Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More comments on these essays can also be seen at Frans de Waal’s Facebook page.

by Frans de Waal

I’ve been told that gender is uniquely human, so what would be the point of comparing us with other species? They only have sexes.

I find this highly unlikely.

Jonas, a two-year-old baby, closely follows every bluff display by high-ranking males in the chimpanzee colony. Each male has a distinctive style, including spectacular jumps, hand-clapping, flinging objects, and breaking off branches. The alpha male often drums for minutes on end against a specific metal door to demonstrate his vigor. Mothers keep their little ones close throughout this racket, but let them go as soon as the performer calms down. Once released, Jonas runs up to the exact same door. With all his hair on end, he kicks it just like alpha had done. It doesn’t sound the same, but he has the right idea.

I’ve often seen male infants do so, never females. Young females rather follow the actions of adult females, such as their mother. I call it “self-socialization:” young primates emulate the behavior of adults of their own sex. They choose them as models. If their monkey-see-monkey-do mentality helps them develop sex-typical behavior, we could say that they have “genders,” too. Gender refers to the influence of the environment in shaping adult behavior, such as the expectations and norms surrounding the roles of men and women. Read more »

by Martin Butler

Liz Truss, the recently appointed UK PM, has said: “My mission is to make our country an aspiration nation, where every child, every person has the best opportunity to succeed.”

At first glance who could argue with this?  However when Truss speaks of success it’s reasonable to assume that she isn’t talking about eudemonia or being the best person you can be; she means something like having a successful career, getting a good job or doing well financially in some other way. And if we accept this interpretation, there is a problem with Truss’s mission that she, and others with similar views, never seem to confront.

Let’s imagine that Liz Truss achieves a society “where every child, every person has the best opportunity to succeed”. Let’s then also imagine that everyone takes the opportunities given to them, for if her statement is to mean anything at all this must surely be at least a theoretical possibility. Now let’s remind ourselves of the obvious point that societies that have ‘good jobs’ such as solicitors, doctors, accountants, successful entrepreneurs and so on can only operate if there are also refuse collectors, care assistants, road sweepers and the like, and that the latter need to considerably outnumber the former.  Societies requiring the high-powered also require far more of the unsung. Perhaps in future when technology has reached a more advanced stage the structure of the workforce might radically alter. Despite all the prophecies on this front, however, we are not there yet by a long way. This creates a problem, since success for everyone at the same time, in the sense of having an esteemed career, cannot even be a theoretical possibility.

What is insidious about this is that if everyone really has the best opportunity for success, we can explain why someone doesn’t succeed by saying that they didn’t take the opportunity offered to them, that they lacked ‘aspiration’ – thus turning lack of achievement into a personal failing and adding a sense of shame to those who are already struggling. Read more »

by Michael Abraham

She used to roll up to my house late at night, in her green pickup truck, smoking a Parliament out the window and blasting The Strokes. I was seventeen. I would climb in, and we would drive through my neighborhood much too fast, her weak, amber headlights illuminating only the nearest spot of road. We would talk about the day, about our friends at Catholic school, about whatever. It wasn’t so much about the talking. Even then, at that early time in our friendship, it was about the being together, often the being together in silence. We grew up outside of Seattle, and so there were woods aplenty, and we would pull off on some country highway, and she would take out her straight-tube bong, and we would rip it while Julian Casablancas crooned, Some people think they’re always right. Others are quiet and uptight. Others, they seem so very nice-nice-nice, oh! Inside they might feel sad and wrong, oh, no! We liked that song, probably because inside we felt so sad and so wrong, so unfit as subjects in the world we inhabited. Two misfit kids in a green pickup truck in the dead of night. Then, she would start the truck back up, and we would drive listlessly through the dark vigil of the trees on either side of the road, winding this way and that, singing along or lapsing into thought. I would stare out the window and watch the shadows roll by, and I would feel, for a moment, impossible and effervescent. I fell in love with her on these long, circuitous drives through the night. I came to believe very strongly in her, in the vibrancy of her presence, in some curious and ineffable extra that she had to her which other people did not have. She was imposing, even then, as she is now—but gentle inside, just. 

For my birthday that year, she gave me a copy of Crush, Richard Siken’s first book of poetry. Years later, I would meet Siken at a signing in New York, and I would ask him to do something a bit odd, which was to sign the book, not on the title page, but under a poem called “Unfinished Duet.” He would ask why, and I would respond, “A dear friend gave me this book when I was seventeen, and I read ‘Unfinished Duet,’ and now I study poetry at NYU,” which was an entirely true genealogy. Siken smiled knowingly, and he wrote, beneath the poem, “I [illegible] like this [illegible] little poem. I couldn’t finish it so I wrote a whole ‘nother book. RS.” This was probably a gentle nudge to get me to buy the book for which the signing was being held, but I was a college student and broke, so I left with my newly signed copy of Crush and did not buy War of the Foxes until a long time after.  Read more »

“The Thwaites Glacier is the widest on Earth at about 80 miles in width. But
as the planet continues to warm, its ice, like much of the sea ice around Earth’s
poles, is melting. The rapidly changing state of the glacier has alarmed scientists
for years because of the “spine–chilling” global implications of having so much
additional water added to the Earth’s oceans . . .”  —CBS News

Thwaites Glacier

There’s an ice sheet at the bottom of the globe
quite large, the size of a continent;
actually, it sits upon a continent, covers it,
it’s that large, one part is large as the state of Florida
and extends into the sea beyond the edge of the continent,
but still, it rests upon the seabed below in its extension,
not floating, resting, waiting as sea and air warms,
waiting to fall apart as all things do as conditions command,
nothing’s eternal after all, at least in the ordinary scope of perception,
and, as things are (in the ordinary scope of perception),
the falling apart of things has repercussions that reach far and wee
because the arm of repercussion is long regardless
of the wishes of perceivers, in fact, the arm of repercussion
reaches to the ends of the earth and further,
is as long as the arm of God (if you want to put it that way),
an arm which, clenched at its business end is poised the fist of physics,
which packs a wallop as sure as the glove of Mohammad Ali,
or is as gentle as the open hand of wisdom,
whose strokes may be soft and sublime
depending upon how thoughts have been arranged—
depending upon how they’ve influenced
how particular atoms move.

Jim Culleny
9/15/22

by Mike O’Brien

Another summer media detox successfully completed. I managed to spend the better part of five weeks in self-imposed (or self-gifted, depending on how you feel about connectivity) digital fasting, consuming only as much news as CBC Radio One deemed fit to announce at the top of the hour. It was glorious, and probably a boon for my mental health, both chemo-anatomically and in less tangible registers of experience. It’s not that I couldn’t have been as connected as I am in the city (or about half an hour outside of it, to be precise); I could have quite easily added some data to my phone plan and filled my days by the lake scrolling through alarming and depressing missives from The World. I don’t know why it makes sense to fill my October-May schedule with such soul-rending, hope-smothering news about which I can do nothing. In fact, I know quite well that it doesn’t make any sense at all, and yet I keep falling into a loop of terror consumption. But during the vacation months, a state of exception opens up in my habitual patterns that affords me some respite from informational self-mortification. If I had any spare willpower or future-oriented executive function, I might structure my “normal” life to avoid such useless brain flagellation and education-as-expiation. But I am still very, very tired, and not in the market for salvation yet.

I always intend to do much more during my cottage sabbaticals than I end up accomplishing. “I will read books! Especially important ones!”; “I will plan out a productive life!”; “I will write!”. I suppose it still does some good to say these things, even when I know they are almost certainly false. Maybe I fail a little less each time. Maybe I’m approaching a phase shift. Maybe I am already playing the long game.
Read more »

by Ada Bronowski

On the 13^th September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard, the Franco-Swiss film-director, film-poet, film-philosopher, died at the age of 91. One of the most imaginative, rebellious, truly courageous artists on this planet whose existence, in more ways than can be enumerated in language, changed the face of our modernity, decided to end his life through assisted suicide, which is a legal practice in Switzerland, the country he had been living in since 1976, and in which he had spent his youth. He was not ill, ‘but exhausted’. In addition to everything else, his last action resonates with a magnitude that is as powerful as a political stand as it is as a last demonstration of a personal ethics which can be summarised as: moral integrity or nothing. A moral integrity, which he brought to bear indefatigably over the course of a lifetime in pursuit of freedom, resolution and independence – at whatever price.

His decision has opened the floodgates to an open debate for a reappraisal of the right to assisted suicide across Western European media, and renewed pressure on institutions. Death, the possibility of suicide, the preparation for and incorporation of death in life have been constant companions throughout a body of work that spans over sixty years of filmmaking, and around 130 films as credited on Godard’s IMDB page, though word on the street is that it is more like 140 – scholars and archivists have their work cut out for them, and we can at least look forward to a great deal of publications and releases of material that was kept unseen or undistributed for a myriad of reasons, one of them being that Godard did not consider them of interest. He was a perfectionist, and therefore regarded everything once done, practically a failure and everything yet to do, a necessary call to continue working. Making a film is like cooking, he said once in a conversation with the great French novelist Marguerite Duras, (and incidentally author of a rare and refined cookbook), you can’t pretend your soggy noodles are a success. Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

There’s a pervasive idea that there must be works of art and culture that contain “people who look like me,” where “looking like” is usually scanned as race, ethnicity, sex, or gender expression. This clique-ish attitude masquerades as liberalism and can twist your head in knots if you let it: rather than encouraging and reveling in different perspectives, we want a coterie of authors, creators, and fictional characters that can fill out a census form in precisely the same way that we do. No one is so foolish as to come right out and say, “I only want to read about people who have lives similar to my own,” but this is the unstated purpose of wanting books with more people who “look like me.”

There are a couple of problems with this idea, right off the bat. First, and maybe simplest, is: Get over yourself. There are as many stories as there are people on Earth, and then some. We all contain multitudes. Even someone exactly like you on paper will have a different perspective and different story – quite possibly not one you would agree with or find palatable. Second, you must believe there is an immutable essence to being or looking a certain way, otherwise what would be the point of insisting on having more of it? Author Jia Tolentino, in her essay “Pure Heroines,” says: 

“…my white friends would be able to fantasy-cast their own biopic from an endless cereal aisle of nearly identical celebrities…while I would have no one to choose from except about three actresses who’d probably all had minor roles in some movie five years back. In most contemporary novels, women who looked like me would pop up only occasionally, as a piece of set decoration on the subway or at a dinner party, as a character whose Asian ethnicity would be noted by the white author as diligently as the whiteness of his or her unmarked protagonist was not.”

There’s a lot here to sort through, but my initial thought is about narcissism. Does someone need to share visible, tangible attributes with us before we can identify with them, sympathize with them, like them? What about their non-visible, non-tangible attributes? If a character shares our race but not our generation, how much do we really have in common? If they share our biological sex but come from a different social class, how far can we identify with them? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

In his (1930) essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes suggests that the stage has been set to alleviate the threat of material uncertainty for large portions of the world population. “The course of affairs will simply be,” Keynes writes, “that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed.”

The reasons Keynes cites for this blissful state are twofold: “the power of compound interest” and “technical improvements in manufacture and transport.” Keynes writes “Economic Possibilities” recognizing that his readers will likely see his prognostication of future material comforts for all (or most) as bordering on fantasy. For Keynes, however, the more bewildering fact seems not the explosion of growth that occurred beginning in the second half of the 19th century, but rather the LACK of growth that preceded that period.

“From the earliest times of which we have record,” Keynes notes, “back, say, to two thousand years before Christ – down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change. Some periods perhaps. So 1 per cent better than others – at the utmost 1.00 per cent better – in the four thousand years which ended (say) in A. D. 1700.” Keynes continues with the observation that the “absence of important technical inventions between the prehistoric age and comparatively modern times is truly remarkable. Read more »