Sorry kids, Einstein is now out of bounds too

HIS scientific discoveries changed the way we live, but thanks to comments written in a private diary from almost 100 years ago, all of that could be erased by PC warriors, writes James Morrow.

SORRY kids, quantum physics class is cancelled.

The law of gravity is now up for review.

And just to be safe, we’d all better throw out our GPS devices (they work off Einstein’s Theory of Relativity) and cancel our trips to France (where more than likely the electricity will be generated by nuclear power working off the famous formula E=mc2).

You see Albert Einstein, scientist extraordinaire, unlocker of the secrets of the universe, and refugee from Nazi persecution has turned out to be … a racist.

Or at least that’s the narrative being proposed since the discovery of a travel diary of the scientist, written during a trip through Asia in the 1920s.

The unpleasantries recorded include comments about Egypt’s Port Said (“Levantines of every shade … as if spewed from hell”), the people of what is now Sri Lanka (“They live in great filth and considerable stench”), and the Chinese (“a peculiar herd-like nation”).

Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa travelled much of the world together. (Pic: George Rinhart)

You know what’s coming next, of course: headlines around the world condemning a long-dead man for words he wrote a century ago, long before any of us had our consciousness raised by political correctness.

To hear the social justice crowd tell it, he may as well be Captain Cook or Christopher Columbus or whichever celebrity runs afoul of the rules on Twitter next week.

This is nonsense. Given the speed with which manners are changing, it’s hardly fair to hang someone for words uttered last week, let alone put down in a private Jazz Age diary.

But whether the campaign to tear down Einstein succeeds like so many others in Australia, the US, and Europe before, there is a delicious irony in his having fallen foul of the social justice brigades.

After all, when Einstein’s theory of relativity was confirmed in 1919, it was quickly leapt upon by commentators who might not have understood the physics but saw in it a metaphor that could be applied to sex, religion, morality, politics — any area of life whose old certainties had been blown away by the horrors of World War I.

Albert Einstein. (Pic: supplied)

What are today’s politically correct warriors against privilege doing but further misappropriating Einstein’s ideas?

The notion (popular in universities, human resources departments, and much of Twitter) that the correctness of a statement doesn’t depend so much on the facts as the perceived power of the person saying it is really just relativity in action. Attempts to bench white males in favour of members of minority groups by the University of Sydney’s debate team, or the recent dust-up in Melbourne over a dance performance where white audience members were told to wait outside while minorities enjoyed an act just for them are all about this relative jockeying for power.

Likewise, the constant raking through the coals of history to prove that every great achiever in the Western tradition has feet of clay really amounts to an attempt to bend time.

Only today it’s not gravity that causes the warp, but a fierce determination to reset the clock to Year Zero and ensure anything good in the past is forgotten — all the better to build a brave new progressive and socially just world.

James Morrow is the opinion editor at the Daily Telegraph.

@pwafork

Originally published as Sorry kids, Einstein is now out of bounds too