When making an attempt to grasp one thing new, we mechanically search for parallels in our earlier expertise: we search examples from the acquainted as a way to higher perceive the unfamiliar. Typically, this may be useful, as once we be taught a brand new language and we draw on our information of one other language with a standard root.
Sadly, this technique also can take us down a path that leads to not better understanding, however to the confusion of truth with conditioned thought and to a type of distorted imaginative and prescient.
This will readily be noticed within the interpretation of animal behaviour by reference to human behaviour, which is one type of what we name anthropomorphism. Myths and fables and youngsters’s tales are so suffused with the granting of human values and character traits to animals that it’s exhausting to consider a creature that has not, in our imaginations, been stereotyped and imprinted with traits ascribed to it by somebody with a selected level to make, or axe to grind. Thus the fox is ‘wily and crafty’; the canine is ‘trustworthy and obedient’; the elephant is a ‘light large’ and the snake is ‘sneaky and deceitful’. Aesop in all probability began the development, however I want to name it the ‘Beatrix Potter Syndrome’, in recognition of her affect on the growing minds of Twentieth-century kids, of whom I used to be one.
Beatrix Potter was an completed illustrator and observer of nature, who, had she been born a century later, might effectively have had a distinguished profession in science. Sadly, she is now solely remembered for her kids’s books depicting animals in human clothes who stroll on their hind legs. From her tales, a direct line might be drawn to the emotionally charged portrayals of animals in lots of Disney movies, whereas the brutal actuality of the lives of untamed animals is hidden beneath a veil of sugary sentimentality.
Potter’s assignation of human attributes and behavior to animals is just one type of anthropomorphism. There are at the very least two different methods wherein we routinely corrupt our understanding of the non-human world by our alternative of language: using phrases to call or describe an animal and the outline of animal behaviour in human phrases.
We will draw examples from the world of bees as an example each of those phenomena.
After we label the egg-laying mom of the colony as ‘queen’ bee, we impose on her by implication all of the that means with which that English phrase is loaded. Thus we might look forward to finding her as a monarch answerable for the colony, issuing orders and, maybe, punishments for infringements of ‘colony regulation’. The time period ‘queen bee’ has handed again into the English language as an outline of a lady with a controlling and manipulate nature, who likes to have folks round her to serve her wants and provides her consideration. This reinforces the favored however inappropriate image of an actual ‘queen’ bee, which ought to actually be extra precisely considered the egg-laying servant of the colony and positively not its ruler. Whereas the queen bee does certainly have a retinue of attendants to feed and groom her, it’s they who lead her round and put together locations for her to put. When she begins to indicate any indicators of a decline in her potential to supply eggs, she can be outdated, ignored and left to starve.
Likewise the male bee, or drone, which has inherited the favored that means of its identify as a parasitic idler, or one who lives off the labours of others. Whereas the male bees do no apparent and visual work in comparison with their generally hyper-active sisters, we all know remarkably little about their day-to-day actions as a result of comparatively small quantity of analysis that has been performed on them. I recommend it’s extremely inconceivable {that a} colony would intentionally encumber itself with a ‘ineffective’ 10-15% of its inhabitants at a time when gathering meals is its major concern. Just because we now have up to now failed to check them with due care doesn’t entitle us to label them as ‘surplus to necessities’, which is how they’re regarded by most typical beekeepers. In reality, analysis by Juergen Tautz at Wurtzburg College has proven that drones might certainly have hitherto unsuspected duties throughout the hive and should effectively have features within the outdoors world which have up to now eluded detection. As way back as 1852, Moses Quinby (Mysteries of Beekeeping Defined) advised that drones would doubtless have features past mating with a queen, maybe together with serving to to maintain the brood heat. R.O.B.Manley famous that his finest honey-producing hives typically had “a lot of drones” (Honey Farming, 1947).
After we come to bee behaviour, a lot of it’s alien to us that we battle to make sense of it, so it’s not shocking that we resort to makes an attempt to clarify features of their world in human phrases. We discuss freely of bees foraging for meals, scouting for a nest web site, speaking via the ‘waggle dance’, defending their dwelling, mating and finishing up their lifeless as a result of these are all actions that we are able to simply relate to and make sensible sense by way of day-to-day survival in a colony.
What is maybe extra shocking – and infinitely much less useful – is when folks concoct mystical ‘explanations’ derived solely from their imaginations and move them on as if they’d some scientific validity or basis in actual fact.
Myths and legends, populated by gods and heroes, are poetic allegories by means of which we now have conveyed info – each oral and written – from technology to technology and thus gained some understanding of our cultural historical past. Many myths are anthropomorphic of their personification of pure phenomena, however so long as we perceive their origins and true nature, we are able to be taught from them with out complicated their content material with goal actuality.
Nonetheless, as our scientific understanding of the pure world grew quickly all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a parallel progress of standard curiosity in things like clairvoyance, telekinesis, telepathy, reincarnation, ghosts, out-of-body experiences and suchlike para-psychological phenomena that seem to not be topic to the recognized legal guidelines of physics, chemistry or biology. Regardless of the shortage of verifiable proof for such phenomena, they seem to occupy a nether area that stubbornly persists in standard tradition.
Within the context of this text, the consideration of whether or not or not such phenomena actually exist is much less related than the truth that they’ve, since Victorian instances at the very least, been routinely offered as in the event that they had been real by folks with a significantly better expertise for showmanship than for scientific rigour. Demonstrations of ‘manifestations from the spirit world’ had been trendy in late nineteenth century society, whereas Ouija boards and ‘table-tipping’ have floated out and in of trend nearly to the current day, regardless of the efforts of rationalists equivalent to James Randi and Derren Brown to reveal the trickery behind them. Variations on the ‘clairvoyance’ theme have been round at the very least because the days of the Delphic Oracle – in all probability the primary instance of a vacationer trade constructed round a mystical cult – and present no indicators of dropping reputation, regardless of varied myth-busting public exposures of fraud and trickery.
Rudolf Steiner, in his lectures on bees, delivered in November and December of 1923 on the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, sought to interpret the world of bees via ‘Anthroposophy’, a Christianized, model of the paranormal nineteenth century eastern-derived ‘non secular philosophy’ of Theosophy, whose best-known proponent, Helena Blavatsky, was additionally a performing clairvoyant. Each Steiner and Blavatsky claimed to derive their occult information from outdoors the fabric world, by a course of that will these days be known as ‘channeling’.
Steiner believed that mankind had existed on Earth – though not essentially in materials type – since its creation, and that bees (in addition to different animals) had been created for our profit. This chronological reversal of the reality as revealed by fossil proof – bees having actually been round for greater than 100 million years earlier than Homo sapiens – units the scene for additional doubtful assertions, equivalent to when he talks of embryonic queens “giving off gentle” that in some way causes a colony to swarm from “concern that ‘it not possesses the bee poison”.
Anybody unfamiliar with Steiner’s idiosyncratic cosmology and his different writings in regards to the supposed historical past of the Earth could also be shocked by passages equivalent to:
“Our earth was as soon as in a situation of which one might say that it was surrounded by clouds that had plant-life inside them; from the periphery, different clouds approached and fertilised them; these clouds had an animal nature. From cosmic areas got here the animal nature; from the earth the essence of plant-being rose upwards.” (Lecture VIII)
Again on the planet of bees, Steiner makes a lot of the 21-day gestation interval of a employee bee as being equal to “a single rotation of the solar on its axis” (Lecture II), apparently unaware that the equatorial areas of the solar carry out a single rotation in 25.6 days, whereas polar areas rotate as soon as in about 36 days (NASA).
He goes on to say that ‘the drone is thus an earthly being’ (as a result of its completion takes longer than the solar’s rotation – which in actual fact, as we now know, it doesn’t).
He additional elaborates on this thesis:
“The drones are the males; they will fertilize; this energy of fertilization comes from the earth; the drones purchase it within the few days throughout which they proceed their progress throughout the earth-evolution and earlier than they attain maturity. So we are able to now say: within the bees it’s clearly to be seen that fertilization (male fecundation) comes from the earthly forces, and the feminine capability to develop the egg comes from the forces of the Solar. So that you see, you may simply think about how important is the size of time throughout which a creature develops. This is essential for, naturally, one thing occurs inside a particular time which couldn’t happen in both a shorter or an extended time, for then fairly different issues would occur.”
As occurs quite a few instances within the Lectures, Steiner makes an announcement that’s demonstrably faulty, after which goes on to elaborate a sequence of specious arguments from it, which, being derived from false premises, should inevitably result in false conclusions.
It might be tedious to quote each occasion the place Steiner is obfuscatory, unnecessarily mystical or simply plain mistaken. Suffice to say that, whereas not being completely devoid of curiosity, his Lectures are about as helpful a supply of insights into bees as a medieval guide of medicinal herbs could be for conducting fashionable surgical procedure. Certainly, Steiner even betrays his lack of primary understanding of the features of the human physique (Lecture VII) in saying that:
“…it’s represented as if the guts had been a sort of pump, and that this pumping of the guts sends the blood everywhere in the physique. That is nonsense, as a result of it’s in actuality the blood which is introduced into movement by the ego-organization, and strikes all through the physique.”
Nonetheless, Steiner does make some non-mystical statements that have to be thought-about, as they at the very least fall into alignment with observable actuality. He warns towards pushing bees for over-production, drawing a parallel with the dairy trade (Lecture V); he emphasizes that “… the bee-colony is a totality. It have to be seen as a totality.” (Lecture V); The one much-vaunted however typically mis-quoted, ‘prediction’ made by Steiner, normally misrepresented as a ‘prophesy’ of the final demise of bees, quantities to a slightly delicate criticism of the then comparatively new apply of synthetic insemination: “…we should see how issues can be in fifty to eighty years time…”.
Proper on the finish of the ultimate Lecture, we discover clear proof that Steiner’s view of nature is definitely extremely anthropocentric:
‘Thus we are able to say: After we observe issues in the appropriate means, we see how the processes of Nature are literally photos and symbols of what occurs in human life. These males of olden instances watched the birds on the juniper timber with the identical love with which we take a look at the little truffles and items on the Christmas tree. “…I’ve subsequently spoken of the juniper tree which may really be considered a sort of Christmas tree, and which is identical for the birds because the blossoms for the bees, the wooden for the ants, and for the wood-bees and bugs typically.”
And so Steiner’s private mysticism, in addition to his sentimentality, seems to have a big part of anthropomorphism lurking inside it.
Having reached this level in our evaluation, we now have to think about what’s left to us: what could be a authentic methodology for the research of bees, that will be free from the elephant traps of anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism, sentimentality and mysticism, but can embody the sense skilled by many who come into contact with bees that there’s ‘one thing else’ current, past the purely materials?
A rationalist would say, ‘observe with out interpretation: see what’s there and describe it as precisely as attainable, however with out overlaying it with that means. Be true to observable actuality’.
And but, many individuals report some sort of transcendental expertise within the presence of bees en masse, so are their reviews to be written off as mere whimsy?
Talking from my very own expertise, I can say that whereas working with bees and sustaining a relaxed, unhurried manner, I’ve had moments of internal peace akin to that I’ve additionally skilled whereas meditating or participating in sure martial arts practices that goal to ‘nonetheless the thoughts’. Having one’s unprotected fingers in a hive containing 50,000 fully-armed bees has a means of focusing the thoughts very a lot within the second, whereas any deviation from the ‘now’ is prone to be punished extra quickly and extra severely than by a Zen grasp’s employees.
Being current ‘within the second’ is a rarer – and thus extra treasured – expertise for the Twenty first-century Twitter-dweller than for our ancestors. For the chance to expertise that sense of timelessness within the firm of a wild creature so many millennia our senior is a privilege that beekeepers ought to have a good time and cherish.
Mysticism has had its day. We’re grown-ups now: we now have seen the atom bomb and the double helix and we have to come to phrases with goal actuality in all its great kinds with out ascribing all phenomena simply past our understanding to the work of gods, aliens, faeries or gnomes. We will recognize nature with out projecting our aspirations or values onto it. We will observe with out at all times needing to know the ‘hidden that means’ of what we see hear, odor and style. We might be elevated by what’s round us and revel in all of the sensations accessible on this outstanding, pure world. We will even compose poems and songs, myths and fables to entertain us and our kids, however we not want to take a seat on the toes of all-too-mortal males who exert energy over the ignorant by interposing themselves between us and genuine expertise of the mysteries of life.
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