Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the perils of genius
Books about geniuses tend to fall into predictable categories. There is hagiography, along the lines of 'How Picasso revolutionised art'. There are takedowns ('Picasso was a monster'). And there are how-to manuals ('How you can become the new Picasso'). 'The Genius Myth' by Helen Lewis is more original and painfully timely. This is the high age of the genius, readers may conclude—but not in a good way.
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Spectator
15 hours ago
- Spectator
‘Genius' is a dangerously misused word
For several centuries, the word 'celebrity' meant fame. A couple of hundred years ago, it acquired a secondary meaning of a person overendowed with that quality, and this has now largely driven out the previous usage. In parallel, the same journey has been travelled by 'genius'. Once an essence that attached to works or deeds, it now also refers to people – celebrities of accomplishment, no field too trivial. Helen Lewis teases out the consequences of this shift and makes a modest plea for its reversal. Her indictment of the genius myth – the idea that a small cadre of special people are fundamentally more gifted than their peers – is that it is not only corrosive and unhelpful, but also inaccurate. Genius, she argues, is fundamentally immeasurable; it is better understood as residing not in individuals but in teams or milieux. It is used to license terrible behaviour in those awarded the title; it appears inevitable in retrospect but in prospect is highly contingent; it is a temptation to ultracrepidarianism. Above all, genius is a misleading schema – a seductive, ready-made, familiar pattern we can use to make sense of the world. Lewis takes a long journey through the history of IQ testing – from Francis Galton's eugenicist championing of hereditary genius, to Louis Terman's longitudinal studies, to Mensa, and on to the increasingly recondite and fissiparous world of ultra-high IQ societies. IQ exists in a curious apposition to genius, as, arguably, a necessary-but-not-sufficient component – but one that is more easily measurable. This history is littered with fraud, including Cyril Burt's suspiciously perfect, probably invented data and Hans Eysenck's questionable studies. Some of Lewis's criticisms of the industry are inarguable. The widely used tests have cultural biases baked into their terminology – 'savages' in a questionnaire that dates back only as far as 1993 – and patriarchal assumptions underlying questions that depend on identifying surnames or habits of dress. But she also complains that 'the test selects heavily for speed', even though on the face of it this feels entirely reasonable. Her real complaint is that high general intelligence is used as if it were interchangeable with genius – but delivering acts of genius also takes application and patience. In the second half of the book, Lewis dives deeper into the genius schema and the ways in which it is often used to explain or to excuse behaviour ranging from poor to criminal. Tolstoy, for example, exploited his wife Sofia; Lee Krasner struggled to escape the shadow of Jackson Pollock; Gertude Stein 'stole her partner's voice' in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and used it to praise herself. 'When you admire an artwork or a scientific invention,' Lewis asks, 'what duty do you owe to those harmed in its production?' She does not quite stay for an answer, though a chapter on the avant-garde theatre director and serial abuser Chris Goode, and the mental contortions employed by his collaborators to ignore the people harmed in his productions – and then, after his suicide, occlude the historical record – sharpens that question. People who are hailed as geniuses find that their words on any subject, however unrelated, somehow magically carry extra weight. At a trivial level, this is why social media is full of greetings-card sentiments misattributed to Einstein or Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln. Lewis identifies a few special cases of this. There is the seemingly irresistible pull towards race science among the high-IQ. There is the lure to the overconfident of posing as a rebel disrupting consensus paradigms (as during Covid, passim), which is only intensified by the fact that sometimes these rebels are correct. And there is the read-across from qualification in one field to other unconnected ones. Lewis makes no mention of Jordan Peterson, but she does of Elon Musk, whose achievements are duly acknowledged even as his idiosyncrasies are mocked. Unhappy the land that has need of geniuses, as Brecht might have said. But lands that do not wish to stagnate do genuinely have need of genius – at least, of the instances of scientific and technological genius that lead to growth. So finding the best path to steer is important. A lot of the problems become clearer if we compare 'genius' with its lower wattage cousin 'talent'. No one would claim that talent does not exist, or deny that different people have different talents. You can test pretty reliably for talent. Equally, talent is very clearly domain-specific and non-fungible. Being a talented newspaper columnist, for example, does not make you a talented fighter pilot. The contributions of others to creating contexts where talent can flourish are obvious and uncontested. Talent offers no immunity. Organisations, and indeed nations, if they want to be successful, will have strategies for recruiting and developing and retaining the specific talent they need, whereas a 'genius strategy' would be nonsensical (except for 'key man risk'). If we thought more about talent, perhaps we could benefit from genius without having to pay obeisance to geniuses.
Economist
2 days ago
- Economist
Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the perils of genius
Books about geniuses tend to fall into predictable categories. There is hagiography, along the lines of 'How Picasso revolutionised art'. There are takedowns ('Picasso was a monster'). And there are how-to manuals ('How you can become the new Picasso'). 'The Genius Myth' by Helen Lewis is more original and painfully timely. This is the high age of the genius, readers may conclude—but not in a good way.
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Telegraph
Stop using the word ‘genius' – here's why they don't exist
'Genius' has become a widely devalued concept: it can describe a goal by Mo Salah, Sally Rooney's latest novel, or the geek who fixes your computer. One reason for this, as Helen Lewis suggests in her breezy and entertaining new book The Genius Myth, is that the idea of genius has always been hazy. It holds that an exceptional few possess, for some reason, faculties or talents from which the many are ineluctably excluded, and that no amount of perspiration, method or reasoning can produce the eureka! moment, the sudden flash of inspiration or intuition that opens closed doors. Lewis is sceptical. There is no such thing as genius, she argues, in the sense of an individual discovering or creating something unprecedented. Even the most apparently original artists and scientists are building out of what is already there, drawing on either tradition or collaboration. 'To make Leonardo,' she writes, 'you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450.' The same could be said for Steve Jobs needing Silicon Valley in 1997. And yet there lingers the glamorous notion, fundamental to Romanticism, that genius is a divine gift granted to an elite exempt from normal standards of behaviour. Licensed by his operatic achievements, Wagner's anti-Semitism has to be excused; Picasso's serial maltreatment of the women he loved is framed as inspiration for some of his most powerful paintings. Related to this is Thomas Carlyle's belief that history is made and changed not by impersonal social forces or revolutionary masses but egregious mould-breakers such as Cromwell or Napoleon. Lewis finds such hero worship aggravating: she complains that 'people who succeed wildly in one domain stop thinking of themselves as any combination of talented, hard-working and lucky, and instead come to imagine that they are a superior sort of human.' After this comes the book's strongest section, exploring the development of the (now largely debunked) idea of IQ and its implication of inherent genius in those who score highly – as well as its uncomfortable relationship to racism and eugenics. Lewis exposes the fraudulence of some celebrated spokesmen in this field, including the psychologists Cyril Burt and H J Eysenck, as well as recording the rather poignant tale of Marilyn Vos Savant, whose chart-busting IQ of 228 was honoured in The Guinness Book of Records but who ended up as an advice columnist in a popular magazine. Some comedy pops up here too, notably in the account of Robert K Graham's short-lived scheme for Nobel laureates to provide a bank of sperm that could impregnate comparably brilliant women to produce a new breed of genius. And it's amusing to find among Havelock Ellis's many potty notions the assertion in his study of 'the British genius' that East Anglians have 'no aptitude for abstract thinking'. The latter half of Lewis's book is a series of disconnected essays, and it's less successful. A chapter on Thomas Edison usefully points to the moment when the Byronic idea of genius gives way to 'the workaholic tech bro harnessing the white heat of technological innovation'. There's proper acknowledgement of the backroom boys on whom the front-page astrophysicists such as Stephen Hawking rely for their ground-breaking discoveries, and due tribute is paid to the support systems that women such as Tolstoy's wife Sophia and Pollock's wife Lee Krasner provided for their husbands' grand achievements – at the cost of their own aspirations and talents. But too much space is wasted on the question of the Beatles, and futile speculations as to what might have happened if John had never met Paul. Quite what the avant-garde theatre maker Chris Goode (posthumously exposed as a paedophile) did to merit inclusion is anyone's guess. More predictably, 'disruptor' Elon Musk appears to be dispatched as 'one of the clearest examples of how the mythology of genius – the sense of being a special sort of person - can warp someone's outlook'. What is most disappointing, however, is that Lewis doesn't engage in any depth with a category of genius that doesn't depend on tradition or collaboration, and which remains something of a neurological mystery. This consists very largely of men, often on the autistic spectrum, who excel in fields such as chess, mathematics and music and whose brains appear to be wired differently to those of the rest of us, especially in terms of their ability to make staggeringly complex computations in nanoseconds and draw on total recall of anything they've read. Films such as Rain Man, based on the real-life figure of Kim Peek, have romanticised this phenomenon, and it would have been worth analysing, inasmuch as it relates to Lewis's questioning of the extent to which genius is the result of mental torture or eccentricity. It would also have been interesting to speculate on a new species of purportedly superhuman genius: AI. Now that computers are on the brink of becoming creative thinkers as well as information processors, might the intellectual potential of homo sapiens have run its course? Or will A1 turn out to be merely the latest instalment in the 'genius myth'?
