Genius And Why Americans Are Afraid Of It - The Myth Of Social Equality

Lorraine Anderson was born and grew up in northern Minnesota.  Her grandparents were Norwegian immigrants who had settled in Minnesota in 1915, farmed a living in a land very similar to the remote region of northern Norway from which they had emigrated.  It was not unusual that there were so many Norwegians in Minnesota - with the marginal choice they had as poor economic refugees - it was no surprise that they settled in Minnesota and not Florida. Ford's Landing, a town whose name had nothing to do with Henry Ford but the fjords of their native land had been their stopping place, inhabited as it was by others from the same town in the old country. 

Lorrie's parents like their parents before them were farmers, and had learned over the generation how to make the best of an unforgiving climate and to make do for their family.  She led a quiet, unassuming, and straightforward farm life of milking, sowing, gardening, and cooking for her large family.  The Andersons were God-fearing Lutherans who made their way to the small church in nearby Blanton Falls every Sunday morning, drove the pastor home with them for a Sunday dinner, and never thought much about the world outside hearth and home. 

In fact the quiet, stable, and unremarkable life of Ford's Landing had been the subject of an Atlantic feature article about the heartland - a very unsympathetic tale of people leading 'intellectually sedentary' lives - lives without curiosity, interest, or ambition.  'If this immured, insular place expresses the ethos of America', the author wrote, then the country had little hope of reaching the social utopia demanded by the persistence of its social ills. 

He was going against the grain, for the heartland was very much thought to be the American idyll, a place of community, hard work, family and faith.  Although urban America had long since eclipsed these 19th century values, they were still held closely as what the country should and could be. 

As nasty and arrogant as the Atlantic piece was, it opened Lorrie's eyes.  Could it be, she reflected, that her dutiful, predictable, and thoroughly limited existence was not the vision of God as she had been told, but a retrograde, unforgiving place of harsh winters and bleak futures?

So, not unlike many young people and very much like Carrie Underwood, the fictional heroine of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, a woman of urban sentiment but living in a town like Ford's Landing who leaves her husband and moves to New York.  Life must have more purpose than that found in rural Minnesota, she believed.  The 'idolatry of plainness' was how the Atlantic writer described Ford's Landing and he could have been describing the fictional place of Carrie and her plain, unassuming, limited husband. 

 

Lorrie fell into the Greenwich Village crowd, the epicenter of the growing social revolution of the Sixties - a culture of cafes, socialist idealism, and youthful optimism.  Nothing could have been further from the life she left, and the dramatic change of scene affected her more than her colleagues who had come more urbane and worldly places and elided rather than fell into the culture of protest and rejection. 

It was a heady time, all sailing in the same boat towards a utopian future. Camaraderie, fellowship, collegiality, and love were the expressions of a universal optimism for a genuinely just, fair, and equal society.

The Greenwich Village crowd, although drawn from different social quarters and environments, shared not only the same political philosophy but the same intellectual simplicity.  This was not a genius cluster by any means, and the readings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin as passionately as they were spoken, went over the heads of listeners.  The sang the Internationale, occupied Union Square, and defiantly challenged the police, but by and large they were uniformly uninspired thinkers. 

No one had ever claimed that progressivism was an intellectual movement.  Its inspiration - the Soviet Union - certainly had little insight into the complexity of labor and capital.  There were no brilliant theorists like those of the Scottish Enlightenment who set forth the principles of capitalism. There was none of the brilliance of Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas whose intellectual rigor and logical discipline helped define the precepts of Christianity and helped create the Church. 

The modern progressive movement, a far cry from the early days of Lafollette, Brandeis, and Gompers whose socialist passion was undimmed by intellectual seriousness, mistrusted genius if not intelligence, products of a deformed capitalist society which valued the superficial. 

Lorrie and her colleagues meant well.  They had all the right progressive instincts, marched in unison for a more equitable, verdant world; but collectively, they were subpar thinkers, drawn to the movement exactly because it required little thought. 

Lorrie maintained her commitment to socialist idealism throughout her years, and as an older, mature woman, was thought of as a leader in the current revolt against the conservative resurgence.  Again, while she had never read Hayek, Friedman, or Adam Smith and had no patience for the considerations of Sowell or Clarence Thomas she dismissed them out of hand.  What was more to know than the unabridged manipulation of the poor that capitalism had always signified?

The era was characterized by a genius cluster as impressive as that of the early industrialists where Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan all existed within the same time frame and revolutionized the American economy.  It hearkened back even farther to the Founding Fathers - Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton men of incredible intellectual talent and vision all of whom worked and lived during the same period. 

Gates, Huang, Altman, Brin, Pichai, Musk, Zuckerberg and others were all recently invited to a White House conference to discuss America's tech future in an AI age - a powerhouse of talent, genius, business acumen, and social savvy.  'America has not lost its mojo', wrote one commentator, impressed with the country's undiminished reserves of brilliance. 

At the same time Lorrie Anderson and her colleagues were accusing these men - almost all of the White House invitees were men - of arrogance, superciliousness, greed, and unmitigated selfish ambition.  Their so-called 'genius' was a fiction, an expression of white supremacy, the insularity and unconcern of the wealthy, and a show of ignorance not brilliance. 

Despite the fact that Elon Musk, CEO of Space X and Tesla and also a pioneer in high tech solutions to persistent problems of health, energy, and economic productivity is at the leading edge of the tech avant-garde in the nation, Lorrie and her fellows hate him for his unalloyed conservative capitalism. 

They give no reasons for this, stymied by Musk's job creation, propelling innovation, workplace and family diversity, and  unalloyed patriotism.  They hate him because genius is always suspect, for how could it not be, so exclusive a club?  There were no black men among the White House invitees, none in the genius cluster, none among the history of genius. In all the years of the Nobel science prizes none had ever come from Africa or the African diaspora - 'genius' was nothing more than a cabal of white men with pretentions of superiority. 

Within the progressive canon genius is ipso facto to be criticized, creativity dismissed, and innovation a matter of collective contribution only.  The Deconstructionists provided the foundation for this idea.  In their view every work of literature could be reduced to the sum of environmental influences. The work of writers, poets, dramatists simply reflect the influences of society and culture; and only if one looks through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity, can one observe reality. 

John F Kennedy, hero of Camelot, and assembler of a genius cluster to advise him - 'the best and the brightest' drawn from the best families, the best schools, and the best patrician, aristocratic traditions - has been dismissed by Lorrie and her group because of JFK's elitism and intellectual remove.  Genius like beauty is simply and artificial confection. There is no such thing, only false imaginings of it. 

There can be no equality unless all the shibboleths of genius, superior intelligence, classic beauty, elegance, and social brilliance are destroyed.  Uniqueness has no place in the progressive canon.  Outstanding is an outdated concept.  Only inner compassion and collaboration matter. 

The reason why progressivism is being dismissed in America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America is because citizens have finally seen the emperor without his clothes.  They have seen the emptiness of the idea, the lack of substance, the fanciful assumptions, and the complete historical ignorance.  There is such a thing as excellence and it should be valued and promoted.  There are cultural values which are superior to others.  Intelligence like everything else is subject to the bell curve. The time to favor the best and the brightest over the the worst and the dimmest has arrived. 

Lorrie went to her retirement happy that she had given her all and that a utopian future was still most definitely in the offing; but that was because of her limited intelligence, collective mentality, and unfortunately persistent idealism. 

Donald Trump And The Wild West, The Defining American Icon That Europe Will Never Understand

Donald Trump didn't come out of nowhere as the American Left seems to assume - an alien being of vast intelligence and inimitable power with the conquest of earth in mind, an interloper, an unexpected, unexplained viral threat, a demon cast out of someone else's hell. 

He came from America, from everywhere in America - from the prairie, the bayou, the backcountry, the Mississippi, Las Vegas, Hollywood, and the mean streets of New York; but most of all from the Wild West.  For all of these origins, he is more American than any president before him. 

Europe can understand part of this legacy.  They can fathom the wide open spaces. 'Purple mountains' majesty' may not have the resonance it does for Americans, at least older, native ones who remember Flag Day and Fourth of July parades, and the Pledge of Allegiance, but any European who has travelled beyond the Mississippi and has some inkling of American history can combine the grandeur of the West with Monroe's Manifest Destiny and come up with a vague conception of our origins. 

They cannot understand the Wild West - that vast territory settled by early Americans, a contentious place where Indians resisted colonization with militancy, savagery, and persistence but Union soldiers cleared the way for white settlement. Where settlers staked their claims and defended them with the same determination and violence as those who wanted to take their land. 

Europe has been settled, civilized, and sedentary for a millennium. The tribal Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, and Celts have been long forgotten in Britain, too distant in memory and cultural destiny to become icons.  Only after the Romans and William the Conqueror did history become real; but only thanks to remnants - French and Latin influences in language, amphitheaters and aqueducts. 

The French have a more living past.  It has always considered itself the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church since Charlemagne and Charles Martel defeated the invading Muslim Saracens at Roncesvalles and kept Europe Western and Christian. Other European nations have their own history with its victories and defeats, defining culture, religion, castles, and cathedrals.

Yet this recognition of the past, this pride of legacy and cultural patriotism is a far cry from the nativism of America - a country which does not simply remember its history, but lives its legacy every day.  Westward Expansion, that heady period of American history where Monroe and Jefferson were determined to create a country from coast to coast, to create a European continent in the New World, to dominate, control, and profit from the remarkable land discovered by Columbus, settled by pilgrims and cavaliers in New England and Virginia, explored and claimed by Lewis and Clark, and settled by new citizens tempted by the unimaginable richness newly settled. 

Wagon trains, the horse-drawn caravans of 'prairie schooners', the Donner Party and the crossing of the Rockies to the promised land of California, the winning of the Southwest, the clearing of the cypress, snake-infested swamps of Mississippi to make way for cotton plantations, the northward expansion to Alaska...all were not simply the ordinary territorial imperative common to all countries in history, but an expression of common character.  It was the kings, queens, and popes of Europe who initiated expansionist wars. 

In a seminal scene from Shakespeare's Henry V, Henry goes incognito into the trenches to hear what the common soldier thinks of his heroic adventure.  Cannon fodder for royal vengeance they are is the consensus, dampening but not destroying Henry's dream to retake English territories from the French. 

American westward expansion was done by the people, not kings and courtiers.  It may have been conceived and initiated by Presidents, but the real work of plodding, planting, fighting, and settling was done by ordinary Americans. 

The frontier was indeed a lawless place where justice was administered from the barrel of a gun, where summary, extrajudicial hanging of cattle thieves was common, where The Gunfight at OK Corral was a fictional representation of the harsh reality of the times. 

The market was as free as it gets, and the only rule was 'Let the buyer beware'.  It was a marketplace of raw supply and demand, horse trading, snake oil salesmen, canny entrepreneurs, suckers, and gold diggers. Fortunes were made through diligence, violence, insight, and defiance. Laissez-faire was the mildest way of putting commercial transactions. 

 

Eventually civilization came to the West.  Those first settlers understood that the six-shooter was only a temporary, inefficient way of protecting one's investment; and out of that understanding came the rule of law, land titling, court access, and the gradual ordering of new lands.  The early years were indeed lawless and violent, but reflected the insuppressible frontier spirit of the new Americans willing to risk their lives for prosperity, land, significance.

The typically American valuation of individuality and independence grew out of those days.  Government was non-existent, towns grew up willy-nilly and only as supply depots.  The new Americans had no use for government until it could do what they could not.  The platting of urban land facilitated property rights, provided order to development.  In the old Southwest (the Florida panhandle) where English, French, Spanish, and Americans fought for dominance, transport, infrastructure, social services were all private until settlers and entrepreneurs realized the benefits of a benign overseer. 

The early days of industrialization - the era of the Robber Barons Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan - was an urban extension of the Wild West.  These first capitalists built and grew businesses on their own in bloody, unmediated competition with others.  The Al Capone era in Chicago where gangsters fought for turf and influence was no different, simply the other side of the American coin. 

So it is no surprise that after a scant 250 years, America is still redolent of the Wild West, robber baron capitalism, expansionism, territorialism, and fierce individuality.  The inner city black ghettoes are not anomalies, but legatees of this persistent, timeless ethos.  Guns, territorial ambition, individualism, violence, and lawlessness there are no different than the Wild West of two hundred years before. 

Donald Trump is the most complete expression of this ethos that America has ever seen.  The Left thinks he runs against the grain - baldly and defiantly individualistic, capitalist, and opportunist while they are compassionate, commiserating, and inclusive - but he goes with the grain.  Even the most casual student of American history with one or two trips to the wide open spaces understands his profound Americanism.  Only those with fanciful visions of a world that never existed and never will think he is out of step. 

Trump is a gunfighter, a robber baron, a carny barker, a roughhewn salesman, an adventurer.  He brooks no opposition and confronts any resistance with violence of his own.  He is uncultured without social graces.  He does not suffer fools, makes way through the ranks with intimidation and force of character; and he is exactly the president to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Putin and Xi.  He has, like his OK Corral gunslinger ancestors, no hesitation to use all the weapons in his armory to defeat his enemies, gain hegemony, wealth, and control. 

Why should anyone be surprised at the personality, character, and ambitions of Donald Trump?  He is a product of America, speaks for America, embodies every bit of its aggressive, uncultured, bourgeois appeal. 

Europeans shake their heads as they always have at American low-class excess, and the American Left goes apoplectic at his use of power and authority; but both have ignored or at best overlooked his origins, his social and cultural inheritance. 

Romance In A Time Of Misery - A Story Of Sex, Love And The Taming Of A Liberal Woman

Amanda Phillips was a simple woman of simple tastes and modest expectations.  She had grown up in a small New England town, daughter of a homemaker and a pharmacist, good Catholic, choir girl, good student, and aspiring citizen. 

That is what New Brighton did.  It was the model of propriety, rectitude, and good manners. Men still tipped their hats to women and opened doors for them, mothers happily and willingly took care of their husbands and their homes, and neighbors were helpful and considerate. 

Some thought that Thornton Wilder had New Brighton in mind when he wrote Our Town; and while the play had a dark message about life, the characters were much like those in Amanda's home town. 

 

Mrs. Eddy next door, for example, watched out for the Phillips children, brought angel food cake to Emma Phillips on Saturdays, and her husband helped Jack Phillips shovel snow from the driveway after bad storms. 

The town had its rumors - Irma Swanson's suicide, John Baxter's fugue to Paraguay to meet his Guarani lover, the 'incident at Chestnut Hill Park', an affair best left alone, and the arrest of a city alderman who 'had one hand in the till and the other hand up the skirt of the receptionist' - but all in all New Brighton was a good place to live, worship, and work. 

 

Amanda spent two years at Central Connecticut State College before it became a university and when it was still a teachers' college.  Her family intended her to become an elementary school teacher and she followed their advice and counsel.  Until one day she woke up dissatisfied, disappointed with and discouraged by her ordinary, common, and uninspiring life. 

It could have been the times.  Despite the insularity of New Brighton, the social revolution taking place everywhere else in the country could not but help but influence the town. Or perhaps it was sexual maturity and a growing sense of her femaleness and erotic desire; or the surprising fragility of her parents' marriage, itself a product of the age.  She heard late night arguments in their bedroom over her mother's frustration, immobility, and desperate desire for independence. 

In any case, Amanda became increasingly restive, told her parents that she was going to quit CCSC and go to New York to find herself and her fortune. 

Mr. and Mrs. Phillips were just as happy to have their now adult daughter out from underfoot - the decks needed to be clear for running in these difficult times - and wished her well.

New York was a far cry from New Brighton, but the young Phillips girl had her wits about her and enough savvy to negotiate the pitfalls of a young ingenue in the big city.  In fact she found the city exciting, demanding, and perfectly matched to her mood and expectations.

It was a heady time, a time of coffee shops, intellectual debate, revolutionary thinking, and liberal vision.  Life was now an open field, vistas in all directions, and room to roam. 

 

She enrolled in NYU, took courses on Hegel and Marx, found places of intellectual opening and collegiality, and her life trajectory now seemed clear.  Her life as a committed progressive began. 

Her personal life was just as fulfilled.  She had many sexual partners, travelled with them cross-country and stayed in Haight-Ashbury and a cabin in the Humboldt County woods and with each adventure became more and more convinced of the rightness and righteousness of her journey. 

However, the doors to her inner rooms, as she put it, remained closed.  None of her lovers had the patience to go beyond political philosophy, but she enjoyed her immersion in the heady social freedom of the times to explore who she really was. Love was absent in an otherwise full and complete life. 

She, like most of her New York friends grew out of rebellion and channeled her progressive energies into more substantial and productive work.  Too limited in education to follow a career in law and pursue a radical agenda in the courtroom, and too rooted in progressive ideology to pursue one in business, she turned to non-profit advocacy and joined the mainstream of liberal activism. 

Over the years there was no progressive cause that she didn't embrace - women's rights, the fate of the black man, the environment, world peace. So committed, involved, and passionate was she about the causes she fought for, that she lost the perspective that she once had.  If there was one thing about the Grover's Corners and New Brighton it was foundation - the importance of social and personal compassion and the inclusion of others in one's life and liberty.  

Now she had become embittered, angry, and annoyed at the ignorance of conservatives who refused to acknowledge the problems faced by the country and the world at large.  They were hidebound in the false security of wealth and privilege or so trapped in a working class prejudice that their obduracy and unwillingness to open their eyes was maddening. 

It is hard to love anything, let alone anyone within this zeitgeist of hate, resentment, and suspicion; and so that one important piece of the puzzle remained missing.  There was no room for wine and roses when the problems facing humanity were existential. 

Epiphanies happen unexpectedly - that is what they are, sudden aha! experiences that come without warning, and so it was that she met the man of her dreams in a K Street bar.  All of the subliminal, long immured, but powerfully romantic feelings that had remained behind closed doors for so many years came to the fore. 

 

At first she hated her feminized, independent, willful self for even entertaining such feelings, but simply could not help herself.  She fell head over heels in love with Trevor Cabot, Republican, conservative, lawyer and developer. 

Patrick McGrath in his book Asylum writes of the spontaneous, uncontrollable sexual desire of a young married woman for a patient at the maximum security hospital for the criminally insane where her husband is Deputy Superintendent. There was no question of propriety or caution involved.  Like Amanda, too much unrequited emotional need had built up and there was no question of for once and for all releasing it. 

McGrath's Stella simply could not help herself, and even awareness of her lover's violent, psychopathic past could deter her. She abandoned all reason, all caution, all responsibility to her husband and young son and pursed a disastrous relationship with Edgar Stark. 

Women, said McGrath, are creatures of vast, inexhaustible resources of sexual desire, passion, and need; and under the right circumstances and with the right partner, they are expressed and cannot be reversed. Men, he went on to say, are much more limited and circumspect in their desires.  Perhaps because they have always been the pursuer, the privileged, and the dominant sex, they have fewer such emotional reserves; but in any case it is women who fall the hardest, who succumb despite every measure of social discipline. 

Stella was so impossibly in love with Stark that she risked her life and despite the reemergence of his deadly psychopathic side never lost her desire for him. 

McGrath could have written just as easily about Amanda Phillips who from the very first came under the thrall, the spell, the control of Trevor Cabot.  All reserve was abandoned, and despite everything - his radical conservatism and his socially dismissive and arrogant political posture against which she had fought for decades - she couldn't resist.  He was inimitably attractive, confident, sexually mature, and irresistibly charming. 

In her calmer moments, she thought of her mother who had warned her against such men.  They had only only one thing on their mind and all women should beware.  In fact Trevor was a caricature of the cad, the Casanova,  and the Lothario her mother had described, and she had to smile at both the image and the reality.  Neither mattered.  She knew that she could not do without him. 

It is not surprising that her political advocacy waned as her sexual desire increased.  There was clearly no room for both in such an intense physical and emotional relationship; but it was more than her liberalism being shunted aside to make room for the more immediate passion she was feeling. The sexual desire somehow dismantled the architecture of her political belief. 

If this individual, highly personalized, intense, independent relationship was so completely satisfying, then wasn't individualism itself more valuable than communitarianism?  And if such irrevocable intimacy erased everything outside it, of what value was that pedestrian, predictable world she had spent so many years trying to change?

The relationship between Stella and Stark ended and ended badly - he off into his own febrile, insane world and she desperately depressed, still hopelessly in love with him and unable to live without him.  The affair between Amanda and Trevor ended less dramatically and existentially; but the transformation in her had been ineradicable.  The world looked different after the affair, as clear as before but the obverse of what she had seen. 

Love - usually the obfuscator of reality - was a cleansing agent, and gone were her former dreams of utopia and a new, compassionate, verdant, and peaceful world.  She had been tamed as completely as Kate had been by Petruchio in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.  In both cases the taming had not been enslavement but freedom to choose once the fetters of the inhibiting past had been removed. 

Amanda was finally a happy woman.