Are vulcans bigots?
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FaxModem1
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Are vulcans bigots?
Topic. saw one of my favorites, 'Take me out to the holosuite', makes me wonder, are they, or are they not?
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Praxis
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Patrick Degan
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"Spock, are our ceremonies for Outworlders?"
—T'pau, "Amok Time"
There's always been a certain degree of coolness and sometimes distaste for "outworlders" from Vulcans, but that seemed to spring more from their isolationist tendencies than from genuine racism. Naturally writers of a latter era aren't smart enough to make a distinction between the two and have gone ahead and recast the Vulcans as bigots if not outright racists.
"I too experienced a brief upsurge of racial bigotry. Most distasteful."
—Spock, "Day Of The Dove"
It has always been a mistake to assume Vulcans are unemotional. They do indeed have emotions and have let them slip through their screen of logical discipline in varying degrees; some Vulcans become able to integrate their emotional tendencies with their logic and achieve a balance. Vulcans have tried to convince themselves that they have no emotions, or rather reject emotionalism as defined in a Terran context, because their passions tended in the past to express themselves violently. They are very much like religious converts; rejecting in toto the very thing which once defined them but runs counter to the new "faith", and logic is a relatively recent societal phenomenon in Vulcan culture, extending only 2000 years from the Peace of Surak but given their two-century lifespans representing a stretch of only eight generations or so.
I argue that the latter-day writers ignored the clear portrait of the Vulcans from TOS —a people striving toward a better Way and still having a distance to go in that struggle yet clearly on the path— and went for a very black/white view of the whole matter and this is how we now get these pointy-eared cartoons running around in place of the Vulcans.
—T'pau, "Amok Time"
There's always been a certain degree of coolness and sometimes distaste for "outworlders" from Vulcans, but that seemed to spring more from their isolationist tendencies than from genuine racism. Naturally writers of a latter era aren't smart enough to make a distinction between the two and have gone ahead and recast the Vulcans as bigots if not outright racists.
"I too experienced a brief upsurge of racial bigotry. Most distasteful."
—Spock, "Day Of The Dove"
It has always been a mistake to assume Vulcans are unemotional. They do indeed have emotions and have let them slip through their screen of logical discipline in varying degrees; some Vulcans become able to integrate their emotional tendencies with their logic and achieve a balance. Vulcans have tried to convince themselves that they have no emotions, or rather reject emotionalism as defined in a Terran context, because their passions tended in the past to express themselves violently. They are very much like religious converts; rejecting in toto the very thing which once defined them but runs counter to the new "faith", and logic is a relatively recent societal phenomenon in Vulcan culture, extending only 2000 years from the Peace of Surak but given their two-century lifespans representing a stretch of only eight generations or so.
I argue that the latter-day writers ignored the clear portrait of the Vulcans from TOS —a people striving toward a better Way and still having a distance to go in that struggle yet clearly on the path— and went for a very black/white view of the whole matter and this is how we now get these pointy-eared cartoons running around in place of the Vulcans.
When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln
People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House
Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)
—Abraham Lincoln
People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House
Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)
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JME2
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Well, they are trying to bridge the gap between the ENT and TOS Vulcans with the upcoming "Forge" storyline, but I'm not getting my hopes up at all.Patrick Degan wrote:snip
Better to stick to Josepha Sherman and Susan Schwartz's most excellent Vulcan novels (Vulcan's Forge, Vulcan's Heart, and the Vulcan's Soul trilogy)