The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (27 page)

Groupthink is the flip side of group genius. It is the bugaboo in every theory that celebrates the virtues of collective intelligence. Groupthink is collective stupidity, and every culture is susceptible to it. The question is, why does it rear its head at certain times and not others? Why is it that when you get one group of smart people together the result is genius, and with another group of equally smart people the result is groupthink?

That question has no simple answer, but psychologists suspect a lot hinges on a group’s willingness to entertain dissenting views. Groups that tolerate dissent generate more ideas, and more good ideas, than groups that don’t, studies have found. This holds true
even if those dissenting views turn out to be completely wrong.
The mere presence of dissent—even
if wrongheaded—improves creative performance. How we talk matters at least as much as what we’re talking about. Conflict isn’t only acceptable in a place of genius. It is indispensable.

How did this truth manifest itself during the Scottish Enlightenment? First of all, explains Tom, people didn’t talk about just anything. A subject had to be deemed worthy of conversation, “conversable,” as Hume put it. Once that happened, anything was possible.

“Even a good bout of flyting.”

“Fighting?”

“No, flyting.”

“Never heard of it.”

Flyting (pronounced “flighting”) is, Tom informs me, “ritual humiliation of your opponent by verbal violence.”

I shudder. “It sounds vicious.”

“Oh, it is.” The twinkle in Tom’s eyes intensifies. The Scots are great debaters, Tom tells me, his national pride bursting through his academic propriety. If you’re looking for verbal violence, Scotland is your place. But—and this bit is crucial—after a good, vicious round of ritual humiliation, the opposing sides headed to the local pub for a few pints. No hard feelings.

For a flyting session to be deemed successful, both aspects are necessary: the ritual humiliation
and
the pints of beer afterward. Without the former, the conversation lapses into tepid banalities. Without the latter, you’ve got a brawl on your hands.

This sort of tolerance infused life in Enlightenment Scotland, a permissiveness that emerged remarkably soon after the last “witch” was hanged. Writers unleashed broadsides against the Church and politicians and other previously bulletproof targets and suffered no more than “minor inconveniences, pinpricks for their irritating behavior,” as one historian put it. Nothing was more celebrated than what the poet Robert Burns called “the man o’ independent mind.”

Tolerance
, though, is one of those words that everyone supports but few define. Tom tells me that tolerance, like genius, comes in different flavors. The most common variant is a passive tolerance; certain transgressions
of convention are permitted, though not necessarily encouraged. Edinburgh, for instance, tolerated its eccentrics and its geniuses, who conveniently tended to occupy the same body. Adam Smith, for instance, was often seen on the streets “smiling in rapt conversation with invisible companions,” as one contemporary put it. In any other city, someone like that would have been locked up. In Edinburgh, he was celebrated.

But Tom Devine describes another Scottish flavor as an “in-your-face tolerance.” That seems like a contradiction to me, but I know better by now than to say so, not here in the land of Deacon Brodie. So I wait and, sure enough, Tom elucidates.

“Take Adam Smith and David Hume.” The two philosophers were the best of friends but squabbled frequently, especially over certain subjects, such as religion. “Smith couldn’t fathom why Hume made that final leap to outright atheism. Hume couldn’t fathom why Smith didn’t.” The point, says Tom, is that these debates, while heated and laden with colorful vitriol, were never personal. “It was the battle of ideas that mattered.”

I love the way Tom Devine talks. I love the way he makes even the most pedestrian of sentences sound like poetry, and the most benign suggestions—“Let’s get a cup of coffee”—sound as if he were hatching some dangerous conspiracy and he’s inviting you to join him. That is, if you’re up to it. If you’re man enough. If you’re Scotsman enough.

I am, Tom, I am. But, alas, Tom has to run. Something about meeting a TV producer. When you are Scotland’s national bard,
living
national bard, everybody wants a piece of you. We’re walking out together, down the soulless hallway, down the stairs from floor one and a half to floor one, then through the heavy wooden doors and out into the cold and the gray.

“Come here, come here,” he says, his perma-twinkle turned up a few notches. “Look over there. Do you see that black van?”

Um, yes, I do. So?

“Cadavers.”

The history department, he explains, is joined at the hip, as it were, with the medical school. They used to bring the cadavers for dissection in hearses, and in the middle of the day no less, and this was freaking
out the history students, who were keen to dissect dead ideas, not dead bodies. But the bodies kept coming every Friday, like clockwork. It was a real problem. So Tom asked the medical school to convey the corpses in ordinary vans, not hearses. Judging by the gleeful tone in his voice, Tom never tires of telling this story. Scottish stories, like single malts, improve with age. I’m eager to hear more of Tom’s stories, but he is already gone, swallowed up by the gray skies and all that history.

As I’ve learned, form matters. Not only what we say but how, and where, we say it. During different golden ages, social discourse took different forms. In Periclean Athens, it centered on the symposia, with their diluted wine and clever wordplay. In Belle Époque Paris, intellectual life revolved around the drawing-room salon. In Enlightenment Edinburgh, it was flyting and the favored venue for such verbal jousting: the club.

I want to find out more, so the next day I drop by the refreshingly frumpy Edinburgh Museum, where memorabilia from these clubs are proudly displayed. There’s a badge for the Six-Foot High Club. Yes, you had to be at least six feet tall to join, no mean feat back then, when most men measured no more than five feet three inches. The author Sir Walter Scott, a giant in more than the literary sense, refereed the club, overseeing gatherings that featured both “witty conversation” and a “16-pound hammer toss.” Presumably, these events did not take place at the same time, but you never know.

I spot a nondescript badge for the mysterious Pitt Club. A small placard informs me, “Detailed information about this club is not known,” before going on to speculate, “Perhaps because so many clubs had strict rules, this one made a point of having none.” The Scots certainly have a contrarian streak, I think. Is that a mark of genius, or merely stubbornness? My inner Janus whispers that it might be both.

Some clubs specialized, such as the Mirror Club (agriculture), the Rankenian Club (philosophy), and the Corchallan Club (literature). The 7:17 Club met once a week at precisely 7:17 p.m., and the Boar Club supposedly met in a pigsty. Some clubs were not as they appeared. The Poker Club, for instance, was named after the poker used in a fireplace, not the
card game. Its members agitated for a Scottish militia and, in general, made trouble. The clubs all had one thing in common: no women were allowed. The one exception was the Jezebel Club, whose members were all prostitutes.

My favorite is the Oyster Club, founded by Adam Smith and his two friends the chemist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton. The members met on Fridays at 2:00 p.m. and, as the name suggests, inhaled ridiculous amounts of oysters, washing them down with equally ridiculous amounts of claret.

Some clubs held secret initiation rites and “hid their activities from the general gaze, thus generating an aura of exclusivity and mystery,” writes historian Stephen Baxter.

Yet more mystery and secrecy. What is with you people and your mystery fetish? What exactly transpired in those clubs and their “learned suppers,” as they called them?

Only about forty miles separate Edinburgh and Glasgow, yet they might as well be on different continents. Glasgow considers Edinburgh aloof and elitist. Edinburgh considers Glasgow boisterous and uncouth. The city’s uncouthness, its endearing roughness, fascinated no less of a genius than Adam Smith, who spent hours chatting with merchants and seamen at the city’s docks, gathering the threads that he’d eventually weave into his masterpiece,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

I’m en route to Glasgow now to meet Smith’s successor, Alexander Broadie. For fifteen years, he occupied the chair at Glasgow University once held by Adam Smith. Surely Broadie knows what transpired behind the closed doors of the Oyster Club and its ilk.

As the train lurches forward, something happens to my mind. Unlike most things that happen to my mind, this something is good. The usual whirlpool of inchoate musings and random associations that pass for rational thought settle, not exactly to a mirror-smooth lake, more like the river in
Deliverance
, but for me that represents progress. Improvement, you might say.

That this unexpected clarity should descend upon me while on a train is
no coincidence. Something about train travel—the rocking motion and the passing scenery, there for you to admire or ignore—lends itself to creative breakthroughs. A few great minds did their best thinking on a train, including the Scottish physicist Lord Kelvin and J. K. Rowling, who dreamed up Harry Potter while sitting on board a delayed British Rail.

It’s not only trains. Something about motion triggers creative thoughts. Charles Darwin’s budding theory of evolution gelled while he was riding in the back of a carriage. “I can remember the very spot on the road . . . when to my joy the solution occurred to me,” he later wrote. Lewis Carroll recalled, with equal clarity, the moment when, on a rowboat floating in a pond, listening to “the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars, as they waved so sleepily to and fro,” he dreamed up a magical underground world and a girl named Alice who visits it. Mozart always traveled with scraps of paper tucked into the side pocket of his carriage, “for it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.
Whence
and
how
they come, I know not; nor can I force them.”

Alas, no symphonies or magical underworlds materialize in my mind, but I do think of some brilliant questions for Alexander Broadie. Questions, not answers, but as I learned in Athens, the road to genius is paved with good interrogatives. I want to know how exactly the Scottish penchant for practical genius extended to the clubroom and the tavern. How did these places encourage big ideas, and not (only) drunken rambling?

In our e-mail exchange, Broadie struck me as a person out of time, a throwback to eighteenth-century Scotland, when the country was known as the Republic of Letters.

Dear Eric,

I’ll be waiting for you as you emerge from the passenger barrier at the station. Look out for a pale shilpit creature wearing a black jacket, a hat and a shoulder bag. I look forward to our meeting.

Regards,

Alexander

Shilpit?
That word befuddled not only me but also my spell-checker, which, in my experience, is not easily rattled. Merriam-Webster came to the rescue, informing me that
shilpit
, an old Scots word, means “pinched and starved in appearance.”

As I step off the train, I have no trouble spotting Broadie in the crowd. There he is, as promised, in all his shilpit splendor. He leads me out of the bustling station with the quiet confidence of someone who has bonded with his city, absorbed its essence. As we walk, Broadie explains that while he was originally an “Edinburgh boy,” Glasgow and its blue-collar charms have grown on him, and today he wouldn’t live anywhere else. “Dynamite wouldn’t get me out of this town,” he says, and I do not doubt him.

Despite such colorful assertions, Broadie is actually soft-spoken and, I suspect, shy. We stroll through a large public square, past a statue of James Watt, Glasgow’s favorite son. A pigeon sits atop his head, and judging by the splotches of white covering the marble, it isn’t the first to do so. Poor James Watt, I think. So typically Scottish. No respect.

When Broadie tells me he’s chosen an Italian restaurant, I smile and, not for the first time, silently give thanks that Scotland counts among its many discoveries the cuisines of others. We order—I choose a fusilli in olive oil and a Chianti—then dive into the subject at hand. What exactly transpired in these mysterious clubs, and what role did they play in the Scottish Enlightenment?

Broadie doesn’t answer my question directly, for that is not the Scottish way. Instead, he says, I need to consider timing. At the dawn of the eighteenth century the Scots suddenly found themselves on the brink of cultural extinction. England had just annexed them. This was demoralizing, but with Scottish politics neutered, intellectuals no longer needed to worry about taking the wrong side, for there were no sides. They were free to wrestle with bigger issues. Sometimes politics can propel a creative movement—as it did in the 1960s—but sometimes nothing is more liberating than a political vacuum.

Gone was the old order and, Broadie tells me as our pastas arrive, “all of a sudden you had to think for yourself.” The Scots, though, took
that reality and, as usual, twisted it. They thought for themselves
together
, behind the closed doors of the Oyster Club and hundreds more like it.

What made these gatherings special was how they combined the lubricated collegiality of a pub with the intellectual rigor of an academic seminar. Members adhered to a strict drinking protocol. First, the host toasted each guest, then each guest toasted the host, then the guests toasted one another. Do the math and you can see how it quickly adds up to an awful lot of drinking. So it begs the uncomfortable but unavoidable question, were these clubs simply excuses to get well and truly sloshed? Was the Scottish Enlightenment, as some have suggested, really the Scotch Enlightenment?