Genius Under House Arrest

In 2007, the Watson Affair – the worldwide character assassination and exclusion from public life of Dr. James Watson, the brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning scientist co-credited with the discovery of DNA – shocked the global public in an early episode of what would come to be called “cancel culture.” Watson was an early and very public victim of incipient wokeism: a warning to others who might be tempted to dissent from favored ideologies of expression and behavior. With the Watson Affair, Western society had changed to the point of inversion; from being broadly supportive of genius, and providing protected niches for those of great accomplishment, to exactly the opposite – a censorious surveillance culture where even minor missteps could result in personal and professional ruin. Genius Under House Arrest explores how this dramatic shift occurred and argues that not only was every “controversial” remark of Watson’s empirically accurate, but that geniuses – with Watson as the example – are a package deal: extreme creative ability as a consequence of sometimes difficult personalities, with effects ranging across social, ideological, and professional life. As society has begun to realize, nothing less than the West’s culture of merit and achievement is at stake.