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“The word genius makes me uncomfortable,” confesses journalist Helen Lewis in this witty and timely critique of a perennially problematic concept. Her ambivalence is not surprising in a world in which the entrepreneur Elon Musk is, as she puts it, “one of the leading candidates for our modern idea of a genius”. He can’t lay claim to a creative breakthrough such as inventing the world wide web. So how did he get to be more of a “genius” in the popular imagination than Tim Berners-Lee?
The answer, Lewis explains, is that Musk brilliantly “performs the cultural role of genius”, not least by affronting societal norms. As she puts it in one of her funnier asides, “Elon Musk has more than a dozen children, with names like X EA A-Xii and Exa Dark Siderael. Tim Berners-Lee’s children are called Alice and Ben.”
By flamboyantly embodying the stereotype of the disrupter genius, Musk draws on an idea with a long cultural history and a dark underbelly. Genius theory has been used in the past to justify eugenics, to exclude people on the basis of race or gender, and to excuse moral failings.
Lewis isn’t, by the way, out to debunk the value of Shakespeare’s plays, Newton’s Principia or Picasso’s paintings. She doesn’t deny that some individuals have created world-changing work. Her beef is with the myth of the lone genius and the unspoken assumption that genius means that some people are innately better than others.
For the Romans and Greeks, genius was something you had: a tutelary deity outside yourself. Only in the Romantic period did the notion that you could be a genius take off — although it had been brewing for a while. In Renaissance Italy, art had previously been seen as a workshop-based craft until Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550) lent mystique and status to its author’s own profession by singling out the personal oddities of Michelangelo and Leonardo to explain their brilliance.
Although Lewis worries that genius is a “right-wing” concept today, it was originally a democratic idea, staking the claims of lower-born talent over noble birth in traditionally stratified societies. The irony is that the notion of geniuses as “nature’s elect” had, by the 19th century, brought the idea of breeding back into the equation in works such as Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius. The rise of IQ testing followed, as pseudoscience attempted to subject genius to quantification.
Galton was peculiarly myopic when it came to the role of cultural environment (and nepotism) in creating high-achieving individuals. Another Victorian researcher thought you could quantify genius by using a ruler to measure entries in a biographical dictionary of famous people, with the longest meaning best. On that basis, Jane Austen, who spent her life in uneventful genteel retirement, wouldn’t make the grade. Later, Lewis Terman, author of Genetic Studies of Genius, recruited “gifted” children for a research study in California. He rejected two future Nobel Prize-winners due to deficient IQ scores.
Helen Lewis is not the first to discredit such ideas. When asked what his IQ was, Stephen Hawking replied, “I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers”.
But this book offers new texture to the story. Drawing on reception studies and the sociology of science, Lewis wants us to see genius as a cultural rather than individual phenomenon — both in terms of where exceptional creativity comes from and in terms of how “geniuses” get iconised. She’s fascinated by what Brian Eno dubbed the “scenius”: the contextual web of contacts and ideas in which creative epiphanies happen. Tolstoy, for example, could not have written War and Peace without the efforts of his wife Sophia (also known as Sonya). Women, unsurprisingly, get short shrift in the history of genius, whether as collaborators or in their own right.
Tim Berners-Lee has ascribed his own tech breakthrough to the “scenius”: “Most of the technology involved in the web . . . had been designed already. I just had to put them together.” In his own day, Shakespeare was a team player, a first among equals, described as a “friend and fellow worker” by the editors of the First Folio. He was canonised as “the Bard” only in the 18th century when the actor David Garrick put on his highly publicised Shakespeare festival. The role of PR in establishing the specialness of genius should not be underestimated.
Other issues touched on in this wide-ranging book include the perceived closeness of genius to madness and the role of luck and timing. Lewis’s enthusiasm can lead to overly sweeping statements, such as “the Industrial Revolution led to capitalism”. But her voice, which reflects her experience as a journalist and podcaster, is fresh and unpretentious: more conversational and raggedy than the smooth rhetorical sleight-of-hand that once made Malcolm Gladwell — who posed some of the same questions in Outliers — into a guru.
Lewis doesn’t pretend to provide a catch-all thesis. She admits there are things she doesn’t know and conundrums she can’t solve. If we were minded to explore her own “scenius”, we could put her self-deprecatory voice (along perhaps with Berners-Lee’s gentlemanly modesty) down to a certain sort of Englishness. Yet her approach has the honesty of reflecting that genius, whatever it is, is dependent on such a vast number of human variables that it remains resistant to definition and impossible to predict.
The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers by Helen Lewis, Jonathan Cape £22/Thesis Books $30, 352 pages
Lucasta Miller is the author of ‘Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph’
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