Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty

**Charles Murray** (0:00)
I was not only convinced by that time that religiosity was extremely important to the, particularly Christian religiosity, extremely important to Western civilization and what had gone on. I was also beginning to think that secular humanism didn't have the staying power that it needs.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:25)
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Charles Murray needs an introduction, so let's begin with Human Accomplishment, The Pursuit of Excellence, and The Arts and Sciences. I first want to ask you, what motivated you to write this book?

**Charles Murray** (1:10)
Well, a lot of times while I was writing it, I wondered that myself.
It was an incredibly difficult book to write. The short answer is, back in the 1980s, mid 1980s, I read a book by Daniel Borsten called The Discoverers, I think it was. And Borsten, 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 many biographies of a lot of major sciences and so forth. And there wasn't anything wrong with that, 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, I had a book I wanted to read, and the way to do that was to write it. And so I set off on writing this and it was a five-year task altogether. Very intense five years.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:03)
Clearly, you can see that from the book itself.
I've always had this question when I read books like this that seem to integrate every single domain of human knowledge. How does a human being write a book like this? How do you consolidate so much information and integrate in these new explanations?

**Charles Murray** (2:18)
Well, I don't do it the way a lot of people do. 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 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 historiometric research. People who have not read the book 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 the number of pages that a 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. And the reason you are going to do it is to explain his music, Beethoven's music, takes more time. And he looms larger in the story of music. The same thing goes with science, that Einstein gets a lot of space, same thing goes with the arts. All right, so in order to accumulate inventories, and I have something like 16 or 18 of them, I have one for Western literature, I have one for Indian literature too, and for Indian philosophy, and for Chinese art, and you know, 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 data. There was 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 science. It took me 17 10-hour days at the Hood College library, which is about 20 miles away from me, to do that one source. So in one sense, I had to do an awful lot of research beforehand.
But then when I started out, 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 for a while, I have a lot of stuff in my head. My wife would say as I was finishing Human Accomplishment, that for a few shining moments there, you knew everything. But then of course, we start to forget it all. Immediately, 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 completely forgotten that it was.