“One argument of Uniqueness is that it is not any particular renaissance, revolution, or liberal institution that marks out the West, but its far higher levels of achievement in all the intellectual and artistic spheres of life. I relied on Charles Murray’s book, Human Accomplishment: Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, to make this argument.[1] This book is the first effort to quantify ‘as facts’ the accomplishments of individuals and countries across the world in the arts and sciences, by calculating the amount of space allocated to these individuals in reference works, encyclopaedias, and dictionaries. Murray concludes that ‘whether measured in people or events, 97% of accomplishment in the scientific inventories occurred in Europe and North America’ from 800 BC to 1950.[2]
Murray also notes the far higher accomplishments of Europeans in the arts, particularly after 1400. Although Murray does not compare their achievements but compiles separate lists for each civilisation, he notes that the sheer number of ‘significant figures’ in the arts is higher in the West in comparison to the combined number of the other civilisations.[3] In literature, the number in the West is 835; whereas in India, the Arab World, China, and Japan combined, the number is 293. In the visual arts, it is 479 for the West as compared to 192 for China and Japan combined (with no significant figures listed for India and the Arab World). In music, ‘the lack of a tradition of named composers in non-Western civilization means that the Western total of 522 significant figures has no real competition at all’.”