by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Andreu Mas-Collel, a mathematical economist from Catalonia, came to Berkeley before I did. He was a student activist in Barcelona, was expelled from his University for activism (those were the days of Franco’s Spain), and later finished his undergraduate degree in a different university, in north-west Spain. When I met him in Berkeley he was already a high-powered theorist using differential topology in general-equilibrium analysis, in ways that were far beyond my limited technical range in economic theory. But when we met, it was our shared interest in history, politics, and culture that immediately made us good friends, and his warm cheerful personality was an added attraction for me. (His wife, Esther, a mathematician from Chile, was as decent a person as she was politically alert).

A few times it so happened that when I went to see some obscure Latin American film in a special showing at a remote movie hall in Berkeley, at the end when the lights came up, I discovered that Andreu was also in the audience, and then we sat down somewhere to discuss the film animatedly. We used to frequently visit each other’s home. One time Romila Thapar, the eminent historian of ancient India, came to visit us from Delhi, and we asked Andreu and Esther to join us. Later he told others about meeting ‘this very impressive woman’ at our place.

When, after a few years, he left Berkeley, first for Harvard, and then in 1990’s back to Barcelona, I sorely missed him. At Harvard Andreu co-authored what is probably the most used graduate textbook in microeconomic theory in the world. In Barcelona he was a Professor at the Pompeu Fabra University. He later joined politics, serving the Catalonian government in different capacities, including as the Minister of Economy and Knowledge in 2010-16. In 2021 he was slapped with a multi-million-euro penalty by the Spanish Court of Auditors for allegedly participating as Minister in activities that led to the abortive Catalonian bid for independence; I believe the case is still pending. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

After sort-of dissing James Joyce last time around – 0 comments, though! I expected Colm Tóibín to demur or something – this month I was meant to outline what the language of thought is supposed to be like, thus bringing to an end this series on the relationship between language and thought. But before getting to the details of the representational-conceptual system with which we think our thoughts, and in view of the posts I have devoted to claiming that we don’t think in any natural language – that we really don’t think in any language! – I ought to at least discuss the possibility that different languages may well have an effect on the sort of thoughts available to their speakers.

That there might be cross-linguistic differences in cognition is a rather common belief, in fact – who hasn’t been told that this or that word in this or that language is impossible to translate, for instance? – and it has received quite a bit of attention in both academia and the popular science press. Read more »

I . Me .We

so much depends upon the tale we tell ourselves,
words have the force of love or death,
they can raise or raze. In fact, the typhoon of
a single letter, incessantly said,
can ruin nations

the simplest vertical stroke

“I”

or its Russian solo

“Я”

not to mention the tiny bleating duo

“ME”

in the minds of megalomaniacs, or anyone
who stumbles or steps willfully into a cage of mirrors,
can make a hell of families, countries, churches, schools,
because “me” loves the taste of power
while “we” tastes the power of love

Jim, 4/10/22

(“Я” translation: “I”; Pronunciation: Ya)

Nikita Kadan. Hold The Thought, Where The Story Was Interrupted, 2014.

Wood, metal, plaster, stuffed animals, print on paper, paint.

“Three weeks after the Russian attacks on large parts of the country, the Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan remains in war-ravaged Kiev. Over the past two decades, Kadan’s work has been exhibited in various group and solo exhibitions in the East and West of Europe. As an artist, Kadan is outspokenly political, producing paintings, sculptures, and installations. Kadan is a member of REP (Revolutionary Experimental Space) and co-founder of Hudrada, a curatorial and activist collective. A few days after the outbreak of the war, the artist sought refuge in Voloshyn Gallery, an exhibition space in a cellar in the center of Kiev, which served as a bomb shelter in the Soviet era. He keeps on working as well as the circumstances allow. Surrounded by artworks, and amid bombs falling overground, Kadan installed an exhibition of works from the gallery’s collection.”

More here, here, and here.

by Charlie Huenemann

“Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.” (Johannes Climacus / Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript)

It is entirely possible that we cannot handle the ever rising tide of knowledge. Yes, I am going to presume that it is knowledge — that we are not barking up the wrong axis mundi, that we are not ten days away from the next Einstein who overturns everything, that this time next year we will not look back on today as back when we were mere children. You might ask how I can possibly make this presumption, and you are right to ask. Nevertheless…

We know a helluva lot. It’s really extraordinary if you stop to think about it. Why should the descendants of some savannah primates be able to figure out all this stuff about quarks, penicillin, double-entry bookkeeping, stock derivatives, the rise and fall of psychoanalysis, Bluetooth (well, right, work in progress), and microchip readers? Any ancient alien bookies would have placed the odds heavily against us. But here we are, trying to drink from a veritable firehouse of veritas, swelling our heads most impressively.

As I said, maybe we can’t handle it. What am I saying? Of course we cannot handle it. Look at the guy over there, the one who holds in his palm a device that can tell him that there may be archeological evidence of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon beneath the Euphrates, the one who is watching a video of a dog pooping on a boat. Check your own recently closed tabs. Would you make him or you the lord of the whole of human knowledge?  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Spring in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, three days ago.

by Carol A Westbrook

I pulled my mask up, making sure to cover my nose and mouth as we walked into the supermarket.

My husband looked at me quizzically.

“Why are you putting on your mask?”

I pulled off my mask and gave him a sheepish grin.

I forgot that the mask mandate had been lifted because the Covid-19 case rate is now so low that the chance of infection was almost negligible. But I know that this is temporary, as we will probably have another spike in the fall with the emergence of yet another Omicron variant. But for now we have a temporary reprieve, and we could get back to “normal.” But what is normal? Two years under the threat of Covid-19 has changed the way we do things. The post-pandemic normal will be different than it was before Covid, and here is how I think things will look.

We have changed the way we shop. For me, and for many other people, this is the first time I’ve actually shopped for groceries in person instead of ordering online. As I walked in, the store felt like a wonderland, so full of good things to buy that I couldn’t make up my mind. Yes, they even had toilet paper!  Every brand and any size! (Remember the first few weeks of the lockdown, when one of our biggest fears was to be caught with our pants down, with nothing to wipe our rear ends?) Still, some products were in short supply, with their empty spots glaringly obvious, like a mouth with a missing tooth. Supply chain problems, they said. Read more »

At My Mother’s Grave in the Putnam Valley —

7000 Miles from Where She Was Born

by Rafiq Kathwari

Mother, I thought I heard an echo
of your rousing words —

“My Life Is Ahead of Me”—

Wrinkles mapped your face
after you flew
from the Kashmir Valley where—
long as I remember—
you raged for a life of dignity —
again losing your mind . . .

Seventy-three is the same age you were
when you spoke those words, yet
mapping my life ahead, I wonder

how stirring now must be
your echo across eternity!

Maryam Kathwari, March 5, 1924 ‑— March 31, 2020

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

In the Berkeley hills there is a campus bus but the nearest bus stop is about a one-mile walk from my home, if you take a short cut through a meadow, but it gets quite muddy in the rainy season. Still, after some years I opted for taking the campus bus rather than my car on weekdays. One regular passenger I used to meet in the bus was a distinguished nonagenarian, Charles Townes, who had won the 1964 Physics Nobel Prize for inventing the laser (later he was also involved in the team that discovered the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy). In a campus lecture that I once gave on Globalization I was thrilled to see him at the front in the audience. He was active in the campus even in his 100^th year, shortly before his death.

I also came to know that he was a deeply religious man. He claimed that his invention of the laser came to him like a ‘flash’ akin to religious revelation. When he got the 2005 Templeton Prize that celebrates scientific and spiritual curiosity, he said that “Science and Religion are quite parallel…..Science tries to understand what our universe is like and how it works, including us humans. Religion is aimed at understanding the purpose and meaning of our universe, including our own lives”. This reminded me of what Tagore said to Einstein on the relation between Science and Religion when they met at the latter’s home in Berlin in 1930: “Science… is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth.” Einstein did not fully agree with Tagore, nor do I  with either Townes or Tagore. But no one can deny that in interpreting facts scientists cannot be independent of values (this is an important issue in some debates in life sciences now), and I also understand a bit about the possible appeal of deep spirituality even for atheists. Read more »

by Martin Butler

Beliefs about the essential goodness or badness of human beings have been at the heart of much political theory.[1] A recent book by the political philosopher Lea Ypi succinctly expresses the conflicting approaches. Speaking of her mother she’s says:

“Everyone, she believed, fought as a matter of course, men and women, young and old, current generations and future ones. Unlike my father, who thought people were naturally good, she thought they were naturally evil. There was no point in trying to make them good; one simply has to channel that evil so as to limit the harm. That’s why she was convinced socialism could never work even under the best circumstances. It was against human nature.”[2]

This negative view of human nature is associated with philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the more positive view with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Whether this is entirely justified is an open question, and I do not want to challenge the idea of human nature as such. Human beings like sweet things, they are sexual beings, they are on the whole social, seeking the approval of their fellows, and so on. The idea of human nature seems perfectly reasonable.  I do, however, want to examine how the idea that human beings are naturally bad should affect our political beliefs, if indeed it should affect them at all. Read more »

by Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Kurt Gödel, one of the most important logicians of the 20th century, is best known for his incompleteness theorem, which proves that any attempt to formulate a logical basis for arithmetic will either be unsound or incomplete. He was also famous for being a strange egg: walking around in a heavy coat in the summer, attending an occasional séance, and living in fear that someone was trying to poison him. There are lots of odd anecdotes about Gödel, but one happens to be a particular favorite among historians of logic: the story of his becoming an American citizen.

Gödel taught at the University of Vienna. After Hitler’s invasion of Austria, the Anschluss, Gödel would frequently be accosted by Nazi hoodlums in the street who assumed that because he was a skinny nerd with glasses, he must be Jewish. He wasn’t. Eventually, he had enough. He relocated to America, settling in Princeton, where he took up residence at the Institute for Advanced Study.

He became friendly with the Institute’s most famous scholar, Albert Einstein. Gödel had done some mathematical work exposing some of the stranger possibilities of the general theory of relativity, including the possibility of time travel, where a fast-moving electron could collide with itself if there was a bizarre enough distribution of matter and energy throughout space and time. Einstein and Gödel had plenty to discuss as they took walks together in their adopted homeland.

Before long, Einstein and economist Oskar Morgenstern convinced Gödel that he should become an American citizen. Looking into the process, Gödel learned that he would have to swear an oath to obey and defend the Constitution of the United States. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait at Gas Station, April 3, 2022.

by Joseph Shieber

One of the best television comedies of the last decade was The Good Place. Over the course of four seasons, its creator, Michael Schur, and a phenomenal ensemble cast tackled topics that I had thought to be too arcane for network television. The so-called “trolley problem”? Kantian deontology? Utilitarianism? All in the series, served up with Schur’s finely honed comedic chops.

Despite having already had countless opportunities to explore the moral philosophical underpinnings of the show – on Vox alone Schur had a 100-minute interview with Ezra Klein on the moral philosophy of The Good Place and Dylan Matthews wrote an extended piece on “How the Good Place Taught Moral Philosophy to its Characters – And Its Creators” – Schur revisits this territory in his new book, How To Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. 

To which my first reaction was: Really, Michael Schur? You didn’t have enough to do creating and writing sitcoms for NBC? You just had to sell a philosophy book project to Simon & Schuster? I was almost enraged enough about his amateurish poaching on my professional bailiwick to sit down and craft an unputdownable pitch that would land me an exclusive, even more impressive deal with Universal Television than the one he signed. (Suck it, Schur!)

After I realized that I didn’t know the first thing about pitching a television series, I decided that my fall-back plan would be to read How To Be Perfect and then mock it with haughty disdain – not only at faculty cocktail receptions but also to my immediate friends and family … and here, at 3QD. So I read the book and I can now tell you it’s … really quite good, actually. Read more »

by Brooks Riley