Did It Have to be That Way?

Somehow I missed Sunday's post. So for all you faithful blog-followers out there in internet-land, this is going to be part 1 of a two-installment attempt to catch up with my post-count, as well as discuss our class on Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and examine that thought alongside Todorov's The Conquest of America.

One of the topics that kept coming up in our discussion on Thursday was the question of whether humans have the right to impose their values on an alien culture. During that discussion, I kept slipping into a familiar (Schmitt) mind-set that when two societies meet each other, the more technologically powerful society will naturally impose its beliefs and morals on the other society. I wanted to argue that in this situation, the humans should not give way to Jana'ata morals, since human practices and thoughts have already changed life on Rakhat forever. They should merely try to escape alive, cutting their own losses from the inevitable exploitation of the Runa and Jana'ata. Thinking like Schmitt is sort of a scary label to apply to yourself, so I want to re-evaluate my original position.

On Thursday someone brought up the fact that the humans in The Sparrow, while scientists, do not handle the situation scientifically. They fall in love with Rakhat, a planet that is so similar to Earth they forget that it is an entirely alien world, ecosystem, and culture, with entirely different values. A more rigorous scientific mindset would have helped their contact with Rakhat. The Jesuit mission to Rakhat often suffers from errors resultant from impatience or non-rigorous scientific standards. Marc and Sofia, forgetting to check the fuel in the lander, maroon the mission on Rakhat. Anne, an anthropologist, somehow fails to even recognize the significance of "giving agriculture" to a society. With almost no knowledge of Jana'ata culture or language, they decide to go to the city. Here the problem is "they should have sent a scientist," or at least someone willing to put up safeguards against cultural contamination, a la Speaker for the Dead. Setting up a separate camp or settlement, taking time to understand Jana'ata society, learning the language, listening to some of the radio signals after learning Jana'ata language; all would have been improvements.

Even abandoning the "us or them" line of thought leaves the truth we discussed in class that an unknown party should be assumed hostile until more knowledge is obtained. Even the seemingly friendly Runa should have been kept at a distance. Once the humans become stranded on Rakhat, they make almost no attempt to keep their technology or even their way of life away from the Runa.

What is most at issue here is the intersection of cultures. The humans seem intent on avoiding war or conflict with the Rakhati, but they overlook the fact that cataclysm might arise from the meeting of two cultures whether or not ill intent is involved. It seems, in The Sparrow, that the largest error was the human attempt to contact the society first, without studying it from a distance, studying the planet on a larger scale. Remote observation from orbit around Rakhat would certainly have been possible. Their underestimation of the volatility of alien culture is the flaw that destroyed them.