Philosophical Apprentice comments.

Look at what my brief absence from the Political Scene has wrought, to speak in terms that echo’s, in its way, Mr. Ganesh’s self-regard:

One victim of the Covid-19 pandemic had died 500 years earlier. Raphael (1483-1520) was due to get the quincentennial treatment from some august museums. Then the doors shut. When at last his moment came, the shows were drowned out in the hubbub of a reopening world. And so a big chance was lost to arrest two centuries of reputational drift for the artist. Raphael will continue to be seen as the bronze medallist of the High Renaissance, some distance beneath Michelangelo and Leonardo, whatever his technical perfection, whatever his former standing as their equal or better.

How did his star drop? For one thing, the modern mind finds it hard to believe that so uncomplicated a lad could be so total a genius. The Raphael who comes down to us in the records is cheerful and well-adjusted, an obliging courtier, a delegator, with manners as smooth as his face and, despite being orphaned at 11, few of those Florentine neuroses. “One couldn’t write a bestseller about Rah-file,” drawled the art historian Kenneth Clark, in a dig not at the painter, but at our own demand for inner torment and outer conflict in our heroes.

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https://www.ft.com/content/2036f049-2929-42bc-b8af-bfe269e4eba3

Call these opening paragraphs a way of reminding the ordinary reader that his Oxbridger Education has not gone to waste? that frames his commentary on Elon Musk: The paragraphs feature Ganesh’s breezy commentaries on ‘geniuses’ that exploit his penchant for the telling observations, adapted to breakfast table reading, as a complement to morning coffee or tea. This, the kind of newspaper writing of a more sedate age of the bourgeoise press? And the leisurely breakfast of past ages? Aren’t all those strivers of the etiolated neo-liberal age already at their desks? Have I wasted The Readers Time? Here is the Ganesh ‘diagnosis’ of Musk as ‘no general-purpose sage’. Even with all it’s rhetorical embroidery.

We know that not all temperamental people are geniuses. But the idea persists that all geniuses are temperamental. And this isn’t just an academic mistake. It leads to the indulgence of bad behaviour: to the excusing of it as something world-historical individuals can’t help. Elon Musk is the ultimate living case in point. His followers, at best, brush off his odder doings and retweets as the waste products of a great mind. Worse, I think more than a few read genius into them. Had he the outward blandness of, say, Richard Branson, he’d be taken for what he is: a brilliant man in his core domains, but no general-purpose sage and quite often banal in his obiter dicta.

Mr. Ganesh’s argument, if that is what it purports to be, begins to meander as his essay begins to loose it’s argumentative velocity, yet he is most capable at writing beautiful sentences, that evolve into paragraphs. He is an accomplished rhetorical stylist, some quotation from his essay:

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Granted, the conflation of genius with unpleasantness does work in theory. To conceive of something original again and again, never mind to execute it against steep odds or social pressure, a person has to have strange patterns of thought. What are the chances that such cognitive peculiarities will generate only benign results? If you want the Pietà, put up with Michelangelo the loner and miser.

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A short list of Ganesh’s rhetorical snapshots:

Raphael, Franklin Roosevelt, Einstein, Newtonian vehemence, Shakespeare, a creative writing workshop at Dartmouth, Mozart liked a scatological joke, Steve Hilton, Dominic Cummings, Raphael, The Romantics, Freud.

A fragment of the final paragraph:

In our own century, the emergence of inner trauma as almost the mark of a civilised person. It all adds up to a mistrust of and even disdain for the cloudless temperament, the natural social being.  If we fail to see genius where it exists, that’s merely sad. If we see it where it isn’t, we invite trouble.

Philosophical Apprentice

November 29, 2023:

Mr. Musk’s anodyne comments on the Genocide against the Palestinians, perpetrated by Netanyahu, betray his toxic egoism: in the guise of his status of ‘a person who matters’ as the owner/operator of twitter, who controls one of the the internets most important communication tools, worldwide. He might be judged, to speak in the patois of American Film History, as the Charles Foster Caine of the internet? Mr. Musk gets lost in the murky highfalutin framing of Mr. Ganesh, perhaps this is the point of his intervention?

Philosophical Apprentice