Stop using the word ‘genius' – here's why they don't exist

Telegraph

16-06-2025

'Genius' has become a widely devalued concept: it can describe a goal by Mo Salah, Sally Rooney's latest novel, or the geek who fixes your computer. One reason for this, as Helen Lewis suggests in her breezy and entertaining new book The Genius Myth, is that the idea of genius has always been hazy. It holds that an exceptional few possess, for some reason, faculties or talents from which the many are ineluctably excluded, and that no amount of perspiration, method or reasoning can produce the eureka! moment, the sudden flash of inspiration or intuition that opens closed doors.
Lewis is sceptical. There is no such thing as genius, she argues, in the sense of an individual discovering or creating something unprecedented. Even the most apparently original artists and scientists are building out of what is already there, drawing on either tradition or collaboration. 'To make Leonardo,' she writes, 'you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450.' The same could be said for Steve Jobs needing Silicon Valley in 1997.
And yet there lingers the glamorous notion, fundamental to Romanticism, that genius is a divine gift granted to an elite exempt from normal standards of behaviour. Licensed by his operatic achievements, Wagner's anti-Semitism has to be excused; Picasso's serial maltreatment of the women he loved is framed as inspiration for some of his most powerful paintings. Related to this is Thomas Carlyle's belief that history is made and changed not by impersonal social forces or revolutionary masses but egregious mould-breakers such as Cromwell or Napoleon. Lewis finds such hero worship aggravating: she complains that 'people who succeed wildly in one domain stop thinking of themselves as any combination of talented, hard-working and lucky, and instead come to imagine that they are a superior sort of human.'
After this comes the book's strongest section, exploring the development of the (now largely debunked) idea of IQ and its implication of inherent genius in those who score highly – as well as its uncomfortable relationship to racism and eugenics. Lewis exposes the fraudulence of some celebrated spokesmen in this field, including the psychologists Cyril Burt and H J Eysenck, as well as recording the rather poignant tale of Marilyn Vos Savant, whose chart-busting IQ of 228 was honoured in The Guinness Book of Records but who ended up as an advice columnist in a popular magazine.
Some comedy pops up here too, notably in the account of Robert K Graham's short-lived scheme for Nobel laureates to provide a bank of sperm that could impregnate comparably brilliant women to produce a new breed of genius. And it's amusing to find among Havelock Ellis's many potty notions the assertion in his study of 'the British genius' that East Anglians have 'no aptitude for abstract thinking'.
The latter half of Lewis's book is a series of disconnected essays, and it's less successful. A chapter on Thomas Edison usefully points to the moment when the Byronic idea of genius gives way to 'the workaholic tech bro harnessing the white heat of technological innovation'. There's proper acknowledgement of the backroom boys on whom the front-page astrophysicists such as Stephen Hawking rely for their ground-breaking discoveries, and due tribute is paid to the support systems that women such as Tolstoy's wife Sophia and Pollock's wife Lee Krasner provided for their husbands' grand achievements – at the cost of their own aspirations and talents.
But too much space is wasted on the question of the Beatles, and futile speculations as to what might have happened if John had never met Paul. Quite what the avant-garde theatre maker Chris Goode (posthumously exposed as a paedophile) did to merit inclusion is anyone's guess. More predictably, 'disruptor' Elon Musk appears to be dispatched as 'one of the clearest examples of how the mythology of genius – the sense of being a special sort of person - can warp someone's outlook'.
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. This consists very largely of men, often on the autistic spectrum, who excel in fields such as chess, mathematics and music and whose brains appear to be wired differently to those of the rest of us, especially in terms of their ability to make staggeringly complex computations in nanoseconds and draw on total recall of anything they've read. Films such as Rain Man, based on the real-life figure of Kim Peek, have romanticised this phenomenon, and it would have been worth analysing, inasmuch as it relates to Lewis's questioning of the extent to which genius is the result of mental torture or eccentricity.
It would also have been interesting to speculate on a new species of purportedly superhuman genius: AI. Now that computers are on the brink of becoming creative thinkers as well as information processors, might the intellectual potential of homo sapiens have run its course? Or will A1 turn out to be merely the latest instalment in the 'genius myth'?