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

Rating:
Summary: Monumental but linear reasoning
Review: I recently heard an hour-long interview with Murray on this book and was troubled by the tone of his conversation. He described the book in fairly innocuous terms as an attempt by a quantitiative social scientist to document "creative explosions." However, whenever the interviewer would ask him about other grand non-Western achievements such as the Egyptian civilization, the Umayyad's and Moors in Iberia, the Central Asian artists and poets, the Aztec and the Incas -- he would dismiss them as great but not of the same "magnitude" as Europe. Murray completely neglects the borrowing of traditions that went on in Europe as a reason for the increased "magnitude." He also neglects the influence of colonialism in artificially augmenting Europe's accomplishments. If you are interested in the question of why certain societies have "accomplished" more, I would suggest Jared Diamond's pulitzer prize-winning book Guns Germs and Steel. Murray should also be more forthright in discussing the negative consequences of presenting data of this kind without constructive commentary. This was the same problem with The Bell Curve. While the analysis may be internally consistent and statistically impeccable, the role of the social scientist is also to discern what the research could be used for and how it can potentially reinforce negative stereotypes about societies and cultures. If you are going to present such highly charged data, that is fine, but then spend the extra time in contextualizing it and preventing its misuse by prejudicial circles.

Rating:
Summary: Doctoral Dissertation That Needs Revision
Review: If you have done little reading or thinking about human excellence in arts and sciences, this would be a good introductory book to get a sense of the outlines and a perspective on this quality. If, however, you've read or thought about individual human achievement in the arts and sciences, you would be better served reading books that are more focused (for example, Harold Bloom's 1994 book, The Western Canon, for literature) in specific areas.

Charles Murray attempts to move the discussion on excellence beyond mere listification (who is number one) to an understanding of how these geniuses and their works arise. He creates a strong quantitative scheme for generating the people and their achievements. Most interesting, he observes irregular bursts of great talent across time and geography, a pattern that invites closer examination, but then falls apart trying to understand why these varying bursts occur. If you can get past the red herring of multicultural oversensitivity and dead white European males, it is intriguing to realize that great human accomplish does vary over time and place. Why? This book fails badly at answering this question, offering essentially a nice quotation of "carving for the eye of God" as explanation after stumbling through inferior regression analysis (perhaps something like structural equation modeling will occur to someone).

Mr. Murray has a fabulous data set that begs for better analysis. I hope he makes it available to other scholars. As for understanding human genius and what gives rise to it, the scholarly works of Dean Simonton are a better source although perhaps not as accessible to the common reader.

What causes great human achievement? This is not simply an interesting intellectual question, but rather one of great practical importance.

Rating:
Summary: Poppycock!
Review: It's easy to dismiss this kind of book as another racist attack; and coming from Charles Murray, such a charge might be considered appropriate. As with his previous book, "The Bell Curve", he has taken an everyday observation, called it an apparent fact, and then expounded a full blown thesis out of it.

The problem is he is not altogether incorrect, though how he states it is totally bogus. For instance, it is true to say that the political, economic, social and cultural ideas of the "West" dominate the world ... and where they don't, they are sought after and/ or emulated. But there is more to this than the simple observable facts.

It is important to start with a clear definition of culture, and to keep focused on it, because much has been written (especially in these "politically correct" days) of "multi-culturalism" ... a particularly onerous term that attempts to force us to accept what doesn't exist. One's culture is the product of the environment (customs, ideas, values, etc.) that one is raised to be a part of.

But a culture has to be dynamic, and in a continual state of change, if it is to survive -- but this dynamism is an evolving force and cannot be coerced to progress. But some of us believe that "multi-culturalism" is a way of forcing us to accept (nay, "embrace") the apparently unacceptable before society (as a whole) is ready to embrace it. The multi-culturalists also fail to accept that there are some things we will never embrace -- female circumcision, for example. There's nothing I "need to understand" about such barbarities and even thinking about them beyond condemnation is an intellectual cul de sac.

But Charles Murray has entered the fray by trying to prove "scientifically" what cannot be scientifically measured -- and nor should it, for today's world "cultures" owe their contemporary climax more to the whims of chaos than a preordained progression.

That the cultural development of Western Europe evolved out of Christianity is indisputable -- but if "Christianity" alone was the catalyst, then Egyptian Copts would be the bedrock of Civilization. But this is clearly not the case ... no, the influence of the likes of Martin Luther was the true catalyst, with unpredictable and staggering results: he dared to challenge established (and corrupt) authority, thus opening the door to the Period of Enlightenment. One could argue that without Martin Luther, Western Europe might still be in the Dark Ages, though that would miss the point.

But Protestantism, given birth to by Martin Luther, itself led to culturally restricting extremes ... the Puritans (and here I speak of the English version, replete with Cromwell and his draconian Parliament) tried to retard progress. Then the whole process was reversed with the very Catholic James II, which culminated in the "Glorious Revolution" (1688 - which crushed the Catholic backlash to Protestantism once and for all). None of this was predictable and far from inevitable -- yet the results were profound.

Once the power of the state had been crushed, and the Dutch influence (William & Mary succeeded James II) established, trade and commerce became the primary driver -- it is in this age where we see insurance (Lloyds - 1696) start to develop. It was this factor (insurance) which reduced the highly risky business of international trade to an acceptable level ... and this led to the wealth and dominance of Western Europe.

All this led to the economic infrastructure that created the possibility of personal wealth, the principles of "property" ownership, capitalism in its crudest form, legal contracts, and the political and social order to promote them -- which were (and remain) the bulwarks by which western civilization (policed and enforced by the legal system) is centered.

African, Asian and South American cultures stopped growing because they emphasized the collective nature of society, pouring scorn on individual effort. As a result, their cultures failed their people -- advancements were only permitted if all could benefit and/ or they did not threaten the power base of the few.

Western culture, as an observable fact, encourages and rewards individual effort. It is inconceivable that a James Watt would have come out of an African culture; or that a Henry Bessemer would come out of a South American culture. The fact that the Chinese invented (or, more likely, stumbled upon) gunpowder is immaterial ... they used it for fireworks and crude weapons, not blasting ore out of the ground.

"Turnip" Townsend or a Jethro Tull revolutionized western agriculture by providing winter food for livestock (Townsend) and the principles of crop rotation (Tull) in the early 18th century. By such revolutionary changes, the people could be fed with cheap food. But it was personal gain that drove them to implement their ideas ... and doubtless hundreds of others who tried and failed, leaving history to remember only Townsend and Tull.

So although Charles Murray has a point, he is not blind to the point that his "facts" can be distorted to become a political agenda, which was doubtless his intent. As such, it's bogus science.

The triumph of Western Civilization is that it is becoming a World Culture ... slowly, but surely.

The arts, of course, are only a reflection of the current cultural and social state of things ... they are not material as a "driver". It is therefore not surprising that Charles Murray's examination of this aspect of our culture was abandoned.

In conclusion, to attribute our eminent and evident success to "genes" ("Bell Curve") or because we're just "better" ("Human Accomplishment"), is spectacularly crude and repelling. Our success is due to the intellectual discovery that there was more to be gained by encouraging the radical idea than suppressing it -- and that discovery became self perpetuating. That simple premise, established long ago, brought us here ... and we stumbled into it by trial and error, not by design.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent observatory piece by an excellent writer.
Review: It's far too fitting that one of the current greatest political minds in the country should take the time to pen down a novel discussing the geniuses preceeding him. As always, Charles Murray proves himself well thought out and strong in his viewpoints, even as he now takes a turn away from the sometimes controversial libertarian novels. All in all, this is an excellent and intriguing read by a Great American Political writer.

Rating:
Summary: His Radio Interview
Review: Mr. Murray gave a radio interview today concerning this book. He made some negative comments about how, in Europe, scientists, artists, and philosophers treated their respective disciplines as a sort of competition among their peers. Mr. Murray seems to think that the Asian culture was superior in that they took a more "community" approach rather than a personal one. I strongly disagree with Mr. Murray's intent. The competative nature of progress in the West is what spurs further discovery. One-upmanship is a much better (and more reliable) motivator than an sense of community.

Mr Murray also disparaged the contributions of the United States versus those of Europe. He seems to ignore the fact that Europe has a head start of over 2000 years. Given the relatively small number of years the U.S. has been in the cultural "ring", I would assert we have contributed much to the Arts and Sciences.

I am anxious to see him finish out his work to include the last 53 years.

Rating:
Summary: Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts
Review: Murray (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C.) offers a detailed survey of human excellence, from the time of Homer to the mid-20th century. He examines who these contributors were; which are most significant and why; how human accomplishment has been distributed and has shifted across the centuries, around the world, within Europe and the U.S.; what characterizes the great accomplishments; the roles of basic economic, political, and demographic factors; to what extent streams of accomplishment are self-reinforcing; what initiatives such streams; and prospects for future human accomplishments.

Rating:
Summary: genius and democracy are mutually exclusive
Review: My complaint with this book certainly isn't of the typically and absurdly politically correct variety on display in one of the above amazon reviewers; the dominance of white male Europeans in the significant events in human history is beyond reasonable question and Murray bends over backwards here, as he did in his classic "The Bell Curve", to pacify the looney-left contingent that has dominated social "science" for the last three quarters of a century. In reality, if anything, the female sex and the also-ran cultures are over-represented in this book. That isn't the problem. The problem is, the methodology on which this study is based reduces to a popularity contest among academics, which, as anybody who has spent five minutes around academics ought to know, is not a very good way to determine the quality, truth or beauty of anything. Michelangelo the greatest artist? No doubt. Picasso second? Ridiculous. Picasso has been written about disproportionately because he was an ingenious, self-promoting hack. Aristotle the greatest philosopher? Most written about historically, certainly, but I can't believe any but a few cobwebbed classicists would, in this day and age, consider him the greatest. Personally I would take the pre-socratics anyway, but Plato is the most influential Western philosopher. And what if he did a survey of social scientists? An outright fraud who has now been utterly discredited, Sigmund Freud, would quite possibly finish first according to Murray's method.
Genius is not democratic. That's the reason the pc crowd hates Murray; his works make this fact obvious. But in this case, he seems to be defining greatness by popular vote. It makes no sense. The book is a fascinating novelty and a fine history lesson, but no more.

Rating:
Summary: Charles Murray's Super Human Accomplishment
Review: 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 know what was going to be in them.

Q. You found that per capita levels of accomplishment tended to decline from 1850 to 1950. Would you care to speculate on post-1950 trends?

A. I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive -- and then ask, "Seriously?" Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the "Seriously?" question.

Rating:
Summary: Charles Murray's Super Human Accomplishment
Review: 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 know what was going to be in them.

Q. You found that per capita levels of accomplishment tended to decline from 1850 to 1950. Would you care to speculate on post-1950 trends?

A. I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive -- and then ask, "Seriously?" Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the "Seriously?" question.

Rating:
Summary: A Prize Horse's Ass Tries to Quantify the Unquantafiable.
Review: Rating human achievement by the amount of of space it takes up in reference books is a *sublimely* asinine endevor and one *hell* of a shuck-and-jive job on whoever funded this farago (Melon-Sciaffes? Olin? He had to have taken more than the Free Enterprise Institute to the cleaners on this one; maybe a General MacArthur grant?). It's probably nice work if you can get it (or have poor schlubs of graduate assistants or junior fellows or whatever gauge "text density" that you can plug into a carefully skewed mathematical model).
As a historian, I'm generally damned suspicious of the purported "social sciences" as such, *especially* since they lend themselves so easily to advancing the political prejudices of their "researchers." I am also profoundly unimpressed by the fetishization of quantification. This bollocks is like flinging a pile of exams down a staircase and grading them according to how high they landed, or grading term papers by weighing them.
There is no here here. Don't bother. The publishers are going to lose a mint from the printing and remaindering, however, and that makes me smile.