Igniting Collective Genius

Igniting Collective Genius

How to Create Culture that Transforms the World

The efflorescence that was the Florentine Renaissance, which vaulted Europe out of a thousand year period of arguable stagnation, seems to have been catalyzed by a very small number of people, several hundred more or less, over something like 80 years.

Of those known many were humanists– scholars, painters, sculptors, architects–receiving common inputs and in dialogue with one another either directly or through encountering one another’s work. As a student of contexts, I am wondering what particular contextual alchemy is required to create the conditions for the social cartography of genius?

Genius, I am told, comes from Nature. There is talent in it, but something else, some grace in it. Yet what happened in Florence defies expectation unless there are some other elements at play. These other elements are, I would propose, context. Not that there were not talented Florentines, but rather that there was a social context that systematically evoked genius. It was the context, not something in the particular people. And this has been under-attended to in the literature, and in our imaginal realms, because we are fixated on the notion of individual greatness.

A unique combination of factors, undeniably including patronage (of the Medici in particular), as well as this sort of trans-disciplinary ferment was happening as people (they were men at the time) from various trades, disciplines, classes, backgrounds, and social standings came together around books, around ideas, and debated, in call-and-response, in gatherings both formal and informal, a broad range of ideas, at a time when the traditional structures holding society together were in flux. These dialogues were across disciplinary boundaries, across social classes. This ferment was characterized in particular by its diversity.

This had happened before, perhaps most famously in the Academy that developed around Socrates in ancient Athens. Plato and Aristotle were Socrates’ most famous students and couldn’t agree it seems on anything. Here was a previous context that birthed genius. Not a single person, not one genius, but a birthplace of ideas with historical import…

It has happened fairly recently, at Black Mountain College, for example.

Black Mountain College was a privateliberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. The college was ideologically organized around John Dewey's educational philosophy, which emphasized holistic learning and the study of art as central to a liberal arts education.[2]

Many of the college's faculty and students were or would go on to become highly influential in the arts, including Josef and Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Max Dehn, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Ray Johnson, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Charles Olson, Robert Rauschenberg, Mary Caroline Richards, Dorothea Rockburne, Michael Rumaker, Aaron Siskind and Cy Twombly.

Although it was quite notable during its lifetime, the school closed in 1957 after 24 years due to funding issue...The history and legacy of Black Mountain College are preserved and extended by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, located in downtown Asheville, North Carolina.[3][Wikipedia]

The college existed a mere 24 years, and look at the list of luminary graduates. A veritable who’s who of 20th century artistic influence. From a tiny school. Yet something magical happened there, something that was about creating the proper context to evoke collective genius.

How did that happen? How could we cause it to happen again?