Why Do the Soft Lothark Eat Their Own?

The danger of the rational utility-maximizer.

Scene from The Expanse, Season 3. (Rafy/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images) 

Last August, Yascha Mounk posted “Stop Telling the Aliens that We’re Here,” inspired by Liu Cixin’s trilogy The Three Body Problem. In it Yascha makes the argument that attempts to contact alien civilizations are more likely than not to bring about disaster. The impulse to reach out beyond our earth comes from well-intentioned scientists and dreamers who hope to find solidarity not just with other human cultures, but with alien species from whom we might be able to learn. This according to Yascha is hopelessly naïve and ahistorical. The experience of most human societies that have come into contact with foreign cultures (human ones, that is) is one of ruthless conquest, and in some cases, like the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, almost total annihilation. In the second volume of The Three Body Problem (which Netflix has not gotten to yet), the alien civilization that is summoned by the first volume’s heroine turns out to possess deadly technologies that make mincemeat out of the human defenses put up to stop them.

This year saw the publication of a new science fiction novel that poses a somewhat different version of this story. James S. A. Corey, the pen name of the writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, had previously written a nine book series collectively known as The Expanse, which was turned into a five-season TV series by the Syfy Channel and Amazon Pictures. I absolutely loved this series, both in its written and TV versions. The Expanse was a throwback to the optimism of the early space opera genre. The initial technological premise is simple, the invention of the very fast Epstein Drive by which human beings are able to colonize their solar system out to the moons of Jupiter. In the show, human beings are threatened primarily by other human beings in a three-way struggle between Earth, Mars, and the marginalized inhabitants of the asteroid belt.

Abraham and Franck have now started a new trilogy, The Captive’s War, whose first volume, The Mercy of Gods, was published earlier this year. As in The Three Body Problem, a human civilization that had colonized the planet Anjiin sees on its radar scopes a fast-approaching invasion fleet headed towards them. This fleet is commanded by creatures called the Carryx, who look like enormous bugs, and whose technology far outstrips that of humankind. They conquer Anjiin in days, killing an eighth of the human population in the first few minutes of the war and taking captive a group of exo-biologists who up to then had mainly been preoccupied with getting the equivalent of NSF grants. They are transported in miserable conditions to the Carryx home world, where they are held as either slaves or pets, and told they will be allowed to live if they can solve a particular biological problem. 

What is interesting about this story is the way the Carryx civilization is portrayed. They have been tearing their way through the galaxy for centuries, conquering an expanding range of worlds and the species that live on them. They are utterly exploitative: having defeated a new world militarily, they then experiment to see if the species it contains can be made materially useful. If so, they are subordinated to the Carryx’s own purposes; if not, the population is obliterated and their world destroyed. When they appear on Anjiin, the actual violence is done by Rak-Hunds or Soft Lotharks, species subordinated long ago which have evolved to be obedient slaves or foot soldiers.  

The Carryx are well organized, rational, and utterly ruthless. What strikes me about this species is that they are very much like the rational utility-maximizer beloved by neo-classical economists. They cooperate with one another because it is in their self-interest to do so, maximizing their gains and eliminating threats to themselves. They act according to their own laws and rules that organize the species into a strict social hierarchy. The one thing the Carryx utterly lack is any sense of empathy or compassion. When one Carryx successfully completes its mission, it is ritually killed by its fellows since it is of no further use to the group. When the human captives rise up and kill one of their Soft Lothark captors, the creature’s fellows—bred to this behavior by the Carryx—aren’t moved to take vengeance on the human killers, but rather start eating their fellow Lothark’s body.  

Human beings do not behave that way, needless to say. At the end of the classic Charlton Heston sci-fi film Soylent Green, we are horrified to learn that bodies of the dead are being recycled into food for the living in a world beset by global warming. But if we are simply rational utility-maximizers, why not squeeze out a little extra income from grandma’s body? Why not simply kill off old people once they have stopped being economically productive, and not waste resources keeping them alive?

In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality the philosopher attempts to describe man in the state of nature, which is a metaphor for human nature. This allows him to distinguish natural traits from those that are socially or culturally constructed. Rousseau argues that primitive man was solitary, isolated, and had few wants beyond basic needs for food, shelter, and sex. The expansion of wants begins only with the establishment of human societies, in which individuals could start comparing themselves with other people; it is at this point that human unhappiness takes root.  

Rousseau explicitly disagrees with Thomas Hobbes’ portrayal of the state of nature on one critical point, namely, the latter’s assertion that humans are violent and cruel by nature. In fact, Rousseau argues that compassion or pity is the one emotion that is natural to humankind, and is the basis for all human morality. Violence and cruelty come only with the establishment of societies and the spread of envy, competition, and feelings of superiority.

With this assertion about the centrality of compassion, Rousseau establishes the basis for modern progressive politics. Institutions like slavery, patriarchy, xenophobia, and racism are all based on the inability of people to sympathize with the suffering of groups unlike themselves. As Tocqueville noted, equality and democracy have spread because of an ever-expanding “circle of compassion” where we are able to feel sympathy for different marginalized groups. In Democracy in America, he tells the story of Mme de Sévigné, an educated and urbane salon hostess who wrote her daughter a lighthearted letter about seeing a tailor being broken on the wheel, his body quartered and then exposed to the four corners of the city. She believed this would be a good example to teach the common people to respect their betters and not throw rocks in their gardens. Tocqueville explains that this was not done out of any particular malice or cruelty; Mme de Sévigné simply did not see the tailor as a fellow human being who could feel pain the way she did.

The question raised by The Mercy of Gods is whether it is possible to build a successful society out of creatures lacking any form of compassion, and who operate entirely on the basis of self-interest. Or to put it in somewhat different terms, is the faculty for compassion a natural human characteristic, as claimed by Rousseau, or was it in some way socially constructed at a certain contingent historical moment? And if it was a natural characteristic coded into human genes, why did it evolve?  

I don’t know the answer to these questions. While I suspect that compassion is likely to be rooted in human nature in some way, it may not be necessary to successful society-building. The behavior of the Carryx is actually not as alien as it may seem. There are many human societies that were comparably predatory: the Spartans killed infants who were deformed or weak; the Romans, who admired strength and honor above all, conquered much of the known world and those who would not submit were enslaved or killed off. The Mongols and Spanish Conquistadors behaved in a similar manner. The Nazis adopted Roman insignia like the fasces and behaved as direct imitators of that earlier empire. Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Christianity was a slave morality that elevated compassion for the weak into a sublime virtue and thereby undermined the Roman world. In making this argument, he comes down firmly on the side of compassion as a socially-constructed behavior, one that actually weakens societies rather than strengthening them.  

Modern liberal democracy is built in some sense around the universalization of compassion. It creates institutions like law and constitutional checks and balances to deliberately protect the weak by constraining the power of the strong. Within the broader orbit of identity politics, compassion has been taken to extraordinary lengths in recent years. Under the spell of the postmodernist preoccupation with language, words were seen as a form of power, and even of violence. Indeed, during peak Black Lives Matter frenzy, silence was seen as violence. Microaggressions and political correctness were policed rigorously, in the interest of protecting the marginalized.

These expressions of compassion have created a major backlash today. People on the MAGA right delight in breaking liberal norms surrounding racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and the like. The populist movements in today’s world prize strength and want to buck the institutional constraints around state power. It’s not clear how far they can go in acting on these feelings.

So politics today has become polarized in certain ways around the issue of compassion, both pro- and anti-. The Trump voters who won November’s election so decisively want, in a certain way, for the country to become more Carryx-like, without necessarily becoming Carryx themselves. In the meantime, let us follow Yascha’s advice and not alert any alien civilizations out there to our presence here on earth. 

Francis Fukuyama is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He writes the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.

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