But to understand that world, he didn’t hesitate to cut off the bees’ wings, slit their thoraxes, shellac their eyes and otherwise maim them. The discrepancy troubles Raffles. “It seems very revealing about the scientific enterprise,” he says, “that there’s a greater good, which allows Frisch, no matter how attached he was to bees—and sometimes he really thinks of them as individuals—to do these things to them as subjects of his experiments.”
Raffles quotes the writer Elias Canetti’s comment that killing insects “is the only act of violence which remains unpunished even within us. Their blood does not stain our hands, for it does not remind us of our own.”
This attitude becomes monstrous when it turns human beings into insects. In the chapter called “Jews,” Raffles dissects the way Nazism justified the extermination of Jews by categorizing them as lice and parasitic vermin. “Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing,” wrote Heinrich Himmler. Killing Jews wasn’t criminal, merely sanitary. The poison used in the gas chambers—Zyklon-B—had been developed as a delousing insecticide. The Hutus would later use a similar rationale to kill hundreds of thousands of “Tutsi cockroaches.”
Throughout his book, Raffles seems alternately drawn to and ambivalent about the knowledge extracted from insects by scientists, amateur naturalists and collectors. On one hand, they are the people who have taken insects seriously and looked at them most intently and sympathetically. A Japanese connoisseur tells Raffles that to collect insects requires hours of study and thought and time outdoors, which requires patience and focus. These practices lead to a love of nature and an appreciation of the many small worlds within the bigger world, and of the subtle differences and connections between all beings. Love of insects can be a path to wisdom. On the other hand, Raffles points out that these scientists and collectors kill the thing they love.
Except for the killing, he sees similarities to what anthropologists do. His work is also “an extractive process,” he says, based on hours of patient observation. “I think of myself as providing some kind of bridge to ways that people understand something.” With Insectopedia, he provides quite a span.
