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Charles Murray’s All-Stars
« on: 2003-11-03 06:30:20 » |
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Following the Pinker discussion...
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/teachout.html
November 2003
DESPITE THE faddishness of post modern ways of thinking, I doubt very many people truly believe that quality in art and literature is only an arbitrary construct, imposed by the powerful on the powerless for political purposes. Even intellectuals who pay lip service to this fundamental tenet of postmodernism, I suspect, hew in private to the more common view of aesthetic quality summed up by the art critic Clement Greenberg:
One of the wonderful things about art is that everybody has to discover the criteria of quality by himself. They can’t be communicated by word or demonstration. Yet they are objective. . . . You have to find out for yourself by looking and experiencing. And the people who try hardest and look hardest end up, over the ages, by agreeing with one another in the main. That I call the consensus of taste.
Still, it appears that a certain number of nominally educated Americans do indeed believe such terms as “quality,” “beauty,” and “greatness” to be wholly subjective. For them, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Rembrandt are “great” not because of the towering and self-evident merits of their work but because greatness has been ascribed to them by virtue of their status among dead white European males. Given the incapacity of such minds to apprehend the greatness of art through its immediate experience, how else might one persuade them of its objective existence?
The hallmark of Charles Murray’s work is its commitment to the persuasive power of statistical analysis, the fruits of which he invariably presents to his readers in a calm, reasonable tone, no matter how explosive their implications may be. In this respect, Murray’s latest book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950,* is entirely consistent with his earlier Losing Ground (1984) and The Bell Curve (1998), in which he sought to persuade skeptics to accept conclusions about, respectively, welfare and intelligence-testing that cut sharply against the grain of conventional wisdom.
In Human Accomplishment, Murray takes a similar tack, setting out to demonstrate that some artists and scientists are objectively better than others, and that their collective achievements can be both measured and subjected to meaningful statistical analysis. In his words:
It is possible to distinguish the important from the trivial, the fine from the coarse, the credible from the meretricious, and the elegant from the vulgar. Doing so is not a simple matter, and no single observer is infallible, but a realm of objective knowledge about excellence exists. That knowledge can be tapped systematically and arranged as data that meet scientific standards of reliability and validity.
To those unconvinced by the postmodern world view, the first part of this claim will seem so obvious as to border on truism. But is it really possible to make “scientific” use of our “objective knowledge about excellence”? And if so, does it make sense to apply identical methodology to such profoundly different realms of human thought as art and science? For all its surface reasonableness, Human Accomplishment turns out to betray certain assumptions about the world of art that are so problematic as to call into question the fundamental validity of its author’s approach.
THE UNDERLYING premise of Human Accomplishment is what postmodern scholars, with their stress on social and political context, refer to contemptuously as “the great-man theory of history.” Murray, unabashedly, puts it like this:
One may acknowledge the undoubted role of the cultural context in fostering or inhibiting great art, but still recall that it is not enough that the environment be favorable. Somebody must actually do the deed.
The heart of this book, accordingly, is a series of lists of great artistic and scientific deeds done between 800 b.c.e. and 1950, along with the 4,002 “significant figures” who did them. These lists are not idiosyncratic. Rather, they have been compiled through an analysis of standard reference works, an approach consistent with Murray’s contention that “given a large number of expert opinions about a dozen specific qualities of a work of art, we will not see a random set of responses, but ones that cluster around a central tendency.” This central tendency he takes to be the “objective” element in Human Accomplishment.
A specific example will help illustrate the approach. In order to create his inventory of significant events and figures in Western visual art, Murray consulted such reference works as Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, H.W. Janson’s History of Art, and Wolf Stadler’s twelve-volume Lexikon der Kunst, compiling in each case a list of artists mentioned and the frequency with which they are cited. These lists were then combined to create a preliminary list of 1,232 names, and the individual sources statistically analyzed to determine how closely they correlated with one another.
In all cases, the correlation coefficients were exceptionally high, leading Murray to draw the following conclusion:
Because different critics are tapping into a common understanding of importance in their field, they make similar choices. Various factors go into the estimate of importance, but they are in turn substantially associated with excellence.
Murray defines his “significant figures” as those mentioned in at least 50 percent of his sources; in all, 479 Western artists made the cut. Each of these figures was then assigned an “index” score indicating relative position within the list on which his name appears, with all top scores arbitrarily set at 100.
In the Western art list, the top scorer is Michelangelo, followed by Picasso (77), Raphael (73), Leonardo (61), Titian (61), Dürer (56), Rembrandt (56), Giotto (54), Bernini (53), and Cézanne (50). The highest-scoring names on the other lists are equally familiar. Western literature, for instance, is led by Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dante, Western philosophy by Aristotle, Plato, and Kant, and Western music by Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. This reinforces Murray’s contention that the so-called “canonical” figures in Western culture are, in fact, not merely famous but objectively great.
READERS OF The Bell Curve will immediately spot the resemblance between the method used by Murray in Human Accomplishment and the methodology of standardized intelligence tests, which measure in varying degrees a hypothetical “general intelligence” factor common to all tests of cognitive ability and known to psychologists as g. Because g is a mental capacity that cannot be directly measured as one measures (say) blood pressure, it resists simple definition. Indeed, the experimental psychologist Edwin Boring, writing in 1921, famously went so far as to “define” intelligence as “what the tests test.”
The seeming circularity of this nondefinition has long been remarked by hostile commentators who disapprove of intelligence testing, and it is likely that the same sort of case will be made against the way Human Accomplishment approaches the question of greatness in art. For Murray, greatness is what the experts say it is, a definition that will hardly convince those who believe the experts are themselves part of the problem.
Equally unsatisfying to some readers will be the conclusions Murray draws from his data, though few if any of these conclusions will come as a surprise to those untrammeled by political correctness. Ninety-eight percent of his “significant figures,” for example, are male, and most of them lived in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy (in that order), which collectively account for 72 percent of all significant figures active between 1400 and 1950.
Nor does Murray shrink from interpreting these now-uncomfortable facts by means of equally uncomfortable arguments from history. Among other things, his data lead him to conclude that human accomplishment in the arts and sciences is “facilitated by growing national wealth” and “fostered by political regimes that give de-facto freedom of action to their potential artists and scholars.” Even more controversially, he argues that Human Accomplishment is “fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose” and which “encourages the belief that individuals can act efficaciously as individuals, and encourages them to do so.”
In practice, of course, what this means is that the Judeo-Christian West has done the most to foster Human Accomplishment throughout the latter part of recorded history, and that non-Western cultures will similarly thrive only to the extent that their values resemble those of the West. Such a conclusion might have been deliberately calculated to enrage postmodern thinkers.
EVEN THOSE predisposed to agree with Murray’s findings, however, may quarrel with him in at least one important respect. For he observes another tendency in his lists of significant figures, which is that their numbers have declined noticeably in the course of the last century.
In the fields of science and philosophy, Murray explains this decline as follows:
For many specialties within astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and mathematics, the fundamental laws had been found decades or centuries earlier. In philosophy, some of the fundamental truths had been discovered not decades, not even centuries, but millennia earlier.
In the arts, however, Murray draws a different conclusion. Not only the number of great artists but the overall quality of artistic achievement has been in decline, he contends, since the late 19th century—that is, since the coming of the modernist movement.
“It is hard to make a case that the literature, art, and music of today come close to the best work of earlier ages, let alone signify progress,” Murray remarks in the introduction to Human Accomplishment. This turns out to be one of his main themes, and at regular intervals he supplies the attentive reader with further clues as to his private judgment of the matter. In, for example, his description of the highest-scoring significant figures in Western art, he observes: “The presence of Picasso in second place will surprise and perhaps outrage some readers.”
Anyone who fought last spring to get a ticket to the Museum of Modern Art’s hugely popular Matisse-Picasso exhibition is likely to wonder just who could be “outraged” by Picasso’s high index score, second only to Michelangelo’s. The answer, one eventually concludes, is Charles Murray himself, for at book’s end he brings his anti-modern views out into the open. Having previously argued that nihilism is antithetical to Human Accomplishment at the highest levels, Murray suggests here that primary responsibility for the measured decline in the objective significance of Western art lies precisely in the prevalence of nihilism among modernist artists:
I hold that a stream of great accomplishment in the arts depends upon a culture’s enjoying a well-articulated, widely held conception of the good. I suggest as well that art created in the absence of a well-articulated conception of the good is likely to be arid and ephemeral. . . . [F]or the arts, over a period starting in the late 1800’s and extending through World War I, many of those who saw themselves engaged in high art consciously turned away from the idea that their function was to realize the beautiful, and then rejected the relevance of the true or the good as valid criteria for judging their work.
AS FAR as it goes, this statement is perfectly plausible. But Murray takes it implausibly far. Without offering any specific examples, he claims that “most of the serious novels from 1920-1950” are “arid and ephemeral.” When it comes to the visual arts and music, his dismissal of modernism is even more categorical:
[E]ach of the arts in the first half of [the 20th century] had a channel that was a lineal descendent of pre-[20th-century] traditions—men such as Stravinsky and Kandinsky, who were aware of the legacy and valued it, but sought, as artists had sought before, to use the raw materials of great art in new ways for their own time. But they and other artists in this channel tended to come early . . . , and their numbers dwindled as time went on. The generalization remains: in large part, the visual art and concert music of [the 20th century] is what visual art and concert music become when their creators do not tap transcendental goods.
Once again, Murray is correct up to a point, but his sweeping and unspecific dismissal of 20th-century art drastically diminishes the force of his argument. Of course modernism produced far more than its share of nihilistic, antinomian art, as I and others have argued repeatedly. But it is impossible to read Human Accomplishment closely without starting to suspect that Murray simply does not know very much about modern art. (If he did, he would never have yoked Igor Stravinsky, the inventor of musical neoclassicism, with Wassily Kandinsky, the inventor of abstract art, much less offered Kandinsky as one of only two examples of the tradition-based modern artists whom he claims to respect.)
This suspicion is further strengthened by Murray’s concluding remarks on the state of Western art today:
The West’s popular culture is for my money the only contemporary culture worth patronizing, with its best stories more compelling and revealing than the ones written by authors who purport to write serious novels, and its best popular music with more energy and charm than anything the academic composers turn out. . . . The people producing the best work include some who in another age could have been a Caravaggio or Brahms or Racine, and perhaps dozens of others good enough to have made their way onto the roster of significant figures.
No apologies need be made, certainly not by me, for Western popular culture at its not-infrequent best. But when Murray mentions the TV series The Simpsons and the films Saving Private Ryan and Groundhog Day (the only works of popular art cited by him as exemplary) in the same breath as Caravaggio, Brahms, and Racine, one inevitably wonders whether he has any business making critical judgments of any kind about art of any period.
THAT MURRAY is indiscriminately hostile to modernism seems clear enough. But has his hostility led him to go so far as to stack his statistical deck?
Even though a plausible case can be made for his decision to establish a cut-off date of 1950 for his lists of significant events and figures, doing so must have had some skewing effect on his data bases. In addition, he freely admits that the particular reference works from which his lists were compiled reflected a private agenda. “I am choosing one type of expertise and rejecting another,” he writes, “allying myself with the classic aesthetic tradition and rejecting the alternative tradition that sprang up” in the 20th century.
The admission is admirably frank. In the end, though, it can only reinforce the impression that, for all of Murray’s elaborate statistical apparatus, Human Accomplishment amounts to nothing more than a massive exercise in circular logic. Even those who believe as I do in the continuing validity of the “classic aesthetic tradition”—and who recognize, as Murray does not, that it is no less applicable to the great art of the tradition-conscious moderns—are likely to come away convinced that the author of Human Accomplishment has cut his analytic cloth to fit his aesthetic tastes.
CHARLES MURRAY's well-intentioned efforts notwithstanding, the question of whether or not it is possible to demonstrate objectively the existence of absolute standards of aesthetic quality will probably always remain open. That such absolute standards do exist, however, seems to me indisputable. No matter how aggressively postmodern thinkers may deny the significance of the consensus of judgment—or the overwhelming dominance of Western culture—the whole of human history and experience is arrayed against them. It cannot be coincidental that, as Clement Greenberg observed, “the people who try hardest and look hardest end up, over the ages, by agreeing with one another in the main.”
What also seems indisputable, if Human Accomplishment is any indication, is that attempts to endow this striking concordance with the patina of quasi-scientific objectivity are probably doomed to failure. To which one may respond: so what? Ideology-blinded philistines who choose to deny the greatness of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Rembrandt (or, for that matter, Proust, Stravinsky, and Matisse) will never be persuaded by any amount of evidence, statistical or otherwise. Again, so what? Experts or no experts, all music sounds the same to the tone-deaf.
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