Boring but Right

More nominees for Correct yet Uncharismatic:

Better at being right than personally imposing: Edward Westermarck.

Westermarck argued in the early 20th century for what is called (not by him) the "Westermarck effect": individuals raised together from infancy display a lack of erotic interest in one another when they reach sexual maturity. Westermarck argued that the effect is an adaptation to prevent the harmful genetic effects of close inbreeding -- since those raised together are commonly siblings -- but that it incidentally reduces sexual activity even among non-siblings raised together. He had evidence for this from fieldwork in Morocco, from cousin marriages that didn't work out. All sorts of evidence, both human and non-human, now supports both the harmful effects of inbreeding and the "negative imprinting" proposed by Westermarck,. And Westermarck also did a huge amount of what is basically evolutionary psychology both on human marriage and sexuality, and on morality.

Yet, although he provided the correct explanation for incest avoidance, a big part of what kinship is about (altruism is another big part, of course, covered by Hamilton and successors),Westermarck was completely overshadowed in the 20th century by various sociological style theories and by Freud. The sociological theories aren't completely crazy, and might even be at least part right, but Freud's Oedipus Complex story is so off-the-wall that you have to suspect that its real appeal is not those in search of serious scientific explanations, but to folks with an unadmitted hunger for vivid counterintuitive narratives -- i.e. mythology. Chesterton says something like "Those who leave the Church don't end up believing in nothing; they end up believing in anything."

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My choice for the substance over style intellectual in political science would never be James Burnham--who was endowed with both--but Ferdinand Hermens who, in a series of books (Democracy or Anarchy, the Representative Republic, etc.) in the forties and fifties destroyed proportional representation for its contribution to the political catastrophe of the 1930s. (Not even a sexy topic then!) After the war, several European countries either dropped PR or modified its bad effects and henceforth became stable democracies. (Germany is the prime example.) Hermens critique of PR has in my view never been refuted--just ignored. Recently the UN and the US foisted it on Iraq. Hermens would not have been surprised that no government has formed yet.

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I'm surprised nobody mentioned Kant in philosophy. The man never bothered to leave Konigsberg his entire life, and was considered a bust until he published the First Critique in his mid-50s. Housewives, it is said, set their clocks to his daily walks. Yet, nearly all 19th and 20th century philosophy can be traced in large part back to Kant's ideas.

On the opposite extreme, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the two most celebrated 20th century philosophers, had a mesmerizing effect on their followers, which probably accounts in large part for their continued fame today. In Wittgenstein's case, his followers even adopted his eccentric mannerisms, so that for almost a half century after his death one could instantly recognize any Wittgensteinians walking the halls of academe.

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My hazy assumption is that 19th Century Germans developed an outsized respect for Herr Professors. For example, in Germany to this day, a man with two doctorates is a double doctor by title. Jerry Pournelle, for example, would be "Dr. Dr. Pournelle" in Germany.

This got intermingled with traditional Jewish esteem for charismatic rabbinical scholars who could exegete esoteric texts more cleverly than anybody else in town. Thus, the small number of German Jews. combining the two traditions, led the world in the production of intellectual cult figures like Marx and Freud.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer