To what extent is the price of immortality humanity, as you could put it? Must the revolutionary artist ignore — even flout — the basic laws of decency that govern our world in order to transform that world? “Perfection of the life, or of the work,” as Yeats had it. “And if it take the second,” he went on, the intellect of man “must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.”
It was an ancient question even then, but somehow every other book I’ve been reading of late comes back to it. Walter Isaacson’s unbiddable 2011 biography of Steve Jobs presents his subject as a kind of Lee Kuan Yew of the tech industry, demanding we give up our ideas of democracy and control in exchange for a gorgeously designed new operating system. Innovation doesn’t have to be so dictatorial: Albert Einstein, the subject of Isaacson’s previous biography, is revered in part for his readiness to defer to what he didn’t understand. Yet the more we read about Jobs publicly humiliating colleagues and refusing to acknowledge responsibility for the birth of his first child, the more we see that his genius could seem inextricable from his indifference to social norms.
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