Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret".

Jonah Lehrer: the fall of a hipster intellectual

Lehrer: an expert on creativity (Photo: Nick Cunard/Rex)

From Saturday's Daily Telegraph
The Shulman House in the Hollywood Hills was designed by the architect Raphael Soriano in 1947; the photographer who commissioned it, Julius Shulman, described it as “a glass box with a magnificent orientation”, surrounded by koi ponds and a “jungle of trees” including an 85ft redwood. Let’s hope that the house’s new owner, 31-year-old science writer Jonah Lehrer, soaks up its soothing atmosphere this weekend. He’s had a rough few days.
On Monday he resigned from the New Yorker magazine after what the New York Times described as “one of the most bewildering recent journalistic frauds”. Bewildering because Lehrer is cool, modest and smart. His postmodern CV leaps from neuroscience at Columbia to literature at Oxford; he dresses like a Palo Alto geek.
Anyway, he’s in a real pickle, because in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works he fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan. That was stupid. Dylan exegetes have memorised his every word; you might as well misquote the Torah and expect the Hasidim not to notice.
Also, when journalist Michael Moynihan chased up those quotes – intended to show how the right hemisphere of Bob’s brain rearranged nonsensical thoughts – Lehrer told a pack of lies. The fibs were plausible, involving supposed unreleased archival footage. Unfortunately for him, Moynihan is a Dylan expert. Jonah ended up digging a very deep grave for himself.
Sweeping statements are all the rage in the school of pop science that produced Lehrer, so here’s one for you. He’s a victim of digital culture.
First, the software that allows writers to cut, paste, tweak and borrow words also makes it easy to uncover plagiarism. You’d think that the aspiring gurus who witter about “connectedness” would remember this. On the contrary: digital utopianism encourages a dangerously chilled-out attitude to copyright law.
The second trap into which Lehrer fell was created by the fad for books in which a light bulb goes on and everything is illuminated: apparently random events are tied together by the Big Idea.
Forbes blogger John McQuaid talks about “Gladwellisation”, whereby would-be Malcolm Gladwells try to force their Blink, Nudge, Bounce or (in my case) Fix on to every media platform.
The temptation (which I hope I resisted) is that the author will hastily mould data to fit his smart-alec thesis. Lehrer’s theory of creativity is too muddled to sum up neatly, but there’s evidence of clumsy shoehorning on almost every page. Long before the Dylan lie was discovered, critics had mocked Imagine for its slippery elisions. Shakespeare, Nike, Pixar and the brain: Lehrer had something misleading to say about all of them.
In places, Imagine borders on parody. It talks about the left-field creativity that produced a disposable mop, the Swiffer. “That insight changed floor cleaning forever,” says Lehrer.
Today’s digital market seeks to satisfy the appetites of intellectually curious people with very short attention spans. The result is a deluge of books, blogs, online lectures and web apps that offer to unpack the world for us by playing multidisciplinary leapfrog.
This scandal should make us think carefully about the methodology underlying many of these claims. We don’t need any more hipster “intellectuals” telling us what traffic lights in Tbilisi and the mating habits of the duck-billed platypus reveal about Why Stuff Happens. Lehrer is a potentially brilliant exponent of proper science. I hope his career recovers from this scandal. But I hope the genre doesn’t.