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The Current Transcript for July 4, 2016

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

BARACK OBAMA: No matter who we are, where we come from, what faith we practice, here, we can make of our lives what we will. The dreams of generations, immigrants, refugees, they were welcomed to these shores.

MIKE FINNERTY: Canada's openness is widely admired and celebrated and US President Barack Obama made sure to salute our diversity last week when speaking to parliament. But it is not something to be taken for granted. Today, homegrown bigotry and fresh racist incidents in Canada inspired, in part at least, by Donald Trump, the Brexit debate, and the German anti- Islam PEGIDA group. We examine how intolerance outside our borders feeds Canadian racism. Also today…

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Certain places at certain times produce a mother lode of brilliant minds and good ideas and the question is why?

MF: When it comes to genius, it's less about who you are and more about where you are, according to Eric Weiner, at least. He's the author of The Geography of Genius. Stay with us to find out why genius pops up in clusters.

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Trump, Brexit and racism: Why Canada isn't immune to racist rhetoric

Guests: Kim Fry, Rinaldo Walcott

MIKE FINNERTY: I'm Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Mixed shouting]

VOICE 1: What are you, 18, 19?

VOICE 2: [bleep]

VOICE 1: I've been here longer than you have.

[unintelligible arguing]

VOICE 3: Disgusting, disgusting! You're a disgrace!

VOICE 2: [bleep]

VOICE 3: Absolute disgrace! A disgrace to England! You are a disgrace!

MF: An ugly scene caught on camera last week on a streetcar in northern England: young men yelling racial slurs before other riders forced them to exit the tram, calling them a disgrace to England. Racist, anti-immigrant acts such as these have become all too common over the past week. Britain's National Police Chief's Council says it has seen a 57 per cent spike in hate crime complaints since the United Kingdom voted to leave the E.U.; something stressed by members of parliament in the British House of Commons.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: The scenes and behavior we have seen in recent days are despicable and shameful.

VOICE 2: The leaders of the Brexit campaign have engendered an atmosphere where some people believe it is open season now for racism and --

CROWD: Hear!

VOICE 3: This is turning Britain into a place we have never ever been.

CROWD: Hear, hear!

VOICE 3: Hate crime by its very nature is a rejection of the British values that have always bound us together.

MF: As anti-immigrant rhetoric ramps up in the United Kingdom and the United States, where presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump campaigns for a wall along the Mexican border and a ban on Muslim immigration, it can be easy for Canadians to feel smug. Well today, we'll explore racism in our own country and ask how the rise of anti-immigrant political rhetoric abroad is affecting us here at home. In the past few months, a pig's head was left outside a local mosque in Quebec City; a woman in London Ontario wearing a Canada t-shirt verbally assaulted a Muslim woman in a supermarket; police in Nanaimo, British Columbia investigated racist graffiti found on bus stop advertisements featuring real estate agents of Asian descent; and just last week, another incident in Toronto. Here's Lorraine Fry describing what she witnessed while riding a streetcar in the city on Tuesday.

SOUNDCLIP

I started hearing some abusive language. I could see that the person was a white male, looked to be in his 50s, and that he was standing and just sort of hurling racist abuse at this young black woman who was sitting there. He was using the n-word all the time, basically invoking Trump and saying, just you wait until Donald Trump is elected president and then you'll all be deported. So she responded by saying please stop, you're upsetting me, and then it escalated. The woman behind her started to cry, and it just continued. I mean, just horrible, racist abuse. I heard this other black gentleman, about probably in his early 30s, who very respectfully said to him look, you know, this is not the way to behave, you can't be like this, you're being extremely disrespectful. And the guy reached inside his jacket, got out this can of mace, and sprayed the young black man right in the eyes and in the face. He threw up, then-- it was obvious that he couldn't see at all, and he was in real agony. There were so many people who gathered around him to try and help him. Out came Benadryl, because that might help, this off duty nurse came to help him. And when the conductor stopped the car, of course the doors flew open and he flew out, and a couple of guys actually tried to catch him. The response of one of the people was you know, well, he's clearly crazy, and you just need to, you know, say nothing. I didn't seem to me that he was clearly crazy or drunk. He was just an angry, abusive, racist white man.

MF: That's Lorraine Fry describing an incident on a Toronto streetcar last week. As incidents like these raise alarm bells, some Canadians are finding ways to fight back against racism. Kim Fry, no relation to Lorraine there, was out shopping in her Toronto neighborhood a couple weeks ago when she ran into an anti-refugee rally organized by the ultra-right anti-Islam group PEGIDA. And her reaction? Create a rally of her own. Kim Fry is with us in the Toronto studio, Kim, hello.

KIM FRY: Hi there.

MF: What did you see that day when you went out and you ran into that racist rally?

KIM FRY: Yeah, well, I was sort of taken aback. I was out shopping with my daughter on a Saturday afternoon in the neighborhood, and it was a sidewalk sale, a little bit of a street festival so there was more people than usual.

MF: Typical kind of summer Canadian stuff.

KIM FRY: Exactly. And we saw you know about a dozen people or so gathering with comedian flags and signs and so, you know, as an activist, I was a little curious about who they were. And then when I started to read the content on their signs, at first they just said Canadian values PEGIDA, I didn't really know what PEGIDA was, but then as they walked past, there started to be some signs that were clearly targeting Muslims and the Islamic community. Hate-fugees, we won't let in. There was stuff about men needing to protect their wives from the rapists that we were letting in, and they were chanting protect Canadian values. So I started running after them and saying you guys can't be here, this is racist. And their big line is Islam is not a race, it's a religion, and a few of them wanted to engage in an argument with me. My daughter was really uncomfortable with my level of confrontation, which was intense, I think I was still reeling from Orlando and from the murder of Jo Cox.

MF: Was it instantaneous, as well, or did you think about it before you went out?

KIM FRY: No, I was just totally reactive.

MF: Just went.

KIM FRY: I was in reaction kneejerk mode. And so I talked to them, and a couple of them kind of got a bit aggressive, but there was one woman who was like, no, we're here to stay calm, we're trying to reach people. So I sent my daughter off to Book City and then got out my phone and started to document and try to talk to them again and yeah, it was fairly intense.

MF: How did they react? What kind of -- did you have a conversation?

KIM FRY: It was more heated than a conversation, partly because I knew there wasn't really the opening for a conversation and there is one of me who's almost seven-- I'm almost seven months pregnant, and I was feeling vulnerable and also just shaken by the whole thing. I had not expected to see that my neighborhood. So I hadn't kind of prepared myself with what I was going to say and how is going to reason with people who seemed unreasonable.

MF: Tell us more about them. Who were they, were they from the neighborhood, do you know?

KIM FRY: I didn't recognize them as people from the neighborhood, and when I went home after the incident, I of course immediately went to research PEGIDA and realized that they stand for the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamification of the West, and they're a Dresden-based organization that have been pretty active in Europe, and that the leaders both in Germany and the U.K. had been on trial for inciting and being involved in violent anti-immigrant actions. And then as things came out, I posted pictures on Facebook of the incident what happened and what I saw, and it kind of went a little viral.

MF: And just before we leave, who those protesters were. There were a couple of them who were wearing Trump hats?

KIM FRY: Yeah, and one of them had a Trump button, and they kept saying, you know, things are going to be better when Donald Trump becomes president, and you'll see, and he's fighting back, he finds this a worthwhile issue, but Canadians are in the dark, and we need to let Canadians know that this is happening here, too.

MF: Okay, so stage one of your resistance was to confront them immediately. Stage two, you go on social media. Stage three, you organize your own rally.

KIM FRY: Yeah, so I had a meeting-- so that happened on Saturday, I had a meeting on Wednesday, about a dozen or so people came, some local people in the neighborhood and some other into racist activists, and we ended up having a rally exactly one week later on the Saturday.

MF: And what did you do in the rally?

KIM FRY: Well, we had about 70-75 people, we gathered on the same corner that they gathered on, though our numbers were much larger. Had a few speakers, including some local families who were involved in welcoming refugees. Because when this happened, down the street in Bloor West Village, our Member of Parliament and City Councillor were involved in a welcome to new Syrian refugees kind of picnic. There was an event going on. So I don't know if the timing was coincidental or not. So we invited them to speak and then had stickers and signs and went through the neighborhood and encouraged businesses to put refugees welcome signs in their windows, and finished at High Park, which sent a very positive, welcoming message, that refugees are welcome in Bloor West Village, but racism and Islamophobia is not.

MF: Those PEGIDA protesters, they are Canadians. They have as much a right to free speech as you do, but you think they crossed a line. Why do you think they crossed a line?

KIM FRY: Well, interestingly, my MP and my City Councillor would do nothing about it for that same reason. They said, well, you know, I don't like what they're saying, but there's free speech. For me, in Canada, one thing we do is differentiate between free speech and hate speech. And when we have speech that targets a particular community and paints a whole group of people with a very broad strokes of a brush, to me, that incites hate and when I see the kind of messaging that PEGIDA has on their Facebook group and on their website, it's much less team than maybe the-- well, and the signs weren't even that tame, but they were trying to give a kind of like, we're just concerned Canadians message. A lot of them were wearing Canadian flags on their shirts, or carrying Canadian flags. But there is a more insidious hateful undercurrent to what their message is, and especially if you go on their Facebook page, it's horrific.

MF: I mean, do you think things have changed in the past few months with the Trump candidacy and the Brexit campaign? I mean, these people feel influenced by PEGIDA, that's, you know, dates back a few years. Do you think something has changed in Canada?

KIM FRY: Absolutely. I'm really concerned with the kind of freedom that people have to attack Islam with very little understanding of what it's about. To generalize about a whole religion and group of people based on hardly any information, and a lot of rhetoric from politicians. And I see this, like, my daughter's 13 and she has friends who I have to kind of re-educate as they have these pretty strange ideas. And they are influenced by Trump, they are influenced by the discourse coming out of the U.K., and I think it's sort of kind of created a freedom for people to say things that are quite hateful, racist, and xenophobic, whereas 10 years ago there wouldn't be that space to explore these ideas.

MF: Kim Frye, who organized an anti-racism rally in her neighborhood after she saw one herself. She was here with us in Toronto. Kim, thanks for coming in.

KIM FRY: Thank you.

MF: And we did reach out to PEGIDA Canada for a response, but they declined our invitation. And we're going to continue on that same vein to discuss how anti-immigrant rhetoric abroad can inspire racist incidents in Canada with our next guest, who joins us in studio, as well. Rinaldo Walcott, he is the Associate Professor and Director of the Woman and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. And he, as I say, is live with us. Rinaldo, hello.

RINALDO WALCOTT: Hello.

MF: Nice to see you. You've been listening in, what do you make of the incidents that were just described?

RINALDO WALCOTT: Well, I think what Kim just described doesn't actually surprise me at all. I think what we're seeing is a far right politics that is feeling emboldened to come out of the shadows once again, and to assert itself. Not only in popular media and on the internet, but in the public space.

MF: And those people, are they-- they're there anyway, do they have the fervor anyway and it's just what happens that, as you say, emboldens them, or are they influenced and inspired?

RINALDO WALCOTT: I think, I think it's both. I think they're influenced and inspired, and I think they have been there all along anyway. And I think that their emboldenedness, though, comes from what I would say is the dire lack of the kinds of public discourse that we have in contemporary politics today.

MF: So I mean, we have, you were at the Pride March I think yesterday walking along with Black Lives Matter. we have a Canadian Prime Minister who marches in a pride march, who meets refugees at the airport. In fact, all the main political parties are roughly pro-refugees. So why do these anti-immigrant messages still have such resonance here?

RINALDO WALCOTT: Well, I think there are a couple of things. I think one is that, you know, in the recent election, we barely, we almost bit the bullet on going much more further down that road than we might want to assume, right? The Tories who were just ousted had on the table the cultural barbaric acts bill. So I don't think that we should be celebrating too quickly. I think those, as we can see by PEGIDA, that that those sentiments are deeply implanted in Canadian public political sphere. Again, as much as I think we saw the performance of the prime minister yesterday and our premier and so on in the province of Ontario at the Toronto Pride Parade, there's still a Bill C-51 on the on the books that has to be dealt with and it's being sent to committee as opposed to being undone. So what these things tell me is that there's a particular kind of political ferment that we need to uncover here in Canada, as well.

MF: What's your analysis of what is going on? What is feeding Donald Trump's candidacy that also seems to appeal to these far right and racist groups? What about that vein in Britain that fed into the Brexit vote, the leave vote, that was highly suspicious of immigration, that sort of thing? What is going on?

RINALDO WALCOTT: So I think that part of part of what's going on is that we are yet to, despite all of the evidence that migration and immigration is important and useful and fuels Western economies, there's still a myth that immigrants draw from, rather than contribute, and it seems almost impossible to be able to break that myth. But the other thing, and obviously, Brexit complicates this because of the attacks on Polish people in particular, as well, but the other thing that-- I think we still see the immigrant as someone who doesn't belong. As an outsider. And in Western nations, we always imagine the immigrant is also non-white. So there's a kind of discourse that has already settled, where we imagine these nations as white nations, and others come in who are non-white to despoil them. And that's at the basis and the foundation of these practices. And it's become an unspoken kind of thing, because we celebrate these nations now as multicultural, multiracial nations. But then the imagined ideal citizen is never who we think as the multiracial multicultural subject.

MF: Let's talk about the role of the media, and to help us, Anita Bromberg who's executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. Here's what she had to say about racism and the effect of social media.

SOUNDCLIP

The hate-mongers are going to find a way to express themselves. What they've found today is social media. And unfortunately when they find social media, they can reach out to like-minded individuals, influence those that are open to hearing their messages, and not necessarily be effectively countered. That's something the media can do. If they cover a story of a person expressing hate, they can bring in the voices that will make it very clear that it's the hate-monger that's the other.

MF: Rinaldo, what's your view on that?

RINALDO WALCOTT: I think that she's getting to a really important point and I think it has to go beyond social media. I think that in mainstream media, there is the there's been this false notion of two sides to every story, and the way in which those two sides are covered has to be rethought. So for instance, I'm going to take someone that Nigel Farage, and I would say that Nigel Farage shouldn't appear in mainstream media. What should appear is the analysis of what Nigel Farage has to say.

MF: But he's the leader of a main political party.

RINALDO WALCOTT: And by doing so, we gave that party a legitimate base from which to both help to produce hate and embolden those who already hate.

MF: But let's use that example, because in Britain, for example, you do have a phenomenon, an economic phenomenon, where the white working class has lost out economically and some of them turn to explanations that include migration from the rest of Europe. And there has been a large influx of people from, you mentioned Poland, and other Eastern European countries. And what, should the media not cover those grievances?

RINALDO WALCOTT: No, the media should cover those grievances. But the media should cover those grievances in the way that trained analysts are speaking to why those grievances might have appeared. So for instance, if you take Britain. You know, many of the Poles who are working in Britain are working in hotels, the construction industry, doing the kinds of labor that the white English working class had not been doing. So they're actually not taking jobs, they're responding to the restructuring of austerity economies. The white English working class jobs where de-industrialized jobs. [laughs] And so, but because we don't have a decent public discourse about what's actually going on in our economies, many things become clouded and then hate is directed at groups of people who are actually themselves being moved because of other restructurings in their own home economies.

MF: Really, just in a word: do you think things are getting worse or better?

RINALDO WALCOTT: I think things are revealing themselves for what they are, so I don't think it's a worse or a better.

MF: Rinaldo Walcott who's in our Toronto studio, who is Associate Professor and Director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute the University of Toronto. Thanks very much.

RINALDO WALCOTT: Thank you.

MF: Now we would like to hear from you. Have you experienced or witnessed racist behaviour over the past year? You can tweet us, we're @TheCurrentCBC; comment on this story on our Facebook page, search for CBC The Current; or visit our website and click on the contact link, that sends us an email. It's over at cbc.ca/thecurrent. We would like to leave you on a hopeful note. Racist incidents occur in Canada, of course, but many people across the country are reaching out to support refugees in unprecedented ways. One such place is the newly opened ISS Welcome Centre in Vancouver. Patricia Woroch is the CEO of Immigrant Services Society of B.C., and here she describes the outpouring of goodwill in the days since the centre opened.

SOUNDCLIP

I think in terms of the volunteers, the Syrian refugee crisis that we saw a few months ago demonstrated how much people want to help. In a matter of, I think about five days, we had over 5,000 people. We had no idea how to cope with that many people, it was unbelievable. People want to help, they want to make a difference in other people's lives. They understand the struggles that people go through, and they're at that door, banging on the door, wanting to come in and help us. They don't care where anybody comes from. It's about how do I make their life better?

MF: I'm Mike Finnerty, and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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ENCORE: Genius linked to geography more than genes, says author Eric Weiner

Guests: Eric Weiner

MF: I’m Mike Finnerty and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current. Amadeus. A little Nachtmusik, please.

[Music: Eine kleine Nachtmusik – 1. Allegro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]

MF: The unmistakable sounds of an unmistakable. But Mozart wasn’t alone in Vienna during the city's golden age. Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, were all given forth at the same time and place as Mozart. To author Eric Weiner, that is more than a coincidence. He argues that geography may be even more important than genes when it comes to producing works of genius, and that is the focus of his book, The Geography of Genius. Eric Weiner is a former international correspondent for NPR and he spoke to Anna Maria Tremonti in February.

AMT: So, how do you define genius?

ERIC WEINER: Ah. You know, I subscribe to what I call the fashionista theory of genius, which is essentially that a genius is someone who we declare a genius, that it is a social verdict. We decide who gets to be a genius. And I think that's the best definition, because otherwise, you are making sort of arbitrary decisions about who gets to be a genius and who isn't. Let's say you return to your apartment and you start working on the great Canadian novel, and you're convinced it is a work of genius. But none of your friends agree, none of your co-workers agree, no one will publish it. Are you a genius?

AMT: Well, maybe after I'm dead, but not now.

ERIC WEINER: Exactly. So the point is it takes both the creator and an audience to make a genius. And that you need both elements. But to give you a simpler answer to your question, I like a quote from the German philosopher Schopenhauer. Talent, he says, hits the target no one else can hit. Genius hits the target no one else can see. So, there's always a conceptual leap. The genius is making this leap. It's not just an incremental innovation, it's a jump. It's a jump that Einstein made, and that Darwin made.

AMT: You’ve got another quote that I really liked, and it’s a quote from Genius, as you're talking about China, and it's something about, a genius looks at what everyone else is looking at, and sees something different.

ERIC WEINER: And that's one of the key points here, is that when I talk about genius, I'm not talking about intelligence. It's not about just having a high I.Q., and it's not about just knowing a lot. The genius is not a know-it-all. They’re a see-it-all. They're seeing connections that other people don't see. Einstein, during his time, there were other physicists who knew more physics than Einstein, actually knew more. But Einstein saw things that the others didn't. He made connections that other people didn't. And that is creative genius. It’s not being a smarty pants, it’s about seeing things that others don’t.

AMT: So, how often do we see these kinds of people emerge in clusters?

ERIC WEINER: Almost all the time. You know, you look at the world map over time, and you plot where the geniuses appear, and it’s not like you see one in La Paz, Bolivia, one in Moscow, and one coming from Windsor, Ontario. You see them in groupings, in what I call genius clusters. Certain places at certain times produce a mother lode of brilliant minds and good ideas, and the question is why? What was in the water back then, and can we bottle it?

AMT: So, what kinds of locations are the most common?

ERIC WEINER: Cities. It's almost always a city. You know, there's that old African proverb, it takes a village to raise a child, well, it takes a city to raise a genius. With very few exceptions, Silicon Valley, which we can get to, is one of those. But for the most part, it's densely populated cities, and that's where genius blossoms.

AMT: So, why do you think location has something to do with the emergence of genius?

ERIC WEINER: Because I think that we have this myth of geniuses being just genetic, or geniuses are born, or it's hard work that they're made, and we ignore the soil. We ignore the fact that creative genius is always in a context of a place. It's a relationship to the place, and it grows out of the soil. It's like an apple tree. You need the seed, you need the water, but you need the right soil. And one of the important roles that place plays is audience. You know, you began the segment with some beautiful music from Mozart. Well, he was coming of age, professionally, in Vienna of the 18th century. And he actually moved there from Salzburg, because it was the place to be, and one things he one of the things he loved about Vienna was this audience. And the audience pushed him and prodded him, and in a way, you could say the audience was a co-genius along with Mozart.

AMT: An enabler, almost, yeah.

ERIC WEINER: Enabler in a in a good way, yes.

AMT: Yeah, yeah, okay. So, well, take us on this journey. Let's start with Greece, because you went there first.

ERIC WEINER: It seemed like the place to start. I have to confess that, like most people, I had some passing knowledge of ancient Greece, and Athens in particular, but I didn’t realize the extent to which we are all a little bit Greek, whether we know it or not. And the question, the mystery, really, is why. Not just why Greece, because there wasn't one Greece, there were hundreds of Greeces, these small city states that populated the region, and Athens was probably one of the least likely to become a golden age. The land was barren, it was not the biggest of the city states, not the wealthiest, not the most powerful. Yet, it's the one that flourished more than any other. And so I approached it sort of like a detective. Why Athens, why this one city?

AMT: And what did you find in Athens that then kind of replicated itself as you went along?

ERIC WEINER: one of the common threads is something that's going to sound very simple, and that's walking. They walked a lot, and Aristotle founded the Peripatetic School of Philosophy, which was walking and talking. And Socrates was a huge walker. And as I looked into this, I realized a lot of geniuses walked. Charles Dickens walked through the streets of London in the middle of the night, turning over the plot of whatever novel he was stuck on, and Mark Twain was a huge pacer, he would pace in the room until the ideas came. And, in fact, some recent research out of Stanford University finds that when you put people on a treadmill for as little as 15 or 20 minutes, they then produce more creative ideas than the people who are sitting in a chair like you and I are right now.

AMT: [laughs]

ERIC WEINER: Not having a creative thought enter our minds. So there's something about putting one foot--

AMT: [interposing] You’ve done the work already, I'm just listening.

ERIC WEINER: Okay.

AMT: [laughs]

ERIC WEINER: But we should be on treadmills, really.

AMT: Okay.

ERIC WEINER: While we’re doing this. And, you know, putting one foot in front of the other, it’s something about that simple act that that makes us more creative, because we’re entering the incubation stage of creativity. We're not thinking consciously. Now that's just one small example, there was--

AMT: [interposing] Because they didn't just walk, they walked to, what was it called, the Agora?

ERIC WEINER: The Agora, the marketplace.

AMT: They walked to, like, a marketplace. They walked to a place of chaos and life.

ERIC WEINER: There was life.

AMT: Stuff going on.

ERIC WEINER: I mean, here’s a dirty little secret about ancient Athens, the cradle of Western democracy and civilization, is that it was kind of a dump. It was a dump, even by the dumpy standards of the day, really. The walls were so thin on the houses, that robbers simply dug through them. In fact, the ancient Greek word for robber means, literally, one who digs through walls. And it was smelly, and visitors would come from other city states and say, essentially, what a dump. But that's one of the first threads I found about these genius clusters, is they’re not paradise. This notion we have that creativity only happens in the perfect setting is totally wrong. In fact, a lot of these places are difficult, and they give us something to push against. Because creativity, and creative genius by extension, is always, I think, a response to a challenge. And Athens, the topography of Athens, the society of Athens, challenged people. And they responded in very creative ways.

AMT: So remind us, who did Athens give us?

ERIC WEINER: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, not necessarily in that order. Sophocles, the playwrights, and so much else. But just one more thing about Athens is, I think the real key to Athenian genius was its outward orientation. The dirty little secret about the Athenians is that they didn't invent as much as we think. They perfected a lot. They mooched, they were moochers.

AMT: So there was a port--

ERIC WEINER: [interposing] There was a port, Piraeus, and went out and they sailed. And they didn't invent statuary. They borrowed that from the Egyptians, and the same thing with mathematics, and other things that we associate with the Greeks. And Plato once said, what the Greeks borrow from foreigners, they perfect. This is something I saw in all these places, and you still see in Silicon Valley today. These golden ages are not necessarily places where great ideas are born, it's where they come of age, it’s where they learn how to walk.

AMT: Okay. Well, let's walk to Florence during the Renaissance.

ERIC WEINER: Okay.

AMT: It was like nothing seen since Athens, what kind of characters are we talking about in this age?

ERIC WEINER: We're talking about some very well-known characters like Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, and slightly lesser known characters like Filippo Brunelleschi, who built that iconic duomo that any visitor to Florence today will simply stare and wonder--

AMT: [interposing] That’s right, and that whole structure, actually, the creation of that duomo, the architectural wonder of that was, no one had ever done that.

ERIC WEINER: No one had done it, absolutely. And mainly artists, but also some incredible thinkers, and humanists, as they were called, to this day there's the lingering presence of not just the Renaissance, not just the Italian Renaissance, but the Florentine Renaissance. Again, one specific place.

AMT: So, what was it about that place? We know that the Medici family had a lot of money and it was a big patron, what was going on there?

ERIC WEINER: Money. It was actually, I subtitled that chapter, genius is expensive, purposely being a bit provocative, because we don't normally associate money and genius. We think the creative genius is just off doing his or her thing, and they don't need money, but that's not true. It was once said of Mahatma Gandhi by his aides, it takes a lot of money to keep the Mahatma in poverty. And it takes a lot of money to keep a starving artist starving, likewise. The Medicis were amazing patrons. I'll give you just one brief story, is at the time, one of the head Medicis was Lorenzo, known as Lorenzo the Magnificent. And he's wandering around the palace grounds, and off into the Medici Gardens, he notices a young stone cutter who couldn't be more than 14 years old. And he spots something about that kid, and says, kid, you've got talent. You're really good. You should come live with me, be a member of my family. I'll give you the best teachers and the best material in the land. And it was a wise investment, because today that kid is best known as Michelangelo. Who was the genius, was it Michelangelo, or was it Lorenzo, or was it the whole city of Florence?

AMT: And, you know, I was just in Florence this summer, and I was really struck by the fact that these artists then were given the opportunity to do more things, you make the point that Michelangelo starts as a sculptor, he ends up painting in the Sistine Chapel.

ERIC WEINER: Right.

AMT: Like, once you show talent, you get opportunity to show more talent.

ERIC WEINER: And to show more--

AMT: [interposing] And he rose to it, obviously.

ERIC WEINER: And to show more talent in unrelated fields, I think that's the key. And that's what separates Florentine genius from our version of it today, is today, we tend to play it safe. You know, we only hire people for job X if they've already done job X somewhere else. But Pope Julius II, I believe it was, who was a Medici himself, was looking for someone to do some ceiling work, you know, in the Sistine Chapel. And he says, I want that Michelangelo guy. And I'm sure his aides said, but, he's mainly a sculptor. He hasn't done much painting, and nothing on this scale. And the pope essentially said, I don't care. I'm going to place a huge bet on this guy for a seemingly impossible task. And that’s the sort of risks they took and the leaps they made that I don't know if we are so up for today.

AMT: Something else you point to with the Florentine crowd, and it carries over to other things, is that a lot of these people have dead dads.

ERIC WEINER: Dead dads, yes. Dead dads are important for genius. Sartre once said, the best gift that a father can give to his son is to die young. And that's based on some research that shows that a disproportionate number of geniuses lost a parent, usually a father, at a young age. And that speaks directly to this connection between trauma and genius. There seems to be a connection on a personal level. And the same thing for the places, though, Anna Maria, that a lot of these places suffered trauma just before their golden age. Athens was sacked by the Persians before Pericles rebuilt it grander than ever. Florence was decimated by the Black Death, the bubonic plague, just a few generations before The Renaissance blossomed. It seems that you need a stirring of the pot.

AMT: Eric Weiner, you found some differences between genius in the East and West. Tell us about your visit to China, and how do I pronounce it, is it Hangzhou?

ERIC WEINER: Hangzhou.

AMT: Hangzhou.

ERIC WEINER: Yeah, Hangzhou was the place to be in the 13th century in the world. City of a million people. You know, when Europeans were picking lice out of their hair and wondering when the Middle Ages would ever, ever end, the people of Hangzhou, in the capital of the Song Dynasty, were inventing the compass, inventing toilet paper, no small thing, wood block printing, creating beautiful art and poetry, and just thriving. And one visitor to Hangzhou was Marco Polo, who was blown away. In fact, he wrote about Hangzhou, and people back home didn't believe it. They called it, Il Milione, the million, as in a million lies. They couldn't believe there was such a place. But there was, and you're right, that it is Chinese creativity is somewhat different from Western creativity. In the West, we're really focused on novelty. That something, to be creative, has to be new and surprising, have that shock effect. In the Eastern, particularly the Confucian version of creativity, it's more a matter of usefulness. If something isn't useful, it won't be considered creative. It's a slightly different approach.

AMT: It’s so interesting, especially with China, because that's a history that in the West we don't know enough about, all of the amazing things that came out of China.

ERIC WEINER: And it's true, and the West does not have a monopoly on creative genius by any extent. And today, the Chinese are wringing their hands collectively, wondering why so much is made in China, but so little was invented there. You know, when will they see a Chinese Steve Jobs? And I met with a man there named Jack Ma, who is the founder of Alibaba, one of the wealthiest men in the world now, and he told me something surprising. When I asked him what it will take for China to regain that creative spark, he said they need to return to their roots, to their spiritual roots of Confucianism and Taoism and Buddhism, and these old notions of creativity, as being something actually, and this is going to sound really weird, but creativity that's based on tradition. And that sounds weird to Western ears, because we think that creativity is, by definition, a slap in the face try to tradition, but it's not. Every creative development is always based on what came before. Is Isaac Newton's old standing on the shoulders of giants, that's how we could see further. And I think in China, they acknowledge those shoulders more than we do here in the West.

AMT: You also profile Calcutta, now called Kolkata.

ERIC WEINER: Correct.

AMT: Tell us about the Bengal Renaissance.

ERIC WEINER: This was probably the most surprising, and I think a lot of people might say, what is Calcutta doing in a book about creative genius, because it's so associated with poverty and despair today, but for a while, in the late 19th, early 20th century, it was a golden age. And it produced its own renaissance man, Rabindranath Tagore, who was a poet, essayist, activist, educator and the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize for literature. And he was one of many writers, there were scientists, including Chandra Bose, who may or may not have invented the radio before Marconi, and there were more books published in Calcutta at the time than any city in the world except for London. It's little known today, but it seemed like an interesting place to explore the connection between chaos and creative genius.

AMT: Tell me more about that.

ERIC WEINER: Well, we think of them as being just antithetical, like, that the genius sort of makes order out of things. And that's true, but first, they create chaos. Einstein's hair was chaotic. Beethoven's desk was chaotic.

AMT: His whole life was chaotic.

ERIC WEINER: He was a slob. I mean, he kept moving from apartment to apartment in Vienna, because landlords kept kicking him out because he was it was such a mess in his, in his various apartments. There's something to this. There are recent studies that show that if you put people in a very pristine, super neat office setting, and give them a creative thinking exam, they don't do as well as when there's a little bit of a mess. And if you think about it, if you're trying to come up with a new idea, you have to enter through a state of chaos. It's ignorance, chaos is a form of ignorance. It's your brain trying to form a new pattern around this information. And in Calcutta, there's chaos everywhere. There's stimuli coming at you, whether you want it or not. I think that’s one reason why cities are so creative. There's just, you walk down the street, even in a city like Toronto, and stuff is coming at you, and you never know--

AMT: [interposing] So you have to think differently.

ERIC WEINER: You have to think differently, and you never know where that stuff might lead.

AMT: Well let's get back to your fashionista theory of genius, then.

ERIC WEINER: Right.

AMT: And talk about, because we've been talking about people in the past, and that you can identify, but Silicon Valley, which is underway--

ERIC WEINER: [interposing] Yes.

AMT: And so many people point to geniuses. Help us--

ERIC WEINER: [interposing] Steve Jobs being the best example. And my cocktail party question when researching the book was, was Steve Jobs a genius, yes or no? Everywhere I go, with the exception of Silicon Valley, where they all say yes, it's pretty much divided 50-50. Some people will whip out their iPhone and say, my God, yes he was. Look, this device changed the world, it changed the way we do everything. And other people say, no, he didn't really invent anything, he was maybe a marketing genius, not a real genius. And the point is, one, is that it's a little close. It's a little recent for us to make that judgment, we need a bit of time. And the other point is, look, we get the geniuses that we want and that we deserve, and in 18th century Vienna, they cared a lot about music, what we now call classical music, and they got a Mozart and a Beethoven and others. What do we care about now? We care about technology. And who are our geniuses? Steve Jobs.

AMT: So what sets Silicon Valley apart?

ERIC WEINER: Well, it's an outlier in a couple ways. One way is that it didn't start as a city. And this, I have to admit, I've not fully figured out why and how it did that. But it started in this farmland, essentially, that it was best known as the prune capital of America.

AMT: But if that’s where it started, I suppose you could say that people kind of flocked to it, though, I mean, and money played a role.

ERIC WEINER: Yes, this is the magnetic theory of genius. That places of genius were places where people were attracted to, and that's true, but they have to be attracted there for a reason. It's not a coincidence that Silicon Valley blossomed on the West Coast. Think about it. All the money, all the power, all the brains were in the East Coast. But, you know, in the late 19th century, a U.S. Senator named Leland Stanford starts a school called Stanford University. And what did a New York newspaper say at the time, they sniffed. They literally sniffed. California needs an elite university about as much as Switzerland needs a retirement home for sea captains. And I'm sure that pissed off Californians.

AMT: [laughs]

ERIC WEINER: And they had a chip on their shoulder, right, not a microchip yet, that hadn't been invented, but the other kind of chip, and they were out to prove those East Coast snobs wrong. And that was a driving force behind Stanford University, a driving force behind Silicon Valley. And there’s also the freedom out there. The freedom to fail.

AMT: No rules.

ERIC WEINER: No rules. A founder of one of the early computer companies there said, well, in Silicon Valley, if you fail, your family won't know and your neighbors won't care.

AMT: So Silicon Valley, it's full of the beanbag chairs, it's got slides in the offices…

ERIC WEINER: Yeah.

AMT: It’s got fully stocked fridges. Yet, you argue that making life too comfortable does not encourage a creative genius.

ERIC WEINER: You know, where are the beanbag chairs at CBC, by the way? I have not seen any.

AMT: We don’t have any.

ERIC WEINER: No. Then that's good, that's why you're so creative here because-- and no ping pong tables, right?

AMT: No ping pong tables.

ERIC WEINER: Right. That's why this is a bastion of creativity, is because you don't make life too comfortable and too easy for people, right?

AMT: Well, that's true, actually.

ERIC WEINER: [laughs] Right. And that's good, because again, you need something to push against. That creativity actually thrives when we're confronted with constraints, which again, sounds counterintuitive. We think, give everyone, give our employees everything they need to be creative. And that's not the case.

AMT: So you look at the geography of genius. You're not immune to trying to grow genius, even in your own family. Like, parents want to somehow nurture genius, kind of.

ERIC WEINER: [interposing] Everyone wants a little Einstein and a little Mozart, right.

AMT: Yeah, but maybe we shouldn’t be thinking that way?

ERIC WEINER: That’s okay, no, I want my daughter to be a genius, I have to be honest. [laughs]

AMT: So where should she be living?

ERIC WEINER: [crosstalk] I want her to be happy, too.

AMT: So where should you be living, then, right now?

ERIC WEINER: That’s the big question. I could lie to you, I could say, like, La Paz, Bolivia, but not for another ten thousand years. You know. [laughs]

AMT: Because I won't be able to hold you to account.

ERIC WEINER: Exactly, those are the best kind of predictions. The honest answer is I don't know, but I can tell you where it's not going to be. It's not going to be in Pyongyang, North Korea. Is it because they don't have good genes there? No. Is it because they don't work hard? Oh, they work plenty hard. It's because it's not an open system. Right? It doesn't have that fundamental ingredient of diversity and tolerance and openness that all these places have. So, I place more of a bet on Tallinn, Estonia, which, wonder if you know this, but Skype was invented there, and they have a flourishing high-tech sector, and they have a strong culture, and they have an openness to the outside world. So, it may seem weird now, because it's so small and obscure, but it's possible, absolutely.

AMT: Thanks for coming in.

ERIC WEINER: Thank you. I feel that we're both more genius-like after this.

AMT: Well, at least we know maybe how to recognize it in others.

ERIC WEINER: Exactly, exactly.

AMT: Eric Weiner, thank you.

ERIC WEINER: Thanks, Anna Maria.

MF: Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Genius. He spoke to Anna Maria in February. I’m Mike Finnerty. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current and we’ll see you tomorrow.

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July 4, 2016 full episode transcript

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