Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Excerpt from a Message To The Italian Society For the Advancement of Science By Albert Einstein




“We are living in a period of such great external and internal insecurity and with such a lack of firm objectives that the mere confession of our convictions may be of significance even if these convictions, like all value judgments, cannot be proven through logical deductions.

There arises at once the question: should we consider the search for truth or, more modestly expressed, our efforts to understand the knowable universe through constructive logical thought as an autonomous objective of our work?  Or should our search for truth to be subordinated to some other objective, for example to a “practical” one?  This question cannot be decided on a logical basis.  The decision, however, will have considerable influences upon our thinking and our moral judgment, provided that it is born out of deep and unshakable conviction.  Let me then make a confession: for myself, the struggle to gain more insight and understanding is one of those independent objectives without which a thinking individual would find it impossible to have a conscious, positive attitude toward life.

It is the very essence of our striving for understanding that, on the one hand, it attempts to encompass the great and complex variety of man’s experience, and that on the other, it looks for simplicity and economy in the basic assumptions.  The belief that these two objectives can exist side by side is, in view of the primitive state of our scientific knowledge, a matter of faith.  Without such faith I could not have a strong and unshakable conviction about the independent value of knowledge.

This, in a sense, religious attitude of a man engaged in scientific work has some influence upon his whole personality.  For apart from the knowledge which is offered by accumulated experience and from the rules of logical thinking, there exists in principle for the man in science no authority whose decisions and statements could have in themselves a claim to “Truth.” This leads to the paradoxical situation that a person who devotes all this strength to objective maters will develop, from a social point of view, into an extreme individualist who, at least in principle , has faith in nothing but his own judgment.  It is quite possible to asset that intellectual individualism and scientific eras emerged simultaneously in history and have remained inseparable ever since. 

Someone may suggest that the man of science is sketched in these sentences’ is no more than an abstraction which actually does not exist in this world, not unlike the homo oeconomicus of classical economics.  However, it seems to me that science as we know it today could not have emerged and could not have remained alive if many individuals, during many centuries, would not have come very close to the ideal.

Of course, not everybody who has learned to use tools and methods which, directly or indirectly, appear to be “scientific” is to me a man of science.  I refer onto to those individuals in whom scientific mentality is truly alive.

What, then, is the position of today’s man of science as a member of society?  He obviously is rather proud of the fact that the work of scientists has helped to change radically the economic life of men by almost completely eliminating muscular work.  He is distressed by the fact that he results of his scientific work have created a threat to mankind since they have fallen into the hands of morally blind exponents of political power.  He is conscious of the fact that technological methods made possible by his work have led to a concentration of economic and also of political power in the hand of small minorities which have come to dominate completely the lives of the masses of people who appear more and more amorphous.  But even worse: the concentration of economic and political power in few hands has not only made the man of science dependent economically; it also threatens his independence from within; the shrewd methods of intellectual and psychic influences which it brings to bear will prevent the development of really independent personalities.

Thus the man of science, as we can observe with our own eyes, suffers a truly tragic fate.  Striving in great sincerity for clarity and inner independence, he himself, through his sheer superhuman efforts, has fashioned the tools which are being used to make him a slave and to destroy him also from within.  He cannot escape being muzzled by those who have the political power in their hands.  As a soldier he is forced to sacrifice his own life and to destroy the lives of others even when he is convinced of the absurdity of such sacrifices.  He is fully aware of the fact that universal destruction is unavoidable since the historical development has led to the concentration of all economic, political, and military power in the hands of national states.  He also realizes that mankind can be saved only if a supranational system, based on law, would be created to eliminate for good the methods of brute force.  However, the man of science has slipped so much that he accepts the slavery inflicted upon him by national states as his inevitable fate.  He even degrades himself to such an extent that he helps obediently in the perfection of the means for the general destruction of mankind. 

Is there really no escape for the man of science?  Must he really tolerate and suffer all these indignities?  Is the time gone forever when, aroused by his inner freedom and the independence of his thinking and his work, he had a chance of enlightening and enriching the lives of his fellow human beings?  In placing his work too much on an intellectual basis, has he not forgotten about his responsibility and dignity?  My answer is: while it is true that an inherently free and scrupulous person may be destroyed, such an individual can never be enslaved or used as a blind tool.

If the man of science of our own days could find the time and the courage to think over honestly and critically his situation and the tasks before him and if he would act accordingly, the possibilities for a sensible and satisfactory solution of the present dangerous international situation would be considerably improved.”

Albert Einstein

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