In human achievement, the sun rises in the West

Which come first, facts or theories? Scientists and statisticians are often thought to compile mountains of data from which, in due time, theories are born. In practice, an unusual circumstance -- for example, Alexander Fleming’s neglect of a petri dish of bacteria, resulting in the growth of an antibiotic mold -- can often prime a discovery. Fleming spotted the anomaly and drew clever conclusions; without his incompetent genius, we might not yet have penicillin. No wonder the Greeks made a divinity of Tyche, goddess of luck and chance.

Charles Murray’s “Human Accomplishment” is structured to give the impression that its statistics preceded what they turned out to establish. Yet who can believe that its author spent five years assembling all this material without a preconceived notion (perfectly proper) of his conclusions? Given his coauthorship (with Richard J. Herrnstein) of “The Bell Curve,” which also told politically correct people what they didn’t want to hear, it’s no surprise that his preconceived notion is that the overwhelming mass of great achievements in the arts and sciences -- the two categories to which he limits himself -- must be credited to that maligned class known as Dead White Males.

A dispassionate tone cannot hide the polemic aim of proving that women, blacks, Arabs, Chinese or whoever have not been unjustly excluded from the creative pantheon by rigged data or partisan assessment. No mute inglorious Milton ever wrote his or her “Paradise Lost” but was denied publication or the applause of posterity. Mute Miltons never wrote anything, stupid! Flood or fire may well have deprived us of the majority of plays by the great Greek tragedians, but it is still beyond reasonable doubt that Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were in a class of their own.

Murray concentrates on names, not events or anonymous artifacts. He cannot, therefore, include the ancient Egyptian who aligned the Great Pyramid almost exactly with the cardinal points of the compass with an average error of 0.02%. For the rest, he defies us to furnish great names that his several sources have failed to embrace. Shining lights seldom remain under bushels. He begins by constructing a massive parapet of (he would claim) unarguable statistical tables. “Human Accomplishment” is, he insists, about “those great things ... Homo sapiens [can] brag about -- not as individuals but as a species.... The first purpose of this book is to assemble and describe inventories [to show that] the dimension and content of human accomplishment can be apprehended as facts. It is more than a matter of opinion that Rembrandt was a greater artist than, say, Edward Hopper.... The same is true at a higher level of aggregation: Assessing the comparative contributions of the Greeks and the Aztecs to human progress is not a choice between equally valid constructions of reality.”

It may be that Murray underestimates the genius of the bloodthirsty Aztecs: Cortez and his men were amazed by the beauty of the lake city of Teotihuacan (a sort of Mexican Venice). However, his point is to persuade us that there are objective measures of quality in both arts and sciences. To cut to where the chase is leading, he seeks to prove that the distribution of achievement, which has little to do with potential, is uneven and preponderantly Western, no matter what sane measure you adopt. Common sense forbids serious quibbling about the quality of the intellectual heft of ancient Athens as against that of, say, medieval Tokyo. All the same, Murray attributes altogether too much of the Greek genius to Athens alone. He is a great and unduly uncritical admirer of Aristotle, who was no more a native of Attica than Edward Teller was of New Mexico.

Murray discounts military and political genius and has no time for Heraclitus’ claim, in the 5th century BC, that “War is the father of all and the king of all.” He offers a tentative account of why the West has won but ignores the artillery that lent such formidable clout even to its dissenters; writers such as H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw had global reach because of the imperial power they deplored. Great powers tend to foster great writers, and great wars great scientists. Archimedes and Leonardo, like Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, envisioned and made practical plans for weapons of massive destructive power. Murray also insists that civil unrest and revolutions are not in themselves either aids or impediments to genius; however, his prime scientific example, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, was accused by the Jacobins of culling the people’s taxes to fund his research and had his head cut off. There is no evidence that there were no good ideas left in it.

The claim that the West has rigged the reference books in order to justify its hegemony became widespread only in the mid-20th century. The student revolts of the 1960s, and their self-important gurus, challenged antique disciplines and the idea of dispassionate assessment. Postmodernism made it orthodox for ambitious academics to practice careerism and preach unorthodoxy. Paul de Man pioneered the “deconstruction” of awkward facts, such as his erstwhile Nazi sympathies. For others, Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was the new gospel. If Galileo had been alive during the Cultural Revolution and had denied Mao’s infallibility, he would again have been shown the instruments of torture, or worse. Eppur, it is still true that bourgeois society is much more productive of ideas than People’s Republics. Division spawns ideas; theocratic and political totalitarianism inhibits them. Any serious questions?

Thorstein Veblen (oh, for some of his dry wit!) jeered splendidly at the supposed charms of the leisure class, but Murray shows that cash surpluses and fancy tastes favor the arts. But then again, too much money can also choke them: Spain’s Golden Age was ended by the influx of Inca gold, which led to hyperinflation. Subsistence farmers, on the other hand, may be the salt of the earth, but their societies rarely engender a Pheidias or a Tolstoy, which adds comedy to the great Russian’s assumption of peasant costume and innate rustic virtues. (Gogol knew better.)

When it comes to objective assessment of genius, Murray points out, the scientific community provides the least controversial scale of individual merit: If your paper is published in major journals, you are pretty good, and if you publish more papers than any but a very, very few, you belong to the elite. Despite the similar, very uneven distribution of supreme talent, art differs fundamentally from science. Someone other than Fleming might have stumbled on penicillin, but no one can stumble into writing “The Iliad” or painting the “Mona Lisa.” (Among the incidental charms of Murray’s book is his explanation of why scientists rush to go public with their results: It is not only to get in line for Nobel Prizes but also to anticipate plagiarists, who might otherwise snatch credit for their ideas. Girolamo Cardano is the prime example: He cribbed Niccolo Tartaglia’s solution to cubic equations even though he redeemed himself with brilliant pioneering work in the clinical analysis of typhus.)

Although golfers are not among Murray’s selected 4,002 outstanding human beings (between 800 BC and 1950), he takes time out to show that the “Lotka curve,” which plots the incidence of supreme achievers, makes Jack Nicklaus undoubtedly the king, just as his renown suggests. The arts are little different: Their “champions” -- Michelangelo, Mozart and (like it or not) Picasso -- are not at the head of their class because of blinkered Eurocentric bias but because they did the best work. The average human being may have all kinds of virtues, but being above average is unlikely to be among them. It is still possible to wish, for political reasons, that White Men didn’t jump so high intellectually or creatively, or that Jews were not so disproportionately clever (at least after 1800, when they were first given half a chance to distinguish themselves), but to insist that the problem lies in biased evaluation is to find the truth only at the end of the rainbow.

The Chinese of the Song Dynasty were centuries ahead of Europe in all kinds of ways: hygiene, social organization (they had a meritocratic civil service, with candidates selected impartially for their intelligence) and technology. They only just failed to arrive at scientific methodology, but fail they did. Yet at the same time that Columbus was sailing west in a boat only 85 feet long, Zheng He’s flagship was 444 feet long, and he stayed at sea for two years. But his discoveries did not impel the emperor to extend his borders. (In fact, the fleet was disbanded.) The invention of paper -- including toilet paper, long before Europeans had that soft option -- did not have the same impact on the Chinese as it might have if they had had the wit or luck also to invent printing. The West’s monopoly of the mechanical press prompted the liberating publication of ideas and texts that no ecclesiastical authority would ever have spelled out. James Watts’ steam engine later put Europe on the fast track industrially.

It may be that God should have thought again and spread the wealth, but he didn’t, and there’s small chance that he will. If creativity is a universal human possibility, it is not universally achieved. Murray appears right (sometimes alarmingly) in his general thesis, but he needs watching (and challenging) in the slippery area where facts and figures coalesce into supposed laws.

For instance, his crowning conclusion is that great art, however dependent on individual genius, requires a “transcendental” philosophy -- that is, religion. Though he does not deny that great artists and scientists often react against prevailing ideas, he implies that even exceptional genius owes a good deal to the rule. And he has a point: Spinoza, for example, revolutionized thought by saying the new thing in the old language. His mandarin Latin elegance exploded the old philosophy and set Europe on the way to Enlightenment. In doing so, Spinoza challenged the notion of a benign God capable of miraculous interventions and did much to dismantle the transcendentalism that Murray seems to prescribe. After a long and knotty text, Murray would have us take a strong dose of “religion” as a panacea for modern anomie and an antidote for a culture of hedonistic entertainment and glib rhetoric. And Jerry Falwell shall lead them?