Song of the Queen Bee
A Celebration of Nature vs. The Hubris of Man
"The breeding of the bee,” says a United States Department of Agriculture bulletin on artificial insemination, "has always been handicapped by the fact that the queen mates in the air with whatever drone she encounters."
— Introduction to “Song of the Queen Bee” by E. B. White
I was sick as a dog this last week for the first time since the start of the pandemic. It was not COVID; rather it was some random cold incubating in the environs of our youth, which made its home in my son and thence, me. I am not being original when I say that being sick is no fun. The good news is that I survived and am almost fully back to par.
Since I could not work, I decided to take some time to round up and archive the writings I posted over the last eighteen years, some 200-plus articles of varying lengths and varying quality. It was a good time to do it because normally I would be tempted to read and edit the articles. After all, writing is never really done. But, I was not in a mental state to think so reviewing and editing was too much. I just copied each article from the web page to a Microsoft Word document, documenting the date, title, and site location, and saving it off.
As I was doing this, I came across my favorite poem, “Song of the Queen Bee,” by E. B. White. I excerpted the poem back in February.
I was considering a couple of different things to write about this week, and one of those things was Artificial Intelligence. I thought back to this poem, which was written at the dawn of the Atomic Age.
I have lived under the cloud of potential annihilation from atomic incineration my entire life. I was two years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and four years old when the “Daisy Ad” came out, and 22 when Prince released 1999 and Nena released 99 Luftballons. The Bomb was always there. Somehow I came across this poem, written by one of my favorite writers, about a young and lively queen bee who will not be tamed by Man’s meddlesome ways, ways that are “alarmingly suicidal.” I come back to this poem like I come back to The Third Man or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: it is perfect.
The poem was published in the December 15th, 1945 edition of The New Yorker magazine, published a mere four months after we dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and two weeks before the birth of the first Baby Boomer. I can just imagine E. B. White coming across the quote at the top of the poem and thinking to himself, “My God, can’t they leave anything alone?” The poem is a celebration of youth and love and untamed passion and exuberant femininity in the face of Man’s (and I mean Man’s) obsessive patriarchal need to control every goddamned thing on his way to killing us all.
It is a scathing indictment of Man’s hubris. The same hubris we are seeing now, coming out of Silicon Valley Bro Culture in the form of unbridled and irresponsible Artificial Intelligence, AI that falls “in love” with its users, and suggests they commit suicide, that lies to us and confidently invents “facts” (charmingly called “hallucinations” by the AI boys). Bro culture has invented the ultimate mansplainer, the ultimate plagiarist who can’t create on its own but steals from real artists and then lies about how it doesn’t download photographs but just digests them with algorithms. Hubris that thinks it’s a damn fine idea to have AI machines fly jets armed with missiles.
I am not anti-Artificial Intelligence. I am anti-hubris and anti-foolishness. We were foolish in the years directly after WWII, when we had atomic test-watching parties allowing us to bask in the literal fallout of the Nevada above-ground nuclear tests. I have a major news magazine from 1953 showing on its cover how we could win a nuclear war against Russia by bombarding them with a cannonade of atomic shells. The military ran war games with soldiers rushing into just-nuked desert areas, condemning these soldiers to die from radiation poisoning. We managed to pull back from the purely insane use of atomic energy. I am hoping that we can avoid the purely insane use of Artificial Intelligence technologies.
I love this lovely queen bee telling the men, “you have no idea what you are talking about. Why would you ever want to tame me? Not that you could.”
The poem was published December 15, 1945 in the New Yorker magazine, and is copyrighted by them. I could not just type the poem into this editor. No, the Substack editor loves to strip out all the leading spaces and tabs that give the poem its visual charm. So, I battled with Microsoft Word to get the formatting right. Word, of course, had its own hubris: the hubris of doing spell- and grammar-checking of E. B. White’s work, for God’s sake! I mean, the man was co-author of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I am a technologist, but I often shake my head at technology.
Bravo!