by Tim Sommers

In Democracy in America (1848), Alexis de Tocqueville concluded from his travels in the United States that “The particular and predominating fact peculiar to” this democratic age “is equality of conditions, and the chief passion which stirs men at such times is the love of this same equality.”  Indeed, “The gradual progress of equality,” he wrote, “is something fated. The main features of this progress are the following: it is universal and permanent, it is daily passing beyond human control, and every event and every man helps it along….”

If this is at all accurate, it seems fair to say that our conditions, and our ambitions, regarding human equality, are much diminished. But I want to draw attention to just one specific point de Tocqueville highlights.

Equality, the relevant kind of equality for him, is “equality of conditions”. It’s not abstract moral equality or equality limited to political decision making or equality of opportunity or (as contemporary philosophers say) equality in the distribution of some underlying abstraction like utility, access to advantage, or primary goods. Democracy, and the democratic spirit, called on and depended on, for de Tocqueville, a certain level of real, actual, surface-level equality. The love of equality, that he is both drawn to and repelled by – with “a kind of religious dread” – is just ordinary equality, not some philosophical surrogate.

If you ask someone at a random about equality or inequality in the United States today, they will very likely assume you mean economic inequality. This is partly because economic inequality has gotten more attention recently, but it is mostly because, if you ask people to think about whether the conditions of their life are equal or unequal to the conditions of others’ lives, the first thing many will think about is money.

Yet, at the precise moment Thomas Piketty’s groundbreaking work on economic inequality was drawing new attention to the shocking level of economic inequality that characterizes our new gilded age, philosopher Harry Frankfurt thought it imperative to insist that “Insofar as economic inequality is undesirable…this is not because it is as such morally objectionable. As such, it is not morally objectionable.” Rather, he said, “from a moral point of view economic inequality does not matter very much”.

Unfortunately, many other philosophers writing about economic inequality also deny that it is bad in and of itself. Instead, they insist that substantial economic inequalities are bad because, and where, they have bad effects.

I believe this view is a mistake. Read more »

by Varun Gauri

Covfefe.

Alternative facts.

Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

“The line of ‘Make America great again,’ the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody’s using it, they are all loving it. I don’t know, I guess I should copyright it, maybe I have copyrighted it.”

The style and rhetoric of the Trump era appears to be historically unique, the result of the narrow and unexpected electoral victory of a man who honed his skills performing as a reality TV idiot savant. But I believe that the rhetorical style of Trumpism — nonsense, incoherence, giving truth the middle finger— will outlast Trump.

When people say that Trumpism will outlive Trump, they usually refer to the political economy. Typically, they mean that trade shocks and the integration of China into the World Trade Organization caused unemployment and anger in the American heartland that has not yet been adequately addressed, that rising levels of immigration and the coming emergence of America as a majority-minority nation evoke nostalgia and a politics of resentment, or that the political alliance between plutocrats and populists has proven durable. All that may be true. But I think that it is not only the structural forces that are likely to endure, but also the trappings of Trumpism, what we think of as its ephemera — the circus atmosphere, the sensation that up is down, the experience of having fallen through the looking glass. Read more »

Harold Newton. Untitled, 1960s.

Oil on Masonite board.

“In 1955, 19-year-old African American artist Harold Newton was convinced by A. E. Backus, a prominent Florida landscape artist, to create paintings of landscapes rather than religious scenes.^[6] Newton sold his landscapes from the trunk of his car because art galleries in South Florida refused to represent African Americans.^[7] The following year, 14-year-old Alfred Hair began taking formal art lessons from Backus and, after three years, also began selling landscape paintings. Newton and Hair inspired a loose-knit group of African American artists to follow their leads. Newton is recognized by fellow artists for his technical inspiration while Hair is the considered the leader and catalyst “who set the tone for the group through the 1960s.”^[6][8] They attracted a group of a “young, energetic” artists who painted large quantities of brilliantly colorful impressionistic landscapes that they each sold from their cars.^[6] In 1970, the group lost its charismatic leader when Hair was killed in a barroom brawl at age 29 and the prodigious output of the movement’s artists began to wane.” (Wikipedia)

More here, here and here.

by Jonathan Kujawa

If you’d like a punch to the throat, use classroom hours as a measure of the work of the next teacher or professor you meet at a social event. It’s like only counting hours on the playing field for a professional athlete or hours in the air for a pilot.

There is hidden work in every job. For university faculty, a big part of their job is conducting research, publishing that work, and getting the grant funding needed to do that work. For both teachers and professors, there is also the mentoring of students outside the classroom. For university faculty, this frequently comes in the form of student research projects.

Many of my essays at 3QD have focused on the work of professional mathematicians, but there is a vibrant community of student researchers, as well. Indeed, Involve is an entire journal devoted to publishing new research in mathematics suitable for publication in mainstream research journals, but with the extra requirement that at least 1/3 of the authors be undergraduate students. Full disclosure: my colleague, Mike Jablonski, is an editor at the journal.

Four years ago we talked about the work of my former student, Rhyker Benavidez. Rhyker worked on questions involving the symmetric group which were inspired by biology. I have worked with several students since then, but none have done projects which seemed suitable for a 3QD essay. On the other hand, my collaborator, Rob Muth, was just telling me about some great work done by students of his at Washington & Jefferson College. Rob was justifiably proud of their results and I thought they were perfect for the readership of 3QD. Read more »

by David Kordahl

Paul Halpern’s new book, Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect, takes its time to get there, but its best parts discuss the intersection of two puzzles for 20th century rationalists: psychoanalysis, and quantum mechanics. This intersection is dramatized by the correspondence of Carl Jung, Freud’s influential protege, and Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist whose “exclusion principle” provides the quantum explanation for why matter doesn’t simply collapse. Halpern situates the Jung/Pauli dialogue in a broad-strokes science history. The first 120 pages roam from ancient Greece to modern physics. Then we get the interesting hundred-odd pages on Jung and Pauli. Finally, unconvincingly, John S. Bell and his famous theorem are described in terms of Jungian synchronicity.

This hook could work for a popular history, but already in the introduction, I realized this book wasn’t for me. Halpern has written an unabashedly Whig history, picking winners and losers, judging historical figures largely on whether they agree with the opinions of modern researchers. “Many great thinkers over the ages have conflated valid, testable scientific connections with pseudoscientific analyses,” he writes, confidently picking out the “specious numerology” of the Pythagoreans and the astrological impulses of Kepler as examples.

There’s nothing exactly wrong with this—I’m not going to the ropes for the numerologists—but it does call into question why we should care about this history. In a sort of thesis statement for the book, Halpern chides,

In retrospect, Jung’s insights about the need for a new acausal principle in science were brilliant and prescient. Nonetheless his low threshold for accepting anecdotal evidence about ‘meaningful coincidences’ without applying statistical analysis to rule out spurious correlations was a serious failing in his work. Jung trusted his intuitive sense of when things were connected. But in the light of the mind’s capacity to fabricate false linkages at times, pure intuition on its own is not genuine science.

This is all perfectly reasonable, but it misses the point. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Paul Orlando

Louise Bourgeois was an artist based out of New York and most often thought of as a sculptor. My favorite of her works was called Maman — a giant spider that I walked under many times while visiting the Tate Modern.

She also used to hold an artists’ salon out of her home in Manhattan.

Her salon was famous both for it being her salon but also because she continued it for over 30 years. I’m at an age where doing something for over 30 years is just becoming understandable. So I thought I’d share my experience attending.

Years ago I was part of an artist group and learned about the salon. I had never experienced such a thing before, which seemed fitting more with old European novels than my life in New York. But one by one over a few years, different artist friends in the group told me about their experience at Bourgeois’ salon. Good and bad (where criticism was tough), but mostly good.

Eventually, I resolved to try it myself.

The next day I went to my phone, looked at the number to call, and let a year go by.

The next year, when I got up the nerve, I reached Bourgeois’ assistant and was told that the salon was already full for that week.

I waited another six months. Same result.

A year went by with only occasional thoughts of calling again.

Finally, one day I picked up the phone and with minimal worry, called, was connected, told to arrive that Sunday at 3pm, and of course that Louise liked chocolate. Read more »

Roses and Dolomites, as seen from a walk above the village of Latzfons in the mountains of the South Tyrol in September of 2020.

by Brooks Riley

On January 28^th of this year, just as the biggest black swan event of the century was about to unfold, the South Korean band BTS debuted their latest single Black Swan on CBS’s Late Late Show. Looking back on this moment of Jungian synchronicity, one might be tempted to ask, ‘How did they know?’  

Then in February, when the Tonight Show featured BTS performing their song ON in the deserted main concourse of New York’s Grand Central Station, the rare sight of that vaulted Beaux Arts architecture devoid of travelers seemed also vaguely ominous. Weeks later, an empty Grand Central was no longer the wee-hours venue rented out to a TV show. It was a daytime reality, thanks to a pandemic which shut the city down.

Like many fellow Koreans BTS believes in fate. They seem to gravitate to moments that are portentous and credit at least some of their massive success to fated good fortune—notwithstanding hard work, innate talent, good management, and the support of an abiding Army of fans.

Those early omens were not the only brush the band would have with the sober realities of 2020. The massive demonstrations for Black Lives Matter in June after the death of George Floyd prompted BTS to donate $1 million to BLM, an amount spontaneously matched by their Army of fans the next day, donations that may have influenced more Americans into giving as well.

This summer, Stay Gold, a sunny, upbeat plea to keep dreams alive, complete with golden retriever and technicolor landscape, was the perfect fit for a pandemic playlist. And a simple PSA about social distancing funded by Hyundai made staying at home as glamorous—or not—as they are, sending the essential message that no one, not even stars in the pop culture firmament, are exempt from the challenges that a lockdown imposes. Read more »

by Katie Poore

I majored in English in college.

This statement tends to get one of two reactions: the first is a vague and uncomprehending stare, the kind that belies complete indifference to anything literary, much less anything academically literary. The second is a furrowed brow, a slight narrowing of the eyes, and the question “Why?” or any of its variants (“What are you planning on doing with that?” “Do you want to be, like, a teacher?” “What can you use that degree for?”).

These reactions are understandable, and even somewhat reasonable. Forbes frequently lists English Literature as one of the worst majors for a return on investment. Comedian John Mulaney lampoons the major in his stand-up act Kid Gorgeous at Radio City, saying of his own English education at Georgetown University: “I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to go read Jane Austen, and then I didn’t. That’s the worst use of 120 grand I can possibly fathom.”

English degrees, like many humanities degrees, invite skepticism, and in response to these skeptics, English majors have rallied the troops, battened down the hatches, and said with force: “Literature fosters empathy.”

Maybe you’ve heard this before. It’s something that I’ve said innumerable times to anyone who will listen, and something that I’ve heard repeated by classmates and professors and even during my graduation ceremony. The Director of the English Department’s speech read like a rousing, if not hilarious, defense of the major so many of us young undergraduates had naively decided to undertake. It was as if she were trying to say to the parents who had foot their child’s educational bill: “Don’t worry. That money you just paid was worth it. I swear.” Read more »

by Ali Minai

I came to Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon by Lesley Adkins (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003) because I was looking to read about Henry Rawlinson – someone I had wondered about and admired for a long time. Copying the immense and inaccessible trilingual cuneiform inscription of Bisitun, and then working to decipher not one but three ancient languages from virtually nothing were feats fit more for legend and story than reality. But Rawlinson was real and, if anything, even more remarkable than my limited knowledge of his accomplishments had suggested. Nominally, the book is a biography of Rawlinson, with a strong focus on the period he spent in Iran (or Persia, as it was called then) and Iraq (then under Ottoman rule). But, in fact, it is the story of a Great Adventure that completely revolutionized our knowledge of human history in ways that is almost beyond imagination for us in the 21^st century. And it is told by the author with great skill and verve in this gripping book. This article too is not intended as a book review, but rather as a general reflection on archaeology and how it has changed the world, albeit seen through the work of Rawlinson and his peers.

There is certainly something to the trope that our vast knowledge of the world has taken away some of its magic. No longer being able to say “Here be dragons” has, in effect, killed off the last dragons, and left us to look for them in pages of fantasy or Game of Thrones. And what is true of geography is also true of history, though in a far less complete way. There are still plenty of unvisited places in time past, and teasing out information about those places remains one of the most exciting adventures for the human intellect. In the list of such quests, the one by Henry Rawlinson and his peers was surely one of the greatest.

Imagine the state of historical knowledge in the early 16^th century. Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus – and others who shared their lands – derived most of their knowledge of ancient history from scripture and tradition. Time itself was uncertain. Some – using Biblical calculations – believed that the world was 6,000 years old. Others clung to stories of vanished civilizations of indeterminate antiquity, or put their faith in cosmic philosophies of ages past, present, and future. The Chinese, as one of the most culturally continuous civilizations in the world, had perhaps the longest tradition of true historiography, but even that only went back no more than 4,000 years or so, and dealt only with Eastern Asia. For the West – and for much of the Muslim world, which ultimately derived its intellectual capital from Greek sources – concrete history went back to Thucydides and Xenophon and then to Herodotus. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

One of my favorite science fiction novels is “The Black Cloud” by Fred Hoyle. It describes an alien intelligence in the form of a cloud that approaches the earth and settles by the sun. Because of its proximity to the sun the cloud causes havoc with the climate and thwarts the attempts of scientists to both study it and attack it. Gradually the scientists come to realize that the cloud is an intelligence unlike any they have encountered. They are finally successful in communicating with the cloud and realize that its intelligence is conveyed by electrical impulses moving inside it. The cloud and the humans finally part on peaceful terms.

There are two particularly interesting aspects of the cloud that warrant further attention. One is that it’s surprised to find intelligence on a solid planet; it is used to intelligence being gaseous. The second is that it’s surprised to find intelligence concentrated in individual human minds; it is used to intelligence constantly moving around. The reason these aspects of the story are interesting is because they show that Hoyle was ahead of his time and was already thinking about forms of intelligence and life that we have barely scratched the surface of. Read more »

Unknown artist. Zuljanah (devotional folk art related to Moharram).

Digital photograph by Sughra Raza.

Thanks to Sara Suleri Goodyear for finding this poster in her collection.

by Joan Harvey

The Passive Vampire by Ghérasim Luca, 1945. Translated into English by Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Prague, Twisted Spoon Press, 2008)

If it is true, as is claimed
that after death man continues
a phantom existence
I’ll let you know.

Ghérasim Luca, La Mort morte, 1941

Vive le vampire!

James Joyce, Ulysses

A book travels through time, disappears, reappears, and bites. Bites a reader who exists in a completely different time and space. Does this bite draw blood? As I read I get goosebumps, even in 100-degree heat.

The Passive Vampire turns up here in Utah, a Utah of rocks and Mormons, Navajos and uranium, coyotes and bats, “a net of bats cleaving our destinies together to a slender, delirious wire.” (P.V. 103) Bats, vampires, things that bite in the night. We live here in a visual delirium of stone and color, vast blue space, green valleys, red rocks, orange rocks, purple rocks in all manner of outrageous formations, and heat, dry heat. Reality itself is surreal. Though the water of the Colorado River seems far from the water of the Seine where Luca drowned himself.

Here, in this house, in this desert landscape, I’m bored with the whole idea of vampires, although they keep multiplying, turning up everywhere. I once bought a house from America’s foremost vampire theoretician. (Was it haunted? Of course.) I have even been a vampire in a movie called Who Killed JonBenét?, a film that from production descended directly into a crypt. I thought I made a surprisingly good vampire, but all images have been lost.

But a passive vampire is something else. A passive vampire gives blood as well as takes it. Is this passive vampire “sadomasochistically confused,” as Luca says, or perhaps, as well, a generous vampire? Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

Most of the atoms in your body are hydrogen atoms. Because hydrogen atoms are so light, however, by mass you are mostly oxygen (60% to 65%). The amount of oxygen in your body varies because most of it is in the form of water (98.3% of your molecules are water molecules), and in the human body, water is always coming or going. You are wet star stuff.

Carbon is the second most abundant element in your body by mass (about 18%). We refer to all life on Earth as carbon-based because all of our biologically important molecules (carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and nucleotides) contain carbon.

Carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen are three of the four most abundant elements in the visible universe. In fact, six of the elements essential for human life are among the ten most cosmologically abundant elements. It’s important to remember, though, that hydrogen and helium, the most common elements cosmologically, account for more than 99% of the universe we see. All the rest is almost not there. The third most abundant element cosmologically, oxygen, accounts for 0.1%. Our bodies reflect the relative abundances of elements in the universe, to some extent, and on Earth. At the same time, planets and all the life on them are astonishingly rare in the context of all there is. Read more »

by Callum Watts

Picture this: a society that uses government controlled predictive mechanisms to determine the future of children before they get the chance to try and make something of themselves. In such a society exams and education play a secondary role, as predictive technologies are able to allocate the right people to the right tracks from the get-go. This might sound like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which powerful social and biological engineering create and enforce social hierarchies. Every person has their place and role determined for them from early on.

Well this month, the UK almost followed suit, as hundreds of thousands of teenagers had their futures predicted, and grades assigned to them, not based on their performance in actual exams, but based on where they live and come from. In the context of the UK is highly correlated with seemingly irrelevant factors like wealth and race. These results were to be used to determine students’ futures. But rather than being rooted in a terrifying and highly sophisticated system for social control, the British version was driven by an obsession with efficiency and the limited understanding that an elite clique has of the value and purpose of education. Whilst the algorithm approach has now been abandoned, it’s interesting to examine what got us here.

On the face of it, the way we got into this mess looks like bad luck. The global pandemic made it difficult to sit exams safely, so a solution needed to be devised. By looking at a combination of teacher’s predictions, past individual performance, and past school performance, grades were generated for every high school student in the UK. But as soon as the grades started to come in, thousands of students and teachers were shocked to see bright students getting poor grades. How could it be that otherwise diligent and intelligent students from poor backgrounds were getting results which were demolishing their hopes and ambitions? Straightforwardly, it was because of the final variable in the prediction algorithm. By factoring in school performance, students were being downgraded not because of anything they had done, but quite literally because of where they come from. And roughly speaking, in the context of the UK, this means being judged based on wealth. The algorithm boosted the grades of the children of wealthy parents (on average) and reduced the grades of children from poorer backgrounds (on average).

The algorithm development was done by Ofqual, details here, and a PR firm was hired to defend and explain it to the public. The algorithm was roundly criticised as being inadequate and unfair even before it was used, and given its consequences, it seems pretty hard to defend now. But even if the algorithm had been perfect, the episode reveals a deeper unfairness within the education system as a whole. When I expressed my surprise at how brazenly this approach rewarded the wealthy to a friend who teaches in an inner-city school, she responded with frustration, pointing out that the algorithm mostly reflects what is already going on. Yes, this year would have been even crueller, because many talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds would have missed out on University places, but by and large access to the best universities is already unfairly distributed. The offending algorithm mostly replicated already existing inequalities. If it was shocking to see kids being allocated to universities by an algorithm that looks at their socio-economic background, then the whole educational system to date should shock us too. The algorithm merely made explicit the pre-existing injustice.

It’s worth pointing out that the objection is not to algorithms in public policy per se, an algorithm is just a formalisation of some decision or prioritisation procedure. It’s just that this particular decision procedure is patently unfair. This got me thinking about what a fair algorithm might look like. It seems that the measurable difference that a particular school or post code makes should not, in a fair system, be relevant to a child’s future. One can imagine an algorithm which was designed to remove this unfairness, basically the opposite of the government algorithm. The better the school, the less a high grade is worth, the worse the school, the more a low grade is worth. One challenge with this approach is that it would have the consequence of sending students who are less academically prepared onto courses which are no less demanding. This would create degree programmes where individuals would have different skill and knowledge levels in the subjects they were being admitted to study. You might wonder how someone would teach such a class. Would instructors be forced to lower either the quality or the difficulty of the material to avoid ‘leaving students behind’? This does not seem like a desirable outcome.

A university is supposed to produce graduates with a certain proficiency in their field of study. If the inputs are unsuitable, then the outputs will disappoint too. In some professional contexts this could lead to serious problems; we want properly qualified doctors, lawyers, nurses and so on. This model of education is connected to the idea that universities are a rigorous training ground, delivering people into adulthood so that they can go away and fulfil social roles to a certain standard. But when we look outside of the context of the professions which require specific technical skills, this way we measure whether this standard has been met is by looking at future earning power. And this is a model that UK society is to a greater or lesser extent bought into. Whether we’re employers, university administrators, or students, it’s that earning potential, that price tag which acts as the ultimate justification of an undergraduate education. We see this in how universities compete for students and in how the value of different courses are assessed. To give just one example, the University of the West of England announced plans to review whether it should have a philosophy programme. The key reason being that it does not perform well enough at creating highly employable graduates. This claim, aside from being demonstrably wrong based off of the Universities own statistics, clearly betrays an entirely jobs and market driven motivation for education.

There is a tendency to believe that this view of education is pragmatic, economically sound and the correct one to judge educational institutions by. But it misses many of the most important reasons we have an education. At an individual level personal edification and development, the pursuit of truth, beauty, and knowledge are all reasons someone might pursue higher education. And even at the level of society, we want more than individuals capable of becoming employees and employers. We want responsible members of communities, we want well informed citizens, we want people who behave ethically towards others, and we want to reproduce our traditions, knowledge and history into the future. We want to increase our stock of knowledge, scientific and otherwise, to become wiser and better at living together. This view, rather than seeing education as a conveyor belt to sort people into social roles, views education as key to human flourishing.

At first sight the flourishing view can appear indulgent, something that sounds nice but that we have neither the time nor resources for. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more convinced I am that it is the conveyor belt approach to education which is indulgent, and likely damaging to the long-term posterity of a society wedded to it. From a long-term perspective, both individually and collectively, the flourishing view is essential to the continued existence of communities in all times and places. It’s only in the context of a hyper competitive and highly unequal market society that the conveyor belt view becomes our chief frame of reference. And even then, its limitations are becoming clear. The social dysfunction created in winner take all economies seem to be exacerbated by this approach to education. The hyper specialisation and focus on grades seem to be having a devastating effect on mental health. This is mirrored in the way graduates are then tossed into a mode of living characterised by precarity and scraping together next month’s rent. And if we step back from the individual plight, we are confronted with a social situation in which individuals are finding it hard to organise themselves to solve anything but their own narrow sets of problems, and collective challenges go unaddressed.

The higher education system is not designed to produce individuals focussed on solving our collective challenges. And when it does produce such people, it is largely because individuals are taking it open themselves to try to swim against the current, in the face of overwhelming pressure to focus exclusively on employability. The powers that be are largely made up of privileged individuals for whom education really is a conveyor belt designed to deliver them straight to the levers of power. For them, these problems are not inherently connected to education because they don’t actually understand what the value of an education could be, because they understand it in the luxury context in which they received theirs. They see education as a finishing school for people whose destinies are essentially already fixed.

This is why when they looked at the fiasco unfolding with the exam’s algorithm, they were largely unable to see that anything very wrong with what was happening. Yes, some talented state school pupils might miss out on university places, but ultimately that would only affect a small number of individuals, and by and large the education system was still performing perfectly well in directing the right individuals to their allotted roles in the social and economic hierarchy. They don’t have the breadth of mind to understand that an education can and should do far more than this. Unfortunately, so trapped are we in the unpredictable currents of a competitive market economy, it feels impossible to look at education in this broader sense. But higher education does not exist to give people careers, flatter the egos of intellectuals, or to create employees. It exists to further knowledge, promote a society and culture worth living in, and to create citizens capable of being happy within it. This isn’t indulgent or fluffy or bourgeois. Along with family, it is the foundation of the ethical life which makes possible the long-term survival of a society.