EXCELLENCE:

A Cultural Scorecard Says West Is Ahead (EMILY EAKIN, 10/25/03, NY Times)

Published on Oct. 21 by HarperCollins and accompanied by a publicity release optimistically anointing it "his most ambitious and controversial work yet," Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 is well timed to stir debate. At a moment of considerable East-West tension, when the phrase "clash of civilizations" has rarely had greater currency, [Charles] Murray has issued what he says is a mathematically precise global assessment of human achievement, a "résumé" of the species in which Europeans like Shakespeare, Beethoven and Einstein predominate and in which Christianity stands out as a crucial spur to excellence. Equally provocative, he maintains that the rate of Western accomplishment is currently in decline.

"As I write, it appears Europe's run is over," he asserts. "In another few hundred years, books will probably be exploring the reasons why some completely different part of the world became the locus of great human accomplishment. Now is a good time to stand back in admiration. What the human species is today it owes in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just half a dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass."

Mr. Murray, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, says touting Western superiority is not his goal. He notes that he began work on the book six years ago, well before the current conflict in Iraq, and that as a former Peace Corps worker in Thailand who was married for 14 years to a Thai Buddhist, he has great respect for Eastern cultures. He says he conceived of the book as an exercise in "honest multiculturalism."

"I thought that in this regard I would come out saying, `Look, I'm not being politically correct when I say that China, Japan and some other places have made incredible contributions to human world culture,' " he said. "And I still say that, but it is also true that I was surprised by the extent to which Europe dominated."

Do we really need mathematical measures to tell us that the Judeo-Christian West is the main source of human accomplishment or that Europe is no longer a part of that West?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 3, 2003 8:39 AM