For the romantics, so for the Germans, where God had been, genius now stood. Genius for Germans became religion by other means, in the sense that the German people took their bearings from their supposed geniuses. Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, von Humboldt, Wagner, Nietzsche, the candidates for genius among them were not few. The one work of fiction with a genius as its hero, Thomas Mann’s modern composer Adrian Leverkuhn in Dr. Faustus, was of course a rich product of German culture.
The worship of genius on the part of the Germans would one day exact a heavy price. Some of Professor MacMahon’s most brilliant pages persuasively set out how the genius cult helped pave the way to power for Adolf Hitler. Even Hitler’s failure as an artist played into his reputation and self-regard as a genius. “Far from abandoning his interest in art,” MacMahon writes, “Hitler, via politics, pursued aesthetics by other means.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler announced his own entrance onto the world stage as a genius: “Geniuses of an extraordinary kind do not admit consideration of normal humanity.” Even Hitler’s madness tended to certify him as a genius, for by the early decades of the twentieth century, everyone knew that geniuses were “touched,” in all meanings of the word.
The next obvious step in the demystification of genius was to attempt scientifically to measure it. Here the conflict was between those who took geniuses as miracles of nature and those who took them as the product of their nurture. Eugenicists and others began studying genius, attempting to locate and then quantify it. Much nuttiness followed: the measuring of skulls and brainpans (cranioscopy) and the studying of bumps on heads (phrenology) were for a time thought to supply the key. People even began grave robbing to secure the skulls of long-dead geniuses. The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso studied the interrelation of genius, madness, and degenerative disease, producing wild conclusions about the longevity of geniuses and the paucity of the production of genius in topographically flat countries. Genius and climate conditions were added into the mix; in one such treatise, the cold northern European countries were said to be more productive of genius than the warm southern European ones.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the eugenicist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, sought and failed to prove that genius was hereditary. If it were, then we should have to regret the many geniuses who were childless, when they might have created a rich gene pool. (In the 1980s, an American optometrist named Robert K. Graham, himself distinctly no genius, began a Nobel Prize-winners sperm bank, known as the Repository for Germinal Choice, which, as McMahon notes, “closed it vaults in 1997.”) In fact no two geniuses—if one holds to a strict standard—have ever showed up in the same family. A nature trumps nurture man, Galton’s ideas for breeding higher intelligence, and hence increasing the prospects of genius, never really got off the ground, though as we sadly know Hitler, in later years, ran with them.
Professor MacMahon calls all these various social- and pseudo-scientific attempts to understand genius “geniology.” The best known, of course, was the invention, by the Frenchman Alfred Binet in 1906, of the educational diagnostic tool known as Intelligence Quotient, or IQ. MacMahon writes:
The immediate goal was to classify those falling below normalcy, but it was readily apparent that an exam of this sort could be used to do the opposite, too, identifying and ranking individuals whose mental ages were above average.
IQ was arrived at by dividing mental age by actual age and then multiplying by 100. What IQ chiefly showed was a propensity, or want thereof, for solving abstract problems. (The Scholastic Aptitude Test, the SAT, similarly, predicts nothing more than one’s chances of doing well in college.) Chess players, mathematics wizards, and memory freaks seemed to score highest on IQ tests.
IQ, those who believed in it felt, was innate, and derived from heredity. A man named Lewis Terman was a true believer in the accuracy of IQ. He believed that through using the results of IQ testing carefully, society, in a bit of finely tuned social engineering, could be improved by early marking out the brightest of children and encouraging and ultimately utilizing their talents. “It should go without saying,” Terman wrote,
that a nation’s resources of intellectual talent are among the most precious it will have. The origins of genius, the natural laws of its development, and the environmental influences by which it may be affected for good or ill are scientific problems of almost unequaled importance in human welfare.
In what is known as a longitudinal study, Terman discovered 1,000 children who scored 140 or more on IQ tests—140 was thought to be potential genius level—and arranged to track them through their later lives. None did anything extraordinary, while two children tested at the same time who did not make the 140 IQ cut went on to win Nobel Prizes. In his acknowledgements, Professor MacMahon notes that he was someone who early in life was told his intelligence test results showed him “not the recipient of gifts.” He goes on to write:
There is evidence to suggest that an exaggerated belief in the strength of one’s innate capacities can actually harm a child’s development, sapping motivation and initiative. And there is even more evidence to show how damaging it can be to tell young people that, according to the numbers, they just don’t measure up.
Intelligence, as anyone who has thought at all about it will long ago have concluded, is multi-valent, or of many kinds. Howard Gardner, the Harvard developmental psychologist and the leading investigator of intelligence in our day, has concluded that there are at least seven types of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. (He later added an eighth, naturalist intelligence, or that of people with a gift for observing nature.) Each of us is likely to be better endowed in one or another of these than in the others. “No two people,” Gardner concludes, “have exactly the same intelligence in the same combination.”
Genius, meanwhile, remains the least understood of all kinds of intelligence. The explanation for the existence of geniuses and accounting for their extraordinary powers have thus far eluded all attempts at scientific study. The intelligence of genius is still, so to say, off the charts. “As yet little is known about the genetics and neurobiology of creative individuals,” writes Howard Gardner. “We know neither whether creative individuals have distinctive genetic constitutions, nor whether there is anything remarkable about the structure and functioning of their nervous systems.”
I, for one, find it pleasing that science cannot account for genius. I do not myself believe in miracles, but I do have a strong taste for mysteries, and the presence, usually at lengthy intervals, of geniuses is among the great mysteries. Schopenhauer had no explanation for the existence of geniuses, either, but, even while knowing all the flaws inherent in even the greatest among them, he held that geniuses “were the lighthouses of humanity; and without them mankind would lose itself in the boundless sea of error and bewilderment.” The genius is able to fulfill this function because he is able to think outside himself, to see things whole while the rest of us at best see them partially, and he has the courage, skill, and force to break the logjam of fixed opinions and stultified forms. Through its geniuses the world has made what serious progress it has thus far recorded. God willing, we haven’t seen the last of them.
Cowardice
(2015)
Two Jews before a Nazi firing squad. The officer in charge approaches the first of the Jews and asks if he wants a blindfold. “Go to hell, you Nazi pig,” he says, and spits in his face. The second Jew whispers to the first, “Shhh. Don’t! You’ll get him angry.”
Is the first Jew in this story courageous? Is the second Jew a coward, or instead comically prudent? As for the Nazi officer, is he, with the force of his squad of soldiers behind him, the true coward?
These questions, it turns out, are not so easily answered. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary’s definition of a coward—“a person who lacks courage, especially one who i
s shamefully unable to control fear and so shrinks from danger or trouble”—none of these men qualifies. The first Jew certainly isn’t cowardly; the second Jew isn’t either, but is merely reverting to traditionally temporizing methods that apparently worked for him in the past. As for the Nazi, his behavior isn’t cowardly, but is instead wicked and cruel. Cowards are perhaps rarer than one might have thought. And, with a substantial push from modern psychological theory and medicine, they are becoming rarer all the time.
Cultures devoted to the cultivation of courage, which is also to say to the avoidance of cowardice, have existed. Perhaps the most famous was that of Sparta. As a warrior culture, Spartan training of the young was almost exclusively devoted to making them fit for battle. Spartan boys, according to Plutarch, were put on a regimen of relentless competition intended to conquer fear and instill courage. This regimen included a sparse diet, which implicitly encouraged them to steal food. Those who were caught were whipped; only successful thieves went unpunished. (Ethics in Spartan training was of a much lower priority than acquiring the skills of survival necessary for victory in battle.) The entire education of Spartan boys, Plutarch writes, “was aimed at developing smart obedience, perseverance under stress, and victory in battle.” The success of this upbringing, judged by its own terms, was illustrated at Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans, with the aid of small bands of other Greeks, held off tens of thousands of Persians for days until all the Spartans were finally killed. Among Spartans, the most honorable life was concluded by death on the battlefield. Much of Spartan poetry is divided between praise for those who died for the country and contempt for those who showed cowardice.
Japan, with its samurai tradition of honor, obedience, and self-sacrifice, provided another culture devoted to courage that lasted well into the 20th century. Death before dishonor was integral to the Japanese military ethos. Banzai charges during World War II were emblematic of this culture. Kamikaze pilots, sent out to crash into Allied ships, were nothing less than human missiles. (An old joke tells of a kamikaze pilot who had been on twelve flights before being discharged owing to an insufficient death wish.) Defenders of the American use of the atomic bomb to end the war have argued that the Japanese would otherwise never have surrendered.
In certain sports—football, hockey—the tradition of physical courage runs deep. Doug Plank, for eight years the almost suicidally aggressive safety of the Chicago Bears, claimed that the first thing one must jettison if one is to play in the National Football League is one’s sense of self-preservation. Hockey is a sport where playing with pain is less a notable than it is a reigning assumption. I once saw a Chicago Blackhawks game in which a player in the first period suffered an injury to his face that required 33 stitches who then returned to play in the third period. For high-serotonin types—mountain climbers, skydivers, aerial tightrope walkers—cowardice does not exist as a possibility. For the rest of us, concerned about pain, shame, death itself, cowardice awaits just outside the door.
Until relatively recently, when parents began supervising much of the play of children, Spartan training (diminished a thousand fold) reigned among young boys in America. My own boyhood, between the ages of 10 and 14, was spent on the playground, competing at the three major American sports of the day. Two of these sports—baseball and football—provided ample opportunities for cowardice. (Basketball had not yet become the physical game it now is.) In baseball, there was the fear of being hit (beaned was the word) by a fast pitch in the head or face in a day when boys did not wear batting helmets, or of being spiked by a base runner. In football, fear came in the form of being brutally tackled, or missing tackles one should have made, or dropping passes lest one be clobbered upon catching them (“hearing footsteps” is the catch-phrase here). Then there was tree-climbing, doing risky tricks on bicycles, hitching onto the backs of cars on snowy streets, minor shoplifting from five-and-ten-cent stores. Fights broke out, and to walk away from a challenge to a fight was a disgrace.
Cowardice, also known as “chickening out,” was disdained, courage admired. The greatest courage on exhibit at the Boone School playground was that of Marty Sommerfield. Marty was small, well-coordinated, intelligent about sports and much else (in high school he won a Westinghouse science award), but what distinguished him above all was his fearlessness. He would crash into walls going after fly balls, race out into the street to catch foul balls. At least twice that I can remember he suffered concussions as a running back playing without a helmet. Although not pugnacious, in later years he took on guys six inches taller and 40 or 50 pounds heavier than he in fist fights. Although I was never guilty of chickening out on the playground, I knew that there was a distinct difference between Marty and me. I considered the prospect of pain and injury; Marty Sommerfield apparently never did. I haven’t read Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, but I gather what made the generation great for Brokaw was that its members risked their lives in World War II. I, too, admire the men who fought in that war, as I do those soldiers who faced death in our country’s subsequent wars. Every man of the least imagination surely wonders how he would have fared in battle. I’ve wondered about it for years. Would I, as the British say, have cacked my pants, or would I have come through admirably? I shall never know, but how splendid it would be to walk the streets knowing that I had faced death bravely on the battlefield.
Cowardice: A Brief History by Chris Walsh, a university teacher with an interest in military history, examines the changing nature of cowardice over the past 200 or so years. His emphasis is on America, the home, as our anthem has it, of the brave. Not a great deal has been written on cowardice, for, as Walsh notes, it “is not a pleasant topic.” Among the reasons for this is that “contemplating other’s cowardice can push us to contemplate our own.” Yet cowardice, a subset of shame, is a moral category, and all such categories, insofar as they constitute a piece in the great unsolved puzzle of what constitutes human nature, are worthy of study in and of themselves. “Thinking more clearly about cowardice,” Walsh writes, “can help us think more critically, more realistically, about fear and how society should respond to it.” Walsh writes clearly, with a sardonic point of view and a sure grasp of the issues raised by his subject.
Cowardice concentrates chiefly on military cowardice. “The cowardly soldier,” its author writes, “remains the poster boy, so to speak, for cowardice.” Walsh examines the word coward in its every nuance. He distinguishes between courage and recklessness, cowardice and prudence. Although the meaning of cowardice has changed over time, what hasn’t is the word’s continuing force as an insult. In America, politicians and journalists called the terrorists who flew the planes into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers cowards. In their own eyes, of course, the terrorists were warriors, ready to die for Allah. The fear associated with cowardice had nothing to do with their acts. The immensely unattractive Bill Maher made this point on his television show and threw in, at no extra charge, the accusations that we Americans, killing Serbs with cruise missiles, were the true cowards. In both cases, cowardice is the wrong word. Terrorists are not cowards, but they are indubitably villainous because they have no compunction about killing innocent people. As for killing without risk by missile or drone, cowardice doesn’t really enter into this new advance in the technology of modern warfare. A drone, after all, is little more than a javelin hurled at great distance and powered by computer.
The grave mistake here derives from the notion that all bullies are at bottom cowards. In his Modern English Usage, which Walsh quotes, H. W. Fowler notes:
The identification of coward and bully has gone so far in the popular consciousness that persons and acts in which no trace of fear is to be found are often called coward(ly) merely because advantage has been taken of superior strength or position.
My father, who bought me boxing gloves when I was six years old and used to spar with me in our living room, was fond of saying of bullies that the bigger they are, the harder
they fall. I recognized that this may have a certain truth in physics, but the problem, I thought even then, was how to get them to fall in the first place.
The literary chronicling of cowardice begins with Shakespeare, whose Falstaff held that “discretion is the better part of valor” and who in Cymbeline wrote, “Plenty and Peace breed cowards.” In the Inferno, Dante placed cowards, those who refused to take stands in life, who feared life itself, in the anteroom to hell. There they dwelled for all eternity
and all about were stung
By stings of wasps and hornets that were there.
Because of these, Blood, from their faces sprung,
Was mingled with their tears and flowed to feast
The loathly worms that about their feet clung
The great American novel of cowardice is Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, set in the Civil War, and from which Walsh quotes generously. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, on the other hand, is given but a single paragraph. But then it is a novel that lends cowardice justification, through arguing, in effect, that war is on the face of it absurd, and no war, not even one against Hitler, is worth dying for, which, if it is to be believed, closes the books on military cowardice.
The shame of cowardice, Walsh reports, was regularly preached from the pulpit during the Revolutionary War. The motive of avoiding shame has always functioned as a great deterrent against cowardice. Shame in this realm takes many forms, from fear of letting down one’s fellow soldiers to that of bringing disgrace on one’s family. Honor and saving face have always been the chief antidotes to cowardice. In his book, Walsh reprints a British World War I poster that shows a man, his son playing on the floor before him, and his daughter on his lap asking, “Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?” In marked contrast, he reprints a poster, during the Vietnam War, of Joan Baez, her sister, and Mimi Farina, all showing lots of leg, under a sign reading, “Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say NO,” an inducement to draft resisters.
The Ideal of Culture Page 8
