Let's be honest about the Federation's failings

IDK, I don't want to nitpick Star Trek just to nitpick, but I have seen scenes where they're obviously talking about the Federation government, but they use the term "Star Fleet" in it's place. Which makes it sounds like Starfleet is pulling the strings.

Not to mention the Baku or even the Maqui thing.

In Trek, humans are seen almost as the pinnacle of evolution in the Federation. Q is interested in humanity as having some type of potential, but not the other cultures, who probably solved all their "isms" long before humans made it into space.

When Quark was giving his famous root beer speech, which was an analogy to the Federation saving everybody, the first image that likely pops into mind is a human wearing a Starfleet uniform. Not a Vulcan, or Betazed, or Andorian............-- I mean, they show so little of the Federation members I can barely list them.

 

And that's the thing. If they brought the subject up of why are there always so many humans in Starfleet,and the response was something like Starfleet was started on Earth centuries ago or something, that would actually be an example world building.

Simply because they brought the subject up and got a response that explained something. If they constantly brought the subject up and debated about it, it would be even better world building.

Instead the subject has never been brought up so the show takes it for granted that humans are going to be the face of Starfleet and the Federation. Sometimes when I watch a rerun and see it, it looks outdated in a way, like when you see an old sci fi show and you see a floating object and you see the strings attached to it.

 

I got the impression that a lot of ships and fleets in Starfleet are operated almost entirely by crews from Federation worlds, like ships mostly made up of Vulcans or Andorians with the odd other species sprinkled in for experience and cohesion. LaForge's mom, for example, worked on a ship mostly of Vulcans IIRC. This made sense to me when you consider that a lot of species could have different environmental needs and specialities. I could see those Miranda class ships and Defiant vessels in the Dominion War being operated mostly by Andorians, since we know they were quite a militaristic species and consider serving their military an honour etc.

Remember the "Officer Exchange Program" had a Benzar, a Federation member world, serving on the Enterprise as an Ensign and they still seemed to be a full Starfleet member, just used to working in a Benzar working environment.

I know it is down to budget, but that's always been my head canon to explain it.

 

I mean, the unavoidable implication of this explanation is that the Federation Starfleet practices segregation....

 

Maybe there could be a local Andorian Starfleet or Vulcan Starfleet. That actually used to be on of my guesses for this subject.

The problem is Starfleet Command itself is located on earth, and from the looks of it, is run mostly by humans. Although I have seen a Vulcan a couple of times.

Apparently Starfleet is tasked with defending the entire Federation, and makes a lot important decisions concerning the Federation that affects other Federation members. Except a vast majority of the time, the officers doing it are humans.

It makes it looks like humans are basically the face of Starfleet, and often the Federation itself.

Yes, it's like "either, or". Either you see mostly humans, or you hear about a ship with only one specific species serving aboard.

In order to be an all Vulcan ship, that would mean they would have to practice deliberate exclusion of other species right off the back.

 

I would like to imagine that species segregation is a rarity in Starfleet.

 

I don't think it is segregation to have completely difference species, with different needs and living standards, to work together.

 

(reading the 2051 as 2151) Well, it depends on what you call "feasible" I suppose. Apparently, interstellar travel was feasible enough at least 70 years before the NX-01 was launched to establish the Terra Nova colony, for example. It was also feasible enough to already have those slow interstellar Y-class and J-class freighters around for decades before 2151 (as one of the NX grew crew grew up in one of those). It was feasible enough to send off the Friendship One probe all the way to the delta quadrant as early as 2067.

Of course all that seems very unrealistic, but it's what canon says so I'll have to go with that.

The way warp drive development is portrayed in Star Trek seems like a watershed event. Relatively hard to achieve, but once you have discovered it the technology can be improved relatively quickly (within a century or so you can get up to warp 2, and Earth did it in less time than that). And even warp 2 (going by the cube formula) is already 8c which would cut down travel time to, say, Alpha Centauri, down to slightly over half a year - generally in the same ballpark as it would take us with today's technology to travel to Mars. Assuming that a warp 2 civilization would generally be about a century ahead of us in other tech areas too, a space trip of half a year probably would be "feasible".

Finally, any criterion would be somewhat arbitrary. Putting the threshold at the development of the first warp drive seems as good a choice as any.

 

On-screen evidence very much suggests that humans are the dominant and favored species within the U.F.P., considering as well that most of the admirality seems to be made up of humans, who are not one of the more longer-lived species, suggesting a certain bias that favors humans.

The flag ships also, time and time again, have had a primarily human crew, a human captain, and named after an Earth ship.

 

Jumping into one of the most interesting threads I've seen in quite a while!...

Colonialism? I don't know about that. I'd say imperialism. At least as conceptualized in TOS, that's how I always saw the PD: a set of rules to prevent the UFP/Starfleet from being tempted to construct the kind of hegemonic status enjoyed by the UK or US in recent Earth history, or the Klingons in Trek's present.

In-universe, that makes sense to me not only for idealistic reasons, but also as an effective way of distinguishing the UFP from the Klingons: no "empire" here, just voluntary association. Out-of-universe, it seems like a pretty enlightened concept for Gene and company to have come up with, acknowledging the shortcomings of human tendencies and (implicitly) critiquing the American exceptionalism so commonplace in the Cold War era.

(How TNG handled it... that was another story.)

Dunno how old you are, but you could expand it to all of U.S. history and the list of really decent presidents would still only be a half-dozen or so. (In my lifetime? At most one. And yeah, it's discouraging.) Fortunately, the U.S. president is not the only exemplar of governance on Earth, much less of human capabilities. There are best practices out there that the U.S. could and should be following, but isn't.

The "lead a horse to water" principle? Ah, you are an optimist. Sadly, psych studies show that a substantial contingent of humanity is stubbornly resistant to any new information that undermines their preconceptions.

Hmm, I'm not sure whether that sounds optimistic or not. It's hard to say, especially because "personal responsibility" has become such a right-wing catchphrase. Probably best to assume that you're not intentionally using it as a dogwhistle, and that you're implicitly including the capacity to demonstrate social responsibility through collective action, as well.

Yeah, I always liked that aspect of TOS myself, and it's one of the things that always seemed a little "off" to me about First Contact (even in contrast to the versions of humanity's first warp explorations presented in earlier Trek novels). Although, to be fair, even TOS posited that we had to get through some version of a Third World War first.

Real history has fallen far behind what Trek optimistically posited in lots of ways. But we have, at least, successfully avoided any nuclear wars—not something anyone would've taken for granted in the '60s.

Ah, the optimism runs wild in this thread! What if the inclination toward prejudice is simply re-directed toward the new group outsiders?

Hear hear. I always hated that episode, and thought it exemplified how deeply TNG's writers misunderstood the whole purpose of the PD. It's not about "fate," it's about fairness. Allowing other cultures the opportunity for self-determination does not mean letting them get destroyed.

Nothing mystical about it (again, outside certain episodes of TNG). It's about not exercising dominance, that's all. Not putting a thumb on the scales of other cultures (as so many Earth nations had been guilty of doing). Offering genuine humanitarian aid without strings attached—that's fine, and it's where the UFP should/would "interfere."

 

I'll never understand how personal responsibility is a right wing catchphrase. I can only control myself.

 

Why not? Surely in their era "segregration" is no longer associated with discrimination, or any form of unequal or preferred treatment the way it still is in our time, simply because the idea of unequal treatment is something they've left behind them for over three centuries.

And it could just be eminently practical to simply put all chlorine-breathing species on the same type of ships, and all oxygen breathing species on another contingent of ships. Otherwise, everyone would have to wear environmental suits on the job all the time.

And even between lifeforms that can intermingle, such as Vulcans and Humans, perhaps most still prefer the company of their own species - given how for example Tuvok often is the butt of (goodhearted) jokes and pranks on Voyager, that would be understandable.

So perhaps over the centuries a default policy emerged to place new Starfleet officers mostly with their own species, unless they specifically ask for a different placement themselves, or an officer with particular skills is really needed on a specific spot?

 

Yes, self-determination is a huge aspect that I think the PD occasionally gets right. I think that individuals, peoples, and planets have the right to self-determination and to make their choices.

 

Of course it is. The question is whether or not such segregation is necessary for some sort of compelling biological reason.

Like, yeah, if there's a Federation Member world whose people breathe methane and for whom oxygen is poisonous, that probably constitutes a compelling biological necessity to segregate them from oxygen-breathing species.

On the other hand -- why on Earth was the USS T'Kumbra an all-Vulcan ship in 2375? There's no compelling necessity for such segregation; we've seen on numerous occasions that Vulcans and non-Vulcans are perfectly well able to integrate into eminently capable, unified crews.

Now, I will concede that there's an argument to be made that earlier in Starfleet's history, learning how to integrate officers from different species may have been an ongoing process. And indeed, for whatever it's worth, the Rise of the Federation ENT novels by TrekBBS's own @Christopher have established that the Federation Starfleet was first formed in the 2160s by merging the space services of the founding Member States under one umbrella, with the fleets of those respective services still functioning as separate divisions of the Federation Starfleet. So ships in the United Earth Space Probe Agency and Alpha Centauri divisions of Starfleet were predominantly Human (the Alpha Centauri Concordium being a Human state that had declared independence from United Earth before joining a separate founding Federation Member State in its own right), ships in the Andorian Guard division were predominantly Andorian, etc. (He posits that the different insignia badges we saw in TOS represent which of those divisions of Starfleet a ship was assigned to.) Presumably the USS Intrepid of the 2260s is a holdover from that.

But I just don't see any justification for species segregation absent a compelling biological necessity in the 24th Century.

I mean, yes and no. Yes, most of the canonical officers and flag officers we've seen have seemingly been Human.

But:

1) It is entirely possible that a large percentage of those officers who look Human were actually just aliens who look like Humans or look Human-like from a distance: Ardanans, Argelians, Elasians, Halkans, Lumerians, Ramatisians, Risians, Ventaxians, Fabrini, Betazoids, El-Aurians, Deltans, MInarans, Bajorans, etc.

2) We have only seen a small sample of the crews in Starfleet. The Federation Starfleet of the 24th Century is comprised of hundreds of starbases and probably at least two thousand or so starships. Of those, we've only gotten an up-close look at three of those crews. So canonically, we have not seen a representative sample.

I agree... to some extent. To the extent that the Prime Directive is about preventing the Federation from engaging in imperialism/colonialism -- great! To the extent that the Prime Directive is about officially designating alien cultures as "primitive" and "inferior" -- it's still problematic, still a "white guilt vision of anti-colonialism."

And yeah, I'd say the TNG conception of the P.D. is very problematic in that way. Instead of it being about saying, "This culture has the right to make its own decisions for its own future and we cannot trust our culture not to exploit them," the P.D. of the TNG era became about saying, "This culture is too primitive and inferior to understand us. We must not contaminate them by speaking to them and treating them as equals or else they won't grow up. Also, we should let them all die if a natural disaster should occur." That's a very colonialist appropriation of an anti-colonialist concept.

100% agreed.

Are you aware of how potentially offensive starting your argument off that way could be given the real-world implications of such a thing?

See... the thing is, "separate but equal" is almost never actually equal. Equality inherently requires integration. Yes, in this fictional construct that is Star Trek, there may occasionally be biological necessities such as incompatible atmospheric requirements. But if you're constructing a work of fiction like Star Trek, I would say that creators have an obligation to depict diverse species and diverse real-world cultures as an integrated whole. Because there is no equal treatment without integration. In the real world, there is no such thing as separate but equal. There is no such thing as egalitarian segregation.

And within the fictional world of Star Trek, leaders should be aware that that same principle holds true, and should seek to minimize species segregation as much as possible.

Sure -- a compelling biological necessity. But even then, that should be mitigated as much as possible. If you can have chlorine-breathing officers on an oxygen-breathing ship through special apparatuses without compromising crew safety or significantly compromising crew performance, you should. And vice versa. Equality comes from integration.

Better idea: Officers and crew who engage in such bigoted behavior should suffer disciplinary action, and officers from diverse cultures should be integrated into unified crews whenever biologically possible.

 

That's a lot of science fiction not just Trek.