by Rebecca Baumgartner

We prefer not to think about our own ignorance. We hope it sorts itself out as we get older and presumably wiser. We especially resent having it pointed out to us – which of course is very counterproductive if the goal is to get rid of it. The better approach is to cultivate an appreciation for our ignorance, get comfortable with it and look at it very closely, disentangling it as much as possible from our ego to see what’s really there (or not there). 

* * *

This is the moral lesson in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which isn’t really about Christmas, of course, despite the yuletide trappings; the emotional heart of the story is a man discarding his attachment to pride and expanding the definition of himself to make room for new knowledge about the world. In other words, it’s about the importance of learning, and the courage it takes to learn and change.

The Ghost of Christmas Present makes this explicit when he shows Scrooge two filthy urchins crouching at his feet, a boy symbolizing Ignorance and a girl symbolizing Want. The Spirit makes it clear that Ignorance is the greater threat of the two: “On his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

We’re very good at ignoring our ignorance. It took several supernatural interventions just for Scrooge to start to admit that his conception of the world was flawed. We might give him a hard time about this, but in reality all of us are bad about seeing what we don’t want to see. That’s why the Spirits had to be so heavy-handed – it required a series of guilt-trips bordering on psychological warfare for Scrooge (and the audience) to see the extent of the problem. 

“Deny it!” the Spirit says sarcastically. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!” In other words, go ahead and stay in denial about your ignorance and impugn those who point it out – go on, he says, I dare you to brush this aside and see where it gets you. Read more »

Deborah Roberts. Shankia and Grace. 2021.

Collage and mixed media.

More here, here, and currently at ICA Boston..

by Thomas R. Wells

According to the meta-charity GiveWell, the most effective charities can save a child’s life for between 3 and 5,000 US dollars. One way of understanding this figure is that whenever you consider spending that amount of money, one of the things you would be choosing not to spend it on is saving a child’s life.

Take the median of the GiveWell figures: $4,000. I propose that prices for all goods and services should be listed in the universal alternative currency of percentage of a Child’s Life Not Saved (%CLNS), as well as their regular prices in Euros, dollars, or whatever. For example, a Starbucks Frappucino might be priced at 5$ /0.13%CLNS. A Caribbean holiday cruise might be priced at $8,000/ 200%CLNS.

The justification for this would be to fix a gap in the way the price system functions. Normally we make our consumption decisions entirely in terms of a consideration of how much we want something and how much we can afford, a matter of prudence only. As economists have analysed, such exercises in constrained maximisation are all we need do to enjoy a flourishing economy since by responding to prices we automatically take into account the social cost to others of resources being used for what we want rather than for something else (so long as some wise and non-self-interested government steps in to correct for externalities).

Occasionally it is questioned whether merely responding rationally to the information revealed by prices is enough. For example, perhaps we should also be pushed to take account of the impact of our choices on non-human entities by explicit ethical warnings on animal products (previously). Read more »

by Michael Abraham

It was in the midst of thinking about my own childhood and friendships, of thinking about faith and magic and the End of the World and the World to Come, in the midst of reflecting quite deeply on these things, which for me are so profoundly interwoven, so profoundly interwoven because, in the tapestry they make together, there is, glimmering, the idea of what love is and means, the sense I have of amory, of life’s affectionate trajectory and the purpose of affection in the trajectory of life—it was in the midst of reflecting on these these things and of writing about them over and over that I met a man we’ll call Khalid. 

I was in Tribeca, playing pool with the friend I once liked to call Shakti in my writing. She had to run off to a dinner, and so I was left on my own with a beautiful summer night thrumming around me. O, it was perfect. It was deep purple and eighty degrees with a strange chill in the breeze—everything New York in August is supposed to be. I was two blocks from the train to my house, but how could I go home on such a night? So, I decided I would walk north from Tribeca to the Christopher Street pier. This pier is a mightily historical place, both for me personally and for queer history itself. It was on this and the surrounding piers that voguing was invented by unhoused Black and Brown queer youth in between turning tricks, as they dance battled to pass the night. It was on this and the surrounding piers that so much of the twentieth century gay and trans lifeworld of sex and friendship existed. It was also on this pier that I first discovered myself as a queer man. I had been gay long before the discovery of course; I came out at fourteen. But I was not queer until I was nineteen. I was taking a class my second semester of freshman year at NYU, taught by Tamuira Reid, in the writing of creative nonfiction and immersive journalism. For our final projects, we had to pick something to immersively research, something to involve ourselves in, and then write a long-form lyrical essay about it. Having recently been exposed to Elegance Bratton’s then-unreleased film, Pier Kids, which follows the lives of three unhoused queer youth as they secure housing, I decided what I would write about were just these people, the unhoused youth of color who make the Christopher Street pier their nightly home. Looking back, I can see how voyeuristic and naïve this was. But I didn’t want to meet the pier kids to gawk at them. I had a sense, a sense merely, that they knew something, many things, about the kind of people we are, them and me, that I did not yet know. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

1. There’s something ironic about the fact that the received wisdom about science is that science teaches us not to trust received wisdom. Or, to paraphrase a recent blog post that seems oblivious to this irony: “Scientific expert opines, ‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’”

I should be fair to Daniel Lemire, the author of that blog post. He does a good job of spelling out the received wisdom about science, as well as of reflecting the orthodox opinion about the scientific expert that Lemire takes as his authority, the Nobel prizewinning physicist, lock-picker, and bongo-player, Richard Feynman.

Unfortunately, Lemire is wrong on both points: the received wisdom about science is hopelessly naive and, far from being a univocal opponent of the importance of expert opinion, Feynman was himself rather confused about the role of iconoclasm in science.

2. Let me begin by tackling the second, in some sense less interesting, point concerning Feynman interpretation.

Far from being of the opinion that all scientists should be iconoclasts who question the experts, the bulk of Feynman’s writing is far more nuanced than the pull-quotes that are turned into the posters that adorn undergraduate science majors’ dorm rooms.

Before appealing to Feynman as an authority on the nature of science, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that Feynman’s field of expertise isn’t the nature of science itself, but theoretical physics. This is important, since, as Feynman himself noted, “In order to talk about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field one is always apt to be an idiot of one kind or another. In these days of specialization, there are few people who have such a deep knowledge of two departments of our understanding that they don’t make fools of themselves in one or the other.” (“The Uncertainty of Science,” John Danz Lecture Series, 1963)

With that in mind, we can appreciate the ways in which slogans like, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” do an injustice to Feynman’s own insights about the nature of science. I’ll briefly sketch five ways in which this is true. Read more »

Autumn colors in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Bill Murray

In spring the pandemic lurked. Boris Johnson was Ukraine’s new best friend, Russia’s domination of Ukraine appeared imminent and the UK basked in the queen’s platinum jubilee. I’ve been away since spring. Have I missed anything?

The war continues. Many who caution they can’t get inside Vladimir Putin’s head proclaim from in there that his scheme is to split and outlast a freezing western alliance this winter. We operate from that premise this fall, while minding an added pinch of Kremlin nuclear horseplay.

Putin must now fulminate over his mobilization. Timothy Snyder thinks this war was meant to be played out as a Russian TV event  “about a faraway place.” But as the birches fade in Moscow, the fight creeps ever farther into the Motherland.

A month ago I was convinced mobilization wasn’t in the cards, because by the time call-ups got even the most basic training it would be that muddy time of year when the weather constrains fighting vehicles to the roads and the great European plain becomes a great big mess.

So to hell with basic training.

Novaya Gazeta Europe, now operating from Riga, reports that a “hidden article of Russia’s mobilisation order allows the Defence Ministry to draft up to one million reservists into the army,” which may or may not be Putin’s intent. But finer legal points have a distinctly irrelevant feel now, as Commander Putin appears to be personally running the war these days. Read more »

by Derek Neal 

There are certain words that seem to take on a life of their own, words that spread imperceptibly, like a virus, replicating below the level of consciousness, latent in our environment and culture, until suddenly the word is everywhere, and we are afflicted with it. We may even use these words ourselves: we struggle to find the right phrase, the true word to capture our intention, and these words come to us unbidden, floating into our minds from somewhere out there, and we speak the word without understanding what we really mean, but we see understanding and acknowledgement in the face of our interlocutor, and we know we have hit upon the correct utterance that will mark us as one who belongs.

Journey

Here are some uses of the word “journey” that I’ve heard or read recently: faith journey, personal development journey, teeth journey, skincare journey, healing journey, leadership journey, finance journey, mental health journey, breast cancer journey, fertility journey, musical journey, immigration journey, medical journey, weight loss journey, pregnancy journey. The first thing we notice about these “journeys” is their combination with another word, increasingly a noun. It seems to me that the use of journey used to be exclusively about physical travel from one place to another (journey to the stars, journey to the center of the earth), or that an adjective would be used to describe a journey (harrowing journey, difficult journey), but now nouns are often used to describe a type of journey, which enables us to turn any sort of experience into a narrative story. Just now, when attempting to pay my credit card bill, I was told that my bank could help me on my “credit journey.” The word “journey” acts like a spell—once it is cast, it performs a sort of magic, turning something without order or structure into something that we can trust will turn out well, because it’s about the journey, not the destination. Read more »

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 »