So You Want to Be a Genius
Let’s say there’s another pandemic. This time, a lethal disease spreads through contact with other people’s fecal matter. Precision toilet cleaning becomes a matter of life and death. In the wake of this pandemic, an aptitude test—call it the T.I.Q.—is developed to measure one’s ability to rotate brushes three-dimensionally inside holes. Kids who score highly are trained for the Toilet-Cleaning Olympiad, meant to keep the citizenry battle-ready and internationally competitive. Eventually, the world crowns a toilet-cleaning champion—not surprisingly, someone with an off-the-charts T.I.Q. This person is the very best at a skill that is crucial for the survival of humanity. Are they a genius?
The question is hard to answer because our definition of genius is so inconsistent. Generally, we want geniuses to be good with their minds rather than with their hands, but we can make an exception for a surgeon or a chef. We expect them to discover new realms of knowledge; alternatively, they can be very good at an automatable skill like chess. Their talent should be incomprehensible to the masses, unless they’re a politician. We have recognized genius in the physical mastery of a bathroom staple like marble (Bernini) and even in an innovation involving a toilet (Duchamp). So why not in this champion cleaner? Is the difference simply that only one of these fields is associated with working-class, racialized women?
In “The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea” (Thesis), Helen Lewis, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argues that what we call genius depends on the norms of a given period, “on what our society values, and what it is prepared to tolerate.” Lewis does not take a hard stance against the very existence of genius; she grants that Shakespeare might have been one. Her issue is more with the license given to genius, and the resulting admiration of traits that are not all that admirable. The nineteenth-century Romantics, for example, liked their geniuses boyish, naughty, in the late stages of tuberculosis, and, best of all, dead by suicide. They believed that genius was a natural, childlike quality, and that too much education could corrupt an otherwise promising case.
A competing theory of genius was advanced by an early statistician named Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton studied a set of English judges and tallied their “eminent” relations, doing the same with members of the clergy and professors of classics at Cambridge University. He concluded that genius ran in families, that it was more likely to be found in Europeans than in the “lower races,” and, as Lewis puts it, “that although genius was carried in the female line, it did not show up in women.” (Galton published these conclusions in 1869, the same year that a small group of British women were, for the first time, allowed to take a university entrance exam.) Despite the obvious silliness of his methodology, which, among other issues, does not separate the advantages of nepotism from those of talent, Galton’s theories remain influential; students taking the modern MCAT, more than half of whom are women, are expected to be familiar with his work.
Galton wanted to rebrand genius as the picture of respectability and health. He took special issue with the Romantic conception of inspiration, which harked “perilously near to the voices heard by the insane”—a particular problem for him because insanity appeared also in the “lower races.” Today, we’ve reached a compromise on the idealization of madness: all kinds of people can hear voices, but it’s a sign of genius only among those who are unlikely to be shot by the police during a psychotic episode. The novelist Ottessa Moshfegh claims to take dictation from her narrators: “I just write down what the voice has to say.” John Nash, a Nobel Prize-winning creator of game theory who was forcibly hospitalized for schizophrenia, once told a colleague, “The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”
If mental illness is compatible with the modern-day myth of genius, it is often not compatible with getting good work done. Nash, who wrote in an essay on the occasion of his Nobel Prize that his return to apparent rationality was “not entirely a matter of joy,” nevertheless dismissed his twenty-five years of “partially deluded thought” as a “gap period” from scientific productivity. The artist Karen Green, who was married to David Foster Wallace when he died by suicide, has spoken against the idea that Wallace’s depression was helpful to his art. “People don’t understand how ill he was,” she told a reporter. “It was a monster that just ate him up. And at that point everything was secondary to the illness. Not just writing. Everything else: food, love, shelter.” Perhaps, like the Romantics, we want geniuses to kill themselves. (Think of the Twenty-seven Club.) If we admire them, we can read it as a final act of self-mastery. If we resent them, we are reassured that those who fly so close to the sun will see their wings melt.
Lewis calls this the “deficit model of genius,” the possibly unconscious desire for the “precious gift” to extract a “human price.” Recent books, as varied as Benjamin Labatut’s feverish portrayal of physicists in “When We Cease to Understand the World” and Michael Lewis’s indulgent tale of the tech fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried in “Going Infinite,” continue to gild the portrait of the flawed white-boy wonder—young, arrogant, lonely, careless, sensitive, misunderstood, and frequently, if forgivably, cruel. We think of these defects as the products of intense specialization. John Watson once had to explain to Sherlock Holmes that the Earth revolves around the sun, a fact Holmes then insisted he would forget, so as not to clutter his mind with useless trivia. Bankman-Fried famously opined that all books should instead have been six-paragraph blog posts.
Because geniuses tend not to specialize in things like picking up after themselves, the human price is often paid by a long-suffering partner-secretary—wifely figures like Véra Nabokov, Sophia Tolstoy, and Alice B. Toklas, or the occasional husband like Leonard Woolf. Albert Einstein once told his cousin, who was also his mistress, that he treated his wife, Mileva Marić, “as an employee whom I cannot fire.” Several years before he published his general theory of relativity, he wrote a letter to Marić:
In 1996, this letter was part of a bundle that sold at a Christie’s auction for almost nine hundred thousand dollars. The demand for the ephemera of genius might be viewed as an update on the medieval crowds who flocked to the (various) churches that claimed to have the foreskin of Christ. Both pursuits satisfy our craving for signs of humanity in a being thought to be divine. If we have long granted humanlike immortals the license to do bad things—Zeus, for example, was a sort of Harvey Weinstein of Olympus—Lewis argues that we wrongly extend the same license to apparently godlike mortals. The goal of her book, she writes, is to “demolish” the idea that some people are members of a “special and superior class.”
The history of “scientific genius studies” is, to a large extent, the history of race science. Galton—who, among his other contributions, coined the word “eugenics”—was a pioneer of both, and genius hunters ever since have attempted to classify racial groups by intelligence. The psychologist Lewis Terman, who popularized I.Q. tests in the United States, asserted that people of “sub-normal intelligence” were to be found “with extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes.” His seminal Genetic Studies of Genius, which sought to identify future geniuses by testing the I.Q.s of California children, undersampled these communities and, according to one critique, missed an estimated twenty-four to forty per cent of the kids who might have qualified.
Among the children whom Terman did test but who were determined to have insufficiently high I.Q.s were two boys who would go on to win Nobel Prizes in Physics. In “The Genius Myth,” Lewis dedicates a chapter to one of them, William Shockley, who is known for his work on the transistor, a semiconductor used in most modern electronics. Shockley was a self-promoter and a jerk; he once asked a house guest, “What law of nature have you discovered?” By middle age, he had become almost impossible to work with. When he started his own company, a group of his employees mutinied—some went on to found Intel—and Shockley turned to less scientific pursuits. He claimed that there was a direct relationship between a person’s percentage of “Caucasian ancestry” and their I.Q. He advocated for the sterilization of those with low I.Q.s. He donated to a sperm bank for Nobel laureates and other luminaries, even as he publicly complained that his children had failed to live up to his intellectual standards. (It was their mother, he said, who hadn’t been smart enough.) By the time he died, in 1989, Shockley was largely viewed as a crank, a second act common enough among his fellow-laureates that it has been given a name: Nobelitis.
