Precipice by David Mack (SPOILERS)

[Christopher]

It's possible that sometime between "Angel One" and "Homeward," the Federation enacted a civilian law that was equivalent to Starfleet's General Order One, and the term "Prime Directive" may have been applied to both in vernacular usage because they'd be essentially the same thing. Perhaps the Angel One crisis even prompted UFP lawmakers to enact such a change. The 24th-century Starfleet is clearly much more extremist in its view of the PD than its 23rd-century equivalent was (even to the point of letting civilizations die rather than risk "damaging" them with contact, which is just insane), so that extremism could extend to the civilian culture as well, leading to the belief that a strict "hands-off" policy needed to be enacted for civilians as well. And that would be why, by the time of "Homeward," a civilian like Nikolai was subject to a law against contact with pre-warp civilizations.

 

[William Leisner]

Or it could just be that the writers, being imperfect human beings, simply used the term "Prime Directive" in "Homeward" without considering how anal the fanboys on the internet would be. (Or that there would even still be an internet after the looming Y2K apocalypse.)

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

He dropped out, which makes him an ordinary citizen, a civilian.

Yes, but he's *former* Starfleet, in a sense. Starfleet rules could still apply even after dropping out of the Academy.

Remember in Licence to Kill, after M fires Bond? M says that Bond still is bound by the Official Secrets Act or some such thing. With Nikolai it could be the same. Anyone who leaves Starfleet is still bound by regulations affecting its members.

 

[JarodRussell]

He dropped out, which makes him an ordinary citizen, a civilian.

Yes, but he's *former* Starfleet, in a sense. Starfleet rules could still apply even after dropping out of the Academy.

Remember in Licence to Kill, after M fires Bond? M says that Bond still is bound by the Official Secrets Act or some such thing. With Nikolai it could be the same. Anyone who leaves Starfleet is still bound by regulations affecting its members.

LOL, sorry, but argueing with what happened in another work of fiction gets a from me. Moreover, James Bond is a fucking secret agent with a license to kill and insight into many complex and very dangerous secrets nobody else knows about. No wonder he has to chose between shutting his mouth and having a car accident.

When you go to the US Navy or the US Marines and drop out you are a "free" civilian, and are not bound by any rule that these two organizations have. Especially when you drop out before even finishing their academies.

It's possible that sometime between "Angel One" and "Homeward," the Federation enacted a civilian law that was equivalent to Starfleet's General Order One, and the term "Prime Directive" may have been applied to both in vernacular usage because they'd be essentially the same thing. Perhaps the Angel One crisis even prompted UFP lawmakers to enact such a change. The 24th-century Starfleet is clearly much more extremist in its view of the PD than its 23rd-century equivalent was (even to the point of letting civilizations die rather than risk "damaging" them with contact, which is just insane), so that extremism could extend to the civilian culture as well, leading to the belief that a strict "hands-off" policy needed to be enacted for civilians as well. And that would be why, by the time of "Homeward," a civilian like Nikolai was subject to a law against contact with pre-warp civilizations.

That's exactly what I'm thinking. If it was a Starfleet-only rule in the 23rd century, it definately turned into a Federation law by the 24th century.

 

[pookha]

i think it is called federation dogma in homeward.

and i agree taking the prime direction to the degree we saw in in homeward was insane.

 

[JarodRussell]

i think it is called federation dogma in homeward.

and i agree taking the prime direction to the degree we saw in in homeward was insane.

I see no difference between the Prime Directive in Homeward and that very early episode where Data made contact with a little girl from a dying star system. Picard was about to let everyone die until he heard her voice. Basically the same what happened in Homeward. He stayed as passive as possible until he had no other choice.

 

[Myasishchev]

If there's no equivalent of the PD generally binding on Fed civilians, there wouldn't be a single primitive planet in the reach of the Federation. Given that one of the Federation's core values is giving a shit, I strongly doubt a charitable organization that doesn't agree with the PD's ethic wouldn't have developed. I mean, we can't be expected to believe that a population of a trillion is monolithic on this issue, when one thing we know about people, even future people and alien people, is that they're unlikely to fully agree on anything. And especially since a fair number of the Federation's members are relatively recent to the whole warp scene, who would recall within living memory the suffering their own societies experienced before the advent of their own Federation membership. Even if it's a fraction of a fraction who cares enough to want to help, and is well-educated enough to be helpful, its ranks would still number in the hundreds of thousands or millions of members.

Hence, an organization would very likely exist dedicated to uplifting (to steal a term) pre-warp civilizations, in the absence of a compulsory method to prevent them from doing so. If just being nice isn't enough of a motivation, imagine the adulation you would get if you came down from heaven and showed them a faster-than-light drive?

I suspect there are differences between the federal law that prohibits civilian contact with primitives, and the executive agency regulation that governs Starfleet--and that the regulation is more strict and detailed.

But the PD has been so inconsistently portrayed, that it could be just about anything a writer prefers.

 

[Christopher]

I think that humans by ST's time are smart enough to know that pushing a culture to advance rather than letting it make its own choices is more destructive than helpful. The reason there's a Prime Directive at all is because imposing your values and views on another culture, trying to decide their future for them and rob them of the right to choose that for themselves, is arrogant and wrong. But that doesn't mean it's intrinsically damaging to have any interaction with a less advanced culture. The key is to recognize that they have the right to choose for themselves how to handle the interaction. It's not about "uplifting." The Civilising Mission is just as arrogant, condescending, and self-aggrandizing as military conquest. The right approach is simply to be a good neighbor -- be friendly, offer to help out where it's needed, but respect their choices and boundaries.

The essential thing is to avoid buying into the false dichotomy of so many Prime Directive episodes, this assumption that the only alternatives are complete contamination or complete avoidance. As with just about everything else in life, defining it in terms of such simple, black-and-white extremes is artificial and missing the truth. There could be civilian Federation laws that forbid imposing on pre-warp societies but don't go to the extreme of forbidding any contact whatsoever as Starfleet does. As I suggested (or rather, as someone else originally suggested, I can't remember who), maybe the reason Starfleet holds itself to stricter standards is because it has so much more power that could be abused. A civilian organization wouldn't have that same force of arms at its disposal and thus there wouldn't be as great a risk that it could force its will on the locals.