Freud - Complete Works (774 page)

 
4787

WHY WAR?

(1933)

(EINSTEIN AND FREUD)

4788

Intentionally left blank

4789

WHY WAR?

Caputh near Potsdam, 30th July, 1932

Dear Professor Freud,

   The proposal of the League of
Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual
Co-operation at Paris that I should invite a person, to be chosen
by myself, to a frank exchange of views on any problem that I might
select affords me a very welcome opportunity of conferring with you
upon a question which, as things now are, seems the most insistent
of all the problems civilization has to face. This is the problem:
Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? 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; nevertheless, for all the zeal displayed, every
attempt at its solution has ended in a lamentable breakdown.

   I believe, moreover, that those
whose duty it is to tackle the problem professionally and
practically are growing only too aware of their impotence to deal
with it, and have now a very lively desire to learn the views of
men who, absorbed in the pursuit of science, can see world-problems
in the perspective distance lends. As for me, the normal objective
of my thought affords no insight into the dark places of human will
and feeling. Thus, in the enquiry now proposed, I can do little
more than seek to clarify the question at issue and, clearing the
ground of the more obvious solutions, enable you to bring the light
of your far-reaching knowledge of man’s instinctive life to
bear upon the problem. There are certain psychological obstacles
whose existence a layman in the mental sciences may dimly surmise,
but whose interrelations and vagaries he is incompetent to fathom;
you, I am convinced, will be able to suggest educative methods,
lying more or less outside the scope of politics, which will
eliminate these obstacles.

Why War?

4790

   As one immune from nationalist
bias, I personally see a simple way of dealing with the superficial
(i.e. administrative) aspect of the problem: the setting up, by
international consent, of a legislative and judicial body to settle
every conflict arising between nations. Each nation would undertake
to abide by the orders issued by this legislative body, to invoke
its decision in every dispute, to accepts its judgements
unreservedly and to carry out every measure the tribunal deems
necessary for the execution of its decrees. But here, at the
outset, I come up against a difficulty; a tribunal is a human
institution which, in proportion as the power at its disposal is
inadequate to enforce its verdicts, is all the more prone to suffer
these to be deflected by extrajudicial pressure. This is a fact
with which we have to reckon; law and might inevitably go hand in
hand, and juridical decisions approach more nearly the ideal
justice demanded by the community (in whose name and interests
these verdicts are pronounced) in so far as the community has
effective power to compel respect of its juridical ideal. But at
present we are far from possessing any supranational organization
competent to render verdicts of incontestable authority and enforce
absolute submission to the execution of its verdicts. Thus I am led
to my first axiom: the quest of international security involves the
unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of
its liberty of action, its sovereignty that is to say, and it is
clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such
security.

   The ill-success, despite their
obvious sincerity, of all the efforts made during the last decade
to reach this goal leaves us no room to doubt that strong
psychological factors are at work, which paralyse these efforts.
Some of these factors are not far to seek. The craving for power
which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile
to any limitation of the national sovereignty. This political
power-hunger is wont to batten on the activities of another group,
whose aspirations are on purely mercenary, economic lines. I have
specially in mind that small but determined group, active in every
nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social
considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and
sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal
interests and enlarge their personal authority.

   But recognition of this obvious
fact is merely the first step towards an appreciation of the actual
state of affairs. Another question follows hard upon it: How is it
possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority,
who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of
their ambitions? (In speaking of the majority, I do not exclude
soldiers of every rank who have chosen war as their profession, in
the belief that they are serving to defend the highest interests of
their race, and that attack is often the best method of defence.)
An obvious answer to this question would seem to be that the
minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press,
usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to
organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of
them.

Why War?

4791

   Yet even this answer does not
provide a complete solution. Another question arises from it: How
is it these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild
enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is
possible. Because man has within him a 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. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the
complex of factors we are considering, an enigma that only the
expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve.

   And so we come to our last
question. Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so
as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and
destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means only of the
so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather
the so-called ‘Intelligentzia’ that is most apt to
yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the
intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but
encounters it in its easiest synthetic form - upon the printed
page.

   To conclude: I have so far been
speaking only of wars between nations; what are known as
international conflicts. But I am well aware that the aggressive
instinct operates under other forms and in other circumstances. (I
am thinking of civil wars, for instance, due in earlier days to
religious zeal, but nowadays to social factors; or, again, the
persecution of racial minorities.) But my insistence on what is the
most typical, most cruel and extravagant form of conflict between
man and man was deliberate, for here we have the best occasion of
discovering ways and means to render all armed conflicts
impossible.

   I know that in your writings we
may find answers, explicit or implied, to all the issues of this
urgent and absorbing problem. But it would be of the greatest
service to us all were you to present the problem of world peace in
the light of your most recent discoveries, for such a presentation
well might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of
action.

Yours very sincerely,

A. EINSTEIN.

Why War?

4792

Vienna, September, 1932.

Dear Professor Einstein,

   When I heard that you intended to
invite me to an exchange of views on some subject that interested
you and that seemed to deserve the interest of others besides
yourself, I readily agreed. I expected you to choose a problem on
the frontiers of what is knowable to-day, a problem to which each
of us, a physicist and a psychologist, might have our own
particular angle of approach and where we might come together from
different directions upon the same ground. You have taken me by
surprise, however, by posing the question of what can be done to
protect mankind from the curse of war. I was scared at first by the
thought of my - I had almost written ‘our’ - incapacity
for dealing with what seemed to be a practical problem, a concern
for statesmen. But I then realized that you had raised the question
not as a natural scientist and physicist but as a philanthropist:
you were following the promptings of the League of Nations just as
Fridtjof Nansen, the polar explorer, took on the work of bringing
help to the starving and homeless victims of the World War. I
reflected, moreover, that I was not being asked to make practical
proposals but only to set out the problem of avoiding war as it
appears to a psychological observer. Here again you yourself have
said almost all there is to say on the subject. But though you have
taken the wind out of my sails I shall be glad to follow in your
wake and content myself with confirming all you have said by
amplifying it to the best of my knowledge - or conjecture.

Why War?

4793

   You begin with the relation
between Right and Might. There can be no doubt that that is the
correct starting-point for our investigation. But may I replace the
word ‘might’ by the balder and harsher word
‘violence’? To-day right and violence appear to us as
antitheses. It can easily be shown, however, that the one has
developed out of the other; and, if we go back to the earliest
beginnings and see how that first came about, the problem is easily
solved. You must forgive me if in what follows I go over familiar
and commonly accepted ground as though it were new, but the thread
of my argument requires it.

   It is a general principle, then,
that conflicts of interest between men are settled by the use of
violence. This is true of the whole animal kingdom, from which men
have no business to exclude themselves. In the case of men, no
doubt, conflicts of
opinion
occur as well which may reach
the highest pitch of abstraction and which seem to demand some
other technique for their settlement. That, however, is a later
complication. To begin with, in a small human horde, it was
superior muscular strength which decided who owned things or whose
will should prevail. Muscular strength was soon supplemented and
replaced by the use of tools: the winner was the one who had the
better weapons or who used them the more skilfully. From the moment
at which weapons were introduced, intellectual superiority already
began to replace brute muscular strength; but the final purpose of
the fight remained the same - one side or the other was to be
compelled to abandon his claim or his objection by the damage
inflicted on him and by the crippling of his strength. That purpose
was most completely achieved if the victor’s violence
eliminated his opponent permanently - that is to say, killed him.
This had two advantages: he could not renew his opposition and his
fate deterred others from following his example. In addition to
this, killing an enemy satisfied an instinctual inclination which I
shall have to mention later. The intention to kill might be
countered by a reflection that the enemy could be employed in
performing useful services if he were left alive in an intimidated
condition. In that case the victor’s violence was content
with subjugating him instead of killing him. This was a first
beginning of the idea of sparing an enemy’s life, but
thereafter the victor had to reckon with his defeated
opponent’s lurking thirst for revenge and sacrificed some of
his own security.

Why War?

4794

   Such, then, was the original
state of things: domination by whoever had the greater might -
domination by brute violence or by violence supported by intellect.
As we know, this régime was altered in the course of
evolution. There was a path that led from violence to right or law.
What was that path? It is my belief that there was only one: the
path which led by way of the fact that the superior strength of a
single individual could be rivalled by the union of several weak
ones. ‘
L’union fait la force
.’ Violence
could be broken by union, and the power of those who were united
now represented law in contrast to the violence of the single
individual. Thus we see that right is the might of a community. It
is still violence, ready to be directed against any individual who
resists it; it works by the same methods and follows the same
purposes. The only real difference lies in the fact that what
prevails is no longer the violence of an individual but that of a
community. But in order that the transition from violence to this
new right or justice may be effected, one psychological condition
must be fulfilled. The union of the majority must be a stable and
lasting one. If it were only brought about for the purpose of
combating a single dominant individual and were dissolved after his
defeat, nothing would have been accomplished. The next person who
thought himself superior in strength would once more seek to set up
a dominion by violence and the game would be repeated
ad
infinitum
. The community must be maintained permanently, must
be organized, must draw up regulations to anticipate the risk of
rebellion and must institute authorities to see that those
regulations - the laws - are respected and to superintend the
execution of legal acts of violence. The recognition of a community
of interests such as these leads to the growth of emotional ties
between the members of a united group of people - communal feelings
which are the true source of its strength.