(1997-02-28) Banks Clusters Of Talent

David Banks on Clusters of Talent. The most important question we can ask of historians is ``Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?''

Obvious clusters of geniuses occur in
Athens, from about 440 BCE to 380 BCE,
Florence, from about 1440 to 1490,
London, from about 1570 to 1640.

One can spend pleasant postprandial hours noting similar clusters in Weimar, Paris (twice), London (the Romantics), 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. (scene)

Were general citizens asked to name famous Athenians, the handful of names produced would come entirely from the indicated period

Florence is almost as compelling. There is an early bump of productivity with Dante and Boccaccio and Giotto and Cimabue, but it faded out

Then came a new lot, with Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Machiavelli, Botticelli, Donatello, Politian, Mirandola, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and so forth. But before the birth of Cimabue (1240) and after the death of Galileo (1642), not much happened in the city

Elizabethan London is the third example. Marlowe and Shakespeare and Jonson and Raleigh and Bacon and Spenser laid the foundation for English writing, and there are a host of lesser luminaries whose hands helped. But their momentum ended with the coming of Cromwell

It is interesting to compare the primary modes in which these societies operated (Athens did plays and philosophy, Florence did painting and sculpture, London did poetry and plays), and speculate upon the modern roles of television, performance art, and rap.

Also, scientific thinkers do not seem to cluster to the same degree that arts and letters do, perhaps because science is necessarily accretive

Having posed the problem, let's proceed to a catalogue of some of the stock answers that have been given previously.

The following five can be rejected out of hand.

Hegel, in his The Philosophy of Right, proposed the "Zeitgeist" theory of genius. But this, at best, is description masquerading as explanation

Kroeber (1944) listed many cases of apparent clusters, and lists all the obvious factors

Gray (1958, 1961) believes that geniuses arrive according to numinously perfect mathematical cycles.

McClelland (1961) counted the numbers of achievement images

Asimov (1951) suggested that psychohistorical forces could cause the cultural florescences, but, after all, this is only science fiction. And he never specified the mechanisms that drove Hari Selden's futuristic mathematics

What type of explanation is adequate? My guess is that high points in cultural history require the confluence of many factors; some of these are more important than others. When all or most of the factors coincide, then one has a Periclean Athens, Laurencian Florence or Elizabethan London.

Searching for Factors When I beard social historians at cocktail parties, they usually dismiss the problem of explaining excess genius as complex and ill-posed. But when coaxed into conversation, several ideas for facilitating factors come forward:

Prosperity

Peace

Freedom

Social Mobility

The Paradigm Thing

All of these are good ideas, and superficially plausible. But most contradict the historical record.

To be specific, the prosperity suggestion fails for Athens, Florence and London

Regarding the peace hypothesis, it clearly fails

Regarding artistic freedom, the Athenian plays were written for religious festivals, and the prize was awarded according to the taste of respectable, pious, and civic-minded judges (this caused Aristophanes and Euripides no end of trouble). In Florence, art was commissioned largely by the Church

Regarding social mobility, this hypothesis seems borne out by our three primary examples

One could propose other factors. It seems to me that each of the three societies under consideration enjoyed a substantial military victory in the generation preceding their florescence. (source of economic surplus?)

Also, the great minds in each of these societies tended to hang out together

Does the social intercourse of good minds produce great minds?

A third possible factor is education. In each of the three societies, education tended to be as personal as a punch in the nose. In Athens, the upper class had tutors

And there is ancillary evidence (cf. the lives of Wiener, Maxwell, Dirac, Russell, Mill, Malthus, Arnold, Feynman, Tukey) that tutoring is enormously effective.

One can postulate many other factors. For example, it is suggestive that all three of Athens, Florence, and London had populations near 300,000. Also, all three had relatively democratic styles of government, and all three's florescences were ended by right-wing revolutions (the Rule of the 400, Savonarola, and Cromwell). Finally, each of the three were in the process of reinventing their language

The Individual: There is an alternative strategy for studying the problem of clusters of geniuses. Instead of focusing upon the society that produced them, one can study the minutiae of geniuses' lives, looking for commonalities that might suggest cultural forces

Hayes and Simon (1985) report a study of composers.

they conclude that a minimum of ten years of serious study is required before anyone begins to produce important music (ten-k hours)

Clearly, the controversial element in this line of research is its underemphasis of the importance of native intelligence and skill.

In a similar mood, I undertook a study of 100 eminent men and women of Victorian science and letters

Unfortunately, the results of the analyses so far have been unilluminating.

Conclusions: The problem of excess genius is one of the most important questions I can imagine, but very little progress has been made