The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (28 page)

No, says Broadie. That old accusation—usually leveled by certain troublemakers residing south of Hadrian’s Wall—is not only unfair but also untrue.

“Really? How’s that?”

“They didn’t drink Scotch. They drank claret,” he says, as if that made all the difference. Realizing that I find this argument less than convincing, he adds, “Besides, they drank for practical reasons.”

Practical drinking? This should be interesting. Do tell.

“The water supply wasn’t to be trusted. You’d live longer if you drank claret.”

So the Scots,
Homo practicus
, drank boatloads of claret. Merchants drank while conducting business. Judges drank, too, often arriving for their first trial of the day thoroughly soused. At dinner parties, guests were labeled either a two- or three-bottle man, depending on how much wine they were capable of consuming. (Presumably, one-bottle men weren’t invited to dinner parties.)

The Scots may have been drunk but they were no fools. Like their heroes, the ancient Greeks, they knew that a little bit of alcohol makes you more creative but a lot makes you fall down. So, like the Greeks, they drank a diluted wine, much weaker than ours today. Besides, Broadie tells me, at these gatherings drinking was merely a detour, albeit a pleasant one, en route to the true destination.

“Which was what?” I ask.

“Mutual cerebral stimulation.”

I pause mid-fusilli, intrigued, and more than a little impressed. In a mere three words, Broadie’s phrase conveys both erudition and kinkiness. A winning and all-too-rare combination, in my book.

“What exactly did this mutual cerebral stimulation entail?”

“Well, you’ve got people striking sparks off of each other. One person makes a comment, say a businessman, and then someone from a very different field adds to that, takes it in an entirely different direction.”

Pondering this, while simultaneously spearing a stray fusillo, two things come to mind. First, that Broadie and I are not only discussing mutual cerebral stimulation but are
at this very moment
engaging in it. Very meta. The second epiphany is that Edinburgh’s golden age—indeed
every
golden age—was interdisciplinary, and all creative breakthroughs the result of what Arthur Koestler calls “mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines.” Take James Hutton. Before devoting himself to geology, he studied medicine. His specialty was the circulatory system. He would later apply its principles to a much larger circulatory system: the earth. Again, it’s not knowledge or intelligence that makes the genius but, rather, an ability to connect seemingly disparate strands of thought. “Moral philosophers” such as Hume and Smith did this regularly, ranging over a huge swath of intellectual territory: international relations, history, religion, aesthetics, political economy, marriage and the family, ethics—disciplines that, today, hardly talk to one another, and when they do, it’s not with their indoor voices.

The geniuses of Edinburgh had no patience for idle banter, Broadie tells me. “We’re not talking about conversation as a form of entertainment. We’re talking about conversation as the piling up of premises leading to a conclusion. We’re talking about conversation that takes an issue forward, conversation as a way of getting somewhere.”

“But you don’t necessarily know what that destination is, do you?”

“No, you don’t. You have to be willing to live with a certain degree of uncertainty. Picasso was asked if he knew what a painting was going to look like when he started it, and he said, ‘No, of course not. If I knew, I wouldn’t bother doing it.’ ”

Studies have found that creative people have an especially high tolerance for ambiguity. I suspect this holds true for places of genius as well. Cities such as Athens and Florence and Edinburgh created atmospheres that accepted, and even celebrated, ambiguity.

I am no longer in Glasgow, at least my mind is not. It’s back in California, in Dean Simonton’s cramped office, with the classical music playing softly in the background, as he tells me about something called blind variation and selective retention. It’s a theory of creativity that Simonton has been developing for the past twenty-five years, and it speaks directly to the geniuses of Edinburgh. Creative genius, Simonton believes, involves “superfluidity and backtracking.” Superfluidity is the willingness to pursue hunches that might well turn out to be dead ends. Backtracking is when you return to these supposed dead ends and give them a second look. Geniuses, as we’ve seen, don’t have a higher batting average than the rest of us; if anything, they miss more often, but—and this is key—they are able to recall exactly where they missed and why. Psychologists call these markers “failure indices.” They’re like mental bookmarks, and geniuses collect them voraciously and methodically.

“Be careful,” Broadie says sharply, snapping me back to the present. For a second I think my napkin might be on fire, or worse, but then I realize he is speaking metaphorically. I need to be careful not to confuse the jovial atmosphere of the clubs for docility. “If you had an idea and it was complete rubbish, it would be destroyed. Utterly destroyed,” he says, harpooning a strand of linguine as if to underscore his point.

By engaging in this sort of intellectual jousting “we find out not only what others think of our ideas but what we think of them as well,” he says. People react to our ideas and we react to their reaction. “They disprove and I improve.” Flyting, I realize, is more than a rough sport; it is how the Scots sharpened their ideas.

These intellectual fireworks ignited not only in the tavern and the clubhouse but also, surprisingly, the classroom. As I saw in Florence, formal education and creativity have little to do with each other. If anything, the straitjacket of a curriculum tends to bind the imagination.

Edinburgh was different. The lecture halls were not suffocating but
inspiring. Why? What was it about Scottish universities that made them genius factories and not, as I’ve seen in so many other places, creativity killers?

Perhaps, I wonder aloud, they excelled at imparting knowledge?

Yes, up to a point, says Broadie. But knowledge is not the same as genius and, if anything, impedes it. The geniuses we most admire today were not necessarily the most knowledgeable in their fields. Einstein, for instance, knew less physics than many of his contemporaries. Einstein wasn’t a know-it-all. He was a see-it-all. If creative genius is characterized by the ability to make unexpected and important connections, then clearly breadth, not depth, of knowledge is what matters.

Another way Scottish universities excelled was that the learning flowed in two directions, not only from professor to student but also from student to professor. It was a more formalized and broad-based version of what took place in Verrocchio’s workshop. Scottish professors viewed the lecture hall not only as a cash cow (they worked on commission; the more students they attracted to their lectures, the more money they earned) but also as a laboratory. There they test-flew their latest wacky idea. Adam Smith first presented his seminal
Wealth of Nations
as a series of lectures to his students. Their average age? Fourteen.

As we order a couple of espressos—a practical decision, designed to counterbalance all that wine—it dawns on me that these two threads of the Scottish Enlightenment, its dual emphasis on improvement and sociability, are connected. All that socializing, all that clubbing—and, yes, all that drinking—had a practical aim: improvement.

I ask Broadie my time-travel question. If he suddenly found himself in the Scotland of 1780, whom would he want to share a glass of claret with? I’m expecting the obvious answer—Adam Smith—but Broadie, in true Scottish fashion, surprises me.

“Adam Ferguson.”

Ferguson, arguably the father of sociology, was every bit as brilliant as Smith and Hume. He famously summed up the bittersweet days in which he lived, in which we all live: “Each age hath its sufferings, and its consolations.” Ferguson was particularly attuned to the wheels of fate, for
he was an ordained minister, a fact which points me in a totally new, and unexpected, direction.

I’m walking along the Royal Mile one day, feeling pleased with my progress, when I spot a church. Called St. Giles, it is impressive with its crown-shaped spire, elegant carvings, intricate stained glass windows, and ceilings that stretch heavenward. It is, though, a church, and in Europe churches are nearly as common as pubs, though if it’s elbow room you crave, the church, not the pub, is your best bet. These days, most Europeans have no use for religion.

Usually, neither would someone such as me, hot on the scent of creative genius. In the places I’ve visited so far, religion had little to do with the flowering of genius. If anything, the religious institutions tended to squelch innovation. This isn’t surprising. A basic tension existed. The Church (or mosque or synagogue) was the keeper of tradition; creativity, at least in the Western formulation, represents a break with tradition. It’s a recipe for conflict.

Sometimes, the most religion can do is get out of the way. That is what the Catholic Church did, at least partially, during the Renaissance. In Hangzhou, religion was a loose affair, flexible enough to allow for experimentation and “strange doctrines.” Before the advent of Islam, the Arab peoples constituted a cultural backwater. With the exception of poetry, they contributed virtually nothing to world civilization, unlike their neighbors—the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Persians. Islam changed all that. Shortly after its advent, the Arabs excelled in fields from astronomy to medicine to philosophy. The Muslim golden age stretched from Morocco to Persia and spanned many centuries.

Likewise, the Scottish Presbyterian Church, known as the Kirk, played a major, albeit unintentional role in the Enlightenment. To tell this tale, we need to take a giant step back, to the beginning.

In the beginning, there was the Word. The Word was good, but hardly anyone could read the Word, or
any
word. This was frustrating for all. Being illiterate in the eighteenth century was like having a dial-up
connection in the twenty-first. You’re awash in a sea of information, but little reaches you, and what does takes a long time to download.

The Scottish Church knew it needed to do something so it launched a major literacy campaign. This succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Within a century, nearly every parish had a school. Suddenly, Scotland, the poorest nation in Western Europe, boasted the highest literacy rate in the world. People could now read the Word. So far, so good.

What the Church didn’t count on, though, was that people could also read other words. This is how new technologies work. Once unleashed, they can’t be contained. The Church teaches people to read so they can access the Bible, and next thing you know everyone’s reading Milton and Dante. A group of nerdy scientists concoct a computer network so they can share technical data, and next thing you know you’re buying underwear online.

The Scots, like the Florentines, fell in love with books but with a significant difference. By now, Gutenberg’s printing press was in widespread use. Books were no longer luxury items. Ordinary people could afford them, but these ordinary people didn’t read ordinary books. Their taste was considerably more erudite. David Hume’s six-volume
History of England
, hardly light reading, was a huge bestseller in Scotland.

How did Scottish Church officials react to this wave of secular reading? They allowed it to crest, and a few ministers jumped in. Not only Adam Ferguson, but also men such as John Home, another minister, who wrote the most popular play of the day. A new kind of genius, simultaneously secular and religious, had blossomed in the hard brown soil of Scotland.

On my final morning in Edinburgh, I go for one last walk along the canal. It’s a mostly overcast day or, as the Scots call it, sunny. I know it won’t last. The rain is coming, and the wind, and God knows what else. Nothing lasts. That holds true everywhere, but it seems truer, is felt more acutely, here in Scotland. As I walk, pulling my jacket collar up against my face, I am reminded of how, in Athens, this fleeting nature of life stoked genius.
It makes sense. We are at our most creative when confronted with constraints, and time is the ultimate constraint.

The clever Scots, though, devised a work-around for this, too. David Hume, articulating a school of philosophy known as empiricism, famously said that it is a mistake to assume that all men
must
die just because until now all men
have
died. Indeed, when his friend Adam Smith lay on his deathbed, in 1790, he was heard murmuring to those gathered at his side, “I believe we must adjourn this meeting to another place.”

So, in an odd way, they did. The Scottish Enlightenment never really ended. It merely relocated. As I said, Scottish ideas reached many distant shores, including the young United States. Nowhere did Scottish ideas flower more magnificently and unexpectedly, though, than on the Indian subcontinent, in a teeming, malarial city that, for a while, lit up the world.