To implement B was, on the surface, ethically preferable; we would have left the Terrans to settle their own affairs, and would have confined our interference to that absolute minimum necessary to preserve the physical safety of our citizens. (That is, we would essentially have continued the policy we had been maintaining up to that point, without change.) But there were serious problems with that choice. For one thing, it meant abandoning the female population of Earth and some percentage of its males to an inevitable period of great suffering, the length of which we could not even estimate. This did not seem an admirable act on the part of the consortium of cultures allegedly more highly evolved than those of Earth. None of the logically accurate analogies drawn between this plan and the inevitable discomfort of necessary medical procedures lessened its obvious cruelty. There was also a strong feeling within the Council, especially on the part of the more conservative members, that Alternative B was nothing more than a disguised version of the unacceptable Alternative A; that is, it was highly probable that the violence of Terran males would result in the total destruction of the planet and its colonies long before the evolutinary gap between the genders could be resolved. (A number of moving speeches were made in which B was compared to standing fastidiously by while a child was devoured by some wild animal, for no other reason than the preservation of one’s own ethical self-image.)
7.The final decision reached was to implement Alternative C, under the strictest possible controls. Interference would be confined to a carefully orchestrated introduction of technological advances in the guise of “interplanetary trade,” together with a continuation of the self-defense measures already mentioned. First contact was then initiated in early 11,304 under the supervision of the COTC, with XJHi as the implementing agency; the existing surveillance systems were supplemented by the placement on site of live observers undetectable (with a single exception not relevant here) by the Terran population.
8.It is now shamefully clear that our choice ought to have been either Alternative A or B, repugnant as they both seemed at the time. THIS SAD CONCLUSION CANNOT BE AVOIDED, WHATEVER THE COST TO OUR SELF-RESPECT. We have not accelerated the evolution of the Terran males past the stage of violence in any way. On the contrary, we have retarded their progress! What we have managed to do by our inexcusable stupidity is make an endless expansion of that violence not only possible but easy. Those males whose violence requires overt physical expression are now exported to Terran colonies where their behavior is a threat only to the indigenous species of the colony world and to other such males. In the most extreme cases, when the degree of violence is viewed even by Terrans as inappropriate, these males are encouraged to relocate to the planet Gehenna, on which no law except brute force is allowed. Males in whom the trait has more subtle expression remain on the more developed worlds and devote themselves to the manipulation and control of this appalling empire. In other worlds: those who wish to slash and rape and disembowel go to the frontier to do so; the rest devote their lives to overseeing the slashing and raping and disemboweling from a safe distance and enjoying it vicariously. There is no sense in which this can be considered an improvement, although it is of course so perceived by the Terrans themselves.
If we had left Earth alone, one of two things would have had to happen. The Terrans would have destroyed their planets and all their peoples, thus putting a tidy end to the problem. Or, the imminent prospect of that destruction would have forced them to find some way past the evolutionary barrier, both genders would have advanced past the stage of violence, and eventually we would have been able to invite Earth into the Consortium like any other civilized planet. In hindsight, it is obvious that we should have stood by our principles and allowed Earth to find its own way to one of the other of these outcomes. THERE IS NO DISAGREEMENT ON THIS POINT—IN HINDSIGHT.
But it’s far too late to do that now. We have now widened the gulf between the genders on Earth. We have pushed the males back farther into violence by making it easy, and convenient, and without obvious penalty. We have further weakened the females, because our meddling has enabled the males to reduce them to a state of pampered ignorance and subjugation much like that of domestic pets. We do not know if the original helplessness of the females in the face of the violence was really due to inferior intelligence; if it was, we have probably made that worse as well. We have now gone around our own evolutionary loop, and we are back at the beginning. We are back at “square one,” to use an apt Terran phrase, and the debate should once more be before the Council—not for just one world, but for a swarm of them. Now, instead of having to decide whether to cleanse the universe of just one nasty little planet, or one nasty little planet and a few nasty little colonies, we must consider the same problem multiplied many times over by our bungling. And we cannot evade our responsibilities forever by the stratagem of annually issuing sets of documents deploring the situation and demanding minor modifications of it from XJHi.
What do we do now? That is the question that must be faced, and formally asked, and formally answered.
Do we now put every last Terran world, from the largest planet down to the tiniest inhabited asteroid, under strict quarantine, isolating all of them from us totally and leaving them to find their own way to harmony or to annihilation? Now that we have made their situation far worse than it was before we interfered? The prospect is not only horrible from the point of view of morality, it is almost unimaginably complex from the point of view of implementation. It could not be done secretly; we could not just disappear like the deities in the ancient Terran myths and legends, there one moment, gone the next in our flaming chariots. We would have to separate ourselves from Earth and all its territories as an open totalitarian act, with an impact on the Terran populations that we cannot predict other than to say that it would be destructive in the extreme. We would have to announce that we had changed our minds, take back our technology by force where that was possible and leave it to be misused where it was not, and abandon the Terran peoples to deal with the messes they could never have created without our help—messes that we ourselves are unable to deal with effectively.
Alternatively, do we face the fact that we have now made the problems of Earth so desperate that the only action consistent with decency is for us to put the Terrans quickly out of their misery by destroying every one of their worlds and all of their populations? That is, have we made the unthinkable Alternative A not only thinkable but desirable? If so, we can only hope our own science is sufficiently sophisticated to predict what the consequences will be when that many planetary bodies are removed from space simultaneously. Or do we, to spare ourselves that last hazard, destroy every last vestige of the populations and leave the planets as empty monuments, to stand as a memorial to our genocide for all of time? If we resort to something so monstrous, can we stay sane?
It would be a fine and wondrous thing if we could reject both the plan of condemning the Terrans to a slow and miserable death and the plan of offering them a swift and painless one, and could instead attempt once again to guide them toward civilization. But we have tried interference already, and it has been proved beyond all doubt that we only make matters worse. We do not know enough—we do not understand the Terrans well enough. Their psychology is so alien to us that we have no foundation on which to build understanding. We have looked upon them as naughty children, but they do not have the minds or the hearts of our children. The analogy is not valid, and it never was valid; it simply eased our consciences.
We have made that mistake once; there can be no justification for making it again. XJHi hereby puts the Council formally on notice that it will fight any such suggestion with all the resources at its command.
The current policy of live and remote surveillance, which the Council each year condemns, is nothing more than a way of stalling while the inevitable choice is postponed over and over again. This is contemptible; it is cowardly; it cannot be allowed to continue. We must decide. We must make the choice, how
ever difficult. Perhaps the females of Earth do have within them somewhere the resources to bring their runaway males under control? Perhaps the fact that we have provided them with ghettos for the most extreme manifestations of violence would be the slight edge they need to bring this about? Perhaps we should allow them the opportunity to try. Perhaps there are among the females some who have ways of creating real change—we have had reports from agents observing the families of Terran linguists, to offer just one example, suggesting that those women do understand the mechanisms of change and have the courage and resolve to set them in motion—although with a slowness that is not encouraging. Perhaps we should allow them to try.
And perhaps we should not. Perhaps that would only be still more cruelty. Perhaps they, and all the others, are entitled to our swift mercy.
But we must decide. Please do not insult the citizens of the Consortium with further evasions; we do not believe that they will be tolerated.
We look forward to hearing that this question has been placed upon the agenda for the current session of the Council.
XJHi
Afterword
Gender, Technology, and Violence
The Judas Rose (1987) is the second book in Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy about the invention and social establishment of a woman-centered language. The trilogy as a whole dramatizes two themes: 1) the way languages work to structure perception and 2) how we might understand and develop principles of nonviolence.1 In the trilogy’s first book, Native Tongue (1984), we are introduced to a future world where women have been returned to second-class status and the economy is dependent on intergalactic trade. A small number of superb women linguists secretly create a women’s language that not only introduces them to the new society of the Womanhouses—a society radically altered by Láadan’s impact on its speakers—but also helps them to imagine and enact alternatives to the society of masculinist violence in which they live. The Judas Rose follows the story of that language, Láadan, as it is spread secretly and subversively to link women worldwide and as the relationship between humans and Aliens becomes more explicit. The concluding book of the trilogy, Earthsong (1994), turns from the question of a gender-based language to the broader question of alternate and nonviolent forms of nourishment, as well as to the results of total economic collapse when the interplanetary Consortium decides to leave Earth en masse.
The central strategy of the Native Tongue books is the invention of a women’s language, Láadan, in response to the idea that existing languages, reflecting and encoding patriarchal culture as they do, often exclude and/or distort the experiences and perceptions of women. The women of the Lines design Láadan to eliminate as many such exclusions and distortions as possible. Elgin’s basic tenet is that language is power: “If speaking a language were like brain surgery, learned only after many long years of difficult study and practiced only by a handful of remarkable individuals at great expense, we would view it with similar respect and awe. But because almost every human being knows and uses one or more languages, we have let that miracle be trivialized into ‘only talk’” (Language Imperative 239). That Elgin draws a parallel between language and brain surgery is suggestive: as much as the two activities differ in their social reception, they are both interventions that can reshape the world. Like all technologies, language is reflexive: it both shapes us and is shaped by us. Because of this reflexivity, both brain surgery and language are technologies that have the power to change not only how we understand the world, but the world itself. Moreover, the comparison conveys Elgin’s conviction that language, too, functions as a kind of technology, an extension of human capacities. Finally, linguistic knowledge can be a therapeutic response to violence, just as medical education is a therapeutic response to disease: “My position has been that the only nonviolent mechanism we have for reducing human violence is language, and that a major barrier to using that mechanism is public ignorance of linguistic science (just as public ignorance of hygiene was a major barrier to improving public health until very recently.)”2 And it is precisely because language, as Elgin understands it, is material, technological, and curative that it is also charged with feminist significance. The language we use affects (and genders) our understanding of the world, our place in it, and our interactions with one another; changing our language can change for better or worse not only how we think, but the world in which that thinking occurs. The premise of the Native Tongue books is that a linguistic revolution is necessary, not only to challenge the linguistic foundation of patriarchy but to treat the society of violence that subtends it. As Elgin puts it, “patriarchy requires violence in the same way that human beings require oxygen” (“A Feminist Is a What?” 46).
Encoding women’s perceptions, Láadan encodes nonviolence as well. Because the choices available for responding to conflict expand with the range of new alternatives imagined in the new women’s language, for Elgin a woman-centered world is a peaceful one to be attained by a struggle both linguistic and therapeutic. While Elgin’s vision here is essentialist in its notion that Láadan simply gives linguistic shape and power to the way women inherently are, it also contains the possibility of what might be termed a performative extrapolation from that essential nature. Láadan, in part, is developed around what the women of the Lines call Encodings, “the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before in any human language, and that has not just suddenly been made or found or dumped upon your culture. We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to deserve its own name” (Native Tongue 22). Creating the compilation of encodings that becomes Láadan, then, women are not simply creating new words. They are reordering the world: separating the significant from the insignificant, determining what will be perceived and what will go unperceived, and thus establishing a context for feminist experience and action.
The creative force of language is not only thematically central to what Elgin called the larger “thought experiment” of the Native Tongue books; it was actually the motivating force behind the series. Elgin wrote the books in order to test four hypotheses, not merely in fiction but in the real world context beyond the novels:
1) that the weak form of the linguistic relativity hypothesis is true [that is, that human languages structure human perceptions in significant ways]; 2) that Gödel’s Theorem applies to language, so that there are changes you could not introduce into a language without destroying it and languages you could not introduce into a culture without destroying it; 3) that change in language brings about social change, rather than the contrary; and 4) that if women were offered a women’s language one of two things would happen—they would welcome and nurture it, or it would at minimum motivate them to replace it with a better women’s language of their own construction. (“Láadan”)
Elgin admits that despite the success of the Native Tongue trilogy, her experiment did not produce the desired outcome beyond the world of literature. The fourth hypothesis was proven false when Láadan failed to be taken up in any meaningful way in society. But the broader questions of language, of gender, and of violence continue to resonate, both in fiction and beyond.
GENDER, LANGUAGE, AND VIOLENCE IN THE JUDAS ROSE
Because the action of The Judas Rose so closely depends on that which happens in Native Tongue, it is worth reviewing the plot of the first book so that we can see how the second builds upon it. There are three primary narrative strands in Native Tongue, though each overlaps with the others. The first narrative follows Nazareth Chornyak Adiness, a remarkably talented linguist whose difficult life demonstrates the need for a women’s language as she leads the women of the Lines into using and teaching Láadan. The second narrative chronicles the long line of failures and disasters resulting from the U.S. government’s attempts to Interface a non-humanoid Alien with a human infant. The third narrative connects the government Interfacing experiments to the
work of the Lines by tracing the life of Michaela Landry, mother of an infant killed in an Interface who initially blames the Linguists for her child’s death. While the conflict between Linguists and non-Linguists has led to two separate societies whose relations have been characterized by prejudice and isolation, the growth of Láadan brings women together, giving them a new, shared basis for social relations. Native Tongue dramatizes how changing a language can in fact change reality, as the spread of Láadan alters the very lives of the women of the Lines. No longer isolated from each other and subjected to the constant observation and supervision of their husbands and fathers, women now can work together for a society that is both fairer and less violent.
In The Judas Rose, the project of linguistic education for a general audience continues on both a Terran and galactic scale. Working with the unwitting assistance of both the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, the women of the Lines find ways to send Láadan into the greater community in order to undermine the culture of violence the men have instituted. The women’s project of expanding the reach of Láadan is a gentle echo of the Terran governments’ project of colonizing space; while the former allows for greater communication among women, the latter reduces communication and connectivity as social deviants of all kinds are isolated each to their own designated asteroid. The Terran governments are less successful in attempts at linguistic expansion: the project of Interfacing non-humanoid Aliens with human infants (despite consistently horrific results) to extend the trade possibilities to those worlds as well as for linguistic exchange, also chronicled in Native Tongue, becomes less and less successful, and, ultimately, fails altogether—at least in producing the desired results. As the different projects of linguistic outreach continue (overtly and covertly), male members of the Lines are revealed to be linked to Alien objectives and monopolies, part of a coherent political power structure extending throughout the galaxy—a power structure undercut by the linguistic rebellion occurring secretly in their midst. Through these interwoven narratives and the lens of linguistics, Elgin deftly explores several issues that still have urgent relevance for us now, as the book is reissued, including the relation between gender and technology (both informational and biomedical) in the project of globalization (a project that is central to the new world order) and the possibilities for women to unite across boundaries of religion, class, nationality, race, and ethnicity.
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