The Generations Of Genius

Great intellects turn up regularly but not constantly or continuously – there is usually a gap of many years between a sort of tide of bright people. Pure intellect is not like art or music, which you might even say is taken to a peak through unwitting inspiration. Whereas the exercise of pure intellect is mostly a matter of just plain hard work. How many people, for example, were convinced because of poor teachers, that they weren't good at maths, or literature, or history...? How many successful mathematicians, scientists, historians, writers will tell you, by the same token, that what got them there, was dumb persistence!

My private theory is that it isn't about genetics or generation-skipping, but about the tendency of the power-driven to exploit the work of great intellects, and commandeer the apex, as it were, and hold back competition.

Thus you will get one generation that is able to avoid the scrutiny of the power-mad at the top who are moving into the decline of advancing years, and thereby re-express the work of genuine active intellect.

Right now I am in the middle of reading a book I missed reading earlier while I had consumed just about everything else of his – Asimov's 'Prelude To Foundation,' a rather large book which pre-sees all this current 'global warming/climate change' stuff. Asimov the scientist and thinker is transparently the author's voice behind each of his stories – he's a very clunky writer whose hand, if not exactly heavy, is quite evident. But of course he's still very readable. His intellectual height comes from his grasp of the importance of science, and his ideas – philosophical and even I would say political – rather than merely his slickness with words. The next identity I'd like to say a few words about is Len Deighton.And here we have a great intellect unhampered by the vast difficulties of specialised and often extreme science. Here we have an intellect - whose actual spoken voice is a cockney one – who can speak in ways so cleverly that out of the frisson of his mental games, we are left only that much later having to acknowledge how towering an intellect he really is.

I find Deighton a dangerous personality. He is utterly self-effacing to the interviewing camera but this belies his obvious self-comprehension about what the public can, and cannot, take, from the genius.

Still, Deighton is from the last great intelligent generation. We have not yet seen what the new crop has to show us; what it has to thrill us with and titillate us about and open our eyes to.

Will it come? Is it really going to come? We've been fed such utter drivel by people like Murdoch and Reagan and Thatcher and that crowd for over more than thirty years now.

Oh yes, it is coming. As surely as those old fools are dying. Nothing surer. You can smell genius. It's like getting into a brand new Rolls Royce – it's like opening a box of brand new leather shoes inside a church basement...

All the Best,

Calvin J. Bear