West beats East in cultural deathmatch

The NYT article A Cultural Scorecard Says West Is Ahead reports on Charles Murray's new book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. (Via Calpundit.)

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.

...

Mr. Murray developed inventories of 4,002 significant figures in the arts and sciences by calculating the amount of space allotted to them in standard reference works and assigning them scores on a 100-point scale.

For the sciences, at any rate, the results suggest a contest of David-and-Goliath proportions. Using 34 reference works in four languages, Mr. Murray produced inventories for eight fields — astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics, mathematics, medicine and technology — as well as a combined index ranking scientists from all disciplines. In all, Europeans and North Americans account for 97 percent of scientific accomplishment.

Murray's "mathematically precise" approach is debatable, but it's just one of many approaches, I suppose. Like all top 10/100/4002 lists, the book sounds like good fodder for conversation, discussion and name-calling. And like all lists, it's more useful for that purpose than for serving as an objective reference.

It would still be easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to the overwhelming Western dominance in Murray's findings. Take the "97 percent of scientific accomplishment" credited to Western figures. It's simply unbelievable, since we all know the Chinese invented everything. And shortly thereafter, the Japanese copied, improved, lowered the price, made loads of money. Then the Koreans outdid the Japanese, but we weren't rich or arrogant enough to think we could take over Hollywood. Here's looking at you, Sony.

Around '93, Time magazine faced a slow news week, and came up with a cover article on the greatest heroes and villains in human history. Among the heroes: Alexander the Great. Among the villains: Genghis Khan. I'm not familiar with details about the two rulers, but I never understood what makes one of them good and the other bad. They both seem to have killed a lot of people in a lot of places. It seems perspective makes all the difference all the time.