The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (24 page)

No one in eighteenth-century Edinburgh suspected good and decent Deacon Brodie was behind the wave of robberies until, eventually, the evidence pointing to him was irrefutable. Brodie ran, getting as far as Holland before he was extradited back to Scotland and hanged for his crimes. Hanged, the story goes, on the very type of gallows he invented.

It’s a nice tale, one with a satisfyingly dark and ironic ending. I suspect, though, that Deacon Brodie is more than a historical curiosity, more, even, than the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
But what?

Deacon Brodie, at the very least, helps explain why Edinburgh has been called a “two-faced” city. The Scots, then and still today, are at odds with themselves. On the one hand, they possess a reflexive pessimism, which I witnessed one day when I overheard a couple walking down the street. The Scottish sun was making a cameo appearance, as it does now and then, just to mess with people’s heads.

“Nice day,” said the man.

“Yes,” replied his companion, “and we’ll pay for it!”

For a Scot, no good deed goes unpunished; every nice day comes at a price. Yet they also possess a grudging optimism, a belief that anything is possible, or at least improvable. How else to explain the 1767 decision by Edinburgh’s most revered citizens to entrust the future of their beloved city to a twenty-two-year-old neophyte architect? Then there is Scotty, of
Star Trek
lure. He is an engineer, and therefore naturally cautious.
It can’t be dun, Cap’n,
he says, after Kirk has implored him to squeeze a bit more warp drive out of the
Enterprise
. No, it can’t be done. Then he does it anyway. Very Scottish.

I return to my hotel and hit the “honor bar.” It’s located in the sitting room, a lovely common area with a fireplace, Scottish bric-a-brac, and big leather chairs that invite hours of blessed idleness. The bar is generously stocked with wine and beer and, of course, Scotch. You help yourself, then write down what you imbibed and how much. How nice, I think, how trusting of human nature, as I help myself to another glass of twelve-year-old Macallan. And I honor the honor bar. Mostly. Not until the end of my stay do I notice not one but two covert surveillance cameras trained on the honor bar. Practical genius at its finest.

I pivot to coffee and investigate Scotland’s two faces. Some two hundred years after Adam Smith and David Hume walked Edinburgh’s odorous streets, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg dedicated himself to studying these impossible contradictions that seem to lie at the heart of creativity. He coined a term for it:
Janusian thinking
. It’s named after Janus, the Roman god with two faces, which look in opposite directions. Rothenberg defined Janusian thinking as “actively conceiving two or more opposite or antithetical ideas, images or concepts simultaneously.” Creative people, Rothenberg found, are particularly adept at this. To be clear: Janusian thinking is not about synthesizing two incompatible ideas but living with their incompatibility. If Hamlet had engaged in Janusian thinking, he would never have deliberated over that pesky question. He would have been content to be
and
not to be.

Rothenberg studied major scientific breakthroughs and concluded that most resulted from Janusian thinking. Einstein, for instance, arrived at his general theory of relativity by realizing that someone who jumped off a building would not find any evidence of a gravitational field in his immediate vicinity, yet that very force caused his plummet. Einstein was able to imagine opposite truths coexisting simultaneously—an object that was both in motion and at rest at the same time—a thought that he later called “the happiest in my life.”

Fellow physicist Niels Bohr’s hunch that light is both wave
and
particle is pure Janusian thinking. How can something be two very different
things at the same time? Simply asking that question, and not necessarily answering it, is the first step to a creative breakthrough, Bohr believed. When you do this, thought is not accelerated but suspended, and Bohr speculated that creative breakthroughs are most likely to occur in this state of suspended cognition.

Janusian thinking not only describes creativity but also cultivates it. In one study, psychologists divided participants into two groups. One was “primed” for Janusian thinking by being presented with paradoxical concepts, while the second group was not. Both groups were then given a test designed to measure creative problem solving. The first group, the one primed for Janusian thinking, exhibited more creative thinking.

I wonder if this love of paradox defines not only creative individuals but creative places, too. Enlightenment Scotland was paradox heaven.
We are British and not British. We are a large nation and a small one. We are cocky. We are insecure. We are practical adventurers. Hopeful pessimists.
No wonder it was a Scottish psychiatrist who penned the seminal work
The Divided Self.
This is a nation of divided selves, of Deacon Brodies.

Everywhere I look in Edinburgh, past and present, I keep bumping up against contradictions. For every one conclusion the opposite also holds true. Unlike Niels Bohr, I find this paradox frustrating, not enlightening.

If anyone can help alleviate my suffering, surely it is David Hume—soulful atheist, social introvert, man of ideas and action. I find him, a statue at least, on the Royal Mile, the main thoroughfare of Old Edinburgh, looking pleased, almost angelic, and dressed in ancient-Greek garb. Of course. The Scots admired the Greeks and to this day like to call Edinburgh “the Athens of the North.” (Or as one local wag told me, “Athens was the Edinburgh of the South.”)

Hume, even more than Smith, was the quintessential Scottish genius. Simultaneously strong willed and deeply insecure, gregarious and introverted, he was “modernity’s first great philosopher,” writes historian Arthur Herman.

Hume enrolled at the University of Edinburgh at age twelve—young even by the standards of the day. At first, he studied law, as his family
wished, but the thought of pursuing that profession made him “nauseous,” and he soon realized that he possessed “an unsurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning.” So while his family thought he was studying legal textbooks, he was “secretly devouring” the likes of Cicero and Virgil. Nothing fires the intellect more than forbidden learning.

Hume produced some of his best work while still young. He penned his
Treatise of Human Nature
while still in his twenties. The book was a flop, falling “still born from the press,” as Hume later recalled. The young philosopher persisted, though, as all geniuses do, and soon gained notoriety across Britain and beyond. Today, his
Treatise
is considered one of philosophy’s greatest works.

Hume aimed to understand how we understand. Where do we get knowledge from? After engaging in a series of thought experiments, he reached the then-radical conclusion that all knowledge comes through direct experience—through our senses and only our senses. Hume borrowed Isaac Newton’s experimental method and applied it to the messy world of mankind. Hume used himself as a human laboratory, going several days without food, for instance, to gauge the mind’s reaction to hunger. He was trying to create what he called “the Science of Man.”

This was, he argued, the most important science of all, for how can we begin to understand our world if we don’t understand ourselves? He conceded that was a difficult, if not impossible, objective, since we can never fully step outside ourselves, any more than the camera can photograph itself. Knowledge, he concluded, is not universally true but is “something felt by the mind.”

Hume was a skeptic. He questioned everything, including his own questions. Not surprisingly, he was an unapologetic atheist, a stance that cost him the support of the Church and two professorships but, crucially, not his life.

Hume was a rationalist, but not in the cold, robotic sense of the word. “Indulge your passion for science but let your science be human,” he urged. “Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions.” With those few words, he upturned centuries of philosophical thought. Most
philosophers, dating back to Aristotle, argued that what distinguished man from other animals was his ability to reason, but “Hume quietly pointed out that human beings are not, and never have been, governed by their rational capacities,” writes Herman, the historian. Reason, Hume argued, doesn’t determine
what
we want but only
how
we obtain it.

Hume did all of this upending with a smile, for unlike many of his furrowed-brow colleagues, he found genuine joy in philosophy. As he wrote in a letter to a friend, “Reading and sauntering and lownging [
sic
] and dozing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.” Hume would spend weeks holed up in his study, reading and pondering, but then he would emerge again, “absolutely and necessarily determin’d to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life.” He was a regular in Edinburgh’s taverns and at its many clubs.

Hume was not only a social soul but a restless one as well. For a while he lived in London, where he took perverse pleasure in his outsider status. As he wrote to a friend, “Down here some people hate me because I’m a Whig, some people hate me because I’m an Atheist. Everyone hates me because I’m a Scot.” He also lived in Paris.
Le bon
David, as he became known, frequented the city’s parlor salons, where he jousted with Rousseau and Diderot and other intellectual giants of the day. He even briefly considered becoming a French citizen, but couldn’t bring himself to make the leap and returned to Edinburgh.

There, he reveled in the city’s democratic stew, the way blacksmith and professor shared the same social space, and often the same bottle of wine. Hume believed this social porousness helped drive Scottish genius, for “the same age which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilled weavers and ship-carpenters.”

This is not, Hume believed, mere coincidence, or an act of charity on the part of intellectuals. The philosopher needs the weaver as much as the weaver needs the philosopher. No wonder Adam Smith spent as much time talking to merchants as he did buried in books. He was merely following his friend David Hume’s advice: “Be a philosopher. But, amidst
all your philosophy, be still a man.” I read those words and smile. The wily Scots even converted philosophy into a practical endeavor.

At this latitude, this time of year, mornings are not your friend. The darkness and the chill conspire with your down comforter to immobilize you. On this particular morning I might easily have slept until noon, were it not for the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, mocking me, cajoling me out from under the covers. “The great affair is to move,” the Edinburgh native said.

So I move. First to the shower then to breakfast then, boldly, in the spirit of adventurers through the ages, outside. I join a walking path that runs along the city’s main canal. It’s pleasant and, I’m told, stretches all the way to Glasgow, connecting these antithetical cities in a perfectly Janusian relationship. I am not alone. Others are heeding Stevenson’s advice; they are walking and running and cycling, and doing so in attire—T-shirts and shorts—that, to my non-Scottish mind, seems wholly inappropriate given the biting cold.

The word
scrappy
springs to mind. Yes, that is what the Scots are. They are scrappy. I had not previously associated the word with creative genius, but perhaps I should. As I pick up my pace in a futile attempt to stave off hypothermia, it dawns on me how that word,
scrappy
, defines so many of the people and places I’ve encountered during my journey. Athens rebounding after its sack by the Persians. Florence bouncing back from the plague. Su Tungpo recovering from his two exiles and going on to write some of his most exquisite poetry.
Scrappy
, I decide, deserves a better connotation.
Scrappy
is not mere pluck or stubborn persistence. Scrappy people are resourceful, determined, creative. Scrappy is good.

“It’s true,” says Alex Renton, a local journalist and a friend of a friend. “We are a scrappy people.”

He tells me this over a pint at a little tavern called Kay’s. It took some work to find, hidden as it is down an alley. The rotund bartender has the biggest walrus mustache I’ve ever seen, including on actual walruses. I tell him about my quixotic search for places of genius, and he mentions, without a hint of faux erudition, that he is reading a biography of David
Hume. All of this transpires while he simultaneously, and expertly, pours two pints of ale.

Alex and I find two open stools and quickly appropriate them.

“We are the most myth-ridden country in the bloody world,” he proclaims, apropos of nothing, as we order another round from the Walrus. I couldn’t help but notice that Alex said “myth-ridden” as if it were a good thing. What does he mean?

“The Scots of the Enlightenment believed in their own myths,” he says. “Otherwise, there would have been no Enlightenment.”

Now, on the face of it, that sounds delusional. Myths, as we define them today, are falsehoods, misguided beliefs. Lies. They are irrational and to be avoided at all costs. However, another definition of myth, one Joseph Campbell spent a lifetime elucidating, says myths define us. Myths inspire us. Myths are good. Without myths, we wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning, let alone create anything worthwhile. The app designer tinkering in his garage in Silicon Valley, the unpublished writer toiling away in her tiny Brooklyn apartment, are driven by the myth of the lone genius. As we’ve seen, it isn’t true, but it is useful.

I ask Alex about another myth of genius—the notion that big things happen in big places. They do not; if anything, genius clings to the small. Ancient Athens had a population of fewer than one hundred thousand people. Florence was even smaller, and Edinburgh smaller still. Yet these cities spawned so much greatness, outshining much larger rivals. How can this be?