Gas is 1.3 minutes cheaper this week.

Two numbers converged last week have been the subject of outrage in different quarters. The price of gasoline finally started coming down. I saw $3.89 this weekend. Nationally the price fell below $4. It will be interesting to see whether that's the new benchmark for outrage and whether we will now be content to pay anything below $4. Incidentally, I'm betting on $5 by next Memorial Day.

The second number was the federal minimum wage, which reached the height of $6.55 per hour (incidentally eclipsing Wisconsin's $6.50). There were the usual stories about what a terrible burden that will be on small businesses. Of course, any minimum wage or child labor law is a burden on small business and you would be surprised how many people would like to see both of those impositions repealed.

But for now it's worth contemplating that it only takes 35.6 minutes of work at the minimum wage to pay for a gallon of gas this week versus 36.9 minutes last week. I guess that's what passes for progress these days.

If you drive a gas hog, you actually have to work longer at the minimum wage to buy a gallon of gas than it takes to burn it. My truck gets 15 mpg. At 55 mph, it would take a bit more than 16 minutes to burn a gallon of gas. A gas miser is better, but doesn't give much satisfaction. My Passat averages 33 mpg, which means I could drive for 36 minutes at 55 mph, just a few second more than the time it would take to pay for the gas at $6.55 per hour.

And you wonder why Americans seem depressed these days.

Deep thoughts

Do you ever come across a thought that makes you go hmmmmm? This is from Human Goodness by Yi-Fu Tuan.

"We rarely consider the good things that come our way as unjust."

Sense and sensibility

Tenzin Gyatso. the 14th Dalai Lama, tends to present his “advice for living” not as a religious precept, but as common sense, or more often science. He made much of the fact that humans are “social animals” and are therefore dependent on others for their happiness.

All true as far as that goes, but when we came home we noticed that Kid, the older of the two colts, had a big lump on his back – no doubt from being bitten. Susan surmises the culprit was Waldo the pony and the casus belli was jealousy. Whatever the cause, it’s not the only time Kid has taken a knock, or the only time any of the horses has turned up with hoof rash or worse.

That got me thinking about social animals like herd animals, pack animals etc. Stuff goes on out in the pasture that would end up in the police report if they were humans.

But whether domesticated or not, all animals have a code of conduct and a way of resolving conflicts that is understood in the group, and which admits to change, testing and sometimes outright violation. It’s universal and it’s innate. So the Dalai Lama is smart to talk about right behavior being a matter of sense and science, not received wisdom. Unless someday we find the Book of Equus in an earthen jar in the desert somewhere. Then we’ll have to reconsider.

Lama Rama

We spent part of yesterday afternoon listening to Tenzin Gyatso. the 14th Dalai Lama give one of homely little lectures on how to be happy. He has a genial, aw-shucks attitude that makes him seem like a Tibetan Garrison Kiellor, especially when it came to the Q&A time at the end. The questions ranged from political – China in Tibet – to existential – “is there a beginning and an end?” – to woeful “What should I do with my life?” The answers could have come from Ann Landers, with a Buddhist twist. Things going wrong in your life? Try to rise above your worries? Can’t stop worrying? Blame karma – maybe it was something you did in a past life.

I’m sure people who have to deal with him as the titular head of state for Tibet or as a religious leader don’t see him as harmless and kind-hearted. He has to do some rough stuff sometimes, as the protesters outside reminded us. Any time you combine bureaucracy (material world) and religion (world of the non-rational) there will be conflict. That’s why there are hundreds of so-called Christian religions. It reminds us once again that founding a nation on “religious principles” isn’t such a good idea. In fact, I was happy to hear the Lama say that ethics, good behavior and the pursuit of happiness are just as much the province of reason and secular beliefs as of religion.

Not so simple

I was reading Nicholas Wade’s paean to E.O. Wilson (who deserves it, after all) in the NYT Science Section when this caught my eye:

When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

The environment committee of the Spanish Parliament voted last month to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future. The project’s directors, Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher, regard apes as part of a “community of equals” with humans.

It’s worth reading the whole story at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/weekinreview/13mcneil.html?ref=science&pagewanted

A point common to both the Wilson story – which focused on his theories of “social evolution,” (which irks the evolutionists like Dawkins who believes that the gene is everything in evolution) and the one above is the tendency of human nature to select one fact above all others and say that’s the explanation for everything. Whether it’s evolution or animal rights – or darn near anything else from traffic to marriage – the real reasons for why things are the way they are usually are much more subtle and various than any theory can account for.

So whether we’re reading Wilson or Genesis, it’s probably a good idea to approach the text as a kind of libretto. You can understand the outlines of the story, but you won’t understand the opera until you hear the aria.

Neglecting the blog

Maybe you noticed that the last couple of posts have been short and kind of far between.  Blame that on vacation.  I was on the beach and had very limited access to the Internet.  The beach in Door County was pretty good this year.  Not too stinky from the geese. Not too much crud in the water. Not too many weeds growing right up to the water's edge. A good place to sit and read. Beach reading for me consisted of Patriot Battles, Michael Stephenson's technical, but very well written account of how the Americans won the War for Independence, and The Courtier and the Heretic, Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart. There's nothing like a cup of coffee and a book about philosophy on the beach to start a summer day off right.

A visit from Aristotle's Witnesses

This is mostly funny because we used to get visits from people like this all the time. There was the guy who pulled up one Saturday morning in his SUV as I was heading out to burn the prairie.  I had the truck loaded up and a crew of half a dozen standing about waiting for instructions and this guy was oblivious. He could think of nothing but himself and his burning need to tell the world how just gosh-darn right he was about everything.  He didn't ask how I was doing or what I was up to, or why all these folks were standing around.  He dived right in and once he had ascertained that, yes, I did read the Bible, he whipped out his copy and invited me to read Matthew Chapter 28 right then and there.  What an ass.  If the cartoon strikes a chord with you as well, you can find more like it at http://abstrusegoose.com/31.

Thoughts on the Fourth of July

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. – Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Darwin and his contemporaries saw wonder and beauty in the world around them, in the smallest details and the largest. His fascination for the patterns of creation came out of a long tradition of liberal natural philosophy, first animated by a belief that by understanding the pattern of nature we might understand the mind of God. Ironic. The Drinking and Reading Society is a direct descendent of those amateur naturalists. We too seek the grandeur of the natural world in the books we read and the pursuits of our lives in the streams, prairies and woods.

Once upon a time even our presidents and government officials shared this passion – even were leaders in learning. Theodore Roosevelt for example. On this Fourth of July I wonder if it is even any longer possible to have a president who was curious about the natural world and who saw in its details endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.

On On the Origin of Species

It is an argument that would no longer be considered scientific. I was surprised to learn upon reading On the Origin of Species for the first time, (Yes, I know I am late in coming to it, but it always seemed daunting.) that Darwin, like his critics and contemporaries, both religious and secular, presented his argument “from reason” rather than “from fact.” So I can see why Darwin was reluctant to publish and only did so with Wallace’s spur in his side. It’s not just that he didn’t want to offend his religious wife or associates. His argument just wasn’t all that strong. The critics act as though the argument “from fact” has never been made; they continue to argue “from reason.”

So it is a remarkable tribute to the power of Darwin’s insight that his argument stuck at all. It is actually more revealing to read the Voyage of the Beagle because not only is the writing much more lively, but you can actually see how the insight began to form around the kernels of hard data. In hindsight it all seems like an intellectual flashing neon arrow pointing the way to evolution. But had we been in Darwin’s place, given his knowledge and expectations, would any of us have come to the same conclusions?