by Mike Bendzela

“I am not an animal! I am a human being!”–“John” Merrick, The Elephant Man (1980 film)

“Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch. [That is not only not right; it is not even wrong.]”–Attributed to Wolfgang Pauli 

We get no traction on a problem until we develop a sound theory about it. Not a hypothesis or a hunch, but a theory, a true grasp of what a condition is and how it presents in society.

Imagine how horrible life must have been before we had a sound germ theory of disease. With no concept of viruses, amoebas, spirochetes, parasites, we floundered around with our hit-or-miss salves and poultices, herbs and concoctions, incantations and exorcisms. Ultimately, we just relapsed into fevers and sweats, berated continually with, “Well, you didn’t pray hard enough!”

No theory = no traction. It’s a disaster. Yet, somehow, our species managed to stumble through epochs of disaster. To evolve through it, even.

Such evolution was all but invisible to our ancestors, even though the signs were everywhere in our ancestral environments. We noticed that the war of nature persists non-stop.  As a result, everything propagates apace — even unduly. Like begets like, yet variation is endemic. But the incremental ratcheting of species through time — that completely escaped us. We couldn’t know that our great grandmothers were primates and that the chimps are our cousins.

We know it now, though — in spades. But until we all incorporate these biological, universal truths into a fundamental world view, we are bound to continue “blowing and beating each other without mercy” [1] till Kingdom Come. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by David J. Lobina

A truism, perhaps, and certainly meant to draw attention, at least in one way. In reality, the title of this post is intended as a playful dig on last month’s post, which really should have been called Animals Don’t Think Like Humans!, even if in the event that post was about how some academics have gone about studying human thought via the study of the psychology of other animal species – and in that event, the post concentrated on the excesses of some philosophers. Similarly, this post will be about how some psychologists have gone about studying adult human thought via the study of the cognition of preverbal children (roughly, children under the age of 4), and about their excesses (the scholars’, in this case, not the children’s, though both go without saying). So, in a nutshell, this is Take 2: The Preverbal Case.

At first sight, the cognition of preverbal infants may be more relevant to the study of human thought than that of other animal species, these being human subjects, though not yet in possession of a natural language, but some caution must be exercised here too. No-one doubts that acquiring a natural language results in great cognitive benefits – a languageless mind is an impoverished mind. The issue here has to do with the sort of conclusions some scholars have derived about (adult) cognition on the basis of data from infant cognition.

The discussion will revolve around two questions: whether it is at all possible to neatly separate thinking and linguistic abilities in the cognition of infants and toddlers, and the question of whether it is possible to conclude that a specific conceptual ability depends upon acquiring a specific linguistic ability. It is in fact quite common to find claims to the effect that a specific conceptual ability depends on acquiring a specific language ability, and it is this particular conclusion that I will argue here ought to be resisted. Read more »

City of Salo on the southwest shore of Lake Garda in Italy. Photo taken last week.

by Mindy Clegg

Music provides a powerful means of shaping emotion and even actions. Most of the times, that’s a positive. A popular song can bring a group of strangers together in a shared experience. In times of uncertainty a good song can be an outlet for fears and frustration. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade pop stars helped give voice to the anger many Americans felt about the loss of an important civil right for women. Pop star Olivia Rodrigo dedicated her Glastonbury performance of Lily Allen’s “Fuck You” (with Allen) to the members of the Supreme Court who voted to end Roe protections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpc40dmPlVM

Historically, songs were employed by labor unions to create a sense of solidarity and move labor rights forward against overwhelming odds. If music can be a salve and a rallying cry, is the opposite true? History confirms this to be the case. I want to share three examples from global pop music history. First, white power punk bands emerged from the UK and US in the 1980s. Later that same decade also saw the emergence of turbofolk in the Balkans, which became the soundtrack of a violent strain of genocidal nationalism in the Yugoslav wars. More recently, a genre of music known as Hindutva pop found a ready and eager audience among the far right members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Prime Minister’s Nerendra Modi’s political party. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Being in Berkeley for more than four decades I have met and encountered many leftists and several of them are/were radical in their politics, though in recent years the radical fervor has been somewhat on the decline even in Berkeley. I remember some time back reading one east-coast journalist describing Berkeley, with a pinch of exaggeration, as moving from being the Left capital of the US to being its gourmet capital—this transition is, of course, most well-known in the case of Alice Waters who, a Berkeley activist in the 1960’s, started her iconic restaurant Chez Panisse in the next decade, though she herself considers the novel approach to food embodied in that restaurant—insistence on fresh ingredients and cooperative relations with local farmers– as growing out of the same counter-culture movement. (This transition was, of course, much more agreeable than some of the militant Black Panther leaders of 1960’s Oakland turning to Christian evangelism).

In campus politics the decline in radical fervor became plain to see in the first decade of this century during the Iraq War. There were protests in the campus but nowhere with the same intensity that was observed during the Vietnam War. I think this was partly because the military draft had been lifted meanwhile so that young men from middle and upper classes which are in large numbers even in a public university like Berkeley were no longer conscripted—wars in America now (as has been the case always in India) are largely fought by poor people—so the Iraq War was not an immediate threat or interruption of life for the young in the campus. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

In the last two decades the topic of inequality has entered the public discourse across a broad spectrum of issues, with an urgency that is astonishing. To name but a few examples, the Occupy movement has called for more income equality, Black Lives Matter protesters have demand racial equality, women’s advocates have rallied behind causes as varied as equal pay and reproductive rights ,  and environmental activists have advocated for climate justice.

Surprisingly, economists are not front and centre of this discussion. I say “surprisingly” because economists are supposed to be the experts on inequality: they measure and study it. I think the reason why economists have not played a more central role in this discussion is that the protesters in today’s mass demonstrations are not just pointing out the existence of inequality. They are saying: “inequality is unjust”. With a few notable exceptions, however, today’s empirical economists don’t talk about justice. I fear that if economists don’t incorporate justice into their analysis, they risk losing relevance.

Why don’t applied economists who deal with data and policy design, speak of justice in a meaningful way? I think it boils down to four fundamental axioms that will be familiar to every economist. First, allocations must be efficient. Second, evidence must be data-driven. Third, policies should be forward-looking. Fourth, choices are made “at the margin”. As I explain below, I believe that these are very useful axioms. I also think, however, that they make it very hard for empirical economists who study inequality to effectively participate in the current debate on justice. In what follows, I explain why, using the four examples of protest movements to illustrate the crux of the problem. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The idea that ‘taxation is theft’ is one of those thrilling, paradigm shifting recognitions that are continually being rediscovered and shared. It is a classic case of pseudo-intellectuality, in which the excitement around an idea determines its popularity, rather than its quality (previously).

First, unlike theft, taxation is legal – and this turns out to be a more significant difference than it first seems since we rely on laws to determine who owns what. Second, taxation is a device for solving collective action problems and thus allowing us (by coercing us) to meet our moral obligations to ourselves and each other – including our obligations to respect each others’ property rights. One can’t coherently be in favour of enforcing property rights, e.g. by having a police force and judges to catch and punish thieves, without also being in favour of a sustainable system for funding that enforcement.

1. Taxation is Legal

The straightforward rebuttal of the claim that taxation is theft goes like this:

1. Theft is when someone takes something from you in a way that violates your legal property rights
2. When the government taxes money from you they do not violate your legal property rights
   Therefore
3. Taxation is not theft

To many people this semantic analysis is rather unsatisfactory. Whether things are legal or not is after all determined by the government. But whether something is right or wrong is determined by morality, which is not something determined by governments. The point of the claim that taxation is theft is that taxation is immoral in just the same way that theft is, i.e. that taking people’s property from them against their will and under threat of violence is wrong whether it is done by an ordinary person or by an agent of the government. Read more »

Mystical Sects & Fractals

so many spinning sects exist with
peculiar angles

facts of life: all human things exist
alongside phantom gods and angels

a billion mystical takes on Is exist
like fractured fractals

as guesswork insistently persists
heads spin off their axles

Jim Culleny
5/6/16

by Ada Bronowski

The encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx has always represented the encounter between two incompatible worlds: chaos versus reason, myth versus history, woman against man, enigmatic verbosity against crystal-clear clarity. Only one of these worlds can survive the clash.

The Sphinx’s riddle: what stays the same yet walks on four feet in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening, is solved by Oedipus who says that it is man, who crawls on all four as a baby, walks on two feet in his prime and with the aid of a stick, and thus on three legs, in his old-age. With this answer, Oedipus came to his own not as Oedipus, the individual, but as a figure of modern man, dispelling the forces of darkness that reigned terror on helpless mortals. Overcoming the Sphinx was – it seemed – like a new beginning, in which man-made laws became the one true law, and wild nature was tamed by human rationality.

As the Sphinx threw itself off a cliff, it buried with it the unwieldly, monstrous side of nature, and Oedipus was hailed not as ‘one amongst the gods’ as so often with Greek heroes, but ‘as a mortal, first amongst men, who disarmed the supernatural forces’, (at the beginning of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, l.31-4). Of course, we know what happened next. Man-made law and order did not stand a chance in the face of parricide, incest and children that are also siblings. The dark forces soon took hold of Oedipus and of Thebes once more, to the extent that one suspects they never left in the first place. Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the Antarctic explorer who would become famous for documenting Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition in his book The Worst Journey in the World, wrote a letter in 1919 in which he cast doubt on the purity of the motives of one of the expedition members, Lieutenant Edward “Teddy” Evans: “There will…be an unprinted reference to the Antarctic as a white wall upon which some people have a passion for writing their names. If the cap fits let him put it on.”

One of the fascinating things about Antarctica is how its extreme conditions put the best and worst of humanity into stark relief. From the very beginning, the motives of the people going there have been multi-layered, an adulterated mix of ego, commercial incentive, scientific curiosity, wanderlust, and the siren call of the unknown. Even Cherry-Garrard himself, not having any training or scientific skill to speak of but coming from money, ended up buying his way onto Scott’s team. Geographic landmarks were routinely named after sponsors and backers of various expeditions. The very earliest journeys were motivated entirely by a money-making desire to kill as many seals and whales as possible. One member of Scott’s team was photographed happily eating a tin of Heinz Baked Beans as part of a sponsorship deal. There has never been a time when commercialization wasn’t a major part of the Antarctic enterprise. And it’s likely to stay that way, simply due to the sheer difficulty and expense of getting there in the first place and equipping yourself to survive once there.  Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait in The November Sun, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Joseph Shieber

I had my piece for 3QD all prepared at the beginning of the past week, but a phone call on Monday derailed my plans.

Early Monday morning, I received an email from the Philosophy Department administrative assistant saying that someone had left their name and phone number on the Philosophy Department’s answering machine with the request that I call them. I was curious, so I did.

I reached their voicemail, left my name and number, and they soon called back. They told me that they were concerned for a close family relative who had fallen down a QAnon rabbit-hole. Why were they calling me? Because their close family relative was appealing to my Great Courses lectures on epistemology in support of their views. The caller wanted to know, did my lectures in fact endorse QAnon?

Reader, let me begin by stressing at the outset that my lectures do NOT endorse QAnon.

With that out of the way, let me introduce some fake names for my caller and their family member – let’s make the caller “Avery” and the family member “Harper”. (I’m withholding as many details as I can to protect the caller’s privacy and in that spirit I’ve chosen gender neutral names.)

I began by telling Avery that it’s very common for conspiracy theorists of all stripes to latch onto – and misread – the work of experts. I continued by stressing that Harper’s appeal to my Great Courses lectures for support is clearly a misreading.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Michael Abraham

I want to write about Christ and the End of the World and how queerness will usher in the World to Come. I want to write about these things immediately, right up front, but, instead, I will begin by telling you the story of two tattoos on my own body. I will begin this way because the story of these two tattoos has themes in it, and images in it. Themes and images are always a little murky, a little slippery. You have to write in circles to catch a theme, have to enter the circle of an image and be consumed there. You have to begin elsewhere than where you mean to be. So, I will tell the silly, little story of these two tattoos that I got as a teenager, and, after that, we will have themes and images. And once we have some themes and some images, it will be time to play with them, to twist and stretch them, to try to be creative in the sense of the eros: creative, to make, to bring forth. We will bring forth the End of the World and the World to Come and the indefatigability of the queer as an immanent force of transitionality in history. We will make these things real in our dual-action of writing and reading. But, first, the silly, little tattoo story.

***

I am sixteen, a year in which quite a lot happens to me. But one of the many things that happens when I am sixteen is that I decide I want a tattoo, and I want it on my wrist so that everyone can see it. I tell my mother this repeatedly, and she is understandably trepidatious, since how is one to trust a sixteen-year-old with a permanent decision. She comes to a solution finally, which is that I can have a tattoo if we get tattoos, the same tattoos, together. She is excited to share something significant with me, and I am excited about that too, but I am mostly excited to be the first kid in Catholic school with a tattoo. It is on a family trip to Kauai that we meet up with an old surfer bum tattoo artist on the North Shore in his beach shack tattoo studio, which I think he also lived in. By the time we get to the studio, I have given a lot of thought to the tattoo that I want. I know I want it to be words, for language, even then, matters deeply to me. However, I am a rather pretentious sixteen-year-old, so I want my tattoo to be in Latin. I have chosen the phrase “to the sea always” since both my mother and I are lovers of the ocean. Google Translate tells me that “to the sea always” in Latin is AD MARE SEMPER. So, the surfer bum tattoos AD MARE SEMPER on my wrist, facing towards me so that I can read it to myself, and on my mother’s leg. Read more »

by Dick Edelstein

Although jazz pianist, composer, arranger and lyricist Billy Strayhorn died in 1967 at the age of 51, his obscure life has since then become much better known than it was during his lifetime. His songs remain popular, and his reputation has continued to grow. Strayhorn shares credit for many jazz tunes he composed and arranged in collaboration with Duke Ellington and contributed without credit to others, such as the popular “Satin Doll”, but none of these tunes illustrate his importance and success as a jazz composer better than “Lush Life” and “Take the A Train”. The latter not only became the theme song of the Ellington orchestra but also one of its greatest successes and an anthem of the swing era. The lyrics of this song came from notes that Strayhorn took when he came to New York to work for Ellington for the first time, when he was only 23 years old. Ellington had given him directions on the easiest way to get to his house in Harlem – by taking the A train. The song has gone on to become one of the great jazz tunes both in its version with lyrics and as an instrumental.

Let’s consider one of Strayhorn’s most popular compositions, Lush Life, recorded by dozens of jazz artists over the years, and in recent years by Lady Gaga and Queen Latifa. For many jazz fans, one of the most memorable recordings of this song is the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman version on their album released by Impulse! in 1963, which was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000. Most of the lyrics were written when Strayhorn was still in high school, living in Pittsburgh. In a world-weary tone, the lyrics speak of night life following a failed romance. They represent a young boy’s fantasy about a sophisticated life seen from the point of view of a jaded bon vivant. Remarkably, they also describe the sort of life that, against all odds, Strayhorn was eventually to lead. Read more »

The waters of Lake Garda substitute well for sky in this photo, I think, taken looking down from a high vantage point on the western shore last week.