Charlie Hustle

Two Pete Roses died.

Pete Rose the man hit more pitches for base hits than anyone else who ever played Major League Baseball. He ran hard, slid headfirst, and made the All-Star team 17 times.

Pete Rose the myth stood for much more and became larger than life. He symbolized ideals to which many Americans still aspire.

In 1954, psychologist Julian Rotter coined the phrase “locus of control,” which refers to the degree people believe that they – and not external factors beyond their influence – control the outcomes of events in their lives. A strong internal locus of control, i.e., the belief that we are in charge of our own success, often leads to putting in more effort and focusing on achievement. If we think our test scores will be higher because we try harder, and we’re not worried about our genetics, or whether the test is hard, or whether the teacher hates us, we will put in the hours and give it our best shot.

Rose was an ugly guy with a bad haircut who tried hard and whose effort made things happen on the baseball field. Rose’s conduct and resulting success sent a message. I can just imagine Reds and Phillies fans as they looked in the mirror every morning: “I may be ugly and have a bad haircut, but if I try harder, good things will happen for me too, and people will say: ‘There goes a guy who kicks ass.’” How many little league coaches yelled at their players, “What the @#$% are you doing out there? You think Pete Rose would’ve stopped running?!?”

Like his hero, Ty Cobb, the other guy with the most hits ever, Pete Rose was also a cautionary tale for humanity who didn’t appear to care whether he hurt people on the field or off it. Rose was a selfish asshole who bet on his own team, hung out with drug dealers, and showed no outward sign that he ever cared about doing the right thing outside the baselines. Many people loved him for it.

There is nothing controversial about Pete Rose the man. He paid his gambling debt with his legacy. The end.

When Pete Rose the myth died, though, many expressed a desire to forgive his trespasses – “He was a great player!” “Everybody’s gambling now!” – and put him in the Hall of Fame. That won’t happen. And it shouldn’t. The Hall has unequivocal rules and consequences. It doesn’t care about popularity or peer pressure, which is why it currently commands more respect than the White House, the Capitol, or the Supreme Court. You play by the rules or you don’t get in. Period.

This is a clarifying moment.

The paradox of tolerance has led us to a tipping point in our cultural and political history. Shouldn’t we all appreciate each other and everyone else, no matter what we say or do?

No.

As Mira Ptacin points out in her brilliant account of how a community in rural Maine stood up to a neo-Nazi (see What I’m Reading below), near the end of World War II Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper wrote about the paradox of tolerance. From The Open Society and Its Enemies:

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal.

If we don’t maintain a sense of right and wrong, and we legitimize the world view of every flat-earther, Holocaust denier, and baseball cheater out of a misplaced sense of empathy just because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, the players become bigger than the game, and the game itself as we know it ceases to exist. When the game is actually our community, our society, our system of government, or the physical environment upon which we depend for our survival, ethical cowardice becomes a problem we cannot afford.

I’d like to know: Where do you think we should draw the line? Drop me a line and tell me about it. I’m curious.

Curiosity is worth practicing. That’s how we get better at it. When it’s done particularly well, curiosity can be elevated to an art form. Curiosity makes life worth living. I am literally Curious AF. And now you can be too! Click HERE to unlock your free membership subscription.

Here is a taste of what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.

If You Give a Mouse an Ephaptic Field Effect –

In 2013 at TEDxUCLA I said, “For all of our advances in neuroscience and observational technology, and academic disciplines, I’m still at a loss to explain how that sub-neuronal lightning storm somehow creates my experience of being alive.” I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that thoughts, feelings, memories, and perceptions are sparked in the synaptic spaces between axons and dendrites. I’m clearly no expert (as you can tell, because an expert probably would have used the word subneural), so I’m tickled to report that there is even more to this than meets the retinal ganglial cells.

It turns out that our mechanistic ideas about neurotransmitters carrying impulses from cell to cell may not be the whole story. From Scientific American: While neuroscientists have long focused on spikes traveling throughout brain cells, “ephaptic” field effects may really be the primary mechanism for consciousness and cognition. These effects, resulting from the electric fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings, may play a leading role in our mind’s workings.” In simpler terms: The electric and magnetic interactions that power our cells create tiny fields which conduct impulses between cells that don’t touch each other.

In 2019, researchers sliced mouse brains and separated the pieces, and within 400 microns the cells still communicated through these electrical fields. The idea that slow periodic activity in the longitudinal hippocampal slice can propagate without chemical synaptic transmission or gap junctions, but can generate electric fields which in turn activate neighbouring cells was so revolutionary that peer reviewers demanded that it be replicated – three times – before accepting it for publication.

Now I’m curious about how those energy fields may affect multiple people when they’re in close proximity. It sure would explain a lot about empathy and crowd behavior.

What I’m Watching –

My parents met at the Goethe Institute in Heidelberg as exchange students. They learned German together and spoke it around the house when they wanted to keep a secret from my sister and me. It worked: 16 ways to say the word “the” is exactly 15 too many for me.

So I read the subtitles and listened to guttural, nostalgic gibberish with an occasional recognized word (schnell, bitte, scheiße) when I watched Murder Mindfully on Netflix. From Decider: “In a new German comedy, a lawyer who has gotten wealthy working for a mafia boss but has no control of his own time gets that control back — but he has to kill lots of people in order to do that.” Deep breaths.

What I’m Reading –

A number of things came to mind this week when I read The Crash of the Hammer: How Concerned Citizens Ran a Neo-Nazi Out Of Rural Maine by Mira Ptacin. From The Atavist: “For years, Crash has been doing the dirty work for the rest of us, documenting pockets of hate in America.”

I’m actually reluctant to provide more summary or commentary here because I want you to read this for yourself. The portrayals of everyday neighbors, the history of our country, the courage to stand against hate, the beauty of love and community, and the satisfaction that comes from 80 year-olds righteously telling off a douchebag are all on proud display, and expertly woven into a story we should be sharing in classrooms across the country.

Quotes I’m pondering —

There’s only one way to play, and that’s to bust ass.
– Pete Rose

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