SUNDAY, 29 JUNE 2025

‘Genius’ was a word which appeared almost without fail in every tribute to Brian Wilson which I read or listened to over the past fortnight. It has become increasingly common in contemporary discourse and has been semantically bleached to the point where it seems everyone and his dog can be defined as such. At what point does this word become inappropriate, or even risible? If Wilson qualifies as a genius, does Bowie? Little Richard? Cristiano Ronaldo? Steve Jobs? Even Jordan Peterson? What exactly do we mean when we call someone a genius?

The word has its roots in Latin. It was originally a kind of spirit in Roman religion that watched over and protected a family lineage through the generations but slowly evolved into a more personal guardian angel which guided each individual from birth and connected him to the divine. The word moved into English during the 14^th century and its etymological links to the later English word ‘genie’ suggest that there was always more than a hint of magic in both words. The less supernatural modern meaning which merely denotes someone with exceptional talents or ability only became pre-eminent in and beyond the 18^th century and owed much to the rise of Romanticism, with Lord Byron as its poster boy.

In modern use, ‘genius’ tends to require at least one of two key features: abnormally high IQ and/or groundbreaking creativity. The use that stresses intelligence is generally restricted to scientists and mathematicians like Pythagoras, Galileo, Newton and Einstein (the first image that pops into many people’s minds when they hear the word is probably the famous photo of Einstein with his mane of wild hair and his tongue sticking out). The second use which stresses imagination and inspiration is more likely to be reserved for painters, musicians and writers, but, as the example of Ronaldo shows, it is sometimes extended to those who do not work in the arts, including sportspeople. Sadly, accountants and YouTube presenters never seem to make the cut.

While researching this topic, I came across a quote from Schopenhauer: ‘Talent is hitting the target nobody else can hit, Genius is hitting the target nobody else can see.’ This perfectly sums up how we view genius. It is not enough to be talented, even outrageously so: to wear the laurel of true genius, a person’s thinking must also be transformative and change the world in some way. Thus, in science we have the revolutions created by the genius of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and Planck. In Art, we have the giants of the Renaissance, and the various key works that heralded the arrival of Modernism: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon; Eliot’s The Waste Land, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring; Joyce’s Ulysses. Each of these is seen as a work of genius that shifted the tectonic plates and transformed the way humanity perceived both Art and the world in general.

It is easy to detect a link here to the original idea of genius as a kind of pathway to the divine. There is a sense that the genius is never fully in control of his powers, but that he functions as a kind of shaman connecting the invisible world of spirit with material life here on earth. There is nearly always a sense of mystery to genius, of a talent too uncanny to be explained, of something that defies or transcends logic. This creates problems for the genius on a personal level since it separates him from the rest of humanity, and in the public imagination (and it seems often in reality) he leads a tortured, unhappy life, as exemplified by Wilson himself. Genius is a burden as well as a sublime gift.

So there is a kind of fatalism at the root of the concept of genius: of all the millions of possible candidates, this person was chosen to be both blessed and cursed. It doesn’t matter whether this is explained in religious and/or supernatural terms, as a channel between humans and the gods or some kind of spirit world, or in materialistic terms as a freak coming together of genes to forge a mind that is a radical mutation from every other mind: there is a stringency within the concept of genius which reduces the individual genius to the tool of a hidden hand and turns the rest of the human collective into an uncreative blob waiting for the next despatch from beyond. Even the genius himself is denied agency in this model, though, in the sense that he becomes a mere cog in an infernal machine which takes him over, a puppet in the hands of a greater force.

This renders the concept problematic for many contemporary thinkers, especially poststructuralists and postmodernists (and their Marxist rivals) since it bears obvious links to the Great Men theory of history and reduces the role of collective humanity to extras on a film set who are there merely to act as background to the glory of the stars. The significance of larger societal influences is downplayed and replaced by a kind of mystical fixation on the individual detached from his social setting. In contrast, those who are sceptical of transcendental claims for genius point to the wide array of conditions which need to be met before someone can enter the pantheon and these conditions are far from arcane or inscrutable.

Using Wilson as an example, he needed to be born into a situation where his innate talent could be nurtured and realised. He came from a musical family; he was blessed with a wonderful voice; he had an ambitious father who pushed him to the limit; he had talented brothers and relatives whose skills he could draw on as a composer. Beyond this, he was born at a time when popular music was flourishing and ubiquitous, and its focus on harmony in genres like barbershop and doo-wop suited his musical background and his personal inclinations. He was born in California, not in Montana or Maine, which was important both in terms of the popularity of the local environment of surf and sand which he portrayed in his early music and the greater opportunities his birthplace gave him to get his music into the public domain. If any one of those conditions had been different, although he might still have grown up to be a very talented musician and composer, it seems highly unlikely that he would have gone down in musical history.

The point I’m labouring to make is that not only did the huge talent have to be there in the first place but myriad other conditions had to be right, from the miniscule and the parochial to what was happening to music and society on a national and even an international level. In short, even a genius needs to be in the right place at the right time. We so often work retrospectively to argue that something was bound to happen – in this case, Wilson becoming a genius – but most of the time this is myth-making, the construction of a narrative that serves our need for comforting, predictable patterns of cause and effect in a chaotic world. Brian Wilson with a different life history would probably have remained totally unknown, like most of the billions of people on this earth.

For it can be argued that we – the collective – create the individual genius, or at least place the crown on his head. If we turn to ancient Greece, we seem to witness an extraordinary blossoming of thought that seems almost miraculous: where have all these amazing people suddenly come from? Yet it was Greek society as a whole which enabled and encouraged this incredible period of flourishing. An audience had to exist which was ready to listen to Thales rather than run him out of town or burn him at the stake, and later to pay heed to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, and all of the other names which schoolchildren once had to learn before we decided that this was terribly elitist and they were replaced on the curriculum by Harry Potter.

A few names within the Greek canon of geniuses managed to spread out from those educated in elite institutions into more general societal awareness, often helped by a good narrative which upped their profile: Socrates drinking his hemlock or a naked Archimedes shouting ‘Eureka!’. Others became known only to a few: for example, Leucippus and Democritus and their theory of atomism more than two thousand years before modern atomic theory, or Eratosthenes proving that the world was round and measuring its circumference so precisely. This explosion of ideas can seem almost inexplicable without some kind of appeal to enigmatic individual genius, but to those who are sceptical of this, what happened in the eastern Mediterranean was a societal outburst of intelligence and intellectual curiosity, not the gods whispering in the ears of a chosen few.

The idea of the divinely inspired individual genius also belittles the role of others in the same field at the same historical moment. It turns Marlowe into little more than a precursor of Shakespeare, for example, and while almost everyone has heard of Darwin, far fewer have heard of Wallace. Yet if the key criterion of genius is that it is transformational, it can be argued that the transformation generated by evolutionary theory would have happened even if Darwin had perished on the HMS Beagle and Wallace’s name had been the one that went down in history because the world was ready for the idea of natural selection. Scientists, despite some notorious spats between individuals, are generally more willing, perhaps, than those in the arts to accept the reality of collective ownership of ideas: even someone as famously prickly as Newton recognised that he stood on the shoulders of giants. Artists tend to be more proprietorial about their work, possibly because subjective feelings play such a larger role in its evaluation and they therefore feel less confident about its worth, an inner doubt which AI sadly seems destined to make worse.

Genius is also essentially amoral: there seems no correlation between the talent that a human being has and his basic decency as a person, with many examples of hugely gifted people who were unprincipled shits, or, to put it more tactfully and stylishly, mad, bad and dangerous to know. The world seems willing to award geniuses ethical carte blanche as a kind of compensation for the fact that their genius is a burden which most people would choose not to have to bear. They are forgiven their sins because they are the ones who must climb the mountain and bring the stone tablets down to the people.

Another argument against the ontological reality of genius is the fact that almost all proclaimed geniuses to date have been male. I can see only three possible reasons for this: either women are biologically less likely to be geniuses, the gods don’t want to speak to them, or societal and cultural restrictions made sure that women stayed firmly in the domestic sphere. In writing this essay, I’ve used male pronouns in general and worried that I was excluding women from the ranks of putative genius. But this simply reflects the reality that genius is a product of a whole society and not just the work of a few freakishly gifted individuals, no matter how great their talent. There have been almost no female geniuses to date because this was the way the social world was organised through gender. Even if the talent had been there, the other essentials of recognition, support and opportunity would not have been.

I also find it highly unlikely that there have been so few geniuses scattered through world history and still so few even now: in a world of eight billion people, it seems that probability alone would mean that there are millions of outliers who possess the requirements to rise to the top and transform the world. That they don’t is probably due to other factors which have nothing to do with their ability or skills: they lack opportunity, or motivation, or lose out to the competition, and their talent ends up never being realised or rewarded. They are like the thousands or even millions of eggs which many species produce because the reality is that only a tiny number of them will ever come to fruition.

And sometimes society at large isn’t ready for what a highly original mind can create or discover and his recognition will be posthumous, or someone else will take the credit and fame many years later, as occasionally happens in science. Turning to the world of Art, according to this way of thinking, Van Gogh was not a ‘genius’ who the people of his time stupidly failed to recognise as such; he was an astonishingly talented painter whose head was posthumously anointed with the laurel crown once a critical mass of society was willing to recognise and label him as such. Almost totally unknown during his lifetime, he has become the apotheosis of the tortured genius in the popular imagination (again a good narrative helps, especially if it comes with a striking image: the severed ear).

Ultimately, I doubt that genius exists as an ontological reality. I am tempted to define it not as some elusive, inexplicable quality which a mere handful of individuals possess, a gift either from God or from our chromosomes, but as a rather haphazard societal process which we collectively construct and channel through a few selected voices. Candidates for genius must have great talent to begin with, of course, but that is not enough to lift them out of obscurity without many other factors coming into play. Some might feel that this makes me a party pooper who has some ‘woke’ need to erase the individual and replace him or her with impersonal forces in the manner of Marxism or structuralism. But I have no desire to deny that individuals can change history – there seem to be too many examples of this happening to dismiss the idea out of hand. Individuals matter, but which specific individuals end up mattering may often be more the result of chance than anything else.

Despite my scepticism about genius in the last half of this essay, I still have to admit to lingering doubts. As someone who writes poetry, even if his flowers grow in the foothills and not at the peak, a little part of me remains attracted to the idea of shamanism, the feeling that in some strange way poems write themselves and pictures paint themselves, especially the better ones. What the world makes of them, though – what the world eventually considers to be the work of genius – is up to the world and is not intrinsic to either the work or its creator.