Star Trek as a vessel of liberalism

Maureen C. writes:

I was discussing Star Trek via email with a friend recently. Perhaps you have already talked about this—it sounds as though you might have, the way you have about The Lord of the Rings, but in any case, here is part of the exchange:

There wasn’t a link between Star Trek and multiculturalism but there was a link between Star Trek and the Civil Rights movement. Roddenberry deliberately assisted the movement that was taking place in Alabama and other U.S. areas: He put an African woman, a Russian, a Japanese, and a Vulcan as the main part of the Star Trek crew. He was saying we can make blacks part of the crew, women part of the crew, former enemies, such as the Japanese, current enemies, such as the Russians, and even weirder people whom we haven’t met yet, part of the “crew.” In the 1970s the U.S. tried to do what no other society had ever before done, incorporate the black race into the mainstream. And it seems to have worked to some extent, but the methods used led to excesses. No good deed goes unpunished.

The American Civil Rights for blacks then evolved into American Civil Rights for the Third World—and that is when Star Trek-type civil rights morphed (was “teleported”?) into a policy of multiculturalism—an attempt to give everyone in the world a seat on the Enterprise, on the bus, at the diner. We were no longer allowed to shut America’s doors.

The next TV show, Star Trek Enterprise, opened the doors even wider by incorporating the “warrior” Klingons into the crew. See! There is no such thing as enemies. Even Klingons can see the American light and become kinder and gentler. People may look frightening, like the Klingons, but all people are just Americans at heart. Even Klingons can be trusted with the controls of the Enterprise.

The movie Star Wars, which was made shortly after the Star Trek series ended on TV, carried on the idea that there can be no boundaries by making Chubaka, a nonhuman creature who roared, part of the Starwars crew. I suppose Princess Leah could have married the wookie, if she wanted, but Lucas contented himself with making her the object of the lust of a sluglike creature named Jabba the Hut. However, in this peaceful American view of the world, there isn’t any dramatic action, so George Lucas had to find some “villians.” Since Americans of the 1970s couldn’t find any “villains” in the la-la land they lived in, they had to reach into the noncontroversial past to find a noncontroversial war with noncontroversial villains. They found Nazis. Darth Vadar wore a Nazi uniform. They also found Jabba the Hut. I guess everyone was still allowed to distrust a slug. (Sounds like Jabba ought to appeal to the ACLU though—he might have a case for defamation of character.)

Such is the “starry-eyed” landscape of the modern American mind and the view of history according to Hollywood and the 70s generation—who now run Congress and the Pentagon and occupy all high bureaucratic posts.

LA replies:

Just the other day a reader crticized Star Trek on similar grounds and I said that as far as the original Star Trek series was concerned, I did not entirely agree. Sure, all those liberal elements were there, but the original Star Trek also had strong non-liberal elements of heroism, a masculine, egotistical, and imaginative captain, a medieval quality of fealty in Spock’s relationship with Kirk, and, by and large, a traditional moral framework in which, for example, hubris and excess bring ruin and self-restraint saves the day. The show took seriously the classic philosophers’ understanding of the constitution of human nature, with the need for the will, reason, and feelings to operate correctly and in balance, each doing its own work, and the problems that occur when this balance fails. Consider the episode where Kirk is split into two halves, his rational side and his passionate side, and his rational though weakened half is able to defeat his passionate but irrational and therefore fearful half, but only when the two halves are joined again, does Kirk become whole, a being of energy and reason, and is able to take effective action and prevent disaster. Consider the episode where a somewhat megalomaniacal computer scientist, who is black, has developed a computer system that is supposed to make the Enterprise run by itself, the scientist is blind to the flaws of his creation, and his overambitious scheme causes a near disaster which is saved by Kirk’s human intelligence outwitting the machine intelligence that has run amock. Or consider the most famous episode of all, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” where Kirk, who has traveled back in time to 1930s America, must let the social worker played by Joan Collins, with whom he is in love, die in a car accident because he is aware that if she lives, she will become a leading figure in society and her idealistic schemes of world peace will lead America to fail to defend itself from Nazi Germany, delivering the world into a global dark age. That is serious anti-liberal content that is inconceivable in any entertainment of today. Also, the multi-ethnic aspect of the original Star Trek was low-key and non-intrusive.

However, when it comes to the later Star Trek spin-offs, Maureen’s analysis is correct. They kept becoming more and more inclusive and PC. Not only were interspecies love and sex a major element, but one of those shows (I forget the name) was like Hillary Clinton’s ideal world: a mannish female captain, surrounded by effeminate minority and non-human males.

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Arlene M. writes:

Maureen is right of course about Star Trek’s agenda. Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, tells the story about how she was ready to quit the series when she met Martin Luther King, Jr., who told her she had to stay and represent black people on the series.

And yes, the PC was a little more low-key on the original series, and the later series became more insanely “inclusive.” I’ve noticed the prevalence of interspecies couplings on ALL the newer sci-fi series, and it seems to be part of the agenda.

There’s one way to look at it though: according to the Star Trek view of the future, we will still be identifiable members of races and ethnic groups, despite the strenuous efforts to make us all one amorphous blended breeding population. I guess the writers never thought of that. Maybe they will “rectify” that when they realize it, and cast only racially ambiguous people on the series, like they actually do on many commercials now.

Chris L. writes:

Certain areas of Star Trek have remained fairly conservative throughout. First, it is the only sci-fi series I know of that has been pro-life. Whether it is over euthanasia or abortion, Star Trek has always taken the position of supporting life. Second, The Prime Directive is really a recognition that all people (in this case all aliens) are not the same. The policy of not interfering with other species, especially less developed ones, is a very conservative concept. Finally, the series recognizes that just because science can do something, it does not mean it should. For instance, genetic modification is seen as an evil and as such is banned. All of these go against liberal beliefs.

All of that being said, the later series did veer into the liberal swamp of multiculturalism. The result was falling ratings, uninteresting story lines, and a certain blandness. It is interesting that as the series went left, the need for more action and sex was found to be necessary. Additionally, the villains became more one dimensional.

Will Dial writes:

Miscegenation was built into the original series—remember that Spock was half Vulcan, half human. It runs rampant in the later series—Troi is half human, Worf’s son one-quarter human, and on and on—and to this was added the notion of “racial diversity” among the alien races in the form of, for example, a “black” Vulcan on, I think, “Enterprise.” But every series seemed to assume that Earth’s many national, cultural, and racial identities would continue to exist three and four hundred years from now.

Justin T. writes:

I can only assume by your statement about later Star Trek spin-offs that you have never seen Deep Space Nine. It was different from all of the other Star Trek series in that it portrayed a universe that was constantly at war and where money played a decisive role. The Federation was not portrayed as some utopian socialist society like it was in other Star Trek series; it even had its own ruthless secret police and intelligence force: Section 31. I could go on, but I won’t.

And your point about inter-species love and sex is wrong. The original series had a lot of that, but you’ve forgotten something fundamental about it all. In Star Trek, races didn’t exist; humans were only a sub-species of a much larger group: humanoids. Klingons, Romulans, Bajorans, Cardassians, Humans (homo sapiens), etc. were all humanoids. So, what the creators did was reverse what most race realists accept: that human races are something akin to a subspecies of homo sapiens; in the Star Trek universe, homo sapiens are simply a sub-species of a much larger group of humanoids.

On another note, all Star Trek series can be praised from something they all have in common: a rejection of collectivism.

I personally don’t see a problem with having crews made up of different species, unlike many of your readers. In a theoretical future where we’ve explored much of the galaxy and met a great many different species and cultures, some of whom which were hostile, would it not behoove us to embrace friendly species and the abilities that they evolved to help us in future expeditions against those who were hostile? If your readers are so opposed to having different species work side by side with humans, why aren’t they out opposing the use of K-9 units and Navy dolphin units? I know dolphins and K-9s are a crude comparison to the advanced species in the Star Trek universe, but in a non-fictional world where we have yet to explore much beyond our atmosphere, that’s as good as we can get.

Ralph P. writes:

Having seen all of the original episodes and enough of the spin-offs I can say that Star Trek goes far beyond just multiculturalism in its advocacy (that’s what it was, after all). In fact pretty much every tenet of modern liberalism made its way into the episodes. Even the last, horribly made Enterprise, which in its promos had promised a more “down to earth” version of the Trek universe, was irredeemably liberal.

I agree with you that the original version had many traditionalist aspects to it, to the credit of Roddenberry and some of the real sci-fi writers who wrote episodes. The more liberal aspects could almost be excused because at the time no one had yet experienced the full brunt of its effects yet.

The other spin-offs, with the possible exception of Deep Space Nine, had no such excuse. On The Next Generation, Voyager and Enterprise I have seen episodes which advocated homosexual rights (an androgynous race, one of whose members just “felt” that she was a woman, and had to hide it from, um, her, peers), utterly ridiculous peacenik solutions to aggression that would only work on TV (examples abound), and the unquestioned “superiority of “native” culture, i.e. romantic primitivism. In one particularly ridiculous episode the Enterprise came to the rescue of American Indians in outer space, on some reservation planet encroached upon by one of the approved baddies. The whole show ran like an argument for reparations, almost point for point. In the same episode the ship’s teenage genius was stalked, yes stalked by some advanced alien who thought the kid was “special.” The whole thing played out like a homosexual seduction. Very subtle of course, perhaps they didn’t mean it that way but I imagine that whole ethos is so endemic in the entertainment industry that it has long since become unconscious (more than one poster on the website Jump the Shark mentioned it).

As far as Justin T.’s point that all these shows were against collectivism, well I just don’t buy it. All the bad guys on the show were really just stand-ins for white male patriarchal societies. It’s not collectivism that the shows were against, but one particular collective identity. In contrast, the society Star Trek was based on really was a socialist utopia, where money had been eliminated (one set of aliens, the Ferenghi, were thrown in as a society of money-grubbing semi-dwarves, just in case you didn’t get the message), and “race” relations were oh so nice. Even the Klingons, a supposedly bloodthirsty group of savages, were given a nobility that in Hollywood could only mean lots of black actors (none of the Cardassians or Borg were black, of course, they were just bad).

For some reason Deep Space Nine was somewhat different. Though it was infected with the same PC virus it managed to treat its subject, about the crew of a space station at the crux of some very complex set of circumstances, with much more intelligence and balance than the other two. It had some of the flavor of older sci-fi and in fact in one episode the captain (played by Avery Brooks) was made under interrogation to imagine himself as a black sci-fi writer in 1950s New York! The episode was so well written, presumably by people very familiar with that era, that even its liberal leanings did not offend, (after all, sci-fi in those days was populated with liberals of all stripes).

And that episode, with its ‘50s flavor, summed up the difference between the original series and most of the spin-offs. Writers of the earlier eras had the now all-but-lost grounding in the Western canon. Even as liberals this must have curbed their inclination to just preach at people. It would have been considered bad writing. I’m sure there were exceptions but the culture at the time was not as willing to accept it, unlike the current younger generations, cut off as they are from their roots. And the newer Star Trek shows exemplified this, in spades.

Alan Levine writes:

I thoroughly agreed with your remarks about Coulter.

You were also on target about Star Trek. By the way, you may have solved, for me, one of the things that has always puzzled me about not only Star Trek, but other film and television (not literary!) science fiction, namely the origins of the weird and ridiculous trope of having humans interbreed with aliens. (This appeared, for example, in the later series “V” and the movie “Strange Invaders”.) I am not sure, however that you have gotten the whole reason for this.

I was surprised, however, by Maureen’s remarks that American society in the 1970s “decided to incorporate blacks in the mainstream.” That is exactly the opposite of what happened. It was in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s that the social agenda, if there was any, was integration; from the latter half of the 1960s on, there was an elaborate fabrication of special statuses and double standards, ranging from the polite avoidance of discussing racism or hostility to Jews among blacks to affirmative action and self-segregation on college campuses, and the acceptance of the idea that at the least blacks were fundamentally different from other minority groups. Now of course, we have graduated to triple standards, so that immigrants (or at least non-Western or nonwhite ) immigrants can claim different treatment from both blacks and whites, and the interests of both can be sacrificed to the interests, or supposed interests of newcomers… or invaders.

Derek C. writes:

Yeah, the old Trek series was liberal, but as you note, it was still in touch with traditional ideas. It was still American in the original sense of the term. You could feel the confidence of pre-1968 America in each episode. The eagerness for adventure and discovery brightened every episode, even the “darker” ones. Sure, there were some patently silly story lines, like the Nazi Planet, or the Roman Empire Planet (which positively plugged Christianity at the end), but you could forgive this, because the show’s optimism and enthusiasm for its subject matter and for the universe beyond the characters made you want to suspend your disbelief. The later spinoffs wound up being dedicated more to introspection, and it sucked the life out of lot them, despite some great performances from Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks and other Trek actors. The test of time tends to bear this out. I can still sit through an old Trek episode, but, excepting the Borg episodes, I flip the channel on TNG and DS9 eps.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Ralph P mentions that Star Trek’s mony-grubbers were “Ferenghi.” Did anyone else notice that Feringhi is an old Indian derogatory term for white, European foreigners in India?

Alan Levine writes:

A further point occurred to me about “Star Trek.” (I concede this is perhaps not a very serious subject!)

Although I have been an ardent science fiction reader all my life, I was never a big Star Trek fan. I watched the original series, but never felt great enthusiasm for it.. I did not watch the successors; I glanced at episodes of each but was hardly thrilled. I did notice however, that the “aliens” depicted were not in fact very alien-looking; to be blunt, they looked like deformed human beings. The producers seemed unable to depict non-humans who were nice looking, as nice to look at, say, as a dolphin or a cat. It is unclear to me whether this was to allow for the absurd interspecies breeding trope, or for some other reason—if anything, it made the interspecies breeding thing even less likely.,as the other races all were butt ugly! By contrast, on the original show, the Vulcans resembled Earth humans closely, save for the pointed ears. I seem to recall that they were all quite Euroepan Causcasoid looking. Possibly someone who posts on VFR could clear some of these points up?

Re Howard Sutherland’s remark: Ferengi, Ferenghi, Faranghi, etc. are standard words in Arabic, Hindustani and many other eastern languages for Western Europeans, from “Frank,” Even Ethiopian Christians use a variant of this. I do not think that, in and of itself, it is hostile.

LA replies:

I think Mr. Levine is making a key point. As I said, the racial aspect of the original series was very low-key, there was nothing really alien and “other” about the other races.

But his main point has to do with the ugliness of the other races in the later series. And this is absolutely correct. They were all gross and off-putting looking, yet none of that got in the way of all that lovely inter-racial friendship and mating. What was that about? It was about normalizing the ugly and repulsive. If the other races had been beautiful, it wouldn’t have served the multicultural purpose of destroying all standards and getting whites to surrender to the Other.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 05, 2007 07:30 PM | Send