The age of Einstein
He became, almost despite himself, the emblem of all that was
new, original and unsettling in the modern age
By ROGERROSENBLATT
December 27,1999
Webposted at: 12:30 p.m. EST(.1730GMT)
For Einstein to become a modern icon, especially in America, required a total
revision of the definition of a hero. Anti-intellectualism has been as integral a part
of American culture as the drive for universal education, and the fact that both
have existed concurrently may account for the low status of teachers. In America
it is not enough to be smart; one must compensate for one's intelligence by also
showing the canniness and real-world power of the cowboy and the pioneer.
'"
i:"
Einstein did this. He was the first modern intellectual superstar, and he won his
stardom in the only way that Americans could accept--by dint of intuitive, not
scholarly, intelligence and by having his thought applied to practical things, such
as rockets and atom bombs.
The recognition of the practical power of his ideas coincided with a time when
such power was most needed. Einstein came to America in 1933 as the most
celebrated of a distinguished group of European intellectuals, refugees from
Hitler and Mussolini, who, as soon as they arrived, changed the composition of
university faculties (largely from patrician to Jewish), and who also changed the
~,.
j;
composition of government. Until F.D.R.'s New Deal, the country had never
associated the contemplative life with governmental action. Now there was a
-7
Brain Trust; being an "egghead" was useful, admirable, even sexy. One saw that
it was possible to outthink the enemy. Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt urging
the making of a uranium bomb, and soon a coterie of can-do intellectuals
convened at Los Alamos to become the new cowboys of war machinery.
Presidents have relied on eggheads ever since: Einstein begat Kissinger begat
Rubin, Reich and Greenspan.
'Ii'
..
As for the appeal of his intuitive imagination, it helped that Einstein was initially
not associated with a brand-name institution of higher learning and that his
stature did not depend on official accreditation--both of which Americans at once
insist on and do not trust. To the contrary: he was eagerly adopted by ordinary
folks, though he spoke the obscure language of mathematics, because he
seemed removed from snooty trappings. In fact, he seemed removed from the
planet, to be out of things in the way the public often adores: ~!2.Y.ClQ~Ea..d~~I:
So strong was the image he created that he affected both culture and politics in
ways that were sometimes wholly opposite to his beliefs and intentions~hat his
theory of relativity was readily mistranslated as a justification for relativism says
more about the way the world was already tending than about Einstei"fi1jis
stature gave an underpinning to ideas that had nothing to do with his~;;;;
or
,
personal inclinations. The entire thrust of modern art, whether it took the form of
-
Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism or fantasy, was a conscious effort to rejigger
-the shapes of observable r
~p:~n~~~_~~~~stein
. ration and
broug~~~~~-
But relativism--that is, the idea that moral and ethical truth exists in the point of
view of the beholder--owed nothing to Einstein (who believed the opposite),
,
except a generalizedhomageto revolutionarythought.Art's eliminationof
semblances to the physical world corresponded vaguely with Einstein's way of
seeing time and space, but it really sprung from an atmosphere of change, in
which Einstein was yoked with Freud, Marx, Picasso, Bergson, Wittgenstein,
Joyce, Kafka, Duchamp, Kandinsky and anyone else with original and disruptive
ideas and an aggressive sense of the new. By that tenuous connection did the
discoverer of relativity become a major figure of a world consisting of individuals
interpreting the world individually. He was similarly associated with the pluralism
of modern music and the eclecticism of modern architecture.
j,
In literature, things were ready to fall apart on their own, so any excuse to do so-especially one as revered as a theoretical restructurinq of the universe~-was
embraced. In 1919 relativity exploded upon science. In 1922 T.S. Eliot's The
-~IIIIIIII.,
Waste Land had a similar effect on literature. Yet when Eliot wrote, "these
fragments I have shored against my ruins," people took up the fragments but
ignored the shoring.
The key, though, in Eliot and other 20th century poets and novelists, lay in the
prominence of the pronoun I--the center of relativistic thought. Thus spake the
confessional poetry of the 1960s, the memoirs in the 1980s and 1990s, the
prominence of the narrator in all of modern fiction. A commonplace paradox that
was soon to characterize fiction was that the antihero, who was beset and
disempowered by modern bureaucracies and machines, was simultaneously
exalted by his diminished status.
Relativism brought the underground man into his own--in Europe, with
Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Aichinger, Sartre, Mann and Pirandello; in America
with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Ellison, Capote and Salinger. The antihero, too,
searched for unified meaning, but the narrative that held him was all about
divisions, schisms and self-inspection. He sought to be by himself, like a god. In
Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Richard Wright's The Outsider,
protagonists become serial killers out of the desire to be alone.
All this has nothing to do with relativity, but it had much to do with Einstein's
contemplation of relativity. Einstein became the emblem not only of the desire to
know the truth but also of the capacity to know the truth. In his 1993 novel,
Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman writes, "In this world time is a visible
dimension. Just as one may look off in the distance and see houses, trees,
mountain peaks that are landmarks in space, so one may look out in another
direction and see births, marriages, deaths that are signposts in time, stretching
off dimly into the far future." It does not take much of another stretch to attach
godhead to such a vision, though that was hardly Einstein's own feeling.
However interesting this view made art, what it did for politics was pure
destruction. Paul Johnson connects relativism to the extreme nationalism of 20th
century political movements in his generally persuasive view of Modern Times.
The relationship he cites is sometimes elliptical. -What one can say is that the --
destruction
'-~--
of absolutes--monarchies
no less than
Newtonian
physics--c~~~
vacuum,
and in certain key- places that vacuum was filled by maniacs a~d
murderers.
~
c-~
-'
There is a connection, though, between European Romanticism, which came into
being at the tail end of the 18th century, and the totalitarian credos that bloomed
like sudden deadly plants in the first third of the 20th. Einstein did not promote
the image of man at the center of the cosmos, controlling the stars by thought.
But, quite by accident, he was that image. Merely by being, he corroborated the
Romantic view that people were 10 feet tall, capable of knowing heaven, and, in
the Byronic mode, of speaking directly to God. The logical consequence of such
"thinking" was that some people were more able to speak to God than were
others, and that God, in turn, spoke to a selected few. Throw in social Darwinism,
and by the time the 20th century was under way, Romanticism led directly to
Dachau, Auschwitz, the Gulags, the hills of skulls in Cambodia and most recently
the fields of graves in Bosnia.
C!-o read Einstein's essays in Out of My Later Years is to see that he held none of
the artistic or political ideas that were extrapolated from his wor~hatever
revisions he made of Newton, he continued to side with his predecessor on the
issue of causality. He abhorred chaos and revolution for its own sake. He was
devoted to constancy as much as to relativity, and to the illogical and the senses.
In the end, his most useful gift may be not that he pulled the world apart but that
once that was done, he strove to put it back together.
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility," he quoted Kant, and
added that the fact that the world is comprehensrble "is a miracle." He also
,
understood his responsibility for the weapons he helped create. "We scientists,"
he wrot~hose
tragic destination has been to help in making the methods of
annihilation more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and
transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being
used]
Why. finally, is he so important to the age? Not because he personified
brainpower--not because he was "an Einstein"--but rather because he
demonstrated that the imagination is capable of coming to terms with experience.
Simply by gazing into existence, he concluded that time and space could be
11'\
warped, that~~§.~aAG-eft-ergy-weJ::e.iQ~IQ~~9.~~e. He understood that the
world was a puzzle created for deciphering and, more, that a person's place in
the order of things was to solve as much of the puzzle as possible. This is what
makes a human human; this, and the governing elements of morals and humor.
Einstein's friend and fellow physicist Abraham Pais called him "the freest man I
have known," by which he meant that by the pure act of thinking, Einstein
controlled his destiny. His mind was utterly fearless, and by its uses he
diminished fear in others. "It stands to the everlasting credit of science," Einstein
wrote, "that by acting on the human mind. it has overcome man's insecurity
before himself and before nature." And so he became a model of what humans
might do if they put their mind to it.