Why War? Reading Albert Einstein’s letter amid Russia-Ukraine crisis

The world is marking physicist Albert Einstein’s birth anniversary on March 14. (Image credit: www.nobelprize.org)

The threat of a global-scale conflict looms over the world with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia has cautioned that if a third World War were to break out, it would be a nuclear conflict.

The catastrophic consequences of the first and second World Wars had led the world to introspect the futility of violence. How could mankind be saved from violence? Physicist Albert Einstein, one of the greatest minds in history, was among those who asked this question.

As the world marks the scientist’s birth anniversary on March 14, we take look back on his 1932 letter, titled “Why War?”, to pioneering Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud.

“Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” Einstein asked in the letter, written amid the spread of Fascist and Nazi violence in Europe, according to a version published by UNESCO. “It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for civilization as we know it.”

Einstein sought from Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, some insights into the “dark places” of the human will.

The physicist reflected on human "lust for hatred and destruction".

"In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis," he added.

Einstein sought to know if it was possible to control mental evolution itself to make humans immune to the “psychoses of hate and destructiveness”.

In his response to Einstein's queries, Freud, pointed to the strengthening of human intellect and an introversion of the aggressive impulse –- two most important phenomena of culture.

“Now war runs most emphatically counter to the psychic disposition imposed on us by the growth of culture; we are therefore bound to resent war, to find it utterly intolerable,” Freud wrote. “With pacifists like us it is not merely an intellectual and affective repulsion, but a constitutional intolerance, an idiosyncrasy in its most drastic form. "

But how long would be the wait for others turn pacifists too? Impossible to say, Freud wrote.

“And yet perhaps, our hope that these two factors (of) man's cultural disposition and a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take may serve to put an end to war in the near, future, is not chimerical,” he added.