The Patriarchy of Rousseau

There's a lot I like about the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. There is also, however, a lot to dislike. As I've been reading his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and now the Discourse on Political Economy, I keep bumping into passages that basically make me want to say, "Rousseau, you pig!" Like this one, for example:

In the family, it is clear, for several reasons which lie in its very nature, that the father ought to command. In the first place, the authority ought not to be equally divided between father and mother; the government must be single, and in every division of opinion there must be one preponderant voice to decide. Secondly, however lightly we may regard the disadvantages peculiar to women, yet, as they necessarily occasion intervals of inaction, this is a sufficient reason for excluding them from this supreme authority: for when the balance is perfectly even, a straw is enough to turn the scale. Besides, the husband ought to be able to superintend his wife's conduct, because it is of importance for him to be assured that the children, whom he is obliged to acknowledge and maintain, belong to no one but himself. Thirdly, children should be obedient to their father, at first of necessity, and afterwards from gratitude: after having had their wants satisfied by him during one half of their lives, they ought to consecrate the other half to providing for his. Fourthly, servants owe him their services in exchange for the provision he makes for them, though they may break off the bargain as soon as it ceases to suit them. I say nothing here of slavery, because it is contrary to nature, and cannot be authorised by any right or law.

Now, to a certain extent one shouldn't judge Rousseau too harshly for this passage. It was probably no worse, and perhaps even a bit more enlightened, than the conventional wisdom of the day. He at least makes a nod toward the general equality of the sexes, for example. Moreover, this is found in a tract on political economy, not economy in the original sense, pertaining to a single household. The point of discussing the natural patriarchy of a family in this passage is to go on, in the next one, to contrast a political society with a family, and argue that a political ruler does not hold his command by natural right as the father does. The claims he makes in this paragraph are probably best understood as allusions by Rousseau to the conventional wisdom about Topic X for the purpose of making a point about Topic Y. Those mitigating factors aside, however, my god how piggish the ideas in that paragraph are.

Political Donations Can't Be Irrelevant to Profits

The Chamber of Commerce, in opposing a petition to the Securities and Exchange Commission asking for a requirement that public companies disclose all political donations, had occasion to state that it "believes that the funds expended by publicly traded companies for political and trade association engagement are immaterial to the company’s bottom line." This is impossible. Every dollar that a company gives to a political cause is a dollar it doesn't have, i.e. a dollar subtracted from its bottom line. Insofar as it's true, then, that political donations do not cause a change in anything else about a company's costs or revenues, the expected marginal change in a company's bottom line on each dollar spent on political donations is -$1. Now, companies aren't usually supposed to do things where the marginal expected effect on the bottom line is -$1 per dollar spent. It's kind of irresponsible, from a business stand-point. Even things like charitable donations aren't thought to have an expected value of -$1; the assumption is that having a decent charitable reputation will generate goodwill, and therefore sales, for a company. You could imagine that some companies might try to do something similar with political donations, trying to generate goodwill with a particular segment of the political market and thereby acquire a loyal customer base. But that, of course, depends on conspicuous generosity, not on secret donations with non-disclosure. How might dollars spent on politicking make up some of their immediate losses? I don't know. Perhaps the corporations in question expect to fare better in a world where their preferred candidates are in office, either because they think they'll receive favors or because they think those candidates' policies will make the world a better place for them to inhabit. But I'm pretty sure that, when a corporation makes a political donation, it expects to get recoup some of that money, somehow. And if it doesn't, it's making an irresponsible business decision. So, by the very logic of profits and economic self-interest, the Chamber's statement must be wrong: funds expended for political engagement are extremely material to the bottom line, one way or another.

The Lockdown and Letting the Terrorists Win

My professor just quoted some public commentator who cancelled a debate with him that had been scheduled for today as having questioned the lockdown of Boston last week. Why, if the point of terrorism is to create terror, did we let them win? Why did we fold to our terror, and shut down a whole city? Well, here's the answer: how many people got killed during the lockdown? As best I understand, not a one. That, to me, is a win. I'll take "letting the terrorists win" in the sense of acting scared for a day or two any day, if it means no one gets killed. Or, to put it another way, you wouldn't have had to tell me to "shelter-in-place" last Friday, I'd've done it of my own initiative. You could scarcely have paid me enough to step out the front door. Good god, I would've been terrified. For my life. And rationally so: there was a real danger. Terrorists try to create fear. This is within their power. Violence creates danger creates fear. We can't fight them on this: if they get to cause violence, they get to cause fear. We can try to prevent them causing violence. You know what did a great job of that? The lockdown and manhunt.

This is not to say that we should always do anything possible to avoid exposing anyone to any possible violence. Shutting down all airplanes forever, for instance, would have massive adverse consequences. Telling everyone to stay inside for a day, however, is not in that category: it was a sensible precaution against a specific, imminent threat, and it successfully prevented any further casualties from the manhunt.

Stanton's Slumps

Giancarlo Stanton is playing very badly right now. Like, very badly. For the three previous years of his career, Stanton's average 162-game season would have included 41 home runs, 101 runs driven in, 36 doubles, and a triple-slash line of .270/.350/.553. Those are good numbers. They probably also don't represent his ceiling; he's pretty clearly got the best raw power in baseball, or very nearly the best. Through 13 games this year (a figure depressed by several games he missed with a minor injury), Stanton has had 48 at-bats. He has nine hits. Two of them were doubles; none of them were home runs. He's struck out 20 times, which in fairness is only somewhat above his career rate of roughly 3 at-bats per strikeout. He has walked nine times, which is solid; oddly, only one of those was an intentional walk. That's an overall line of .188/.316/.229, which is, well, decent for a pitcher. Not very good for the best pure power hitter in the game. Also, Stanton has only driven in a single solitary run, and that's a new update since the last time I had checked, when he had 0 RBI on the year. What gives?

People will often say, of various players around this time of year, that if you slump like so-and-so has done to start the year in August, no one notices. It's not quite true; at the very least the people watching a given team every day, the announcers and the manager and the diehard fans, notice the 3-for-20 slumps in August. But let's consider whether Stanton has had a slump like this before. The answer is that yes, he has. Three times before he's had a home run drought of at least this magnitude, once in each of his full seasons. But only one of those, his rookie year, was as bad as his overall play this April.

Beauty, Horror, and Observers

It is often observed, in one form or another, that the universe contains a great deal of beauty and a great deal of horror. The statement does not, I believe, need much justification. The horror is apparent just about everywhere on this planet, and in this part of the world especially apparent after a week like this past one. It's not just in the human world, of course; that's the point of the whole "nature, red in tooth and claw" thing. The beauty, however, is equally apparent, from the brilliance of the stars to the serenity of a natural landscape to a gorgeous human being to the beauty of, say, a random act of kindness. This post is not about the balance between the two. No, it's about the relationship between the two.

Consider the following. Many thousands of light years away, in the heart of our galaxy, a supermassive black hole is sitting there eating. That's what it does: it eats other stars, other systems, other worlds. Is that horrible? It's certainly an awful lot of destruction. I contend, however, that it is not horrible. (Probably, that is.) As best we can tell, none of the worlds being eaten by that black hole, or any other for that matter, have any life on them, let alone sentient, complex life. We don't normally consider it a horror if we smash a rock, though it is certainly destructive. A black hole eating up stars and planets and asteroids is the same thing. And, given that it's not horrible, it can be cool, and interesting, and maybe even beautiful, in its own strange way. A universe that had no life, then, would be wholly free of horror, as might one devoid of complex, sentient life. Horror requires suffering, and suffering requires a sufferer.

Conversely, how about some particularly pleasant astronomical phenomenon? A nebula, for instance, or an aurora. Is that beautiful? Well, people might disagree, but an awful lot of people think an awful lot of such things are very beautiful indeed. But, hang on, that's an intrinsically subjective statement: a lot of people think such things are beautiful. But are they? Well, that's an absurd thing to ask. Beauty is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You can't describe something as beautiful without a frame of reference, specifically without someone observing it. But consider the implications of that fact. If beauty can only exist in the context of observation, then the universe is not beautiful unless it has some observers in it. And observers must be life forms. Probably they even need to be complex, sentient life forms in order to actually impart beauty on the things their senses detect.

But, hang on. I just said that the presence of (complex, sentient) life forms is a necessary condition for the presence of horror in the universe. Now the very same thing is a necessary condition for the presence of beauty as well? Oops. In fact I think it may be true that complex, sentient life forms might sort of be sufficient conditions for both beauty and horror as well. Horror because, well, presumably these creatures aren't immortal, which means they'll die eventually, which makes a certain amount of pain and suffering inevitable. Beauty is probably more controversial a claim, and one I won't try too hard to justify, but I think it's likely that some sense of aesthetic pleasure will pretty naturally develop in any such creatures.

What we have, then, is an intimate connection between horror and beauty in the universe. If there are no living things, the universe has no value. No beauty or wonder or magnificence, but also no horror or terror or evil. The universe is just empty of anything except stuff. But the very thing we might try to do in order to allow the possibility of the positive values, creating some sentient beings, is precisely the thing that will, perhaps inevitably, bring all the negative values rushing in along with the good ones. You literally cannot have the good stuff without the bad stuff; whether it's possible to have pain and horror and misery without having there be anything beautiful in the universe is, I think, a fairly uninteresting question, since it's not like that's something we're trying hard to accomplish.

One final note is that value spreads through the universe in an interesting way once we do create some sentient life forms. (Where "we," of course, probably means impersonal forces over billions of years.) You're unlikely to have them from the beginning of the universe's existence, so for all the time that the universe exists lifeless, it is valueless as well. Right? Well, not really. Because beauty, in particular, is a quality of observation, and the curious thing about observation is that it comes at the end of the causal chain. It's an effect, not a cause (although it might then cause other things, of course). But that means that an observation event becomes beautiful at its end, while the signal that was observed as being beautiful was created and sent at the beginning of the event. Was that signal beautiful from the beginning? Perhaps it was, since after all it is the thing being observed that we consider beautiful and that thing only enters the picture at the very beginning of the process. But it can only have been beautiful in retrospect, or, if you like, it always was beautiful, but it didn't really become something that had been beautiful until the signal arrives at its destination. The result of which is that our lifeless universe was already beautiful, if there will ever be living things in the future who will observe the signals created by that universe while it was lifeless. That is, of course, what happens, since light (and all other information) takes time to travel through space. When we look at a star, we're looking at it some thousands or millions of years ago. When we look at a distant galaxy, we're looking at it billions of years ago, perhaps from back when the universe was lifeless. And if we think it looks beautiful, we can only think that it looked beautiful all those years ago. So once we have living beings observing our vast universe, they impart value on it even before they ever existed. Value cascades backwards through the causal chains of observation, retroactively giving life to the long-gone lifeless periods of the universe's history. Kinda neat, if you ask me.

Put the Bat on your Goddamn Shoulders, Guys!

The New York Mets entered the bottom of the ninth in today's baseball game against the Washington Nationals trailing by a run. They had the top of the order due up, namely (today) Justin Turner, Daniel Murphy, and David Wright. Now, Turner in particular is no power hitter, and neither really is Murphy although he's been hitting for more power than usual so far this year. But still, what you want out of them, and especially out of Turner, is just to reach base somehow. And Turner got to a 3-1 count against Rafael Soriano. And then he swung at the next pitch, a fastball that I'm pretty sure was up and out of the strike zone, fouling it back. He also swung at the next pitch, which in fairness probably was a strike, and lined out to right field. Murphy then also got into a 3-1 count, whereupon he swung at a good slider on the outside corner of the plate and hit a weak ground ball to first base. David Wright, then, got behind 1-2 and then worked out a walk. How'd he manage that? Well, he didn't swing at the various pitches Soriano threw that weren't in the strike zone. Then up came cleanup hitter John Buck, who swung at a first-pitch slider that was either perfectly placed on the corner or outside, and hit a weak ground ball to the shortstop, ending the game.

Is it that hard for a guy in that spot where they're just trying to get on base to just not swing 3-1? The pitcher's been demonstrating some wildness, you're not going to hit a home run, and if he misses the plate, you're on first base. An out has not been made. Everything's good. Even if he does throw the ball over the strike zone, you're not out yet, it's just a full count. At the very least, Turner and Murphy should've been extremely selective, yeah? As in, like, don't swing at a shoulder-level fastball or a slider, anywhere? Gah, it's so infuriating when hitters swing themselves out of an inning like that: Soriano was trying to walk Turner, and Turner just said, no thanks. And then Buck, of course, after Soriano fell behind two batters and walked a third, swung at a first-pitch slider and made the last out of the ballgame. Geez.

Fox you, Fox

The New York Mets are playing a baseball game starting in a few minutes. It'll probably start before I finish writing this post, though it hasn't yet. It's a FOX game, meaning it gets played on Saturday afternoon (they used to be at 4 p.m., but this seems to be at 3) and the team's own broadcast doesn't get to carry it. I think I recall that there used to be only one FOX game each Saturday, but now there appear to be several, and since there's only one FOX channel showing these games, they have to decide which parts of the country see which games. Now, I'm currently located in Providence. They have apparently decided that, rather than watch the Mets and Nationals, I am most likely to be interested in the Detroit Tigers and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. I am currently located 147 miles from Citi Field in Queens, 359 miles from Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., 600 miles from Comerica Park in Detroit, and 2571 miles from Angels Stadium in Anaheim. But apparently they project me to care more about the Tigers and Angels.

The consequence of this is that I have no way to watch the game. No way whatsoever. Normally, when one's local TV doesn't carry a given game, that's because one is out of its market, and if one has an MLB.TV subscription one can watch the local broadcast online. For a national broadcast, like FOX or ESPN, you can't do that, of course, but, well, it's a national broadcast. You can't be out of market. Except that FOX isn't a true national broadcast: it's a national lottery broadcast, where you might get to watch the game you want. So all I can do is get up Gameday and listen to the Mets' radio broadcast over my computer, which is fine since Howie Rose and Josh Lewin are so much better than any FOX announcers. But still, the principle is supposed to be that you can watch any baseball game anywhere if you have the MLB.TV subscription. This is not the case in practice. The more routine problem is that the local blackout zones, areas where you can't watch a given game online because you're in one of the teams' local media markets, correlate only rather roughly with the actual range of the relevant TV stations. But there's also this problem that FOX blocks out multiple games every Saturday and only allow any given person to watch one of them. This is not acceptable, and eventually it's going to need to change. Either they could concoct some way to let people have access to any one of the three FOX games, or they need to let people watch those FOX games that they don't actually have TV access to online. Something needs to give here.