Philosophy

The attached advertisement for environmentally and socially responsible fashion came with a note:

“Not sure exactly what is ethical about fashion – isn’t it all about throwing one set of clothes out each year and enlarging one’s ecological foot-print?”

Download file (about 80 kbs)

I got about half way through the first book about Mark Latham – the one by Bernard Lagan titled Loner: Inside a Labor Tragedy – before somehow misplacing my copy. It must be under a pile of papers somewhere in this house.

Anyway, I decided to buy The Latham Diaries while in Sydney last week. The decision was probably influenced by ravings from a friend in the Victorian timber industry who was finding the read insightful.

I have start the book by working from the names in the back index – Barry Chipman (Tasmanian Coordinator of Timber Communities Australia) and Bob Brown both feature.

I was fascinated to read that Latham holds Brown in the highest regard. He writes:

I also like Bob Brown: other than economic policy, our beliefs are quite similar. I prefer this political values to the likes of Adams [federal Labor colleague] and Michael O’Connor [union boss], with their close links to the timber and woodchip bosses. It’s a shame that people like Bob Brown have been lost to the Party. Gough tells me he was a member of Western Sydney in the 1970s.

Later in the book Latham complains that Adams,O’Connor and Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon did not cooperate with him during the federal election campaign putting the interests of the local timber industry before the needs of the federal Labor party.

I received my first ever copy of Cosmos magazine today(September issue). The 112 page glossy has some good stories including a piece titled ‘Pulsar a stellar double act’ (pg 23) that explains how scientists at the Univeristy of British Columbia,Vancouver, are still trying to disprove Einsteins’s General Theory of Relativity.

Why is it OK to keep challenging Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but not some of our less predictive theories like ‘anthropogenic global warming'(AGW)?

This all reminded me of the ‘two laws’ I wrote down on a scrap of paper years ago and posted here:

Harris’s First Law:
Belief in the truth of a theory is inversely proportional to the precision of the science.

Harris’s Second Law:
The creativity of a scientist is directly proportional to how much he knows, and inversely proportional to how much he believes.

Stephen Jay Gould in his book ‘Rocks of Ages: Science and Religon in the Fullness of Life’ (Random House 2001)concludes that science defines the natural world and religon our moral world.

In an insightful piece published last week in the Sunday Times Andrew Sullivan considers how penguin biology has become part of the morality wars in the US with the religious right hailing a movie about penguins as “passionately affirming traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.”

But, Sullivan writes:

According to “The Auk,” the scholarly journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union, emperor penguins make Liz Taylor look like a lifetime monogamist. Their mate fidelity year to year is 15 percent.

… According to the Auk, “in Emperor Penguins, the tendency to divorce occurred only when females returned earlier than their previous mates. Most Emperor Penguin pairs formed within 24 hours after the arrival of males, which were outnumbered by females.” Memo to male emperor penguins: If you get to the breeding grounds a day late, forget about it. She’s already moved on.

It gets worse. Some penguins are – wait for it – gay. Of course, any fool could have told you that. They’re invariably impeccably turned out, in simple and elegant tuxedoes with a very discrete splash of color; and you can’t tell the boys from the girls.

This is a major problem for zoos, hoping for baby penguins. In Berlin’s Bremerhaven zoo, zoo-keepers were frustrated for years wondering why their penguin couples weren’t producing any eggs. After DNA testing, they found out that three of the five pairs had the avian equivalent of “civil partnerships.”

Gay marriage has apparently been around a lot longer than many of us believed. So they brought in four, er, birds from Sweden to try and wean the gay penguins into reproducing. No word yet on progress.

But German gay groups were outraged. How dare the zoo try and re-program gays?

And Sullivan concludes:

Alas, for all the, er, mounting evidence that homosexuality and promiscuity and trans-genderism exist in the natural world, it’s a little stupid to use this material for political purposes. How do I put this gently to both the social right and the p.c. left? We’re not penguins. We’re not chimps. We’re not even those merrily promiscuous bonobo monkeys. We’re humans. And even our “natural” mating habits – moderate monogamy and some homosexuality, according to all the best science – do not tell us anything about morality as such.

… Not everything is political. And not everything is about us.

Owen Harries writes in today’s Financial Review,

“On political matters, intellectuals tend to share two characteristics: they are slaves to fashion; and on the big questions, they tend to get things hopelessly wrong.”

Harries proceeds to give a few thousand words of relevant examples beginning with,

“If you had been a man of affairs living in 1910 or thereabouts, it is likely that you woiuld have been well aware of the increasing tense international atmosphere, as Germany not content with having the most powerful army in the world, sought to challenge Britian as a leading naval power. But if you had been an intellectual living in the same period, chances are you would have subscribed to the view, propagated by Norman Angell in The Great Illusion, that war was a dying institution… ”

The Club of Rome predictions in the 1970s – that unless we limit population and industrial growth the world would self-destruct by the end of century – are included in Harries list.

Harries asks, “Why do intellectuals get things so wrong, so often? The question is worth asking because they are still with us, still vocal, still taken seriously by many as the interpreters of the course of human history. A large part of the answer, surely, lies in the intellectuals’ search for – demand for – coherence in human affairs, for pattern, for meaning and consistency. Once this was found in the form of religion; for the past hundred years or more, most intellectuals have found it in the form of ideology.”

Does this provide some insight into how and why some of our most revered environmentalist academics get it so wrong – from Paul Ehrlich to Ian Lowe?

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The piece by Owen Harries titled ‘The parochialism of the present’ is to appear “simultaneously in the inaugural issue of The American Interest” at www.the-american-interest.com. But I can’t find it there.

A reader of this web-log sent me this link, with the note: I wonder what this gamma ray burst of 13 billion years ago does for the Intelligent Design argument?

I have previously commented on Intelligent Design here.