On Cultivating Genius (Part II)

[click here for controversial thoughts]

A Cultivated Garden in Lalaland

This is a response piece to

Elle Griffin

’s piece from last week. To read my original essay “On Cultivating Genius (Part I),” see the footnote.¹

NOTE: I highly recommend reading this essay directly on Substack’s website / in the Substack app. If you’re reading this in your email inbox, click on the piece’s title/subtitle to be redirected.

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Dearest Elle,

After reading, re-reading, and digesting your response to my essay + reading the comment sections (plus reading the comments on comments), it seems to me that this whole discussion about genius is at risk of reductio ad absurdum being reduced to an absurdity.

Of course, you and I could continue discussing what “genius” is and how/if it should be cultivated, but I will seek to answer two more fundamental questions that feel pressing:

• Why are we so interested in defining, let alone producing, “geniuses” nowadays?

• If “genius” is in fact connected to “progress” (as is generally assumed), how far, exactly, have we come?

In Praise of Genius Unfinished Thoughts

We live in an age wherein purchasing education and regurgitating others’ ideas has become synonymous with being an intellectual.

I should know, at least on paper: I have plenty of student debt from an MA in social theory + an MFA in creative writing. In addition to paying my bills as an “expert literary tour guide,” I adjunct at the Sorbonne, a supposedly esteemed academic institution.²

Over the last decade, however, whether at my local Parisian dive bar or with walking tour clients or in seminar rooms alike, I’ve noticed how much of intellectual discourse has gone the way of perceived value and superficiality, a surface-level conversation based on who knows can cite more sources, refer to more “geniuses,” or paraphrase zeitgeist-acceptable ideas that keep us all comfortably distanced from sharing anything resembling what we, individually, actually think.

This is odd, given that we live in an era of rampant solipsism identitarianism and individualism narcissism. Indeed, these days, subjective opinions have become tantamount to ideology if not capital-T truths, which is why people like you and me are often cautious about saying something that might be misconstrued or—lo and behold—deemed “offensive” to any number of people (the title of Chris Rock’s latest stand-up special sums it up quite nicely: we live in an era of “selective outrage”).

Take this letter exchange, for example: you and I could very well continue this dialogue in academic form by exchanging what amounts to a compendium of references to other thinkers’ ideas, mostly proving that we understand what “smarter” people than you or I think, without ever risking much other than an incomplete footnote.³

But at its most effective, in my opinion, philosophy is a dialogue between two people because it is also an exercise in cognitive independence. It isn’t about being well-educated, name-dropping, or proving how much we’ve read, but rather about calling on our own mental faculties to attempt to understand what we purport to understand about existence.

An exercise in futility, perhaps. And yet … in reading many of the responses to your and Hoel’s essay, I’m struck by how often we (myself included) feel the need to prove our own position by referencing someone else’s intelligence. This is quite normal (in fact, it’s what we’re all taught to do), but in the spirit of a genuine dialogue, I shall keep my hyperlinks to a minimum down below (and only a few essential footnotes). Finally, if there are comments on this piece, I’m far more interested in learning about what readers THINK than reading about what they KNOW.

Progress is Freedom

From the Economist Intelligence Unit 2022 Democracy Index

Knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same thing, and the Internet has proven this. As to the wealth of information to which much of the world now has access, it seems it’s left us with impoverished attention spans.

Despite our utopian, dial-up dreams that the World Wide Web would introduce a golden-age of independent, free-thinking individuals, unlimited access to information has left much of the world more myopic less thoughtful.

As Hoel correctly points out in his essay,⁴ we have yet to see a glorious paradigm-shift in human affairs or human wisdom. In fact, many people’s baseline ideas about the human condition are becoming more calcified and entrenched in identitarian nativistic and individualistic egomaniacal mythologies.

Alas, despite our best-laid plans, authoritarianism & fundamentalism are on the rise.

Human Arrested Development

It isn’t all bad, obviously, and in many ways I agree with your essay, Elle: there is much to be said for the “genius” and “progress” of the last twenty years, too.

The Trans Movement is one of my favorite examples at a societal level, for the very simple reason that it challenges our naive assumptions that we can explain much of anything with binary systems. On an individual level, the movement has been essential in teaching us that every. single. human being. has the right to identify however they please … indeed, like life itself, the breadth of the human experience exists on a vast spectrum.

Unfortunately, however, this truth has been lost to political posturing

which is why, in my opinion, we are now being confronted with reductionist ideas about what identity is (or can be) in our endless search for a collective identity.

Take the USA as the most pertinent of examples. Despite the wisdom of thinkers like James Baldwin and the post-colonialist Frantz Fanon (“to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture”), terms like “black” and “white” and “left” and “right” and “red” and “blue” (and acronyms like LGBTQ+, QUILTBAG, BIPOC and a host of others) are being used as neat and tidy identifiers, as if any generalization could ever mean something specific.

A person’s identity doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with their ethnicity/sexuality/gender or preferred pronouns, and yet this is currently a primary concern for many people across all sides of the political spectrum, resulting in splintered interest groups that fall prey to Group Think as they are further forced to draw lines in the sand lest they die upon one thousand different hills in the name of semantics, political correctness, or moral righteousness.

Essentialism = Individuation! Censorship = Freedom!

This truth, coupled with imperialist/colonialist countries’ historic, consistent, and systematic marginalization of '“The Other” has led many people to feel the need to reclaim their identity by identifying pigeonholing themselves into increasingly specific (and eerily corporate) acronyms/interest groups that claim to honor a collective identity by insisting that individual identity become paramount.

As for whether or not civil liberties are progressing in the USA, AR-15s, police body cams, and crooked leaders still benefit from more protections than elementary school children. Even our oh-so-hallowed “freedom of speech” has become politicized, where at one extreme you have state governments banning drag shows and children’s books about male penguins raising a baby in a zoo, and on the other end you have “sensitivity readers” bowdlerizing Roald Dahl books, censoring words like “fat” and “ugly” in the name of “inclusion and accessibility.” (Dare I mention She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named? What would a 2003-version of J.K. Rowling, a cisgender female FAAB TERF⁵ with disagreeable opinions, think about the ways in which fundamentalists always seem to find a way to silence those who identify as women?).

BUT I DIGRESS.

This is not a political treatise. My point here is only to segue into an unsavory idea: the very concepts we’ve been talking about—“genius” and “technology” and “progress”—are in fact selective delusions that we need to believe in lest we relinquish the mythologies in which we were taught to believe:

“Freedom of Speech.”

“All Men Are Created Equal.”

“Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness.”

“American Exceptionalism.”

Part III: On Utopian Ideals Contemporary Realities

A Drawing From a Letter (+ video + composition) to an Architect

Despite the 21^st century’s untold of utopian comforts, many of us remain disillusioned, anxious, and in search of a culturally appropriate form of sublimation. This is why we’re now witnessing a slew of stringent ideals and ideological dogmatism. Quite simply, we are lost, and we want somebody to tell us what to do.

In this sense, I applaud you, Elle, for looking at the bright side of it all, and rest assured, I don’t intend to be a Negative Nancy Debby Downer Salty Samuél about your optimism, because in many ways, it’s much more valuable to talk about a malaria cure than to talk about cultural regression, or to discuss the cosmic benefits of a new kind of telescope than to peer into what’s happening in states like Florida and Tennessee.

Your conviction that we need to imagine a better future in order to create it is well-founded. In the era of the 24-hour news cycle, it’s become a truism to lament the various ways in which life feels like it’s getting worse. The media eats it up, and we are eaten up by it, which is why I’m genuinely impressed by (and thankful for) your ability to investigate the silver lining.

Yes, even I have hope. I am an existentialist, after all.

Which is why my less-than-optimistic feelings about “utopias” and “genius” and “progress” don’t mean both of our opinions can’t co-exist. But while you point out some fantastic examples of contemporary “genius” in your piece,⁶ I have to admit that reversing the aging process sounds eerily dystopian to me (ah, the human quest to be immortal), and self-driving cars don't interest me (what is this obsession with saving time; to do what? to go where?), and the unchecked power of AI systems like Chat-GPT and Open-AI are downright scary.

“But that’s just like, your opinion, man.” The Dude, The Big Lebowski

Alas, whenever we seem to be at our best, we also seem to teeter on the edge of folly.

Just think of it. We asked for the moon and just as soon as our feet were covered in moon dust, we demanded more from the stars … and now we have space debris and something called the Kessler Syndrome (don’t look it up).

And what about the promises of the Enlightenment juxtaposed to the Atlantic Slave Trade? Not to mention the continuing ripple effects of Johan Friedrich Blumenbach’s On The Natural Variety of Mankind (1775), which proposed a “scientific” taxonomy of “race” that proposed five “racial” divisions for humankind (“white,” “yellow,” “brown,” “black,” “red” … guess which “color” Blumenbach put at the top of his “scientific” “racial” hierarchy? And why, exactly, are we still using some of these terms today?)

In my mind, this is simply what it means to be a human being, forever riding the swinging pendulum between two poles, oscillating in perpetuity between prosperity and calamity.

Which brings me to some kind of conclusion, for now:

We live in increasingly technocratic, authoritarian societies which peddle “progressive” technologies as liberating rather than as nefarious tools used to wield power, profit, and control.

Almost one hundred years ago, a group of progressive “geniuses” built the atom bomb, the most destructive weapon human beings have ever known. To this day, advocates say the nuclear bomb has kept the world powers at peace longer more than any other technology in human history (if we didn’t bomb Japan, we would’ve had to liquidate the entire country; Mutually Assured Destruction is the best chance at world peace … never mind that in 2022, Vladimir Putin started a new war on the European continent).

Detractors point to the fundamental instability of nuclear energy (see: Fukushima), not to mention the ongoing prospect of nuclear war, which could very well be the conclusion of our megalomaniacal obsession with oblivion.

And so, my dear friend, in my opinion, I’m not quite sure I agree that “a lot of what we’ve come up with is so much better than [older] philosophers could’ve ever imagined!” Now more than ever, words like “progress” and “genius” and “utopia” give me pause, which is not to say I don’t believe in them, but belief is fickle, and I remain a skeptic when it comes to believing “genius” necessarily leads to a more equitable world.

But this is just my opinion

and I’m no genius, and to prove it to you, I shall continue this run-on sentence by breaking my own hyperlink rule (as well as a cardinal rule of academic writing) and end this essay with a paragraph about the atom bomb, written by George Orwell in 1945:

“We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.”

Yours,

Samuél

PS

Woof. It’s high-time for a glass of whiskey, don’t you think? That’s what you get when exchanging letters with an optimistic absurdist.  

1. On Cultivating “Genius” (Part I)

2. “The Sizzle and the Steak: Teaching at the Sorbonne (On Reality, Cliché & A Revelation at the Techno Parade.”

3. I told you this footnote would be incomplete. Why don’t we believe what anyone says anymore?

4.

Erik Hoel

“Why We Stopped Making Einsteins,” March 16, 2022

5. FAAB stands for “female assigned at birth,” which is how she identifies. As for TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist), it’s still unclear to me whether or not J.K. Rowling self-identifies as a TERF, or if she’s simply being called one by critics, which would be assigning an acronymic title to someone with which they do not identify … oh the humanity! As for J.K Rowling’s gender-neutral acronym of a first-name, her publisher encouraged her to androgenize “Joanne” by adding the “K” lest the (male-dominated) fantasy-reading public realize “J.K.” was in fact a woman … oh the humanity (again)!

6.

Elle Griffin

“There Are So Many Geniuses Alive Today,” March 5, 2023