by Charlie Huenemann

At the beginning of book three of his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume argues that justice is something we invent. In a word, justice is unnatural. It isn't something we just see in the world, since we only ever see what is, and nothing in what we see tells us how things ought to be. Neither does justice come from some inner, natural feeling, if by “natural” we mean the hard-wired, immediate pleasures and pains that we can't help but have. No; to have any sense of justice, we have to be taught to have it. We have to be trained by others to feel a particular kind of pleasure in seeing fair treatment being done. Our parents have to show us how to be fair, and encourage us in whatever ways they can to get us to want fairness, until it starts to seem natural to us.

Parents train their children in this way because, somewhere along the way, our ancestors figured out – probably the hard way – that respecting and honoring fairness eventually leads to the kind of life where we can live safely, raise families, and keep property. Justice works. And so these ancestors taught their children to be fair, and they taught their children, and so today do we. “In a little time, custom and habit operating on the tender minds of children, makes them sensible of the advantages, which they may reap from society, as well as fashions them by degrees for it, by rubbing off those rough corners and untoward affections, which prevent their coalition”. We become shaped by our early experiences to take some pleasure in a sense of justice – and a good thing, that.

Hume argues that this early and artificial shaping has to be in place well before promises can have any hold over us. Promises come about because, at some point, the affairs of daily life present us with circumstances where an exchange of this for that can't happen right away. “Your corn is ripe to-day; mine will be so to-morrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I shou'd labour with you to-day, and that you shou'd aid me tomorrow”. At this point, a promise would come in handy. So we invent special words and signs that constitute a promise. But there is no reality to this human invention, apart from all of us agreeing to treat it as a real thing, out of the interest in justice we have been shaped to have.

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Posterity:

………… all that
follows

every generation since Oldowan man chipped obsidian and flint
to make a stone ax to lay open the skull of an adversary
for food or turf, honing technique until

at this end
he’s chipped them
into ICBMs

the inner stuff of blind surge
the inclination of instinct
down a slippery slope

…………the popped buds
…………of hope

…………or

whatever’s survived
the gauntlet of a willful Demiurge
in which rank and ecstatic
blossoms collide

what morphs into the next thing
which unfolds from a chrysalis
and mounts the sky

a lime Luna moth the color of bliss
a bird that whistles, a bird that sings
desire that will not desist
the leading edge of everything

the fruit it brings

my daughters now in the outer world
pushing on, pioneers

………..a bird that whistles
……………a bird that suffers
…………………a bird that sings
.

by Jim Culleny
3/12/14

by Brooks Riley

We didn’t want a second cat. That said, we got a second cat, succumbing to the desperate pleas of a friend with two litters to give away. By the time we capitulated, she was the only kitten left.

If there were an antonym for ‘runt’, it would have applied to Sperl, as we finally named her (see T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Naming of Cats’). She was the biggest kitten of the two litters, a black-and-white, gangly thing with a strange face. Like a mother who loves one child more than another, I did my best to hide my antipathy. Our other cat, after initial outrage, lapsed into a state of chronic resentment behind a mask of indifference.

Sperl was huge, a gentle giant with muscles, not fat. Anthropomorphically speaking, she could have been a Valkyrie (with an operatic voice to match), or a female wrestler. When she was nearly grown, it dawned on me that she had become a great beauty. But something else made me sit up and take notice: It was that presence, so much greater than her body mass. I fell in love.

When she died eight years later (was it gigantism?), it was one of the saddest days of my life. She had brought us so much pleasure, and more: She had taught me a thing or two. In memory of Sperl I have written down the Sperl Commandments, as I learned them from her.

The Sperl Commandments

1. If they don’t like it, don’t do it.

There was almost nothing Sperl did that I didn’t like. She was a considerate cat, unlike others I’ve known. She never used her claws, even when she was kneading my stomach in a show of affection. She knew instinctively what I liked and what I didn’t. If I reprimanded her for something just once, she never did it again.

2. Don’t be forced to do something you don’t want.

Sperl didn’t like to be held. She might curl up on my lap, but if I picked her up, she would struggle to get down, using her muscles to get free, not her claws, not her teeth. Because I was so besotted, I sometimes picked her up anyway, just to hold that great bulk in my arms (I had yet to learn Commandment number 1). Over time, to please me, she would remain still in my arms a bit longer—one second, then four, in the end ten whole seconds–before she began to squirm.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

In my first piece for 3QD, I discussed some aspects of the science of queueing. In this essay, I'd like to ground that discussion in the context of delays that patients routinely experience in American hospitals. In 2010, there were around 130 million visits to the emergency departments (EDs) of hospitals around the country. Nearly 23% of these patients waited an hour or more to see a care provider [link]. Many urban hospitals and individual patients do much worse.

The documentary The Waiting Room foregrounds the human stories that underlie these statistical estimates, and lets patients, their families, nurses, doctors and social workers speak for themselves. The film is shot during a 24-hour period at the emergency department of a safety-net hospital: Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. 241 patients come to seek care during this one day. Most of the time the camera is in the waiting room, where patients reconcile themselves to a long wait; this applies even to a man with a gunshot wound, whose body is turning numb – hard to believe but true.

The problem faced by Highland Hospital is by no means unique. I've heard it many times from hospital administrators and clinicians. My own research on reducing delays in healthcare led me to work with a large hospital which sees nearly 300 patients daily — more than Highland — in its emergency department. I was quite familiar with what I saw in the documentary: the look and feel of the waiting area; the small rooms inside the main care section with beds and equipment, curtained off to provide patients and their families some privacy; the additional hallway beds with no privacy, but nevertheless necessary due to the sheer volume of patients in acute condition; the constant buzz of pagers, movement of personnel, calls for lab analyses and diagnostic scans; the flicker of computer screens with way too much information; the difficulties in deciding whether the patient should be admitted to an inpatient unit or discharged; and if discharged where the patient should go, for some psychiatric or substance abuse patients have no home to return to.

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by Michael Lopresto

What, if anything, makes life worth living? What matters to us most as human beings, and hence enables us to live the good life? Could it be knowledge, or worthwhile achievement, or love? Philosophers have produced various answers to this question. Aristotle argued that the good life is one lived according to reason, where we as rational beings exercise our rationality and virtue. Accordingly, we'd be in a state of flourishing. (Philosophers would apparently be living the ultimate form of life, on this view.) Alternatively, philosophers have come up with two main competing theories to Aristotles's: hedonism and objective-list theory. These two views contrast with each other really well. Hedonism says all that matters for a life to go well only has to do with having good experiences, namely, pleasure and happiness. Objective-list theory, on the other hand, moves right away from hedonism's first-person perspective, and says that all that matters is what can be “seen from the outside”, and from here we try to construct an open-ended list of all the things that are objectively valuable that can be plausibly said to make a life go well. Presumably, we'd include things on this list like knowledge, achievement of worthwhile ends, wisdom, friendship, and so on.

How are we to decide between these three views? One way may be to subject each view to criticism, and see which one fares best. So the objective-list theorist may say to the hedonist that hedonism can't be true because someone could conceivably get happiness counting blades of grass or from watching Nicolas Cage films. The hedonist may in turn say to the Aristotelian or the objective-lister that exercising one's rationality, or pursuing worthwhile ends, actually makes one miserable, and this is by no means a good life. Constantly exercising one's rationality may lead one to be constantly vigilant about one's moral obligations to humanity, and to be constantly weighed down by the knowledge of having done morally wrong things in the past, like dismissing the desperate needs of a friend.

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by Dave Maier

I don't usually watch the opening or closing ceremonies of the Olympics – I like to think of the Super Bowl halfime show as an aesthetic catastrophe uniquely American in nature – but I did see the Sochi closing ceremony, which celebrated Russian achievement in the arts. Or some of them, anyway. We saw dancers and poets and painters and composers, but sadly missing (with a partial exception to be noted below) was a form to which Russian artists have contributed spectacularly since its very beginnings up through the present day.

Russian cinema ranges in tone from the bleak to the mordant to the ecstatic, in subject from the quotidian to the mystical and visionary. If you appreciate the characteristically Russian sensibility in music or literature or painting, you will surely recognize it here as well.

Some of the following films are well-known classics, others possibly mere curiosities. Time will tell; but in any case this is not a best-of list – I have omitted many famous names (Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Eisenstein) – but simply a selection for your enjoyment (much like my similar list of Japanese films a while back). I'm not a film critic, so I might not have any great insights to share with you. Go watch the films, they speak for themselves.

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by Maniza Naqvi

She is startled awake by the sound of her own snore—a sense of falling—a sudden panic— the sensation of drool down the side of her mouth—the cold point on her forehead against the window– the plane seems to be dropping—she looks out of the window—where are they? Above the Congo — no must be just out of Lilongwe—she must've nodded off—The long road trips to several villages—starting out at six am and returning late in the evening and all the attendant turmoil of thoughts— The guilt of having three meals a day—and clean water– The Agenbite of Inwit—Coetzee—had it right——-last night on a narrow path—between fields on fire—stubs of maize, stalks set ablaze—and in the other blaze of headlights: children, fleeting sights—-Children catching fleeing mice, trapping them for food—-a special favorite treat. The SUV, rushing through the rising smoke, with its large aid logos, stamped on its sides. In it, peering through the haze outside, Coetzee, Mapanje in her head, one sentence after the next.——– she is caught there—suspended—repeating words—the Agenbite of Inwit—And tomorrow is another long day and then another long ride– back in the night—Confused she looks out into the darkness— — a large patch of lights below—are they approaching Addis already? That would mean she's slept the entire three hours — But the cramped seat—the shabby state of the seats does not fit what she is accustomed to on Ethiopian. But then the surly announcement just then—instructions about the seat belts meant to allay the fear of the abruptness of turbulence—brings her back—She is suspended ten thousand feet above the frozen space between Minneapolis and Washington DC—on United—-another two hours to go—they must have just flown over Chicago—-she can just make out that it's all frozen below.

The fear sets in for a moment just as it does over the Congo— the sight of the frozen lakes conjure up the same sensation as do dense green forests —what happens if she were to fall—into that wilderness—if the plane were to crash—This possibility she wills herself to banish from her thoughts—she must get her feet on the ground fast— she tries to lure herself back to sleep—wills a calmness to flow through every fiber and nerve—-she is afraid of flying—and yet it seems she is forever doing this.

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