Atlantic writer Helen Lewis was recently interviewed by respected journalist Bari Weiss about her provocatively titled new book, The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. The title is provocative because it contains two fallacies. First, she says, there is no such thing as exceptional talent. Second, argues that the very idea of exceptional talent is somehow “dangerous.”
The first claim is obviously wrong; some people are cleverer and more energetic than others—even Lewis admits it, after a while. To imply an untruth, that such differences don’t exist, is itself dangerous. Furthermore, if we are not to admire excellence, merit, genius, exceptional talent, why should anyone aspire to it? To deplore genius is to elevate its opposite.
The author’s main theme, however, is not so much to disparage geniuses—although she does some of that—or even envy their success. What she is really upset about is that some “geniuses” are obnoxious characters and are allowed to get away with it because of their talent. “I have a personal reluctance to say there is a level of people being assholes that we should tolerate in order to have inventions,” she writes.
Lewis confuses fame with genius. Not all geniuses are famous. Not all celebrities are geniuses. There are modest geniuses just as there are arrogant mediocrities. It is fame and huge wealth that encourage arrogance, not talent ipso facto.
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Is Donald Trump’s obnoxiousness—he is a favorite bête noire—due to his genius or his fame? I doubt she considers him a genius, so fame then? That would be a silly confusion.
Lewis goes on: “I write in the book that genius is a right-wing idea because it is about the individual and the idea of privileging them over the collective.” My handy artificial intelligence helper summarizes “Individualism … emphasizes the moral worth and autonomy of the individual over collective or institutional control.”
Ms. Lewis is opposed to that idea, evidently. For her, “the collective” is everything. This also happens to be a Marxist axiom: “The human essence is the true collectivist essence.” No more autonomous individual; the individual exists only as part of the collective. Most people will find this idea repellant.
The book has many other flaws in addition to misreading talent rather than fame as a source of bad behavior. Lewis seems to think that universal rights are somehow incompatible with individual differences, including the fact that some are more talented than others. She confuses equal rights with equal social status:
We need a framework to mitigate against what is demonstrably true—that some people are innately born with enormous talents and abilities, and some people are not … So you need a framework that mitigates against that by suggesting that we’re endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, or we are all equal because we are all created in the image of God.
So we must bring down those who stand out, “mitigate” those with exceptional talent? Lewis thinks this egalitarian imperative is self-evident. Why?
Whether she knows it or not, Lewis is following a flawed philosophy long promoted by influential Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel and his late colleague John Rawls, who famously said that “the distribution of natural talents is arbitrary from a moral point of view.” Hence, they are unjust.
Rawls and Sandel don’t distinguish between injustice and bad luck. They don’t believe in the idea of “just deserts,” the idea that people should be rewarded for doing good or punished for doing bad. This is an extraordinary departure not just from common sense but from practice throughout most of human history.
Harvard is not alone.
For example, Stanford legal scholar Barbara Fried, mother of fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, has written at length against the whole idea of “blame.” There is no free will, so perpetrators should not be blamed for their bad actions. If good people are not responsible for being good, well then, bad people should not be blamed for being bad.
Fried’s argument is self-contradictory. She dislikes the idea of blame, yet advocates a pragmatic, consequentialist view of legal consequences. A perpetrator, say, should be treated in such a way that he—and presumably others like him—will do less harm to society in the future. There is an obvious problem with any version of consequentialism. How well can we predict the effects of our treatment, especially over the long term and across the whole of society?
But some effects can be predicted. What if blame and the punishment that follows are often effective in deterring and possibly even improving behavior? Fried condemns blame and the punishment that it implies, but ignores its possibly beneficial effects. This contradicts her avowedly consequentialist position.
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Sandel’s position is mostly subjective and personal, based on people’s feelings. People at the low end of society “are made to feel that their failure is their own fault, a failure of character, a lack of merit.” He is particularly concerned that the successful might actually think they deserve their success, as he writes in The Tyranny of Merit.
There is nothing wrong with recognizing and rewarding talent and effort. The problem is when the successful come to believe that they morally deserve the rewards that the market bestows upon them, and that those who struggle deserve their fate too.
What’s wrong, according to Sandel, is that those who fail, or don’t even try, might feel they deserve their fate also. So, we must avoid rewarding the above-average lest we make the below-average feel unhappy. The unhappiness of the unsuccessful weighs more than the happiness of the successful.
Recognition of excellence must give way to compassion for failure. In other words, all inequality is bad; all must be equal—even if everyone is, then, unhappy. Sandel is a crypto-Marxist. Marx believed in “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Marx accepted the reality of human difference. He just didn’t feel that the talented deserved more than the rest. Au contraire, the able should be exploited to compensate the unable. For Marx, as for Sandel and Rawls, there should be as little inequality as possible.
Helen Lewis believes all this. She is happy to downgrade excellence in favor of an egalitarian dystopia, which will suffer from its mediocrity. Poor and unhappy because genius has been “mitigated,” but we are all equal, so that’s okay. Really?
Image: “Helen Lewis Open Rights Group November 2017” by James Collis on Wikimedia Commons
