The near-totalitarian adherence to "logic" that seems to dominate Vulcan culture and interspecies relations is extremely distasteful to the human palate, to be sure. That's why Romulans are like blondes: they have more fun.
If xenophobic paranoia, war, scheming, and secret police are your idea of fun, then yes.
Well, it would explain why I chose a Russian username.
Besides, I find the idea of sentient biological living beings without emotions simply unbelievable.
And even if I got over that, how would you even protray an entire race of beings without emotions? Almost every sentient fictional android or cyborg ends up looking emotional, even when we're being told over and over that they don't have emotions.
Indeed. Data got to the point where I'm convinced he was playing a huge joke that only the patience of an android could pull off, and laughing himself sick every day.
xortex said:
This is a good question and the 'Enterprise' writers should have given it a bit more thought but noone was gonna lift their head while Berman was around. I would have made Emotions alien to Vulcans except of course Spock who's half Human and therefore would have more intense emotions. I would think the Romulan's emotions arose out of a mutation of sorts and that Vulcans so affected were ousted and destined to become Romulans some day.
1)
A 2000 year-old mutation is unlikely sweep through a population of billions. Unless the founding father of Romulus is Wilt Chamberlain or Genghis Khan, and had virtually no competition. Even blonde hair is older than that, and it's a simple trait compared to the multiple traits that constitute "emotional" behavioral programming.
2)
Emotion tends to have firm logical underpinnings, from an evolutionary point of view. Sexual desire, spousal and parental love, anger, even spite, have all been selected for, and are general adaptations to competition for scarce resources, almost universal in mammals, and with a great degree of penetration amongst all vertebrates and sufficiently advanced invertebrates. It's hard to imagine them not being replicated in the harsh conditions of Vulcan. Of all the emotional responses, the only one I can think of offhand that might not almost by necessity arise is humor.
3)Most importantly, Vulcans completely without emotions are far less interesting than those who suppress their emotions.
(Emphasis mine.)
I also find the idea of intelligent humanoids without emotion unlikely in the extreme, given the normal evolutionary development of mammals. I'm no evolutionary/socio-biologist, but, as Myasichev states above, there are very good survival reasons for emotions. In fact, the limited resources and harsh conditions of Vulcan would seem to argue in favor of the development of intense emotions.
As shown in Trek, Vulcans do indeed have emotions. Although I'm sure the "emotional control" aspect of Spock/Vulcans came about for dramatic contrast rather than scientific reasons (and yes, I know about Number One), one can see from the TOS to XI that Vulcan emotion is canon, along with the race's effort to master, suppress and control them. how much more fun for us. (Enterprise be damned, those guys were annoying and contradictory in their treatment of Vulcan psychology and motivation.)
Although the writers on TOS often had Spock (and other Vulcans) stating he feels no emotion (or sometimes no "human" emotion), I don't think most of us takes that at face value, since Spock clearly does feel emotion, as does Sarek. Some of Spock's protestations are a subtle (and not so subtle) needling of his crew mates. We've seen plenty of emotion - subtle, overt, supressed or otherwise - in TOS, films and TNG from Spock, Surak and other Vulcans.
There is also a school of thought that because of his mixed heritage and the high expectations of his father, Spock attempts to be "more Vulcan than the Vulcans. Certainly I think a lot of the interest in Spock is his search for his identity, always "the other" in whatever culture he resides. No wonder the man found a home in Starfleet.
Most everything in canon and in Treklit shows that Vulcan emotions are, in fact, stronger and more aggressive than human ones. Surak's philosophy, developed during a time when wars and violence put the very survival of the race in jeopardy, posited that fear was at the root of most Vulcan agression and conflict. His development of the practice of "c'thia" - or mastery of emotion - through meditation and other mental disciplines was to save the race from themselves. It was not intended to be a "religion", but a method for attaining a space of calm in which to act more less violently. Achieving c'thia was a way of seeing "what actually is" in any given situation, uncolored by emotion, in order to make logical, ethical and well-reasoned decisions. This philosophy eventually spread across Vulcan to become the dominant pillar of their culture. However, it appears to me that only certain adepts on Mt. Seleya take it to the point of eliminating emotion entirely. Kol'inahr isn't the way most people on Vulcan live.
The Vulcan mental abilities seem to have been developed and practiced much more widely after Surak's time, but one must assume from a practical point of view (which is supported in much fanon and Treklit) that mental abilities were inherent in Vulcans before Surak, but the peace and advancement of mind techniques after the "Reformation" allowed these talents to fully flower.
A few thousand years isn't a long enough span to provide significant genetic drift for the trait to have completely died out amongst the Romulans. (This means there's no damned good reason for those ugly and stupid Rommie ridges on the Rommies in TNG either).
But the mind techniques would have been less advanced at the time of the sundering and moreover, they weren't developed amongst the Rihannsu. The Vulcans have now had at least a couple thousand years to develop advanced mental techniques, which appears to be a cultural norm (monoculture alert!!) . As with most talents, one assumes a range of abilities - some individuals would have stronger natural telepathic abilities than others. One would also presume that the ability is latent in some Romulans and could be taught to those individuals.
