From the webpage: http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/22/feb04/murray.htm

Full article: The Human Limits
Of Human Accomplishment
Denis Dutton commenting on Charles Murray's "Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life"

There are, according to Murray, four conditions for the highest realization of this innate impulse toward excellence. The sources of energy for accomplishment are a sense of (1) purpose and (2) personal autonomy. The sources for what he calls the content of accomplishment are (3) organizing structure and (4) transcendental goods. Here Murray moves, by his own admission, into an area beyond statistical demonstration; his data are relevant, and he thinks supportive, of these conclusions, but they are not decisive.

Purpose. Accomplishment “is fostered in a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.” Murray calls people who doubt or deny that life has a purpose “nihilists.” Since accomplishment at the level Murray specifies requires enormous levels of work, nihilists are at a disadvantage. They lack a sense of vocation, either in the form of an idea that God has called them to a life of scientific or artistic endeavor, or, if they are not religious, in having a sense that they were put on earth to accomplish great things.

Autonomy. A culture that “encourages the belief that individuals can act efficaciously as individuals” will be best in encouraging human accomplishment. Freedom for the individual and tolerance of nonconformity are positive contributors to a climate of achievement. It is not only formal political control (e.g., dictatorship) that will discourage initiative, but strictures found in familism (which presumably helps explain relatively lower levels of scientific and technical accomplishment in cultures of east Asia and the relative lack of innovation in Asian art). A culture that fosters individualism stands a higher chance of producing significant creative individuals in art and science.

Organizing structure. “The magnitude and content of a stream of accomplishment in a given domain varies according to the richness and age of the organizing structure.” In the sciences, “the structure from the Renaissance onward has been an evolving scientific method.” In the arts, structures present themselves differently: sonata form, haiku, Pointillism, the novel, and the motion picture are all organizing structures. All can be richly elaborated. Some structures are checkers-like in allowing a limited range of elaboration; others are more chess-like in their vast potential. Historical bursts of creative activity are initiated by theories, styles, and techniques (including the development of instruments, such as the spectroscope in physics or the grand piano in music) that open rich research or aesthetic possibilities. The age of an organizing structure is important: they are born, can have a vigorous youth, and then enter senescence, losing their potential to yield insights.

Transcendental goods. Accomplishment requires “a well-articulated vision of, and use of, the transcendental good relevant to that domain.” These values are the true, the good, and the beautiful—the first central to science, the last to art, and the second to both science and art. Without a coherent sense of these values to underpin them, science and art may rise to “the highest rungs of craft,” but they will not achieve exalted heights. A culture without a sense that science can reveal truth will never develop a stream of scientific accomplishment; a culture without a sense that beauty is real will never enjoy a great epoch of art, literature, or music: such artistic cultures are likely, as Murray puts it, to be “arid and ephemeral.”

Of these four conditions, Murray places the most weight on the last. Taking into statistical account (1) the tendency of everyone to overrate more recent accomplishments, and (2) the worldwide rise in skilled, educated populations that might produce great scientists and artists, Murray finds it inescapable that accomplishment has been slumping since around the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this respect, anyway, he resembles such gloomy cultural observ- ers as Nietzsche, Spengler, and Toynbee. Though he does not accept their versions of laws of history, he does present us with one last grand generalization. This idea is so important to him that it preoccupies him up to the last page of the book’s main text (before the nearly 200 pages of tables, appendices, and notes). “Human beings,” he claims, “have been most magnificently productive and reached their highest cultural peaks in the times and places where humans have thought most deeply about their place in the universe and been most convinced they have one.” This for Murray helps explain the preponderance of achievement in the arts and sciences in Europe during the centuries when Christianity was regnant.

Truth, regarded as a goal guiding inquiry, may be considered a transcendental value for science. Art faces a different challenge. An ironic, detached culture in which artists have lost faith in ultimate values is not likely to rival the greatness of the past. In terms of freedom, wealth, creature comforts, and health, Murray says, we may be doing better than our forebears, but that does not mean that our artists will achieve more than “shiny, craftsmanlike entertainments.” He quotes Gibbon’s observation that even at the apex of their empire, the Romans, who looked back at the achievements of old Greece much as we do of old Europe, were “a race of pygmies.”

Religion, Murray argues, “is indispensable for igniting great accomplishment in the arts.” Religious believers and philosophers of a traditionally idealist stamp may find comfort in this, especially since it comes from an avowed agnostic such as Murray. I am personally not convinced. In particular, it seems to me that Murray seriously underestimates the role of organizing structures in creating conditions for high achievement.

Murray is right to stress the importance of meaning it—of commitment in the arts. He tells of the stonemasons who sculpted gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals. They worked with passionate devotion, even when their handiwork would be invisible from the ground: God would see it. I discovered a similar aesthetic psychology in my own fieldwork in New Guinea, where serious artists view a carving created for a dead ancestor differently from one knocked off for tourists. Much of our own art and entertainment is shallow and flashy, made neither for God nor ancestors, but for a market.

But, accepting this does not mean that transcendental values form a principle necessary to explain high achievement in the arts. Consider the history of music. Murray makes it clear that the invention of polyphony led to more complex structures that, along with improved instrumentation, continued through the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth. The Himalayan heights of music were reached 150 years later, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. If there is progress in this period, it is the progress of artists who responded to the problems and potentialities inherent in musical tonality. New instruments, developing popular audiences, a sense of formal experimentation, and above all the maturing of tonality were the driving forces for the great flowering of music through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was, in other words, the birth, flourishing, and exhaustion of organizing structures, not transcendental values, that provided the most important motor for music development.

Murray argues that the greatest artists have “a vision of perfection” stirring them to greater achievements.