Posted on 12/27/2003 9:34:16 AM PST by vladog
The Practice Of Eminence: An Interview With Charles Murray
By Bernard Chapin
CLICK HERE Toogood Reports [Christmas Weekender, December 28, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST] URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ Dr. Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar in Culture and Freedom at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. AEI is one of the most prestigious research think tanks in the world and some of the most important names in conservatism can be found within their roster of scholars and fellows. Dr. Murray has published voluminously over the years and his books have had tremendous influence over the way ideas are discussed in our nation today.
His most recent work, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, came out this fall and numerous reviews of it have already been published. Previous works, such as The Underclass Revisited, Income Inequality and IQ , and Losing Ground are well-known. Yet, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, sent the media into a hysterical frenzy and the responses to it seemed to tell more about its reviewers than it did about the text in question.
Personally, at the time The Bell Curve was released, I happened to be in graduate school and recall two of my professors making preemptive attacks against its conclusions in case we might approach Dr. Murray´s ideas with an open mind (my response was to order a copy from Borders).
Dr. Murray is certainly a polymath and a renaissance man. Toogood Reports readers are most fortunate that he consented to answer a few questions for us.
Bernard Chapin: Dr. Murray, your new book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, has been recently released. The subject matter covers an immense span of time and a diverse range of cultures. What made you decide on undertaking such a project? Also, how long did it take you to complete your Herculean task?
Dr. Murray: Why? I didn't want to repeat myself, for one thing. I was tired of the social policy debate, which had gotten trivial after 1996. I've always been fascinated by great achievements (that's why my wife and I wrote a book about the Apollo lunar program back in the 1980s). And there was the promise of huge data bases. Playing huge data bases is my chief joy professionally.
I got the idea in 1997 and finished the manuscript in January 2003. The last three years were the most intense I've ever experienced with a book — in effect, I was working from six to six every day.
Bernard Chapin: You selected over 4,000 individuals as apexes of human excellence. For our readers who may not have read any reviews or heard of your work, can you explain your selection process?
Dr. Murray: It's a standard historiometric technique for measuring eminence: Go to a large selection of first-rate histories, chronologies, encyclopedias, or biographical dictionaries, record all the people who are in them, and measure how much space is given to them. To become part of the database I used for the major analyses, a person had to be mentioned in at least 50 percent of the sources covering that person's field. If I had chosen another criterion — thirty percent, say, or seventy percent — it would have affected the number of people in the database, but the geographical and historical patterns would have been the same. (I know, because I tried out such possibilities.)
Bernard Chapin: Western civilization dominates the list since 1400 AD, in terms of great accomplishment, but what is your opinion of our future dominance? Is the west, as a civilization, on the decline?
Dr. Murray: The sciences and the arts have different stories. In the sciences, East Asian and South Asian scientists are joining with Western scientists, but Western science is not in decline. In the arts, I think a strong case can be made that the density of accomplishment began to decline in the mid 19th century and continued through the end of the period I studied (1950). An impressionistic look at the arts since 1950 gives me no confidence that we have seen a resurgence of enduring work. On the contrary, it is hard for me to think of much of anything that has been done since 1950 in the arts that people will still care about 200 years from now. For example, you can still find the works of Austen, Fielding, and Dickens in a typical airport book store, let alone "serious" book stores. What books written from 1950–2000 will still be selling in the airport bookstores of 2200? What music from 1950–2000 will be people still be playing? And if you tell me the Beatles or Pink Floyd, as a few people have, I've got a question for you: Seriously?
Bernard Chapin: Many of your critics have labeled you as a right-wing extremist. This is most puzzling to me. Have we reached a time when nearly every region of human thought is demarcated as being either left or right? I´ve read quite a few evolutionary psychologists who take great pains to communicate to their readers that they are not “right-wing.” Why is it that anybody who wishes to discuss individual variation must be denounced as a “right-winger?”
Dr. Murray: I'm a libertarian, which is an extremist of a sort, but not the kind that most people have in mind by "right-wing." I didn't see this topic as having much to do with politics when I started, and I still don't. The bulk of the human accomplishment I dealt with occurred under the aegis of absolutist governments, with most of the rest scattered among aristocratic republics and the mixed British system. One can ask how accomplishment fared under different political systems, and I ask that question in the book, but the answer is certainly not that liberal democracies provide the most fertile soil. Actually, whatever political implications one can try to force from the book go against my own political preferences. The arts began their decline just as liberal democracies were taking hold, for example.
Bernard Chapin: Why is the topic of genius itself so offensive to people? We don´t think twice about using the results of human achievement, so why is there so much resistance to celebrating great individuals?
Dr. Murray: Inequalities of all sorts became disreputable during the last half of the 20th century. In the beginning, it was healthy — the Civil Rights Movement being the prime exhibit, but also feminism in its original form. Then we moved from the idea of giving everyone open opportunity to the idea that unequal outcomes are bad. If one celebrates the existence of genius, I guess the implication is that some people are immensely more skilled, more industrious, or more efficacious than others. Everyone knows it is true, but no one wants to say it, because it implies that some other people are dumb, lazy, or feckless — which in turn implies that some inequalities merely reflect real inequalities in ability. A certain way of looking at the world (and we're back to politics now) finds this offensive. I don't.
Bernard Chapin: Along the same lines, there is no disagreement when scientists state that there are racial differences in terms of skin cancer, hypertension or sickle-cell anemia, so why is there such strife over stating that there might be ability or skill variations present between racial groups?
Dr. Murray: It's going to be another century or two before we have enough distance from this issue to discuss it dispassionately. I don't think "strife" is the right word to describe the discussion of racial differences. "Hysteria" is a better word. I think white guilt about what whites did to blacks is a profoundly important cause. I have no problem with whites feeling guilty — we have much to feel guilty about — but it would be helpful if whites would understand that to talk about racial differences is not to talk about "inferiority" versus "superiority" of people. People are complex bundles of virtues and abilities, and no global judgment of the worth of groups is possible. To discuss discrete characteristics, whether it's hypertension or mean IQ scores, should not threaten anyone. But it does, obviously.
Bernard Chapin: One review of Human Accomplishment stated this would not be a controversial book like some of the others but I disagree. I believe that your favorable comments regarding Christianity as the guiding force behind western achievement may make you even more susceptible to attacks than in the past. Why do you think there so much negative sentiment (in the west) against Christianity?
Dr. Murray: So far, very little of the reaction to the book has dealt with my discussion of Christianity. I suspect this is one area in which the times are changing. When I first wrote a draft of that section, I said something to the effect that my position was not original, but it had not been fashionable for some decades. By the time I was correcting galleys, I had to stick in a footnote discussing several recent books making a case for Christianity quite similar to mine, written by people who (like me) are not believers. I think that at least some elements of the elites are taking a new look at religion in general and Christianity in particular.
Bernard Chapin: I was at a workshop [recall the words of Kinsley Amis here] where your book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, was randomly referred to as “racist” by the main speaker. I, unfortunately, did not have the courage to stand up and dispute this slander amidst a throng of 500. Have you found that The Bell Curve controversy damaged your career or enhanced it?
Dr. Murray: I think the damage has been substantial in certain respects — I've been effectively shut out of broad swathes of academic activity. On the other hand, the American Enterprise Institute has been unflinchingly supportive. When you spend your life as I do, getting up every morning and spending your work time exactly as you wish, it takes a little imagination to feel sorry for yourself.
Bernard Chapin: I´d really like to know what your opinion is of Howard Gardner´s theory of multiple intelligences. Do you think his critique is legitimate? Don´t the factors he sites all weigh on g (general intelligence) anyway?
Dr. Murray: There are two Howard Gardners. The Howard Gardner who writes so engagingly, instructively, and provocatively about the different aspects of human creativity and ability is a treasure. The Howard Gardner who continues to insist that these are independent intelligences, with "intelligence" used in the sense of solving problems (as he himself means), has to confront the mountain of evidence that any way of measuring problem-solving abilities in different domains does not reveal independent abilities, but ones that are dominated by a common general factor.
Howard doesn't dispute the existence of the mountain, but says that he doesn't accept the results of the existing tests. He gives us no way to falsify his theory. In my view, a theory that can't be falsified fails one of the basic criteria of good science.
Bernard Chapin: If you could mandate one educational reform for our public schools what would it be?
Dr. Murray: Privatize every school in the country. And if we can't do that, my second choice is to require that no one graduate from high school without having taken a solid, year-long course on statistical reasoning. Half the stupid arguments extant, whether about the environment or the 2000 presidential election or FCC regulations, are stupid primarily because people don't understand probability and statistical distributions.
Thank you very much for your time Dr. Murray.
Inequalities of all sorts became disreputable during the last half of the 20th century. In the beginning, it was healthy — the Civil Rights Movement being the prime exhibit, but also feminism in its original form. Then we moved from the idea of giving everyone open opportunity to the idea that unequal outcomes are bad. If one celebrates the existence of genius, I guess the implication is that some people are immensely more skilled, more industrious, or more efficacious than others. Everyone knows it is true, but no one wants to say it, because it implies that some other people are dumb, lazy, or feckless — which in turn implies that some inequalities merely reflect real inequalities in ability. A certain way of looking at the world (and we're back to politics now) finds this offensive. I don't.This is incorrect. it is not individual excellence--socialists celebrate individual excellence--but evidence of differing virtues in different politically selected subgroups (i.e., the accumulation of the individual excellences) which socialists resist.
Socialists strongly believe in the existence of elites--their fantasy is that Monday-morning quarterbacking qualifies themselves as members of the elite. They throng into journalism and the other entertainment media exactly in order to publicize their second guesses.
It was refreshing to this American "conservative" to find in the public library a musty tome of socialist ("liberal") claptrap. Refreshing, that is, because their claims that they could "decide between steam and diesel locomotives" via centralized planning board were not only .fatuous--with hindsight they were completely off-topic. They were worrying about old problems just as utterly new opportunities (miniature digital electronics) were coming at their blind side. And that is obvious now, but at the time a "conservative" who said something entirely new was more important than the apex of big-iron technology might easily have been dismissed as a kook.What socialism actually proclaims is the priesthood of the public-relations/journalism "elite." It's an "elite" which you can easily join--you need only check your brains at the door and join the mutual admiration society mouthing conventional wisdom that the sky is falling and Republcans are to blame.
Dr. Murray: Privatize every school in the country. And if we can't do that, my second choice is to require that no one graduate from high school without having taken a solid, year-long course on statistical reasoning. Half the stupid arguments extant, whether about the environment or the 2000 presidential election or FCC regulations, are stupid primarily because people don't understand probability and statistical distributions.
A bit too narrowly focused. Instead, I'd require passing a basic course in logic. Plus an entire course on the history and purpose of the Constitution, going through it clause by clause (using a book written by someone who isn't a socialist).
I agree with you that someone with no understanding of history or logic is, in effect, an idiot. But the Constitution must be understood in context, and a fundamental (ha) understanding of world and US history is required for that.
When I went to school, we studied world or USA history every other year and you had to take both world and USA history in college as well as at least one foreign language. Now, my grandchildren (who have gone through so-called "magnet" schools) have learned, effectively, practically nothing of history and even less of science, literature, or anything else but PC-feelgoodism, BS-environmentalism, and how to watch television until their brains fall out. Sometimes I think it's just too late to try to save the baby because its brain has already been flushed away with the bathwater.
I had an impression it was this bad. Maybe it's just as well we're offshoring all the real work.
If this were done the lottery industry would collapse.
I couldn't agree with the good doctor more.
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