Latest news with #TheGeniusMyth
Atlantic
a day ago
- General
- Atlantic
The Centuries-Old Quest for 'Genius'
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. 'When Paul Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when young Colburn gives impromptu solution to a mathematical problem involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder,' J. Brownlee Brown wrote in 1864. His Atlantic article had a simple headline: 'Genius.' Only seven years after the founding of this magazine, its writers were already addressing one of the greatest questions of the 19th century: How should we define genius, that everyday word we use to denote the extraordinary? Brown's two geniuses are largely forgotten today. Morphy was a chess wizard from New Orleans who grew tired of the game and gave up playing seriously at just 22. He reportedly died in his bath at age 47. Zerah Colburn's story is even more tragic: As a child, he wasn't thought to be particularly gifted until his father overheard him repeating multiplication tables after only a few weeks' schooling. The little boy from Vermont was then dragged around Europe as a 'mental calculator,' ruling on whether large numbers were primes or not, and sent to an expensive school thanks to the patronage of an earl. But like many child prodigies, his adult life was a comparative disappointment. He died of tuberculosis at 34. While researching my new book, The Genius Myth, I spent a lot of time exploring how we tell stories of exceptional achievement, and what the changing definition of genius reveals about the history of Western thought. The word itself comes from Latin, where it was used to mean a person's spirit—the inner essence that gave them their unique characteristics. 'Every man, says the oracle, has his daemon, whom he is bound to obey; those who implicitly follow that guidance are the prophetic souls, the favorites of the gods,' Frederic Henry Hodge wrote in The Atlantic in 1868. 'It is this involuntary, incalculable force that constitutes what we call genius.' Well into the 20th century, The Atlantic used this older definition, writing about people who possessed a genius, rather than those who were one. Individuals whom this magazine has described as being or having a genius include Richard Strauss, Leo Tolstoy, George Gershwin, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, and Edith Wharton, that last accolade having been delivered by Gore Vidal. Oh, plus the 23-year-old hockey player Bobby Orr, the children's cartoon Rugrats, and the shopping channel QVC. This proclamation makes for great copy, because it is deeply subjective. Christopher Hitchens was prepared to call the poet Ezra Pound a genius, but not the acclaimed mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers, whose work he dismissed as 'dismal pulp.' (I know whose work I would rather read.) In 1902, a female writer for this magazine airily declared that there were no great women writers to compare with Juvenal, Euripides, and Milton. 'George Eliot had a vein of excellent humor, but she never shares it with her heroes,' argued Ellen Duvall, adding that Jane Austen's male heroes were 'as solemn as Minerva's owl.' The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Something similar is true of geniuses. An earlier age would have attributed Paul Morphy and Zerah Colburn's gifts to divine providence, but in the more secular 19th-century America, another explanation was needed. 'We seek in vain for the secret of this mastery,' wrote Brown of his subjects. 'It is private,—as deeply hidden from those who have as from those who have it not.' For the genius-hunters, one encouraging source for exceptional talent was inheritance. At the time Brown was writing about Morphy and Colburn, academics throughout the Western world were wrestling with the theory of evolution by natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin only six years earlier. The study of what would later be called genetics promised new methods of understanding genius, that quicksilver quality that seemed so resistant to explanation. The first edition of Hereditary Genius, by Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton, was published in America in 1870. Galton's work aimed to classify all men into lettered bands, depending on their mental faculties and lifetime achievements. The Atlantic reviewed Hereditary Genius that year, noting that the difference between the men in the upper part of Galton's highest band and those in his lowest band 'represents the difference between Shakespeare and the most degraded idiot mentioned in medical literature.' This was a coldly rational view of genius—more scientific in appearance, but also less humane. Galton went on to coin the term eugenics. His unpublished utopian novel, The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere, imagined a world where people were allowed to marry only after extensive tests of their fitness to reproduce, and where those who failed were shipped off to labor colonies. Thanks to the popularity of eugenics at the time, what started as an attempt to identify geniuses eventually led the U.S. Supreme Court to justify the forced sterilization of the 'feeble minded' in Buck v. Bell in 1927. Thousands of Americans were subsequently denied the right to have children—an idea that also took hold in Nazi Germany, where an estimated 400,000 people were sterilized under the Hitler regime in the name of 'racial hygiene.' From the start, Galton's ideas about genius were presented in explicitly racial terms: He believed that Europeans were intellectually superior to Africans, and that ancient Athenians were superior to both. The Atlantic, a proudly abolitionist magazine, ran an article that contested this bigotry. In 1893, Havelock Ellis argued that many in the contemporary canon of geniuses had mixed ancestry, from what he called the 'negro blood' that was 'easy to trace in the face of Alexandre Dumas, in certain respects, to the Iroquois blood in Flaubert.' The popular novelist Olive Schreiner's heritage was 'German, English, and Jewish,' Ellis observed, while Thomas Hardy believed his paternal great-grandmother to have been Irish. (Neither Jews nor Irish people would have been considered white, according to popular beliefs of the time.) Today, most modern geneticists acknowledge that intelligence is partially heritable—it can be passed down by parents—but that does not account for the making of a genius. 'We can no more produce a whole race of Newtons and Shakespeares than we can produce perpetual motion,' the anonymous author of the Hereditary Genius review wrote in 1870. A 'genius' can pass on some of their genes, but not their personality—nor the social conditions in which their success happened. That matters. While talking about my book, I've found that acknowledging the role of luck in success makes some people nervous. They think that any discussion of broader historical forces is a covert attempt to debunk or downplay the importance of individual talent or hard work. But even 19th-century Atlantic writers could see the importance of good timing. 'A given genius may come either too early or too late,' William James wrote in 1880. 'Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted rifles.' As we get closer to the present, a note of sarcasm creeps into the word's usage: In the 2000s, the writer Megan McArdle used the recurrent headline 'Sheer Genius' for columns on businesses making terrible errors. But she was far from the first Atlantic writer to use the word sardonically. One of my favorite essays on genius from the archives is a satirical squib from 1900, which masquerades as an ad for a Genius Discovery Company. 'This country needs more geniuses,' the anonymous author wrote. 'Everybody knows it. Everybody admits it. Everybody laments it.' The article urged any reader who wondered whether they might be a genius to write in, enclosing a five-dollar fee, 'and we will tell you the truth by return mail.'
Winnipeg Free Press
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Notion of ‘genius' a fluid, ever-changing concept
Books about genius and geniuses abound. We are all fascinated by people who display otherworldly intellectual ability or whose creativity and inventiveness seem to exceed human limitations. However, this entertaining survey is not so much about individual geniuses themselves as it is about how society defines and regards those mental giants who walk among us. Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg Elon Musk gets plenty of ink in Helen Lewis' musings on the notion of genius. A key element in the thesis of British journalist and author Helen Lewis is that our notion of what constitutes genius changes given the time and place and yet there are also patterns that reappear throughout history. An observant reader will notice that the word 'Myth' on the book's cover is set in larger type than the word 'Genius.' This is not an accident. It is her central point. 'The argument over whether Elon Musk is a genius is really an argument about what our society values, and what it is prepared to tolerate,' Lewis writes. 'A suite of behaviours that would otherwise be inexcusable are forgiven when they are the price of greatness.' The South African-born electric vehicle and rocket ship entrepreneur gets a lot of ink here. As Lewis notes, this is because his talent for financial risk and organization control, not to mention his personal eccentricities, seem to be what the culture reveres at the moment. He also represents a 'poisonous' type of high achiever. This is a person, almost always male, who succeeds in one domain and begins to think of themselves as 'a superior sort of human' and an expert in everything (even government cost-cutting). With its conversational tone and often witty asides, The Genius Myth seems to take for its conceptual model Malcolm Gladwell's influential 2008 bestseller Outliers. She references it at several points, especially its idea that behind every brilliant person lie 10,000 hours of brute practice and hard work. She travels back to 19th-century England to examine 'the great age of classification,' in which its proponents, like the scientist Frances Galton, were obsessed with defining and measuring genius. Galton is credited today, or more accurately blamed, as being the father of eugenics, the terrible idea that the human species can be improved through selective breeding. The Genius Myth Lewis includes a fascinating chapter on the equally misguided work of Louis Terman, the early 20th-century American psychologist who led in the development of IQ testing. Mostly what Lewis finds is that genius is the eye of the beholder. It can't really be measured and it can't be predicted, though we do find similarities in types of geniuses. She devotes chapters to the so-called 'monsters' such as Pablo Picasso and Harvey Weinstein, who felt they had licence to abuse people around them, and 'rebels' such as Galileo and Monet, who broke new ground by rejecting previous orthodoxies. Currently on hiatus A review of funny, uplifting news in Winnipeg and around the globe. Although she admits she is weak on the subject of musical genius — writers and painters being her stronger artistic suits — she includes two interesting chapters on the Beatles (and the degree to which their accomplishments can be separated from time and place). Of the hundreds of names dropped in this book, the astute local reader will notice, her fellow chronicler Gladwell aside, a complete absence of Canadians. Are we as a nation inhospitable to genius or even superior talent? (Admittedly, in a book that limits itself to a discussion of Western accomplishment, the Australians don't rate either.) We know this can't be the case. In this time of raised elbows, there is room for a great Canadian mythologizer of genius. Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.
The National
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
McScenius: Let's put brains together to bring about a smarter Scotland
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. READ MORE: Owen Jones: Opposing Israeli violence is 'extremist'? The world's upside down 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. READ MORE: Scotland wants no part in further dangerous nuclear experiments '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. READ MORE: Interim head appointed at university after damning report into financial crisis 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'.
Economist
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.
