Bruce CharltonGenius has now all-but disappeared from public view; partly because intelligence (which is strongly genetic) is in decline in the West, partly because social institutions no longer recognize or nurture genius, and partly because the modern West is actively hostile to genius.
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Genius has now all-but disappeared from public view. Genius is a word that often gets thrown around too loosely. It's not something that can be easily defined, since it's an abstract concept. But there are some things worth noting.
First, the word "genius" has entered the English language from the Latin "genii". This word originally meant "of or belonging to nature". It comes from the Latin "genus", meaning "kind".
The word thus means "kind of person". The modern use of the word "genius" comes from this original sense of "nature" or "kind". The ancients did not always use the term to mean what we think of as genius today.
Sometimes they used it to mean a god, or an ancestor, or a good spirit. But it did not originally refer to any specific person, although Homer refers to it in his Iliad. Eventually this usage became more common and was used interchangeably with the name of particular individuals (such as Aristotle, Plato or Socrates).
During the Renaissance, there were several figures who were called geniuses: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. But most people think of them as individuals and not as geniuses. That's because most people now consider genius as an exceptional talent that is possessed by only a very small number of people--only those who are truly extraordinary in some field.
If you're not one of those exceptionally talented people, then you're unlikely to become a genius (and you're certainly unlikely to be called one). Yet, if we look at history we'll see that there have been many cases where many people have been considered geniuses and they were not exceptional at all. For instance: Charles Darwin was a brilliant naturalist who produced groundbreaking work on several disciplines during his lifetime but he is now widely recognized as only a moderately creative thinker whose theories have been superseded by those of his successors.
However, he is generally considered the most important thinker in biological history and one of history's greatest scientists. Abraham Lincoln was a far less brilliant politician than Franklin Delano Roosevelt but he was generally acknowledged as one of America's greatest presidents for his success in preserving the Union during the Civil War and for carrying out social reforms during Reconstruction after the war. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a less brilliant poet than Walt Whitman but he was one of America's greatest thinkers on Transcendentalism and was widely acknowledged as a great American philosopher and pioneer in American literature.
And lastly
Source: The Genius Famine: Why We Need Geniuses, Why Theyre Dying Out, And Why We Must Rescue Them
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