Einstein on our mightiest counterforce against injustice, Rollo May on love, apathy, and our human task in times of radical transition, and more

Einstein on our mightiest counterforce against injustice, the stunning drawings of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Rollo May on love, apathy, and our human task in times of radical transition, and more NOTE: This message might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](. If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( – it's free. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. If you wish to cancel your recurring donation, you can do so [here](. 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[Einstein on the Interconnectedness of Our Fates and Our Mightiest Counterforce Against Injustice]( “We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more,” Albert Camus wrote in reflecting on [strength of character in turbulent times]( as WWII’s maelstrom of deadly injustice engulfed Europe. But that mending is patient, steadfast, often unglamorous work — it is the work of [choosing kindness over fear]( again and again, in the smallest of everyday ways, those tiny triumphs of the human spirit which converge in the current of courage that is the only force by which this world has ever changed. That’s what Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) examined in a beautiful autobiographical piece titled “The World as I See It,” originally published in a 1930 issue of the magazine Forum and Century, and later included in [Ideas and Opinions]( ([public library]( — the invaluable compendium that gave us Einstein’s reflections on [the secret to his thought process]( [the common language of science]( and his increasingly timely [message to posterity](. Albert Einstein by [Yousuf Karsh]( Three centuries after Newton [popularized his famous “standing on the shoulders of giants” metaphor,]( Einstein writes: How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. I am strongly drawn to a frugal life and am often oppressively aware that I am engrossing an undue amount of the labor of my fellow-men. I regard class distinctions as unjustified and, in the last resort, based on force. I also believe that a simple and unassuming life is good for everybody, physically and mentally. Reflecting on the irreplicable subjectivity of the notion of “the meaning of life,” Einstein considers his own: To inquire after the meaning or object of one’s own existence or that of all creatures has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view. And yet everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavors and his judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed to me empty. Illustration by Vladimir Radunsky for [On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein]( by Jennifer Berne This notion of human fellowship and kinship wasn’t a mere ideological abstraction for Einstein, who lived through two World Wars and witnessed humanity at its worst, yet remained animated by a fundamental faith in the nobility of the human spirit — or, rather, its potential for nobility. He devoted much of his life to [“widening our circles of compassion”]( and advocating for the conditions that nurture this nobility, from his [correspondence with W.E.B. Du Bois about racial justice]( to his [encouragement of women to pursue science]( to his [letters to Gandhi about peace and the antidote to violence](. In a passage of chilling prescience, written just before the Nazis unleashed upon humanity our darkest hour, and one of equally chilling pertinence to our own age of rampant propaganda, fear-mongering, and “alternative facts,” Einstein writes: In politics not only are leaders lacking, but the independence of spirit and the sense of justice of the citizen have to a great extent declined. The democratic, parliamentarian regime, which is based on such independence, has in many places been shaken; dictatorships have sprung up and are tolerated, because men’s sense of the dignity and the rights of the individual is no longer strong enough. In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties. Illustration by Anne Simon from Corinne Maier’s [graphic biography of Einstein]( A year before his death, Einstein revisits the subject in a magnificent acceptance speech for a human rights award conferred upon him by the Chicago Decalogue Society, also included in [Ideas and Opinions](. He begins with a reminder that questions of meaning and moral values are entirely human-made, for the universe — his primary object of inquiry and the lifelong object of his [“passion for comprehension”]( — is impartial and unconcerned with notions of human rights. A decade before John Steinbeck asserted that [“all the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,”]( Einstein writes: The existence and validity of human rights are not written in the stars. The ideals concerning the conduct of men toward each other and the desirable structure of the community have been conceived and taught by enlightened individuals in the course of history. Those ideals and convictions which resulted from historical experience, from the craving for beauty and harmony, have been readily accepted in theory by man — and at all times, have been trampled upon by the same people under the pressure of their animal instincts. A large part of history is therefore replete with the struggle for those human rights, an eternal struggle in which a final victory can never be won. But to tire in that struggle would mean the ruin of society. Eight years before Hannah Arendt’s sobering treatise on [the banality of evil and our sole antidote to its normalization]( and exactly four decades after Ella Wheeler Wilcox proclaimed that [“to sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men,”]( Einstein considers a frequently overlooked yet inexcusable and monumentally reprehensible violation of human rights — complicity with evil by keeping silent against injustice. He writes: In talking about human rights today, we are referring primarily to the following demands: protection of the individual against arbitrary infringement by other individuals or by the government; the right to work and to adequate earnings from work; freedom of discussion and teaching; adequate participation of the individual in the formation of his government. These human rights are nowadays recognized theoretically, although, by abundant use of formalistic, legal maneuvers, they are being violated to a much greater extent than even a generation ago. There is, however, one other human right which is infrequently mentioned but which seems to be destined to become very important: this is the right, or the duty, of the individual to abstain from cooperating in activities which he considers wrong or pernicious. Six decades before Rebecca Solnit made her poignant case for [breaking silence as our mightiest weapon against oppression]( Einstein suggests that the power to speak out against injustice need not be reserved for those professionally devoted to human rights work, nor manifested in grand deeds of activism. He reflects on his own simple, steadfast commitment: In a long life I have devoted all my faculties to reach a somewhat deeper insight into the structure of physical reality. Never have I made any systematic effort to ameliorate the lot of men, to fight injustice and suppression, and to improve the traditional forms of human relations. The only thing I did was this: in long intervals I have expressed an opinion on public issues whenever they appeared to me so bad and unfortunate that silence would have made me feel guilty of complicity. Complement this particular portion of Einstein’s wholly indispensable [Ideas and Opinions]( with Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on [human rights and our shared duty in ending injustice]( Audre Lorde on [breaking our silences]( and physicist Sean Carroll on [how we find meaning in an impartial universe]( then revisit Einstein on [the secret to learning anything]( [the nature of the human mind]( his [letter of advice and solidarity]( to Marie Curie when she was cruelly attacked, and his [remarkable letter of consolation]( to a grief-stricken father who had lost his young son. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Beautiful Brain: The Stunning Drawings of Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramón y Cajal]( Sacks insisted that [“ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing,”]( which he considered “a special, indispensable form” of talking to himself. [Unusual creature]( though he was, the beloved neurologist was not the only scientist who turned to other forms of creative expression as a clarifying force for scientific inquiry. The Spanish histologist, onetime bodybuilder, selfie pioneer, and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal (May 1, 1852–October 17, 1934), widely considered the founding father of modern neuroscience, used drawing the way Dr. Sacks used writing — as a vital way of thinking out loud, of giving form to ideas, of making arguments and fleshing out theories around the skeleton of observations. Cajal — who, given the magnitude of his contributions, ought to be as much of a household name as Darwin and Pasteur — created hundreds of exquisite, exceptionally skilled drawings to illustrate his scientific papers. In them, he laid out the basic architecture of the nervous system and tackled the grand unanswered question of his era: How do nerve impulses travel between separate cells, or, what is the neurological basis of reflexes? Art became the sandbox for testing his theories, which in turn became a centerpiece of modern science. The best of his drawings, ranging from the iconic to the never-before-published, are now collected in [Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal]( ([public library]( — astonishingly detailed and deft illustrations, some reminiscent of Johannes Hevelius’s [17th-century comet drawings]( and others of [the tree diagrams of medieval manuscripts](. Glial cells of the cerebral cortex of a child Cajal was drawn to art from an early age, to a point of compulsion — as a boy, he was frequently possessed by what he called “manias” to draw everything in sight, and even drew his dreams. At sixteen, he fell in love with photography, particularly with the photographic process Daguerre had invented three decades earlier, and taught himself how to take, develop, and print daguerrotypes. A century and a half before the selfie, he produced a lifelong series of remarkably artful photographic self-portraits. Self-portrait by Cajal at his library in his thirties Self-portrait by Cajal at his laboratory in his thirties But Cajal’s father, a physician, was unthrilled by his son’s artistic pursuits and hoped the boy would instead follow in his own footsteps. In an attempt to gently steer his course away from art and toward science, he persuaded young Santiago to help him teach anatomy at the local medical school. The plan was both a success and a failure — it only amplified Cajal’s passion for art, but it also kindled a lively interest in science. Like Leonardo, who [made porous the membrane between art and science]( and who was [a prescient anatomist]( Cajal became enchanted by the mysteries of the human body and used his meager savings to build a home laboratory where he could undertake histology — the study of body tissues through a microscope. The medial geniculate nucleus in the thalamus of the cat Both in scope and in promise, histology fell partway between anatomy, which had been a staple of medicine for centuries, and microbiology, which Pasteur had rendered a research field du jour. The obscure discipline was in its infancy, its growth only recently accelerated by innovations in optical technology in the 1830s, but Cajal saw it as full of possibility. He would later write his poetic autobiography, [Recollections of My Life]( I finally chose the cautious path of histology, the way of tranquil enjoyments. I knew well that I should never be able to drive through such a narrow path [as microbiology] in a luxurious carriage; but I should feel myself happy in contemplating the captivating spectacle of minute life in my forgotten corner and listening, entranced, from the ocular of the microscope, to the hum of the restless beehive which we all have within us. Calyces of Held — synapses made by axons carrying auditory information and contacting neurons in a brainstem structure called the trapezoid body It was from this transfixed vantage point at the eyepiece of the microscope that Cajal, who always considered himself “a visual type,” first saw the potential of fusing science with art in advancing discovery. At the University of Barcelona, he learned of the Golgi method — a technique pioneered by the Italian physician Camillo Golgi, using potassium dichromate and silver nitrate to stain neurons in black. It worked beautifully but unpredictably — there was no control over which neurons would be stained and which wouldn’t, rendering the results uneven and unreliable. The pyramidal neuron of the cerebral cortex A Purkinje neuron from the human cerebellum Cajal toiled tirelessly to improve the technique until its scientific reliability was as spectacular as its aesthetic splendor — a feat he accomplished in 1888, which he considered his “year of fortune,” his very own pre-Einsteinian annus mirabilis. In a passage that calls to mind Alan Lightman’s beautiful writings about [the creative sympathies between scientific and artist breakthrough]( Cajal would later write: The new truth, laboriously sought and so elusive during two years of vain efforts, rose up suddenly in my mind like a revelation… Realizing that I had discovered a rich field, I proceeded to take advantage of it, dedicating myself to work, no longer merely with earnestness, but with a fury. In the grip of that fury, he worked fifteen-hour days and in a single year published fourteen scientific articles on the nervous system, which at the time was an enigmatic terra incognita. An astrocyte in the human hippocampus Pyramidal neurons of the central cortex and their axon pathways The embryonic spinal cord But even through his most groundbreaking scientific discoveries, Cajal remained at heart a Renaissance man. His books included a treatise on the technology and art of color photography, a compendium of aphorisms [à la Oscar Wilde]( a book of advice to young scientists [à la Rilke]( and a collection of science fiction short stories. He deliberately divided his autobiography into two parts, one exploring his artist passions and the other his scientific career. Superior colliculus of the kitten Diagram illustrating how information from the eyes might be transmitted to the brain There was an almost daredevil aspect to Cajal’s choice to study the brain — the often controversial and infinitely challenging Everest of science at the end of the nineteenth century. Bodies fell along the way as some of the world’s most ambitious scientists attempted to reveal its mysterious inner workings. In one of the essays in the monograph, curator Lyndel King and editor Eric Himmel consider the visionary approach that elevated Cajal above the rest: At best, a brain slice seen through a microscope is notoriously difficult to interpret. To borrow one of Cajal’s favorite metaphors, imagine entering a forest with a hundred billion trees armed only with a sketchbook, looking each day at blurry pieces of a few of those trees entangled with one another, and, after a few years of this, trying to write an illustrated field guide to the forest. You won’t get anywhere if you simply draw what you see every day; you’re going to have to build up a mental inventory of rules for the forest, and then scrupulously try to fit what you see into that framework, or be flexible enough to allow what you see to reshape your stock of ideas. A generation earlier, the great Victorian art critic John Ruskin had argued that [drawing cultivates the art of observation and helps one see the world more clearly](. Cajal brought this ethos to his scientific work, using his illustrations — which he preferred to do freehand, rather than tracing images projected from a microscope — to deduce the framework of how the brain works. He would later write: A graphic representation of the object observed guarantees the exactness of the observation itself. But Cajal also cared deeply about the aesthetic quality of the art itself — he took great pains with his draughtsmanship and, at the start of his career, pooled his meager resources to pay for high-quality printing. The labyrinth of the inner ear The olfactory bulb of the dog King and Himmel consider the integral role of Cajal’s art in his ultimate legacy as a scientist: As with Einstein’s theories, it has taken many decades for those of us who are not scientists to catch up with Cajal’s brain. It wasn’t until 1946, twelve years after Cajal’s death, that the first electronic computer flickered into life, hinting that a machine could be built that behaved like a brain. That day may be (infinitely) far off, but since then, the concepts that Cajal discovered, explained, and illustrated have burrowed into the world’s technology, economy, popular myths, moral dilemmas, philosophical debates, and art and literature. Since Cajal, we have seen mounting evidence that the idea of the brain being as vast and mysterious as the universe — for centuries a trope for poets — may contain some literal truth. When we look at his drawings today, we see not diagrams or arguments, but the first clear pictures of that remote frontier, drawn by the man who traveled farthest into its endless reaches. Complement the scrumptious [Beautiful Brain]( annotated with fascinating background on each of Cajal’s drawings, with Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter’s [little-known mycological illustrations]( and Leonardo da Vinci’s [visionary anatomical drawings]( centuries ahead of medicine, then revisit this modern-day [graphic novel about how the brain works]( built upon Cajal’s legacy. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Love and Will: The Great Existential Psychologist Rollo May on Apathy, Transcendence, and Our Human Task in Times of Radical Transition]( “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” Albert Camus wrote in his 1951 meditation on [what it really means to be a rebel](. At the heart of this sentiment are the two complementary forces of love and will, for a loving regard for the future requires a willful commitment to rising to the problems of the present and transcending its tumults — a dependency as true in our personal lives as it is in our political lives, and one which demands a capacity for withstanding uncertainty. That essential interrelation is what the great existential psychologist Rollo May (April 21, 1909–October 22, 1994) examined nearly two decades later in his influential 1969 book [Love and Will]( ([public library](. Rollo May Drawing on his quarter-century experience as a psychoanalytic therapist working with people trying to wrest from their inner turmoil an existential serenity, May writes: Love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being — a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other. But this is only possible, in an inner sense, if one opens oneself at the same time to the influence of the other. Writing half a century ago, May examines the consequence of warping the balance of love and will, speaking with astonishing precision to and of our own time: The fruits of future values will be able to grow only after they are sown by the values of our history. In this transitional [time], when the full results of our bankruptcy of inner values is brought home to us, I believe it is especially important that we seek the source of love and will. […] The striking thing about love and will in our day is that, whereas in the past they were always held up to us as the answer to life’s predicaments, they have now themselves become the problem. It is always true that love and will become more difficult in a transitional age; and ours is an era of radical transition. The old myths and symbols by which we oriented ourselves are gone, anxiety is rampant; we cling to each other and try to persuade ourselves that what we feel is love; we do not will because we are afraid that if we choose one thing or one person we’ll lose the other, and we are too insecure to take that chance. The bottom then drops out of the conjunctive emotions and processes — of which love and will are the two foremost examples. The individual is forced to turn inward; he becomes obsessed with the new form of the problem of identity, namely, Even-if-I-know-who-I-am, I-have-no-significance. I am unable to influence others. The next step is apathy. And the step following that is violence. For no human being can stand the perpetually numbing experience of his own powerlessness. Art from [Thin Slices of Anxiety: Observations and Advice to Ease a Worried Mind]( by Catherine Lepage May argues that during times of radical transition, when the societal structures we’ve used as external guides begin to fall apart, we are apt to turn inward and rely on our own consciousness. Such times, therefore, become a critical testing ground for how well we are able to wield the complementary forces of love and will. This grand personal responsibility can swell into a source of anxiety which, upon reaching its most extreme and unbearable limit, festers into apathy — when we continually face dangers we feel powerless to overcome, we resort to this final self-defense mechanism of shutting down both love and will. And yet in these two capacities lies the sole mechanism of our salvation and sanity. May writes: The interrelation of love and will inheres in the fact that both terms describe a person in the process of reaching out, moving toward the world, seeking to affect others or the inanimate world, and opening himself to be affected; molding, forming, relating to the world or requiring that it relate to him. This is why love and will are so difficult in an age of transition, when all the familiar mooring places are gone. In a sentiment that parallels Hannah Arendt’s insight into [how bureaucracy breeds violence]( May adds: There is a dialectical relationship between apathy and violence. To live in apathy provokes violence; and … violence promotes apathy. Violence is the ultimate destructive substitute which surges in to fill the vacuum where there is no relatedness… When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible. […] Apathy is the withdrawal of will and love … a suspension of commitment. It is necessary in times of stress and turmoil; and the present great quantity of stimuli is a form of stress. But apathy … leads to emptiness and makes one less able to defend oneself, less able to survive. However understandable the state we are describing by the term apathy is, it is also essential that we seek to find a new basis for the love and will which have been its chief casualties. Art by Shaun Tan for [a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales]( May examines the antidote to apathy through the lens of the three central elements of love and will — eros, the ancient Greek manifestation of love that drives toward higher forms of being and relationship; the daimonic, which represents the intermediary between the divine and the mortal; and intentionality, the imagination’s drive to transmute individual impulses into interpersonal experience. He writes: As the function of eros, both within us and in the universe itself, is to draw us toward the ideal forms, it elicits in us the capacity to reach out, to let ourselves be grasped, to preform and mold the future. It is the self-conscious capacity to be responsive to what might be. The daimonic, that shadowy side which, in modern society, inhabits the underground realms as well as the transcendent realms of eros, demands integration from us on the personal dimension of consciousness. Intentionality is an imaginative attention which underlies our intentions and informs our actions. It is the capacity to participate in knowing or performing the art proleptically — that is, trying it on for size, performing it in imagination. Each of these emphases points toward a deeper dimension in human beings. Each requires a participation from us, an openness, a capacity to give of ourselves and receive into ourselves. And each is an inseparable part of the basis of love and will. With an eye to the future, which is now our present, May considers the pathway to finding such a fertile basis of love and will: What is necessary … is a new consciousness in which the depth and meaning of personal relationship will occupy a central place. Such an embracing consciousness is always required in an age of radical transition. Lacking external guides, we shift our morality inward; there is a new demand upon the individual of personal responsibility. We are required to discover on a deeper level what it means to be human. Echoing Alfred Kazin’s insistence on [the necessity of embracing our contradictions]( May adds: The only way of resolving — in contrast to solving — the questions is to transform them by means of deeper and wider dimensions of consciousness. The problems must be embraced in their full meaning, the antinomies resolved even with their contradictions. They must be built upon; and out of this will arise a new level of consciousness. In a sentiment of astonishing pertinence to our own tumultuous and transitional time, May frames our highest responsibility to ourselves and to the future: The new age which knocks upon the door is as yet unknown, seen only through beclouded windows. We get only hints of the new continent into which we are galloping: foolhardy are those who attempt to blueprint it, silly those who attempt to forecast it, and absurd those who irresponsibly try to toss it off by saying that the “new man will like his new world just as we like ours.” … But whatever the new world will be, we do not choose to back into it. Our human responsibility is to find a plane of consciousness which will be adequate to it and will fill the vast impersonal emptiness of our technology with human meaning. Echoing Bertrand Russell’s abiding assertion that [“not all wisdom is new, nor is all folly out of date,”]( May adds: We stand on the peak of the consciousness of previous ages, and their wisdom is available to us. History — that selective treasure house of the past which each age bequeaths to those that follow — has formed us in the present so that we may embrace the future. What does it matter if our insights, the new forms which play around the fringes of our minds, always lead us into virginal land where, like it or not, we stand on strange and bewildering ground. The only way out is ahead, and our choice is whether we shall cringe from it or affirm it. For in every act of love and will — and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act — we mold ourselves and our world simultaneously. This is what it means to embrace the future. [Love and Will]( is an illuminating read in its totality. Complement it with the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm, a contemporary of May’s, on [the art of living]( Nobel-winning writer Toni Morrison on [the creative person’s task in volatile times]( and philosopher Martha Nussbaum on [how to live with our human fragility](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. 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