The Monocultures of Trek

[The Wormhole]

Korean communications,

Hoshi is supposed to be Japanese. Yes, Linda Park is herself Korean, but Hoshi is Japanese.

 

[Sci]

Think about it... less cultural diversity means that most of the time they might not have had nearly as many issues as humanity did.

Oh, I dunno about that. There have been plenty of times in history where a relatively homogeneous culture still had major civil wars, authoritarian governments, oppressive social structures, etc. Diversity isn't really the origin of social conflict.

As such, having a unified global educational system would have resulted in types of people who end up sharing more similarities than differences.

I think that's a severe oversimplification.

This followed massive amounts of socio-economic and educational reforms on Earth which ultimately paved the way for more evolved humanity... <SNIP> On a galactic level, humans seem to have achieved certain levels of advancements faster than some other species (such as the Ferengi).

I would strongly urge you not to frame this in ordinal terms. This is not a matter of hierarchy, of some cultures being "more advanced" than others. This is a matter of cultural values, and those exist along a spectrum in multiple axes, not an ordinal hierarchy.

But see, that was one of the aspects that rubbed me wrong about the novelverse. We suddenly have crews with a huge number of exotic, often non-humanoid aliens as bridge officers that, apparently, were always just hiding off-screen during every tv episode.

I agree that that's a bit different from what the canon did, but I like that. Star Trek's onscreen casts really ought to be more diverse in species than they are, and it's a good thing when novels correct a deficiency of the canon.

Even so, it also showed that there was different sects within the Bajoran religion. It's like how Christians, Jews, and Muslims, all worship the same God, and the next "Pope" could be Muslim or Jewish.

Very true, although I wouldn't equate it to different religions believing in the same God. I would instead equate it to different orders and factions within a single church that have divergent beliefs and compete with one-another for power over the institution; this remains a historical reality within the Catholic Church, for instance, and we even see versions of that today in organizations like the United Methodist Church (which is undergoing a split between liberal and conservative factions around issues like gay marriage). The Bajoran Church (for lack of a better term) is institutionally unified, but it's clearly not ideologically unified -- we know from episodes like the Circle trilogy that Bariel's order was in open competition with Winn's order for influence and formal power within the Church.

 

[UssGlenn]

I would instead equate it to different orders and factions within a single church that have divergent beliefs

I thought about comparing it to the next Pope being Protestant, but we have no reason to believe the biggest differences between Bajoran orders are smaller than between the Abrahamic religions.

 

[Sci]

I thought about comparing it to the next Pope being Protestant, but we have no reason to believe the biggest differences between Bajoran orders are smaller than between the Abrahamic religions.

I mean, the fact that they remain part of a united religious institution under the shared leadership of the Kai strongly implies that the theological differences between different orders of the Kai's church are smaller than the differences between the three Abrahamic religions. If their differences were of similar orders of magnitude, I find it hard to imagine they would still be under the authority of the Kai.

 

[Markonian]

The IDW comic Star Trek, Issue 2 has a Starfleet brief on the Klingon Empire and specifically calls it a monoculture.

 

[Ragitsu]

Good. Be it in fantasy or science-fiction, "monocultures" are - to an extent - necessary when dealing with non-humans.