Genius culture, part 1
Originally published on Toward Decolonizing Physics
As children, most of us consume a particular societal image of a physicist: a genius who is eccentric, works alone or with a small insular team, and devotes his entire life to the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Of course, those of us who work in physics know that this is an incredibly inaccurate view of physics in the 21st century, where collaboration is key and institutions are increasingly paying at least lip service to diversity. However, this image of a lone wolf genius does not die easily, and it negatively impacts both physics culture and who decides and is able to become a physicist in the first place. A friend and I coined the term “genius culture” a year ago to describe this pervasive phenomenon.
Essentially, genius culture works by portraying the stereotypical physicist, or at least the ideal physicist, as a “genius” – an eccentric, loner white man with prodigious intelligence. This is a two way street: physicists are assumed to meet the description of genius (and are devalued if they do not), and wannabe physicists are told they have to be or become geniuses if they wish to be successful as a physicist. Even if many of us within physics accept a much broader conceptualization of who a physicist is and what a physicist does, the subconscious image of a physicist stays with us from childhood. Moreover, institutions such as the Nobel Prize, by design, reward the work of a single solitary genius and present such individuals as representative of the top tier of physicists.
What Makes a Genius?
To begin exploring how genius culture affects physics, we must first understand how the concept of “genius” is societally constructed. Merriam Webster defines genius as, variously: “a single strongly marked capacity or aptitude,” “extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative activity,” or “a person endowed with extraordinary mental superiority.” Putting aside for a second the oppressive and normative function of dictionaries, this definition already reveals a few features about the character of a genius. The genius’s mental prowess is assumed biologically inherent, not cultivated by hard work, emblematic of a fixed (vs. growth) mindset. The genius’s ability also is not implied to have any dependence on the culture and values under which he was raised. Finally, the concept of genius is deeply rooted in the cultural definition of “intelligence,” which measures a set of skills and qualities that are uniquely respected under an individualist, colonizer framework (as opposed to, for instance, wisdom).
We can delve further by thinking about how geniuses (such as Einstein, Mozart, or Thomas Edison) are portrayed in popular society. A genius is, nearly without exception, white. (Why else but racism does Satyendra Bose, an Indian theoretical physicist responsible for much of the early development of quantum mechanics, rarely come to mind as a genius while his contemporaries such as Heisenberg and Dirac would undoubtedly be on most physicists’ lists?) A genius is also almost invariably male, with women such as Emmy Noether who otherwise fit the description rarely being described as such.
Equally important is how a genius uses his intelligence. A genius typically works alone or among a small elite club of other geniuses; to the extent others (graduate students, technical assistants) are involved in making the genius’s discoveries happen, they serve solely as labor, not brains. A genius’s ideas and intelligence are his own, are to be fiercely defended (think Newton vs. Leibniz), and no credit is given to his intellectual forebearers. The societal and historical narratives around a genius’s life are contrived to present such a pattern, even if the true person being genius-ified fits this description poorly.
Genius and the Settler-Colonial State
It is also informative to note what factors don’t go into whether someone is considered a genius. For instance, heterosexuality does not seem to be a necessity for being a genius, at least in the present; Alan Turing, tortured by the British government for his sexual orientation, is now unambiguously regarded as a genius even as he was reviled for his sexuality at the time. Speculation that Isaac Newton may have been gay does not seem to diminish his status as a perpetual genius, either. And as society’s portrayal of Steven Hawking shows us, disability need not be a barrier to being regarded as a genius. Even in a society intent on oppressing queer people and people with disabilities, these men continue to be regarded as intellectual heroes. How come race and gender matter so much in determining who gets to be a genius, but categories like sexuality and (physical) disability matter less so?
The answer, I suspect, is that a genius is someone whose mind alone is considered an asset to the settler colonial state. Education and intelligence are benefits to the kyriarchy in the hands of white men; they are a liability in the hands of oppressed people. More importantly, in the eyes of the colonizer, only for white men is intelligence viewed as one’s primary asset. In the eyes of the settler-colonial state, white (cis) women are first and foremost vehicles of reproductive and domestic labor for the white man’s household. Black and immigrant bodies are dehumanized and monetized to provide labor for the economy, and Indigenous people are relegated to a historical footnote whose mere existence is to be suppressed. A genius is a person whose brain is valuable enough to the colonizer to be kept and preserved as a tool; definitionally, it is nearly impossible for a Black or Indigenous person, or even a white woman, to achieve this status.
Under this lens, other marginalized identities (such as sexual orientation or disability) just become more of the genius’s quirks: eccentricities that, though perhaps looked down upon and oppressed, are ultimately secondary to the genius’s value as a resource. As a white man whose mind is held on a pedestal, a genius is likewise excused from following societal norms and is allowed (and even encouraged) to be irritable, narcissistic, and emotionally immature. Though a genius is apt to experience bullying and is not immune to visceral oppression due to marginalized identities, his mind remains sacrosanct: a godlike entity judged independently of his body or character. This deification of white men’s intellect is precisely what enables white male physicists to engage in immature, unself-aware, and oppressive behaviors with impunity, while minoritized physicists, regardless of their intellectual achievements, can never join the canon of great physicists.
In part 1 of this article, we have introduced the idea of genius culture and deconstructed the societal definition of a genius. In part 2, coming soon, I will discuss how genius culture is perpetuated within physics, what its visceral effects are, and how we can transform physics culture in light of it.
