“Societies entertain such morals as they can afford.”
That’s not an exact quote, and for the life of me I can’t remember if it’s Heinlein or Herbert. Probably the former (or maybe someone else entirely). It’s a sentiment that makes me chafe: I don’t like it, I don’t want to believe it.
I am convinced, on the evidence, that human beings are innately moral, innately cooperative, innately altruistic overall (allowing for individual differences). I am convinced of this because the human animal not only survives but thrives in company, rather than autonomously, and the archaeological record bears this out. Still, it is a fact that the lure of cooperation weakens with the diminishing of resources, and individual differences in the persistence of cooperative behavior inevitably surface in any group in the face of this diminishing.
Why is he telling us this?
I’m telling you this because in the year 2399, it looks like the Federation is beginning to fray around the edges.
The premise of the new Star Trek: Picard is that the benign United Federation of Planets is beginning to shake apart: following the obliteration of Romulus, a wave of anti-immigration sentiment is rising, and even our beloved Starfleet is shedding its humanitarian impulses. The fleet yards at Utopia Planitia on Mars have been blown to pieces by rogue androids, triggering a corresponding wave of prejudice against artificial life. The Neutral Zone has collapsed, and both the Federation and Starfleet have abandoned the frontier worlds near the border that it once protected, leaving their defense to the vigilante Fenris Rangers (who include Voyager’s Seven of Nine).
The Federation is no longer the happy place it was. While there are characters to spare who still embrace that core commitment to cooperation - Picard, of course, leading the charge - this scenario still chafes me.
An aggressive journalist and Starfleet’s C-in-C both claim, in harsh exchanges with Picard, that the salvation of the Romulans was abandoned as a matter of limited resources.
Limited resources?
This is the Federation we’re talking about! Ships that travel many times the speed of light! Transportation that disassembles the traveler into energy and reassembles them as matter! Alcoves in the wall that deliver any requested object - clothing, pottery, dinner, or tea-earl-grey-hot - assembling it from scratch out of starter matter in seconds.
In such an energy-rich economy, how can resources be limited?
Well, of course they’re not limited on Earth, the center of the Federation, where people still beam hither and yon like they’re riding the bus; but we can wonder if that energy-rich economy persists throughout the Federation’s inhabited worlds. On its borders, with 900 million Romulan refugees pouring over the Rio Grande, probably not so much.
The deficit is easily explained by Treklore, and gives us insight into our own fraying times.
While there’s plenty of solar scattered around 24th century Earth (even the surface of the Golden Gate Bridge), we know that planets, starships and space stations are powered by antimatter. And we know that the efficiency of antimatter reactions is derived from the energy-focusing properties of dilithium [and, we presume pergium, cooperatively mined on Janus VI by human and Horta]. We know that one of Starfleet’s top priorities is securing sources of both minerals.
If dilithium is becoming scarce, then, per Heinlein, the societies of the Federation will be able to entertain less morality.
And this pulls us back into our own reality. Physicist Jeremy England gives creedence to the value of dilithium and its morality-inducing, cooperation-enhancing properties with a simple idea: that matter is condensed energy (per Einstein), and that it has an inherent tendency to become energy once again. It will optimize its molecular structure to dissipate energy as efficiently as possible. This explains ocean currents, tornadoes, snowflakes, and - wait for it! - crystals.
If England is right, this idea - which he calls dissipative adaptation - explains the evolution of life. Organic matter dissipates energy more efficiently than anything else. Rocks spread energy, but trees spread energy better; and reproducing trees - forests - spread energy better still.
Organic beings can rearrange matter and dissipate energy magnificently, doing so with intent - the non-random construction of energy dissipation systems that will continue their activity indefinitely. Conscious organic beings have the capacity for cooperation; and cooperative conscious beings are able to dissipate energy more efficiently, and on grander scales - from canals to cattle ranches to power grids - than anything else in the universe.
When were human beings in their greatest state of equilibrium, in the battle against entropy? One hundred thousand years ago and more, when our communities were small and manageable in size, our landscape unimaginably abundance with energy we could easily harvest - from huge mammals that could feed us for weeks to the hundreds of plants, growing everywhere, that we could easily gather and consume - and our cooperation had the fewest barriers.
It is ironic that we now inhabit a world that is still more energy-rich, yet our cooperation is diminished; more ironic still that our lack of cooperation derives from that abundance.
That’s the difference between the Federation of 2399 and the Earth of 2020: the Federation’s moral hesitation can owe to diminishing energy distribution resources; ours derives from the hoarding of resources and the mis-distribution of energy by those exploiting the abundance.
And it’s in this context that the value of our purest morality becomes clear: our Paleolithic ancestors stood and fell together; we do not, we pick and choose, and thereby separate benefit of all from the benefit of one. The needs of the many...
We can only be the universe’s optima by acting together. We can only know that we will persist tomorrow if we remain united today. We cannot abandon our role in ordering reality for any reason - and that is what we do when we abandon one another. If the human animal is the ultimate custodian of energy, then the lowliest among us is precious beyond measure.
I remember talking with a high school buddy in 1991, the glory days of Star Trek: TNG, marveling over how a short, bald, politically correct Frenchman had turned out to be way cooler than Captain Kirk. Now we know why.
He’s the very last to turn from principle. He won’t let any diminishing anything stand between him and the right thing to do.
He’s the Paleolithic chieftain. A leader for all times.
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