The rather sweet little note that President Carter appended to the Voyager spacecraft in '77 reads a bit like something a High School kid who’d been binge-watching Star Trek might have scribbled. (Ironically of course, given the role that the Voyager was to play not long afterward as the franchise broke out onto the big screen.)
Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy record was principled and of mixed success, shall we say.
And perhaps here we can extract some clues as to why this might have been. He betrays some peculiarly American prejudices about the way the lines on our political maps come about. These include the notion that all of us human beings are on an evolutionary path to a state of government that looks a lot like the USA writ large.
Nation states, particularly those based on identifiable nations, are thus a more primitive form. Carter assumes that his extraterrestrial audience will inherently understand this. In this worldview, blocks or federations are great, empires however, always decrepit, and don’t say ‘world government’ or half your audience will disappear off into a homemade bunker.
I suggested in a post the other day that one of the reasons that we misunderstand the Middle East, often deliberately so, is that we apply some combination of the American and the Marxist way of looking at human organisation to the region, both containing an inherent sense of a direction of travel.
In fact there is always an innate tension in our individual and collective relationship to the available scales of organisation and control which, unlike time or natural selection, possesses a very definite reverse gear.
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