I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog—O, the dog is me, and I am myself. Ay, so, so.
—Launce, in Shakespeare’s
The Two Gentlemen
of Verona
Dog? To be dog? Then what’s the use?
—Leon Rooke
Once, in the Canton Zoo, I saw a dog behind bars. He sat quietly, staring forlornly from his cage, beneath a little sign that identified him as a dog. There are few dogs on the streets of China—strays are soon captured and eaten—so to put a dog in a Chinese zoo is not preposterous, even if his breed is unexceptional. Still, to me the dog seemed lost among the monkeys and bears and tropical birds. He looked faintly embarrassed, like an actor stuck in an unsuitable role.
There is, after all, a difference between a dog and a wild animal. Of all the species on Earth, dogs alone have elected subservience to man. (House cats are said to be domesticated, but most retain their ability to survive in the wild, and if imposed upon may pad out of the house and never return.) To my mind there is something chilling about the way dogs so readily abdicated their sovereignty, given that we humans see so much of ourselves in dogs. I wonder whether we have a little dog in us, inasmuch as a slaveowner’s world view can become a mirror image of the slave’s. We haven’t had to worry about our capacity to subordinate ourselves to a more powerful species, voluntarily or otherwise, because we haven’t encountered a more powerful species. Yet.
We value our imperatives, and love dogs for obeying them. “Dogs are very loyal,” was a typical comment offered in a survey of what dog owners like about their pets. “The dog obeys me instantly,” was another. Praise of doggy obedience forms a sturdy thread in the history of people and pets, and on occasion has been carried to ludicrous extremes: A tenth-century Iraqi poet reported fondly that when a dog belonging to a man named al-Hārith caught his wife in bed with his best friend,
he leapt on them and killed them both. When al-Hārith returned home, he saw the two and realized what had happened. He informed his drinking friends of this and recited the following poem: “He is always loyal to me and protects me; He guards my wife, when my friend betrays me.”
Some swell pup. Yet we don’t have to go so far as to adore the dog who “guards” a woman by killing her to perceive that there is something more than faintly nauseating about the obedience we cherish in dogs. Dogs lose something essential in the bargain, and it is this forsaken state, in my view, that sets them apart from the wild animals, and made the dog in the Canton Zoo look out of place.
Wild animals are by definition free. They rely on other creatures, of course, from the prey they eat to the bacteria and insects that groom and perpetuate their environment, but they obey none. They live in direct contact with nature, with the universe—with God, if you will. But dogs have forsaken their spiritual independence. Between a dog and his god stands man, the master, upon whom the dog is not only materially but spiritually dependent. Kipling in one of his sentimental stories made this explicit, in a dog dialogue about theology: “He says: ‘I am fine dog. I have Own God called Miss.’ I say: ‘I am very fine dog. I have Own God called Master.’”
Would you care to lead a dog’s life—to eclipse your God and your universe behind a nonhuman species upon whom your mind and soul were thoroughly dependent? I doubt it. We’re used to being top dog. To abrogate our independence would leave us barely human. Superior beings might teach us valuable lessons and treat us decently, but they would enjoy a perspective on God and nature so far above our own that we could but defer to their judgment and await scraps from their table.
Yet that is exactly what the search for extraterrestrial intelligence threatens to do to us. Proponents of SETI have from the outset maintained that any beings from whom we receive a message are likely to be (or to have been) far more technically advanced than we are. We’re neophytes in the interstellar communication business, they would be old hands at it, and this difference presumably implies a loftier technological status for their race than ours. One can be persuaded by this argument without necessarily believing that technological progress moves steadily upward toward a better tomorrow; if, for instance, technically advanced worlds typically blow themselves to bits in short order, then we shall not hear from the inhabitants of those worlds. But the realm of the technically possible stretches to the far horizons, and there is no reason to assume that alien civilizations have not explored this realm far more extensively than we have. The gulf between their attainments and ours could be incomprehensibly broad; as the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke comments, the technological feats of an advanced civilization would strike us as indistinguishable from magic. (If so, interstellar communication relies upon the willingness of superior societies to make themselves intelligible to their inferiors; otherwise their messages would serve only to bewilder us.)
What would be the likely effect on human culture of contact with a superior civilization? Some SETI enthusiasts think it would be all for the good—that an extraterrestrial message might for instance tell us how to live in peace or solve the energy crisis. The American astronomer Richard Berendzen, while conceding that the experience of being flooded with encyclopedias’ worth of transcendent alien knowledge could “rob us of the benefits of our own inquisitiveness,” nevertheless volunteers that “the person who has cancer would not care whether the discovery of its cure came from the Boston Medical Center or from Tau Ceti.” He proposed that contact with aliens “might also lead us to better social forms, possibly to ways to solve our environmental crises, and even improve our own social institutions.” In a similar vein, the authors of a NASA report conjecture that “we might hear from near-immortals the views of distant and venerable thinkers on the deepest values of conscious beings and their societies.” Some SETI thinkers allow that contact with a superior species could let us in for a shock, but suggest that the shock would be good for us. Carl Sagan, hypothesizing that “there are a million other civilizations, all fabulously ugly, and all a lot smarter than us,” concludes that “knowing this seems to me to be a useful and character-building experience for mankind.”
So the picture as customarily presented by SETI advocates looks rosy. Contact with aliens could give us a leg up in science, technology, even politics and philosophy, and if it bruised our self-esteem a little, that might be salutary as well.
I’m not so sure. I’ve been arguing on behalf of SETI for some twenty years, and I agree that we might benefit from information bequeathed us by extraterrestrials. (Their putative intelligence aside, just consider how much of our technology has been borrowed from the study of living things on Earth, then imagine how many more engineering clues might be obtained from studying the architecture of alien life forms.) But it seems facile to think that aliens will solve our energy crisis or resolve the paradoxes of quantum logic, and I would urge that whatever else we seek among the stars, it ought not to be victory in some imagined scientific or technological footrace.
I suspect, moreover, that the potential penalties of contact are a lot darker than has usually been appreciated.
Military history does not suggest that the technologically inferior customarily benefit from contact with the technologically advanced. One searches in vain for instances in which peoples possessing the stirrup, the longbow, gunpowder, or the machine gun acted in a beneficent spirit of education and handed over these inventions to their fellow men who lacked them; more often, they simply mowed them down.* And these were our brothers and sisters, members of our own species. Why should a superior alien civilization, learning of our emergence, hesitate to exterminate us?
Sagan dismisses this sort of concern, pointing out that it would be extravagantly expensive for aliens to send armies across the daunting reaches of interstellar space just to eradicate our little world. But they wouldn’t have to come in person; an automated infernal machine, sent lumbering into the solar system from another star and detonated somewhere inside the orbit of the moon, might well suffice to sterilize the lands of Earth. I don’t know why an alien civilization would want to do such a thing—perhaps they fear and abhor violent species like ours—but the central tenet of strategic defense is to prepare for all plausible threats, and the spectrum of imaginable interactions among worlds on the interstellar scale contains many rather nasty scenarios.
Even if we agree that the danger of military aggression from space is minimal, there remains the question of culture shock. The culturally dispossessed peoples of our world—from Native American men lying drunk in the gutters of Albuquerque to Penan women driven from the rain forest to work the bars and brothels of Singapore—are not victims solely of violence and economic deprivation. They suffer as well (and in the long run more bitterly) from the loss of their culture, their universe, their God. The technological leverage required to disenfranchise a people in this fashion need not involve direct contact; Russian legislators in 1991 complained that Soviet youths were being seduced away from traditional values simply by watching American television programs. How much greater, then, might be the seductive power to the human species of a superior extraterrestrial civilization (or a network of many such societies) far superior to ours in technical achievements, knowledge, and wisdom? And what would become of us, once that edifice had erected itself between our species and our universe, our God?
The biologist George Wald brought up this point in an impassioned outburst during a 1972 SETI symposium at Boston University. “What are you going to do when all the things that make you proud and think it worthy to be a man are demonstrated to be unimaginably inferior to what creatures out there know and do?” Wald asked. Directing his remarks to Krister Stendahl, dean of the Harvard University theology school, Wald said:
“Krister thinks as a theologian, ‘Why, it’s wonderful because we’ll see the wider province of God.’ How do dogs feel about your God, Krister?” Wald demanded. “Are they proud, you know, of being men’s dogs, and having a dog’s share of man’s God?”
Stendahl responded eruditely that God amounts to more than our conception of Him: “For him who somehow believes in God, God is never a concept; but He definitely transcends that concept,” Stendahl said. “… I really think that it is not as simple as saying that man created a concept of God and where does the dog fit into it. If you mean God when you say God, you might even in the long run have to reorganize your behavior to dogs.”*
Which is just the point.
If there is intelligent life out there broadcasting signals into space, I suspect that we will find it sooner or later, or that it will find us. There’s no use trying to ignore the possibility, regardless of the potential dangers of contact. (China tried that approach with England. It didn’t work.) In the meantime, SETI acts as a mirror, encouraging us to think of ourselves from a more cosmologically urbane perspective. But if we take that perspective to heart—pull back the camera until the earth swims in a field of stars and scrutinize Homo sapiens from that lofty perch—what we behold is not very pretty. We see a violent species multiplying at a carcinogenic rate, laying waste to its mother planet while it wars against itself, spending more money on weapons of war than on education, hoarding wealth in the hands of a few while multitudes struggle with inadequate food, sanitation, health care, and education, permitting millions of children annually to die of curable disease or suffer permanent brain damage as a result of malnutrition when their lives could be saved for less money than a suburban matron spends getting a CAT scan for her dog—a species, in short, so blind in foresight and so indifferent to the commonweal as to make the word humane a hollow joke. Put yourself in alien shoes and ask whether such a species deserves to survive. If we’re intelligent, why aren’t we taking better care of ourselves and our planet?
The dismal prospect I see in SETI is not that there is but one intelligent species in our galaxy, but that there is none. I fear not that aliens will be different from us, but that they will resemble us in the ways of which we are least proud—that they, too, will turn out to be brutal bullies, only armed with bigger clubs. Nature loves irony and transcends justice: If the long arm of an unfriendly world should reach out and bludgeon us into a dog’s life or into extinction, could we, having inflicted as much on creatures that never did us harm, plead that we merited better treatment?
With the decline of organized religion in the Western world in the mid-twentieth century, millions of people began investing their religious impulses in science fiction fantasies about superior alien beings aboard flying saucers. As I do not think of mortal beings (or even immortal computers) as gods, I regard such sentiments as misplaced. Yet perhaps, when we consider the devastating impact that contact with a superior species could have on our culture and freedom, we can with justice compare extraterrestrials with God in this one sense—that one trembles to reflect that God is just, and hopes that He is merciful.
*“Thank God that we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not,” wrote Hilaire Belloc, in a tribute to the weapon that slaughtered thousands of Zulus, Dervishes, and Tibetans. In John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (London; Groom Helm, 1975), p 18.
*Robert Louis Stevenson would have understood Stendahl’s remark perfectly. One day in 1881 he stopped a man from beating a dog. The man objected, “It’s not your dog.” “It’s God’s dog,” Stevenson replied, “and I’m here to protect it!”