Someone called me a "genius" the other day. It made me feel very nervous and I told them not to call me that. I am not a genius. If you think you are a genius, you aren't one. I would like to be one, but that would involve a lot of logical twisting. One very strong precept that I was raised with, states that you should never "get above yourself," or think you are better than you are. Egotism and self-praise and self-promotion were heinous sins, in a cultural milieu that otherwise never spoke seriously about "sin."

The word "genius," like the word "awesome," has become greatly debased in recent times. You can call someone who has clever moments, or a person who produces nice art or craft, a "genius," but that is too strong a word for mild competence. Mount Etna erupting is "awesome." Someone's embroidered blue jeans are not awesome. Many thoughtful writers claim that there is no such thing as genius, which lets us all off the hook. Some other ones propose that "genius," as Thomas Edison (who really was one) suggested, was much more a matter of capacity for work and perseverance than innate intelligence or talent.

I believe there are real geniuses. Physics and the sciences and engineering love geniuses. Everybody, even non-scientists, knows that Richard Feynman was a genius. There are even some still living today. The inventor Dean Kamen is a genius. String theorist Lisa Randall is a genius. There are artistic, musical, and literary geniuses too, but their status is much too controversial to mention here.

So, what makes a genius a genius? You can be brilliant, but you can be a failure, crazy, or a dolt. You can have all the intelligence in the world, but if it is not effective intelligence, it doesn't mean a thing. You can use your brilliance to make up an entire imaginary world including its languages, but unless you can write like J.R.R. Tolkien, (genius, fair enough), you won't be a genius, you'll be a fantasy-prone dweeb. Someone banging out a Weblog entry at 2:47 AM is not a genius. Why is that?

Because genius, as I just said, is about effectiveness. It's not only about the intelligence or the creativity, it's about what it does for the world. A genius does something, or makes something, which changes the world far beyond his or her personal circle. Genius physicists, such as Wolfgang Pauli, change the way scientists look at the world. Genius computer engineers such as Stephen Jobs, who invented the Macintosh computer, change how people live in the world. Genius artists (again, no citations to avoid controversy) change the way we look at the world. In other words, the work of these people is not only intrinsically great, but it changes things, hopefully for the better. There are evil geniuses who change the world, too, but I don't want to even remind you of them.

As I said a couple of entries earlier, I respect doing something much more than being something. Genius is as genius does. As a result, real geniuses are driven to do work all the time, even when they are supposed to be taking time off. They don't poke out a weblog entry in the middle of the night, they do calculations or research. They will appear as eccentric and obsessed, but they can't help it. One of the downsides of genius is that most of them aren't very pleasant people. My same cultural milieu which so valued humility, also valued intelligence, to such a point that it was willing to overlook a lot of bad behavior as long as someone was brilliant. So how much of a genius can you be before your bad behavior is excused? I've never been able to measure that.

Another thing about genius is that unlike the common assumption, genius is communicative. It happens in relationship with the wider world and an audience of receptive people. A genius poet could write the most wonderful verse, but unless it gets read by someone else, no one will know that the poet was a genius. Emily Dickinson wouldn't have been thought of as a genius if her poetry, most of which she hid during her lifetime, hadn't survived in manuscript form, to be published after her death. The art, the science, the music, the invention, needs to be communicated, and put into action, so that it can do its work of changing the world. A Nobel Prize does not confer genius, but the alleviation of generations of suffering, such as was accomplished by Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, would. There are no truly solitary, reclusive geniuses keeping their great work away from the corruption of the world. If the corrupt world doesn't hear of it and adopt it, then genius is lost.

This all sounds like wistful and childish hero-worship, and maybe it is. Good humanists don't like to dwell on heroic individual geniuses. We all have our own talents and our own little bit of genius. It would be good to democratize genius and allow us all our own form of intelligence; one in cooking, another in teaching, another in successful finance, yet another in basketball. There could be backyard geniuses with perfect compost piles, or craftsman geniuses who carve wonderful things in wood. This is comforting. But again there is still that notion that someone who makes an absolutely wonderful apple pie is competent, but not a genius. Someone who is great at crossword puzzles is wordy and intelligent, but not a genius. All this talk of different kinds and levels of intelligence is a gentle way of trying to get out of the unnerving presence of genius. Local competence might change a family, or even a neighborhood, but not the world. Is that effective enough? If you have to wonder whether you could be a genius, you are back in the trap, and you are disqualified. And if you want to be a genius, not only are you not one, but you are condemned to mediocrity, finishing out a Weblog entry at 3:30 AM while the real geniuses are whirring in their workplaces.

Posted at 3:40 am | link