Malcolm Gladwell (forget Christopher Hitchens for a minute, this is the one to watch), reviewing several new books for a recent New Yorker, writes about innovation emerging from groups. He says forget about the lone-genius trope; brilliant innovators have needed social reinforcement just like the rest of us. Pulling from books on disparate subject matters (television’s early SNL, art, politics, and philosophy), he ties together the thread that argues: anyone who’s mattered has been part of a movement.

[He draws, for example, from Randall Collins, who, in The Sociology of Philosophies, argues that only three major thinkers have appeared solo-- Wang Ch’ung (1st Cent. Taoist metaphysician), Bassui Tokusho (14th Cent. Zen mystic), and Ibn Khaldun (14th Cent. Arabic philosopher).]

Sweeping through major figures in Neo-Confucianism, Freudian psychoanalysis, Impressionism, German Idealism, Darwinian science, and more, I am, in fact, hard-pressed to locate a soloist in the act of innovation or genius.

Rather than focusing on the lone-genius trope (one of the most irritating narrative devices in both cinema and literature-- anyone seen Shine?), Gladwell instead reminds us of our under-conceptualized notions of groups:

“Uglow’s book [The Lunar Men] reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet it you can combine the best of those two states- the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity- you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible." (emphasis mine)

So it turns out that we need CAPGAS more than we thought. A Genius Lesson, of sorts.