Mar 21, 2021 04:47 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-we-learn...-of-genius
EXCERPT: . . . Mozart in music, Leonardo in art; what about the everyday world of politics? Here the perfect subject of a study of genius was close at hand: Elizabeth I, queen of England. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale owns copies of every history of her reign written by her contemporaries. The secret to her success? Elizabeth not only read books voraciously (three hours a day was her wont) but also people. She read, she studied, she observed, and she kept her mouth shut (Video et taceo was her motto). By knowing all and saying little, Elizabeth ruled for nearly 45 years, laid the foundations of the British empire and fledgling capitalist corporations, and gave her name to an entire epoch, the Elizabethan era.
[...] Perhaps it takes a non-genius to analyse how exceptional human accomplishment happens. During my years at Harvard and at Yale, I met a lot of smart people, including a half-dozen Nobel Prize winners. If you’re a prodigy with a great gift for something, you can simply do it – yet might not be aware of why and how. And you don’t ask questions. Indeed, the geniuses I met seemed too preoccupied with committing acts of genius to consider the cause of their creative output. Maybe an outsider looking in has a clearer overview of how the magic gets done.
[...] The question ‘Nature or nurture?’ always provoked debate. The quant types (mathematics and science majors) thought genius was due to natural gifts; parents and teachers had told them that they’d been born with a special talent for quantitative reasoning. The jocks (varsity athletes) thought exceptional accomplishment was all hard work: no pain, no gain. Coaches had taught them that their achievement was the result of endless hours of practice. Among novice political scientists, conservatives thought genius a God-given gift; liberals thought it was caused by a supportive environment. No answer? Call in the experts: readings from Plato, William Shakespeare and Charles Darwin to Simone de Beauvoir followed, but each had his or her own take.
[...] A Japanese student told me of an ‘anti-genius’ aphorism from his native country: ‘The nail that sticks up the most gets hammered down the hardest.’ Asian students generally expressed an intense curiosity about Western genius owing to the (for them) novel notion of a single transformative individual. Yes, more and more I came to see that genius is indeed cultural; the notion of individual immanent genius seems to have emerged during the 18th century, in part because it mapped well on to a Western, expansionist, capitalist ideal under which individual property, especially intellectual property, could increasingly be generated and would enjoy legal protection. I was never averse to any of that but now, at least, I was more mindful of the historical basis and bias of my intellectual leanings. And thus, my student-provided education went.
[...] Genius is not an absolute but a human construct that’s dependent on time, place and culture. Similarly, genius is relative. Some people simply change the world more than others. Accordingly, genius presupposes an inequality of output (the exceptional thoughts of an Einstein, or the music of a Bach) and generates an inequality of reward (eternal fame for Bach, fabulous riches for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos). That’s just the way the world works. Acts of genius are usually attended by acts of destruction; that’s generally called progress.
What’s not pure genius? IQ, it turns out, is overrated and so, too, are other standardised tests, grades, Ivy League schools and mentors. Stephen Hawking didn’t read until he was eight; Picasso and Beethoven couldn’t do basic mathematics. Jack Ma, John Lennon, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, Charles Darwin, William Faulkner and Steve Jobs likewise were all academic underachievers.
If IQ is overrated, curiosity and persistence are not. Nor is a having a childlike imagination through adult life, the capacity to relax so as to allow disparate ideas to coalesce into new, original ones, and the ability to construct a habit for work so as to get the product out the door. Finally, if you want to live a long life, get a passion. Geniuses are passionate optimists who on average outlive the general populace by more than a decade.
And the end of term usually brought an epiphany: many great minds, it turns out, are not-so-great human beings. [...] If you work for a genius, you might be berated or abused, or you could lose your job. If someone close to you is a genius, you might find that his or her work or passion always comes first. ... To paraphrase the writer Edmond de Goncourt: almost no one loves the genius until he or she is dead. But then we do, because now life is better... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: . . . Mozart in music, Leonardo in art; what about the everyday world of politics? Here the perfect subject of a study of genius was close at hand: Elizabeth I, queen of England. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale owns copies of every history of her reign written by her contemporaries. The secret to her success? Elizabeth not only read books voraciously (three hours a day was her wont) but also people. She read, she studied, she observed, and she kept her mouth shut (Video et taceo was her motto). By knowing all and saying little, Elizabeth ruled for nearly 45 years, laid the foundations of the British empire and fledgling capitalist corporations, and gave her name to an entire epoch, the Elizabethan era.
[...] Perhaps it takes a non-genius to analyse how exceptional human accomplishment happens. During my years at Harvard and at Yale, I met a lot of smart people, including a half-dozen Nobel Prize winners. If you’re a prodigy with a great gift for something, you can simply do it – yet might not be aware of why and how. And you don’t ask questions. Indeed, the geniuses I met seemed too preoccupied with committing acts of genius to consider the cause of their creative output. Maybe an outsider looking in has a clearer overview of how the magic gets done.
[...] The question ‘Nature or nurture?’ always provoked debate. The quant types (mathematics and science majors) thought genius was due to natural gifts; parents and teachers had told them that they’d been born with a special talent for quantitative reasoning. The jocks (varsity athletes) thought exceptional accomplishment was all hard work: no pain, no gain. Coaches had taught them that their achievement was the result of endless hours of practice. Among novice political scientists, conservatives thought genius a God-given gift; liberals thought it was caused by a supportive environment. No answer? Call in the experts: readings from Plato, William Shakespeare and Charles Darwin to Simone de Beauvoir followed, but each had his or her own take.
[...] A Japanese student told me of an ‘anti-genius’ aphorism from his native country: ‘The nail that sticks up the most gets hammered down the hardest.’ Asian students generally expressed an intense curiosity about Western genius owing to the (for them) novel notion of a single transformative individual. Yes, more and more I came to see that genius is indeed cultural; the notion of individual immanent genius seems to have emerged during the 18th century, in part because it mapped well on to a Western, expansionist, capitalist ideal under which individual property, especially intellectual property, could increasingly be generated and would enjoy legal protection. I was never averse to any of that but now, at least, I was more mindful of the historical basis and bias of my intellectual leanings. And thus, my student-provided education went.
[...] Genius is not an absolute but a human construct that’s dependent on time, place and culture. Similarly, genius is relative. Some people simply change the world more than others. Accordingly, genius presupposes an inequality of output (the exceptional thoughts of an Einstein, or the music of a Bach) and generates an inequality of reward (eternal fame for Bach, fabulous riches for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos). That’s just the way the world works. Acts of genius are usually attended by acts of destruction; that’s generally called progress.
What’s not pure genius? IQ, it turns out, is overrated and so, too, are other standardised tests, grades, Ivy League schools and mentors. Stephen Hawking didn’t read until he was eight; Picasso and Beethoven couldn’t do basic mathematics. Jack Ma, John Lennon, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, Charles Darwin, William Faulkner and Steve Jobs likewise were all academic underachievers.
If IQ is overrated, curiosity and persistence are not. Nor is a having a childlike imagination through adult life, the capacity to relax so as to allow disparate ideas to coalesce into new, original ones, and the ability to construct a habit for work so as to get the product out the door. Finally, if you want to live a long life, get a passion. Geniuses are passionate optimists who on average outlive the general populace by more than a decade.
And the end of term usually brought an epiphany: many great minds, it turns out, are not-so-great human beings. [...] If you work for a genius, you might be berated or abused, or you could lose your job. If someone close to you is a genius, you might find that his or her work or passion always comes first. ... To paraphrase the writer Edmond de Goncourt: almost no one loves the genius until he or she is dead. But then we do, because now life is better... (MORE - details)