James Q. Wilson, or, Admitting You Were Wrong

I always thought the most impressive thing about Jane Goodall was not the decades of astonishing effort she put into studying chimps and working to preserve their habitat, but the ease and grace with which she admitted being wrong. Back in the late 60s she wrote a book arguing that chimpanzees, though they had interpersonal violence, did not have anything like war. War, she said, was an entirely human invention. For this more than anything else she became a left wing heroine. But then the chimpanzee troop she studied split into two factions, and the males of one faction systematically hunted down and killed the males of the other. She could have developed some long-winded argument explaining why this was not "war," but she didn't. She wrote another book arguing that chimpanzees do fight wars.

Mark Kleiman made a similar argument for the greatness of  sociologist James Q. Wilson in his obituary:

The things that made Jim special – beyond is massive intellect, wide reading, and graceful, accurate prose – were his generosity of spirit and his deep moral and intellectual seriousness. . . .  Jim wanted to get things right, even when that meant acknowledging that he had earlier been wrong: a tendency not common among academics, or among participants in policy debates.

Recently I was asked to sign on to an amicus brief in a case involving the constitutionality of imposing life imprisonment without parole on those who were legally juveniles at the time of their offending behavior. The argument of the brief was straightforward: legislatures had passed juvenile LWOP under the influence of the idea that the 1980s had seen the rise of a new generation of “juvenile super-predators,” whose propensity to violence put the nation at risk of a bloodbath once they became adults unless they were kept behind bars. In fact, the upsurge in deadly violence by adolescents turned out to be merely a side-effect of the crack markets; instead of soaring, violent crime fell sharply. But the laws passed while the theory was in vogue remain in force.

Jim had been one of the promoters of the “super-predator” theory, though he was not its originator. When I glanced down the list of signatories for the amicus I found, at the bottom, “James Q. Wilson.” 

The pressures on all of us to stick to our guns are great, and they are even greater for famous intellectuals, so I think we ought to celebrate whenever a prominent person takes such a stand.