Recently, audiences were disappointed to learn that author-journalist Jonah Lehrer fabricated and misrepresented quotes and self-plagiarized. His crime spurred a couple soul-searching response pieces, most of which are summed in Salon's "Jonah Lehrer throws it all away". Here, Roxanne Gay hits a few angles and floats the hypothesis that a guy like Lehrer "fits the narrative we want about a boy genius" because he can "make us feel smarter for finally being able to understand the complexities of the human mind"; he is the product of, and answer to, "a cultural obsession with genius, a need to find beacons of greatness in an ordinary world".
Because there must be some deeper reason he did what he did. Symptomatic of some disease rooted in our culture and in our souls that caused this thing. This fucking thing.
Doesn't this kind of ponderous speculation, this pathologizing, just create, replicate, and self-serve our need for meaning and significance in this "ordinary world"? Or our need for a need for meaning? Couldn't it just be that Lehrer is dishonest? Or that maybe he got lazy? Or that he tried to produce too much too soon? Or maybe we don't know. And it doesn't matter.
Finding the work of guys like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell interesting is one thing, but to mistake these pop-sci/pop-soc writers for preeminent thinkers of relevance and genius undermines the fearlessness, moral courage, and intellectual vigor of the better writers (and artists) who act as critics, stewards, and producers of culture.
Note:
- I'm not convinced self-plagiarism is a thing or that, if it is, it should be so damnable an offense. But in Lehrer's case, if nothing else, it's sort of ironic considering his big theme was creativity.
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