The Other
Einstein
December 28, 1999
Time magazine has named Albert
Einstein its “Person of the Century.” The great physicist beat
out such competition as Franklin Roosevelt, Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin, and
Gloria Steinem.
The choice is hard to argue with, but not
necessarily for the reasons Time offers. True, Einstein was
more than a genius: he was an Einstein. He had the transcendent gift to see
that the unquestioned presuppositions of an entire culture were
questionable. His pencil vanquished a way of seeing the world that had
seemed self-evident from Euclid to Newton.
The reverberations were indeed
tremendous. Thanks to Einstein’s inspiration, the old common sense
not only of science, but of politics, psychology, economics, art, literature,
music, and morality, became subject to iconoclasm and revolutionary
innovation. All this had no logical connection with the general theory of
relativity, but it certainly had an imaginative debt to Einstein.
Without his example in science
it’s unlikely that the intellectual, political, and artistic novelties
of Freud, Lenin, Eliot, Picasso, Joyce, Keynes, Schoenberg, and many other
geniuses and frauds (even now it’s not always easy to tell which
are which) would have had the impact they did. More than any other man,
he gave us the modern cult of the genius, the leader, the expert, with all
their blind followings. The total state claimed the authority of
“racial science” and “scientific socialism.”
In every field, old traditions and basic
assumptions — linear thought, coherence, melody, narrative,
harmony, representation, the rule of law itself — crumbled. Einstein
is the godfather of the counterintuitive, the modernist avant-garde, the
new emperor whose new clothes (if any) we are still arguing about. Yet
Einstein himself, puzzled by his celebrity in the mass culture of his time,
remained out of touch with nearly every movement he spawned outside the
world of science.
![[Breaker
quote: The limitations of a great genius]](breakers/991228.gif)
Time’s cover story paints him in the familiar way
— as a naive, lovable champion of freedom, driven by “humane
and democratic instincts,” hated by Hitler and Stalin alike. It
neglects to add that Stalin’s hatred was unrequited: Einstein
became a resolute fellow-traveler who defended the 1938 Moscow show
trials and refused every opportunity to condemn Soviet tyranny. He spoke
of the “great merits” and “important
achievements” of Soviet Communism, whose “only aim is
really the improvement of the lot of the Russian people.” When a
correspondent pointed out that Stalin had deliberately starved millions of
peasants, Einstein made no reply, though on another occasion he doubted
that the Soviets could have done so much good “by following softer
methods.”
Einstein was also the godfather of the
nuclear age. A pacifist during World War I, he came to hate not only Hitler
but his native Germany, and he urged Franklin Roosevelt to develop an
atomic bomb — the most practical application of his discovery of the
energy latent in all matter. He was later distressed when this weapon of
mass murder was dropped on Japan and brandished against Stalin; after
all, it had been meant for Berlin.
Yet somehow his cherished image as the
original absent-minded professor, “humane and democratic,”
has survived, despite revelations that he was a cruel and habitually
adulterous husband — “an egregious flirt,” as
Time indulgently puts it. He preached against the dreadful
weaponry that owed its existence to him without incurring charges of
hypocrisy: his sad, droopy face, his wild white mane, and his baggy clothes
immunized him against criticism, reinforcing the impression that he was
a sort of eccentric saint, the wise child of Spinoza’s God.
“Besides campaigning for a ban on
nuclear weaponry,” gushes Time, “he denounced
McCarthyism and pleaded for an end to bigotry and racism.” What a
seminal thinker!
In helping bring science out of the ivory
tower and into the hands of tyranny, Einstein was very much a typical man
of the twentieth century. In one respect, at least, he didn’t
criticize the presuppositions of his time: he shared the basic assumption
of Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and, yes, Hitler — that political
power should be centralized.
There are some old principles that
remain sound in spite of all revolutionary ideas, one of them being the
principle that freedom depends on the division of power. The towering
mind of Albert Einstein never managed to grasp this.
Joseph Sobran
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