The humility of everyday genius
This is a hard post to write, because it violates my number one taboo-rule. Never, ever admit in public that you might be smarter than the person you are talking to.
Here is something true: I am a freakish kind of intelligent.
I'm not a mathematical or musical prodigy. I didn't publish a book at 15 or play Carnegie hall. I'm not famous in my field or one of the "Top 40 under 40." But I did get the highest marks in a class of 900 on the provincial exams (both English and Math). I placed 4th in my province on the grade 12 math competition, got a 93 in nuclear physics, and wrote a grad-school paper on the sociology of higher education that came back with the comment, "Brilliant! Worthy of publication!" (Along with an english paper that came back marked, "A. Not bad for an engineer." To which I replied, "An A isn't bad for an English student.")
Younger, I was the one who skipped a grade and still was at the top of the class. Could have skipped another grade, but they didn't know what to do with a kid who would have been 2 years younger and still near/at the top of the class. Would have been labelled "gifted", but they didn't do that where I grew up, and so I was left with... no support, no strategies, no enrichment, more than a decade of complete coasting because the parts that are actually trained in our school system came so easy for me that I barely needed to show up. (Literally. I would read under my desk, dip back into the stream long enough to answer a question, and then go back to the book.)
And...
I have nearly no skills for dealing with the mind I *do* have. This isn't a "normal" mind. (Well, it is a normal mind... it's just way out at the end of some curve or other.) It doesn't do what a normal mind does (or at least, what I've been told/have concluded that a normal mind does). It runs ahead (of itself) gathering, scanning, seeking, making connections, testing, throwing out hypotheses, learning, learning, ever learning. It does not need repetition, practice, drills, and help integrating. It needs help focusing, eliminating, confining its questions, and documenting a network of connections that is so complex that... I don't know how to finish that sentence. Let's look at this: it is currently in the process of thinking about the entropy of the universe caused (directly and indirectly) by the transmission of stories, and what that means to moral reasoning (particularly the externalization of your entropy into a limited system... and then whether that is an effective survival strategy). It's like... here are parallel streams in my mind, and one (or more) of them is continuously throwing out thoughts that make the other streams, sitting around trying to decide what to have for dinner, say, "Whoa! What?!?" Thoughts that I lack the connections or credentials to investigate (hmm... I wonder whether they have neuro-imaged people trained in multiple kinds of meditation to see whether there is a measurable difference between vipassana and shamatha?), what-ifs, ideas for art projects that I lack the physical skills to complete, skipping around from moral reasoning to aesthetics to gardening to scales of systems to molecular physics to art history to linguistics...
Layer on top of this the taboo: never, ever admit this to the world. You are never allowed to claim your intelligence out loud. Only other people are allowed to confirm it for you.
And they will (in my experience) always, always combine it with a dire warning: Don't let this go to your head. Don't become vain. Don't presume above your station. Or, they will try to caution you against becoming attached to it: Just because you've been successful so far doesn't mean you will continue to be. You could become bad at math any moment (I did, eventually, after 9 university level math courses. Although it turned out that I just hadn't understood Taylor expansions in first year.) You're only ever as smart as your last exam. I used to cry all the way through exams, even when I was doing just fine on them. I once went into shock (literal, physical shock) on the way to a statistical mechanics exam.
In fact, in this world, you can't ever (under any circumstances) confirm your ability. You can only confirm your incompetence. Your incompetence is assumed, and the whole educational process is a weeding to prove it.
And so you try to be silent, to never draw attention from anyone who might feel it necessary to put you in your place. It spills over, of course. Anybody who has talked to me for longer than a few minutes knows that there's something... not... quite... right. "Oh, yeah! I read about that in... my... course..." the force concept inventory (100%), sociology of the professions (I did a guest lecture in a graduate course), higher education (I have a whole degree in that one), the engineering profession's conception of the public good (presented it at a conference), the social construction of race as a category, Foucault, the ways in which scientific investigation is constrained by "askability" (one of the main points in the Physics for Artists course that I taught at OCAD), the pedagogically effective use of PowerPoint in the classroom (workshop), systems integration (corporate trainer), software documentation, the implications of karma and ego development on parenting strategies, stages of ethical development in the undergraduate, the existence of somatic memory as a indicator about the mind/brain connection, mystical practices in a range of religious traditions...
I'm spending my life trying to hide (and tame) this whirlwind, and the cognitive dissonance of seeing through the collective everyday stories strains at the edges of my sanity. Just getting up and facing a world that bothers to do science, and then throws out the inconvenient results... that tries to find truth via showmanship...
I can't get anything done. I don't know how.
As the icing on the cake, my mother says to me, (again, and again, and again, for years on end) "You're really weird. I'm the only normal one in this family." Of course I'm weird, Mother. I'm a fucking genius. And not one of the good ones. (By which I mean the prodigies, the dedicated, the focused, the ones who wind up on stage at Carnegie hall, and as world-renowned neuroscientists and theoretical physicists, and the ones that Malcolm Gladwell argues don't really exist, they are just the product of 10,000 hours. To which I say, "Fuck That". I was like this when I was 5 and there weren't no 10,000 hours by that point. There is something different about me, and nobody knows what to do with it. Including me. From my seat in the house, his position is part of the problem.)
And then there is this: creativity, genius, linked with madness.
What kind of intelligent am I? The kind that doubts everything, including its own existence, positing the possibility that the socially constructed reality has validity: "We have ways of finding out who the most capable are. You didn't make the cut. The world is divided into the successful and the supporting players. You, as a housewife, have become a supporting player. You aren't really one of The People. You are one of the extras. And therefore, since you are not successful, you must not be as smart as you think you are, and therefore..."
But I... but i... but...
Internationally known author on the radio, talking about higher education, makes undergrad mistake on key educational theory. I know that better than he does. I can't be completely incompetent.
Same old pat answers in the mainstream media, as if the last 150 years of philosophy haven't ever happened. I see how the discourse works, can trace it back to fundamental beliefs about the body... wonder whether we are still playing out fears of the black plague, horror of the body, betrayed by our physical forms, covering ourselves, pretending we don't have sex or think about sex... the body, the queers, the intelligentsia, amazing how much overlap there is among those categories, perhaps the access to education lets us question the assumptions and ways in which we experience our own bodies in conflict with what They Say...
What if madness is merely correlated with genius? The same way that gay and bullied youth, subject to humiliation and degradation, have high levels of suicide... what if it is the social ostracism that causes madness? What if it has nothing to do with genius, and if only we accepted this way of being and didn't try to make People Like Me (queer in addition to all the rest) try to believe that we don't exist (in the face of great evidence to the contrary), the correlation would be disentangled? What if it was (genuinely, truly) OK to be different? Not just at moments of campaigns, but everyday, in between, when we have to get up the next morning and we're still weird, and the world has moved on to the next cause?
What if we were allowed to believe we exist, were allowed to examine ourselves and our capacities, were permitted, (nay, encouraged!) to educate the next generation of The Weird without first having to deprogram their need to be invisible... what if we cast off our drab glamours and started really truly thinking about what to do with minds like these?
What would that be like?
Here is something true: I am a freakish kind of intelligent.
I'm not a mathematical or musical prodigy. I didn't publish a book at 15 or play Carnegie hall. I'm not famous in my field or one of the "Top 40 under 40." But I did get the highest marks in a class of 900 on the provincial exams (both English and Math). I placed 4th in my province on the grade 12 math competition, got a 93 in nuclear physics, and wrote a grad-school paper on the sociology of higher education that came back with the comment, "Brilliant! Worthy of publication!" (Along with an english paper that came back marked, "A. Not bad for an engineer." To which I replied, "An A isn't bad for an English student.")
Younger, I was the one who skipped a grade and still was at the top of the class. Could have skipped another grade, but they didn't know what to do with a kid who would have been 2 years younger and still near/at the top of the class. Would have been labelled "gifted", but they didn't do that where I grew up, and so I was left with... no support, no strategies, no enrichment, more than a decade of complete coasting because the parts that are actually trained in our school system came so easy for me that I barely needed to show up. (Literally. I would read under my desk, dip back into the stream long enough to answer a question, and then go back to the book.)
And...
I have nearly no skills for dealing with the mind I *do* have. This isn't a "normal" mind. (Well, it is a normal mind... it's just way out at the end of some curve or other.) It doesn't do what a normal mind does (or at least, what I've been told/have concluded that a normal mind does). It runs ahead (of itself) gathering, scanning, seeking, making connections, testing, throwing out hypotheses, learning, learning, ever learning. It does not need repetition, practice, drills, and help integrating. It needs help focusing, eliminating, confining its questions, and documenting a network of connections that is so complex that... I don't know how to finish that sentence. Let's look at this: it is currently in the process of thinking about the entropy of the universe caused (directly and indirectly) by the transmission of stories, and what that means to moral reasoning (particularly the externalization of your entropy into a limited system... and then whether that is an effective survival strategy). It's like... here are parallel streams in my mind, and one (or more) of them is continuously throwing out thoughts that make the other streams, sitting around trying to decide what to have for dinner, say, "Whoa! What?!?" Thoughts that I lack the connections or credentials to investigate (hmm... I wonder whether they have neuro-imaged people trained in multiple kinds of meditation to see whether there is a measurable difference between vipassana and shamatha?), what-ifs, ideas for art projects that I lack the physical skills to complete, skipping around from moral reasoning to aesthetics to gardening to scales of systems to molecular physics to art history to linguistics...
Layer on top of this the taboo: never, ever admit this to the world. You are never allowed to claim your intelligence out loud. Only other people are allowed to confirm it for you.
And they will (in my experience) always, always combine it with a dire warning: Don't let this go to your head. Don't become vain. Don't presume above your station. Or, they will try to caution you against becoming attached to it: Just because you've been successful so far doesn't mean you will continue to be. You could become bad at math any moment (I did, eventually, after 9 university level math courses. Although it turned out that I just hadn't understood Taylor expansions in first year.) You're only ever as smart as your last exam. I used to cry all the way through exams, even when I was doing just fine on them. I once went into shock (literal, physical shock) on the way to a statistical mechanics exam.
In fact, in this world, you can't ever (under any circumstances) confirm your ability. You can only confirm your incompetence. Your incompetence is assumed, and the whole educational process is a weeding to prove it.
And so you try to be silent, to never draw attention from anyone who might feel it necessary to put you in your place. It spills over, of course. Anybody who has talked to me for longer than a few minutes knows that there's something... not... quite... right. "Oh, yeah! I read about that in... my... course..." the force concept inventory (100%), sociology of the professions (I did a guest lecture in a graduate course), higher education (I have a whole degree in that one), the engineering profession's conception of the public good (presented it at a conference), the social construction of race as a category, Foucault, the ways in which scientific investigation is constrained by "askability" (one of the main points in the Physics for Artists course that I taught at OCAD), the pedagogically effective use of PowerPoint in the classroom (workshop), systems integration (corporate trainer), software documentation, the implications of karma and ego development on parenting strategies, stages of ethical development in the undergraduate, the existence of somatic memory as a indicator about the mind/brain connection, mystical practices in a range of religious traditions...
I'm spending my life trying to hide (and tame) this whirlwind, and the cognitive dissonance of seeing through the collective everyday stories strains at the edges of my sanity. Just getting up and facing a world that bothers to do science, and then throws out the inconvenient results... that tries to find truth via showmanship...
I can't get anything done. I don't know how.
As the icing on the cake, my mother says to me, (again, and again, and again, for years on end) "You're really weird. I'm the only normal one in this family." Of course I'm weird, Mother. I'm a fucking genius. And not one of the good ones. (By which I mean the prodigies, the dedicated, the focused, the ones who wind up on stage at Carnegie hall, and as world-renowned neuroscientists and theoretical physicists, and the ones that Malcolm Gladwell argues don't really exist, they are just the product of 10,000 hours. To which I say, "Fuck That". I was like this when I was 5 and there weren't no 10,000 hours by that point. There is something different about me, and nobody knows what to do with it. Including me. From my seat in the house, his position is part of the problem.)
And then there is this: creativity, genius, linked with madness.
What kind of intelligent am I? The kind that doubts everything, including its own existence, positing the possibility that the socially constructed reality has validity: "We have ways of finding out who the most capable are. You didn't make the cut. The world is divided into the successful and the supporting players. You, as a housewife, have become a supporting player. You aren't really one of The People. You are one of the extras. And therefore, since you are not successful, you must not be as smart as you think you are, and therefore..."
But I... but i... but...
Internationally known author on the radio, talking about higher education, makes undergrad mistake on key educational theory. I know that better than he does. I can't be completely incompetent.
Same old pat answers in the mainstream media, as if the last 150 years of philosophy haven't ever happened. I see how the discourse works, can trace it back to fundamental beliefs about the body... wonder whether we are still playing out fears of the black plague, horror of the body, betrayed by our physical forms, covering ourselves, pretending we don't have sex or think about sex... the body, the queers, the intelligentsia, amazing how much overlap there is among those categories, perhaps the access to education lets us question the assumptions and ways in which we experience our own bodies in conflict with what They Say...
What if madness is merely correlated with genius? The same way that gay and bullied youth, subject to humiliation and degradation, have high levels of suicide... what if it is the social ostracism that causes madness? What if it has nothing to do with genius, and if only we accepted this way of being and didn't try to make People Like Me (queer in addition to all the rest) try to believe that we don't exist (in the face of great evidence to the contrary), the correlation would be disentangled? What if it was (genuinely, truly) OK to be different? Not just at moments of campaigns, but everyday, in between, when we have to get up the next morning and we're still weird, and the world has moved on to the next cause?
What if we were allowed to believe we exist, were allowed to examine ourselves and our capacities, were permitted, (nay, encouraged!) to educate the next generation of The Weird without first having to deprogram their need to be invisible... what if we cast off our drab glamours and started really truly thinking about what to do with minds like these?
What would that be like?