The Star Trek: Voyager episode with the title “Course: Oblivion” shows a starship crew which looks like Voyager and its complement. Throughout the episode all manner of things go wrong until it is determined the warp field is destabilising the integrity of everything and everyone on board. There is no record of this ever happening before. A while longer it is concluded the ship and its crew are not really Voyager and the people on board but a clone made by “biomimetic fluid” from a place called “The Demon Planet” — which was seen earlier in the episode titled “Demon”.
Many heroic efforts to rescue the ship, to control the damage of the warp field, to return to the Demon Planet for safety, and so on are attempted. All fail. The ship explodes and nothing is left but molecules of debris.
There is a lesson here for politically correct, historically naive, and psychologically misinformed multiculturalists. If the new reality you are trying to construct has some hidden inconsistency with reality, your efforts will fail catastrophically. Unlike the crew on the Biomimetic Voyager, the victims of Multiculturalism and Political Correctness will include those who were too young or too gulled by propaganda to raise meaningful objections.
Cultures shape and are shaped by the people who live in them. The science of “natural ecology” tells us it is unwise to ship elephants to Antarctica or penguins to North Africa. Species belong in the environment they evolved to inhabit. Likewise it is unwise to introduce new species haphazardly because the result could be the introduction of an “invasive species” which will destroy the indigenous inhabitants.
In Svalbard, Norway, is the world’s food-seed repository. Almost every country on the planet has stored its grains there. Even North and South Korea have separate sets of seeds preserved there.
Effectively, every biome and every meaningful species in that biome is protected.
Biologists understand that the preservation of “diversity” means keeping invasive species away from new ecosystems, being careful about the changes to the ecological space within which the indigenous species must live, and maintaining good border controls to avoid upsetting the existing balance.
Politically Correct Science Fiction is “green” enough to endorse with enthusiasm the Svalbard project while decrying the dangers of “anthropogenic climate change”. It is “inclusive” enough to know the various cultures around the world which have risen up uniquely in time and space and history are all able to live together without any difficulty so “multiculturalism” can never be anything but “good”.
Politically Correct Public Policy uses what appears to be “science fact” when it comes to regulations regarding the “natural ecology” and it uses “science fiction” when considering changes to the “social ecology”.
How do they manage to do this?
Again, science fiction and fantasy are instructive.
Every fan of Star Trek, Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings, Dune, and so on is able to “enter the reality” of their preferred “alternative reality”. Online games and simulation games show the same psychological capabilities.
Books have even been written about how the inventions of Star Trek inspired everything from cell phones to medical tricorders. The current Qualcomm X-Prize is going to be awarded to the team that produces the best “medical tricorder”.
If we can act in a sustained social interaction as if warp drive, matter transporters, Klingons, Vulcans, and The Dominion are all real, then we have the imagination to suspend our normal grounding and concept of “reality”. We are asked to “imagine” (as in the song “Imagine”) life in a world of utopian harmony which will not be in any way “unstable” and no catastrophic explosions will result.
So was “Course: Oblivion” just a television episode or a cautionary tale?
The best single lesson to come from this might be something once said by Dick Cheney.
Cheney cautioned us to be aware of the “unknown unknowns”.
There are things we know we know and things we know we don’t know. The beings on the cloned Voyager did not know they were in danger. Perhaps back in the early days of warp drive experimentation this kind of danger was entertained by members of the Federation. When it proved to be irrelevant it was forgotten. The fact the question was even asked became a footnote.
Science fiction, because of its use of metaphor can explore more generally some social policy options than historical studies or ideological debates.
Generally there are two kinds of science fiction. The traditional kind is based on imagining new technologies such as warp drive, matter transporters, and time travel. The companion to it is social or political science fiction in which the dystopian or utopian possibilities of technology are explored. Some of these include imagining different kinds of cultural options. How much of the multicultural rhetoric about “making the world a better place” is little more than science fiction or manifest fantasy? The DUNE series is in some ways an examination of something very much like Islam. One of the Dune books is titled “The Butlerian Jihad”. A leading religion is a syncretic creed known as “Budd-Islam” — a fusion I find somewhat difficult to grasp by the way.
Science fiction is a way of discussing the theories and assumptions of various political and social theories while simultaneously avoiding the disapproval of all but the most astute members of the ruling elite. This is no doubt why Stanislaw Lem, whose book Eden is a brutal condemnation of communism and the utopian obsession which drove it, was not censored.
Today we have weather and climate scientists telling us what the various future scenarios are if (a)their assumptions are correct about how the Earth’s systems all work together, (b)if their measurements are accurate enough and complete enough to be useful and (c)if their models which combine their assumptions to their measurements are good enough to be reasonable approximations to reality.
City planners run all kinds of models on what will happen if a subdivision, bridge, road, etc. is, or is not, built.
Government officials tell us how immigration will change the country, what kinds of immigrants are desired, how many there should be, and what criteria should be used to pick them. Those who object are deemed to be xenophobic or racist.
Unelected judges wearing black robes are deciding on how the oldest rules of society — those of marriage and the family — should be changed to bring them into accord with some kind of “historical inevitability” or some abstract theory of “social justice”. Those who voice disagreement are vilified or worse.
Is the vast range of predictions these groups make really all that different from “science fiction”?
Going back to Voyager: The lessons we can take from any hypothetical or metaphorical situation are sufficiently abstract as to be applicable in many contexts. Perhaps the best lesson we can draw from this episode in the modern world is: “some societies should dwell alone.” Or, perhaps, “not all simulations are as good as they first appear to be.”
Whichever level of analysis is more appropriate for the context under consideration.
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| Course: Oblivion (episode)As Voyager crewmembers begin dying, they make a startling discovery about their true identities. In USS Voyager’s mess hall, Lieutenants B’Elanna Torres and Tom P… | |||||||
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| Demon (episode)Voyager, desperately low on fuel, finds deuterium on a highly hostile “Demon class” planet. The USS Voyager is running out of deuterium as a fuel and is forced to g… | |||||||
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https://www.croptrust.org/what-we-do/svalbard-global-seed-vault/
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| Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZEMaking the Impossible Possible | |||||||
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Unjustified Margins 