Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
And maybe the 31th century federation thinks the 27th are backward buffoons too, and nothing gets ever done because who knows, maybe someone in the future will do it better.
Morality of prime directive
- Thread starter lotho
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The Last One
Here because reasons
Pretty much, yeah. Either ethics and morality are somehow solved or future generations regard these interventions with the same yikes as we do with colonial settlement.
Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
Okay, the thing is, there's two parallel arguments at the same time here.
One is, "is interventionism justified/doesn't result in catastrophes", like, in the context of our societies and their probable evolutions, to which the answer (in my opinion) tends to point towards "no".
The other is, "is the prime directive good", that is to say, in the diegetic context of Star Trek, and of what we know of the Federation. And I feel like that calls for a different answer.
One is, "is interventionism justified/doesn't result in catastrophes", like, in the context of our societies and their probable evolutions, to which the answer (in my opinion) tends to point towards "no".
The other is, "is the prime directive good", that is to say, in the diegetic context of Star Trek, and of what we know of the Federation. And I feel like that calls for a different answer.
The Last One
Here because reasons
Oh, definitely. Like, the Federation is probably overly cautious and could be capable of doing more. I just don't blame them too much for being cautious when they're trying to avoid doing another colonialism.
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I agree with Memphet'ran about the whole perversity thesis point. Rejecting interventionism is at a fundamental level rejecting leftism and the concept of social progress in general. Leftism assumes that government can intervene in the lives of individuals to produce better outcomes, even though the imbalance of power between government and individual is far larger than that of a developed and developing nation. Leftism is hegemonic by nature, its current rejection of hegemonic action at the international level I see as a kneejerk reaction to modern international hegemonies being exclusively liberal or reactionary in character after the main leftist attempts failed disastrously and ultimately evolved into one of the other two.
Meanwhile the assumption that more developed societies are more socially progressive ones, all other factors held constant, is also kinda ingrained. I doubt anyone here backs the idea that modernization inevitably leads to fascism so we should all just go back to being luddite subsistence farmers, rather than simply fight the negative aspects of modernization while keeping the positive ones, to make it more sustainable and empathetic. Its also kind of hard to ignore that the most socially conservative regions are nigh exclusively the least developed ones, or how technological advances have allowed for increased independence and equality for various groups.
Meanwhile the assumption that more developed societies are more socially progressive ones, all other factors held constant, is also kinda ingrained. I doubt anyone here backs the idea that modernization inevitably leads to fascism so we should all just go back to being luddite subsistence farmers, rather than simply fight the negative aspects of modernization while keeping the positive ones, to make it more sustainable and empathetic. Its also kind of hard to ignore that the most socially conservative regions are nigh exclusively the least developed ones, or how technological advances have allowed for increased independence and equality for various groups.
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As an anarchist I absolutely reject your understanding of left wing politics as state based or hegemonic and interventionist.
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I can't see how an anarchist state can avoid being interventionist. In order to make power fully decentralized you need to either seize or destroy all centralized power that currently exists, otherwise they just roll you with their power, and are nigh inevitably hostile to your existence. Hegemonic I mean in the sense of interventionist, not a centralized ruling authority, a decentralized state is fine if you can achieve.
Speaking of the Federation is many things but anarcho-leftist its not, what with its centralized hiearchy commanding a fleet of warships. I'll note though that tech like a replicator and tricorder I see as basically the holy grail for things that make an anarchist state viable, in that they decentralize most production and service powers respectively. I'd be fine with a critique of the Federation as insufficiently anarchist in tilt.
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well there's your problem.
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- Patriarchova
That is absolutely not central to leftism. At most, it is central to certain particular strains of leftism, most of which are not remembered fondly.
The Federation isn't anarchist, but I really don't think it's ML/M either.
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bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
Consider what being pre-Warp means in the Star Trek universe- it means that unless you're the keepers of one of those ancient forerunner ruins that somehow travel through galactic transport beams or wibbly-wobbly time stuff or whatever, and unless you're actually higher level energy beings that have abandoned power and statehood to relax as on vacation as simple meat-body arcadian farmers, then if you are fully brought into contact you usually have no way to seek alternatives to the hegemony of your contactor, even in theory. No other cultural perspectives to consult, no other trade deals on the table, no other way to acquire a modern galactic-standard education, unless your planet is strategically located enough that multiple interstellar powers are contending for it and then just turn your home into a covert battlefield.
Warp drive or no Warp drive is not actually the best measure of overall scientific understanding and 'evolution' of a civilization as Starfleet would put it- as seen with all the times Starfleet pokes space gods or giant crystalline brains or weird culty colonies of other humans. What it works as really is not as a deep analysis of the structure of a civilization, but simply as a results based measure. If a planet has Warp drive then the power imbalance is not so insurmountable that they are not able to assert their own agency and sovereignty and act on their own interests, and as a final extremity can send a ship in a not-Federation direction to request patronage and protection. In a pre-Warp scenario it would be extremely difficult to not just be acting on the contacted people as trustees for a vision of them, in the name of their future as now a galactic grade member of the Federation. Even with that largely aligning with most of their own interests already and not really ending up with any gross empire stuff, that's still the power dynamic going on.
And yeah the Prime Directive can be applied really grossly by the shows and reflect really paternalistic impulses in RL. Yes, the way the show treats conflicts about the PD end up focusing on the original course and uninterrupted arc of history like there's somehow one way forward and the Federation just has to wait for their climb up the tech tree to unlock Federation virtue. And yes, a less flawed presentation should have much more consistent and widespread interventions against the horrors of life outside of just civilization-threatening asteroids, albeit still passive and unobtrusive. But the society of the Federation as accidentally implied by the biases and limitations of the showrunners does have those flaws, does have the structural incentives that reward harsher and more conservative interpretations of the PD from Starfleet Command and the Admirals, probably tied up in the self-narrative of the Federation as a responsible enlightened civilization that never interferes unjustly like every other state's self-narrative like the fucking Romans trying to seriously claim that every conquest was an honorable war of self-defense and revisited slights.
But that's the thing, the flaws of the PD do reveal I think something really important here- the failures to be maximally good and structural flaws in the Federation reflect noninterventionist interests as like planets jealously guard the current importance of their votes from expanding membership, the Federation is just fundamentally an un-colonial power. Even as I agree that they probably overshoot the PD and often themselves miss what the PD should really be about, I think that's still really quite a beautiful dream, to imagine a state whose's biggest problem is trying to bend acolonial institutions to fierce anti-colonialism, instead of trying to keep democracy and human rights from being strangled to death by the parasitical growth of imperialism.
Warp drive or no Warp drive is not actually the best measure of overall scientific understanding and 'evolution' of a civilization as Starfleet would put it- as seen with all the times Starfleet pokes space gods or giant crystalline brains or weird culty colonies of other humans. What it works as really is not as a deep analysis of the structure of a civilization, but simply as a results based measure. If a planet has Warp drive then the power imbalance is not so insurmountable that they are not able to assert their own agency and sovereignty and act on their own interests, and as a final extremity can send a ship in a not-Federation direction to request patronage and protection. In a pre-Warp scenario it would be extremely difficult to not just be acting on the contacted people as trustees for a vision of them, in the name of their future as now a galactic grade member of the Federation. Even with that largely aligning with most of their own interests already and not really ending up with any gross empire stuff, that's still the power dynamic going on.
And yeah the Prime Directive can be applied really grossly by the shows and reflect really paternalistic impulses in RL. Yes, the way the show treats conflicts about the PD end up focusing on the original course and uninterrupted arc of history like there's somehow one way forward and the Federation just has to wait for their climb up the tech tree to unlock Federation virtue. And yes, a less flawed presentation should have much more consistent and widespread interventions against the horrors of life outside of just civilization-threatening asteroids, albeit still passive and unobtrusive. But the society of the Federation as accidentally implied by the biases and limitations of the showrunners does have those flaws, does have the structural incentives that reward harsher and more conservative interpretations of the PD from Starfleet Command and the Admirals, probably tied up in the self-narrative of the Federation as a responsible enlightened civilization that never interferes unjustly like every other state's self-narrative like the fucking Romans trying to seriously claim that every conquest was an honorable war of self-defense and revisited slights.
But that's the thing, the flaws of the PD do reveal I think something really important here- the failures to be maximally good and structural flaws in the Federation reflect noninterventionist interests as like planets jealously guard the current importance of their votes from expanding membership, the Federation is just fundamentally an un-colonial power. Even as I agree that they probably overshoot the PD and often themselves miss what the PD should really be about, I think that's still really quite a beautiful dream, to imagine a state whose's biggest problem is trying to bend acolonial institutions to fierce anti-colonialism, instead of trying to keep democracy and human rights from being strangled to death by the parasitical growth of imperialism.
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My point is that Federation is definitely a hegemonic leftist state. Strong central government, actively intervenes in their people's lives, proselytizes to non-members to join up. If your position is that people here are not fond of hegemonic leftist states they shouldn't be fond of the Federation, even if it draws a line in the sand for a few specific things like "pre-warp societies are too fragile to contact without exploiting or destroying them by accident" or "transhumanist research is dangerous because it could result in a stratified elite who think they're better than everyone because they actually are".
Which honestly strikes me as the epitome of establishment liberalism actually. The advances we achieved in the past are good and any bad that resulted is a done deal by this point so we're just gonna keep all our modern accoutrements, but any future advances should be disregarded because of the risk they pose to
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- Patriarchova
If your argument is that central authority is inherent to the Federation paradigm specifically, then that's a different and much more reasonable position.
I'll also agree with your assessment that Star Trek - especially 90's Star Trek - had a kind of "this far and no further" conservativism to it that just looks weirder and weirder the more time passes.
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Not really, as older civilizations will still be far larger and more powerful than them; especially given how the Prime Directive ensures that the older civilizations have even more time to expand and advance, widening their lead.
The real reason that's the dividing line is that it's no longer possible to keep such a culture in its planetary zoo without actually destroying their ships to stop them from leaving. As amusing as it is to imagine Federation people just pretending that a bunch of aliens who show up and try to talk to them don't exist, that's not exactly practical.
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Well yes. I noted that the Federation definitely has the building blocks to build an anarcho-leftist framework that modern anarchists could only dream of, but don't, at least not onscreen. What we get onscreen is Starfleet, which is explicitly a hierarchical top-down military organization. Kirk makes the decisions, not a communal conclave of redshirts. Capital ships that run on dilithium aren't something that any ordinary joe schmoe can build with their replicator. Tricorders and medical holograms exist but people still mostly go to a medical bay crewed by organic non-holographic doctors, rather than using their futuretech tools to diagnose and treat themselves.
Its also pointedly absurd given the Federation's neighbors, who continue being ultra-capitalists or fascists or nightmare caste systems all the way until they hit the space age and start posing an actual threat to the Federation. Star Trek's setting unambiguously rejects the forward arc of history angle, which means that unless the Federation does contact there'll be a lot of factions that end up like the Cardassians or the Dominion, after millennia of mistreating people on their homeworld of course. Or just ended up wiping themselves in a nuclear exchange. Which is kind of another point against it given that it happened to the Federation even.
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bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
noooot really? In Star Trek there's a metric shitton of one-planet civilizations that all each have a different crazy thing Starfleet can't do and the protagonists have to figure out how to investigate and technobabble back a way to respond and defend themselves ad-hoc. The really important thing, reflective of both Star Trek's space opera episodic nature and also RL not being the one singular arc of whig history and fixed Darwinian stages of technological and social progress, is that Warp drive is the big sexiness in interstellar transportation in Star Trek physics and allows the freedom to go and communicate with the rest of the galaxy outside as well as alongside Federation efforts and greatly lessens the power dynamic of "you are all our children to learn at our feet".
No; it ensures that they will forever be far behind the Federation in size and power and have he choice of joining or existing at its sufferance. Not "you are children", but "you are insects".
I will agree that the federation has a strong government it needs to be to have the ability to stop someone with a replicator and their buddies making weapons and go conquer a pre warp world enslave the locals and live as god kings. But it's not centralized, the planets in the federation are left to themselves, they only have to follow certain limits. So if you are some weird religious group you can go colonize another planet and the feds will let you run yourself. They probably have limits on sapient rights. But if your group is against that they still won't stop you they just won't allow your planet to be part of the federation and share in its wealth. Do you have any proof that they interfere in peoples lives more than a modern 1st world nation? Also they don't try to expand, the prime directive also applies to Klingons and Romulans. Except for section 31 they will interfere in internal affairs of other states for the benefit of the federation.
What makes you think they will forever be behind and not able to catch up? And why do you imagine infinite growth and the federation colonize all the planets and spread like a disease?
Cloak&Dagger
Definitely Insane
Because the isolated areas are Bantustans with trade only at the Federation's whims, and because that's how nations work? Undeveloped space doesn't stay undeveloped forever.
They will forever be behind because they have been left behind on purpose and therefore can never catch up. You might as well ask why I think that an uncontacted tribe of hunter-gatherers will never overtake the US; the opportunity for them to do so has long since passed them by, and none of their efforts or merits can possibly change that. In the same way some world that's been languishing in its Prime Directive mandated zoo for centuries or millennia is going to emerge into a galaxy that has long since been settled and developed, and will at best never get beyond being a speck within a much larger polity like the Federation. At worst, they end up conquered or destroyed because they've been deliberately left helpless and ignorant until it's too late.
And the Federation will grow because that's what it's been doing since the start, as is to be expected of it.
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Leaving aside the centralisation=leftist bit (I don't disagree that the *Federation* is a state and not anarchist but that wasn't the argument your first post that I responded to made) I don't think "They could turn out bad and do evil in the meantime" is a good argument for imperialism. And yes its imperialism not just intervention, you can't destroy social systems that cause harm without imperialism of one stripe or another. I certainly feel that the Federation trying to conqure the galaxy and impose its values (which this thread and others have pointed out are far from perfect) is the greater evil than holding non-interferance as the ideal (which is not always met and can be broken from with good cause).
Multiple intelligent species have gone extinct because of the Prime Directive; exactly what do you think they'd do that is a "greater evil" than that?
Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
That's a very weird argument to make, because it'd imply that either some imperialism is good, or that social systems that cause harm are good.
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
I think a more precise version of @LilyWitch 's argument is not that its bad when harmful social structures are overturned but it would be bad for the Federation, as an external power coming down from the heavens, to itself overturn them as in doing so it would have to be by the imposition of Federation social structures and definitionally imperialism. Which like at its core a basically correct argument and something I can largely agree with.
Personally I'm fine with enough wiggle room for like a stealthed Federation outpost to be just secretly beaming the locks out of the shackles of a slave empire every once in a while, but the core components of the argument and of the Prime Directive of having to justify all direct Starfleet interference as immediately necessary, proportionate to the goal, and always as unobstructive as possible is, I think, fundamentally in the right direction. Something that can be built upon to keep aiming towards better outcomes, but has its heart in the right place.