Progressives’ disdain of genius is not just wrong, it’s destructive - Adrian Wooldridge

Key topics:Victorian-era levelling spirit now dominates, downplaying the role of great men.Modern education systems neglect genius, risking loss of working-class talent.Intellectual elites drive innovation; China’s meritocracy challenges Western dominance..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Adrian Wooldridge.In his great book, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), Thomas Carlyle raged against the levelling spirit of Victorian Britain. “This…is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great men,” he complained. Show the critics a great man, he said, and they will ask you to “account for him,” “take the dimensions of him,” and otherwise “bring him out to be a little kind of man.”The levelling spirit is far more powerful today than it was back then. Any history student who is foolish enough to argue, as Carlyle did, that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men” would be guaranteed a stern lecture on the importance of “social forces” and “economic factors.” This is particularly pronounced when it comes to the notion of geniuses.A new book by Helen Lewis, The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers, is a perfect example of this levelling spirit. Lewis advances some serious if unconvincing arguments: that the concept of genius is vague and malleable; that the concept ignores the importance of social resources (educational opportunities, clusters of excellence, administrative power). But her core argument is political: Genius is “a right-wing concept” that allows entitled people (most of them white men) to behave badly and claim the credit for collective achievements. The figure of Elon Musk hovers over the book not as a great man but as a great curse. Though Lewis likes to think of herself as swimming against the current, she is in fact summarising conventional wisdom (which is actually much better summarised in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man).This levelling spirit is not completely triumphant, of course. The scientific world cherishes Nobel prize winners. Silicon Valley is obsessed with brain power. Google and other big companies pour billions into innovation. Yet it has almost completely conquered the public educational system, particularly in Britain and America, which ought to be responsible for discovering and cherishing genius. The British abolished grammar schools in the 1960s on the grounds that they separate “sheep from goats,” and the current education minister, Bridget Phillipson, is giving egalitarianism another push by watering down the curriculum and making assessment more subjective.The US has just 140 “exam schools” (which admit pupils based their intellectual ability) out of 24,000 public high schools. And even these few are under threat from progressives: The Democratic Party’s nominee for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, plans to abolish admission tests to the city’s selective high schools (in other words, kill them). The country’s only federal program for the gifted received all of $16.5 million in 2024, a tiny fraction of the money spent on the intellectually disadvantaged. The result of the levelling spirit is that education is becoming more class-bound and working-class Einsteins are being lost..Read more:.Perplexity AI: The startup poised to challenge Google’s search dominance.This institutional neglect of genius in the public sector helps to explain why outside of a few hot areas, both innovation and creativity are in a dismal state. Several studies demonstrate that “new ideas are getting harder to find” in key scientific areas. Hollywood is stuck in a prolonged creativity famine, with studios focusing on making remakes and follow-ups. The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, which has been running since the mid-1960s, demonstrates that, although various measures of creativity and originality had risen in line with average IQ until 1990, ever since then they have been falling. Lewis’s claim that “genius” is a right-wing idea that helps to reinforce the status quo is topsy turvy. The revolutionaries who overturned the old order in America in 1766, France in 1789 and Britain more gradually argued for a shift in power from the landed elite to “natural geniuses.” A striking number of these natural geniuses came from poverty: Think of Srinivasa Ramanujan performing astonishing feats of mathematics in his local village school in India. And whether they came from poverty or not, their signature achievement was always to disrupt the status quo and make a new world, whether conceptual or material, possible.Lewis is on equally weak ground when she says that our scientific understanding of genius is deficient. From the mid-19th century onwards, a succession of biologists, geneticists and psychologists produced an elaborate theory of intellectual abilities. These scientists argued that the “blank slate” theory of mental ability—saying differences in ability are the result of nurture rather than nature—have failed to answer tough questions. Why do so many children of privilege fail academically and so many children of poverty succeed? Why are there such wide individual differences among children who are born in the same environment? These scientists produced a variety of tools to explain individual differences in human ability: the normal distribution curve; regression to the mean; nature-plus-nurture rather than nature versus nurture.Lewis reminds us that some of these scientists held repugnant views about eugenics. Indeed, such repugnant views were almost universal at the time: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, H.G. Wells and John Maynard Keynes were all members of the Eugenics Society. But do the incidental beliefs of scientists tell us much about the validity of their work? The fact that Isaac Newton believed in alchemy does not discredit his theory of gravity. Current advances in genetics are providing ever solider evidence that some individuals have extreme levels of natural ability that, if properly encouraged, can lead to outstanding achievement.Many self-defined geniuses have certainly tried our patience in recent years, particularly in Silicon Valley, by claiming a right to break the rules that bind ordinary mortals, interfering in areas that are far from their core competence, and lavishly flaunting their wealth. Musk set the cause of government reform back by disrupting Washington for a few months and then giving up. Bezos showed no awareness of how strained the social contract has become by hiring Venice for his star-studded wedding.Yet people at the far right of the normal distribution curve for intellect increasingly drive economic progress. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs undoubtedly made our lives better with their innovative contributions to personal computing. (Gates is also a giant when it comes to giving away wealth as well as creating it.) The AI revolution, with all its extraordinary promise to transform our lives, is necessarily being driven by the most gifted. The more advanced the knowledge economy becomes, the more we depend on the tiny minority of people who can, first, absorb the vast body of learning that has already accumulated and, second, make innovative breakthroughs.Such people will increasingly determine our geopolitical might — perhaps even our survival — in a world where warfare is being transformed by science and innovation. China is now following Singapore’s example in turning itself into an authoritarian meritocracy that searches the population for talent and allocates the bulk of that talent to science and engineering—and the military. In the latest Nature index of scientific research, compiled by America’s leading scientific publisher and based on papers published in 145 respected journals, Chinese universities occupied eight of the top 10 places, and Western universities (Harvard and the Max Planck Institute) were left with two places. As recently as 2016, Chinese institutions only managed one place. More worrying still, China is also exceeding America in areas of high-tech weaponry such as high-speed missiles and space robots. “America’s educational crisis is a national security threat,” warn Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky of the American Enterprise Institute in Foreign Affairs.During the Cold War, the West succeeded in constructing a giant capacity-catching machine that not only discovered hidden geniuses but also promoted general upward social mobility. The US, for example, introduced Early Admission and the Advanced Placement Program and created the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. It would be a tragedy if this time around, muddled thinking about the genius myth prevented us from adopting equally bold policies..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Progressives’ disdain of genius is not just wrong, it’s destructive - Adrian Wooldridge

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