by Bill Benzon

The First Arena is that of inanimate matter, which began when the universe did, fourteen billion years ago. About four billion years ago life emerged, the Second Arena. Of course we’re talking about our local region of the universe. For all we know life may have emerged in other regions as well, perhaps even earlier, perhaps more recently. We don’t know. The Third Arena is that of human culture. We have changed the face of the earth, have touched the moon and the planets, and are reaching for the stars. That happened between two and three million years ago, the exact number hardly matters. But most of the cultural activity is little more than 10,000 years old.

The question I am asking: Is there something beyond culture, something just beginning to emerge? If so, what might it be?

Let us review.

Complexity and Abundance in an Evolving Universe
My basic thinking about the nature of the universe, about ontology and cosmology, is grounded in two ideas: 1) complexity, which I take from Ilya Prigogine, though he is by no means its only exponent, and 2) abundance, from the philosopher, Paul Feyerabend. Complexity of this kind is more than complication. It is, paradoxically, the capacity for simple systems to undergo self-organization and thereby to become more complex, and still more ever complex. And complexity accounts for the universe’s abundance.

Abundance? Here is a remark that Feyerabend made to John Horgan, the science journalist:

… he told me about a book he was working on, The Conquest of Abundance, about the human passion for reductionism. It would address the fact that “all human enterprises” seek to reduce the natural diversity, or “abundance,” inherent in reality.

“First of all the perceptual system cuts down this abundance or you couldn’t survive.” Religion, science, politics and philosophy represent our attempts to compress reality still further. Of course, these attempts to conquer abundance simply create new complexities.

The universe is complex, it is abundant, it is overflowing. It is, above all, the capacity of one arena to give rise to another: inorganic matter gives to life, life to mind and eventually to culture. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In the early 1980’s apart from joining the September group, there were two other outside organizations I was invited to join which expanded my intellectual horizons. The first was the South Asia Committee of the Social Science Research Council in New York. This Committee planned some research projects on different topics of social science in South Asia and also gave out research fellowships and postdoctoral research grants. It gave me the opportunity to interact with some of the top scholars working in the US on South Asia, including Myron Weiner, the distinguished political scientist, Bernard Cohn, the historical anthropologist, Wendy Doniger, the Sanskrit scholar, Ralph Nicholas, cultural anthropologist of Bengal, Richard Eaton, cultural historian of medieval India, and Ronald Herring, political scientist on agrarian development in India.

Of these the most colorful person was Wendy who used to entertain us with her charming stories drawing upon the erotic aspects of ancient Hindu texts. Myron, when he was the chair of the Committee always began the meeting with his collection of jokes. Myron was downright serious, though, in his work where he was insistent in bringing to the attention of Indian policy makers the crucial importance of universal child education and reform of the prevailing, widely connived, practice of using child labor. Ralph used to share with me his stories of his experience of ethnographic work in Bengal villages (he was fluent in Bengali and during his field visits he’d often be chatted up by curious villagers who’d tell him that as he was from America interested in their lives, he must be a CIA agent, and were utterly disappointed when they heard his emphatic denial). Read more »

by Paul Braterman

An Immense World; How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong, Random House/Bodley Head, June 2022

This book is an enormous achievement. A thrilling read, taking us into the Umwelt, or perceptual world, of numerous mammal, fish, reptile and insect species. A major work of scholarship, with over a thousand references to a 45-page bibliography, as well as accounts of interviews with numerous researchers and visits to their laboratories. An exploration of many ways of sensing the world, some of which we share, while others are beyond our imagining. The evolving interplay of perception and action, communication and deception, environment and response. And an enhanced insight into what it is like to be a bat, a bird, a blue whale, a beetle, or a human.

From the wealth of detail in the book, a consistent grand narrative emerges. Some physical process interacts with living matter. This is the raw material for sensation. Sensory abilities then shape a creature’s Umwelt, being developed according to the demands of its environment. But every perceiver is itself an object of perception to others, and we have colour displays and camouflage, smells as signals and identifiers, sound as communication to others and, by echolocation, back to the creature who generates it, and the same is true of other senses that we do not share, such as the detection of tiny electrical fields. Senses combine and even, we suspect, merge, and what we ourselves perceive is but part of an immense pattern. But the heedlessness with which we amplify our own signals disrupts this pattern, contributing to our destruction of nature, and we ourselves are the poorer for it.

Let me offer a few samples from the book’s wealth of detail. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Be Unvaan. June 11, 2022, Cambridge, MA.

Digital photograph.

by Tim Sommers

“If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” I can’t find the origin of this unfortunate slogan, but it’s been around – and oft repeated – at least since the 1970s. “To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.” That’s Wayne Lapierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, the day after the Parkland Shooting. The trouble with slogans and bad arguments like these is that it takes much less time to make them than it does to break them. The point of outlawing guns is to make it the case that outlaws and bad guys won’t have as many guns. But Sam Harris, prominent “rationalist”, denies that “restrictions would make it difficult for bad people to acquire guns illegally.”  (Compare, restrictions on bank robbery or speeding don’t make it any more difficult for people to rob banks or speed.) Sometimes, you get a more neutral argument along the same lines. “Maybe, having a lot of guns around will lead to more violence. On the other hand, maybe, having more guns around will prevent more violence than it causes. We can’t know.”

But this is not an unknown. It’s known. More guns cause more homicides. More guns cause more suicides. It’s a simple equation. More guns = more death. There are hundreds of studies (done in just about every which way), asking whether or not increasing the availability of firearms contributes to more suicides and more homicides. It does. At this point, it’s like asking whether evolution is real, whether smoking causes cancer, or whether the increase in the level of certain gases in the atmosphere is causing global temperatures to trend upward. The answers are yes, yes, yes, and yes. These are all things we do, in fact, know.

This is important. Guns are now the leading cause of death among teenagers. And children. How can people not know that more guns lead to more deaths? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Editor’s Note: Thomas O’Dwyer wrote almost fifty essays for 3QD which you can see here.

by Michal Yudelman-O’Dwyer

Thomas O’Dwyer, my husband, died on Wednesday. He wouldn’t approve of this beginning. In his articles he always came up with something original or intriguing to draw the reader in.

Thomas was so many things, but first of all a writer. He never stopped seeking facts and information up to his last night in hospital. He had a quick Irish temper and no patience for slow understanding or explaining things twice, which sometimes made things difficult, especially if you were always asking him how to do this or that on the computer, or to edit something you wrote, as I did.

He was also generous and caring and had a weakness for street cats, which he fed every day in our building’s back yard until the last trip to the hospital. All our house cats over the generations were street cats who’d wandered in, or which he’d found as kittens.

As a fearless war correspondent, he had hair raising tales, sometimes sounding, how shall I put it, somewhat enhanced. But there was nothing enhanced about his reporting. His pursuit of the truth was relentless and everything he wrote depended on the background of his vast knowledge and understanding.

His daughter Fiona said he’d told her as a child, when he was Reuters’ bureau chief in Nicosia, that as a journalist it was his responsibility to know the history of “every country in the world.” Read more »

by Ethan Seavey

It’s my last day in Paris, and a liminal one. I have to leave for the airport by 14:00 to retrieve my suitcases from my friend. 

[…]

I intended to write several sentences before writing the climax of this short piece—that I wish France would say goodbye to me, that someone French would notice my absence—when a young man walked up to where I am sitting on the lawn. He wore brown sandals and a soccer uniform in bright orange and blue. His hair fell to his shoulders and he said: 

« T’écrit ? »

“Sorry?” I responded.

“You are writing?”

“Yes.”

I glanced back down and finished my sentence, “…from my friend.” 

He laughed softly.

“Sorry.”

He left. He walked down the lawn, and then across another.

1

I suppose he was Paris coming to say goodbye. I reacted to him as I did to the city. I engaged lightly but held back; I didn’t know how to respond to his existence; I buried my head in my journal; I kept writing to end the conversation; I pretended that I was as important as any other expatriate writer in Paris; I wanted to appear lofty and crafty; I wanted to walk away with the city’s last muse, sitting in the dregs of their coffee cup.

When I wanted to be seen by Paris, I felt ignored. On my very last day I am noticed. He has altered my premature past.  Read more »

Surface of a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In the 1990’s Andrei Shleifer was only one among many in the proselytizing army of reformers who went out to the transition economies, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe but also in developing countries, to make them ready for capitalism. They were in a hurry to implement reforms of liberalization and privatization according to some general, often one-size-fits-all, formula. The purse strings of emergency financial help by international organizations like the IMF and the World Bank and US agencies like USAID were also controlled by stern macro-economic ideologues of ‘structural adjustment’. The reformers were in possession of the canonical gospels which it was their sacred duty to spread among the heathens as quickly as possible, given the golden opportunity after the fall of the godless communists and socialists.

I went to some of the international conferences on the Economics of Transition in this period, held usually in cities like Budapest or Prague or Riga. Soon I gave up going to such conferences as I felt I did not know enough of those countries to really say anything that’d make sense to the local audience. But I did go to one organized in Kolkata by the eminent political economist Mancur Olson. (Mancur grew up in a Norwegian-American family in North Dakota. When he came to know that the name Mancur, a traditional name in such Scandinavian families, was a variation of the Arabic name Mansoor, he speculated: “In fanciful moments, I imagine a Viking raid on the Levant.”)  I had admired his past work on collective action and I thought he deserved a Nobel Prize for that work, which he did not get. When he asked me to contribute to a collection of essays on institutional economics he coedited, I gladly did. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

“Thus the concept of a cause is nothing other than a synthesis (of that which follows in the temporal series with other appearances) in accordance with concepts; and without that sort of unity, which has its rule a priori, and which subjects the appearances to itself, thoroughgoing and universal, hence necessary unity of consciousness would not be encountered in the manifold perceptions. But these would then belong to no experience, and would consequently be without an object, and would be nothing but a blind play of representations, i.e., less than a dream.” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 112(A))

[IN OTHER WORDS: Without concepts, experience is unthinkably weird.]

Back in the 17th century, some philosophers tried to place all knowers on a level playing field. John Locke claimed the human mind begins like a blank tablet, devoid of any characters, and it is experience, raw and unfiltered, that gives the mind something to think about. Since everybody has experience, this would mean everybody could develop knowledge of the world, and no one would be inherently better at it than anybody else.

It’s a valuable idea, and in the neighborhood of a great truth, but not very plausible as a model of how we manufacture knowledge. Later philosophers argued that, if this is how we do it, then we really don’t know much. For example, David Hume could not see how anyone could ever develop the idea of causality: you can watch the events in a workshop all the livelong day, and though you might see patterns in what happens, you will never see the necessity that is supposed to connect a cause with an effect. (Philosophers writing about this stuff have a hard time avoiding italics.) 

But clearly we do end up with causal knowledge, as Hume himself never doubted, and we manage to navigate our ways through a steady world of enduring objects. We somehow end up with knowledge of an objective world. And we don’t remember that arriving at such knowledge was all that difficult. We just sort of grew into it, and now it seems so natural that it’s really hard to imagine not having it, and it’s even difficult not to find such knowledge perfectly obvious. But in fact it is anything but obvious (as Jochen Szangolies recently explored).  Read more »

“This guided Theseus thro’ the Maze;
And sent Him home with Life . . . “
………………… —Matthew Prior

Love is a Cord, a Chord, Accord

a boy at his labyrinth’s door
grasped the end of the string of a spool
proffered in the hands of a woman
who knew that once within, if
without tether, if no more than
a floating mote, if bound to nothing,
disoriented, he would, at each
critical turn, run the risk
of being zero or fool

once you step in, she sang,

— and a chorus swelled behind
— and a drummer struck a chime
— and a cornet blew a mind
— and an artist drew a line
— and a poet spoke divine:

do not release this thread, she sang,
even as you reach the core

it’s the one way true,
your only means to find again
this door

Jim Culleny
6/2/22

by David J. Lobina

It was no accident that it was an immigrant who revived the debate. While Marxist thought provided (…) a lens through which to observe the nation from the outside, the experience of living as an “alien” (…) proved an almost indispensable condition for (…) more advanced tools of observation.

—Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People.

Who he? Exactly.

An “anarchist rabbi” nowadays mostly known for a book on Anarcho-Syndicalism as well as for his involvement with the Jewish anarchist movement in East London at the turn of the 20^th century, the life and work of the German thinker Rudolf Rocker has much to teach us in these most modern of times, if only we were to read him more often. Of particular interest to me is his magnum opus, Nationalism and Culture, a work now basically forgotten but which was regarded as a genuine contribution to the study of nationalism (and other topics) when it was published in 1937 by people as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and Herbert Read. The book, and Rocker himself, are now due a revisit.[i]

The first thing one notes when approaching Nationalism and Culture is its impressive combination of breadth and depth. The book covers multiple time periods, thinkers, and artistic developments, and in doing so Rocker chronicles how the state and the nationalist worldview have combined to shape the contemporary world, influencing life and manners, thought and culture, and much else – and for this alone it should be more widely known.[ii]

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As is often the case, Rocker’s outlook was partly a product of the times he lived, so let’s start with that first and I will come back to the book next month. Read more »

by Brooks Riley