I only recently read “The Fable of the Bees,” a poem by Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), a Dutch physician living in London. The poem was controversial in its day (it was published in England in 1714) and, it struck me, is relevant to our own. In the manner of the fables of La Fontaine, “The Fable of the Bees” surveys the populace of a successful beehive, setting out the reasons for its success, and finding them in, of all places, its vices, greed prominent among them.
No Bees had better Government,
More Fickleness, or less Content:
They were not slaves to Tyranny,
Nor ruled by wild Democracy.
The hive has a population of a vast number of bees, “Millions endeavoring to supply / Each other's Lust and Vanity; / While other millions were employed, / To see their handiworks destroyed.” The hive is filled with lawyers “of whose Art the basis / Was raising Feuds and Splitting Cases” and physicians who “valued Fame and Wealth / Above the drooping Patient's Health.” The clergy, no strangers to hypocrisy, are little better. Politicians, then as now, enrich themselves. “All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit.”
