The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley Read Free Page B

time. Geniuses do not pop up randomly—one in Siberia, another in Bolivia—but in groupings. Genius clusters. Athens in 450 BC. Florence in AD 1500. Certain places, at certain times, produced a bumper crop of brilliant minds and good ideas.
    The question is why. We now know it’s not genetic. These golden ages come and go much more quickly than gene pools change. So what was it? Climate? Money? Dumb luck?
    Typically, these are not the sort of questions we ask about creative genius. We’ve framed the discussion almost exclusively in terms of something that happens “inside of us.” If that were true, though, these genius clusters wouldn’t exist. And if creativity were solely an interior process, psychologists would by now have identified a universal “creative personality.” They have not, and I doubt they ever will. Geniuses can be sullen introverts such as Michelangelo or happy extroverts such as Titian.
    Like Galton, we’ve been sticking pins in all the wrong places, asking the wrong questions. Rather than asking “What is creativity?” a better question is “ Where is creativity?” I’m not speaking of trendy metropolises with lots of sushi restaurants and theater. Those are the fruits of a creative city, not its source. I’m not speaking of free food and beanbag chairs but, rather, the underlying conditions, often unexpected, that make a golden age shine. In a word, I’m speaking of culture.
    Culture is more than what the dictionary tells us: “a set of shared attitudes, values and goals.” Culture is the enormous yet invisible ocean inwhich we swim. Or, to put it in modern, digital terms, culture is a shared IT network. Yes, it’s temperamental and crashes too often for our liking, but without it we can’t communicate with one another or accomplish much of anything. Only now, though, are we beginning to fully understand the connection between the cultural milieu and our most creative ideas. Simonton and a handful of other social scientists have quietly been developing a new theory of creativity, one that aims to chart the circumstances of genius.
    I’ve decided to explore this geography of genius, to put flesh and blood on Simonton’s numbers. I realize this won’t be easy, given that these genius clusters existed not only in a certain place but at a certain time, and that time is not now. I fully acknowledge that, say, Athens of today is not the Athens of Socrates’s day. Still, I’m hoping that something of the spirit, of the genius loci, remains.
    I tell Simonton of my plans and he nods his approval. As I stand up to leave, though, he throws a name at me: Alphonse de Candolle.
    “Never heard of him.”
    “Precisely,” says Simonton. Candolle, he explains, was a Swiss botanist, a contemporary of Galton’s. He thought Galton was dead wrong about genius being hereditary and, in 1873, wrote a book saying as much. Candolle laid out a thorough and convincing argument that environment, not genetics, determines genius. Unlike Galton, he even accounted for his own cultural biases. He would only classify, say, a Swiss scientist as a genius if scientists outside Switzerland concurred. His book Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siècles was “one of the greatest books ever written on genius,” Simonton says.
    It sank without a trace. The world did not want to hear what Candolle had to say.
    “Just a friendly warning,” says Simonton, as I say good-bye, then make my way across the sleepy California campus to a bar where I order a stiff drink and ponder the task ahead.
    I’ve selected six historic places of genius, as well as one current one. Some are huge metropolises, such as Vienna of 1900; others, such as Renaissance Florence, are tiny by modern standards. Some, such as ancientAthens, are well-known; others such as nineteenth-century Calcutta, less so. Each of these places, though, represented an apex of human achievement.
    Nearly all are cities. We may be inspired by nature—a