They kept up the "we're so great" schtick pretty much though the entire run.
Humanity in the TNG era is more buggered than they let on
- Thread starter Lance
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They kept up the "we're so great" schtick pretty much though the entire run.
Whenever the TNG guys are respectful, it's to people who are self-aware enough to realize they have a ways to go and there's always room for improvement. Therefore, those they look down on (and it didn't even happen that often) aren't showing that self-awareness and see no room for growth in themselves.
So having no sense of Pride and letting people walk all over you is supposed to be better?
Why is that, exactly?
Since when is a show that tries to portray people in the future as being less tied to the petty garbage that ruins much of society today (chasing after money, being obsessed with differences, tied to outdated human traditions and beliefs) creating "arrogant" characters?
How many total episodes are there that the TNG crew "look down on people who haven't reached their evolved sensibilities"?
In the movie Insurrection, even through the Baku correctly diagnosed the problem with Data's positronic brain and were known to be a warp capable species, Picard still felt the need to begin explaining to one of the Baku what a hologram was.
Given that you too have observed a "lack" of gays, why did you say "Doesn't it say something about the progression of society that these types of biases and turmoils no longer afflict homosexuals or transgendered persons in the future?"
Trekker4747, what homosexuals or transgendered persons in the future?
How can a society that depicted no gays, be "progressive" towards gays?
Inspite of their androgyny appearance and social order, the J'naii did have two biological genders, male and female.
Soren was a woman and she was straight, her dialog reveals this. She lived in a society that had completely done away with traditional gender roles, and was willing to imposed this policy on it's citizens. Their androgyny was behavioral androgyny, and not a lack of male and female genitalia. The society didn't have freedom of gender self-expression.
The society insisted it's citizens practice bisexuality, regardless of their actual sexual orientation. Soren rejected this, she realized and embraced that she was female and heterosexual, and she only took males as lovers. But she had to hide this, until she got fed up and stopped hiding.
Soren: "I am tired of lies. I am female. I was born that way."
I disagree, Beverly was obviously excited to meet the new male host for the symbiont Odan, when a woman walked into sickbay her disappointment was apparent. This does not speak ill of Beverly, she's a heterosexual.
Yet the future had absolutely no problem calling attention to the sexual orientation of the many heterosexuals on the show.
What indications are these?
Simply having gays on the show would not making a big deal about it.
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I didn't know the J'naii practiced any kind of sex (or even romance) at all...I thought that had also been outlawed, just like gender identity.
They outright say they no longer have gender and that they procreate by both parties inseminating a husk. There are occasional, for want of a better term, "genetic throwbacks" where gender identity from a previous form of the species manifests itself in the present day. Equate this today with the occasional human being born with, say, a vestigial tail or some other aspect of an earlier hominid that most people do not have.
The J'naii had EVOLVED past gender. Androgyny wasn't something forced on the population, it was just forced on the occasional person who exhibited symptoms of the earlier form of their species.
So forcing the androgyny on her was like forcing that person with a vestigial tail or other early-human trait to undergo cosmetic surgery so they'd fit in with everyone else. Only in Soren's case it was "brainwashing" to accept androgyny.
Prior to Soren beginning to openly confiding with Riker, she did tell him that the J'nail engaged in sex and sex play.
I like that! That and other parts of your post gave me this though:
As you say, in the past, everyone worked to make a small group of people wealthy. Slaves to a small degree, but peasants/surfs, which is to say up to 98% of some countries populations, worked to make the very few (kings, queens, dukes, and other nobles) rich.
We're past that, now people work to make themselves better off. US income inequality notwithstanding, people see in today's first world see the fruits of their own labour.
In the future, everyone works to help out everyone else.
Summary:
14th Century: Everyone works for the few.
20th Century: Everyone works for themselves.
24th Century: Everyone works for each other.
And yes, that does make our society better than that of the 14th century, and yes it does make 24th century society better than ours.
I do.
I think I am a better person than someone advocating, for example, the death penalty for homosexuality.
The extreme persecution of homosexuality in certain countries, I'm thinking in Africa specifically, is the fault of their society. You might not be able to point to any one individual person and say it's their fault, after all they are brought up that way, that is what they are taught, that is what society imposes on them...
But that is exactly the point.
It is a societal practice which is acceptable to those people, it is not acceptable to me. I think it does make me a better person.
Just like I think I am a better person than a serial killer. Would you argue with that point?
Take that further back in time and apply it to slavery, or torture, or a lord's right to sleep with the bride on her wedding night. Lets take the last example.
The societies where these things exist(ed) accepted those things as normal. If your lord was having his way with your wife on your wedding day I'm sure you though it sucked, but it was still happening, and your neighbours weren't outraged over it. Today everyone in our society would be like:
WTF are you thinking! I don't care who you are, under no circumstances does anyone have the right to sleep with someone else's wife.This does make our society better than one which accepted such things.
If that's the case then why bother with the prime directive? Just fly down there to any backwards alien culture and educate them, and the earlier in their development the better to accept federation imprinting/brainwashing. Then you would skip the phases involving slavery and other bad stuff.
The US income disparity, though, is the big problem with that and not just the income disparity but the resistance by the rich and the political party they largely support so actively oppose things that'd make lower income brackets better off.
The most telling thing is that most people today make the same thing, a little less actually, as their counter parts from 30 to even 40 years ago. (Adjusted to the respective economies/for inflation of course.) For the upper income brackets they're making orders of magnitude more than their past counterparts. So, for all intents and purposes we *DO* have slavery today, it's just about as legalized of version of one as companies can presently get away with.
The so-called "trickle-down effect" doesn't work and has never happened, actions to ease the financial burden on job creators as far as taxes and operating expenses hasn't translated into higher salaries for others or in more hiring. It HAS increased corporate profits and the salaries, bonuses and incentives for business runners, boards and so-forth. And these people have enough power over government to resist things like wage increases, minimum wage increases and something as simple as goddamned health-care coverage.
Oh? Part-time employees would be entitled to health-insurance but only if they average more than 25 hours a week? Okay, so we'll just start cutting people's hours.
It's a fucked up system and while it's certainly better than pure slavery and the corporate towns of the past it's almost as close as these businesses can legally get to it. All because there's people out there that want to make more money in a month of work than most of their employees see all year.
Because part of realizing you're better is realizing that you're not perfect and certainly not so perfect as to step in and tell other cultures how to live. You know you have to let them make mistakes and stumble and find their own way to achieve a better society. Indoctrination is a bad thing too.
Okay let's take those two seperately, second one first.
What Soren actually says is "our fetuses are incubated in fibrous husks, which the parents inseminate." A husk is another name for a shell, a fibrous husk would be like a coconut shell. Incubated means to keep something biological warm.
A fetus is what develops after a ova is fertilization. I believe what Soren is saying is that the husk is basically a shell which encloses a fetus, which at some point was previously fertilized.
Now the ova has to come from somewhere, or rather someone. Soren said that she had parents, parents plural. Either the female (and no they don't use that term) lays a unfertilized ova and the male (they don't use that term) inseminates the ova, like salmon do it.
Or the ova is fertilized inside the female and she "lays" an egg which encloses a fetus, like birds do.
SO ... Soren is saying that it was the fetus which was inseminated (prior to becoming a fetus), and not the fibrous husk itself.
Now as to the J'nail outright saying they no longer have gender. Treker4747 I personally know many androgynous persons in the Seattle queer community, and some outside of it as well. These people do indeed have genitalia.
The J'nail didn't "evolve" physically/biologically to become androgynous, they evolved culturally to embrace a society that was androgynous. They did away with personal gender identity, and cultural gender roles.
I disagree, Soren told a story about the lack of social conformity resulted in a child being physically assaulted in her school. It was Soren's nonconformity that got her sentenced to psychological reprogramming.
What they changed was her mind, not her body. She retained the same physical form as she possessed before.
And are you better than the people who neither avocate nor support the practice, would you also be better than the homosexuals in that society who certainly don't support the practice? You would seem to be tarring that entire society with the same brush.
Of course you can, you said you were better than a individual who advocated a certain course of action, you can now point specifically at that person, in isolation, as being someone you feel you're better than.
You just can't say you're better than a entire population, simply because than population holds that advocate.
At least Khan didn't even bother trying to hide how arrogant he was. He was open and honest about it. (As was Q.) Somehow this is less annoying than first-season-TNG-humans were.
I hope you do account for what was going on in TOS. I feel that the writers of TOS had a better grasp of human nature and a better understanding of history than the writers of TNG. Imo, this was reflected in the superior and more compelling stories of TOS.
One of the things that I didn't like about TNG was the smug satisfaction of having achieved enlightenment (or so they thought) by humans of the 24th century, as portrayed by the snobbish TNG Enterprise crew. TNG utopia was too good to be true.
This reminded me of something that Kirk said in "This Side of Paradise". I checked the transcript to get the dialogue right:
MCCOY: Well, Jim, I've just examined the last of the colonists, and they're all in absolutely perfect, perfect health. A fringe benefit left over by the spores.
KIRK: Good.
MCCOY: Well, that's the second time man's been thrown out of paradise.
KIRK: No, no, Bones. This time we walked out on our own. Maybe we weren't meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through. Struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.
Kirk got it right. Human nature is not going to change in the 24th/23th century from what it is in the 21st century or from what it was in, say, the 16th. Attitudes and technologies may change and improve but human frailties will not. Humans have to be constantly on guard to protect whatever good they have already achieved.
That may sound good, if that is indeed what it is like in the TNG universe, at least for humans. It does seem that way from the TNG episodes that I saw, especially if replicators supposedly made that possible.
While it would be good if every human's needs are provided for, there would be unintended negative consequences for such a society, a society where people could engage in nothing more than leisure or just idling around. And I doubt it would lead to utopia. Complacency and decadence usually do not lead to good results.
There will always be issues and problems that will arise that we will not foresee. Improvements in technologies may bring about those unforeseen problems. TNG seemed a bit too perfect.
And then there will always be demagogues, like Khan, who think they can bring about a "better" and more "utopian" society, and they usually try to do so through force and by taking away individual liberties so that everyone will "get with the program", so to speak.
TOS writers seemed much more aware of this than the TNG writers.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHQTcuskl3k
TNG isn't allowed to do this though because they'll be accused of being overbearing snobs.
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