This Book Covers the 14 Great Leaps in the History of Human Creativity

An encyclopedia of science and art, covering 4,002 of the world's top figures in every field and what they achieved.

Excerpt from the Book: On the Rise and Fall of Human Art

By Charles Murray

In many ways, we were born at the right time. As I said in the preface, here at the start of the 21st century it would be foolish to choose to be born in any earlier age. In wealth, in health, in personal safety, no age can compare with this one. We enjoy the best of everything that ten thousand years of human culture has handed down.

The conditions for going on producing great achievements in science have been preserved. In the natural sciences I see no great damage done to the faith in truth. The scientific method is built to renew itself. Important new tools and techniques keep appearing, and scientific principles are refined and strictly examined. Measured the way I have measured achievement — by counting the new bricks added to the edifice of science — the number of scientific achievements may keep falling. But measured by how much new discoveries affect human life, there is no reason to think scientific achievement will stall. There is every reason to think it will grow. Heaven knows: perhaps the universe Einstein described sits as far from the ultimate truth as the universe Newton described. Perhaps basic science will find vast new territory that is still unknown.

Art is a different matter.

I believe that in three of the four dimensions — purpose, autonomy, and transcendental goods — it can be shown that over the first fifty years of the 20th century the conditions for great artistic achievement grew steadily worse. And it seems unlikely that any of those conditions improved in the second fifty years. It is much easier to argue that some of them got worse still.

If the conditions for achievement deteriorated over the second half of the 20th century, that means the level of achievement fell too. By the measures I have used, artistic achievement has been sliding. Whether that is really so, the years from 1950 to 2000 are too short a stretch to judge. But we can guess. Of the plays, novels, paintings, sculptures, films and scores produced between 1950 and 2000, which will still be counted as important works two hundred years from now? I can think of only a handful, and even about those I am not confident.

Perhaps I simply do not know the good work that already exists. I am told that in recent decades composers in Eastern Europe have written superb pieces, played in concert halls, that Americans have still barely heard of. I am told that the second half of the 20th century also produced poetry that won little fame and yet reached a consummate level of craft. Perhaps I am too gloomy. Art made after 1950 fetches high prices at auction, and those prices keep climbing. The world's film industry turns out hundreds of blockbusters a year and draws millions of paying viewers. The music industry puts out thousands of songs. More new books are published than ever before. New technology keeps opening new ways of expressing art. Why not consider this possibility: that the second half of the 20th century had a small renaissance, that every art was flourishing, and that it simply was not to my taste?

Some works of art last because people who know the form keep coming back to them, talking about them, writing about them. For a work of art to keep its hold, there has to be something real in it — something an expert can think over, chew on, return to again and again, something that moves him.

The West after 1950 undoubtedly produced a great deal of brilliant entertainment. I use the word brilliant with no hint of contempt. The cartoon The Simpsons is witty and clever; the film Saving Private Ryan grips you; Groundhog Day is a fine moral fable. Of all the culture on offer today, only Western popular culture is worth my money. The best novels are more absorbing than the work of the so-called serious novelists. The best popular music has more life and more charm than anything the academic composers write. Popular culture is a jumble that mixes the coarsest material with the most profound, sometimes fusing the two, and its quality is often first-rate. The people who make first-rate work in it, had they been born in another age, might well have been another Caravaggio, or Brahms, or Racine. A dozen or so others are good enough that they might earn a place on the list of heavyweights.

So why not simply welcome brilliant entertainment?

Exercising talent is a pleasure; watching talent exercised is a pleasure too.

Meeting a great work is exciting, even when we cannot take in every fine detail of its greatness. First-rate work has a kind of magic about it — whether you are eating a dinner cooked by a master chef, or watching a fine athlete compete under enormous inward pressure, or looking at any brilliant piece of work. In front of such achievements we can only stand and marvel.

The harder the feat and the more it matters, the better the performance looks when someone brings it off. Performance also carries risk and self-sacrifice. That is why no athletic achievement can fire our imagination the way heroism in wartime does. In science, Einstein's E=mc² became an icon not only because it represented an enormous leap in human understanding, but because it lit up our understanding of the universe itself. In art, writers, painters and composers are doing another kind of complex and difficult work: explaining ourselves to ourselves. When an artist's achievement reaches its height, it passes beyond what we normally take to be the limits of a human being. Earlier I borrowed the question "how is this possible?" to express what we feel before the most dazzling artistic achievements. That feeling has a second layer too — not a question but a kind of pride: "Somebody did it!"

That is also why a culture that produces nothing but freakish, trick-of-the-trade entertainment cannot meet our needs. In wealth, in the material comforts of daily life, in health and length of life, we may have surpassed the people who came before us. In the broad political freedom and equality that government provides, we may have surpassed them too. And yet a culture unable to compete with the greatest works that once reflected the human spirit is, in one sense, a backward culture. It was this backwardness that made Gibbon call the subjects of the once-mighty Roman Empire "a race of pygmies." In human history some cultures have monopolized humanity's greatest achievements, reaching heights we cannot match. Knowing that is bound to be dispiriting. If instead you come from a culture that has contributed masters of its own, the effect is encouraging.

Exactly how a culture changes, I do not know. But as this book nears its end I have come to believe that religion is an indispensable element in inspiring great artistic achievement. I use the word religion both broadly and narrowly. Going to church on Sunday is not what I mean by it. Neither is theology in the traditional sense. Confucianism and classical Greek thought are both essentially secular — look at the cultures they produced — and yet both come close to being religions, because they set out humanity's place in the vastness of the universe, they clarify what human striving is for — the highest good — and they lay down standards of conduct worth celebrating. Now let me explain the narrow sense of the word. Confucianism, Aristotelian principles and the world's other great religions are all meant for grown-ups to hold: they require mature thought about the true, the good and the beautiful. A culture whose elite artists and scientists do not think about the true, the good and the beautiful will not produce great art.

Suppose this reading of history is correct. Today's elite scientists and artists are not only mostly secular; they are often hostile to the idea that transcendental goods have any value at all. So there is reason to fear that some of today's fine works of entertainment culture are the best products we will get to see. Great art cannot do without inspiration, and the people making entertainment are not drawing on that kind of inspiration.

Still, what has held for the past few decades need not hold forever. Gloomy predictions underestimate the power of certain truths to regenerate.

The first truth is this: great works of art have such a hold on the human imagination that the nihilism now in fashion among intellectuals cannot last. It seems safe to predict that within a few years the people who love literature, music and painting for the tremendous power in them to express the true, the good and the beautiful will again lead the faculties of the world's best universities, and will set the tone for how the public talks about great art. That people who do not love the transcendental power in literature, music and painting should have influence at all is a strange thing. It is the product of a particular historical situation, and looking back now, that situation is not hard to understand. But it bloomed briefly and is already fading. Once the turn is complete, children with a gift for art will again grow into adults who understand what the word great means.

Gloomy predictions about the future also underestimate how hard thoughtful people will press at the basic question of human existence. "Why is there achievement in the world, and not just emptiness?" No one can avoid that question entirely, even in an age that cares least about it. Another is: "What makes a life meaningful?" It is hard to think about such questions outside the frame of religion. Because traditional religious thought has taken blow after blow from Darwin, Freud and Einstein, some intellectuals have stopped thinking about them in religious terms. But there is reason to believe that this too will prove a brief flowering.

The stretch from the Enlightenment to the end of the 20th century will very likely be seen, in the end, as humanity's adolescence. In that time humanity lost the simplicity of childhood and came to understand the outside world more deeply. And like any adolescent, humanity acted rashly, sure that it alone was clever and that everyone before it had been wrong.

If Darwin was right, Aquinas can be dismissed. If Freud was right, the Nicomachean Ethics must be wrong. But adolescence is short. The young adult just out of it discovers that the older generation has grown smarter. As the new century arrives, that may be exactly what is happening.

Many years ago, when I was still in college, I first encountered the injunction. I have forgotten most of the courses I took then. But some moments in the classroom are still vivid. The man who taught our introduction to philosophy was named Demos, an old scholar of the Platonic school. He spent two or three sessions on free will, going through what the great philosophers had each said about that treacherous question. Near the end he said something like this: "You now know what the great philosophers have said about free will. Perhaps you would like to know what I think." He paused a moment and then said briskly, "It seems to me that since we act every day as though we have free will, why not believe that we do?" As he expected, the class roared with laughter. Only later, turning his words over, did I realize that he had not simply made a joke: he had handed us a koan, a question to meditate on. Everything human beings do suggests that free will exists. What are we to make of that?

Let me ask my own question again. At those moments in history when human beings thought hardest about their place in the universe, and were most sure that they had a place in it, they were also at their most creative — the moments when they pushed culture to its limits. What are we to make of that?

This is not a question you can wave away in a few words. As we try to find an answer we know perfectly well that, because of our own limitations as human beings, our predictions about the future are bound to carry a note of pessimism. And yet that unrelenting search is precisely what has held up every great achievement. You and I may never paint like Titian or compose like Debussy, but everyone unwilling to waste a life is taking part in the same grand undertaking.

That undertaking comes with no certainty of victory and no arrogance. What writing this book about human achievement stamped on my mind was not what great people achieved but how they went about it. Some of them matched the picture the public holds of them; more of them did not. But in their working methods they resembled nothing so much as a craftsman busy with the job in hand, intent on not making a mistake. Every small slip left them full of regret, and they went back and did the work again. They kept at it until they were entirely satisfied.

Medieval stonemasons carved the gargoyles that decorate the great Gothic cathedrals. Sometimes their work sits high on the building, or hides behind a cornice, or stands where no eye can reach. There is no spot on the ground from which these gargoyles can be seen. And yet the masons carved them with care, knowing that once the cathedral was finished and the scaffolding came down their work would never see daylight again. They carved them, it is said, for God to see. Thousands upon thousands of stories like that one make up the story of human achievement.