Eccentricity Is No Longer An American Virtue

This article in the New York Times made me reflect on the vanishing role of eccentrics in our culture, which I take seriously, as someone who has been considered eccentric at times and as someone who tends to prefer the company of eccentrics.  I'm not writing here about people who are "different" in a way that is harmful; right now, we have that kind of eccentric in the Oval Office. Rather, I feel compelled to comment on people who are "different" in ways that benefit all of us, or at least in ways that don't harm anyone.

Eccentrics used to be a defining aspect not just of American society, but the American character as well.  When we talk about entrepreneurship in our history, we are not talking about people who in any way resemble today's slothful seekers of easy, debt-fueled deals.  People like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and George Washington Carver were more interested in solving problems than in making money, and they understood the role that knowledge played in solving problems.  They would all have been considered eccentrics by their contemporaries.  But they were mainly "different" simply because they looked at ordinary aspects of life in a way that was "different" from they way everyone else looked at them.  And, because they did so, all of us benefited in unexpected ways that are still relevant today.

Eccentricity is not just a defining feature of the sciences; it also plays a major role in the arts, going all the way back to Mark Twain and even before him.  Eccentricity has been a defining feature of our motion picture and television industry, going all the way back to the silents when, to borrow a phrase, "they had faces"--the actors, that is.  Eccentricity has been a defining feature in the production end of show business.  Think of Gene Roddenberry, whose idea for a high-concept science-fiction television series landed with a thud on NBC-TV at first, but is now a defining part of American culture more than fifty years later.  And then, there are those rare, amazing individuals like Hedy Lamarr, whose achievements were in both the arts and sciences.

My point?  We no longer value eccentricity.  We no longer even tolerate it.  I think that this goes a long way toward explaning the increasingly bipolar nature of our political system, and the increasingly sclerotic nature of our culture, with its emphasis on "tried-and-true" material. Perversely, I think this is why New York is more of a tourist attraction now than it was when Hal Willner first came to New York.  I also think that this is why I like the post-Giuliani New York less than the New York I first saw as a student.  It was grimy and dangerous.  But it was also a city in which you didn't need a six-to-seven figure bank account to find a place and flourish.

I miss Hal Willner's New York.  For that matter, I miss Hal Willner's America.  I think all of us do, more than we realize.  I hope it's not too late to find a way to reclaim it.