Aaah, gotcha.
United Federation of Planets & Starfleet
- Thread starter James Wright
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Aaah, gotcha.
I've always liked the idea that it is only Humans from Earth who think that way and Humans who live on the various colony worlds are embarrassed by their Earthican cousins for being so pretentious and self-congratulatory.I'm glad you enjoyed that writeup - and I find your last comment particularly compelling. Somehow, I think of the "We seek to better ourselves..." line and just cringe.
Alien: You're a human, aren't you?
Human: Yeah, but don't worry I'm not one of those Earth Humans.
Alien: Thank space-Christ, I can't stand those guys.
Human: Me either, they give Humans a bad name.
To be honest, that never bothered me that much. I think back to the strange way we would portray aliens in 50s serials and how they would talk about stuff like that, it only seemed fitting that future humans who go around doing the stuff those serial aliens did would sound the same way eventually.
What I don't get is the idea that humans who had grown up in a world with technology far beyond ours and with alien lifeforms would act exactly like 20th century humans. They wouldn't.
What I don't get is the idea that humans who had grown up in a world with technology far beyond ours and with alien lifeforms would act exactly like 20th century humans. They wouldn't.
Well, they don't act exactly like 20th Century Humans. For one thing, intra-Human bigotry has been eliminated.
As for trying to figure out how the existence of aliens would influence Human culture on a more practical, day-to-day basis.... I think that's the sort of thing that's next to impossible to convey well in a TV show, and that's why they tended to avoid it.
I've always wondered: was the artificial singularity stuff invented to retcon that line away, or was it just invented for the purpose of plot on TNG? The first time it was mentioned, it was part of the plot, wasn't it?
The bird of prey obviously had warp drive, as it had those big nacelles that were virtually identical to those of the Enterprise. It never ceases to amaze me that people thought Scotty literally meant she had no warp drive. To my way of thinking, Scotty's line can be interpreted one of two main ways:
- The BoP had fusion-powered warp, which was inferior.
- The BoP could only operate on impulse while cloaked, but still had "conventional" warp drive.
I could actually see the Tal Shiar being once like this in the Prime 'verse, but by the mid-24th, the Empire has reached a state of societal decay to the point where the Tal Shiar has gone from actually doing good to overreaching and being feared.
Either way, it's a good idea of a reinterpretation for TNG, if I do say so myself.
You know I actually LIKE the fact that Romulans' ships are powered by an artificial singularity drive. It made them unique
Also, it's pretty smart on the part of an Empire that's theoretically very poor. I'd say it's a good example of why I attribute a "fight smarter, not harder" mantra to the Romulans.
I've always liked the idea that it is only Humans from Earth who think that way and Humans who live on the various colony worlds are embarrassed by their Earthican cousins for being so pretentious and self-congratulatory.I'm glad you enjoyed that writeup - and I find your last comment particularly compelling. Somehow, I think of the "We seek to better ourselves..." line and just cringe.
Alien: You're a human, aren't you?
Human: Yeah, but don't worry I'm not one of those Earth Humans.
Alien: Thank space-Christ, I can't stand those guys.
Human: Me either, they give Humans a bad name.
*shudder*
Reminds me of that "New Human" stuff from the TMP novelization, where all the Starfleet officers were seen as backwards...
In principle, I agree, although I'd certainly hate to pompously go flouncing about surreptitiously protesting how "enlightened" I am to all the "primitives" I met.
I suppose it all comes down to whether you believe there are core, fundamental characteristics of humanity that will remain unchanged no matter what, even while the cosmetic stuff changes, and, if so, what you believe those characteristics to be.
It's a matter of values changing over time, it's happened enough to humans already. I mean you do you why the original "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale was made, right? It was a tale to young women being married off to nasty men to just suck it up and accept their @$$hole and hope to God he'd get better. Hardly the story it is now, eh?
As I recall, the first time it was mentioned was in TNG's "Timescape," where it was part of the plot device for what caused the Enterprise-D and a Romulan warbird to appear to be frozen in time from the point of view of a returning runabout.
Not just that, but the plot of "Balance of Terror" establishes that the Romulan ship was destroying Earth Outposts in different star systems -- strongly implying FTL capacity.
To be fair, it is possible that the Romulan bird of prey seen in "Balance" lacked warp drive and was being deployed from system to system by a warp-capable mothership, since it was relatively small and the sequences featuring the Enterprise tracking the BOP could have happened at sublight speeds. (The episode is pretty vague on how fast the Enterprise is going when it tracks the Romulan ship.) This is the explanation offered in the novel The Lost Era: The Sundered by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels.
For whatever it's worth, the novel The Lost Era: Serpents Among the Ruins by David R. George III establishes that the Romulans had recently developed and installed quantum singularity drives on their capital ships by 2311 -- part of the events leading up to the Tomed Incident.
That seems possible. The Romulan Commander in TOS seemed to feel that his people were sliding into decadence and dishonor. Perhaps ENT-era Romulans (covert manipulation of foreign states aside) were a culture dominated by a sort of code of chivalry (including the Tal Shiar), and this was changing by the time of TOS.
You know, I wouldn't even mind it if there were only some Earthers and Humans out there who would challenge that presumption of Humans being oh-so "enlightened." Real societies always have different factions with different ideologies competing for influence. Certainly the presumption of a "more evolved Humanity" would never go unchallenged in a more realistically-written Trekverse -- in the same way that common presumptions about America, such as that it is always a force for democracy and liberty, do not go unchallenged by other Americans today.
For my money, it's a bit of both. There are some aspects of Human nature that will simply never change. Indeed, the argument that Joss Whedon puts forth in the film Serenity is a powerful indictment of the idea that you can "improve" humanity and supports an idea I find quite compelling -- that the things we commonly think of as flaws in Humanity are also the sources of all that is good in Humanity. A world without sin is a world without life, and attempts to "improve" Humanity are inherently tyrannical.
On the other hand, I also firmly believe that many of the problems facing Humanity today are a result of our political cultures being insufficiently moral and insufficiently compassionate. I honestly do think that the idea that Humanity is trapped in an endless cycle of warfare and conquest is erroneous -- and, for that matter, deeply unsettling, since it implies that Humanity is incapable of choosing a better life for itself. The fact that the world has actually grown significantly less violent in the past 60 years, that we are, as Fareed Zakaria writes in The Post-American World, actually living in the least violent period of Human history, strongly supports that idea, I think. So does the fact that war amongst the European states, previously a near-constant fact of life for centuries, has in the course of only a few decades become unthinkable thanks to the work of the European Union.
In short.... I suppose I subscribe to the TOS/DS9 idea of Human potential rather than the TNG/VOY ideal. I reject the idea that Man is perfectible, or that there's even a such thing as being perfect or "more evolved" or "Enlightened." But I also reject the idea that we're as good as we're ever gonna get and that we can't build a better, egalitarian future for ourselves. I'm with Captain Kirk when he said, "We're killers... But we're not gonna kill today."
I disagree that TNG/VOY were saying that humans were perfect, I mean there were plenty of examples of other humans who were less than perfect people on both shows. They may not have been as in-your-face and unsubtle about it as DS9 and TOS but it was still there.
As for the "Humans are doomed to eternal violence and war" stuff, I chalk that up to the guys who try to be Neitschze but don't realize the truth about his philosophies (like how the Ubermensch is supposed to be a constructive force, not someone out to totally annihilate existing society).
As for the "Humans are doomed to eternal violence and war" stuff, I chalk that up to the guys who try to be Neitschze but don't realize the truth about his philosophies (like how the Ubermensch is supposed to be a constructive force, not someone out to totally annihilate existing society).
True... but the general consensus on TNG and VOY was this notion that most of Humanity had become "enlightened" and had become clearly "superior" to other cultures. Witness Riker's arrogance towards the Ferengi in "The Last Outpost." That kind of arrogant superiority is actually the exact same attitude that Europeans once had towards the rest of the world, and tends to lead to justifications for acts of horrific oppression.
Yes, but at that point the Ferengi were the enemy and it's typical for anyone to look down and be hostile to their enemies. And the Ferengi were acting like a bunch of trolls. I know people bring up Quark's speech about how the Ferengi never did stuff as bad as the humans but his speech is more an example of his own arrogance since it's been shown that Ferengi HAVE done a lot of that bad stuff. Quark was BSing Sisko.
Certainly Quark's speech overlooks the millennia-long oppression of women and of the working classes. But, by the same token, he probably was not lying when claiming that the Ferengi have never engaged in genocide or slavery -- genocide's bad for the economy, after all. Why kill or enslave your enemies when you can sell stuff to them?
As for Riker's speech -- yes, the Ferengi had certainly acted in a hostile manner towards the Federation. But he decided to judge the worthiness of an entire species and an entire culture on the basis of one encounter with a few individuals, and judged their entire culture as being thoroughly inferior to his because it shared a few superficial similarities with an ancestral Human culture. As much as he thought of himself as enlightened, he was actually being profoundly bigoted and ethnocentric there, too.
UE dominance of Starfleet and the Federation in general is best explained by the simple fact that the most powerful of the Federation's non-human founders were on good terms with Earth, but had centuries of animosity toward each other. Andorians, Tellarites, and Vulcans would never have worked together without Earth between them as a mediator. None of the big guys would want any of the others to be dominate, so they hand the ball off to Earth, whose idea it was in the first place, and whom they all like, sort of.
This, unfortunately, does have the effect of inflating the human ego a bit. Earth is dominate because it's the only powers that isn't burdened by centuries of interstellar conflict with the other major races and the resulting enmity, and that makes them seem better than everyone else. They quickly and easily forget all the conflict on Earth. That the Eugenics War ends up being blamed on genetic engineering rather than the fact that humans are naturally violent miscreants is a symptom of this. Humans of the Federation like to pass the blame for their more recent mistakes, as much as they can, and deny responsibility for their old ones with a simple claim that they're more enlightened now.
Quark was right about one thing, humans do come down hardest on cultures that remind them of their own history. The more esoteric cultures they come across are generally treated as curiosities, but that mirror historical Earth cultures in their practices tend to be called out as barbaric more often.
This, unfortunately, does have the effect of inflating the human ego a bit. Earth is dominate because it's the only powers that isn't burdened by centuries of interstellar conflict with the other major races and the resulting enmity, and that makes them seem better than everyone else. They quickly and easily forget all the conflict on Earth. That the Eugenics War ends up being blamed on genetic engineering rather than the fact that humans are naturally violent miscreants is a symptom of this. Humans of the Federation like to pass the blame for their more recent mistakes, as much as they can, and deny responsibility for their old ones with a simple claim that they're more enlightened now.
Quark was right about one thing, humans do come down hardest on cultures that remind them of their own history. The more esoteric cultures they come across are generally treated as curiosities, but that mirror historical Earth cultures in their practices tend to be called out as barbaric more often.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not convinced in the slightest that United Earth in any way dominates the Federation, even if Humans dominate Starfleet.
Even if we expand the pallet to include the novels, we only find the following Federation Presidents from Earth:
* Haroun al-Rashid (22nd Century) (Articles of the Federation by Keith R.A. DeCandido)
* Jonathan Archer (2185-2192) (IaMD viewscreen)
* Kenneth Wescott (2261-2268) (Errand of Fury by Kevin Ryan)
* Hiram Roth (2285-2288) (Star Trek IV, name established in Articles of the Federation)
* Hikaru Sulu (mid-24th Century, The Return by William Shatner; Shatnerverse novels are not acknowledged by non-Shatner-authored novels)
We do get a couple of other Humans who are either established to be from another Federation Member State or whose origins go unestablished:
* Sukio Hirashito (c. 2269, Prime Directive; origins unestablished; later contradicted by other novels)
* Lorne McLaren (2269-2272, Articles of the Federation; origins unestablished)
* Gan Laikan (c. 2313, from Alpha Centauri, TNG eBook: Slings and Arrows: Enterprises of Great Pitch and Moment)
* Nanietta Bacco (2379-?, from Cestus III, A Time for War, A Time for Peace)
Meanwhile, we've gotten numerous non-Earth, non-Human presidents, including:
* T'Maran (22nd Century, Vulcan female, AotF)
* Avaranthi sh'Rothress (22nd Century, Andorian shen, AotF)
* Unnamed alien female (early 23rd Century, Burning Dreams)
* Madza Bral (c. 2230, Trill female, AotF)
* Ra-ghoratreii (2289-2300, Efrosian male, Star Trek VI)
* Thelianaresth th'Vorothishria (c. 2325, Andorian thaan, AotF)
* T'Pragh (2349-2364, Vulcan female, AotF)
* Amitra (2365-2368, Pandrilite female, AotF)
* Jaresh-Inyo (2369-2372, Grazerite male, DS9: "Homefront")
* Min Zife (2373-2379, Bolian male, A Time to Kill)
And then there are the 30 4-year presidential terms of office that have yet to be established to have been occupied by anyone.
Meanwhile, the novels have only ever established one Federation Councillor from United Earth, and we've never seen a canonical Federation Councillor representing United Earth.
Bottom line: I'm not convinced in the slightest that United Earth has any more influence over the UFP in general than any other Member State -- though, to be fair, Articles of the Federation does imply that the five founding Members (Earth, Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, and Alpha Centauri) all seem to dominate the Federation and have more influence than the other Members.
The species of various Presidents doesn't really matter in this regard. What does matter is the over-culture of the Federation. The Federation, in keeping with ideals of diversity, allows member worlds to keep their own cultures, but there is also an overarching controlling Federation culture that permeates and influences all Federation worlds, and this culture is very much derived from humanity.
Human ideals were used as the foundation and the skeleton of the Federation, a fact that can't be changed without tearing it all down. Earth is the seat of the Federation government, and new members must meet basic standards of freedom that are in line with current Western Human ideals.
It isn't that humans have undue influence so much as the fact that human culture permeates the Federation so strongly that it is impossible for them to not have influence, resulting in a degree of cultural normalization that gently tugs member worlds toward human standards. The culture of cooperation that ties the Federation together is human at its core.
Human ideals were used as the foundation and the skeleton of the Federation, a fact that can't be changed without tearing it all down. Earth is the seat of the Federation government, and new members must meet basic standards of freedom that are in line with current Western Human ideals.
It isn't that humans have undue influence so much as the fact that human culture permeates the Federation so strongly that it is impossible for them to not have influence, resulting in a degree of cultural normalization that gently tugs member worlds toward human standards. The culture of cooperation that ties the Federation together is human at its core.
Well, I'd argue that even if we accept the argument you follow this up with, I firmly disagree with this point. Even if everyone begins to adopt some of the values of a given culture, that doesn't mean that doesn't mean anything when members of cultures other than that one gain power.
That's a good point... But I don't think it's necessarily clear that Earth culture is the clear origin of all of this.
Certainly it would appear that it was Earth that began pushing for closer interplanetary cooperation with the Coalition of Planets, but by the same token, those basic beliefs you describe as constituting the over-all Federation culture -- it seems to me that there's no particular reason to think that those beliefs originated from Earth. I would argue that it's entirely possible that those beliefs all developed independently on the founding Federation worlds, and that Earth's primary role was to facilitate the dialogue between those cultures that allowed their native liberal democracies to come to the forefront and then unify.
I don't understand why we have to come up with convoluted "explanations" for this at all. Let's just assume that there's other ships that are just as dominated by Andorians or Tellarites as the Enterprise is. If the UFP is a United Federation of Planets, I think we should assume that it's Starfleet is just as diverse as it's member planets, and we just haven't seen it. We KNOW the real-world reason for the overwhelming dominance of humans. I'd rather not try to explain it in the ficitional world because any explanation we get won't satisfy everyone.
There are 150 planets in the UFP. Just because we haven't seen them all, doesn't mean they don't exist.
There are 150 planets in the UFP. Just because we haven't seen them all, doesn't mean they don't exist.
Haha thanks Praetor, although I wouldn't call it an explanation. I'm explaining that we don't need to explain it. Which may sound self-contradictory at first. And maybe it is
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