by Charlie Huenemann

“Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.” (Johannes Climacus / Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript)

It is entirely possible that we cannot handle the ever rising tide of knowledge. Yes, I am going to presume that it is knowledge — that we are not barking up the wrong axis mundi, that we are not ten days away from the next Einstein who overturns everything, that this time next year we will not look back on today as back when we were mere children. You might ask how I can possibly make this presumption, and you are right to ask. Nevertheless…

We know a helluva lot. It’s really extraordinary if you stop to think about it. Why should the descendants of some savannah primates be able to figure out all this stuff about quarks, penicillin, double-entry bookkeeping, stock derivatives, the rise and fall of psychoanalysis, Bluetooth (well, right, work in progress), and microchip readers? Any ancient alien bookies would have placed the odds heavily against us. But here we are, trying to drink from a veritable firehouse of veritas, swelling our heads most impressively.

As I said, maybe we can’t handle it. What am I saying? Of course we cannot handle it. Look at the guy over there, the one who holds in his palm a device that can tell him that there may be archeological evidence of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon beneath the Euphrates, the one who is watching a video of a dog pooping on a boat. Check your own recently closed tabs. Would you make him or you the lord of the whole of human knowledge?  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Spring in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, three days ago.

by Carol A Westbrook

I pulled my mask up, making sure to cover my nose and mouth as we walked into the supermarket.

My husband looked at me quizzically.

“Why are you putting on your mask?”

I pulled off my mask and gave him a sheepish grin.

I forgot that the mask mandate had been lifted because the Covid-19 case rate is now so low that the chance of infection was almost negligible. But I know that this is temporary, as we will probably have another spike in the fall with the emergence of yet another Omicron variant. But for now we have a temporary reprieve, and we could get back to “normal.” But what is normal? Two years under the threat of Covid-19 has changed the way we do things. The post-pandemic normal will be different than it was before Covid, and here is how I think things will look.

We have changed the way we shop. For me, and for many other people, this is the first time I’ve actually shopped for groceries in person instead of ordering online. As I walked in, the store felt like a wonderland, so full of good things to buy that I couldn’t make up my mind. Yes, they even had toilet paper!  Every brand and any size! (Remember the first few weeks of the lockdown, when one of our biggest fears was to be caught with our pants down, with nothing to wipe our rear ends?) Still, some products were in short supply, with their empty spots glaringly obvious, like a mouth with a missing tooth. Supply chain problems, they said. Read more »

At My Mother’s Grave in the Putnam Valley —

7000 Miles from Where She Was Born

by Rafiq Kathwari

Mother, I thought I heard an echo
of your rousing words —

“My Life Is Ahead of Me”—

Wrinkles mapped your face
after you flew
from the Kashmir Valley where—
long as I remember—
you raged for a life of dignity —
again losing your mind . . .

Seventy-three is the same age you were
when you spoke those words, yet
mapping my life ahead, I wonder

how stirring now must be
your echo across eternity!

Maryam Kathwari, March 5, 1924 ‑— March 31, 2020

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In the Berkeley hills there is a campus bus but the nearest bus stop is about a one-mile walk from my home, if you take a short cut through a meadow, but it gets quite muddy in the rainy season. Still, after some years I opted for taking the campus bus rather than my car on weekdays. One regular passenger I used to meet in the bus was a distinguished nonagenarian, Charles Townes, who had won the 1964 Physics Nobel Prize for inventing the laser (later he was also involved in the team that discovered the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy). In a campus lecture that I once gave on Globalization I was thrilled to see him at the front in the audience. He was active in the campus even in his 100^th year, shortly before his death.

I also came to know that he was a deeply religious man. He claimed that his invention of the laser came to him like a ‘flash’ akin to religious revelation. When he got the 2005 Templeton Prize that celebrates scientific and spiritual curiosity, he said that “Science and Religion are quite parallel…..Science tries to understand what our universe is like and how it works, including us humans. Religion is aimed at understanding the purpose and meaning of our universe, including our own lives”. This reminded me of what Tagore said to Einstein on the relation between Science and Religion when they met at the latter’s home in Berlin in 1930: “Science… is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth.” Einstein did not fully agree with Tagore, nor do I  with either Townes or Tagore. But no one can deny that in interpreting facts scientists cannot be independent of values (this is an important issue in some debates in life sciences now), and I also understand a bit about the possible appeal of deep spirituality even for atheists. Read more »

by Martin Butler

Beliefs about the essential goodness or badness of human beings have been at the heart of much political theory.[1] A recent book by the political philosopher Lea Ypi succinctly expresses the conflicting approaches. Speaking of her mother she’s says:

“Everyone, she believed, fought as a matter of course, men and women, young and old, current generations and future ones. Unlike my father, who thought people were naturally good, she thought they were naturally evil. There was no point in trying to make them good; one simply has to channel that evil so as to limit the harm. That’s why she was convinced socialism could never work even under the best circumstances. It was against human nature.”[2]

This negative view of human nature is associated with philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the more positive view with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Whether this is entirely justified is an open question, and I do not want to challenge the idea of human nature as such. Human beings like sweet things, they are sexual beings, they are on the whole social, seeking the approval of their fellows, and so on. The idea of human nature seems perfectly reasonable.  I do, however, want to examine how the idea that human beings are naturally bad should affect our political beliefs, if indeed it should affect them at all. Read more »

by Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Kurt Gödel, one of the most important logicians of the 20th century, is best known for his incompleteness theorem, which proves that any attempt to formulate a logical basis for arithmetic will either be unsound or incomplete. He was also famous for being a strange egg: walking around in a heavy coat in the summer, attending an occasional séance, and living in fear that someone was trying to poison him. There are lots of odd anecdotes about Gödel, but one happens to be a particular favorite among historians of logic: the story of his becoming an American citizen.

Gödel taught at the University of Vienna. After Hitler’s invasion of Austria, the Anschluss, Gödel would frequently be accosted by Nazi hoodlums in the street who assumed that because he was a skinny nerd with glasses, he must be Jewish. He wasn’t. Eventually, he had enough. He relocated to America, settling in Princeton, where he took up residence at the Institute for Advanced Study.

He became friendly with the Institute’s most famous scholar, Albert Einstein. Gödel had done some mathematical work exposing some of the stranger possibilities of the general theory of relativity, including the possibility of time travel, where a fast-moving electron could collide with itself if there was a bizarre enough distribution of matter and energy throughout space and time. Einstein and Gödel had plenty to discuss as they took walks together in their adopted homeland.

Before long, Einstein and economist Oskar Morgenstern convinced Gödel that he should become an American citizen. Looking into the process, Gödel learned that he would have to swear an oath to obey and defend the Constitution of the United States. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait at Gas Station, April 3, 2022.

by Joseph Shieber

One of the best television comedies of the last decade was The Good Place. Over the course of four seasons, its creator, Michael Schur, and a phenomenal ensemble cast tackled topics that I had thought to be too arcane for network television. The so-called “trolley problem”? Kantian deontology? Utilitarianism? All in the series, served up with Schur’s finely honed comedic chops.

Despite having already had countless opportunities to explore the moral philosophical underpinnings of the show – on Vox alone Schur had a 100-minute interview with Ezra Klein on the moral philosophy of The Good Place and Dylan Matthews wrote an extended piece on “How the Good Place Taught Moral Philosophy to its Characters – And Its Creators” – Schur revisits this territory in his new book, How To Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. 

To which my first reaction was: Really, Michael Schur? You didn’t have enough to do creating and writing sitcoms for NBC? You just had to sell a philosophy book project to Simon & Schuster? I was almost enraged enough about his amateurish poaching on my professional bailiwick to sit down and craft an unputdownable pitch that would land me an exclusive, even more impressive deal with Universal Television than the one he signed. (Suck it, Schur!)

After I realized that I didn’t know the first thing about pitching a television series, I decided that my fall-back plan would be to read How To Be Perfect and then mock it with haughty disdain – not only at faculty cocktail receptions but also to my immediate friends and family … and here, at 3QD. So I read the book and I can now tell you it’s … really quite good, actually. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Derek Neal

The character of the American abroad is an archetype in American fiction. By placing the American outside of his native country (usually in Europe), writers such as Henry James and James Baldwin were able to explore what constitutes American identity. More often than not, this identity is revealed in their novels not through what the identity contains, but in what it lacks.

Indeed, the American in Europe is an empty vessel. Like the negative of an image, his surroundings are filled in, and the empty space where a person should be appears in outline. Thus, the American has the task of creating his own identity, of forging his own personality without the aid of history or culture but through sheer willpower alone. Whether this is a true representation of what it means to be American is irrelevant; this is the conception that writers have created in literature, giving rise to the myth of the American in Europe. Every time an American character enters Europe, they enter into this legacy, intentionally or not. It is a sort of self-orientalizing, as one can stereotype and mythologize oneself just as one can others.

Henry James and James Baldwin are two progenitors of this genre. For both, the American is a prodigal character and the return to Europe is a return home, to where his real roots lie. The trip to Europe, or the permanent move in some cases, is a search for self-knowledge, and similarly to the biblical Garden of Eden, Europe is often cast as a place of sin and danger, a place one might never escape from if one isn’t careful. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” —Ecclesiastes 1:9

“Bullshit.” —Mike O’Brien 04-04-2022

It is a strange enough thing to collect knives. It is a step stranger still to collect sharpening stones; a further abstraction from reality, an auxiliary activity supporting a hobby which is itself a pantomime of preparedness and practicality. No matter. Once one is lodged firmly enough down a rabbit hole, the only options available are to hope for rescue, or to keep crawling deeper. I have clearly chosen the latter.

The two collection are, in principle, complimentary. Or they would be, if my knife collection served any use that would engender a need for resharpening. As it is, they remain pristinely polished and razor sharp, to no wordly end. The fact that their polished edges are also sharp is almost incidental; the added challenge of making them both polished and sharp is an undertaking of curiosity, contemplative time-wasting, and vain self-overcoming. Still, it’s cheaper than collecting cars, with far less surface area over which to preen.

Of course, function is a factor in this appreciation. The marvel of an alloy hard enough to cut glass is that it can cut glass, in addition to the marvel of our ability to produce such an alloy. Diamonds can cut glass, but you can’t make a reasonably priced pocket knife out of diamonds (actually… well, it’s complicated). But an alloy that can cut glass, while being transformable into a shape of our choosing, and while also being re-sharpenable after God-know-what manner of use managed to dull it, is something more special still. It is an example of human ingenuity’s power to manipulate natural substances to suit whatever specialized application we may devise. It is awe-inspiring, both in the sense of wonderment and dread. Read more »

by Michael Abraham

I am leaving, and I am taking nothing.

I am leaving, and I am taking nothing, and there is a void inside me—a round, black sphere, like a planet, or like the absence of a planet where a planet should be. I am coming apart in the stress of it. I am borrowing money and time, bleeding my pride out my feet as I run from this bar to that bar to be anywhere, to be out. It is not only that I am sad. It is that I am depleted, that I have given all I can give, and, now, there is no gift left. There is no gift, as in, there is no special sense of possibility glimmering, of the impossible becoming possible through me. There was once this gift, this special sense, and now there is only its having been there, its having flown off to someone somewhere else.

***

I walk circles around this place that I am leaving, and I note all the little, special things, the daily clutter of being alive. I do not think about the time that I have spent here. I think only of leaving, of fluttering off like a moth—not like a butterfly, for I am not going off in a gay manner. I am somber like a moth. To be somber is not to be destitute; it is not to despair. There is a certain resignedness to being somber, a certain goodnaturedness. One who is somber is like falling water, carried forward irrepressibly, tinkling and shimmering as the onward pull of gravity does what it will always do, which is to draw on and downward—that is to say, to be somber is to face inevitability. One who is somber has an air about him, is better-off than other sad folks. One who is somber is like a moth. This is the best that I can explain it, the allure of the feeling that I am feeling. It is not enough to say that everything in my life is ending and starting again. That is true. But it is better to say that I am a small and fragile thing, a small and fragile thing with a certain gravitas, a certain solemnity, moving into the broader world to see what the broader world has in store, moving into the broader world because there is no choice, because it is in my nature to move. Fluttering, fluttering.  

***

I don’t want to get into specifics because specifics muddy the water; they make complication where there might be the simplicity of feeling and all its affordances. Read more »

The literary critic Hugh Kenner (whom I got to know a bit when I was an undergrad at Johns Hopkins) once wrote about the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) that he “…tired of flowers, and indulged in artificial flowers, and then tired of those and sought out real flowers so exotic they could pass for artificial.” This flower, in a restaurant I was in recently, reminded me of that. It was a real flower that could pass for artificial.

by Dick Edelstein

In Barcelona the daily scramble to deliver children to school results in terrible congestion in the upper part of the city, where the more economically privileged send their children. Watching this phenomenon brings back my own school days, when the most embarrassing thing any of us could imagine was being dropped off by parents. If such a thing were necessary for some unavoidable reason, the kids urged their parents to drop them a short distance away from the school so their peers wouldn’t see them getting out of the car. To be seen being coddled in this way was unimaginably embarrassing, almost as bad as having your mother show up to deliver a forgotten lunch box. Everything about parents tended to be embarrassing and much of the time we pretended not to have any. But there was a single exception to the drop-off rule. If the parents happened to own a 1956 Chevrolet, with its futuristic swept-wing design, then it was obligatory to be dropped off at school on some occasion, even if the ride was for only for a couple of blocks, so the other kids could look with sheer envy on this most prestigious possession. Read more »