Eurocentrism run amok

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, October 25, 2003
A Cultural Scorecard Says West Is Ahead
By EMILY EAKIN

BURKITTSVILLE, Md. ? "I do not set out to write controversial books," 
Charles Murray says with an easy laugh. "I don't know whether part of the 
attraction might be the forbidden," he adds earnestly. "If it is, it's not 
very much."

It is tempting to believe him. Dressed in blue jeans, tennis shoes and a 
flannel shirt, his hands clasped confidently behind his head, he reclines 
in a swivel chair surrounded by books in his elegant study here overlooking 
a grove of weeping willows and a murky pond. At home in this rural Maryland 
village, about 70 miles from Washington and the policy circles in which his 
pronouncements are invariably debated, Mr. Murray ? affable, gently 
weather-beaten but still ruggedly handsome at 60 ? more plausibly suggests 
a gentleman farmer than America's most notorious social scientist.

But his record is hard to ignore. As the author of "Losing Ground" (1984), 
which argued that social programs do more harm than good, and then, with 
Richard J. Herrnstein, of "The Bell Curve" (1994), which theorized a 
genetic basis for class and IQ differences between blacks and whites, Mr. 
Murray has repeatedly managed what for a scholar is too rare a feat to be 
entirely accidental: to capture the national spotlight by arousing public 
ire. Is it any surprise that his latest book seems intended to inflame 
passions once again?

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, Mr. 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.

(clip)

Why, he wondered, when he factored in population growth, did the 
achievement rate in Europe appear to plummet beginning in the mid-19th 
century, a period when peace, prosperity, cities and political freedom were 
steadily increasing? In the sciences, he decided, the decline was largely 
benign, reflecting the fact that in many fields the most important 
breakthroughs have already been made. But for the arts his diagnosis was 
grim: a collapse of social values and the advent of nihilism.

In a word, what modern Europe lost was Christianity. While other major 
religions, like Buddhism and Daoism preached humility, acceptance and 
passivity, Mr. Murray writes, Christianity fostered intellectual 
independence and drive. In his account it was Thomas Aquinas who "grafted a 
humanistic strain onto Christianity," by arguing that "human intelligence 
is a gift from God, and that to apply human intelligence to understanding 
the world is not an affront to God but is pleasing to him." And where 
post-Aquinas Christianity thrived ? in Europe between 1400 and the 
Enlightenment ? so, too, according to Mr. Murray, did human excellence.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/25/arts/25MURR.html


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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