Was the show classically liberal? The first of a series.
In the sixties perhaps it was, but it veered sort of left in TNG in the eighties, with Roddenberry’s socialist utopian fantasies.
37 thoughts on “The Politics Of Star Trek”
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That was when Captain JFK, I mean JTK was doing battle with the evil Soviet Kingon Empire. Then the Empire collapsed and Captain Fabian Frenchman took over.
I don’t remember much overt politics in the old show. Certain contemporary issues were buried in some of the stories, but they tended to be more in the civil liberties vein than in endorsing any system. I think the Federation was more like Banks’ Culture in that respect–post-scarcity, which freed up people to do their own thing.
By ST:TNG, the socialism was pretty overt. The old show used to have Federation representatives on board on occasion, bossing Kirk around. Didn’t see that much in the later series, which often gave the impression that Starfleet and the Federation government were one and the same.
I don’t remember much overt politics in the old show.
You might want to watch the original pilot, which was touched upon again with Captain Pike in a later episode. Then there is the whole Khan thing…
I have always thought the original Star Trek pilot (The Cage – the one you are talking about) was interesting.
In a time before virtual reality (1965) it showed a race (the Talosians) that invented a system that was an equivalent and it ended up destroying that civilization.
I have often thought that the reason it did not sell was because it was perceived by the TV execs as being an anti-television television show. That (to me at least) was overkill in the extreme where television is concerned. However, every time I hear someone on one of these websites make the accretion that we don’t need to send people into space because we can send robots only instead and study/experience the results virtually; I think of the Talosians and wonder.
Be a Talosian, play the Sims!
Sadly, I wonder if it didn’t sell because of the overt sexuality with the Captain and the somewhat literal offering of a sex slave, either the young survivor of a horrible crash or Pike’s first officer. Remember what a shock it was for
JFKKirk to kiss Uhura...but it veered sort of left in TNG…
“sort of”???????????????
ST:TNG ended for me in the first episode I watched, when the Q character shows up in an Ollie North uniform, while that scandal was hot, as an example of human barbarism.
“sort of”???????????????
I was told that at one point a woman scientist sacrificed herself to prove that warp speed was killing the universe, so they had to limit themselves to warp 5.5 – just when the 55mph speed limit was starting to be questioned. So the previous and more usual ST cornucopianism gets replaced by a Mathusian construct.
Oh yeah, there was some changes made between ST and NG.
Yeah. What you said. I can’t watch ST:TNG.
I forgot about the USMC uniform. I do remember the Queen of Spades outfit, though.
Liberal of 1960’s are not very similar modern “progressives”.
The modern progressive are brainless.
That “Occupy movement” appeared as re-enactment of “Lord of the Flies”
is a reflection the new normal of badly educated population.
The critical TNG moment for me was when Councelor Troi tells a visitor, in an upturned nose sort of voice:
“*We* in the Federation celebrate diversity.”
That was it..all I needed. I bailed immediately.
The old show (TOS), was fairly conservative, I thought. There was the insipid show where you had Skip Holmeier playing a hippie with a hippie group and Kirk & Co. were clearly the squares…the hippies died or got hurt in the end.
Or you had the pretty crummy show with the Yangs and the Koms – “WEEEE the people!…it has to be for everybody or it means nothing.!”
And when it got down to brass tacks, Kirk generally opened fire. So he wasn’t squeamish about that.
There is an election campaign in Utah right now. I am just waiting for someone challenging the incumbent Governer to proclaim, “I am not Herbert!”
“Herbert! Herbert! Herbert!”
😉
From “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”
“Your Truth is the Truth of Yonade.”
“Is not Truth Truth for all?”
That simple belief — that there is such a thing as truth and falsehood, and that they are not culturally relative, is a line of demarcation in modern culture; not everyone believes there is such a thing as fact. And which side Star Trek TOS was on was pretty clear.
It was also pretty clear what they thought about instruments of obedience.
It looks like part 2 will be on The Conscience of the King. Hope he gets to The Return of the Archons. And Space Seed. And A taste of Armageddon.
Come to think about it, there is a wealth of material there.
Getting an eerie parallel vibe between Lucas/Roddenberry right now: if you’re going to base your masterpiece on Kurosawa/C. S. Forester, this says you shouldn’t stray too far from your source.
TNG went way off the deep end with the episode Half a Life, featuring a society that’s essentially Logan’s Run with a higher retirement age. David Ogden Stiers plays a scientist who’s in the middle of researching a way to rejuvenate his dying sun, but his retirement date is imminent. He temporarily seeks Federation asylum, but he eventually caves, and he and his planet’s place on the learning curve regarding solar rejuvenation research shuffles off the mortal coil.
But the absolute worst of Trek is the ST: Enterprise episode Half a Life. A planet with two sapient species has a problem: one of the species, the Valakians, suffers a genetic malady that threatens to kill off the race. Dr. Phlox finds eventually a cure, but he tells Captain Archer that he is morally opposed to presenting it. Here’s the pivotal scene:
Archer eventually comes to Phlox’s argument, and makes this outrageous statement: (cited from the Memory Alpha link, emphasis added) “Someday my people are going to come up with some sort of a doctrine: something that tells us what we can and can’t do out here – should and shouldn’t do. But until somebody tells me that they’ve drafted that directive, I’m going to have to remind myself every day that we didn’t come out here to play God.”
Rick Berman decides to poke at the origins of the Prime Directive, and he does it in a way that (I certainly hope) most people would question the wisdom of that doctrine.
Oops, the link is correct, but the ST: Enterprise episode is “Dear Doctor.”
This comment thread is really, really disturbing.
http://www.jammersreviews.com/st-ent/s1/deardoctor.php
Interesting one. Yes Archer and the doctor were committing an act of genocide by denying the cure. Yes the Doctor’s understanding of evolution is nonsensical. No, evolution is not some magical deity that must never be interfered with. Sentient beings do it all the time, it’s called technology. This episode failed on so many levels, it isn’t funny.
Ah, I’ve seen this episode. I had read a blog somewhere that the ‘Enterprise’ series was more suited to libertarians. Then I watched this episode and knew that couldn’t be true. Libertarianism is built upon the strategy of the win-win scenario. We all seek to survive so survival is a common goal shared amongst. As an Ambassador you’d want to show you were willing to do the most to help this society survive to their fullest so that in turn if you fell into this same trap you’d have some other society come and lend you a hand to help you through species threatening malignity. For all you know a plague would wipe the land and some other planet would be like, “Sorry you didn’t help the afflicted denizens of Proximus Centi IV with there genetic affliction so we’re following the dictates of your own prime directive to not help you. How do you like them apples?”
Assuming this is yet another look-alike “post-scarcity” society, that would have been an excellent chance for Picard to sermonize about how wonderful it is that people are colonizing the galaxy because the one thing a “post-scarcity” society does not afford one is more land.
Of course, that didn’t happen. Is every episode just a parable for conventional Leftist orthodoxy?
Well, actually, a real post-scarcity society would afford one more land. It’s a key point of Bank’s “The Culture” mentioned earlier. You take mass from uninhabitable planets and form it in to space habitats. Or you build supramundane planets. Or a Dyson sphere. As Dyson himself foresaw, energy is likely to be what limits “post-scarcity” societies.
Well, they did encounter a Dyson sphere in one episode, but it inexplicably, it was a one-off and not the game-changer one would expect. I think the Federation persisted with the “one tiny colony of twenty TV-extras easily overrun by the Romulans per planet” model thereafter.
If the Federation has so many planets they can do that, there’s not much incentive for building artificial habitation. But then it means that the Federation can afford more land for its citizens.
But it does leave their defense resources spread pretty thin, what with Starfleet getting wiped-out in every movie…
Here’s some food for thought…is the Internet compatible with the concept of the Prime Directive?
I’d say the answer is a big fat “no.”
So you’ll be writing a linkable post about this, right?
Immediate thought: as long as you don’t give them the Internet, you’re OK…
For that matter, how can the concept of free trade coexist with the Prime Directive? You simply cannot interact with a world through trade or culture without “interfering” with it.
The same logic that says Klingons and Vulcans shouldn’t influence each others’ politics and culture would place such restrictions on terrestrial societies. An Earth under those rules has no 17th/18th-century abolitionist movement or International Red Cross.
There’s a real-life parallel to Prime Directive thinking, found among anthropologists who discover new tribes and insist that the tribes be left in “pristine” condition.
Trek could have concocted a more realistic Prime Directive: starship captains and crews, being representatives of the Federation government, are prohibited from conducting foreign policy on alien worlds.
For that matter, how can the concept of free trade coexist with the Prime Directive? You simply cannot interact with a world through trade or culture without “interfering” with it.
Star Trek was never perfectly consistent about the Prime Directive (or anything else), but initially, at least, it was portrayed as a regulation governing the actions of Star Fleet. There was no indication that it applied to civilians.
Which is a bit strange when you think about it. Kind of like saying the Army cannot sell guns and whiskey to the Indians but civilians are free to do so.
I never watched much Star Trek. I watched a few episodes of the original series and got the impression that it was mostly some kind of post-scarcity economy (matter fabricators on the ship, etc.). I don’t remember much politics being discussed.
The big difference I noticed between the original and the next generation was that things seemed more overtly martial in the next generation series. Some of this might be due to Picard being a more martial character than Kirk as well as the Klingon defense officer (there was no defense officer in the original series) who was very martial-like. However, the uniforms looked more military-like and the characters acted more military like in the next generation series. The 60’s series depicted the fleet being purely an exploration organization like NASA. The next generation series depicted it more like a Navy.
I will say that the next generation definitely had a deathist (hostility toward radical life extension) bias in several of its episodes.
As I said, I was never much of a trekkie and never really thought much about the background society of the episodes I watched. I just considered it decent entertainment.
There were no matter replicators in TOS, outside of some transporter glitches. The ship even had cooks for the first season or so.
Hmm, I thought in TOS the Federation was more blatantly military, but I missed a lot of TNG.
TOS had a pretty big anti-technology streak running through many of its episodes.
Star Trek TNG I think treats Earth as if it were the New York or Paris of the Federation.
All the rich establishment types live there, funded by establishment money, endlessly pursuing bureaucratic ends. There are some leftover ‘ethnic’ neighborhoods, and the establishment funnel some of their money to keep these people fed and away from causing a fuss or making the city appear poor.
You know those Panera bread stores that stopped charging for their food and only asked for ‘donations’ by customers of what they thought the food was worth? That’s Earth. It’s San Francisco, but only the hipsters and geeks are leftover. Everyone is so much richer than the value of mere human services, that all are essentially free. I can imagine property – like land and homes – are passed like heirlooms. Positions are assigned via the bureaucracy based on pull or merit.
To ‘get in’ to the upper bureaucracy – “Starfleet Academy” – you compete and while demonstrating basic aptitude.
The thing about pull is that an organization can function fairly well, even if it is highly politicized, if EVERY member is essentially brilliant and also self-motivated.
Those that aren’t, on earth, have the public rec center, or the bureau of parks, or wherever: to work, to live, to be at.
All of this would have to be supported by a vast empire of commerce, which one presumes the Federation is.
Like the real economy for modern leftist academics, the greater galactic commerce is taken completely for granted by Star Trek.
The implication is that this Bay Area smug-ocracy, if given enough time, will inevitably burst from the bounds of the Earth, and be at the forefront of adventure, bravery, and discovery in the universe.
So, not actual socialism, just exaltation of very a linearly thinking and spiritually immature subset of history.
I figured the only way Star Fleet in TNG got any recruits was because it allowed them so many minutes of Holodeck time per week.
Lots of talk in TNG about people only working at jobs they found fulfilling. So presumably robots do all the dirty work. Or else they brainburn the malcontents into liking the servile jobs.
Of course, my effort has been to explain Kirk’s bizarre ‘no money’ comment from Star Trek IV.
Perhaps he was just trying to pick up the girl.
And, unfortunately for Spock, hipster academics of the rising generation are completely content to use all manner of colorful metaphors.
The episode with the haunted castle in TOS, Catspaw, maybe, had Kirk say that jewels were no longer valuable, which of course makes sense. I don’t remember if he said anything about outgrowing money as well. By the time TNG rolled around money was apparently outmoded.
I’m not sure whether describing the society of Star Trek’s Federation as socialist is either accurate or useful. IMHO it’s neither; it’s post-scarcity – and we have never yet had that experience to draw on.
As for Starfleet volunteers; well, some people will work hard and take risks even when they don’t need to, as evidenced by the numerous gentleman scientists in history. Again IMHO, Starfleet gets volunteers for the same reasons as the Culture’s Special Circumstances does – because the volunteers want something interesting, important and possibly exciting to do.
Gene Roddenberry was asked once about the role of money in his Star Trek universe in an interview. He adamantly stated that there was no money (form of currency) in the Star Trek universe. He was very emphatic about this in the interview and would not discuss it further.
Star Trek, both original and next generation, always had a vaguely quasi-leftist idealism that never manifested itself overtly in any of the episodes. Rather, it was a background atmosphere that permeated the whole series in a subtle manner.