RedJack said:
We're just going to have to differ on the Emissary thing. I don't agree that people from outside a culture who assume powerful roles in that culture can be absolved of diverting said culture's natural evolution.
As I said, a culture's "natural" evolution
includes outside influences. It's perfectly natural for cultures to interact and exchange ideas and innovations -- that's the primary mechanism that's driven cultural growth in human history. Why do you think three major world religions were born in the Middle East? Because it's a natural crossroads where different cultural ideas and traditions meet, interact, and spark innovation. It's IDIC in action.
The original idea behind the Prime Directive was to forbid Starfleet from
imposing its will on other cultures, and to act against other powers that were imposing their wills. As we saw in various TOS episodes, giving a culture the freedom to make its own choices often involved making them aware of the existence of the outsiders who were manipulating them and cooperating with them in removing that influence.
The 24th-century PD has gone to a much more condescending, paternalistic extreme, making the anthropologically incompetent assumption that the "natural" path for a culture is absolute isolation and that any external influence is somehow "contamination" that must inevitably damage the culture. That's not right, either factually or ethically. There's a huge difference between giving people the freedom of choice and assuming they're too fragile to handle a choice.
Sisko's learning curve alone would have created massive ripples in Bajoran society as his near complete ignorance of their faith would have engendered near constant faux pas activity.
Again, that's making the simplistic assumption that the only person with agency in the interaction is the outsider. It's ignoring the role the Bajorans themselves play in the process. Sisko wasn't telling the Bajorans what to do; they were telling him, every step of the way, how to be the Emissary. They were plugging him into the role
they needed him to play, despite all his best efforts to avoid it. He didn't need to have a full understanding of their faith, because
they understood it and it was their understanding that guided their interactions with him. As for Sisko himself, he never imposed his own will upon the Bajorans. The only times he actively spoke as the Emissary with the goal of guiding their policy, it was because the Prophets had shown him a vision of the future. It was the wormhole aliens, not Benjamin Sisko or Starfleet, who were delivering those messages to the Bajoran people. And arguably the wormhole aliens have been an integral part of Bajoran culture for tens of millennia, so even that qualifies as an internal interaction. Sisko was just the messenger. That is what the word "emissary" literally means, after all.
I know I'm treading in your area with EX MACHINA (not my aim, obviously) but, in my view, you don't set people on a multi-generational interstellar journey without giving thought to cultural evolution. the tech necessary to simulate life on a planet for the "crew" rather than simply building them a big ol' battlestar would, IMO, almost certainly have to have been designed to fool subsequent generations. Why create an illusion if not to mislead?
It's not an illusion. It's environmental engineering. Humanoids evolved on planets and are adapted to them. If you create an artificial environment where generations of human(oid)s will live, it's logical to design it so that it replicates natural environments and cycles. (Cf. any proposed megastructure such as an O'Neill Colony, a Ringworld, an Orbital/Halo, etc.) Also, Yonada needed an environmental regulation mechanism capable of functioning for 10,000 years, and a self-sustaining biosphere is a more sensible approach than a bunch of machines. "A big ol' battlestar" might be good for battle, but it makes no sense as a place where several hundred generations of civilians will live out their entire lives.
Since Star Trek accepts both breakage and fix, we have to credit McCoy with the creation of the Nazi-verse, intentional or not. That's a pretty big PD breach regardless of the existence of the temporal directive.
It's a pretty big intervention, sure, but I think it's stretching the legal definition to lump it under "Prime Directive breaches" rather than some other label. There is also the fact that it was not an intentional, premeditated act, and therefore can't fairly be claimed as evidence of a pattern of Prime Directive violation. (Unless you're arguing that this and the Iotia communicator incident prove a pattern of reckless neglect.)
RedJack said:
The natural course of North American civilization was diverted by the intrusion of Europeans. As was that of Africa and Central and South America.
But the word "natural" is a value judgment. The idea that there's some preordained "normal" path for a culture to take that is thrown off by external contact is totally false. It incorrectly assumes that the form a culture had at the time of contact represented the way it had always been prior to that contact, and that the fact of change was an anomaly. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cultures routinely change and evolve. That
is the natural course of any civilization: to become different from one generation to the next.
After all, there was no such thing as "North American civilization." There were hundreds, thousands of distinct civilizations in North America, and they often interacted with one another, influenced each other, absorbed new ideas and technologies from each other. The assimilation of external influences had always been part of their natural existence. The Europeans were just the latest set of visitors. The same was true of Central and South America, Africa, Asia, anywhere else you care to name. Europe did far more damage to the Americas with its microbes than with its ideas, or even with its technologies. The indigenous Americans were actually pretty successful at repelling European conquest for nearly a century before European diseases wiped out the vast majority of the Americas' population and devastated their civilizations. And many of the early European settlers found themselves captured and assimilated into Native American communities; look up "captivity narratives" sometime. The European settlers were as changed by the contact as the Native Americans were, up until the point that disease tipped the balance. United States culture is still influenced by Native American culture to this day; Ben Franklin got the idea for democracy as much from the Iroquois as the Greeks.
Then there's the case of a backwater civilization called Europe, about six to nine centuries ago. These backward, superstitious, impoverished people began traveling to the East and were exposed to radical new ideas and technologies from the more advanced and worldly civilizations of Asia -- things like the compass, the printing press, the stirrup, the lateen sail, carbon steel, and gunpowder. They turned out pretty well as a result of that interaction.
There is no "natural course" for any civilization. The only thing that's natural or normal is change -- change that is usually due to the natural, normal process of contact with outside cultures.
