I’d like to begin this with Kanye West. There are many words to describe him. He’s a lunatic, an anti-Semite, whose attention-grabbing persona has no limits. He’s also a visionary and a genius—at least there was a time people thought he qualified as one. West has repeatedly released albums that have shaped the landscape of pop and hip-hop music, and his fashion design is immensely popular with the public. The rapper recently launched a regrettable ode to Adolf Hitler, yet some of his defenders interpreted it as a sign that he’s breaking establishment norms of what can be acceptable. For someone who is a fan of his music, how do you reconcile his positive contributions to pop culture with his intellectually indefensible positions and conclude that he’s a genius?

I’ve been thinking of him while reading The Genius Myth, written by Helen Lewis, a staff writer at the Atlantic. While Lewis gives a passing mention to him, he is someone who could be a solid (if not on-the-nose) example worth mentioning of how we often overestimate the term. This book asks how the concept of genius and its positive connotations have been oversaturated in modern society. Anyone big in entrepreneurship, sciences, and the arts could qualify for the title. It’s a new type of celebrity, distinguished only by the application of their intellect. Lewis shows how the narrative of the genius heavily combines the stories of "great men" and a fixation on IQ, as well as numerous fields, using those stories to market themselves.

While Lewis is quite skeptical of the concept, viewing it as something that could be easily corrupted, she’s not willing to dismiss the idea. But halfway through the book, she then asks for these narratives "to be resisted, challenged, their contents deliberately returned to complexity from an appealing state of simplicity." "Otherwise," she continues, "we end up living in a world of myths that does not reflect reality—a world where every iconoclast is right, a world where power is abused, and where everyone is told that they are getting what they deserve." The passage is sensible, if not agreeable. You should not reduce your heroes to infallible beings, and The Genius Myth attempts to soberly argue this. But she intends to strip them down as villains masking their newfound powers as a guise for their intellect.

The depictions of individuals being hyped as geniuses are quite compelling. Among them is Chris Goode, a British avant-garde playwright, whose theater work was transgressive (to the point that it veered on child pornography), before he faced allegations of sexual abuse of the actors (he died in 2021). Her biggest one, however, which begins and ends The Genius Myth, is Elon Musk. The entrepreneur needs no introduction, except that he has popularized electric cars and private space travel and lifted constraints on what people could say on social media after buying Twitter. Such endeavors increased his reputation among right-wingers, and less with the left-wingers, who like the idea of electric vehicles. He has also used that platform to air petty grievances with others who criticize him, and when he entered into Republican politics, he displayed inconsistencies in his newfound belief in reining in government spending. All of this is regurgitated by the author, and his achievements and flaws are elaborately laid out.

According to Lewis, there are two critical parts of the genius narrative: the hagiography of big-brained individuals and a fixation on IQ, singling out unique human beings with higher intelligence. She points to Giorgio Vasari, who wrote a series of salacious biographies called Lives that centered on the careers of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and other Renaissance artists. He wrote that the young Leonardo was "marvellous and divine," and "would have made great profit in learning had he not been so capricious and fickle, for he began to learn many things and then gave them up." With regard to IQ, she traces that back to Lewis Terman and Francis Galton, proponents of eugenics. But this certainly has its limits—she points to Cyril Burt, a geneticist who performed twin studies to understand genetic inheritance, and describes his career as "a story of status, hierarchy and privilege." Following his death in 1971, the results of Burt’s studies have been alleged by some to have been falsified.

Such scientific misconduct led to the publication of Genius by Hans Eysenck, well known for his research on cancer and personality, which projects egotism and strength onto the concept of the genius. In terms of prose, The Genius Myth is sometimes littered with snarky interruptions. Among them, she quotes Eysenck’s thesis as "genius is only found in males (for whatever reason!)."

Downplaying the impact of hereditary IQ is also reductive, as it is a deeply complex science that is unfairly dismissed by progressives as a pipeline to racism and sexism. While Lewis doesn’t resort to this, she falls into the typical trap many progressive journalists have already presumed about the field. One of these is minimizing the usefulness of IQ tests because some of the questions being provided—Is idle a synonym for inactive or a synonym for lazy?—were "arguable" rather than settled for both. But standardized tests are accurate predictors of employee performance and the likelihood of a major accomplishment before middle age. It is otherwise a scientific tool that can be applied and misapplied.

While this isn’t a major component of the book, Lewis mentions the Great Men of History approach as an extension of her problem with the genius myth. She acknowledges that Thomas Carlyle wrote the famous essay about Great Men of History as a defense of public figures and their innate ability to accomplish things that change the world. But she falls into the widespread misinterpretation that Carlyle’s essay was ultimately hero worship, to demonstrate how "Francis Galton’s belief that greatness is innate and inherited" was its major influence. But Galton himself believed that these gifts were highly correlated with insanity.

Lewis writes that "a genius therefore becomes the human embodiment of a political argument—and smashing the genius’s reputation is a more compelling way of demolishing that argument than a tedious, footnoted appeal to the facts." She demonstrates this in her remarks on Galileo Galilei, where she writes that "if you have ninety-nine insane ideas and the other one is gravity, congratulations. History will remember gravity." She suggests that this "distorts our idea of achievement." Why would this be a problem? If that can influence the world for the better, this should be a net positive.

The criticism of one man’s overestimation of his abilities is to be expected, especially when it’s clear that he can only be good at one thing. But the myth of the genius expands his possibilities, and as long as the public still has the desire to disrupt the status quo, it’s here to stay. Which brings us back to Kanye. Did his contradictions tamper with his legacy of influential music? Absolutely. Is he still a genius? Considering the absurd, yet barren cultural landscape that we’re experiencing now, he might as well be.

The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea
by Helen Lewis
Thesis, 320 pp., $30

Adrian Nguyen is a freelance critic based in Sydney, Australia.