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| ISBN-13: | 9780520958098 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 300 |
| File size: | 24 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Criminal Genius
A Portrait opf High-IQ Offenders
By James C. Oleson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95809-8
CHAPTER 1
Crime, Genius, and Criminal Genius
The lower classes feel for the criminal very much the same reverence that the educated feel for the man of genius. He has always been the hero, and often almost the saint of the degenerate and the low born.
CHARLES CURRY, "CRIMINALS AND THEIR TREATMENT," P. 11
Early criminology was founded in philosophy and medicine and sought to locate the origins of criminal behavior within the biology of the criminal (e.g., Hartl, Monnelly, & Elderkin, 1982; Hooton, 1939; Lombroso, 1876/2006; Sheldon, 1949). Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, however, criminology was transformed into an essentially sociological discipline (Hirschi & Hindelang, 1977), often to the exclusion of the investigation of individual differences (Pinker, 2002). Biological explanations of crime remain taboo (Wright & Miller, 1998) and psychological explanations are disavowed. Many sociologically oriented criminologists deny the role played by intelligence in crime, although even researchers critical of the IQ-crime linkage acknowledge low intelligence as a significant criminological variable (e.g., Caplan, 1965). Low intelligence ranked 19th in the list of factors identified by criminologists to explain serious and persistent offending (Ellis & Walsh, 1999).
Dozens of studies have examined the relationship between IQ and offending (e.g., Binder, 1988; Bower, 1995; Burt, 1955; Caplan, 1965; Hirschi, 1969; Hirschi & Hindelang, 1977; Rutter & Giller, 1983; West & Farrington, 1973; Woodward, 1955), but with few exceptions, these investigations have focused upon only below-average or average individuals. The few studies of bright offenders (e.g., Gath, Tennant, & Pidduck, 1970) have examined juvenile subjects with IQ scores only one standard deviation above normal. This book represents the first systematic criminological investigation of adult subjects with genius-level IQs (two standard deviations above the mean, as distant from the mean as mental retardation). To understand the crimes of genius, however, it is necessary to begin by defining genius.
DEFINING GENIUS
Genius is notoriously difficult to define (Howe, 1999) and is a concept that evolved over 2,000 years (McMahon, 2013). At different moments in history, genius has signified (1) an attendant spirit, (2) exceptional creative ability, (3) eminence, and (4) exceptional intelligence (Ball, 2014). For each of these definitions, genius followed the Zeitgeist of the age, reflecting what man felt was divine within man. In the ancient world, genius was a procreative force; in the Renaissance, it was creativity tempered by judgment; in the Romantic period, it was creativity triumphant over reason; in the Darwinian nineteenth century, it was hereditary eminence; and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is psychometric IQ. These varied definitions are not entirely unrelated. Ochse (1990) writes, "People tend to agree that 'creativity,' 'intelligence' and 'wisdom' have something in common, and that creativity is closer to intelligence than to wisdom. ... Some take it for granted that a [creative] genius is intellectually 'brilliant' in most respects" (p. 108). Csikszentmihalyi (1996) suggests that genius denotes a person who is both brilliant and creative. Others argue that intelligence and creativity are both necessary, but not sufficient, for genius. "[W]hatever ... genius is, it is something more than I.Q. A high I.Q. may be one of the necessary attributes, but it is only one" (Rockwell, 1927, p. 380; cf. Galton, 1892).
Genius as Tutelary Spirit
The etymology of the word genius may provide clues to its deep meaning (Nitzsche, 1975). Although Sprenger (1861) suggests that genius is derived from jinn, the Arabic spirit associated with lamps and wishes, most scholars trace the term's etymology to the Latin gignere (to sire). But a thorough genealogy actually begins not with the Latin, gignere, but with the cognate Greek concept of the daimon (Saipov).
In Homer, daimon describes all supernatural phenomena that cannot be attributed to Olympian gods (Murray, 1989), but by the time Hesiod wrote Works and Days in 700 bce, daimones were more precisely rendered as dead men from the Golden Age who acted as beneficent guardians to men on earth. Plato describes daimones both as intermediaries between men and gods and as guardian spirits allotted to each man at birth. In the Apology, Socrates describes the daimonion that occasionally spoke to him, guiding him in decision making: "I am subject to a divine or supernatural experience ... a sort of voice, which comes to me and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and ever urges me on" (Hamilton & Cairns, 1989, p. 17). This version of the daimon most resembles the Roman genius, the procreative spirit of paternal ancestry allotted to each Roman man at birth. The concept was expanded later: genius referred to a tutelary spirit who determined both a man's character and his accomplishments. Birthday sacrifices were made to geniuses, and oaths sworn by one's genius were sacred (Becker, 1978). The concept was further modified so that every existing entity — whether individual, house, town, or nation — had an attendant spirit. For example, the Genius Populi Romani, the guardian of Rome, was especially important (Fears, 1978). Although later men of exceptional abilities were said to possess genius, in the ancient world it was the other way around. "Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you" (Cowley, in Peter, 1977, p. 211). Every man had a genius, which acted upon him as an external agent.
Genius as Creativity
For more than 1,000 years, the concept of genius was abandoned in Europe. Early Christians transformed daimones into demons (Walker, 1983). Joan of Arc described the voices she heard as saintly — not daimonic — but in the fifteenth century, hearing voices (even the voices of saints) was sufficient to justify her excommunication as a heretic. After one of the most famous trials in history (Barrett, 1991), Joan of Arc was executed.
With the arrival of the Italian Renaissance, however, the notion of genius as a possessing force reemerged. The Florentine Ficino popularized the notion of genios, men of exceptional creative ability known both for their talents and their pazzia (Becker, 1978). Pazzia, loosely interpreted as insanity, drew from two classical sources: Plato's idea of divine madness and Aristotle's notion of melancholia.
Plato suggests that the poet, while composing poetry, is mad, literally out of his mind (ekstatikoi), creating by divine dispensation without being personally aware of what he is doing (Murray, 1989). In the Phaedrus, Plato argues that man's greatest blessings come through four varieties of divine madness: Apollo's prophetic madness, Dionysus's telestic or ritual madness, the poetic madness of the Muses, and the erotic madness of Aphrodite and Eros. Plato writes, "There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry. ... But if any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness" (Hamilton & Cairns, 1989, p. 492).
The Aristotelian notion of melancholia also helped shape Renaissance conceptions of genius. Aristotle explains the inspiration of the poet as a function of shifts within the body's four Hippocratic humors: "[T]hose who are full of hot black bile become frenzied (manikoi) or brilliant (euphueis) or amorous or easily moved to anger and desire, and some become more talkative. Many too, if this heat approaches the seat of the intellect, are affected by fits of frenzy or possession" (in Murray, 1989, p. 20).
Pazzia, in linking Platonic possession-states to Aristotelian melancholia, articulated a new and enduring relationship between genius and madness. Although pazzia encompassed everything from mere strangeness to clinical insanity, it typically referred to melancholic traits such as moodiness, sensitivity, solitariness, and eccentricity. Becker (1978) argues that Renaissance geniuses remained fundamentally rational. While there was something irrational about the generative powers of genius, it was generally agreed that the mental faculty of judgment restrained the imagination from actual madness.
With the ascendance of the Romantic movement, however, the primacy of judgment was usurped by the irrational imagination. Kessel (1989) argues that at this time, originality supplanted reason as the chief attribute of the great man. Scientists were no longer described as geniuses. Their accomplishments were described in impersonal terms (Raskin, 1936). Men no longer venerated the sage, but glorified the poet. Carlyle (1841/1966) writes that our heroes first manifested as gods, then prophets, and next emerged as poets. Romantic genius was liberated from the shackles of reason: organic, impulsive, creative, and artistic. A sort of ecstatic Geniekult celebrated the Dionysian ideal of the maddened genius (Becker, 1978).
"There is no great genius without some touch of madness." (Seneca, in Sanderlin, 1979, p.38)
"Between genius and madness there is often not the thickness of a hair" (Sand, in Herschman & Lieb, 1988, p. 8)
"The lives of men of genius show how often, like lunatics, they are in a state of continuous agitation." (Schopenhauer, in Herschman & Lieb, 1988, p. 9)
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied / And thin partitions do their bounds divide." (Dryden, in Kessel, 1989, p. 197)
In 1836, Lelut published Du demon de Socrate, in which he suggests that the daimon of Socrates was an auditory hallucination, mistaken as the voice of a supernatural agent. Lelut concludes that Socrates was mad. In Lamulette de Pascal (1846), Lelut arrives at similar conclusions in the case of Pascal.
Inspired by the revolutionary paradigm in On the Origin of Species (Darwin, 1859/1870), researchers applied concepts of evolution in their own pioneering research on genius. For example, Moreau (1859) insists that the originality of genius can be traced to the same degenerative organic causes that are responsible for madness or idiocy, a claim developed more fully by Lombroso in Genio e follia (1872). Lombroso (1891) maintains that genius is rooted in hereditary degeneration of the nervous system: "We may confidently affirm that genius is a true degenerative psychosis belonging to the group of moral insanity, and may temporarily spring out of other psychoses, assuming their forms, though keeping its own special peculiarities, which distinguish it from all others" (p. 333; cf. Mora, 1964). Others shared Lombroso's conception of genius as pathological (e.g., Bett, 1952; Hirsch, 1896; Hyslop, 1925; Jacobson, 1926; Kretschmer, 1931; Lange-Eichbaum, 1931; Madden, 1833; Marks, 1926; Nisbet, 1900; Tsanoff, 1949; Turck, 1914). Nordau (1895) suggests that the genius hails from the same degenerate stock "as criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics" (p. vii). On the other side of the debate, other commentators insisted the genius was healthy (e.g., Carroll, 1940; Freud, 1964; Padovan, 1902; Schlesinger, 2012; Stevenson, 1886). In The Sanity of Art (1908), Shaw wryly asks, "What in the name of common-sense is the value of a theory that identifies Ibsen, Wagner, Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Victor Hugo with the refuse of our prisons and lunatic asylums? ... I could prove Nordau to be an elephant on more evidence than he has brought to prove that our greatest men are degenerate lunatics" (pp. 91-92).
Table 5 identifies some of the key publications on both sides of the madgenius controversy (Becker, 1978; Chan, 2001; Sirotkina, 2002). The debate between the degenerationists and their opponents waned after World War II. Nevertheless, many researchers continue to equate genius with creative ability (Andreasen, 2005; Bloom, 2002; Briggs, 1988; Eysenck, 1995; Ochse, 1990; Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 1999). The MacArthur Foundation continues to award its "genius grants" on the basis of exceptional creativity and the promise of great contributions. The relationship between genius and madness also continues to attract scholarly interest (Kinnell, 1983; Missett, 2013; Schlesinger, 2012). Juda (1949) studied 113 German artists, architects, composers, writers, and their relatives and found that artists and their first-degree relatives had higher rates of psychiatric abnormality than would be expected in a general population. Andreasen (1987) examined 30 creative writers and found dramatically elevated rates of mood disorders. In the general population, only 1% suffer from manic depression, only 3% from cyclothymia (an attenuated form of manic depression), and only 5% from major depression (American Psychiatric Association, 2013); yet 80% of Andreasen's writers experienced one or more episodes of mania, cyclothymia, or major depression. Ludwig (1995) studied mental illness in 1,004 eminent geniuses and found elevated rates of mental disorder and substance abuse, particularly among artists. Jamison (1993) concurs, citing numerous studies indicating elevated incidence rates of major depression, manic depression, cyclothymia, and suicide in artists, writers, and poets. She reports that artists experience up to 18 times the suicide rate of the general population, 8-10 times the rate of depression, and 10-20 times the rate of manic depression and cyclothymia (Jamison, 1995).
Genius as Eminence
In 1869, Galton — Darwin's second cousin — published Hereditary Genius. It differed from earlier works on the subject of genius by including statistical analyses instead of biographical accounts. Serebriakoff (1985), a founding member of the high-IQ society, Mensa, writes, "Previous writers about genius, ability, and talent had wondered to what extent they were hereditary. Galton started the first objective studies to establish the facts. ... Galton was the first in the field of individual psychology, as he put it, 'To treat the subject in a statistical manner and arrive at exact numerical results'" (p. 171).
In Hereditary Genius (1892), Galton makes three related claims. First, he suggests that people vary in terms of their natural abilities. At one end of the intellectual distribution, there are the very dull; at the other end, there are geniuses. Second, he suggests that the naturally enabled genius will rise, almost without exception, to achieve distinction. Third, he suggests that these natural abilities are heritable and that genius runs within families. Galton sought to demonstrate his tripartite thesis by examining the pedigrees of almost 1,000 geniuses (defined as men who achieved what only 250 in 1 million can hope to achieve: "On the most brilliant of starlight nights there are never so many as 4,000 stars visible to the naked eye at the same time; yet we feel it to be an extraordinary distinction to a star to be accounted as the brightest in the sky" [p. 9]) selected from dictionaries and encyclopedias based on the space allotted to them, including judges, generals, poets, painters, and scientists. Galton then looked at their relatives, trying to assess the likelihood that an eminent individual would be related to another eminent individual. Galton concludes that a genius's son is 129 times as likely to be a genius himself as the child of an ordinary father. Galton attributes the achievement of genius to three necessary factors: capacity, zeal, and the tendency to work hard. In the second edition of Hereditary Genius, he writes, "I do not mean capacity without zeal, nor zeal without capacity, nor even a combination of them without an adequate power of doing a great deal of very laborious work. But, I mean a nature, which when left to itself, will, urged by an inherent stimulus, climb to the path that leads to eminence and has strength to reach the summit — one which, if hindered or thwarted — will fret and strive until the hindrance is overcome, and it is again free to follow its labouring instinct" (p. 33).
Galton's work was challenged by Kroeber (1944), who examined 5,000 creative individuals living between 700 BCE and 1900 CE and concluded that creativity levels oscillate in society much faster than its biological foundations. Kroeber himself adopted Galton's nomothetic method, using eminent creators selected from encyclopedias. The practice extends into the present.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures and Tables, ix,Preface, xiii,
Acknowledgments, xvii,
Introduction, 1,
1. Crime, Genius, and Criminal Genius, 39,
2. The Study, 73,
3. The Participants, 94,
4. The Offenses, 126,
5. Prosecution and Punishment, 171,
6. Explanations for High-IQ Crime, 205,
7. Discussion and Conclusion, 228,
Appendix A. Technical Appendix, 245,
Appendix B. Questionnaire, 253,
Appendix C. Interview Schedule, 261,
References, 265,
Index, 315,