‘Genius' is a dangerously misused word
For several centuries, the word 'celebrity' meant fame. A couple of hundred years ago, it acquired a secondary meaning of a person overendowed with that quality, and this has now largely driven out the previous usage. In parallel, the same journey has been travelled by 'genius'. Once an essence that attached to works or deeds, it now also refers to people – celebrities of accomplishment, no field too trivial. Helen Lewis teases out the consequences of this shift and makes a modest plea for its reversal.
Her indictment of the genius myth – the idea that a small cadre of special people are fundamentally more gifted than their peers – is that it is not only corrosive and unhelpful, but also inaccurate. Genius, she argues, is fundamentally immeasurable; it is better understood as residing not in individuals but in teams or milieux. It is used to license terrible behaviour in those awarded the title; it appears inevitable in retrospect but in prospect is highly contingent; it is a temptation to ultracrepidarianism. Above all, genius is a misleading schema – a seductive, ready-made, familiar pattern we can use to make sense of the world.
Lewis takes a long journey through the history of IQ testing – from Francis Galton's eugenicist championing of hereditary genius, to Louis Terman's longitudinal studies, to Mensa, and on to the increasingly recondite and fissiparous world of ultra-high IQ societies. IQ exists in a curious apposition to genius, as, arguably, a necessary-but-not-sufficient component – but one that is more easily measurable. This history is littered with fraud, including Cyril Burt's suspiciously perfect, probably invented data and Hans Eysenck's questionable studies.
Some of Lewis's criticisms of the industry are inarguable. The widely used tests have cultural biases baked into their terminology – 'savages' in a questionnaire that dates back only as far as 1993 – and patriarchal assumptions underlying questions that depend on identifying surnames or habits of dress. But she also complains that 'the test selects heavily for speed', even though on the face of it this feels entirely reasonable. Her real complaint is that high general intelligence is used as if it were interchangeable with genius – but delivering acts of genius also takes application and patience.
In the second half of the book, Lewis dives deeper into the genius schema and the ways in which it is often used to explain or to excuse behaviour ranging from poor to criminal. Tolstoy, for example, exploited his wife Sofia; Lee Krasner struggled to escape the shadow of Jackson Pollock; Gertude Stein 'stole her partner's voice' in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and used it to praise herself. 'When you admire an artwork or a scientific invention,' Lewis asks, 'what duty do you owe to those harmed in its production?' She does not quite stay for an answer, though a chapter on the avant-garde theatre director and serial abuser Chris Goode, and the mental contortions employed by his collaborators to ignore the people harmed in his productions – and then, after his suicide, occlude the historical record – sharpens that question.
People who are hailed as geniuses find that their words on any subject, however unrelated, somehow magically carry extra weight. At a trivial level, this is why social media is full of greetings-card sentiments misattributed to Einstein or Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln. Lewis identifies a few special cases of this. There is the seemingly irresistible pull towards race science among the high-IQ. There is the lure to the overconfident of posing as a rebel disrupting consensus paradigms (as during Covid, passim), which is only intensified by the fact that sometimes these rebels are correct. And there is the read-across from qualification in one field to other unconnected ones. Lewis makes no mention of Jordan Peterson, but she does of Elon Musk, whose achievements are duly acknowledged even as his idiosyncrasies are mocked.
Unhappy the land that has need of geniuses, as Brecht might have said. But lands that do not wish to stagnate do genuinely have need of genius – at least, of the instances of scientific and technological genius that lead to growth. So finding the best path to steer is important. A lot of the problems become clearer if we compare 'genius' with its lower wattage cousin 'talent'. No one would claim that talent does not exist, or deny that different people have different talents. You can test pretty reliably for talent. Equally, talent is very clearly domain-specific and non-fungible. Being a talented newspaper columnist, for example, does not make you a talented fighter pilot. The contributions of others to creating contexts where talent can flourish are obvious and uncontested. Talent offers no immunity. Organisations, and indeed nations, if they want to be successful, will have strategies for recruiting and developing and retaining the specific talent they need, whereas a 'genius strategy' would be nonsensical (except for 'key man risk'). If we thought more about talent, perhaps we could benefit from genius without having to pay obeisance to geniuses.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The National
2 days ago
- The National
McScenius: Let's put brains together to bring about a smarter Scotland
Those emeritus professors of snark, Steely Dan, put one aspect of the genius myth very well. Once you declare your geniushood, all the rest of your behaviours – however cranky or cruel – come to be justified. As Helen Lewis writes in her funny, combative new book, The Genius Myth, we have plenty of current examples of this. Most notable at present is Donald Trump, declaring himself a 'pretty stable genius', while his conversational 'weave' baffles all who hear it. Trump then appoints Elon Musk as a 'pretty high-IQ individual', on the basis of his tech business success. Yet he departs from his Doge post in ignominy, leaving a trail of administrative destruction behind him. READ MORE: Owen Jones: Opposing Israeli violence is 'extremist'? The world's upside down As Musk advances both on our brains with neuro-filaments, and on the starry skies with satellites and Mars ships, the temptation is to say: let us be protected from such 'high-IQ geniuses'. Lewis lays out the historical seeds of what she regards as a 'dangerous' idea. Originally and classically, genius was visited upon us, a bolt of insight from a higher realm. It became individualised from the Renaissance onwards. Leonardo da Vinci was the original 'scatter-brained polymath' archetype of genius. The Romantics liked their geniuses 'boyish, naughty, in the late stages of tuberculosis and, best of all, dead by suicide', as The New Yorker review puts it. Geniuses were also natural and child-like; and out of that fragility, we assume their 'precious gift' extracts a 'terrible price'. This archetype also excuses behaviours like 'alcoholism, family abandonment, unfaithfulness, abuse, weirdness, failure to take responsibility'. The shit-posting, ketamine-gobbling, games-obsessive, promiscuously-parenting Musk is all too exemplary of these cliches of genius. To top it off, Victorian and early 20th-century eugenicists like Francis Galton and Hans Eysenck believed they could measure genius, by using tests to identify a person's 'intelligence quotient' (IQ). Lewis has grim fun with Nobelists like William Shockley, who got a Nobel for inventing the transistor, but then descended into arguing that 'caucasians' had higher IQs. Shockley even tried to set up a sperm bank for Nobelists (it's noteworthy he didn't consider an egg bank), and advocated for the eradication of lower-IQ people. Great delight is taken by Lewis in pointing out that Shockley came to his world-changing transistor idea while working at Bell Labs. This was an 'alchemical space of collective achievement', a set of 'ripe social conditions constructed by previous breakthroughs'. That is, Bell Labs was a place of 'scenius' (using Brian Eno's term for a fertile milieu of talents and experiments). It's out of these scenes that superhuman acts of 'genius' might occur. Lewis admits that this sociological explanation is deeply unsatisfying for most people. READ MORE: Scotland wants no part in further dangerous nuclear experiments 'We find it intuitively easy to understand human-sized stories, where someone does something,' Lewis says in a recent interview. 'Our brains crave stories with protagonists and don't want mushy explanations that involve complex social forces.' I accept this, as well as Lewis's injunction that ascribing genius 'says as much about us as it says about them'. The educationalist Howard Gardner, in his 1997 book Extraordinary Minds, emphasised how great innovators need a coherent field around them, in order that their novel moves make sense. Picasso's paintings, like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or Guernica, shake up traditions of portraiture or landscape. Joyce's Ulysses, or Woolf's To The Lighthouse, have the great 19th-century novels around them to trouble and unravel. It's even clearer in music. I wouldn't hesitate to call John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder or Prince 'geniuses' of pop and jazz music. I also wouldn't deny that they came to their moments of blinding newness from imbibing and inhabiting long-standing traditions. Coltrane was trained in barroom blues and big bands. Wonder came from the gospel tradition, as well as passing through the Motown hit factory. Prince drank from all those wells self-consciously throughout his musical life, giving himself an enormous toolbox to use. However, I still feel that genius – even if it is a 'lightning strike' upon individuals, already thriving in 'fertile conditions', as Lewis concludes – is something that extraordinary minds can and do perform. The thrill is when separate domains are conjoined, in ways unimaginable before the act of genius, to produce a new domain – one that triggers a cascade of fresh activity. There are two Scottish geniuses who exemplify this. Firstly, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, of whom Einstein said 'the special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell's equations'. Maxwell had a profound ability to see analogies between different areas of science and mathematics. His crowning achievement – Maxwell's equations – unified electricity, magnetism and optics into a single theoretical framework. This synthesis anticipated Einstein's later unifications (of spacetime and mass-energy), establishing the basis of modern field theory and quantum electrodynamics. But it's Maxwell's conceptual leaping across domains that remains awesome. In literature, this reminds me of another I would call 'genius', novelist and artist Alasdair Gray. The domains Gray effortlessly bridges is fictional prose and figurative illustration. His 1981 masterpiece Lanark, illustrated and fashioned by Gray as an object, also connects wildly different literary domains – angst-ridden realism, dystopian science-fiction, the end of the novel's narrative placed at the beginning. Gray tangles up the frames of causality, in many of his novels, just as Maxwell challenged mechanistic visions of physics. The thrill of Gray's genius is felt when you go through the original novel of Poor Things (1991). Its Frankensteinian tale of self-creation is richly illustrated throughout. It feels like a wholly different historical world. I'm not so sure of Maxwell's milieu. But one would have to accept that Gray was partly produced by the 'scenius' of the second Scottish Literary Renaissance – embedded in the bohemias of Glasgow and Edinburgh, embarking on groups and magazines with James Kelman, Janice Galloway, Liz Lochhead, Philip Hobsbaum and many others. So is one implication of Lewis's social explanation of 'genius' that such hot-beds can be fomented and prepared? Not so much the 'genius bars' of an Apple showroom, but the bars and 'third places' in which flashes of genius might occur? Can these be nurtured, even planned? If domain-crossing is a fundamental process leading to genius-like activity, then one would have to say, in Scotland, the buildings and ambitions to support it are moving into place. I was honoured to accept an invitation to become an associate at the Edinburgh Futures Institute earlier this year, because I could see in the edifice (and its research prospectus) that domain-crossing is an expectation, not an exception. READ MORE: Interim head appointed at university after damning report into financial crisis But in Dundee and Glasgow universities, there are also 'advanced studies' centres. All of them look at major challenges and megatrends – around AI, health, urban development – and declare their intent to rub together many different talents and specialisms, in pursuit of lasting solutions. So there's your 'McScenius' – but of course there can always be more of it. For example, is there enough traffic between the universe-building taking place in Dundee's games sector, and the massive computations – now to be even greater with the supercomputer recommission – operating in Edinburgh? What worlds could we be virtually simulating, in order to help repair the actual world? Another example: will the tumult around community power – whether land ownership, renewable energy generation, ecological lifestyles – compel innovations in democracy and organisation, supported by radical tech? And if so, what Hume- or Smith-like Second Enlightenment minds might survey this, and elaborate new models of progress and development from it? There's doubtless many other zones like this in Scottish life. And it's as important to identify and foment them, right where we are now – when proximity and engagement are vital. An independent Scotland should be the ideal framework for such a culture of immanent, everyday genius. But we shouldn't be put off from pursuing a Scottish 'scenius' by political or constitutional log-jams. It may be that we have an answer to the Dan. And that, thanks to Helen Lewis's excellent provocation, we do know what we mean by 'genius'.
Metro
3 days ago
- Metro
'I'm the 6ft 8in Alpha in 28 Years Later that's haunting your dreams'
'Terrify me.' That was the instruction given to Chi Lewis-Parry by director Danny Boyle in his 28 Years Later audition. 'I didn't really understand what that meant. Like, how do you want me to go about this?' Lewis-Parry laughs. 'But I'm guessing I terrified him good enough!' The actor and MMA fighter didn't know the movie he was reading for initially, it was just 'Untitled Danny Boyle project'. But as he says of the name attached: 'It didn't matter what it was. I could have played a bin bag, and I'd have been happy.' * Spoilers ahead for 28 Years Later!* Lewis-Parry gets rather more than that as he portrays the 'king of the Alphas', Samson, in 28 Years Later – the most feared, and genuinely nightmare-inducing, of the newly evolved strain of the Infected. Over 20 years since Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland introduced their take on the zombie horror flick to the world with 28 Days Later in 2002, they're back with their hotly anticipated follow up, which was released in cinemas on Thursday. It's not a sequel, but – like the less well-received 28 Weeks Later in 2007, which Boyle and Garland only executive-produced – it's set in the same post-apocalyptic world, ravaged by the blood-born Rage Virus that turned humans into the flesh-eating Infected. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video But, after 28 years and with mainland Britain now under quarantine, new variants have emerged, and the most fearsome of all is the massive Beserker or Alpha. Not only are they bigger, stronger and meaner, but they display intelligence – and also the truly hideous habit of 'despining' their victims. Another variant is the Slow Low, a blubbery and bald creature that crawls on the ground slurping up worms. 'I saw it as you became what you are in your society,' Lewis-Parry tells Metro of the Infected's evolution. 'So if you are an alpha in your everyday life, then you are an Alpha as the infected. The traits and characteristics of the Infected didn't necessarily change from when they were human, but they are fuelled by rage, so control is lost.' We see one Alpha chase father and son Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Spike (Alfie Williams) down the causeway to their human haven on Holy Island after an educational hunting trip. But Samson, who is so named by the iodine-stained and eccentric Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), gets a little more character development. After we see him take out a patrol of NATO soldiers – ripping one man's skull and spine out and then using it to beat another to death – he announces his arrival in an abandoned train carriage in similar fashion after Isla (Jodie Comer) helps a pregnant Infected give birth. Samson is shown to be more in control of his Rage than normal, aware of his surroundings and clocking the Infected after seeing her feet, leading to an interaction that informed the rest of that claustrophobic encounter between him, Spike and Isla. 'I remember when we shot that, it wasn't on the page. That was something we came up with. Danny just said, 'I want to include something here that shows he is conscious, what do you think?'' 'That's his creative genius is he lets you talk about things because we all inspire each other. There's no ego involved – and he literally just made it up on the day, based off our conversation.' Spike and Isla are then stunned to see Dr Kelson sedate Samson rather than kill him – something which would take as many as 12 precious arrows anyway in a society without guns. Suddenly, he's not just a scary killing machine – especially as Kelson reveals he has spent 13 years tending to the dead among both humans and the Infected alike, building his towering 'memento mori' of their skulls and bones. 'A lot of people would be put off by a person like Dr Kelson, and Jamie even says that he's gone mad, but he's a complicated man, in a very dire situation, and he's also very lonely,' suggests Lewis-Parry, who also played Phoebus in Gladiator II. And as to their characters' unexpected 'sweet relationship', he adds: 'I think in Samson he sees something that is probably more attractive than the humanity that's left, because this is something that's just operating off instincts, not hatred or a dislike for people, it is just existing. I think there's a nice sort of innocence to it.' That's one way of describing the huge naked zombie with wild hair and a long beard, red eyes and a thirst for blood – oh, and near-unstoppable strength. And yes, because everyone will be wondering – the Infected wear prosthetic genitals for both modesty and also legal reasons, due to working with the then 12-year-old Williams (or as Lewis-Parry confirms of the behind-the-scenes processes for the appearance of nudity: 'I never at any point thought I was going to be walking around in the nip'.) But it's not just how Lewis-Parry looks – being 6 ft 8in barefoot helps with the intimidation – but how he moves as an Alpha too that gives him such impact on screen. There's a very neat story behind the first person he explored Samson's physicality with, actor and the film's movement coach, Toby Sedgwick. Sedgwick actually played the Infected priest who Cillian Murphy's confused courier Jim interacts with in 2002's 28 Days Later, when he's trying to work out why he's woken up from a coma to find London abandoned. It was also him who invented the iconic stilted but petrifyingly fast run of the Infected. But Lewis-Parry knew he needed to do something different as he saw his Alpha having 'more control over the state that the infection puts him in, so that actually makes him more dangerous'. 'I felt like it looked like he was trying too hard, and I didn't want him to be trying anything – everything he did was just incidental. So I started to look at legendary movement, people like Andy Serkis, who is, in my opinion, the greatest all time. I looked at how he moved.' Although he couldn't directly copy Serkis due to – in his words – 'how vastly different our sizes are', he knew it was all about intention. 'What was his intention when he was moving, when he was crawling, when he was standing or when he was breathing?' shares Lewis-Parry, who was also inspired by creatures in 1980s and 90s horror movies like Predator and the Wolf Man. '[Samson's] very predatory, but he's not hiding the fact that he's coming after you. He's not trying to sneak up on you or conceal his presence. He's just like, I'm running through this wall, and if you're on the other side of it… The motive I gave him was that nothing will stop me.' And it appears that nothing has yet, as – although Lewis-Parry is very careful about giving anything away regarding next year's sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple , which was shot back to back – Samson is still alive and kicking as a zombie can get at the end of this year's film. More Trending 'What can I tease? There's a part two,' he smiles before hesitating as he picks his next words carefully. 'It's different, it's amazing.' And that's all I'm getting. 28 Years Later is in cinemas now. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will be released on January 16, 2026. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Netflix fans devour 'unrelenting' horror movie as sequel hits cinemas MORE: The 'best horror film of 2025' has arrived on Amazon Prime's Shudder MORE: Jurassic World Rebirth embraces hardcore horror: 'I waited for the studio to say no'
Spectator
5 days ago
- Spectator
‘Genius' is a dangerously misused word
For several centuries, the word 'celebrity' meant fame. A couple of hundred years ago, it acquired a secondary meaning of a person overendowed with that quality, and this has now largely driven out the previous usage. In parallel, the same journey has been travelled by 'genius'. Once an essence that attached to works or deeds, it now also refers to people – celebrities of accomplishment, no field too trivial. Helen Lewis teases out the consequences of this shift and makes a modest plea for its reversal. Her indictment of the genius myth – the idea that a small cadre of special people are fundamentally more gifted than their peers – is that it is not only corrosive and unhelpful, but also inaccurate. Genius, she argues, is fundamentally immeasurable; it is better understood as residing not in individuals but in teams or milieux. It is used to license terrible behaviour in those awarded the title; it appears inevitable in retrospect but in prospect is highly contingent; it is a temptation to ultracrepidarianism. Above all, genius is a misleading schema – a seductive, ready-made, familiar pattern we can use to make sense of the world. Lewis takes a long journey through the history of IQ testing – from Francis Galton's eugenicist championing of hereditary genius, to Louis Terman's longitudinal studies, to Mensa, and on to the increasingly recondite and fissiparous world of ultra-high IQ societies. IQ exists in a curious apposition to genius, as, arguably, a necessary-but-not-sufficient component – but one that is more easily measurable. This history is littered with fraud, including Cyril Burt's suspiciously perfect, probably invented data and Hans Eysenck's questionable studies. Some of Lewis's criticisms of the industry are inarguable. The widely used tests have cultural biases baked into their terminology – 'savages' in a questionnaire that dates back only as far as 1993 – and patriarchal assumptions underlying questions that depend on identifying surnames or habits of dress. But she also complains that 'the test selects heavily for speed', even though on the face of it this feels entirely reasonable. Her real complaint is that high general intelligence is used as if it were interchangeable with genius – but delivering acts of genius also takes application and patience. In the second half of the book, Lewis dives deeper into the genius schema and the ways in which it is often used to explain or to excuse behaviour ranging from poor to criminal. Tolstoy, for example, exploited his wife Sofia; Lee Krasner struggled to escape the shadow of Jackson Pollock; Gertude Stein 'stole her partner's voice' in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and used it to praise herself. 'When you admire an artwork or a scientific invention,' Lewis asks, 'what duty do you owe to those harmed in its production?' She does not quite stay for an answer, though a chapter on the avant-garde theatre director and serial abuser Chris Goode, and the mental contortions employed by his collaborators to ignore the people harmed in his productions – and then, after his suicide, occlude the historical record – sharpens that question. People who are hailed as geniuses find that their words on any subject, however unrelated, somehow magically carry extra weight. At a trivial level, this is why social media is full of greetings-card sentiments misattributed to Einstein or Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln. Lewis identifies a few special cases of this. There is the seemingly irresistible pull towards race science among the high-IQ. There is the lure to the overconfident of posing as a rebel disrupting consensus paradigms (as during Covid, passim), which is only intensified by the fact that sometimes these rebels are correct. And there is the read-across from qualification in one field to other unconnected ones. Lewis makes no mention of Jordan Peterson, but she does of Elon Musk, whose achievements are duly acknowledged even as his idiosyncrasies are mocked. Unhappy the land that has need of geniuses, as Brecht might have said. But lands that do not wish to stagnate do genuinely have need of genius – at least, of the instances of scientific and technological genius that lead to growth. So finding the best path to steer is important. A lot of the problems become clearer if we compare 'genius' with its lower wattage cousin 'talent'. No one would claim that talent does not exist, or deny that different people have different talents. You can test pretty reliably for talent. Equally, talent is very clearly domain-specific and non-fungible. Being a talented newspaper columnist, for example, does not make you a talented fighter pilot. The contributions of others to creating contexts where talent can flourish are obvious and uncontested. Talent offers no immunity. Organisations, and indeed nations, if they want to be successful, will have strategies for recruiting and developing and retaining the specific talent they need, whereas a 'genius strategy' would be nonsensical (except for 'key man risk'). If we thought more about talent, perhaps we could benefit from genius without having to pay obeisance to geniuses.
