Genius or Cult: A Historical Examination of Genius

Review of Darrin M. McMahon, The Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013) ISBN 978-0-465-00325-9, 312 pages, hardbound, $29.95.

Creativity has helped propel much of humanity from our hunter-gatherer origins to a technologically advanced, affluent state. Among us have been individuals whose original and exemplary discoveries, inventions, creations are so extraordinary that these persons have been called geniuses. Newton, Beethoven, Einstein, and Hitler are names that come to mind when genius is invoked. Not surprisingly psychologists, literary critics, and historians (among others) have investigated this topic. Most recently, this includes Darrin McMahon’s The Divine Fury: A History of Genius.

Dr. McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University who has also written books on the Enlightenment and the history of happiness. Here McMahon has jumped into arenas where history encounters psychology. Though McMahon’s subject is within the psychological domain, The Divine Fury is more the history of the idea of genius; it is about the reputation of genius within public discourse in the Western world from Socrates to Steve Jobs. McMahon believes “that genius is in part a social creation” (p. xvi). If you want to know about the complexity of being a genius itself, for example how Isaac Newton combined his remarkable scientific innovations with his involvement in alchemy and the occult and having a nervous breakdown, you will not find much of that here.

Instead, McMahon traces the idea of genius back to Socrates who proclaimed he followed his daimon, and this accounts for what he knows. Varieties of this notion of inspiration have been part of the notion of genius from Athens through the Romantics and beyond. Once Christianity came to dominate Western culture, the notion of inspiration was seen as stemming from God, and thus when it manifested itself in humans, it was derived from the Holy

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Spirit rather than some inherent human quality.

McMahon says that the “modern genius was born in the eighteenth century….the birth itself occurred in the bright place of deliverance we call ‘the Enlightenment’” (p. xvii). It is in this period of history that McMahon says God withdraws and humanity itself comes to the fore. Yet though it appears that the West is becoming more secular in the 18th century, McMahon says that throughout this history there is a “profound religiosity associated with genius and the genius figure” (pp. xii-xiii). When he discusses genius in the modern period McMahon talks about either the cult of genius or the religion of genius. While discussing the romantics he will quote from writers who say that they are passive vehicles for forces and their creations or discoveries. McMahon will spend less time discussing what these discoveries entailed than on how the genius is elevated to a cult figure.

There are geniuses in many walks of life. McMahon though is as much concerned with political leaders who were considered geniuses as with poets or scientists. In his chapter on romantic genius, the first nine pages are on Napoleon, while Goethe and Shelley are given some attention, Wordsworth is mentioned just three times and Keats not at all. Similarly, Hitler is discussed in 13 straight pages, while his contemporary counterpart Einstein gets six pages.

McMahon says that “the religion of genius” reached “its terrible apotheosis in the genius-cult of the Nazis” (p. 191). While McMahon gives due diligence to creative scientists, he is more concerned with the dangers of this cult of excellence than he is with what genius has positively contributed to civilizations, or to understanding how genius appears in individuals. McMahon also connects genius to the publicity given them in the media, somehow seeing marketing as being part of the package that makes one considered to be a genius.

As well as there being a religion of genius, there have been attempts by academic psychologists to study the emergence of genius. The most well-known attempt was by Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman and the long range study of those with extremely high IQs. As McMahon and others have pointed out, these highly intelligent individuals studied since they were children in the 1920s did not produce any recognized geniuses. McMahon adds, “the

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study famously failed to detect two men—Luis Alvarez and William Shockley—who would later be awarded the Nobel Prizes in Physics. Their tested IQs failed to meet the cutoff of 140, and they were weeded out and discarded accordingly” (p. 181).

McMahon shows additional skepticism concerning psychological attempts to examine genius. One of Terman’s students, Catharine Cox, studied 301 historical geniuses. While McMahon cites Hans Eysenck calling Cox’s study a classic and the most cited work on genius, McMahon says “its conclusions were in many cases laughably speculative” (p. 184).

Surprisingly McMahon is not interested in what psychologists after World War II have had to say about genius. Without documentation, he claims that “genius has largely vanished as a category of academic research” (p. 238). A quick search of Google Scholar for psychology of genius finds 169,000 hits. While these are much fewer than the 954,000 hits for the psychology of creativity, they are similar to psychology of temperament with 213,000 hits. By claiming that academic study of genius has almost gone the way of the dodo bird, McMahon then does not have to deal with their findings about what genius is and the various psychological forms in which it manifests itself. These findings by psychologists and others would certainly fall within his theme of the history of the idea of genius, but would fit less well in his central theme of associating genius with religion. McMahon then does not consider pertinent evidence that does not fit comfortably within his thesis. Here then we have yet another historical volume whose subject matter entails psychology, but whose author has little respect for what psychologists have achieved in this field. In an age of interdisciplinarity, McMahon is able to maintain the divisions between related disciplines, when even within his framework more recent psychological research is pertinent to his topic. His work suffers from his disregard for what contemporary psychology adds to the study of genius.

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