Why is 'genius' so unevenly distributed in Western civilization?

June 16, 2018 9:40 PM

People of extraordinary ability seem to clump together in space and time. Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, England's Elizabethan poets, 19th century novelists (mostly English women or Russians with giant beards), the Harlem Renaissance, NYC hip hop. Some of this is bias towards artists from famous eras, or because the city was a magnet for talent. But often it's not: many of the insanely gifted artists from these periods grew up in the same town or province. How is it that Florence in the 1300s, a town with the equivalent of one rural high school, produced world-shaking figures like Dante, Boccaccio, Giotto, Petrarch, Brunelleschi, Masaccio? It seems unthinkable today.

Like, we have literally 1 billion more people and our most celebrated artists make Lego portraits or sit in a chair for several hours.

posted by dontjumplarry to Society & Culture (24 answers total)

The genius was nurtured and fostered by benefactors.
posted by Cuspidx at 10:11 PM on June 16, 2018 [20 favorites]

Fashion. There is usually one happening scene and anyone working outside of it will be ignored and denied opportunities, no matter their skill or “genius”. Want to make a movie outside of the Hollywood system? It can be done but…
posted by rodlymight at 10:47 PM on June 16, 2018 [13 favorites]

I love Victorian novels. If there were a million Anthony Trollope books I would postpone death to read all of them, 20 or 30 pages at a time, before bed. Every person you ask will give you a different answer re: why Victorian England was such a fertile breeding ground for these huge social novels; some people will point to their favorite logistical reasons, others their favorite sociological reasons, and nearly all of them will be right. (Likewise some people will tell you we're still reading them because they're great, other people will tell you we're still reading them because dead white men, and it could be that both conditions were necessary for me to read every Trollope novel. Plus/But: If they weren't all free on Gutenberg, or I didn't own a smartphone, or I weren't a little depressed and in need of a stupendous and powerful distraction, both conditions still might not have been sufficient.)

I think there's a fine tuning that's apparent in situations like this, where a large body of work endures for so long. Form and material, form and audience, form and the resources that are available to artists are all a perfect match. (I think you can see that in a lot of the examples you mention—or at least you can read a lot of the examples you mention that way.)

Above all things, Trollope was—to the vacant disgust of the generation that followed him—prolific. He wrote as much as he did, in part, because he could get paid for it, and he could get paid for it because of the thriving circulating libraries and magazines and newspapers that put 700-page novels within the reach of huge numbers of people. Without that infrastructure, which hadn't really existed before (and doesn't exist in the same way now!) he might have been a civil servant all his life.

But also: Industrialization brought huge disparate masses of people together and created a world that could be animated by, say, Charles Dickens's peculiar magic—people did appear in each others' lives by impossible coincidence, there were titans of industry and consumptive urchins living on top of each other, it was necessary to weave four different places together to get a picture of London, etc.

Victorian novelists had a world unlike any that had come before it to write about—a world that I think was unusually suited to the form in which they were writing. I was a writer for a little bit, and something I kept running into was that characters who live in 2018 don't really have to go anywhere; obviously the inveterate country-house letter-writers who people a Trollope novel don't spend a lot of time on foot, either, but I don't know—writing novels when I was trying to write them, about what I was trying to write them about, just felt a little less natural, a little more like working in a form as a tourist or a reenactor. It didn't seem to fit the material I had.

(There's a really good book about the mid-century renaissance of American Catholic writing that has influenced my thinking on this topic—The Life You Save May Be Your Own.)

Right now a lot of logistical, social, and artistic factors have come together to allow people to make some really wonderful, retro-inflected indie RPGs. That's just a scene I know about; I'm sure there are a lot of others. God willing, someone smarter than me—and working in a community and within a situation that makes the genre a natural fit —will figure out how to write a Trollope novel about 2018. (Granted, The Way We Live Now is kind of already about 2018.)

Sometimes the times, the narrow or broader culture, the particular moment in aesthetics or the development of a genre, etc., engender a specific, wonderful, vital kind of art, through the interaction of form and content and situation and all kinds of other things. That's my guess, at least.
posted by Polycarp at 12:20 AM on June 17, 2018 [14 favorites]

Your question -or at least the stinger deriding Maria Abramovich and Ai Wei Wei- seems to presuppose that this sort of clustering of talent is impossible today, but in your examples you include 1970s NYC hip hop culture. Why such moments of flowing occur is beyond my pay grade (though I would suggest patronage and economic reward is a primary mover), but I think that the particular aspect of the premise suggesting that this localized floating of talent is flawed.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:51 AM on June 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

Of the Italians you mention - Dante, Boccaccio, Giotto, Petrarch, Brunelleschi, Masaccio - only one (Brunelleschi) was born in Florence. As mentioned benefactors and the fact that Florence was a magnet for talented people, who could find work and help, was the key factor so people from Ravenna (Dante) and Arezzo (Petrarch) went there. The same applies to the 19th century English novelists who were generally not from London but could get their books published in London as there was a thriving market and support in London.

No doubt there were budding Dantes and Brontes in other parts of the world at other times but they had no support, no outlet for their work and had to work (hard) to make a living.

Interestingly you do not mention the main current example - why are all budding software geniuses in SoCal?
posted by TheRaven at 1:32 AM on June 17, 2018 [23 favorites]

People of extraordinary ability seem to clump together in space and time.

There are, as you have noted, a number of historial factors that encourage this clumping, but I think that the fundamental answer to you question is that clumping is much more common in random events that we expect, so much so that it is exceptionally difficult for us to accept that they're random. True randomness is clumpy in ways that appear deeply implausible to our intuition (Wired article but there's loads of stuff out there on this). It is pretty much inevitable that the distribution of genius will lot improbably clumpy to any intuitive assessment. Take that in combination with (a) the attractiveness of a cultural hub distorting various factors in favour of clumping, and (b) the selectivity of the historical record, and the weird looking distribution of genius will be extremely marked.
posted by howfar at 1:34 AM on June 17, 2018 [8 favorites]

On clumping: do you think the Host could possibly have started his nightclub in Pylea?

That's one thing. Another is that our view of the past is always distorted by current interests. Gifted and creative people are always slipping in and out of current knowledge and whatever is not mainstream at the moment is hard to recover. Minorities of every sort tend to disappear from the record (they don't fit in tidy popular categories) and in particular there is chronic institutional blindness towards women that wipes them from the record every generation or so. Which of the great Baroque women painters do you know about? Which of the great Impressionists? Which women Modernists? Which of the female mathematicians and computer pioneers and astronauts? Why do you think this is so?

So, 1/ great urban centres act as hubs of training, learning, patronage and opportunity that attract people from all over their hinterland (except when they don't and Van Gogh say, retreats to live and die and be ignored out in the sticks until the hub takes notice of him posthumously). The training bit is very important: Renaissance boys that showed promise would be sent from all over Italy to an established artists studio - centrally located for business and patronage reasons - for intensive training.

2/ We have forgotten far more brilliant, popular and successful makers and creatives than we remember, historically.

3/ Ingrained prejudices select for who is forgotten and who is remembered in irrational ways but with a particular bias against lack of self-promotion and also against the non-mainstream who don't get into popular records such as newspapers etc.

4/ Random nature of clumping as howfar says above.
posted by glasseyes at 2:23 AM on June 17, 2018 [14 favorites]

I'd take issue with the usage of 'genius' to mean 'creatives doing historically unusual work'. Most of these examples aren't driven by some incredible insight arriving fully formed into a single person's head, but instead grew amongst a small community stumbling across a rich creative vein and developing their ideas off each other.

Which is a key part of the question: they cluster because it's much harder for these kind of insights to happen separately.
posted by Merus at 4:03 AM on June 17, 2018 [17 favorites]

Technology today reduces the need for collaborators and "scenes" to be geographically clustered.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 5:20 AM on June 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Historical and cultural bias. In math/physics it's generally "known" to be a European creation but it's just not. Many of the foundational concepts were invented in the middle east/persia and china, some did not grow and become established, some threads were not followed up with technology (say advancements of optics pushing the math of astronomy). But the core ideas were invented, lost, reinvented, everywhere by all the cultures and peoples.
posted by sammyo at 6:48 AM on June 17, 2018 [7 favorites]

If by chance you ever need a citation, The German Ideology by Marx and Engels agrees with several commenters here:

Raphael as much as any other artist was determined by the technical advances in art made before him, by the organisation of society and the division of labour in his locality, and, finally, by the division of labour in all the countries with which his locality had intercourse. Whether an individual like Raphael succeeds in developing his talent depends wholly on demand, which in turn depends on the division of labour and the conditions of human culture resulting from it.

Regarding the selection bias you mention toward certain artists, I think I'd explain it as people noticing periods/clusters that their own culture celebrates, typically holding them up as legitimizing antecedents that function sort of like charter myths for their own particular tradition.
posted by Wobbuffet at 7:37 AM on June 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

I recall reading an essay in the mid-1990s about how music scenes popped up in different cities. The author made the argument that there were three essential ingredients: education, a place to practice and play, and a person who could bring others together.

The basic premise was that most any community of even a modest size has a wealth of talent, but it takes specific conditions to make a scene. Education, whether it be an enthusiastic piano teacher or a town that takes great pride in their high school marching band, identifies and encourages that talent. Talented people need a place to hone their craft, so parents who tolerate kids practicing in the basement or an abundance of cheap warehouse space are important. A band can practice and become great but nobody will know unless there is a benefactor/scenester/promoter who can offer a critical view ("you guys would be great if you had a better drummer/added a horn section/played acoustic instead of electric, etc.") and could get them appropriate gigs ("your sound would make a great opener for this band who are getting some visibility"). The competition of practicing and playing in close proximity to other bands then pushes everyone to become better players and to innovate so their sound stands out.

While the author specifically discussing music scenes the same idea would apply to any creative endeavor. For talent to flourish it needs nurturing, perfection of craft, and visibility. Unfortunately I don't remember who wrote the essay and where I read it.
posted by plastic_animals at 8:02 AM on June 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

Another example for your list, if you'd like: Hungarian (mostly Jewish) physicists born around 1900. This paper attempts some explanations.
posted by clawsoon at 8:22 AM on June 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

Clawsoon gets in before me! I came here to post about the same thing.

Yehudi Menuhin -- 22 April 1916 – 12 March 1999 -- Born in America to Jews from Lithuania
--Both of his sisters were noted pianists

Isaac Stern -- 21 July 1920 – 22 September 2001 -- born in Ukraine to Jewish parents

Itzhak Perlman -- born 31 August 1945 in Israel to Polish Jews

In a class I once took on the history of the violin, the professor spent one class period talking a bit about the factors that may have led to a number of Eastern European Jews being violin virtuosos (or otherwise being noted musicians) and how such a thing would never happen again due to the diaspora.
posted by Fukiyama at 8:37 AM on June 17, 2018

Geniuses used to be more notable, because often their creations were very visible against the backdrop of a smaller and somewhat simpler cultural background noise.

Today geniuses are put to work in cubicle farms, where they code physics simulations into the way graphical candies stack and slide, against a scintillating cultural backdrop of constant innovation, overlapping voices, daily marvels and citizen-generated quotidian media.

Not a case of less genius, I would argue — it’s just that it’s all a bit “Where’s Waldo?” now.
posted by Construction Concern at 9:33 AM on June 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

MORE DARK THAN SHARK: Brian, could you reiterate your word "scenius" and perhaps tell us how, in times to come, we might evaluate that seed you're trying to plant?

BRIAN ENO: So he's asking about the word "scenius" - and I'll expand a little bit on that word.

So, as I told you, I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.

As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn't really a true picture. What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people - some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were - all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work. The period that I was particularly interested in, 'round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who'd survived in history - in the sort-of "Great Man" theory of history - they were called "geniuses". But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent. So I came up with this word "scenius" - and scenius is the intelligence of a whole... operation or group of people. And I think that's a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that - let's forget the idea of "genius" for a little while, let's think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.

 — Brian Eno, interviewed at the Luminous Festival, Sydney, 2009.
posted by scruss at 10:28 AM on June 17, 2018 [20 favorites]

I think your premise is flawed. There is genius and superb creativity all around - In so many sub groups or sub cultures of western and non western art (and craft). I think creativity is one of the most wonderful aspects of human nature. And it is surely one of the most important adaptive traits we possess. I would argue all the people you have named are known and appreciated because they are/were fashionable in academic and mass media cliques.
posted by Lucky Bobo at 10:57 AM on June 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

You mention English literature twice, so here is how an English poet reflected on a related question (Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," 1751):

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

I've been trying to write a response to this for a while, but I'll only be able to leave the vaguest outlines of what I think an adequate answer would be. I think this question is monumentally complex and touches on many others, and these subsidiary questions are themselves of great complexity. What you are asking about, at some level, is what is this thing called history? How do we (or can we) distinguish between history as an independently existing set of events and the ways we turn those events into knowledge of the past?

Before we can attempt to determine what makes these clusters unique, we have to establish their uniqueness, and that is already very hard. For every cluster of geniuses I am aware of, there are certainly others I don't know about. I've read books about the Italian Renaissance, and I have a clear enough idea of what it means for Michelangelo and Brunelleschi to be geniuses. But what about forms of cultural achievement that are harder for me to recognize? What about the geniuses of alchemy or other kinds of esoteric knowledge that means nothing to us today? Or, to turn to a period I am more at home in, there are, as you say, many famous English and Russian novelists. But there is also a rich tradition of nineteenth-century Spanish novels. Perhaps these attained the same greatness as, say, the Russian novels, but almost no one has the necessary erudition to compare those two traditions. So that is one issue that comes up: how do we know our observations about what was are adequate to what was in reality?

On the other hand, there are also less--let's say--philosophical considerations. To take your example about novels again, one would need to think about the way that literature was understood and practiced in a given place at a given time. In Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century, social, political, and cultural factors contributed to the enhanced prestige of the novel relative to other kinds of literature. A generation earlier, most aspiring writers aspired to be poets. In the age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, large numbers of men and women (although almost none of the latter are now canonical) wrote novels. In general, to understand why the novel gained such importance in mid nineteenth-century Russia and Britain, we would need to ask a number of questions, such as: Who can and wants to write novels in a given time and place? Who reviews and appraises them? What institutions exist for the production, dissemination, and consumption of novels? Then, to understand why and how we know that these are great novels, we have to ask other questions. How are novels remembered, that is, how is a canon of national literature formed? How does this canon spread across national and linguistic boundaries? I have never read a work of literature written in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century. I don't think I could even name one! Why is that?

Our awareness of individual "clusters" of cultural achievement is dependent on these two major factors: the material conditions (broadly speaking) that made the work possible and the other set of conditions that made it possible for us to know and appreciate it. For a genius to be recognized more or less universally, both of those factors are required. I suspect that both of these processes encourage clustering. Only in a minority of places and times have people 1) been able to devote their energies to something better than surviving, and 2) done things whose greatness is something we still recognize.

I'll end by saying that I am fascinated by these clusters myself. One of my favorites is that two of the most important modern German philosophers--Hegel and Schelling--were roommates at seminary with one of the major German poets, Hölderlin.
posted by a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich at 11:07 AM on June 17, 2018 [5 favorites]

Read A Room of One's Own "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" and extrapolate to art of all kinds. In addition, people create and excel with what is available and supported. If athletics is the best way out of poverty and every school has a gym and teams, many poor people will pursue athletics. If NASCAR is admired, becoming a driver is pursued. If Mom is a conductor, there will be a piano and other musical instruments in the home, music will be played and discussed, and pursued.

If there is a Great Books group near you, you'd probably enjoy it.
posted by theora55 at 11:19 AM on June 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

our most celebrated artists

unless you come from the next century over, you have no idea who our most celebrated artists will turn out to be. and I don't mean they will be better ones than the ones you don't like; posterity isn't any smarter than we are any more than our children are. but they do like different things. it's a rare era that praises the same figures in itself as the following generations do, and that, more than sheer quantity of geniuses, is something that distinguishes certain ages from other ones.

there are extremely good reasons for artist demographic clusters most of the time. like: the arts in which women geniuses dominate have been until very recently those arts which can be self-taught, done in solitude, in secret, in small and frequently interrupted scraps of time, with no collaborators and little to no funding, and whose final products can be copied and preserved for a few generations until they find a congenial audience. so: poetry and the novel.

painting, by contrast, has tended to go in schools and groups, and to belong to a school or a group or even paint a painting 'after' someone, you must be a part of that school or group or at the very least be free to visit a museum and left alone to make copies. this is extremely contingent on other people letting you do that. so: go back a few centuries and the painting geniuses come in clusters of men in close proximity to each other. with a few exceptions who paid horrible and high prices for their limited access. very logical really.
posted by queenofbithynia at 12:24 PM on June 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

Don't forget as well the tendency of history to impose a narrative. There's an unspoken assumption behind your question that certain artists/places/etc are recognised as "special" and have always been such - but this is not really the case; 'progress' tends to wander aimlessly like a lost dog more than proceed in a straight upward line.

The Bloomsbury group, as one example, were deeply unpopular in the fifties, and only really took off in the sixties.

The Victorian novels we champion today were not necessarily the ones lauded at the time. Indeed many of them were viewed the way we view Tom Clancy or E. L James today,this includes people like Dickens.

If you asked, for example, "why did Hollywood produce so many great movies in the twentieth century?" you would see how it's easy to compress quite long time periods, and ignore the sheer volume of production - whilst still having a series of demographic, and socio-cultural reasons for an explosion.

If you're interested in forgotten phenoms, the book" banvards folly" is a quite enjoyable collection of essays.
posted by smoke at 6:48 PM on June 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'll answer for Elizabethan poetry because that's a field that I studied. There were a lot of great writers working on it at the same time. Why wasn't it written anywhere else? Because by definition Elizabethan poetry was poetry written in the Elizabethan era. Poetry written in another language, or style, or time period doesn't count. Modern culture found Elizabethan Poetry and decided in retrospect that Elizabethan Poetry is Great. But nobody's writing it now, and it's not because nobody in the world is incapable of writing a decent sonnet. It's because tastes change and there's no money or audience for new literature written in this style. If for some reason everyone in the world decided that writing English Renaissance literature was an important thing to do, I'm sure we'd have clusters of writers popping up left and right.

And frankly, this is a matter of opinion of course, but I think you can't discount the halo effect. A lot of the Elizabethan poets were not particularly genius individually by modern standards, it's mostly considered as a cluster that people love them. Like, how many Elizabethan poets other than Shakespeare are read and enjoyed these days by people who don't have graduate degrees in English Literature? A lot of people who were, at least IMO, very good writers but maybe not Great writers, got classified as "genius" by association with the Elizabethan Literature movement. [I feel the same way about the metaphysical poets too.]

Also, really don't underestimate the influence of culture. My favorite example of this is Lazlo Polgar, whose three daughters all became chess grandmasters (one of whom, Judit, was the highest ranked female chess player in the world), simply because Lazlo Polgar decided that having his children be chess grandmasters was his mission in life. If one guy can create a talent cluster like that on his own, it is probably easier to do than you think.
posted by phoenixy at 1:20 AM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I think the idea that this never happens any more - never mind the idea that there are no great artists in the current era - is flawed. For one thing, if we're comparing events over centuries or millennia, NY hip hop, at least, is from our current era!

But also it would be hard to prove your theory one way or another until we have a lot more temporal distance. In 200 years, will people regard, say, Renaissance Florence and NY hip hop as equivalently impressive, as you suggest? Will the view be different in 500 years? Is there a scene happening now that current societies don't value, that will be regarded as one of the greats in 500 years?

Aside from that, Peter Hall's 1184 page Cities in Civilization looks at many of these historical examples of "scenius", as Eno puts it, one per chapter. So it's a good overview if you want more details of more examples, although I was disappointed Hall doesn't really ask if there's something all these places/times have in common.
posted by fabius at 2:08 AM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

People of extraordinary ability seem to clump together in space and time.

Correction: people of extraordinary ability are able to more fully develop in clumps together in space and time.

Genius-level intelligence - and even just plain garden-variety talent - is only part of the equation that makes up "A notable person whom I've heard of". IQ is merely a measurement of potential - if someone with a genius IQ is given every possible level of support (economic, emotional, social, political, etc.), they will achieve more so than a person with a lower IQ who is also given the same advantages. But - if someone with a genius IQ is never sent to school, or is abused and bullied to the point that they are afraid trying anything new, or they make one mistake and end up having to work in a factory job to make ends meet, then...that genius-level intelligence ends up maybe going into some personal hobbies that keep them occupied in their down time.

Places and times where there seem to be unusually high concentrations of "geniuses" also had some kind of economic or social advantages in place for the geniuses - maybe it was a political or social system that supported their innovations (like Florence in the 1300s), maybe it was a bunch of like-minded people that all encouraged each other (like the Beats). There are more "indie" geniuses around you right now than you may be aware - it's just that we're too busy trying to pay off student loans or work office jobs to maintain health insurance to paint the 21st Century answer to Guernica or write the next Divine Comedy.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:00 PM on June 18, 2018 [3 favorites]