The bees teach us that selfishness is the real face of altruism
PAUL JOHNSON
When I am looking at the poultry in Somerset, I am not idle. I am thinking. The three main species — ducks, geese and chickens, of various kinds — often fight among themselves, for reasons of social precedence, but never engage in inter-species warfare. Why is this? One reason could be that the farmyard does not run to a race-relations industry, forever telling these birds that they belong to a multiracial and multicultural society and must associate with each other. There are no officials, whose salaries depend upon there being a 'problem'. So there is no problem. The poultry's harmony, the result of each ignoring the other groups, reminds me of my mother's description of early 20th-century Manchester, where three communities — Catholics, Protestants and Jews — lived in perfect peace because they rarely mingled, let alone intermarried, their relations being expressed in distant politeness.
At this time, the bees are hyperactive. Near the woodshed are a huge Spanish privet tree and an escallonia, both burdened with blossom, and I have only to stand within their penumbra to grasp the scale of the apian operation. Here, indeed, is what Tennyson called 'the murmuring of innumerable bees': the noise is tremendous, the branches shake with it, as thousands of creatures go about their task with undeviating purpose and relentless industry. This collective hum is both comforting, reminding us of a benevolent providence that enables a living community to unite in giving us delicious honey, and scary, for no human society could be dragooned into such unthinking altruism. Or could it? The bee makes us think of Nineteen Eighty-Four, or, much, much worse, of an age when the biopositivists have really got going.
Bees do not send me back to Mandeville, that drunken old Dutch doctor whose insidious Fable of the Bees, as Dr Johnson says, 'opened my views into real life very much'. I don't worry that public benefits are dependent on private vices or that the endless 'getting and spending', which Wordsworth so rightly deplored as lifewasters, are essential to the workings of capitalism. I am much more worried about the deeper implications of bee societies. How could they have evolved into a system which is, at one and the same time, so brutally efficient in securing its objects and yet so ultimately futile? Humans have been philosophising about bees for many millennia. The bee hieroglyph was the sign of the Kingdom of Lower Egypt, with its capital at Memphis (Old Cairo)
even before the two thrones were united in the Pharaonic state. In the British Museum there is a bee-glyph on the Sarcophagus of Mykerinos, from about 3700 sc. Bees seemed to have solved many of the fundamental problems of social dynamism, such as controlling food production and breeding so as to bring them into alignment; hiving off colonies as and when required; operating complex division of labour not just by nurturing instincts but by deliberate cloning programmes and biological adjustments produced by variation in diet; above all, by instilling into all ranks a communal discipline which, so far as we can see, is as near perfect as anything in nature.
A hive is not an autocracy at all. It is a weird kind of constitutional monarchy. The workers rule, to a much greater extent than they ever did in Soviet Russia, or even in Marx's imaginings; certainly more so than in a Tonycrony democracy like ours. They control the polity of the hive. They determine if a grub is to be given the highly nutritive food that they discharge from their stomachs — the 'royal jelly' — which turns it into a queen. Just before a young queen emerges, the workers take measures to prevent the old queen from stinging her daughter to death by diverting her with a colonisation project. When the old queen is gone, the workers crown the chosen daughter, sending her high into the air for the nuptial flight, and they allow her to murder her sisters, or prevent her from doing so, in accordance with the requirements of their colonisation programme. The workers are not only rulers, operating (as humans never can) according to Rousseau's concept of the General Will, but also scientific diet-managers, architects, practical builders, artisans, labourers and scavengers, warriors and executioners. They permit the stud-drones months of wellfed idleness, then withdraw their food supplies. Depending on the time of year at which they are born, many work themselves to death in a few months, as in Hitler's and Stalin's camps, but not under compulsion. They are, as it were, programmed to lead a life of perfect altruism on behalf of society.
But what is it all for? In nature, the object of the worker polity seems to be expansion for its own sake — proliferating endless colonies without any benefit to themselves — for however extensive and successful the colonisation, their diet and lifespan remain the same and their debilitating labours become, if anything, even more arduous with the success of their community. Exceptional weather, when 'sum
mer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells' as Keats puts it, may enable them to feed the drones for a few weeks more, and the queen may have four years of life. But this workers' state has absolutely no principle of hedonism for its ruling class. What can we say of a civilisation whose creative sustaining elements have no other object than to work themselves to death with all deliberate speed?
Moreover, this propensity itself invites ruthless colonisation by another species. The perfect regulation of bee societies, early observed by humans, led quickly to their domestication for the purpose of producing honey in even larger quantities. Our humanity is now leading us to regulate such matters as keeping hens in batteries. How will we deal with the infinitely more complex and ruthless exploitation of bees by human beings? At the rate the 'rights' crusade is proceeding, this is sure to become an issue. Bee-keepers have always systematically reinforced the salient social virtues of bees to increase production for human benefit, and in the 20th century this process has accelerated and been augmented by all the means science provides. The bee workers are made to work harder and more intensively than ever, though care is taken — as it was not in the death-camps and gulags — to keep the creatures alive just long enough to make economic sense. Keeping bees according to modern principles is the most merciless exploitation known in the whole history of creation — or could be described as such were there any evidence that the bees resented it. But of course there is none, as bees are perfect social animals; more fools they.
For we learn from the bee that a successful society, in which the individual submits willingly to the demands of the community, is bound to be a tyranny — and not only a tyranny in itself, but one easily made the collective slave of a more thoughtful species. 'There is no such thing as Society,' said Margaret Thatcher; to which I add 'Among humans, anyway, thank God!' So long as there are individuals, with independent minds and souls, linked to their creator by a personal compact, no such monstrous tyrannies, ending in servitude and stupidity on a calamitous scale, can come into existence. Humans early learnt, as bees never have, to ask, 'What's in it for me?' And this healthy selfishness keeps us free. We must always think for ourselves, for the individual is shrewder than the consensus. We must learn to speak fearlessly, not hum in mindless contentment. That is the lesson of the bees.
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