The Genius of the Season

So much is contained in a single word—a single letter. Thus, “Celebrating the birth of God” carries a different connotation from “Celebrating the birth of a god.” Maybe the phrase “Celebrating birth” says it all.

My Greek is a little rusty after all these years, but as I recall, the prefix “gen-” carries a range of inference that spans race, kind, line of descent, origin, creation, sexual relations, and reproduction. Just think of the modern equivalents: generation,  genius,  generator,  genuine, and genesis. But we must also include such words as genus, genealogy, and general, as well as that seemingly all-powerful biological entity, the "gene." 

Clearly that simple prefix can take us in two different directions. On the one hand, it calls up a series of concepts having to do with novelty, creativity, authenticity, and uniqueness. One the other hand, it refers to concepts that lump things together into groups on the basis of their type or ancestry. We hold no one in higher esteem than the “genius,” yet reserve our most withering derision for the merely “generic.”

Somewhere in between lies the concept of the "gens." In ancient Greece, a genos (Greek: γένος, "race, stock, kin") was, to quote Wikipedia, " a social group claiming common descent, referred to by a single name. Most gene were composed of noble families and much of early Greek politics seems to have involved struggles between gene." Eventually many of these families became associated with hereditary priestly functions.

These aspects of the concept—family origins, noble group functions—are obviously not the same as the striking individual referred to as a genius, but it would be a mistake to imagine that they’re entirely unrelated. In modern times the individualistic element has grown in prominence, no doubt, along with the notion of finding one's "true self," but we meet up with both at every family gathering: the idiosyncrasies and the differences between family members that stimulate and nourish us (though they can sometimes annoy us, too) accompanied by a sense of something hallowed in the air. At best, the veins of affection run ever-deeper and constitute the heart and soul (rather than merely the pedigree) of the clan. 

Praise be to whoever cooked up a universe replete with such a dialectic, which, whether fueled by merely congenital or broadly congenial energy, is the richest heritage we possess.