Cars in front of the train station of Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, during a brief but heavy snowfall last week.

by William Benzon

I read a great deal of Bertrand Russell when I was in my teens. I read various collections of essays, such as Why I Am Not A Christian, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays, and Marriage and Morals, some of which my father had stored in a box in the basement, along with Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, a book or two by this guy named Freud, though I forget which one, and some others. I also Russell’s – dare I say it? – magisterial A History of Western Philosophy And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, which I purchase myself, a big thick paperback with a white cover. It was cited when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

It was from Russell more than anyone else that I got the idea that philosophy was a grand synthetic discipline, which I liked. Putting things together, seeing how all the parts interacted, that had immense appeal to me. And so I became a philosopher major when I enrolled in The Johns Hopkins University in 1965. I enjoyed an introductory course called, I believe, Types of Philosophy. Edward Lee’s course in Plato and the Pre-Socratics was wonderful as well; Lee was young, charismatic, and loved Mahler, as I did.

Then there was a two-semester sequence in the history of modern philosophy, from Descartes up through Kant. Maurice Mandelbaum taught the first semester, outlining each lecture on the board and then delivering on the outline. The lectures were so clear that you almost didn’t have to read the primary texts. The second semester was taught by a visitor from Chicago, Alan Gewirth. A different experience, like pulling teeth. Gewirth did the pulling and we students offered up our teeth. Ouch! But perhaps more pedagogically effective than Mandelbaum’s clarity, more Socratic, if you will.

By my junior year, however, I had come to realize that philosophy, as it is practiced in the academic world, is not what I had imagined it to be from reading Russell’s essay. It was another specialized discipline that had long ago abandoned any attempt at a broad synthesis. Fortunately, I had discovered literature, and Dr. Richard Macksey, whom I’ll discuss in more detail later. I’d always loved to read, and Macksey’s free-wheeling and broad ranging intellect appealed to me. I took four courses with him, plus an independent study on I forget what, and did a master’s thesis on “Kubla Khan” under his supervision. Literary criticism became the rubric under which I put things together. And why not? Literature expresses the world, and so couldn’t one study the world under the rubric of studying literature?

Well, no, if you must ask. By the time I’d figured that out – it didn’t take but a year or three – I was committed to an impossible intellectual project. I remain so committed. I will end this essay by arguing – it’s more of an earnest suggestion, really – that perhaps, if we do it right – of which there is no guarantee, and many signs that we’re botching it – we can harness these marvelous new machines to the job of synthesizing (human) knowledge. If we succeed, we’ll find ourselves in a whole new world, perhaps one where it is not at all obvious who is harnessed to what and to what end. I will, however, proceed indirectly. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Global migration has been remarkably stable for decades. Despite that, media coverage of immigration tends to give the opposite impression. In the US, for example, there’s always a “crisis at the border.” But if there is a real crisis it’s not about the number of immigrants coming into the US relative to population. The  percentage of the US population born outside the US is on the rise now, but it has never gone below 5% or above that 15%. The US does have more immigrants than any other country “by a wide margin” – and the rate of immigration has been trending up since the 1970s. But the percentage of immigrants living in the US relative to population (14%) is similar to the number living in similar countries like Canada (20%) and Australia (33%). And then there’s this from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office: “In our projections, the deficit is…smaller than it was last year because economic output is greater, partly as a result of more people working. The labor force in 2033 is larger by 5.2 million people, mostly because of higher net immigration. As a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”

In a recent book, “How Migration Really Works,” Dutch sociologist Hans de Haas argues that the real immigration crisis is political and arises from what he calls the “paradox of immigration.” The problem is that there are three demands always in play in immigration debates. (i) We can’t reduce people’s rights to work or settle at the risk of disrupting the smooth running of the economy. (ii) We have a moral obligation to respect the rights of immigrants, including officially unauthorized immigrants, to fair and humane treatment. (iii) We should respect, or at least can’t resist, the political will of the majority of citizens who oppose immigration. The problem is we can do any two of these, but not all three. Simultaneous pressure from both the left and the right has reduced the Western political approach to immigration to, Haas argues, “bold acts of political showmanship that conceal the true nature of immigration policies.” In the U.S., as Duncan Black puts it, immigration “is an issue completely untethered from whatever the reality of it is, and people mostly don’t care until conservative media/politicians are telling them to care and then they get enraged…They aren’t mad about immigration, they are mad about what they see on television.”

One small contribution that ethics might make to this political morass is to examine our moral obligation to allow immigration – or not. Read more »

Who Spoke First?

who knows from where the echoes come,
who knows who forms the echoes?

if, in a canyon, I speak loudly enough
that echoes come,   I
might think it’s me,     I
am the maker of echoes,   I

belch a series of wave forms
toward a mirror of cliff and
hear myself return on ripples of air,

it’s simple. but what if I too am an echo,
a mere echo of echoes, an echo of something
with an infinity of mouths.

who was it that spoke first?

Jim Culleny, 2/18/24

by Nils Peterson

This is what Abraham Lincoln said.

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility.” [Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862]

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we will save our country.” [Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862]

“It is the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. It is the same spirit that says ‘you toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation, and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” [Lincoln-Douglas debates, 15 October 1858]

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” [from a handwritten note]

And from a modern editorial, “Patriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart. Lincoln was capable of understanding both the greatness and the limits of Thomas Jefferson and the founders and still come out at the end embracing the American experiment for ‘giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.’ And so should we.” [Editorial. NYTimes, 7/4/15] Read more »

Sughra Raza. Let Me Just Absorb Today.

Digital photograph, October 2023.

by Brooks Riley

by Claire Chambers

I have already written columns for 3 Quarks Daily about starting Hindi language-learning early in the Covid-19 pandemic, continuing to intermediate level as things opened up, and then learning Urdu alongside Hindi once Covid became less of a problem.

However, as is suggested by the post-2020 timestamp of my linguistic odyssey, I am internet ki bachi, a child of the internet. At least at the beginning, I was confined to my house using apps and working with online language tutors during successive lockdowns. As a consequence, I started to become passable in reading, listening, speaking, and writing on my keyboard with the help of a plug-in – but I could not write by hand.

In the final instalment of my previous trilogy, the blog post concerning Urdu, I discussed my hesitancy about handwriting. Finding myself reasonably proficient in constructing emails and short documents on the computer, learning Urdu calligraphy seemed unnecessarily burdensome on my mental capacity. There’s no familial need for me to produce handwritten notes, so I thought this competence wasn’t worth cultivating.

However, Leanne Ogasawara in particular encouraged me to think again. Read more »

by Thomas Wilk and Steven Gimbel

Last month’s open mic night at New College of Florida revealed more than just the comedic ineptitude of its administrators; it exposed the underbelly of a culture clash at the heart of the academic institution. Amidst the cultural war that has engulfed New College, following a takeover by figures appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis, the event was meant to be a light-hearted affair. Instead, it turned into a public spectacle with calls for a dean’s ouster and New College claiming a victory over cancel culture.

Hosted as part of a comedy course, the night featured a routine by Dean of Students David Rancourt that included jokes about a 7-year old boy exposing himself to a girl at the bus stop, violation by a drill sergeant’s baton, and a forced choice between death and “bunga bunga.” The jokes elicited a mix of reactions from the audience. Even New College President Richard Corcoran, who followed Rancourt’s performance, noted the abundance of gay jokes in the set. Corcoran jokingly called Rancourt his “former” dean of students, but, after his homophobic routine, some in the community wish that it wasn’t a joke.

In response to outrage from students and the media, the university gave a statement to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune: “Cancel culture is over at New College. Comedy is a work of art, one that is reliant on our society’s tenets of free speech and free expression. New College supports its students, faculty and staff’s right to participate in artistic endeavors like a comedy performance, or any other civil exercising of free speech and free expression.”

The College is making a common mistake about the ethics of humor. We’d know because we wrote the book on it. The mistake is to think that just because an act is intended to be humorous it must be beyond the scope of moral judgment. Read more »

Rose-ringed parakeets at a children’s zoo in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Richard Farr

At first, the countless violations of the law by our new rulers still caused a degree of disquiet. But among the incomprehensible features of those months, my father later recalled, was the fact that soon life went on as if such crimes were the most natural thing in the world. —Joachim Fest, Not I – Berlin, early 1930s

[Y]ou have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. —Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Book II, Chapter VI

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. —Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

Sometimes it’s hard to stay on top of things. While trying to rank-order Nuclear War Over Taiwan, Deforestation in the Amazon, Child Slavery Linked to my own Spending Habits, The Latest Data from the Thwaites Glacier, and What’s Being Done Right Now to the Uighurs the Rohingya the Palestinians the Hazara the Yazidis the Kurds and the Tigrayans, I keep being distracted by trivia, like How Irritated I am to Have Received Yet Another Cloyingly Chummy Fund-Raising Email from the Biden-Harris Campaign. 

Sometimes you have to put Now aside and get the cool perspective of ancient sources. So this week I dug around in my shelves and dusted off a book from a distant era. Written by Al Gore, and entitled The Assault on Reason, it’s an eyewitness account of the decline of more or less everything back when the American throne was occupied by the Kennebunkport Dauphin, George II. 

Preoccupied with our current traumas, how quickly we forget! Gore is not a neutral observer, but his account is stolidly factual. And the fact is, George II’s reign at the great White Palace in Washington was astonishingly awful. Vandalizing, reckless, arrogant and ignorant; cruel and authoritarian; chaotic and incompetent beyond all previous measure; contemptuous of the law, of democracy, of transparency, of innocent life, of any “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” In sum, what strikes the modern reader most forcibly perhaps is that the era, half lost in the mists of history, was so strikingly Trumpian.  Read more »

Making Way

—Narragansett Bay —1960, first time out

We part from pier
slow as disengaging lovers
one landlocked, the other a
floater who won’t be kept at bay

The diminishing dock slides back,
its bollards and planks deploy
to some other place not here
—to a distancing otherworld

The tether breaks
as stern-first we pass the
channel buoy

     Quarter back, the OD says.
     Quarter back, aye sir,

and we slip away

    Steer two one zero, half ahead.
Two one zero, half ahead, aye sir

and we slow-slide down
the gleaming bay

The sun’s so bright it indicates
a tern on the roof of a big estate
a half mile away atop its
long lawn hill off the starboard bow
which slopes down clear
through the wind-wove air
to a point where jades meet blues
……… —which passes now as we part the sea while
making way

Further south the sea’s first chops
begin to unsettle our sheltered
adolescent cruise

Near the harbor mouth all decks
rise then make their first
supplicating bows to whatever
god it is who intervenes
to call-off wrecks

…… —we’re juggled gently first in
Neptune’s law as
pitches rolls & heaves
meet yaws

Grey diesel billows from our raked stacks
Halyards snap against the mast’s steel
Gulls abundantly rise & reel
over the white chaos of our wake’s track

Sunlight splinters
into rippled trillions
upon each breaker’s
sequined breast
before it folds
in a white rush, falling
to the soul percussion
of our bow-wave’s

shush
…………. shush
……………………
by Jim Culleny
November, 2009