Measuring Man

Charles Murray: Human Accomplishment

American Outlook, December 1, 2004

Did Charles Murray have a difficult time in high school? Judging by what he writes, when he writes, and how he writes, he’s someone who would not have enjoyed the conformist, unimaginative world of contemporary American secondary education. A controversialist who never knows when to stop, a math geek who understands what counts, Murray was probably jostled in the school yard, pushed about in the cafeteria, and, in that hallmark of intellectual independence, repeatedly hauled up in front of the principal. “Murray, don’t ever, ever argue with your teachers again.”

His best-known work, 1994’s The Bell Curve (co-written with Richard J. Herrnstein), triggered a spasm of denunciation, condemnation, and self-righteous indignation that an earlier heretic, the luckless Galileo, would have found all too familiar. It’s not necessary to agree with Murray and Herrnstein’s thesis to be struck by the nature of the criticism it generated, a carnival of vituperation where the language used, replete with keening cries of anathema and frenzied declarations of conformist piety, was more reminiscent of the deliberations of the Inquisition than any attempt at scientific discourse. The message? Suggestions that intelligence is an inherited characteristic are perilous and, if in any way associated with “race,” positively lethal.

So what, nine years later, has Murray gone and done? Indefatigable, delightfully tactless, and armored only with a thick cladding of protective statistics, America’s heretic has volunteered once more for the stake, this time as the author of a book that in essence argues that a wildly disproportionate part of mankind’s intellectual and cultural patrimony is the work of those reviled monsters, the “dead white males.” Will the man never learn?

Praising dead white males is bad enough, of course, but even if we put that grave offense to one side, it’s a sad reflection of the current intellectual climate to see that Murray’s belief in the possibility of making objective assessments of human achievement will likely be condemned as lunacy, and, worse still, as unacceptably—and archaically—“judgmental.” Seared by the inquisitorial fire last time, Murray tries to anticipate these objections with statistical method; taken in aggregate, he argues, the data cannot lie. It may be reasonable to disagree with the relative rankings of, to pick two of his greats, Michelangelo and Picasso, but not with the overall conclusion: “Now is a good time to stand back in admiration. What the human species is today 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.”

But before any living white males are tempted to reach for brown shirts and chilled champagne, it’s important to recognize that Human Accomplishment is far from being a piece of ethnic cheerleading, nor is it any cause for Old World complacency. Always reliably gloomy, Murray warns, “it appears that Europe’s run is over. In another few hundred years, books will probably be exploring the reasons why some completely different part of the world became the locus of great human accomplishment.”

Murray’s method of reaching these conclusions is intriguing. To start with, he confines his examination of “accomplishment” to the sciences and the arts (some of them anyway; omissions include, dismayingly, architecture). That’s a little too narrow, in my judgment. There’s no room for the military, for example. In defense of that omission, Murray maintains that “putting ‘Defeated Hitler’ on the human résumé is too much like putting ‘beat my drug habit’ on a personal one,” but excluding the warriors and the warlords shuts out a Churchill or a Caesar, individuals who certainly ought to be found on any roll call of human genius. Governance and commerce are also eliminated. “Those achievements,” Murray avers, “are akin to paying the rent and putting food on the table, freeing Homo Sapiens to reach the heights within reach of the human mind and spirit—heights that are most visibly attained in the arts and sciences.”

There’s more than a touch of the ivory tower about Murray’s decision to restrict his investigation in this way, but it fits nicely with the aspirational message of Human Accomplishment: the arts and the sciences matter. More cynical folk will note that these areas of activity also lend themselves better than most to Murray’s approach. He writes,

After reviewing histories and chronologies of [commerce and governance], my judgment was that while it was possible to compile inventories of people and events, the compilations were unlikely to have either the face validity or the statistical reliability of the inventories for the arts and sciences. The process whereby commerce and governance have developed is too dissimilar from the process in the arts and sciences.

That’s true enough, and, more importantly, Murray’s relatively narrow focus doesn’t necessarily detract from the case he is trying to build. After all, success in the arts and sciences are not only worthy aims in themselves: taken together, they represent an excellent proxy for the achievements of a particular society at a particular time.

Good proxy or not, it’s still jarring to read about “the statistical reliability of the inventories for the arts.” “Statistical reliability” is bean-counter speak, hardly the lofty language usually associated with an early Picasso or the glories of a Turner sunset. This helps explain why some readers’ initial reaction to the methodology at the heart of Human Accomplishment will lie somewhere between incredulity, astonishment, and laughter. Mind you, Murray’s methodology is unusual enough to raise an eyebrow or two regardless of any aesthetic considerations. Basically (and this is a gross oversimplification), what he has done is count the footnotes. He has gone through a large number of reference books dedicated to the history of the arts and the sciences, and kept a tally of references to a particular individual or event. After subjecting the data to various statistical adjustments, those accomplishments that feature in the most references are, he asserts, likely to represent the pinnacles of man’s achievement. In “recounting . . . accomplishment in the arts, sciences, and philosophy for the last 2,800 years,” there are, concludes Murray, 3,869 people “without whom the story is incomplete.”

And not 3,870? At first sight this technique appears absurd, little more than the mathematics of the lunatic asylum, but statistics is nothing if not a patient discipline, and Murray carefully explains his logic. As an example, he demonstrates how it works when applied to Western art. He begins with “a staple of undergraduate art courses, Art Through The Ages.” In its sixth edition, “Michelangelo has the highest total of page references and examples of works devoted to him, more than twice the number devoted to either Picasso or Donatello, tied for number two. Then comes a tie among Giotto, Delacroix, and Bernini, followed by a tie among Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Dürer, and then still another tie between van Eyck and Raphael. . . . ”

He then turns to another standard text, H. W. Janson’s History of Art. Many of the names overlap, but Delacroix (somewhat surprisingly highly rated in Art Through The Ages) doesn’t make the top eleven, whereas Titian and Masaccio do. Repeat this exercise enough times with enough sensibly chosen reference books, and the list is likely to end up dominated by the same names again and again, a list, Murray argues, that is a fair measure of artistic greatness. The high correlations are “a natural consequence of the attempt by knowledgeable critics . . . to give the most attention to the most important people. Because different critics are tapping into a common understanding of importance in their field, they make similar choices. Various factors go into the estimate of importance, but they are in turn substantially associated with excellence.”

Of course, there are many potential problems with this method, but although I am no statistician and Human Accomplishment is (casual readers beware) a math-heavy tome, it is impossible not to be impressed by the steps its author has taken to deal with some of the more obvious objections, particularly those involving cultural, geographical, ethnic, and gender bias, let alone the dread offense (and worse word) of epochcentrism. If, at times, the results make uncomfortable reading for the politically correct, those people should not look for much consolation from Murray: “it is important,” he warns, “not to conflate aspirations with history.”

This is not to say that Murray would claim that his method is perfect. His decision to create separate categories for what he sees as the great literary traditions (Arabic, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and “Western”) is proof enough of that. How does one compare Shakespeare with Basho, or Kalidasa with Du Fu? And then there are those ancient feats of scientific discovery (fire, say, or the wheel) that underpin our society more than any microchip—who gets the credit for those? Murray sidesteps some tricky questions of attribution by beginning his survey at a comparatively late date in human history (and 800 B.C. is a comparatively late date), but even this maneuver doesn’t address those more recent human achievements that are now vanished from memory. If the Iliad hadn’t survived, for example, it would not have been included in Murray’s database, but would it have been any less of an accomplishment? In all likelihood, not enough such works have been lost, or discoveries forgotten, to invalidate Murray’s argument, but it is difficult not to think of these and other such issues when trying to weigh the wisdom of what he is trying to say.

These problems do not, however, undermine the core of his case: the central and defining role of Europe (and its American extension), particularly over the last half-millennium, as the pacesetter of human accomplishment. This ought to be a statement of the obvious. In much the same way as the small plaque in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral dedicated to its architect simply states, “si monumentum requiris, circumspice,” so it is with Europe’s contribution to civilization. Just look around you.

Sadly, however, we live in an age when such commonsense observations can set off a scandal. Murray laments how

the idea of the Noble Savage . . . has reemerged in our own time. It has become fashionable to decry modern technology. Multiculturalism, as that word is now understood, urges us to accept all cultures as equally praiseworthy. Who is to say that the achievements of Europe, China, India, Japan, or Arabia, are “better” than those of Polynesia, Africa or the Amazon? Embedded in this mindset is hostility to the idea that discriminating judgments are appropriate in assessing art and literature, or that hierarchies of value exist—hostility as well to the idea that objective truth exists.

Of course, there’s no denying that, with all its lists and scatter diagrams, there is a hint of madness in the method that Murray uses to inventory “our species at its best.” Nevertheless, fans of insanity will discover far more to delight them in the posturing of today’s intellectual establishment, with its poisonous mix of self-loathing, political correctness, and frivolity, than in anything to be found in Human Accomplishment.

That said, there’s a danger that Murray’s readers may be left asking themselves exactly what his 668 pages are for. As a miscellany of intriguing information and quirkily intelligent observations, the book is a delight. To take two examples, both the charming description of the twelfth-century Chinese city of Hangzhou and the concept of a “meta-invention” (by which he means “the introduction of a new cognitive tool [such as logic] for dealing with the world around us”) are worth the price of admission alone; but, by themselves, they are commentary, not a theme.

More useful, perhaps, is to see Murray’s ratings of excellence as a valuable antidote to the ethos of an age deeply prejudiced against the notion of genuine achievement. As Murray reminds us, “excellence is not simply a matter of opinion, though judgment enters into its identification. Excellence has attributes that can be identified, evaluated, and compared across works.” Indeed it does. But if Murray is not just to be the highbrow equivalent of the record-store nerds in novelist Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (“We’re messing around at work, the three of us, getting ready to go home and rubbishing each other’s five best side-one track-ones of all time”), there has to be more to Human Accomplishment than an accumulation of lists, applause, and fascinating facts.

So, is it the shocking science of IQ, genes, gender, and race? Is Human Accomplishment’s tale of dead white male success merely a return to some of the Bell Curve’s most controversial contentions? Somewhat cagily, Murray notes that “almost all of the current evidence regarding the causes of group differences is circumstantial and inconclusive. The debate will not have to depend on circumstantial evidence much longer, however. Within a few decades, we will know a great deal about the genetic differences between groups. Not all of the controversy will go away, but the room for argument will narrow substantially.”

Cagey, perhaps, but fair enough. That said, Murray’s conclusion that “it therefore seems pointless to use historical patterns of accomplishment to try to anticipate what these genetic findings will be” is disingenuous. Although he writes, correctly, that “biological and environmental explanations [for different rates of achievement among different ethnic groups or between the sexes] can both play a role, separately or interacting in such complex ways that the line between the roles of biology and environment blurs,” it is clear that he sees biology as highly important in the equation. His discussion of the extraordinary success of Ashkenazi Jews, for example, leaves little room for doubt that he believes that a good deal of the credit is due to their genes.

And if that could be true for the Ashkenazim, why not for other ethnic or racial groups? It is no surprise, then, to discover that the book contains a favorable reference or two to Francis Dalton, one of the most famous (or infamous, depending on your view) of the Darwinian danger men. Yes, of course Murray is entitled, and right, to insert the (handily diplomatic) disclaimer that it is still impossible to come to a precise assessment of the relative contributions of nature and nurture to individual and group differences, but that disclaimer comes at a high price. If he is suggesting that we may be on the verge of scientific discoveries that could transform our understanding of the sources of human accomplishment, logically this must substantially dilute the importance of much of what he is trying to say about that topic now.

That, doubtless, would be a disappointment to Murray. He has more than a touch of the teacher about him, and much of Human Accomplishment is best seen as an instruction manual for our species. It is this, I suppose, that the book is for. Murray being Murray, the controversialist extraordinaire, his advice makes uncomfortable reading for the vapidly sentimental. Money, he explains, makes the world go round—faster. Too much consensus or too much family can hold back achievement. War, amusingly, need not. Despite a somewhat shaky grasp of history and horology, The Third Man’s Harry Lime understood this perfectly: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, and they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Needless to say, democracy fares no better with Murray than with Lime. The record so far (distorted, admittedly, by the fact that democracies were very rare until recently) shows that a political structure permitting individual autonomy has been more valuable than the mere existence of universal suffrage. In this conclusion, Murray is clearly correct.

To Murray, it is, above all, the extent to which individuals use that autonomy to realize their potential that makes accomplishment possible. One of the most refreshing aspects of this book is the critical importance attached to the individual: “one may acknowledge the undoubted role of the cultural context in fostering or inhibiting great art, but still recall that it is not enough that the environment be favorable. Somebody must actually do the deed.” Doing the deed (in the sciences just as much as the arts) and, in the case of the most talented of all, having a shot at joining Murray’s blessed 3,869, involves extraordinary amounts of work (some of that “perspiration” that Thomas Edison was always talking about) and a degree of commitment that can often tip over into monomania. Murray argues that this takes not only talent but also a sense of some higher purpose. This is likely to be grounded in religion (Murray argues, for example, that post-medieval Christianity offered Europe particular competitive advantages). Even if it is not, however, such a sense of purpose will be impossible to reconcile with the “ennui, anomie, [and] alienation” that, Murray suggests, account for the twentieth-century artistic and cultural decay and are, quite clearly, the villains of his fascinating and stimulating book.

It is a beguiling argument, to be sure, but to return tactlessly to an earlier topic, will the issue that Murray has so elegantly tried to dodge reduce what he has to say to irrelevance? The notion that an individual’s future is irrevocably determined, in a Calvinism of the genes, by his or her biological make-up will probably always be the crudest of caricatures, but caricatures can be surprisingly persuasive. After all, Murray tells us,

after Freud [and] Nietzsche . . . it became fashionable . . . to see humans as unwittingly acting out neuroses and subconscious drives. God was mostly dead. Morality became relative. These and allied beliefs substantially undermined the belief of creative elites that their lives had purpose or that their talents could be efficacious.

That is probably quite true, but our increasing understanding of genetic science may mean that a far greater philosophical challenge is lurking just over the horizon. As Murray has said, “all we need is a few decades’ patience.”

Hang onto your hats.