McScenius: Let's put brains together to bring about a smarter Scotland

The National

21-06-2025

Those emeritus professors of snark, Steely Dan, put one aspect of the genius myth very well.
Once you declare your geniushood, all the rest of your behaviours – however cranky or cruel – come to be justified.
As Helen Lewis writes in her funny, combative new book, The Genius Myth, we have plenty of current examples of this. Most notable at present is Donald Trump, declaring himself a 'pretty stable genius', while his conversational 'weave' baffles all who hear it.
Trump then appoints Elon Musk as a 'pretty high-IQ individual', on the basis of his tech business success. Yet he departs from his Doge post in ignominy, leaving a trail of administrative destruction behind him.
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As Musk advances both on our brains with neuro-filaments, and on the starry skies with satellites and Mars ships, the temptation is to say: let us be protected from such 'high-IQ geniuses'.
Lewis lays out the historical seeds of what she regards as a 'dangerous' idea. Originally and classically, genius was visited upon us, a bolt of insight from a higher realm.
It became individualised from the Renaissance onwards. Leonardo da Vinci was the original 'scatter-brained polymath' archetype of genius.
The Romantics liked their geniuses 'boyish, naughty, in the late stages of tuberculosis and, best of all, dead by suicide', as The New Yorker review puts it.
Geniuses were also natural and child-like; and out of that fragility, we assume their 'precious gift' extracts a 'terrible price'. This archetype also excuses behaviours like 'alcoholism, family abandonment, unfaithfulness, abuse, weirdness, failure to take responsibility'.
The shit-posting, ketamine-gobbling, games-obsessive, promiscuously-parenting Musk is all too exemplary of these cliches of genius.
To top it off, Victorian and early 20th-century eugenicists like Francis Galton and Hans Eysenck believed they could measure genius, by using tests to identify a person's 'intelligence quotient' (IQ).
Lewis has grim fun with Nobelists like William Shockley, who got a Nobel for inventing the transistor, but then descended into arguing that 'caucasians' had higher IQs.
Shockley even tried to set up a sperm bank for Nobelists (it's noteworthy he didn't consider an egg bank), and advocated for the eradication of lower-IQ people.
Great delight is taken by Lewis in pointing out that Shockley came to his world-changing transistor idea while working at Bell Labs. This was an 'alchemical space of collective achievement', a set of 'ripe social conditions constructed by previous breakthroughs'.
That is, Bell Labs was a place of 'scenius' (using Brian Eno's term for a fertile milieu of talents and experiments). It's out of these scenes that superhuman acts of 'genius' might occur. Lewis admits that this sociological explanation is deeply unsatisfying for most people.
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'We find it intuitively easy to understand human-sized stories, where someone does something,' Lewis says in a recent interview. 'Our brains crave stories with protagonists and don't want mushy explanations that involve complex social forces.'
I accept this, as well as Lewis's injunction that ascribing genius 'says as much about us as it says about them'. The educationalist Howard Gardner, in his 1997 book Extraordinary Minds, emphasised how great innovators need a coherent field around them, in order that their novel moves make sense.
Picasso's paintings, like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or Guernica, shake up traditions of portraiture or landscape. Joyce's Ulysses, or Woolf's To The Lighthouse, have the great 19th-century novels around them to trouble and unravel.
It's even clearer in music. I wouldn't hesitate to call John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder or Prince 'geniuses' of pop and jazz music. I also wouldn't deny that they came to their moments of blinding newness from imbibing and inhabiting long-standing traditions.
Coltrane was trained in barroom blues and big bands. Wonder came from the gospel tradition, as well as passing through the Motown hit factory. Prince drank from all those wells self-consciously throughout his musical life, giving himself an enormous toolbox to use.
However, I still feel that genius – even if it is a 'lightning strike' upon individuals, already thriving in 'fertile conditions', as Lewis concludes – is something that extraordinary minds can and do perform.
The thrill is when separate domains are conjoined, in ways unimaginable before the act of genius, to produce a new domain – one that triggers a cascade of fresh activity.
There are two Scottish geniuses who exemplify this.
Firstly, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, of whom Einstein said 'the special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell's equations'. Maxwell had a profound ability to see analogies between different areas of science and mathematics.
His crowning achievement – Maxwell's equations – unified electricity, magnetism and optics into a single theoretical framework. This synthesis anticipated Einstein's later unifications (of spacetime and mass-energy), establishing the basis of modern field theory and quantum electrodynamics.
But it's Maxwell's conceptual leaping across domains that remains awesome.
In literature, this reminds me of another I would call 'genius', novelist and artist Alasdair Gray. The domains Gray effortlessly bridges is fictional prose and figurative illustration.
His 1981 masterpiece Lanark, illustrated and fashioned by Gray as an object, also connects wildly different literary domains – angst-ridden realism, dystopian science-fiction, the end of the novel's narrative placed at the beginning.
Gray tangles up the frames of causality, in many of his novels, just as Maxwell challenged mechanistic visions of physics.
The thrill of Gray's genius is felt when you go through the original novel of Poor Things (1991). Its Frankensteinian tale of self-creation is richly illustrated throughout. It feels like a wholly different historical world.
I'm not so sure of Maxwell's milieu. But one would have to accept that Gray was partly produced by the 'scenius' of the second Scottish Literary Renaissance – embedded in the bohemias of Glasgow and Edinburgh, embarking on groups and magazines with James Kelman, Janice Galloway, Liz Lochhead, Philip Hobsbaum and many others.
So is one implication of Lewis's social explanation of 'genius' that such hot-beds can be fomented and prepared? Not so much the 'genius bars' of an Apple showroom, but the bars and 'third places' in which flashes of genius might occur? Can these be nurtured, even planned?
If domain-crossing is a fundamental process leading to genius-like activity, then one would have to say, in Scotland, the buildings and ambitions to support it are moving into place.
I was honoured to accept an invitation to become an associate at the Edinburgh Futures Institute earlier this year, because I could see in the edifice (and its research prospectus) that domain-crossing is an expectation, not an exception.
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But in Dundee and Glasgow universities, there are also 'advanced studies' centres. All of them look at major challenges and megatrends – around AI, health, urban development – and declare their intent to rub together many different talents and specialisms, in pursuit of lasting solutions.
So there's your 'McScenius' – but of course there can always be more of it.
For example, is there enough traffic between the universe-building taking place in Dundee's games sector, and the massive computations – now to be even greater with the supercomputer recommission – operating in Edinburgh? What worlds could we be virtually simulating, in order to help repair the actual world?
Another example: will the tumult around community power – whether land ownership, renewable energy generation, ecological lifestyles – compel innovations in democracy and organisation, supported by radical tech?
And if so, what Hume- or Smith-like Second Enlightenment minds might survey this, and elaborate new models of progress and development from it?
There's doubtless many other zones like this in Scottish life. And it's as important to identify and foment them, right where we are now – when proximity and engagement are vital.
An independent Scotland should be the ideal framework for such a culture of immanent, everyday genius. But we shouldn't be put off from pursuing a Scottish 'scenius' by political or constitutional log-jams.
It may be that we have an answer to the Dan. And that, thanks to Helen Lewis's excellent provocation, we do know what we mean by 'genius'.