Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty | The Lunar Society #10

I was not only convinced by that time that, um, religiosity was extremely important to the, particularly Christian religiosity, extremely important to Western civilization and what had gone on. Uh, I was also beginning to think that secular humanism didn't have the staying power that it needs.

Hey folks, I hope you enjoy this interview. I just quickly wanted to say that this is a new and a small podcast, as you can see from the subscriber count below on YouTube. So I would really appreciate it if you could share this on social media and with your friends. Um, that, that kind of stuff is really helpful. So if you can subscribe on YouTube, if you can leave a review on iTunes, and especially if you can tell people about this podcast, it helps out a lot, especially at this stage in the channel. Um, and we got a lot of great interviews coming up. I think you're going to really like them, so just stay tuned and I hope you enjoy this interview. Charles Murray needs no introduction, so let's begin with Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences. I first want to ask you what motivated you to write this book?

Uh, well, a lot of times while I was writing it, I wondered that myself. Uh, it was an incredibly difficult book to write. The short answer is that back in the 1980s, mid-1980s, I read a book by Daniel Boorstin called The Discoverers, I think it was. And Boorstin, you know, when I picked it up I thought it was going to lay out this panorama of human accomplishment over the centuries, and it was really just a set of mini biographies of a lot of major scientists and so forth. And there, there wasn't anything wrong with that, but, but it's not what I wanted to read. I wanted to see the whole thing as a panorama. And as has been the case with other books I've written, (laughs) I had a book I wanted to read and the, the way to do that was to write it. And so I set off, uh, on writing this and it was a five-year task altogether. Very intense five years.

Clearly. You can see that from the, uh, book itself. Um, I- I've always had this question when I read books like this that seem to integrate every single domain of human knowledge. H- How does a human being write a book like this? Like, how do you consolidate so much information and integrate in these new explanations?

Well, I don't do it the way a lot of people do. A lot people, a lot of people pretty much map out the book ahead of time and they know which chapters are going to follow which chapters and, and so they go ahead and do a lot of their research and then they start to write. Human Accomplishment was different for me because in one sense I couldn't start writing until I had done a lot of this, uh, historiometric research. People who have not read the book, uh, should know that I established inventories of events and inventories of people in the arts and sciences, and I use a technique that's quite well-established, it's been around for a long time, whereby you go to the index of a book and you count up, uh, the number of pages that, uh, th- uh, given person is referenced. And the logic behind it is this, that if you are writing a history of music, you are going to end up spending a lot more time on Beethoven than you do on Prokofiev. Uh, and the reason you're going to do it is to explain his music, Beethoven's music takes more time, and he, he looms larger in the story of music. The same thing goes with science, uh, th- that Einstein gets a lot of space, same thing goes with the arts. All right. So, so in order to accumulate inventories, and I have something like 16 or 18 of them, I have one for Western literature, uh, I have one for, uh, Indian literature too and for, uh, Indian philosophy and for Chinese art and, you know, I, I just had a whole bunch of separate inventories. Well, I spent two years basically doing nothing but going through these indexes of books and writing down the, the data. There was a book called, uh, you know, a set of books called The Dictionary of Scientific Biography. It's a wonderful resource in that it is supposed to be the definitive catalog of the important figures in, in science. Took me 17 10-hour days at the Hood College library, which is about 20 miles away from me, to do that one source. Uh, so in one sense I had to do an awful lot of research beforehand, but then when I started out, uh, I did what I always do, which is I get interested in some particular aspect and I dig into that. And I write. And then I go on to another topic and there's no particular rhyme or reason to it. It's very idiosyncratic. And (laughs) I, uh, for, for a while I have a lot of stuff in my head. So my wife would say as I was finishing Human Accomplishment that, "For a few shining moments there, you knew everything." (laughs) But then of course you start to forget it all, uh, immediately. That's wh- As I went back to the book today to remind myself, I found myself in the position of reading a passage and saying, "That's really interesting," because I'd completely forgotten that it was in there. (laughs) Anyway, I've, th- the answer is I go about this stuff very, very personally and the analogy that comes to mind is a guy who was a fine sculpture, uh, and he asked, "How do you do it? How do you make a sculpture of a, of a horse?" And he says, "You have this block of wood and you cut away everything that isn't a horse."