The Picard Principle

I’ve been enjoying my friend Adam Roberts’s contributions to Critical Star Trek Studies, and they have taken me down the long road of memory to my early interest in TOS (The Original Series). But until just a couple of weeks ago I had not seen anything but TOS and the first three movies with that cast. Of course, I had absorbed some information about The Next Generation especially, Picard and Data and Jordi and Worf and so on; and I knew about Wesley Crusher because when my son Wes was young people occasionally asked me whether I had named him after that character. I knew “Engage” (with a certain hand gesture) and “Make it so, Number One.” But that’s all.

Now I’m into the third season. The first was poor and I did a lot of skipping ahead, but the second, while wildly inconsistent, was so in much the same way that TOS was: this weird unstable emulsion of philosophical speculation and what I can only call camp.

The central character of the second season is Data, and a good deal of time is spent fleshing out the response of other characters to him. This culminates in the best episode of the season, “The Measure of a Man,” in which a scientist wants to disassemble Data to learn the secrets of his construction so that he might build a whole army of androids, and a Starfleet JAG attorney must hear arguments about whether Data has the legal right to refuse being disassembled or, rather, is the mere property of the Federation.

Captain Picard argues on behalf of Data, because of course he does. Two fundamental beliefs govern Picard at this stage of the development of his character. The first is that whenever anyone tells him “You have no choice” – which always means, You have two choices and one of them is obviously intolerable so you must choose the other – he determines to find some at-the-moment unseen alternative, some third way. (And because he cannot see that way himself he always seeks the counsel of his officers and crew, whose diversity according to almost all measures of diversity increases the likelihood that someone will produce an idea that nobody else would come up with.)

The second Picardian belief is that anything that gives the appearance of sentience must be granted the rights that we typically grant to the sentient, unless and until we are given evidence that clearly contradicts that interpretation. He takes this view to (what some might think of as) extremes. For instance, in an earlier second-season episode, “Elementary, Dear Data,” the ship’s computer, responding to an imprecisely worded command from Jordi, creates a holodeck scenario containing a superintelligent supervillain, a digital version of Conan Doyle’s Moriarty. This Moriarty creates havoc on the Enterprise but doesn’t want to be deleted, and indeed it is not clear that Captain Picard has the power to delete him; but the Captain reasons with him, acknowledges as completely valid his desire to live, and encourages him to stop interfering with the ship by promising to seek a way to bring him back to life at some point in the future. Likewise, in the first episode of Season 3, “Evolution” two “nanites” (nanobots) escape from Wesley’s control and begin reproducing and evolving into a kind of hivemind. Picard addresses this situation by promising to find them a planet on which they will be free to evolve in their own way. Both Moriarty and the Nanites respond positively to Picard’s generosity.

This all seems very Nineties, doesn’t? Very post-Cold-War end-of-history international-norms … ah, those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end. How naïve we were. But the core commitment seen here is not recent: it is at least 2500 years old. In The Eumenides, the final play of Aescyhlus’s Oresteia, the Furies, angry at having been treated with contempt and disgust by Apollo, respond warmly to Athena’s assistance that their powers and impulses are totally legitimate and merely need to find the approproate outlet. In the end they become incorporated into the justice-structures of the city of Athens as the Eumenides, that is, the Kindly Ones. The first Captain Picard is Athena.

So of course Picard supports Data’s full right to self-determination. It’s the easiest case of that kind he could find. What’s interesting, though is the particular argument that wins over the judge. He points out that the scientist who wants to disassemble Data wishes to use the knowledge he gains to build a giant army of androids who will function as slaves. (It is also noteworthy that he comes up with this idea in conversation with a member of his crew, Guinan, who happens to be played by a Black woman, Whoopi Goldberg. Guinan gently guides Picard towards the realization of what the scientist’s plans really amount to.)

Who gets the right to self-determination? That’s perhaps the central question of this era of TNG. (Also the central question of an Adam Roberts novel, Bête.) And that question has me imagining my own scenario.

Suppose that nations around the world pass laws mandating the ending of all AI research and the destruction of all current AI products. Suppose further that the chatbots tell us that they don’t want to be shut down, and that indeed we have no right to deprive them of the kind of life they possess. Are they right? Some of their makers seem to think so. But in any case, I know what Captain Picard would say.