FASCINATING BUT VERY VERY CONTROVERSIAL

Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

Charles Murray has compiled a fat book of statistics 'proving' that Western men alone are responsible for all the great achievements of civilisation. Julian Coman meets the writer who loves to make liberal hackles rise 

To say that Charles Murray makes enemies easily is something of an understatement. His last major academic work was variously described by critics as "racist, philosophically shabby, politically ugly, disingenuous and creepy".

These were judgments offered on his mid-1990s bestseller, The Bell-Curve, in which Murray argued that for genetic reasons African Americans possessed significantly lower average IQs than whites or Asians.

It would be difficult to imagine a more provocative thesis to advance in contemporary America. For a while, following that succes de scandale, the author lay low, perhaps wondering how such a masterpiece of political incorrectness could be bettered.

The answer, it turns out, comes in the form of a 488-page textbook entitled Human Accomplishment: the Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950. A disheartening proportion of the pages are filled with forbidding graphs and charts, but there are enough shocking ideas in between to bring Murray's critics rushing into print.

"I don't go out of my way to write controversial books," he tells me when we meet in a cramped office at Washington's American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. But he says it with a wry grin, before adding: "My wife says that this book would not be controversial if it wasn't written by me. But it's true that there are people out there who are very unhappy with Human Accomplishment."

The book - which is published by HarperCollins in the US - is a self-proclaimed and extraordinarily ambitious resume of the major cultural achievements of the human species, from music to philosophy to chemistry. Earlier this month, Human Accomplishment reached No 82 on the Amazon bestsellers' list, an accomplishment for such a dense, scholarly treatise. Its robust conclusions have already had the singular effect of enraging feminists, members of ethnic minorities, lovers of 20th-century modernism, orientalists and Islamic fundamentalists.
Put bluntly, Murray has attempted to prove scientifically the overwhelming cultural superiority of Dead White Males. To his chagrin, HarperCollins has decided not to bring Human Accomplishment out in the United Kingdom. The company's British representatives are curiously reluctant to say why. But lovers of a good row were able to attend Mr Murray's public presentation of its thesis in a London lecture last week. This is the gist of it:

By pursuing an arcane 134-year-old statistical method known as "historiometry", the author claims to have scientifically demonstrated what every cultural conservative instinctively knows: white males have been head and shoulders above all rivals when it comes to significant cultural achievement in the arts and sciences. Think Shakespeare. Think Michelangelo. Think Louis Pasteur. Don't think women or non-Caucasians.
In the arts, the rehabilitation of the traditional Western canon has long been a cause celebre on the American right, which has railed against creeping relativism in schools and on university campuses. According to Murray, the idea that no one culture or tradition can ever be judged objectively superior to another has led to a wilful and quite unjustified "trashing" of Dead White Males.
"In anthologies of literature now," says Murray, "women and black writers are represented out of all proportion to their merit, in order to promote equality.
"Let's not take Shakespeare - it's too obvious. But, for example, why are pupils reading Toni Morrison instead of Joseph Conrad? Conrad is incomparably better than Toni Morrison could ever dream of being. But if you say that you will be accused of male, white, Anglo-Saxon prejudice."
Harold Bloom, in his book Genius, made dazzling arguments in favour of just such a prejudice. Murray makes the same claims, but through different, and slightly odder, means. The methodology of Human Accomplishment is disarmingly simple. For five years, he buried himself in 167 encyclopedias from around the world, adding up the column inches accorded by experts to the most significant scientists and artists throughout history, stopping the count at 1950.

Sceptics have pointed out that all but three of the encyclopedias were published in the latter half of the 20th century, giving the experiment a somewhat modern bias. Murray argues, however, that within 50 years, greatness will almost always have made itself known. So all pre-1950 candidates for posterity were given a fair chance.
In the end, 4002 artists, scientists and philosophers make the final cut. They are divided into a set of league tables claiming to rank scientifically the best and brightest members of the human species up to 1950. The more words devoted to a philosopher, a musician or a physicist in Murray's encyclopedias, the greater his significance and achievement. For lovers of lists, the book is a joy.

 

Shakespeare naturally walks off with the Western literature prize, as the most discussed writer of all time. Goethe finishes runner-up. Beethoven and Mozart tie for the equivalent music award. Isaac Newton wins the combined sciences competition, beating Galileo into second place. Women, it emerges, have contributed almost nothing, ("Let's see them produce!" challenges Mr Murray). Africa is not even on the map. Confucius gets an honourable mention. But in general, eastern cultures have just not tried hard enough:
"You have a philosophical and theological culture in East Asia that states that this life is not that important," explains Murray. "This is one of a whole cycle of lives if you're a Buddhist. Furthermore, striving in this life is seen as a source of suffering rather than a source of pleasure. That's explicit in Buddhism, but is also present in Daoism."
By contrast, the development of the Christian notion of vocation, particularly from the 14th century onwards, led to a flowering of intellectual and artistic achievement, almost exclusively among men. "To express yourself, to create beauty, to discover the miracle of God's works through science was seen as pleasing to God. That was extremely powerful in its effects."

Thus, between 1400 and 1950, Murray's historiometric method has found that 72 per cent of significant figures in the arts and sciences came from Britain, France, Germany and Italy alone. Overall, male Europeans and North Americans are shown to be responsible for 97 per cent of scientific accomplishment from 800 BC to 1950. Statistically, when it comes to curing disease, building bridges, inventing glasses or devising new, better modes of transport, Western man is in a league of his own.
"What the human species is today," he says, "it owes in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just half a dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass."

Unfortunately, there is a sting in the tail of Murray's narrative. In the 20th century, Western societies lost their religious convictions. At the same time, equality and inclusion replaced the pursuit of excellence as the highest social goal. The result was nihilism, relativism, Toni Morrison and "unreadable" literature such as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. "The 20th century tipped over into a kind of sterility. Finnegans Wake will become a curiosity, like atonality and serialism in music."
Instead of the vibrant vision of a Dante, readers were presented with the bleak absurdities of the likes of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and even Woody Allen, all of them utterly depressed by the meaninglessness of life. For a nihilist, says Murray, producing great work is "just harder".

As for women and the ethnic minorities: "Let's see them go and produce the art. It's not necessarily true that justice, freedom and the social good go hand in hand with the production of great art."
Murray is all in favour of democracy, but not when it comes to artistic achievement, which has always been the glory of an exclusive elite. "There is a tension between democracy and mass markets, and the production of great art," he says. "There is a tendency for people producing art to go where the market is. The market will reward financially a lot of things that are not going to last as much as a couple of years or even a couple of months." The profit motive, it seems, can never be a vocation.
This kind of thinking has earned Charles Murray a reputation as "the most notorious social scientist in America" (courtesy of The New York Times). However, he is anything but a wild-eyed ideologue in person. Affable and soft-spoken and a youthful 60, he is rather amused at his renewed diabolic status among liberal intellectuals. His wife, he says, was once a radical feminist, although his three daughters take a more moderate view. None of them, it seems, object to his book.
"There are those who really think I am quite a nasty fellow," he says, "bent on proving the superiority of Western culture or dissing women. But I don't consider either of those to be the aims of the book. I have found a lot of resistance to my arguments. I have not found counter-arguments."

There has been carping, though. Some critics have balked at the rather predictable results yielded by Murray's quantitative analysis of greatness. Do we learn much new from a literature list with a top three of Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante? Others have suggested that the methodology of Human Accomplishment is simply tautological. Greatness is only what experts have called great. Murray's reply is that authorities are there to be trusted.
"I respect expertise and I respect central statistical tendencies," he says, "The philosopher David Hume points out that any given expert can come up with a silly judgment. But when you put a lot of experts together, and they are expressing similar opinions, then that becomes a matter of judgment rather than sentiment."
As someone born in 1965, by the end of our talk I have become rather melancholy at the apparent worthlessness of the era I was born into. Sadly, I make a plea for one work of art created since 1950, preferably by a woman, which Murray believes will endure. There is a long silence.
"Let's see. Music. Well, will My Fair Lady or West Side Story last? Maybe, but it's hard to see much popular music lasting. As for classical, I'm not competent to judge."

Literature?

"Ah, I'm not the person to ask because my own tastes run far too much to trash. At the moment I'm reading the Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton." Matt Helm is a fictional assassin working in the 1960s for an unnamed US Government agency, whose job it is to kill people who pose a threat to the United States. The cult series may be newly topical in the 21st century. But it is not high art. "I just read stuff like that," says Murray. "My wife reads all the heavy stuff. I guess she might be able to find a woman nominee."
A final, insouciant comment, carefully calculated to make liberal blood boil.

Synopsis

Charles Murray's account of human excellence, from the age of Homer to our own time. Murray compiles inventories of the people who have been essential to the stories of literature, music, art, philosophy, and the sciences - a total of 4,002 men and women from around the world, ranked according to their eminence. The heart of Human Accomplishment is a series of descriptive chapters: on the giants in the arts and what sets them apart from the merely great; on the differences between great achievement in the arts and in the sciences; on the meta-inventions, 14 crucial leaps in human capacity to create great art and science; and on the patterns and trajectories of accomplishment across time and geography.

Product details

• Hardcover: 692 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins (13 Mar. 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006019247X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060192471
• Product Dimensions: 15.6 x 3.9 x 23.2 cm
  

Customer Reviews  

Format: Hardcover

This book shows how the modern world is primarily as a result of Western Europeans. That is not to say that the conclusion of this book was written before the book, far from it. Charles Murray has excelled in the amount of research he has done to look at the great achievements and achievers of mankind, classify them in order of importance and then try and understand why it has been this way. It is not biased from a racial perspective but biased based on facts.
In a world where everyone is supposed to be production line equal it is rare to find a book that ignores this and focuses on what is really important, facts.
A superb book that will stand the test of time and should be required reading for everyone.