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The latter understanding of the word only gained currency in the eighteenth century …. Charged with supernatural authority and invested with mystery and power, the notion of genius was dangerous. To speak of Hitler as a genius may seem unsettling, even shocking. Revelations that the singer Michael Jackson did so several years ago provoked an international outcry.

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But whatever the warped musings of the late pop star, to describe Hitler as a genius here is not to condone his actions or character in any way, or even to comment on his abilities, such as they were. It is simply to call attention to the fact that the label was crucial to his rise to power and public cult.


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We are less familiar with the darker side of genius today. We tend to focus on the heroic version that brings to mind the good genius of Einstein. Historians, by and large, have abetted this triumph, showing themselves little inclined to think of genius in connection with a man like Hitler. Their reluctance is understandable. Yet if we wish to appreciate the role that genius has played in the modern world, we must recall the evil with the good, bearing in mind as we do so the uncomfortable thought that genius is ultimately the product of the hopes and longings of ordinary people.

We are the ones who marvel and wonder, longing for the salvation genius might bring. We are the ones who pay homage and obeisance. In a very real sense, the creator of genius is us. It begins in classical Greece, when poets, philosophers, and statesmen first entertained the question of what makes the greatest men great, initiating a conversation that was continued by the Romans. What power did Socrates possess to make him the wisest of all men?

What godlike force moved through Alexander or Julius Caesar as they leveled all before them? Why was the poet Homer able to sing like no other? What special something did these great-souled men possess? What special something possessed them? Christians took up these and related questions in a centuries-long rumination that continued into the early modern period, adapting the language of the ancients to suit their own image of the God-man Christ and the prophets and saints who struggled to imitate his perfection.

Possessed by the Holy Spirit, or lifted up by the heavenly angels, the great-souled man might aspire to be perfect as God was perfect. How could one be sure that those seized by higher powers were not mad, their souls stirred by dark humors and melancholy fits? It is worth listening closely to the answers. For although there is no single notion of genius that coheres magically over time, there are coherent ways of imagining how the highest beings might appear and what a beautiful mind might entail.

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The modern genius was born in the eighteenth century—conceived, in keeping with long-standing prejudices, almost exclusively as a man. There were precedents for this birth, stretching all the way back to antiquity. That dismissal was by no means uniformly accepted. But the scale was nonetheless significant and the consequences profound.

For not only did it leave men and women alone in the world with their Creator; it did so at the very moment that the Creator was appearing to many to be more distant, more remote, more withdrawn, and less likely to intervene in human affairs than he had been or so it seemed in earlier times. To reach the realm of the sacred, to get to God— if indeed he even existed, as an emboldened minority was inclined to wonder—was more difficult than ever before.

A vast space opened up, and there were no longer helpers on hand to guide human beings across the way. It was in that space that the modern genius was conceived and born. Geniuses pulled back the curtain of existence to reveal a universe that was richer, deeper, more extraordinary and terrible than previously imagined. Genius was a flash of light, but its brilliance served to illuminate the dark mystery that surrounded and set it apart. Geniuses, then, were believed to possess rare and special powers: the power to create, redeem, and destroy; the power to penetrate the fabric of the universe; the power to see into the future, or to see into our souls.

The second transformation key to understanding the modern conception of genius is sociopolitical and rests on a foundation of the belief in human equality. And yet the assertion of equality was qualified and challenged from the start, with whole categories of human beings singled out as exceptions to the general rule. Historians have devoted close attention to these exceptions, showing how women, people of color, Jews, and others were systematically deprived of their rights in strategies of exclusion that aimed at denying some the inherent equality granted to others.


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  8. Even historians are wiser now. We know there is a point to sociology, and we do study the colonial world, in fact many of the most interesting historians in recent years come out of the former colonies.

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    We have a fantastic pluralism. But it is quite rare and even the public knows that they are getting just a fraction of the whole, as part of the entertainment industry. As pluralism grew, authority became distributed. But authority, and wisdom, will always be in demand. Before the past informed contemporary life. Between and the future became the obsession of modernity.

    Our era, says Hartog, is one of hollowness and of fear of what is coming. Hollowness sometimes comes with a face, such as that of a Putin or a Trump. We try to see what historical forces may counter them, and we may think of the faces of Merkel, Macron, or Justin Trudeau, although we are far from certain what they can achieve. It should give impetus for historical consideration.

    Just as liberties and wealth have grown for decades, and same sex relations and marriages make global progress, still providing directionality for our time, it is combatted fiercely by authoritarian regimes. In Poland, our neighbor, the nationalist regime is clamping down on gender and sexology programs in universities.

    The campaign extends to the humanities at large. Academics in Poland now have two CVs—one with their courses in gender and sex included, one without.


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    Time and its directionality are coming back with force. But at the core it is all about values. Some of the most inspiring work in the humanities these days is about articulating values and anchoring them in realities. But, to be honest, this is not yet the main focus of our work. The humanities are conspicuously weak when it comes to articulating where we are and where we should go.

    Instead, we mumble. And when someone really provides such a grand narrative, it is with irony. It is part of the entertainment industry, Pirates of the Caribbean relocated to Silicon Valley, where billionaires claim that nanotech will make them live forever. It sells. But it will do nothing to change the mind of Polish ministers, or help remove them from power. They are serious. We should be, too.

    Today, there is another source of authority that has rapidly been taking over a good deal of the consciousness of time. They are also erudite, they have prestigious positions at top universities, they are still often men—the difference is that they are scientists.

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    They are the new masters of time, and they appear when many historians have accepted that there is a crisis of time, a vacuum, a period of no clear direction. Humans are changing the planet, they said, and it is not becoming flatter. They were physicists and chemists. In the old days physics people said very different things. From about physicists started thinking otherwise.

    In fact, some had started this thinking much earlier.

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    See further below. But now there was an entire community talking—about time and history. On scales that they only seem to talk about in the School of Physics, or the School of Divinity, leaving us in history far behind… The first reaction from history would of course be to say, come on, there are so many times! Your big time is just a special case. Come and take a course in our faculty first and you will realize how many. This synchronization is a work now ongoing.

    2. Darrin McMahon - Beyond Belief 2007

    Some of it is indeed done by scientists—but over the long term, we historians must also do the job, and we have barely started. Much of this work by the sciences is creative, fabulous, groundbreaking, mind-boggling. We should embrace it. And of course, most of us do—we register that this is happening, just as historians always take note of progress in science, medicine and technology. We should also be proud of taking, sometimes, a critical attitude. Historians always kept a distance from science-y ways of talking about history, such as Darwinism and evolutionary thought, because it intruded on what we held dear, intentionality.

    With R. Collingwood we took seriously the distinction between events—that happened in nature—and actions, that humans performed and could be held responsible for. Collingwood, The Idea of History , new ed. In times of climate change and rapid environmental disruptions, and when ice ages are so rare that we can leave them to the geologists, nature is not just a silent backdrop where things go on more or less as they always did.

    To his credit, E. Carr was somewhat aware of this. He noted that with Charles Lyell in geology and Charles Darwin in biology, history entered science—and science entered history. We could discuss the mastery point of course, but this was —the downside of mastery was not yet fully established. At the time, few historians thought that this was their mission.

    His point was not so much the environment, but rather the status of history. Carr dislikes the dualism of Collingwood. He cites C.