In a nutshell: Charles Murray’s 2003 book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 continues to have pernicious resonance today.
Ten years ago, Charles Murray, co-author of the influential 1994 book The Bell Curve, published Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. I came across it today as I was searching on combinations of the words “pursuit” or “pursuing” and “humanity” or “the human” for my own nefarious purposes. (As an aside, I found the first chapter of a very juicy looking piece of fan fiction, which I now cannot find again.) Murray is a libertarian and the book is another in the long series of works that celebrate the heights of Western Civilization and lament its current decline. To summarize his major insight, I will quote from an essay Murray wrote about his book in a libertarian blog (the quotation marks are Murray’s own):
“A major stream of accomplishment in any domain requires a well-articulated vision of, and use of, the transcendental goods relevant to that domain.” The transcendental goods to which I refer are the classic triad: truth, beauty, and the good. A “well-articulated vision” means one with gravitas. Chinese artists of the Song dynasty and Italian artists of the Renaissance had different visions of beauty, but both were explicit, carefully thought out, and rooted in insights about what is aesthetically pleasing to human beings. Confucius and Aristotle had different visions of the good, but both are profound and rooted in deep insights about the human condition. Andy Warhol’s vision of beauty (if he had one) doesn’t cut it, nor do New Age clichés about being a nice person.
Later in the essay, Murray obligingly gives us “Human Accomplishment’s bottom line, from the opening of the last chapter” (again, the quotation marks are his own):
“If the last several hundred pages can be said to have a principal message, it is this: Excellence exists, and it is time to acknowledge and celebrate the magnificent inequality that has enabled some of our fellow humans to so enrich the lives of the rest of us.” The libertarian beliefs we share are about how to free everyone to reach whatever heights are in him. Human Accomplishment is the story of the outer limits of those heights.
There’s a nice review of the book in The New York Times by Judith Shulevitz. I’ll quote her summary of Murray’s major findings:
Western civilization has generated the greatest number of important contributions to knowledge and the arts. …D.W.M.’s — dead white males — have been more creative and innovative than dead minorities or women. Newton outranks Galileo in the combined sciences but ties with Einstein in physics. Darwin tops Aristotle in biology, though Aristotle beats Plato in philosophy. Confucius mattered more to the Chinese than Laotzu. Michelangelo was the greatest Western painter. Shakespeare was the greatest Western writer. The greatness of most of these men was called forth by a culture girded by a faith in its own purpose and value — that is, by Christianity. Now that nihilism and relativism have supplanted faith, however, the West would appear to have lost its vitality and status as history’s highest achiever.
Shulevitz notes “three basic objections to [Murray’s] methodology, all of which he acknowledges and none of which he successfully refutes: first, that it is biased toward present-day perspectives on the past; second, that it is Eurocentric; and third, that it is circular.”
As any diligent readers of Pedagogishness may realize, I’m somewhat obsessed with developing a grand response to the likes of Murray. On the one hand, I lament that I’m so late to the game: after all, as I said at the outset, 2013 marks the tenth anniversary of this book. On the other hand, while culture warfare is less in the headlines today than it was in the 1980s, 90s, or even the early 2000s, these celebrations and laments are still out there (a good recent example is this essay by Joseph Epstein) and their impact, if anything, is probably greater now than it was in their heyday, precisely because the arguments themselves have slipped quietly offstage, while the defense of Dead White Maleness has become, if anything, more desperate and hence more dangerous. So, in a sense, I’m writing this post about this book now just to remind my readers of my ideological target, its intellectual roots, and their stubborn persistence.