Philosophers Daniel Kodsi and John Maier write:
The greatest mathematicians, scientists, and writers in history have been unusually smart and creative people. But do great intellectual achievements depend on unusual mental abilities alone? For instance, would Jane Austen still have written the same novels if she had been born in an illiterate society? Well, no – obviously not.
This crushing insight is one of several intertwined morals conveyed in Helen Lewis’s new book, The Genius Myth. Others are that good publicity is useful for cultivating a lasting reputation, that individuals who know a lot about one subject can fail to know a lot about another, that men in positions of authority sometimes abuse their power, and that being talented is not an all-purpose licence to behave like an arsehole. Whole chapters are dedicated to elaborating these, and further, equally profound lessons for the reader’s edification. In illustration, there are some arbitrarily chosen case studies. For instance, one chapter explains at length that the niche theatre director Chris Goode, whose avant-garde plays featured naked young men touching each other, turned out to have engaged in disreputable sexual activities. A concluding chapter develops the startling thesis that Elon Musk is erratic and self-aggrandising. Who knew?
If it sounds like we are being uncharitable to Lewis, let us explain. The Genius Myth, as its title suggests, is an exercise in demythologizing the category genius. Yet it pursues this demythologization while doing nothing to specify the reality that is misrepresented by the myths. Indeed, one of the first things that Lewis says about “genius” is that “its meaning is hard to pin down”. (The first thing she says is that the word “makes [her] uncomfortable”.) The result is a haphazard and disorganized approach, which oscillates unstably between insisting on contemporary platitudes and insinuating fashionable falsehoods.
Now, it is no doubt true that the term “genius” is somewhat vague and subject to shifting standards of application. But it is not so hard to understand as all that. For a working definition of “genius”, one could do worse than consult the OED, which defines it as “an exceptionally talented or intelligent person”. (Lewis herself repeatedly finds ways to do worse, like by explaining “genius” as “the transcendent, the extraordinary, the feathers of the phoenix”, or “the demigod, the super-hero, the shaman”.) Indeed, the OED definition doesn’t seem to be so far from Lewis’s own implicit understanding of “genius” – she explains that at one point she intended to call her book Special People. But if a genius is just an exceptionally talented or brilliant person, then to prevaricate about whether there are geniuses is to prevaricate about whether there are exceptionally talented or intelligent people. Is that a smart thing to do?
Examples may help at this point. Consider: When the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy paid a visit to his ailing colleague Ramanujan in London, he is said to have mentioned offhand that the departing taxi’s registration had been a rather dull number: 1729. “No Hardy”, Ramanujan replied on the spot. “It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.” Or again, of John von Neumann, widely thought by his peers to have the quickest mind of his generation (surpassing Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Edward Teller, and Albert Einstein), Enrico Fermi is said to have told his physicist colleague: “You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can! And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, Herb, so you can see how impressive Johnny is!” Other obviously exceptionally brilliant figures, past and present, include Plato, Euclid, Euler, Gauss, Mozart, Frank Ramsay, Kurt Gödel, Terence Tao, and Peter Scholze.
It is useful to keep such paradigms of extreme intelligence in mind when reading The Genius Myth, because Lewis herself never confronts them openly. She spends considerably longer discussing visual artists like Jackson Pollock and Picasso than mathematicians. In fact, she makes frequent reference to intellectual flyweights, like actors and pop stars, and several times excuses herself for not discussing more athletes. The omission of mathematics could have a variety of explanations – Lewis says in passing that she uses her iPhone calculator to multiply seven by eight – but a simple one is that in the case of the best mathematicians, the awesome, occasionally preternatural, intelligence they possess is simply too hard to deny.
Of course, it is not as if “exceptionally intelligent or talented” is a fully precise description. What exactly does “intelligent” or “talented” mean? Where exactly is the cut-off for being “exceptionally” intelligent or talented? But one does not always, or even often, need a background theory of a phenomenon in order to recognise cases of it. Consider an analogy: a young child may be good at recognising individual dogs without being able to explain what all dogs uniquely have in common. That combination of a recognitional capacity and a theoretical incapacity is typical when it comes to ordinary terms like “genius” and “dog” in natural languages like English. Naturally, people can be wrong about which people are geniuses, just like they can be wrong about which animals are dogs. In neither case does the mere possibility of error suggest the underlying phenomenon is mythical in any interesting way.
One question to which it would be helpful to know Helen Lewis’s answer is whether she holds other words of holistic cognitive assessment in the same low regard that she holds “genius”. Words like “moron”, “idiot” and “imbecile” spring to mind, as do ubiquitous terms like “stupid” and “clever”. It is possible to recognise that someone is an idiot, and correctly call them an “idiot”, without having a fully fleshed out, or perfectly precise, theory of idiocy. But if that’s right, then it remains unclear what is so specially defective about the category genius, or the word “genius”, according to Lewis. In particular, if the problem with genius is, as Lewis puts it, that it is “immune to […] scientific precision”, then countless English words besides “genius” will come out as similarly defective following consistent application of the very same criterion. But such pervasively sceptical conclusions are clearly unwarranted…
Lewis’s characteristic unclarity saves her from outright committing herself to the claim that intelligence has mythical status. Instead, in the least-unstructured first part of the book, she pursues a campaign of guilt by association against the study of genius in particular and the study of intelligence in general. Academics (Francis Galton, Lewis Terman, William Shockley), and by insinuation the academic questions that interested them, are treated as crankish, “obsessive”, “oblivious”, “odd”. Galton, for instance, is disparaged as a man who expected “the world to be orderly and comprehensible – not messy like humans, whom he had trouble understanding”. Though one may feel the temptation to mock historical scientists and researchers, whose theoretical ambitions so far outstripped their means and methods of inquiry, to indulge it too often, as Lewis does, is to risk lapsing into philistinism. For instance, the disciplines of contemporary psychology and cognitive science, barely acknowledged in the book, are clearly committed to rendering “comprehensible”, and imposing some degree of theoretical “order” on, the “messy” data of the human mind. Does Lewis think these modern disciplines are no replacement for the impressionistic discursions of a jobbing journalist?
One irony of Lewis’s refusal to engage seriously with the scientific study of intelligence is that it provides by far the best framework for assimilating exceptional cases to normal ones. Indeed, in the preface to the 2nd edition of his discipline-founding book Hereditary Genius, Francis Galton himself insisted that he intended nothing special by the term “genius”: “There was not the slightest intention on my part to use the word genius in any technical sense, but merely as expressing an ability that was exceptionally high … There is much that is indefinite in the application of the word genius. It is applied to many a youth by his contemporaries, but more rarely by biographers, who do not always agree among themselves.”
A further irony is that in attempting to discredit an entire field of research by the underpowered method of ad hominem attack on the eccentric political agendas and methodological laziness of a handful of academics within it, Lewis enacts exactly the vices she critiques.
The best move is the dictionary point. If genius means an exceptionally talented or intelligent man, then to wonder aloud whether genius exists is to wonder whether exceptional talent exists. That question answers itself. John von Neumann (1903-1957) existed. Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) existed. The 1729 story and Enrico Fermi’s quip about Johnny doing sums ten times faster do the work, because the great mathematicians are the cases no social account can dissolve. Lewis spends her pages on Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and pop stars and skips the mathematicians, and Kodsi and Maier catch her at it. The omission is the tell, and they press it hard.
The dog analogy lands too. A child sorts dogs from cats long before he can say what a dog is. You can know a genius on sight without a theory of genius, and the chance of error does not turn the category into a myth. That part is clean.
Where the review weakens is the place it refuses to look. Lewis runs two claims together, and the reviewers attack the weaker. One claim: exceptional intelligence is real. A second claim: the social label “genius” tracks that trait, and tracks it without bias toward the White, male, and badly behaved. Lewis can grant the first and hammer the second, and her better material does that. The Austen case shows it. The reference books of her day left Jane Austen (1775-1817) out because her life stayed quiet, while the talent sat there on every page. That gap between who gets anointed and who has the gift is Lewis’s firmest ground. Kodsi and Maier flip it. We recognize Austen anyway, they say, so we have independent access to talent. True. But the flip concedes her point. The label and the trait come apart, and the label carries baggage. The publisher’s own summary makes her real thesis plain: the lone gifted man, exempt from the rules, has run his course. That is a claim about a cultural script and the bad behavior it licenses, and the review mostly steps around it.
There is an agenda under the surface. The two authors want to shield the study of intelligence from guilt by association, and a stake in hereditarian psychometrics shapes the whole piece. Their complaint stands on its own terms. Mocking Francis Galton’s (1822-1911) oddities does not refute the field he started. Then they run their own version of the same tactic against Lewis and admit as much at the close while claiming the high ground.
The tone says something. “Who knew?” and “Well duh?” read fast and write easy. Contempt this thick tends to mean the writer stopped hunting for the strongest form of the other side. Some of Lewis’s targets earn it. The cult of genius does excuse cruelty, and she is right about that, which the reviewers grant in one line and drop.
