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The Superhero Handbook
A Do-Gooder's Guide to Saving the Planet A Book in Progress by Glenn Campbell Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Production Notes This is a DRAFT document, and everything here is subject to editing. Your feedback is encouraged! FamilyCourtGuy<at>gmail.com |
A fourth essential concept is the "Prime Directive"—the Star Trek principle of non-intervention. According to Starfleet mandate, space travellers must not interfere in the development of primitive civilisations, even to the extent of revealing their existence. No matter how pure ones intentions may be, any transfer of techology or information is bound to have disastrous effects. You don't give guns or even life-saving medicine to cave men, lest the equilibrium of their society be disturbed. At least until a civilisation achieves the Warp drive on its own, it must be left to evolve independently.
The same principle can be applied to interventions on Earth. When you encounter a primitive society or a dysfunctional family, "helping" them may not necessarily be wise, because it is difficult to anticipate the ultimate results of your actions.
Imagine you were an alien (which you are) who had stumbled upon Earth for the first time. Given how messed up this planet obviously is, would you choose to intervene? There is plenty of needless suffering here, and an alien race probably has the technology to address some of the immediate causes of this suffering, but at what cost? Remember that adjustment is likely to create a new problem for every one that technology solves. The essential problems of Earth are not technological but social and political, and it is not clear that an alien race could help even if they wanted to.
It is a natural law of the universe that you are responsible for the effects of your actions—i.e., if you make a mess, it is your duty to clean it up. If you pass the planet by and take no action, then it's not your mess. If you choose to intercede, then to some degree Earth becomes your problem, your mess, even if you did not create the initial crisis.
We can call this process "implication." By attempting to intervene in someone else's problem, you become implicated in it—that is, you automatically incur some legal and moral liability for the outcome. For example, if you rescue someone once, you automatically create an expectation that you will save them again. If you try to rescue someone and fail, then you could be sued for any bad effect that might be traced to your actions. Any Good Samaritan is bound to run into this liability conundrum. You see a desperate problem and try to help, but by doing so you could place yourself in jeopardy or find yourself trapped in a quagmire of dependencies with no easy way out.
If, in good faith, you give the humans the secret of anti-gravity travel and they start killing each other with it, that bloodshed is your responsibility, just like if you had given guns to cave men. You may have good reasons for the donation, and the humans will probably be grateful at the beginning, but that doesn't make your actions wise or good. For one thing, no intergalactic insurance company is going to cover you. No one wants to assume the liability of letting a scourge like us loose on the universe.
Looking at it another way, if you reside here on Earth, are you responsible for some social or environmental catastrophe in a distant star system? Of course not. For one thing, you have no information about the crisis. While intelligent life probably exists elsewhere in the universe, if you don't know about it, you certainly aren't responsible for that society's problems. Secondly, even if you did know about the crisis, it is unlikely that you, light years away, could do anything to help. It is the same on Earth, where you probably wouldn't try to address the problems of a country you are only a casual visitor in. If civil war breaks out in the place where you are vacationing, you probably won't try to sort it out and find a solution; instead, you'll simply get out of the country.
The Prime Directive is a natural and pragmatic starting position for any superhero or space traveller. As you fly around the universe or just your own neighborhood, you are going to observe many societies and individuals doing a lot of apparently self-destructive things, but you usually won't try to intervene. This is as much a safety rule as a moral one. If you intervene in an environment that is alien to you, there is a high probability that your actions are going to blow up in your face or ultimately damage the people you are intending to help. Furthermore, you know that you have only limited ammunition at your disposal—that is, a finite ability to intervene within your lifetime. You want to save your interventions for where they are most effective and most likely to succeed.
Unfortunately, the Prime Directive, like the Malthusian Dilemma, is subject to misinterpretation. While it is a good starting position, you can't take it as an excuse for never intervening. In the Star Trek universe, the Prime Directive was supposedly inviolable, but of course the various Enterprise crews were forced to violate it again and again. While non-intervention was usually the best policy for truly isolated planets that had not yet had contact with the Federation, things got murkier when you encountered civilisation that had suffered a little bit of outside contact and had already been screwed up by it.
For example, when there was a civil war on Bejor, a relatively primitive planet, the Federation's policy was to stand back and let "nature" take its course. What do you do, however, when the Cardassians, a technologically advanced race, are secretly arming one faction in the conflict? Should you stand back and let one unfairly advantaged side slaughter the other? Likewise, what should you do when current problems on a planet are the result of accidental or ill-considered Federation contact fifty years before? The Federation is responsible for cleaning up its own mess, but how do you do this without interfering further? These are all true dilemmas of the sort you often encounter as a superhero.
As you fly through space or travel through a foreign country, you don't need to feel much obligation to the beings you encounter en route, apart from the general courtesies and fair-dealing of commerce. As soon as you land, however, you start becoming implicated in that environment. The longer you stay and interact with the natives, the more you are drawn into local affairs.
We each became implicated in the affairs of Planet Earth merely by virtue of being stranded here. Yes, we were inserted into bodies against our will and placed with families we did not choose. Still, over time, we come to feel responsible for them. Merely by being brought to life, we are saddled with dilemmas that we spend the rest of our lives struggling to resolve. The Prime Directive doesn't apply when you are a resident of a planet and are already entangled in its problems. In this case, you are obligated to intervene, at least to try to get yourself unentangled.
While the Prime Directive applies very cleanly to any extraterrestrial civilisations we stumble upon in our travels, it gets more and more dubious the closer we get to "home," wherever that may be. We become the most interventionist in the lives of our own children, who obviously need our protection and who we are explicitly charged with caring for. We certainly wouldn't stand by and let them die or fail to rescue them in case of serious threat. We are more inclined toward a laissez-faire approach the further we venture from our core environment. For example, we may be concerned about a humanitarian crisis in a distant part of the world, but in most cases we, as individuals, don't have the knowledge or ability to take effective action.
What the Prime Directive gives us is a default position. It doesn't mean we shouldn't intervene. It means that when we do intervene we must have a damn good reason for doing so and be damn sure we know what we're doing. We also need a damn good plan for withdrawal, so we aren't trapped forever in the obligations created by our intervention.
The Prime Directive applies to personal interventions as well as galactic. If we see a parent on the subway treat their child in a manner we regard as abusive, that doesn't necessarily mean we should use our superpowers to intervene. This family is essentially a primitive society we have stumbled upon. With our superior technology—such as our intelligence, social skills or monetary resources—we are probably capable of helping this society, but we also risk entanglement and disrupting the natural ecology of this system. Since we don't know this society very well, the chance of misstep is high. For all we know, what we regard as dubious parenting might actually be pretty good parenting compared to the available alternatives. The risk when we interfere is that we make matters even worse while compromising our own powers and our future ability to help others.
For most dysfunctional families we encounter, the Prime Directive is going to guide our actions. We may privately disapprove, but we won't publicly interfere. Before we can realistically intervene, a certain high threshold of dysfunction has to be crossed. If parent is humiliating their child verbally, we probably won't do anything, but if he is physically beating the child, we are probably going to call the police, child welfare authorities or some other superheroic force.
These authorities, in turn, must live by their own pragmatic Prime Directive. Like us, they know that swooping down and "saving" people isn't as easy as it sounds. They could take the child out of the home, but where will they place him? You don't want to extract a child from a bad situation unless you can guarantee him a better one, which isn't always possible. Furthermore, by taking action, you become implicated in the family's problems. Once you intervene, the sole responsibility for the child no longer rests with the parent. Now, you are forced into an uneasy alliance with the parent, trying to make him more functional and sharing responsibility for the outcome.
All interventions are both costly and risky. It is natural, then, to want to avoid intervention whenever practical—that is, revert to the Prime Directive by default. If there is any possible way that a problem can be resolved without your involvement—even if the solution is marginal and imperfect—you usually want to give it a shot. Intervention is your high-cost luxury alternative: You need to use it sparingly and only as a last resort. You can quietly monitor the situation and be poised to use your weaponry, but you should only exercise your super powers when truly necessary.
Continued in Chapter 11
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