#statistical probabilities

In “Rapture,” a series of visions leads to him neglecting his diplomatic duties and eventually outright halting Bajor’s acceptance into the Federation; he is only able to keep his job as CO of Deep Space Nine because of the Bajorans’ regard for him. In “Tears of the Prophets,” by contrast, orders from Starfleet compel him to ignore a warning from the Prophets. Sisko’s growing attachment to Bajor also prompts him to decide to create a home there despite his intention to remain in Starfleet. The intimate relationship to Bajor and its culture that Sisko develops is incompatible with his initial mission to assimilate Bajor into the Federation, and the life he wishes to carve out for himself there is one that he clearly envisions as separate from his duties with Starfleet.

The first direct challenge to Sisko’s identity and obligations to Starfleet comes in “Destiny,” in which Sisko is pushed both by members of an extremist Bajoran sect and by Kira to bring an important scientific collaboration with the Cardassians to a halt because of a prophecy. His insistence that he needs something “Starfleet” to justify calling off the project has several implications. It implies oversight, the need to justify his actions to his superiors and the institutional body to which he is accountable. After all, his motivations are not personal - he is acting as a representative of the Federation, and the project has important symbolic significance in ensuing future cooperation between Bajor and Cardassia. But Sisko is also referring to epistemology, to the mechanisms through which knowledge is accrued and tested and validated.

Part of Sisko’s arc in accepting his role as Emissary involves opening himself up to new avenues of acquiring knowledge. And although explicitly taking up the role of Emissary is one of active choice on his part (as seen in “Accession,” when the Prophets push him to embrace it), it also necessitates relinquishing control. In “Rapture,” Sisko has to surrender himself to an onslaught of visions in order to gain insight about Bajor’s future. He actively chooses to retain subject to this process, even with the understanding that it could threaten his life, but he is also in a somewhat altered state, driven by forces beyond his control that pose a serious threat to his mind and body. Moreover, the cognitive and experiential processes he undertakes in order to interpret the symbolism of these visions is quite divorced from Starfleet-approved empiricism, and is more like a kind of felt intuitionism (one Sisko compares to the loving attentiveness he felt towards his baby son when he was born). In “Far Beyond the Stars,” Sisko is thrust without warning into a vision of Earth’s past, through which he comes to understand his place in history and the importance of his continued war efforts. In “The Visitor,” when he is unmoored from the normal flow of time, he encourages Jake to “let go” and stop investing effort into bringing him back. This calm acceptance of his liminal state foreshadows his acceptance of his progression to a higher plane of existence in the series finale, in which he recognizes that he needs to learn from the Prophets by dwelling with them outside of corporeal space and linear time.

In “Destiny,” he arguably takes the first step in that process. He takes initiative and, after a conversation with Dax, opts to ignore the prophecy and act as he normally would without having heard it. This is in effect choosing his role as a Starfleet officer, and its associated proper procedures, over his role as Emissary. However, that choice in and of itself constitutes a kind of “letting go” - he stops trying to interpret the intricacies of the prophecies relating to the Emissary and acts on his own instincts instead. And the revelation that events have fallen into place in a way that might, potentially, constitute the realization of the prophecy paves the way for radical surrendering of control in allowing the Prophets to guide him later on.

For Bashir, his arc sees recurring friction between two roles that he initially sees as non-contradictory: his role as a doctor versus his role as a Starfleet officer. Bashir believes in a benevolent Starfleet and its humanitarian mission. But there are several episodes that indicate that Starfleet’s goals and underlying ideology are, in DS9, more oriented towards defending and protecting the Federation’s borders, an approach somewhat incompatible with a more universal altruism.

This is the underlying conflict between Bashir and O’Brien in “Hippocratic Oath.” Before Bashir learns that the Jem’hadar who are holding them captive are trying to break free from the Dominion, he objects to helping them on the grounds of his duty as a Starfleet officer to protect the Federation (which he follows up with “or any other race” - the “serve and protect” impulse comes before the altruistic impulse). However, after bonding with Goran’Agar and witnessing the suffering of the other Jem’Hadar when deprived of ketracel white, he opts to help them, not only to alleviate their suffering and release them from their enslavement by the Founders, but because he becomes invested in their potential as a species:

BASHIR: He's beginning to question everything he's been taught. Blind obedience to the Founders, killing without remorse and the devaluation of other sentient lifeforms. He's developing his own moral structure. It's incredible. … O'BRIEN: …Stop being so naive, Julian, and look at them for what they are. They're killers. That's all they know how to do. That's all they want to do. BASHIR: But they have the potential to be so much more. Goran'Agar has shown them that. They just need our help.

O’Brien, in this scene, voices the same objection that Bashir initially raised re: helping the Jem’Hadar, namely that it will result in “unleashing the Jem'Hadar against the Federation.” Interestingly, one could construct a pragmatic counterargument here: taking steps towards potentially curing the Jem’Hadar of their ketracel white addiction would weaken the Dominion and thus strengthen the Federation. But Bashir instead makes an ideological argument, and it’s one based in the ideals on which Star Trek has been built from the beginning: the necessity of self-improvement. The franchise famously imagines a more enlightened future for humanity, and the (somewhat problematic) link between technological development and social and moral development is embedded into its worldbuilding. Jake Sisko explicitly cites self-improvement as the human ideal that has supplanted material gain. Bashir’s interest in Goran’Agar and his followers is not just borne of sympathy and compassion, as O’Brien surmises (although there is that); rather, he’s motivated by his belief in what is arguably the Federation’s central ethos. It’s the kind of (somewhat paternalistic) guidance that the Vulcans provided for humans several centuries before his time, and that he himself wished to administer by practicing “frontier medicine.” But it’s a mindset that is, in this context, divorced from his loyalty to the Federation as a sovereign nation.

That brings us to “Statistical Probabilities,” in which Bashir’s conflict with Sisko sees him instead in the role of the pragmatist, and Sisko as the idealist. Bashir advocates for surrendering to the Dominion because, based on the calculations and predictions he’s done, he believes avoiding a fight will save nine hundred billion lives.

One could raise some valid objections to his reasoning. For one thing, there’s the fallibility of the entire process of predicting the future, as the episode makes clear by the end that no speculation can take into account every possible variable. For another, there are ethical questions that Bashir’s recommendation fails to contend with - what of the suffering that will occur under Dominion occupation? What about the potential lives lost during a projected future rebellion against the Dominion? Indeed, Sisko raises some of these concerns, pointing out that Bashir is “[asking] an entire generation of people to voluntarily give up their freedom.”

But it is fitting that Bashir doesn’t stop to consider this angle. O’Brien is right - he’s operating on a doctor’s mindset, with a doctor’s priorities. That tends to get parsed as warm and caring in fandom and in popular reception of the character, but it’s also a role that necessitates a lot of calculus regarding death and suffering. Bashir has experience in battle triage situations, and is familiar with the seemingly cold, utilitarian logic that governs them. If you have two critically injured people and you can only save one, you save the one who has the best chance of survival. More broadly, the goal is to ensure as many people survive as possible, and that calls for some individuals to die for the good of the group. It’s that simple. Here, he’s trying to apply the ethos of triage on a mass scale.

Note, however, that his push is not just about saving lives. He defends surrender to Sisko because he believes it will, in the long-term, benefit the Federation:

BASHIR: If we fight, there will be over nine hundred billion casualties. If we surrender, no one dies. Either way we're in for five generations of Dominion rule. Eventually a rebellion will form, centering on Earth. It'll spread, and within another generation, they'll succeed in conquering the Dominion. The Alpha Quadrant will unite and a new, stronger Federation will rule for thousands of years. Since we can't win this war, why don't we save as many lives as we can?

So, Bashir is welding two sets of priorities - his duty as a doctor to save lives, and his duty as a Starfleet officer to ensure the existence and sovereignty of the Federation. The latter is still manifestly important to him.

Sisko’s response, on the other hand, is an argument from ideology:

SISKO: I don't care if the odds are against us. If we're going to lose, then we're going to go down fighting so that when our descendants someday rise up against the Dominion, they'll know what they're made of.

Sisko is effectively saying that even if Bashir’s predictions were completely infallible, surrender would be a betrayal of everything the Federation stands for, and that its preservation necessitates holding on to its values. Interestingly, their conflict here in some ways anticipates the issues raised in the Section 31 arc. Bashir’s willingness to surrender for the sake of a future, stronger Federation invites comparisons to the kind of ruthless pragmatism displayed by Sloan, a man for whom the preservation of the Federation supersedes any adherence to the values it publicly espouses. The difference here is that Bashir is arguing for the preservation of the Federation in tandem with preserving lives, and that the ideals Sisko is dedicated to upholding are specifically the ideals of military heroism. And for all that he enjoys indulging in heroic self-annihilation fantasies in the holosuites, Bashir evidently does not share those ideals, given his bitter response to Sisko:

BASHIR: So we go down fighting. How terribly courageous of us.

However, events compel Bashir to choose his loyalty to Starfleet over his ideals as a doctor. After Starfleet rejects the recommendation to surrender, the other augments decide to go to the Dominion on their own and hand over military secrets in order to force a Dominion invasion. Bashir objects to this, again on pragmatic grounds, since abetting a Dominion invasion is different from prompting Starfleet to surrender and will get many more people killed than a peaceful surrender will. However, his objection in that scene is also framed in ideological terms: he doesn’t feel he and the other augments have the right to play God.

Fascinatingly, his precise phrasing is “It’s not our place to decide who lives and who dies.” One could argue he was trying to do exactly that earlier in the episode, as pushing for surrender to the Dominion is in and of itself trying to ensure that fewer people die. Therefore, it’s telling that what he decides is a bridge too far for him involves committing treason. He’s willing to use his abilities within the bounds of institutional approval from Starfleet, but going against their authority is too great a transgression. As Jack puts it, the augments are “the next best thing” to gods, to which Bashir replies, “That's precisely the kind of thinking that makes people afraid of us.” Later, Bashir also retroactively justifies his decision to stop the other augments by acquiescing to Sisko’s logic, that they can’t possibly account for every variable in predicting the future. But it’s clear that his loyalty to Starfleet, as well as the scrutiny on him now that his genetic enhancements have been revealed, is guiding his reasoning here as well.

“Fortunately, this doctor is also a Starfleet officer” - that “fortunately” is doing so much work. Bashir’s role as a doctor is the locus of his intellectual ambition and his egotism, qualities that stand in opposition to the loyalty and obedience that his position within the Starfleet apparatus demands. And for all his arrogance, Bashir is terrified of his own ambition, and recognizes it as a potential liability. When he berates himself for his failure to save or help people, such as in “The Quickening” and “Chrysalis,” it’s specifically for his arrogance and for overstepping his bounds in what he assumes it’s within his capacity to do. It’s “fortunate” that he’s a Starfleet officer in the sense that he averted a potential military invasion, but also in the sense that his role as a Starfleet officer has kept him in check, has overridden his personal ambition and overconfidence. In hindsight especially, it’s clear he was right to follow his duty to Starfleet and the Federation here, but that loyalty becomes more fraught in light of his later arc with Section 31 and the revelation of the lengths to which the Federation will go to maintain its power.

To sum up, both Sisko and Bashir view their roles in Starfleet as central to their identities; however, their conceptions of themselves become more fragmented over the course of the show, and, for different reasons, they both come to understand their duty to Starfleet as being at odds with other facets of their identities, values, and priorities.

They are given no real opportunity to fully process this together. I’d posit that this is partly due to Sisko’s role as Bashir’s commanding officer, and the resulting dynamic in which he metonymically stands in for Starfleet in Bashir’s perception. This is most clearly illustrated in their conflict in “Statistical Probabilities,” in which Sisko is the entity through which Bashir makes his appeal to Starfleet, and who, in vocalizing the values of the Fedeation, is the most strident voice against Bashir’s advocacy of surrender. But earlier, in “Distant Voices, Bashir sees his fellow officers as representations of aspects of his personality, and Sisko appears to him performing Bashir’s own role as a medic. Bashir realizes that Sisko represents his professionalism and skill. It’s fitting that his subconscious mind would have this association with his commanding officer, but it’s also notable, in light of the later discontinuities in Bashir’s perception of his different professional roles, how unified those roles are in this vision. By the later seasons, when his priorities evolve and his trust in Starfleet starts to erode, it’s possible that his faith in Sisko as the embodiment of his professionalism feels more fraught.

But this failure to reckon with their increased alienation from Starfleet is unfortunate given that Bashir is somewhat sympathetic to the possibility of Sisko exploring new epistemic avenues through his role as Emissary. In “Accession,” Bashir raises the possibility to Sisko that the Prophets might be telling him something important in his visions of them, and encourages him to listen despite Sisko brushing the possibility aside. “Rapture” - if one assumes that it is truly Bashir present there, and not the changeling (as I do) - sees a comparable dynamic arise. Bashir is confronted by the visiting Admiral Whatley regarding Sisko’s visions, and, in response to the Admiral’s frustration over the conflict of interest in Sisko accepting the role of Emissary, counters that the Bajorans’ spirituality is important to them and that there’s no changing their minds regarding Sisko’s legitimacy as Emissary. When Sisko later discerns that Whatley is having conflict with his son, Whatley wonders how he possibly could have known that, and Bashir simply replies, “He’s the Emissary.”