Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 Paperback – November 9, 2004

By no means is this a book for everyone. It is a slog to get through it. Seriously. I loved it. Until I retired I was a heavy user of statistics. I am even more deeply an historian. (Can't possibly make a decent living with that.) Plus some other mental decoration. This book was my cup of tea. ASTONISHINGLY he is rational, reasonable, and straightforward. Rare! (Naturally I would say that about one with whom I share much agreement.) As I was reading the book, from time to time I wondered how I could encourage my extended family to include this book as part of the home schooling curriculum. It is that important. (Thinking of the children, as Mr. Murray does, I recommend skipping until later the details of the data development and statistical analysis. Yes, important. No, not a lot of fun and insight.)
Now then, a dose of reality. It is too little too late.. Even if we teach our children the things he develops it will only allow them to see and understand the collapse. Mr. Murray peripherally acknowledges the overriding importance of worldview in the culture(s) that drives accomplishment. I think he may have been a little weak with respect to this but not entirely.
I heartily recommend this book to those who enjoy the patterns and subtleties of long term cultural history. Mr Murray provides many, many insights.

A blurb on the dust jacket suggests that <Human Accomplishment> is a book for the general reader. Not so. Instead it is for the minority who can be defined as a discriminating readership. It is not an easy book. To quote author Charles Murray, his "<Human Accomplishment> describes what we (society) have achieved, provides some tools for thinking about how it has been done, and celebrates our continuing common quest." It might be said that our common quest is to discover truth and beauty.

Murray has chosen the creme de la creme of thinkers and doers who have accomplished results having profound, advancing effect on society in the areas of artistic and scientific excellence -- this between 800 BC to 1950 AD. Murray recognized that such choices as he made can be seen as tainted by his own subjective biases. For this reason he has devoted a significant part of his book to explaining the systems by which he sought to achieve objectivity.

<Human Accomplishment> is not a book to be entered lightly. It contains much to interest the discriminating reader IF THAT READER IS PREPARED TO GIVE IT HIS CLOSE ATTENTION.

You can think of Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment as the winners of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, as determined by experts in the various fields in which these great people worked. Some of the winners will be surprising, others not terribly surprising at all. In the combined sciences, the man who experts think had the most important contribution was ... [drum roll] Isaac Newton. In Western philosophy, Aristotle beat Plato by almost 10 percentage points. The giants of Western music are Beethoven and Mozart, who basically tied for first place. And in Western art, the most significant figure is Michelangelo. You can buy the book for the other results.

I'll tell you a little about the author Charles Murray's method to determine who the most significant figures are in the arts and sciences. He did a statistical analysis across English-printed and foreign-printed textbooks in the arts and sciences, calculated who the most frequently cited were, and the amount of pages were devoted to those figures. And these were the figures that emerged. It's a pretty cool concept, and it made for a pretty fun read. I think it's definitely an important book.

Charles Murray is a gutsy social scientist. Back in 1994, he co-wrote the excellent Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) with Richard Herrnstein. The onslaught of controversy from the politically correct faction exhausted Herrnstein (he died not long after the release of the book). But, Murray kept on trucking and a decade later released another politically incorrect outstanding bombshell with this book.

Being aware of the topic's controversial nature, Murray spends nearly as much time explaining his statistical methodology as he does analyzing results. After reading Murray's disclosure, you're overwhelmed by his data gathering effort. And, you are hard pressed to think off how a researcher could have been more objective in this endeavor.

From his extensive data, he develops a ranking of the top 20 contributors in tens of different fields. The usual suspects dominate the podium. In Western literature it is Shakespeare and Goethe. In Western Art, it is Michelangelo. In Physics, it is Newton and Einstein. In Western music it is the usual trio Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. And so on and so forth.

Murray makes a great effort in capturing non-Western culture by dedicating several inventories/rankings specifically for them, including numerous disciplines for the Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cultures. His research methodology renders him as well versed in Japanese Art as Arabic Literature. His related analytical commentaries are fascinating and educative.

Murray preempts politically correct concerns by addressing them head on. How about representation of women? As an abstract of his findings, if you are looking for the greatest composers of all time it is just impossible to come up with an alternative to the Mozart-Beethoven-Bach trio. And, the same is true for the other rankings he developed. He mentioned that in his gathered inventory of significant figures 98.5% are male. Speculating that all the well established sources had been heavily biased against women and had missed 50% of such significant figures; that would mean the percentage of male/female significant figures would be 97%/3% instead of 98.5%/1.5%. Murray does not believe the mentioned sources were biased. But, he adds even if they were it would not have made a material difference as stated above. Murray explicitly states men and women are of equal intelligence. It is just that our societies are patriarchal. Access to activities leading to superlative achievements is limited for women. Biologically, women incur the burden of reproduction and child rearing that is a constraint on the maniacal focus needed to become one of the all-time-greats in anything.

How about representation of foreign cultures? As mentioned, Murray already dedicated numerous inventories/rankings to other cultures to give them more than their fair share of representation.

After ranking individuals, Murray goes on to developing chronologies of major events in all the mentioned disciplines. Then, he moves on to analyzing trends in creativity over time and geographical location. You get that just a few places over short period of times generated an inordinate number of luminaries such as Athens during the Greek antiquity and a few Italian cities during the Renaissance.

Murray is intrigued by this phenomenon. In chapters 15 and 16, he analyzes the factors contributing to generating many luminaries at any one time within a specific country. From his multivariate regression models we learn that the major contributing variables to generating such luminaries per country are: 1) # of political and financial centers; 2) # of cities with an elite university; 3) population of the largest city; 4) # of luminaries in the immediate preceding generation (defined as a 20 year span); and 5) GDP per capita. On page 380, he discloses the results of this model. And, it is surprisingly good. Using this model he estimated within + or - 10 the number of luminaries per country from 1400 to 1950. Less than 5% of the defined per country-period have an error greater than + or - 10 in the estimated number of luminaries.

Next, Murray attempts to explain what the model has not. He extensively looks at the role of government with the expected assessment (totalitarian ones are bad as they don't allow individual creativity). He also advances that the reason why Europeans dominate the rankings is because of religious considerations. Confucianism and Buddhism in Asia valued tradition, family, responsibility to community, and detachment from desire and individual aspiration. Murray feels Christianity allowed more room for individual achievements hence related human accomplishments thrived in Europe more than else where. Murray makes a case that Christianity fostered human accomplishments more than our modern secularism. This is because he feels religion gives a greater sense of life purpose than secularism. He extends his theory by explaining why he feels that the rate and quality of innovation in the arts and sciences has declined in the 20th century. Remember, he is not talking just about technology. He is questioning whether our civilization will ever produce music composers of the quality of a Beethoven, or painters comparable to Michelangelo, playwright matching Shakespeare, or even scientists matching Newton or Einstein (ok this last one is just on the cusp belonging in good part to the first half of the 20th century). Even though many would disagree, Murray makes a very interesting point. Do we really have another Michelangelo or Shakespeare to come?

For a much different view of the interaction between science and religion, I also recommend Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and Mike Shermer's Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design.