The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (5 page)

We hike a bit more before reaching the peak, where the Parthenon, arguably the most famous structure of the ancient world, resides with all the quiet confidence of a Saudi king or a Supreme Court justice. Tenure will do that. Its status is well deserved, Aristotle assures me. The Parthenon represents an unprecedented engineering feat. For starters, workers had to transport thousands of blocks of marble from the surrounding countryside. The project employed carpenters, molders, bronzesmiths, stonecutters, dyers, painters, embroiderers, embossers, rope makers, weavers, cobblers, road builders, and miners. Amazingly, the Parthenon was completed on time and under budget, marking the first and last time any construction project has accomplished that.

“Take a look at the columns,” says Aristotle. “How do they look to you?”

“Beautiful,” I say, wondering where he’s going with this.

“Do they look straight?”

“Yes.”

Aristotle smiles a mischievous smile. “They’re not straight at all.” He fetches an illustration of the Parthenon from his rucksack.

What looks like the epitome of linear thinking, rational thought frozen in stone, is an illusion. The building has not a single straight line. Each column bends slightly this way or that. Yet when gazing at the Parthenon, as French writer Paul Valéry explains, “no one is aware that the
sense of happiness he feels is caused by curves and bends that are almost imperceptible yet immensely powerful. The beholder is unaware that he is responding to a combination of regularity and irregularity the architect had hidden in his work.”

When I read those words—“a combination of regularity and irregularity”—they stick with me. I suspect they might explain more than clever engineering. All of ancient Athens displayed that combination of the linear and the bent, the orderly and the chaotic. Within the city walls, you’d find both a clear-cut legal code and a frenzied marketplace, ruler-straight statues and streets that follow no discernible order. We think of the Greeks as reasonable people, the original straight-and-narrow thinkers, and they were, but they also possessed an irrational side, and a sort of “crazy wisdom” prevailed in classical Athens. People were guided by
thambos
, “that reverential terror and awe aroused by the proximity of any supernatural force or being which one discerns,” as historian Robert Flacelière explains. The Greeks feared madness but also recognized it as “a gift of the gods.”

Disorder is embedded in the Greek creation myth, where in the beginning there was not light but chaos. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. For the Greeks—and, as I’d later learn, Hindus, too—chaos is the raw material of creativity. Might this explain why Athens’s leaders resisted calls to “regularize” the city’s unruly layout? Their rationale was partly practical—the winding streets would confuse invaders—but perhaps they also suspected that messiness stimulates creative thought.

None of this means the Greeks were slackers, says Aristotle, comparing them with another extraordinary civilization. “The Egyptians reached what they considered perfection, and they stopped there. The Greeks always wanted to do more. They always wanted to be the best.” So all-consuming was this quest for the perfect that Greek artisans devoted as much time and effort to the backs of their statues as they did to the fronts. The Parthenon also represented something else: an overt attempt to stick it to the other city-states. Ictinus, the architect who designed the Parthenon, had seen the Temple of Zeus at Olympia and was determined to outdo it. “It was always this sense of competition that drove them,” says Aristotle. Might this competitive zeal explain their genius?

The evolving science of genius has been investigating that very question. In a landmark study, Teresa Amabile, a psychologist at Harvard University, examined what effect a promised reward has on creative thinking. She divided a team of volunteers into two groups. Each group was asked to produce a collage. One group, though, was told that their work would be evaluated by a panel of artists and that those who produced the most creative collages would receive a monetary award. The second group was told, essentially, to have fun.

The results weren’t even close. By a wide margin, those who were neither evaluated nor observed produced the most creative collages (as determined by a panel of art teachers). In many follow-up studies, Amabile and her colleagues found similar results. The expectation of a reward or evaluation,
even a positive evaluation
, squelched creativity. She calls this phenomenon the intrinsic theory of motivation. Stated simply: “People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and the challenge of the work itself—not by external pressures.” She warns that many schools and corporations, by placing such emphasis on rewards and evaluation, are inadvertently suppressing creativity.

It’s a compelling theory, and one that, intuitively, makes sense. Who hasn’t felt creatively liberated writing in a private diary or doodling in a notebook, knowing no one will ever see these zany scribbles?

The theory, though, doesn’t always jibe with the real world. If we are only motivated by the sheer joy of an activity, why do athletes perform better in the heat of competition rather than during training sessions? Why did Mozart abandon works in progress because his commission was withdrawn? Why does the lure of a Nobel Prize motivate many a scientist? James Watson and Francis Crick, the first scientists to describe the structure of DNA, stated up front that their aim was to win the prestigious prize—and they did, in 1962. And in ancient Athens, this cutthroat nature of life clearly drove some to great heights. “Always excel and be better than others,” urged Homer, and if the Greeks obeyed anyone, it was Homer.

Some recent studies cast doubt on the intrinsic theory of motivation.
Jacob Eisenberg, a professor of business at University College Dublin, and William Thompson, a psychologist at Macquarie University, found that experienced musicians improvised more creatively when enticed with cash prizes and publicity. These results appear to fly in the face of the intrinsic theory of motivation. Is the theory flawed or the study?

Neither, actually. What matters, Eisenberg and Thompson suspect, is the type of people involved in the studies. Amabile’s participants tended to be novices, with no background in art, while Eisenberg’s were veteran musicians, with at least five years’ experience. Competition apparently motivates experienced creators but inhibits inexperienced ones.

An evolving theory suggests that some combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is ideal. Some, for instance, might initially be motivated by the promise of an external reward (money, status, etc.), but once immersed in the work they enter a psychological state known as flow. They forget about any external pressure and even lose track of time. That is what Watson and Crick said happened to them. They desperately wanted to win the Nobel, but once they immersed themselves in the research, the prize receded to the back of their minds.

A crucial question is not whether someone is competitive but, rather, for what (or whom) they are competing. In ancient Athens, the answer was clear: the city. The ancient Athenians enjoyed a deeply intimate relationship with their city, the likes of which we can scarcely imagine. The closest term we have to describe this sentiment is
civic duty
, but that carries the weight of obligation and doesn’t sound like any fun. What the Athenians practiced was more like
civic joy
. That we find that juxtaposition of words odd speaks volumes about the chasm that separates us and the ancients.

Civic life, though, was not optional, and Aristotle tells me the Athenians had a word for those who refused to participate in public affairs:
idiotes
. It is where we get our word
idiot
. There was no such thing as an aloof, apathetic Athenian, at least not for long. “The man who took no interest in the affairs of state was not a man who minded his own business, but a man who had no business being in Athens at all,” said the great historian Thucydides. Ouch. And to think how I whined like
a petulant child when I found myself stuck on jury duty for two weeks.

Aristotle and I find a rock and sit down. From here, all of Athens is visible. In every direction, as far as my eye can see, it is unrelentingly urban. An endless sea of low-rise apartments, office buildings, highway cloverleafs, microwave towers. Here I run headlong into a most inconvenient truth: the Athens of today is not the Athens of 450 BC. Modern Athens has indoor plumbing and outdoor demonstrations. Modern Athens has traffic and bankruptcy and iPhones and Xanax and satellite TV and processed meat.

The past, it’s been said, is a foreign country. They do things differently there. Yes, they do, and unfortunately this particular foreign country, known as Ancient Greece, has extremely tight border controls. It doesn’t take kindly to interlopers such as me. Yet if I’m going to solve the Athenian Mystery, the past is exactly where I need to be. What to do?

“Squint.” That was the advice of a friend back home when I’d mentioned my plans to visit Athens. I’d laughed it off, but now I realize it’s actually a smart tactic. Sometimes we can see more by narrowing our field of view than by expanding it. The zoom lens reveals as much as the wide angle, and sometimes more.

“Don’t squint too much,” Aristotle warns. If I could time-travel to Athens circa 450 BC, he says, I’d probably be disappointed. The great Athens, the cradle of Western civilization, the birthplace of science, philosophy, and so much else we hold dear, was a dump. The streets were narrow and dirty. The houses, constructed of wood and sun-dried clay, were so flimsy that robbers gained entry by simply digging. (The ancient Greek word for robber means “one who tunnels through walls.”) As a time traveler I would definitely notice the noise—vendors hawking their wares at the agora, a lute screeching off-key—but what would grab my attention and not let go is the stench. People relieved themselves in the courtyard of their own home, or even right in the streets, where the mess would sit until a slave sluiced it away. Conditions were such that, as historian Jacob Burckhardt put it, “no sensible and peaceful person of our day would want to live under them.” And he wrote those words in the nineteenth century!

Let’s take stock of what we have so far. A small, dirty city, situated on unforgiving land, surrounded by hostile neighbors, and populated by a people “who, when we get down to facts, never cleaned their teeth, never used handkerchiefs, wiped their fingers on their hair, spat everywhere regardless, and died in swarms of malaria or tuberculosis,” as historian Robert Flacelière reminds us. Not exactly a recipe for a place of genius. Or is it?

One of the biggest misperceptions about places of genius, I’m discovering, is that they are akin to paradise. They are not. Paradise is antithetical to genius. Paradise makes no demands, and creative genius takes root through meeting demands in new and imaginative ways. “The Athenians matured because they were challenged on all fronts,” said Nietzsche, in a variation of his famous “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger” line. Creativity is a response to our environment. Greek painting was a response to the complex light (the Greek painter Apollodoros was the first to develop a technique for creating the illusion of depth), Greek architecture a response to the complex landscape, Greek philosophy a response to the complex, uncertain times.

The problem with paradise is that it is perfect and therefore requires no response. This is why wealthy people and places often stagnate. Athens was both wealthy and not; it was, to turn John Kenneth Galbraith’s observation about 1960s America on its head, a place of public opulence and private squalor. The houses of the wealthy were indistinguishable from those of the poor; both were equally shoddy. Athenians were deeply suspicious of private wealth, and the plays of Aeschylus are rife with stories about the misery it causes. Nearly everyone, from craftsman to physician, received the same salary. Laws limited how much money could be spent on funerals and forbade women from carrying more than three dresses on a journey. In ancient Athens, notes the great urbanist Lewis Mumford, “poverty was not an embarrassment: if anything, riches were suspect.”

These policies had their downside—forget about that nice water clock you’ve been eyeing at the agora—but it also meant that Athenians were liberated from the burdens of frantic acquisition and
consumption. “Beauty was cheap and the best goods of this life, above all the city itself, were there for the asking,” says Mumford.

When it came to public projects, though, the Athenians spent lavishly and, if they could help it, with other people’s money. They paid for the Parthenon, and other glorious projects, using the funds amassed by something called the Delian League. It was the NATO of its day, an alliance formed to fend off a common enemy, the Persians. It worked, and so the Athenians said, in effect,
Thank you very much. We’ll take this money and do great things with it
. Nobody ever said places of genius were nice.

Flush with other people’s cash, Athens was suddenly the hot spot of the ancient world, explains Aristotle as we circle the Parthenon. “So, if you were an engineer or an architect or a sculptor, or a philosopher, this is where you wanted to be.”

This is what I call the Magnetic Theory of Genius. Places such as ancient Athens, or Silicon Valley today, are creative because they attract smart, ambitious people. They are talent magnets. This is true but also a little too convenient, and circular. Creative places are creative because all the creative people move there. Yes, but what was the attraction in the first place? How did the magnet become magnetized?

Timing is important, and Pericles, the great Athenian leader, had exquisite timing. For much of its history Athens was either preparing for war, at war, or recovering from war. But in the window between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, from 454 to 430 BC, Athens was at peace, and this is when Pericles doubled down on cultural projects such as the Parthenon. One of the prerequisites for a golden age is peace.