Comment: The face of genius

2009/11/15

A. Murad Merican

LAST month, I attended the Merdeka Award Lecture Series held at Chancellor Hall, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS in Bandar Seri Iskandar, Perak. The speaker was Royal Professor Ungku Aziz. The professor needs no introduction. His iconic presence in the national consciousness has inspired many, this writer included.

But there is another provoking note to the occasion. Towards the end of the video montage preceding the lecture, a voice-over alluded to genius with a series of questions beginning with "Does genius have a face?"

We tend to think of genius as freaks. "She is gifted", my aunt once waxed lyrical on a certain public personality to my 12-year-old daughter Sophia. But is being "gifted" a sign of genius? Perhaps not.

In 1921, Lewis Terman, a young professor of Psychology at Stanford University, decided to make the study of the gifted his life's work.

Armed with a large grant, Terman put together a team of field workers who went to California's elementary schools. Teachers were asked to nominate the brightest students in their classes. These students sat for an intelligence test.

Let’s celebrate the genuis of Muhammad Haji Salleh

Students who scored in the top 10 per cent were then given a second IQ test. Those who scored above 130 in that test underwent a third IQ examination, and from that set of results Terman selected the best and the brightest.

By the time Terman finished his project, he had sorted through the records of some 250,000 elementary and high school students, and identified 1,4750 children whose IQs averaged more than 140 and ranged as high as 200.

That group of young geniuses came to be known as the "Termites", and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history, according to Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, in his latest bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success (2008).

Out of nine chapters, Gladwell devoted two to genius titled The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1 and Part 2. He maintained that Terman watched over his charges like a mother hen for the rest of his life.

They were tracked and tested, measured and analysed. Their educational attainments were noted, marriages followed, illnesses tabulated, psychological health charted, and every promotion and job change dutifully recorded.

Terman would record his findings in thick red volumes titled Genetic Studies of Genius. He believed, perhaps like most of us, that leaders who advance science, art, government and education are those with very high IQ.

He even took writing samples from some of his most artistically-minded subjects and had literary critics compare them to the early writings of famous authors. They could find no difference.

All these signs, Terman confidently believed, manifested a potential for "heroic stature". "(H)is Termites were destined to be the future elite of the United States," Gladwell wrote of Terman.

Terman's ideas, even until today, remain central to the way we think about success -- the gifted, the elite, the prodigy. But Terman turned out to be wrong. The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point.

Gladwell illustrated this with Nobel Prize winners. Of course, we have to be smart enough to be accepted by a good university. As an example, he compares two tertiary institutions -- Georgetown University and Harvard (both in the US), the latter ranked No. 1 in the latest Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings (THES).

Hundreds of plastic lamp busts of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe shine in Weimar, eastern Germany in celebration of his 250th birthday in 1999.

Suppose Sophia was accepted into these two learning institutions. Where would I want her to go? Probably Harvard, because it is a "better" university, so says THES, and those who subscribe to the fallacies and foibles of ranking. According to Gladwell, Harvard students score a good 10 to 15 per cent higher in their entrance exams.

As we have seen in a number of commentaries, ranking universities does not make much sense really, be they the top 10 or 100.

Georgetown students may not be as smart on an absolute scale as Harvard students, but future Nobel Prize winners may come from Georgetown as well as Harvard. Gladwell quoted British psychologist Liam Hudson: "Knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a form full of clever boys."

It took sociologist Pitirim Sorokin to poke holes in Terman's idea of genius. Sorokin concluded that "by no stretch of the imagination or standards of genius is 'gifted group' as a whole 'gifted'." So what if one were a genius? Gladwell was trying to understand the true outlier.

But again so what? And then what? Is the conception of genius cultural? After all, Gladwell is American, and he cited the Anglo-Saxon experience from both sides of the Atlantic. Is there much that we do not know, or is it that we do not celebrate genius in the manner that has been portrayed?

Another way to look at genius. is examining its enduring mysterious power.

Every civilisation has its genius -- at least if we go by names such as Al-Mutanabbi, Mozart, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Ibn Khaldun and Shakespeare, as identified by scholar Edward W. Said in the Cairo-based Al-Ahram weekly edition.

To Said, genius means scarcely imaginable gifts of invention, computation, insight; gifts that are unending in their richness, miraculous, close to divine, certainly more than human.

And genius is the word to describe all those qualities. But the disparity between sheer genius and everyday life is so great that the tremendous achievements of the former are even more dramatically underlined by the banality of the latter.

Einstein needs no introduction. He was a mediocre amateur violinist and an uninspiring academic. Goethe, whose universality of gifts extended the whole range from science to poetry, who gave the world a "Faustian" magnitude, did not seem to mind remaining in a boring administrative position for 50 years in the little state of Weimar in Germany.

Significant in Said's insight into genius is the actual works, the labour that went into them. He cited Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima as an example.

It is not a flash of divine inspiration. It is hard effort -- a remarkable devotion to work, patience, slogging away at a problem or a task. It is an obsession to detail, going on for years. Genius reflects the magnanimity of patience.

If genius has often been associated with the musical, it is also integral to writing. Charles Dickens -- I first read David Copperfield in the mid-1970s -- wrote all the time.

It is the sheer busyness, noted Said, that also marks the genius. Brilliant linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky's hallmark is his unstinting, virtually unstoppable capacity for work.

Said concluded that the products of genius are precarious, by no means guaranteed in their outcome, and, alas, derive from often thankless effort. Genius is not only the child prodigy.

Maybe we do not celebrate Abdullah Munsyi and Za'ba, or even the unknown author of the Malay epic Hikayat Hang Tuah translated into English as The Epic of Hang Tuah by scholar and national laureate Emeritus Professor Muhammad Salleh.

Genius is unbounded by dreams and imagination. It is spiritual, emotional and intellectual labour. We have forgotten the genius behind the genesis of this nation. Our intellectual history may go unnoticed if we ignore that labour in our midst.

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A. Murad Merican is a professor at the Department of Management and Humanities, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar, Perak. He can be contacted at amurad_noormerican@petronas.com.my