The Hindu Business Line : Audacious outrage!

ALL talk of knowledge explosion and information revolution comes to naught in the case of certain categories of thinkers and writers morbidly determined to live in unfathomable depths of ignorance about countries and cultures other than their own. A larger number of them is still to be found in the Western world, for whom their own religion, their own past, present and future, and their own greatness are the only things that matter, and there is unredeemed darkness beyond. It was this kind of obscurantist megalomania that led to monstrous concoctions such as white man's burden and Third World in the past, and regime change and pre-emptive strikes in the present.

In tune with this arrogance, one Charles Murray (may his tribe decrease!) has had the audacity to come out with a book "Human Accomplishment" (reviewed in the New York Times of November 30) in which he comes to the finding that the Caucasian race is far ahead of any other in accomplishments of all kinds.

The pith of the book as it emerges from the review is: Western civilisation has generated the greatest number of important contributions to knowledge and the arts. The greatness of the 4002 best minds (with not one Indian name!) in science and arts derives from a culture inspired by the Christian faith whose exalted precepts and values cannot apparently be surpassed.

The methodology followed by the author is as absurd as his conclusions: He has ranked the names by simply counting the column inches given to the names in 167 encyclopaedias. The reviewer points out in extenuation of any possible bias against non-European contributions to the sciences that though Mr Murray has not used any encyclopaedias published in the Far or Middle East or in the languages of those parts of the world, he has compensated by using the most authoritative reference work available, the 18-volume "Dictionary of Scientific Biography", which "includes experts in Arabic, Indian and East Asian science drawn from universities around the world". As regards literature, there is, of course, no one in the whole wide world who can excel Shakespeare, in sculpture none comes anywhere near Michelangelo and so on down the line — blanking out the great contributions of civilisations other than Christian and Western.

These outrages occur because our intellectual community also panders to the Western conceit, instead of spiritedly standing up to refute this sort of nonsense. Is it not time someone pointed out, for example, that Shakespeare is a pigmy compared to Kalidasa?

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