In the course of writing my criticisms of The God Delusion I remarked that we cannot conclude from a man's brilliance in one area of intellectual endeavor that he will prove brilliant in every area or, for that matter, that he'll even be reasonably bright in other areas. Intellectual ability is like athletic ability. A man might be a great basketball player but a terrible swimmer.
Algis Valiunas in The New Atlantis gives us a fine illustration of this phenomenon in a wonderful glimpse of the life and genius of Albert Einstein.
Einstein was perhaps the most extraordinary thinker of the 20th century, but his personal life was heartbreakingly chaotic and his political and philosophical notions were often naive, inconsistent or even incoherent. For example, Valiunas tells us:
In 1935, animated by the Nazi military threat, Einstein reversed his earlier militant pacifism and insisted "no reasonable human being would today favor the refusal to do military service, at least not in Europe, which is at present particularly beset with dangers." Confirmed pacifists must support the concerted action of decent states to foil the warlike designs of the indecent. In August 1939, having been informed by the Hungarian refugee physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner that the Germans may already be working on a nuclear bomb, Einstein famously wrote a letter to President Roosevelt urging that the U.S. government initiate a nuclear program of its own; it took months to see serious action, and Einstein was left out of atomic research during the war, but his letter was a prime impetus for the Manhattan Project.
If pacifism is the correct moral position then one must be a pacifist regardless of the nature of the threat. One cannot be a pacifist with regard to that war but not this one, or be a pacifist regarding wars in which the carnage is in the thousands but not in wars which threaten to kill millions.
Einstein's political thinking was also naive:
In 1953, during the height of the Red Scare, he published an open letter in the New York Times exhorting a Brooklyn schoolteacher subpoenaed by a congressional investigative committee to remain silent: "What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this evil? Frankly, I can see only the revolutionary way of non-cooperation in the sense of Gandhi's. Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify, i.e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of his country." To do otherwise, he concluded, was to live as a slave.
Valiunas observes:
One can only cringe at the rhetorical bluster, utterly oblivious to the fact that America was facing a potent enemy that kept tens of millions of slaves in the gulag archipelago. Einstein's genius suffered no greater injury than from his lifelong political crusading.
Another example of Einstein's massive intelligence failing to spill over into areas other than math and physics can be found in his philosophical ideas, some of which were incoherent. He was, for example, totally committed to a deterministic view of everything:
"I do not at all believe in free will in the philosophical sense," he declared in the 1930 essay "What I Believe." If he meant by this no more than that we are all creatures and cannot make ourselves anything we want to be, there is little to quarrel with in that. But elsewhere he averred, "Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player."
Having said that, however, he nevertheless also says this:
"The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life."
Valiunas concludes that:
[Einstein] seemed finally to live a riven life, one of spiritual incoherence, denying freedom of choice yet preaching an exigent morality.
What this all teaches us is that we must not be overly impressed when we hear someone who has demonstrated intellectual accomplishment in one sphere of life offering opinions we find disagreeable in some other sphere. When scientists pontificate upon politics or religion, it's best to simply consider the merits of what they say and not put too much weight on whom it is that's saying it.
HT: No Left Turns
RLC
