Some Desperate Glory

by Emily Tesh

There is only one human community where T-standard is the language of choice. Ironically, in claiming a position as the sole “true” humans, the extremists of Gaea Station have made themselves an enclave of galactic-language speakers.

Since language and identity are closely intertwined in human culture, a society seeking to eradicate individual cultural identities and histories in favor of a fictitious pan-Terran “cause” must begin by robbing its people of their languages.

The “warrior code” or “code of honor” so often used to explain human behavior to other sentient peoples is in fact more often honored in the breach. Humans may claim to be honorable, but they will cheerfully lie, betray, and exploit every available weakness in the pursuit of their goals. Actions which at other times would be considered even by humans themselves to be hideous crimes are justified in warfare as the price of victory.

Nation and tribe are not concepts unique to humanity, of course. All sentients form social units. But the way humans cling to tribal custom and squabble over national interests is astounding for such an advanced species. Never mind conquering the universe: an outsider could be forgiven for feeling surprised that the constantly arguing humans managed to get into space at all.

Hi, I liked kissing you, but for complicated reasons I need to run away and commit crimes, sorry. Also, in another universe I failed you in every possible way and never even noticed, so it’s weird now. Bye!

A peace brought about with the threat of violence is only a war in waiting.

True peace would surely require the elimination of warfare altogether. Utopia—the perfect society—demands what we might call an unenforced peace. But is it possible? Unenforced peace would require an end to all conflict. The question then arises: What causes conflict? Resources, says history, and ideas. So humans seeking this utopian society and its unenforced peace must first settle the question of resources: who has them, who wants them, who needs them. Many approaches have been tried. Unsurprisingly, several of them led to conflicts of the other kind, conflicts of ideas. Should everyone have a fair share—and in that case, who should define fairness? Should everyone be free to pursue the resources they want in whatever way seems best to them? Is there a technology capable of balancing these suggestions? The old imperial standby—to take resources from elsewhere, far more than could possibly be of use, and so create a bountiful surplus in which resource conflict cannot arise—has been successful for some; not, of course, for the inhabitants of history’s various elsewheres. It is this mindset of conquest and colonization which first brought humanity into disagreement with the majoda, with such tragic consequences.

Humanity’s greatest wars have always been conflicts of ideas—ideas of ethnicity and nationality, of religion and belief, of justice and morality. The utopian vision of unenforced peace requires that these conflicts cease. But how? Here is an old, old answer: if we all understood one another, if we all treated one another kindly, if we all listened and thought and exercised toleration for difference.

A united humanity. A humanity without disagreements. A humanity without its varied belief systems, without its national histories, without its assortment of cultures and ethnicities—or at least, a humanity where religion, nation, culture, and ethnicity were entirely lacking in meaning. This would be a humanity without differences; speaking one language only, to avoid misunderstanding; subscribing to one set of moral standards, and rejecting all others. It would be by definition a majority humanity; a universal humanity; a monolith humanity. And this, perhaps, would bring an end to war—or at least, an end to war with other humans. I leave it to the reader to decide whether such an obliteration of history, culture, ethnicity, and language aligns in any way with their understanding of utopia.

It has been tried more than once. The latest iteration is perhaps the extremist enclave of Gaea Station. Young refugees—those who have “refused assignment,” in the station’s own terms, and been cast out—have struggled to cope with the multiplicity of human identity beyond Gaea. They speak no language but T-standard, and they follow no religion, unless Gaea’s veneration of human power can be classed as a religion. All of them find themselves fitted into ethnic categories they do not understand. Analysis of Gaea’s early experiments in eugenics suggests an attempt to eliminate visible markers of racial difference. Unsurprisingly for those who know the ideological antecedents of Gaean philosophy (visible in the names of its children, overwhelmingly drawn from Norse myth and Roman imperium), the results of these attempts to create a “pure” human tended to be white. Gaea Station may believe itself free of humanity’s complex and divided past; to an outside observer, it is anything but. History has a tendency to outrun us.

Kyr felt suddenly and forcefully the weight of legacy. She wasn’t Earth’s child. She was Elora Marston’s, and Yingli Lin’s, and Ursa’s, and she owed her duty not to some abstract unknown planet but to the women who’d come before her.

“Historically,” said Avi, “every dictator inspires plotters.”

What a waste it was, what a terrible waste, to take a person who dreamed cities and gardens and enormous shining skies and teach him that the only answer to an unanswerable suffering was slaughter.