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What makes an eccentric? For one thing, fear causes some people to behave peculiarly when they wish above all to be merely "normal"; some eccentrics doubtless create their own rules of conduct because they do not wish to compete by conventional standards. For others, eccentricity is clearly a bid for attention, an attempt to show their distinctiveness as people. Whatever the cause, there are clearly two basic kinds of eccentricity: selfish and productive. The best eccentrics have always been discoverers, creative men who saw new patterns and possibilities. It is easy to smile at today's International Flat Earth Society, devotees of flying saucers and prophets of intelligent life on Mars. It is also easy to forget that many pioneers, including Galileo and Freud, were initially considered quite eccentric. On a lesser scale, Ford, Edison and the Wright brothers were eccentrics who stubbornly imagined radically different realities. Many crusaders like Ralph Nader, however prickly they seem, often serve a similar purpose. The point is that eccentrics—or anyway the benign kind—are nearly always worth heeding.
Unfortunately, their voice is not very strong today. U.S. eccentricity currently lacks the grand style and creative bursts—either of sane whimsy or crazy sanity—that marked the golden age of English eccentrics, among them one exotic aristocrat who habitually dined with dogs dressed as humans and another who spent his life trying to breed a symmetrically spotted mouse. If nothing else, such obsessions had a mad integrity that might now leaven modern grimness, or even produce occasionally brilliant insights. The U.S. surely could use more authentically unconventional people who dispute conventional wisdom—or at least make life a bit more interesting. A nation that fails to nurture eccentrics, after all, runs the risk of becoming the victim of a kind of national eccentricity.