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May. 3rd, 2003 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unbibiumIn a speech titled "Is that a burqa on the bedroom floor?", Sarah Fitz-Claridge writes:
And I'm citing this week's Enterprise episode because it applies to the argument, it's in recent memory, and I don't feel like searching my mind for a better example.
In the episode, "Cogenitor," the Enterprise meets a race of very very likeable aliens. Their captain read most of the works of Shakespeare on the day they met each other, their engineers were rather free about sharing their technology to help the Enterprise out, and one of their women seduced that British guy. But while men and women are rather equal in the society, there is a third gender, that of cogenitors, that is not. Like the similar situation in Alien Nation, they make up around 3% of the population, and make no genetic contribution to the child, but their product is necessary for conception. Unlike Alien Nation, the cogenitors not only are not taught to read, or hold a job, but they do not even have names.
Due to one alien couple trying to have a baby, Commander Tucker gets wind of this, and even does a clandestine scan of its brain to make sure that these third ones aren't all retarded or something. Long story short: he "rescues" it, teaches it to read, and it beats him at Go, and now it's all uppity and ambitious. This creates huge political problems and it all ends in a way in which nobody is happy at all.
Now, perhaps Tucker may not have done the right thing, but only because he didn't understand the situation. Perhaps their history is littered with cogenitors' rights movements that end in deserted cities, when they can no longer create enough offspring, or something like that. And, since these people don't have to meet any standards for genetic selection, their social demands would naturally follow a different scale. Not that I think the writers thought this deep, mind you. This is "Enterprise" we're talking about here.
The message of the episode was that cultural interference is politically inconvenient. Humans can get along great if Westerners simply refuse to be offended by burqas and wife-burning and so forth, and if Middle-Easterners simply refuse to be offended by short skirts and rock music.
But, you know what? That never happens. People don't "live and let live". Not that our government isn't looking the other way on draconian anti-women laws in Saudi Arabia, for example. Rather, the Bush administration's Republican leadership is taking sneaky measures to derail birth control in third-world countries, by putting a few loopholes in his AIDS package. Indeed, previous Republican administrations apparently had a "global gag rule" that prevented U.S. aid from going to anyone who spends any money on anything abortion-related, including lobbying.
That's the real trap of cultural interference. If, indeed, we can impose freedom on other people, who's to say we can't also impose oppression on them? In America, we don't have a Taliban, but we have Christian conservatives in office, and their follies are plenty. If the Prime Directive existed as anything but a vague plot device, this is probably its true motivation: to protect other planets from both Republicans and Democrats alike.
"In the early nineteenth century, when India was a British colony, a new incoming governor was once shocked to find out about wife burning, so he banned it. The entire Hindu community was outraged and hurt. The previous governor had always respected their local customs. He had believed in freedom of religion, and in minimal government and the non-intervention principle – rather like Star Trek's Prime Directive – which a friend of mine calls the ‘Crime Directive’, because it seems to entail nothing but evil, and siding with evil."Taking the Star Trek tangent, I'd like to talk about the Prime Directive and cultural non-interference.
Anyway, the Hindus sent the new governor a polite but anguished deputation. They said that they'd never done him any harm. Didn't he realise that he was initiating an attack on something that was very deep in their culture and that they were not harming anyone else, and all they wanted was to be left alone. They appealed to the Governor to respect the customs of their country, as they respected his. “But in my country, we have a custom too,” the governor replied. “When a man sets fire to his wife, we hang him.”
And I'm citing this week's Enterprise episode because it applies to the argument, it's in recent memory, and I don't feel like searching my mind for a better example.
In the episode, "Cogenitor," the Enterprise meets a race of very very likeable aliens. Their captain read most of the works of Shakespeare on the day they met each other, their engineers were rather free about sharing their technology to help the Enterprise out, and one of their women seduced that British guy. But while men and women are rather equal in the society, there is a third gender, that of cogenitors, that is not. Like the similar situation in Alien Nation, they make up around 3% of the population, and make no genetic contribution to the child, but their product is necessary for conception. Unlike Alien Nation, the cogenitors not only are not taught to read, or hold a job, but they do not even have names.
Due to one alien couple trying to have a baby, Commander Tucker gets wind of this, and even does a clandestine scan of its brain to make sure that these third ones aren't all retarded or something. Long story short: he "rescues" it, teaches it to read, and it beats him at Go, and now it's all uppity and ambitious. This creates huge political problems and it all ends in a way in which nobody is happy at all.
Now, perhaps Tucker may not have done the right thing, but only because he didn't understand the situation. Perhaps their history is littered with cogenitors' rights movements that end in deserted cities, when they can no longer create enough offspring, or something like that. And, since these people don't have to meet any standards for genetic selection, their social demands would naturally follow a different scale. Not that I think the writers thought this deep, mind you. This is "Enterprise" we're talking about here.
The message of the episode was that cultural interference is politically inconvenient. Humans can get along great if Westerners simply refuse to be offended by burqas and wife-burning and so forth, and if Middle-Easterners simply refuse to be offended by short skirts and rock music.
But, you know what? That never happens. People don't "live and let live". Not that our government isn't looking the other way on draconian anti-women laws in Saudi Arabia, for example. Rather, the Bush administration's Republican leadership is taking sneaky measures to derail birth control in third-world countries, by putting a few loopholes in his AIDS package. Indeed, previous Republican administrations apparently had a "global gag rule" that prevented U.S. aid from going to anyone who spends any money on anything abortion-related, including lobbying.
That's the real trap of cultural interference. If, indeed, we can impose freedom on other people, who's to say we can't also impose oppression on them? In America, we don't have a Taliban, but we have Christian conservatives in office, and their follies are plenty. If the Prime Directive existed as anything but a vague plot device, this is probably its true motivation: to protect other planets from both Republicans and Democrats alike.
