Reflection: Manifest Destiny

In last Thursday's class, we seemed to unusually skate around the subject this ENTIRE course is dedicated to: contact with extraterrestrial alien species. I think PTJ tried at a few points to round it back to that central point, but we seemed pretty concentrated on America's history rather than its potential future in space. In this post I want to try and extrapolate what we mentioned in class and bring it forward into an interstellar context. Here, the issues we brought up in class are accentuated further - differences among beings highlighted by a concept like manifest destiny is magnified one hundred fold by the fact that in space, we ARE actual different species, a very poignant biological and political fact.

Before reading Stephanson's work, I never imagined that the political force of manifest destiny still exerted itself in the modern world. Perhaps in a few aspects I was correct - the manifest destiny of the late 1800s is very different from the manifest destiny of the 21st century. However, the disturbing trend that remains in American ideology, what we pointed out as something beyond simple American exceptionalism, is that America has a God given place amongst the universe. This, of course, is the most poignant point of all - the idea, even the risk - that America could carry its "manifest destiny" to the stars. What would this kind of stance lead to in an interstellar context? We already established in class that America is uniquely capable of bringing itself and its own ideology beyond its own borders. Was it imperialism, or just "spreading democracy"?

The issue brought up with America going into the stars with manifest destiny is not political, it is biological (Although, from the course so far, I have come to believe that the "political" is simply a vast misnomer for the biological, a point which would render my following discussion moot. However, for the sake of not writing an entire blog post on this distinction, I'll continue assuming that the two are worthy of a distinction.) Now instead of facing fellow man in an alien way, we'd encounter aliens in an alien way. Can you spread democracy to a being whose biological structure totally renders the concept of "universal rights" moot? Not to harp on my own point during class discussion, but I think my Speaker for the Dead example has more merit in the consideration of manifest destiny that it got credit for. If, in our thought experiment, America really does try and expand "human" rights to piggies, how do they account for the purely biological process that the fertile piggies go through when they're eaten from the inside by their young? Anyone assuming that the argument of basic human rights applied to aliens is EASIER than this is badly mistaken, and probably suffers from a "Star Trek species delusion". I think that's why PTJ brought into consideration the scene from Star Trek VI, where one of the klingon states that the phrase "human rights" is racist. And, honestly, I couldn't agree more.

In my opinion, America will be the first to reach the stars, and the country will be the first to encounter aliens. I wish I were a European citizen saying this, so it didn't sound purely like American exceptionalism, but I think we all agreed in class that America will be a world super power for a while longer. Therefore, the main issue we face is aspects of manifest destiny applied to alien races. The most recent form of manifest destiny has been the spreading of, or at least the facade of the spreading of, human rights and a democratic system. But if we accept basic biology principles, we encounter the fact that there's no way that any of our core values can be applied in an understandable way to an alien race. Whether or not this will lead to destruction of either species is still up for debate - my point, in general, is to simply say that the human rights argument is even weaker among the stars than it is between states.