I’ve just finished a draft of a dissertation chapter that dredges up one of Richard Rorty’s few, all-too-few references to Philip Rieff. Rorty liked Rieff’s remark that “Freud democratized genius by giving everyone a creative unconscious.” Harold Bloom, no antagonist of Rorty’s, has something to say about this:
These days, we blink at so amiable illusion. Does President George W. Bush have a creative unconscious? I may be an antiquarian in urging us back to less generous ideas of genius, or again Freud, with his own aristocratic disdain for those less intellectually ambitious than himself, may have been more ironical than we yet have realized. (Genius, 180).
Whatever you think about Bush’s endowments, Bloom is right that Freud’s own genius was so uncommon that it can hardly be chalked up to whatever it is he democratized — despite his long, unsatisfied desire to see lay psychoanalysis run free.
Enter David Brooks, whose newest column tells us the Romantic vision of genius is being shrugged off in a technological age. Nowadays, genius is “the ability to develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine. Coyle and Colvin describe dozens of experiments fleshing out this process. This research takes some of the magic out of great achievement. But it underlines a fact that is often neglected. Public discussion is smitten by genetics and what we’re ‘hard-wired’ to do. And it’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.”
Take that, Freud — although Mozart is Brooks’s main example of the idea that what we call genius is often just the product of hard work and determination. Elsewhere in the column, Brooks says this disenchanting view fosters “a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world.” And obviously, after a fashion, it does. But it raises the competetive stakes pertaining to genius even higher — not only by opening the field of genius to anyone willing to devote themselves entirely to a single pursuit, but by raising the raising the ceiling even as it lowers the bar, allowing geniuses to envision even higher levels of performance simply by better and more fully routinizing their effort.
In such a view, genius is less the cause of great works than the consequence of technologies of effort. The disenchantment of genius will intensify, I think, the zeal with which we direct our energies into the best-technologized or routinized fields — the ones most amenable to repetition, practice, precision, and quantitative appraisal: science and sports spring to mind. But it will also probably revolutionize the arts, too. You can already see this movement intimated, I think, in the explosive popularity of Guitar Hero. My point isn’t to rail against technology as some kind of culture-destroying menace — my enthusiasm for GarageBand is proof enough of that. I am troubled, however, by the prospect that we’ll increasingly correlate genius with extent to which human bodies and minds are technologized — and reward them accordingly. We really do impoverish ourself by obsessing over quantifying greatness at the expense of qualifying it — especially, I think, by downplaying varieties of genius that exhibit themselves much more qualitatively than quantitatively. Freud’s was one such genius. Freud is being replaced by the geniuses responsible for prescription drugs. What substantive vision of the genius at teaching is encouraged by the move Brooks is describing? Once it sets in, will an aristocratic disdain for that vision be able to reassert itself?
May 1st, 2009 | 6:32 pm
I am troubled, however, by the prospect that we’ll increasingly correlate genius with extent to which human bodies and minds are technologized — and reward them accordingly.
I find this troubling as well, but for me the most troubling aspect of our considerations of “genius” is the egalitarian iron fist. All children are above average, especially our own! This is not to say that one has less moral worth than another, only that talent and aptitude varies and is tied to genetics. I wish we wouldn’t as a society get the vapors when this obvious point creeps into supposedly polite conversation. Concerning Brooks, Sailer’s fisking is worth a look on that column:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-brooks-on-what-mozart-and-tiger.html
May 1st, 2009 | 6:52 pm
You’re right to think that the retreat from spiritual genius has anti-aristocratic implications, but whether that would lead to a democratic (or puritanical) conclusion is less obvious to me. The approach to learning and accomplishment that Brooks describes, both in its teaching methods (steady tutelage), its ultimate goal (effortless flow), and the ideal type of its genius (the well-practiced master) is definitely meritocratic, but there are any number of ways it can be taken. I mean, all of those motifs have existed for a long time in the Confucian tradition, which has very few democratic undertones. Ditto any number of other religious traditions.
Now granted, for us, this may all come out as being just another variation on the themes of democratic equality, but the scale at which the technological approach to genius is coming to the fore means there are going to be a lot of different places and ways in which it gets articulated, some of which are destructive of vertical thinking and others which are not. (I wince to imagine the universe that a Russian tennis trainee exists in, for example.)
May 1st, 2009 | 10:10 pm
Disenchanting the practice of art appears to be the flipside of Denis Dutton’s disenchanting art itself. (For some reason every conservative magazine I know of has felt the need to review his The Art Instinct. Fortunately, Maureen Mullarkey was among those reviewers.) My money’s on the muses surviving both disenchantments.
May 1st, 2009 | 10:16 pm
Genius. Practice, practice, practice. (Brooks and his sources)
Well, no. You can’t get there from that. Otherwise enless mediocrity is genius. It ain’t.
Think of the NBA, not as a collection of geniuses, but of extremely tall men. Many men over six foot ten in fact. How often do you see men that tall around you? Not very often is my experience. Every few years, and I’m talking 25 years in the Big City, I might see someone that high off the ground.
Geniuses are like that, but rarer, and IQ is not the determining factor, but it helps. There’s much more to it.
I’ve known only one certain genius in my life, along with many very smart people. May I mention his name? It’s Mikhail (born Michael) Horowitz. His genius is in poetic form: he’s a perfect master of it. Any poet from any time of any greatness, of any depth and complexity, and Mik grasps it down to its roots and can, in fact, take those themes and do variations on them. He was like that by his early 20s, probably before, since that is when I first met him. His own poetry is nothing to look askance at either. It’s greatness was once self-evident, but complications have arisen in the world of poetry that are beyond the scope of this comment.
Being in Mik’s presence is like being in front of an x-ray machine. His mind is a network of profound, interlocking impressions under the spotlight of precise formal reflection. His debilitation is an equally profound egotistical humility. He doesn’t want the Big Show, not that the BS in poetry puts anyone on the red carpet on Oscar night. Mik is anti-religion, perhaps an atheist, but he radiates unmistakeable genius. I would be surprised if there were five of him walking around in the West.
More: Freud? I don’t know about that. A genius, perhaps, but maybe a charlatan. I’ll stipulate.
Certainly geniuses: Toynbee and Husserl. I remember seeing Charles Murray’s (I refer to the IQ maven) list of the West’s most impressive minds and he didn’t have Husserl on it (Toynbee, I don’t recall). Missing Husserl made me think less of Murray.
(Edith Stein was Husserl’s assistant, I’m sure you know, and JPII was a Phenomenologist, though Husserl might not have been his main source for it.)
So, my point is that genius is Providential, not accidental or earnable. Two specific parents must meet and put together the right combo of DNA strands in a child, the child has to be struck by something, has to get pinged, and that which is pinged has to light up, and what is pinged and then lights up has to be great, and then Providence must put a will with it and open a path for it. Then the practice, practice, practice will bring out the extraordinary gift.
But talent and practice, practice, practice with a not so extraordinary gift cannot add up to genius. Tiger Woods was born to be what he is. That, I believe, is his irreducible element. Ten thousand similar efforts will not produce those same results. It is wrong to build the hypothesis Brooks suggests based on the one who succeeds.
May 2nd, 2009 | 1:03 am
For me, the genius as technology argument doesn’t pass the “straight face test.” Becoming Mozart by working harder?? C’mon!! I haven’t read up on Mozart laterly, but on lesser examples, consider the autobiographies of Dylan and Clapton. Sure, they worked hard, they devoured everything they could get their hands on in certain musical traditions, they were consumed by their art — because they had a 1-in-millions gift that drove them. I could play the violin OK, and basketball a little better, but neither was finally “the food that was mine alone.” My brother is something of a self-made musical genius. When I was 12 and he was 9, he took the guitar from me. He never put it down again, and I never demanded it back. There are gifts; they remind us all that what is given infinitely exceeds what we can make.
May 2nd, 2009 | 2:25 pm
Good comments. Cf. the sinophobia in Tocqueville, Constant, and Nietzsche. Tocqueville remarked on China perhaps most colorfully as the kind of place where the hero of a romantic novel gets the girl by (shudder) passing a bureaucratic administrative exam.
May 21st, 2009 | 12:47 pm
[...] Brooks’ recent column on genius, which offered a portrait of the Mozart who excelled by logging his ten thousand hours of rote [...]
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