by Thomas R. Wells

The current immigration crisis in Europe has, finally, generated much soul searching among European citizens, as well as a great deal of unfortunate political squabbling among European governments. Yet a great deal of the debate still assumes the centrality of national political concerns when this is, morally speaking, irrelevant.

The right to migrate is a meta-right. As a practical matter, access to human rights, including social and economic rights, depends on governments. Since some governments are uninterested or unable to protect or support human rights, people must be free to move to other states where their access to human rights is acceptable, including such socio-economic rights as a fair market wage for their labour. The very point of the idea of human rights is that human beings do not belong to their states, and what they deserve is not to be determined solely by the benevolence or otherwise of the state they happen to be born into.

I

My case goes beyond refugees – those fleeing armed conflict or persecution. But refugees are a good place to start because most sovereign governments have formally acknowledged, with legally binding treaties, that the right to migrate trumps ordinary political concerns. They did so in the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing unleashed by the conclusion of the second world war, and for the kinds of reasons identified by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the awful failure of European states to accept stateless Jewish and other ethnic minority refugees in the 1930s.

When refugees request asylum it must be granted, subject only to checking the basis of their claim. States acknowledge that they cannot refuse asylum merely on the basis of the economic costs or political unpopularity it would impose. The granting of asylum does not fall within the usual logic of statecraft in which a policy is considered from the perspective of the political interests of a governing party, taking into account how it will play to popular prejudices, how it fits with internal party disputes, its consistency with budgetary and other manifesto promises, its influence on the viability of other policies the government wants to pursue, and so on. None of these have standing in the face of the moral emergency of aiding refugees to regain their lives.

As Ban Ki-moon put it, “Refugees have been deprived of their homes, but they must not be deprived of their futures.”

As is clear from the present crisis in and around Europe, and in other parts of the world such as the Andaman Sea, many states are currently failing in their moral – and legal – obligations to refugees. This is often portrayed as an exercise of sovereignty. Actually it is a failure – an inability to govern oneself according to the principles one has laid down.

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by Charlie Huenemann

Descartes was not a bookish man. There’s a well-known anecdote that reveals what he thought of libraries:

One of his friends went to visit Descartes at Egmond. This gentleman asked him about physics books: which ones did he most value, and which of them he did most frequently consult. ‘I shall show you’, he replied, ‘if you wish to follow me.’ He led him into a lower courtyard at the back of the house, and showed him a calf that he had planned to dissect the next day.

It is a suspiciously artful anecdote: Descartes prefers nature bound in calfskin to another person’s words bound in calfskin. But it gets something right: while Descartes did read and comment on books, and wrote many books himself, he steadily maintained, as did many early modern philosophers, that you can learn more by going straight to nature itself than you can by poring over old books.

Descartes spends several pages in his Discourse on Method relating his disenchantment with different sorts of books. He had studied at La Flèche, a great academy for classical education; but while he found the stories and histories of the ancient authors informative and entertaining, he was wary of the effect they had on him:

For conversing with those of other ages is about the same thing as traveling. It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, so as to judge our own more soundly and so as not to think that everything that is contrary to our ways is ridiculous and against reason, as those who have seen nothing have a habit of doing. But when one takes too much time traveling, one eventually becomes a stranger to one’s own country; and when one is too curious about what commonly took place in past ages, one usually remains quite ignorant of what is taking place in one’s own country.

This is coming from a Frenchman who spent most of his productive years the Netherlands, where he could count on having few distractions. He devoted his attention to the abstruse studies of physics, metaphysics, mathematics, anatomy, and optics, and wrote virtually nothing on cultural issues and politics. The path he chose in life, it seems, was to be a stranger to his own country, and a resident of the world of ideas. He really wasn’t in any position to look over at the philologist studying Homer and fault him for knowing more about that world than this one.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

I finished reading War and Peace recently. It took me three years but I did try to read it carefully. Tolstoy defined art “as that human activity which consists in one person's consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he or she has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” This is a wonderfully robust definition – especially because it does not impose which types of “human activity” or “external signs” qualify. And I was certainly infected by the themes of War and Peace: I felt on many occasions that the book was speaking especially to me. I took notes and copied down everything that struck me.

War and Peace operates in two distinct parts. There's the story of two upper class Russian families and individuals – the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs and the inimitable Pierre Bezukhov – whose lives are directly affected by the Napoleonic wars from 1805-1812, including the French invasion of and subsequent retreat from Moscow. Here the narrative flows so seamlessly from one character to another, from one high society intrigue to the next, and so clear is the psychological detailing that it never feels like anything is being overdone. This despite the fact that Tolstoy likes to intervene constantly. His style goes against the “show but don't tell” advice that is nowadays given to writers. He takes great pains to tell us what's going on in each character's mind, how things have changed since we last met this or that person. Everything, internal or external – estates, battlegrounds, soirees, dinners, military offices, forests – is described with great precision. Sudden twists are not Tolstoy's style; the suspense instead comes from how a character will respond to changes in her circumstances.

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by Justin E. H. Smith

[I have a long essay on the Roma communities of Paris appearing later this year in print. The essay's focus changed radically in the middle of my research for it, in part due to editorial decisions, in part as a result of changes in the world that seemed to demand attention to different issues than those initially conceived. One result of these changes is that I was left with significant amounts of material that have no place in the final version, which I thus thought best to share here at 3 Quarks Daily. This seems particularly urgent at the present moment, as there is inevitably a close connection between the plight of the Syrian refugees seeking to escape from war in Europe, and the plight of the Roma, who, I have come to believe, have very similar experiences of discrimination and social exclusion in Europe, and particularly Eastern Europe. The principal difference is that the Roma are internally displaced, and have been for centuries. –JS]

1.

‘Gypsy’ is a classic misnomer, a deformation of ‘Egyptian’, arising from a long-discredited theory that the people it denotes had wandered from that country into the Levant, Anatolia, the Balkans, and finally Europe proper. It gives us the French gitane, glamorized in a brand of cigarette, and the Italian gitano. There is the alternative generic term tsigane, which yields Zigeuner in German, ţigani in Romanian, and so on, and which likely arises from a Byzantine Greek word for fortune tellers (or, perhaps, for untouchables). These are exonyms, and they are considered derogatory, though as with any insult much depends on who is uttering them, in what tone and for what purpose. When in 2007 the Romanian president Traian Băsescu called a reporter a ţigancă împuţită (a stinking Gypsy), to unexpected outrage, he was plainly only using the adjective to make explicit what he already felt to be packed into the noun.

In recent years, ‘Roma’ (along with ‘Rom’ and ‘Rrom’ and the adjectival ‘Romani’) has gained currency, in part as a way of freeing the people it describes from the history of connotations, mostly negative, that have congealed around ‘Gypsy’, and in part to provide a cohesion at the global scale that is lacking in the various regional designations. ‘Roma’ is the term we are now obliged to use, and the term I shall use here, even though it is far from universally satisfactory. For one thing, it is a masculine plural noun: it means ‘the Romani men’, or, perhaps, ‘the Romani husbands’. Moreover, its resemblance to various other geographical terms from the region –notably the name of the capital of Italy, and of the country of Romania (which, like an ancient road, does lead back to Rome, the city of Romulus)– is only a coincidence. Yet, like the English ‘niggardly’, ‘Roma’ invites misunderstanding. Grassroots organizations of Romanians have even petitioned the European Parliament to ban it, in the hope of distancing themselves from their fellow citizens who, they believe, are tarnishing their reputation throughout Europe. And indeed many Western Europeans do have trouble grasping the difference in question, and lack the patience to stop and dwell on etymologies.

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Key

by Bill Benzon

After I’d sat myself down at my computer on Tuesday morning, and after I’d checked in at my blog, New Savanna, and at Facebook, I zoomed here to 3QD, as I often do, and saw a link to an article about a Robert Frost poem. I, being an American citizen in good standing, know a bit about Frost. He’s sort of the Walt Disney of American poetry, him and Carl Sandburg, but apparently Frost had a nasty side as well. He’s not our nation’s kindly uncle. But then who knows what really goes on in the minds of those kindly uncles, eh?

This post had an intriguing title: “The Most Misread Poem in America”. Really? I gotta’ check that out. So I read the posted snippet, which was about “The Road Not Taken” – I’ve read that one, I think, said I to myself, but it’s not the one about miles to do until we eat? pray? love? one of those basic things – and then followed the link the full article, which is in the Paris Review. It’s by David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and is an excerpt from a book he’s devoted to that one poem.

It'll take a pretty determined individualist to take this road that's not been travelled in a looong time.

The common understanding, Orr tells us, is that the poem is about staunch individualism. Everyone else hightailed it down the popular road but me, individualist that I am, I took the less popular road, and it turned out darn well. That just won’t wash, not when you actually read the words carefully.

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

I’ll buy that. But what if there’s something going on in the poem that isn’t adequately captured by limning its meaning?

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by Matt McKenna

Donald Trump's famous hat promises to “Make America Great Again,” and likewise M. Night Shyamalan's new horror film The Visit promises to make the director's critical reputation great again. While Trump's pithy cap begs the two questions, “Is America currently not great?” and “Was America ever great?”, M. Night Shyamalan is certainly a director whose stature started high and fell fast: his first three films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs) averaged a respectable 75% “fresh” rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website and garnered the director comparisons to legendary film great Steven Spielberg, but his next six films averaged an abysmal 26% which is more on par with legendary film non-great Uwe Boll. The question now is, which is more frightening: The Visit or Donald Trump's campaign?

The Visit is shot in a faux-documentary style from the point of view of a teenage siblings, Becca and Tyler, who visit their grandparents for the very first time. We are told that long ago there was a falling out between their single mother and their grandparents, and this first meeting between grandchildren and grandparents is meant to be a moment of bonding and forgiveness for the estranged generations. Of course, The Visit being a horror film, everything goes spectacularly wrong as the kids witness creepy occurrences on their grandparents' remote farm.

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by Eric Byrd

His poetry emerges out of dreams – of a very special kind that abide wholly within the realm of art. (Blok, on Mandelstam)

Guy Davenport's essays are more read than his stories – and so would begin a critical lament, if Davenport's use of the modes were more distinct; if his stories did not abide “wholly within the realm of art”; if his essays and reviews were less visionary, were mere journalism, Sunday summaries; if his early essays were not the soil of his late-blooming fiction. For Davenport, criticism carried the demands of storytelling, and vice-versa. Kafka, for instance, is as likely to figure in a story as to provide the subject of an essay. In his Paris Review interview Davenport said that the “The Hunter Gracchus,” his essay on Kafka's story, started out as a story, and “The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” his picture of Kafka's visit to an early exhibition of flying machines, and one of the wonders of Tatlin! (1974), started out as an essay. Of his compositions he concluded, “It's all one big happy family.” Tatlin! was Davenport's first collection of stories, and “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” the first story he'd written – aged forty-three – since some undergraduate Faulknerisms.

Davenport's critical prose is sibling to that of his onetime friend and fellow Pound disciple Hugh Kenner, whose The Pound Era Davenport hailed as a “new kind of book in which biography, history and analysis of literature are so harmoniously articulated that every page has a narrative sense.” Like The Pound Era, Davenport's early essays, collected in The Geography of the Imagination, vividly narrate influential encounters and pungently picture shocks of recognition. Degas, tracer of haunches equine and balletic, is awake all night with Muybridge's Zoopraxia, with its leaping nudes and galloping tarpans. Shelley and his guest, a literary banker, inspect a copy of Diodorus; both note the boastful inscription attributed to a pharaoh whose name a Greek source had garbled to “Ozymandias,” and they sit down to their respective sonnets.

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by Samir Chopra

On 12 February 2014, Penguin India announced it was withdrawing and destroying—in India—all published copies of historian Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009). Penguin's decision came after reaching an out-of-court settlement with Shiksha Bachao Andolan, which, in 2011, had filed a legal complaint objecting to sections of Doniger's book. Amidst the vocal expressions of concern over the damage done to free speech and academic freedom in India were also thinly-veiled suggestions that justice had been done, that the right outcome—the suppression and quelling of an academic work that supposedly offended Hindu sensibilities—had been reached. A prominent voice in this choir was of one Rajiv Malhotra, who noted on his Twitter account that Doniger was merely the “idol of inferiority complex Indians [sic] in awe that white person studies Hinduism,” that Penguin's withdrawal of her work was justified in a world in which “media bias” in an “intellectual kurukshetra [sic]” had led to a “a retail channel controlled by one side.”

This dispute over Wendy Doniger's work is merely the latest instance of a long-running contestation of how best to study India and all things Indian.

The philosopher and statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan noted in the preface to his two-volume opus Indian Philosophy (1923) that the “modern aesthete” dismissed Indian philosophy and its associated cultures as “chaotic clouds of vapor and verbiage”; he then moved on to provide a sympathetic explication of its central systems and principles that would be both comprehensible to the Western mind and suitably respectful of Indian philosophy's intellectual contributions to philosophical discourse at large. While comparisons with Western philosophy were unavoidable, they did not have to begin with the premise that Indian philosophy needed to merely play catch-up to it. In more recent times, the philosopher Daya Krishna sought to achieve, if not a synthesis, then at least a dialogue between Western and Indian philosophy that would show their mutual relevance, their ability to influence each other's most central debates, all the while emphasising the latter's distinctive formulation of classic philosophical problems.

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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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