotheism.” Another reading would see it as an invitation to Einstein to fill that vacuum by doing what Spinoza’s God wisely refrained from doing—bringing harmony to mankind and rationalizing a notoriously irrational world.
To a critic today, some of Einstein’s views, on war and peace, capitalism and socialism, Judaism and Zionism, may appear as almost a parody of the right-minded (which is to say, left-thinking) progressive of his time. Steven Gimbel is relatively benign about this Einstein, the public intellectual, out of respect for the scientist who “made Einstein Einstein.” But the social effects of the spirit that animated him—his passion for a rationalism productive in science but all too often counterproductive in society—are perhaps not so benign.
Gertrude Himmelfarb is the author, most recently, of The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill.
Comments are closed.
