{"id":984,"date":"2022-06-17T16:06:23","date_gmt":"2022-06-17T16:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/?p=984"},"modified":"2022-06-17T16:06:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-17T16:06:23","slug":"technology-cant-save-you-from-an-amoral-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/2022\/06\/17\/technology-cant-save-you-from-an-amoral-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology Can’t Save You From An Amoral Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[ Originally posted March 9, 2004 ]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lately I\u2019ve been watching a bunch of episodes that I missed of the current Star Trek series,\u00a0Enterprise<\/em>. For the most part I\u2019ve been pleased with the show\u2019s pretty convincing \u201cgap filling\u201d between our own era and an era of sustained manned space exploration.\u00a0Enterprise<\/em>\u00a0takes place in the 2150\u2032s, which is really not the far away from us, and furthermore, it is set only a century after the discovery of the ability to travel faster-than-light in the 2050s\u2013even closer to our own time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enterprise<\/em> has greatly impressed me with its \u201crealistic\u201d approach to the \u201ctechnical\u201d aspect of manned space travel, and it\u2019s done so mostly with \u201cthe little things\u201d\u2013stuff like all the computer screens being obviously \u201ckinda next generation\u201d flat panel monitors literally just hanging on the walls, and like a great deal of trouble communicating with new aliens precisely because the Universal Translator is still in its infancy and is literally being \u201cdebugged\u201d by a language expert they brought along with them from Earth. Unlike every other Starfleet ship we\u2019ve ever seen, this \u201cprimitive\u201d Enterprise<\/em>\u2018s doors don\u2019t even have proximity sensors, but are opened via pushing buttons on the wall. The transporter, an absolutely indispensable tool of Picard\u2019s era, is so new to this crew that even though it\u2019s been successfully used on humans several times, mostly they shy away from it and actually physically hard dock with other ships. Enterprise<\/em> is shown flying around doing things that you\u2019d never in a million years have thought of a Starfleet ship having to do\u2013such as the \u201cmundane\u201d chore of laying \u201csubspace amplifier buoys\u201d so that communication with distant Earth can actually take place as the ship gets farther and farther away. The ubiquitous \u201cphasers\u201d of later generations are here merely retractable \u201ccannons\u201d whose targeting sensors sometimes don\u2019t work properly, and the equally ubiquitous for later generations \u201cphoton torpedoes\u201d aren\u2019t even invented until the end of season 2. Replicators don\u2019t exist\u2013the ship has a real live \u201cChef\u201d who cooks for the whole crew. The state of interspecies medicine, so taken for granted by McCoy, is for this Enterprise so \u201cDark Ages\u201d-like that the doctor actually prescribes alien leeches for some illnesses and makes various healing ointments and so forth from the droppings of alien beetles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now sure, they have this fantastic warp drive making use of exotic \u201csubspace fields\u201d and so forth, but in the last analysis they\u2019re really a bunch of ignorant folks playing with fire. For instance, the show went 12 episodes in the first season before it finally occurred to the crew that they shouldn\u2019t have left spacedock with only one of their three \u201cphase cannons\u201d operational\u2013and they only figured this out because they happened to run into a very hostile species whom they could not bargain with and who very nearly destroyed the ship. Twelve episodes (roughly half a year of story time) before they figured out something as seemingly elementary as \u201cTake more than a few big guns just in case.\u201d The whole idea was \u201cHi, we\u2019re from Earth and we\u2019re here to get to know new people. Come on over and have dinner.\u201d \u201cCaptain, they\u2019re charging weapons!\u201d \u201cWhat, I just wanted to shake their hand!\u201d Ah, the naivety of the newly \u201cenlightened\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or consider their ramshackle \u201cshuttle pods\u201d. Those things are probably the most minimal spacecraft to appear in any Star Trek series (saving perhaps Zefram Cochrane\u2019s first warp ship, the Phoenix<\/em>). Several episodes have focused around serious difficulties arising from the shuttlepods\u2019 severely limited capabilities\u2013and Enterprise<\/em>, traveling nearly one hundred light years away from Earth, only has two of them. And of course they haven\u2019t even developed deflector shields yet, so they\u2019re running around in deep space with nothing more than something called \u201cpolarized hull plating\u201d\u2013better than naked metal, but obviously not capable of a great deal of protective functionality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end of the first season they had, as their disgruntled Vulcan advisors tallied it, engaged in armed conflicts with over a dozen species and broke so many rules of \u201ccivilized\u201d spacefaring that the mission nearly got cancelled. In the early second season they successively managed to hit a cloaked mine that blew out a huge chunk of the hull (thus reducing their engine capability to a level that would require something like 15 years to reach a repair station in Earth\u2019s system), and then got in serious trouble with some locals that they had to barter with (!) for supplies to fix the ship. Later in the second season they met the Borg\u2013and if you thought that Picard and Co. had a hard time handling the Borg, just imagine how Starfleet technology two centuries less-developed than Picard\u2019s fared against the Borg! And all of this on mankind\u2019s first \u201cpeaceful\u201d mission of deep space exploration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At any rate, I\u2019ve been chugging along just fine with most aspects of Enterprise<\/em> (barring the usual constant undertone of secularism that is the staple of all Star Trek)\u2026.And then last night I watched the second season episode \u201cStigma\u201d. Long story short, this episode allegorically explored the sociopolitical ramifications of various sexual agendas of our own era\u2013namely, the present brouhaha about homosexuality and the continuing push for the legitimization of just about all forms of \u201cprivate\u201d sexual behavior between \u201cconsenting adults\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first issue was explored via having Enterprise<\/em>\u2018s science officer, a Vulcan woman named T\u2019Pol, contract a neurological disease from a mind meld that was forced upon her earlier in the second season by some renegade Vulcans. As it turns out, at this point in Star Trek history, mind melds (so often performed by Spock a hundred years later without negative comment from anyone at all) are considered socially-subversive behavior by the Vulcans. Any Vulcans who are able and willing to indulge in mind melding\u2013and they are comparatively few on account of \u201cbeing born that way\u201d\u2013are considered radicals and ostracized as an \u201cunacceptable minority\u201d. Anyone found with the disease that sometimes results from mind melding is then stigmatized as somehow \u201cabnormal\u201d. The conflict that the Enterprise<\/em> crew faces on this score results from three Vulcan doctors who discover that T\u2019Pol has the disease and who then attempt to have her removed from her post on Enterprise<\/em> and sent home in disgrace. It doesn\u2019t matter to these doctors how T\u2019Pol got the disease; it only matters that she has it and that it is apparently utterly socially necessary to stigmatize her rather than being \u201copen minded\u201d about the whole thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through a great deal of very clever dialogue and appropriately emotional musical score, the viewer is drawn into the \u201cplight\u201d of \u201cunacceptable-and-downtrodden-minorities-who-sometimes-unfortunately-contract-yucky-diseases\u201d and then forced to swallow a boatload of utterly transparent propaganda about \u201cnot being a bigot\u201d and \u201caccepting diversity\u201d and \u201cnot judging people\u2019s private practices\u201d that come from \u201cthe way they were born\u201d. The philosophical capstone of the propaganda comes when Captain Archer confronts the bigoted Vulcan doctors and reminds them that for 100 years the Vulcans have been riding humans hard to get rid of their \u201cpreconceptions\u201d about life and the universe before going out to the stars to meet other races, but then ironically, it is the Vulcans themselves who are found to be saddled with \u201cintolerance\u201d\u2013something that the humans \u201cgave up\u201d when they met the Vulcans and found out they they truly weren\u2019t alone in the universe. The message could not be clearer: Judge not\u2026unless the one you\u2019re judging is being judgmental, in which case it\u2019s morally required to be judgmental yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second theme of this episode concerned the hedonistic sexuality of the race to which the ship\u2019s doctor, Phlox, belongs: the Denobulans. Other episodes have revealed that Denobulans are rather excessively polygamous, but this episode pushed the envelope much farther than that. For it seems that the Denobulan concept of \u201cmarriage\u201d is a very vague thing, susceptible to all manner of \u201ccreative\u201d experimentation which none of the multiple parties involved in such relationships ever have any sort of second thought about. This fact comes out when Phlox\u2019s third wife visits Enterprise<\/em> and spends the whole episode trying to seduce Commander Tucker, whom she finds exceedingly attractive. Tucker, a good Southern gentleman (but not good enough, as other episodes have intimated, to confine his sexual activities to one woman within the bond of marriage) refuses to sleep with \u201canother man\u2019s wife\u201d since he was \u201craised not to do that\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately the adulterous advances of Phlox\u2019s wife send Tucker to confront the doctor himself in an attempt to obtain some relief by having Phlox rein the lusty creature in. But Phlox does nothing of the sort. Instead, he encourages Tucker to sleep with his wife precisely because the Denobulan concept of marriage is not the human one, and actually encourages a maximum of behavior that humans consider \u201cadulterous\u201d. Tucker is dumbfounded, but sticks to his guns and refuses to violate his own personal moral code (hey, a man has to have standards, right?). But the radical assault upon the viewer completes itself when toward the end of the episode (just as the Vulcan \u201cbigots\u201d are elsewhere being challenged to rethink their \u201cintolerance\u201d) Phlox and his wife share a moment of high mutual amusement at Tucker\u2019s expense, finding it utterly bizarre that the man would refuse the advances of Phlox\u2019s wife. Thus, the viewer is assaulted one final time by the two Denobulans cuddling up to each other as a man and wife should do, but offset by Phlox\u2019s grinning remark \u201cHumans!\u201d and the joyful laughter of his \u201cliberated\u201d wife. The moral is again plain: You don\u2019t have to sleep with someone if you don\u2019t want to, but just make sure that you understand your objections to doing so are relative only to yourself and your own personal culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Enterprise<\/em> progresses I\u2019m noticing more and more items like these cropping up all over the place. As if the above offenses weren\u2019t enough, an earlier episode had featured an encounter with a pre-warp drive civilization\u2013the usual fodder for Trek\u2019s disgusting \u201cPrime Directive\u201d mentality. This species, suffering from a horrible epidemic that their science could not cure, had managed to get some non-warp spacecraft out far enough from their system that they actually discovered warp-capable species on their own\u2013thus relieving Enterprise<\/em>\u2018s crew of the usual Prime Directive \u201cdilemma\u201d of \u201cinterfering with their culture\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the episode features Dr. Phlox actually discovering a cure for the disease that is afflicting the aliens\u2026and then withholding it from them on the absolutely immoral basis that \u201cevolution is an undeniable fact of the universe, and evolution may be sending this species to extinction.\u201d It seems that on this planet there are two species, the \u201csuperior\u201d one with the illness and another one that they consider \u201cinferior\u201d but which does not catch the illness. Phlox discovers that the \u201cinferior\u201d species appears to be in the midst of an \u201cevolutionary awakening\u201d that, while possibly still millennia away nevertheless has the potential to make the \u201cinferior\u201d race the dominant one via natural selection killing off the presently \u201csuperior\u201d race. Phlox decrees Evolution to be an established fact of the universe and observes that he would not be speaking to his human friends if, 35,000 prior some alien race had interfered with Evolution on earth and prevented the Neanderthals from being supplanted by Homo sapiens. It seems to Phlox the scientist that the humans\u2019 \u201ccompassion for these people\u201d is \u201caffecting their judgment\u201d, clouding their objectivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The perverted logic was spelled out more subtly in the episode\u2019s dialogue, but the connection of capital-e Evolution to the dogma of \u201cnon interference\u201d was made explicit. So explicit, in fact, that Captain Archer, who begins by officially ordering Phlox to share the cure with the aliens is eventually won over to Phlox\u2019s side by the evil \u201clogic\u201d that whatever humans have come out into deep space to do, it is not \u201cto play God with the destiny of other species.\u201d As if withholding a desperately needed medical solution and thus potentially condemning an entire race to extinction is not \u201cplaying God\u201d! But of course it isn\u2019t, since in Star Trek\u2019s universe there is no God and the impersonal forces of time and chance conspire to make capital-e Evolution rule all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now this is the problem with unbelieving culture and the plan to take it off this planet and spread it abroad into the cosmos. Unbelievers live in an amoral universe\u2013a universe with no standards beyond the finite conditions of the radically disconnected cultures that have all randomly evolved on so many different worlds under so many different conditions, a universe of ultimate philosophical incoherence and ultimate metaphysical randomness, a universe where tolerance is intolerant, morality is immorality, and truth is only true if you have been genetically and socially predisposed to believe that it is. As the more \u201cenlightened\u201d Vulcans of Spock\u2019s day (a century after Enterprise<\/em>) will say, one should embrace infinite diversity in infinite combination. You don\u2019t know what you\u2019re depriving yourself of, otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This shallow worldview is frequently hailed as the solution to the \u201cproblem\u201d of such things as religious dogmatism, and yet it turns out that in the end the dogmatism of the non-dogmatic is far more dogmatic than anything the dogmatists could ever have dreamed up. The secularist inquisition of Star Trek<\/em> doesn\u2019t tie its heretics to a stake and physically burn them, but it does make sure they never leave the fringes of the city and can do no more than toss foam rubber rocks at the \u201cenlightened\u201d souls passing them by on the great evolutionary journey to the great big undefined Whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sheer amorality of the unbeliever\u2019s universe is upon reflection graphically startling. And they want to take it out into space, \u201cthe final frontier\u201d! The problem is, of course, that in reality we don\u2019t live in the amoral universe that they wish we did. Perhaps if we ever do encounter an alien race our representatives will be men who live in that amoral universe and find out, as C.S. Lewis observed fifty years ago, that creatures more righteous than ourselves have no choice but to destroy us lest we inflict our disgusting sinful rebellion against our common Creator upon them, as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ Originally posted March 9, 2004 ] Lately I\u2019ve been watching a bunch of episodes that I missed of the current Star Trek series,\u00a0Enterprise. For the most part I\u2019ve been pleased with the show\u2019s pretty convincing \u201cgap filling\u201d between our own era and an era of sustained manned space exploration.\u00a0Enterprise\u00a0takes place in the 2150\u2032s, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":985,"href":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions\/985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tgenloe.com\/rescogitandae\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}