Thoughts on Einstein’s message to the Italian Society for the Advancement of Science:

Einstein's Message to the Italian Society for the Advancement of Science Link

Einstein appears to confront the crucible of scientists like him bridging the way to the potential nuclear destruction of humanity in the pursuit of an ambiguous definition of truth.  Albert saw the aggregation of wealth and industry consolidating humanity’s basic roots to feed, nourish, and grow a complete society.  Given the opportunity part of our plant will destroy the sources of profit in the long-run for a perceived benefit in the short.  Independence is in jeopardy.  I can feel the trepidation in his words of that time reverberating. 

The idea of defining why we do what we do, when it is probable that our objective once achieved may be misused to the detriment of the whole is confounding.  There is a gap requiring trust, which can only be filled by faith in humanity.  Faith is the antithesis of science.  Faith requires an assumption with a hypothesis the scientist knows cannot be proven.  It is an agnostic’s playground, which Einstein appears reluctant to stomach, but ultimately recognizes as mandatory.

Einstein appears to acknowledge this debate of faith.  He is professing effort; that scientists try, have tried, and will continue to try to bridge this gap, knowing the impossibility, yet still trying.  It is better we do try; for what are we if we cease trying?  This becomes his conclusion. 

I think about all the benefits of the microchip in finance, medicine, transportation, communication, education, energy, public safety etc. and with every advance comes a threat, if not a commensurately greater threat to the vulnerability of society becoming less self-sufficient.  We develop new animals to fear in our caves.  We are becoming further from our native identities.  We are farther walking closer to the edge. 

The animals, the plants, the seed, the warm-embrace of friend and family: are we moving towards or away from these supporting tethers of life or are we leveraging them to the verge of extinction for a more profitable present?  The bees, the water, the very genetics of our seeds are being ramped for exploitation.  Einstein saw the raw powered-danger of science.  He knew what humanity would choose if left unabated.  

I see the battle of misplaced faith.  Some think a God will make sure everything is all right.  The Dalai Lama says God would say, “I didn’t do that.  Humanity did that.  Why are you asking me?”  As an atheist, I kind of end up in the same place.  What are we going to do?  We are doing it.  We are suffering. 

I wish there was a magic answer, a savior, but there is only us.  Given the advances in technology health care should be getting less expensive not more.  The human body is not evolving to a more complicated life form.  Our sense of greed is merely adapting.  Food should be getting easier to grow.  Quality of nutrients should be improving.  We should be satisfied with quality at a moderate financial cost, not profit at any human cost.  

The average prosperity gap should be closing, not widening.  Why is that; what are we choosing to do with our science?  Who owns our science?  Which states hold the patent rights inside a stock price?  These are Einstein’s nuclear weapons active in a far more malignant cancer than a missile silo.  Surely death in a flash of masses of humans is still able to recur, yet what of the systematic decay of what it means to achieve self-sufficiency and dignity?  Oh, what would the Eggman say?

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

In the Office on Memorial Day part 1 of 4- In the Office

In the Office, part 1

I realize I am running away from and towards my own life

Work is like a rapturous beloved blanket of a woman

A stalker of sorts leaving me arsenic post-it notes on my desk

With lipstick for turning the computer on again

The monitors light up with the revving body of software

Accounting system gyrating spreadsheets to design manipulations

To cast aspersions about me to the other programs that I have not gotten around to yet

As if I am a lascivious whore of an accountant

The parade of circumstance of a salaried position that does not pay me a dime more

For being here when I have no place else to go

Statutory release at five p.m. and I am like Red betrothed to Shawshank into the night

In an inescapable progression to see a world out of what was, past haunting, institutionalized

The vision of my role as a father is kept behind an idea professed into a courtroom

Debated, retorted victoriously and I gave it all back to be here

Typing at eight p.m. on a Friday, contemplating coming in most of the weekend

And Memorial Day Monday when the rest of the office is on holiday

The pile of work is one I could ignore if it was not so comforting like a luminous moon

Corporate lycanthrope to wipe my mind to a beastly oblivion,

At least some membership of the community will appreciate or

Profit from my diligence, the rest of my time is spent

Reading, writing, sleeping, or perusing the Internet

Avoiding the conundrum of current socialization

I am vagabond.

Since Katrina I have lived a total of seven months in a place I considered home.

The years stack of raising my infant daughter to one and Boom

The days rolled across the bathroom floor wet like heirloom pearls off clavicles

Boulders with the crucifix golden chain her mother makes her wear to remind me of her

In a perverse attack against my notion of God and love all in one

She most recently added a blue dog-tag with her cell

As if in my allotment I will lose our child or

A near nine-year old cannot remember a phone number

The babble tower teeters and off to Texas and then to Louisiana rural-jamboree

Accounting for water districts and non-profits I get banned for thinking

The days of penalty petrify the expectation of doing for a prescription of persistence

Like a Scopes monkey dancing for cow chips

Survival is appreciating that this day is one day closer to another day where exhale is possible

The chicken bones are in the gumbo.  I am pulling them out one by one; stirring for hours to months to years to one instance to allow a bite from this pot; this homemade attended roux.

“Let me tell you something my friend.  Hope is a dangerous thing. 

Hope can drive a man insane.”

In the Office on Memorial Day part 2 - Hope

Hope, part 2

I still own a house there where I once put my art on the walls and it still

Never looked like home despite the spit-shine colors of every hue

Trying to sell, waiting out, last one took two years

Moving on and put blood through the door frame in my New Orleans

Permission to breathe the other direction and contemplate a relationship that does not end

In decisions over melancholy strategies to survive in a place where human respiration stiffens

Living in another person’s dwelling, I avoid even the companionship of my grandmother

I am ashamed of my own shell to feel air on my turtle flesh.

Hermit crab and all I have is a room of boxes and frames to in-one-hour hang

The ropes the marks of who was here; won’t ever process because the soldier needs me

Besides who will make all these journal entries and get the financial statements out

After the last guy who had this job was a drinker gun-nut with printable targets on the hard drive.

I think occasionally about him coming in and blowing the whole department away as retribution

On the day after I get the infrastructure set to actually catch up

Now that his severance has been paid for this flood of debris

Of spider-web papers on the shelves and digital folders on the server

Like wet Bibles and wedding photos in NOLA shotguns with his NRA hand-gun application.

I am marathon-running wearing a jacket and dress shoes

Attempting to be worthy of something, just trying to find a reason for this life other than

Writing another God-dam shitty poem, reading passages from dead men:

Hitchens, Einstein, Kierkegaard, Orwell, Nietzsche and No one

Listening to another iPod song on shuffle with Springsteen, Dylan, Guthrie, Cooke, Strummer and crew, I am trying to make friends of plain air

As if the glaring loneliness is not staring at me in every driver.

I make the illusions of a fraudulent magician; the act is not even an act any more

It is who I am.

Yet, I know I am running away from and towards my own life

As this is me and was me and will be the foundation of a man capable of reaching across

A coffee table to embrace a hand softly, despite the notion that I never plan on drinking coffee

The plan seems attainable, within the distance of all these digits manipulated, puzzles rearranged

Underneath is a picture, I am making him,

I am always him and this pile is just a portion of the whole.

If I am working, I am writing, at least I am doing.

I am not still, for in the stillness the wasteland comes to feast

Like cockroaches out the box of Malt-O-Meal in the darkness shaken

The brood explodes after the quake ends; so a man must keep tinkering

That this cup is the one to drink of and this tool is the one that may bring solace

To some other wretch attempting to sail these seas