Was there such a one as this?
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
July 03, 2005

To Albert Einstein, it was far more important to be a man of value than a man of success.

TAKING TIME OFF: Albert Einstein on his boat at Sarnac lake. PHOTO: AP

IT is difficult to believe it has been 50 years since Albert Einstein died. His ideas have so affected our perception of the world around us, and his image, with that famous shaggy head of hair and drooping moustache, is so much a part of the intellectual consciousness of any educated person, that he seems an essential part of our contemporary lives. Yes, he is dead, but gone half a century? The theory of relativity, dark matter, string theory, quantum physics, that familiar equation E=mc2, spring fresh to the mind, like yesterday's headlines. It can't be.

And yet, of course, it's true: Albert Einstein left our planet in1955. It was as far back as 1905 that he published the three papers that did little short of transform the history of physics, and indeed of our knowledge of the physical world. His revolutionary insights into the nature of light particles or photons, into the nature (indeed the very existence) of molecules, and into the electrodynamics of moving bodies, burst upon an unsuspecting world when he was just a 26-year-old working in a Swiss patent office. In 1921, when he had barely celebrated his 42nd birthday, Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Einstein's ideas led, directly or indirectly, to the electron microscope, the television set, the digital age — and the atom bomb. But he never considered himself just a scientist. He was intensely concerned with the larger purpose of his work, its impact on society, its moral content. He was a passionate advocate of peace; indeed he strived to ensure that scientific discoveries advanced human life and understanding, and he was a dedicated humanitarian as well as a convinced internationalist, a firm supporter not just of the United Nations but of world government. "Nationalism is an infantile disease," he declared. "It is the measles of mankind." He challenged racial discrimination, fought for human rights, spoke out against war (which he excoriated as "vile and despicable", conducted in the name of the "loathsome nonsense" of patriotism) and abhorred weapons of mass destruction. Typically, one of his last acts was to initiate, alongside the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the Pugwash Conferences that to this day are dedicated to disarmament.

Robust pacifism

His pacifism was robust and strongly felt. "Human life will become intolerable," he wrote, "if people do not discover before long a way of preventing war .... War is not a parlour game in which the players obediently stick to the rules. Only the absolute repudiation of any war can be of any use." In his celebrated correspondence with Dr Sigmund Freud in1932-33, Einstein asked the great Viennese psychoanalyst if it was possible "to control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness".

A victim of Nazi persecution himself — as a Jew, Einstein was forced to flee Hitler's Germany in 1933 — he was an outspoken opponent of tyranny anywhere. "Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it," was his motto. (A fierce individualist, he once accepted a prize as honouring "the stubbornness of an incorrigible non-conformist.") "All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual," he declared on leaving Germany. From this flowed his respect for the creations of individual talent: Einstein's love for the arts was the stuff of legend. He read widely, admired literature, and adored music. His favourite possession was a battered old violin, which he played affectingly, and which he left in his will to a beloved grandson.

As a scientist of boundless curiosity about the meaning of life, religion, spirituality and morality fascinated him. ("Science without religion is lame," he said famously, "religion without science is blind.") He was no fan of organised religion, and was particularly dismissive of what he called "the religion of fear", constructed to benefit the hegemony of a priestly class "which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear." To him, a God "who rewards and punishes is inconceivable"; he could not believe in a God "who plays dice with the world." He saw heretics as the most profoundly religious of men. But he believed strongly in the need for ethical behaviour, emerging from a secular humanism directed toward the welfare of human beings. To serve God, he argued, was to serve the living. He greatly admired Mahatma Gandhi's pursuit of just ends through ethical means.

"The ideals which have lighted my way," Einstein said, "and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty and Truth .... The trite subjects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible."

At his death his entire estate was worth $65,000. Far lesser men died as millionaires on the back of his scientific advances. But Einstein himself had said it: it was far more important to be a man of value than a man of success.

When he died, a cartoonist — the Washington Post's inimitable Herblock — memorably captured his impact on our world by depicting the solar system, with Earth just a speck of it, marked by a plaque: "Einstein lived here." In the words that he himself uttered upon learning of the death of Mahatma Gandhi: "generations to come may scarce believe that such a one as this, in flesh and blood, walked upon this earth."