If genius is group selected - then...

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Suppose that genius benefits group fitness rather than individual fitness, as seems likely to be the case - then this is a precarious situation.

If genius led to higher fitness, then the proportion of geniuses in a population would increase with each generation. But if genius is group selected then the genetic consequence of a genius is to expand the group - and this rising tide of group fitness will raise the boat of genius.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/the-reality-of-group-selection-and-not.html

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A group-selection account of genius therefore (I think) suggests that genius grows in an expanding group, an expanding population - the outcome of genius being the expansion of that population - and the situation can only be sustained if the consequences of that expanding population include maintaining and promoting the causal requisites of more geniuses.

I think it is probably correct that each genius is a one-off - sui generis - not as a matter of necessity, but mostly because of the extreme unlikelihood of the occurrence same combination of abilities and personality factors.

This means that there is NOT a specific and definable 'genius-type' - which further means there cannot be a system for recognizing and promoting geniuses.

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Which means that genius-type creativity cannot be taught, and can indeed only be described in a broad brush terms.

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Add to the mix that geniuses are nearly always (not always) troublesome in one way or another - this goes with the territory because even if you cannot say with precision what the genius does do, what he does NOT doe is think like other people - and what kind of personality he does NOT have is one that goes with the flow of social consensus.

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There are many consequences of this way of understanding genius - and one is that genius is tolerated rather than encouraged - and this especially applies at the local level of the people living around and with the genius - these will experience the problems of genius, but will not benefit from the genius any more than the rest of society.

Since the benefits of genius are general, there is an incentive, therefore, to shift the costs - let someone else, some other group, employ the genius and let them put up with him!

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Further more, due to the activities of genius, a society, more exactly a human group - that group within which the genius functions - may abruptly switch from being one which tolerates genius for the sake of what he offers, to one which has... well some other attitude that could be actively anti-genius, or merely conformist, or short-termist, or non-functional...

(Non-functional in the sense that what genius offers is ultimately greater functionality, greater efficiency and/or effectiveness at some function - and if a group stops being concerned about functions, then there is no reason to  tolerate genius.)

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My reason for exploring this point is that at some point in the past few decades, British society went from being one which in practice tolerated genius, to one which is hostile to genius - and this can be seen at almost every level.

To read of such difficult, annoying, disruptive geniuses as Dirac or Wittgenstein, and then to realize that that were Professors at Cambridge - is to recognize that such characters would nowadays get nowhere near a Cambridge chair - not least because actual functional ability is not regarded as of primary importance in modern Britain.

I personally know of examples of supremely able and creative and productive people (as close to genius as we now get) who have been in practice (and for many and various 'excuses') excluded from positions in UK universities - not just once but repeatedly.

Mediocrity is zealously enforced by Head Girl types (of both sexes) whose sole concern is their own social micro-environment.

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Modern Britain values Leftist ideals far, far more highly than the ability to do your 'job' - and I mean job in the ideal sense of performing a distinctive function.

What happens now is that instead of selecting people on the basis of how they do the job, the job is redefined to include the kind of people you want to select. 

(This is, of course, the bureaucratic way of doing things - in which the bottom line is satisfying other bureaucrats whose bottom line is satisfying other bureaucrats - with bureaucratic 'turtles all the way down' and no bottom line of reality.)


So, in such a world as modern Britain, why tolerate difficult characters whose 'only' recommendation is that they are supremely good at the real job? 

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Thus a society with a high concentration of effective geniuses flipped quite suddenly into a society which is in practice and almost universally (at the relevant level of effect) actively anti-genius, selecting against genius, excluding of genius.

And the whole thing is denied by the simple expedient of re-labelling: in which some creative nonentity (which high status or a nutter) is simply stated to be a genius, talked about as a genius - probably given awards and medals for being a genius - and the concept of genius is thereby relativized and even further discredited!

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How could English genius apparently disappear between the 1960s and 1990? Answer: it was the ability to recognize the products of genius which disappeared at that time

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The collapse of genius in Britain happened very quickly indeed, in a single generation: my generation, in fact - those born from 1945 onwards (but in England we don't use the phrase 'baby boomers').

How could this happen - I mean so abruptly?

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Of course, there were still some elderly geniuses still around in 1990, and some are still alive - but the supply is cut-off.

There aren't any recognized, active, genuine geniuses in England today - whereas a century ago, and two centuries ago, they were thick on the ground.

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Even though I believe that average intelligence has been declining very rapidly since the Industrial revolution (due to some mixture of accumulating genetic mutations in from very low child mortality, and a differential fertility pattern adverse to high intelligence - and more recently mass population movement) - even though I think it possible that average intelligence may actually have declined at something like 1 IQ point per decade...

Even despite all this; the abruptness of the collapse of genius was still too rapid to have a biological basis in terms of the actual production of potential geniuses.

So I assume that the problem was not actually in the production of genius people but in a collapse in the ability to recognize the products of genius - the failure to perceive and to use genuine breakthrough ideas and products - and that this was substantially due to very rapid social changes happening in England through the 1960s through 1980s.

What happened, I think, was that the production of geniuses declined rather gracefully, gradually, incrementally - but that it was that the ability to evaluate and recognize major work of genius that collapsed abruptly.

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The idea is that creative genius - the ability to make breakthroughs - is extremely rare because it requires a combination of high intelligence and high 'Psychoticism' - which is a personality trait defined by Eysenck that include both high creativity plus a constellation of personality attributes most of which are helpful or necessary for a genius.

However, the role of the genius is essentially to produce products of genius which can be exploited - by society. Therefore, a society must have the ability to recognize and use the products of genius.

To recognize and exploit the products of genius - a new theory or equation, an invention, a technique - requires a much lower intelligence and creativity than first devising it - and there will be something like ten or even a hundred-fold more people in a society who can recognize, understand and exploit the products of genius than can make significant breakthroughs.

Yet, although genius exploiters are much commoner than geniuses, to recognize genius nonetheless requires some elements of genius - early users require substantial intellectual abilities and some elements of a creative and autonomous personality.

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My idea here is that as the frequency of of production of geniuses declined throughout the period from about 1800, this was accompanied by a decline in the proportion of the population capable of recognizing, understanding and exploiting the products of genius - and during by the 1960s this pool of genius exploiters had reached a critically low proportion in most areas of national life - and during the 1960s into the years beyond, rapid social changes caused a sudden dilution of genius-product recognizers and genius-product users until by 1990 they were outnumbered, overpowered and ignored.

By 1990, the English had not only suffered a long term reduction in the proportion and number of creative geniuses, but English society had also become incapable even of recognizing genius; and unable to detect and use the products of genius.

There are numerous possible contributing reasons why English society and its institutions may have very rapidly become incapable of recognizing genius; all or several may be true, and I don't know which would be the most important.

These include the rapid expansion of higher education (universities and colleges), the collapse of 'meritocracy' (i.e. a system which allocated roles primarily on the basis of functional ability) the transition to a sexually-mixed co-educational workforce, the rise of 'affirmative action' in terms of a system of group preferences favouring those groups with the lowest frequency of occurrence of the attributes of genius, and of genius-recognizing capacities; a massive shift of national focus away from social functions and towards sex (i.e. the sexual revolution); the rise of the Mass Media and bureaucracy; and of course the collapse of Christianity as the dominant national religion - accompanied by the collapse of honesty, ethics and devotion to beauty.

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By 1990 and since then, England had become a society where there are no acknowledged geniuses, and the relatively few people capable even of recognizing the products of genius are few, scattered and powerless - so social evaluations are dominated by fashion and expediency; and the primary societal ethic is of conscientious conformity to the oscillations of fashion and the winds of expediency.

There are, I think, still men of genius; and still a few people who recognize them and (more importantly) can recognize the potentially revolutionary breakthroughs which could (if adopted and exploited) transform societal function.

But there are not enough such people - so their effect is extremely diluted, and they are not in positions of influence, and they do not make any perceptible impact on the major social institutions of England today.

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In sum, England gradually lost her innate ability to innovate from about 1800, and this was accompanied by losing the ability to recognize and exploit innovations - but this decline (being much common) lagged the decline of genius by a few generations.

But from the 1960, the proportion of people who had enough genius in them to be able to recognize and exploit innovations - and has the kind of independence of personality required to hold by their own unusual understanding - had also become critically low - and the social revolution from the mid 1960s triggered institutional changed which very suddenly and abruptly overwhelmed not only the geniuses but even the genius-detectors.

In England nowadays, the competence even merely to recognize work of genius has become rarer than the occurrence of actual creative genius used to be.

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Understanding human creativity and originality

There have been three main ways of understanding human creativity.

The first was that the creative Man was a channel or conduit for the gods (e.g. muses), or God; that creativity was breathed-in (inspired) from the divine. 

It was the divine/ God/s who were creative - who were original, and Men were instruments of the divine. The divine created: Men were tools of creation.

A creative Man was therefore one attuned with the divine, and who had the skills and application necessary to accomplish what he was being 'told' to do.  

The second view was of the creative Man as an observer of realities, who 'copied' reality (with skill and diligence). The most-creative person was one who best held-up 'a mirror to nature'. 

Men were not truly creative (they did not originate); but some Men were good observers: honest, hard-working and skilled observers. 

The idea of a creator was Not to be 'original' - indeed Man could not, and should not try to, originate; because his job was to perceive and record existing reality. 

The Romantic idea of genius was that the genius should be original: should originate. That is, the genius should add-to already-existing reality, in new ways, unique to that person. 

That which the Romantic genius creates is assumed to come from the Man himself - and not 'merely' be  something that already-existed in the divine, or in nature.

This means that - in this particular respect - Man is a god: the genius is ascribed the same primary creative capacity as the prime creator/s*. 

So, to the Romantic understanding, Man can be a true creator, thus truly original. Yet - especially from the early 20th century - there arose the Modern consciousness; and with it the question of what direction this originality should assume: what were the proper constraints on it. 

For Modern Man, the idea of the genius in his creative capacity as a type of the divine became impossible to think at a general cultural level; because the divine was either ironized or excluded. Modernity was atheistic, materialistic - the spiritual was not real. 

Thus 'originality' became detached from the genius being an originator (because to modern consciousness the material world was everything); and was redefined in terms of clashing with what went before: as novelty, newness, shockingness. 

A false dichotomy thus arose between the direction of originality: should the genius create to please the 'audience', satisfy the 'public' - or else to please oneself (or - in practice - for a small group of those Men who appreciate newness and shock - the avant garde). 

This led to the idea of popular art that pandering to the masses; versus elite art that was 'art for art's sake', and was indifferent to shocking the bourgeoisie (indeed enjoyed doing this).

The assumption that the genius was therefore a Man who was in opposition to the masses - either working alone or supported only by a small and enlightened 'audience' of open-minded radicals. 

This was a false dichotomy because it excluded the divine and necessarily understood the purpose of genius in purely this-worldly terms.

The true direction of genius is Not a choice between pandering to the public or pleasing oneself; but whether to create in harmony with already-existing-and-ongoing divine-creation; or else in conflict with God. 

In other words: the choice was between being a good genius or an evil genius. The good genius creates in harmony with God's creation (which is the source of the good: which defines the good).

But the evil genius sets himself against divine creation - past, present and/or future. 

There are only two choices. Because not to be in harmony with divine creation is - of itself - to be a source of dis-harmony, of dissonance - to be working-against God's on-going creation. 

The twentieth century saw the decline of genius; and part of this was surely the profound misunderstanding of creativity that came from the exclusion of the divine from public discourse. 

This led to the false dichotomy of the popular versus personal/ elite creator - and this led to the phenomenon of the evil genius dominating the twentieth century; with more and more of the most influential geniuses from c. 1918 creating in disharmony with the divine: Picasso, James Joyce, Schoenberg and Stravinsky all fell into this category in their later work. 

Then, in the later twentieth century, genius became rarer and less gifted; first in the arts (where the evil genius first dominated) then in the science also (as science became less honest, increasingly externally-controlled, and used for increasingly evil purposes).  

So we have ended up in the 21st century with very few and marginalized geniuses of lesser stature. Why? Probably because genius originates in God's placement of potentially-genius souls in particular circumstances. 

When genius becomes predominantly evil, and when a single genius can have such massive cultural effects, then it is reasonable to assume that the gift of genius has been withdrawn from the Western, European-originated societies where it was previously most dominant and evident.  

When human creativity is being regularly used against divine creation; human creativity is withdrawn by God - as a form of a damage-limitation. 

This rapid collapse of Western creativity over recent decades has had the unfortunate consequence of reducing the possibility of The West - as a society - escaping from its downward self-imposed, spiral towards self-annihilation.

Yet if the West was more creative, if there were more and greater geniuses; these would almost-certainly not be used to solve of social problems; but instead be used in ways that would increase our problems and accelerate our collapse into evil even more rapidly.  

*And, since the genius is a Man - this understanding also implies that Men generically have a nature previously only ascribed to the divine. This further implies that because Men are 'gods' there are many gods. By my understanding, this further implies not just polytheism - in the sense of multiple creative-originators. There is only one primary creative source of our reality, of the creation in which we dwell; whom we term God. But if the reality of Romantic genius is accepted; then this implies a pluralistic universe of many divine-creative-agents who have co-existed with God, eternally - since this neatly explains why originative creativity is possible to many entities. Why (to use Tolkien's term) Man is truly a subcreator.   

How to find and identify a genius: IQ, Psychoticism, Endogenous Personality

(Note. In order to keep the following concise and focused - I need to assume familiarity with the meanings/ definitions of my basic terminology; and also to draw inferences from a great deal of evidence that I have surveyed. This may require the reader to look at my book The Genius Famine - or at least to browse relevant sections of the Intelligence, Personality and Genius blog.)

Major geniuses are rare, and may even be almost extinct - but some degree of creative genius is much commoner. Creative genius is susceptible of degrees - from a world historical genius to geniuses across smaller domains and with more localized scope. How could such individuals be found?  

1. IQ - General Intelligence

Genius requires a very high intelligence. However, a large majority of those with very high intelligence are not geniuses - they are un-creative. 

So although a measure of intelligence is a useful first step in finding a genius - it is only the first step.  

To be a creative genius requires a high intelligence, and this can be measured relatively and comparatively by IQ tests. The objective level of intelligence thus depends on a proper sample from the comparison population being studied - which varies among races, classes, sexes; and through history.  

In the Anglosphere in the middle 20th century it seems that an IQ in the top 5% (125) or so was about where noticeable genius began - since intelligence has declined since then, it may be that a higher IQ is needed nowadays? However, the validity of IQ testing has also declined (i.e. the test does not measure 'g' so precisely as if did) so perhaps the 'threshold' is not necessary different now - but the proportion of geniuses within all categories of IQ will surely have declined considerably. 

What about those with 'ultra high' intelligence? At this level, it is not possible to use comparative measures such as IQ - except among young children and using the 'ratio' method of calculating IQ. Thus an 8 year old child scoring in an IQ test at the average level of 16 year old children, can be regarded as having an IQ of 200 (16/8 X 100). 

However, childhood IQ is highly but imperfectly correlated with adult IQ, due to differences in development rate (especially between races, classes and sexes). So, a sample of children with high IQ defined in early childhood, will always have lower average IQ as adults. 

Adult IQ tests rank test performance and project it onto a normal distribution curve derived from a (supposedly) random sample of the index population - but sufficiently-large and random samples are in practice impossible; so there are never enough ultra high IQ people in a random sample to provide precise IQ measures. 

The ultra high IQ societies have developed tests that can differentially rank those who are within the top one or two percent of the population for 'g'; however these values cannot with both precision and validity be expressed in terms of more average IQs (because people with around-average IQs cannot do ultra high IQ tests at all!). 

Furthermore, it is found that the concept of 'g' breaks-down among the most highly intelligent - and intelligence becomes much more specific and less general. For instance; the most mathematically/ geometrically intelligent are not also the most verbally intelligent - and the correlation between sub-types of intelligence gets less as intelligence increases. Therefore the precise IQ score at high scores becomes very dependent on the balance of (for example) quantitative and verbal questions in the specific test being used. 

In sum: 'high intelligence' is necessary but not sufficient for genius; but it is not possible to provide any precise threshold where 'sufficiently high intelligence' starts. 

2. High Psychoticism

Most very highly intelligent people are not creative. 

But those who are may be indicated by the Eysenck personality trait of Psychoticism; which is correlated with a wide range of measures of creativity - although trait Psychoticism is mostly negatively defined in terms of psychotic (insane), psychopathic, impulsive and selfish behaviours. 

Self-rating measures of Psychoticism depend on honesty, and can be faked. Therefore behavioural correlates of high Psychoticism are more reliable measures - esepcailly as high Psychoticism tends to be 'punished' by social mechanisms. 

Most of the most-genius individuals have demonstrated clear evidence of moderate-high Psychoticism in their biography. These can be seen as the opposite to conscientiousness - because high psychoticism tends to sabotage attempts to be conscientious - to follow instructions, to conform to social norms, to work hard and long as externally-imposed tasks etc. 

Therefore among the most intelligent people; the most creative are very likely to be less 'successful' then the uncreative conscientious conformists. For example, a person of known high IQ who performed relatively badly in exams - an under-achiever; with results below the level predicted by his IQ; is much more likely to be creative than an over-achiever who performed above the level predicted by IQ.

(Because exam results are predicted by a combination of IQ and conscientiousness.) 

(An example is Christopher Michael Langan, who has been claimed to be the highest IQ person alive, and is certainly among the small minority with ultra-high IQ. Langan's biography demonstrates a high Psychoticism personality type (non-conformist, unwilling to accepts instruction or authority, unsuccessful in social terms) - and in a negative sense this is compatible with creativity. So far, with very high IQ and high Psychoticism; Langan would be potentially a creative genius...) 

3. Endogenous personality

If high Psychoticism negatively defines a high -IQ group whose non-conformism makes them potentially geniuses; Endogeneity is the positive trait within Psychoticism that leads to actual genius. 

Endogenous means internally-generated, and it refers to a personality type that is dominated by inner qualities (and is relatively immune to outer qualities.  

At this point it is necessary to go beyond science into metaphysics; because the positive inner qualities that lead to genius need to be dominated by the Real Self, which is also the divine within Man. 

It is this being driven by the Real and Divine Self, that is what enables the genius to be genuinely creative. Because to be creative is to be generative of new truth, novelty that is true - and not merely to combine and extrapolate from memorized known truths.

Also; because the genius is in-touch with his Real and Divine Self; it is unlikely that the genius will be an atheist - he may be a deist (acknowledging an abstract deity or spiritual tendency), a theist (believing in a personal God), or may be an adherent of a religion (albeit likely to be unorthodox or heretical, due to the nature of his personality). 

The total package

But to be a genius means that this internal drive is also focused and sustained. So an Endogenous personality with show biographical evidence of having been intensely interested for sustained periods (some years, typically), by some internally-driven (not socially normal) subject. 

The not-normal, not-socially-imposed nature of the subject is evidence of internal drive; that the drive is intense and sustained is what is required for genius level achievement. 

(To return to Chris Langan; his intellectual interests are unfashionable, have been pursued over extended periods, and he is explicitly a theist. I would conclude that by this schema, Langan is therefore likely to be a creative genius.)   

There may, or may not, be accessible evidence of achievement by the genius. If the genius has expressed his contribution in writing, making, depicting - these are more likely to have survived; but may have been ignored or rejected - and they may be difficult to evaluate by those of sufficient ability who are not in the same field, or who will not devote sufficient effort and attention. 

After all, the expression of genius concepts is a secondary matter from the ability to originate them. And it is possible that the output of genius may be ephemeral - such as conversation. 

  

Conclusion

So, it is apparently possible to find and identify a probable-genius by going-through these stages of evaluating IQ, Psychoticism and Endogenous personality. 

What to 'do with' a genius when you find him is another matter! 

Perhaps the most valuable thing would be to support them in what they are trying to do - assuming they are not an evil genius! But you could only know someone was evil in motivation if you yourself were already on the side of God, creation and The Good.  

Genius as a form of power

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I have been mulling-over the idea that genius could be regarded as a form of power; when power is considered as being able to shape the world according to desire.

This captures the ambiguity, or two-faced quality of genius - that because it is power, it can be used for good or ill.

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By this account there used to be large numbers of individuals who were gifted with exceptional power; and if this was combined with hard work and luck, these individuals each had an exceptionally large influence on the world.

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The 'world' that genius influences necessarily includes the human world, and may be restricted to the human world. So genius in the arts is of this type.

But let us first consider scientific, technical, economic genius - the kind of genius which when found in high concentration for several generations led to modernity: this world of increasing productivity, capability, specialization.

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A scientific genius re-orders some aspect of the world - by discovery, invention, theory - and this re-ordering survives, spreads, replicates through the human world.

It is as if the genius is the origin of an epidemic, or the first of a successful lineage of mutants.

But this is purposive, it is non-random - the genius knows what he is doing, and knows what he is trying to do - even if he cannot possibly predict the consequences of succeeding.

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And this is where the transcendental aspect of genius comes in. There are those who are gifted with the potentiality for changing the world, and they, as individuals, have a choice - a profound choice - how they deploy that gift, in which direction they point that gift.

As the gift unfurls itself, they will be confronted with forks in the road when they are able to choose and to influence the direction of the power they are unleashing - and whether it will be for God, or against God.

The way that it works is that the whole nature of the power unleashed may be decided by this quantitatively small choices - so that, in effect, a genius may create a power that is 99.9 percent Good; yet is evil in nature due to one choice made.

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In Tolkien's world, Feanor is the greatest ever genius of science, and is defined by the unsurpassed beauty of the Silmaril jewels - yet his choice not to allow the jewels to be sacrificed in order to restore the light of the destroyed trees of light, is an evil choice which sets in motion a vast tide of misery and further destruction.

The Silmarils are thus almost wholly good - yet from this choice, and from the possessiveness they engender - are a net evil.

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This is a symbol of genius. There are - or were - individuals with Feanor-like power to change the world; but the cumulative misdirection of this power, generation upon generation, has led to the psychotic, purposively evil aspects of the world which are ascendant.

This has been the doing of genius in the world of the arts, just as has the several generations of rapid economic growth, the several centuries of increasing scientific and technical capability...

So many of the geniuses of the past chose, in the crux, to deploy their power against God: sometimes very obviously and explicitly, sometimes (as with so many of the scientists) simply by leaving-out God or by eroding his nature.

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I found the seeds of this idea in George Orwell's essay on Salvador Dali - where Orwell acknowledges that Dali was, qua painter, of genius or near-genius level - but deployed this power to sicken and demotivate, to poison the minds of many. At a lesser level, something similar is true of  painters such as Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud.

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And the same could be said of many or most artistic geniuses in the past century especially - and although some repented, they were not able to undo the harm done by the unleashing of evil-directed power in their early work.

So, James Joyce was an unrepentant genius who unleashed his amazing power over language against God; and TS Eliot did the same in works such as Prufrock and The Waste Land -  which have acted like a residual toxin on the world view of four generations.

Eliot's later repentance seems incomplete (since he seems not to have repudiated the early work which made his name) - but either way the harm had been done: the toxic phrases had been launched on the world, had replicated, had become an epidemic.

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In science and technics, a similar phenomenon has of course been at work.

Geniuses have, by and large, lined-up to attack God and tradition - and the changes they wrought have not, therefore, taken life and then enhanced it by addition of Good and subtraction of evils; but have instead utterly transformed life;

such that people have become so deeply perplexed they cannot make comparisons nor evaluations - but simply gaze around bewildered as they are swept out into the ocean by a tidal flow which they cannot comprehend; the withdrawing tide of faith generated by cumulative individual choices of past genius.

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Robert Graves on Genius

Excerpts from an essay in ‘Difficult Questions, Easy Answers’, 1972

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“The word genius in its modern sense first appeared in eighteenth-century England. This was presently exported to Germany, there blown up romantically and re-imported to England in the nineteenth century. It implied an incommunicable power of inventive thought found among a few, very unusual people who somehow did not depend on academic education for their discoveries or performances.

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“Not long ago I overheard a group of American professors wondering about the small Greek State of fifth century B.C. Athens. It seemed impossible, they agreed, that an equal percentage of historically important figures could appear today in any part of the United States despite the recent massive increase of educational. facilities. But why? they wondered.

“One of them hopefully suggested that the title 'genius' is too grudgingly awarded nowadays; so that most of the numerous first class physicists working in the States, whose technical know-how would have staggered Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Alcibiades, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Anaxagoras, Zeno and all the other Athenian geniuses, are denied the title.

“But these professors seemed to me to be confusing historical importance with scientific talent, and scientific talent with the unfathomably original way of thought now associated with genius.

“For example Franklin, Watt, Marconi and Edison were men of unusual scientific talent, and attained considerable historical fame; whereas Clerk Maxwell, Rowan Hamilton, Thompson (of the genes) and Rutherford, whose work displayed all the signs of genius, remain almost unknown to the general public.

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“The original sense of genius was a far simpler mystery to accept and handle than the present one. The word genius is not Greek but Latin. Other Latin words of the same formation are progenitor, generate, engender and genitals.

“But genius had a spiritual rather than a physical sense and implied the primitive creative power with which a man is born and which accompanies him throughout life as his highest spiritual self, his protector, his oracle. A Roman who behaved evilly or foolishly was said to have 'defrauded his genius'.

“Genius was his primitive male dignity, his sense of love, and his power of instinctive thought, the preservation of which was his constant duty. Because such genius was considered noble and inspiring, the adjective generous, which in Latin implied a family tradition of honourable dealing, was formed from it. A similar formation was genial, which implied the incessant and comforting radiations of genius on a man's equals and subordinates.

"Still another formation was genuine, meaning the authenticity of this power. Horatius's inspired defence of the Tiber bridge against the whole Etruscan army was quoted as a typical example of personal genius.

“The Greeks, however, rejected this concept by philosophically opposing the good genius with an evil one. The imported Greek notion of opposing demons fighting for the possession of a man's soul weakened the Roman's simple confidence in a mystic power which took possession of him in times of crisis. 

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“Geniuses when at work think largely in pictorial images and the consequent exactness of their thought tempts logicians to dismiss them as liars, guessers or madmen.

“But poetry is composed of words alone: is there then no genius in poetry? The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations.

“The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.

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“Psychopaths are often mistaken for geniuses.

“The most common psychopath is the confidence trickster. The prisons are full of con-men; so are politics. Their power to read a victim's mind and so take advantage of his weaknesses is fortunately counterbalanced by their megalomania.

“Every con-man or political rabble-rouser tricks himself in the end.

“Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Hitler have been hailed as geniuses; but all were psychopaths conning themselves with their own boastful legends until they ruined their own countries and died shamefully with no sons to succeed them.

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“Romans refused to credit women with an individual genius, on the grounds that they did not engender but parturiated: and held them, instead, to lie under the divine guidance of the goddess Juno Lucina.

“This implied that men were ruled by a male code, but women by a divinity which absolved them of obedience to any code at all, except that of being true to their own bodies.

“And though a patrician Roman's appetite might casually involve him with women from whom he declined to breed children, his social conscience opposed a similar instinct in his female relatives.

“Roman women at first accepted the practical value of this ban on their sleeping with men who lacked the generous tutelary power of patrician genius; but by Catullus's time female morals had noticeably relaxed. 

*

“Western High Society still deprecates mésalliances, but wherever acceptable alliances are judged not merely by a man's wealth, influence and talents, but by his integrity, women too often make trouble by falling in love with outsiders whom their fellow men recognize as cads or crooks.

“The male proverb 'no woman is wise below the girdle' is, of course, a libellous exaggeration; but few married women like to be cheated of satisfaction in what the Romans called 'the genial couch', meaning the marriage bed. Moreover, in choosing their lovers, few women of spirit realize that a man who has forfeited his sense of honour by some disgraceful act can never be redeemed by even a perfect woman's love.

“That women themselves are infinitely redeemable makes it hard for them to realize that what the Romans called 'a lost man', meaning that he had assassinated his genius, is like a drinking glass, which however neatly repaired after breakage will never again ring clear when tapped with the finger nail.”

The full essay is transcribed online at: http://math.uci.edu/~vbaranov/nicetexts/eng/genius.htm

*

Comment:

This essay had a big influence on me from when I first read it more than 35 years ago, in a copy borrowed from Bristol Central Library.

As usual with Robert Graves, the essay is compounded of brilliant insights, crazy notions, and rampant egotism - expressed with total conviction.

'Genius', in either its modern or Roman conceptualization, is a pagan value and a part of that noble pagan world with its 'warrior code' values of honour, integrity, duty. 

In its Roman conception, genius would ideally be an attribute of all respect-worthy men; but while necessary, genius is not sufficient, and is not one of the highest 'goods'.

In particular, a man of genius may also (nonetheless) be consumed with pride and devoted to power.

Greatness versus Genius

*

Greatness can be distinguished from genius - although greatness is even less common than genius (and greatness may be - apparently - absent from areas of life where genius predominates - e.g. the theatre).

Genius is about ability - about outcomes, but although greatness requires abilities it is more about character - wisdom, maturity, dominance, solidity.

*

In English literature the premier genius is Shakespeare, and there are others such as Milton and Wordsworth - but none of these were great men.

The greatest figure in English literature was Samuel Johnson - who, although extremely able, was not a creative genius.

The contrast can be seen also between CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien - Lewis was a great man, while Tolkien was a genius.

*

It is possible to be both - Einstein was both a genius and a great man.  Perhaps Rutherford too?

But you could be 'just' a genius - like most big names of the past: Newton, Darwin and so on.

I can't think for sure of any great men in science that were not also geniuses - maybe Lord Kelvin or David Hilbert? But maybe they too were geniuses?

*

Indeed, it is possible - maybe even usual - to be a rather small man and a genius - immaturity, foolishness, inconsistency, even insignificance are all compatible with genius. That was the contention of the play and movie Amadeus, and there are plenty of other examples. As an extreme and recent example, although I would not rate Picasso as a genius, most people do - and he was a very small man, qua man (and not just in stature).

*

Greatness is generally associate with politics and generalship - perhaps because effective p&g especially benefit from the same constellation of aptitudes as are found in greatness - however greatness is still rare.

I have already named King Alfred the Great as the prime example in English history; it is hard to find another so clear cut.

Perhaps there were great English generals (I'm not sure of this) - maybe Wellington, maybe Cromwell?

Perhaps the explorer Captain James Cook? 

An example of greatness from my part of the world might be the railway engineer George Stephenson - he seems to have struck contemporaries in that way.

*

In US history the greatest man of whom I am aware is Robert E Lee.

Another possible 'great American' was William James. 

Robert Frost (the poet - himself the premier genius of literature that America has produced, and who took his middle name from Robert E Lee) named the three greatest Americans as Washington, Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'm not sure about W and L but Emerson was a genius rather than a great man - which illustrates the difficulty of this distinction. 

The greatest Scottish writer was undoubtedly Sir Walter Scott - despite that many would now deny him the title of genius.

Maybe King David the First of Scotland was their nearest equivalent to Albert (although, naturally, not so great!)

Greatness in music is of course rare - and seems likely to be found more among conductors and performers than composers.

For recent examples, the conductor Otto Klemperer and singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau seem to have had aspects of greatness - although the activities of being a conductor and singer are not themselves first rate creative activities in the way that composition is first rate - and despite that DFD was not even a first rate singer qua singer, in my opinion (lacking in tonal beauty and musical spontaneity).

Among painters only Rembrandt strikes me as great; among sculptors only Rodin. Although both of these were also geniuses - so do not make perfect examples.   

*

What is the cutting-edge and primarily 'creative' part of being a genius?

*
It is worth noting at the outset that here I am doing science, and science rules out using supernatural explanations - so if creativity really has something to do with divine or diabolical or any other kind of spiritual inspiration (as was generally considered to be the case from the ancient Greeks and Hebrews  onward) - then this is not going to be a part of a scientific explanation. So if inspiration is real, then a scientific explanation of creativity can only be partial.

It is also - and for similar reasons - worth noting that science has, and can have, no explanation for real novelty, qualitative novelty, something absolutely new - but can only explain the present in terms of what is known of the past - so novelty will always be explained in terms such as new patterns of old facts, now shapings and combinations of previous forms and so on.

But, taking into account these limitations - how can we describe that actual, cutting edge, 'moment' of creativity - in which the creativity in itself happens?

*

The thing that needs to be explained with human creativity is not just novelty - newness - but useful novelty. There are an 'infinite' number of ways of being new and worse - and not many ways of being new and better - the problem is how the mind gets from the vast 'search space' of new and false ideas or new and useless discoveries to home in on true useful breakthroughs.

*

The mainstream idea in creativity research is associated with Dean Keith Simonton and endorsed by Hans J Eysenck in his 1995 book Genius is a variant of the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection: that useful creativity works by randomly generating large numbers of variations on old ideas, and then using memory and intelligence to test and sort through these ideas to find those few that are plausible in the light of previous knowledge and current observation.

The genius is explained at being better at making useful newness by having a Personality type which is better at generating multiple random variants of previous ideas due to having looser, wider, more far-ranging associations of ideas (which Eysenck explained in terms of the personality trait Psychoticism) - and then having high intelligence which leads to a well-stocked memory and the ability rapidly and efficiently to sort between these multiple random variants to check them for internal consistency and against previous knowledge.

This theory of creativity is coherent, but I think it is not true. The two reasons against it which seem to me decisive are 1. the open ended 'infinite' number of wrong and false ways that any random generator can produce variants, as contrasted with the finite capacity of any selection system for dealing with this endless abundance; and 2. that this description does not fit the phenomenology (inner experience) of genius at its most genius-like.

*

The characteristic of genius is not that of mass producing a near infinite number of failures and falsehoods; but instead an amazing swiftness and sureness of touch at creating or discovering new things that are useful and true.

The Natural Selection view of genius is that it is mostly errors and failure; and that the mental process of a genius is essentially a struggle for existence on the part of true, useful, beautiful and virtuous things against being overwhelmed by false, harmful, ugly and wicked things

But this is simply not how the greatest geniuses operate, when they are at their most genius-like! It is, indeed, almost the opposite to the subjective experience (or objective observation) of creativity.

Of course genius is not effortless - because the genius requires finding his destiny, and then embarking on a discovery 'quest' during which he fills his mind with relevant 'data; but the actual cutting-edge of creativity is an act of insight - of In-Sight - that is to say the genius usually 'sees' the answer all at once and whole, and knows by intuition that he has the right answer.

That is to say, from the mass of inner knowledge accumulated, the genius looks-within and perceives the 'one and only' answer (it may be modified in detail later - but the shape is seen as one).

*

What is astonishing about a genius like Mozart is how the work came to him complete; it is the facility with which they work which amazes us about so much creativity. Even when we see an artist 'struggling' - such as Beethoven - this is usually mostly a matter of an already-genius struggling to continue his work, and to be ever-original, when the pure and fertile imagination of youth has departed.

The youngest geniuses are perhaps the lyric poets - who are almost-always young men in the late teens or twenties, who fluently pour forth their songs and verses without strain or effort. Or the young mathematicians who just 'see' and 'know' things - which they may not be able to explain or prove.

*

So, I suggest that the creative bit of creativity does not resemble a process of trial-and-error; but is a moment of (near) instant insight; and the place it comes from is within; and the method it comes by is intuition; and intuition is a multi-faceted process including illumination, validation, conviction and drive or motivation.

The genius looks within for his answers - and when he finds the answer it is seen or felt as an over-powering insight; which floods him with a conviction of its right-ness and a desire to accept it, make it, live by it.

*
The above argument is continued at:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/a-theory-of-creativity-based-on-new.html


This is also also posted at:

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/what-is-creative-bit-of-creativity-in.html 
*

What happened to the geniuses? (Where will they pop up?)

*

The concept of the over-promoted society where general intelligence has been declining since around 1800, and where the average person from 100 years ago would probably be in the top 10-15 percent of the modern population, provides an explanation of what happened to the geniuses.

Because, looking around the intellectual world, there seem to be approximately zero geniuses.

(At least it is apparently zero if the criteria of the past are applied.)

*

In intellectual history it is interesting to observe how different subjects dominate at different eras; and how genius tends to migrate from one area to another.

For example, one of the last eras of genius was biology, especially genetics; and a significant number of the biology geniuses had migrated from physics - which had been the previous dominant area of science.

From this I assumed that the decline of genius in biology would be accompanied by a rise in some other area - and I was continually on the look-out for where this might be.

*

My first idea was computing science; but it seemed clear that the breakthroughs had been made several decades ago and the field was no longer alive.

A second idea (please don't laugh) was economics; and I read a great deal of economics in the mid 2000s - partly to see whether this was correct.

However, I realized (from about 2007-8) that economists as a class lacked basic honesty and were not motivated to know the truth. Any impression of genius in modern economics was mere public relations, hype.

*

I still kept scanning the intellectual horizon; on the assumption that there must (surely!) be geniuses just as there had been for 100s of years, and they must (surely!) be doing great work somewhere.

But this was challenged by a careful reading of Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment which made clear that zero (detectable) geniuses was the norm in world history - and that the distribution of genius across time and space was very uneven, and shown no tendency to equilibrate (fill the gaps).

Of the near geniuses/ unacknowledged geniuses whom I knew, only one was successful in career terms (and that after their scientific apostasy) while the others were grossly under-promoted and indeed persecuted by academe.

*

So at that point I thought that there were the same number of geniuses as for the past few hundreds of years, but that they were held back and not recognized; and therefore they failed to have impact.

This is clearly correct, and genius is discriminated against while various types of mediocrity are promoted and celebrated with moralizing zeal.

But it is not likely that all geniuses of the past were able to fulfil their potential, nor is it likely that discrimination would be able utterly to crush genius had it been as numerous and vibrant as it was a century ago in the West.

*

My current view is that the age of genius is over - and the West has returned to the normal default state for humankind.

That is, genius is now a very infrequent occurrence; and while it may have a significant impact, it does not change the fundamental nature of society because each genius is isolated and the breakthroughs generated are not frequent enough (in the same domain) as to alter the way society as a whole functions.

Furthermore, genius is now 'misunderstood' in the sense that the general standard of intelligence is too low for their work to be comprehended; so in fact the work of a genius (those rare isolated instances) can seldom be acted upon any more - and therefore the fact that there has been a genius is not longer obvious.

*

What we have, then, is that the decline of intelligence means there are many-fold fewer geniuses in the West (ten-fold, twenty-fold fewer? Or an even greater decline?); plus that those geniuses who are born are less likely to get into a position to make a significant contribution due to Leftism and bureaucracy; plus, even if they do excellent work and make a theoretical contribution, this cannot be recognized (because their work cannot be understood by enough people) - and they will not make a significant practical difference.

So there are now many-fold fewer geniuses; and the few there are, are invisible. And even if not invisible, they make little or no difference to society at large - because modern society is incompetent to use the products of genius.

*

What can be done about the Genius famine?

*

I seem to have evolved such a distinctive view of the nature and effect of Creative Genius that I don't suppose anyone else holds any similar views...

And, in the end, I am ambivalent about Genius. Clearly Genius is such a powerful weapon that it can scarcely be trusted in the hands of a fallen Man.

Genius is thus more likely to lead to harm than good, for the same reason that any machine will usually do more harm than good.

*

But if the modern world has been necessarily based on the work of relatively few Geniuses - as I believe it has; and if Genius is disappearing fast - as I believe it is; then what would be a rational response of a pro-modernizer to the situation.

What is actually happening is not rational, because in fact the modern world has become (and is becoming more so) hostile to Genius; so that the relatively few who emerge are usually kept from having any chance of influence.

This happens passively by bureaucracy and actively by Leftism (pretty much all of the Leftist 'moral' priorities will have the net effect of making it harder, or impossible, for a Genius to get into any position of influence or be taken notice of).

*

So on the one hand there is a 'famine' of Genius - which afflicts the science, technology, the arts, politics, philosophy, law... pretty much everything with very few people of that sort within the fields

But on the other hand, there is near zero awareness of the rapid and (from a modernizing perspective) catastrophic decline in Genius.

*

Take classical music. There are essentially zero geniuses operating in composing Western classical music nowadays, although there used to be many; and this has been the situation for many decades; and indeed the kind of people who might potentially do work of genius are utterly absent from these social systems - yet nobody ever talks about this.

Or in academic scholarship. In the vastly bloated British university systems, not only is there essentially nobody doing work of Genius (I can think of just one); but there is probably nobody who would even be capable of having a shot at Genius-level work: the people are just the wrong kind of people altogether.

In the first place, they are not even trying to do the best work of which they are capable - so it is not going to happen,

In the second place they have the wrong personality type: conscientious, obedient, empathic, following of established rules...

In the third place they are of lesser intelligence compared with the past.

*

Nothing much can be done about the demographic decline in intelligence; and the process continues.

However, it would, in principle, seemingly be possible to compensate for this - for a while - by a better 'search process': a more effective way of unearthing more individuals from the declining pool of potential geniuses and giving them a better chance of coming through to a position where they might attain the best work of which they were capable - and then taking some notice of it.

Yet, to write that paragraph is to see that it will not happen, and also perhaps why it will not happen.

How could a society which is root and branch hostile to the kind of person who might (but probably wont) become a Genius, do anything of the sort?

And there is the paradox of organizing society to encourage the emergence of the disorganized and disorganizing and disruptive.

*

But if something of the sort was actually put into effect (and this might well be a plot for a science fiction novel, perhaps by Philip K Dick), then it could happen by means of a program of psychological profiling and testing rather like the process which already exists for discovering talent in musical performance.

That is, a multitude of individual coaches, teachers or Maestros who would take on promising youngsters for training; and a variety of competitions aimed at evaluating both achieved performance and (more important) potential.

The framework is that what is happening is that talent is being discovered then developed to a point where the talent can take-over its own development.


*

The apprentice would need to find, and trust, a Master.

The Master would need to want to find, and work with, the best apprentices. 

The Masters would be in control of the system.

Because only the Masters can see what is going on. 

But aside from that, there is no 'system'. No formal requirements. No standard progression. No accreditation of any significance.

*

Very individualistic, very elitist, very esoteric.

It sees talent and the potential for Genius as essentially innate.

If you haven't got it you can't do it; and if even you have, you probably won't.

*

The only place I think anything of this sort continues (at least until recently) in the scholarly world is mathematics in some countries - where there exists a system of competitions for sifting the general population, identifying then developing the small number of kids who show special mathematical talent.

If modern society was concerned with its own continuation - which very clearly it is not, instead being devoted to its own extinction - then something of this kind would need to occur to locate and empower sufficient numbers of Geniuses to maintain the frequent and relevant breakthroughs necessary to enable continued growth in efficiency and capability.

But instead we have public relations which convinces everybody who matters that everything is fine and getting better. 

*

What is genius and why has it almost disappeared? My Genius Famine (2016) book free online

My 2016 book (co-authered with Ed Dutton)

The Genius Famine: Why we need geniuses, Why they’re dying out, and Why we must rescue them

is now available online, complete and free of charge.

http://geniusfamine.blogspot.co.uk

The Genius Famine is a wide ranging examination of the nature and potential causes of genius; the possible reasons for its decline; the effects genius has had on human society; and the expected effects of the recent (all-but) disappearance of geniuses of 'world historical' stature.

**

Introduction 

This book is about genius: what it is, what it does, where it comes from. And about geniuses: especially why there used to be so many and now there are so few; what was the effect of an era of geniuses, and what will be the consequences of our current Genius Famine. 

This book describes the genius as an Endogenous personality; that is, a person of high intelligence combined with a personality driven from within, an ‘inner’ –orientated personality: that is, a dominated by the Creative Triad of (1) Innate high ability, (2) Inner motivation and (3) Intuitive thinking. When high intelligence and this type of personality are confluent, a potential genius is the result. 

But to fulfil this potential the Endogenous personality must find and accept his own Destiny, and must undergo the trials and tribulations of a Quest before he is likely to be rewarded by an Illumination: a breakthrough. Even then, the breakthrough must be noticed, understood, accepted, implemented by society at large; and we describe how past societies were much better at recognizing and making a place for the potential genius. 

Because the problem is that the Endogenous personality is usually an awkward and asocial character at best; and often an actively unpleasant person and a disruptive influence. Geniuses are altruistic, in the sense that their work is primarily for the good of the group; and not for the usual social rewards such as status, money, sex, and popularity. Therefore many geniuses need to be sustained in a long-term way; and their work demands careful attention and evaluation. 

We argue that modern societies, by means both indirect and direct, have become hostile to genius and indifferent to the work of those relatively few remaining geniuses. However, because the work of a genius is necessary and irreplaceable, we argue for a change of attitude. Modern society needs geniuses for its own survival in the face of unfamiliar, often unprecedented, threats. 

Therefore, we must in future do a better job of recognizing, sustaining and accepting guidance from as many geniuses of the highest quality that can be found.

Bad endings are common because most modern writers are corrupt (The example of Phillip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' triology)

*
Phillip Pullman published a well-known trilogy from 1995-2000 called 'His Dark Materials', comprising Northern Lights (aka The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.

The point I wish to make about this series is that it starts very well, and ends very badly. The contrast is extreme - the first part of the first novel is very good, and by the end of the third volume it has become very bad.

This interpretation of His Dark Materials is not really a matter of opinion, but as close to objective fact as you can get in literary criticism - anyone who doubts should read John C Wright on the technical aspects; and the ideological reason for these gross errors and incompetencies.

http://www.scifiwright.com/xabout/transhuman-and-subhuman/#_Toc384557547

But bad endings are not unusual - indeed, it is quite normal, statistically common, even fashionable and mainstream - for books, plays, movies, and TV plays and series to start well and end badly.

But why should this be? Why do they, on the one hand, start well; and on the other hand, finish badly?

*

I think the answer is quite simple. Great works are written with the assistance of genius, which can be understood as a visitor who will only stay if treated well.

Many more talented writers are visited by genius than succeed in completing works of genius, because most writers betray their visiting genius before the work is complete - the genius flies away, and the work must be finished without it; and talent without genius is comparatively a very poor thing.

So, Phillip Pullman was a talented writer who was visited by genius and began Northern Lights; but he was dishonest in the way he used this gift - so away it flew and he cobbled together the rest of the trilogy on his own - getting across the 'message' which meant so much to him, but making a an artistic pig's ear of the writing.

JK Rowling is different. She was visited by genius when writing Harry Potter, and it sustained her through seven volumes - and the last volume, including its ending, are wonderful! The best thing in it (probably).

There are signs that, part way through, Rowling became personally dishonest and corrupt -  probably due to the temptations of fame - but she kept this out of the books. However, when she finished Harry Potter, Rowling embraced the dark side, and away genius flew - her work has waned even as her commitment to political correctness has waxed - and she has been caught in several blatant lies about her life and work. I would not expect her ever to write anything really good ever again.

However, throughout HP, Rowling was true to her visiting genius - it stayed with her for the duration, and she was therefore able to complete a great work.

*

And of course the benchmark classics all end well, else they would not be real classics. The Lord of the Rings, the Narnia Chronicles (despite extreme digressiveness en route), The Wind in the Willows (despite major incoherence and a detachably episodic structure) - all of these have deeply satisfying endings.

No author is so great as to overcome the need for a good ending. When George Bernard Shaw tried to end Pygmalion with an anticlimax, the actors when on tour secretly substituted the dramatically-implied-and-required 'comedic' ending (ie implying marriage between Higgins and Eliza). This, to Shaw's extreme annoyance! - but they would not stop doing it, because the audience response told them what was right. And the highly successful musical adaptation (My Fair Lady) made exactly the same change.

So, even so great a playwright as Shaw was not immune to the absolute requirement for a good ending. Even the greatest of all - Shakespeare - has to bow to this imperative...

All Shakespeare's best plays (best, that is, according to the consensus of playgoers through the ages) end well; and the ones that don't end well are not regarded as great.For instance, Measure for Measure is shaping-up superbly for most of its length; but the play has a truly terrible ending - so it never has become a part of the standard dramatic repertoire (despite having the best 'strong' female role Shakespeare ever wrote).

*

This, then, is a possible reason why too many books end badly; and why so many other narrative forms end badly too. It comes down to the abuse of visiting genius.

Bad endings have indeed, become a feature of modernist writing over the past century. The inability to finish a book, play, movie has been covered-up with nonsense about the sophistication of an 'ambiguous' ending, or 'deliberate' anticlimax, or the desirability of 'dark', 'subversive' conclusions; or the need for some kind of radically transgressive and expectation-thwarting finish (to educate the audience).

But the fact is that it is an extremely difficult thing to end a narrative well - and I would regard supposedly deliberately ambiguous (etc.) endings as a fake; an excuse to cover-up incompetence and failure.

*

Bad endings are so common nowadays because corruption of writers has become so common as to be nearly universal. When visited by genius, the writer is not grateful, does not perceive that this entails a duty to be truthful to his inspiration - but instead he tries to use the gifts of genius to pursue to fashionable ideology, or to ride some personal hobby horse.

Corruption leads to betrayal of genius - usually by dishonesty; and the cause of dishonesty is usually some brand of Left Wing/ radical politics - which the writer or artist places above the truth of art.

Dishonest art cannot be great; and an habitual liar can only be a great artist when he is (nonetheless) utterly truthful in his art - however badly he behaves the rest of the time.

*

Why creative genius is like a 'genie'

*
Genius can be conceptualized as a 'genie' within us - the word genie being derived from the Roman concept of a guardian and tutelary spirit, akin to the Greek 'daemon' (like Socrates's daemon who advised him and give him insights) - the concept then gathering connotations of creativity, and then 'genie' being used for the Arabian Jinn, which are autonomous supernatural entities (some good, some evil).

I am coining a usage which somewhat playfully takes all these elements so as to indicate the way in which the creativity of a classic genius:

1. Guides the genius - not in all the minute and specific details of living, but in a long-term, strategic fashion

2. Has apparently 'supernatural' powers - since real creativity is ultimately mysterious, and

3. Acts somewhat like an independent and autonomous personage - with whom the conscious and rational mind must build a relationship (the conscious rational mind may influence but does not control the genie, and cannot force the genie to do his will).

*

My understanding is that - in the above sense - almost everybody will have a genie of creativity - but the genie will vary considerably in power and dominance - in most people the genie has modest power and is usually ignored or suppressed; in a great genius the genie will have great power and will tend to dominate life strategy in many ways.

(Other in-between and dissociated states are presumably possible.)

*

The genie of a normal (non-genius) person will only be apparent in short bursts and perhaps in a crisis. In a short term crisis a person may demonstrate remarkable and seemingly-inexplicable powers or abilities (which can look like sheer luck). This could be explained in terms of them drawing upon the mysterious insights, intuitions, and knowledge of their genie.

However, this state can seldom be maintained over the long term, because most people are set-up to be dominated not by the genie but instead by more 'normal' motivations - such as social esteem (e.g. the striving for status and admiration), familial and sexual motivations, comfort, convenience, excitement etc.

*

So, creative genius is quantitative - the genie varies in power and dominance - at at a certain degree of power and degree of dominance the genie will have 'taken-over' the life strategy of a person (not completely, but primarily) - and such as person is A Genius.

*

Why is this important?

Because we live in a society where, for whatever reason, genius tends to be unacknowledged, denied, ignored and even (but usually indirectly, for other and usually 'political' given-reasons) actively persecuted.

Also, because the world-historical geniuses, which for the past four hundred years used to be common in all major domains of life in The West - art, literature, science, medicine, law, politics, the military, and religion - has become extremely rare; indeed has almost disappeared.

Therefore - if modern society wishes to avail itself of the benefits that genius (and only genius) can bring (e.g. solving unyielding problems by intuitive insights, making breakthrough discoveries), then modernity needs to become more sensitive in its detection, acknowledgement and recognition of genius: this is so even from the perspective of pure self-interest.

Perhaps a starting point is to recognize our own individual creative genie - no matter how relatively feeble it may be, and how infrequently it becomes apparent - we may notice it when, in a crisis, we may, briefly, be able to do something rather extraordinary and inexplicable.

*

Robert Frost's influence on my life

*

Robert Frost is just about my favourite poet - in the sense that he wrote more of my favourite poems than anyone else.

He wrote a lot of superb poems.

*

I began to engage with his work in 1984, but from the mid 1990s for a decade I read Frost - and everything I could find about Frost (biographies, memoirs, letters, criticism) - with great intensity; it was a spin-off from my fascination with the earlier generation of New England Transcendentalists to whom Frost was an heir, of sorts.

Around the peak of interest I visited the Frost Farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, and stayed in Bethlehem NH where he spent his summers. Frost's presence - or rather his world - was so vivid that it felt like a time-slip.

(The same semi-delirious mood had come-upon me several times the week before wrt. Emerson and Thoreau and their circle in Concord Massachusetts, and Walden Pond early in the morning - it was that kind of vacation.)   

*

Aside from his literary genius, I now perceive that this interest was driven by the fact that Frost seemed to offer a spiritual path that, I thought, might solve the main problem of life: alienation, driven by ultimate meaninglessness and purposelessness.

Frost was, I think, a Deist (believing in an impersonal God that provided structure) - within which his life was 'poetry' - conceived in a broad way. The creation of poetry, its performance, teaching poetry - and with its ideal 'a life that goes poetically' - I quote from memory - Frost was describing how his wife Eleanor wished this for the Frost family; and how she preferred the early days of the family when the children were young and Frost was unpublished (part-time farming/ teaching in Londonderry, Franconia and visiting England).

This notion was what I aimed for - a life that goes poetically... and I tried to understand whatever that might mean in practice.

*

This is, more or less, the aim of most artists and many intellectuals in the post religious era - at least since Romanticism in the early 1800s.

What sustains it, in the face of overwhelming forces that tend to destroy the poetry of life? Unfortunately, one necessary component, as exemplified by Frost himself, is selfish pride. 

I am certainly not one of those who regard Frost as an exceptionally bad man - that is a falsehood assiduously cultivated by his embittered official biographer Lawrence Thompson. But Frost got close to living poetically for extended periods by virtue of his pride - which sustained him in the face of opposition; and his selfishness - which sought a suitable niche for his activities and, essentially, saw the rest of the world as organized around that niche.

At any rate, that was the lesson I drew from my extensive examination of Frost and his life.

And Frost got close to achieving his goal because he was a poetic genius, and became recognized as such (but only relatively late in his life, from his forties onward) - so life organized-itself around him; and because his will was strong and his intelligence acute.

*

So, learning from Frost, the problem of life becomes How To Be A Genius - which is difficult enough - but then in addition there is the matter of How To Become Recognized As A Genius... and that question leads into all kinds of seedy and dishonest shenanigans, which subvert the Genius (if it even exists).

And leads onto what is so common in the arts - which is people scheming to be treated as a Genius, but with no genius whatsoever to back it up  - merely egotism.

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In a secular (or Deist) world view, there is a hunger for genius, almost a greed for it; precisely because only the genius can live at the highest level.

For most people, most of the time, all this is little more than a day-dream; yet such a day-dream may be a secret and sustaining thing (for good or ill) - a vital fact of life.

This is a thread which runs through much or even most successful post-romantic art: there are many great artists, writers, thinkers, poets, musicians  (and many more non-great artists) whose work is mostly about-genius; and especially about their own genius, its nature and its relation to the world.

And the reason is that they are post-religious individuals who perceive the meaning and purpose of life as something self-created; and thus their own creative activities become the focus of concern: their sense of life depending on their own activities.

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How common this is among intellectuals!

We strive to convince ourselves of our own importance, indeed indispensability; then having finally convinced ourselves of this fact we recognize that if 'everything' (or everything that matters)  depends on our own efforts, then 'everything' will end sooner or later and - anyway - if everything depends on our genius then nothing really matters anyway.

It is a self-subverting activity; to succeed is to fail.

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C.S Lewis commented on this when he said that after any particularly effective and well-received Christian apologetics he felt at his worst, most vulnerable, most despairing; because at that moment Christianity felt like it depended critically on the efforts and abilities of CS Lewis - which made Lewis feel that Christianity must be a false and futile kind of thing if it depended on himself for its defence...

In my own feeble way I have noticed exactly the same thing at work in my life, on a daily basis.

If ever I have written something decent on this blog, or had an effective 'evangelical' conversation perhaps; then I first of all feel puffed-up with smugness; then, almost always and quickly, plummet down into the same kind of crash that Lewis described.

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Which explains why I could not find anything I wanted to blog about yesterday...

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(Reminder: Tomorrow is the Sabbath - so I intend not to blog then.)

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What are the social ill-effects of the genius famine in the arts? (What are 'the arts' for, anyway?)

The lack of genius in some of the arts such as fine art and classical music may be accepted as true, but what is its effect? What are we missing?

The questions is ultimately one about the proper function of art - what is art supposed to do? Why does art exist at all?

Only if we know the function of art could we understand why art's supreme practitioners might have value, and then understand what the lack of living representatives if such practitioners might do.

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This question has not proved at all easy to answer over the past couple of hundred - even for the most dedicated and enthusiastic advocates of 'the arts'. Indeed, the most extreme advocates, 'aesthetes - who tried to build their lives around the appreciation and practise of art and to make life itself an art - were reduced to incoherent babble about 'art for art's sake'.

And the reason for this difficulty is simple enough: it is that secular culture, culture which denies the reality of religion, cannot answer any 'why' questions.

The only possible answer to 'why' questions is some kind of story, purpose or teleology of life. Only if we know where life-in-general is supposed to go and our own role in it, can we explain the role of any-thing in particular - such as art.

From the perspective of my Christianity, the function of art is seen in terms of a long, interrupted progression, potentially towards divinity; a vision of life in which love is the primary value, and other values including creativity rank very high indeed.

The transcendent Good, within which such progression occurs, has been traditionally and usefully separated into Truth, Beauty and Virtue. So, in a metaphysical sense, the Good - including Beauty - are part of the backdrop or frame within-which the prime drama of the human story happens - the value of Beauty is built-into the fabric of reality. Beauty is therefore extremely important!

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Yet, we immediately notice that our recognition and appreciation of Beauty is 'also' subjective, and relative - there is a lot of disagreement about the specifics.

However, there is also the feeling that disagreement about the specifics of art - disputes over who are the greatest geniuses - or an inability to appreciate Shakespeare, Rembrandt or Beethoven - or disagreements over whether Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Wagner was the greatest - and so on... such inconsistencies do not really matter, so long as the basic aims and purposes are correct.

The basic assumption that makes art valuable runs along the lines that:

Art is about Beauty, and Beauty is part of The Good. 

The artistic genius and art itself is therefore a kind of human-bridge between ourselves and the transcendental value of beauty. Art is, must be, about Beauty - and forms a kind of framework or explanation, an education and training, about Beauty.

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Therefore art is not neutral, neither is it optional, and it is highly consequential. A specific culture's art and appreciation of art is indeed a fundamental aspect of its nature - and this is related via Beauty to the most fundamental distinction of Good and evil.

The lack of living geniuses is therefore rather like a lack of living prophets. A lack of living prophets means that there is nobody authoritative to interpret and explain uncertainties and ambiguities of religious scripture and doctrine - the prophet is a mediator.

A lack of living geniuses is similar although in a way that is more like showing than explaining - the work of an artistic genius is itself a kind of model of how to relate to reality in terms of beauty - it is an experience of how to identify and respond to beauty.

If we having no living genius to do this for our time and circumstances, and in face of new and specific problems and deliberate obfuscations, then we must make do with past geniuses - and we come a much less-direct, a 'silver', antiquarian or museum culture.

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Of course, there are many types of art, seldom living geniuses in all of them all of the time, and there is another possibility of using the achievements of genius domain and applying it to others.. Thus some cultures (in an particular time and place) are dominated by painting, others by poetry, others by music.

In the modern West, it seems to me that the highest levels of achievement are probably in fiction, novels - especially 'genre' novels such as fantasy. By contrast, poetry and drama are in a bad way.

In that sense, we are living in a literary prose culture - and our primary genius is in that domain.

Since the best modern fiction is more 'niche' than the novel used to be, the scale of genius is probably less than in the past - but the possibility exists for benefiting from such living interpreters and intermediaries as the basis for a relationship to Life and an answer to fundamental problems; including an interpretation which spills over into other domains such as music and art.

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This happens by reading books, novels of genius; imaginatively entering into the worlds made by genius, and actually experiencing the way that we as individuals may experience Beauty 'inside' the experience of those worlds.

The example is now historical, but the reason why reading The Lord of the Ring's by JRR Tolkien was so important in my life was that the experience educated me into an experience of fictive life (life inside the fiction) that solved (more or less) the problem of relating to beauty which I experienced in modern everyday life. Tolkien's genius was to create a proper relation to Beauty inside his world, and I was able to learn from this.

It is the lack of this possibility which causes deep problems when genius is absent, and when art is corrupted - especially when art claims to be nothing to do with Beauty, or advocates the destruction of Beauty as a deeper Beauty, or the shock value of ugliness as a kind of Beauty, or subordinates Beauty to politics.

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In sum, we live in an era when the problem is not so much lack of genius, nor of low quality of art - but one where anti-Art (based on an ideal of anti-Beauty, which is therefore anti-Good) is officially propagated as mainstream.

This is... confusing. It is easy to know what the arts are for in a sane society; but in our society of deliberate insanity, where 'arts' may legitimately be themselves ugly, promote ugliness, subvert and destroy Beauty, and deconstruct the meaning of 'art'... well, the (officially approved) arts merely contribute to the state of delusion and despair.

But in a 'normal' (rather than an inverted) society, the role and function of art and the artist including The Genius is much easier to discern. Art in such a society is an extremely important part of The Good Life and an obvious source of understanding, motivation and enhancement.

Reflections on Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment and genius

Charles Murray's book length quantitative analysis of Human Accomplishment, made a big impact on me. I 'brooded' over it for quite a while, especially the summaries and speculations concerned with the possible cultural causes of 'genius'.

I have always been interested in 'genius', and have read many biographies of geniuses in a range of endeavors.

Ad on the whole, I subscribe to the Great Man theory by which specific individuals shape the course of history - some of these individuals do exceptional damage, others are exceptionally creative, while of course some do both.

And therefore I regard the ability of a society to produce potential Great Men and embody the conditions they need to make a difference, as a major influence on it - and this ability has been very unevenly distributed between societies across space and time.

For example, the modern world - the kind of society characterized by growth in scientific knowledge, technological capability and economic production, which took off in Great Britain and became apparent in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries - and spread from there; this kind of society I believe was probably driven by the work of numerous Great Men (or 'geniuses') who produced qualitative advances (or 'breakthroughs') across a wide range of human activities.

I believe that these numerous breakthroughs required Great Men (i.e an adequate supply of GM were necessary but not sufficient), but once made could be exploited by ordinary men.

Most histories of society took the form of a series of mini-biographies. For example, Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man TV series was, for most of its length, focused on a series of specific individuals. And the implication was that this was not just a convenience for the purposes of teaching and entertainment, but an account of how things really, necessarily happened.

Up to the 1950s it was obvious for Britons to focus on Great Men, since they were living among us, and each new generation brought forth a fresh supply - so many, indeed, that only a sample could become household names.

Then, from the mid 1960s into the second half of the century, people began to notice that the supply of GM seemed to be drying up. This went along with various fashions for denying the importance of GM in human history, and attributing change to other forces (such as class). And for human affairs increasingly to be organized bureaucratically, in ways that implicitly denied the need for GM, and indeed sought to replace human creativity and genius with explicit and predictable procedure.

By the mid 1980s I noticed that the last real English poets were dying and that there was nobody to replace them. For the first time in several centuries, there was not one single living poet of real stature.

Looking around, the same situation was looming in science - and by now there are just a few elderly remnants of previous generations who might be regarded as geniuses. Medical breakthroughs also began drying up at about this time (although there have not been many major medical geniuses, according to Murray’s lists).

So apparently the age of genius is over for Britain, which probably means the age of progress via multiple breakthroughs is over; and the same situations seems to prevail everywhere else - so far as I can tell. If genius was the driver of the modern world, this means that the modern world is also over (unless you believe that genius has now effectively been replaced by bureaucracy – Ha!).

Whatever it was that created the supply of geniuses and the conditions in which they could make breakthroughs has changed. I do not know whether there are still *potential* geniuses being born, but the whole motivational structure of society is hostile to genius and it is likely that individuals who would have grown to be potential Great Men in an earlier phase of society, nowadays have their motivation and sense of self poisoned. Instead of trying to achieve great things, such people would now probably pursue a great career, or would simply find themselves fish out of water.

I find myself ambivalent about this. Of course I vastly prefer a society conducive to genius to one being destroyed by bureaucracy. And if human history is conceptualized –like Bronowski does - in terms of a story of progressively increasing power to shape nature (by increasing understanding of its underlying structure) then the prospect of a massive decline in human power is dismaying. It is also dismaying from the perspective of mass human happiness – the prospect of mass violence, displacement, starvation, disease etc.

Yet, realistically, modernity was not planned neither were the modernizing societies (such as late Medieval and early Modern England) in any sense designed to nurture, or provide opportunities for, genius. The whole thing was an unplanned by-product and the age of genius was accidental.

Indeed, it was transitional, never stable, containing the seeds of its own destruction – like so many things. The geniuses were usually transitional figures who – over the course of their own lives – rejected the religious and traditional societies into which they were born. In their own lives they sometimes combined the strengths of the traditional society of the past and the progressive society which was emerging (as a result, partly, of their own work).

Yet of course the transitional phase is necessarily temporary, evanescent, cannot be sustained – and the generations of fully modern people, who are born into the world created by the geniuses – are one-eyed, feeble, and lack the source of strength of traditionalism. They (we) are post modern hedonists, for the most part – consumers, not creators.

I now tend to regard modernity as a temporary aberration from the course of human history. It arose from an accidental conjunction of genetics and society; and the effect of genius was to destroy the genetics and society which had caused itself. Whether it would have been good to sustain modernity (and reform it – because its vices are intolerable and have grown exponentially) I don’t know for sure.

But I do know that we have not even tried to do this, has not even tried to sustain itself, but instead has parasitically exploited the heritage of genius; so the question is now unanswerable empirically.

I now see human choice, or at least our destiny, in terms of lying between traditional societies – a choice between the kinds of human societies which existed roughly between AD 500 and AD 1500.