Noted author and Middle East researcher James Q. Wilson serves as a professor at the School of Public Policy, and presents lectures on ‘who becomes a terrorist.’
By Sam Hedlund
Contributing Writer
ames Q. Wilson, one of America’s leading social scientists, is Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy. Wilson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom June 23 alongside a number of other distinguished honorees, from Julia Child to Charlton Heston. President George W. Bush praised Wilson for his “intellectual rigor and moral clarity.”
Wilson presented his annual public lecture Oct. 14 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley. In the lecture, titled “Who Becomes a Terrorist?”, he spoke about his most recent research.
Born in 1931, Wilson earned a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1959. He taught at Harvard from 1961 to 1987 and at UCLA from 1985 to 1997. Wilson is the author or co-author of 14 books, most recently “The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families” (Harper Collins, 2002).
What kinds of work are you doing right now?
Well, other than giving four lectures a year at Pepperdine, I’m doing a lot of research on the Middle East, and on the origins of democracy in the world generally, and the question of whether democracy can be installed in the Middle East. I’ve written some things about the rise of terrorism, some things about the origins of democracy in the West, some things about the nature of terrorism in the Middle East and whether democracy and terrorism — one can triumph over the other. It’s a fascinating subject, especially because I don’t read Arabic, and I have to look around for translations of most of the important subjects. But this is a very new departure for me.
Traditionally I’ve worked about subjects in American government. I’ve written a lot on political parties, crime, marriage, moral philosophy, and going outside the United States and trying to think about the issues we face in a larger context is a new direction for me. It’s very interesting — I’m not boring myself. I will probably bore the readers who will already know what I find out when I write it down, but I’m not boring myself!
What are the prospects for democratizing Iraq?
I’m cautiously optimistic about doing this in Iraq, in part because Iraq is a very old culture — it once was called Mesopotamia. It has immense natural resources in terms of water and oil, it has people who are perfectly capable of running a government. It has to throw off 30 years of tyrannical despotism, and that’s not easy.
Things can go wrong. There could be religious activities that prevent politics from succeeding, there could be military dictators, there could be all sorts of things we can’t anticipate. That’s why I’m cautiously optimistic, but I am an optimist, because I don’t think it’s impossible.
I don’t think there is any group of people in the world for whom a reasonable degree of democracy is not possible because I think any time people are exposed to freedom they want to keep it, and if we expose Iraq to freedom, I’m, again, cautiously optimistic that they will find ways to keep it.
What did you think about being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
I was overwhelmed — I had no idea that it was about to happen. When the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House called me at home, she asked, “Is this James Wilson?”
I said “Yes.”
There was a long pause, and then she asked, “How do I know that this is the James Wilson I want to talk to?”
And I said, “Well, my middle initial is ‘Q,’ does that help?”
And she said, “A bit. What have you written?” So I began reciting some titles of books, and she said, “Well, you sound like the one I want to talk to. The President is going to award you the Medal of Freedom,” at which point I nearly fell off my chair. But I got her phone number, in order to call her back, to make sure it wasn’t one of my friends producing a hoax. It was a great experience.You walk on air for a week before it happens, and two weeks after it does happen. As near as I can tell, there’s no way of planning to win the medal — it’s not like the Nobel Prize for Peace, in which you get interest groups to write off to the Swedes or the Norwegians telling everybody what a great person you are. Suddenly it just happens. It’s something that the president, on the advice of the committee he appoints, simply decides to do.
But it’s nice to sit there with (basketball coach) John Wooden and (Czech playwright) Vachlav Havel and family members from (atomic scientist) Edward Teller and (historian) Jaques Barzun and the other winners — Van Cliburn. You felt like you were in pretty distinguished company. And President and Mrs. Bush couldn’t have been nicer.
I imagine someone like you, who’s known as a conservative, might have a better chance at receiving the medal under this administration?
Well, as I look back over the list, it’s hard to tell whether the political affiliation of the person made a big difference. It probably made some difference — I mean, the president isn’t going to give it to his worst enemies or the friends of his worst enemies. On the other hand, if you look at most of the names who won it, politics plays no role at all. I’m very happy to be in their company.
What did you learn in your earlier research, such as your work on crime?
I started my work on crime in the mid-1960s . . . when President Johnson organized the President’s Commission (on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice). I was approached by the executive director of the commission to be on one of its committees, and I said “That’s absurd, I don’t know anything about crime.”
And the executive director said, “That’s unimportant. We’ve discovered hardly anything. . . . You’ve just written a book about the police, so at least you know something about that part, so why don’t you join the commission?”
My reading on crime was stimulated by the need to keep up with the work of the commission. And the more I read the less I thought criminologists, in fact, knew about the subject. Criminologists were preoccupied with the causes of crime — a perfectly reasonable subject. They had a very narrow view of the causes of crime. They didn’t think the family mattered much. They thought teenage gangs cause crime, to which my obvious response was, “Well why do some teenage gangs cause crime and others not? Why do boys join teenage gangs in the first place?”
I began to think about what do you do with the facts you’ve learned about crime in order to control it, because the crime rates were skyrocketing starting in the 1960s and really didn’t start turning down until the early 1980s. And this led me into a study of the extent to which being convicted of a crime would reduce the rate at which other people committed similar crimes, and compared that with the prospect of rehabilitating offenders.
Many people were saying “We can’t bring down the crime rate until we can cure the causes.” To which my response was twofold: First, we don’t know what the causes are, but if I’m right as to what I think the causes are, it will take several generations to bring down the crime rate by attacking those causes even if we know how. Some kid grows up in an abusive family, and hangs out with a teenage gang, and he thinks he can steal anything he wants. How do you cure that cause? Well, I don’t know, but you’re not going to do it in two years. But I thought there were other things that could bring down the crime rate.
And then I became very curious about something else: Most people don’t commit crime even if they face no chance of being imprisoned. You and I don’t walk around this campus looking for something to steal, and look around and see that no one’s watching, and steal it. Why? Because of the sort of people we are. Well why is that the sort of people we are? And so I began exploring more deeply the causes of crime.
In the book I wrote with Rich-ard Herrnstein, “Crime and Human Nature,” I think we pretty much got it right. And then I began thinking about how people acquire a conscience, and so I wrote “The Moral Sense” as a way of explaining why and how conscience develops in some people, and with that it became clear that families are very important, so I wrote “The Marriage Problem” as a book explaining that families are getting weaker and thus an important source of human conscience was deteriorating.
One thing led to another—it wasn’t planned in advance. You finish one book and it leaves a question in your mind, and so you start on the next book trying to find an answer to the old problem.
In The Marriage Problem, you came to the conclusion that society has to value marriage in a public way, and a legal way?
Yes, that’s exactly right. The emancipation, the spread of human freedom was of enormous benefit to all of mankind, but there’s a cost attached to it.
If you create so much freedom that people do not invest in communal relationships, and relationships they have with other people, then society becomes worse off. Not that freedom is bad, but we have to establish out of our own views, not by government programs, some restraints on freedom, in order to preserve this core institution of society, namely the family, on which everything else depends.
The government might be able to help, although I don’t know how, but I think it’s a cultural question, not a government question.
What do you think are some of the things you’ve learned about scholarship, teaching and the learning process as you’ve taught at different universities?
I’m not sure I’ve learned much about it at all. In my view, if university professors didn’t exist, I would be on food stamps. I think it’s the only job I could possibly qualify for, because I love teaching, I love doing research, I love writing up my results and when you write up your results as a scholar, as opposed to an editorial writer, you have to worry about the facts, getting the facts right, getting the footnotes in the right place and you make sure that you’ve answered criticisms that can be made of your views. And I find that a very bracing experience.
Now, in doing it, I’ve seen the country change around me. At one time, I would say, politics of professors was not important in college campuses. When I started teaching in 1959, I had no idea which professors had what view.
Today, they care a great deal. Campuses are divided by political loyalties, which I regard as extremely unfortunate, because it guts the nature of the scholarly process. And I find myself being influenced a bit by it.
From time to time I get agitated by some subject, and I start writing things that are less scholarly and more of an op-ed piece. And then I start to tell myself, “Now wait a minute, that’s not what you’re here for. You can write an occasional op-ed piece, but your job is to write the truth.”
I never object to scholars questioning the accepted wisdom. But when you challenge it on the basis of political preconceptions, I become upset. On Sept. 11 of 2001, I was at the University of Missouri, and I was scheduled to give a lecture at 8:30 that morning to a group of graduate students. On my way to the lecture I learned about the great tragedy that happened in New York, so I said when I got there, “Forget about my talk, let’s talk about what happened.”
The first two comments I got, one was from a professor, the other from a graduate student, were this: “Well it’s obviously America’s fault.”
I just stared in disbelief, not because it’s impossible to ask such a question — who’s fault it is — but to start with the assumption the United States is somehow to blame for the death of 3,000 of its own innocent people was to me just staggering.
I give that example, not because it’s typical of what I encounter — I’ve been retired for many years, so I don’t encounter much at all from professors — but because it illustrates, I think, the problem that universities have.
November 13, 2003
