Fair warning: this is a social and political rant that I’m writing because I need to vent. If this isn’t your thing, there’s plenty else on this blog and elsewhere for you to read.
I was old enough to be fascinated by the original Star Trek when it came out in 1966, but not old enough understand the stories beyond a superficial level. I was in high school when it came back in syndication and I turned into a total geek for it.
Somehow that geekdom didn’t transfer to The Next Generation and subsequent series, though I’m familiar with them. But I still remember episode titles, plot points, and countless lines from TOS.
So much science fiction is dystopian. Star Trek was and is anti-dystopian. Star Trek said “we made it.” In the middle of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the U.S. civil rights movement, Star Trek said not only did we not blow ourselves up in some act of nuclear MADness, the people of Earth finally learned to live together in peace. We saw a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-gender society where nationalities were a source of pride (as demonstrated by Scotty and Chekov) but not a source of division.
Interstellar travel may or may not be possible (I tend to think it’s not, but perhaps science will find a way someday). But the kind of society envisioned by Star Trek has no technological barriers, and the progress we saw from 1945 to 2015 led many of us – myself included – to assume we were on the right path.
And now we’re not. The Star Trek future is dead.
Moving in the wrong direction
This isn’t about Trump. Or at least, not just about Trump.
It’s about Putin and Netanyahu and Hamas. It’s about Brexit and the struggles of the European Union. It’s about MAGA and the idea of a National Divorce and attacking the very existence of trans people. It’s about the fact that not only is there no universal health care in the richest country in the world, nobody’s even trying to create it.
Technological progress is fast – social progress is not
Star Trek was set in the 23rd century – 300 years in the future. Was that overly optimistic?
300 years prior to Star Trek – the late 1600s – was pre-Industrial Revolution, barely out of the Middle Ages. Coal was just beginning to be used for heating in Europe, and the steam engine was still decades away. Progress is never linear, but if you go from there to the mid-20th century with world-wide communications, air travel, and nuclear power, it’s not unreasonable to expect we could be building starships in another 300 years.
Socially, though…
Slavery is gone… but we still have for-profit prisons. Women have the right to vote… but not to control their own bodies. We no longer cut people’s heads off in public (actor Christopher Lee was a witness to the last public guillotine execution in France) but as I’m writing this the state of South Carolina just ritually shot a man to death.
Throughout the last election campaign I heard talk over and over again about “the border” and the supposed importance of closing it. Why? Why do borders even exist? Why can I pick up and move from Texas to California but not to Canada? Why are people living in dangerous places not allowed to move some place safer? Why are people not allowed to move for greater oppportunities? That’s what we’ve done for as long as we’ve been human.
Why does Donald Trump want to make America great and not make the whole world great, especially when his idea of greatness involves making other people and other countries less?
Why has Vladimir Putin killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians and tens of thousand of his own people to try to put a buffer zone around Russia? Why has the rest of the world allowed him to do it?
Why do ordinary Americans still disown their children for being gay or trans and revolt when schools teach history that doesn’t portray their culture as being the best of all possible worlds?
The reasons why these things are happening are the reasons why the Star Trek future is dead.
Disappointment in knowing things could be so much better
The anger I’m feeling right now isn’t because I’ve experienced some great personal harm – though many have, and many more are threatened. It shouldn’t have to happen to you for you to care about it.
I’m angry because I see society moving backwards instead of forwards. I understand that progress is never linear, and I understand that some people are struggling to keep up with the progress of the 20th century, much less with the progress of the 21st. Understanding that doesn’t make it any easier to accept, especially when I see intelligent, well-educated people cheering the reversal.
But here we are.
Perhaps this is as far as we can go for now.
We are not so far removed from the trees
For all of the wonder that you’re able to read my words from the other side of the world a fraction of a second after I write them, we are not so far removed from the caves… or from the trees.
We’re still new at this civilization thing. Our species is perhaps 200,000 years old. We’ve been living in cities – some of us, anyway – for 10,000 years. Industrial society is 300 years old.
Evolution – whether biological or social – does not move at a fixed pace. Evolution moves when a mutation or an adaptation gives some members of a species an advantage over others, and then that mutation or adaptation spreads.
Historians have speculated that the Roman empire was less than a hundred years away from an industrial revolution. Can you imagine the Roman empire in all its brutality with steam engines and firearms?
If you’re struggling to imagine, read about the U.S. Civil War. I don’t think it would be much different.
We are not as civilized as we like to think. We are not as enlightened as we like to think.
We are not as far removed from the trees as we like to think.
Evolution has no foresight – humans do
Evolution has no foresight. Mutations happen randomly. Most are harmful and quickly die out. A few are helpful and are passed on. This is a slow process – it took four million years to go from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens sapiens.
Social evolution (to the extent that it’s proper to call it “evolution”) is different. Humans have foresight. We can see problems, identify causes, propose solutions, and try them out. We can also deny problems, blame others, and do nothing, but that’s another rant for another time. The point here is that we don’t have to wait for a favorable mutation to make things better. We can learn and grow and make things better at amazing speeds – and we have.
Just not as fast as some of us would like. Not as fast as some of us thought we would. 1968 to 2001 is going to take a lot more than 33 years.
Can we build a Star Trek future in 300 years? Right now it’s not looking good.
But a lot can happen in 300 years.
Star Trek says we will make it
The Star Trek future isn’t really dead. It may be dormant, but it’s still alive, still possible, because we’ve imagined it, and we continue to imagine it.
Imagination is a powerful thing. So is the will to survive, to thrive, and to turn our imaginings into reality.
None of us were going to be around to see the 23rd century anyway. Building the 23rd century isn’t our job. Our job is to build the 21st century, to make it as peaceful, compassionate, just, and kind as possible.
And where we can’t make it as good as we need it to be? We need to keep telling stories about a better world. Keep imagining a better world.
We will never have a perfect world. We are human and therefore perpetually imperfect.
But we don’t have to build a perfect world.
We just have to build a better world.
Star Trek says we can, and we will.
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