OK...this is something that's been bugging me for awhile, regarding the Cairn species in "Dark Page," and the attitude of the Federation towards them.
Trouble was Lwaxana's attitude towards the Cairn, because from what I saw, there was only one option ever discussed with or provided to the Cairn: surgery to implant an artificial larynx. They HAD to receive this surgery in order to be integrated with the Federation.
When I saw this episode when I was little, I didn't see anything wrong with the line in question, because I viewed it analogous to Geordi wearing a VISOR (which was the analogy that I think the writers tried to play, per the conversation between Geordi and Hedril).
But there's a big problem with looking at it that way. That implies that the Cairn are deficient, that they do not match the standards of other species, rather than having evolved to be a certain way that clearly works very efficiently on their world (in fact, as Lwaxana concedes, more efficiently than speech, or Betazoid-type telepathy, which still uses morphemes and lexemes, just transmitted without the use of the voice). Yes, it is implied that they had once had vocal cords but lost them over the course of their evolution, but so be it.
(As for Geordi and his VISOR, that's a whole other conversation, and one I'd rather not derail this thread with.)
The question becomes, why pressure the Cairn into receiving surgery as a prerequisite of becoming Federation members or even part of the community? Numerous alternate systems could have been devised, though in my mind the primary of these would be sign language. I don't see why that was insufficient.
I would not have had a problem with the idea of some Cairn choosing to go through with the surgery if it were implied that it were a Cairn idea, or at least an idea given to them as one of many, a form of curiosity and an option available for them to choose among other perfectly acceptable options. But the paternalistic attitude demonstrated by the episode as we actually saw it is, quite frankly, disturbing.
Did anyone else see this? Any thoughts here?
Besides the usual confusion people have between "verbally" and "vocally," where the former, more expansive term is used as though it were the narrower term ("verbally" only means with words, but is commonly mistreated as though it means with voice), it seems to me that we have more than one problem with the implication of this line. Had I not seen the artificial larynxes that the Cairn were implanted with, I could have assumed that we were dealing simply with the fact that the Cairn would need to learn to understand the idea of encoding through morphemes and lexemes--linguistically-distinct units of meaning encoded for transmission. Spoken words, written symbols, and hand signs are all examples of what could fall into that category, in addition to a number of other encodings, and the Cairn were implied not to make such a separation.
Trouble was Lwaxana's attitude towards the Cairn, because from what I saw, there was only one option ever discussed with or provided to the Cairn: surgery to implant an artificial larynx. They HAD to receive this surgery in order to be integrated with the Federation.
When I saw this episode when I was little, I didn't see anything wrong with the line in question, because I viewed it analogous to Geordi wearing a VISOR (which was the analogy that I think the writers tried to play, per the conversation between Geordi and Hedril).
But there's a big problem with looking at it that way. That implies that the Cairn are deficient, that they do not match the standards of other species, rather than having evolved to be a certain way that clearly works very efficiently on their world (in fact, as Lwaxana concedes, more efficiently than speech, or Betazoid-type telepathy, which still uses morphemes and lexemes, just transmitted without the use of the voice). Yes, it is implied that they had once had vocal cords but lost them over the course of their evolution, but so be it.
(As for Geordi and his VISOR, that's a whole other conversation, and one I'd rather not derail this thread with.)
The question becomes, why pressure the Cairn into receiving surgery as a prerequisite of becoming Federation members or even part of the community? Numerous alternate systems could have been devised, though in my mind the primary of these would be sign language. I don't see why that was insufficient.
I would not have had a problem with the idea of some Cairn choosing to go through with the surgery if it were implied that it were a Cairn idea, or at least an idea given to them as one of many, a form of curiosity and an option available for them to choose among other perfectly acceptable options. But the paternalistic attitude demonstrated by the episode as we actually saw it is, quite frankly, disturbing.
Did anyone else see this? Any thoughts here?
