Few heroes of the past can escape the censure of today’s bigotry police. Every week, it seems, brings news that some heretofore revered figure said or wrote something we enlightened postmoderns consider untoward, obliging us to qualify any subsequent expressions of admiration.
Even so, we were surprised to learn from the Washington Post that Albert Einstein was the same as all the rest. The great physicist and refugee from Nazi Germany, the Post’s Kristine Phillips tells us, was a xenophobe and misogynist and held “racist views.” Sure, he spoke up for the civil rights of blacks in the 1940s and ’50s. “But,” wrote Phillips, “there’s another side to Einstein that perhaps people did not know then.”
Uh oh.
In his travel diaries, recently published by Princeton University Press, “the Nobel-winning physicist portrayed people of other races, such as Chinese and Indians, in a stereotypical, dehumanizing way.” To wit: “The average Japanese, Einstein wrote, is ‘unproblematic, impersonal, he cheerfully fulfills the social function which befalls him without pretension, but proud of his community and nation. Forsaking his traditional ways in favor of European ones does not undermine his national pride.’ ”
You might expect Phillips to pass over that masculine pronoun on the grounds that Einstein lived from 1879 to 1955 and can hardly be expected to have embraced the gender-neutral pronoun fetish of a later era. Nope. She goes on:
His reflections about the Chinese, with whom he spent far less time, were more callous, even insulting. Though he called the Chinese “industrious,” he also described them as “filthy” and “obtuse.” They’re a “peculiar herd-like nation,” Einstein wrote, “often more like automatons than people.” He saw them as intellectually inferior, quoting—instead of challenging—Portuguese teachers he met during his travels who claimed that the Chinese “are incapable of being trained to think logically” and “have no talent for mathematics.”
Imagine—the 20th century’s greatest scientific mind merely quoting bad remarks instead of challenging them!
Then we come to a reflection in which Einstein exhibits what the diary’s editor, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, terms a “healthy dose of extreme misogyny”: “I noticed how little difference there is between men and women,” wrote Einstein. “I don’t understand what kind of fatal attraction Chinese women possess which enthralls the corresponding men to such an extent that they are incapable of defending themselves against the formidable blessing of offspring.”
Einstein, in other words, didn’t think Chinese women attractive, and he had the outrageous temerity to say so in his personal journal. If that doesn’t convince you that Einstein was a racist—or at least had “racist views”—consider a remark he recorded after a few days in China: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”
We hope future journalists and scholars will be more charitable to us than today’s moralists are to the greatest men of the past. Sorry—men and women of the past.
