Expelling Elon Musk would make the Royal Society look like ‘pathetic woke hypocrites'
It's so he can get as far away as possible from all the idiots he has to put up with on Earth.
That, at any rate, was my first thought when I read the ludicrous following story. At a crisis meeting next month, members of the Royal Society – the scientific institution founded in 1660 – will discuss whether to strip Musk of the fellowship he was awarded in 2018. Why? Because of his supposedly 'disreputable' comments and behaviour since Donald Trump won last year's US election. In November, one Oxford professor resigned her own fellowship after likening Musk to 'a Bond villain'. Now, more than 2,000 scientists have signed an open letter calling on the Society to 'take a stand' against him.
Honestly. Let's hope their colleagues have more sense. Because expelling Musk would make the Royal Society look like pathetic woke hypocrites.
First of all: even if Musk is a horrid man who says and does nasty things, so what? Does this make his contributions to science (such as in the fields of electric cars and space travel) any less significant? Should we only honour scientists who express opinions of which we approve, and who strike us as jolly nice chaps to have round for dinner? Whenever it emerges that a great poet or painter was a ghastly cad with politically incorrect views, sensible people do not call for him to be stripped of his honours, and for his work to be removed from the school curriculum, because we're capable of separating the art from the artist. So why not separate the science from the scientist?
In any case, if the Royal Society decides that fellows should be cancelled for 'disreputable' comments and behaviour, it's going to be pretty busy. Because in the past it awarded fellowships to people who were even more horrid than Musk.
Take Isaac Newton – who, as Warden of the Royal Mint, gleefully had men disembowelled, hanged or burnt for the crime of counterfeiting coins. He also relished destroying the reputations of his intellectual rivals. After the death of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, for example, Newton boasted that he'd taken great pleasure in 'breaking Leibniz's heart'. Little wonder that, in A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking describes Newton as 'not a pleasant man'.
Then there's Charles Darwin – who made a number of frightfully problematic remarks about what he called the 'lower races', and wrote that it was damaging for 'civilised men' to 'build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick', and 'to institute poor laws', because as a result 'the weak members of civilised society' were able to 'propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.'
If Newton and Darwin were alive today, would the twits throwing a tantrum over Musk be demanding their expulsion, too? In fact, will they strip these great but not terribly PC men of their fellowships posthumously, as a warning to others?
Personally, I think the Royal Society should listen to another of its most celebrated fellows: Benjamin Franklin. In 1722 (under the pseudonym 'Silence Dogood'), Franklin wrote that nothing was more important than free speech. 'Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom,' he explained, 'and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man [sic].'
And, as he might have added, had he been able to foresee the invention of social media: 'Yes, that includes Men who write mean Things on the Internet.'
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