Isn't it interesting that "genius" is a now popular idea? Elite academics avoid this concept--except of course for popularizers like Harold Bloom with his recent overblown tome on the 100 greatest geniuses of literature. Of course, for élite academics, this concept is suspect precisely because it is supposedly elitist. The middle-brow public for which Bloom writes, meanwhile, has no such scruples. For me, the concept of genius has no specific analytical value, in other words, it doesn't tell you anything specific about a poet to say he or she is a genius. You do have to know whether a writer like Gertrude Stein saw HERSELF as a genius (she did of course, and meant something fairly specfic by this word.

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Stephen Pinker, the author of a new book attacking the concept of the "blank slate." In theory he is quite right. I'm sure that if I had an identical twin separated from me at birth he would love poetry of the New York School, Ornette Coleman, and double lattes. The problem is that every specific conclusion that Pinker wants to draw from the centrality of genetics and evolutionary biology is ideologically charged in a tendentious way. When he gets to the Arts he wants to say that modernism is a betrayal of our genetics. He has great fun with Virginia Woolf's assertion that human nature changed in 1910. Of course it didn't, he dutifully points out. Here's the thing, though: to take this sort of statement literally shows an obtuseness to imaginative uses of language that should disqualify him from saying anything about literature.

If my hypothetical identical twin also loves Ornette, then we might say that this preference lies in our genetic make-up. Yet there obviously cannot be an Ornette-loving gene per se. It must mean, rather, that it is in our genetic make-up to like "that sort of thing," however that is defined. Then how can any preference for the avant-garde be defined, a priori, as contra naturam? How can some behaviours and preferences be seen as naturally human and others be disqualified as abberant? If genes make us what we are, they also make us write dissertations on Foucault and found feminist movements, write atonal music, build ugly modernist skyscrapers, and join cargo cults. By definition, no activity reasonably widespread among human beings of any place or time can be defined as fundamentally unhuman. It would be like arriving at the Galapagos Islands and saying "those tortoises aren't acting like real tortoises; obviously they haven't read Stephen Pinker's new book!"