The Wiley Handbook of Genius

28 Genius in World Civilization

Charles Murray

Introduction

In heaven, as Mark Twain imagined it, people are given status according to the great things they would have achieved if they had gotten the chance. The greatest poet in heaven, ranking far above Shakespeare and Homer, is Edward J. Billings, a tailor from a little town in Tennessee who could never get his neighbors to pay attention to his work, and the greatest military genius is Absalom Jones, who was turned down when he tried to join the Army (Twain, 1909).

Twain was speaking to a melancholy reality: Geniuses around the world from time immemorial have lived out their lives without ever realizing their potential. But the appearance of realized genius has not been random. Whereas latent genius per unit of population within a given geographic area changes slowly, if at all, over time, the expression of it has shown dramatic spikes depending on the course that prevailing culture has taken. What then can we say about the patterns of realized genius across civilizations and time? I will ask that question in two different ways: When and where were the qualitative leaps in the capacity for genius to express itself? When, where, and in what density has realized genius occurred?

The Meta-Inventions

All expressions of genius may be seen as occurring within a matrix of cognitive enabling conditions. I stress the word cognitive to denote the conceptual breakthroughs that must be known to a genius before certain kinds of accomplishment ...