The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley by Eric Weiner

would still his enormous heart, Socrates implored his followers, “I would ask you to be thinking of the truth and not of Socrates.” Not only is that statement admirably Dude-like in its selflessness—it’s not about me, it’s about the truth—it is also noteworthy in that Socrates spoke of himself in the third person. You don’t get any more Dude-like than that.
    Yes, Socrates was the Dude, but more than that, he was an Athenian dude. The Athenian dude. Never before or since have a man and a city been so perfectly matched. He loved Athens and would never consider living—or dying—anywhere else. He could have avoided execution by fleeing Athens, but rejected that offer out of hand. He had a contract with the city, and he was going to fulfill his end of it.
    Eccentric, barefoot, and endearingly stubborn, Socrates occupied that precarious position that all geniuses do—perched between insider and outsider. Far enough outside the mainstream to see the world through fresh eyes, yet close enough so that those fresh insights resonated with others.
    Genius is many things, but beautiful is not one of them. Socrates was a profoundly ugly man. “Bearded, hairy, with a flat, spreading nose, prominent, popping eyes, and thick lips,” relays the historian Paul Johnson. Socrates, though, was not the least bit troubled by his appearance and often joked about it. In Xenophon’s Symposium , Socrates challenges Critobulus, a handsome young man, to a beauty contest. Critobulus points to Socrates’s elephantine nose as evidence of his ugliness. Not so fast, retorts the great philosopher. “God made the nose for smelling, and your nostrils are turned down while mine are wide and turned up and can receive smells from every direction.” As for my outsize lips, Socrates continued, they confer kisses that “are more sweet and luscious than yours.”
    Whatever Socrates lacked in physical beauty, he made up for with exquisite timing. He was born at a propitious moment in human history, duringthe time of Pericles, a mere nine years after the Chinese philosopher Confucius died. Socrates was twelve years old when the Hebrew priest Ezra left Babylon for Jerusalem, bringing with him a freshly transcribed version of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Torah. During this period, known as the Axial Age, old orders were crumbling, and new ones were not yet solidified. Cracks appeared, and as it’s been said, the cracks are what let the light in. The genius, too.
    Socrates, like all geniuses, benefited from “zeitgeist fit.” This doesn’t necessarily mean he fit happily with the spirit of his times. What distinguishes geniuses is not a seamless fit with their times but, rather, what psychologist Keith Sawyer calls “the capacity to be able to exploit an apparent misfit.” This was certainly the case with Socrates; he pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse—and got away with it, until he didn’t. His ideas resonated even as they riled. That is the way it is with geniuses. They fit in their times the way a pearl fits in an oyster shell. Uncomfortably yet essentially. A useful irritant.
    Socrates is remembered as a great philosopher, but he was first and foremost a conversationalist. Before Socrates, people talked, but they didn’t have conversations. They had alternating monologues, especially if one person was of higher status than the other. Socrates pioneered conversation as a means of intellectual exploration, of questioning assumptions, ones so deeply ingrained we don’t even know we have them.
    Conversation, I realize, is also a vehicle for the sort of group genius I’m probing. Sometimes ideas are the deliberate result of conversation, but just as often they arrive as an unexpected, but no less pleasing, by-product. Henry James recounts how his novel The Spoils of Poynton grew from “mere floating particles in the stream of talk.” Socrates dipped into that stream often, delighting in how it was never the same