The Obscurantism of "Genius"

I recall encountering a lengthy discussion of the concept of "genius" in a popular news magazine a long time ago (TIME, perhaps).

The author of the piece chalked up the desire to believe in "genius" to a romantic desire for transcendence.

One may well grant an element of that existing within the contemporary cult of genius, but it seems to me far from being the whole of it. More important, I think, is the contradiction between the complexity and scale of modern life, and the prevailing individualistic intellectual and emotional attitudes.

Consider, for instance, scientific life. The scientific endeavor is old, vast, collective in spirit--sociologist Robert Merton, indeed, seeing the collectivist attitude toward scientific knowledge as in fact one of the key elements of the scientific ethos. Scientists build on the work of predecessors in conjunction with their colleagues, such that the individual efforts all flow into a common stream so much larger than any of them that it can seem foolishness to worry too much about whether this or that drop came from that particular tributary of the great river--with the depth and intricacy of the collective, collaborative, aspect getting only the more conspicuous to go by the sheer number of authors on single scientific papers today (a function of just how painfully specialized the work has become). However, a culture accustomed to individualism, indeed vehement about explaining results in terms of individual achievement, individual choice, individual contribution, is more likely to stress single, towering figures who, because so much more is credited to them than any one person ever actually did, or for that matter probably could have done (especially insofar as all the others who helped lead up to them fall by the wayside), can only seem superhuman, magical, in a word, "geniuses." Thus in a common view physics had that Isaac Newton guy who did it all pretty much by himself--and never mind those giants on whose shoulders he supposedly stood. And then not much happened until that Albert Einstein guy, who singlehandedly vaulted us into the relativistic era with a few papers. And so forth.

The tendency obscures rather than illuminates--which is plausibly just fine with those who prefer to see humanity as consisting of a tiny elite of superhumans who accomplish everything and a vast mass of dross who owe that elite everything and should accordingly be groveling before them in the dirt lest Atlas decide they are not worth the trouble, and shrug. Naturally the word is bandied about much in our time--and never more than in the case of persons who, one way or another, seem to amass a lot of money (in a reminder of what, infinitely more than knowledge, is really valued in this society).

Thus was Ken Lay a genius. And Jeffrey Epstein. And Sam Bankman-Fried. And Elizabeth Holmes. And many, many others just like them. In the haste to acclaim such persons such the real reasons for the desperate attachment of persons of conventional mind to the concept become all too apparent.