Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Books, Environment, Nature

Book Review: Buzz

NATURE

Buzz

Bees are brilliant and a much-needed species. And it’s thanks to wasps from which they evolved.

DO you know what Aristotle, George Washington, Leo Tolstoy, Sherlock Holmes and Scarlett Johansson have in common?

If you didn’t you might be surprised to hear that they were (or are) all beekeepers.

This lively, engaging book shows the human fascination with bees has deep roots. Stone Age art, from Africa to Europe and further afield to Australia, depicts honey-hunting expeditions. People kept bees before they tamed horses. The Hittites imposed fines on anyone caught stealing from hives. The Greeks had honey taxes.

Bees have long been central to our eating habits. “It’s often said,” Hanson remarks, “that every third bite of food in the human diet relies upon bees.”

He includes a table of 150 crops which either need or benefit from pollination by bees. They range from apricots to tomatoes and turnips.

Mead, brewed from honey, is one of mankind’s oldest tipples. People have been drinking it for at least 9,000 years. The ancient Chinese downed a version laced with rice and hawthorn berries; the Celts preferred theirs flavoured with hazelnuts.

The Mayans of Central America went one better and produced hallucinogenic varieties, spiked with narcotic roots.

Bee products have also proved invaluable in traditional healing. Of 1,000 prescriptions in a 12th-century volume entitled The Book Of Medicines, more than 350 made use of them. Honey was thought to be a remedy for everything from hiccups to a low sperm count. Beeswax could be used to treat loose teeth, aching testicles and sword wounds.

It’s little wonder that bees figure prominently in various mythologies. In some Greek myths, the god Zeus was raised by wild bees who fed him on nectar and honey. In cultures across the world, the buzzing of bees was interpreted as the voices of departed souls.

Bees are certainly remarkable creatures. They evolved from wasps. The first unequivocal bees appear in the fossil record about 70 million years ago. There are now around 20,000 different species around the globe.

Their antennae tune into chemicals which signal everything from potential meals to potential mates. Their wings can flap more than 200 times a second. One species of bumblebee can hover at elevations higher than the peak of Everest.

Bees, of course, evolved in tandem with the flowers on which they feed and which in turn depend on them to spread their pollen. In one sense, the colours of flowers reflect the nature of bees’ eyesight.

The prevalence of blues and golds in flowers is no chance matter. These shades fall right in the middle of a bee’s visual spectrum. On remote islands where there are few, if any bees, flowers are drab and colourless.

The development of scented flowers is also interwoven with bees’ ability to sense them. As Hanson puts it, “The fact that bees prefer odours we find worthy of poetry, counts as one of nature’s happier accidents.”

Plants need to attract bees to help them pollinate. They have devised any number of cunning strategies to do so. Some include caffeine in their nectar to get bees addicted to visiting them.

There are varieties of orchids which mimic the body shapes and scents of female bees to lure lustful male bees towards them.

The behaviour was recorded in the 19th century but prudish naturalists, including Charles Darwin, were puzzled. They thought the bees were attacking the orchids. They didn’t realise that they were actually trying to have sex with them.

 

BEES are now big business, particularly in the U.S. For a price, honeybees are sent by truck around the country, so farmers can improve bee-dependent crops. More than 10 million bees can be on a single truck.

Much publicity has been given in recent years to the alarming decline in bee numbers – so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Hanson acknowledges the concerns, but he is ultimately optimistic about the future. He is also a charmingly enthusiastic bee fanatic and his book is delightful to read.

– Buzz by Thor Hanson is published by Icon for £16.99

Standard
Arts, Literature, Philosophy

(Philosophy): Aristotle’s teaching of ‘happiness’

HAPPINESS

Aristotle (384–322 BC): ‘Happiness is the highest good, being a realisation and perfect practice of virtue, which some can attain, while others have little or none of it.’

The term “polymath” is often used in a somewhat hyperbolic sense to describe a significant figure who excels in several different disciplines. In modern parlance, for example, a sportsperson who writes a newspaper column, has an interest in current affairs and wins a televised ballroom-dancing competition is often erroneously described as being a polymath.

The sheer range and depth of Aristotle’s contribution to Western philosophy cannot be underestimated. Aristotle wrote on subjects as varied as physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology, while still finding the time to study under Plato, found his own academy – the Lyceum – and act as a private tutor to the young Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s main contribution to philosophy concerns his work on the study of formal logic, collected together in a series of texts known as The Organon, and the use of “syllogisms” in deductive reasoning. In basic terms, a syllogism is a method for arriving at a conclusion through constructing a three-step series of premises, usually a major premise, A, followed by a minor premise, B, via which it is possible to deduce a proposition, C.

    For example:
    Major premise: All men are mortal.
    Minor premise: Socrates is a man.
    Conclusion/proposition: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

In order for step C to be a viable logical proposition, step A and step B must be true.

Aristotle is often credited with “inventing” the form, although in truth he was probably just one of the first people to explore formal logic in this manner, especially the way in which logic must proceed to avoid fallacies and false knowledge. Aristotle’s systematic approach to all of the disciplines to which he turned his enquiring mind displayed a love of classification and definition, and it is possible that where words did not exist for a philosophical phenomenon, Aristotle simply made them up.

The quote at the beginning of this article about “happiness is the highest good” comes from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a series of ten scrolls believed to be based on notes taken from his lectures at the Lyceum. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle addresses the question of what constitutes a good and virtuous life. Aristotle equates the concept of happiness with the Greek word eudaimonia, although this is not happiness in an abstract or hedonistic sense, but rather “excellence” and “well-being”. To live well, then, is to aim at doing good or the best one can, for every human activity has an outcome or cause, the good at which it aims to achieve. If humans strive to be happy, the highest good should be the aim of all actions, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

In this regard, Aristotle saw the pursuit of happiness as “being a realisation and perfect practice of virtue”, which could be achieved by applying reason and intellect to control one’s desires. In his view, the satisfaction of desires and the acquisition of material goods are less important than the achievement of virtue. A happy person will apply conformity and moderation to achieve a natural and appropriate balance between reason and desire, as virtue itself should be its own reward. True happiness can therefore be attained only through the cultivation of the virtues that make a human life complete. Aristotle also pointed out that the exercise of perfect virtue should be consistent throughout a person’s life: “To be happy takes a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring.”

The Nicomachean Ethics is widely considered to have had a profound effect on the development of Christian theology in the Middle Ages, largely through the work of Thomas Aquinas, who produced several important studies of Aristotle that synthesised his ideas with doctrines concerning cardinal virtues. Similarly, Aristotle’s works also had an important role to play in early Islamic philosophy, where Aristotle was revered as “The First Teacher”.

Standard
Arts, Britain, Education, History, India, Literature, Poetry

Snowflake students censor ‘racist’ Kipling

RUDYARD KIPLING

Intro: Students at Manchester University have painted over classic verses of Kipling’s IF poem that was put on the wall of the university to inspire hard work.

STUDENTS have been branded “snowflakes” after removing a poem by the Victorian writer Rudyard Kipling from a university wall over claims that he was “racist”.

Undergraduates at the University of Manchester painted over a mural featuring the celebrated poem “IF” in their students’ union. Students feared it would upset ethnic minorities.

The 1895 work contains no reference to race, but the students said it was still offensive because some of Kipling’s other works are about colonialism.

His 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden has been criticised in modern times for advocating colonialism and portraying other races as inferior.

It is the latest in a string of similar incidents involving students trying to remove references to controversial historical figures at universities.

Kipling’s IF gives advice about how to be a strong and resilient man and has often been used to inspire young people, because it advocates self-discipline and hard work.

Staff at the students’ union commissioned a local artist to paint it to motivate undergraduates in their studies.

But the union’s student representatives complained that they had not been consulted and decided to have it removed.

They replaced it with the 1978 poem “Still I Rise” by American civil rights activist Maya Angelou, which was read by Nelson Mandela at his presidential inauguration in 1994.

A Welfare officer from the university told The Tab website: “We noticed an artist had painted a Rudyard Kipling poem in the students’ union. This was done without our consultation or approval.

“This was especially problematic given the poet’s imperialistic and racist work such as The White Man’s Burden, where Kipling explains how it is the responsibility of white men to ‘civilise’ black and Asian people through colonialism.

“We decided to paint over that poem and replace it with Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, a poem about resilience and overcoming our history by a brilliant black woman.”

A spokesperson for the union said: “We understand that we made a mistake in our approach to a recent piece of artwork by failing to garner student opinion at the start of a new project. We accept that the result was inappropriate and for that we apologise.”

It was added that the union would make changes to “guarantee that student voices are heard and considered properly” so that “every outcome is representative of our membership”.

“We’re working closely with the union’s elected officers to learn all we can from this situation and are looking forward to introducing powerful, relevant and meaningful art installations across the student’s union building over the coming months.”

Chris McGovern, of the Campaign for Real Education, criticised the Manchester students, saying: “This is outrageous cultural vandalism. Kipling is a much beloved poet.

“These students are closing off access to one of our most popular poems and it is Liberal Fascism.

“They are snowflakes who should not be indulged. Forcing your views on other people should have no place in British society.”

The University of Manchester said it would not be appropriate to comment because the students’ union is an independent body.

It comes after Oxford University students led an unsuccessful campaign to tear down a statue of the 19th century imperialist Cecil Rhodes. They also forced the university authorities to move a portrait of Theresa May by putting up signs saying she was “hostile” to immigrants.

At Bristol, students tried to force the authorities to change the name of a building named after benefactor Henry Overton Wills III, a cigarette maker whose family company was said to have benefitted from slavery.

Critics have said it is wrong for students to try to censor the past and that they should instead view writers and figures in their historical context.

 

ONCE revered as the Bard of Empire, Rudyard Kipling has often been viewed as something of an embarrassment in the post-colonial world.

Critics often point to his poem Gunga Din (1890), which is written from the point of view of an English soldier in India about an Indian water-bearer, and lines from his novel Kim (1901) such as “My experience is that one can never fathom the Oriental mind” as examples of how he was a racist. But academics also say that he had a deep infinity with India and was often affectionate towards the Indian subjects of his work.

Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford University, who has a Bengali family background, describes Kipling as “very respectful of India as a culture and society”.

Professor Mitter said: “Kipling understood India better than his British contemporaries. If you read a poem like Gunga Din you’ll see that it isn’t contemptuous of India at all, but is respectful.

“However, Kipling was a product of late-Victorian Britain and had prejudices that were commonplace at that time.”

The Oxford University professor has also said that Kipling’s “The Ballad Of East And West”, which contains the famous line “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet”, is more problematic.

Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling was sent away to school in England when he was five.

In 1882 he returned to India, where he worked for newspapers. Aside from his poetry, among his best-known work is The Jungle Book from 1894, which became a children’s classic and inspired a film produced by Walt Disney in 1967. He died in 1936.

. Appendage

IF

Standard