A lovely, sunny Easter weekend, and yesterday found me sitting on the back porch, strumming my banjo and watching my daughter play among the dandelions and violets that grace our patchy back lawn. My house, a shabby duplex on one of my hometown's shabbier streets, plays host -- as so many old buildings do -- to a wide array of opportunistic fauna, from carpenter ants to a raucous family of starlings that nests every summer in the rickety rear gutter. As was the fashion in the mid-20th century, my house is sided with rust-red tarpaper shingles. Many of the nails that once held the shingles in place have fallen out or sunk into the aging wooden walls, leaving many small punctures reminiscent of woodpecker holes. As I plucked my banjo, I noticed that many of these nail-less holes were now harboring leafcutter bees, small cousins to the honeybee that line their dwellings with pieces of leaf that they meticulously scissor from living folliage with their precise little jaws.
Leafcutter bees pose no threat as long as they're left alone. They came and went by the dozens as I sat and played. There were at least twenty different nests in the wall of my back porch, a number likely to grow as the shingles continue to peel away from the nails that once held them in place, and my hands-off landlord continues to ignore the deteriorating exterior of a once-proud structure. It is not, after all, the fault of these tiny bees that siding a half-century old is yielding to the exactions of Pennsylvania's fickle weather.
I rarely sit on the front porch, not merely because of the street noise and neighbors who smoke and drink, but also because the wooden front porch railing has attracted another kind of bee, the carpenter bee. These are large, in-your-face bees with gleaming black abdomens and a disquieting habit of hovering aggressively in front of your face. Like leafcutters, they are solitary, but unlike them, they love to fight with one another, whirling and tumbling through the air in angry fits of territoriality. Also, carpenter bees are destructive, chewing large .40 calibre holes in untreated wood, an activity that leaves mounds of sawdust all over the porch.
These bees are the bane of old wood houses; all up and down Logan Avenue, which is lined with century-old wood frame houses, carpenter bees are destroying the porches. They swoop agressively at pedestrians on warm spring days. By early summer, they disappear into their newly-chewed tunnels. What shipworms are to docks and wooden hulls, carpenter bees are to front porches.
We Latter-Day Saints are fond of bees -- of honeybees, at least, which Brigham Young chose as the symbol for what became the state of Utah. Honeybees, at least, are not only industrious but also productive. Honey is one of the least-perishable substances known, mysteriously preserving its virtue for years. Unlike carpenter bees, honeybees do not destroy in order to create space for themselves; rather than reducing good wood to sawdust, they find a convenient hole in a tree or wall and fill it with combs. Some varieties of honeybee, such as those found in India and Nepal, construct huge hives on the exteriors of cliffs and temple towers.
Besides these, there are thousands of other varieties of bees to be found almost worldwide, from the treeless arctic to the equatorial rain forests. There are parasitic cuckoo bees which, like their avian namesakes, parasitize others of their kind rather than going to the trouble of building their own nests. There are the inoffensive bumble bees (or humble bees), which nest in holes in the ground and are active anytime there is pollen to be gathered. There are the brightly-colored halictid bees, certain of which, known colloquially as "sweat bees," are fond of lapping up perspiration and stinging when they can't get any more.
Ideally, we Latter-Day Saints should be like the honeybee -- the most highly-evolved of all insects -- industrious, orderly, cooperative, and above all, productive. No solitary bolt-hole dwellers we, nor vexatious parasites. Yet the Deseret metaphor sometimes seems dated, given the drift of modern culture and our willingness, even need, to follow in its wake. The era of Deseret was an era of unexampled industry and risk-taking. Mormon pioneers literally wrote the book on taming the desert wastes. Out of the torrid sagebrush basin the early Saints erected not only towns, but farms, ranches, schools, universities, banks, factories, and all manner of mercantile establishments. Karl Maeser, Jacob Spori, John Moses Browning, Philo Farnsworth, John Widtsoe, James R. Talmage, Hugh Nibley, Ezra Taft Benson, B. H. Roberts, and many other innovative, creative souls were products of that culture.
Nowadays, it seems to me, we are mostly content to find a niche somewhere and accomodate ourselves to it. Like the leafcutter bees, we work hard but create little, happy to take whatever the world gives us and to be secure in our respective stations. This is not necessarily our fault; it is a survival strategy forced upon us by a world increasingly under the sway of Management, where initiative is stifled by a myriad bureaucrats and a web of laws and regulations so complex that virtually all human activity is subject to some form of control (blogging being, at least so far, a happy exception). This is the world of Egypt in which Joseph prospered by finding his niche. It is also the world of the Roman imperium, where the primitive Christians learned to submit to the irresistible authority of the Caesars. It is the world of the Medieval Jew who, relegated to the status of second-class citizen, found niches in the financial service sector that allowed him to hold his own amid a hostile majority. It is emphatically not the world of Moses and the Israelites in the desert, nor of the early Jaredites, nor of Lehi and his progeny in the Arabian wastes. The world of Deseret is, in so many ways, the world of the pioneer and the emigrant; it is not the world of so-called civilized man, whose survival depends more on his ability to adapt and to conform than on his creativity, inventiveness, or willingness to take risks.
What the Mormon pioneers were able to accomplish a century and more ago would be literally impossible in today's world. Homesteading has long since been discontinued by the federal government, even in far-flung Alaska. Most of the land in the Intermountain West now belongs to the federal government, and every human activity undertaken by the pioneers is nowadays so tightly regulated -- on environmental, social, economic, or other grounds -- that such an enterprise as founding an entire town in the desert is not to be thought of. Farming, ranching, and timbering are viewed with narrow suspicion by Those Who Matter -- inside the Beltway and in the hallowed halls of state government, for the most part -- for their alleged ill effects on the environment, the water supply, and whatnot. Farming and ranching destroys native prairie habitat, while lumbering strips away virgin forest. Humans in large concentrations anywhere are viewed not as sons and daughters of God, with unimaginable potential that ought to be encouraged, but instead as a herd of livestock who require, in Saint-Juste's cynical prescription, only to be told where to browse. It is the aim of mature urban civilization everywhere to furnish not opportunity but security, and in the providing of the second, the first must be systemically curtailed. Thus our morphing from honeybees into leafcutters.
This, then, is why most of us modern Latter-Day Saints look to the safe professions -- law, finance, medicine, the academy, etc. -- as a route to temporal salvation. Few of us would consider starting a business of our own, or purchasing a farm, or any other such, because we know that self-employment is penalized as against seeking to work as a subaltern in some large, established corporation. For myself I am reminded every year, when I pay the double FICA tax on my side earnings as a free lance writer, that the world to which I have been consigned punishes initiative while encouraging and subsidizing conformity and compliance (in the professional and legal sense of the terms).
I suppose that the Deseret ideal will never be fully re-enshrined this side of the Millenium, if for no other reason than because most Americans do not really want it. Comfort and security have become our watchwords now, a natural inclination for those in search of something other than the Father of Lights in whom to repose their trust.
