← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Eendracht Maakt Mag
Thread ID: 6841 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-05-21
2003-05-21 18:32 | User Profile
**David Banks, Department of Statistics Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA 15213 The most important question we can ask of historians is "Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?" It is intellectually embarrassing that this is almost never posed squarely -- I can think of only two articles (Gray, 1958 and 1961) and two books (Kroeber, 1944 and McClelland, 1961) that tackle this directly. But Gray is a lunatic, Kroeber waffles vaguely, and McClelland veers off into a fascinating but incomplete assessment. The question has never been the focus of professional attention in social history, although its answer would have thrilling implications for education, politics, science and art.
The Problem Geniuses are not scattered uniformly through time and space. Some cultures have many more than one would expect, even after making sensible allowance for imperfect records, biased perspectives and such gross factors as famine, war, and the magnetic effect of libraries and patronage. Obvious clumps of geniuses occur in Athens, from about 440 BCE to 380 BCE, Florence, from about 1440 to 1490, London, from about 1570 to 1640. If the reader agrees that these three societies show such a remarkable excess of creative accomplishment that explanation is demanded, skip on to section 2. The remainder of this section is just a borderline pretentious argument to convince rational skeptics that random chance is an inadequate explanation for the intellectual inhomogeneity that history records. First, the three cities and times listed above are not unique -- there are many other accumulations, although these are particularly conspicuous. One can spend pleasant postprandial hours noting similar clusters in Weimar, Paris (twice), London (again), Vienna, Japan (late Heian period), Persia (just before Genghis Khan), the T'ang dynasty, and New York, at times that I hope most readers can discern for themselves. My sense is that there is a continuum of remarkability, from the three stellar cases listed first through the slightly humbler collections indicated in this paragraph, and the degree of remarkability shades imperceptibly into average societal behavior. (There are also major vacuums in intellectual achievement -- the Dark Ages were notoriously weak, and one should recall Orson Welles' comment that 500 years of Swiss peace produced only the cuckoo clock.) But let us focus on the first list. Were general citizens asked to name famous Athenians, the handful of names produced would come entirely from the indicated period. Even were an academic interrogated, the list would surely lean (list?) towards this period (Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, Anaxagoras, Demosthenes, Pericles, Aspasia, Alcibiades, Praxiteles, Phidias, Protagoras, Aristippus, Isocrates, Lysias, Lycurgos, Polygnotos, . . .). The suggested dates are obviously approximate, but I defy anybody to name an Athenian who amounted to anything that was born after 380 BCE (well, Kazantzakis will get a footnote, and if anyone were foolish enough to put forward Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, I remind them that the extant writings are of Alexandrian origin).
So what happened to the cultural IQ of Athens over the last 23 centuries? The genetics didn't change appreciably (at least until 1398, when Nicopolis fell to the Turks). Why did such vitality stagnate?
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[url=http://www.monad.com/sdg/Journal/genius.html]Full Article.[/url]
2003-05-23 12:49 | User Profile
**Obvious clumps of geniuses occur in Athens, from about 440 BCE to 380 BCE, Florence, from about 1440 to 1490, London, from about 1570 to 1640. **
Another was St. Petersburg/Moscow, 1850 - 1917.
These two capital cities produced an astonishing number of geniuses in nearly every area. Music, mathematics, philosophy, literature, painting (some dispute about how good the painting was on a world scale), and perhaps most especially the theater including acting and dance.
Walter
2003-05-23 17:42 | User Profile
Perhaps it is because that when genius is recognized it is readily imitated and protected infinitely. Shakespeare is a great example. Will another Shakespeare ever be allowed to occur? Breaking past the comparison stage gets harder all the time.
Just my two cents worth.
2003-05-23 20:14 | User Profile
Memory dims, but I would wager the late 18th century and early 19th in the West was a time of great genius. In 1776 the USA signed our Declaration of Independence and in England the Wealth of Nations was written.
Mathematical breakthroughs abounded. Lagrange, LaPlace(?), Euler, Legendre and above all Gauss, a man who may have been the most intelligent man who ever lived. Goethe, Beethoven and Schiller and Hegel thrived. This would be my guess as to when the West was most prolific.
2003-05-23 20:23 | User Profile
It's the fear of 'waves' of genius arising amongst whites that has our enemies so busy with the continued dumbing down, the dismantling of our educational systems, not only here, but throughout the White West. When genius does rear its head in the form of a white male, it seems that there is always some concerted effort to derail his efforts or quickly "buy him out", if he is embarking on a path that doesn't directly line the pockets or credit the 'real rulers' of our society.
The traitorous elites have just enough arrogance to believe that genius will emerge from their own inbred pool, but truly fear its appearance amongst the great unwashed white middle class whom they are working so hard to destroy.