Understanding Genius II: Women

00:00:00 and that necessian welcome to this program on genius this is the second one we are doing the first one essentially only discussed male Geniuses and Anne-Marie approached me afterwards and says what about all the women so then we decided we will have a second one so Anne-Marie Levine who is a member of our Advisory Board who is a poet and a visual artist has organized this meeting

00:00:31 and she will run it our next meeting we may have a meeting in April but I'm not sure yet but we our next scheduled meeting is on May 7th and it will be on fear and anxiety thank you that's a very unsheerful note on which to start although

00:01:02 truthful um so welcome to this round table um I'm Anne-Marie I don't know if I was just introduced or not but anyway um I'm gonna introduce the participants but I want to tell you a little bit as Ed did about the origins of this particular Round Table I don't usually do this but the program was inspired by a previous Helix program called understanding genius and as it happened the soul woman on the panel didn't appear because her airplane was delayed I'm not sure if this affected the

00:01:33 discussion or not but as I listened I realized that genius was being understood as a solely male property much it occurred to me as the nude in painting or photography is immediately understood to be female genius was defined by the four male participants as a combination of IQ and accomplishment I thought the definition accomplishment was a very poor one for the history of gifted women since they were so often prevented from accomplishing anything at all or from developing their gifts or from having

00:02:03 their accomplishments recognized simply by virtue of being female but sometimes they did succeed so where for instance in that discussion was Marie Curie who won two Nobel prizes her daughter who won a Nobel in chemistry Rosalind Franklin who at the very least did much of the work that led to the understanding of DNA not to mention Hedy Lamarr noted movie star and physicist I then realized that the Geniuses mentioned were not only all men but all scientists where were all the women and

00:02:34 where were the Geniuses in the Arts male and female my feminist streak was activated and I am an artist I spoke first to Darren and then to the executive committee which does our programming and they agreed that we should do two more programs about genius one about women as genius and one about Geniuses in the Arts the last one will happen next season so I put together a round table of and I swear this is an accident four women and one man by intention though they are historians

00:03:06 and anthropologists and an artist all with a special interest in the historical evolution of the idea of Genius okay now I'm going to introduce the panelists in alphabetical order and I'll ask you to raise your hands as I mentioned your names so that people will recognize you by the way the complete biographies are on the website I've shortened them Joyce Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips professor of early American history at Harvard University and director of Harvard's program in American studies she has taught at six

00:03:38 different universities on two continents a peninsula and an island and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean her interests are equally varied a specialist in early American history intellectual history environmental history and the history of science Professor chaplain is the author of an anxious Pursuit agricultural Innovation and modernity in the Lower South 1730 to 1815 subject matter technology the body and science on the anglo-american frontier

00:04:08 1500 to 1676 the first Scientific American Benjamin Franklin and the pursuit of Genius round about the Earth circumnavigation from Magellan to orbit and with Allison Bashford the new worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus re-reading the principle of population she's also the editor of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography A Norton critical Edition and with Darren McMahon of genealogies of Genius her reviews sure

00:04:42 ask them to raise their hands we all have their buyers online but not on your paper this is what we do here help just [Laughter] um you can stop the reviews what that's a compromise you can stop with mine that's that's true okay Kathleen Keith Kathleen Keith a

00:05:15 professor of European history and Secretary of the faculty at Trinity College Connecticut she received her PhD in history from Harvard with a year on Passau at The Institute politic de Pali her undergraduate degree is from the Harvard Extension school which she received while working at the Harvard College Observatory astronomical plate Stax Library her research Works to broaden the field of History by including within its purview previously neglected but Rich subjects of study her first book The Beast in the Boudoir pet keeping in 19th Century

00:05:47 Paris helped create the thriving field of the cultural history of animals this was followed by an edited volume a cultural history of animals in the Age of Empire a second major project addressed the complicated history of attitudes towards ambition in French culture her book on this subject making way for genius the aspiring self from the old regime to the new was published in 2012. currently she is writing a history of Geneva and the Alps in the 18th century provisionally titled becoming visible the history of

00:06:19 the Alps in the age of the French Revolution I will I will assume that I have been introduced I'm not sure um uh I do three kinds of Arts um and Skip pardon me yeah oh I guess I wasn't interested I was a concert pianist and um and then a writer a poet and sort of experimental fiction writer now and a visual artist in many ways

00:06:50 principally digital at the moment I paint on the computer okay and I'm interested you know the idea of Genius prodigies Etc um Darren McMahon is the Mary brins Mead Wheelock professor at Dartmouth College and was formerly professor at Florida State University born in Carmel California and educated at the University of California Berkeley and at Yale where he received his PhD McMahon

00:07:21 is the author of enemies of the Enlightenment the French counter Enlightenment in the making of modernity also of Happiness history which has been translated into 12 languages and was awarded best books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times and many other Publications um in 2013 McMahon completed a history of the idea of genius and the genius figured called Divine Fury a history of Genius he's also the editor with Ryan Hanley

00:07:52 of the Enlightenment critical Concepts and historical studies with Samuel Moyne a rethinking modern European intellectual history and with Joyce Chaplin of genealogies of Genius McMahon has taught as a visiting scholar at Columbia NYU Yale the University of Hawaii's altitude and the University of Potsdam his writings have appeared in such Publications as the New York Times Wall Street Journal Boston Globe the list the list is distinguished and as long as it is distinguished

00:08:24 Susan Seymour is Gene M Pitzer professor emerita of anthropology at Pitzer College where she served as vice president for academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty as well as coordinator of women's studies for the Claremont colleges her research has focused on changing family and gender systems in India specifically a longitudinal study in bubaneshwar India her books on India include the transformation of a sacred Town bobaneshwar India women education and

00:08:54 family structure in India and women Family and Child Care in India a world in transition her article multiple caretaking of infants and young children an area in critical need of a feminist psychological anthropology won the 2004 Sterling prize awarded by Society for psychological anthropology in recent years she has focused on two principal projects rethinking the Western concept attachment it takes a village to raise a child attachment Theory and multiple child care in L or Indonesia and in North India in the

00:09:26 edited volume attachment reconsidered cultural perspectives on a western Theory and two on researching and writing a biography of her Harvard Mentor Cora Dubois titled Corey Dubois Anthropologist Diplomat agent this is this is a woman who did succeed in a man's world in every way Dubois distinguished career included groundbreaking research in the culture and personality movement of the 1930s co-chairing a seminar with psychoanalyst Abram cardner on the impact of culture on psychological

00:09:57 development at the New York psychoanalytic Institute but apparently not this one 1935-37 directing research and Analysis for the OSS in Southeast Asia during World War two and becoming Harvard's first tenure female professor in the faculty of Arts and Sciences so now um I will sit down and become part the panel and I'll ask Darren to to begin but thanks Emery yeah I'm a token male on the on the panel so I'm happy to be

00:10:27 here I was actually fortunate enough to be at the last discussion about genius as well and I thought I'd just begin uh maybe by explaining uh why we didn't talk about women a lot in the last section and why uh the issue of of women and genius is particularly vexed but also particularly important and that is primarily because the very category of Genius as a uh as a term that we use to measure others is a male category it's

00:10:58 invented by men four men in the 18th century uh and indeed there's a long sort of prehistory uh prior to that that's also profoundly gendered the very word genius derives from the Latin genogenari which gives us words like to beget a gene to father uh and it's conceived by the Romans as a kind of Guardian Spirit of all men and exclusively men a god of birth so

00:11:28 there's a link to procreation male procreation uh there's an exclusive sort of uh gendering of the very term and this is built uh upon over the centuries by kind of layers of of prejudice but when the cult of Genius emerges in the 18th century this is even further reinforced somebody like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century can say that that women simply cannot uh be Geniuses and you see that

00:11:59 in the in the following Century in the 19th century a whole kind of a scientific apparatus designed to explain that so you know everything from measurement of cranial capacity to sort of psychological and medical evaluations of women explaining why they don't have the capacity for genius there's an irony here uh in that when the cult of Genius emerges in the 18th

00:12:29 century the way Geniuses male Geniuses are described is often in terms of certain feminine characteristics so we associate genius with imagination and Imagination in the 18th century is a kind of dubious uh notion it's it's it's you know it's the thing that that women have when they read novels one of the reasons why it's thought to be dangerous for a woman to read novels in the 18th century because their imagination will start and it will lead them into trouble

00:12:59 but Geniuses of course are people who are particularly imaginative Geniuses are particularly sensitive this is they're talked about in this way in the 18th century as having the special capacity to feel right to feel for others to get inside the hearts and minds of others but this is also a way that that women are spoken about Geniuses are prone to kind of fits of a convulsion the Divine Fury that Plato talks about women have hysteria right and so there's

00:13:30 a way in which even at the same time the concept is gendered in its origin a certain feminine characteristics as it were are ascribed to women now there's a whole history of of of of women courageous women uh that Kathleen has written about uh who who checked this uh this Prejudice does dominant stereotypes so you have Gertrude Stein very famously saying you know I am a genius at the end of the 19th century and they're people in the 18th and 19th do that as well combat the category but I think that's just the

00:14:01 place to start by noting what is in some ways an obvious uh point but profoundly important that the genius is a kind of profoundly gendered category to begin with um and I think you know can we can go from there anyways because it comes out of a non-patriarchal tradition that we are still dealing with absolutely and as an anthropologist I think about different

00:14:31 kinds of patriarchies a lot and try to think about the psychological effect on women in particular of different kinds of patriarchal institutions and it doesn't surprise me at all that women are not generally categorized as penises given that history sure exactly not history cross-culturally and history since basically since we became agricult Force right I do a longer sense of History

00:15:03 and it must be said that it was never a category that was about human equality of any kind I think that is the bigger problem and that the long long history of gender inequality is really one aspect of the difficulty of using genius nowadays um I think genius is a great problem to contemplate in terms of deciding how much of our society really is democratic that is founded on a fundamental idea about equality among all people however that might not be exhibited in everyday

00:15:34 practice it has to be an assumption about democracy as well genius doesn't exactly comfortably fit along those lines and I think even when ideas about democracy are modified with ideas about meritocracy well some people have different or greater merits than others how is that going to be adjudicated and this is where designation of who is or isn't a genius very often maps onto fundamental problems with Democratic culture and fundamental

00:16:05 asymmetries in terms of how we're willing to think about human mirror um by uh how at least some women who want to present themselves as Geniuses adopt gendered terms of masculinity Madame distillation Amanda style was accused of being masculine but she also presented a little bit as masculine in order to fit the the type of a genius in a way

00:16:38 um uh and by the same token she expresses her genius in a kind of way that uh privileges inspiration but there seems to be a a kind of model that women follow of being male in order to succeed in certain professions I suppose that's another idea although I don't think anyone thinks she's a genius but a celebrity they

00:17:10 right but from an anthropological point of view why are there female goddesses they're goddesses yes but then there are no female Geniuses well I don't think I'm I'm not aware of uh Indian culture generally talking about genius but but they would include they probably would include women um and the interesting thing about India

00:17:40 is that it's both a very patriarchal society in terms of the family system and the caste system and yet you have all these female goddesses and women are considered potentially very powerful and heads of state pardon and heads of state oh and and have been heads of state yes and governors Etc they have certainly surpassed Us in terms of political leadership but um yeah I mean Hinduism never became a a

00:18:13 monolithic patriarchal system and it it gives a lot of openings for for women that is an interesting question though how why you have Athena as the goddess of wisdom and yet not human embodiments and of course that that also brings to mind a dubious place of women in the discourse of genius and that is as Muse right uh uh genius has inspiring figure right even goddess who gives to uh the

00:18:44 genius uh his creative capacity uh and that you know that that's there's a long history of the Geniuses as the woman as Muse for genius and then in the 19th century you get in somebody like in balsak or in Zola um and Zola's novel The Love um the the figure of the mistress as at once kind of muse and then also uh impediment to male genius right that distracts or uh uh siphons off male kind

00:19:18 of viral uh intellectual energy and then poses a conflict right now that's the conflict in contemporary India and I would suspect it was an ancient Greece through that period and the embedded problem that I think for a woman to be super human in some way makes her monstrous rather than necessarily uh Divine and so the the phenomenon that would exist for a man being inspired by a kind of divine power reads differently

00:19:51 uh when that is exhibited by women uh where there are long Western traditions of categorizing powerful women as viragos they're not quite natural right for instance even female rulers and likewise um uh any number of holy women for instance who yes they're they're comparable to men but there's also something wrong with them and so there isn't the same positive designation of that Divine attribute in women I mean they're always dangerous because they might usurp male power and they do beget

00:20:24 children even though men control think they control the system yeah I'm going back to the question of uh so Love's uh there's two interesting women in that there's the the woman Muse who helps in the self-destruction of Claude but there's also the wife of the character who is meant to be Zola and so la has a really interesting argument I think in that novel about the function of genius and

00:20:56 creativity because the artist Burns himself up and can never create the Masterpiece but the writer character who's supposed to be Zola goes to work every day and comes home to a family life that's directed by his wife so I'm seeing two things one has to do with the balance between inspiration and work which um even in Zola a recognized genius he

00:21:28 understands that that's not really how you get that done but also in the 19th century world there's very little room for a woman of Genius I'm not sure when there ever has been a lot of room what a woman of Genius 19th century difficulties notwithstanding I mean I'm really struck as well that there's a kind of a cumulative problem that it's one thing to be female and be a genius I'm aware of the example of Phyllis Wheatley for instance the 18th

00:21:59 century African-American poet so black female genius probably not um and so the the way in which female obviously belongs to a larger category of social experience and cultural expectation I think that is a continuing problem 18th 19th 20th centuries and probably still now even for men I would think that uh to be a man and a genius seems less problematic perhaps in being a woman and genius but it depends obviously a social class ethnic

00:22:31 background educational standing so I again I think the the the problem of women in genius is a is one facet of the bigger problem about well who is unequal and why do we say that if you go to small non-western societies some of which which are are not uh patriarchal you have women who get to be shyamans for example and are considered really important have special powers and

00:23:02 um and are are recognized and that's okay um so but it takes a very different type of society and egalitarian society or reasonably egalitarian society also I think there's a question of whether that is a Shamanism for example is exactly like genius or or what the similarities I'm just saying if we go to something else where women are allowed to be in a special category where actually it's more like what Darren described

00:23:32 historically that there were Supernatural Powers women could have them and women in India can have them today I think that the point that the Joyce was making about gender being embedded in a kind of larger problem of inequality is really important I mean I like to point out that you know the for the same man who declared that it's a self-evident truth that all are created equal Thomas Jefferson um you know can turn around and speak

00:24:04 quite openly as many people in 18th century America and ancient Europe do of natural Aristocrats and that that is people who are born uh to be superior to lead and use in fact genius is one of the categories by which to find these people and that I think gets to the heart of this problem that Joyce mentions in democracy right it's it's kind of it's actually a really striking thing that the cult of Genius emerges in the very same Century that that human equality is on the table as a as a possibility politically and socially and

00:24:36 that creates for somebody like Jefferson a huge problem right how do you run a society without hierarchy okay well we're going to get rid of blood hierarchy on the basis of uh Gentry and aristocracy okay but we need to put something in its place and intelligence becomes one of these categories and then that category then is justified by a science what in the 19th century would have been a science we would call in many cases pseudoscience today that that placed women along with a

00:25:07 whole slew of others people of color Jews on a spectrum that showed you know sort of white males of European descent on one end and then people of color women and so forth on the other and this this science that you know begins with physiognomy and craniometry leads to brain science culminates in IQ and in fact you can show that the kind of founding fathers of of the IQ exam binay

00:25:39 and Louis Turman come out of Genius research studies in in the 19th century and they share many of the prejudices so Galton Turman um you know they they have uh uh discomfort uh well they just believe categorically that uh that that women can be Geniuses and determine sort of from his data says oh actually women you know do pretty well on IQ exams uh but

00:26:09 then says but at the extremes right at the real extremes where Geniuses are four or five standard deviations from the norm they don't have it right and they say similar things about Jews and so the again the point being is that this category of Genius is a problematic one in all kinds of ways not simply vis-a-vis vis-a-vis gender and precisely because it is in a sense defined uh during the age of revolutions the late 18th century early 19th century becomes a sort of tremendous source of cultural anxiety well do you want to be equal or

00:26:40 do you want to be unusual um and the choices uh for people who are going to be in a sense classified as not toward the top um why should there be one or the other and it is a really a kind of removing opportunity rather than offering it with anxiety again perhaps I do think that we're worried about whether we are still or increasingly a culture of meritocracy I

00:27:11 think that's a question that is of great concern for every generation but perhaps maybe for younger people these days about what kind of society are they going to enter as adults it does seem like it's a moment where economic opportunities and therefore social and cultural opportunities might be closing so who is going to get through and on what Merit and yeah I think that's one reason genius is a newly operative category for us well also if

00:27:42 if being special is somehow important being most special is to be most important and so that's would be one way to and it's a kind of rule of thumb say what a genius is and so I mean it's a little bit just interesting about how we might nurture our our progen and make sure that everyone feels special but how special are you compared to other people I mean I think that goes to the cultural issue about meritocracy and success and

00:28:13 and ambition and who gets to succeed and who and who doesn't and I think some of the anxiety comes from the fact that in a meritocracy if you don't succeed it's because you're not good enough and we still do hide a lot of the impediments um two getting to a certain certain place so um so that's one thing but I was also wanted to go back to the point of origin that uh Darren was mentioning about the

00:28:45 18th century in the 19th century and I wonder whether one of the reasons why it gets so uh fixed the issue of gender and masculinity is that we we welcome a world in which progress is very important and we say that one of the characteristics of a genius is to be able to see into the future um and so the perhaps the future that we want to see in the 18th and 19th century possibly today too has to do with technology has to do with

00:29:17 the economy has to do with some of the fields in which um women were were not were not welcoming at the time so if a function of Genius is to be able to LEAP into the future and see where we're going um maybe that's one of the reasons to get to associated with the privilege with my masculinity the two things go together we are not interested in the uh the 19th century or today in a world that

00:29:49 works with imagination as unless it's we're to the degree that it works with technology and Imagination Microsoft and Google and all that so are you kind of indirectly equating genius with function actually like to think of the relationship between genius and function I don't think it's just says that I truly uh understand the importance of say a

00:30:22 Mozart but I think if we think in terms of how the word genius functions in our society or calling certain people Geniuses and not raiding certain people as Geniuses or not I think it might help unlock what what we mean by it what we mean by the word and how then it works rather than assume that it is a natural category of being or that it measures something trans-historical I do think

00:30:53 that the designation of the world and how word sorry and how it functions is really analytically important uh more so than determining well yes no maybe in the case of actual historical people and that is actually a place where one can show that you know when the when the category emerges in 17th century people who referred to most often as genius were poets uh and and creative artists um and then you get the introduction of Statesmen the the kind of exception that proves

00:31:23 the rule is Newton who's spoken as a genius from very early on but often in a way that that characterizes it more like a writer or a poet than a scientist and it's really not until the 20th century with a Calderon Einstein that that immediate association between genius and Science and Technology is made and today this is I should fill you in on the back story when we were downstairs we were all commenting on the fact that Geniuses re-emerged relatively recently as a kind of topos of discussion in popular culture but also in an academic culture

00:31:55 in a way that would been Unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago when genius was still so implicated in its dark past it's it's racism it's misogyny um its connection to Eugenics and and we've spent in the at least in academic circles the last you know uh several decades kind of deconstructing genius and yet it's it's back and we're sort of trying to figure out why that's the case but it is back and it's being spoken of and I think one of the ways in which it's spoken of is precisely as as

00:32:25 Kathleen says with respect to Google with respect to uh Microsoft with respect to business technology and culture and you know maybe there was this hope that that scientists of of Genius can get us out of terrible problems like global warming so that we can still you know run around in our expensive cars all the time and so forth but uh so when you say genius has come back what is it that has come back exactly the conversation about this

00:32:56 issue does the conversation since it's not back in anthropology this is the conversation it never was there women I mean is that part of the conversation I think so I mean you know that I believe in Julia de Christopher I mean yeah like actually female genius functions as a female okay yeah I mean even though some people are writing that or halfway yeah and even even for

00:33:26 historians I I think that obviously we're talking about a certain idea that is floating around the the global West and has very United States Dimensions that really you referred to Silicon Valley as a very specific site of Genius which is a very particular place on Earth let's just say um so I'm not I'm not sure where it's back um certainly within Western Academia picking up I think on some of the Public's willingness to use it again as an innocent category of description

00:33:57 whereas we obviously approach it with more suspicion about what it represents in the longer history and a disbelief that is actually describing something real yeah uh I mean you I think one can point to ways in which it's back in as you say not just in the United States but in Western media more generally um but there is a surprising Resurgence of interest in it as a as an analytical category it seems within um with in academic circles which is

00:34:27 quite striking I think um but let's say one could say that genius is good to think with now now she's a meritocracy we're trying to think about um issues of child raising we're trying to think about practical questions about how to say it solve global warming maybe there'll be a technological solution or things like that but inter um for historians it's become a um a category that helps us maybe see the

00:34:58 difference between the 18th century and the 19th century or our connections with different periods so that's what we might mean by good to think with it helps open up a a certain plane in history that we hadn't thought through before so sure and therefore the work that it is supposed to be doing uh in any given era is quite striking that the older uh poetic or artistic sense of Genius only gave way to our modern scientific

00:35:29 technocratic idea of it with Einstein so it's really quite striking that Darwin for various reasons is nearly never really described as part of a cult of genius and that's a really interesting 19th century it would seem laps in terms of the development of Genius but it makes perfect cultural sense and only now I think are we moving really even away from science in terms of discoveries about the natural world to a technological uh application of our knowledge to solve problems in a world

00:36:00 where I think we are all worried about shrinking natural resources shrinking opportunities and therefore the human mind has to expand and genius does that for us whoops sorry well um slightly related question and a little bit uh may be interesting with respect to uh concerns about gender I'm thinking about the um recent Triumph of a computer over The

00:36:32 Go Master and I'm just thinking too that whether computers or the artificial intelligence are in fact masculine or whether they're neutral um more feminine more feminine neutral would be the real achievement right it's beyond gender somehow machine intelligence cannot be described in terms of management except for there's of course huge public discussion about the the lack of female coders right and

00:37:04 computer Engineers is a real problem uh so and I mean that's actually a really interesting question to be asking I think but again a very culturally distinct one since that uh the IR are idea that mathematics and computer science belong to men is again Western in India mathematics and coding are more open to girls than they are here so an interesting way in which internationally that machine genius may eventually if it is the work

00:37:34 of many Global hands to be neutral I was struck in the description of the battle between the human and the Machine with the go that the machine had a seem to have found an inspired way to win the game it had been a way that hadn't been thought of before so The Go Master said I had never thought of using those kinds of things as opposed to Simply thinking more quickly to get to a certain point

00:38:05 um so perhaps the machine had genius in this older fashion sense of of inspiration I'm also reminded that the uh Hamilton speaks a lot about genius the obviously the Alexander the show the show the show Hamilton exclamation mark Hamilton explanation point uh Burr talks about you know everybody Geniuses lower your voices

00:38:35 he mentions that his mother is a genius um and there's a sense that um you know a kind of reification of the the Revolutionary moving history forward through acts of individual and Collective genius and that might be something that has such a resonance today because maybe it goes back to a question about anxiety who's going to solve our problems who's going to solve global warming

00:39:06 who's going to figure out who the bad people are in Paris and Belgium and stop the bot means you know who's going to who's going to do this is it going to be Collective is it going to be individual how are we going to get there but here's where I think the ideas about genius intersect with those about Charisma and Leadership as well as I mean we were talking earlier downstairs about the cult of celebrity and the idea about

00:39:37 particularly people grabbing the spotlight as Hamilton did and does every night again again where having ambition and wanting to be prominent can be qualifications or be perceived as qualifications for problem solving foreign in establishing one as a genius because another point we were beginning to develop downstairs too had to do with

00:40:08 it has somehow to do with success too I mean if you were four years old and or do you know if that person is it is a genius so um achievement and getting to the place where one can achieve is one of the vital questions and I think that intersects with the issue of gender because it has historically been so much easier for a male to get to that space than for a female to get to that space one of the

00:40:39 projects I'm working on has to do with a man in Geneva who's uh explores the Alps for the first time but he has a sister who is almost invisible in history sounds like a familiar uh story but it's very interesting her sister's name is Judith yudith and um Voltaire is living in Geneva at the same time she is growing up and she asks Voltaire if he would be her mentor and

00:41:10 he write she writes him letters and they meet and um he plays along with her um and then at a certain point in time something horrible happens and uh it appears that they have a little bit of possibly a sexual encounter it's probably not true but her reputation is ruined throughout Europe because of this um it's written about Ingram's what why wasn't it enhanced why did it ruin a reputation it ruined her and in

00:41:42 um reputation uh in Geneva as this 16 17 18 year old girl it enhanced voltaires so that Grimm and Richelieu and in fact the court Circle laughed at uh you know it was an apple tear he's almost 83 years old and he's still having these things it's actually Madame to Denis who spreads this room so it's terrible for her but it's a um what is uh interesting is that the young uh Madame de chatelet also had

00:42:13 asphaltaire be my mentor and it works for her and she becomes um very important as a mathematician translator of Newton et cetera Etc and what I'm trying to say is that there's a there's a there's a there's a more vulnerable way in which women have been able to get to the world of success it is often through the world of the masculine so it's also very open to we might even say abuse but

00:42:44 vulnerabilities too um and that that's that's just part of the the problem the gendered problem and uh I began with talking about saying that genius is recognized through achievement it's just a more difficult and more complicated way in history for women to get to that place of achievement certainly to begin and it's certainly important for 18th century ideas of Genius that it seem

00:43:15 untutored that have a kind of natural um and internal Foundation within the person who's going to be so designated and that to be dependent on the education or the tutelage or the patronage of another questions that and so the way in which a particularly a young woman might work through a male Patron would immediately question whatever accomplishment might eventually play out which I think continues to be uh a sense about genius that it has to have this

00:43:45 kind of spontaneous bursting out from a person which obviously puts a burden on um somebody who has less access to education and all the things that might actually be the the foundation for this kind of accomplishment yeah so he's genius then completely related to the product of that person or is genius I mean based on the level of the IQ in

00:44:20 other words if a person with an IQ of 110 makes a fantastic Discovery he becomes a genius well you know that I don't think that that's part of the point that not just so love makes but standal who very very gifted writers but standal also has the moments of truth though he's a genius but he's a movement of Truth he says in his autobiography um his Memoir he says why did I you know

00:44:51 30 years old or however years older and I've been waiting for inspiration every day why didn't somebody when I was 15 tell me just to get up in the morning and work for three to five hours a day so I'm not fully answering your question but clearly actually doing the thing um is is important maybe with a IQ of 110 or 140. I don't know I don't know I mean is it go ahead there's this

00:45:22 whole kind of romantic idea of the Undiscovered genius right uh but when when genius becomes a category of research and it's Francis Galton who's the father of eugenics who's the key figure here uh his first book is called hereditary genius and he tries to figure out you know why Geniuses Arise at a certain point he he just makes a distinction that you know that creativity or production is the the sole measure of Genius otherwise you don't have anything and so he says basically an Undiscovered genius is a is an oxymoron

00:45:52 um and a lot of people who study genius now follow that so Dean Keith Simonton who was here last time with us who uh as a psychologist Emeritus at UC Davis practices what Galton called historometrics and basically you study achievement you study production right and a genius is in in the goods the problem with that kind of analysis though is that um and this is Dean's own uh figure that something like only three percent of significant World production in the Arts

00:46:23 or in the Sciences is created by women right and you know in other words and so and this was a problem for Golden Galton turned around and said you know who are the Geniuses in uh in in 19th century England and lo and behold they were all white men you know uh why would that be the case well because they've had access to education they've had uh the family backgrounds they run the institutions that give the label out in the first place and so studying simply productivity is a kind of way of finding what you're looking for uh in the first

00:46:55 place oh sure I mean in the world of mathematics in the world of philosophy I had a professor uh say to me once that this is true um how many female philosophers can you name right right zero so or mathematicians or composers don't bother yeah don't bother I was also struck by recent coverage of uh the I mean this is this

00:47:26 is not a recent discovery but it is uh a good reminder that whenever a profession for instance becomes more than 50 female uh wages go down in that profession so yeah obviously in a category that really matters has men as a minority and this is out expressed in economic terms as well as the kind of cultural capital of the idea of Genius there on the other hand a little bit there's um the story of Mendelson's sister I mean I suppose Mendelson could be it doesn't matter called it genius or

00:47:56 not um but they came from the same family a very rich banking family in Vienna and um they were educated together their education was apparently the the uh The Wonder of all of Europe everyone went to their Salon concerts and Mendelson and Fanny Felix and Fanny were educated together and they performed together at these cellos and everyone knew they were both Geniuses but there was really no question and they were treated as such very well and when Fanny

00:48:27 became 15 or 60 she received a letter from her father on her birthday and it said from now on you must consider yourself an ornament and your joy must come from your brother's success and it absolutely stopped her and she wasn't allowed to publish or to give concerts in public only in her home Etc et cetera so what happened was everyone forgot about her but she went she went on composing and playing but she could only do it in

00:48:58 small forms she couldn't hire an orchestra or write an oratorio or anything like that to having her performed in her house she did trios and Duets and songs and stuff like that and she couldn't publish and et cetera et cetera and finally when her father died um her very nice husband encouraged her to go and because other women were out right for instance Joe's son was out there doing things and uh Clara Schumann was too turns out that those were about class

00:49:29 if you were an aristocrat or lower class you could you could do things like that but if you were Jewish converted like the medicines it was dangerous but anyway when she was about 40 her father died she started to publish everyone knew who she was and how gifted she was and she was beginning to have some success and then she had a stroke and died and Mendelssohn collapsed when he heard about it and six months later he was dead too so anyway I just wanted to

00:49:59 say the obstacles that you know that are put women's paths still sure why are they no women philosophers that's the dumbest thing I ever heard right I mean that's really strange yeah and I agree that these are terrible stories about the waster human capital yeah again and again and again and they really show us the very embedded way in which societies have worked in terms of inequality but I still have the question why do we want women to be Geniuses what is achieved by having women fulfill that category or fit into that

00:50:31 category that as we've been identifying is Insidious in in all kinds of ways uh agreed so yes I I think that this can be a a very important uh way of revealing how Western Society has achieved only so much by the 18th century in the 19th century by the 20th century but with the Resurgence of interest in genius now I guess I don't want to see that the way in which women might be categorized as genius solves the problem because since

00:51:02 I think it's playing along with the game that has been really really again Insidious about ranking of different kinds of human beings for a very long period of time agreed I just thought that since men have this special status um right playing field not to be leveled that's yeah well I just think that we should probably question the special status and no longer call Mendelson a genius the category would be the best thing I

00:51:33 think yeah but you say it's coming back no I'm I'm just saying it's coming back as part of public discourse yeah Fascination not that there's a reality and that's now uh that never existed before but there's a real interest in trying to classify people in an era when we're trying just the opposite or trying to promote women and if they're going to promote women if they're going to have the category genius then you'd better damn well have some women in there but uh uses a a term or a category instead

00:52:06 you know I think of Virginia wolves to the lighthouse and I can't think of that book without thinking of it as being almost a perfect thing which is one of the definitions of what Geniuses were a product of the genius if something that appears perfect structurally that can hardly be chipped away at and so if we don't call that an active genius I wonder if we're

00:52:38 calling it an active Beauty which could also work in the world of mathematics mathematicians talk about their things as Beauty Newton's Doom own discoveries I think that's part of one of the reasons why he's understood in his age is poetic because the the heavens are in some way poetic there's a sense of maybe there's a sense of perfection that um might even be innate might it be at least intuitive that we see but I can think of that novel as being something

00:53:10 to my mind is as perfect as it can be structurally and that somehow we can recognize and so if it's not genius I wonder what it is well I think the the difficulty here is shifting from Praise of the product to praise of the producer I agree I think that's it as I said that I think it's it rather than Virginia Woolf being the genius things are a work of genius and that would be liberating I think with respect to um gender itself right

00:53:40 because actually if we could identify a long list of all of the things that Humanity has done that are valuable and amazing inspiration I think we could very easily establish it probably it's not just men who did that right or even behind you know the stories of Great Men are often great women right um I I it's I think it is interesting though we you know when I said that three percent figure but the one way you can grow that a little bit is is in literature uh and literature doesn't

00:54:12 have the same prohibition uh that sort of you don't need to hire a Orchestra right so the startup costs are less right and so one can you know fairly easily compile a list of great women writers uh in in the 19th century right from Jane Austen Ford but the women who are originated writing novels don't get acknowledged I'm not saying they're Geniuses but the history got Rewritten and just eliminated a whole bunch of people um and it became a male category and

00:54:44 then you ReDiscover women but the the other dimension here um worth I think our interrogation is the idea of authorship anyway um that it is not necessarily only an individual thing there should be communities of production and creativity and very often the credit goes to one person and it's interesting that that happens anyway and it's of course especially interesting in terms of the discussion discussion when it happens for the male author who is perceived as the the genius within the community but

00:55:15 very again if we're going to look at works that uh have benefited Humanity who did that I think very often it's not that just we're talking about men and women but a lot of people working together yeah and that's that's a this is another side issue but it's centrally related and the cult of Genius emerges at the same time as a notion of copyright yeah uh and so uh there's a there's an interest in identifying a Creator who owns his creation so therefore can drive profit from it right uh so that the cult

00:55:46 of the genius then is is very convenient it's convenient also in a market society when you're trying to find ownership um and that I think that's part of its Resurgence today I mean you know yeah I mean I'm you know just just off the top of my head I mean there's been a whole slate of of Genius films of late right so Alan Turing and um the the two Steve Jobs films um uh A Beautiful Mind before that then the uh the film about Facebook

00:56:19 you know the great physicist uh Cambridge physicist who's in a wheelchair Stephen Hawking right uh and then about you all know um Boris basket and Company um so uh yeah and and I mean in the in the jobs case it's actually very interesting right I mean you know clearly the man had marketing uh genius if you will uh but but jobs isn't a creator of anything right uh and in fact one can argue that he's what he's really

00:56:51 good at is taking other people's ideas uh and you know giving them a kind of logic of their own and yet the brand you know if you've seen that the the the the the the first of the jobs film the opening shot you know as he comes down the stairs is that big picture of Einstein right and this is the man that got Walter Isaacson who's written biographies of Einstein and Benjamin Franklin to to write his biography yeah so you know uh I mean he's he's setting out to kind of myth make in that way yes um hence a lot of the popular interest

00:57:22 it'd be fascinating to know how far isaacson's books have been translated and then yeah that would help us identify uh who is talking about genius now because I think that's been a very important prompt for everyone I I think I like what the idea of eliminating the genius as the person but focusing on the work as a work of Genius because it also takes care of the problem that you may be have a work that seems a work

00:57:52 of Genius today about 10 years from now it seems completely wrong so it allows you to be more flexible it's hard to say he was a genius 10 years ago but he's no longer a genius now but you can say it seemed to us it was a work of Genius then but now we've learned other things and we no longer think that about it may change in the future that's what's happening with Lamarck right suddenly Lamarck is coming back

00:58:23 I mean Kathleen you mentioned uh Julie costeva a little while ago and I think you know there so coming out of this effort to deconstruct genius in the post-world War II period Then was an emphasis to think about what what women might bring to bear specifically as women and christeva and then actually Dairy Dawn one of his last Works have things to say about this right Christopher wants to argue that there's a kind of that women's link to

00:58:55 creation and pro-creation uh gives them kind of special insight into the creative process that women have a certain relationality issue that that puts them in touch with uh different people in a better way and again you get into kind of essentialist ideas of what genius is but I think that's important to bring up that there's there's that's part of a discourse if there may be something uniquely feminine about about certain kinds of genius and that that we should be in the business of cultivating

00:59:26 that right um I see a push um in a sense that in a different direction on that question from animal studies which every year those folks are getting better at trying to make a good case for animal intelligence is comparable to human intelligence um and I don't think it's there yeah I mean I I am the yet is implied we'll see um we can't see into the future on that question but it is interesting a lot of that analysis does not pay any attention to

00:59:57 gender it's just how smart crows are right period um how what what kind of intelligence dolphins have um and so it's that's a really interesting way again like computer or machine intelligence where it is for the moment neutral uh and I think pursuing a lot of the same questions but doing so quite profitably differently animals

01:00:29 under the computer intelligence is is neutral because the programming has been done by men for the most part and it has a very strong male Cultural Association I was only referring to that now as we're getting more and more women into Math and Science and Engineering that image may change but you know probably not in my lifetime uh but but it's happening yeah I think the response in um with respect to animal studies could be that here again you could see

01:01:02 and I can see this argument being made that about the animal say it's very interesting because it raises the question of the distinctiveness of humans with respect to other species one could say that genius could be held on to because it might be a special characteristic of Being Human because we can't quite measure it in animals I'm not forwarding that but I'm suggesting that that might be something else that could be going on with respect to thinking about genius what makes humans

01:01:34 distinct in a world in which we're understanding ourselves in such a a real web that has to do with machines and that has to do with other species what is it particularly about being human that that tells us that we're human and not something else so once we find the genius dolphin that will be that will be that will shake it up the question yes and that is uh going back to what problems do we think genius is going to

01:02:06 solve if for instance it's climate change um that's a way of thinking about ourselves in which we're comparing ourselves to other animals that we are just other animals we need natural resources and if we don't have them we are going to suffer um uh but it is hypothetical whether we're going to be like unlike other animals in terms of solving that problem I'm laughing to myself because I'm remembering a French Anthropologist who was

01:02:36 um there was a whole movement brain studies and not just studying brains but collecting them so there were massive museums all over the world in the 19th century and one of the biggest was at the Museum in Paris 8 000 brains and skulls and of course the dominant notion at the time was that the bigger the brain the smarter you were and you know somebody pointed out that you know by that calculus uh the whale is the smartest creature of them all clearly right and I mean it's going to show you how dumb scientists can be

01:03:07 right I mean you know that they hadn't thought in those terms for the longest time that you know of course brain size varies with body mass right uh bigger people have bigger brains it doesn't mean they're smarter yeah that is still still an issue for the people are are fighting yeah entirely comfortable with Geniuses product well I'm not comfortable with genius but uh but I I I think especially having written the biography

01:03:39 of core DuBois and thinking about her and the lifespans of other prominent women who managed to accomplish things in a world that was very male dominated and where it was very difficult for them you have to look at the whole life to to understand how special they were and I'm not saying you know I want to throw her into the genius category necessarily but it wouldn't be just one product it would

01:04:09 be the way she and others that I can think of managed to work through a whole series of you know very male professions and get to the top and so her her life is the product it's not any one thing and I think of Gertrude Bell somebody like that the same thing many different professional activities but a just an amazing woman

01:04:43 and so I for me it's the life and how they managed and under very difficult circumstances and what the toll was on them to to get to that level of achievement and it's all it's often a very heavy toll and I think you're right but I'm also thinking about Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict who I think didn't have to deal I think they didn't have

01:05:17 it thank you they didn't have to deal with as much Prejudice for some reason in anthropology in those days uh not true not true okay tell it well women a small number of women were were allowed to pursue phds but they never got positions you know Mead was with the museum right um Benedict did get a position because she worked closely with Boaz and he

01:05:48 eventually got her a position at Columbia but as soon as he retired they brought in a man to run the department um and and so she she was the exception DuBois was the exception for her generation the the only one so even though there were a lot of women invited into the field they were kept at lowly positions right I see attraction of thinking about a person as a genius in the sense of thinking about the the

01:06:18 whole life but I'm I'm not sure whether how would that not be a matter of determination plus Talent Plus resilience plus plus all these things I wonder if it also does um though speak to Something in the history of Genius I mean uh when things of Napoleon is often described as not just a genius uh the military or a genius of people but he's a kind of charismatic genius person in this age of of being that I mean it just

01:06:51 seems like that's a little bit more of a myth than looking at a creation and I think I feel that we're on a clearer ground if we look at what has been accomplished but I think that though the what has been accomplished could be something more than one particular work of art or two I'm kind of thinking of uh it was we're thinking of this with respect to the issue of climate change and the um meetings in Paris in December and it if you followed

01:07:23 them at all you could see that one of the reasons why the cop 21 meeting succeeded was because of French diplomacy which one could only say was an invention a cultural invention of Genius it allows people to get together the contrast was made between the the talks and Copenhagen and the cost the talks in in Paris where in Copenhagen people couldn't eat good food and the lighting was bad and stuff like that but the flexibility of the people in charge at Paris Lauren fabios and the woman

01:07:54 whose name I forget and I totally apologize in charge they mobilize rise to the history of French diplomacy in order to get everyone as it were around the table someone can think I think of long-term accomplishments as being accomplishments of Genius that other people can use or not and that exist in a kind of sense that's both beautiful and effective

01:08:27 until we go to questions sure let's do that already just a quick comment as a Avid go player I stayed up all night watching the match instead the um commentators I listened to often refer to alphago the program as she I don't know if that was just a particularly to that one person interesting but um [Laughter]

01:08:59 hi thanks very much um I'm used to I'm not a professional in the ways that you are but I'm used to thinking of uh intelligence those seven categories of emotional intelligence and I'm wondering what if anything you think about viewing um genius in in that way I mean there's almost no relationship between I mean a mathematical genius versus an artistic genius versus a many other different categories a musical genius is it useful to to um

01:09:30 get at the issue of gender by segmenting achievement through the prism of field major fields so so you're referring to the Howard Gardner's idea that they're multiple intelligence and so forth yeah I mean of course this is a much disputed notion whether I to me it makes a lot of sense um I think that you know the people on the other side of that argument would argue that there is something that unites um spatial intelligence and mathematical intelligent musical intelligence that is

01:10:01 the general intelligence Factor G right that that you can do factor analysis on IQ exams and show correlations between these various types um I'm I mean personally I I think that you know we all know people who are really good at math and can't talk to other human beings or uh you know who or people who can you know right uh and and it makes intuitive sense to me that there are different styles uh intellectual Styles uh and I think this is something that Chris Dave was hinting

01:10:32 at that you know that there may be something um feminine about certain types of thinking you know uh again I'm slightly comfortable with this uh um but uh but that was you know the way she was directed yeah I think it was useful in rescuing music as a form of intelligence and athletic ability as a form of intelligence I mean I would have never yeah they didn't have that standing before Howard Gardner

01:11:02 writes about uh Francis Galton actually writes about rowers and wrestlers in his military genius yeah uh and you know then there's the Robert musil's famous line of a racehorse of genius and The Man Without equalities and so but uh but nonetheless uh I think you're right and clearly right somebody like well in fact I was thinking just recently that a Time Magazine did a kind of special issue on genius and um the Sabrina thank you yeah uh the African-American tennis star was on the

01:11:34 cover as genius and clearly that kind of spatial sense uh ability to kind of see the court um you know this is something that is a kind of Genius right a kind of superlative ability in a certain character how about celebrity I mean sorry or was that a question celebrity that that she got on the cover of well she's she's won a lot of tournaments you know in this re-emergence of talking about

01:12:05 people as Geniuses right I'm delighted that she was you know that they said that but I would guess that a big part of it was celebrity yeah I don't know I see in a sense a kind of democratization of the category of amazing multiplying the areas in which people can make extraordinary accomplishments which American woman is Major which might be a positive development but the categorization of certain kinds of Genius as more female and others as male I think that's a way of making sure that women don't get in some categories

01:12:43 here today very a lot of interesting ideas but I have too many too much too much to say I try to be um very short but it's like comment and questions together first of all I would like um to ask why nobody talked about how destructive people who we call Geniuses could be for example especially in art

01:13:21 who destroyed his first white wife with whom he probably started his probability Theory um and a lot of other people who destroyed everything around them Buddha would like to be that kind of Genius would I would like to drink for whole night to discover a yellow color is mendeliani I probably wouldn't you see so it's it's very

01:13:52 it's one of the questions would it be possible that actually this hierarchical structures when we put Geniuses on the top uh could be actually the cause of today um Global warmerica today we should not probably wait for geniuses to solve the problem it should recycle and probably we should but rebalance the

01:14:25 situation and remove this hierarchical structures and then we probably to survive and if we wait for this probably we would not for a solution in probably it's not good idea in a neutral um artificial intelligence probably it should be absolutely I don't know not different sex it's not even connected to sex you see it's kind of they don't have sex

01:14:56 computer don't have sex they are absolutely different it's something that absolutely separate from us put them in these categories and um and genius is actually probably part of the problem and we have to rebalance this situation I had something else to say but probably I I don't remember maybe I completely understand that in some ways the category is what gives people

01:15:27 permission to misbehave I wouldn't say that there is something innately about Geniuses that is evil but certainly uh I I doubt that Napoleon questioned people who called him a genius and that was in if if anything kind of encouragement and what he thought he was doing right so absolutely the way in which it gives license to people to misbehave and more privileged people even more license to misbehave definitely and that's part of the mythology Association is going way back I mean it's you know um digital rights in the Ramos nephew

01:15:57 about the kind of relationship between genius and crime and there's a famous line there where the genius is like a tall tree that chokes off the sunlight and shade for the other trees around so you get stunted growth right it might be the 19th century that allows people first to be Geniuses of crime yeah this story is about Napoleon the Napoleon or cry sure uh speaking of um uh Geniuses who are

01:16:28 misbehaving there's a gentleman named Kanye West who's declared himself as a genius um but one of the ideas that circling him is that he's not actually a genius he's a genius he's involved in the middle of a scene there's a lot of people that he's connecting with they've kind of allowed him to come up and he's become the spokesperson of a larger group of people and he can see the same thing with Steve Jobs and other characters so I guess the idea is is genius just a dumb old word that we don't really need to focus on anymore and more focus on the seniors is because

01:16:59 then you can take each individual who's speaking today as their own seniors or as a member of a scene that's bringing something bringing Enlightenment forward to humankind I hadn't heard that term as well yeah it's the idea being the conductor or the band leader um or the empresario or the master of a studio so again going back to the idea that communities actually make the greatest creative contributions to

01:17:30 society um but the way in which that often is uh has to intersect with or develop into an author that one person is more important in terms of creating that creative ferment making the product that is eventually identifiable and branding it getting the copyright and so on sure it seems so connected with the culture today yeah how things are working in Google et cetera et cetera that it just seems like

01:18:01 an echo of that and a way to legitimize it but one could argue I mean you mentioned Darwin before you know that I think one of the reasons why Darwin wasn't categorized as a genius uh in the way that Einstein later is is that people could see clearly what was also true of Einstein and that is that um you know Darwin was sort of first to the the block but only just right you had Wallace and others there and if Darwin hadn't come up with natural selection it would have been discovered

01:18:33 so Darwin you know kind of puts his finger on something that's in the air and that's what Geniuses always do right um and uh the seniors in this respect you know does that as well sort of becomes a focal point for cultural movement right uh and then Brands it individually because that's the way we like to do things in the west but uh but really is speaking for a collective right or embodying Collective movement for about

01:19:05 inspired me to wonder about the connection between religious movements and secular the rise of secularism and the the right the emergence of the cult of genius and the re-emergence of of Genius today um insofar as I wonder if genius is not potentially sort of a replacement for God that you know it's a genius that's the thesis of my book by the way

01:19:43 [Laughter] um I hope you cited me on your book I will now and also to you know it just in terms of you know in in a climate of a rise of secularism Society still looks to defer to some sort of authority that if someone is the Pinnacle of something that therefore they are you know even if they might be hesitant to um to accept it that they have to

01:20:13 acknowledge it that they are sort of divinely inspired with that um and and also the ex the extension of that is that in Western society that you know might be you know it's sort of implied in everything but this you know paternalistic monotheistic idea of God as it referred to as a man that that might be another sort of you know undercurrent of why it's so difficult to accept women as Geniuses so but I'm interested to know about what you know

01:20:43 the connection of religion and secularism in The Institute yeah I mean I wasn't kidding it's actually the main pieces of my book that the cult of Genius emerges it it in in effect as a replacement for not only God but for um a whole kind of series of mediating beings that in all of human history from the beginning of time had served as kind of intermediaries between uh the heavens and the Earth right so Saints prophets Apostles um and this is very clear with somebody

01:21:14 like Newton I mean in the iconography of Newton Newton is somebody who's who can see the mind of God right and we talk about Einstein this way too see into the fabric of the universe right see in in a prophetic way uh in a way that ordinary Mortals can't and then translate that and give voice to that uh whereas uh whereas Newton buried uh you know in Westminster Abbey right so uh like a saint literally cultivated like a saint in fact there's a whole kind of traffic in the body parts of geniuses in the 19th century uh as if they're relics of

01:21:46 saints and so forth and so there are I think a lot of ways in which the genius serves or does religious work and in fact at the beginning of the 20th century you have German and Austrian sociologists writing about a religion of Genius which uh and you know somebody was talking about the Dark Side of Genius actually this isn't a whole nother kind of discussion but um it's very clear that that the national socialists and Nazis make use of this kind of Genius cult in promoting Hitler uh as as a genius as as you know

01:22:16 bizarre as that sounds to us today so there are all kinds of things and Hitler self-consciously uses this as well dimension of geniuses the fact that it's so pessimistic about human nature because it basically says that humans cannot are not capable of extraordinary achievement unless there's a sort of weirdly inhuman capacity that they have that's true and that it can't be widely distributed and this just seems to me kind of defeatist that we assume that human beings cannot actually be creative

01:22:47 and extraordinarily devoted to certain kinds of tasks and problem solving and that that has to belong to a tiny minority of people who are bizarre why do we have to think of humanity as being defined that way why can't we think of achievement again in more Collective terms and as being more evenly distributed through Humanity that would be I think a more optimistic idea of the of the race and I I just wonder also though it was it seems that we're sort of setting up the 19th century and and modern you know

01:23:18 the 21st century essentially is is two points in in you know significant times ingenious and and you referred to sort of uh you know the period which I assume is essentially the 20 the 20th century although you just cited the rise of Hitler so it um but I wonder if you know when you talk about the the retraction in the 20th century if you're referring mostly to the academic sphere if you're referring to Society at large and if so you know

01:23:50 if you might speak to the religious sort of frame of what's going on in the 20th century by contrast to the 19th century yeah I mean huge subject but I think the the short answer would be the the genius cult is extremely strong in Europe and in this country until the second world war and after the second world war for for a whole variety of reasons part of it's being linked to uh the Nazi cult and also the kind of the cult around Stalin uh and and Lenin as Geniuses and

01:24:20 I've met other totalitarian regimes use linked to Eugenics and so forth uh what I call the religion of Genius loses its appeal in some ways Einstein is the last kind of figure who occupies this space and even I mean Steve Jobs plays the part well enough I mean he's eccentric and you know he's prone to outbursts and so forth but no one really thinks that he can kind of speak the voice of God right and I don't know maybe I'm wrong about that but which God yeah exactly

01:24:50 the question um that he's sort of divinely uh Enchanted and possessed and so I think that you know in that respect you see kind of falling off of the religion religion of Genius in the second part of the 20th century and I don't think that's back today uh I mean this what's going on today is different I think but you do I'm sorry you do almost see a a homogeneous mass of people with a few special people on top which is part of the issue and um you know it might be

01:25:21 worthwhile to recuperate a kind of English sense of difference that that sense of eccentricity um and a more of a celebration of eccentricity as something that's valuable in our society John Stuart Mill makes a lot of this as a notion of the importance of tolerating people who have behaviors that are not comfortable with ours if we're just tolerating people it's Geniuses he's worried about and on Liberty uh I mean that's why you have what do you mean worried about he sees modern democracy you know

01:25:55 undermining the foundations for the creation of Genius those special people that make all of human history but he also um argues in terms of the exact word eccentricity which I think is slightly different than genius and he says that it's important to allow for eccentricity because we don't know what that person's odd solution might be we might need that in in the future I see the in I'm seeing that in a greater cultural context of English eccentricity which allows for

01:26:27 difference but without sort of we all are this way um it allows for meritocracy but also allows for democracy um because the presumption isn't that there's a few select and a and uh you know Mass if not I mean we'll go back to the genius thing but eccentricity I think is an important concept that might go which is closely related to genius as well in the tradition oh yeah yeah but it isn't insane right now go ahead okay so

01:26:58 I love the idea of allowing yourself to misbehave and I think that's a key to genius because good girls and two good girls too which is not make not make a mess I mean you can't collect stuff you have to have your brother has to have the bigger room and to defer to guys so I think there's a gender culture bias against women being Geniuses you have an expectation you

01:27:30 mentioned um it's so funny when you were talking about um Mendelson's sister I couldn't remember her name yeah of course and I thought I can't write Mendelson's sister you have to say who she is and I I believe that genius and identity self-identity self-awareness are basically culturally transmitted more more and more much more than genetically and I I love that idea going back to permission permission you have to give

01:28:01 yourself permission to take yourself seriously also skipping forward to the idea of the misfit and the holy fool which is somebody who can say the truth to the king like King lear's holy fool stuff I would love to see plays Classics where women are given the role of King Lear so see what she does with King Lear you know Meryl Streep instead of acting like the fool that she she's going to be coming out with a new

01:28:32 movie on this um this woman who couldn't sing of course Meryl Streep has a beautiful voice oh yeah but I want to see Meryl Streep as King Lear you know let's let's put on different costumes and give ourselves permission to be just outrageously fantastic thank you one more yes okay okay so um I think this actually from my point of view the biggest problem is that we

01:29:02 have to fit in male dominated structures that was developed and created by male dominated civilization and and even even um first group that established itself oppose male dominated structures like feminists that extremely hierarchical for example when I came to United States I discovered that I am not enough

01:29:33 feminist although I'm a woman you see so so it's kind of these the whole structure of society and lead to development of the leaders and like something that we have lighthouses that we have ourselves and would you think that without without

01:30:05 we could solve our problems without no changing all these structures because they are extremely powerful you cannot you cannot remove them you see you have to fit in them right well that's where what what greater good could we do would it be by making women Geniuses equal to men would it be by getting rid of the category of Genius altogether um I mean which would accomplish uh the

01:30:37 greatest good for society I kind of think the latter but that may be a minority opinion I just think that doing away with that extremely hierarchical designation of some people at the expense of others um that's probably the bigger accomplishment than trying to get women equally into the ranks of the tiny minority at the top I just question what would be accomplished by doing that in part because I think too the way that Geniuses function historically is you mentioned this earlier Joyce is that the kind of the dominant discourse that wins out in the 18th century is the genius is

01:31:09 is born not made right that you don't acquire genius you can't learn genius the learning genius is somehow you know inferior right that's talent but not genius the genius and therefore genius doesn't need institutions do you just doesn't need good schools and early exposure to reading and so on and so forth all the things that are necessary to cultivate human capital in a democratic way because genius always transcends that right and so the discourse then then takes our attention

01:31:39 away from institutions intellectual one percent won't do everything for us but we see that now in the um disaster of the s.a.t tests which were designed to find the Geniuses or the talented people outside of a you know the um a small well-educated family Elite but in fact of course as we all know to do well one almost has to um you know take a take a lesson take a test take

01:32:09 that unless you were two of my siblings who get 800 without being tutored but there are some people but it doesn't work it doesn't work to have that test defined you three Geniuses or you three talented people no matter what your upbringing is we just know it doesn't yeah it's interesting does it do good for gin divisions

01:32:43 yeah exactly yes right another question receives one we think they're stupid and ridiculous you have a question yeah I I think occasionally you've come close to this other uh category uh of uh genius but no one seems to have mentioned it and uh you know Geniuses is is ontologically it's an ontologically suspect notion uh

01:33:16 it's something that only exists uh in society and and that's where the definition uh really needs to be and we need to follow uh follow with through Society in other words you know consciously that way um it seems to me that it's uh this need for a savior which which is really uh one of one of

01:33:49 the foundations of that and uh uh and I think it potentially explains a lot about the notion certainly not everything and I I I would like to hear more about that foreign I think goes back to that Divine sense that again someone who is superhuman does work the rest of us cannot do I I

01:34:22 wouldn't be a little bit more specific in other words it it has to do in other words a genius arises when we need uh us someone to resolve a crisis and it may be a real crisis or or it may be just a perceived crisis it seems to me one of the most recent uh genius that I can think of is Andy Warhol who crisis

01:34:52 who right who solved right an artistic crisis that's true he was a genius in that way yeah I mean there's there's no question that I mean from the early 19th century Geniuses are spoken of as Redemptive figures uh who um who suffer and sacrifice for the whole and this is part of the mythology of Genius in the

01:35:23 Romantic Period and then going forward that you know Geniuses are often uh despised by Society because they um they're so far ahead of the times that they can't be understood and appreciated so they suffer in silence and yet they're they're working for uh the Redemption or the betterment of humanity right and so you get the cult to figure like tasso the Renaissance poet right who's institutionalized as as a Madman because Society can't understand his genius this is you know

01:35:54 the the Alan Turing film kind of plays on that that idea too of the genius who who was uh who's literally persecuted right for for his eccentricity for his strangeness his queerness in this case right being different being literally being gay but also because the Society of the time cannot understand him so the Geniuses suffer become Martyrs La Martin the French poet says that all genius is modern uh is a martyr two

01:36:25 um and uh there is no no question that that's part of the discourse but I think what's been said is that if I understand you correctly that in a sense someone has to solve a problem before they're acknowledged kind of as the genius I mean we can even think of the 19th century there Victor you go is a genius but he has solved artistic problems he solved political problems you solved the problems of rallying a certain group of French people around a

01:36:56 certain idea about democracy and Napoleon about the nation itself any embodies of people right yeah yes regenerating yeah so that's another the the person who has solved the problem whatever it is has that is given the license of being the genius as opposed to seven-year-old Victor Hugo sure but there's also a Mis historical mismatch that there are plenty of crises that never get sold the genius or the Savior never appears also

01:37:28 um I think again this scenario is very gendered that the suffering savior was the genius figure tends to be male women are just supposed to suffer so it doesn't necessarily play out in the same way yeah no there's no question okay thank you very much thank you we want to end on that note [Music] [Applause]

01:38:02 yes