The Quandry of Moral Relativism as Pertains to Extraterrestrials

Why the Wait?
Standig Explains Why Delays Required for Imminent Contact

One week after confirming authenticity of the "star-pod", Oxford University's renowned socio-ethicist Dr. Philip A. Standig was appointed head of a hastily assembled Global Commission on Extraterrestrial Diplomacy (GCED). The group includes some of the world's finest minds, including linguists, code-breakers, futurists, successful ambassadors, biologists, mechanical and aeronautics engineers and medical practitioners.

"Despite the fact that we have yet to understand completely the contents of the star-pod," stated a representative of GCED in their first release, "We are clear on the basic message. The star-pod was intelligently designed as a capsule by which a foreign race could concisely represent itself to an unknown entity. In this case, us."

Later reports remained vague as to the intention of the star-pod, except for the latest statement on Tuesday, which indicated that we should "not see this as a warning" but implies that the human race would do well to prepare itself for a possible follow-up.

I sat with Dr. Philip Standig in his first interview after the star-pod's arrival. He is disarmingly young for his credentials, but speaks with the sort of measured calmness befitting a more more practiced public official. The traces of fatigue in his face are no match for the ambition in his voice. Standig has taken quite a bit of heat for suggesting that we stay grounded after the CIA declassified their fleet of K-14 spacecraft. Now, for the first time, he explains why:

Q: Let's get right to the point, Dr. Standig. The star-pod poses an imminent threat to life on Planet Earth. With this sort of time-crunch, why are you so insistent that we simply do nothing?

A: I'm going to have to correct two assumptions in that question. First, the star-pod itself is no threat to our planet, none whatsoever. It has been thoroughly examined for every possible form of reactive, malignant technology and been deemed safe, even for direct contact with GCED. The star-pod indicates what we have previously been unable to confirm, and that is, intelligent life beyond earth. This is our source of fear, not the pod. The threat is perceived, and should not be assumed without further evidence. Second, I have not suggested that we "do nothing", only that we refrain from preemptive attack. First impressions are irreplaceable. If we strike them as a warlike people, we may never be able to regain their confidence.

Q: But they are headed our way, are they not? Shouldn't we be prepared for any threats leveled against us?

A: Yes and no. The pod's tracking device does indicate that it was launched from a larger body which was moving, more slowly, in the direction of our solar system. But I do not think this can logically be construed as aggression. If the life-form had hostile ambitions, why would they send us a pod which not only foretold their destination, but informed us of their precise location?

Q: But you aren't discounting the possibility, right?

A: No. The possibility remains under serious consideration.

Q: So, given that, what are you doing to prepare for this? What is taking so long?

A: I have to remind you that GCED has been in existence for less than a week. The problem is not logistical, but philosophical. When you think about it, humans have never been confronted with this form of moral structuring. I do not think it is too prudent to draft a basic doctrine of ethics before we proceed.

Q: Dr. Standig, mankind has dealt with issues of conflict and negotiation since we stood on two legs. I don't see how redrafting our ethical standards would involve anything new, especially when there are far more diligent measures -

A: (interrupting) I have to stop you there, I'm afraid. Inter-human conflict resolution is entirely different from the scenario we face now, for a variety of reasons.

Q: Explain.

A: With some fluctuation, domestic legal systems and diplomatic relations between nations have been based on a secular humanist ideology. That is not to say that every nation holds a secular government, but rather, international communication necessitates that individual players broaden their scope beyond religious doctrine. It is, as I've said, absolutely necessary for trade, diplomacy, alliance, every form of positive cooperation. Most wars involve some element of unwillingness to concede to secular ethics. Religious doctrine is untestable, and moral beliefs based solely on said doctrine cannot be demonstrated to a group outside of that religion. As a result, one country, unable to work within a moral structure that does not directly involve religious doctrine, simply cannot see eye to eye with another country of a different religion. It's quite simple.

Q: There are many examples of different theocracies having similar laws, and even co-operating.

A: Yes, but in every case this involves some sort of ethical overlap. The overlap most often occurs in instances where the values are not only shared by those religions, but by the secular community as well. They are demonstrable. For better or worse, I tend to think better, our most common values as a global society are those which improve the quality of life in a tangible way. They are largely agreed upon despite your background. In other words, whether spiritually or pragmatically motivated, they are "humanist".

A: The star-pod is not human in origin.

Q: That's exactly the point.

A: But how are we to project our ethics on a form of life which we know absolutely nothing about? Isn't humanism the best template, given we have nothing else to go on?

Q: Again I have to say yes and no. I don't have the answers yet, so I admit that my concern may be problematic.

A: Yes, so what does this have to do with our very real situation? We don't have time to theorize, we need a plan.

Q: Fair enough. The problem is this. Humans cannot, as theologians suggest, really agree on a universal standard of morality. First, the standard is not so universal as we like to think. Even the most common assumptions of criminal law, such as the wrong-ness of murder or theft, are not shared by every government of every country in every case. Take the Western world. We are relatively similar in our value system, yet our value system is not shared by every agent in society. Some people do not think murder is wrong, despite our court system which says it is.

Q: Those people usually deranged though, they're sociopaths.

A: Sociopath, yes, but how to you define deranged? Our most common indicator of mental illness is that-which-is-not-like-the-majority. Who are we to say that murder is wrong?

Q: It is wrong.

A: But we must accept that we consider it wrong because the vast majority - not all - of us believe it is wrong. We must accept that nothing is absolute. Nothing is ever unanimous. We, a secular government, base our laws only on the most popular assessment of ethical standards. Those less popular assessments, sticky issues like abortion or euthanasia, ricochet wildly through our legal system and create quite a flummox! They are never without heated contention. But even if the most egregious acts, say, child pornography, gained wide and popular acceptance, we would have to accept that it is "right". No doubt the small remaining minority would be quite passionate that it is wrong, but nonetheless...

Q: So what are the implications for extraterrestrial contact?

A: It goes like this: If you remove God from the equation, as I feel you must when considering mankind holistically, there is no objective moral standard. Humans generally create their ethics based on the needs of their own survival. If you zoom out far enough, self-interest is a good thing.

The foreseeable result of wanton and unregulated violence between humans, especially in a post-nuclear age, is the extinction of the human race.

Or say we turn our violence against animals. If we disrupt the food chain of which we are a part, we face serious, if not lethal, repercussions.

Or say we turn our violence against the planet, against the natural resources we enjoy. We shave off the ozone, we burn. We melt the ice-caps, we drown. We flatten the rain-forest, we degrade our air quality and lose, permanently, potential medical discoveries that could save our lives.

The earth is not at stake. We are. The danger of our actions falls directly upon our own heads. Once we are gone, the earth will rebuild. This planet's unfettered conditions naturally support life, and it will do so with or without us.

So ultimately, every action we take, moral, immoral, or amoral, is self-afflicting. There is nothing we could do that is worse than total self-destruction. On the grand scale, that's not so bad. Life on earth only has value to life on earth. Humanity only has value to humans. It has always been this way. Our moral standard is a contingent structure that always - not sometimes - always, gets back around to us.

But what now? A foreign agent, something outside this closed circuit of earth-ethics, has made contact with us.

So we pack up our K-14 spacecraft, we ready our nuclear missiles, and we head into the great open universe.

What happens to our ethics then? How do we begin? How to we wager our livelihoods outside of this reciprocal system?

And moreover, what is our worth?


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Black and White Television

Being that this particular subject was inspired almost entirely by Race Class and Gender by Paula Rothenburg (1), and more specifically by the essay "Racial Formations" by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, it may be more fair to call it a response text.

This paragraph caught my eye on page 17:

"Film and television, for example, have been notorious in disseminating images of racial minorities which establish for audiences what people from these groups look like, how they behave, and "who they are". The power of the media lies not only in their ability to reflect the dominant racial ideology, but in their capacity to shape that ideology in the first place. "

This phenomenon isn't specific to racial minorities, as anyone with a liberal arts degree can attest, wincing as they touch the bump on their head where they were repeatedly beaten with post-modernism.

Before the advent of mass media, race and culture were primarily experiential. According to this same essay, before the late 1700's there was really no concept of black vs. white in America. Without going into too much unnecessary detail, color differences were largely exploited by the wealthy elite to keep the slave class (at one time, poor whites, too, were slaves) from uniting in rebellion. Thus race was largely manufactured, as it still is today (2).

Racial politics is not really my area, I'll be the first to admit. I generally rely on things I read to tell me what's going on. What interests me is how race pertains to media studies, or, in this case, how black people in television affects black culture.

There are two reasons that African Americans make a good case study.

First, and most obvious, they have made more strides in television than any other ethnic group while still retaining minority status (3). They have their own channel, which I'll disregard, because everyone has their own channel. They have been making deep inroads in film and television since the seventies. By this I mean, mainstream, primetime television specifically contextualized around black life in America. Most, if not all of these shows, had at least one black person working as a producer or writer. I'm not saying it's perfect, as many of these shows were still created by white people, but it is substantial. We are just beginning to see this develop with Latino culture, and we have yet to see it with any other American racial group.

Second, anyone who reads this and has horrible college flashbacks of dead horses will know that in the age of post-modernism, TV is a feedback loop. Put simply, television producers glean what they can from pre-existing popular culture to write shows that they think people will like. People take their cues from television and mimic it in popular culture. Television producers act on these initiatives to create yet more distilled, hyper-realized television truths which in turn create the culture that they mimic. At a certain point it becomes unclear, and in fact, impossible to discern who's mimicking whom. African-Americans, I'd venture to say, have been dealing with a similar culture war for centuries, as they were unwillingly assimilated into this country and given artificial mandates about who they are. The result is, even today they struggle to assume an identity that is their own - yet not reactionary.

"Racial Formations" goes on to say (still on page 17)

In US television, the necessity to define characters in the briefest and most condensed manner has led to the perpetuation of racial caricatures, as racial stereotypes serve as shorthand for scriptwriters, directors and actors, in commercials, etc. Television's tendency to address the "lowest common denominator" in order to render programs "familiar" to an enormous and diverse audience leads it regularly to assign and reassign racial characteristics to particular groups, both minority and majority.

The "lowest common denominator" may look racially motivated, but at heart it is economic. Most television today takes no leading role in creating newer, healthier attitudes toward the "other", but rather reflects the simplest assumptions made by the largest number of people. This is especially true in sitcoms, which are largely situational comedies with little time for character development. I say it isn't racially motivated because, where the profit margin is involved, no one is safe. As a woman, I turn on the television and learn that my gender is slutty, catty, idiotic, petty, judgmental, humorless, and obsessed with babies and weddings. As a straight man, you turn on the television and learn that you are obsessed with sex, a simian couch potato with no common sense, no complexity, and no passions other than sports.

The problem of whites controlling black television is obvious. But black media professionals face a more unique dilemma. If I were a black person, I would want my ethnic identity to be preserved in the transition to popular media, but ways that are neither pejorative nor assimilated into “white” culture. It's the eternal dilemma, blending without forfeiture, yet remaining distinct without isolation.

Pulling from an unlikely source, I recently read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (5). There is no way to tell you how interesting this book is, just go read it. What pertains here is how McCloud details the gradual movement of images from physical representation to iconic representation. As this happened, the images grew simpler and simpler. Instead of, for example, many thin swooshy lines trying to look like movement, you had strong, thick lines that symbolizes movement. I would argue that because of this country's racial history, dark skin has become iconic (7). In the brief moments of co-habitation before people had time to develop this specific prejudice, the appearance of blackness meant you came from Africa. Now, far removed from Africa, the appearance of blackness signals a long list of character traits that may or may not have anything to do with the actual person. Conversely, the actual person is faced with the unweildy task of defining and redefining their race every day as a living symbol (7). This is how "blackness" has come to be "shorthand".

So, how do black TV writers, directors and producers deal with this issue? Could you say that their hand in mainstream television has advanced black culture? I would say yes, but not in perfect way. Black is still "iconic", meaning, "reductionist". I made a list of a few popular television shows with all black casts with at least one black person behind it. Then I made a list of popular television shows which are mostly all white with one or two black characters. It seems to me that in both cases, "blackness" is a significant part of the equation, but in all black shows, a significant effort is made to "normalize" blackness, whereas in white shows with black characters, blackness is used for emphasis or contrast (6).

Black television marketed to white people is a particularly curious thing. Take Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which is almost a cult classic among white people (to the extent that that's often the only "rap" most white people know). It features a somewhat sterilized street kid who is supposed to represent black urban culture with his garish, brightly colored graffiti name and sideways baseball cap, coming to life with his stuffy, naive, and obscenely rich black relatives.

The conflict between them represents many things. Imagine if the Banks family was white. They would seem like an almost extreme version of whiteness, wouldn't they? Yet they are black, and in so being they represent the clash within black culture itself. Furthermore, setting the Banks family opposite an imminently like-able Will normalizes black culture on both ends. There is something of a debate in the black community over whether people like the Banks (to use an extreme, fictional example) are insulting because they "act white", or if community blacklash against "acting white" is merely a symptom made up by white people to account for their own racism (8).

Do these shows represent an attempt to de-stigmatize African-Americans? Do they succeed or do they just make them white for easy consumption? That's not a thing I can answer. But I do have a sneaking suspicion that a deeper representation of blacks - not an iconic one - would not look like this. But then again, 20 minute episodes rarely allow for depth of any color.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but black presence in television interests me because my life's goal is to improve access to the media machine for all under-represented groups. African Americans have done quite well for themselves already, so they give us an idea of what it looks like when alternative perspectives enter mainstream (mainstream still being primarily white-male dominated). What are the complications? What are the dangers to the original culture? What does equal representation actually look like? Have we even begun to achieve it?

This is not fair representation in television for television's sake. I am not trying to artificially inject the entertainment world with my values. It's pragmatically crucial because, as I said earlier, television creates culture. Not just television. All media. If we continue to whitewash it, if we continue to grow gender, class, race, orientation, locations, etc to mythical proportions then the ideology of the masses will reflect that myth.

Only one thing is clear. The only way that media can dispel harmful myth and facilitate complexity, not just of race but of any stigmatized demographic, is to let people speak for themselves and allow for a wider range of voices on the creative end of media. I don't think this is artificial. I think rich white male hegemony is artificial. Diversity is a method by which we can dismantle that artifice, not to mention make television more interesting.

1) Race Class and Gender...

2) described in great detail in "Racial Formations", you should really check it out.

3) I'm disregarding Jewish people, while not completely free and clear of discrimination, essentially became white after WWII, when every racist in America was grabbing their awkward collars.

4) Baudrillard, my fave post-modernist.

5) Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

6) I didn't include many specific examples in the interest of space. It's still an issue, keeping things short. Working on it!

7) This isn't offered as proof of point, but this relevant Daria clip is an insightful illustration. Good stuff starts at 1:15. I'd like to point out the iconography of blackness. Jodie has to represent, or symbolize, her entire race, whereas Daria has only to speak for herself. It's a rather unfair burden.

8) One example: "Acting White" Also, more lengthy: http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/3212736.html

Just Marvelous