Of Human Greatness
Lance
Policy, 1950-1980, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in
American Life) know that he is not a man to shy away from controversy or
bold opinions. In Human Accomplishment,[1] Murray's aim is nothing less than
to determine the geographic and chronological distribution of creative
genius in science and the arts across the whole of the world during
twenty-eight centuries, from 800 BC through 1950. It's a tall order. Murray
assembles histories, surveys, and encyclopedias of the arts and sciences,
163 of them, and records their treatment of significant figures. Using an
initial cut-off that leaves only individuals who are mentioned in at least
50 percent of his sources, he comes up with a list of 4002 writers,
philosophers, mathematicians, musicians, poets, astronomers, painters,
physicists, biologists, and innovators in technology. These are then rated
in a system devised and refined in order to provide an objective assessment
of high achievement across cultures and over the ages.
The leading names are predictable: Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Darwin in
the sciences, Beethoven and Bach in music, Shakespeare and Schiller in
literature, Michelangelo in painting, Euler in mathematics, and so forth.
Murray is at pains to eliminate Eurocentrism in his analysis: there is
separate coverage of Chinese and of Indian philosophy to match Western
philosophy, Chinese painting, Japanese art, Japanese literature, Arabic
literature, and Chinese literature. These include, at a level he views as
comparable to Aristotle and Mozart, such names as Gu Kaizhi, Basho,
al-Mutanabbi, and Kalidasa. Murray's goal is not, however, merely to make a
list of 4002 all-time greats. He wants to build up a general view of the
historical conditions that allow for the flourishing of artistic and
scientific innovation and discovery.
One of Murray's favorite ideas is contained in a quip he credits to his late
colleague Richard J. Herrnstein: "It is easy to lie with statistics, but it'
s a lot easier to lie without them." It's a notion worth remembering in
light of the sour reactions to his book from critics who don't like the idea
of quantifying greatness. In The New York Post, Sam Munson wrote that "there
is something disturbingly petty about creating indexes, tables, and rates of
human accomplishment." Murray's "page-counting," Judith Shulevitz sniffed in
The New York Times, seems the kind of thing that normally "would interest
only those who find that sort of thing interesting," were it not for the
fact that his conclusions seem as "fantastical" as something out of Borges.
Along with other critics, Shulevitz tends to find the book typical of
old-time social science: when it's right, it's bleeding obvious; when it's
not obvious, it's wrong.
Granted that in some respects Murray's statistics drive him to conclusions
not all that different from those of purely qualitative historians of genius
and culture, such as Jacques Barzun and Harold Bloom. And when he does
resort to humanistic sermons extolling great men and their masterworks, they
come accompanied by tables and statistics lessons that many readers will
find too tedious and wearying to study. This is a shame, for they will miss
the heart of an impressively well-argued account of magnificent achievements
of human history. For all his statistics, Murray does not promise or deliver
certainty on the conditions for human accomplishment. Rather, he supplies
data on which informed opinions, by him or by his critics, might be based.
Murray's method for identifying eminence by reputation follows a form set by
Francis Galton's 1869 Hereditary Genius, which also used biographical
literature quantitatively, as a platform for research. But the spirit of
Murray's endeavor stretches back farther, to David Hume. In his essay "Of
the Standard of Taste" (1757), Hume formulated the problem of evaluating
artistic achievement. There is "a species of opinion," Hume observed, which
holds that taste is subjective, beauty in the eye of the beholder, and that
there can be no point in searching for standards in the arts. Many people
find this an easy opinion to adopt, Hume writes, until someone forces it to
its conclusion, declaring (say) that John Ogilby is as great a poet as John
Milton. "The principle of the natural equality of tastes," Hume remarks, "is
then totally forgot, and while we admit it on some occasions, where the
objects seem near an equality, it appears an extravagant paradox, or rather
a palpable absurdity, where objects so disproportioned are compared
together."
Hume recognized works of art that pass what he called the Test of Time,
works with the capacity to engage deep, permanent features of the human
personality and are thus to be appreciated over the ages. (So the same Homer
who pleased "at Athens and at Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired
at Paris and at London.") This shows, for Hume as for Murray, that objective
achievements in the arts are demonstrable-and if they can be historically
established for the arts, then they are even more clearly identifiable for
the sciences. These two spheres of human endeavor represent two kinds of
potential objectivity: there is as little chance of the human race giving up
Homer or the Beethoven symphonies as there is that it will give up the
notion that the earth is a sphere. Over time, achievement in the arts and
the sciences is seen as not merely an invention of scholarship, a product of
fickle fashion, or a general social construction. It is an objective fact
about the real world.
Nevertheless, Murray does not glibly assume the reality of lasting values:
he argues for them, scrappily, provocatively, with energy and conviction. In
his introduction, he quotes St. Augustine in City of God, sounding, as
Murray remarks, like a Victorian triumphalist: "What varieties has man found
out in buildings, attires, husbandry, navigation, sculpture, and painting! .
What million of invention has he [in] arms, engines, stratagems, and the
like! . How large is the capacity of man!" The idea of progress, the notion
that each generation builds a better world-by its own invention and
discovery, standing on the shoulders of its forebears-is old indeed. It was
prevalent for the last 600 years and has only recently fallen out of fashion
among postmodernist intellectuals.
Intellectuals who dismiss progress-or who find attractive the idea of the
Noble Savage, a person uncorrupted by civilization who lives a more deeply
creative or authentic life than we can understand-have Murray's contempt.
Nor has he patience with people who complain about technology and economic
growth over their cellphones on the way to the airport. A little question
does the trick for him on the issue of whether there is progress in science
and technology: "Would you be willing to live your life at any time before
the invention of antibiotics?"
Murray is more patient with circumspect objections to his argument.
Throughout the book, he anticipates plausible objections to show how they
can be addressed. For instance, he notes that his index scores for
literature suffer from problems of chauvinism: there is a tendency for
encyclopedia editors to give too much attention to their own national
literatures. Murray overcomes this problem by eliminating from his figures
coverage by encyclopedias of the national literatures of the encyclopedist.
Shakespeare is at the top of the literary heap only because non-English
sources placed him there. Goethe comes in second after eliminating all
non-German sources. Again, a cleverly Humean strategy to counter local bias:
"Authority or prejudice may give a temporary vogue to a bad poet or orator,"
Hume said, "but his reputation will never be durable or general. When his
compositions are examined by posterity or by foreigners, the enchantment is
dissipated, and his faults appear in their true colours."
Some readers will nonetheless not feel entirely happy with Murray's derived
rankings, which can be odd despite his efforts to correct anomalies. His
approach puts Michelangelo at the top of the list for Western art-but
Picasso, mirabile dictu, comes in at number two, above Raphael, Leonardo,
Titian, Dürer, and Rembrandt. Even Picasso's most generous admirers would
have to see this as an artifact of a reliance of encyclopedias written
during Picasso's age. Murray attributes this absurdly high placement not
only to Picasso's art, but also to his "seminal role in several phases of
the break with classicism" that took place in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
The anomalous ranking of Picasso highlights a potential source of error that
Murray does not adequately acknowledge. Dictionaries of biography and
encyclopedias tend to feature entries written by historians of art or
science. The academic mindset of such scholars concentrates on historical
importance in the arts, but it is also prone to confuse historical
importance with aesthetic achievement. This problem shows itself clearly in
Murray's inventory of accomplishment in Western music: Arnold Schoenberg
stands above Brahms, Chopin, and Verdi. For good or ill, Schoenberg has
affected the course of music just as Picasso has the history of painting,
but to place his achievement above Brahms's makes as much sense as to place
Picasso's above Rembrandt's. Schoenberg's nearly exact contemporary
Rachmaninoff had no effect whatsoever on music history in the twentieth
century; my guess is that his music will be performed much more frequently
in the future than Schoenberg's. So which composer's "accomplishment" is the
greater? Murray's methodology gives one answer, history will probably supply
another.
Nevertheless, readers who tune out of Murray's analysis because of
occasional weirdnesses and anomalies will miss much that is worthwhile. He
shows that central Europe for a few hundred years has been the main scene of
progress and innovation in the arts and sciences. Whatever their earlier or
later contributions, China and India are outliers in the sciences, while the
United States's contributions to both the arts and the sciences is
comparatively slight. There are women in the inventories-Sappho, Hypatia,
Lady Murasaki, Jane Austen, Madame Curie, and others-but Dead White Males,
as Murray likes to call them, do most of the heavy lifting in his specified
fields of intellectual accomplishment. (Why? Murray considers the usual
roster of arguments-child-bearing, lack of female access to the professions,
possible innate biological differences between the sexes.)
There is much for later readers and researchers to ponder in Murray's data.
One arresting aspect of the book is the inclusion of European maps showing
achievement in geographical distribution. The big four contributors to
progress are Britain, France, Germany, and Italy; together they vastly
exceed the combined contributions of all other European countries. Taken
together, Murray's dotted and shaded European maps for science, art, music,
and literatures are wonderful to study. The music map 1800-1950, for
example, shows shadings in northern Italy and France, but is dominated by
dots and a huge dark glob extending through the German-speaking parts of
Europe. The science maps are more uniform, but dark areas in France and
especially Britain counterbalance a densely speckled Germany. In the art map
and the early science map, Italy makes all other countries literally pale by
comparison. There is much to contemplate in these maps, not least of which
is the historically variable borders of the land we would today call
Germany: the Germans have spread enormous intellectual influence all over
Europe at various times, and in the last two centuries significantly into
the United States.
With his facts, graphs, and tables as support, Murray tackles the question
of the general decline in the arts and sciences. The fall off in the
accomplishment rate (significant figures per unit of population) is severe,
especially since around 1800. And yet conditions that promote
creativity-wealth, cities and their cultural endowments, communication, and
political freedom-have not declined but improved in recent centuries. How is
this possible? What does ignite the blaze of human creativity and
achievement? Why does it die out?
The fundamental principle of human achievement is expressed by Aristotle in
the Nichomachean Ethics and accepted by philosophers since, and more
recently even by psychologists: that human beings derive pleasure from the
just exercise of their skills and capacities. From crossword puzzles and
rock climbing to painting, composing music, playing a musical instrument, or
solving equations, Murray says, "The pursuit of excellence is as natural as
the pursuit of happiness." For the creative geniuses who are the subject of
his book, I prefer to say that achieved excellence simply is happiness.
There are, according to Murray, four conditions for the highest realization
of this innate impulse toward excellence. The sources of energy for
accomplishment are a sense of (1) purpose and (2) personal autonomy. The
sources for what he calls the content of accomplishment are (3) organizing
structure and (4) transcendental goods. Here Murray moves, by his own
admission, into an area beyond statistical demonstration; his data are
relevant, and he thinks supportive, of these conclusions, but they are not
decisive.
Purpose. Accomplishment "is fostered in a culture in which the most talented
people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to
fulfill that purpose." Murray calls people who doubt or deny that life has a
purpose "nihilists." Since accomplishment at the level Murray specifies
requires enormous levels of work, nihilists are at a disadvantage. They lack
a sense of vocation, either in the form of an idea that God has called them
to a life of scientific or artistic endeavor, or, if they are not religious,
in having a sense that they were put on earth to accomplish great things.
Autonomy. A culture that "encourages the belief that individuals can act
efficaciously as individuals" will be best in encouraging human
accomplishment. Freedom for the individual and tolerance of nonconformity
are positive contributors to a climate of achievement. It is not only formal
political control (e.g., dictatorship) that will discourage initiative, but
strictures found in familism (which presumably helps explain relatively
lower levels of scientific and technical accomplishment in cultures of east
Asia and the relative lack of innovation in Asian art). A culture that
fosters individualism stands a higher chance of producing significant
creative individuals in art and science.
Organizing structure. "The magnitude and content of a stream of
accomplishment in a given domain varies according to the richness and age of
the organizing structure." In the sciences, "the structure from the
Renaissance onward has been an evolving scientific method." In the arts,
structures present themselves differently: sonata form, haiku, Pointillism,
the novel, and the motion picture are all organizing structures. All can be
richly elaborated. Some structures are checkers-like in allowing a limited
range of elaboration; others are more chess-like in their vast potential.
Historical bursts of creative activity are initiated by theories, styles,
and techniques (including the development of instruments, such as the
spectroscope in physics or the grand piano in music) that open rich research
or aesthetic possibilities. The age of an organizing structure is important:
they are born, can have a vigorous youth, and then enter senescence, losing
their potential to yield insights.
Transcendental goods. Accomplishment requires "a well-articulated vision of,
and use of, the transcendental good relevant to that domain." These values
are the true, the good, and the beautiful-the first central to science, the
last to art, and the second to both science and art. Without a coherent
sense of these values to underpin them, science and art may rise to "the
highest rungs of craft," but they will not achieve exalted heights. A
culture without a sense that science can reveal truth will never develop a
stream of scientific accomplishment; a culture without a sense that beauty
is real will never enjoy a great epoch of art, literature, or music: such
artistic cultures are likely, as Murray puts it, to be "arid and ephemeral."
Of these four conditions, Murray places the most weight on the last. Taking
into statistical account (1) the tendency of everyone to overrate more
recent accomplishments, and (2) the worldwide rise in skilled, educated
populations that might produce great scientists and artists, Murray finds it
inescapable that accomplishment has been slumping since around the beginning
of the nineteenth century. In this respect, anyway, he resembles such gloomy
cultural observ- ers as Nietzsche, Spengler, and Toynbee. Though he does not
accept their versions of laws of history, he does present us with one last
grand generalization. This idea is so important to him that it preoccupies
him up to the last page of the book's main text (before the nearly 200 pages
of tables, appendices, and notes). "Human beings," he claims, "have been
most magnificently productive and reached their highest cultural peaks in
the times and places where humans have thought most deeply about their place
in the universe and been most convinced they have one." This for Murray
helps explain the preponderance of achievement in the arts and sciences in
Europe during the centuries when Christianity was regnant.
Truth, regarded as a goal guiding inquiry, may be considered a
transcendental value for science. Art faces a different challenge. An
ironic, detached culture in which artists have lost faith in ultimate values
is not likely to rival the greatness of the past. In terms of freedom,
wealth, creature comforts, and health, Murray says, we may be doing better
than our forebears, but that does not mean that our artists will achieve
more than "shiny, craftsmanlike entertainments." He quotes Gibbon's
observation that even at the apex of their empire, the Romans, who looked
back at the achievements of old Greece much as we do of old Europe, were "a
race of pygmies."
Religion, Murray argues, "is indispensable for igniting great accomplishment
in the arts." Religious believers and philosophers of a traditionally
idealist stamp may find comfort in this, especially since it comes from an
avowed agnostic such as Murray. I am personally not convinced. In
particular, it seems to me that Murray seriously underestimates the role of
organizing structures in creating conditions for high achievement.
Murray is right to stress the importance of meaning it-of commitment in the
arts. He tells of the stonemasons who sculpted gargoyles on Gothic
cathedrals. They worked with passionate devotion, even when their handiwork
would be invisible from the ground: God would see it. I discovered a similar
aesthetic psychology in my own fieldwork in New Guinea, where serious
artists view a carving created for a dead ancestor differently from one
knocked off for tourists. Much of our own art and entertainment is shallow
and flashy, made neither for God nor ancestors, but for a market.
But, accepting this does not mean that transcendental values form a
principle necessary to explain high achievement in the arts. Consider the
history of music. Murray makes it clear that the invention of polyphony led
to more complex structures that, along with improved instrumentation,
continued through the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth. The
Himalayan heights of music were reached 150 years later, from the middle of
the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. If there is
progress in this period, it is the progress of artists who responded to the
problems and potentialities inherent in musical tonality. New instruments,
developing popular audiences, a sense of formal experimentation, and above
all the maturing of tonality were the driving forces for the great flowering
of music through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was, in other
words, the birth, flourishing, and exhaustion of organizing structures, not
transcendental values, that provided the most important motor for music
development.
Murray argues that the greatest artists have "a vision of perfection"
stirring them to greater achievements. This is true for some artists. But it
slights the role of solving formal artistic problems-an important motive
force even in so spiritually committed an artist as Bach. Think of
Impressionism in painting; think of the rise of the novel from Cervantes and
Richardson to Jane Austen. And there is nothing, by the way, nihilistic in
the artistry of Jane Austen.
"Realized capacities are pleasing not only when they are exercised," Murray
observes, "but also when they are seen to be realized." Right he is. We take
pleasure in watching an athlete break a record, hearing a soprano in full
flight, or reading a philosopher of depth and insight. Human accomplishment
is the ultimate spectator sport. Apply as much historical analysis to it as
we wish, and we'll not unlock all its mysteries. The continuous capacity of
genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant.
Denis Dutton teaches philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New
Zealand. His website is www.denisdutton.com.
Jim Purdie
> "Realized capacities are pleasing not only when they are exercised,"
Murray
> observes, "but also when they are seen to be realized." Right he is. We
take
> pleasure in watching an athlete break a record, hearing a soprano in full
> flight, or reading a philosopher of depth and insight. Human
accomplishment
> is the ultimate spectator sport. Apply as much historical analysis to it
as
> we wish, and we'll not unlock all its mysteries. The continuous capacity
of
> genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant.
>
> Denis Dutton teaches philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New
> Zealand. His website is www.denisdutton.com.
>
>
I take it that this review was written by Dennis Dutton, Lance. I read most
of it thinking it was your work, and marvelling, as I have before, at how
you found the time! I believe Dennis Dutton teaches philosophy of art, and
he is prominent in the NZ Sceptics. Thank you very much for bringing it to
our attention.
Jim Purdie
Peter H.M. Brooks
> Even Picasso's most generous admirers would
> during Picasso's age. Murray attributes this absurdly high placement not
> only to Picasso's art, but also to his "seminal role in several phases of
> the break with classicism" that took place in the late nineteenth and early
> twentieth centuries.
>
explanation of Picasso's position is sound. Increased speed and
saturation of communication allowed Picasso to play this seminal role
in a way that previous artists couldn't have hoped to. Also, the local
bias is difficult to remove as Spanish sources aren't more biased
towards Picasso than non-Spanish sources for the same reasons - he
influenced schools of art in many different countries.
>
> The anomalous ranking of Picasso highlights a potential source of error that
> Murray does not adequately acknowledge. Dictionaries of biography and
> science. The academic mindset of such scholars concentrates on historical
> importance in the arts, but it is also prone to confuse historical
> importance with aesthetic achievement. This problem shows itself clearly in
> Murray's inventory of accomplishment in Western music: Arnold Schoenberg
> stands above Brahms, Chopin, and Verdi. For good or ill, Schoenberg has
> affected the course of music just as Picasso has the history of painting,
> but to place his achievement above Brahms's makes as much sense as to place
> Picasso's above Rembrandt's. Schoenberg's nearly exact contemporary
> Rachmaninoff had no effect whatsoever on music history in the twentieth
> century; my guess is that his music will be performed much more frequently
> in the future than Schoenberg's. So which composer's "accomplishment" is the
> greater? Murray's methodology gives one answer, history will probably supply
> another.
>
considered at great length in other places. In any 'school', there
will be the originator(s) of the school and those that produce work at
the peak of flowering of the 'school'. Confusing the originality of
those who break from the past with the originality of those who
exploit the constraints of the mature school to its utmost is common.
It is made worse where the originator is also the peak performer of
the mature movement - as is possible in a short-lived genre like
cubism.
It isn't really a conflict - though if a linear scale is built then it
can be seen as one. A different form of creativity and achievement is
seen in both instances, and, even if found in the same person, must be
judged separately.
Even so Picasso, for producing such a range of brilliant work in so
many different genres is something of an anomaly - maybe one only able
to exist at the particular nexus when he did.
>
> Nevertheless, readers who tune out of Murray's analysis because of
> occasional weirdnesses and anomalies will miss much that is worthwhile. He
> shows that central Europe for a few hundred years has been the main scene of
> progress and innovation in the arts and sciences. Whatever their earlier or
> later contributions, China and India are outliers in the sciences, while the
> United States's contributions to both the arts and the sciences is
> comparatively slight.
>
This fits most observation well - that Murray, being from the US,
comes to this conclusion is, using his standards for controlling local
influence, quite persuasive.
>
> There is much for later readers and researchers to ponder in Murray's data.
> One arresting aspect of the book is the inclusion of European maps showing
> achievement in geographical distribution. The big four contributors to
> progress are Britain, France, Germany, and Italy; together they vastly
> exceed the combined contributions of all other European countries. Taken
> together, Murray's dotted and shaded European maps for science, art, music,
> and literatures are wonderful to study. The music map 1800-1950, for
> example, shows shadings in northern Italy and France, but is dominated by
> dots and a huge dark glob extending through the German-speaking parts of
> Europe. The science maps are more uniform, but dark areas in France and
> especially Britain counterbalance a densely speckled Germany. In the art map
> and the early science map, Italy makes all other countries literally pale by
> comparison. There is much to contemplate in these maps, not least of which
> is the historically variable borders of the land we would today call
> Germany: the Germans have spread enormous intellectual influence all over
> Europe at various times, and in the last two centuries significantly into
> the United States.
>
These are interesting findings - I must explore this more.
>
> With his facts, graphs, and tables as support, Murray tackles the question
> of the general decline in the arts and sciences. The fall off in the
> accomplishment rate (significant figures per unit of population) is severe,
> especially since around 1800. And yet conditions that promote
> creativity-wealth, cities and their cultural endowments, communication, and
> political freedom-have not declined but improved in recent centuries. How is
> this possible? What does ignite the blaze of human creativity and
> achievement? Why does it die out?
>
I see no surprise here. You wouldn't expect much invention in the land
of the lotus eaters.
>
> The fundamental principle of human achievement is expressed by Aristotle in
> the Nichomachean Ethics and accepted by philosophers since, and more
> recently even by psychologists: that human beings derive pleasure from the
> just exercise of their skills and capacities. From crossword puzzles and
> rock climbing to painting, composing music, playing a musical instrument, or
> solving equations, Murray says, "The pursuit of excellence is as natural as
> the pursuit of happiness." For the creative geniuses who are the subject of
> his book, I prefer to say that achieved excellence simply is happiness.
>
> There are, according to Murray, four conditions for the highest realization
> of this innate impulse toward excellence. The sources of energy for
> accomplishment are a sense of (1) purpose and (2) personal autonomy. The
> sources for what he calls the content of accomplishment are (3) organizing
> structure and (4) transcendental goods. Here Murray moves, by his own
> admission, into an area beyond statistical demonstration; his data are
> relevant, and he thinks supportive, of these conclusions, but they are not
> decisive.
>
> Purpose. Accomplishment "is fostered in a culture in which the most talented
> people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to
> fulfill that purpose." Murray calls people who doubt or deny that life has a
> purpose "nihilists." Since accomplishment at the level Murray specifies
> requires enormous levels of work, nihilists are at a disadvantage. They lack
> a sense of vocation, either in the form of an idea that God has called them
> to a life of scientific or artistic endeavour, or, if they are not religious,
> in having a sense that they were put on earth to accomplish great things.
>
In the case of genuine nihilists, who could disagree? It isn't clear
that Murray's definition identifies nihilists. He does provide a
sensible alternative to god bothering though.
>
> Autonomy. A culture that "encourages the belief that individuals can act
> efficaciously as individuals" will be best in encouraging human
> accomplishment. Freedom for the individual and tolerance of nonconformity
> are positive contributors to a climate of achievement. It is not only formal
> political control (e.g., dictatorship) that will discourage initiative, but
> strictures found in familism (which presumably helps explain relatively
> lower levels of scientific and technical accomplishment in cultures of east
> Asia and the relative lack of innovation in Asian art). A culture that
> fosters individualism stands a higher chance of producing significant
> creative individuals in art and science.
>
This would rather explain the shortfall in US accomplishments - at
least I'd think so.
>
> Organizing structure. "The magnitude and content of a stream of
> accomplishment in a given domain varies according to the richness and age of
> the organizing structure." In the sciences, "the structure from the
> Renaissance onward has been an evolving scientific method." In the arts,
> structures present themselves differently: sonata form, haiku, Pointillism,
> the novel, and the motion picture are all organizing structures. All can be
> richly elaborated. Some structures are checkers-like in allowing a limited
> range of elaboration; others are more chess-like in their vast potential.
> Historical bursts of creative activity are initiated by theories, styles,
> and techniques (including the development of instruments, such as the
> spectroscope in physics or the grand piano in music) that open rich research
> or aesthetic possibilities. The age of an organizing structure is important:
> they are born, can have a vigorous youth, and then enter senescence, losing
> their potential to yield insights.
>
Contrast this to the creative potential of the iPod and plebvision and
there aren't too many surprised about the lack of current
accomplishment either.
>
> Transcendental goods. Accomplishment requires "a well-articulated vision of,
> and use of, the transcendental good relevant to that domain." These values
> are the true, the good, and the beautiful-the first central to science, the
> last to art, and the second to both science and art. Without a coherent
> sense of these values to underpin them, science and art may rise to "the
> highest rungs of craft," but they will not achieve exalted heights. A
> culture without a sense that science can reveal truth will never develop a
> stream of scientific accomplishment; a culture without a sense that beauty
> is real will never enjoy a great epoch of art, literature, or music: such
> artistic cultures are likely, as Murray puts it, to be "arid and ephemeral."
>
So here the socialist experiment, political correctness and other
attempts to achieve equality of outcome by bringing all down to the
lowest common denominator provide a sound explanation. Though it is
unfashionably old-fashioned in most circles, political correctness
still lives on in some isolated groups - humanities academics in lower
league universities, for example.
>
> Of these four conditions, Murray places the most weight on the last. Taking
> into statistical account (1) the tendency of everyone to overrate more
> recent accomplishments, and (2) the worldwide rise in skilled, educated
> populations that might produce great scientists and artists, Murray finds it
> inescapable that accomplishment has been slumping since around the beginning
> of the nineteenth century. In this respect, anyway, he resembles such gloomy
> cultural observers as Nietzsche, Spengler, and Toynbee. Though he does not
> accept their versions of laws of history, he does present us with one last
> grand generalization. This idea is so important to him that it preoccupies
> him up to the last page of the book's main text (before the nearly 200 pages
> of tables, appendices, and notes). "Human beings," he claims, "have been
> most magnificently productive and reached their highest cultural peaks in
> the times and places where humans have thought most deeply about their place
> in the universe and been most convinced they have one." This for Murray
> helps explain the preponderance of achievement in the arts and sciences in
> Europe during the centuries when Christianity was regnant.
>
It makes sense. It doesn't seem bleak, or even particularly
Nietzschean to me.
>
>
> Religion, Murray argues, "is indispensable for igniting great accomplishment
> in the arts." Religious believers and philosophers of a traditionally
> idealist stamp may find comfort in this, especially since it comes from an
> avowed agnostic such as Murray. I am personally not convinced. In
> particular, it seems to me that Murray seriously underestimates the role of
> organizing structures in creating conditions for high achievement.
>
Not to mention the stultifying effect of religion on science and many
other areas of artistic creativity.
>
> Murray is right to stress the importance of meaning it-of commitment in the
> arts. He tells of the stonemasons who sculpted gargoyles on Gothic
> cathedrals. They worked with passionate devotion, even when their handiwork
> would be invisible from the ground: God would see it. I discovered a similar
> aesthetic psychology in my own fieldwork in New Guinea, where serious
> artists view a carving created for a dead ancestor differently from one
> knocked off for tourists. Much of our own art and entertainment is shallow
> and flashy, made neither for God nor ancestors, but for a market.
>
Quite.
>
>
> Murray argues that the greatest artists have "a vision of perfection"
> stirring them to greater achievements. This is true for some artists. But it
> slights the role of solving formal artistic problems-an important motive
> force even in so spiritually committed an artist as Bach. Think of
> Impressionism in painting; think of the rise of the novel from Cervantes and
> Richardson to Jane Austen. And there is nothing, by the way, nihilistic in
> the artistry of Jane Austen.
>
Even though, in 'Northanger Abbey' Austen is ironic, detached and not
appealing to any transcendent values?
--
Do you know, I get so immoderately sick of Bath; your brother and I
were agreeing this morning that, though it is vastly well to be here
for a few weeks, we would not live here for millions. – Jane Austen
‘Northanger Abbey'