> He says, “if I were forced at gunpoint to name the two greatest minds of the 20th century, I’d pick Bertrand Russell and John von Neumann. Is it really a coincidence that both were basically aristocrats?”
Without education access of course only aristocrats and the very rich can develop genius kids. All other social layers cannot, really. But this takes out about 90% of the talent distribution.
So we could have had many more genius's throughout history if we had more equal education systems of whatever kind. Even most of the aristocrats, at least the ones mentioned in Hilary Mantels Cromwell series, didn't bother to educate their female offspring (leaving about 51% of the talent pool without chances).
On the other hand, Hoel also makes some good points: having mentors, getting educated not only in school, but also at home by the family, the value of a good home library etc.
Yes, agree. At the time of aristocratic tutoring, everyone who wasn't aristocratically tutored didn't even stand a chance of becoming a genius.
And yes, Hoel makes some great points. I can already hear him looking up all of the people I mentioned and showing that they had some kind of mentorship in their lives. 🥰 I'm sure we would only increase the level of genius if we made that accessible to everyone!
It seems the argument between you and him breaks somewhat down to: make special education efforts to special persons (Hoel) <-> make education and meaningful careers in science and engineering available to anyone (you).
Like, you could be the biggest genius in history, but if you live in Haiti, you will not be very productive, because overall productivity is so low. Better to improve Haitis overall standing than to focus on single individuals. Actually, Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs & Steel" mentions this when he says that average persons from Papua-New Guinea are probably more intelligent than average persons from, say, Germany, because they have to live on the edge and try to survive daily, and this sharpens their instincts, fast grasping of situations, memory etc. much more than shuffling to work, shuffling to the supermarket, shuffling to your microwave, shuffling in front of the TV.
Also: let's not forget the correlation between a free society (say, allowing homosexuality, freedom of expression etc.) and innovation. Europe just was more free than other areas and thus had all those free thinkers.
Yes, I hate the idea that some places have poverty just because of location. If someone born in Haiti were born in the United States instead, that difference alone could provide them with the opportunity to work on feats of genius, where they might never have that opportunity in Haiti. 😫
Love this! You reminded me how much genius there is in the world. Sometimes I think social media and you tubers crowd the airspace so much that we forget that there really are groups of people with great talent pushing us forward societally. I wrote once about a kid genius for a magazine and she was super smart and sweet but without much special tutoring, she had nowhere to put all of those smarts. I’m not sure what she’s up to now but last I heard she was extremely frustrated with her genius rather than gifted with it.
"Why should we give so much credence to Marcus Aurelius when there are modern thinkers among us who can expand upon what we’ve learned since then? A lot of what we’ve come up with is so much better than those philosophers could even have imagined!"
This way of framing the value (or not) of past thinkers already begs the question against them. Right Now is better, therefore the past is worse. Now where is your wisdom, Plato? <smugface>
The value in reading thinkers like the Stoics, and Plato and Aristotle and Cicero et al, is precisely because they put *our* modern views, including our humanistic assumptions, our natural equation of technology and science with goodness, and the very idea that history has a meaningful trajectory, into relief.
The fact that you can even judge today as "progress" against a prior state of affairs is entirely due to ideas you've received, without realizing it and to be sure through indirect means, from Plato and Aristotle.
I'd ask why incremental progress (James Webb, for example) is now wowing us more than the genuine revolutions in thought marked by Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Neils Bohr. It's easy to slag them off because we don't really get what upsets these were.
The same can be said for philosophers. A major figure like Kant or Hegel (responsible for Marx, by the by) really did bring about lasting changes in how the world looks. That doesn't happen when a lab tech patents a new gene-editing technique or a telescope sees a little better than the last one.
I don't mean to be harsh, but reading your list drove home to me just how *little* techno-science or artistic progress we make these days and how little it takes to amaze us compared to true table-throwing innovations of past thinkers.
The distance past was dominated br superstition and religion, ergo, the scientific shift by innovative thinkers was, indeed, revolutionary. (To this day, some people don't 'believe' in science.)
I think, after reading these comments, that I have presented my arguments for the present to the detriment of the past. I should clarify that I find great value in past philosophers!!! Perhaps too much so! Up until last year I couldn’t have told you a single book I loved that was written within the last 100 years. I would definitely put myself in the category of people who worship the past to the detriment of the present. This piece in a lot of ways is me trying to understand modern genius. Not to discount past genius of which I am hugely obsessed. Almost everything I read is 100 years old at least, and I think that has led to a bias that has made it difficult for me to see genius in the present.
I mentioned in a comment on one of Samuel's recent posts that the word "genius" itself, up until quite recently, had was steeped in romantic ideals of creativity and inspiration.
Today's use of the word to talk about people like Einstein, Turing, von Neumann, and others in the sciences and engineering is a very recent departure from the romantic use.
I think that fact is *hugely* relevant for any discussion of genius or its absence today. If it's a matter of raw horsepower in brain-smarts, then it's hard to dispute we've got a lot of genius running around.
But I also balk at using the G-word as a label for people who are little more than termites in a managerial hive of bureaucrats. Distribution of labor in the modern corporation, which now includes universities and whatever is left of private-sector labs, means that, as you point out, nobody's responsible for nothin'.
We may have the raw talent out there. It would be strange if not. But I find it hard to disagree that the way it's being put to use is not helping genius to flourish, no matter what techno-shinies are in the news this week.
From my POV, what we're doing today is inch-worming along the tracks of innovations that were already laid down in the essentials from 1945-1970, without any real revolutions or upheavals. There's a few here and there, but they're modest firecrackers compared to the (occasionally literal) nuclear blasts of the early 20th century.
I feel the same about most art and entertainment, which feels stuck in a time loop for the last 20 years. The sensory spectacles and optimized-for-addiction storytelling is nice, I guess, but I'm hesitant to call these works of genius.
Anyway. I appreciate that you're trying to be optimistic. To me it all looks fake and unexciting, and it seems like we're happily letting the past go for the sake of cheap junk.
I can understand that perspective. I suppose you are saying that discovering antibiotics, for instance, has greater weight (is a larger leap forward) than developing the internet, for instance. It’s hard to compare as one changed our life expectancy and the other changes how we get information. But I do consider both huge leaps forward. If in different ways.
I am, I guess, but the point I'm working out here is deeper than this or that scientific discovery.
I'm thinking of *conceptual* revolutions. The leap in how people thought about reality in Europe in 1600 vs. 1900, for example. There's leaps like that salted through history, and not just in the West, where the whole "order of things" went through a seismic shift. It's not a coincidence that the usual suspects on our lists of "geniuses" are clustered in those times.
Even the fact that we can look at science and (mostly) technology in terms of life-changing discoveries *is itself one of these revolutions*. I find it hard to get excited about James Webb when it is an incremental improvement in a technology we've had for a long time.
I don't say that to take away from the impressiveness of the accomplishment, but to point out that not all progress is created equally. I don't associate it with genius because it is an engineering project to sort out more or less known problems within a mostly well-understood frame of reference. Genius, in my mind, is about breaking frames.
I can see that. Maybe if the James Webb Telescope discovers the cause of all life you'll be swayed haha. My brother-in-law is an astrophysicist and he was trying to explain to me how groundbreaking the data was that was coming back from that telescope but I couldn't understand it. Maybe if we can get it into layman's terms that will be half the battle. 🤓
I've written a novel about two coming-of-age geniuses who feel alienated as outliers or outsiders. When they meet, they are drawn to each other and fall in love.
Here is the opening Author's Note that seems relevant to this post:
Author’s Note
Genius children need protecting. Intelligence possessed to a larger degree than almost any other, they are gifted in many ways except one—they will never be ordinary, and no one will view them that way. From early childhood, their precocity can lead to speaking early, thinking deeply. Such behaviors may appear unlikely, even suspect. They may be envied rather than befriended, often ostracized. They may be viewed as having privileged intellects and talents, and if they have beauty as well, they are judged far too often, with accusation.
Gifts carried as blessing and burden present obstacles and disadvantages others fail to understand. Gifts wrought with shame because they trap, set the genius apart, divided against oneself.
I think you’re right about a lot, as is Erik (and I’m a huge fan of you both). This is such an awesome, generative response I really wanted to dive in, but I’m working on a Sunday and doing this on my break so I can only share two thoughts—apologies in advance if these are a bit verbose and meandering.
COMMENT 1:
"I think we give too much credence to dead philosophers and not enough to alive ones." I'll never forget reading a book about ten years ago that was about the modern state of Catholic parishes. I don't remember the book or author (it wasn't very good, overall) but it was hugely influential--they were just handing it out at the front of a church I went to a wedding for and that's how I got it. I mainly remember it for one anecdote I think about all the time.
The audience of the book is Catholics and at the beginning, the author observes that Catholic churches all over the world are losing membership, and trying to build their parishes back up by 10% or so. He says that this is the exact wrong strategy. He then explains how all of the work (volunteering etc.) in a church is done by 1% of the parishioners, and churches would be better served by aiming to double that number than to increase the parish size by 10%. His reasoning makes sense at first, but he is literally (unironically) advocating preaching to the choir.
I think about this a lot when I hear comments like, "we should focus more on these people not these people." I think that these comments come from people who care about things to other people who care about things. Like, all of us reading this CARE about which philosophers are studied--we are "carers" But I think by saying, "let's focus more on thinkers this and less on thinkers like this," we are advocating something similar to doubling the 1% of hardcore parishioners, when instead we should be saying, "let's focus more on thinkers." As a fellow carer, the world would be a better place if the overall number of carers was greater, rather than if the active carers trained their focus on a different subset of thinkers.
There is a good argument to be made that a lot of people we consider geniuses, we do so mostly because someone before us did, and so they were put into the genius pantheon. This is in fact a very low-resolution version of the postmodern critique of the canon. But doesn’t it count for something that generations of people have been inspired to come up with new ways of seeing the world even though they are studying these “geniuses” based solely on some other tastemaker’s input?
I think that if you grok the postmodern critique and agree at all, it’s easy to draw one of two conclusions about what we, as “carers,” can do.
1 – We can share or reinterpret the postmodern critique of the canon to impugn the quality of existing canon thinkers and artist, and therefore draw attention to underrepresented voices
2 – We can simply become those tastemakers ourselves and use the best of what we find in the canon to celebrate the underrepresented voices.
I think the existence of places like Substack is evidence that there is a whole lot of room for a whole lot of new tastemakers, and people who care about a whole lot of things. The truth is that some of the people who care the most about dead philosophers are alive philosophers. I think there is ample room to celebrate and care about both.
COMMENT 2:
I’m actually writing a short round-up of some of Erik Hoel’s stuff I like the most, and one thing that this essay pointed out to me is that I think there is sort of a delicious irony to the fact that two of his most popular pieces are the series you’ve referenced here and the piece on the Gossip Trap. ChatGPT was kind enough to summarize the Gossip Trap as: “The ‘gossip trap’ limits social connections and creates a society focused on reputational management, hindering innovation, but civilization's formal systems level power dynamics and allow for the development of art and new ideas, exemplified by figures with immunity to gossip like Supreme Court justices and journalists.”
The irony is that, one could extrapolate the central thesis of the gossip trap out to something like, “institutions is what makes civilization as we understand it, and this is good, and social media is probably moving us away from this to a more level, primeval, individual and personality-focused way of living.” But the central thesis of they don’t make Einsteins like they used to is, “we don’t make geniuses like we used to, because old-timey geniuses were superhuman talents into whom wealthy people poured resources via tutors, and our homogenous, institutional education system is why the Einsteins are gone.”
I’m probably being way too cavalier with my summaries and a little obtuse with my understanding of the two, but there seems to be an interesting conflict there, like institutions and their hierarchical, structured, ‘personalities are not important’ approach to human affairs are both the reason that we have civilization and also the reason that we don’t have geniuses anymore. (Given, these are different kinds of institutions, timelines, etc., but I think about the state of institutions a lot, and this essay made me view his essays in a way I hadn’t before.)
I definitely agree that Hoel’s posts are true probably in the same way that mine are. I don’t think they cancel one another out at all. In a lot of ways, this post is me trying to convince myself that there is modern genius as I would definitely count myself among the idolizers of past genius. (My favorite author is Victor Hugo and I still haven’t found a modern author that compares in my opinion. But I think I’m being a snoot here and that I need to change my mindset lol.)
I definitely don’t think Plato is obsolete. He provides the foundation for a lot of today’s thought. But I don’t think we would apply a purely Plato vision to the world today, there are many ways we have evolved utopian thought since then.
Excellent, Elle! An outstanding piece of thinking and writing!
Oh thank you!
One of your best articles Elle. Also a huge fan of Midnight in Paris. Its a great story with a moral.
Thank you!!!!!!
Couldn't agree more with you, great reflections. And the cartoon at the end was such a nice touch.
I want to point out that there is a bias in this:
> He says, “if I were forced at gunpoint to name the two greatest minds of the 20th century, I’d pick Bertrand Russell and John von Neumann. Is it really a coincidence that both were basically aristocrats?”
Without education access of course only aristocrats and the very rich can develop genius kids. All other social layers cannot, really. But this takes out about 90% of the talent distribution.
So we could have had many more genius's throughout history if we had more equal education systems of whatever kind. Even most of the aristocrats, at least the ones mentioned in Hilary Mantels Cromwell series, didn't bother to educate their female offspring (leaving about 51% of the talent pool without chances).
On the other hand, Hoel also makes some good points: having mentors, getting educated not only in school, but also at home by the family, the value of a good home library etc.
Yes, agree. At the time of aristocratic tutoring, everyone who wasn't aristocratically tutored didn't even stand a chance of becoming a genius.
And yes, Hoel makes some great points. I can already hear him looking up all of the people I mentioned and showing that they had some kind of mentorship in their lives. 🥰 I'm sure we would only increase the level of genius if we made that accessible to everyone!
It seems the argument between you and him breaks somewhat down to: make special education efforts to special persons (Hoel) <-> make education and meaningful careers in science and engineering available to anyone (you).
Like, you could be the biggest genius in history, but if you live in Haiti, you will not be very productive, because overall productivity is so low. Better to improve Haitis overall standing than to focus on single individuals. Actually, Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs & Steel" mentions this when he says that average persons from Papua-New Guinea are probably more intelligent than average persons from, say, Germany, because they have to live on the edge and try to survive daily, and this sharpens their instincts, fast grasping of situations, memory etc. much more than shuffling to work, shuffling to the supermarket, shuffling to your microwave, shuffling in front of the TV.
Also: let's not forget the correlation between a free society (say, allowing homosexuality, freedom of expression etc.) and innovation. Europe just was more free than other areas and thus had all those free thinkers.
Yes, I hate the idea that some places have poverty just because of location. If someone born in Haiti were born in the United States instead, that difference alone could provide them with the opportunity to work on feats of genius, where they might never have that opportunity in Haiti. 😫
Love this! You reminded me how much genius there is in the world. Sometimes I think social media and you tubers crowd the airspace so much that we forget that there really are groups of people with great talent pushing us forward societally. I wrote once about a kid genius for a magazine and she was super smart and sweet but without much special tutoring, she had nowhere to put all of those smarts. I’m not sure what she’s up to now but last I heard she was extremely frustrated with her genius rather than gifted with it.
It's so true. We hear more about everything Harry Styles does than we do about the huge leaps that are taking place!
Hey Elle,
Check out this 1 minute long video on what a genius is:
https://chasholloway.substack.com/p/what-is-genius
ch
"Why should we give so much credence to Marcus Aurelius when there are modern thinkers among us who can expand upon what we’ve learned since then? A lot of what we’ve come up with is so much better than those philosophers could even have imagined!"
This way of framing the value (or not) of past thinkers already begs the question against them. Right Now is better, therefore the past is worse. Now where is your wisdom, Plato? <smugface>
The value in reading thinkers like the Stoics, and Plato and Aristotle and Cicero et al, is precisely because they put *our* modern views, including our humanistic assumptions, our natural equation of technology and science with goodness, and the very idea that history has a meaningful trajectory, into relief.
The fact that you can even judge today as "progress" against a prior state of affairs is entirely due to ideas you've received, without realizing it and to be sure through indirect means, from Plato and Aristotle.
I'd ask why incremental progress (James Webb, for example) is now wowing us more than the genuine revolutions in thought marked by Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Neils Bohr. It's easy to slag them off because we don't really get what upsets these were.
The same can be said for philosophers. A major figure like Kant or Hegel (responsible for Marx, by the by) really did bring about lasting changes in how the world looks. That doesn't happen when a lab tech patents a new gene-editing technique or a telescope sees a little better than the last one.
I don't mean to be harsh, but reading your list drove home to me just how *little* techno-science or artistic progress we make these days and how little it takes to amaze us compared to true table-throwing innovations of past thinkers.
The distance past was dominated br superstition and religion, ergo, the scientific shift by innovative thinkers was, indeed, revolutionary. (To this day, some people don't 'believe' in science.)
I think, after reading these comments, that I have presented my arguments for the present to the detriment of the past. I should clarify that I find great value in past philosophers!!! Perhaps too much so! Up until last year I couldn’t have told you a single book I loved that was written within the last 100 years. I would definitely put myself in the category of people who worship the past to the detriment of the present. This piece in a lot of ways is me trying to understand modern genius. Not to discount past genius of which I am hugely obsessed. Almost everything I read is 100 years old at least, and I think that has led to a bias that has made it difficult for me to see genius in the present.
Are you including fiction in your 100 plus years old? Or only philosophy?
Both!
Only going off the top of my head, random, A Dance to the Music of Time, The Alexander Quartet?
Haven't read!
So many brilliant works written in the last 100 years, English language and translations.
100 Years of Solitude?
That's fair.
I mentioned in a comment on one of Samuel's recent posts that the word "genius" itself, up until quite recently, had was steeped in romantic ideals of creativity and inspiration.
Today's use of the word to talk about people like Einstein, Turing, von Neumann, and others in the sciences and engineering is a very recent departure from the romantic use.
I think that fact is *hugely* relevant for any discussion of genius or its absence today. If it's a matter of raw horsepower in brain-smarts, then it's hard to dispute we've got a lot of genius running around.
But I also balk at using the G-word as a label for people who are little more than termites in a managerial hive of bureaucrats. Distribution of labor in the modern corporation, which now includes universities and whatever is left of private-sector labs, means that, as you point out, nobody's responsible for nothin'.
We may have the raw talent out there. It would be strange if not. But I find it hard to disagree that the way it's being put to use is not helping genius to flourish, no matter what techno-shinies are in the news this week.
From my POV, what we're doing today is inch-worming along the tracks of innovations that were already laid down in the essentials from 1945-1970, without any real revolutions or upheavals. There's a few here and there, but they're modest firecrackers compared to the (occasionally literal) nuclear blasts of the early 20th century.
I feel the same about most art and entertainment, which feels stuck in a time loop for the last 20 years. The sensory spectacles and optimized-for-addiction storytelling is nice, I guess, but I'm hesitant to call these works of genius.
Anyway. I appreciate that you're trying to be optimistic. To me it all looks fake and unexciting, and it seems like we're happily letting the past go for the sake of cheap junk.
Are you suggesting that science no longer requires, or is based on, creativity and inspiration?
If I were suggesting that, I would have suggested it.
I can understand that perspective. I suppose you are saying that discovering antibiotics, for instance, has greater weight (is a larger leap forward) than developing the internet, for instance. It’s hard to compare as one changed our life expectancy and the other changes how we get information. But I do consider both huge leaps forward. If in different ways.
I am, I guess, but the point I'm working out here is deeper than this or that scientific discovery.
I'm thinking of *conceptual* revolutions. The leap in how people thought about reality in Europe in 1600 vs. 1900, for example. There's leaps like that salted through history, and not just in the West, where the whole "order of things" went through a seismic shift. It's not a coincidence that the usual suspects on our lists of "geniuses" are clustered in those times.
Even the fact that we can look at science and (mostly) technology in terms of life-changing discoveries *is itself one of these revolutions*. I find it hard to get excited about James Webb when it is an incremental improvement in a technology we've had for a long time.
I don't say that to take away from the impressiveness of the accomplishment, but to point out that not all progress is created equally. I don't associate it with genius because it is an engineering project to sort out more or less known problems within a mostly well-understood frame of reference. Genius, in my mind, is about breaking frames.
I can see that. Maybe if the James Webb Telescope discovers the cause of all life you'll be swayed haha. My brother-in-law is an astrophysicist and he was trying to explain to me how groundbreaking the data was that was coming back from that telescope but I couldn't understand it. Maybe if we can get it into layman's terms that will be half the battle. 🤓
I've written a novel about two coming-of-age geniuses who feel alienated as outliers or outsiders. When they meet, they are drawn to each other and fall in love.
Here is the opening Author's Note that seems relevant to this post:
Author’s Note
Genius children need protecting. Intelligence possessed to a larger degree than almost any other, they are gifted in many ways except one—they will never be ordinary, and no one will view them that way. From early childhood, their precocity can lead to speaking early, thinking deeply. Such behaviors may appear unlikely, even suspect. They may be envied rather than befriended, often ostracized. They may be viewed as having privileged intellects and talents, and if they have beauty as well, they are judged far too often, with accusation.
Gifts carried as blessing and burden present obstacles and disadvantages others fail to understand. Gifts wrought with shame because they trap, set the genius apart, divided against oneself.
Laurie Hollman
lauriehollmanphd.com
I'd be glad to talk with readers and editors interested in this novel.
I think you’re right about a lot, as is Erik (and I’m a huge fan of you both). This is such an awesome, generative response I really wanted to dive in, but I’m working on a Sunday and doing this on my break so I can only share two thoughts—apologies in advance if these are a bit verbose and meandering.
COMMENT 1:
"I think we give too much credence to dead philosophers and not enough to alive ones." I'll never forget reading a book about ten years ago that was about the modern state of Catholic parishes. I don't remember the book or author (it wasn't very good, overall) but it was hugely influential--they were just handing it out at the front of a church I went to a wedding for and that's how I got it. I mainly remember it for one anecdote I think about all the time.
The audience of the book is Catholics and at the beginning, the author observes that Catholic churches all over the world are losing membership, and trying to build their parishes back up by 10% or so. He says that this is the exact wrong strategy. He then explains how all of the work (volunteering etc.) in a church is done by 1% of the parishioners, and churches would be better served by aiming to double that number than to increase the parish size by 10%. His reasoning makes sense at first, but he is literally (unironically) advocating preaching to the choir.
I think about this a lot when I hear comments like, "we should focus more on these people not these people." I think that these comments come from people who care about things to other people who care about things. Like, all of us reading this CARE about which philosophers are studied--we are "carers" But I think by saying, "let's focus more on thinkers this and less on thinkers like this," we are advocating something similar to doubling the 1% of hardcore parishioners, when instead we should be saying, "let's focus more on thinkers." As a fellow carer, the world would be a better place if the overall number of carers was greater, rather than if the active carers trained their focus on a different subset of thinkers.
There is a good argument to be made that a lot of people we consider geniuses, we do so mostly because someone before us did, and so they were put into the genius pantheon. This is in fact a very low-resolution version of the postmodern critique of the canon. But doesn’t it count for something that generations of people have been inspired to come up with new ways of seeing the world even though they are studying these “geniuses” based solely on some other tastemaker’s input?
I think that if you grok the postmodern critique and agree at all, it’s easy to draw one of two conclusions about what we, as “carers,” can do.
1 – We can share or reinterpret the postmodern critique of the canon to impugn the quality of existing canon thinkers and artist, and therefore draw attention to underrepresented voices
2 – We can simply become those tastemakers ourselves and use the best of what we find in the canon to celebrate the underrepresented voices.
I think the existence of places like Substack is evidence that there is a whole lot of room for a whole lot of new tastemakers, and people who care about a whole lot of things. The truth is that some of the people who care the most about dead philosophers are alive philosophers. I think there is ample room to celebrate and care about both.
COMMENT 2:
I’m actually writing a short round-up of some of Erik Hoel’s stuff I like the most, and one thing that this essay pointed out to me is that I think there is sort of a delicious irony to the fact that two of his most popular pieces are the series you’ve referenced here and the piece on the Gossip Trap. ChatGPT was kind enough to summarize the Gossip Trap as: “The ‘gossip trap’ limits social connections and creates a society focused on reputational management, hindering innovation, but civilization's formal systems level power dynamics and allow for the development of art and new ideas, exemplified by figures with immunity to gossip like Supreme Court justices and journalists.”
The irony is that, one could extrapolate the central thesis of the gossip trap out to something like, “institutions is what makes civilization as we understand it, and this is good, and social media is probably moving us away from this to a more level, primeval, individual and personality-focused way of living.” But the central thesis of they don’t make Einsteins like they used to is, “we don’t make geniuses like we used to, because old-timey geniuses were superhuman talents into whom wealthy people poured resources via tutors, and our homogenous, institutional education system is why the Einsteins are gone.”
I’m probably being way too cavalier with my summaries and a little obtuse with my understanding of the two, but there seems to be an interesting conflict there, like institutions and their hierarchical, structured, ‘personalities are not important’ approach to human affairs are both the reason that we have civilization and also the reason that we don’t have geniuses anymore. (Given, these are different kinds of institutions, timelines, etc., but I think about the state of institutions a lot, and this essay made me view his essays in a way I hadn’t before.)
I definitely agree that Hoel’s posts are true probably in the same way that mine are. I don’t think they cancel one another out at all. In a lot of ways, this post is me trying to convince myself that there is modern genius as I would definitely count myself among the idolizers of past genius. (My favorite author is Victor Hugo and I still haven’t found a modern author that compares in my opinion. But I think I’m being a snoot here and that I need to change my mindset lol.)
Plato is obsolete? ... SMH.
I definitely don’t think Plato is obsolete. He provides the foundation for a lot of today’s thought. But I don’t think we would apply a purely Plato vision to the world today, there are many ways we have evolved utopian thought since then.
I love a good wit. True genius for sure!