Created Unequal: Human Accomplishment
Murray, Charles
Created Unequal Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences 800 B.C. to 1950 by Charles Murray (HarperCollins, 688 pages, $29.95) Reviewed by Alfred S. Regnery F EW...
...There are 1,277 significant figures in Murray's Western inventory for the period between 1870 and 1950...
...It is these very few achievers on whom Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve and Losing Ground, focuses in his new book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences 800 B.C...
...In making his list he rules out almost entirely heads of state and members of government, businessmen, and religious figures...
...In fact, there are 158, more than five times the norm...
...56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2003 BOOKS IN REVIEW contributors to the arts and sciences from 800 B.C...
...They will hate Murray's new book for two reasons...
...The list of 4,000 includes only 80 women, and try as he might to change the criteria to include more women, Murray finds it can't be done without retroactive affirmative action...
...First, because it is a celebration of inequality...
...Peace (with some significant exceptions, like the Thirty Years' War) and prosperity, the development of cities and the concentration of knowledge in universities and other compact areas, and freedom of action all play a significant role...
...Mozart and Beethoven get 100 and 98 points respectively, and Brahms gets a paltry 35...
...Second, they will hate it for exactly the same reason they hate the "Great Books" tradition: those who made Murray's list are overwhelmingly dead, white, European men...
...Money—the availability of resources to commission works of art and music, and to finance inventors and science—is a large factor, at least in terms of keeping talented people fed and clothed while they work...
...But there have been very few people—those whose abilities far exceed the norm—who have created what has become the world's culture and civilization...
...But as these restrictions were lifted there was an explosion of accomplishment...
...The arts and sciences reflect civilization and culture...
...That is not to say that the period before 1400 was a wasteland...
...Murray concludes with a story of the medieval stonemasons who carved the gargoyles on the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe...
...Protestantism played a role as well, encouraging the growth of individualism, of methodical and persistent self-interested action, and even of the development of the scientific method in England...
...There just have not been many Madame Curies...
...But then he was Mozart, and one of a kind...
...Freedom, prosperity, inspiration, access to cities and universities all played a role, but so, certainly, did a strong sense of purpose...
...Prior to the early nineteenth century, there are not more than a handful of Jews who qualify by Murray's standards, probably because, at least in Europe, Jews were nearly excluded from participating in the arts and sciences, and were largely forbidden by law from entering universities and the professions...
...But we still had 7,000 years to wait before civilization had its first stirrings...
...Peter's in Rome, look carefully at a Darer woodcut, listen to Beethoven's Opus 132 string quartet, read Aristotle, Shakespeare, or Dante, and you realize that these are works of colossal achievement...
...Many of the gargoyles would be hidden from view when the cathedral wasfinished, but the masons carved them as carefully as those that would be seen...
...When he further isolates those at the very top of his combined lists—those with a score of 90 or more—the list shrinks to a mere 30 people...
...Perhaps the more interesting side of the story is not who these people were, or where they came from, but why...
...Thomas Aquinas, that human intelligence is a gift from God, and that God wanted us to use that intelligence and our creativity to discover the world around us...
...Mozart, for example, during the summer of 1788 lived in a city that was experiencing bread riots and in a country that was mobilizing for war...
...One need only consider what inspired Michelangelo to design the Sistine Chapel, or Bach to write his Mass in B Minor or the Passion of St...
...There are the obvious reasons, of course...
...To be exact, Murray identifies just over 4,000 people as the originators of and most significant Alfred S. Regnery is publisher of The American Spectator...
...But that is addressed as well: Murray finds that between 1901 and 1950, 4 percent of those who received a Nobel Prize were women, whereas between 1951 and 2000, when most of those impediments had been lifted,only 3 percent made the cut...
...It was said of them that they carved for the eye of God...
...Consequently, Christianity may be the reason that then-Christian Europe played such a dominant role in the development of the world's culture...
...Human Accomplishment will be accused of Eurocentrism despite its use of the most scholarly and all-encompassing sources, and its inclusion of Arab, Indian, and East Asian scientists, artists, mathematicians, philosophers and the rest...
...Excellence in its true form exists very rarely, but the inequality of excellence, Murray convincingly shows, has enabled a few people to enrich the lives of all...
...John, or St...
...to 1950 by Charles Murray (HarperCollins, 688 pages, $29.95) Reviewed by Alfred S. Regnery F EW OF US ACCOMPLISH ENOUGH during our lives to be remembered after we have quit this veil of tears...
...But paying for clothes and food is not inspiration, which only comes from within or from God, and even in times of want and strife great strides are made...
...As unpopular as the notion is these days, there is no escaping the fact that the greatest impetus to accomplishment is inspiration that comes from a belief in, and devotion to, God, specifically the God why is it that European men who lived between 1400 and 1800 created so much of the world's culture...
...Why is it that European men who lived between 1400 and 1800 created so much of the world's culture...
...Indeed, of the great achievers on Murray's list, 72 percent of those who lived between 1400 and 1950, are British, French, German, or Italian...
...Stand in St...
...Yet in June, July, and August he composed two piano trios, a piano sonata, a violin sonata, and three symphonies...
...Had Jews been represented strictly as a percentage of the population, 28 of the 1,277 would have been Jewish...
...He concludes that among mathematicians and scientists, 94 percent and 91 percent respectively of the most accomplished, throughout history, are Europeans and Americans...
...Augustine to write his Confessions, to realize the impact of Christianity on developing a culture conducive to excellence...
...By 8000 B.C., human beings looked about the same way we do now, had well-developed languages, and were beginning to figure out that crops could be planted and harvested...
...The egalitarians and multiculturalists will not take kindly to Murray's argument, and the predictable lefties will, I suspect, pick up where they left off in their criticism of The Bell Curve...
...Murray gives a rating to each of his 4,139 significant figures, based on an elaborate and seemingly unbiased methodology that he developed, within each of the disciplines examined...
...Still, the numbers do not lie...
...Literature, music, art, technology and invention, scientific discovery, medicine, and philosophy are among the disciplines that define human development, and which reflect the refinement of the human mind...
...Although our ancestors appear to have been around for some 200,000 years, they didn't accomplish much, in the development of the sciences and culture, for most of that time...
...If Christianity played an important role, the extent to which Jews are represented on Murray's lists is even more interesting...
...Although genius of the type discussed in the book was scarce, there were some giants, in fact some of the most significant achievers of all time...
...He was completely broke, to the point where he was forced to pawn all his belongings...
...Admittedly, for most of the 2,750 years covered by Murray's book, women were precluded, for one reason or another, from doing many of the things that resulted in extraordinary accomplishment (aside from giving birth to all the men on the list...
...It is an exclusive club, and Murray makes a strong case that it is an objectively defined one...
...As Murray says, "The Greeks laid the foundation [for Western achievement] but it was the transmutation of that foundation by Christianity that gave modern Europe its impetus and differentiated European accomplishment from that of all other cultures around the world...
...Roman Catholicism, which dominated Europe for most of the time in question, developed the philosophy, engendered by St...
...NOVEMBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 BOOKS IN REVIEW of the Bible...
...And that, "written in a thousand variations, is the story of human accomplishment...
...His six-month old daughter died in June...
Vol. 36 • November 2003 • No. 6
