The greatest mathematicians, scientists, and writers in history have been unusually smart and creative people. But do great intellectual achievements depend on unusual mental abilities alone? For instance, would Jane Austen still have written the same novels if she had been born in an illiterate society? Well, no – obviously not.
This crushing insight is one of several intertwined morals conveyed in Helen Lewis’s new book, The Genius Myth. Others are that good publicity is useful for cultivating a lasting reputation, that individuals who know a lot about one subject can fail to know a lot about another, that men in positions of authority sometimes abuse their power, and that being talented is not an all-purpose licence to behave like an arsehole. Whole chapters are dedicated to elaborating these, and further, equally profound lessons for the reader’s edification. In illustration, there are some arbitrarily chosen case-studies. For instance, one chapter explains at length that the niche theatre director Chris Goode, whose avant-garde plays featured naked young men touching each other, turned out to have engaged in disreputable sexual activities. A concluding chapter develops the startling thesis that Elon Musk is erratic and self-aggrandising. Who knew?
If it sounds like we are being uncharitable to Lewis, let us explain. The Genius Myth, as its title suggests, is an exercise in demythologizing the category genius. Yet it pursues this demythologization while doing nothing to specify the reality that is misrepresented by the myths. Indeed, one of the first things that Lewis says about “genius” is that “its meaning is hard to pin down”. (The first thing she says is that the word “makes [her] uncomfortable”.) The result is a haphazard and disorganized approach, which oscillates unstably between insisting on contemporary platitudes and insinuating fashionable falsehoods.
Now, it is no doubt true that the term “genius” is somewhat vague and subject to shifting standards of application. But it is not so hard to understand as all that. For a working definition of “genius”, one could do worse than consult the OED, which defines it as “an exceptionally talented or intelligent person”. (Lewis herself repeatedly finds ways to do worse, like by explaining “genius” as “the transcendent, the extraordinary, the feathers of the phoenix”, or “the demigod, the super-hero, the shaman”.) Indeed, the OED definition doesn’t seem to be so far from Lewis’s own implicit understanding of “genius” – she explains that at one point she intended to call her book Special People. But if a genius is just an exceptionally talented or brilliant person, then to prevaricate about whether there are geniuses is to prevaricate about whether there are exceptionally talented or intelligent people. Is that a smart thing to do?
Examples may help at this point. Consider: When the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy paid a visit to his ailing colleague Ramanujan in London, he is said to have mentioned offhand that the departing taxi’s registration had been a rather dull number: 1729. “No Hardy”, Ramanujan replied on the spot. “It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.” Or again, of John von Neumann, widely thought by his peers to have the quickest mind of his generation (surpassing Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Edward Teller, and Albert Einstein), Enrico Fermi is said to have told his physicist colleague: “You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can! And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, Herb, so you can see how impressive Johnny is!” Other obviously exceptionally brilliant figures, past and present, include Plato, Euclid, Euler, Gauss, Mozart, Frank Ramsay, Kurt Gödel, Terence Tao, and Peter Scholze.
It is useful to keep such paradigms of extreme intelligence in mind when reading The Genius Myth, because Lewis herself never confronts them openly. She spends considerably longer discussing visual artists like Jackson Pollock and Picasso than mathematicians. In fact, she makes frequent reference to intellectual flyweights, like actors and pop stars, and several times excuses herself for not discussing more athletes. The omission of mathematics could have a variety of explanations – Lewis says in passing that she uses her iPhone calculator to multiply seven by eight – but a simple one is that in the case of the best mathematicians, the awesome, occasionally preternatural, intelligence they possess is simply too hard to deny.
Of course, it is not as if “exceptionally intelligent or talented” is a fully precise description. What exactly does “intelligent” or “talented” mean? Where exactly is the cut-off for being “exceptionally” intelligent or talented? But one does not always, or even often, need a background theory of a phenomenon in order to recognise cases of it. Consider an analogy: a young child may be good at recognising individual dogs without being able to explain what all dogs uniquely have in common. That combination of a recognitional capacity and a theoretical incapacity is typical when it comes to ordinary terms like “genius” and “dog” in natural languages like English. Naturally, people can be wrong about which people are geniuses, just like they can be wrong about which animals are dogs. In neither case does the mere possibility of error suggest the underlying phenomenon is mythical in any interesting way.
One question to which it would be helpful to know Helen Lewis’s answer is whether she holds other words of holistic cognitive assessment in the same low regard that she holds “genius”. Words like “moron”, “idiot” and “imbecile” spring to mind, as do ubiquitous terms like “stupid” and “clever”. It is possible to recognise that someone is an idiot, and correctly call them an “idiot”, without having a fully fleshed out, or perfectly precise, theory of idiocy. But if that’s right, then it remains unclear what is so specially defective about the category genius, or the word “genius”, according to Lewis. In particular, if the problem with genius is, as Lewis puts it, that it is “immune to […] scientific precision”, then countless English words besides “genius” will come out as similarly defective following consistent application of the very same criterion. But such pervasively sceptical conclusions are clearly unwarranted.
None of this is to deny that the word “genius” has shortcomings, which – again, like any other word – make it unsuitable for being used for certain purposes. More specifically, “genius” is not a useful explanatory term. To attempt to explain von Neumann’s remarkable intellectual achievements in terms of the fact that he was a genius is at best to go in a circle. Such an attempted explanation makes little progress beyond saying that von Neumann’s exceptionally intelligent work was of a kind that an exceptionally intelligent individual is disposed under the right circumstances to produce. For related reasons, “genius” plays almost no role in theory-building in cognitive science. In particular, it has not been used as a classification on IQ tests for nearly 90 years.
For a book that purports to be a polemic about genius, The Genius Myth devotes surprisingly little space articulating arguments about its topic. In the one passage that Lewis explicitly signposts as “[her] argument”, this is what follows:
Here’s my argument. Because there is no objective definition of genius – and there never can be – societies anoint exceptional people as geniuses to demonstrate what they value, we call some people ‘special’ to demonstrate what we find special.
These rare attempts to be explicit lay bare Lewis’s confusion. “Genius” is supposed to be understood, somehow, in socially reductive terms, and thereby debunked. But in doing so Lewis finds she has to refer to the “exceptional”. Is this category too to be understood in deflationary terms? If not, it is unclear genius has been shown to be in any way mythically social.
Lewis’s complete failure to articulate an argument is even clearer in the final sentence of the passage: we call some people “special” because we find them special. OK? One could just as well say that we call some people “funny”, “smart”, “attractive”, “annoying”, “rude”, “petulant”, “malicious”, “cowardly”, “complacent”, “conformist”, “sentimental”, “lazy”, …, because we find them funny, smart, attractive, annoying, rude, petulant, malicious, cowardly, complacent, conformist, sentimental, lazy, … . Maybe Lewis herself finds the use of almost all adjectives misguided, inaccurate, and prejudiced. As against that appealing thought, it’s worth keeping in mind that a simple explanation of why people think that things are a certain way is that they are that way.
A similar problem arises in the context of what Lewis calls the “Austen problem”: the alleged problem that arose when past theorists of genius found that rough-and-ready attempts to identify geniuses on the basis of social standing or regard led to the exclusion of Jane Austen from the category. Austen’s life, Lewis writes, “was uneventful – she was born, she lived quietly, she wrote books, she died – and so she did not merit three pages in the ODNB [Oxford Dictionary of National Biography]… [This] shows once again the way ‘genius’ functions as a mythology rather than an objective category”. In fact, if the so-called “Austen Problem” is a problem for anyone, it is a problem for Lewis. Our ability to confidently and correctly identify Jane Austen as one of history’s great novelists, despite her uneventful life, shows that we have independent access to facts about who is exceptionally talented. Austen’s intelligence and wit are legible on the page. You are more likely to be in the grip of some sort of social or cognitive bias if you can’t recognise them than if you can.
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On occasion, Lewis seems to notice that full-fledged denialism about genius, and outliers in respect of intelligence and talent, is a highway that leads to unsustainable forms of scepticism about human traits in general. Consequently, one recurring strategy of The Genius Myth is to attack not the existence of exceptional intelligence but its relevance to achievement, by drawing attention to contextual factors that made it possible for individuals to flourish.
Lewis complains that background factors tend to get abstracted away when we focus on the achievements of a particular individual. Or, in her more politically-loaded gloss, “the supportive wives get quietly painted out, the research assistants airbrushed away, the government bailout goes unmentioned, the collaborators downgraded, the university’s role diminished”. Such privileging of the individual makes genius a fundamentally “right wing” concept, she says. The upshot is that the culturally-favoured portrait of the lone genius should instead be a group photo. In fact, why stop there? The image should probably be a densely-populated landscape rendering vivid every single environmental and human contingency causally related to any given achievement. Lewis thinks that if we paid more attention to “scenius” – Brian Eno’s neologism for the social and intellectual context in which intellectual achievement takes place – exhibitions of genius would lose some of their conventional significance.
Lewis concludes that orthodox narratives to do with genius “have to be resisted, challenged, their contents deliberately returned to complexity from an appealing state of simplicity”. Consider Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, who lovingly transcribed his manuscripts, fed his imagination, and generally provided him with an “unseen” domestic “support system”. “Few artists can have been more indulged in their whims”. Tolstoy was “a genius and a parasite”. Doesn’t this all show, Lewis concludes, that it would be “simplistic to say [War and Peace] was his achievement alone”?
A tempting answer here is “no”: it would not be simplistic. Helen Lewis’s approach to explanation is in fact readily seen to be misguided. Something (Tolstoy’s exceptional literary ability, in this case) that is almost sufficient, but not quite, for the remarkable effects it brings about is treated as if it is of negligible explanatory importance; meanwhile, other things that are perhaps important enough to count as necessary or enabling (e.g., pleasant domestic life), but nowhere near sufficient, are treated as if they are central to the target effect (the creation of War and Peace).
More generally, Lewis is too impressed by the role played by contingency, happenstance, and luck in human affairs. In one representative aside, she notes that Alexander Fleming only went on to specialise in microbiology “because his supervisor wanted to keep him in the [university’s] rifle club”. Generalising further, she suggests at length that the success of The Beatles is similarly contingent, because Paul McCartney might never have been born. (Another chapter is dedicated to the gripping question of whether the success of the Beatles’ music itself was due exclusively to its quality as music, or may perhaps have depended to some extent on wider technological and cultural conditions being in place as well. Well duh?) Lewis seems in these moments to think that attributions of genius can be undermined by the reflection that achieving anything is contingent on the fact of one’s birth. To state the obvious, this is not a way of achieving clarity about the nature of achievement, but a recipe for never thinking clearly about human agency again.
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One problem with pinning down Helen Lewis’s view about genius is that you risk being accused of straw-manning her whenever you make her account precise enough to interrogate. She is inconsistent on some central points, evasive on others. “Genius doesn’t exist. And yet it does”, she says, giving italicisation a load-bearing role it is ill-equipped to play in argument.
The flirtation with inconsistency is not surprising. It is a tactic to avoid confronting the uncontrollably subversive implications of the book’s apparent thesis. The most pressing danger is that Lewis’s scepticism about the category “exceptionally intelligent” will degenerate into scepticism about the simpler category “intelligent”. In fact there is considerable pressure on Lewis to make that ill-fated move: as soon as you acknowledge that there is a trait, intelligence, subject to a normal distribution, you will have extreme cases along that normal distribution, and in particular on the right-hand tail. In effect, the distribution of a cognitive trait like intelligence is analogous to the distribution of a physical trait like height. In a sufficiently large population, just as it is nearly guaranteed that some people will be much taller than average, it is nearly guaranteed that some people will be much smarter than average.
Lewis’s characteristic unclarity saves her from outright committing herself to the claim that intelligence has mythical status. Instead, in the least-unstructured first part of the book, she pursues a campaign of guilt by association against the study of genius in particular and the study of intelligence in general. Academics (Francis Galton, Lewis Terman, William Shockley), and by insinuation the academic questions that interested them, are treated as crankish, “obsessive”, “oblivious”, “odd”. Galton, for instance, is disparaged as a man who expected “the world to be orderly and comprehensible – not messy like humans, whom he had trouble understanding”. Though one may feel the temptation to mock historical scientists and researchers, whose theoretical ambitions so far outstripped their means and methods of inquiry, to indulge it too often, as Lewis does, is to risk lapsing into philistinism. For instance, the disciplines of contemporary psychology and cognitive science, barely acknowledged in the book, are clearly committed to rendering “comprehensible”, and imposing some degree of theoretical “order” on, the “messy” data of the human mind. Does Lewis think these modern disciplines are no replacement for the impressionistic discursions of a jobbing journalist?
One irony of Lewis’s refusal to engage seriously with the scientific study of intelligence is that it provides by far the best framework for assimilating exceptional cases to normal ones. Indeed, in the preface to the 2nd edition of his discipline-founding book Hereditary Genius, Francis Galton himself insisted that he intended nothing special by the term “genius”: “There was not the slightest intention on my part to use the word genius in any technical sense, but merely as expressing an ability that was exceptionally high … There is much that is indefinite in the application of the word genius. It is applied to many a youth by his contemporaries, but more rarely by biographers, who do not always agree among themselves.”
A further irony is that in attempting to discredit an entire field of research by the underpowered method of ad hominem attack on the eccentric political agendas and methodological laziness of a handful of academics within it, Lewis enacts exactly the vices she critiques.
There are other criticisms to be made of Lewis’s book, but many will find those already made here in this review excessively harsh. We make no apologies. Journalists often write books for general audiences on demanding subjects with the hope of shaping public thinking. We think they should be held to an intellectual standard commensurate with their aims.
Nothing in The Genius Myth undermines the fact that individual intelligence significantly contributes to individual intellectual achievement. The authors of great books remain responsible for their work. Unfortunately for Helen Lewis, so too do the authors of bad ones.
Daniel Kodsi is a lecturer in philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford, and editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine. John Maier is reading for a DPhil in Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, and a leader writer for The Times.
