Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6526003" data-attributes="member: 4937">Why?  Are you sure?  What is the basis of this observation?  I would imagine that the basis of this observation is that the majority of differences between ethnicities, particularly among the ones that aren't trivial like complexion and shape of the nose, are cultural, and it's reasonable to conclude that a person of one ethnicity, if native to a different culture, would have behavioral norms defined by the culture that they were actually raised in.  But this is a false analogy.  Of course the differences between two humans are mostly cultural.  In biological terms, 99.99% of their genes are shared in common regardless of ethnicity and divergence between ethnic groups is not only biologically recent, but highly dampened through more recent interbreeding leading to shared ancestors in biological blinks of an eye.   Dwarves and elves on the other hand are completely different species with completely different natural histories: for example, one was carved out of stone and given life by a chthonic deity, and the other came into being from the drops of blood shed in battle by a sky deity.  There is absolutely no reason to suspect that the majority of differences between the two species are cultural, and biologically speaking, with such different origins genetically (assuming genetics exist, and assuming that there is at least some equivalent there of) they share 0% in common.  If you are familiar with literary science fiction traditions, you'll know that exploring this species blindness is one of the main themes of several science fiction authors.   Humanity has a tendency to assume that every intelligent species is either fundamentally a human with a few cultural differences (humans with bumps on their forehead) or else a monster.   Further, humanity has a tendency to assume that they are average - 'the Mario' - non-specialized, adaptable, generalists and the standard by which everything else is judged by.  In fact, we have no real way of knowing that, and it IMO would be an interesting setting where that was not true.  Certainly its not true if we compare ourselves to animal species we do know.  When we do that, we actual discover that we are hyper-specialized extremists that in almost every quality are at or near the far end of the spectrum (brain to body ratio, percent of hair covering, density of pores in skin, digestive system to body weight ratio, upright locomotion, spatial processing, digital dexterity, etc.).   While some concessions may be made to how aliens might physically depart from these norms, rarely do humans really accept that another race may depart from its social norms - and when they do they get really appalled and even angry.  I could probably blow up this thread by discussing sentient AI, because people get really passionate when you suggest intelligent things don't have to be human.Anyway, one of my favorite science-fiction authors, Gordon R. Dickenson, wrote a classic of the genera called 'The Alien Way', and IMO it - despite being a bit dated in some ways - is still one of the best treatments of this concept.  In it he postulates a first contact event where humans are allowed to spy on the behavior of another race, a slightly more advanced but similarly predatory race that turns out to be their neighbor.  The major theme of the book is that both races believe that they are just acting entirely logically and naturally, when in fact both of them are acting on almost pure instinct in entirely predictable ways and rationalizing their behavior.  The 'spy' who is observing the aliens eventually comes to understand them, and in doing so comes to understand what makes him human so that he can then predict and make note of all the irrational things that humans are doing in acting out their own biological imperatives that formerly he would never have even questioned because they are so basic to human behavior he assumed they were universal.  A good example of this is the person who asked me, "So what if you are born an adult.  That just means you skip the childhood part of your background.", assuming that if you did skip the childhood portion of your background that it would have no real impact on how you looked at life.That's a cultural value that is being unquestionably misapplied to something that is consciously being created as 'The Other' and which is primarily justified by its differences as 'The Other'.  Your so concerned about 'otherification' of your fellow humans - and I'm not in the slightest trivializing how bad it is to dehumanize your fellow humans - that you don't consider that a large part of the power of that fantasy and science fiction have is that they give us a mirror which we can hold up to ourselves and see ourselves more clearly, precisely because without the presence of another, we have no way of contrasting or comparing or distinguishing ourselves.   We as a species are in some ways profoundly alone, and we are going to have to learn how to get along with things that are really others along with learning how to stop seeing otherness where it isn't there.   Otherwise, we are going to be stuck with if it violates our expectations about what it means to be human/sapient/sophont/intelligent/having a soul, that it must be a monster or monstrous.</blockquote>

Verification