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similarities between Americans and space aliens
Thursday, August 15 2002
There's a book review at Space.com of After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life by Albert Harrison, a book about the sorts of governments we can expect to find among space aliens. Harrison proposes that alien civilizations will be, by and large, democratic, since the meme of democracy tends to impart maximum survival advantages to its host societies. This premise makes sense to me; I've argued in the past that freedom, tolerance of diversity, and democracy (as well as Protestant-Christian morality) probably were instrumental to the success of Western (or, more specifically, English) society against such competitors as American Indians, the Chinese, the Soviets, and the Nazis.
Where Harrison's argument breaks down is his apparent failure to distinguish between a domestic political system and a foreign policy. Countries can be wonderfully humane to their own people while being genocidal to others. One only needs to look at the example set by the Vikings, who were democratic in Scandinavia while enslaving the Irish and pillaging most of the rest of coastal Europe. The British were all very refined with their clinking tea cups and long-lived Queen (a vestigial figurehead for a Parliamentary democracy) even as they undertook brutal quasi-genocidal campaigns against indigenous populations throughout Africa, India, the Far East, and elsewhere.
Then there's the American example. I'll choose in this case not to bother with the well-known tragedy of the Native Americans and skip ahead to the present. Currently the United States is being run by an administration that, though not properly elected, nonetheless must pay attention to sentiments at home. To do anything else (much though they might want to) is politically suicidal. Meanwhile, however, they demonstrate unusually virulent and unprecedented disregard for the interests and needs of the rest of the world. Seen objectively, there isn't a huge difference between the selfishly unilateral, exploitative mentality of the Bush administration and, say, a technologically advanced alien society that has taken over a continent and is here to extract human adenoids and ship them back to the mother planet.
For a civilization to thrive, democracy might well be essential at home, but it simply doesn't translate into benign foreign policy. People governed by a democracy tend to care very little for the interests of people in other countries, especially countries to which they have no connections. Few in America, at least as represented by the media, get exercised about accidentally-gunned-down wedding parties in Afghanistan, tampering with the internal affairs of Venezuelan democracy, or refusal to agree to global standards for the control of carbon dioxide emissions. The only thing that really ticks us off in other countries is when Americans (our people!) get killed. The near-daily tragedy of suicide bombings in Isræl didn't merit any expression of Presidential anger (simulated or otherwise) until some Americans were killed at Hebrew University, as if there's something fundamentally more valuable about an American soul. I'm sure if intergalactic aliens took over Australia and somehow managed to reach a peaceful understanding with humans, we could expect them to be unconcerned about our trouble and strife so long as it didn't affect any of their travelers and students.
Gretchen came home tonight from several days spent upstate - in the part of upstate called Western Massachusetts. She brought home with her a renewed zeal to relocate to the Woodstock area, a place where broken bottles, condoms, and soiled toilet paper don't comprise substantial fractions of the leaf litter. She's tired of smelling other people's urine "several times a day" and could do without the other smells: garbage, puke, poo, fish, and rotting animals. I liked the idea, to a point, but it also frightened me. It sounded a little too much like retirement. I'm too young to move to the sort of place people move to when they die.
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