While the recent release of the “lost diaries” of the legendary physicist pale in comparison to the riveting find of the Dead Sea Scrolls, testing the edgy content of the musty pages against the cultural standards of contemporary society is eye opening and passively startling.
The father of E=mc2 and relativity, lived in a world of cutthroat observations, and an ebb and flow of perceived time crawling from sunrise to sunset, as the days and thoughts lingered in a mechanical age of precision and beckoning the global paradigm shift of the pending nuclear era. As the innovative global embrace with science and technology flourished in small pockets of ingenuity across the vast expanses of Europe, North America, and Asia, the majority of nations were still acclimating to the onset of the industrial revolution in precariously transforming from agrarian based economies and implementing manufacturing as the future of productivity. Fox News reports that Einstein’s harsh and raw observations of the developing Asiatic world unveiled in a series of travel diaries, hint at a strong bias by the physicist on a personal level, and display the struggle of a European grappling with the notion of encountering tribalism. Ironically, the powers that be at Princeton University, the home for many years of his fervid intellectual laboratory, made the decision to publish the papers. The writings provide a stark contrast to the benevolence and graceful demeanor of a legendary humanitarian. Of course, Einstein battled the reality of a Jewish heritage and the powerful stigmas attached to the culture with the burgeoning lobbying of intolerance in the 1920’s and 1930’s leading to the Holocaust.
With the mainstream media from both sides now associating Einstein with racism, what ramifications does this current trend of thought have on the future reputation of the scientific icon and his credibility within the context of mathematics, physics, and humanitarian efforts? Will the public school system now begin teaching students that there once existed a great scientist at the dawn of the nuclear age, who made some revolutionary observations, however displayed deplorable undertones of deep set bigotry and intolerance? Outwardly, the former Swiss patent clerk spoke out ardently for world peace and the elimination of racial segregation, and was widely known for treating individuals of all backgrounds equally. The inconsistencies between the thoughts his personal journal, and his actual demeanor in real life indicate that quite possibly that the writings were a method of venting or maybe he was simply a bastard on the inside. A high IQ does not always equate to a wealth of emotional intelligence.
Unfortunately, making gross approximations of a group of people on Twitter or in a 100-year-old diary entry, regardless of personal actions of conduct in the real world, immediately beckons the “R” word and all the stereotypical connotations followed by a mob of thought police brandishing pitch forks and enough memory erasing dust to wipe the slate clean of Bernie Sanders kissing the feet of Fidel Castro with gushing praise. Actions no longer speak louder than words and the opposite of the logical progression rears its ugly head with the countless hours of bickering and whining in contributing terabytes of data to the servers of the social networks in a Nile River magnitude of a memory dump.
Society will eventually come to the compromise that Einstein was a closet racist, who engineered and finagled his way into winning a Nobel Prize, and his theory of relativity will be forever tainted with the troubling presence of white privilege. This is simply how the contemporary world heals and adjusts to unforeseen events dispensed in a random and at times cruel universe.
As long as emotions and instant gratification are prioritized over critical thinking skills, the life lesson of, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” is quickly being extinguished by the vast cosmos of trendy parochialism. If those who are truly offended by the diaries of Einstein are patient enough, in tens of billions of years the universe will being to contract, and they can send a message to the into “future” and contact the physicist in demanding an apology and explanation.
Read the Fox News story here.