Einstein, Freud, war and chimpanzees – 11/09/2023 – Marcos Augusto Gonçalves

In 1932, the League of Nations invited Albert Einstein, already a giant in physics, to choose a prominent intellectual personality to question him on the subject of war. Einstein accepted the proposal and decided to direct his concerns to Sigmund Freud, like him a great explorer of the unknown – in this case, the human mind.

In a recent and good column in Sheet, Cida Bento recalled the episode. I will revisit it here, as it is rich in facets and deserves to be revisited. What’s more, I’d like to link it to chimpanzees.

In 1932, the world was experiencing the hangover of the First World War and concerns about the prospects for a new conflict. In his letter, Einstein (like Freud, son of a Jewish family) suggested possible rational solutions to preserve peace, such as organizing a hypothetical court of nations to which everyone would submit. He himself, however, tried to point out the impossibility of such institutional arrangements being able to work at least at that point.

The issue resided precisely in the fact that pacifist reason was always defeated, even if the war led to the destruction of those involved.

The great physicist then asks Dr. Freud why men, after all, allow themselves to be carried away by extreme enthusiasm, to the point of going into combat and sacrificing their lives. He himself provides an answer, already somewhat Freudian: “It is because man contains within himself a desire for hatred and destruction.” How to contain it? This is the big question.

In his response, after addressing the various facets of Einstein’s questions, Freud dwells on this underlying destructive desire, addressing humanity’s belonging to the kingdom of nature and the clashes caused by its ancestral impulses. It is not appropriate here to discuss the two famous drives associated, one with Eros and life, and the other with destruction and death. They would always be combined, in the Freudian view, in human behavior. But it is the second, certainly, that drives us to fatal conflicts.

When men are incited to war, a series of motives arise, noble or base, but Freud says that among them there is always “the pleasure of aggression and destruction”. “The death of the enemy satisfies an instinctive tendency,” he says.

And here we come to chimpanzees. Recent Reuters reporting tells us that researchers have documented the tactical use of high ground in wartime situations by observing two neighboring chimpanzee communities daily. The study, according to the researchers, records for the first time the use of this human military strategy by the closest living relatives of our species.

Now, fan of archaeologist Walter Neves’ videos that I am, I remembered one of his classes on evolution in which he mentions the existence of a common ancestor to sapiens and chimpanzees – two branches that evolved separately, perhaps for 7.5 million years. It would be this same ancestor, who knows, who is “to blame” for the characteristics we have in common, including aggressiveness. “There is no society more cruel than that of chimpanzees”, says Neves, who mentions, among other features, the “high level of infanticide”.

Well, perhaps there is no crueler one, but it seems so cruel that we know one. The advantage that encourages us is the possibility, although repeatedly frustrated, of using cultural evolution and the Eros drive in favor of peace. Not to completely eliminate human aggressive tendencies, as Freud observes, but at least to try to “divert them, so that they no longer find their expression in war.”

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