Exogenous Shock

Earliest memory: My father perched on the edge of the couch in the basement of our house in Grand Junction, Colorado as he focused intently on the TV housed in the anachronistic blond wood cabinet.  He strikes a pose that signals remoteness, gravity – leaning forward his right knee propped up his elbow as the forefinger of his hand pressed against the socket of his eye and his thumb supported his chin.  Unnervingly, he stared with raptor-like intensity at the TV through glasses with reddish frames mounted on his deeply furrowed brow.  Dressed in a white tee shirt and khaki pants, he was home from work, unusual for a weekday.  School had been dismissed.  Were my mother and two brothers there?  They must have been, but I do not remember.  At that eternal moment, the compass of my world contracted into a triangle defined by the TV, my father, and me.

At seven years of age, I did not understand the sense of foreboding that hung in the air like a dense fog.  Something terrible had happened.  The moment in the basement was preceded by the inconsolable seriousness of the grownups that constituted the fixed stars in the constellation of my small world.  Some cried – deeply disturbing to a child.

The TV showed a flag draped caisson being drawn along a street lined with crowds.  A riderless horse danced sideways and jerked its head up and down impatiently, boots mounted backwards in the stirrups.  A little boy dressed in a coat and shorts with his bare legs exposed to the winter weather saluted the retreating caisson.

The concept of death was foreign, incomprehensible to me.  John F. Kennedy was my hero – and heroes are invulnerable and immortal.  Watching the funeral procession to Arlington National Cemetery today is a chilling reminder of innocence lost.

Continuing my path through grade school, John F. Kennedy – never John Kennedy – became a talisman that was invoked frequently by quoting from his Inaugural Speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”  My mother collected Kennedy half dollar coins in a glass jar placed in the cabinet over the oven and encouraged me to insert new ones gleaned from trips to the store like offerings to a secular god.  On special occasions, we dumped them out noisily onto the Formica kitchen table and counted them – a fund for my college education.  Tragedy transformed into opportunity.

***

Forty-eight years ago today, John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.  Or, should it be: Forty-eight years ago today, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy.  Which version is the more faithful representation of history?  Does the passive voice of the first formulation insulate – soften – the judgment of history?  Is the active voice of the second version too harsh in the face of counterfactual models of history that concatenate coincidences and conspiracy theories to assert that Oswald did not act – could not have acted – alone?

In Ulysses, James Joyce links the travails of his hero, Leonard Bloom, as he walks around Dublin on June 16, 1904 to the adventures depicted by Homer in his 2,000-year-old epic.  On one level, Ulysses is a meditation on the interconnected, iterative neural network of history.  At one point, Joyce alludes to the implacable rule of history by making one of his characters, Stephen Dedalus, declaim: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”  A nightmare. From which we are trying to awake.  Is history a dream, a figment of our imaginations that allows us to find patterns in correlations without the security of causation?

Politics and economics and religion recur to history.  Filled with inspiring stories of heroes and deeds of an unimaginable courage and suffering, history pulsates with lives lived in extremis. Listen to the rhythm of past glory as it courses through the address that Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg 148 years ago:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In the Gettysburg Address Lincoln defined the American creed, but like most prophets he was without honor in his own country and was sacrificed on Good Friday 1865 as partial expiation for our original sin of slavery.  History is relentless, its claims endless, its toll unyielding, the number of victims unimaginable.  One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War we are still dealing with the legacy of slavery.

Casting the net further back for another example: the three great monotheistic religions claim the same piece of real estate in Jerusalem based on events thousands of years ago and are willing to sacrifice blood – and the tenets of their creeds – to enforce claims grounded in historical interpretations that are simultaneously unassailable and questionable.

In an effort to travel through time, discover causes, and make sense, literary genres morph and adapt: modernist fiction like Ulysses challenged realism with randomness and uncertainty and stream of consciousness, historical fiction like Gone with the Wind inserted characters into real events, literary fiction based on alternative histories like Don DeLillo’s Libra and Stephen King’s 11/22/63 play fast and loose with the facts in an effort to understand events.

Scholars and scientists approach history from oblique angles by creating models on computer screens that abstract the complexity of reality in order to glimpse unseen structures that support the surface that we experience.  Refracting light through disciplinary prisms, the spectrum is decomposed into concepts that shatter old paradigms in the quest for new truths.

In the 1980s, path dependence – a species of history – took its turn in the spotlight: “A process of change … is path dependent if later outcomes of the process depend on the specific course of preceding events.”  More rigorously, it is defined as: “as a property of a stochastic process which obtains under two conditions (contingency and self-reinforcement) and causes lock-in in the absence of exogenous shock.”  Were the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy the result of earlier events that cascaded down through time due to a flap of the wings of a butterfly?  Or did they constitute exogenous shocks that shook up dependent systems and ramify down new paths through time?

Closed systems suffer from the relentless sovereignty of the second law of thermodynamics, which operates according to the self-evident, but often ignored or suppressed intuition that order disintegrates into disorder, that death follows life in an endless spiral.  The future is simply a tendency, an arrow, a vector toward maximum entropy: the undefinable measure of the rate at which disorder exacts its inexorable toll.

Hope emanates from the fortunate ability of entities within closed systems to absorb energy from other systems: the earth and the life it supports partake of power bestowed by a benevolent sun.  Life in the sweep of history triumphs – fleetingly – over disorder in a mystery sublime.

On Revenge and Despair

Yes and some people claim that there's a woman to blame

And I know it's my own damn fault

-          “Margaritaville,” Jimmy Buffett

With mock cheerfulness, she quipped, “I am a cheap date” when the check arrived.  Although the announcement was expected – she uttered the same thing every time we had dinner – hearing the words, hearing the actual words pissed me off. Since she did not suffer from low self-esteem, the boomerang that she launched punctured my hypersensitive self-respect before returning to her with a satisfying snap for future deployment.  Like most frugal people, I resent being called cheap, but resisted the temptation to tell her to shove it.  According to my prelapsarian way of thinking, dinners in the ten to twelve dollar range are not cheap.  And, besides the coed restroom was clean – a sure sign of an upmarket establishment in my estimation.

Casuist distinctions now sink like broken shards of a fine porcelain vase to the bottom of our mutual indecision.  Attracted to her beauty and self-confidence, I was smitten at first sight.  My solidity refracted through a hazy atmosphere of loneliness appealed to her maternal impulse – she would rehabilitate me.  A mutual attraction grounded in shared interests and tastes and spiced with intriguing dissonances developed.  As time wore on without consummation, her confidence, her overconfidence – declarative sentences punctuated with a hearty “Period. End of story” – curdled into a willful avoidance of reality in the Arizona sun as my solidity withered into unreconstructed stinginess, deliberate obtuseness.

After dinner, we went back to my apartment where she resumed her trenchant denunciations of my furniture – wrong kind, not enough, shabby.  The same lame excuses stuck in my throat like a fish bone as intimations of comforting silence beckoned from just beyond the scrim. Failing to interest her in my latest deep thoughts, we parted with an awkward hug – she seemed simultaneously older but too young for me.

Desiccated, hope floated like leaf in the middle of an ocean as recriminations lapped against shores of my mulish obstinacy. With perfect records of failed relationships, we wordlessly negotiated whether to put this one on life support or euthanize it with indifference.  I opted for the latter.  It seemed cleaner.  I miss her bubbly voice.

***

Two weeks ago last Saturday, I absentmindedly turned the knob to set the height of the seat on the stationary bike to fit my six-foot, three-inch frame, clicked the cleats on my shoes into the pedals, mounted the bike, and started pedaling leisurely before the spinning class began.  Looking like an unstrung puppet, the startlingly thin instructor bounced into the stuffy room, twittered nervously like an excited bird, cranked up the formulaic electronica that passes now for hip music, and began issuing commands, incongruous with her slight frame.  After taking at least three hour-long spinning classes a week for ten years – during some periods I would take seven classes per week – the music was boring and the innocent narcissism of the teachers tedious.

Faking it until the endorphins kicked in and stoked my enthusiasm, I lifted my hands from the handlebars and sat upright on the seat, pedaling slowly.  Suddenly, I heard the sickening sound of a seat post sliding down and looked around to see which schmuck in the sparsely attended class had failed to properly tighten the knob on their seat post.  As I was falling backward, the realization dawned on me that I was the schmuck. Milliseconds after my lower back and left hand thumped to the floor, I glared at the instructor as she rushed to my bike.

As I twisted my shoe free from the right pedal while reclining on the floor in supine position like a boxer who suffered a crushing body blow, she launched into an explanation of how to tighten the knob on the seat post without asking the one obvious question: “Are you alright?”  Indignant at her lack of concern and insulted by her chirping nonsense, I rose to my feet and roared, “I know how the knob is used!” As I stalked out of the room, she restarted the class on an upbeat note, determined not to let a middle-aged curmudgeon interfere with her intrepid, inspiring happy talk.

Marching indignantly to the front desk, I demanded that the clerk accompany me to the room to check the bike. As he followed beside me, I scowled impressively, offering an expert opinion on the “ridiculous design” of the bikes.  The old bikes had spring loaded bolts that fit into holes in the seat posts – making them more secure but less amenable to subtle adjustments of the seat height; the new bikes have threaded knobs that allow adjustment to any height with the concomitant risk of sudden failure if the device is not secured properly.

When we got to the room, he tested the seat and proved to my infinite chagrin that the post and knob were OK – I had simply failed to tighten the knob sufficiently.  Humiliated once again, I turned on my heel and stalked out, keeping my fierce gaze sternly ahead.  Still fuming, I took a shower and, to seal my reputation as a mad man, marched once again into the spinning room, purposefully avoiding eye contact with the instructor or the remaining cyclists, and copied the serial number off the offending bike on the chance that I decided to notify the club or pursue a claim. Small comfort for a wounded ego.

***

Recently, I moved to a different apartment in pursuit of lower rent and quieter surroundings.  One evening, shortly after getting settled, the red, macho-looking Jeep in the parking space next to mine began to whistle and flash as I pulled in. Put on guard, I slowly opened the door, only to set off the full cacophony of the alarm – headlights flashing, horn honking, siren whooping and wailing.  Abashed, I slunk away as quickly as possible with my head down, glancing furtively from side to side, hoping that no one would suspect that I was trying to jack the Jeep.  The next morning, I left a note for the manager of the apartment complex asking him to address my discourteous neighbor.

That weekend (Halloween) the alarm accosted me again as I returned home on Saturday afternoon so I marched purposefully over the manager’s office to ask him in person to deal with the issue – and he said that he would on Monday morning while looking at me with bovine indifference as ghoulish revelers lurked and lurched in the background.

With one exception, the alarm continued to blast away whenever I unintentionally violated the personal space of the haughty Jeep.  My frustration moderated into curiosity so I stopped by the office and talked to one of the sincere staff members who assured me that management would look into the matter.  A day later, the manager left a voice message stating that he had talked to the owner of the Jeep who said that he planned to address the problem soon.

To my momentary relief, the next morning the alarm did not sound when I snuck warily into my car at 5:00 a.m.  Properly set up, it blasted me out of my temporary complacency when I returned from working out (yes, I took a spinning class at another club).  After fuming through breakfast, I unloaded on a bicyclist who passed me on the sidewalk by telling her in no uncertain terms that sidewalks were not a proper venue for bicycles.  I am an expert on all things bike.

***

Challenges to my fragile, masculine dignity trigger automatic, instantaneous impulses to strike back and defend my manhood as deep roots of obsession ramify into the reptilian part of my brain if the impulse is thwarted.  All slights, all affronts, all misdemeanors inspire an immediate desire to denounce the miscreants summarily.  If not given an outlet, the urges transmute into grievances that fester while I probe incessantly at the emotional canker sores.

My large body deterred others from retaliating against my sharply worded retorts when I was a kid and allowed me to survive to middle age.  With maturity, spaces usually open up between the desire for retribution and the verbal lashing out.  The out-of-control displays of road rage are a thing of the past and emails documenting my contempt are wisely deposited in the trash can after they are composed and quarantined overnight.

Still, the desire for retribution seems inappropriate to the gravity of the threats – the impulse to fight or flight no longer enhances fitness.  It has been decades since I have lashed out physically and often after the desire for revenge marinades for a couple of hours rationality gains the upper hand and the impulse morphs into regret and despair and self-loathing.

Increasingly, neuroscientists are demonstrating, we are strangers to ourselves – the title of David Eagleman’s book summarizes the human condition well: Incognito.  A surprising number of emotions and thoughts are controlled by subconscious elements that developed in evolutionary contexts that are quite unlike modern society.  However, the naturalistic fallacy prevents one from applying genetic excuses to boorish behavior.  The battle to moderate and adjust those impulses is as close as the neighbor’s car or as far away as the humiliation of Gaddafi.

He’s seen a lot of women, but she never escaped his mind

And he just grew, tangled up in blue.

-          “Tangled Up in Blue,” Bob Dylan

Line of Sight

Middle of the night, shuffling around in circles like a lobotomized mental patient: Where am I? What am I doing?  A dentist drill of discomfort twirls insistently at the base of my cranium as a primal imperative insistently rises to consciousness – find a bathroom and find it soon! 

Shifting nervously from foot to foot in an effort to calm myself, it seems increasingly unlikely that a bathroom will appear in a small room with clothes hanging from racks.  The light is bright but does not provide clarity as I rub my sleepy, rheumy eyes.  With baby steps, I exit the closet after realizing vaguely that the route that took me from bed to hallway in the old apartment angled to the left while the trajectory veers to the right in the new one.

Flicking the light switch off (an automatic habit borne of frugality and a heightened concern for sustainability), I sound my way along the bedroom wall until I reach the hall, depositing mental pheromones that will allow me to retrace and refine trails in the new colony populated by one confused two-hundred pound ant.

Simple rules embedded in my unconscious lead to the complex macro-behavior of disposing of waste in the middle of the night in a way consistent with the survival of the colony, but I wonder absentmindedly: Can a colony consist of one member with no queen?  I make a mental note to look into that later, but the imperative amps up its intensity as the unfamiliar but welcoming sight of the bathroom lurches into view as I fumble for a light switch placed in a diabolically unfamiliar place.

***

On the first day of kindergarten, the teacher asked me, “Kevin, what’s on the blackboard?”  Innocently, I answered her question with another one, “What blackboard?”  My response led to hushed conversations between my mother and the teacher, between my mother and the mother next door, and between my mother and father as I hunched playing over toys, taking perverse pride in the fact that they were talking about me: “He couldn’t even see the blackboard?”  Ultimately, the conversations transmuted into an appointment with Dr. Warren Broderson and my special status was communicated to the other kids by my unceremonious removal from class during the middle of the day.

Dr. Broderson perched on a stool and, as he leaned forward, he violated my personal space, increasing my discomfort.  Harsh beams of light pierced my eyes and made them water as the benevolent doctor murmured reassuring incantations as in a rite of passage.  Later, a phoropter was fitted to the bridge of my nose as a kaleidoscope of lenses began to spin and flip before my eyes.  The chart on the wall filled with strange shapes connected at strange angles that morphed and shifted and jumped in unfamiliar ways fascinating to the uninitiated, the visually-impaired. As new combinations of lenses tumbled and clicked into place, Dr. Broderson invoked the minimalist catechism of this strange, scientific liturgy: “Better here?  Microsecond pause. “Or here?”

The first crisp image of my life rose before my eyes like a revelation: a montage of sparse hairs on the top of Dr. Broderson’s balding head as he stared into the recesses of my eyes.  Controlling the power of sight, he was a magician to a confused little boy.  He prescribed glasses with thick lenses that were both a blessing and a curse: in exchange for the gift of sight mocking references to my “four eyes” were hurled when I dropped the ball or made a bad move.  The frames that supported the powerful optics were fractured often during my ill-fated efforts to play sports, but were a price gladly paid.

During the first five years of my life I developed a capacity and level of comfort with feeling and sounding my way in the dark as I made my way through the world without the aid of glasses.  Sometimes I wonder what happened to children with 20/800 sight before the invention of corrective lenses: Were they abandoned?  Did they experience higher rates of accidental injury or death?  If so, why did evolution not eliminate poor eyesight?  Was there a compensating advantage?

My left eye corrects to about 20/25 and my right to 20/40.  Nevertheless, diminished eyesight in my formative years sharpened other senses.  Sounds that many people are unaware of command my attention and demand resolution – the periodic plops of a dripping faucet in the kitchen interfere with sleep.  My normally sure-footed trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night in a familiar apartment confirm that nature compensates for the weakening of one sense with the increased acuity of others. However, the adaptations are not permanent and lead to unintended consequences and further adaptations in an endless kaleidoscopic search for clarity and fitness.

Telling the Truth from the Trees

The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

-          William James, Pragmatism

Many years ago, I developed the habit of investigating the etymology of words after looking them up.  During one of my forays into the back of my trusty American Heritage Dictionary, I discovered that tree and truth have the same root, deru, which means “to be firm, solid, steadfast, hence specialized senses of ‘wood,’ ‘tree,’ and derivatives referring to objects made of wood.”  That truth and trees share a sense of firmness, solidity, and steadfastness is unsurprising – we admire and are attracted to those attributes in the face of an unpredictable, even arbitrary world.  However, on another level, the organic, evolving nature of wood and trees is consistent with the idea of truth that lies at the heart of the philosophy of pragmatism – “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.”

The orientation, attitude, and approach advocated by William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey under the banner of pragmatism stands in stark contrast with firm, solid, steadfast,  absolute truths advocated by religions and ideologies.  In contrast to these positions, truth lives and breathes and adjusts to changing circumstances when viewed from the perspective of pragmatism.

For instance, truths appropriate to conditions found in the Middle East two millennia ago may not avail in the 21^st century.  Of course, ancient truths may continue to be relevant, but they must be evaluated through the lens of current conditions.  This approach requires looking at circumstances carefully, clearly, and directly without prejudging them or applying stale mental models.

In a recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks describes the efforts of Chris Ward, the leader of the Port Authority, to rescue the rebuilding efforts in Lower Manhattan.  Terms like “Ground Zero” are problematic because they become invested with symbolic meanings – truths – that block thought. Truths seem absolute when viewed in the context of current events.  However, truths can take on different or expanded meanings over time.

For example, the term “Ground Zero” originated during the Manhattan Project that led up to the detonation of nuclear weapons during World War II.  In June 1946, the Strategic Bombing Survey asserted: “For convenience, the term ‘ground zero’ will be used to designate the point on the ground directly beneath the point of detonation, or “air zero.’”  The cruel irony is that the country that first detonated weapons of mass destruction during World War II is the same country that suffered an attack on 9/11.

According to Brooks, Ward demystified the meanings surrounding the rebuilding effort and concentrated on “the thing itself” – the massive, complex construction projects that were hampered by the conflicting “truths” that had grown up around what is essentially the burial site of 3,000 people.  Sentiments interfere with the hard work of constructing massive projects.  Brooks goes on to apply the idea of looking at “the thing itself” to various public policy questions – taxes, gun control, green tech – that have become hostage to interest groups on both ends of the political spectrum.

When things become invested with symbolic meanings or values, “You get politicians and commentators whose views are entirely predictable because they don’t care about the specifics of any particular issue.”  Pro-life and pro-choice positions on abortion and Occupy Wall Street efforts to punish the rich and Grover Norquist’s demands that politicians sign pledges stating that they oppose all tax increases as a matter of principle are positions that allow no room for debate – no room for evolving truths. 

Recently, David M. Kennedy was interviewed on Fresh Air.  Kennedy is a criminologist who has looked closely at violent crime in inner city neighborhoods and has promoted programs that have been highly effective in addressing the problems.   His approach entails looking at “the thing itself” – not the bumper sticker slogans, not the posturing of preening politicians who conjure up “headless bodies in the desert,” not the pious platitudes of those who promote self-esteem as a panacea for failure.

Most violence in inner cities is committed by an extremely small number of young, black men whose chances of death are orders of magnitude greater than those of the average American.  However, the story goes much deeper.  Those young men and their neighbors in inner cities believe – rightly or wrongly – that cops are racist and that drugs are weapons in a genocidal crusade aimed at eliminating the black race.  In fact, many residents believe that the CIA invented “crack” cocaine and promoted its use in inner cities.

Frankly, it does not matter if we believe these assertions – the only thing that matters is if we look at the thing itself.  Bottom line: No community can sustain itself if most of the male members are in prison or are ex-felons.  Although a get-tough approach that locks up offenders is appealing in the short run, it is destined to fail in the long run.

Under Kennedy’s program, cops facilitate meetings between gang members and respected members of the community – ministers, ex-gang members, and even mothers of gang members.  During the meetings, the cops and community members tell the current gang members that violence is ripping the neighborhood apart and that “we need you to stop.”  They are told if they do not stop the cops will focus relentlessly on busting them. If they do stop they are given help with finding jobs and drug treatment.

The results can be dramatic – gang members and their neighborhoods begin to heal almost immediately.  This is not a story with a fairy tale ending.  Many communities slide back into old methods that do not to work.  Although the viability of bipartisanship is questionable, many public policy issues are resolvable by reasonable people who are willing to confront the brutal facts.  It is very difficult to keep looking at the thing itself.

A Little Bit Caught in the Middle

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

-          George Bernard Shaw

A fat hitter smashes a fly ball.  As he lumbers toward first base, he momentarily overcomes his fear of running to second base.  As he starts to waddle tentatively around first fear reasserts itself.  He abruptly changes his mind, executes a hasty U-turn, and falls flat on his face as he scrambles frantically back toward the bag.  After reaching safety, he looks up at the umpire and is chagrined to learn that he hit a home run.

In the movie Moneyball directed by Bennett Miller, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) shows a tape of the hapless home run hitter to Billy Beane (Brad Pitt).  “It's a metaphor,” Brand tells Beane who snaps back, “I know it's a metaphor.”  Sometimes we hit home runs – real or metaphorical, earned or unearned – and do not realize it.

In 2002, Beane was the general manager of Oakland A’s, a team that won 103 games after a poor start and a field manager who did not agree with Beane’s methods.  Twenty of the wins were in a row and set a new record for consecutive victories.  Before the 2002 season, the A’s lost three of their best players to free agency because the team could not match the astronomical salaries offered by those in bigger markets.  However, by discovering and acquiring players who excelled in ways not appreciated by the baseball establishment, the A’s were able recover and win one more game than the year before.

***

Like many boys of my generation, I was weaned on baseball.  The first book I remember reading was a thin paperback about the first five players who were elected to the Hall of Fame when it was established in 1936.  Their black-and-white photos are engraved on my memory and evoke qualities comparable to the gods and heroes of Olympus.

·         Babe Ruth revolutionized the game with prodigious home runs while indulging appetites worthy of Zeus.

·         Ty Cobb, fleet of foot, rapped out singles and stole bases like Hermes.

·         Honus Wagner, steady, loyal, dependable, and ugly like Hephaestus, played faultlessly as a shortstop while winning eight batting titles in a row.

·         Walter “Big Train” Johnson, powerful like Poseidon, won over 400 games and set strikeout records that lasted decades while playing for the lowly Washington Senators (“First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”)

·         Christy Mathewson, a graduate of Bucknell College – professional ballplayers with college degrees were rare in the early 1900s – exhibited the intelligence and calm reason of Apollo.

As an overweight, near-sighted kid, condemned to wear “husky” pants and thick glasses, I eagerly awaited the arrival of The Sporting News each week and pored over The Baseball Encyclopedia, memorizing the statistics that constitute a framework through which I was able to comprehend the deeds of my mythological heroes.

Babe Ruth clubbed 714 career homers at time when the game emphasized small ball.  The 4,191 career hits by Ty Cobb penciled out to 200 hits per year for 21 seasons.  Lou Gehrig played in 2,130 consecutive games – he did not miss one for over 13 years.  These sacrosanct numbers still resonate within the context of a mythology to which I no longer subscribe but whose values seem timeless and true.  With the possible exception of Cal Ripken, players like Barry Bonds and Pete Rose who broke the records cited above seem unworthy to fill the shoes of those enshrined in my pantheon.

The quintessential hero of my youth was Sandy Koufax.  He informed a story of redemption that that appealed to me in a way that religious narrative never did.  After languishing for six years as a “bonus baby” who could not be sent down to the minors, he achieved apotheosis when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and he put together the best five consecutive years of any pitcher in history.  His fastball and devastating curve enabled him to pitch no-hitters in four consecutive seasons, culminating with the perfect game that he pitched in 1965 in the shadow of the riots in Watts.  Yogi Berra said it best: “I can see how he won 25 games. What I don't understand is how he lost five.”

The day in 1966 when he announced his retirement due to debilitating pain in his pitching arm was the saddest of my life.  In the season that had just concluded he won 27 games and posted a 1.73 earned run average.  It was unthinkable, unacceptable that a star so bright could exit with so little warning, but the gods abide by schedules not divulged to little boys in Grand Junction, Colorado.

***

The movie Moneyball is based on a book by Michael Lewis that describes Beane’s exploitation of underappreciated statistics to ferret out the hidden value of players.  With the help of men trained in statistical analysis, Beane drafted and traded for players who were not the buffed up physical specimens touted by scouts.  Desirable players in the world according to Beane perform well on metrics (on base percentage or slugging average) that demonstrate an ability to get on base and help score runs (or, the case of pitchers and position players, prevent runs).

Reduced to its fundamentals, baseball games are won by scoring more runs than the other side and outs are scarce resources to be husbanded with the upmost care.  Based on a sober analysis of the statistics, the “Beane counters” employed by the Oakland A’s determined that sacrifice bunts, strikeouts, and getting caught stealing in the interest of “manufacturing runs” were counterproductive.  Instead, they focused on statistics that betrayed a relentless focus on controlling the strike zone and scoring runs.

The universality of the metaphors – “controlling the strike zone” and “scoring runs” – signal that the implications and influence of Moneyball have spread beyond the confines of major league ballparks and have been applied to business, politics, law, and even philosophy.  In the introduction, Lewis claims: “A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about possibilities – and the limits – of reason in human affairs.  Baseball – of all things – was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method.”

With those words, Lewis justifies an interest in baseball statistics as part of a well-rounded education and alludes to the difficulties encountered when trying to operate according to the dictates of reason in the face of received opinion.  Baseball provides a well-developed, rich microcosm in which observers may devise models – mathematical metaphors – that allow them to explore fundamental questions that affect or rule our lives whether we are aware of them or not.  Yet, despite the fact that rational scientific models have improved our lives immeasurably, many people distrust the results and the implications are often ignored or misunderstood in favor of magical thinking – personified in Moneyball by the scouts who refused to accept Beane’s methods.

Billy Beane is the focal character of Moneyball and his backstory provides subtext.  Despite astonishing athletic gifts, Beane failed to meet the high expectations of coaches, fans, and, most importantly, himself during a six-year major league career.  He participated in 148 games with a .219 batting average with three home runs and an anemic on base percentage of .256.

In 1989, he walked off the field as player for the A’s and into the front office.  Sandy Alderson, the general manager of the A’s, hired Beane as a scout and supported his efforts to explore rational evaluations of players.  After he became general manager of the A’s, Beane exploited the inefficiencies in the marketplace of major league baseball by finding better ways to price assets in the form of players by ignoring the conventional wisdom of baseball insiders.  These lessons apply to all areas of human endeavor that would benefit from evidence-based approaches including business and politics.

The book echoes the efforts of my father to create and test models that tease out the value of discrete events in baseball (singles, doubles, triples, homers, stolen bases, walks, balks) in terms of runs created or prevented.  While reading the book, I was often overcome with feelings of déjà vu as Lewis described findings that track almost exactly with those that my father demonstrated years ago (for example, stolen bases are overrated, strikeouts are hugely detrimental, and walks measure the ability of hitters to control the strike zone).

Nevertheless, models only account for a portion of reality – maybe the least important part.  As a materialist, I believe that numbers and the scientific method provide the best places to start any analysis, but the movie Moneyball demonstrates that numbers do not provide meaning.  In a touching scene, Beane watches his daughter, Casey (Kerris Dorsey), strumming a guitar in a music store as she sings a simple song, “The Show.”  At the end of the movie, the camera causes us to recall that scene as it slowly zooms in on Beane as he drives his truck after listening to a CD of his daughter singing the song:

I'm just a little bit caught in the middle

Life is a maze and love is a riddle

I don't know where to go I can't do it alone I've tried

And I don't know why

Some critics have panned the scene, but I believe that it evokes the central message of the movie - life is not baseball, but baseball (like literature or music or art) can provide metaphors, models from which to assess life. But as the camera zooms in on Beane we realize that we are always “just a little bit caught in the middle.”

Epoché

First you defrost the refrigerator.

-          Ernest Hemingway on how to write a novel

When he published Essays in 1580, Michel de Montaigne pioneered the genre – essays – that now terrify schoolchildren.  Contrary to earlier authors, Montaigne was not concerned primarily with politics or religion or any other discipline. He unapologetically and unabashedly took himself as the focus of his efforts and his essays (“attempts” in French) were aimed at understanding himself.

This blog was inspired by Susan Bakewell’s unusual and intriguing biography of Montaigne, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer.  A Booklist review of How to Live cites the “charmingly digressive and tolerantly skeptical essays” of Montaigne.  Although I am not sure if my essays will be charming or tolerant, I believe that I may be able to write digressive and skeptical ones.  Charm, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.  Digression comes naturally to me and, as I get older, I know that I have digressed when I look up from my shoes and discover that my companions are fidgeting and looking at their watches.

The word skepticism may be used in formal or more colloquial senses.  By nature, I am skeptical, but am not as tolerant as Montaigne.  He adopted an attitude of amor fati, or “love of fate,” founded on his acceptance of a strain of skepticism that someone with my judgmental nature finds difficult to embrace.  However, skepticism or “an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object” seems to me to be an appropriate way to respond to the confusing, ambiguous, mysterious, frustrating world that we inhabit. On a day when the “underwear bomber” pleads guilty after acting as his own attorney who can justify anything other than a skeptical attitude?

According to Bakewell, Montaigne subscribed to a school of skepticism named after an ancient philosopher named Pyrrho.  The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:

Pyrrho of Elis . . . left nothing in writing, but his pupil Timon says that whoever wants to be happy must consider these three questions: first, how are things by nature? Secondly, what attitude should we adopt towards them? Thirdly, what will be the outcome for those who have this attitude? According to Timon, Pyrrho declared that things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable and inarbitrable. For this reason neither our sensations nor our opinions tell us truths or falsehoods. Therefore, for this reason we should not put our trust in them one bit, but we should be unopinionated, uncommitted and unwavering, saying concerning each individual thing that it no more is than is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not. The outcome for those who actually adopt this attitude, says Timon, will be first speechlessness, and then freedom from disturbance

The speechlessness and freedom from disturbance that results from following Pyrrho’s analysis is known as epoché, which means “to suspend judgment or withhold assent.”  Pyrrho maintains that epoché is the appropriate attitude in the face of our lack of knowledge.  Since there is no end of our search for knowledge (“skepsis” means to “always search or investigate”), then we cannot even maintain that we do not know anything because that constitutes an unwarranted claim to knowledge – of our ignorance!

Since setting up this blog, I have been taking epoché to an extreme and following Hemingway’s advice to “defrost the refrigerator” (or “clean up my hard drive” or “run to Costco”) instead of preparing and posting essays. However, that is not the same as epoché.

Skeptics do not believe that we cannot discover reasons to act one way or another. For instance, Montaigne deferred to the laws, customs, and traditions of his time and deferred to the Church in all spiritual matters.  Skepticism only maintains that we cannot discover the “correct or right” way.  That approach resonates with me.

Rescorla Reconsidered

On September 11, 2001, Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley, helped evacuate 2,700 employees from the south tower at the World Trade Center. He died when the building collapsed after he reentered it to make sure no one else needed help.

At the time of the attacks, James B. Stewart covered Wall Street for The New Yorker.  The editor of the magazine asked him to concentrate on stories related to 9/11 and the financial district.  During his research, Stewart discovered that many people who worked on floors both above and below those occupied by Morgan Stanley failed to survive the attacks.  Many told Stewart that Rescorla was responsible for the superior performance of Morgan Stanley during the evacuation.

In 1993, after a car bomb was detonated in the garage of the World Trade Center, Rescorla emphasized the virtues of the military adage: “Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.” Before the attacks, he drilled employees on proper evacuation techniques and when the need arose in the fall of 2001 they were ready.  While singing Cornish fight songs to calm nerves and create a sense of solidarity, he descended down the stairs of the south tower with the employees and brought them to safety.

A public relations representative gave Stewart the unlisted number of Rescorla’s wife, Susan Collins.  Stewart visited Collins and started his article, “The Real Heroes Are Dead,”with the story of the middle-aged love affair that blossomed between Rescorla and Collins.

In a nod to Hollywood, they “met cute” when Rescorla was jogging bare foot as part of his research for a play that he was writing and Collins was walking Buddy, her charmingly named dog.  Both had endured failed marriages along with the other trials and tribulations that middle age is heir to including Rescorla’s battle with prostate cancer.  They persevered, took dancing lessons, brought a house in the country, and married.

Rescorla was born and raised in Cornwall, England.  He fought in Cyprus and Rhodesia in the 1950s where he became an ardent foe of communism.  Figuring that the next big battle against communism would be staged in Vietnam, Rescorla emigrated to the United States where he enlisted in the Army and fought with distinction in Vietnam before obtaining creative writing and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma.  Collins was raised in a cocoon of upper middle class privilege only to fall from grace after two marriages ended in divorce.

During the immediate aftermath of the attack on 9/11, Rescorla and Collins talked by cell phone.  Naturally, she was concerned for his safety.  “Stop crying,” he told her. “I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.”

In remembrance of 9/11, I reread the article every year as the anniversary approaches and it always brings tears to my eyes.  It is irresistible, timeless: two people find true love late in life only to have the happy ending spoiled by cruel, senseless death.  Life has a way of taking tragic turns.

When conceiving this essay to commemorate 9/11, I had vague plans to place Rescorla’s story in the context of the three types of souls that Plato addressed in The Republic: gold for philosopher-kings, silver for soldiers, and bronze or iron for everyone else – like me.  Soldiers – like Rescorla – and the martial ethos they embody constitute a continuing threat to civilian rule, but they are invaluable in times of existential danger.

It is easy for physical cowards like me to criticize or fear soldiers and their codes, but when the going gets tough I am the first to look to them for leadership and bravery.  On my best day, I imagine following Rescorla back into the south tower.  However, alone I would probably take the path of least resistance and run like hell.

Wanting to see a photo of Recorla, I Googled his name and, in addition to finding a website devoted to his memory, I stumbled onto a story on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday that ran on the before the anniversary this year.  It told of an opera based on a book that Stewart wrote about Rescorla called, Heart of a Soldier, which was debuting that night in San Francisco.

On some level and with absolutely no justification, I had asserted a kind of proprietary interest in the Rescorla-Collins story thinking that I would be one of the few people who would remember it after all of these years.  I did not know that Stewart wrote a book about Rescorla or that an opera was in the works.  To my chagrin, I was not the only person who was deeply affected by the story.  Nevertheless, I somehow felt scooped.  Life has a way of exposing and questioning preconceived notions. 

After making these discoveries, I went home and picked up my mail, which included the latest edition of The New Yorker.  Predictably, the issue was devoted to 9/11 and contained articles by Adam Gopnik and George Packer that strike opposing notes.  Packer’s article (appropriately entitled, “Coming Apart”) rehearses the failures and disappointments that we have experienced since 9/11 and laments the continued decline of America’s standing and fortunes.

Packer was one of the prominent so-called “liberal hawks” who supported the invasion of Iraq in the wake of 9/11.   Although I do not consider myself to be a liberal, I – like Packer – now regret my naïve support for the war.  The justification bandied about at the time – that Saddam Hussein had or was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction – seems hollow, unsatisfying now.  The fallback position – that the war was justified as a humanitarian effort to rid Iraq of a dictator – also seems hallow and unsatisfying.  Although I stand in awe of the American military in its efforts to deal with the tough – if not impossible – hand that it was dealt, the war and its elusive end seem hollow and unconvincing despite my best efforts to find justification, redemption.

With broader strokes and with a more even handed approach, Gopnik explores the history of what he calls “declinism” as pioneered in 1918 by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West and rehearsed recently by others including Tom Freidman and Michael Mandelbaum in That Used to Be Us.

Gopnik approaches the aftermath of 9/11 from an angle more oblique than Packer by surveying the historical development “declinism” along with its shortcomings and inconsistencies.  Ultimately, he concludes that the concept founders on the metaphysical fallacy that we have the ability to predict and control the future.

Personally, the past fifteen years have been a roller coaster ride.  More than I care to admit, I bought into the dot.com/new economy happy talk with the gullibility of a convert.  When old economic verities reasserted themselves and that bubble exploded, I watched the insanity of the real estate boom with a dash more skepticism, but still was surprised by the depth of the Great Recession.  In the face of my failures to foresee the consequences of the invasion of Iraq and the nauseating twists and turns of the economy, I find myself humbled in the face of current events and astounded at the confidence of politicians and the gullibility of citizens.

As Gopnik points out, many – if not most – of us – including Friedman and Mandelbaum – subscribe to the belief that everyone is inherently rational and that rational discourse will ultimately carry the day.  Yet, we are confronted – and as I realize now have always been confronted – by the stark reality that most of us make up our minds based on emotions that we dress up with reasons later.  Irrational and magical thinking along with paranoia and inappropriate heuristics and biases seem to be built in features of the human brain.

Errors in these processes are amenable to correction by later rational reflection.  However, ideologues and their followers short circuit the process by their inability to change their minds when facts collide with their ideologies – they are inoculated against rational discourse and argument only drives them deeper into their rigid thought processes.  For instance, Gopnik maintains that a surprising number of Americans do not want improved health care or cleaner air or better infrastructure because they view these goals as “luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despise.”

However, Gopnik points out that adopting an attitude of declinism in the face of such obstacles – as I along with Packer, Friedman, and Mandelbaum have done – is “a bad idea, because no one can have any notion of what will happen next.”  Prediction and control hinge on the delusion that we know what we don’t know when, in fact, the threats – and opportunities – are caused by unknown unknowns.

In accordance with our lack of foresight, we are hampered despite our best efforts to foresee or mitigate the risks associated with ideologies, for instance, converting airplanes full of passengers into weapons that cause tall buildings to collapse, nations to betray their ideals, and middle-aged love affairs to end in tragedy.

However, all is not lost. Gopnik asserts that the same lack of foresight allowed Renaissance thinkers to nurture a humanistic point of view that fosters the revolutionary idea:

that while our lives should be devoted to happiness, they’re impoverished without an idea of happiness deeper than mere property-bound prosperity.  The special virtue of freedom is … that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

Voltaire’s admonition to “cultivate your garden” may make more sense than obsessing about the declining fortunes of the United States for the simple reason that obsessing about something may have the effect of causing it.  We can only control what we believe, what we do, what we stand for.

Rescorla “cultivated his garden” as well as looking out for the common good. He wrote plays, took dancing lessons, fell in love late in life, and sang songs while he guided 2,700 people to safety.  Life has a way of taking unpredictable turns.