Even in this age of subversive websites and 24-hour news channels, few things create quite as many ripples in the intellectual pond as the arrival of a thick tome with Charles Murray’s name on the spine. That is not surprising. The 60-year-old academic — “America’s most notorious social scientist”, according to the anguished PC guardians of
The New York Times — has a knack for causing mass spluttering in liberal circles.
His 1984 blockbuster, Losing Ground, was a brutal mugging of the welfare state in America and Britain which, he claimed, was tolerating and indeed subsidising a “new rabble” of lawless teenagers from single-parent homes. Ten years later he was the co-author of an even more incendiary book, The Bell Curve, which hijacked some fairly whiskery statistics in order to suggest that IQ differences between American blacks, whites and Asians were due to nature, not nurture. In other words, it is all in the genes and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.
Well, that abrasive little theory went down like the Titanic in most academic and literary circles, where the great tradition of freedom of expression seems to be respected as long as a high degree of self-censorship operates. Now Murray is aiming for a hat-trick of scholarly discomforts. His new book has a wonderful “look at clever old me!” title: Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800BC to 1950, and an eye-popping thesis to match.
His target this time is the overwhelming consensus among liberal intellectuals that “the West” — or, more specifically, a time-honoured canon of “great works” by Dead White European Males — has dominated educational curriculums and cultural programming for far too long, and that it is time for all the world’s major cultures to be given equal attention. Wrong, wrong, wrong, says Murray. We should continue to lavish most of our scholarly energies on Dead White Males because they were responsible for “97 per cent” of all human progress.
He is marginally less sweeping in his generalisations about the arts, but even here his assertions are jolting. The West, he says, has produced “834 significant literary figures”, compared with “82, 83, 43 and 85 from the Arab world, China, India and Japan respectively”. And when he says “the West”, what he really means is Western Europe. He maintains that 72 per cent of all “significant figures” in the arts and sciences betweeen 1400 and 1950 came from four countries, what we now know as Britain, France, Germany and Italy.
But before we marvellously brainy Europeans start warming to Murray’s world view, we had better read his sting-in-the-tail, which is that “Europe’s run appears to be over”. He even doubts whether “European culture as we know it will exist by the turn of the century”. Our trouble, he contends, is that we have lost faith — literally. Christianity was what made Europe tick intellectually. Apparently it provided the “transcendental goods ” — the meaning-of-life stuff — without stifling free thinking or creativity.
Even the astonishing flowering of Jewish genius at the end of the 19th century was, according to Murray, seeded by Christianity. “The culture fostered by Christianity,” he writes, “was as instrumental in unleashing accomplishments among Jews as among Christians — once that same culture got around to relieving the suppression it had imposed on Jews in the first place.” How this breezy generalisation can be reconciled with the Holocaust, or with the awkward fact that some of Murray’s “top geniuses” — Galileo, Leonardo, Darwin — made their giant leaps for mankind in the face of ferocious Christian opposition, is not clear. But that does not stop Murray from implying that, now Europe is floundering in atheism, degeneracy and nihilism, we are more or less washed up in intellectual terms.
Quite apart from his provocative thesis, how on earth did Murray arrive at those extraordinary numbers and rankings? How can he state so confidently that the Arab world has produced precisely 82 significant literary figures, or that Beethoven and Mozart are in a “dead heat” for the title of greatest musical genius, with Bach picking up the bronze medal (subject to a drugs test, presumably)? What about Andrew Lloyd Webber, for heaven’s sake, or even Wagner?
The answer is bizarre. Murray has trawled hundreds of scholarly reference works and simply measured the column inches devoted to the 4,000 most frequently mentioned people — a dodgy, cod-mathematical method known as historiometry. I can only doff my hat to his prodigious Protestant work ethic (or that of his researchers). Just to apply this method to a single reference work — The Grove Dictionary of Art — would mean stretching a tape-measure across 30,000 pages.
But is it sane to assemble a league table of genius by a process more usually adopted by C-list celebrities measuring their gossip column mentions? When Gandhi was asked for his view of Western civilisation, he replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” It’s tempting to make the same remark about Murray’s notion of scientific proof. And of course this makes Murray vulnerable to two potent accusations. One is that he is using reference books that are themselves skewed in favour of Western accomplishments (although he points out that he has drawn on scholarly tomes from many different countries). The other is that a huge amount of “human accomplishment”, particularly before the 16th century, is anonymous. How, for instance, could the architectural genius who designed Westminster Abbey — the Norman Norman Foster, you might say — figure in Murray’s rankings?
Taken as a whole, then, Human Accomplishment is more unsettling than convincing. Unsettling not just because of its contents, but also because of its timing. At the very moment when most of the world is desperately trying to play down the lethal notion of a “clash of civilisations” in the wake of September 11, Murray seems to be stoking up the fires: appearing to offer “evidence” to the hawks — in Washington or wherever — that those suscribing to Judaeo-Christian beliefs and “transatlantic” values have every right to lord it over the underachievers of the Middle and Far East.
In fairness, I do not think it is Murray’s intention to offer ammunition to Western triumphalists, just as it was never Nietzsche’s intention to provide (posthumously) a veneer of intellectual respectability for the Nazi doctrine of the master race. What he does want to do is contest the ubiquitous Post-Modern orthodoxy which holds that all cultural value judgments — but especially Eurocentric ones — do nothing but mirror the prejudices of the person doing the judging.
And in this crusade (if that word is not too loaded) one can only wish him well. As he says, Eurocentrism “has in recent years joined racism and sexism as one of the Post-Modern mortal sins”. That perhaps explains why modern undergraduates tend to know everything about Thai beach culture and virtually nothing about the Renaissance. Or why the Arts Council of England agonises each year about whether it is “doing enough” to support Asian music, when audiences and musicians in Japan, China and Vietnam cannot get enough of Beethoven and Mahler.
In other words, Murray is challenging Western educationalists to shed their collective post-imperial guilt complex and acknowledge “the way things really are”. Which is that Europe’s contribution to the Ascent of Man is too overwhelming to be placed anywhere except right at the heart of our engagement with history and culture.
Less than a century ago, such a view would have been thought blindingly and boringly self-evident. It is a mark of how far the world of ideas has changed that Murray is now regarded as the sort of beyond-the-pale maverick whose name can be mentioned only in scandalised whispers, if at all, in senior common rooms.
I happen to think that he massively overstates his case, and that some of the most exciting cultural events in my lifetime have occurred when a window has been opened on to some faraway civilisation of which we knew nothing. I also recognise that, in some unsavoury hands, his Eurocentric special pleading could be (and has been) used to justify all sorts of arrogant and aggressive behaviour towards “outsiders” — up to, and including, genocide.
Nevertheless, I welcome his book. Western or Eastern, ancient or modern, a civilisation that refuses to tolerate the bracing scepticism of a dissenting voice is not really civilised at all.
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