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Charles Murray does it again

Charles Murray (of Bell Curve fame) has written a new book. Richard Morrison reviews it in the Times:

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.

It's about time someone came out and said it. But it's not all good news:

“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.

After this Morrison's review descends into trivialities. The crux (to me) is what Murray says about Christianity. You see, I am an atheist. I simply cannot believe in a God. But I do believe in the greatness of Western civilization. But what if one begat the other - then what? It hardly bears thinking about.

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O ye of little faith.

Posted by God on November 5, 2003

Richard Morrison's attack of prigishness in the second half of his article was unfortunate. He winds up treating Murray's book - and Murray himself - as some kind of mischievous, sociological curiosity. That is perverse, given the several snipes he takes at the liberal establishment along the way. The man seems to have no reliable political compass.

That cannot be said of Charles Murray. There aren't many more fearless authors on the right, nor many who approach their subject with such an instinctive understanding of its historical and political dynamic (the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb is another, I suppose).

No doubt because of their controversy, Murray's writings are influential. The Bell Curve, co-authored with educator Richard Hernnstein, changed the potential for sociobiologists to be heard. The academic left, led by the marxist Stephen J.Gould, responded without honour. But it could not prevent the present generation of neo-Darwinians from taking back Evolutionary Psychology from the "race is irrelevant" faction.

There's nothing to be got from inflating the value of other cultures' artifacts. We are long overdue a correction here. If our intellectual and cultural heritage is more properly appreciated as a consequence of Human Accomplishment, I'll definitely go in for a spot of this Western triumphalism Mr Morrison so clearly dislikes.

Posted by Guessedworker on November 5, 2003

The problem is that the Bell Curve is academically discredited, which makes it rather difficult to care what else he says.

TBC makes no concession for environment and opportunity, uses statistical analyses and assessment techniques that are at best dubious and at worst wrong.

Has anyone asked why there are less 'significant lterary figures' from other cultures? Might it be because we view it from the West and say "Well, I've never heard of it, so it can't be significant"?

Posted by Nick Ellis on November 21, 2003