Diplomatic Imperialism and The Redundancy of Form
A: DIPLOMATIC IMPERIALISM
Part One: The Impossibility of Objectivity While Human and Bound by Histories
Partly due to my longstanding fascination with speculative science fiction, and partly due to a sort of nostalgia for media I quasi-consciously encountered during pre-pubescence, as well as an active interest in discerning what influence its had on my ethics and identity, I’ve recently engrossed myself in the mythos of the 2nd generation of the Star Trek franchise (Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager) spanning the late 1980’s into the early 2000's.
A recurring trope I noticed in Star Trek is that of the “diplomatic imperialist”: an agent of a monolithic sociocultural machination who confidently strolls thru the spaces, time, and lives of unwitting or uninvolved others, imposing the monumental singularity of their voluntarily conditioned ethos — having been granted the authority to roam the galaxy from said monolith: “Starfleet Academy’” — onto everyone in the galaxy, while ardently maintaining a ridiculous/impossible commitment to noninterference.
The excuse superimposed over this serial violation of everyone and everything in the galaxy is, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no man has gone before, as is the starship captains vow, which seems, to me, a bad joke at most, and a cognitive-dissonance-suspending cover-story at least, since the overwhelmingly prevalent result is ceaseless conflict and interference.
“Starfleet”, the centuries-old peacekeeping operation backing these transgalactic expeditions, is run by a handful of easily corrupted, aging, (mostly-) white men, obsessed with starting transgalactic wars, out of paranoia that they will be attacked first by alien forces or indifferent godlike entities from elsewhere in the galaxy, which renders the central thematic instrument and plot device in the franchise a permanent, malignant subroutine embedded in the protagonists’ mission parameters.
A feminist friend of mine has recently been enthusiastically describing the events of the Peloponnesian War — as recounted by Thucydides, the wests “first historian” — to me, explaining that the Athens of late-classical Greece is a more-than-adequate parallel for the ethos of present-day America as an apparent imperialism-democracy-imperialism pattern begins to seem clearer in the modern narrative of human civilization.
After the events of World War II it became very explicitly unacceptable to openly slaughter millions of people in short spans of time, but the human impulse to Cain ones proverbial Abel (or Romulus ones proverbial Remus) has been part of our mythmaking far too long for the idea to simply disappear in one act of epiphanic respect for human life, and in the process of reining in our fratricidal impulses, new ways of slowly killing each other en masse have evolved out of the extant social systems.
It often feels like I’m doomed to keep witnessing the same cluster of mummies resurrect from the canonical catacombs, it feels hellish to me, and even in my own life, amidst an ongoing interest in dismantling the systems of domination and inequality I experience and perpetuate, the recurring elements of violent suppression seem nearly if not entirely inescapable, and maybe — if the same criticisms of human behavior are being made at 1500-year intervals — for me at least, they literally are.
Part Two: Form Fits Function and that Function is Genocide and Subjugation
Since the end of the cold war and the subsequent curbing of many millennia of nonstop imperialist campaigns, a sort of virtual imperialism has developed in the form of free market capitalism, wherein the expansion of wealth and the trading of services, products, and technologies enables a limited homogeneity to dust the top of the imperialist monolith that is “human history”, meanwhile the same loyalty, panic, and paranoia that inspired colonization of the globe is used by governments and businesses to market these services, products, and technologies, keeping populations in supply cycles that help enable the expansion of the virtual empire while limiting the real life conflict zones to the areas with the least access to services, products, and technology, and/or the native lands of the people’s and raw materials used for the same; where the will to conquer and dominate derives from traumatized, reactionary necessity in resistance against — and/or emulation of — imperialist tactics, like a kind of global pathogen.
What we see in the present is a recurrence of empire in a form dissimilar to the practice of empire: capitalist regimes push forward the ideas of respectability and marketability to subjugate and expand populations with less resources by establishing a myth that hard work will afford the hypothetical everyman the same liberties and freedom to access that the established capitalist already has, when in reality the limitation of resources, both practical and conceptual, renders the livelihood of the disadvantaged serf-like, brief, and effectively subjugated.
A Facebook friend and former university classmate with whom I’ve been having political debates for the better part of the last decade framed the hypothetical dissolution of white patriarchic imperialism by saying “so rather than attempt to navigate the huge but slow-moving ship, hope for it to crash/sink so everyone can sail on with a bunch of rafts instead”, to which I replied that a closer analogy would be that the ship is already taking on water and were still debating whether or not it will ever make landfall.
Their ship metaphor was more relevant to this essay than it may initially seem since the various stories that make up the Star Trek franchise are largely reimaginings of the ancient Homeric seafaring poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, blatantly referencing and reappropriating the tropes of ancient Greek and Roman mythologies amidst a series of otherwise negligibly meaningful stunt words and technobabble.
In keeping with ongoing Greek parallels in this analysis, it seems notable that the same Socrates who popularized the Socratic, or “dialectic method”, taught (or possibly was a pseudonym for) Plato; Plato, who popularized the notion of the transcendental “forms”, taught Aristotle, who concretized the notion of “essentialism”; Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, who became the western herald for the impending trend toward global imperialism, and though Aristotle’s ideas were largely contra-Platonic, they in no way lessened the reality that the foundation for “modern history” and “western thought” rests at the heals of the monolithic notion of the Socrates-esque philosopher/martyr betrayed by those who misinterpreted his ideas and claims as too radical and a threat to the imperialist status quo: a narrative reproduced in the canonized lives and deaths of Jesus Christ, Hypatia of Alexandria, Abraham Lincoln, Ghandi, MLK Jr., the Kennedy brothers, and most recently in the post-consumerist mythos of “the 27 club” (and in the case of Zoroaster, possibly stolen by Plato from Persia).
The reality that this dynamo of radical thought seeding power and intellectual fodder for the establishment of subsequent imperial pursuits doesn’t lead me to the notion that we should punish the conceptual child for the sins of the father, but rather that it might be more pertinent to question the very notion of “sin’: the once karmic/cumulative, now — thanks to Judeo-Christian “original sin’ — empirical status of all humanity that represents our past genocides, cannibalisms, and other intraspecies oppressions and atrocities.
B: THE REDUNDANCY OF FORM
Part Three: Parallel Evolution and the Fractal Cosmic Echo Chamber
The unlikely British imperialist parallel to the Star Trek franchise is the BBC’s Doctor Who television show, which only began airing three years earlier than the first generation Star Trek: The Original Series, and has even spawned a crossover comic book miniseries between the two franchises.
In Doctor Who the Platonic philosopher-king trope is inexhaustibly explored by way of the titular character: an effectively immortal, white, male (alien-in-name-only) explorer piloting a time machine with the help of a (usually) young, mortal, white, cis, demi-romantic, woman companion, across and outside the cosmos, encountering innumerable aliens, historic and futuristic humans, monsters, and deities, flouting the principle law of the titular Doctor’s people, which, unsurprisingly, is one of noninterference.
In both Doctor Who and Star Trek the parallels abound and persist across generations, and the use of both space and time travel in syndication could be viewed as the establishment of an intergalactic “white manifest destiny”, especially since both shows began airing around the time of the space race/cold war.
The nationalist frameworks of the respective franchises — w Star Trek setting multiple stories in San Francisco, USA, and Doctor Who, London, UK — are almost incidental when compared to the effective claim of possession/occupation placed onto the spaciotemporal hereafter by (primarily) Euro-descended men, in the form of the showrunners, writers, and producers.
It’s hard for me to imagine any precolonial — or protohominid — societies laying claim to land, space, or time, not out of a need to acquire more of a depleted resource, but based purely on the prospect of increasing the capital of an extant society, whether that be in the form of knowledge, or the services, products, and technologies of unknown cultures, however, after the initiation of this basis for pursuit (in the varied forms of religious assimilation, divine prerogative, “exploration”, and competition), there’s no definitive reason not to expand ones wealth and/or territory as far as possible, and establish myths and legends as a means to quell the cognitive dissonance of justifying the subsequent cultural, ideological, and pathological contamination, social upheaval, and violent domination of incompatible societies.
In many instances and in both shows the use of grotesque alien bodies can be viewed as a substitution for grotesque queer bodies and/or bodies-of-color as viewed from the white cis-male gaze or placeholders for grotesque acts of violence and strategic betrayal perpetrated by imperialists, masked as empirical/biological traits or “warlike natures”, necessarily held by violent alien races inclined to these kinds of suppressive or sociopathic behaviors.
Re Star Trek, by framing the narrative as occurring in a time divorced from humanities violent present — wherein even people with similar ethnocultural backgrounds fight over land and resources, while concurrently obscuring their apparent conflicts by competing in simulated war games like national and international “sports”, including competitive business ventures and award-driven applications of the arts and sciences (notably including TV production) — the entire franchise effectively distances its human or otherwise Starfleet-assimilated characters from the ongoing conflicts of today: implicitly presuming that the species will arrive at utopia thru diplomacy and intellectual pursuit and dissolve its inequality/conflict-perpetuating systems, as though it’s a given that the future will itself somehow inevitably grant all humans unlimited access to what is currently reserved for the privileged.
By positioning humanity as ethnoculturally superior to most spacefaring sentient life, the writers and actors ultimately simulate the class prerogatives now present in modern consumer-capitalism, where respectability and marketability (in the form of peace and diplomacy with regard to “Star Trek’) set the standard for worthiness: if you are incapable of retaining and transmitting a history of peaceful political resolve, you are not worthy of or entitled to life or comfort, while those who espouse to have achieved peace may engage in various types of self-serving warmongery as long as they appear conflicted in their choice to do so.
The trickledown effect this has on people living in the post-civil-rights-movement-era is that three generations of working class people watched these and similarly-framed shows on broadcast television their entire lives and have had the idea that they are not worthy of or entitled to life or comfort reinforced daily because of their perceived inability to ascend to the standards of the galactic explorer class, they are not worthy or entitled to participate in the utopian societies of the future; their dependence on monetary gains and the inescapable violence of their surroundings renders them irredeemably “alien”, and, alternately, the possibility of organizing into a coherent interdependent system is also rendered undesirable, because “the borg” in Star Trek and the “cybermen” in Doctor Who — collective hiveminds composed of humanoid drones which functionally represent the real-life monstrosity that whiteness, patriarchy, and consumer-capitalism have become — are cast as the near-ultimate evils of the universe.
The secondary effect of purporting this sort of ethic is that faith in extant systems and adherence to their protocols results in unending echoic delays in the public understanding of the cause-effect relationship their behavior has on other humans in and outside their communities, which further bifurcates the inequality gap while engendering a theology-simulating reverence for a) wealth, b) stubborn, violent, reactionary responses to sudden shifts in ethical frameworks, and c) constant terror of any threat from “the other”, which we can easily see in the many enthusiastic phobias couched in conservative philosophies across the globe, and, to a lesser extent, in the inability of all participants in capitalist-nationalist structures to imagine worlds where such ethics have been proven disadvantageous to global human interests.
Part Four: Strategies for Approaching Feasible Global Homeostasis
The dynamo at the heart of the state-corporation manifold is powered by the maintenance of massive hierarchies which are then echoed in narratives across the western capitalist web, whether it be in the form of respectability, ethical virtue, or pure intellect — all of which can be acquired at birth if assigned “male” and “white”— positioning ideologically superior individuals in juxtaposition against “the other” reinforces and encourages the reproduction of these qualitative hierarchies that then lead to the development of quantifiable ones.
The importance radical leftist movements have placed on authority figures acknowledging and declaring awareness of their complicity in atrocities and accepting the consequences of their actions as determined by the public court of opinion and/or other more qualified entities seems a functionally incoherent but emotionally intelligent demand to me, since during the height of traditional imperialism the public and more commonly the military would overthrow and frequently execute the reigning class as requisite action prior to revolution or reformation, but that course enacted on todays model of empire is not only unlikely but inevitably entails the collapse of the-internet-of-things that now maintains the infrastructure of even our simplest communication systems.
Just imagining a public who would prefer to abandon the comforts of capitalism for the sake of sustainable autonomy and ecology seems in itself a ludicrous exercise to me, and the global conflict that maintains the groundwork for the resources and privilege constructs that power these comforts keeps the military too preoccupied to prioritize or even consider overthrowing todays equivalent of the noble, clergy, or merchant classes.
What then can we do to work toward a sustainable and empire-obliterating future?
The likelihood of white supremacy ever conceding defeat is negligible, and white empire as a project itself flails around in the dark, inventing slightly different ways to see familiar paradigms and integrating the unfamiliar into itself with no reverence for its origin unless doing so suits the stability of the — aptly named by black feminist/womanist cultural critic bell hooks — monolithic “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.
If we want to enable the discontinuation of the systematized reproduction of these narrative forms we have to see them as what they aren’t: sustainable, and begin conceiving of stories critiquing and logically deriving their arcs from the dissolution — not idealistic advancement — of empire, stories that take place within the oceanic submersion of empire and dare to imagine the maintenance of its downfall, for example, Star Wars, Jupiter Ascending, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Steven Universe, and Top Wo Nerae 2: Diebuster are all science fiction worlds that frame the purposefully hidden systems of empire as “the alien other”, however, these stories ultimately asymptotically approach but cannot surpass the bleeding edge of their revolutionary spirits, because the narratives are themselves drowning in the white gaze.
An idea I frequently return to when strategizing how to increase accessibility to my work is that “structures with higher density-to-space ratios recur at higher rates”, take the concept of a star for example, at some point the early plasmic-gaseous universe collapsed in on itself and ignited into the 1st generation of stars, forming a web of gasses and stellar bodies that eventually accreted into the 1st black holes, which then organized the stars into galaxies, until the primary environment where star clusters form and coalesce was the — still fluctuating — form “galaxy”.
Currently white empire and its many ethnocultural clones represent the primary environment where human communities coalesce, but if you can imagine a galaxy eventually giving way to a different, more efficient structure, where the universal energies can be better consolidated and focused into a fluctuating but similarly coherent form, and if you can imagine that that form will require an initial instance of it cohering before it becomes the obvious one to adhere to, then you can imagine white empire giving way to the form that prioritizes living, healthy, enfranchised, Black African bodies, queer and gender-nonconforming identities, mental health, ecological sustainability, and an equal number or majority of women in leadership positions as a fundamental parameter for the continuation of the human superstructure.
