The narrative of Greatness
My kindly professors always tried their best. They worked hard, spoke passionately, and assigned impressive tomes to be purchased at a markup. They took themselves and their job seriously, and gave all indication that they believed they were relaying facts. That passing down truth was their job.
But they weren’t…. or they weren’t just doing that. They were relaying many things, including quite a sizeable package of values and myths in between those facts.
Let’s focus on just one of those myths — the narrative of the genius.
And here it is: in every subject I studied there wasn’t just an effort to relay skills and information to me, but to put in my head an idolization of historical luminaries who presumably “deserved” “credit” for their contributions to the field.
In some cases that can reflect genuine history — there were some musicians, mathematicians, and scientists who did play a disproportionate role in history.
But in other cases this hero-worship is arbitrary and highly contentious (e.g. those who wrote just one “great” book that wasn’t even received well and then suddenly declared to be part of the canon posthumously).
Though it’s not explicit worship (there are no pews, no prayers, nor would you often hear the word “hero”) this form of idolatry is actually quite easy to prove. You could test for hero-worship by asking a very unceremonious question about somebody, and if it irks people, then that’s an indication that they think the person is above questioning. The idea that anybody can be above questioning is the defining trait of idolizing.
So to measure if somebody idolizes Bach/Euler/DaVinci you could ask a question like, “Is this person really still relevant? I feel like whatever they came up with would have been invented by 12 other people by now if they had never existed.” If the reaction to this question is hostility rather than curiosity, then your bit of troll-bait has succeeded in revealing the emotions at play.
I don’t exactly know why this is done in academia. Perhaps it’s not nefarious, perhaps for narrative and inspiration’s sake many students want a simplistic world of a few “great men” achieving deserved timeless fame from their ideas.
Or perhaps there’s an implicit lie, that we ourselves have some shot at becoming the next idol if we only write that “great American novel” or solve that simple-sounding conjecture. Honestly, I don’t know if academic heroes are still made, especially not while they’re alive.
I studied psychology, and in that field the cult of celebrity was particularly clear. I studied at the tail-end of lionizing of Freud and Skinner. Freud became actively disliked [for his lack of rigor, sexualism, and what he showed us about ourselves], and Skinner was quietly put into a back drawer [as it became more clear that reinforcement was only a piece of learning].
But it wasn’t just them — Zimbardo, Milgram, and revered as men, not just the ideas those men articulated. You’d hear things like “so and so was the Father of positive psychology.” Multiple classes focused as more on the history of the people who offered theories than the truth of those theories themselves.
I understand film, an even younger field, has a similar habit. No matter how young the field, it seems academia will find a way to build up some geniuses.
One clear critique I want to make — if I was studying creative writing with the hope of writing a commercially successful work, it sure would be antithetical to overly focus on the literary canon — books that wouldn’t commercially succeed if they were written today. I’d probably want to study books that had defied the odds, or evergreen genres (romance, dystopian YA, fantasy).
I’ll stake a claim — that many of these heroes aren’t the most important in their fields (Plato, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Hitchcock, Freud, Einstein), and even those that are field-defining often still receive recognition disproportionate to their achievement (Kasparov).
As evidence for this act of desecration let’s consider a question — “Where are all the Shakespeares of our generation?”
There are two possibilities — if fame is objective and always given to those who do “great things” then the fact that there is no writer so famous means there is no writer so good. There must be some odd intellectual collapse?
Or, more realistically, maybe there are 17 Shakespeares alive today (in terms of skill and potential, if not necessarily plays written). After all, the population is 17 times as high now. And what if that’s just too many Shakespeares? What if the narrative of heroism isn’t able to handle a reality where there are dozens, or thousands of geniuses alive at once, too many to name and worship and remember?
What if it’s all just a need we have in our head, to have an idol, and so we take the mere ideas of memories of mere names and use those as a substitute so long as they continue to fit well enough? Well, maybe then we’d expect a writing like this to cause consternation and dissonance — it would come across as an act of emotional vandalism — disrupting a culturally sanctioned peace of mind.