What To Do About Klingons?

Violence and SF, Part 2

As promised, here is the second part of my series on violence and SF. I apologize for the somewhat deceptive title . I am NOT going to talk about Star Trek at any length. As in Part 1, I will focus on a single novel by Stanislaw Lem, who is an invaluable guide to exploring complex philosophical, ethical and political issues through the lens of SF. But first, let us reformulate the question in the title - and yes, with reference to the warlike race in the Star Trek franchise.

The Klingons, especially in the first and second iterations of Star Trek, embody the mid-twentieth-century anthropological belief that some cultures were inherently more violent than others. Perhaps the most famous iteration of this belief is Napoleon A. Chagnon’s work with the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon in the 1960s. Described in several books, including his memoir, the Yanomamo were, according to him, a “fierce people”, engaging in endless warfare, killing each other for “honor”, and abducting and raping women of their own and other tribes.

Of course, Chagnon was heavily criticized by those invested in Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage. He was accused of racism and of contributing to “harmful stereotypes”. It bears emphasizing that these are not actual critiques but virtue-signaling. Whether stereotypes are “harmful” or not (and who decides?), it does not matter if they are based on facts. Without getting into the particulars of the Yanomamo case, there is no question that many, if not most, tribal societies have been quite violent, though the rates vary significantly from place to place. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), Stephen Pinker argues that violence has steadily decreased with the rise of civilization from its height in the Neolithic.

But tribal cultures are not the only ones permeated by violence. The Klingons have spacefaring technology, and yet are militaristic and obsessed with honor, especially in comparison with the peaceful Federation. In some ways, they are comparable to contemporary Muslim societies that justify honor killings and violent jihad. And of course, the history of the West provides plenty of examples of war, conquest, revolution, and outbreaks of violence on a massive scale.

Medieval Europe had homicide rates as high as 70 per 100,000. Compare this to the current European rates, which are less than 1 in 100,000 in France and Germany. In the US, it is 6.3 per 100,000. But in Mexico, it is 24.5 - still not as high as in medieval Italy but much higher than in its neighbor across the border.¹

In the first essay in this series, I argued that there is a biological component to violence. But the above figures also show that culture, not biology, is responsible for how much violence exists in any given society. There was no evolutionary change in Europe between the 13th century and today. It was a cultural shift that has brought down homicide rates and reduced the incidence of war. So, what should we do about Klingon culture?

The rise of postcolonial theory offered two conflicting answers to this question. The first one was to suggest that violence in non-Western societies was the result of settler colonialism. In other words, the Aztec human sacrifices, the slaughter of infidels during the conquests of Islam, the Arab slave trade and all the rest of bloody world history are somehow the fault of the “whites”. The fact that this nonsense is seriously taught in many Ivy League universities is a testament to the triumph of ideology over intellectual integrity and common sense. It is the equivalent blaming the Federation for the Klingons’ bloodthirstiness.

The second answer, however, is more interesting. It is cultural relativism that prohibits applying the Western moral standard to the rest of humanity. An extreme example of this is the recent discovery of the remains of sacrificed children in the Mayan city of Tikal and the explanation given by an archeologist María Belén Méndez who declared with a straight face: “It was a practice; it's not that they were violent, it was their way of connecting with the celestial bodies".

If the killing of children is declared to be “non-violent”, what does violence mean?

Of course, cultural relativism has a problem of its own. How can it denounce anything European colonizers have done if there is no universal moral standard? Cortez and the rest of the conquistadors undoubtedly believed that the spread of Christianity to the benighted natives justified whatever pillage and rapine they engaged in. So in practice, cultural relativists often adopt the first position, trying to minimize or overlook the violence of non-Western and tribal societies.

SF faithfully reflects the changing ideas about cultural violence. In the first half of the last century, the genre was awash in “savage barbarians” of various non-European and non-Terran races. George Allan England’s Darkness and Dawn (1914), for example, depicts the black “Horde” as so inherently violent that genocide is the only way to establish a peaceful socialist utopia.

With the shock of the war in Vietnam, progressive American writers, such as Ursula Le Guin, embraced the notion that the West was to blame for all, or most, violence in the world. Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest” (1972) is a classic example of the “settler colonialism” paradigm translated into the idiom of the SF genre. In the novella, the peaceful indigenous culture of Athshe is “infected” by violence through the evil actions of the Terran colonizers. Read against the background of the war in Vietnam, the novella is both a distortion of history (the Vietnam war was a struggle between two superpowers, not a colonial enterprise) and an insult to the Vietnamese people who had their own agency and political calculations rather than being generic “noble savages”.

Star Trek gradually shifted toward cultural relativism with the introduction of the Prime Directive that prohibited interference with other cultures. But the most interesting exploration of cultural relativism in SF is Stanislaw Lem’s underappreciated masterpiece Eden (1959).

Eden opens with a spaceship crew, designated only by their professional roles (Doctor, Navigator and so on), crash-landing on an unexplored planet whose intelligent inhabitants are “doublers”: obligate symbionts composed of two linked but distinct creatures. The doublers culture is soaked in senseless violence. Pedestrians are randomly executed; the terrain is dotted with mass graves and what appears to be the aftermath of atrocious bio-experiments. The doublers are indifferent to the humans, either overlooking them altogether or reacting in seemingly nonsensical ways.

The human crew are the opposite of the anticolonial caricature of Le Guin: they are highly ethical and civilized people who want to understand what is going on and to help the natives. But the more they learn, the more their moral outrage grows. The last chapters of the novel are a computer-mediated dialog between the crew and a suicidal doubler who shows up on their doorstep. Through tantalizing snatches of information there emerges the picture of a sick civilization, engaged in a vast project of social bio-engineering whose ends are unclear but whose means include mass exterminations and self-policed concentration-camp communities. The society of Eden is ruled by the manipulation of information, which excludes certain type of utterances. The government is not only anonymous but semantically non-existent, even though in reality there is a ruling class. Whoever “says that the government exists ceases to exist”, becoming part of a self-regulating and self-destructive group where they are subject to what the computer ominously translates as “procrustics” (240).

As the crew learns more, their naïve eagerness for contact is gradually superseded by frustration, anger, and eventually the need to “fix” this horrible culture, up to, and including, bombing it out of existence.

But the end, despite the shocking evidence of atrocities, they decide to leave without making any attempt to save either the planet or their doubler interlocutor. In debating what to do about Eden, the Captain articulates a position that is paradoxically both profoundly immoral – leaving the victims of bio-experiments suffer – and profoundly ethical – respecting the essential autonomy of the Other:

‘‘Destroyed the government?’ the Captain said calmly. “Liberated the population by force?”

“If there was no other way.”

“In the first place, these are not human beings. Remember, you spoke only with the computer, and therefore understand the doublers no better than it does. Second, no one imposed all this upon them. No one, at least, from space. They themselves…”

“If you use this argument, then there is nothing, nothing that should be done!” shouted the Engineer.

“How else can it be? Is the population of this planet a child that got itself into a blind alley and can be led out by hand? If things were only that simple…” (255)

Captain’s position challenges both the Western triumphalism of Darkness and Dawn and the benign primitivism of postcolonial SF. He does not claim that Eden culture is good just because it is different from ours. No, this culture is evil, having blundered into a blind alley of its own making. But humanity cannot lead it out. You cannot save aliens - or people - who do not want to be saved.

Eden can be read as an endorsement of cultural relativism. But in fact, Lem’s position is more challenging and nuanced. Doublers’ self-extermination does not threaten Earth. In this situation, walking away is the only ethical choice. But what if Eden was located on our borders? The allegorical undertones in Lem’s novel relate it to the socialist repression in his native Poland that at the time was under the thumb of the USSR. The Cold War eventually destroyed the “evil empire” and liberated Eastern Europe. And yet, if we were consistent in cultural relativism, what right did the West have to encourage the dissidents or for that matter, engage in skirmishes throughout the world to topple the USSR? Soviet culture was, in many ways, as different from the West as the culture of Eden is different from Terra.

There is no simple answer to this question. The only conclusion Lem leaves us with is that violence is ubiquitous and possibly inescapable. Even if the Federation and the Klingon Empire manage to sustain some for of detente, chances are they will eventually clash. So, to answer the question I posed above - what to do about Klingon culture? - my own response is: fight.

Works Cited

Stanislaw Lem, Eden. Trans. Mark E. Heine. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1989 (1959)

1. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country#top-10-countries-with-the-highest-murder-rates-per-100k-in-2023