Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch: "Muse" - Reactor

@17/bgsu98: There’s a novel set shortly after Generations — it might be Shatner’s The Return — which shows Starfleet sending ships to clean up the saucer wreckage and leave the planet pristine.

@27/kkozoriz: “So McCoy would be right in his wish to announce himself as “Behold, I am the Archangel Gabriel.” or whatever would be appropriate in the local religion?  Or Picard should have accepted the Mintakens view of him as a god?”

The point is that it’s not about them. The choice that matters is the natives’, not the visitors’. The indigenous people themselves are the ones who have the real agency, regardless of what the visitors say or do. You can go somewhere and claim to be a god, but that claim won’t get any traction in the culture unless there’s somebody there who has their own reason to play along with it. And if they do, they’ll reinterpret it to fit their existing belief structure so that it’ll be more palatable to their own people (like how vodoun reinterpreted Christian saints to fit West African religious traditions). Otherwise, if they don’t like what you’re selling, they’ll ignore you, kick you out, or kill you. Unless you come in with an army and slaughter or torture them if they refuse to convert. That is what the Prime Directive was supposed to be about preventing — imperialism, not just interaction.

@30/wildfyre: It’s also important to understand that “god” means different things to different cultures — or rather, that a lot of the things that we translate as “god” are very different from what the word means to us. Westerners think of divinity in terms of a single absolute power to which everything else is subordinate, but there are belief systems where gods or spirits are part of everyday life, where individual people or animals or rivers can be considered gods, and where a deity may be subject to specific rules and obligations that they can be penalized for failing to follow. This difference in worldview led to a lot of misunderstandings when Europeans found themselves interpreted as divine and made totally incorrect assumptions about what that meant to the people seeing them that way, which turned out badly and often fatally for the “divine” Europeans (as in the Captain Cook example, or some European/Native American contacts).

Since the Eternals are multiple in number, we might be dealing with something more along those lines, where Eternals are seen as supernatural but not necessarily omnipotent or monarchical. Come to think of it, there are precedents for such things in Western heritage, like Greco-Roman or Norse mythology, where gods are all too human, flawed, fallible, and even mortal.

@50/karey: When are they ever likely to encounter real Vulcans? They’re half a galaxy away. They’ll never know it’s anything more than a story.

@56/noblehunter: “Not all cultural adaptations are positive.”

Of course not. The point is that they aren’t all automatically negative. The alternative to one simplistic extreme is not the opposite simplistic extreme; it’s a recognition that most of reality lies somewhere in the middle ground between the extremes.

“Just because outside ideas aren’t necessarily dangerous, it doesn’t mean they are safe.”

It’s not about the individual ideas. It’s about who has agency in the interaction. It’s the same as with a relationship between two people. If one person imposes on another and compels them to change, that’s abusive. In a healthy relationship, you respect the other person’s right to think and choose for themselves. That doesn’t guarantee that they’ll make the right choices, of course. It doesn’t ensure that they won’t come to harm. But a controlling, abusive relationship is itself a form of harm, and the point is not to commit that harm intentionally if you can help it.

More to the point, it doesn’t make sense to say that the only way to avoid hurting someone is to hide your very existence from them. It is possible to engage with someone and have a healthy relationship with them while still respecting their freedom. Again, life is not about binary choices between opposite extremes. Extremes are not healthy. Life is what happens between the extremes, and it’s complex and unpredictable and dynamic, which means sometimes it turns out badly, but it’s also the only way things can turn out well.

“Local ruler gets religion and decides to conquer his neighbours isn’t an unusual response to cultural contacts but it’s not a particularly nice one either.”

It’s not about whether it’s “nice.” That’s the whole damn point — that we don’t have the right to decide what choices are good or bad for another culture. It’s not about what we want or what we think. The point is that they have the power to make their own choices, even if that means they screw up. That’s what it means to respect people’s freedom. It means it’s their choice to make, and whether you agree with it or not has no relevance.

@59/noblehunter: “I’m not arguing that contact can’t be irrelevant or even beneficial but is it worth the risk that it won’t be?”

I already acknowledged that. I explicitly said that the reason for the PD is to minimize that risk. I’m not talking about the moral rationale for the PD’s existence. That’s not the subject. I’m talking about the actual ramifications if accidental contact does occur. I’m saying that as long as there’s no ongoing effort to interfere, a single accidental contact is unlikely to do any major damage.

That does not mean the precaution isn’t valid. That’s a bizarre misreading and a complete non sequitur. If I say “A small fire broke out on my stovetop but it burned itself out before it did any harm,” it would be incredibly strange to interpret that as an argument for throwing out everyone’s smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. Just because disaster isn’t guaranteed to happen, that doesn’t mean the precaution isn’t valid. Like I said, it’s unrealistic to try to reduce the world to such a simplistic, black-and-white binary, as if the two absolute opposite extremes are the only possibilities. That’s not a rational way to look at anything in life.

Precautions are about guarding against the possibility of disaster, however slim. That does not mean disaster is inevitable. Conversely, the fact that disaster is not inevitable is not an argument against precautions. It’s just putting them into perspective.

@62/Mr. D: “My interpretation of the Prime Directive on this subject was always that keeping the civilization from undue outside influence helps to retain that civilization’s uniqueness for as long as possible”

Yes, of course I know that. But again, that’s not the point. I already explained this. I’m NOT debating whether the Prime Directive should exist. I’m saying that occasional lapses are not automatically guaranteed to be destructive. I’m saying that you have to look at it with nuance and intelligence instead of dumbing it down to a cartoonish absolute the way “Homeward” did. Yes, there are plenty of good reasons for the Prime Directive. But things like “Homeward” and the Nibiru sequence in STID — and arguably “A Piece of the Action” — cartoonishly misrepresent how cultures work and make very bad arguments for why the PD is necessary. Something like “Muse” is better because it’s more nuanced. It recognizes, like TOS did, that applying the Prime Directive is something to be done with flexibility and judgment, not fanatical absolutism.

@70/Mr. D: That’s just rephrasing the same intrinsically invalid premise, the myth that any contact is automatically harmful. As I keep saying, it’s not the contact, it’s the coercion. Cultures are robust and adaptable and stubborn. You have to make an active, ongoing effort to harm or destroy them. A single interaction, or a few occasional minor contacts, won’t “disturb” them seriously.

As I already said, the fact that the Prime Directive enjoins against such minor contacts is not because the minor contacts themselves are bound to be harmful. It’s because you can’t eat just one potato chip. It’s because doing it once without harm creates the temptation to do it more and more, so the policy is strict in order to avoid that temptation. It’s not about the indigenous people’s psychology, it’s about humanity’s psychology, about recognizing our own arrogance and keeping it in check.

Also, like many laws, it’s probably in response to the abuses of a few bad apples, people like John Gill or Ron Tracey who intervene harmfully for their own selfish or misguided reasons. In many cases, it might be perfectly possible to have a harmless contact with a pre-spaceflight culture, like Lieutenant Kirk and Tyree, or Dr. McCoy and the Capellans. But those few cases where the contact is maliciously or misguidedly disruptive require passing laws that affect everyone, because the law can’t differentiate between individuals with good or bad intentions. It’s like how they passed laws regulating the sale of decongestants with pseudoephedrine after people started turning it into meth. Most customers aren’t drug dealers, but the restriction has to apply to everyone because of the few who are. Presumably the Prime Directive was created in response to certain people’s abuses in making contact with other cultures. That doesn’t mean every contact is harmful, just that you have to regulate all of them in order to prevent the harmful ones.

@72/noblehunter: “I meant cult in a more academic sense, think the cult of Isis rather than Scientology. I meant a new religious movement but solidly within their existing framework.”

The label you use is not the issue. I’m disagreeing with the fundamental premise that there would be a new movement of any kind. That’s not the dynamic we saw in “Muse.” When Layna tried to convince the others that B’Elanna was a real Eternal, they didn’t believe her. They just took everything as part of the play — while Layna took it as part of her existing beliefs about Eternals. They interpreted the events in the context of the worldview they already had, as people normally do. So there’s no reason to expect anyone to invent a new worldview as a result of these events — unless it’s the one Kelis hoped for, using his plays to convince the patron to seek peace instead of war.

@74/noblehunter: “The label is important because we see that Kelis already added Voyager to his existing pantheon (if that’s what the Eternals are).”

Yes, he added a new story to the existing mythology. That’s not a “cult,” it’s just a myth. It’s a refinement of the system that already exists. That’s normal. No culture is static. Every culture innovates to some extent, even if it’s just tweaks to their existing system. One of the perennial myths of anthropology is that foreign cultures are stagnant or unchanging, that contact with outsiders was the first time they ever innovated. Even a stable culture is made up of people who are just as creative as people anywhere else, and so they try new things, tell new stories, refine what they have. That’s just normal growth.

“You suggested I meant a cult like Scientology, which isn’t what I meant.”

Don’t put words in my mouth. That is not even remotely what I was saying. For the third time, you’re completely missing my point by thinking the issue is what kind of innovation you’re talking about. I’m saying I don’t believe there would be any major alteration to their existing belief system.

Yes, they’ve added Voyager to their existing myth, but that is not a “new cult,” it is just a refinement of what they already have, well within the bounds of the kind of innovation they would normally have, because cultures are not static. It’s not a new story, it’s just a few new characters and settings in their existing story of the Eternals. Heck, they may well interpret characters like B’Elanna Torres and Seven of Nine as alternate names for the Eternals that already exist in their mythology, like how the Romans interpreted Zeus as another name for Jupiter and so on. I really think you’re overestimating the degree to which this incident would change things.

@76/SethC: “History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well-intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.” “

That statement is deeply problematical, and whether it has any merit at all depends on how you define “interfere.” If you define it to mean mere contact or interaction, that’s absolutely wrong. “Less developed” civilizations are not automatically harmed by contact. Europe was the less developed civilization when it got gunpowder and printing and decimal mathematics and the like from the Mideast and Asia, but it wasn’t harmed by the exposure to more advanced ideas. The reason the colonial, imperialistic West did so much damage to the civilizations it contacted was not because they were “less developed,” but because the West actively tried to destroy their cultures. (Indeed, the Native Americans were arguably equally developed, just specialized in different ways. They had less advanced metallurgy but far more advanced agriculture. Their longbows had better range and accuracy than the early settlers’ guns. What devastated them was the settlers’ diseases, not any technological advantage.)

So the statement is valid only if you define “interference” to mean active, coercive meddling, a missionary or “Civilising Mission” mentality of pressuring a culture to do things your way in the belief that it’s superior. The relative “development” is a factor there because presumably the “more developed” culture has a power advantage that makes it an unbalanced relationship and makes it hard for the other culture to resist the imposition. But talking about it in terms like “less developed” is still condescending and judgmental, the kind of terminology a legitimate historian or anthropologist would try to avoid. Development isn’t a ladder, or a race to a single finish line. Different cultures can develop along a range of different, non-parallel paths.

@78/Mr. D: “I’m saying that there is value in the civilization and the culture’s path without the outside change at all.”

And my point is that there is no such thing as a culture without outside influence. No planet is going to have just one culture. An entire planet is going to have hundreds or thousands of different cultures that interact and shape each other. And that’s not an “impurity” or a “disturbance,” it’s a natural, healthy part of how cultures develop.

As I said, it’s one of the most pervasive myths of colonialism that pre-contact cultures were static, that their traditions and ways were unchanged for centuries or millennia until contact with the West brought about transformation. The reality is that every culture evolves and grows over time, and nearly every culture has some interaction with outsiders who introduce new ideas. But unfortunately, most TV writers are not history or anthropology majors, so Trek has been too quick to buy into such false assumptions about contact and interaction, and it’s shaped their writing of Prime Directive stories in unfortunate ways. “Muse” is better about it than most, perhaps because Joe Menosky is knowledgeable about history.

@81/Mr. D: “I’m not positing nor did I intend to suggest that some culture will be isolated from other cultures on their own planet, but simply from spacefaring civilizations. Which is the Prime Directive’s point.”

I know what the Prime Directive is supposed to be based on. What I’m trying to explain is that the TV writers who formulated it are not historians or anthropologists and made a lot of incorrect and oversimplistic assumptions about how cultural interaction works. I’m saying that you can’t assume a work of fiction gets everything right about its subject matter. Just restating the flawed premises of the fiction does not make them any less flawed.

There’s a strange double standard going on here. When we talk about an episode like “Genesis” or “Threshold,” nobody argues back when it’s pointed out that the episode’s grasp of genetics is utter BS. So why is it so hard to accept that a lot of Prime Directive episodes are based on sociological and anthropological assumptions that are just as ignorant and wrong as the genetics and evolutionary biology in those other episodes?

What I’m saying is that the distinction between on-world and offworld contact is not as absolute as you’re assuming. The first step in getting to the truth is questioning our own preconceptions and assumptions, setting them aside and reasoning from first principles. Imagine how it would look to the indigenous culture themselves. To a culture at an early level of development like the one seen in “Muse,” the distinction between a visitor from another continent and a visitor from another star system would be irrelevant. They would both be seen as equally alien. So that’s not what makes the difference between a healthy interaction and a harmful one. As I keep stressing, the thing that really matters is whether the interaction is coercive. If the visitors try to impose their own ways, that’s harmful. If the visitors show deference to the locals’ ways and let them control the interaction, then the risk of harm is much less. That’s true whether the visitors are from their planet or a different planet.

The reason we think that contact with aliens would be a big shock is because we live in a culture that has full knowledge of its world. We’ve explored the whole Earth, we think we have all the answers, and so discovering something from outside our realm of knowledge would be shocking. But our ancestors centuries or millennia back didn’t think that way. To them, most of the world was unknown and mysterious. They expected to encounter strange and alien things. They imagined the inhabitants of other lands to be far more alien than they actually turned out to be — people with their faces in their chests, people hopping around on one giant foot, etc. So encountering aliens from another world would not have been as disruptive to their expectations as it would be to ours. Like I said, we have to take our own preconceptions and expectations out of the equation.

@82/Mr. D: “I’m not actually that well versed on older depictions of colonialism or anti-colonialism in sci-fi, is the Prime Directive the first time that not interfering in an alien civilization’s business was considered to be the operating rule?”

Oh, certainly not. The idea of an advanced civilization keeping its hands off until younger cultures reached its level goes at least as far back as Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker from 1937. It was used by various prose authors pre-Trek, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley in her Darkover series and the Strugatsky Brothers in the USSR in their Noon Universe. Isaac Asimov did a number of short stories using the idea. There’s a limited non-interference policy in Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hainish Cycle, which started in 1964 but was mostly contemporaneous with or after TOS.