Humans have achieved much in their path to civilisation, with politics a defining aspect of how we socially organise ourselves, but we often forget that we are a species like any other.
Aristotle observed similarities between humans and other animals that also collectively work towards a common activity such as the honeybee, which is the basis of Professor Julia Kindt’s talk ‘The Political Bee: Human Politics and Apicultural Knowledge in Ancient Greece’.
The talk will be held on Thursday 27 April (6.30 p.m.) at Balmain Town Hall in Sydney and is part of this year’s Greek Festival of Sydney.
The premise finds its origins in ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who came up with the notion of ‘political animals’, which includes humans along with honeybees, wasps, ants and cranes.
“Aristotle believes that political animals are all those gregarious animals which have a common activity (koinon ergon or κοινόν έργον) that they pursue collectively. It is this feature, combined with their gregariousness, that qualifies honeybees as a zōon politikon (ζώον πολιτικόν),” Professor Kindt told Neos Kosmos.
The Professor of Ancient History at the University of Sydney elaborated further on how these records from ancient times display the peculiar human habit of attributing political qualities to our natural environment.
“The ancient accounts which humanise and politicise the honeybee allow us to understand the human tendency to ground our own political systems and the values and ideologies on which they are based in the natural world,” the professor said.
“Ultimately this is an attempt to universalise and legitimise them. This has been an invariably powerful strategy that different political systems have made use of throughout history up to this day.”
Prof. Kindt explained that some methods used by honeybees that indicate they are a democracy, citing Thomas D. Keeley’s work Honeybee Democracy as a modern authority that supports this.
“There is obviously a division of labour in the hive. Honeybees also seem to pursue complex procedures for collective decision-making using their famous waggle dance not only to inform each other of nearby food sources but also to indicate the location and quality of prospective sites to establish a new colony,” the professor said.
She stressed that while comparisons can be drawn among the two species, it is not an exact equivalency.
“It is important to state that honeybees constitute neither a democracy nor a monarchy nor any other form of human government. They are ‘social insects’ in the definition of Edward O. Wilson and, as such, both similar to and different from humans,” she told Neos Kosmos.
The talk is based on a chapter on the political bees from Professor Kindt’s forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press, The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures that Make Us Human, which is set to be released to general audiences later this year.
The Political Bee: Human Politics and Apicultural Knowledge in Ancient Greece is on Thursday 27 April (6.30 p.m.) at Balmain Town Hall in Sydney and is part of this year’s Greek Festival of Sydney.
For Bookings visit this link.