3 Quarks Daily asked a number of writers, artists, scientists, scholars, and public intellectuals to give us brief personal reflections on the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe and other places. The following have sent their thoughts and their responses are below in the order in which we received them:

• Feisal Hussain Naqvi
• Robert Pinsky
• Frans B. M. de Waal
• Mohsin Hamid
• Amitava Kumar
• Gerald Dworkin
• Simon During
• Pablo Policzer
• Ejaz Haider
• Huw Price
• Laila Lalami
• Kenan Malik
• Justin E. H. Smith

Feisal Hussain Naqvi

There, but for the grace of God…

In August 1947, my father’s family left behind all their belongings and fled to Pakistan, huddled on the top of a train. They were refugees.

In December 1947, my mother and her family were in what is now Slovenia. On the day after Christmas, they decided to make a run for Austria. Fortunately for them, the guards were too busy celebrating to notice my mother and her siblings creep across the border.

I am not just the child of two refugees. I am the child of two long lines of refugees.

My father’s family are Syeds, descendants of the Prophet. The family tree treasured by my father shows a path from Arabia to Iraq to Central Asia to Iran to India and then finally, to what is now Pakistan.

My mother’s father came from solid Germanic stock. But my mother’s mother came from a family which had converted from Judaism. While my father’s ancestors had been moving eastwards, my mother’s ancestors had headed westwards.

Given that anthropologists have fairly solid grounds for tracing humanity’s common roots back to the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya, it follows that everybody residing outside East Africa moved there at one point in time. In other words, at one time or another, we have all been refugees. If not us, then our parents. And if not them, then their parents. We would do well to remember that simple fact the next time we respond to the misery of others with anything other than compassion or empathy.

Feisal Hussain Naqvi studied Islamic history at Princeton before going on to study law at Yale. He is an advocate of the supreme court of Pakistan, as well as a columnist for various newspapers.

Robert Pinsky

Frans B. M. de Waal

Social Darwinism may be dismissed as old hat, a leftover of the Victorian era, but it’s still very much with us. A 2007 column by David Brooks in The New York Times ridiculed governmental support of the needy: “From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest.”¹ Conservatives love to think this, but it is not always how nature works. Nature is full of cooperative species. Taking care of each other, including sometimes outsiders, is part of the equation.

The refugee crisis is a test of the role of empathy in public policy. Do we care enough about the lives of other humans to welcome those who flee brutal warfare? There is always more involved than empathy, however. Empathy is a well-developed trait in most humans, but one that is conditional. It is subject to calculations and filters. We cannot empathize with everyone and everything equally. So apart from the “humane” reaction (a term based on the assumption that we are the only empathic species, which my work shows is false, since I consider empathy a general mammalian characteristic), there is also the more practical question of how we are going to take care of so many people and if there are alternatives, such as removing the causes for their migration.

The whole political dance around the topic is part of a long tradition of empathy affecting public policy. Another good example is the abolition of slavery (Abraham Lincoln was rather explicit about this), and also the healthcare debate in the US is one of empathy, asking the question how much we care about the health of low income citizens. Empathy is a major but poorly appreciated voice in political decision-making, and the glue of any society, even though it is never the only consideration, and always mixed with more hard-nosed economic and political considerations. The European Union is right to listen to this voice, and to counter xenophobic tendencies, which unfortunately are also part of human nature.

¹David Brooks “Human Nature Redux” (New York Times, 17 February, 2007).

Frans B. M. de Waal is the Charles Howard Candler professor of Primate Behavior in the Emory University psychology department in Atlanta, Georgia, and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Consider the following exchanges.

Hypocrite: A father advises his daughter not to smoke, since it is addictive and causes lung disease. However, the father himself is a heavy smoker. And the daughter cannot help but notice this and point out her father's hypocrisy. On this basis, she rejects her father's advice.

Waffler: A candidate for public office has spoken on some issue many times, but her articulated view has changed over that time. Years ago, she was a staunch critic of some policy, but now she has come to support it. Her opponent seizes on this and points out her waffling on the matter. He holds that her inconsistency indicates that she is unprincipled.

Tu Quoque arguments are ad hominem strategies of criticism wherein a speaker's conclusion is criticized on the basis of the fact that the speaker has a record of inconsistency with the conclusion. The tu quoque may take the form of charges of hypocrisy when someone affirms a practical proposal that she has regularly failed to follow. The tu quoque also can arise when a speaker has not consistently held or articulated the same view in the relevantly similar contexts; the charge of flip-flopping is hence a version of the tu quoque. Given that tu quoque arguments belong to the ad hominem family, it is commonly held that tu quoque arguments are intrinsically fallacious; they are thought to suffer from failures of relevance. The fact that someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean he's wrong, and that someone's views have changed doesn't mean she isn't well-informed or worth hearing.

We've discussed elsewhere (here and here) the ways in which relevance problems for certain versions of the tu quoque might be resolved. Sometimes, it is indeed relevant that someone is a hypocrite or has an inconsistent track record on an issue; those facts may show that the person is insincere or has ideas that are not practicable. However, there is yet a further form of tu quoque argument which, given the right circumstances, is not only relevant, but presents exactly the correct critical point.

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Football

the sheer brilliance of this game’s hook
amazes me—
it’s an homage to collision,
a demo derby of organs and bones,
of fans psyched to see some player’s
near-death experience, a feint game
of fine footwork leading to
victory through the skill to maim
all underlain with clever strategies
and agile trickers
backed by large men
and place kickers,
a mashup of history,
current events and premonition
played in ten yard lunges
down fields of broken bones,
bruised brains and
brute ambition
.

Jim Culleny,
9/9/15

by Paul Braterman

Darrow: Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?

Bryan: No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.

Both sides, I will argue, were long-term loses in this exchange. But why were such matters being discussed in a Tennessee court of law in the first place?

The story so far: An extraordinary case indeed, where a school teacher, with the encouragement of his own superintendent, volunteers to go on trial in the State court for the crime of teaching from the State's approved textbook, and where that same superintendent will be the first witness called against him. And where a mere misdemeanour case, with a maximum penalty of $500, would attract the participation of William Jennings Bryan, former US Secretary of State, and Clarence Darrow, America’s most famous trial lawyer and agnostic.

In the run-up to the case, we even have the involvement of Billy Sunday, possibly the greatest of all pre-television evangelists, whose 18 day crusade in Memphis, Tennessee, was attended by some 200,000 people. Billy Sunday told his audiences that Darwin was an infidel: “To hell with the Modernists. Education today is chained to the devil's throne. Teach evolution? Teaching about pre-historic man? No such thing as prehistoric man.” (Billy Sunday aimed at a wide public. He hosted a “Negro Night”, which 15,000 attended. There was also a Klan Night.)

John Scopes in 1925

The facts were not in dispute. Scopes had of course taught evolution, although the law said he shouldn't. So it was really the law itself that was on trial. The ACLU was hoping to prove it unconstitutional because unreasonable, ambiguous, and an affront to freedom of conscience. Unreasonable because it opposed established science. Ambiguous because the Bible, to which it referred, was itself open to numerous interpretations. And an affront to freedom of conscience, because it imposed a preference for one religion (Christianity), and indeed one school of thought (the Fundamentalist) within that religion. These arguments were, according to the defence, fatal flaws in the prosecution indictment, which should therefore be quashed. The judge, however, was determined not to issue a ruling of that nature, and ordered the case to proceed. Now read on.

The defence case built on the above arguments. According to their interpretation of the statute, in order to be guilty Scopes would have had to do two separate things; (a) teach that humans were descended from lower animals, and (b) by that teaching, contradict the Bible. But the exact text of the Bible, how it should be understood, and even which books should be included in it were matters of controversy. The Bible was not a science textbook, and

[T]here is no more justification for impos­ing the conflicting views of the Bible on courses of biology than there would be for imposing the views of biologists on courses of com­parative religion. We maintain that science and religion embrace two separate and distinct fields of thought and learning.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

One hundred and fifty years ago atoms were mysterious things. They could only be studied indirectly. We knew about their interactions with each other as a gas, the frequencies of light they prefer to absorb and emit, and various other properties. Nowadays we can capture the image of a single hydrogen atom, but back then atoms could only be understood through the shadows they cast in the macro world.

At the time two explanations were in vogue. The atomists went with the ancient Greeks and viewed atoms as small billiard balls clacking against each other as they moved through empty space. This point of view worked great for explaining the behavior of gases, but didn't help much in explaining the intrinsic properties observed by chemists. On the other hand, the followers of the theory of Boscovich, an eighteenth century Jesuit, thought that atoms were points of force which alternately repelled and attracted each other depending on how close they were. This theory held promise for explaining the electromagnetic properties of atoms, but it also had its drawbacks.

On February 18, 1867 William Thomson (aka Lord Kelvin) read out his paper “Vortex Atoms” to the assembled members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In it he suggested a novel alternative to these two theories.

As everyone knew at the time, the universe was permeated by the luminiferous ether. Light traveled as a wave even through “empty” space and, well, waves travel through something, so what was that something? Luminiferous ether! It was a beautiful idea, but eventually the evidence piled up against the ether. The Michaelson-Morley experiment put a stake through its heart in 1887.

But in 1867 the luminiferous ether was widely considered a standard feature of the physical world. Taking his inspiration from recent work in hydrodynamics and, presumably, a fine pipe of tobacco, Lord Kelvin realized that instead of viewing atoms and the ether as two separate things, we could instead think of atoms as vortices in the ether itself. Specifically, he thought of each atom as a knotted tubular shape:

From “On Vortex Motion” by Lord Kelvin [1]

His theory neatly explained a wide variety of atomic phenomena. The rich variety of possible knots justified the wide variety of atoms, the fact that the type of knot is unchanged under small perturbations (after all, you can't turn the knots in Lord Kelvin's table from one into another without applying real violence) explains the robust stability of atoms, and knots will clearly vibrate at different frequencies from one another and so will naturally prefer to absorb and emit light energy at differing levels. For example, Thomson thought the two linked circles in the lower left might be the sodium atom because of sodium's two spectral lines.

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by Jalees Rehman

Some years ago, I was enveloped by the desire to see our children grow up to be poets. I used to talk to them about poetic metaphors, rhymes and read to them excerpts from the biographies of famous poets. When the kids were learning about haikus at school, I took the opportunity to pontificate on the controversies surrounding the 5-7-5 syllable counts and the difficulties of imposing classic Japanese schemes on the English language, which abounds in diphthongs and long syllables.

The feedback from our children was quite mixed, ranging from polite questions such as “Do you know how long this will take?” to less polite snores. I had apparently not yet succeeded in my attempts to awaken their inner poet.

Our younger son was about eight years old, when we found out about a wonderful opportunity to inculcate the love of literature into our children: The Chicago Printers Row Literature Festival! I was especially excited by the fact that they would have a special “Lil' Lit” area, just for children. I convinced the whole family to go – promising to reward each kid with $5 if they accompanied us. I hoped that my poetry monologues had prepared the children for the poetic muses that they would encounter at the festival.

Even though it was early June, Chicago was experiencing one of its rare June Gloom weekends with cloudy, drizzly weather and frosty breezes. After exiting the parking garage, our kids tried to renegotiate the promised $5 reward in light of the unpleasant weather. I brushed off their whining and charged towards the long-awaited beacon of literary pleasure.

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by Brooks Riley

(I began writing this article months ago, long before the refugee crisis.)

—Morgen! (Morning!)

—Guten Morgen! (Good morning!)

—Morgen zusammen! (Morning, you two!)

—Morgen Ihr zwei! (Morning, you two!)

—Kalimera! (Morning, in Greek)

—Servus! (Hi or bye, in leftover Latin from upper Bavaria)

—Buenos Dias! (Morning, in Spanish)

—Tag! (Good day, in North German)

—Einen wunderschönen guten Morgen! (A beautiful good morning!)

This is how my day begins. R and I sit at one of two tables in front of the wee Greek café on a shady street in the Giesing neighborhood of Munich. Like the proverbial all-weather postman, we show up every day, sit outside, smoke cigarettes, share a Zimtschnecke (a kind of cinnamon bun), drink cappuccinos, and watch the world go by—quite literally.

Giesing, with its Obergiesing and Untergiesing, is a now a melting pot of Munich—a quiet oasis of multicultural harmony. It’s always been a working-class neighborhood, not frequented by the grand, but also not ignored by the city fathers. Its 5-story balconied apartment complexes are spaciously nestled in lush green landscapes and along tree-lined streets. A vast elegant park provides meadows for dogs that need exercise and people who want a solitary walk or a picnic or a meditative sit on one of the many benches. Franz Beckenbauer, the second most famous German after Goethe, comes from Giesing, a paradise for families with limited means, born of functional, benign socialism, and a model of integration.

I’ve been sheltered all my life, isolated by acreage or a fine address. Even in New York, where I used to live, there was never a neighborhood feeling, even on the Upper West Side. New York is too big. The chances of seeing the same person on the street on consecutive days are slim. The chances of speaking to a stranger are nil. Los Angeles is worse–no one walks at all.

In Giesing, we know nearly everyone who passes by the café between 6:30 and 8 a.m. Even if they don’t stop to chat, they nod or greet us warmly. They come in all shapes, ages and backgrounds—from Africa, South America, Turkey, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Germany.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

I can't recall now where I originally found this, but several years ago I stumbled on an interesting Japanese translation for the words shalom and salaam.

1) 平和 (対国、対神、対人) ・・・和平、和解 Peace (no conflict; no fighting)

2) 平安 (個人的)・・・平穏、無事、安心、安全 Inner peace and calm; no inner trouble
3) 繁栄 (商業的) Flourishing (business)
4) 健康 (肉体的、精神的) ・・・健全、成熟 Physical health
5) 充足 (生命的) ・・・満足、生きる意欲 Satisfaction, fullness, sufficiency
6) 知恵 (学問的) ・・・悟り、霊的開眼 Enlightenment, wisdom
7) 救い (宗教的) ・・・暗闇から愛の支配へ To be saved (by Love)
8) 勝利 (究極的) ・・・罪と世に対する勝利 Triumph (over evil)

Does shalom and salaam really embody all that the Japanese translator was suggesting above? I have no idea, but the proposed translation really struck me, I felt it captured the wonderfully generous spirit of hospitality that I experienced in the Middle East.

Like the Pax in the Catholic liturgy

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum (The peace of the Lord be with you always)

It is a sign of goodwill for the other. But it is also, I am told, a reminder that we cannot flourish in the eyes of God unless we recognize him in the people around us. This greeting dates to very early times in the Christian church and is an ancient practice informed by the hospitality codes that have such deep roots in the cultures of the Middle East (among other places).

And best of all, it is traditionally delivered with a kiss on the cheek.

++

Almost two years ago to the day, I wrote here in these pages about what I considered to be the delusional liberal response to the crisis in Syria.

It was at that time that I became utterly fascinated by Derrida and Levinas' “ethic of hospitality.”

Derrida's work on this subject is rooted firmly in the work of the Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. But Levinas himself was responding to –who else?– Heidegger.

(All roads lead to Heidegger).

Ah, herr Heidegger–he was so brilliant and yet how could a philosophical system that great have gone that awry? Levinas, who was Jewish, had a particularly strong complaint on this count.

Where did Heidegger go wrong? It is one of the great problems of modern Continental philosophy.

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by Misha Lepetic

“For the people are all in all.”
~ Herodotus III.80.

Last month I reviewed a small but representative selection of instances of Internet vigilantism. Whether we are talking about Cecil the Lion or Justine Sacco, the causes and the consequences may vary, but they share several characteristics, such as the speed with which events unfolded, and their very real-life consequences, such as ruined careers. But I elided the subtler mechanics of why these instances actually occur. Put another way, what gives rise to the mob in the first place? So, in a time-honored essayistic maneuver, I will revert to that quasi-mythical place Where All Things Began, aka ancient Greece.

The scene is ancient Persia, and our chronicler is the inimitable Herodotus. Having taken the throne in a coup, Darius debates the best form of government with the seven Persian nobles who were his co-conspirators. Considering how these things can go, it is a blessedly short discussion, with democracy, oligarchy and monarchy representing the three possibilities. The noble Otanes puts forward a lukewarm endorsement of democracy, but it's very much a straw man. He is more concerned with the shortcomings of monarchy than what might be the virtues of democracy. Another noble, Megabyzus, then speaks in support of oligarchy:

For there is nothing so void of understanding, nothing so full of wantonness, as the unwieldy rabble. It were folly not to be borne, for men, while seeking to escape the wantonness of a tyrant, to give themselves up to the wantonness of a rude unbridled mob. The tyrant, in all his doings, at least knows what is he about, but a mob is altogether devoid of knowledge; for how should there be any knowledge in a rabble, untaught, and with no natural sense of what is right and fit? It rushes wildly into state affairs with all the fury of a stream swollen in the winter, and confuses everything. Let the enemies of the Persians be ruled by democracies.

For his part, Darius acknowledges democracy and oligarchy, but it wouldn't be a spoiler to reveal that he ultimately settles on monarchy, with himself as the head of state. Thus Herodotus sets the stage for the war between the Greeks and the Persians. In a sense, the Histories can be viewed as a meandering meditation on the best form of government, whose merits are ultimately determined on the battlefield.

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by Madhu Kaza

“That girl won't leave any fruit on the trees,” a woman complains looking down from the roof of her home. In the orchard below the girl runs and –once she is in the clear — skips home hiding a guava in her dress. She stashes the fruit under a bunch of bananas in a covered bowl on the veranda. Then she pours some water into a dish that she carries across the yard and places next to a large earthen vessel from which she plucks three white kittens. The opening scene of Satyajit Ray's film Pather Panchali is one of stealing and feeding, mischief and care.

An old woman squats over a bowl of rice on the floor of the veranda. Small clumps of the rice which she mixes and squeezes into balls have fallen on the floor. She eats with her right hand, her wrinkled left hand pressed to the floor for support. Her emaciated face is toothless and her profile dramatic –a hooked nose, sunken cheeks and a sharp, jutting chin. We know she is frail, but hunched over in her white widow's sari, the severity of her features makes her look at times, at medium distance, not unlike a vulture. She eats with absorption and licks her fingers when she is done. The girl, Durga, sits behind the old woman watching her eat. When the old woman turns around and sees Durga she says, “I forgot to save some for you.” She uncovers the fruit bowl and reaches for a banana, discovering the guava that the girl has left for her. She examines the guava closely, beaming with delight.

A French filmmaker once walked out during a screening of Pather Panchali at Cannes and proclaimed, “I don't want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands.”

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by Yohan J. John

What is a person? Does each of us have some fundamental essence? Is it the body? Is it the mind? Is it something else entirely? Versions of this question seem always to have animated human thought. In the aftermath of the scientific revolution, it seems as if one category of answer — the dualist idea that the essence of a person is an incorporeal soul that inhabits a material body — must be ruled out. But as it turns out, internalizing a non-dualist conception of the self is actually rather challenging for most people, including neuroscientists.

The scientific revolution is a story with two great themes: empowerment and disenchantment. While the tools of science and technology give humankind unprecedented power over the material world, the ideas that give rise to these tools seem to cast out the myriad souls and spirits that once haunted the world. Material objects are emptied of such animating principles — their properties are instead viewed as emerging from the laws of science that they must inexorably obey. In a sense this is how objects are defined: those things that do not possess agency. This scientific exorcism started in the skies and is gradually working its way closer and closer to ourselves. Physics began the process by dispensing with the Aristotelian idea that objects move by virtue of some innate source of motion. Chemistry soon cleared the alchemical spirits from the laboratory. And biology eventually banished 'vital forces'. Now the process is being put to work in humans. In seeking a materialist conception of the mind and the self, neuroscientists seem to be envisioning the end of the quest to fully naturalize and objectify the world. The human body may be the final frontier — the last haunted house.

The overwhelming majority of neuroscientists will claim that they have no need for Cartesian dualism — they do not believe in an immaterial soul, and hold that mental phenomena are simply consequences of complex (and thus far poorly understood) physical processes. Words like 'soul' and 'spirit' can seem like relics of the supernaturalist adolescence of our species, so removing them from our lexicon can give the impression that we are no-nonsense materialists. But dualism, properly considered, is not a position about supernatural souls per se, but about perceiving a separation between the body and a qualitatively different something else. Mainstream scientists and philosophers call this something the mind or consciousness. In the humanities the word 'subjectivity' is also deployed. These ostensibly modern concepts occupy much the same role as the soul once did in European thought; they denote a self — that with which a person identifies. To be a true non-dualist, then, is to conceive of the self as a physical process that is not qualitatively different from any other biological process.

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.

COLLECTING FIREFLIES

I’m afraid
I don’t understand
the death part of life
although at my age
you might think I might,
and not necessarily
the last death-part
but the everyday bits of it
that constantly intrude
The only thing I can think
to make sense of it
is that its shadow
over each tenderness
makes each tenderness
more rich and poignant,
as if tenderness were
the only point of light
in this camera obscura,
which is the room
in which we spend lives
netting such points
like children
in a dark field in summer
collecting fireflies

by Jim Culleny
9/2/15

by Lisa Lieberman

I've read countless analyses of Roman Polanski's neo-noir masterpiece, but I'd never considered the subliminal effect of the film's title until I read an offhand remark of Yunte Huang's in his book about Charlie Chan. “Chinatown serves as the symbol for the crime-ridden, dark side of the city of Angles,” he writes. “In Chinatown, the title merely hovers in the background like a black cloud.”

Gambling, opium dens, white slavery and perverse sexual acts were long associated with the Chinese quarters of American cities in the popular imagination, fueling the anti-immigration sentiment that resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Sinister Chinese characters were staples of pulp fiction in the early twentieth century. The adventures of Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu would be filmed repeatedly by Hollywood from the silent era onwards, the villain always played by a white actor in yellowface. Borls Karloff's 1932 incarnation is the most notorious of the lot, and not only on account of the egregious line that provoked a protest from the Chinese government: “Kill the white men and take their women!”

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Haiku

As I fling my arms
Wide to greet dad at Heathrow
He extends his hand

By Rafiq Kathwari whose new collection, ‘In Another Country’ is now available at DoirePress.com

by Mara Naselli

Around 1860, shortly after the James family returned from Europe to Newport for William’s painting apprenticeship, Edward Waldo Emerson (Ralph Waldo’s son), came for a visit. He experienced firsthand the vigor of a Jamesian family debate over dinner, hands gesticulating and brandishing dinner knives: “Don’t be disturbed, Edward,” Emerson recalls Mrs. James saying with a laugh. “They won’t stab each other. This is usual when the boys come home.”

The freethinking Henry James, Sr., raised his children to debate and explore. Their education (though not equally distributed among the five children), was wide ranging and itinerant, rich with art, travel, and theater. “Mr. James’s deepest desire was what his sons and daughter should be,” writes Emerson. “Their works would follow from what they were.” Of the five, William and Henry became monumental forces in American letters. Henry’s novels, stories, and criticism developed the standards by which many now evaluate the modern novel. William threw himself into painting, then natural history, then medicine, and finally became a founding architect of modern psychology and American pragmatism. William’s work strongly shaped Henry’s art, but just how the currents of their separate but intimate intellectual lives interwhirled and eventually eddied out in different directions is another story. In the fleet, beautiful little book Wm & H’ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters between William and Henry James, J. C. Hallman immerses himself in the complete extant correspondence of the James brothers to tell a new tale. As Hallman follows the affection, thinking, diction, and metaphors shared between the two brothers in their letters, we see just how much William’s investigations into consciousness and his philosophical preoccupations infused Henry’s approach to literature. “William is the pragmatist,” writes the scholar Richard Hocks. “Henry, so to speak, is the pragmatism.”

If the extent of William’s influence on Henry is remarkable, even more remarkable is the fact William failed to recognize his own influence in his brother’s art.

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