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

Florida Senator Rick Scott recently declared that “Men are men, women are women,” adding “we believe in science.” He was talking about transgender athletes.

I wish the senator did believe in science, though, because to reduce the gender palette to just two colors with nothing in between hardly works for biological sex and even less for gender expression and identity. It’s an outdated view.

The social roles of men and women are surrounded by persistent myths, often accompanied by the term “natural” as a stamp of approval and “unnatural” for patterns that we condemn. Most natural/unnatural distinctions have little grounding in biology, however. This is because biology is much more flexible than people assume. In the same way that no two trees of the same species are identical, nature is marked by high individual variability. Variability is what evolution works with. Since every individual comes with a unique genetic make-up, we can’t expect them to show the same sexual orientation and gender expression.

As American sexologist Milton Diamond is fond of putting it: “Nature loves variety, even though society hates it.” Read more »

“lacrimae rerum, “ (the tears of things)
…………………………………. —Virgil

Everything Cries

steel’s tears are rust,
trees weep tears of falling leaves,
clouds weep and mourn their loss
sacrificing their billows to the earth as rain,
the earth weeps its carbon into sky,
the sun weeps its energy into earth
and will die someday of the loss,
even stones weep, sobbing their very selves
by force of wind and rain into talus slopes and sand,
their hard tears roll down a mountain’s breast,
on cool mornings rivers weep their mists into atmosphere
joining sun’s tears in a symphony of sight,
the shifting colors of tears, and my eyes well up,
a spontaneous flood comes and joins with
all the salty tears of things

Jim Culleny
10/8/22

by David Kordahl

Every October, I try to carve out a little time to enjoy Nobel Season. This past week marked the climax of the last year’s iteration, with the winners of the various Nobel Prizes announced on successive days of the week. I had fun following the picks, and learning a bit about new things in the fields I don’t follow closely—which, frankly, is most of them.

Physics, however, was a different story. The physics Nobelists this year were familiar to me and most other physicists, seemingly obvious choices, if not exactly household names. Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger have become standard characters in the physics lore of the past few decades. Their stories have even bled out into the wider culture. In Les Particules élémentaires, the 1998 novel by Michel Houellebecq, Aspect’s experiments are positioned as part of a “metaphysical mutation” comparable only to the birth of Christianity and the rise of science itself.

Well, as one might say of many grand claims…sounds important, if true. Here, I’ll be expressing my doubts about a few articles of common faith. Read more »

Naomi Lawrence. Tierra Frágil, 2022.

Acrylic yarn and zip ties.

Photograph by Sughra Raza in Morningside Park, Harlem, NY. September, 2022.

More here.

by Leanne Ogasawara

世中は何にたとへん水鳥のはしふる露にやとる月影（無常）

Mujō (Impermanence)
To what shall I liken this world?
But to moonlight
Reflected in the dewdrops
Shaken from a shorebird’s bill
—Dōgen

1.

Eight hundred years ago, a Buddhist monk, not long into his career, became deeply dissatisfied with the Buddhist teachings available to him in Japan. And so, he traveled across the sea to Song China.

A man on a mission, he wanted to uncover the “true Buddhism.”

This is a story repeated again and again as Buddhism made its way East. Monks and priests, feeling like something had to be “lost in translation,” took to the road in search of the true word. From Japan to China and from China to India—and sometimes as far as to Afghanistan, these early translators were seeking to understand the wisdom that was embedded in the words themselves.

Or maybe what they were really seeking was beyond the words themselves?

The monk Dōgen, after seven or so years in China would return to Japan—his mind filled with all that he had seen and all that he had learned. In time, he would form a new school of Buddhism in Japan: Sōtō Zen.

Interested in notions of time and being, he wrote elaborate philosophical tracts, as well as many marvelous poems.

In the above poem on impermanence, Dōgen compares ultimate reality to that of a reflection: of moonlight reflected in a dewdrop scattering off a waterbird’s bill.

In my first translation attempt, I chose to render mizudori 水鳥 (waterbird) as “shore bird.” It is a valid translation for the Japanese term mizudori, which literally means 水 water 鳥 bird. Maybe I instinctively went with shorebird because I have been taught in creative writing classes to try and be as concrete and specific as possible, so readers can better form mental images. Could this might explain why the translation I found online (made by the great Dōgen-scholar Steven Heine) used the English word “crane” for mizudori.

Dōgen did not choose the Japanese word for crane, which is tsuru 鶴 so why did the translator? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

Today I am giving thanks for the life and work of John Prine, the late, great American singer-songwriter, whose date of birth is October 10, 1946, and who died, of COVID-19, on April 7, 2020.

I am listening to his music and thinking about where he came from, and where he wound up: Prine was born in Illinois but his parents were from Kentucky, where he would spend time in his youth visiting family; his career started in Chicago but he ended his days in Nashville, where he co-founded his own independent record label, Oh Boy Records.

I mention these geographical poles in the life of the birthday boy because they help me make sense of my own intimate, visceral response to John Prine’s work. I was introduced to his music in Toronto in the early 1980s by my high-school sweetheart, whose own parents were from Kentucky, having migrated north, to what is effectively Canada’s Midwest, just like Prine’s folks had when they moved to Illinois. (Of course, having done part of his military service in Canada, William Faulkner is said to have noted the similarities between his own native Deep South and America’s ostensibly ur-Yankee neighbor to the north: but that’s another story.) Read more »

by William Benzon

I grew up in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. At some point “mutually assured destruction” entered my lexicon. I came to accept the threat of nuclear war with the USSR as something I’d live with until I died (perhaps in a nuclear war?). The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and two years later the USSR dissolved. With that the possibility of nuclear war decreased, though the weapons themselves remained. Now, thirty years later, nuclear war is, all of a sudden, more likely than at any time in my life since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962.

I actually do remember the missile crisis, but only vaguely. There is a sense of danger coupled with the image of a grayscale aerial photo, or perhaps a map, of Cuba. But that’s about it. Beyond that, I certainly had a strong sense of persisting conflict between the Soviet Union and American, plus the Free World. The the number and destructive power of nuclear warheads controlled by each side – the so-called missile gap – was a constant concern. Magazines such as Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated regularly carried features about the design, construction, and provisioning of home fallout shelters.

I have a vague sense of one day being in the basement in the TV room and telling my father, “don’t worry, if I’m drafted, I’ll go.” But I can’t recall just what prompted that remark, perhaps a news story about draft resisters. That was before I went off to college. I turned 18 during my junior year and had to register with Selective Service. I was given a student deferment. A year later a draft lottery was instituted and I drew the number 12 in the lottery. I was certain to be drafted once I graduated. By that time I had been actively protesting against the Vietnam War for four years and did not want to be drafted to fight a morally abhorrent war.

I decided to apply for status as a conscientious objector, which would exempt me from military service but require that I perform some kind of alternative civilian service. I sought legal advice through the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization committed to social justice and peace. I worked with one of their lawyers in preparing my application, which was successful. I was assigned to work in the Chaplain’s Office at Johns Hopkins. Chester Wickwire, the chaplain, had been active in both the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, and was able to get two local congressmen to write letters of support. When my term of service was over, 1972 or 1973, I went off to graduate school. Read more »

A reflective street sign iridescing in the sunlight as I walked by it. What looks like a plain white background from a distance (see photo in first comment) is revealed to have much complexity when seen close up.

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

In the previous piece in this series, “The Discernible Reality of a ‘Force of Evil’,” I attempted to show that there is a Force – visibly operating in the world — that can reasonably be called a “Force of Evil.” (With “Evil” defined as “a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world worse.” Or, that “consistently spreads a pattern of brokenness.”)

We can see this Force, I argued, by exploring the connections in “the dense network of cause and effect.” Those connections reveal how the various elements in the human world that are life-degrading – war, injustice, hatred, greed, cruelty, trauma, intrapsychic conflict, etc. – are each both the causes and the effects of one another.

Those connections, in other words, reveal the general truth that “Brokenness Begets Brokenness.” And from that reality – of how brokenness moves through the human world over time in shape-shifting ways — we can infer the existence of a Force that consistently moves a “pattern of brokenness” through the human world, consistently making the human world worse.

This Force — transmitting that “pattern of brokenness” – is something we can see, I said, “the way we ‘see’ the wind in the swaying of the trees and the flapping of the clothes on the line.”

What we see – “a coherent force that consistently makes things worse in the human world” – is something that reasonably be called “a Force of Evil.” And – as it can be discerned by applying reason to evidence – the existence of such a force should be incorporated into the worldview of our secular culture. Read more »