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Human Accomplishment

The Pursuit of Excellence

in the Arts and Sciences, 800

B.C. to 1950

CHARLES MURRAY

To Irwin Stelzer, Charles Krauthammer, and Harlan Crow

It turns out I had brothers after all

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments v

A Note on Presentation ix

Int r oduction xi

PART ONE

A Sense of Accomplishment

1

1. A Sense of Time 3

2. A Sense of Mystery 13

3. A Sense of Place 25

4. A Sense of Wonder 53

PART TWO

Identifying the People and Events That Matter

57

5. Excellence and Its Identification 59

6. The Lotka Curve 87

7. The People Who Matter I: Significant Figures 107

8.

The People Who Matter II:The Giants 119

9. The Events That Matter I: Significant Events 155

10. The Events That Matter II: Meta-Inventions 209

PART THREE

Patterns and Trajectories

245

11. Coming to Terms with the Role of Modern Europe 247

12. . . . and of Dead White Males 265

13. Concentrations of European and American Accomplishment 295

14. Taking Population into Account:The Accomplishment Rate 309

15. Explanations I: Peace and Prosperity 331

16. Explanations II: Models, Elite Cities, and Freedom of Action 353

17. What"s Left to Explain? 379

iv € CONTENTS

PART FOUR

On the Origins and Decline of Accomplishment

383

18. The Aristotelian Principle 385

19. Sources of Energy: Purpose and Autonomy 391

20. Sources of Content:The Organizing Structure

and Transcendental Goods 409
21.

Is Accomplishment Declining? 427

22. Summation 449

APPENDICES 459

1. Statistics for People Who Are Sure They Can•t Learn Statistics 461

2. Construction of the Inventories and the Eminence Index 475

3. Inventory Sources 491

4. Geographic and Population Data 505

5. The Roster of the Significant Figures 513

Notes 589

Bibliography 625

Index 639

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Charles Murray

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

H uman Accomplishment consumed my professional life from the fall of

1997 to the end of 2002, almost to the exclusion of the research on

social policy that is my stock in trade. Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where I am a fellow, gave me his unre served support throughout this long project, as did my colleagues and the Institute•s trustees. AEI is a wonderful home for intellectual inquiry. In the literature on historiometric analysis of greatness and achieve- ment, one name dominates: Dean Keith Simonton, whose works fill a shelf in my library. He generously shared his expertise with an outsider coming into his domain and provided invaluable guidance. If you want to know more about almost any topic in this book, go to the list of Simonton references in the bibliography. At the outset of the project, Michael Novak predicted in his gentle way that I would find Christianity•s role in Western human accomplishment to be pivotal. I privately doubted him (it seemed to me that the Greeks had set the stage without Christianity), but he opened my mind to possibilities that came to fruition in material you will find in Part 4"the most important, but only one, of Michael•s many contributions to the book. As I worked my way through the quantitative analyses in Part 3, I turned first to Douglas Hibbs, a friend since he was on my dissertation committee 30 years ago. Others who responded to my many requests for consultation on technical matters were AEI colleagues Kevin Hassett, Nicholas Eberstadt, John Lott, and Brent Mast, plus anonymous others who provided help at second-hand as my queries were circulated. vi € ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Christopher DeMuth, Richard Posner, and Joan Kennedy Taylor undertook the daunting task of reading the entire draft, providing strategic comments along with line-by-line editorial advice. My topic required that I deal with disparate technical subjects. Kevin Grau, Miles Hoffman, and Roger Kimball were especially unstinting in their response to queries about issues involving the histories of science, music, and aesthetics respectively. I also gratefully acknowledge the review of many others who had expertises I lack: Munawar Anees, Eileen Blumenthal, Harlan Crow, John Derbyshire, Henry Harpending, Masaaki Harada, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Ralph Holloway, Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Marvin Kruger, James Lilley, Elizabeth Lurie, Richard McNally, Steven Reiss, Samuel Schulman, Irwin Stelzer, Scott Tanona, Steven and Kazuko Tripp, Arthur Waldron, Benjamin Wong, José Zalaquett, Kate Zhou, and others who prefer to remain anonymous. The responsibility for mistakes that remain are mine, with this empha- sis: Almost all of the people I just named did not see the full manuscript, but isolated pages of draft. None saw the final manuscript that went to press.That a name appears in the paragraphs above does not imply that person•s seal of approval on anything. I enjoy everything about the kind of research that Human Accomplish- ment entailed, so I did as much as I could myself. But there was too much to do alone, so I enlisted help along the way.Thanks go to AEI research assis tants and interns who took on tasks at one time or another over the years: Hans Allhoff, Bion Bliss, Masaaki Harada, Daniel Mindus, Todd Ostroske,

Sara Russo, Julian Sanchez, and Sharon Utz.

The publishing business with which I have interacted for almost 20 years has been filled all along with nothing but engaging, able people who had the best interest of each book at heart. Not every writer has this experi ence, I am told. That it has been mine is because my agent, Amanda Urban, has made it so. It is high time that I acknowledge how important she has been to my professional life. For this book, Amanda arranged matters so that I should have the pleasure of being edited by Hugh van Dusen, whom I didn•t meet face-to-face for the first four years, after we had long since developed an epistolary friendship in the best Victorian tradition. In John Yohalem, I had a copy editor of formidable erudition who spotted obscure historical errors as fast as syntactical ones. Bob Bull coped with the book•s many design chal lenges and its meddlesome author with equal measures of skill and patience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS € vii

Catherine Bly Cox is the other editor of Human Accomplishment, as she has been of everything I have published since 1982. I doubt whether there is a page of text in the book that has not been improved by her red pen. But she was also my wife throughout this most difficult project. Her role in getting me through it was of a kind for which thanks are both inadequate and superfluous.

Charles Murray

Burkittsville

3 August 2003

A NOTE ON

PRESEN

TA TION H uman Accomplishment uses several devices to organize an unwieldy body of material. Boxed text is scattered throughout the book for excursions that I think are worth including but can be skipped. Brackets around an endnote number indicate that the note contains additional detail. The appendices are reserved for full-scale discussion of methods and for the presentation of data too bulky to fit in the text. I have adopted two conventions for labeling centuries and years to minimize the clutter in a text filled with dates. One is to refer to a century by its number followed by a capital C, so that, for example, the eighteenth century becomes 18C. The second is to dispense with BC and AD or their more recent replacements BCE and CE. The putative year of Christ•s birth has become the world•s cross-cultural base year for a dating system, even in coun tries that still use another base year in their own calendars, so I will treat it as such and be done with it. Thus 300 AD becomes simply 300 and 300 BC becomes ...300. One other convention involving dates should be kept in mind: A span of time designated (for example) •1400...1600ž should be read as •1400 to the outset of 1600,žnot •1400 through 1600.ž Thus the two peri ods 1400...1600 and 1600...1800 do not overlap. On matters involving alternative spellings of names, their order (e.g., •Leonardo da Vinciž or •da Vinci, Leonardož), birth dates, death dates, or fluorit dates, I used the consensus version whenever one existed and otherwise followed the source I judged to be most authoritative. Chinese names, places, and phrases are usually transliterated using the Pinyin system. For Chinese historical figures and places that are well known in the West by labels the Chinese themselves do not use, I have used the x € A NOTE ON PRESENTATION version least likely to cause confusion to Western readers"e.g., Confucius instead of Kongfuzi and Yangtze River instead of Chang Jiang River. Regarding the thorny problem of singular third-person pronouns, I continue a quixotic campaign that is now 20 years old. My position is that constructions such as •his or herž are cumbersome and that restricting sentences to plural pronouns is silly. The reasonable solution is for the author, or the principal author, to use his or her sex as the basis for all third-person singular pronouns unless there is an obvious reason not to, and I hereafter hew to that principle in Human Accomplishment.

INTRODUCTION

t irregular times and in scattered settings, human beings have achieved Agreat things. They have discovered truths about the workings of the physical world, invented wondrous devices, combined sounds and colors in ways that touch our deepest emotions, and arranged words in ways that illu minate the mysteries of the human condition. Human Accomplishment is about those great things, falling in the domains known as the arts and sciences, and the people who did them. In choosing to focus on these categories of great things, I have in mind the metaphor of the résumé. What, I ask, can Homo sapiens brag about"not as individuals, but as a species? In keeping with the metaphor, I ignore the kinds of achievements that personal résumés ignore. Our job applications do not include much about whether we are caring individuals; so also, this book has nothing about whether we are a caring species. Military accomplishment is out"putting •Defeated Hitlerž on the human résumé is too much like putting •Beat my drug habitž on a personal one. I also omit governance and commerce"mostly for technical reasons, but also remaining true to the metaphor. In their effect on the individual•s freedom to pursue happiness, the creation of prosperous and free societies is the greatest of all achievements by humans on behalf of other humans. But as an accomplish ment of the species, those achievements are akin to paying the rent and putting food on the table, freeing Homo sapiens to reach the heights within reach of the human mind and spirit"heights that are most visibly attained in the arts and sciences. The first purpose of this book is to assemble and describe inventories of human accomplishment, a task that implies the book•s first thesis: the dimen sions and content of human accomplishment can be apprehended as facts. It is more xii € INTRODUCTION than a matter of opinion that Rembrandt was a greater artist than, say, Edward Hopper, or Dante a greater poet than Carl Sandburg. 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. Apprehending the facts of human accomplishment does require judg- ment, which implies a corollary to the thesis. Judgment is separable from opinion in matters of artistic and scientific excellence. It is possible to distinguish the impor tant from the trivial, the fine from the coarse, the credible from the meretri- cious, and the elegant from the vulgar. Doing so is not a simple matter, and no single observer is infallible, but a realm of objective knowledge about excellence exists. That knowledge can be tapped systematically and arranged as data that meet scientific standards of reliability and validity. From this view of excellence in human endeavors flows the following claim: I have assembled inventories that contain the people and events mostquotesdbs_dbs42.pdfusesText_42

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