Sherlock Envy

Here is something weird my brain does:

I love fictional genius characters, especially ones whose sense of self-worth is tied up in their intelligence and whose story arc is partially about the messy process of untangling the two. I love Charlotte Holmes, Harrowhark Nonagesimus*, Gregory House, and all the rest.

I also find it uncomfortable to read or watch their stories in a way that doesn’t correspond to whether I agree with the overall ideology of the story.

Why? It took me a long time to put my finger on it–like, I’m in my thirties, and this is the first I’m piecing it together–but it helped to watch ContraPoints’s most recent video essay, Envy.

I guess my brain has decided that I’m really envious of smart fictional characters–not just smart ones, but ones who define the conceit of their universe by their intelligence.

As per the video, it’s not about wishing I were like them, that I had what they “have.” My ordinary self knows that what they “have” is literally impossible. Many of their stories are at least partly about how literally impossible it is! You can’t always be right. You can’t be “the best” at everything that matters to you, because almost nothing can truly be measured along a single hierarchical axis.

For example, you can’t be “the best” writer, because everyone is looking for different things in the stories they read. Even books with amazing Goodreads scores and huge fanbases get one-star reviews!

You can’t be “the best” mathematician because there are so many different branches of mathematics and problems and approaches within each branch.

You can’t be “the best” student because maybe you’re good at getting high marks, but maybe someone else is better at resilience in the face of failure, and maybe yet another person is best at actually learning the material. Or maybe you’re the “best” at all those things in your class, but there are literally seven billion other people in the world, and some of them are going to have more talent than you, and others more grit, and others more opportunity, and still others are going to achieve less than you only because you, through no doing of your own, had more time or resources or outside pressures.

As an historian of science, I was trained to look askance at “great man” history–the idea that technology and knowledge have advanced due to a single (usually white and male) person’s genius. Put another way, I understand that no matter how exceptional an individual’s achievements might seem, a narrative that makes sense of them by appealing to some unique and special quality of the person themselves doesn’t explain or analyze our path to the here-and-now in a useful or accurate way.

Was Newton or Darwin smart and capable? Sure! But were they special geniuses different from everybody else around them? No–there were plenty of other smart and talented people who didn’t have the same opportunities or interests, upon whom social, cultural, and familial forces acted in different ways. Or whose work wasn’t known then and/or isn’t known today for reasons that have nothing to with its quality. Their discoveries, inventions, and insights weren’t born fully-formed as though from the head of Zeus; many people contributed the influences and half-steps and puzzle pieces for the ideas that we credit as springing whole from individuals.

It’s probably this reason, then, that I rankle at these fictional geniuses. Envy, as per Contrapoints’s video above, isn’t about wanting what we don’t have; it’s about not wanting others to have what we can’t.

I can never be a genius, because (among many reasons) I don’t believe that geniuses as we popularly conceive of them exist. People might think I’m smart some of the time–I mean, I hope they do. I might be good at some things, sometimes. Again, I hope I am. Most of the time, I’m good enough at the thing that I’m trying to do. But I will never, ever be “the best” even at the things I’m good at, and that’s not only okay but normal.

I mean, I know, intellectually, that’s normal and okay. That was something I had to learn after a childhood and adolescence of being “good” at school–of internalizing an identity as “the smart kid.” It’s something I struggled with through grad school, where suddenly (at least in my field), everyone was “the smart kid” and, worse, we were all working on superficially similar projects (dissertations) that were actually diverse and incommensurable.

It’s something I still struggle with today as an adult, during the first period in my life when most of the people I meet were never and never will be in school with me and are judging my intelligence (which the rat bastard part of my brain still whispers is equivalent to “worth,” at least for me–somehow it never doubts that other people’s worth is multifaceted and rich) on things I have no control over, instead of on easy-to-compare numerical marks.

I can strive to be considered competent and capable, but I can never be like Sherlock Holmes: considered brilliant by everyone who meets him, and, if someone doesn’t, they’re proven wrong and made to look foolish.

But knowing that doesn’t stop me from wishing it were otherwise–that I didn’t have to confront these feelings of inadequacy, that I could go on in the familiar but unhelpful and unhealthy childhood mode of deriving validity from a number scrawled on a test paper.

And it doesn’t mitigate the fears that threaten my shaky confidence in my value as-a-human-being-because-I’m-a-human-being. What if the fictional genius I’m reading about is real-er than me? What if his or her or their dismissal of people like me is true: that all the above is what lesser people tell themselves to make up for not being talented or smart enough? What if I could be like them if I weren’t too lazy or fearful to dedicate myself to tasks like they do?

What if I did dedicate myself to intellect at the exclusion of everything else in my life and still found myself wanting?

These are toxic thoughts! They’re toxic to me, and, if I listen to them, they’re toxic to the people around me! There’s no such thing as “intellect” all by itself, divorced from the emotions and disordered experience of being human. Every person has value, and none of us is so superior that we can judge the value of others!

And so I sometimes envy fictional characters for living in a more streamlined universe where they can believe these things, where it is possible to be not only smart but special, and I especially envy the ones who get to be those things, even temporarily.

* ETA much later, because it was bugging me: Harrow is different from most of the other characters I’ve named, and I recognize that. Her universe and character arc isn’t “about” this issue in the same way that, for example, Sherlock Holmes adaptations and stand-ins tend to be. But I’ve included her here because her narration/perspective have a heavy element of it; they ping the same feelings in me, and Harrow goes through at least the first part(s) of the series assessing the world through a “genius is both possible and the source of my/my counterparts’ worth” lens.