The Older Siblings of Humanity

There is a particular kind of fictional people whose presence makes humanity seem adolescent.

Tolkien's Elves, Star Trek's Vulcans, and Babylon 5's Minbari all occupy versions of this position. They possess depth that humans appear to lack: historical memory, disciplined thought, spiritual continuity, or knowledge acquired before we arrived. They can be allies, teachers, and infuriating authorities. Their approval matters more than humans generally wish to admit.

Yet the resemblance conceals three different questions.

For Tolkien's Elves, the central difference concerns time. They endure within the life of the world; humans leave it through death. In a letter to Rhona Beare, Tolkien explained that elven longevity is bound to Arda, while human mortality has a different destiny, described by the Elves as a divine gift. [Tolkien's letter]

From a human perspective, that gift is difficult to appreciate. We see beauty, knowledge, and the possibility of remaining with what we love. But endurance means remaining with loss as well. An ancient people can become burdened by everything it remembers and by its desire to preserve a world that keeps changing.

The Elves let us examine our longing to escape death alongside our difficulty accepting change. Their lives make our mortality visible. Our lives make their attachment to the world visible in return.

Vulcans conduct another experiment. Their discipline answers powerful feeling. Logic is a cultural achievement requiring practice, with a history behind it. The related Romulans provide a contrasting historical development, complicating the idea that Vulcan conduct simply follows from Vulcan biology. [Star Trek on Vulcans and Romulans]

The comparison asks what we gain through emotional control, what we conceal behind it, and whether feeling and judgment must be rivals. Humans may admire Vulcan composure while resenting the implication that their own emotions make them unreliable. Vulcans may find human improvisation reckless while having to acknowledge that it sometimes works.

The Minbari place humanity beside a civilization whose authority is entwined with sacred history. Their castes and institutions turn spiritual conviction into a social order. That order can sustain commitment, but it also permits competing authorities to treat their own priorities as destiny.

The devastation of the Earth–Minbari War makes any easy equation between age and wisdom untenable. A civilization can be advanced, disciplined, and profoundly wrong about what it is entitled to do.

Taken together, these peoples resemble older siblings we have invented for ourselves. They expose our immaturity, then discover limitations that our immaturity might help them overcome. Humans bring urgency, improvisation, and a willingness to attempt arrangements that tradition has not authorized.

Babylon 5 makes one version of that claim explicit. In “And Now for a Word,” Delenn identifies humanity's ability to build communities among diverse peoples as the quality that makes the station possible. [Episode dialogue]

It is an attractive role for us. We may lack the others' accumulated wisdom, but we can provide the table at which they finally sit together. It is also flattering enough to deserve suspicion. The story gives humans the meeting place and then calls community-building a human distinction.

What makes these relationships compelling is the possibility of mutual correction. An elder civilization must have something left to learn. Otherwise, humanity is permanently a pupil, and its future consists of becoming a less accomplished version of someone else.

The most interesting moment comes when the teacher encounters a problem for which the student's supposed deficiencies are useful. Then both peoples have to revise the relationship, and perhaps their descriptions of themselves.

This post is part of a planned eight part series on imagined peoples, human nature, and companionship with artificial minds