by Rebecca Baumgartner

While watching a Christmas movie recently and hearing a character describe something as a “Christmas miracle,” my 8-year-old son scornfully exclaimed, “That’s not a Christmas miracle, that’s a Christmas coincidence!” He was right, of course, but despite that outburst, he’s not the kind of kid who would tell the other third-graders that Santa’s not real or ask uncomfortably pointed questions about baby Jesus. He’s the kind of kid who works on a project about Diwali and shows genuine curiosity and appreciation for the beauty of the ceremony. And he’s absolutely right about that, too. He has already learned to straddle the line that all secular people must learn to navigate: declining to accept extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence and honestly pointing out falsehoods, while respecting the social contract and generally being a well-adjusted and likable human being. 

This time of year is just as heartwarming for secular folks as it is for religious ones, even if there are a fair number of eye-roll-inducing “Christmas coincidence” moments. I have fond memories of singing in the choir during my college’s Christmas candlelight service, harmonizing in the darkened, musty-smelling, flame-flickered chapel and awkwardly turning sheet music while trying not to spill hot wax on myself. There is no requirement to believe in virgin births in order to feel the closeness and vastness of a moment like that, and it would be small-minded to insist that there is.

Whether you believe in Christmas miracles, Christmas coincidences, or don’t celebrate Christmas at all, it’s the time of year when we naturally want to nestle in blankets and compile lists, so that is exactly what I’m going to do. Here are a few secular comforts and joys that have lent their magic to the end of 2022 for me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

Famously, the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead referred to all of philosophy as “footnotes to Plato.” Actually, he wrote that, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.” (Whitehead, Process and Reality)

Now, Whitehead intended this statement as a tribute to “the wealth of general ideas” that we can find in Plato. There is, however, another way to read the statement, a way that is not flattering at all to philosophy itself.

According to this other, less flattering reading, all of the major ideas that are still discussed by philosophers were already there in Plato, thousands of years ago. There are at least two ways in which this reading is unflattering for philosophy.

First, and most obviously, the statement suggests that there have been no significant new ideas in philosophy for over 2000 years. The big ideas, so the statement would have it, were already there in Plato; all the philosophers since Plato have only been able to add contributions worthy of nothing more than footnotes – that is, commentary or minor improvements.

Second, the statement paints an unflattering picture even when you consider the – plausible – point that not all philosophers after Plato have agreed with his positions. Here are a few reasons why. Read more »

The river Eisack flowing through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, a couple of days ago.

by Bill Murray

It’s 6:15 on the Erakor Lagoon in Vanuatu. Women in bright print skirts paddle canoes from villages into town. Yellow-billed birds call from the grass by the water’s edge, roosters crow from somewhere, and the low rumble of the surf hurling itself against the reef is felt as much as heard.

Every morning the sky is grayer than blue. Clouds hang close to the hills and the water is green glass, reflecting jungle. We’re staying on a tiny island near the capital city, Port Vila. Last night the heavens inflicted a pounding rain just as we arrived at the ferry dock.

We rise to gasp at the wages of yesterday’s folly – snorkeling from an outrigger in the midday sun. Good bet we’ll stay out of the sun today; we could plausibly be served up as steak tartare, and anyway there’s the thunder, the no fooling rumble you feel through your bare, pink feet in the grass, through the earth.

Vanuatu’s colonial name was New Hebrides. It’s about 80 islands a thousand miles east of Australia. When colonial hands came off, Port Vila was left more British than French. The two countries governed the New Hebrides in an arrangement they called a condominium from 1906 until independence in 1980. Read more »

by Michael Abraham

It has all gotten too technicolor for Dorothy Gale. The trees and the grass are too green—not to mention the Emerald City (she had to take the glasses off several times to rub her eyes)—and the slippers are much too silver, or were they ruby? There are so many colors she is getting confused. The eyes of her friends, these queer little friends she has made, they are much too luminous for her, glittering, glittering, their eyes—it is driving her crazy. Yes, crazy: Dorothy is going crazy in Oz. She stares at the basket of the Wizard’s balloon, and she prays for wind, prays ardently. See, Dorothy has killed a witch, befriended a witch, killed another witch. Dorothy has done all the work of a messiah. She is tired, but, more than tired, her mind is starting to come a little undone at its edges. She loves these odd friends of hers, and she loves the feeling of being on an adventure, but, all along, she has been yearning for quite the opposite of adventure, for home. Not because home is all that special. Home is sepia and boring and full of responsibility. She’s yearning for home because there is something sinister beneath all the brightness of Oz, something dead sent against her flourishing. Kansas is safer. There are no witches to vanquish in Kansas. See, Dorothy never set out to be any kind of hero. She was just in the wrong cyclone at the wrong time. But she feels herself to be so much herself, so overmuch, when in Oz that it is starting to drive her mad. This grandiosity of being a slayer of witches. Dorothy Gale has become much too much of herself, and she is coming undone. So she stares at the balloon, and she prays for wind. And the wind comes, but it comes too soon. It carries off the Wizard. 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

No one can deny the traditional (and ongoing) gender inequality in human society, which disadvantages girls and women. It’s a huge injustice that we need to fight.

But who says that elimination of gender differences is the solution? Or that we need to promote gender-neutrality?

Of the two words in “gender inequality,” only one is a problem, and it isn’t “gender.”

A fully gender-neutral upbringing of children may not even be feasible. Human biology isn’t blind to sex. The breastmilk of mothers, for example, varies dependent on whether she’s nursing a boy or a girl. Milk for male babies has a greater energy content. Milk of monkey mothers shows the same difference.

Young male primates are more energetic and rambunctious than same-aged females. When hundreds of children in different nations were outfitted with accelerometers to measure body movements, boys showed far more bursts of vigorous locomotion than girls. That boys are also three times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) reflects the same difference. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

Because I work part time developing a terminology database at a large econometric institute; and because it is important that, in this capacity, I remain abreast not only of raw vocabulary but also of the substance of recent developments in financial technology, known by its Orwellian moniker “FinTech”; and because the owl of Minerva flies at dusk—for all these reasons I recently dusted off my book-bag, packed my reading glasses and a roll of antacid, and registered for a course on blockchain, crypto, and digital currencies.

The three-month program I attended, leading to a so-called Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS), was offered at the University of Zurich’s Blockchain Center, an interdisciplinary institute ranked fourth for university teaching of distributed ledger technology worldwide. And indeed, my fellow students had come from as far afield as Australia, India, and Brazil, as well as from various corners of Switzerland and Europe, presumably in the hopes of profiting from cutting-edge technical expertise in their work back home as computer programmers, bankers, and jurists.

Instruction was provided by a changing roster of professors in three modules of several full days each, devoted respectively to the IT, economic, and legal dimensions of the new(ish) technology. Each module was punctuated by an assignment, to permit evaluation of the participants: the IT module closed with an online multiple-choice test; the economic component was rounded out with a series of group-work exercises; and the legal section, and thus the course as a whole, concluded with a written essay, on a topic chosen from among suggestions made by the various professors, one of whom, depending on the student’s choice of topic, would then serve as supervisor. Read more »

“Shu” is the single teaching of Confucius and “jen”
it’s counterpart.  Shu means reciprocity; jen is love,
kindness and goodness. T’ien is heaven.
  –Confucius and the Teaching of Goodness

Shu and Jen

Goodness came as two hearts and sat beside me.
“My name is Shu,” they said. At that moment
two birds flew through an open window generously wide
and, pointing, Shu said, “Jen.”

The two hearts of Shu, in duet, said,
“What can we do for you?”

The two birds of Jen sang,
“Looks like you need a friend.”

“The world is split in two, and so are you,” said Shu
“See the birds of Jen, she said? They feed each other and
so are free in T’ien.”

“Think of me,” said Shu
and you may be free too.”

Jim Culleny, 6/18/11

by Marie Snyder

The anger that escalated at a recent Ottawa-Carlton school board meeting when a trustee proposed and lost a motion to mandate masks, in a setting that typically elicits polite discussion, makes it seem like this type of anger is new and shocking in its inappropriateness. But this video of the history of masks, and memories of what many of us lived through when we imposed smoking bans and seatbelts years ago, makes it clear that people have always been fired up by any new restriction. Masks may be even more enraging because they’ve also become symbolic of a danger and harm we’d like to forget. 

But more than that, this type of anger that targeted the specific trustee with emails and phone calls, that included vile sexist and racist comments and threats, is more reminiscent of GamerGate, when a few women dared to criticize some games and were brutally harassed online and doxed, provoking at least one to move. This Vox article explains what needs to be done to prevent these occurrences: 

It’s crucial to understand how, when, and why an online mob is expressing outrage before you decide how to respond to it. Gamergate should have taught businesses that online mobs can and do look for excuses to be outraged, as a pretext to harass and abuse their targets. There’s a difference between organic outrage that arises because an employee actually does something outrageous, and invented outrage that’s an excuse to harass someone. . . . 2014 should have been the year the cultural conversation began to acknowledge how serious aggression toward women really is. It wasn’t.

This understanding of the situation suggests that an outlet for anger is the point and that gaming was just a catalyst or merely the easiest avenue for the anger to seem remotely reasonable. It’s like when a hungry or tired toddler is upset with a random toy until that inner irritation is resolved. The grade school version finds a scapegoat to unload on and then they discover the glee of having power over another. We need to resolve these inner irritations and the joy of domination before people become adults with a greater capacity to cause lasting harm. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by R. Passov

There was a big earthquake in the San Fernando Valley in 1971. Overpasses fell in the north end. People died. My junior high school was closed for two weeks.

I was in the 7th grade and had just begun to hang around a boy named Mark. During recess or lunch, we’d walk to the back of a field of grass and smoke cigarettes. Sometimes, if she were in school, we’d stand next to Mark’s older sister, Sharon.  

A few days after school was closed, Mark said that I should join him selling candy for Dave Katz. Dave was college-age at the time. He lived in the garage of his parents house and earned his living rounding up boys and taking them all over Los Angeles to sell candy. We were told to say we were trying to earn enough money to go to a boys camp and could you help us out by buying a box of candy. Dave got the candy from a local supermarket.

For most of the two weeks that we were out of school, Dave would pick me up at around 7:00 AM. By the time he got to my apartment, his 1971 Dodge Charger was full. I’d force my way into the back and sit on laps. Our first stop was breakfast. As many as nine would get out of the two door Charger which had bucket seats in front.

We’d eat as if we were just out of juvenile hall. Sometimes, we’d pay the bill by each leaving our share in our water glass. We’d put a place mat over the glass, turn it upside down, rest it on the table, then slide the place mat away. Other times, we’d simply get up in mass and rush the door. Read more »

by Michael Liss

The word arrived from the furniture store. They have come! After five months of supply-chain suspended animation, our 15 feet of 72-inch-high bookcases are here. Bibliophiles everywhere (well, everywhere in my family) raised their voices in praise.

I’m excited. Seriously excited. My wife, son, and daughter are excited. While we already had a number of bookshelves and built-ins, their capacity was vastly exceeded by the books at hand. Those “loose” books were everywhere; turned flat, double-shelved, stacked on tables and desktops and chairs and nightstands. A shameful number of them were in boxes, embarrassed (you could hear them grumbling at times) that they were less loved. Some, even, had been exiled to a storage facility, enveloped in quiet beyond the whirr of ventilation systems.

Simple humanity cried out for a solution. Now, liberation was close at hand. The day after Thanksgiving (how’s that for a Providential intervention?), two strong men brought our prizes.

I was not there to witness this, needing to go to the office for a few hours, but my wife was, giving me play-by-play and texting me pictures. Wondrous, fantastic, spectacular. My mind wandered from the work-related tasks at hand. I fought it back with the idea that the sooner I got things done, the faster I would see the mighty oaks and start to grapple with the critical decisions of what went where. I escaped as soon as I could, leaving the strategic “out of the office for the holiday” auto-response on email. Read more »

This reflection of trees, yesterday, on the surface of a pond in Brixen, South Tyrol, reminded me of M. C. Escher’s “Three Worlds”. (See that in comments.)

by William Benzon, with the assistance of ChatGPT

It’s that time again. You may have heard about it, you may even have played with it. Another AI engine has dropped! – one of those black boxes that Tim Sommers talked about last week. This one is called ChatGPT and, as its name indicates, it’s a close relative of GPT-3, which set off shockwaves when it dropped in the summer of 2020. It was difficult for ordinary mortals to get access to GPT-3, but anyone can sign up for a free account on ChatGPT, and so I did, on December 1, the day after it dropped.

Since then I’ve having a lot of fun playing with it. I’ve chatted with it about brass instruments, trumpets in particular, though I had to work a bit to get it to cough up information about Bud Herseth, one of the most important orchestral trumpeters of the last half-century. We had a long and engrossing exchange about Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Gojira, the original Japanese film from 1954. I even coaxed it into writing a parody of “Kubla Khan” that managed to pwn [sic] Donald Trump.

But I want to tell you about our “conversation,” if you will, about Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and the ideas of the late Rene Girard. As you may recall, I published a 3QD article about subject earlier this year, Shark City Sacrifice: A Girardian Reading of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. So I’m familiar with the topic.

Of course, when I did my work, I started by viewing the film, several times in fact. ChatGPT didn’t do that; as far as I know we don’t have any AI system that could view a feature-length film and create a competent summary of the plot much less offer an interpretation of it. However, Jaws is well known and there is a great deal about it on the web, including several different scripts, though I have no idea whether or not any of those scripts were in ChatGPT’s training corpus.

With that in mind, pour yourself a drink and get comfortable, for this is going to take a while. Read more »