Does "Observer Effect" refute "Dear Doctor?"

[DonIago]

It's funny that you claim my "pseudo-sociology" is unsupported while failing to support any of your own assertions.

 

[Noname Given]

Both of these episodes really show how absurd the Prime Directive can be at times. In Dear Doctor, they condemn an entire race to death because they think they shouldn't intervene. How is that moral? In Observer Effect, the Organians are the ones following the Prime Directive. They're willing to allow people to die because they don't think they should intervene. How is that moral?

The same thing happened in TNG: Homeward. The Enterprise crew lets an entire race be eliminated while they just sit back and watch. Again, how is that moral. I think Paul Sorvino's character says it best in this episode - "I find no honor in this whatsoever."

The Prime Directive is a good idea. It keeps people from getting involved in other people's business and it keeps people from interfering in developing worlds' affairs. However, when a world is about to be destroyed and the heros can save the day without the less-advanced culture even knowing, they should do it IMO.

Which is what I think Observer Effect is saying - Humans should be compassionate.

One thing though:

In TOS the Prime Directive ONLY applied to primative cultures that had NO KNOWLEDGE of life on other worlds or the ability to travel in space.

It wasn't until TNG that the Prime Directive was retconned into "The Federation can't interfere in the affairs on non-Federation member worlds". (Which was supposedly while the Federation stood by as Bajor was conquered and enslaved by the Cardassian Union 60 years prior to DS9.

My point in mentioning this? Well, if Archer was under the TOS style Prime Directive; the situation in Dear Doctor wouldn't have been a 'Prime Directive' situation at all; it would have strictly been a straight up political moral (ie does Archer want to get Earth involved in sheperding this society like the Vulcans had been doing for Earth the past 90 years?); or a straight up moral one based in his personal beliefs.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

It's funny that you claim my "pseudo-sociology" is unsupported while failing to support any of your own assertions.

Unsupported?

Name one sociology treaty that affirms contact will always/almost always have negative consequences for the contacted culture.

Name one culture (primitive or not) that self-destructed due to contact with a more advanced culture - SELF-destructed, NOT destroyed through colonial conquest and exploitation policies enacted by the more advanced culture.


Of course, in this post I only repeat what I already said above. As I have supported my other affirmations, too.

 

[Sci]

And what if enough of them want to be educated that it will irrevocably alter their culture, but a significant number of them don't wish to be educated because it will irrevocably alter their culture?

Cultures are inevitably going to change no matter what anyone does. That's just part of life; you can no more keep a culture un-altered than you can keep yourself from aging.

If the government (that is, the official communal decision-makers, whether it be a Prime Minister of a chief) of a foreign society (be its population 500 million or 500) allows you to build the school and offer your educational services to interested individuals, then there's nothing wrong with that. If the government tells you to leave, you leave. And you don't use any economic power you may have to create situations of economic dependency.

That is respecting their sovereignty. Not deciding that you know what's best for their culture and what's best is to make sure you don't "alter" it.

ETA:

My - or your - culture are not what they were 10 years ago; and they're not what they will become 10 years from now.
Cultures change, adapt, evolve - that's part of the very essence of a culture. They're NOT a photograph that should never change under any circumstances."

Never said they were. Cultures do develop and evolve naturally, on their own.

And part of the natural process of developing and evolving naturally, on their own, is by interacting with other cultures and adopting their ideas and technologies. Change as a result of intercultural exchanges -- the word for this is syncretism -- is as natural to a culture as change in an individual as a result of interacting with other people.

But can you identify one culture for me that was not either destroyed, marginalized, or at the very least radically changed from what it was after it came into contact with a more technologically advanced culture?

Europe, obviously.

During the medieval period, they were a backwater collection of tribes on the ass-end of Asia that were still reeling from the fall of the Roman Empire.

Then they came into contact with science and technology and mathematics from the Arabs and the Chinese. And guess what?

They weren't harmed. They didn't fall apart. They didn't all die out. Instead, they used that technology to recover and prosper.

Let's see: Indians, Maori, Native Americans, Native Australians, the Inuit, Africans, the Mayans

And those groups all were killed or conquered because of either the inadvertent spread of disease -- which no one understood well enough to control or prevent in those days -- or because Europeans then engaged in a deliberate, systematic campaign of world conquest.

You cannot reasonably argue that any and all intercultural contacts and exchanges will inevitably lead to conquest and aggression. Conquest is a choice. A culture like United Earth or, later, the Federation, is perfectly capable of contacting a pre-industrial culture, making cultural exchanges with them, but refraining from choosing to conquer or dominate them.

"We did it to educate the less civilized!" is literally what they said to justify it.

This is true. But there's nothing wrong with saying that you'll offer education in your areas of advancement, and ask a foreign culture to educate you in their areas of expertise, if you approach it from a position of cultural equality rather than from a position of, "You're less civilized than we are, we're smarter and better than you, we'll help you be more like us." You can do intercultural educations without it being a form of domination.

The Prime Directive is the logical endpoint of any moral thinking around the idea that any contact with a less-developed culture will alter that culture, and that cultures actually have a right to develop on their own, without the Federation coming in and telling them what's what.

The Prime Directive of Kirk's era, yes. But the Prime Directive of Picard's era was just another instrument of domination by the Federation. It was no longer about preserving the right of a culture to develop in a manner of its own choosing, it was about telling that culture that the Federation knew better than they did what was best for them, and keeping them ignorant of the wider galaxy was what was best for them. (How convenient that it also prevents upstart powers from getting a leg up on the Federation and preserves UFP military dominance.)

In other words -- the Prime Directive was being approached from the same perspective of cultural chauvinism and inequality that had once motivated the "let's educate the less-civilized folk." Only instead of it being, "Let's educate the less civilized," it was, "Let's make sure these less-civilized folk don't get their hands on anything they're not ready for."

"If some indians want to learn, you're free to build schools to teach them. It's their right as individuals to choose what to do with their lives, to learn.

Do you honestly not hear how horrifying that sentence sounds? "Okay, YOU Indians who want to learn math, you come and live with us in civilization over here, okay? All the rest of you who have been happy living off the land, well, let's put you in these reservations over here, shall we?

Nobody said anything about reservations, or about one culture being superior to another. You're introducing those concepts entirely separately. You can have a situation where you treat a non-industrial culture as equals, offer educational services, request educational services from them, and not dictate where or how anybody lives.

just as the British Empire is directly responsible for the destruction of the native cultures of New Zealand and Australia.

While it's certainly true that, for instance, the Palawa were destroyed, I rather imagine that other cultures such as the Ngunnawal, Gurindji, and the Māori would be a bit angry at you for claiming they no longer exist.

Which is why it's not really an apt metaphor. If we came across a planet of alien life that would be destroyed by contact with us,

This is a false premise. A culture is not going to be destroyed simply by being contacted by another culture (unless there's an issue of disease transmission, which the UFP is medically advanced enough to prevent).

A culture has it's own natural development, and anything I do as an advanced culture to interfere with that development will alter that development.

No, a culture does not have its own "natural" development. There's no blueprint for how a culture will move and change; there's no pre-planned system for what that culture will look like in the future. Cultures grow and change as a result of both internal and external forces, and there is no such thing as a culture that lives in a vacuum. A culture is only going to be destroyed by contact with another culture if there's a disease transmission problem or if that other culture is deliberately setting out to dominate or exterminate them.

In 'Homeward' they were restricted by a pre-existing law, put there precisely so the Federation would not become entangled in such matters beyond their purview.

Utter hogwash. It was nothing more than an excuse for the Federation not to bother expanding resources to save innocent people.

In 'Dear Doctor', they saw that they held the future of an entire civilization in their hand and it was not their place to judge who lived and who died.

The entire premise upon which "Dear Doctor" is based is false; there is no way to know that one species is going to evolve one way or the other, or that a species is going to become smarter or dominant in the future. Evolution does not work that way.

What is the Boraalans were at war, and were about to kill each other? Would it be the Federation's place to 'step in' and prevent them from doing so?

I think it's safe to say that refraining from stepping in is respecting the right of the Boraalans to make their own decisions about how to organize their society, even if that means having a civil war. But there's a big difference between refusing to take sides in a civil war and refusing to prevent an extinction-level natural disaster that none of the potential victims chose.