Hardly anyone who is an intellectual celebrity today will merit a sidelong glance a century from now

Seventeen years ago Charles Murray published Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950.  It was a brute effort to establish whether it is even possible to establish empirical and objective measures of cultural achievement and if so, what might the comparative results be.  

Of course it was condemned as Western cultural triumphalism given the results.  Little or none of the criticism was directed at Murray's methodology which was extravagant in its effort to ensure representativeness.  Extravagant and laborious in its culling of sources.  The critics atavistically disliked the results of the methodology but had no improvement to his approach to offer.

That came somewhat later.  A group used the fact that Wikipedia has a couple of hundred different language editions.  What the researchers did rested on a simple assumption.  Individuals with Wikipedia entries in larger numbers of language editions must reflect an inherent utility, influence and achievement.  

Very concretely - if there is an entry on Socrates in Khmer, then that is probably empirical evidence of the utility of knowing something about Socrates.  And vice-versa for a famous Cambodian such as Indravarman I with an entry in English language Wikipedia.  

They chose 25 languages as their cut off point.  If an individual has entries in 25 different language editions, then they were designated as historically significant.  They ended up with some 11,000 names.

Which were not all that different from Murray's list with his entirely different and independent methodology.  

Independent of cultural achievement, there is a passage in Murray's book which is a meditation on just how vestigial permanent recognition of achievement is.

Consider the difficulty of getting into the inventories compiled for this book. Now your assignment is to do something that historians of your field will consider worth mentioning a century from now. Just putting it in words brings home how difficult a task you have been given. Judging from past experience, hardly anyone who is an intellectual celebrity today will merit a sidelong glance a century from now. How many readers under the age of 50 recognize the names of Mortimer Adler or Walter Lippmann? Each was as famous in the first half of 20C as Carl Sagan or George F. Will has been more recently, but contemporary fame is no help in making the history books. If, a century after you are dead, you still have a single picture hanging in a museum, a single composition still being played by the world’s orchestras, or a single scientific finding still being cited in the technical journals, you will have put yourself in a tiny company. No wonder the most common frequency of such feats even in that elite group is just one.

 Indeed.