Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the perils of genius

Books about geniuses tend to fall into predictable categories. There is hagiography, along the lines of 'How Picasso revolutionised art'. There are takedowns ('Picasso was a monster'). And there are how-to manuals ('How you can become the new Picasso'). 'The Genius Myth' by Helen Lewis is more original and painfully timely. This is the high age of the genius, readers may conclude—but not in a good way.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

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'.

Spectator

4 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.

Economist

6 days ago

• Economist

Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the perils of genius

Books about geniuses tend to fall into predictable categories. There is hagiography, along the lines of 'How Picasso revolutionised art'. There are takedowns ('Picasso was a monster'). And there are how-to manuals ('How you can become the new Picasso'). 'The Genius Myth' by Helen Lewis is more original and painfully timely. This is the high age of the genius, readers may conclude—but not in a good way.