In discussing Star Trek (I have in mind the entire saga on the small and large screens from the pilot "The Cage" to the last episode of
Star Trek: Enterprise) I have argued for its being a marriage of the tradition of Wells-Stapledon-type
"scientific world-view"-minded science fiction with the tradition of pulp space operatic adventure identifiable with the work of writers like E.E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton. My view has been that this has been on the whole an interesting and fruitful combination, but there are also ways in which it has synergized less than ideally, not least politically. The Wells-Stapledon tradition is squarely leftist in the proper sense of the term--a bearer of the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially the possibility and desirability of humans applying reason to the material and social world to improve human social arrangements and humans' lot generally because of the existence of a common humanity, the capacity of human beings to think and act rationally, and the potentials for applying scientific knowledge to tame material and moral problems, be it relieving material want through greater productivity or freeing the human mind from ignorance and its terrors. Indeed, the Wells-Stapledon view holds that given the complexity, delicacy and resource-hunger of industrial life, and the destructive as well as liberating potentials of existing technologies (e.g. can states go on making war when the weapons have become so destructive?) it is not merely possible and desirable but
necessary that humans use these potentials to move the world beyond an economic life of Bernard de Mandeville grasping meanness, tribalism, superstition in the way some sneer at as "utopian." By contrast leading lights of the space opera tradition have not only often been right-wingers (as was the case with Smith), but in such aspects of that tradition as the "frontier mentality," the Otherness of aliens, the stress on armed conflict and its constant conduct in such fiction to the point of genocidal extermination, the stress on old-fashioned individualistic two-fisted heroics and technical
"genius" with its obfuscations going far beyond babble about "reversing the polarity," and their propensity for dressing up old genres such as Medieval romance in high-tech trappings, has bequeathed a legacy of deeply right-wing storytelling.
Thus on the one hand we had in Star Trek a united Earth that proceeded to help build a United Federation of Planets, not least in collaboration with the rationalistic Vulcans. We see that, at least at the level of everyday human wants such as food and shelter scarcity is no longer an issue--and that if humans are not without their faults or foibles, individually or in groups, and not wholly free of the danger of falling back into the bad old ways (as seen on Turkana IV) they are on the whole healthier, more rational, more capable of bearing responsibility than their twentieth or early twenty-first century counterparts. The Star Trek: The New Generation episode "The Neutral Zone," where the crew of the
Enterprise meets humans from our time just awakened from the cryogenic sleep that kept them alive in the interceding centuries, exemplifies this. As Jean-Luc Picard tells that arrogant embodiment of the bad old ways Ralph Offenhouse "We've grown out of our infancy." Indeed, though it is rarely spelled out as such the Federation is apparently a
Wellsian World State, and as socialist (
"People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions"), cosmopolitan and rationalist as that implies, on an interstellar scale reminiscent of the polities of the later chapters of Stapledon's
Star Maker.
However, if this is the
premise of the series, and it sometimes figured importantly in a scene or even an episode, the stuff of the typical episode of Star Trek was not really rooted in that. Rather than attempting to depict life in such a society it rarely showed us so much as a glimpse of the ordinary life of a citizen of the interstellar World State of the Federation. Instead it concentrated on the quasi-naval Starfleet dealing with the less utopian or rationalistic galaxy beyond it, in adventures that tended to hew to space operatic norms. There was the emphasis on military confrontation with other galactic polities--the Klingons, the Romulans, later the Borg and the Cardassians, in just the first sequel series. (Indeed, it was a confrontation with the Romulans in the Neutral Zone between them and the Federation that was the backdrop to Picard's encounter with Ralph Offenhouse and his contemporaries from our time.) Even when there wasn't a war or military confrontation on there was a lot of attention to feudal pageantry and general barbarism--the warrior culture of the Klingons in particular, all as even the irrationalism Vulcan rationality doesn't always keep in check was memorably foregrounded in episodes like "Amok Time"--and the existence of a different, less attractive, alternate timeline for humanity and the Federation hinted at in "Mirror, Mirror." (Cue the battle theme!) Moreover, as it progressed much of this became more rather than less prominent, with
The Next Generation devoting more time to the martial side of Starfleet's activity than the Original Series as Worf's inclusion in the cast foregrounded Klingon barbarism,
Deep Space Nine a war story that for many glittered most brightly in the darker patches where Starfleet officers behaved rather unlike Starfleet officers (it says something that the episode "In The Pale Moonlight" was such a hit with fans),
Voyager a saga of the ship's crew making their way home from cosmic terra incognita predictably inhabited largely by hostile barbarian types, such that this "voyage home" tended to consist of the crew enduring one year-of-hellish battle with such enemies after another. After that
Enterprise retreated from the 24th and even 23rd centuries to offer a prequel that repeatedly went the same path (most obviously in Season Three's arc). So it went with the movies that, after the cerebral
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, inclined to increasing action from
The Wrath of Khan forward, with it seeming notable that if the box office trend was generally downward number eight (
First Contact) represented a bit of a rebound, with this at least partly a matter of the movie being
Die Hard on the Enterprise. Indeed, even in the more intellectually serious episodes looking at another society we saw not the "world that works" that the Federation had become, but those societies that
didn't work, and indeed didn't work in the same way that our own society is clearly not working, with its exploitation, its oppression, its irrationality, such that that is what viewers might remember most--all as our glimpses of life on Earth could sometimes seem a cheat. (Thus is it the case that when Captain Picard visits his brother we see not 24th-century San Francisco, say, but a French vineyard whose owner rejects modernity to the point of refusing to have a replicator in his house, looking at which we may feel we have gone centuries back in time.)
Amid all that one could be forgiven for not paying all that much attention to the show's better tomorrow, let alone how we arrived at it, the more in as practical politics required the showrunners to not get too vocal about that. This was, after all, a show presenting a Wellsian-Stapledonian utopia amid
the height of the Cold War, when even what passed for "liberalism" was apt to be
conservative if not reactionary--all as
Anti-Communism never ceased to be the "national religion," and the flak was always there to make sure Star Trek's showrunners never declared too loudly for progressive values, or too obviously critical of the present day. (Hence the commentariat's quickness to attack a Star Trek show whenever it presented its satire of the ultra-capitalist Ferengi, all as,
reflective of the politics that prevail on the web, one very quickly comes across those hastening to declare for the supposed virtues of their social system and society generally.) The result was that one could just take what progress there was as a matter of hazy optimism about "progress" divorced from any more worked-out social views, and not too disturbing to--or even be oblivious not only to how we got to a better tomorrow, but the fact that we had done so at all, attending to the more sensational episodes and thinking it just standard space opera stuff--with all the political baggage going with the war and barbarism and "backwardness" while the humanistic, utopian, cerebral stuff not even on their mental radar. (Indeed, much as I admire New Wave science fiction titan Harlan Ellison,
reading his literal hundred page-long rant in his book about his experience writing the episode "City on the Edge of Forever" and the rancorous aftermath of his efforts, it seemed to me clear that this very intelligent and able writer just "didn't get it," all as evocations of the show in popular culture tend to slight the humane and intellectual aspects. The film
Galaxy Quest, for example, was in many ways a memorable parody of the show, but it didn't even acknowledge this side of it, instead sticking with the martial, war-fighting, running from alien rock monsters-type stuff as if that was all there had ever been to it.)
This not infrequent mismatch between the
premise of Star Trek (and I might add, what the show delivered at its most ambitious and thought-provoking), and the stuff of a typical episode (maybe, too, the episodes that made their deepest impressions on pop culture in such ways as the oddities of Vulcan mating habits, or the significance of
Mr. Spock's beard), may seem predictable. After all, imagining everyday life in a "utopia" (indeed, anything much different from the writer's own world), let alone endowing that with a dramatic interest that would be meaningful for an audience of millions week in, week out, year in, year out, is a far from simple task. We may expect that such a society would still have its conflicts and its drama, but they would be different from those of today--a society that has progressed beyond barbarian to something truly deserving of the term
"civilization," from "infancy" as Picard had it to something closer to adulthood--with the result that in our present state even if we can try and imagine them intellectually (as Leon Trotsky certainly tried to do in
Literature and Revolution) we would likely end up with just hazy notions, rather than anything we can "imagine to saturation" in that way desirable for dramatization, and still more dramatization that could really touch a broad audience, making them
feel those conflicts in the same visceral way they feel those of our present life and time. (What do the troubles of grown-ups mean to those still in their infancy?) Certainly I can't imagine any media corporation being willing to bet real money on the ability to do that. The result itself cannot, especially as they were making a space opera, the show's makers often reached for space opera stuff, perhaps encouraged in this by the fact that action-adventure is always an easy sell, and indeed the pressure to take that course greater as time went on simply because of changing audience expectations. (Those who write professionally of the TV today can be
very smug when they compare the television production of our era and its audience to those of prior decades, but the evidence seems to favor the position that today's viewer probably has less patience or literacy than did his predecessor of the 1960s, with all that meant for the requirement of more Zap, Boof, Pow! per minute of air time, as editors cut even romantic comedies for Hallmark as if they were action films.) Still, however one explains the situation the result cannot be gainsaid, and that seems to me something to remember as we see--bizarrely from the standpoint of left-leaning fans, who admire the show's humanity, utopianism and socially critical perspective--right-wingers likewise lay claim to a show that stands for everything they stand against.
