Stanislaw Lem
Thinking more about the reticence of animals, I was reminded of the wonderful science fiction novel Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem. The novel tells the story of human explorers who discover signs of ‘intelligent’ life on the planet Quinta and try to make contact. The mysterious beings that live there are highly technologically advanced, but stubbornly private; they have no wish to have anything to do with the humans. They don’t express this through dialogue but merely by not responding to, or rebuffing, the various attempts made at contact. The humans busy themselves with hypotheses as to the nature of these beings, and the reasons for their unwillingness to communicate with the terrestrial visitors. They devise ever more intrusive strategies for contact which all lead to increasing levels of chaos and destruction.
The Quintans remain almost a total mystery in the novel, but we learn a lot about the humans who can’t seem to accept that the aliens could be so single-minded in their aversion to the noble enterprise of intergalactic exchange. Whatever the Quintan’s ethics, culture, motivations, history, morphology, etc. they are more or less totally silent in the face of the human explorers’ mania for contact.
What is very well expressed in the novel are the rationalizations the human travelers use, to justify their increasingly destructive intrusions on a life-form which they know nothing about. Self-absorbed paranoia takes the form of rationality and superior ethical wisdom. There are a lot of assumptions being made by the humans in Fiasco, assumptions that are convincing, intelligent and sensible, but assumptions nonetheless. In Fiasco the humans want answers and get none, so they supply their own, which conveniently favour the humans. All the while, the alien other has said nothing.