Where have all the geniuses gone?

Throughout history there have been several people considered as geniuses, not only by their contemporary fellows, but more importantly by mankind afterwards, the is to say, they have entered history as geniuses. One interesting facet of these people is that according to the historic period where they have lived they can be almost grouped into different endeavours.

In antiquity, when the universe was "new", that is to say when human knowledge of the universe was still in its infancy, the genius of mankind was devoted to the discovery of what we now call the bsaics of science, philosophy an politics. This was the contribution of the Greeks and Romans; Afterwards come the Middle Ages, when the interest of mankind was drawn away from the mundane world, and started focusing on the intagible, and divine, so the new interest of geniuses was that, and to show we have the likes of Saint Thomas of Aquine and Saint Augustin (I'm not sure these are their names in English for I learnt them in Spanish and have read most of their works either in that language or in Latin).

The divine is once more replaced by the humane during the renaissance, and genius is once more focused in human affairs, and we have the great endeavours of Michel Angelo, Leonardo and many others who dedicated their lives to pursuits such as anatomy, architecture, and most importantly, the arts, centered on mankind, long gone are the days where art was reserved to angels and portraits, to be replaced by such masterpieces as the David, or the Giocconda, there's even the daring of Michelangelo of painting God when he imbues Adam with the spark of life.

After this period there comes the new expression of mankind in the Age of Lights, where the old monarchies are faced with revolutions and problems of their own, the church continues on its downward spiral, losing more and more power to the secular governments; this new state of affairs provides a new interest to mankinds geniuses, and once more it's necessary to retake the study of Philosophy and Politics, giving birth to the modern conception of government, but this was not all, art was another important part of mankind's endeavours, specilly in the field of music, where we have Beethoven, Mozart, Chopan, Schubert, and so many others.

The next stage in the history of human genius is Modernity. Here there's an interesting change of affairs, where one of the postulates is that art is useless, and early modern philosophers, such as hegel, proclaimed art was dead, which brings us to the age of reason, where artistic genius is no longer focused on those things that worry the greater community of mankind, but rather focuses on those things society most desperately tries to hide; this as a protest to the new label of uselesness cast upon it by the self righteous masters of philosophy; however, despite this new label, art had been an endeavour of genius for so longm that it still attracted many of the brightest minds, but a new field emerged: pure science. This was the new way to go for geniuses, and that's why we have Einstein, Freud, the Curie marriage, and many others.

Which brings me to today, where art is no longer the domain of genius, but rather of talent and in many cases not even that. Genius was devoted to science untill they gave us the atomic bomb and WWII, and on the fringes were the artists, complaining of it, such as Picaso's Guernica, and other similar works. But the devastation of WWII was such, and the guilt so big, that genius changed once more its focus, hence, we have not had reports of anyone as genial and aweinspiring as any of the people I've mentioned in this article; so the question remains, where have all the genius gone?

A friend of mine made me realize that in the post modern are genius is centered in bussiness. The new genius is a man like Bill Gates, who has managed to get a great portion of mankind to buy his products and use nothing else; so is this what in the future will be seen as the genius of our times?