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XI. The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb.
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This makes one smile, especially with West attempting to patent and copyright all human knowledge even when openly stolen from elsewhere!
"No man, I imagine, would object more strongly than Euphorion to communistic principles in relation to material property, but with regard to property in ideas he entertains such principles willingly, and is disposed to treat the distinction between Mine and Thine in original authorship as egoistic, narrowing, and low. I have known him, indeed, insist at some expense of erudition on the prior right of an ancient, a medieval, or an eighteenth century writer to be credited with a view or statement lately advanced with some show of originality; and this championship seems to imply a nicety of conscience towards the dead. He is evidently unwilling that his neighbours should get more credit than is due to them, and in this way he appears to recognise a certain proprietorship even in spiritual production. But perhaps it is no real inconsistency that, with regard to many instances of modern origination, it is his habit to talk with a Gallic largeness and refer to the universe: he expatiates on the diffusive nature of intellectual products, free and all-embracing as the liberal air; on the infinitesimal smallness of individual origination compared with the massive inheritance of thought on which every new generation enters; on that growing preparation for every epoch through which certain ideas or modes of view are said to be in the air, and, still more metaphorically speaking, to be inevitably absorbed, so that every one may be excused for not knowing how he got them. Above all, he insists on the proper subordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea or combination which, being produced by the sum total of the human race, must belong to that multiple entity, from the accomplished lecturer or populariser who transmits it, to the remotest generation of Fuegians or Hottentots, however indifferent these may be to the superiority of their right above that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic author."
India has been now, for decades, fighting U.S. and other multinational corporations who have habitually gone and patented everything India has known for millennia, and not just lying dusty in a corner, but used in practice in every household, taught by older women to their young, as necessities of life everyone must know.
And yet there is every attempt, largely in U.S. surprisingly, of throwing mud at India and her culture of antiquity, attempting to butcher it by such means as heaping contempt on some aspects of culture of India, while denying that other parts- which West cannot heap even discredit, much less contempt, on, are just as much part of eternal ancient culture of India. The former category they include India's worship, religion and social systems; the latter, Yoga, Ayurveda and more. And the ridiculousness of it all is the extreme length they go to - some have "patented" some "yoga" they "invented", while others, indignant at the confrontation of fact of Yoga having originated from India, and not only known but practiced in India for millennia until now, ask if they must pay India a fee for practicing it!
" ... I protest against the use of these majestic conceptions to do the dirty work of unscrupulosity and justify the non-payment of conscious debts which cannot be defined or enforced by the law. Especially since it is observable that the large views as to intellectual property which can apparently reconcile an able person to the use of lately borrowed ideas as if they were his own, when this spoliation is favoured by the public darkness, never hinder him from joining in the zealous tribute of recognition and applause to those warriors of Truth whose triumphal arches are seen in the public ways, those conquerors whose battles and "annexations" even the carpenters and bricklayers know by name. Surely the acknowledgment of a mental debt which will not be immediately detected, and may never be asserted, is a case to which the traditional susceptibility to "debts of honour" would be suitably transferred. There is no massive public opinion that can be expected to tell on these relations of thinkers and investigators—relations to be thoroughly understood and felt only by those who are interested in the life of ideas and acquainted with their history. To lay false claim to an invention or discovery which has an immediate market value; to vamp up a professedly new book of reference by stealing from the pages of one already produced at the cost of much labour and material; to copy somebody else's poem and send the manuscript to a magazine, or hand it about among; friends as an original "effusion;" to deliver an elegant extract from a known writer as a piece of improvised eloquence:—these are the limits within which the dishonest pretence of originality is likely to get hissed or hooted and bring more or less shame on the culprit. ... "
Except, of course, when west steals from india - then combination of Macaulay policy with colonisation and loot that culminated in genocide twice in a decade, leads to an attitude in west whereby its respectable to steal from India and deny India. George Eliot explains.
"I can therefore only explain the apparent infirmity of his memory in cases of larger "conveyance" by supposing that he is accustomed by the very association of largeness to range them at once under those grand laws of the universe in the light of which Mine and Thine disappear and are resolved into Everybody's or Nobody's, and one man's particular obligations to another melt untraceably into the obligations of the earth to the solar system in general.
" ... Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowledgment were brought home to him, would probably take a narrower ground of explanation. It was a lapse of memory; or it did not occur to him as necessary in this case to mention a name, the source being well known—or (since this seems usually to act as a strong reason for mention) he rather abstained from adducing the name because it might injure the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure trade-mark casts discredit on a good commodity, and even on the retailer who has furnished himself from a quarter not likely to be esteemed first-rate. No doubt this last is a genuine and frequent reason for the non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as well as personal sources: even an American editor of school classics whose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of the cheapest sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation for sound learning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and disguised his references to it under contractions in which Us. Knowl.. took the place of the low word Penny. Works of this convenient stamp, easily obtained and well nourished with matter, are felt to be like rich but unfashionable relations who are visited and received in privacy, and whose capital is used or inherited without any ostentatious insistance on their names and places of abode. As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love—when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them. But it is always interesting to bring forward eminent names, such as Patricius or Scaliger, Euler or Lagrange, Bopp or Humboldt. To know exactly what has been drawn from them is erudition and heightens our own influence, which seems advantageous to mankind; whereas to cite an author whose ideas may pass as higher currency under our own signature can have no object except the contradictory one of throwing the illumination over his figure when it is important to be seen oneself. All these reasons must weigh considerably with those speculative persons who have to ask themselves whether or not Universal Utilitarianism requires that in the particular instance before them they should injure a man who has been of service to them, and rob a fellow-workman of the credit which is due to him."
................................................................................................"True, some persons are so constituted that the very excellence of an idea seems to them a convincing reason that it must be, if not solely, yet especially theirs. It fits in so beautifully with their general wisdom, it lies implicitly in so many of their manifested opinions, that if they have not yet expressed it (because of preoccupation) it is clearly a part of their indigenous produce, and is proved by their immediate eloquent promulgation of it to belong more naturally and appropriately to them than to the person who seemed first to have alighted on it, and who sinks in their all-originating consciousness to that low kind of entity, a second cause. This is not lunacy, nor pretence, but a genuine state of mind very effective in practice, and often carrying the public with it, so that the poor Columbus is found to be a very faulty adventurer, and the continent is named after Amerigo. ... "
Europe had no business naming the continent, in the first place - it wasn't empty! Not bothering to ask what the natives called their land and naming it after a forgotten sailor has chutzpah peculiar to the continent of dark latitudes (- yes, summer isn't dark, but people aren't bears, and humans sleep in summer the same amount as in winters, so on the whole if you live in Europe, you live in dark -) that would be equivalent of, say, India naming U.S. after the first migrant from India landing on the continent.
Or 'Kamala' will do just as well.
But fact is, George Eliot forgets, or was unaware, of the Vikings having not only known the continent across Atlantic, and having travelled there, but having settled there as well, for centuries, before giving up and returning due to lack of a n mass migration. They lived in harmony with local people, and had stations as far south as Massachusetts. This was a couple of centuries prior to Columbus.
And the reason Amerigo, not Columbus, was who the continent was named after - was it antisemitism?
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"It is a commonplace that words, writings, measures, and performances in general, have qualities assigned them not by a direct judgment on the performances themselves, but by a presumption of what they are likely to be, considering who is the performer. ... "
And here West uses caste system of West to determine thus issue, whereby wealth, colour and above all, gender, are the criteria - a tall WASP male is obviously considered superior to a dark poor female, no matter how wrong his pronouncements and his correct her observations; and antisemitism is included here.
George Eliot ends with the lovely satire of a fable related to discovery of a honeycomb and an animal council thanking wasp for the sweet produce because a wasp had stung the fox when he questioned the wasp's claim.
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September 20, 2021 - September 20, 2021.
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