Divine Fury (52 page)

Notwithstanding the faint glow of the sacred that continued to attend Einstein the victor, the defeat of the evil genius Hitler served to expose the idolatry of the genius religion, providing an answer of sorts to the petition and prayer of the Yiddish poet Kadya Molodovsky. “God of Mercy,” reads the last line of her haunting 1945 poem of that name, “deliver us from the spirit of genius.” The blood of the Gulag and the Great Cultural Revolution in time did the same, disabusing all save the zealous and the blind of the illusion that the dear leader, the genius of the people, was any such thing. Even the all-powerful Chairman Mao came to deny the label that both he and Comrade Stalin had once so freely claimed. “I am no genius,” he told a group of “responsible comrades” in 1971. The responsible comrades must have been surprised: they had heard the opposite for years. No matter. Genius did not depend “on one person or a few people,” Mao insisted. The product of “collective wisdom,” genius was built by the masses. Although Mao was simply reverting to an older and purer Marxist line, he nonetheless correctly identified the collective force—the
genius populi
, the genius of the people—that was working to topple the idol and destroy the altar on which the people had sacrificed so much.
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Revulsion against the excesses of evil genius in the twentieth century, in both its fascist and communist forms, thus played a crucial part in precipitating the general demise of the genius and the genius religion. But another factor was also involved: the simple recognition of the group dynamics at play in all creative endeavor. That recognition, ironically, emerged more clearly amid the conditions of capitalism than it did in the communist republics. It was of a piece with the broader democratization of genius, and those working in the natural sciences were among the first to make it explicit. As a research director at the storied management-consulting firm of Arthur D. Little, Inc., observed in the early twentieth century, “organized research does not depend upon individual genius; it is group activity. . . . Supermen are not required.” With the development of large-scale industrial research and development (R&D), that perspective gained broad adherence, reflecting the changed (and changing) nature of the scientific workplace. Individuals were now urged to work together in teams to obtain better results, like the celebrated scientists in the “idea factory” of Bell Labs, which employed at its height close to 1200 PhDs. Producing one stunning innovation after the next, Bell scientists would go on to amass no fewer than thirteen Nobel Prizes. Such integrated efforts underscored the point that in many cases, many heads were better than one.
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Scientists themselves registered the development, downplaying the mythology of individual genius.
They
knew that the vast majority of scientific work was laborious and matter-of-fact. True, an outsider might still suggest that the genius of science channeled a kind of magical force, as the celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes did in a public lecture delivered shortly before his death in 1946. Newton, Keynes said, was a “magician” who had been “tempted by the Devil” to believe “that he could reach
all
the secrets of God and Nature by the pure power of mind.” Insiders, however, were, increasingly more cautious. Some might still make an exception for Einstein, along with a handful of other greats. But among practicing scientists, the word “genius” largely fell out of favor after the war, its use treated as a professional and social faux pas.
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At roughly the same time, genius fell out of favor among scholars of the humanities as well. Motivated by Marxian analysis in many cases, and in turn by the literary currents of poststructuralism and deconstruction, scholars exposed the “fiction” of agency, pronounced the “death” of the author, and emphasized the social forces at work in literary and artistic production. Genius, in such accounts, functioned largely as a cipher, while geniuses themselves were widely dismissed as desiccated relics of the past, part of a mummified category and order of things that was likewise dead and gone.
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Finally, the role of genius in the social sciences, and even in psychology, the discipline that long claimed genius as its own, has changed considerably. There are still reputable psychologists who devote themselves to the study of genius, described as such. But many have altered the name to protect the innocent (or hide the guilty), studying, like Terman in his later years, the more limited “intelligence” and the ways to test it; or investigating “creativity” and its correlates; or isolating the characteristics of “outliers,” high achievers, and expert performers. Moreover, there has been an effort to reexamine and rethink the very notion of a unitary intelligence on the model of genius and the IQ. The psychologist Daniel Goleman, for example, has spearheaded the study of what he calls “emotional intelligence,” or EQ. In an enormously popular series of books on the subject, beginning with his 1996 bestseller
Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
, Goleman (along with a host of others since) has promoted the idea that emotional well-being and insight may be a better predictor of success than purely cognitive measures of the mind. The noted Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, meanwhile, has reenergized a line of inquiry originally pursued by those, such as L. L. Thurstone, who argued in the early twentieth century that
“intelligence” was in truth composed of a number of “primary mental abilities.” In Gardner’s influential formulation, crystallized in his 1983
Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
, there are eight such primary abilities, including intelligence not only for language, logic and mathematics, and spatial awareness, but also for music, the body and its movement, interpersonal relations, and even for a relation to the natural environment and existence itself. Human beings, it follows, may be gifted in different ways. And though neither the theory of emotional intelligence nor that of multiple intelligences has been immune to criticism, they register perfectly the broader push to pluralize and democratize what once was called genius.

Such research is in high demand in education departments, the military, corporations, and other places where identifying and nurturing talent is placed at a premium. Yet, even there, a focus on the many has tended to crowd out concentration on the gifts of individuals or the singular attributes of the one. Borrowing a term from contemporary economics, analysts of innovation today stress the importance not just of multiple intelligences but of “collective intelligence,” reaffirming the idea that the many know best. It follows that what matters most in furthering innovation is putting the many in touch with one another. Urban concentrations and markets, social media, and other networks of exchange have become the sites for creative investigation and the investigation of creativity, with the result that individual genius, by and large, no longer garners the attention of experts, presenting a “genius problem” of its own.
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There is considerable irony in the fact that genius has largely vanished as a category of academic research while exploding as a trope in popular culture. It wouldn’t be the first time that academia and the world have missed each other. But, in truth, the two phenomena are related. For not only does the research emphasizing the social underpinnings of creativity track with the broader democratization of genius since World War II, but it also provides a foil. The more we learn about the collaborative nature of creativity in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, the more the myth of the lone genius becomes appealing. In societies that tend by their very nature to thwart it, an emphasis on individual agency is reassuring, if also a little bit quaint.
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There are probably other psychological forces that help keep alive a belief in genius and geniuses as special individuals whose natural endowments and inherent gifts seem to determine their success in advance. It may be that a belief in natural genius gives societies and parents an out: where time and resources are limited, the belief provides an excuse to
focus intensely only on those who are “born” for success. It may be, too, that a belief in giftedness gets the rest of us off the hook, explaining our own shortcomings and failures as the result of genetic endowments (or the lack thereof) over which we have little control. Finally, as I have taken pains to show in this book, the human need for transcendence is great. Endowing others with genius still serves to satisfy a longing for the marvelous. It fills a need.
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For all of these reasons, genius continues to titillate, drawing steady interest and quixotic quests. The American optometrist and entrepreneur Robert K. Graham made headlines in the 1980s and 1990s with his attempt to establish a Nobel Prize sperm bank, the Repository of Germinal Choice. Graham gathered material that Terman had allowed to fall by the wayside, collecting the sperm of the Nobel Laureate in Physics William Shockley, the coinventor of the transistor whom the
Genetic Studies of Genius
had famously overlooked. Despite generous donations from Shockley and, presumably, other Nobel Prize winners—though none of these have been willing to come forward publicly—the bank closed its vaults in 1997. More recently, the neuroscientist Allan Snyder has garnered media attention for his attempts to develop a “creativity cap” at his lab at the University of Sydney. By applying an electrical current to targeted areas of the brain, Snyder hopes to mimic the capacities of savants, bringing out the inner Rain Man in everyone. The results so far are decidedly mixed. And for skeptics inclined to give up on the search for human genius altogether, there is the ongoing hope of artificial intelligence (AI). AI may be genius’s final frontier, entailing an effort to build a machine that can go beyond human nature and do what human beings cannot. A computer, Deep Blue, succeeded in tying the grandmaster of chess, Garry Kasparov, in 1997. But successful efforts to build machines that genuinely create—composing a symphony or writing a poem—are still some ways off. In the meantime, continuing to think about genius in human beings is good press, and for many, good fun.
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But there is one other reason that helps account for our continued fascination with genius at the moment of the genius’s demise: the long and complicated dance of equality, with which the genius has been locked in awkward embrace since birth. The cult of genius emerged in tension with the notion that all human beings are created equal, and it did so at the very moment in history when the notion of equality was on the rise as an organizing principle of society. Genius contested that principle for centuries, and in some ways, it contests it still. Yet equality may finally be having the last laugh, and it was equality’s greatest student who predicted that this would be so. Alexis de Tocqueville
made his name as an observer of democracy in America, as the title of his greatest work suggests. But he was just as much an observer of Europe, and his image of the American republic was colored by his hopes and fears of what Europe might become. Equality, Tocqueville believed, was a relentless force that leveled age-old hierarchies and swept all before it, leaving behind few distinctions with which to take the measure of man. “When there are no more hereditary riches, privileges of rank, and prerogatives of birth,” he wrote, “it becomes clear that what makes the principal difference among the fortunes of men is intelligence.” Some were quicker, others more creative, and still others worked harder to better themselves. Yet, on the horizon of the American republic, extreme differences flattened out. “Scientific and literary genius is as rare as ability is common” in the United States, Tocqueville observed. The country was conspicuous for the absence of minds that towered above the fray, and great writers, scientists, and thinkers played a much smaller role in the American republic than they did in Europe. That was a state of affairs that owed much to the exceptional history of the United States. But although Tocqueville did not rule out the possibility that in the future “some speculative genius” might emerge there, the thrust of his analysis aimed to show that under advanced conditions of democracy and equality, “genius becomes rarer and enlightenment more common.” What in aristocratic societies was concentrated in the exceptional few would be “divided equally among all,” and with tremendous possibilities, unleashing a combined creative ingenuity and capacity for application greater than anything the world had known. Long before the latest avatars of collective intelligence, Tocqueville understood that there was strength in numbers. In a land without geniuses, there would still be plenty of smarts to go around.
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Is this not the image of the United States today, and so, too, of Europe, where equality has moved farther and faster in recent years than in the land in which Tocqueville first read the future long ago? Great disparities continue to exist, of course, and an alarming (and expanding) inequality of wealth in the United States threatens to concentrate its creative capital and squander its human resources in ways that are far from maximally productive. And yet, when viewed historically over the
longue durée
, equality has undoubtedly flexed its muscles. Suspicious of authority of the mind, and wary of the brightest and the best, we bend no knee to greatness. All might be geniuses now; everyone has a genius for something. We have pulled the genius down to size, fitting him and shaping her to human, perhaps all-too-human, dimensions. The distrust
is well earned, and the peoples’ skepticism is useful, serving to protect us from the impulse to raise idols and to bow and scrape before them.

But if to proliferate genius so that the genius is lost in the crowd is an effective strategy against submission, it comes at a cost. Socrates may well have been a threat to the democracy of Athens, but when its citizens voted to convict him, they sullied themselves. And for all the abuse of genius since the presence of the
divinum quiddam
was first detected in the minds of special men, it long kept alive an exhilarating sense of the possibilities of being—and being transcendent—in the world. As Ralph Waldo Emerson acknowledged of “the excess of influence” of great men, their “attractions warp us from our place.” But he also knew that it was natural to believe in them. “We feed on genius,” he said, we need it as sustenance to survive.
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