The Limits of Genius

While on vacation, Randall Nathan has been reading H.W. Brands' biography of Benjamin Franklin, THE FIRST AMERICAN. Brands and Nathan both think Franklin was a genius. Nonetheless, Franklin thought some ethnic groups were hopeless, including the Native Americans, because they refused to adopt "civilized" ways, even when they were well exposed to them and had the opportunity. He noted that Native American children raised among European Americans always reverted to the NA way of life, whereas "English" children raised among the NAs, when given the chance to return to a "civilized" life, always elected to stay with the NA life.

To Randall Nathan reading today, it is a strange contradction in the otherwise very scientific approach of Franklin. Here was evidence before him, yet he chose to interpret it in the exact opposite way he would treat evidence in the field of science, such as electricity. He had a prior assumption of the superiority of the life he called civilized and could only assume that anyone who refused it was of inferior intellect because of something ingrained in hisher ethnicity.