Jesus & the Prime Directive

“Are we growing into a civilization governed by the Prime Directive? Or are we finally heeding Jesus’ call to keep off the grass?”

“The Prime Directive, or Starfleet General Order 1, is the foundational, non-interference principle of the Star Trek United Federation of Planets. It prohibits personnel from influencing or intervening in the natural, cultural, and technological development of alien civilizations…” (Wikipedia)

Wisdom is universal and eternal; but expressions of that Wisdom vary by culture and era and, who knows, perhaps by species, chemistry, planet or galaxy as well. In that light, Starfleet General Order 1 makes a useful contribution. But we should not lose sight of the fact that it restates an expression of Wisdom at least two millennia old:

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…” (Lord’s Prayer )

If it is not immediately obvious why these two statements are semantically equivalent, you may be forgiven – forgiven because these two pearls connect only through the mediation of an obscure 6^th century BCE Greek philosopher (Anaximander) and his less obscure 20^th century avatar (Heidegger). Intrigued?

Homo Sapiens did not evolve in isolation. We exist only in the context of community and community comes about only when you and I grant each other ‘reck’ (i.e. recognition, deference). We grant reck when we sublimate our own interests to those of another. I ‘make space’ for you; and when you, simultaneously and without any expectation of reciprocity, make space for me, then voila, we have community!

The unobvious opposite of ‘reck’ is ‘trespass’. Instead of making room for you to emerge and grow, I impinge upon you, stunt your growth, expropriate your property and perhaps cut short your stay or even abort your arrival. In short, I ‘trespass against’ you. We ask God to overlook, to overcome, to forgive all our trespasses, i.e. all the ‘days and ways’ we use to limit others’ being, growth, or optimization (“be all that you can be”).

“As we forgive those who trespass against us.” Forgiving others’ trespasses is granting them reck, granting and forgiving being two sides of the same coin.

“Whatever you bind on earth (in time) will be bound in heaven (eternally) and whatever you lose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matt. 18: 18)

God operates in the world through the world. Granting reck and forgiving trespasses, we become co-creators and co-redeemers with God. When we forgive, we operate in loco Dei.  We realize God’s eschatological objective in a concrete context.

What happens in spacetime ‘happens’ (potentially at least) in eternity: “On Earth as it is in Heaven.” Forgiveness of others is Step One in the process of universal reconciliation and redemption.

We’ve come a long way since Anaximander, 2500 years to be exact, but our progress has not been entirely fortuitous. The local (in space & time) successes of our engineers and our generals have convinced us that qualia (values) are best realized when imposed externally, not cultivated internally or agreed mutually. 

We have built an entire language around this ethic. Sentences are our ‘quanta of meaning’ and in modern Indo-European (IE) languages, most sentences connect a subject with an object through the mediation of an active (or passive) voiced verb.

In the raging ‘60s, Marshall McLuchan famously said that ‘the medium is the message’. Extending that insight, we can say that the structure of language (medium) determines what is communicated (message) through that language.

Example: A baseball bat and ball are lying together on the ground. We immediately imagine someone using the bat to hit the ball which we would express as “the bat hit the ball” (subject-verb-object) or “John hit the ball with the bat”.  We do not consider that the two artifacts might have an entirely different relationship:

Perhaps we are playing a darts-like game where the object is to throw the ball from a distance to hit the bat. Or the object of the game is to balance the ball on the knob of the bat for as long as possible or to use the bat as a chute, seeing how far you can roll the ball at a 45° angle before the ball hits the ground.

Inquisitive? Use the bat as a tool to crack open the ball so you can explore its rubbery core and the clump of elastic string tightly wound around it. Hostile? Attach the ball to the end of the bat and use it as a mace. Cheeky? Place the objects in the royal nursery and watch them instantly transubstantiate into orb-and-scepter. Pragmatic? They form a clock ‘hand’ worthy of Big Ben…or a measuring rod for surveyors. Add a swivel and you have ‘spoke and rim’ construction.

When writing a message on a deserted beach for a passing plane to read, use our combo to create the letter ‘i’ or better yet, as the exclamation mark ‘!’ at the end of “Help!”

But to fully understand the semantic range of a ‘sphere and cylinder’, hand the ball and bat (taking all necessary precautions of course) to a 3 year old; she will show you things you can do with them that neither you nor I could possibly imagine.

Civilization evolves organically and holistically. Our need for tools and weapons prompts us to scan the environment for suitable objects. We name those objects, we transform them, and we create a language around their role in hunting, herding and construction. Language, in turn, draws our attention to additional objects that might thrive in our technosphere. 

Like the set of a Disney movie, our ho-hum world is instantly transformed into a wonderland of obstacles and tools, somehow magically suited to our projects; our language itself is one such talisman.

The traditional values of Beauty, Truth and Justice are reinterpreted in context as Efficiency, Efficacy and Economy.  We have embedded this ethic in our language; we have divided the world into intentional actors (subjects), passive ‘beneficiaries’ (objects) and their transformations (verbs).

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It doesn’t have to be like this…and it isn’t. Ancient IE languages and some modern non-IE languages have a much richer and more deeply expressive syntax. Ancient Greek and Old Norse, for example, had a dominant Middle Voice that interprets events as products of mutuality rather than agency. In such a grammar, nouns are co-subjects and co-objects, verbs are recursive, and process is reciprocating.

A variety of non-IE languages, some perhaps with Neolithic roots (e.g. modern Basque), solve the problem of Active Voice bias by different means. For example, Basque uses ergative-absolutive alignment (rather than the nominative-accusative system universal in IE languages).

In ergative grammar, the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb both take the absolutive case, which has no suffix — it's the bare form of the word, the root. The implication is that this is the primordial case: being, not doing.

The subject of a transitive verb (doing) takes a different case entirely — the ergative, marked with the suffix -k. Ergativity is found in other languages worldwide (Chechen, Tibetan, many Australian languages, some Mayan languages) but is completely absent from the IE family.

Another grammatical feature characteristic of Basque and, perhaps, certain Neolithic languages, is polypersonality - a single verb form simultaneously encodes the person and number of the subject, the direct object, and the indirect object. The verb also encodes the tense, aspect, mood, and the social register (formal vs. informal, and in informal speech, the sex of the person addressed). Polypersonality is found in other unrelated language families, perhaps most notably, in the indigenous languages of North America and the Arctic Rim.

Let’s revert to our original example: ‘John hit the ball with the bat’. There is just one event here; it is a singularity in space and time. But our IE syntax breaks down that event into its participants and presents it as something that unfolds in time.

Our language draws attention away from the event itself and focuses instead on its various parties (John, bat, ball; it distorts a quantum event so that it appears to occupy a region of spacetime. This is a highly structured view of reality that requires a library of metaphysical assumptions.

Ergative, polypersonal, and middle voiced languages are more respectful of the ontological integrity of the event itself. This cross cultural analysis of language shines a light on a familiar problem: the chicken or the egg! Ergative, polypersonal, and middle voiced languages see the event as primary and its participants as secondary. On the other hand, our modern IE languages reverse the gestalt: participants are primary, events secondary.

Who am ‘I’? An intentional subject who makes things happen…or the distillation of a process? Philosophically, the Middle Voice paradigm is reflected in the philosophies of Anaximander, Buber, and Whitehead (among others). But how does any of this connect to Jesus or the Prime Directive?

Modern IE is the language of imperialism – military, political, economic, cultural and spiritual. That is why our ‘Enlightened’ civilization (1492 – 1969) was so determined to convert ‘savages’ and ‘heretics’ to the ‘right shade’ of Christianity…and to exterminate all others.

After Columbus and Machiavelli at least, all history is the history of trespass. Our so-called ‘explorers’ raised cultural, and sometimes ethnic, genocide to an art form, all in the name of God and civilization.

Columbus was the anti-Kirk. Far from preserving indigenous culture, its extermination was Job One. It was not until the global Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s that diversity was recognized as something worth preserving.

The advent of political liberalism in the second half of the 18^th century extended only to propertied while males of European extraction, the guardians of modern Indo-European. It became the life’s work of the post WWII generations to extend the franchise to people of different classes, races, genders, cultures and even perhaps to some non-human life forms; we are still in the middle of this process with no defined end in sight.

Are we growing into a civilization governed by the Prime Directive? Or are we finally heeding Jesus’ call to keep off the grass, i.e. to avoid trespassing against others and to forgive those who trespass against us? Either way, we are hopefully in the throes of the greatest cultural transformation in 500 years…or not!