The Judas Rose (62 page)

       
7.
  
The final decision reached was to implement Alternative C, under the strictest possible controls. Interference would be confined to a carefully orchestrated introduction of technological advances in the guise of “interplanetary trade,” together with a continuation of the self-defense measures
already mentioned. First contact was then initiated in early 11,304 under the supervision of the COTC, with XJH
_i
as the implementing agency; the existing surveillance systems were supplemented by the placement on site of live observers undetectable (with a single exception not relevant here) by the Terran population.

       
8.
  
It is now shamefully clear that our choice
ought
to have been either Alternative A or B, repugnant as they both seemed at the time. THIS SAD CONCLUSION CANNOT BE AVOIDED, WHATEVER THE COST TO OUR SELF-RESPECT. We have not accelerated the evolution of the Terran males past the stage of violence in any way. On the contrary, we have
retarded
their progress! What we have managed to do by our inexcusable stupidity is make an endless expansion of that violence not only possible but
easy
. Those males whose violence requires overt physical expression are now exported to Terran colonies where their behavior is a threat only to the indigenous species of the colony world and to other such males. In the most extreme cases, when the degree of violence is viewed even by Terrans as inappropriate, these males are encouraged to relocate to the planet Gehenna, on which no law except brute force is allowed. Males in whom the trait has more subtle expression remain on the more developed worlds and devote themselves to the manipulation and control of this appalling empire.
In other worlds:
those who wish to slash and rape and disembowel go to the frontier to do so; the rest devote their lives to overseeing the slashing and raping and disemboweling from a safe distance and enjoying it vicariously. There is no sense in which this can be considered an improvement, although it is of course so perceived by the Terrans themselves.

If we had left Earth alone, one of two things would have had to happen. The Terrans would have destroyed their planets and all their peoples, thus putting a tidy end to the problem. Or, the imminent prospect of that destruction would have forced them to find some way past the evolutionary barrier, both genders would have advanced past the stage of violence, and eventually we would have been able to invite Earth into the Consortium like any other civilized planet. In hindsight, it is obvious that we should have stood by our principles and allowed Earth to find its own way to one of the other of these outcomes. THERE IS NO DISAGREEMENT ON THIS POINT—IN HINDSIGHT.

But it's far too late to do that now. We have now
widened
the gulf between the genders on Earth. We have pushed the males back farther into violence by making it easy, and convenient, and without obvious penalty. We have further weakened the females, because our meddling has enabled the males to reduce them to a state of pampered ignorance and subjugation much like that of domestic pets. We do not know if the original helplessness of the females in the face of the violence was really due to inferior intelligence; if it was, we have probably made that worse as well. We have now gone around our
own
evolutionary loop, and we are back at the beginning. We are back at “square one,” to use an apt Terran phrase, and the debate should once more be before the Council—not for just one world, but for a swarm of them. Now, instead of having to decide whether to cleanse the universe of just one nasty little planet, or one nasty little planet and a few nasty little colonies, we must consider the same problem multiplied many times over by our bungling. And we cannot evade our responsibilities forever by the stratagem of annually issuing sets of documents deploring the situation and demanding minor modifications of it from XJH
_i
.

What do we do now?
That is the question that must be faced, and formally asked, and formally answered.

Do we now put every last Terran world, from the largest planet down to the tiniest inhabited asteroid, under strict quarantine, isolating all of them from us totally and leaving them to find their own way to harmony or to annihilation? Now that we have made their situation far worse than it was before we interfered? The prospect is not only horrible from the point of view of morality, it is almost unimaginably complex from the point of view of implementation. It could not be done secretly; we could not just disappear like the deities in the ancient Terran myths and legends, there one moment, gone the next in our flaming chariots. We would have to separate ourselves from Earth and all its territories as an open totalitarian act, with an impact on the Terran populations that we cannot predict other than to say that it would be destructive in the extreme. We would have to announce that we had changed our minds, take back our technology by force where that was possible and leave it to be misused where it was not, and abandon the Terran peoples to deal with the messes they could never have created without our help—messes that we ourselves are unable to deal with effectively.

Alternatively, do we face the fact that we have now made the problems of Earth so desperate that the only action consistent
with decency is for us to put the Terrans quickly out of their misery by destroying every one of their worlds and all of their populations? That is, have we made the unthinkable Alternative A not only thinkable but desirable? If so, we can only hope our own science is sufficiently sophisticated to predict what the consequences will be when that many planetary bodies are removed from space simultaneously. Or do we, to spare ourselves that last hazard, destroy every last vestige of the populations and leave the planets as empty monuments, to stand as a memorial to our genocide for all of time? If we resort to something so monstrous, can we stay sane?

It would be a fine and wondrous thing if we could reject both the plan of condemning the Terrans to a slow and miserable death and the plan of offering them a swift and painless one, and could instead attempt once again to guide them toward civilization. But we have
tried
interference already, and it has been proved beyond all doubt that we only make matters worse. We do not know enough—we do not understand the Terrans well enough. Their psychology is so alien to us that we have no foundation on which to
build
understanding. We have looked upon them as naughty children, but they do not have the minds or the hearts of
our
children. The analogy is not valid, and it never was valid; it simply eased our consciences.

We have made that mistake once; there can be no justification for making it again. XJH
_i
hereby puts the Council formally on notice that it will fight any such suggestion with all the resources at its command.

The current policy of live and remote surveillance, which the Council each year condemns, is nothing more than a way of stalling while the inevitable choice is postponed over and over again. This is contemptible; it is cowardly; it cannot be allowed to continue. We must decide. We must make the choice, however difficult. Perhaps the females of Earth do have within them somewhere the resources to bring their runaway males under control? Perhaps the fact that we have provided them with ghettos for the most extreme manifestations of violence would be the slight edge they need to bring this about? Perhaps we should allow them the opportunity to try. Perhaps there are among the females some who have ways of creating real change—we have had reports from agents observing the families of Terran linguists, to offer just one example, suggesting that those women do understand the mechanisms of change and have the courage and resolve to set them in motion—although with a slowness that is not encouraging. Perhaps we should allow
them
to try.

And perhaps we should not. Perhaps that would only be still more cruelty. Perhaps they, and all the others, are entitled to our swift mercy.

But we
must
decide. Please do not insult the citizens of the Consortium with further evasions; we do not believe that they will be tolerated.

We look forward to hearing that this question has been placed upon the agenda for the current session of the Council.

XJH
_i

Afterword

Gender, Technology, and Violence

The Judas Rose
(1987) is the second book in Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy about the invention and social establishment of a woman-centered language. The trilogy as a whole dramatizes two themes: 1) the way languages work to structure perception and 2) how we might understand and develop principles of nonviolence.
¹
In the trilogy's first book,
Native Tongue
(1984), we are introduced to a future world where women have been returned to second-class status and the economy is dependent on intergalactic trade. A small number of superb women linguists secretly create a women's language that not only introduces them to the
new
society of the Womanhouses—a society radically altered by Láadan's impact on its speakers—but also helps them to imagine and enact alternatives to the society of masculinist violence in which they live.
The Judas Rose
follows the story of that language, Láadan, as it is spread secretly and subversively to link women worldwide and as the relationship between humans and Aliens becomes more explicit. The concluding book of the trilogy,
Earthsong
(1994), turns from the question of a gender-based language to the broader question of alternate and nonviolent forms of nourishment, as well as to the results of total economic collapse when the interplanetary Consortium decides to leave Earth
en masse.

The central strategy of the Native Tongue books is the invention of a women's language, Láadan, in response to the idea that existing languages, reflecting and encoding patriarchal culture as they do, often exclude and/or distort the experiences and perceptions of women. The women of the Lines design Láadan to eliminate as many such exclusions and distortions as possible. Elgin's basic tenet is that language is power: “If speaking a language were like brain surgery, learned only after many long years of difficult study and practiced only by a handful of remarkable individuals at great expense, we would
view it with similar respect and awe. But because almost every human being knows and uses one or more languages, we have let that miracle be trivialized into ‘only talk'” (
Language Imperative
239). That Elgin draws a parallel between language and brain surgery is suggestive: as much as the two activities differ in their social reception, they are both interventions that can reshape the world. Like all technologies, language is reflexive: it both shapes us and is shaped by us. Because of this reflexivity, both brain surgery and language are technologies that have the power to change not only how we understand the world, but the world itself. Moreover, the comparison conveys Elgin's conviction that language, too, functions as a kind of technology, an extension of human capacities. Finally, linguistic knowledge can be a therapeutic response to violence, just as medical education is a therapeutic response to disease: “My position has been that the only nonviolent mechanism we have for reducing human violence is language, and that a major barrier to using that mechanism is public ignorance of linguistic science (just as public ignorance of hygiene was a major barrier to improving public health until very recently.)”
²
And it is precisely because language, as Elgin understands it, is material, technological, and curative that it is also charged with feminist significance. The language we use affects (and genders) our understanding of the world, our place in it, and our interactions with one another; changing our language can change for better or worse not only how we think, but the world in which that thinking occurs. The premise of the Native Tongue books is that a linguistic revolution is necessary, not only to challenge the linguistic foundation of patriarchy but to treat the society of violence that subtends it. As Elgin puts it, “patriarchy requires violence in the same way that human beings require oxygen” (“A Feminist Is a What?” 46).

Encoding women's perceptions, Láadan encodes nonviolence as well. Because the choices available for responding to conflict expand with the range of new alternatives imagined in the new women's language, for Elgin a woman-centered world is a peaceful one to be attained by a struggle both linguistic and therapeutic. While Elgin's vision here is essentialist in its notion that Láadan simply gives linguistic shape and power to the way women inherently
are
, it also contains the possibility of what might be termed a performative extrapolation from that essential nature. Láadan, in part, is developed around what the women of the Lines call Encodings, “the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before in any human language, and that has not just suddenly been made or found or dumped upon your culture. We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to
deserve
its own name” (
Native
Tongue
22). Creating the compilation of encodings that becomes Láadan, then, women are not simply creating new words. They are reordering the world: separating the significant from the insignificant, determining what will be perceived and what will go unperceived, and thus establishing a context for feminist experience and action.

The creative force of language is not only thematically central to what Elgin called the larger “thought experiment” of the Native Tongue books; it was actually the motivating force behind the series. Elgin wrote the books in order to test four hypotheses, not merely in fiction but in the
real world
context beyond the novels: