Useful speculations

One of the most salient obstacles in the resolution of any kind of conflict is the lack of empathy, the inability to understand that the demands of the counterpart might be more than pure cheekiness or trying to play us for fools, that they might have some merit and deserve honest consideration. Sometimes the encroachment of the positions can make it very difficult to even consider the position of the enemy simply by the fact that an eventual yield would strike too close to our heart to allow us to feel safe. That is where taking some distance can give us a different perspective and provide a cooler set of data that can properly inform our decision.

There are many techniques to change your point of view, but the one I like the most is the translation of the problem to a completely different context as practiced in almost every work of science fiction. In this guise, the hard working conditions of the astronauts extracting helium from the surface of the Moon can be easily related to the situation of the Welsh miners under the Thatcher government; an alien race with limited mobility under normal gravity portraits very accurately the challenges that handicapped people face every day; or the reaction to a group of Klingon in a space canteen brings to light the systemic racism that many African-Americans experience whenever they go out to have some fun.

Photo: ParallelVision on Pixabay

The advantage of the science fiction is that, in making the situations deliberately far from our own, it helps removing or attenuating our prejudice. In the same way that proof reading your own text is much less efficient than asking someone else (because you will miss some of your own errors in the same way that you wrote them wrong the first time), judging a situation while being one of the parts involved is not very helpful. There are many examples, but this blog entry showcases some ads which were violently sexist back when they were published but this fact becomes much more visible when the roles are reversed. The French director Eleonore Pourriat also released in 2010 a short film called "Oppressed Majority" (which, incidentally, got viral only in 2014) depicting a society ruled by women where men take care of the kids, were balaclavas (instead of headscarves) and get wolf-whistled on the streets.

However, in most cases the situations in science fiction books and series do not map to actual conflicts and instead serve the purpose of what the problems and possible avenues of resolution would be in hypothetical situations. Yesterday evening Karen and I watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine entitled "Children of Time" where the crew of the spaceship Defiant finds life signatures in a yet-unexplored planet. When they go on the surface, they discover a colony of roughly 8000 people who bear their very own family names because they are their descendants. When leaving the planet after the exploration, they are supposed to hit a "time anomaly" that would make them jump 200 years back in time and crash land on the planet again, making them the seeds of the colony they have just discovered.

Apart from the intricacies of the plot, the end result is that the whole crew (48 people) have to decide between taking the "regular" way out of the planet, hit the time anomaly, travel back in time and fall back to the planet to establish the colony (and never see their families again), or take a different route, avoid the time anomaly and let the 8000 inhabitants of the colony "disappear" in the new timeline, where they would have never existed. What would you do?

It is tempting to spoil the ending by telling what the crew decided, but instead I will admit that I would have a hard time making that decision myself: on the one hand it would be very difficult spending the rest of my life wandering how Karen and the kids did from the moment I was not there, because it would certainly upend their lives and force them to change many things; on the other hand, coming back to my life and letting the colony die would transform them in constant reminders of how selfish I had been. As I mentioned yesterday, the definition of who is "us" your primary circle of caring, those who would deserve almost any sacrifice, is not a trivial question.

Luckily, I did not have to take such a decision yesterday and I hope never to have to. But I can assure you that, should I be faced with a similar situation, the time I have devoted to thinking about the matter would certainly help me in making up my mind. And if I never have to make use of these insights, at least they have been intriguing from a philosophical point of view. I hope you have a nice evening.