What is Genius? What Places Enjoyed High Levels of Genius Throughout History?
Review of The Geography of Genius by Eric Weiner
“The mere presence of dissent — even if wrongheaded — improves creative performance.”
“You pick up a book from a physicist in the 1890’s, and it is written in a way that people can understand. They had to defend their theories to a wide audience,” Martin tells me. How different from today, I think, when an academic is considered successful when no one can understand a word he says.
Intro
The Geography of Genius is an enjoyable, travelogue style of a book where the author Eric Weiner visits various parts of the world that had previously (or currently) experienced an age of creativity.
It’s sort of a mix of unscientific case studies with personal opinions (often funny) and scientific research tied into his observations.
Overall, it does a good job of identifying some of the characteristics necessary to create creative places and allow genius to develop and flourish. One item he mentions is that —
Nearly all are cities. We may be inspired by nature — a walk in the woods, the sound of a waterfall — but something about an urban setting is especially conducive to creativity. If it takes a village to raise a child, as the African proverb goes, it takes a city to raise a genius.
Each chapter of the book focuses on a city that the author identified as a place of genius at some point in history. Silicon Valley is the only example from the present.
Eric travels to each city and talks to people and visits places that he feels can provide him with insight as to what allowed those cities to flourish as nodes of creativity for a brief period of time.
Ratings
- Likelihood of recommending a friend to read? 📚📚📚📚
- Likelihood of recommending a friend to purchase? 💰💰
- Positive Influence: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Time to read (more stars is more time): 🕒🕒🕒
Two or Three Favorite Things
This is where mentors such as Verrocchio enter the picture. They are an incredibly important component in creativity. Even the most brilliant minds need role models, shoulders of giants on which to stand. In an extensive study of ninety-four Nobel laureates, sociologist Harriet Zuckerman found that most attributed their success to a key mentor in their lives. When asked though, how exactly they benefited from these relationships, scientific knowledge ranked at the very bottom. So what did they learn from their mentors?
The answer could best be described as thinking styles. Not answers but ways of formulating questions. A sort of applied creativity. Normally we think of creativity strictly in terms of problem solving. We are presented with a different puzzle, then we deploy our ‘creative skills’ to solve the assigned problem. That is admirable, but what if we don’t know what the problem is we’re trying to solve?
Enter “problem finding.” Problem solvers answer questions. Problem finders discover new questions, and then answer them. It is these new questions, even more than the answers, that distinguish the genius.
…The problems we discover on our own are the ones that motivate us the most.
I love this. First off, the biggest thing the masters of old learned from their mentors was how to think. And not how to think of answers but rather how to ask questions and what type of questions to ask.
We do not find answers to the questions we don’t ask.
The answer could be staring us in the face, but if we aren’t looking for it we won’t notice it.
Eric Weiner uses the example of Darwin. No one said:
“Charles, please devise a theory of evolution.” He discovered the problem — unexplained similarities between different species — then solved it with a unifying theory. All of this took place within his chosen field of biology — not some free-floating creative-thinking exercise.
When we ask questions about the things we notice, then we can begin to refine thoughts and ideas that can formulate an explanation.
To be a genius requires asking questions and asking the right questions.
Related to this is how formal education is not necessary for creative genius, at least not much. Florence, as an example, had no good universities. Weiner says in the book:
How can this be? Isn’t education an essential ingredient of genius?
He goes on to mention how Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Woody Allen were all college dropouts. Thomas Edison dropped out of school at fourteen years old. Einstein’s PhD dissertation was rejected twice.
So some education is essential to creative genius, but beyond a certain point, more education does not increase the chances of genius and actually lowers it. The deadening effect of formal education manifests itself surprisingly early. Psychologists have identified the exact year when a child’s creative thinking skills plateau: the fourth grade.
This brings us to a remarkable finding. While the number of degrees conferred and scientific papers published has grown exponentially in the past fifty years, the “rate at which truly creative work emerges has remained relatively constant,”…We are experiencing a flood of experts and even talent, but no bump in creative breakthroughs.
One culprit…is specialization. We’ve carved the world into smaller and smaller bits. Then there is the sheer volume of information that exists in every field today. If genius requires first mastering the body of knowledge in your chosen field and then, and only then, making your own contribution, well, good luck. A physicist or a biologist could spend a lifetime reviewing the work of others and still not make a dent.
Edwin Boring…said, “It is useful to be ignorant of bad knowledge.” In that sense, Florence’s lack of a university was a blessing. It saved the city from “a scholastic straitjacket,” as urbanist Peter Hall put it.
He has a point about this. He is not saying specialization is bad for society, but he is saying it’s not helpful for creativity.
Creativity is making connections between the different dots. Many of the geniuses we revere had knowledge in many different fields and were thus able to make new connections.
Also, the point about being ignorant of bad knowledge is key — you don’t hold as sacred or doctrine something that is not actually correct. So you are willing to consider new options or ideas that others might not.
Personal Impact
The book started slow, but I eventually came to love the book and the things I was learning. There are lots of insights and things that reaffirmed some things I believed as well as providing me with knowledge and thoughts I had never considered before. For example:
Shen possessed many talents but, ultimately, I think his was the genius of observation. Not any kind of observation, mind you, but the kind that leads to instantaneous insight — what author Robert Grudin calls “the beauty of sudden seeing.” His was the kind of observation Charles Darwin had in mind when he warned, “It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing.” Darwin advocated observation unencumbered by assumptions and expectations. See what is before you, the thing itself. Analyze later.
Every great discovery, every world-changing invention, every bold theorem, began with this simple act of observation. The genius looks at what everyone else is looking at and sees something different.
I too often try to analyze why observing. It’s tricky. But when something is very new, like traveling to a new place, I try and take it in. I observe, enjoy, and then, thinking about it later, get an idea why the place is different from others that I’m familiar with.
For example, when I visited Argentina for the first time, I wondered why all the Chinese people I met worked and owned one of three types of business: supermarket, laundry, and Chinese restaurants. I didn’t see them working or starting any other type of business. I wondered why.
Eventually I realized that because they are immigrants, most of them did not speak very good Spanish. This impeded them from qualifying for many types of jobs or providing many types of services. But they didn’t need much Spanish to provide and work laundry machines, cook food or buy and sell products. So they started businesses that didn’t require much Spanish.
And they were very successful.
It was not easy for an Argentine family or business to compete. The Chinese ran their businesses as a family business and were open 7 days a week and holidays. Since they weren’t the same religion and probably shared profits as a family, they were open when others were closed. [I honestly have no idea if they paid wages to the individual family members so that is research for another day].
Either way, if I hadn’t observed and later asked questions and thought about the problem, I wouldn’t have discovered an answer [that maybe was obvious to other but was unknown to me].
One problem with brainstorming is that is has an agenda, even if it is unspoken: we’re going to sit around this table until we come up with a REALLY BIG IDEA. That creates a lot of pressure; brainstorming relies almost exclusively on extrinsic motivation. Not good. At the coffeehouse, there was no agenda. The conversation unfolded completely nonlinearly, like a Calcuttan adda. “Purposelessness sanctifies the stay,” as Polgar put it.
Which is not to say that good ideas didn’t emerge from the coffeehouse. They did. But the key word is FROM. The ideas gelled afterward, once the cigarette smoke had cleared, the caffeine exited, and the rush of new information settled. We COLLECT our dots in the company of others. We CONNECT them by ourselves (emphasis added).
Eric Weiner visits Edinburgh and mentions how the Scottish Enlightenment is a real mystery.
Why and how did this tiny city on the edge of the world experience “the most vivacious intellectual shindig in history,”…without exaggeration…
A Scottish historian tells the author that:
One of the secret ingredients that made Edinburgh such a hothouse of genius…was CONVERSATION. Edinburgh, like Socrates’s Athens, was a city of gab, and therein lay it’s genius. (emphasis added)
Eric thinks it’s a “tempting conclusion” that even Socrates would agree with, but Eric’s a little skeptical. Putting a bunch of smart people together and have them talk thing out should lead to “brilliant ideas”.
But it doesn’t allows work. Smart people + conversation != genius.
President John F. Kennedy held a series of closed-door meetings with his closest, and smartest, advisors…the result was the ill-conceived 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Nearly all of the fourteen hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles were captured of killed. Cuba moved even deeper into the Soviet orbit. It was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history (emphasis added). How could it have happened, given the combined intellectual throw weight gathered in that room?
A psychologist named Irving Janis investigated the meetings a decade later and concluded that the
profound error in judgment was due not to stupidity, but rather to a quirk of human nature. When people of similar backgrounds get together, are isolated from dissenting views, and are trying to please a strong leader, the result is consensus around the preferred position, even if it is clearly wrongheaded…groupthink.
Janis is the one who came up with that term. Weiner continues:
Groupthink is the flip side of group genius…Groupthink is collective stupidity, and every culture is susceptible to it. The question is, why does it rear its head at certain times and not others? Why is it that when you get one group of smart people together the result is genius, and with another group of equally smart people the result is groupthink?
That question has no simple answer, but psychologists suspects a lot hinges on a group’s willingness to entertain dissenting views. Groups that tolerate dissent generate more ideas, and more good ideas, then groups that don’t, studies have found. This holds true even if those dissenting view turn out to be completely wrong. The mere presence of dissent — even if wrongheaded — improves creative performance. How we talk matters at least as much as what we’re talking about. Conflict isn’t only acceptable in a place of genius. It is indispensable.
To me, it’s a fascinating finding. It appears dissent and conflict at least force us to broaden our view, even if the dissent is incorrect. It helps us to see more possible approaches to an issue, thus improving creativity.
It’s a big deal. It matters in our school and work discussions, our religious meetings and our families. We need to learn to encourage diverse points of view. But only if we desire to avoid groupthink.
In a similar vein, the presence of foreigners (such as in ancient Athens) can have a similar effect since they introduce new thoughts, food, and ways of living that help people open up their minds to additional ways of doing things.
Final Thoughts
The things I most liked about this book is the different tidbits and findings about creativity found or shared throughout the book.
In addition, I enjoyed getting to know more about cities I had never thought of as cities of great genius, such as Calcutta, Hangzhou, and Edinburgh.
Read this book if you want to learn a little more about a few historical places of genius and some of the factors that influence and encourage creativity. It’s a pretty enjoyable read with a lot of insights I am unable to include in this review.
But just because there’s so much. Here’s one last excerpt and insight from the book as a bonus:
“The ability to acknowledge and mourn loss is apt to lead to a shutdown of vital creative impulses…only the resolution of loss allows for a fresh start and renewed access to sources of creativity,” (Armand D’Angour, a classicist also trained as psychotherapist) says in his book The Greeks and the New. This is a remarkable statement. He’s suggesting that mourning, the fully conscious encounter with loss, is not only vital for our mental health but for our creative lives as well.
This dynamic might explain why a disproportionately large number of geniuses, of any era, lost a parent, usually a father, at a young age…The list includes Dante, Bach, Darwin, Michelangelo, Dosoyevsky, Mark Twain, and Virginia Wolff. These geniuses possessed not only an ability to rebound from suffering but to transform that suffering into productive, and creative, outlets. Winston Churchill, who also lost his father when he was young, said, “Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong: a boy deprived of a father’s care often develops, if he escapes the perils of youth, an independence and vigor of thought which may restore in afterlife the heavy loss of early days.”
That’s a big if though. Psychologist Robert Sternberg reviewed the data and concludes, “The only other groups that suffered approximately the same proportion of childhood trauma caused by loss of a parent were delinquents and suicidal depressives.” The question is why some people who lose a parent go on to become geniuses while others become delinquents or suicides. Perhaps, I think, dog-earing Thucydides and reaching for a glass of ouzo, what marks the genius is not that they suffered but how they suffered. Carl Jung defined neurosis as “a substitute for legitimate suffering.” The Greeks were not neurotic. They suffered legitimately, and authentically. They knew that, as John Adams said some two thousand years later, “genius is sorrow’s child.”
Interesting to think about huh?
