Reflection: Eifelheim

So I was rummaging through Cracked.com the other day and I came across something that I thought had a peculiar relevance to our course:

http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case485.htm

Basically, it's a 16th-century woodcut from Basel, Switzerland which seems to depict some kind of space battle. There also "Madonna with San Giovannino":

http://conspiracypage.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/renaissance-ufo/

Which seems to have a UFO flying in the background. The interesting thing that Cracked points out, however, is that some people consider this a typical Renaissance depiction of the "Holy Spirit." And I thought that, if this is how Medieval and Renaissance people (the word Renaissance in this case being somewhat relative, given that it started much earlier in Italy than, say, England) perceived religion, then Eifelheim is odd in that Dietrich doesn't seem to consider the Krenken as anything other than outlanders. He doesn't really seem to translate them into that kind of religious context, instead thinking of them the same way Christians (and particularly Catholics) have historically had a tendency to think of other peoples: as potential converts.

I think part of my confusion at this perspective is that it switches that situation we see in Conquest of America. The humans aren't the invaders, here, and yet they're behaving like missionaries, unable to understand or help the Krenken but willing to convert them nonetheless. The Krenken, on the other hand, keep hoping that Jesus will come out of the sky--literally--and save them. Their conversion is practical, not spiritual, and by the time they more or less realize that it's spiritual it's too late. The presence of religion in this book seems to be countered by an absence of faith, in the sense of belief in that which cannot be seen, but felt. This may, in some way, have to do with the fact that Dietrich is highly educated, but the fact that the Krenken are not perceived as something holy except in the sense that all men are potentially holy confuses me in the light of how UFOs seemed to be depicted.

Reflection: Eifelheim

As you can probably guess, my post is going to be based on that YouTube video. Go ahead and watch!

Feynman, in this set of interviews from the 1980s, almost outright refuses to answer the interview's question. "How do you answer why something happens?" I think this has important implications for Eifelheim, especially as we watch the Krenken try to decode why things are happening around them. As Feynman points out, a visitor from another planet has no concept of basic answers to the question why, since they're unaware of the social underpinnings of the answer; they don't understand the context of the answer. "I'm telling you how difficult the why question is... I can't understand magnetic forces in terms of anything that you're familiar with because I don't understand it in terms of anything you're familiar with."

The concept of "how we know" is deep in the heart of Eifelheim. The most obvious examples of faulty logic is Dietrich's trust in the sometimes erroneous Greek and Christian philosophers. Compare this to the Krenken's "post-Einstein" stellar knowledge, the world views, and the answers to why is drastically different. But the logical extension of this is ask if Dietrich's supposedly erroneous claims are valid. What makes them not true? This takes us to the fundamental question posed in class - what is the difference between science fact versus religious faith?

"That's just one thing you'll have to take as an element in the world." Feynmen sounded a little fundamentalist there, didn't he? It sounds a lot like faith, at least on the surface. On our sister blog, the poster said that faith has no underlying metonymic qualities; it is irreducible to data-points. This fits nicely with my pre-existing world view, and something akin to what PTJ defined faith as in class. But how do we reconcile that with Feynman, who is making a pretty clear point that if you can't do high level mathematics, you have to take a physicists word for it. The layman's understanding of physical phenomenons is something akin to faith.

Therefore, I call for another definition of faith, a more personal version at that. Faith is belief in an idea when oneself is incapable of answering the why. This, of course, has wide implications on the religious and scientific spheres of influence, as it puts personal knowledge we thought we were sure of to the test. Let me add a reminder: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It is the "scientific" principle that tells us that we cannot be sure of anything in the world which we perceive. If we connect the two, our result is almost dumbfounding: all human knowledge as an element of faith in it. And if all human knowledge is as easily disproven as Dietrich's world view, we are in a shockingly naive state as humans.

Substantive: Eifelheim

Maybe there are successful stories!

So, maybe my last blog post was a little downcast. Maybe it's a bit premature to call for SETI to shut down! Eifelheim has changed my opinion, and perhaps for the better!

What aspects of Eifelheim make it seem that humans and aliens won't end up killing each other? We could chalk it up to author's discretion, but Flynn throws in so many other depressing scenarios (the down being struck by the Black Plague) that it seems that he had other intentions when it came to dictating the fate of the Krenken. The scenario is like The Sparrow, but at the same time, distinctly different. The humans seem as innocent as the Runa in this case (perhaps Eifelheim is The Sparrow in reverse with no Jana'ata?) And maybe there's something to that kind of innocence, or even ignorance.

In Conquest of America, Todorov listed three primary ways of understanding the other. The most familiar was the simple factual level. Cortes knew many facts about the Aztecs, but still destroyed them. Clearly this kind of understanding doesn't necessarily save lives. But what about the opposite? Does complete ignorance allow survival? The Runa and humans in Eifelheim seem to be models of this kind of ignorance - they are incapable of any kind of greater understanding of their situation. It's no coincidence that neither of them truly recognize the "alien-ness" that surrounds them. Of course, its difficult to pinpoint the exact reason why a kind of ignorance allows for peaceful interactions. There are clear factors which influence their "acceptance" of the other: inability to realize the full extent of "alien-ness", and the inability to understand the other on an intellectual level.

The problem with this, of course, lies in the fact that the Krenken and humans in The Sparrow ARE capable of intellectually understanding their counterparts, yet THEY make other critical translation mistakes (Jesus as an actual person in the case of the Krenken). Therefore, I think there's a kind of set dichotomy here, at least in cases where one species is more advanced than the other. The case might be that, in interactions like these, the wild card is whether or not death will result from mistranslations and ignorance. In the end, it seems, things may just be up to chance.

Substantive: Eifeilheim

Eifelheim, to me, was this fascinating glimpse at an alien encounter that was, from our perspective, entirely alien. While every other book this semester has been an alien encounter where we see the humans on one side and the aliens on the other, the humans in this book were almost as alien to us. The vision of the world that medieval Europeans had is totally different from what we perceive in the 21st century, and the fact that everything the aliens said was essentially translated through that perspective was so compelling. The unfortunate part about it, though, was that while we could see the pitfalls of their conversation, it didn't seem like they could.

I'm not totally sure why neither the Krenken nor the humans could identify that there was a disconnect between what each comprehended. Medieval Europe was not exactly the height of technological civilization; the Krenken must have understood that when they talked about heaven it was metaphysics. Some of them converted so at least they somewhat understood the concept of religion. Or maybe not. I'm still not sure if it's that cut and dried, because the Krenken lived in this master-slave dynamic of hierarchy that means that maybe what they understood about Christianity was subordination. Perhaps they assumed that the humans were kept technologically stunted by virtue of keeping their Lord's superiority.

There's no real happy ending to this book, but given that it's set in the future and writing about the past, that's hardly surprising. Everyone Tom and Sharon are learning about are by definition dead by the time they start researching them; it's a natural casualty of history. The kind of downer portion of it is the fact that Krenken who choose to stay also die, and the ones who leave are left to an uncertain fate. Yet this wasn't a total failure in communication, these aliens coexist peacefully with the people of Oberhochwald and some of them, as I mentioned before, even convert to Christianity. They are not trying to control humans, humans are not trying to control them, they're not trying to kill each other. Compared to some of the other encounters we've seen, this one is pretty successful.

Reflection: Children of God

Who to send...

As sad as it seems, in the closing month of our social science fiction class, I seem to have reached a unanimous decision: it's not worth it. Of all the books we've read, Speaker for the Dead seemed to have the best outcome, as far as alien interactions. Which is sad, really, because the entire scenario relied on the actions of a 3,000 year old super intelligent human. No one in our reality comes close to Ender. The next best bet would be Grass, but even then, the aliens almost managed to wipe out all of humanity before they were barely stopped. What gives here?

Of course, maybe PTJ has an affinity for humanity's destruction (I don't know if he'd ever admit to this), but more seriously, the situation calls for us to ask whether or not a positive interaction is even possible. By and large, isn't this an essential question for international relations? And on a more specific level, doesn't this answer the question posed by Russell in her duology?

We can break up options into two categories: intervention and non-intervention. The non-intervention option is clearly the Trekkian option, a carbon copy of the prime directive. The problem with the prime directive is the limits of such a policy; at what point does following an absolutist non-intervention policy become foolish? Conversely, the problem of intervention is presented in Russell's duology. Intervention is risky, and more often than not, goes horribly wrong.

I almost feel bad for suggesting this, but maybe in this case, we best prescribe ourselves a blissful ignorance. Hell, shut down SETI now, or at least pray we never gain the ability to meaningfully communicate with aliens. It's just not worth it. But then again, attempting to prevent humans from doing what comes natural; the process of reaching out, communicating, and interacting; would be oppression.

What we reach is a sad conclusion - if we allow persons to find their own path of interacting with the other, human nature leads to chaos in interaction. Not necessarily chaos in terms of unpredictability (if IR wasn't predictable to some degree, we probably wouldn't call it a science), but chaos in terms of uncontrollability. You can't prevent someone like Emilio from going to Rakhat, if he truly wanted to go, without resorting to oppressive measures. And you can't prevent someone like Jimmy from discovering Rakhat in the first place. It doesn't matter if we send priests, poets, or scientists to Rakhat, or any other planet with intelligent life on it.

Whoever we send are always subject to basic human error - the inability to process the vast amount of variables needed to steer a situation to a guaranteed peaceful solution. We must be content with visualizing what we as individuals would like to happen, and accepting our inability to enact these steps to reach a guaranteed solution.

Reflection: Children of God

Why is Sophia Jewish?

It's a question I've been mulling around in my head over and over again. And along with the question, my brain started supplying this Yiddish song called "Donna, Donna," the lyrics of which I only know in English. In particular, the third verse:

Calves are easily bound and slaughtered
Never knowing the reason why.
But whoever treasures freedom,
Like the swallow has learned to fly.

The song was written during the days of Nazi Germany (I believe in 1940 or so) and that notion of human beings as cattle, to be ignorantly bound and slaughtered, is a Holocaust motif that I think runs very deep in Sophia's psyche. She sees the Runa sacrificing their children to the Jana'ata and she does not see population control, she sees a travesty--she sees Nazis, rounding up men and women and children like cattle and shipping them off to Auschwitz. Since World War II, it's been an inherent part of Jewish cultural memory, and one can hardly blame her for it. But I think, in a way, it runs deeper than that.

Sophia is the only one in the first landing party that comes from a religion that does not proselytize. And yet she is the one to take serious action. I think this comes, in part, from the Jewish belief that good deeds are not buying time in the afterlife, but are important for their own sake, here and now. Jews don't believe in Hell, and notions about the afterlife are generally fairly ambiguous. Sophia therefore comes from a long line of people who act. She mentions Warsaw; my mind thought of things like Masada, Judah Maccabee, Miriam. I thought of Moses, killing the Egyptian slavemaster. And most of all I thought, as I believe I mentioned in class, of Abraham and Isaac, and the message of the story of Isaac's near-sacrifice: We do not kill children.

Phil mentioned in his post about the Jana'ata and the Garden of Eden. I thought about this too, in a way, because Jews don't believe in original sin. The Jewish concept of the Garden of Eden is as a spiritual paradise, not a physical one, and it's a place to which we can return only when we have become righteous. And even so, it does not trump good deeds done while living. The afterlife (or the possibility of an afterlife) is absolutely secondary to human action and life itself. So when Sophia steps out into that world, when she acts, she believes she is doing what is right, regardless of the logistics of population control, environment, etc.

Substantive: Children of God

Am I the only one who thinks there was something oddly touching about the way Supaari saved his daughter? And at the same time slightly troubling. I understand that, in a peculiar way, the circumstances of what happened to Emilio were the result of miscommunication (I can see how telling him that celibacy means "serving everyone" could be misinterpreted) but a society that treats other sentient beings as a form of cattle have a fundamentally different way of looking at things than we do. Or perhaps not. I suppose what I'm saying is that, by having sold Emilio into sex slavery, whether or not Supaari knew what he was, the Jana'ata was doing something that, by our standards, is morally wrong. They thrive (or at least Hlavin thrives) on Emilio's suffering.

So it confuses me that a child conceived in what is essentially an act of rape is the focus of Supaari's own peculiar form of redemption. It was an unhappy marriage and, at the beginning at least, Supaari seemed content with that, but when he sees Ha'anala, it's like everything changes. He essentially becomes a traitor to his own race. Not to mention how horrifying it is that the Runa not only take him in but volunteer to sustain him by sacrificing themselves for his nourishment. I understand that it's an act of kindness but frankly it's baffling to me.

Also: poor Emilio. We give him the opportunity for a real, lasting happiness--exempt from the struggles of his own faith, content to live a decent life, and then it's taken away from him. That moment when Gina comes back and Emilio's disappeared made me want to cry, because I knew that a) he was going back to Rakhat and b) he didn't want to. He's not Christ and, what's more, he's not an emblem for the redemption of the Society of Jesus.

Substantive: Children of God

Anyone else immediately think the title of this book should have been The Sparrow Episode II: The Emilio Strikes Back? I crave a little bit of space dog fighting these days...

Sure, Children of God doesn't feature cool space wars, but it does have one thing in great abundance: an Old Testament God. Perhaps it's once aspect of the author's own personality, but the God featured prominently in Children of God is not an infinitely loving God. Russell, while hinting at Emilio as a Jesus figure in The Sparrow, seemingly drops this pretense in her sequel; Emilio may have been resurrected, but he has assumed a more human form rather than a divine form. Emilio's suffering is no longer obviously akin to Jesus either - the battery and drugging he endures on the Bruno seem almost excessive, into the territory of a truly vengeful God.

And if we are dealing with a vengeful God, than what of Sophia? If we do take her name to be the embodiment of the wisdom of God, then her crusade against the Jana'ata could be pictured as a righteous crusade. She even imparts much of her own religion and language upon the Runa (using "Hebrew for prayer"). So, is she right to do this?

Russell makes Sophia's character very ambiguous. On one hand, Russell has purposely given her a Biblical name, and put religious power in her hands. At the same time, Russell makes Sophia a catalyst for war. A war which costs the lives of an entire species. At the end of the book, I feel quite alone in thinking that what Sophia led the Runa to do was theoretically wrong.

I made this point in my original The Sparrow reflection post - that Sophia's actions lead the resistance of the Runa against the Jana'ata was fundamentally wrong. Personally, I find the actions of Sophia in Children of God vindicating my position. Although at the time of writing my blog post I had no idea Sophia survived, it seems appropriate that Russell continued Sophia's campaign. In the end, her radical views about the Runa flipped the situation completely, and went "beyond an eye for an eye".

Just a thought

The Babel fish

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 6)

Reflection: Conquest of America

We spoke a lot in class the other day about what constitutes true understanding in cross-species communication. And one of the distinctions that we kept finding was this notion of manipulation. I mean, in Conquest of America, Columbus clearly didn't understand the Indians (to the extent that he basically kept insisting that Cuba wasn't an island) but he understood enough to manipulate them into thinking that he'd taken the moon away from them because they didn't understand the concept of a lunar eclipse. Cortes probably understood the Aztecs better--in fact, I think we voted in class that he basically exhibited greater understanding, but I think the caveat of that was that he understood them in the sense of being able to manipulate them into thinking he was Quetzalcoatl. And I started wondering, in a weird way, if that's the sense the Jana'ata have of understanding humans. Given, they seem pretty ethnocentric, but it seems like a lot of the interactions in The Sparrow have to do with the Jana'ata taking advantage of humanity--until the obvious, at the end.

I've been thinking about it a lot because we have a tendency, even in positive interactions like we see in Speaker, to think of ourselves as these horrible invaders and the alien race as basically benevolent if they don't kill or molest us. In Speaker though, both the Buggers and the Piggies do have ulterior motives for human contact--the piggies individually seek their rough equivalent of eternal life, and the Hive Queen basically hangs on to Ender so she can reestablish herself and her civilization. Is that any different or better than the whole Gold, Glory, God thing we find in early American conquest? Given, in those cases we seem to be the aggressors but I can't figure out if the nature of the conquest necessarily lends moral points to one side or the other.

I also wish we could bring up Mass Effect in class sometime. I know it's a video game but it and its mind-numbingly beautiful sequel are so immersive and well-written that I have a tendency to think of the ME universe as being roughly on par with some sort of higher-class space opera. And one of the things ME addresses is this notion of how difficult it is to deal or cope with a species that is fundamentally different. The entire first game centers around finding out about this long-defunct alien race called the Protheans and their conquest by the Reapers, who aren't actually biological but are nonetheless sentient. And the thing about the Reapers is that because they're inorganic they have this idea that it is necessary to enslave and subsequently wipe out all life. How do you argue for the relevance of humankind with something like that?

"Empathy and Violence Have Similar Circuits in the Brain"

Oi, I couldn't let this go unseen by our class. A recent article on ScienceDaily.com reports on a new neural study that shows that, "the brain circuits responsible for empathy are in part the same as those involved with violence." The study suggests that as one gains more empathy for another, the propensity for violence towards that other is reduced. Does this mean that characters like Ender aren't realistically possible? Or perhaps there are more dimensions to our analysis than we initially thought? For me, this reinforces the boundary between a kind of understanding that is simply fact based, and a kind of understanding that's more intimate and value based in nature.

I'll edit this post with any more information I find on the study - it was originally published in Spanish, but I'll try and find an English translation.

Reflection: Conquest of America

The Question of Motivation

In my last post, I asked the question "why conquer". I ultimately concluded that there's some inherent value in the human psyche, some element of being a Homo sapiens, that gave motivational force to this kind of behavior. A great deal of last class was spent attempting to delimit communication and understanding, and attempting to classify what we understand as situations which are inherently communicative. These two aspects of interaction, communication and physical action, are ultimately intimately tied together as an action-reaction sequence. The question remains what aspects of communication prompt certain reactions. What about Cortes's communication with Montezuma and the Aztecs eventually leads to genocide?

The answer to this question lies in the motivation of communication. The greatest drive in humanity is self preservation, second only to the drive to reproduce. This should be taken deeply into account when considering communication. Note: this is a prioritization, not an attempt to characterize these drives. I am not attempting to say these are brought out in any obvious manner. However, these kinds of behavior ultimately drive down to how the genes in our body function. They have been tailored by evolution to encourage self preservation behavior and reproductive behavior, or else they wouldn't exist within us. I brought this point up in class, and I think the "cynical" example of breaking down classroom communication drives this point home.

Consider a general example of a student speaking in class (instead of harping on Tim's GameFAQs example again!). What is his motivation in doing so? For ease of thought, we'll characterize him as being very concerned with academics. Therefore, a student may speak up in class for a couple of reasons. For example, he may have his teacher notice him, or he may be better able to grasp the material. Both of which directly relate to his grade. If our student gets a good grade, it'll reflect better on him. He gains social capital. If he uses to good grades to go on to get a good job, that job will pay him a higher amount. The cash he receives is also social capital, representing some of his worth as an individual. If our student makes the wrong communication, he looses his social capital (like cursing at the teacher).

Gaining social capital allows the fulfillment of our two primary motivators: self preservation, and reproduction. Our student, through his immediate means of communication, is able to project for his needs in the long term: staying alive and finding a mate. Social capital works in a human system to accomplish these ends because of our societal structure.

Then what of altruistic behavior? We'll call altruistic behavior any behavior which, superficially, appear to undermine our two primary drivers. We might consider it to be "artifacts" of the system, accidental end results of individuals attempting to accomplish the two primary drives. As I said in class, the history professor might just be publishing an amazing manuscript to gain tenure, or to gain respect among his peers, which in the end are simply forms of social capital. Individuals need not even recognize that their actions lead to the acquisition of social capital, and need not recognize their expenditure of this capital on self preservation and reproduction.

Coming full circle, what motivated Cortes? As Todorov makes mention of, Cortes's slaughter of the Aztecs certainly wasn't an immediate financial boon to him - preservation of the population could of led to profits from a slave trade. Of the 95% of the population destroyed, at least a portion of that was due to disease, not part of any kind of "motivation". On the personal level, each soldier had a very limited understanding of the Aztecs. While Todorov focuses on Cortes's understanding of the Other, it's really the individuals understanding of the Aztecs that come to bear. To the soldiers, there was no loss of social capital when they slaughtered the natives, raped their wives, and worked them to death. In many cases, there was a gain of social capital among their peers.

This gives us a good chance to delimit understanding and communication. Communication, in this context, is nothing more than a means to a personal end. Its action-reaction sequence is used to get what you want, survival and sex, albeit subtle and sometimes hidden. Understanding, conversely, may be a kind of social limiter. For a Spanish soldier, what's the difference between killing one of his Conquistador peers and killing a native? The former loses social capital, while the later either does not affect his social capital, or is a boon to his social capital. Understanding is the recognition of the worth of another through their preservation.

Substantive: The Conquest of America

One of the main features I picked up in this book (and I was trying desperately to glean information from a story I've heard half a dozen times) was this concept of communication. Columbus in particular seemed convinced of his own worldview, and refused to participate in the acknowledgment of any other. For instance, his insistence that Cuba was the mainland, and not an island, caused him to criticize and abuse the Indians who told him otherwise: "since the information does not suit his purposes, he challenges the quality of his informants" (21). Christopher Columbus wanders into the New World with his own agenda, and as a result everything he sees or thinks he sees is oddly foreordained. His whole discovery is colored by this and as a result his understanding of his own discoveries is fundamentally incomplete.

It reminded me, in a way, of the troubles a lot of people in the various novels we've read have discovered in the course of their alien encounters. The bons on Grass, for instance, base their entire society on a terminology that is fundamentally Earthbound, and therefore totally different from the actuality of the situation, to the extent that most people who try to perceive it from outside are absolutely flabbergasted. It takes Rodrigo a long time to realize that the Hippae aren't really mounts but sentient creatures, because they function to an extent in the same way that horses do.

The Conquistadors took advantage of the Indians and the fundamental social divide between the two cultures with the natural assumption that theirs was the greater and more important culture. The Museum of the American Indian, here in Washington, has walls devoted to the gold the Spaniards took from them, to the various Bibles they forced on them (while simultaneously attempting to expunge their native heritage) and a specific wall with statistics of how many Native Americans died of disease during colonization. That victory is so close to the vague one we get at the end of War of the Worlds that I couldn't help thinking: what happens when we do encounter an alien species?

I'm not sure that humankind has moved very far away from the imperialism that caused this devastating massacre. With The Sparrow we don't have this situation because the explorers were mostly scientists and clergy--it was the native population that sought to exploit them for personal gain, but that difference in communication turned out to be critical.

The way Cortes behaved with the Aztecs reminded me a lot of the Bene Gesserit and the way they took advantage of and implemented messianic legends on Arrakis in Dune. It's sort of dubious, admittedly, whether or not Cortes was actually regarded as the reincarnation of a god or messianic figure, but if it is even remotely true then Cortes took advantage of this to facilitate his own conquest.

Substantive: Conquest of America

Why conquer?

Does anyone else get the feeling that the subtitle of Todorov's book The Conquest of America should have been "The Question of Gold and Religion"? Those two subjects seem to come up quiet a bit...

Seriously though, both of these concepts (wealth and God) are inextricably tied within Todorov's historical account of the Americas, with a strong undercurrent of glory for the homeland. So, I think a pretty basic question is worth asking, and getting at an answer to this question may reveal more than expected. Why conquer? Columbus takes God and gold seriously. For him "the goal of conquest is to spread the Christian religion." Gold for the kingdom, and God for the natives.

Cortes is different though. For him, God is a way to conquer the nation, not the end goal of the conquering. Again, Todorov writes that "in practice, religious discourse is one of the means assuring the conquest's success: end and means have changed places."

It's difficult for me to entirely understand the hows and whys of these conquests. So far, I've analyzed the literature with a specific approach - that is, the naturalistic approach, assigning ecological concepts to the human and alien interactions. But here, we face a different situation. This is a purely intra-specific conflict. Can we still apply biology concepts to our own infighting?

Let's start with an even more basic question: is intra-species conflict a "natural" state? A.k.a., did it come about on it's own before humans, or can we see it in other species? Sure, there's often small scale, individual level conflict in nature, whether over mates, or food. Rare is large scale, group conflict, previously thought to be unique to humans. But we know this isn't the case any more.

A video less than 10 years old, it shows humanity is clearly not the only practitioner of war and conquest. (As a side note, play attention close to the 3:22 mark - an action familiar to the Jana'ata hitting very close to home).

For these chimps, the fruit of the tree is similar to the human concept of wealth, namely gold. They follow the same kind of form as the sailors in each expedition, pursuing one goal, one resource. But it's evident from Todorov that Columbus and Cortes have some kind of motivation beyond the purely material - motivation has moved into the spiritual realm. Is the spiritual component of their conquest simply a type of excuse for the conquerors, or an actual motivator? If there weren't any gold there, or supposed "trading opportunities", would the conquistadors even bother?

I believe that yes, the conquistadors would still conquer - that the domination of the other is an aspect of human nature, and was clearly an aspect of our ancestors which was passed onto our primate relatives. Material wealth or posession of niche resources need not be a specific goal of the conquering or attacking. This is the primary difference between interspecific conflict and intraspecific conflict: conflict among humans needs no physical goal.

Reflection: The Sparrow

Sophia was wrong, and killed herself, her baby, George, and Jimmy. She was guilty of human hubris. We cannot make her mistake.

In evolutionary biology, it's very difficult to deal with humans. So difficult, in fact, that most of time time, humans are simply not included in the equation. The classic phrase is that "humans are no longer subject to natural selection". We sometimes refer to humanity as a "welfare society". Although that has many definitions, I define a welfare society as a group of individuals who are no longer subjected to the pressure of natural selection.

In class, it was correctly identified that the development of agriculture marked humanity's passage into a welfare society. Surplus resources through agriculture allows a reallocation of priorities. The weak and sickly are allowed to live. The mind can be set towards loftier goals than food, water, and shelter. The human moral system is allowed to take hold in a significant manner; the mother with a sick child can focus on nursing her young back to health, instead of chasing herds of game.

But human welfare society is just that: human. It is unique to us. Some may argue for its recognition as a natural state, apart from nature, but I disagree with those assertions, despite my definition. Although separated from natural selection, a welfare state has its origins in a natural, ecological order. But it is this very reason why we cannot extend this welfare state beyond humans. It is rare chance that we do successfully, and when it is accomplished, it is done with species who through other means are far more adapted to such a communal lifestyle than others. Rakhat, and the Runa and Jana'ata who live on Rakhat, are not prime domestic species. We cannot extend our welfare society to them.

What happened on Rakhat is what happens all the time on Earth: humans attempt to change a system on their own biases. The gardens introduced by the humans were problematic, but could be taken care of. Within the context of Rakhat ecology, the Runa could be culled, and the gardens could be destroyed. Humans could of survived the conflict. Sofia took the human welfare society where it should not go, and tipped the delicate ecological balance of the planet too far. What Sofia did was fundamentally wrong.

The moral question Russell grapples with in The Sparrow is humanity's capability of restraining itself in the face of interspecific relationships. Yes, humanity could "fix" the Rakhat system; humanity could prevent the culling of Runa and remove the Jana'ata from power. But we already know the consequences of tampering with systems that evolved naturally; we deal with these consequences everyday on Earth. There are too many variables, too much to attempt to control. Tampering removes balance, and ends with destruction. The Jana'ata killed the Runa infants, but Sophia killed the the Runa adults fighting back. Sophia killed George and her husband through her own ignorance. It was a terrible price to pay to learn that it is impossible to include different sentient species in a human welfare society.

Reflection: The Sparrow

I talked in class (and I think, failed to make my point a little bit) about the fine line of anthropology and moral culpability. What I think I was trying to point out was that the society the Jana'ata lived in created a pretty unfortunate scenario. These third-born males have little to no outlet, being unable to reproduce, and being offered token concubines by their better-off siblings doesn't always seem to do the trick in terms of relieving their feelings of impotence and discontent. Then you get someone like Kitheri, who has made a triumph out of what we could consider perversity--his poetry is, according to Emilio, essentially pornography, and not in an ironic, Robert Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia way.

Although, if you think of the kind of rapture and connoisseurship Kitheri et al. seem to attach to their poetry, it's more akin to something like the Song of Songs than a kind of perversity. It's only that we see it from the perspective of Emilio, who was essentially treated as a beast, and what we consider morally culpable--i.e., the fact that he was brutally raped, and that his suffering was in fact a kind of aphrodisiac to the Jana'ata--but we don't know if they perceive suffering in the same way we perceive suffering. After all, we come from a planet where we force-feed geese until their liver are soft and distended. I could also mention veal...Maybe they viewed Emilio (and this has been indicated) as a kind of beast as opposed to a person--which is easy when you realize that they eat the children of the only other sentient species on the planet.

I'm not a Jana'ata apologist--I'm just trying to understand and put into perspective an act that is otherwise mind-numbingly horrifying.

Substantive: The Sparrow

Earlier this week, I got a rare chance to sit down and chat with another connoisseur of science fiction, my mother! We took this chance to talk about some of the finer points of Lem's His Master's Voice, and came to a mutual conclusion about American science fiction: things don't go nearly bad enough in first contact situations. "Of all the science fiction I've read, people seem to think first contact will go well. Trust me, things will go much worse," my mother said. The next day, I started reading The Sparrow, and realized I was about to read the story of first contact gone wrong.

After finishing The Sparrow, it's tempting to focus on the religious themes of the novel. Many stand out, in particular Emilio's role as a Christ figure, and Sophia's role as a feminine incarnation of God (thanks to Tuesday movie night for that find). The novel itself presents many faces, the religious face being one of many. But, I think the religious topic will be exhausted in class, so I'll steer clear for now. I want to highlight the aliens in The Sparrow.

Much like my mother said, first contact goes far too well in far too many situations. Star Trekkian visions of the future, as pleasingly utopian as they are, reflect poorly on reality. Case and point: after watching the ST:TNG episode "Who Watches the Watchers", it's painfully obvious that alien society will be nothing like the "proto-Vulcan" society featured in the episode. Star Trek suffers severely from human projection - a lack of cultural imagination and emotion, and we get aliens who are essentially humans.

Russell openly mocks this kind of assumption, when Anne comments that, "In Star Trek, everyone speaks English!" But even Russell suffers severely from human projections on alien culture. She designs a two cultures who are essentially bipedal apes with a penchant for living in communities, a painfully human construct. Russell brings the aliens "foreignness" to a sufficient point, at least to a point where there is a continual unease among the human party. The foreignness also serves to cause the chain reaction of tragic events which serves as the impetus for the book's climax. In the long run, though, one could simply replace "Runa" with slave and "Jana'ata" with master, and still accomplish an effective plot (which may paint The Sparrow as more of a philosophical drama than science fiction).

Lem assures us in His Master's Voice that alien life will be more foreign than we are literally capable of imaging. Russell, perhaps unknowingly, captured the greatest dangers of what Lem calls "the Rorschach test", subjecting her protagonist to the depths of human horrors for assuming the aliens were like us, for defending what we call human rights for what are clearly non-humans. It's clear that Russell's account suffers from a high degree of near-sightedness, but its message is monumental enough to disregard her flagrant human biases. Instead of the warnings Lem's scientists give us, Russell shows us. Russell, in a reflection on human history of foreign interaction, plants a sign in the sky that says "Abandon all hope ye who enter here".