The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea
Lewis, in her discussion of race and I.Q., acknowledges that measurable biological differences among groups need not be permanent...but she does not delve into the impermanence of our social definitions of race, or the imprecision of using race as a measure of genetic similarity ... If Lewis doesn’t quite exert herself to demolish the idea that geniuses come from a genetically superior social class, she is more diligent about tearing down the idea that geniuses operate outside of society ... Lewis falls victim to a kind of inverse hagiography—an Annoying Man theory of history—in which she fixates on the individual defects of supposed geniuses rather than on larger trends provoked by the ideology of genius.
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Lewis’s suggestion that we should apply the term 'genius' to specific works, rather than individual people, is persuasive. But the idea that large swathes of the reading public urgently need to be disabused of 'the genius myth' is questionable ... There is an irritating circularity about such pronouncements, whereby the author projects on to the reader the very cliches that underlie her own analysis ... The Genius Myth is one of those popular nonfiction books in which an author sells you the disease in order to sell you the cure ... Lewis strives for the easy, conversational style of a Ted Talk, but her attempt at a pally register comes off stilted and ingratiating. The prose is remarkably heavy on italicisation, which lends a rather laboured feel to the exposition—at times, Lewis sounds as if she is trying to convince herself, quite as much as the reader, that something worthwhile is being imparted ... Her contention that Picasso’s womanising provided 'an aspirational ideal to lower-status men trapped in bourgeois domesticity and wage slavery', and that Donald Trump is therefore his 'analogue,' is little more than a therapeutic rant ... With The Genius Myth, Lewis clambers on to a bandwagon that was already starting to creak.
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The book’s strongest section...explor[es] the development of the (now largely debunked) idea of IQ and its implication of inherent genius in those who score highly ... Some comedy pops up here too ... The latter half of Lewis’s book is a series of disconnected essays, and it’s less successful ... There’s proper acknowledgement of the backroom boys on whom the front-page astrophysicists such as Stephen Hawking rely for their ground-breaking discoveries ...
But too much space is wasted on the question of the Beatles ... What is most disappointing, however, is that Lewis doesn’t engage in any depth with a category of genius that doesn’t depend on tradition or collaboration, and which remains something of a neurological mystery.
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