Places of genius

What Eric Weiner did so ably with happiness in The Geography of Bliss, he attempts to do with genius in his 2016 book The Geography of Genius. Well, almost. This time he includes the time element to his geographical considerations, true geniuses gathered in one place being even more rare than happy people. So while he looked for the happiest places in the world today in the former book, this time he seeks the great places of genius in history.

This search takes him to Athens at the time of Socrates, Plato and Thucydides; Florence at the time of DaVinci and Michelangelo; Edinburgh at the time of Adam Smith, James Watt and James Hutton; and Vienna at the time of Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven.

Some places of genius may surprise readers. Calcutta, for example. Calcutta? Well, yes. From about 1840 to 1920, fueled in part about by the influence of the British Empire, this city produced a number of men of genius, such as Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, who is still revered in India.

Of the places of genius Weiner discusses, only Silicon Valley still exists as such today, but the author opines that its days may be numbered. As places of genius go, it is already getting long in the tooth.

Weiner travels to each of these places, and others, to see what they are like today and to discuss with local authorities the reasons why genius bloomed, however temporarily, in these particular locales and not others. Although he tries to generalize, the reasons seem to vary from place to place. In Calcutta, he determines that cultural chaos may have stimulated genius, except that such chaos doesn't seem to be working today.

In Florence he says that genius is always communal, one genius stimulating another. In Scotland he finds that genius is practical and has a high tolerance for ambiguity. Tension is necessary in Vienna. In Silicon Valley he gives a share of the credit to moving vans, the fact that great computer minds keep coming and going, moving from one company to another, failing with one idea but then going on to the next.

In summary he says that creative cities need three T's: technology, talent and tolerance. And three D's: disorder, diversity and discernment. Yet true genius remains something that cannot be cultivated or predicted. Mostly it's just a matter of luck.