← This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil
This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil
The Genius Myth with Helen Lewis | 319
00:43:53
This episode challenges the myth of genius and asks why we excuse toxic behavior in the name of brilliance. Nicole Kalil and The Genius Myth author Helen Lewis unpack who gets labeled a genius, how the title protects power, and why it's time to embrace collective intelligence over lone-wolf brilliance.
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- [00:00]
Nicole Kahlil
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- [00:52]
Helen Lewis
I think you're on mute.
- [00:54]
Unknown
Workday starting to sound the same.
- [00:56]
Nicole Kahlil
I think you're on mute.
- [00:58]
Unknown
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- [01:32]
Nicole Kahlil
I am Nicole Kahlil, and you're listening to the this Is womanswork podcast and today we're coming for the word genius. If you've been tuning in over the years, you know that I have this thing about words. I feel what might be an unreasonably high level of protectiveness over the ones that actually mean something. Because when we dilute them, when we throw them around like participation trophies, they lose their power. And genius might be one of the biggest casualties. We slap it on tech moguls, tortured artists, startup bros who've managed to disrupt something nobody asked or needed to be disrupted. And suddenly genius means what? Professional success? Eccentricity? A PR team with absolutely no shame. So I have questions. What does it really mean to be a genius? Is it about iq? Creative breakthroughs? Obsession level focus? Is it about changing the world or just being loud enough for long enough that people think that you did? And who gets labeled a genius, and why? Because when we start to unpack it, we realize that genius may not mean what it used to, and it may never have been just about intelligence or invention. It's about who a culture chooses to elevate and who it doesn't. Which means we're not just Talking about brains, we're talking about bias, gender values and power. Which leads me to another question. Does being a genius give you a pass on everything else? Should we excuse someone being an asshole in the name of brilliance? I mean, just because somebody's a genius in one area, are we supposed to believe that they've got everything else figured out? So let's unpack the assumptions, the history, and the marketing machine behind the myth of being a genius. Our guest today is Helen Lewis, staff writer at the Atlantic, author of the Genius A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea and Difficult Women, and Host of the BBC's Helen Lewis has left the chat and the new gurus. Helen, I am fascinated by this topic and I have to celebrate your book subtitle A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. It's so freaking good. So let's start with this. What does genius even mean? And how has the definition evolved over time?
- [03:54]
Helen Lewis
Well, so the Greeks and Romans had, I think, a much healthier idea about what genius was, which was they saw it as a kind of spirit that visited you for poeticus or for divinus, you know, the kind of divine fury. And this was the idea that essentially, like a poetic muse, a God spoke through you. And I think that's quite a healthy way of looking at it, that you might not be particularly special, but you're able to accomplish something special. But it mutated over time. You start it in the Renaissance, you know, with the idea of kind of artists and people writing biographies of artists and saying that, you know, Michelangelo was a special guy and he spent years on his back painting the Sistine Chapel. And, you know, what people are doing there is create a kind of mythology. This is not to take any way anything away from Michelangelo's achievement. Although I shocked a friend of mine by saying that I found the Sistine Chapel actually a bit much for me.
- [04:44]
Nicole Kahlil
I love that much. It is overwhelming.
- [04:46]
Helen Lewis
And he's like, it's one of the greatest artworks in the world. And I was like, true. Also a bit much, but, you know, but this idea that we wanted people who had accomplished special things to have these equally kind of compelling life stories behind them. And then that goes through to the Romantic. So you're thinking of Keats and Shelley and these kind of poets. And then suddenly we get this idea of the genius is kind of tortured of maybe, you know, mentally ill in some way of, you know, bisexual, encompassing both male and female energy within them. You know, all of these kind of ideas that you get around that time, and then it moves through to the 19th century and we get ideas about IQ come around at the turn of the 20th century. And then now, I would say, as you said very well in your introduction, it is the kind of startup, bro. And the tech innovator is, I think, our kind of, you know, we're not so nice about poets anymore, but we do expend an awful lot of column inches on the latest guy in Silicon Valley who has just made a billion selling his, you know, his startup.
- [05:39]
Nicole Kahlil
Okay, so that leads to the follow up question, which is what's dangerous about how and who we define as a genius across history and today? Like what is the dangerous element of that?
- [05:53]
Helen Lewis
Well, I think. Cause it doesn't perfectly correlate with actual achievement. So I have this example in the book that always makes me smile, which is Tim Berners Lee, who invented the web, you know, the protocol that the Internet runs on. Just a very normal person. His kids are called, I think Alice and Ben, undoubtedly an incredible achievement. But does he have the same, does he get called the genius with the same frequency as somebody like Elon Musk who talks about dying on Mars, who has upwards of 12 children, who knows how many it may be at this point, but lives in this very big dramatic way, says, you know, I work all the time. Everybody who works my company's got to be extremely hardcore. You know, I'm different, I'm special. And so I think that's the bit that I wanted to interrogate is what are the criteria that get you called a genius and do they actually line up with objective achievement? And my contention is that they, they don't. And I think you particularly see this with, with women, because women, I think are much less likely to be called brilliant as a word and also genius. And you know, some people can argue that there have been fewer women through history. So you know, we're kind of working on that template. But I also think it's about the fact that this is a set of stories about people, about special people. And maybe we're unwilling to put women on that pedestal in quite the same way.
- [07:05]
Nicole Kahlil
Yeah, I mean, I was trying to think of women in history that we've given the label genius and there are very few that came to mind. And I also wonder if any of them were called genius while they were living.
- [07:19]
Helen Lewis
Well, my signature example, Marie Curie, brilliant.
- [07:22]
Nicole Kahlil
Scientist, who I thought of brilliant scientist.
- [07:23]
Helen Lewis
Yep, unbelievably brilliant scientist. She didn't even get a professorship in Paris, her adopted home, until her husband died and essentially she inherited it. You know, one of her daughters Won Nobel Prizes in two different. Two different disciplines. This is an incredible family. But she's not lionized in that way that I think you see someone like Einstein being lionized or Picasso. These are people of around the same time. Because I think there is not any attempt to make her life bigger than it was and representative of something bigger in the culture. Whereas Einstein becomes about this. Well, you see in Oppenheimer where he has by that point become the wise old sage that you kind of go and consult. You saw the same thing happen to Stephen Hawking who was. Because he was, you know, physics. He was presumed to kind of have these deep insights into the nature of the cosmos. And I don't think we quite do that with brilliant female scientists. We don't also assume that they're going to solve the mysteries of existence for us no matter how good they are at something else.
- [08:23]
Nicole Kahlil
Yeah, so a couple thoughts popped into my head in no particular order. First is, should we believe somebody who's a self proclaimed genius? Like isn't this something that we should be wary about if somebody defines themself as that? I don't know something about it.
- [08:42]
Helen Lewis
Extremely wary. No, I can answer that for you. I personally would run a mile at that point. If anyone says, by the way, I just need you to all to know that I'm a G. Because it's. What you said earlier is right. It's pr, isn't it really? It should be a label that's conferred by other people and you should resist if you. It's interesting to see really great artists. I'm just thinking about Kazuo Ishiguro who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And he talked at the time about how this was often actually ruinous to a writing career because you went on this sort of worldwide publicity tour for several years afterwards and didn't really have a chance to sit down and do your craft, which was sitting down and writing a book. And so that in lots of creative endeavors and scientific endeavors, the two things, the kind of being a public figure and doing really good work are often really mismatched. And the book has got several quite sad stories of scientists who were particularly. Who were brilliant in their early years but. But then the kind of mythology ate them alive. They started to kind of believe their own hype and actually the quality of their work really declined. They became a kind of bloviator on all kinds of subjects and they didn't do the one thing that they did better than anybody else. You know, I think you should try and resist the label if people force it on you. Not that I have to say it's come up for me. I don't know, maybe it's come up for you, but, like, so far I've dodged those allegations quite successfully. Yeah.
- [09:58]
Nicole Kahlil
I also think I would potentially buckle under the pressure of a label like that. Like, I would get so caught up in wanting something to be genius level all the time that I think it would limit my creativity or. And again, nobody's called me that, so this is hypothetical, but I could see how it would be a dangerous thing.
- [10:20]
Helen Lewis
Oh, I think you're entirely right. Elizabeth Gilbert once gave a very good TED Talk that said, that's also who.
- [10:25]
Nicole Kahlil
I thought I would eat.
- [10:25]
Helen Lewis
Pray Love was my masterpiece, or it was my biggest selling book, whatever you want to call it. I have now done the most popular thing I've ever done in my career, and I know nothing will ever match that. So that I can either be horrified by that or I can be liberated by that and now pursue passion projects. And I thought that was a very healthy attitude to have. And frankly, lots more people would be a lot happier if they did think, okay, you know, the lightning has struck once. That's more than most people get. It probably won't strike twice, and I need to make my peace with that and just do what I find fulfilling and makes me happy.
- [10:56]
Nicole Kahlil
Yeah. It kind of brings me to your definition that you started with. And it kind of makes me think of changing the language of to I have a genius versus I am a genius or I have a gift. Right. And, you know, I don't know that every one of us have a genius, though that could be argued. I think we all have unique gifts and abilities that make us special. And isn't that a little bit what we're trying to create here? When we label somebody a genius, as you said, we're trying to give them a story, make them special in some way. Thoughts or reactions to any of that.
- [11:34]
Helen Lewis
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think it's very helpful to think about what you do better than other people and how you can use that talent to the betterment of the world and be kind of the servant of it, rather than try and think that you're the master of the universe and you're a superior type of person. That definitely comes up in the discussions that come out of the IQ movement. Right. Is that people essentially always want to treat that IQ as a measurement of sort of, you know, like a final definitive ranking of how smart people are, which is, you know, intelligence is not meaningless, but it doesn't tell you all kinds of other stuff about a person. And that sort of doomed pursuit of being able to achieve the final ranking of humanity in kind of order has driven lots of people to really, really dark places. So it's much better to, I think, you know, to think I love podcasting. I'm better at it than other people. I've worked really hard on it for a number of years to try and get even better than that. And here's how I can use that to now share ideas and meet people and. And all that kind of stuff that you want to put out into the world that is fundamentally psychologically healthier than thinking. I'm burdened by this great gift where everything I say is amazing and I should just go on every podcast and tell people more about how amazing I am. Which, you know, I think almost in a way, lapses into conspiracy theories, theorizing sometimes. One of the most personality traits that is most highly correlated with believing in conspiracy theories is narcissism, because it's about putting yourself at the center of the world. Right. You're the only one. Everyone else is sheeple and NPCs, they don't understand what's going on, but you've seen through it. And I, you know, and I just think that's. The Internet kind of encourages you to live like that, but it's much better to think of yourself as somebody who's been given something and you have to make the best use of it.
- [13:13]
Nicole Kahlil
Yeah. So I often think that our judgments tell us more about the person doing the judging than the person being judged. And I wonder if that applies here. Does who we define as a genius tell us more about us, or us as a culture or society than it does about the person we're slapping the label on? Does it give us insight into what we value or deem important more than anything else?
- [13:41]
Helen Lewis
Definitely. I mean, I think you see that in the distinction between the kind of Romantic period, so the 1800s and early 1900s, valorizing this idea of the poets, so they were called. I can't remember which one poet said it was, maybe Shelley. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. This was the idea that, you know, you were getting. You know, it was a time of great intellectual upheaval. People were having all these brilliant, exciting ideas, and poets and writers were the ones who were kind of making the world understandable. And that tells you something about what that kind of intellectual culture was. Now I think you see people feeling that the dominant force is the feeling of acceleration of technology. AI is going to take all of our jobs. We're living in this great pivot point. And the way that we talk about AI is often quite unhelpful because it's presented as this kind of inevitable, unstoppable force being birthed by a couple of guys, let's be honest, it's about half a dozen men, primarily at the top of these technology companies, who are the kind of profits of this new religion. And what it doesn't, that account doesn't tell you is the fact that it's obviously anything like that is, you know, is a huge collective endeavor. And not only that, is that those companies only can exist in a society that, you know, values intellectual property, for example, or, you know, doesn't lock people up for no reason, or doesn't have terrible droughts and famines. All of that stuff, all that work that has gone into building the society is kind of erased. And we instead we just talk about this handful of kind of great men at the top of it. And the, the consequence of that is that they are allowed to extract huge value out of it. I mean, AI being the obvious example that you have these companies that are valued in the billions. And then they say, but we can't possibly pay creators and artists in order to feed their stuff into our large language models because then it wouldn't make financial sense anymore. So we have to accept. Like that to me, is a place where the genius myth becomes really toxic. We have to accept that these handful of people should take all of the spoils of this work and they own it in this particular way. When they don't, they're actually building on the work of so many, many hands.
- [15:45]
Nicole Kahlil
So that brings up a couple things. First, I feel like our society, specifically in the US it sends the message that we value success, professional success at the highest level, and that we sort of conflated it with the word genius. And that's just so contrary to my personal experience. Now, I don't know some of these top, top, top, top billionaires, but I know a lot of uber successful people and a lot of them are successful for a lot of really great reasons, but there is no common denominator of them being smarter than everyone else or geniuses. And maybe that just again, keeps going back to, I have genius tied up with extreme intelligence in my mind. But what are the dangers of assuming that just because somebody's uber successful that they're a genius or that it requires genius to become uber successful?
- [16:39]
Helen Lewis
Yeah, I think it works both ways. And I think one of the most obvious is that people who've had enormous success in one domain try and do something different and assume that they have kind of transferable skills. Now the book in the US edition starts and ends with Elon Musk, which I think, I think is a really good example of that. People on the left kind of wish that he weren't a success in his early career. They want to try and say all because his dad owned an emerald mine, or it's all because of this, that and the other. He undoubtedly, to my mind had great success with Tesla and SpaceX, two very successful innovative companies which he can take a huge amount of credit for. However, he then tips up in the US government and goes, why don't I just do the same thing again? Bringing in a load of my acolytes who just lock people out of the computer systems and then anything I don't understand I just delete from the budget line. This is going to be amazing. And you know what? It's not. They found some waste and fraud, but I don't think there's anybody, not even probably him in his kind of less Twitter addled moments who thinks that it's been this great untrammeled success of a parallel with his earlier career. But that to me is a kind of example of somebody who just thinks, I'm a smart person, everything I do is smart. And to go back to your point about iq, which I think is a really good one, the High IQ Societies Mensa was founded in the 1940s in England and one of the initial ideas behind it was that they would have a panel, like an opinion poll panel of very smart people and they would ask them what to do about foreign policy and like, what about economics? With the idea that this would be brilliant because it was going to have a kind of aristocracy of talent who would suddenly have these brilliant ideas. Of course it was useless. Very smart people do not necessarily have particularly great answers to things that are outside their expertise and domain. And actually they should be encouraged to be humble about things outside their experience, is my feeling about it.
- [18:32]
Unknown
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- [19:02]
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- [19:25]
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- [19:55]
Nicole Kahlil
Yeah, I like the example of Elon Musk because I also think it speaks to this thing that we do as a culture where we want to glorify somebody completely or vilify them completely, as opposed to accepting that we're all imperfect humans who have gifts or geniuses. And Elon Musk certainly has a gift or a genius. And a lot of the people who are villainizing him today were the people who were celebrating him and driving his cars, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago or whatever, whenever it was, or the people who all of a sudden are obsessed with him today but thought he was a lunatic.
- [20:37]
Helen Lewis
Back when he was like Mr. Electric Car, there were people on the right who were like, oh, environmentalism, it's so dweeby. Like, you know, but drill, baby, drill. And now those same people are like, Elon, he's so based, he wants to cut DEI programs. And it's like, well, okay, but can we find a kind of like halfway house between those two positions? But you're right, I think one of those things that genius kind of as a concept sets up people as like a one person referendum on a concept. And, you know, you have to kind of say yay or nay to that particular person. And that sort of stands in for a whole other set of kind of political arguments. And I think Musk is a great example of that. He's also frankly, incredibly interested in spreading his seed. There was a great Salzac post about him calling him the great Elon Khan, comparing him to Genghis Khan who fathered so many sons that his DNA is all through the world. And this again, is a kind of fascinating but ultimately failed quest. Because even if you do think you have an exceptionally high iq, your children will inherit some of that. IQ is partially heritable, but there's also a phenomenon called reversion to the mean. They will go back closer to the adverse, the population average. So, yeah, so Elon Musk is probably fathering some pretty smart kids, but he's not, as he seems to believe, fathering a race of kind of ubermensch who will fan out like a legion. That was. He called them his legion will fan out across the world. And that's the kind of, again, that he just. He thinks he's special. He thinks his seed is special, and that's fine. But the rest of us sort of don't have to really go along with that.
- [22:08]
Nicole Kahlil
Right. Well, it's statements like that, regardless of who says it, that make me question anybody's genius. Sorry.
- [22:14]
Helen Lewis
Right. But I think that what I think is nice about the idea of kind of moments of genius or acts of genius or genius acting through you is it does acknowledge. I'm sure you've got examples you can think of, of just times when you've looked at something and just thought, how. How does that exist that's so perfect and wonderful? I talk about Van Gogh's Almond Blossom, one of his paintings, which I think he painted originally for an. For a nursery, and I just love it. It's just beautiful. And it's got all these influences of Japanese woodblock prints, and he's got these beautiful colors in it. But I just think, how did you think to paint like that? You know, that synthesis of kind of Impressionism and Japanese woodblock prints. And the same thing with, you know, every time I get an airplane, because I'm quite a nervous flyer. I just think it's resting on the air. How is this working? And so I want there to still be a place in the world for kind of wonderful, an achievement and celebrating people who take risks and, you know, and try a little harder and maybe are sort of mad obsessives in their shed for 30 years, whatever it is. I find all that really wonderful. What I don't find wonderful is the bit where, yes, any sort of success is deemed to kind of validate everything you think and do.
- [23:21]
Nicole Kahlil
You've mentioned this a few times that men are more likely to be called geniuses and have been historically. I'm going to ask the question in full transparency, believing that the answer can't be yes, but you tell me if I'm wrong. But are men more likely to actually be geniuses.
- [23:40]
Helen Lewis
Well, so the case for it, which is very rarely articulated, is that there seems to be a spread in IQ scores and there are more men at the higher end and more men at the lower end. They are more variable. Now, I don't think that necessarily, even if that finding stands up, really tells you anything, because as I said before, I don't think genius is really correlated with high IQ. There's plenty of people with very high IQs who have, you know, become a perfectly normal architect or doctor or people who haven't actually really done anything with their lives for whatever reasons to do with personality and upbringing. The second thing might be that men, because of testosterone, young men take more risks. They might, for example, be more likely to decide to back themselves on their mad idea for a startup that then becomes a billion dollar unicorn. I think that's reasonable. However, I don't think it entirely explains the gulf that we see in front of us. And one of the things I talk about in the book is just having a wife. Having a wife is like having, you know, a secretary and, you know, and a personal assistant. And a personal assistant, child care provider and caretaker. Right, right. There's a brilliant New Yorker cartoon of people in an art gallery looking at the paintings and there's like that one woman saying to the other, this will become significantly less impressive once you realize they had free childcare. And, you know, we're approaching a time now where you have sometimes women who are in high profile jobs that are really demanding and they have to, you know, negotiate how they're going to juggle that with family life. But some of the men who are most celebrated had a wife who did a load of stuff at home and also really helped them in career terms. I'm thinking about John le Carre's wife, for example, David Cornwell, the author. His wife was his editor and his first reader. And, you know, they had this kind of connection between them and you see that quite often. The same thing was true of Dostoevsky, for example. So once women become literate in the kind of from the sort of 1700s onwards, actually lots of male authors really benefit from having, you know, some sort of in like exactly. A housekeeper who is also your kind of your best critic, basically. Another example would be Sophia Tolstoy, wife of Leo Tolstoy. She was his copyist. She copied these manuscripts out over and over again. He borrowed from a novella that she wrote when she was a teenager for War and Peace. You know, they just not exactly to call them parasites because Some women really enjoyed these relationships or felt, in Sofia's case, she sort of hated it, but she felt very jealous when she felt it was ebbing away. But the fact that men were able to draw on these really deep wellsprings of support is clearly, clearly, if you're going to live an extraordinary, demanding life with an extraordinary, demanding career, then having someone who will tidy up after you constantly is just the most unbelievable asset. You know, it's really notable to me. Yayoi Kazama, who's one of the Japanese artists who does the dot paintings, she, she checked herself into a mental hospital in the 70s and she has a studio across the road, but, you know, which is a kind of exotic way to live. It obviously works for her. She's been doing it for decades. But it replicates the, you know, what maybe, you know, your medieval researcher would have had in a monastery or in a university, you know, the sense that you have, you are entirely free from domestic responsibilities and you only do the thing that is your work. And there's just very, very few women through history that have been offered that, that bargain.
- [27:06]
Nicole Kahlil
I think that that is such a rational, logical way to look at it. Because if being a genius in any area involves time, energy, commitment, devotion, which I think we'd all agree it does, then having a support system in place allows for that to even exist or happen. And throughout history, so few women have been afforded that same opportunity or level of support.
- [27:33]
Helen Lewis
Yeah. And I also think there's a big instinct, maybe bigger in Britain than in America, to kind of take women down a peg or two, to see them as if, like ambition in women being treated as a kind of innately suspicious. And that's, I think that's part of the story too. The kind of. The social rewards for being incredibly single minded are perhaps not there in quite the same way for women.
- [27:55]
Nicole Kahlil
I think that's fair. Okay, so as we've been talking, we acknowledged that nobody's ever called me a genius. And I had the thought of, like, I don't think I'd even want that.
- [28:05]
Helen Lewis
I think that's healthy. Yeah.
- [28:08]
Nicole Kahlil
So I guess my question is there have to be some people who want to be a genius and there has to be a healthy expression of it. Right. Is it when it tips into ego? Like, in what cases would we want to be a genius or should we want to be a genius? And is there a healthy expression of it? You mentioned Elizabeth Gilbert earlier. I thought that was a good example of a healthy expression.
- [28:32]
Helen Lewis
I think wanting to use your talent for other People is the one. So someone's pointed out recently that Paul McCartney of the Beatles is absolutely exceptional in that he has spent his entire life. They were saying, I can't remember who put it on Blue Sky. Saying, you know, people coming up to him saying, we played hey Jude at my dad's funeral. Thank you so much for this. This was the kind of thing that would drive most of us mad or become like massive, unbelievably stroppy divas. But he, you know, he sent his kids to a public school, and that's the US version of a public school. Like. Like one way you don't pay for, you know. And he, you know, has, by, you know, lives a pretty normal life. You know, he's not, as far as we know, into anything kind of particularly weird. And I think he has constantly thought about the fact that the thing he loves is the music. And he's also embraced the generation of younger artists. You know, he went through a phase of making albums with younger artists. And that's one of the. One of the nicer aspects of the kind of being hailed as a genius is becoming this kind of father or mother of the nation or father and the mother of your. Your particular domain, bringing the other people on. There's. There's an essay which talks about people like Freud or Enrico Fermi in physics becoming kind of focusing points. Having this kind of great symbol of achievement that people find really inspirational in a field can make people decide that they want to be a mathematician, they want to be whatever it might be. Those, I think, are really good uses of your power. Yeah, I just think basically, if you're given this incredible power, you need to think about how to be responsible with it. What are you going to try and encourage? What are you going to give back to the world and try not to be grandiose or kind of selfish about it. Essentially, the working title for a long time for the book was the Selfish Genius, which is a pun on the. Richard Dawkins is the selfish gene. And then it became obvious that no one understood that this was a pun. So at that point I gave up calling it that.
- [30:21]
Nicole Kahlil
Well, again, I love your title and your subtitles is genius. Okay, so that brings me to my last question. I'm going to kind of think out loud because I haven't wrapped my brain totally around how I want to ask it. But, yeah, there's this. I think because we want our geniuses to be wrapped in this beautiful story. Right. Or that we want to put them up on a pedestal that we have a tendency to dismiss or not want to hear about their inevitable imperfections. And so my question is around.
- [31:00]
Helen Lewis
How.
- [31:00]
Nicole Kahlil
Do we as a culture, as a people, begin to tolerate people's imperfections and also acknowledge their genius without excusing or tolerating bad behavior? So, like, I think of a lot of geniuses who are, like, miserable people to be married to or, you know, who are adulterers or who, like, we could fill in all the blanks, right?
- [31:29]
Helen Lewis
Yeah.
- [31:30]
Nicole Kahlil
Doesn't take away their genius, but also forces us as a society to look at how we have a tendency to sort of lift people beyond their genius and expect perfection. I don't even know if I'm what I'm asking here, but.
- [31:47]
Helen Lewis
No, I understand. I think, like. Because the way I think about it is that my, you know, something I do have done in journalism is you can debunk without destroying. So one of the reasons I think that this kind of happens is that a genius is a brand. And there's a chapter I have about kind of literary executors, you know, people who are in charge of the body of work once someone's died. And it's very much in their interests to maintain this kind of fiction that the person was, you know, perfect and blessed and everything, you know, because they want to keep the money machine printing. So this happened to, like, Robert Burns, the Scottish poet. There was a. It took like 100 years after his death or a biography to come out that revealed that he had a sexually transmitted disease. You know, he'd been very carefully kind of cleaned up by history. You know, that happens all the time. I write in the book about walking out of mj, the Michael Jackson musical. Now, I really love the music of Michael Jackson. It is undoubtedly incredibly brilliant. He was an incredible performer. But they had set the musical the year before the child abuse allegations came out, so that they didn't need to deal with that at all. And then there was a scene in which he lambasted the press for asking him mean and difficult questions and being intrusive into his private life. And at that point, I'm afraid I thought, no, I'm actually on the side of the press here. Like, obviously, as a journalist, I have a kind of stake in this. But, you know, if you are going to invite kids over to your ranch for sleepovers and live with a chimp, I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to have a few questions about that.
- [33:11]
Nicole Kahlil
Sure.
- [33:11]
Helen Lewis
And so I was just like, you know, I'm not going to ban Billie Jean from all radio Stations in perpetuity. But it felt to me like what had happened there was that the people behind that musical had worked out a way to keep making money out of the life story of Michael Jackson whilst not addressing any of the kind of downsides or any of the people who might have been hurt by his actions. And that was the bit that I didn't want to kind of go along with. So I think that's the. It's the resisting the tendency towards, as you say, having to kind of clean it up. But people resist it, I think, for two reasons. One is kind of nakedly commercial. One is because they probably had a more human people around. Someone like that had their own experience with someone and they saw their good side and they feel it's very unfair.
- [33:50]
Unknown
Or.
- [33:51]
Helen Lewis
Or the third one is, I think particularly in the kind of era of cancellation that we've been through, people were worried that if they admitted any fault in their idol, that was it. People were going to demand that they be consigned to the dustbin of history. And I hope we've got to a slightly better balance now where we can kind of say, you know, I'm going to debunk this, this person wasn't perfect. But that doesn't mean we need to have a big bonfire of everything that they've done right.
- [34:16]
Nicole Kahlil
So the Michael Jackson example is literally perfect for me personally, because, I mean, when I say I was obsessed with Michael Jackson, it like I wore a white glove at my wedding. We, you know, the song we walked out to was a Michael Jackson song. Legitimately super embarrassing, but true. My sister wore like, you know, the red jacket. I mean, we are obsessed. And I at the time, for a very long time, was very dismissive of, you know, he didn't do that. And I think it was because of this internal need to clean somebody up or to think of them as just in one category, in one way. And when I saw the documentary about his abuse, fully sick to my stomach, not because of him, but because of me. Because I got face to face with the fact that this man was beyond imperfect. He was probably horrible in ways that make my skin crawl. And so then I went to the. I'm no longer listening to his music. I cannot condone this in any way. And swung the pendulum really far the other direction. And as it stands today, I am in the camp of I can acknowledge that he was a genius when it came to music. He was an exceptional dancer. I do love a lot of his songs. They trigger memories of times in my life. They make Me happy. They make me want to dance. And that's it. This is not a person who I would want to know or who I would want anybody to emulate or who I like. I mean, at the very least, he was fucking strange, right?
- [36:08]
Helen Lewis
Yeah. I mean, the one thing that the MJ musical does do is really show you about the fact again, for him, fame and so much of genius is bound up with fame. Fame was just a really toxic thing for him. You know, the way that his father obviously was quite violent and that all the boys were pushed to be on stage from an early age. You know, the way that he, you know, he. As a rare black entertainer that, you know, his looks were commented on like. I think it's correct to say that I should have a great deal of sympathy about how deranging that experience was without having to say it is. It's an. It's an explanation, not an excuse, I think is the way to put it. You don't have to take that pain onwards and do what you do. But, yeah, I think. I think it's hard, isn't it? Because I think you probably have a more extreme reaction, having liked him more before. And I think that's what we often see with these big swings is it's something that's personal and meant a lot to you, that has now been cheapened or damaged in some way. And I think that's why also people are reluctant to believe bad things because it is something that meant a lot to you is now tarnished, I suppose, is what it is. But you and your family had that experience and that was something you created. The music was the kind of impetus for it, but like it was your own thing. And I think again, that's another. To get away from this idea of kind of putting too much on the individual and maybe looking more at the collective. Listening to a song and everybody in, you know, you go into a club and the song comes on and everybody dances to it is a much cooler experience than just you loving a song that no one else does. And so I think, again, paying this attention to this idea about how we create meaning as the people watching a genius is also a bit of a redress to the genius myth. So I'm sorry it's ruined, Billie Jean, for you. I understand it, I do. But it is a banger.
- [37:49]
Nicole Kahlil
Yeah, well. And it's been my own personal reckoning with this genius myth. And I didn't even think about it until you said it. But it's funny, I still like today, now I'm still in the camp of there are two types of people in the world, people who dance when PYT comes on, and people I do not want to associate with. Right. I'm still in that camp. And. And you're right. I am so grateful that you said that because there is a lot of explanation as to why he was the way he was. And, you know, at some point in time, we all become adults, and he had a lot of access and resources, and there are just. It's very complicated. And I guess maybe that's my big takeaway with this Genius myth, is it is very complicated. And we're best served if we go back to the definition you started out with, which is a spirit that visited you. All of these people had something that came through them.
- [38:47]
Helen Lewis
Yeah. And also influences. Right. He benefited from working with a really great producer. He benefited from the kind of. The kind of surroundings of Motown. You know, all of these things that are kind of. That are still there. Like, you exist in this kind of community and we all. There's a line by the Playwrights, Simon Stephen says to me about saying, you know, we're not individuals, we're dividuals. We only exist really in relation to other people. And I think when you start thinking like that, it's a really big antidote to lots of things in life. It's a big antidote to anxiety because you think that not everything is about me. Big antidote to narcissism and actually a real antidote to kind of ennui. Right. If you think about what can I do for the world, rather than, like, how can I perfect myself? It's generally a more outward and healthy way of thinking. So I'm. Yeah, I think it is quite a complicated one, which is why this is my plea to why I think, hopefully it was worth addressing a book length. Because it is like. It is just this word that you. I still say it casually all the time, but it carries all of this stuff packed inside it that it's quite interesting to kind of unfurl and look at in its splendor and horror.
- [39:51]
Nicole Kahlil
Yeah. Well, I was fascinated by this topic before we even got started. But the more we've talked, the more fascinated I've become. I can't wait to read the book. And I have 1 million more questions. But of course, we're out of time. So for the listener, the book again is called the genius. Go to bookshop.org or go to your local bookstore or whatever it is you buy books. And Helen also has a substack, which we'll put in show notes along with all the other links of ways that you can find and follow. Helen, thank you for just a really interesting and important conversation.
- [40:25]
Helen Lewis
Thank you very much for having me.
- [40:26]
Nicole Kahlil
My pleasure. Okay, friend, maybe it's time we stop handing out the word genius like it's a party favor for anyone with piles of money and a TED Talk. Maybe it's time we ask harder questions about who gets labeled brilliant and who doesn't, and what we're really celebrating when we throw that word around. Because genius shouldn't be a free pass. It shouldn't excuse cruelty, abuse, or just being a dick. And it shouldn't be reserved for a very narrow, very specific slice of the population. Maybe genius looks more like collaboration than isolation. Maybe more like curiosity than certainty. Maybe it's time we stop obsessing over the genius and start recognizing the value in the collective brilliance all around us. Redefining genius and acknowledging our own. Well, that is woman's work.