There apparently has been an online debate about the sociology of Star Trek, summarized in the Otherwhere Gazette:
David Gerrold has responded to William Lehman’s article “Destroy the myth, destroy the culture.” by pointing out that Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future within the Star Trek was far more sociological than technological. He should know, he was there. In meetings with the creative staff of Star Trek, Roddenberry spoke of a future where all people had equal opportunity and access to resources. This vision is glorious in its scope and ambition. Such a world would be amazing. It is also as fictional as the Star Trek series that envisioned it.
Go to the Lehman link, and you’ll read his piece and counterarguments, including Gerrold’s, about Roddenberry’s views of social justice incorporated into, according to Gerrold, most episodes of the first (and best) Star Trek. We, however, resume course:
Many of the social ideas Gene Roddenberry envisioned have severe problems. Roddenberry thought of a world where people (and aliens) would all work together for the common good. Great in theory but who decides what the common good is? This shouldn’t be a problem except for two factors: available resources and the people themselves. For example: Party A wants to build a bridge to facilitate trade and party B wants to build a hospital to facilitate health. Both projects will require two cranes apiece but only three are available for both projects. Party A’s bridge will mean more resources coming to the area and an increase in the number and quality of jobs available thereby increasing the standard of living in the area. Party B’s hospital will bring more medical services to the area which will help people when they are hurt or sick. Which project takes priority? There are not enough resources to do both projects at the same time so the secondary project will at least be delayed and might possibly be canceled as other projects are put forward. Who decides which is more important? This is a problem even with human resources. Increasing the availability of education sounds very good in theory but where do you get the professors to teach the larger number of students? Also, how do you distribute this among the disciplines? The emphasis on a college education has meant we have a glut of lawyers but a dearth of welders. This is despite the fact a starting welder makes more than a starting lawyer and most lawyers don’t work at the law firms portrayed on “LA Law” or “Boston Legal”. There will never be enough resources for everything everybody wants so this part of Roddenberry’s social vision fails.
And now is where we bring people into it. Roddenberry saw people being better than they are. He envisioned a world where people worked together to achieve their goals and the organization that facilitated this, the bureaucrats of the Federation of Planets, were all competent and did the best they could at their jobs. As far as I can recall, the Enterprise never had a supply issue (“Mudd’s Women” could be argued but I think that was more of a compensation issue). They always had enough toilet paper and spare parts. Talk about fiction! In the real world there is a rule of thumb: 20% of your workers, regardless of your profession, will be awesome, 60% will be simply do their job and go home, and the last 20% will have the other 80% asking how they got hired in the first place and why they are still around. Throw in Dr. Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Rule of Bureaucracy and you’re lucky the Federation can get a starship into orbit, much less explore strange new worlds. And never forget self-interest. Whether the bridge or hospital is built is just as likely to be decided by who the bridge is named after or who gets a job on the hospital’s board of directors as by merit.
Ambition plays a role as well. Generally speaking, most people want tomorrow to be slightly better than yesterday. Ambition and greed are not necessarily bad. However, when an individual’s calculations have them thinking, right or wrong, that the use of force is more efficient and/or more likely to have them achieve their goals this creates a problem. You cannot take aggression away from humanity without taking away its ambition. Even Star Trek showed this in the episode “The Enemy Within”. Leaving it in means you will always have somebody who makes decisions from self-interest rather than the greater good. Take ambition away and you get the planet Miranda from “Serenity” rather than the United Federation of Planets. Make rules to mitigate the effect of ambition and you stifle the good aspects along with the bad. And, sooner or later, you’ll discover that, rather than rules eliminating aggressive behavior from people, you’ll find they have simply disguised it. People don’t “Progress” they adapt.
In summary, we praise the technology of Star Trek because it works and gives us something to strive for. With the right combination of wires and elements we can make the technology of Star Trek a reality. Roddenberry envisioned a future society in which everybody had the ability to fulfill all their goals. However, it only works on television and we generally don’t praise things that don’t work in reality. The unfortunate truth is that we cannot fulfill Roddenberry’s vision because people are people. We must accept that people are individuals with their own wants and needs and always will be. And the individual is where Roddenberry’s social vision fails.
Roddenberry evidently could have been from the Progressive Era, which was based on the belief that man could be perfected with the assistance of activist government and the “experts” in higher education, government and elsewhere. The irony here is that the least competent bureaucrat in the Federation was Gerrold’s own creation, Nilz Baris, the undersecretary of agricultural affairs, who blamed Kirk for the tribbles and the Klingons’ presence on Space Station K-7. (Followed by the commissioner who was fine with leaving senior Enterprise officers marooned on Murasaki 312 in “The Galileo Seven,” and the ambassador who nearly got himself and the Enterprise crew killed in “A Taste of Armageddon.”)
The comment debate-thread included:
Even [Star Trek: The Next Generation] covered the aggression/ambition issue with the [episode] that saw Q send Picard back in time to avoid getting stabbed. The resulting Picard was a milquetoast nobody, pigeonholed as an unhappy botanist or something equally unmemorable…
There were a couple of things that the whole foundation relied on: cheap, unlimited energy and the ability (requiring said unlimited cheap energy) to manipulate matter (transporters and replicators). So, the bridge vs hospital problem would never really have to be addressed because they appeared as if by magic. Neither the toilet paper generally — I guess you might still run out in the stall.
The very first lecture in “Introduction to Microeconomics” back in college had the line “wants are unlimited while resources are limited.” This really is the first law or economics. So far nobody has come up with a realistic way to change that. It remains pure hand-wavey magic whenever it’s used in fiction, less “real” than the magic of fantasy fiction.
And just like magic in fantasy, it can be really useful in a story to look at something besides the limited resources thing.
See also, “why RPGs don’t have you sitting there watching your character sleep for a third of the game.”
The original Star Trek also was willing to give opposite sides of an issue a hearing: a deconstruction of “remote control” “painless” war (a stand-in for the proxy wars of the Cold War) in A Taste of Armageddon on one hand and an argument for why when your enemy arms one side in a “proxy war” you are justified in arming the other if only to restore the “balance of power” and leave the “proxy” some semblance of self-determination) in A Private Little War.
One other thought, the social causes have changed as our society has changed. And so has the terminology. The folks that worked hard in the 60’s on our social causes of the times are not today’s Social Justice Warriors. The modern SJWs {a tag they took on their own} are on the left, but that is all the resemblence they have to the social heroes of the sixties.
In fact, if we look to Star Trek again for inspiration, the modern SJW’s would be the Borg. Their whole existence is predicated into slotting everyone into a hole, whether you fit or not. And they absolutely lose it if you oppose them or disagree.
What is it our heroes in Star Trek do when they run into rampaging Borg? Why they fight and work to protect individual freedom.
“Roddenberry saw people being better than they are.”
Sure. He saw technology better than it is too. He saw them both AS THEY COULD BE. Tech has moved faster than he envisioned, but people are getting better. Give the vision time.
People are the same. People still murder, rape, abuse and all other manner of evil things. People will continue to do this.
The only way to stop people from harming one another is to engineer humans to where they are no longer humans. The only way to stop humans from hating one another is to engineer them so that they are no longer humans.
You have good people, but you have bad people as well. You always will, as long as humans are humans.
Unless you do want to go the Miranda path and try to engineer humans to be something that they are not.
Great article, but I need a clarification on what you mean by “progress” more specifically the idea that progress is limited by human capacity. 100 years ago, no country had universal suffrage. Slavery was common until about 200 years ago. Times changed. Now, the idea of regressing back to those once societal norms seems abhorrent, if not impossible. Clearly regression is possible (for example ISIS) but it’s also hard. Is progress just the product of cultural norms? If so, we see to have created some norms that are pretty enduring and pretty positive. There is a tone to this article that feels very postmodern in its thinking, that denies any real progress. I think progress is very clearly real, and not just technical progress and an endless progression or ever more clever gadgets, but real social progress. I’m not in any way however, a “progressive” as that modern term is used, but consider myself a classic liberal. Thing is, I have no idea what is possible for the future society of humanity. We are already working and collaborating today on levels that people just a century ago would have thought impossible. A lot of this is communitarian, some free market, but it is happening. Is a Star Trek future impossible? Well, it might seem so to us, but them universal suffrage was once considered just as impossible. Don’t count Roddenberry entirely out just yet. He may be right after all.
Gerrold added:
These are all good points. And probably much more grounded in reality than Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future.
But Star Trek as a vision wasn’t meant to be a prediction, nor was it meant to be accurate sociology either — but it was intended as a set of moral thought experiments, and perhaps even a goal to aim for, that human beings might someday learn to resolve our differences without laying hands on one another.
As prediction, all SF stumbles. But as an ideal, Star Trek still works. That’s why it maintains its iconic status.
Remember that line from Robert Browning’s poem, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” That’s Star Trek too.
The dubious economics of Star Trek got mentioned too:
The Economics of Star Trek I always found ludicrous. By TNG it’s pointed out that man has evolved into some kind of glorious socialist, anti-materialist future. (Picard tells someone from the past that we have evolved beyond commerce and the need for money or some such). They apparently don’t use money, and let’s stop to think that things like food replicators and the holodeck, essentially solve the basic economic problem, of scarce resources and unlimited wants, if you can literally transmute matter to make a steak you have no need to explore space. Also the holodeck. My God, you guys go off and explore space, I’ll spent my entire life in my holodeck with Jessica Alba, Marilyn Monroe and the 20 year old Sofia Loren, thank you. Progress would grind to a complete halt.
More succinctly, Roddenberry either never heard of or outright rejected Adam Smith.
Well, yes. Several thousand years, at least, of recorded human history (merely going back to the Bible) should be enough proof that, no, mankind cannot be improved as the progressives believe. The very presence of a Federation and Starfleet proves that. One assumes that Roddenberry (who was a Los Angeles police officer before going Hollywood) would have not approved of a culture that condoned, for instance, murder; well, how do you enforce that prohibition?
This subject came up because of a post by author Frank J. Fleming:
When you think of a future government, probably the first thing that pops into your mind is the Federation in Star Trek. Another might be the Empire from Star Wars, but I said we’re talking about government in the future, and the Empire is from a long time ago. Anyway, the Federation is a more left-wing, highly organized type of government. And what do all the ships in the Federation have? Phasers and proton torpedos — because if you’re going to go around the galaxy telling people what to do, you’re going to need them.
The Federation reflects a problem with our current model of government and why it might not last into the future. That’s because it’s still based on a rather primitive notion: I’m bigger than you, so you have to do what I say. The first government was probably the largest guy in the tribe ruthlessly enforcing the rule that no one could make fun of his fancy leader hat, and then things escalated from there. In a way, government is a more civilized way of putting a gun to someone’s head to make them do something — whether those edicts come from a democratically elected government or a single guy with a fancy leader hat. The reason most people obey laws — even really asinine ones — is that they know the government is big and can hurt them if they don’t. …
So that’s what I see: Government just won’t work in the future. Eventually the scope of humanity (and perhaps alien-ity) will get so big that governments will either become irrelevant or will have to become extremely ruthless to keep enforcing their will. And, anyway, is our vision of the future really that the only way people can live together is if we have this big entity threatening us with fines and imprisonment over millions and millions of different things? Instead I think our future — at least the one we should aim for — is using our advances in technology and our knowledge to find more ways people can work together voluntarily. We’ll always need punishments for theft and violence, but perhaps we can find ways to work together and provide for the poor and needy without all the threats over non-violent actions, such as how we choose to run our own lives or our own businesses. It does seem like a nicer, more peaceful future than our current arc.
As far as I know, Roddenberry was not libertarian. Fleming, meanwhile, did not write “The Way to Eden,” the third-season episode with 23rd-century hippies.
The punchline of not just Star Trek, but every piece of entertainment is, however, in this comment:
Beyond what you said is the fact that even though ST had a message of social justice, the primary reason it succeeded as a franchise is because it told entertaining stories. Browbeat me with a message without telling me a story that keeps my attention and I’ll walk away. Make the story interesting enough for me to hang around and the message will get distributed to a wide audience.
Fortunately for Roddenberry.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 