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Human
Accomplishment:
The
Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to
1950
From The
Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Consider this claim: that the greatest human accomplishments require mastery of rigorous constraints first achieved almost exclusively by white Western European males. One might guess that it would be Charles Murray making such an argument. In his latest book, Human Accomplishment, Murray steps back up to the plate after Losing Ground and The Bell Curve with a thesis sure to irritate most of America's thinking class. Yet the book is, more often than not, brilliant. In lucid prose, Murray methodically addresses and refutes most of the predictable counterarguments to his thesis. Taking local biases into account, he assesses various regions' contributions to human accomplishment by tabulating how many figures from a specific part of the world are cited in 50 percent or more of standard encyclopedic compendia, including Islamic and Far Eastern sources. Murray begins his survey at 800 B.C., arguing that innovation before then had been more species-wide than individual, and had tended largely to evanesce rather than become established, other than in China. Summarizing the work of Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germs and Steel fame), he shows that serious innovation requires advanced civilizations of the sort that geography helped bring about earlier in the Middle East and elsewhere than, for example, in Africa. Murray argues that, with the leisure and specialization that agricultural surpluses allowed, China and the Islamic world gave the West a run for its money at first but that ultimately an efflorescence in a few Western European countries after 1400 turned the world upside down. Linear perspective, polyphonic music, the novel, mathematical proof and the scientific method are largely the product of the Dead White Males whom we are taught to assume have been celebrated at the expense of subalterns written out of the history books. This is no survey of the lives and works themselves à la Jacques Barzun's masterful From Dawn to Decadence; Murray spends more than half of the book justifying his epistemology. But that he must do this is a sign of our times, when reflexive relativism exerts such a hold on so many and qualifies as responsible scholarship. While I find it sobering that none of his milestones springs from Togo or New Guinea, I also share Murray's lack of enthusiasm for the critics who respond to such omissions by questioning the very value of Western technology; he is correct in his skeptical view of those who would make that disparagement while talking on their cell phones on the way to the airport. Nevertheless, he has to craft his argumentation to the terms of present-day cultural debate, and this makes the book something of a trudge. Hundreds of pages of throat-clearing lead to final chapters adopting the Weberian argument that Protestantism encourages individuality and a sense of purpose in secular life, qualities that spur innovation. That point is, after all, hardly new. Nor, however, is it chauvinistic, as opposed to simply a product of historical contingency. As Murray has it, "highly familistic, consensual cultures have been the norm throughout history and the world. Modern Europe has been the oddball." Where he does display bias is in his 1950 cutoff. Ostensibly stopping here because expert consensus has yet to jell, Murray elsewhere pronounces that "it is hard to imagine that the last half-century will be seen as producing an abundance of timeless work." Murray believes that the 20th century witnessed a decline in artistic accomplishment, as artists and intellectuals rejected religious conviction and Western norms. But will two centuries of sifting really leave "La Dolce Vita," "Raging Bull," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," "Sweeney Todd," Mama Day and Herzog on the same scrapheap as the works of Thackeray? There is more awesome craft and inspiration in such works than Murray, with his classical leanings, appears willing to seek. He also has an idealistic sense of how most human beings process accomplishment. Murray makes the surprising assumption that humans are universally awed by complexity, so that the fashion must eventually swing back to all thinking people's readily acknowledging that the Venus de Milo exceeds in sophistication the carving of an indigenous tribesman. When he charges that to equate "How Much is That Doggy in the Window?" with Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is to make "a sweeping judgment of the capacity of the human mind to assess information," he considers it a deft point, supposedly revealing a stark qualitative distinction that few would contest. But for more than a few readers, the distinction Murray draws between sentimental response and critical assessment will be not only counterintuitive but offputting. Few people have trouble with the extremes -- one can like hot dogs without considering them the equal of high Thai cuisine. But many intelligent people today do not spontaneously revere Renee Fleming over Aretha Franklin even though Fleming's art is more complex and based on more training, or regard Bach's achievement as greater than Radiohead's. "Funk" and "attitude" reign as pillars of artistic evaluation, and for more people than Murray seems to be aware of, just why we put "Stairway to Heaven" in quotes and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in italics wound not, I suspect, be readily clear. The reason for this has less to do with lapsed faith in higher ideals than in how more complex artistic forms, such as the novel and classical music, are products of technological developments such as writing, which allow art forms much longer, more intricate and memory-unfriendly than those humans have evolved to appreciate intuitively. All humans have music, for example, but indigenous peoples need no music-appreciation training to embrace their unwritten songs and dance accompaniments. Beethoven's Seventh, with its several instruments sustaining precise melodies and harmonies through complex developments over 30-plus minutes and not based on cyclic repetition or easy remembering, could not exist without writing, and many require tutelage to appreciate it. Time was that familiarity with classical music was tied to education and middle-class membership, but the hold it exerted was always fragile. Today, recording technology combines with the multiculturalist imperative to allow constant access to forms that are more immediately appealing. Unsurprisingly, both creators and listeners now hearken more to those forms. Murray attempts to cut through relativism by designating worthiest those accomplishments that elicit the response "How could a human being have done that?" But more than a few today are sincerely moved to ask that question of Sting's latest album. Murray's cultural predilections leave him unable to address that frame of mind conclusively. And thus, for all of its cogency, Human Accomplishment will never reach readers who recoil at any claim that "The Marriage of Figaro" occupies a higher plane than The Who's "Tommy." Reviewed by John McWhorter Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. -------------------------------------------------
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Charles
Murray's Super Human Accomplishment
Reviewer:
Once a
decade, Charles Murray drops a bombshell book on American intellectual
life.
In 1984, it was his devastating assessment of welfare programs, "Losing Ground," which helped inspire the famous 1996 welfare reform act. In 1994, Murray coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein the enormous bestseller "The Bell Curve." It ignited controversy by arguing that IQ scores are one of the most overlooked tools for understanding how American society is structured. Now, after a half-decade of work, Murray, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, is back with another massive book, 688 pages full of graphs and tables. "Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950" (HarperCollins, $29.95) is a fascinating attempt to rank the 4,000 most important artists and scientists in human history. Murray meticulously measured how much attention the leading scholars in their fields pay to the top creators and discoverers. Reading "Human Accomplishment" is a little like browsing through the statistics-laden "Baseball Encyclopedia," except that instead of being about Ruth, Di Maggio, and Bonds, Murray's book is about Picasso, Darwin, and Edison. Murray took some time to discuss "Human Accomplishment" with me. Q. Who came out on top of big categories like Western Literature, Western Art, Western Philosophy, and Combined Sciences? A. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aristotle, and Newton -- the people you'd expect. In Western music, Mozart and Beethoven were in a dead heat, with Bach third. A rather vocal minority is upset about Bach not being on top. I'm not. I love Bach, but it's awfully hard to listen to Beethoven's later symphonies and string quartets and figure out how anybody could possibly be ranked above him. However, let me stress: I'm not the one who made those decisions. And occasionally I had to grin and bear it when things didn't come out according to my druthers. Rousseau and Byron are way too high in Western literature for my taste, for example. Q. Can you truly quantify objectively which artists and scientists were the most eminent? A. Sure. It's one of the most well-developed quantitative measures in the social sciences. (The measurement of intelligence is one of its few competitors, incidentally.) My indices have a statistical reliability that is phenomenal for the social sciences. There's also a very high "face validity" -- in other words, the rankings broadly correspond to common-sense expectations. Q. Who was the most accomplished person who ever lived? A. Now we're talking personal opinion, because the methods I used don't work across domains, but I have an emphatic opinion. Aristotle. He more or less invented logic, which was of pivotal importance in human history (and no other civilization ever came up with it independently). He wrote the essay on ethics ("Nicomachean Ethics") that to my mind contains the bedrock truths about the nature of living a satisfying human life. He made huge contributions to aesthetics, political theory, methods of classification and scientific observation. Who else even comes close? Q. Which woman scored the highest? A. Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the novel "The Tale of Genji" a thousand years ago, has by far the highest index score -- 86 on a scale of 1 to 100. But, that is in competition just with other Japanese authors, not all of the world's authors. The highest-scoring woman in any of the sciences -- no surprise -- is Marie Curie in Physics, with a score in the 40s (on a scale where Newton and Einstein are tied at 100). The highest in Western Literature is Virginia Woolf. None of the highest-scoring women in the other categories are major figures. Q. You pay a surprising amount of attention to Asian culture. Does that stem from the six years you lived in Asia beginning as a Peace Corps volunteer? A. Put it this way: There are aspects of Asian culture as it is lived that I still prefer to Western culture, 30 years after I last lived in Thailand. Two of my children are half-Asian. Apart from those personal aspects, I have always thought that the Chinese and Japanese civilizations had elements that represented the apex of human accomplishment in certain domains. When I began the book, I actually hoped to give Asian accomplishment a still larger place than it wound up getting. Q. You argue that one big reason that most of humanity's highest achievers came from what used to be called Christendom was ... Christianity. Did you expect to reach that conclusion? A. Michael Novak foretold I would come to that conclusion, but I didn't agree at the time. I didn't think you needed anything except the Greek heritage and some secular social and economic trends to explain the Renaissance. On this score, I have plenty of witnesses in the form of my colleagues who were getting nervous as the years went by. They kept asking me what the thesis of the book was, and I kept saying, "Beats the hell out of me." The last chapters of the book were all written in the last nine months of work, and at the beginning of those nine months, I still didn't kn
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