The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (49 page)

The museum offers an intriguing explanation for the primacy of San Francisco sourdough. The bread is especially sensitive to the presence of certain bacteria in the air. It depends on these microbes for its flavor. San Francisco, the helpful placard explains, has a bacterium especially well suited for baking sourdough. There it is, a rod-shaped little bugger squirming under a microscope, named
Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.

It is a nice explanation, but misleading. To explain San Francisco sourdough by the presence of a microbe is to fall into the Galton trap—that is, to attribute the bread’s goodness to a single factor, and a biological one at that, just as Galton attributed all genius to the “right” genes. This explanation fails to consider all of the other factors that go into the making of a good loaf of sourdough: the innovative baking techniques of Isidore Boudin, the culture of bread-making that evolved in Gold Rush San Francisco, the miners who nourished that budding industry with their dollars, not to mention the inconvenient fact that New York and Paris also have plenty of interesting microbes, including, yes,
Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis
.

It’s not only sourdough that befuddles us. Look out the window. Did your local weatherman get it right? Despite our many scientific accomplishments, we are still not good at forecasting weather more than a few days out. This is not because weather is completely random, like a roulette wheel in the sky. Weather systems behave rationally, but they do so as part of a “nonlinear dynamical system.”

That’s a mouthful, but essentially it means a system where two plus two doesn’t always equal four. In a linear system, small inputs yield small outputs. Turn your steering wheel a smidge and the car veers right or left a smidge. In a nonlinear system, small inputs yield large, sometimes humongous, outputs. Turn your steering wheel a smidge and the car does a U-turn or your microwave goes on the fritz a few hours later.

The best-known example of this phenomenon is the butterfly effect. It describes a scenario in which the flapping wings of a butterfly in, say, Argentina weeks later affects the path and intensity of a hurricane off the coast of Bermuda. It sounds absurd, but it is not. Minuscule variations in the initial conditions of a phenomenon—such as the air disturbance caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings—can snowball into much larger effects in a relatively short time. The problem, and the reason pop culture gets the butterfly effect so wrong, is that scientists find it extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to predict exactly how this cascading chain of events will unfold. It is not the randomness of meteorological conditions that makes predicting the weather so difficult but their
interconnectedness.

That sounds an awful lot like creativity, and especially collaborative creativity. When a jazz trio improvises, it produces something that none of the individual musicians could on their own. “Even if we knew everything there was to know about the mental makeup of each musician, we’d still have trouble predicting the emergence of the group’s improvisation,” says psychologist and jazz musician Keith Sawyer. The whole of the ensemble is greater than the sum of its parts. Now take that small ensemble and enlarge it into the size of an orchestra, then a small town, then, larger still, into a teeming city, such as Athens or Florence.

You see the problem. Golden ages are nonlinear systems, and these are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict. We can’t explain them by homing in on any single factor. They are complex, interlocking systems, like the weather or a loaf of sourdough.

So while we can examine discrete parts of a golden age (tolerance, money, etc.), this doesn’t enable us to predict where and when one will appear. Small inputs balloon into huge, and unexpected, outcomes, but we can’t easily identify which small inputs matter the most. Just as not all butterflies produce a hurricane, not all outbreaks of bubonic plague produce a Renaissance.

Another mysterious aspect of creativity centers on what the great historian Arnold Toynbee called “challenge and response.” All great human advancements, he believed, represented a creative response to a challenge. Makes sense. Why, though, do some people respond to personal tragedy—a debilitating illness, the death of a parent at a young age—by shutting down (or acting out), while others use these tragedies as fuel for bursts of creative genius? Likewise, why do some places respond to collective tragedies—an outbreak of plague, for instance—by turning inward, narrowing their gaze, while others expand their horizons and do great things? We don’t know. This is why, I think, we can’t invent a place of genius, any more than we can invent a sunny day.

That doesn’t mean, though, that we should simply throw up our hands in surrender. We can prepare appropriately, by wearing sunglasses on a sunny day, carrying an umbrella on a rainy one. We can anticipate, too, by tracking approaching frontal systems, reading the sky, and riding
the currents. That’s what the geniuses I encountered in this book did so expertly. They were surfers. The surfer doesn’t create the wave. She observes the wave, sees it, in the profound, Hindu sense of the word, and dances with it.

When a major storm batters a coastal town and evacuation warnings are issued, invariably local TV stations zoom in on a few crazy surfers determined to have the ride of their lives. Some, perhaps most, will wipe out spectacularly. But a few will ride the wave beautifully. Socrates. Shen Kuo. Adam Smith. Mozart. Freud. And, yes, Steve Jobs. Surfers all of them.

Our task is twofold: to improve our surfing skills, and also to increase the likelihood of good waves. Many people have tried to come up with a formula, a piña colada recipe, for places of genius. These almost always miss the mark. Too often they confuse the fruits of a creative place with the causes of one. One popular urbanist, for instance, has identified what he calls the “Three Ts” of creative cities: technology, talent, and tolerance. The first two—technology and talent—are
products
of creative places rather than causes, and technology is hardly a prerequisite for places of genius, witness ancient Athens and Renaissance Florence, two places that produced a mother lode of genius but little in the way of new technology. And while tolerance is certainly an attribute of creative places, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Las Vegas is an extremely tolerant place but not an especially creative one.

A better set of attributes, I think, are—and I’ll jump on the alliteration bandwagon here—the Three Ds: disorder, diversity, and discernment. Disorder, as we’ve seen, is necessary to shake up the status quo, to create a break in the air. Diversity, of both peoples and viewpoints, is needed to produce not only more dots but also
different kinds
of dots. Discernment is perhaps the most important, and overlooked, ingredient. Linus Pauling, the renowned chemist and two-time Nobel Prize winner, was once asked by a student how to come up with good ideas. It’s easy, replied Pauling. “You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.”

It is, of course, not so easy. There’s a reason we’ve made a religion of genius, elevated these brilliant men and women to the realm of gods
and goddesses. As an ancient Greek poet put it, “Before the gates of excellence, the high gods have placed much sweat. The sweat of labor often mingled with the sweat of pain.”

We make creativity even more painful by clinging to unhelpful myths. In particular, the myth of the lone genius squanders our energies. Corporations spend huge sums of money on workshops designed to help employees “think more creatively,” a noble ambition but one that will prove futile if the environment in which they work is not receptive to new ideas.

Clutching our shiny new iProducts, breathlessly awaiting the next Great Disruption, we consider ourselves thoroughly modern, but our beliefs about creativity are stuck in the nineteenth century. We’re trapped in the Galton Box. We can’t breathe in there. We need to break free. We need to begin thinking of creativity not as a genetic endowment, a gift, but as something that is earned—through hard work, yes, but also through the careful cultivation of favorable circumstances. We need to begin thinking of creativity not as a private indulgence but as a public good, part of the commons. We get the geniuses that we want and that we deserve.

Genius, like charity, begins at home. One reason I embarked on this colossal fools’ experiment was not for my own stab at genius (too late for that) but for my nine-year-old daughter’s. Family is the one sort of culture that we can actually mold. So mold I have. No, I have not converted my home into a raucous Athenian agora or a dusty Florentine
bottega
. I have not transformed the breakfast nook into a Viennese coffeehouse, or the living room into a Silicon Valley incubator. But I have learned some valuable lessons from my travels and done my best to apply them.

For starters, I provide a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Sometimes, I throw up obstacles, owing to the Power of Constraints. Like Socrates, I play dumb, asking my daughter a lot of “obvious” questions. Like the poet-rulers of Hangzhou, I try to set an example by not only preaching creativity but practicing it as well. Like the Medicis, I assign her tasks that seem like a “bad fit.” We occasionally hold an
adda
, that wonderfully aimless conversation, which nine-year-olds take to naturally. Sometimes, I introduce schema violations into the household, such as
when I wore underwear on my head. I try to teach her the importance of remaining open to experience, even if that experience involves a green food. Our house is tolerant, but only up to a point. When she asks for a raise in her allowance, I point out, as Pericles did, that a little bit of money promotes creativity but too much squelches it. I encourage her to fail often and foolishly. I provide her with a (mostly) attentive audience.

I warn her of the dangers of complacency and have made it abundantly clear that under absolutely no circumstances is she to invade Sicily. Not even a little. I teach her the art of defocused attention, but not during homework time. I regularly demonstrate the importance of ignorance. We have a family routine, but one prone to spasms of chaos. We walk. We argue. We laugh. When she questions why, if education does not correlate directly with creative eminence, she still has to go to school, I tell her to ask her mother.

None of this has anything to do with genetics. I can hear old Galton harrumphing through the ages. Sorry, Francis, but ever since you coined that term
nature versus nurture
, we’ve energetically debated the relative merits of each. It’s a silly argument, and unnecessary. Creativity doesn’t happen “in here” or “out there” but in the spaces in between. Creativity is a
relationship
, one that unfolds at the intersection of person and place.

This intersection, like all such crossroads, is a dangerous, unforgiving place. You have to pay attention, slow down, and stay alert for the idiots out there. It’s worth the risk, though, for the humble intersection, be it in ancient Athens or strip-mall Sunnyvale, is the true genius loci. The place where genius lives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

You can’t rush genius and, it turns out, you can’t rush a book about genius either. That is a lesson I learned the hard way. Thankfully, I had help from many quarters—friends, family, and complete strangers.

Many people kindly provided me with a place to think and write: Sarah Ferguson, Art Cohn, Hans Staiger, Lisa Collins, and David and Abby Snoddy. I’m grateful to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and especially its director of artistic services, Sheila Pleasants, for the many productive, and happy, residencies I spent there. I’m also indebted to Georgetown University’s Mortara Center for International Studies, and its director, Kathleen McNamara, for providing me with that most valuable of gifts: a library card. Thanks, too, to Alex and Charles Karelis for having the good sense to launch, and maintain, the wonderful Writers Room DC.

Several people read early drafts of the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions: John Lister, Stefan Gunther, Manil Suri, Josh Horwitz, Barbara Brotman, and Chuck Berman. Alyson Wright diligently transcribed hours of interviews.

In researching this book, I relied heavily on what my late friend Laurey Masterton called The Golden Thread. People—sometimes friends but just as often strangers—generously offered an introduction or a suggestion that invariably led me to the right person in the right place at
the right time. Some of these “golden threaders” appear in these pages, others do not. This latter category includes (but is by no means limited to) Joey Katona, Ross King, Yin Zi, Tom de Waal, Gerry Holmes, Tom Crampton, Alexandra Korey, Kimberly Bradley, Raju Narisetti, and Dan Moshavi. In Florence, David Battistella was exceedingly generous with his time and knowledge.

When discouragement reared its head, friends were quick to offer a kind word or a stiff drink, and often both. I’m grateful to Mark Landler, Angela Tung, Laura Blumenfeld, Steven Petrow, Martin Regg Cohn, Karen Mazurkewich, Steve LeVine, Nuri Nurlybayeva, Tracy Wahl, Jim Benning, Aliza Marcus, Andrew Apostolou, Jennifer Hanawald, and, in his own inimitable way, Warren Rabin. I am especially indebted to members of Writers Who Lunch, my informal, yet essential, support group: Maarten Troost, Florence Williams, Tim Zimmermann, David Grinspoon, Juliet Eilperin, and Josh Horwitz.

My agent, Sloan Harris, always has my back, keeps my nose to the grindstone, and isn’t afraid to tell me when I have my head up my ass. At Simon & Schuster, several people worked tirelessly behind the scenes, including Megan Hogan, Jonathan Evans, and Sydney Tanigawa. They made this a better book, and for that I am grateful.

My editor, Jonathan Karp, maintains he is no genius. Don’t believe him. I consider myself very fortunate indeed to have such a gifted hand guiding my sometimes shaky ship. My daughter, Sonya, was a tremendous inspiration, in ways large and small, intentional and otherwise. She patiently endured my absences, as well as my grumpy presences, when the words wouldn’t flow.