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| My 60th anniversary popcorn bucket from AMC Theaters |
The first time I realized I loved Star Trek was while watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a memory I relived yesterday at my local theater for Star Trek's 60th anniversary.
Captain Kirk and crew go back in time from the 23rd century to 1986 San Francisco to bring some whales back to the future in order to avert a cataclysm via mysterious whale-song aliens (most Star Trek fans refer to this as The One With The Whales!). When they arrive in 1986 and Starfleet-out-of-water shenanigans unfold, Kirk remembers, "they're still using money."
My ten-year-old mind reeled! They don't have money in the future? What? How could something that caused so much drama and heartache in the lives of all the adults in my life simply .... not exist?
I had watched Star Trek: The Original Series before this, but I had not yet pieced together this aspect of its post-scarcity utopian vision. From there, I became a huge Star Trek fan. I watched all the movies. I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation every night in syndication well into my teens.
It's no exaggeration to say that Star Trek (especially The Next Generation) has formed a huge part of my moral character. I would not be who I am without Star Trek.
I still love Star Trek today. Sure, it's sometimes silly, but that's precisely the point, because life is sometimes silly. Morose haters of the latest season of Strange New Worlds seem to forget this is the same franchise that gave us tribbles and Q, while those who whine about Discovery or Lower Decks forget that some people hated The Next Generation when it tried something new, too. You can't love a franchise that praises Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC) without accepting some, well, diversity in forms and content (you don't have to like it all, but hating things is not the mark of sophistication many believe it to be ... a general problem in our culture these days, about which I shall have more to say in another post).
While some Star Trek fans will point to favorite characters, the community of fandom, or the coolness of space, science, exploration, and neat gadgets, I think the real reason we're still talking about Star Trek 60 years after "The Man Trap" aired on Sept. 8, 1966 is deeper. Star Trek provides a vision of humanity where we have outgrown our self-imposed evils: poverty, greed, bigotry, ignorance, war, and so on (at least on Earth ... the writers need drama out in space).
Star Trek endures because it reminds us that we can do better. We are not doomed to a dystopian future of scarcity and want, greed and inequality, bigotry and ruin. We don't need longtermist billionaries to appoint themselves the saviors of humanity while dooming the rest of us to economic destitution and cultural desertification.
I love other major science fiction franchises--Star Wars, Dune, Foundation--but Star Trek is the only one I would want to live in (there's also Iain M. Banks's Culture or Ursula K. Le Guin's Ekumen, but let's stick with the pop culture behemoth of Star Trek for now).
Libertarian killjoys love to claim Star Trek economics wouldn't work. Other naysayers dismiss Star Trek as unrealistic. Human nature isn't that good, interstellar travel is a fantasy, our past and present doom the future, we need to live through WWIII first, and so on. Are they right? I don't know, but I think these sorts of critiques miss the point of utopian visions like Star Trek.
As the philosopher Mary Midgley argued, utopias are not blueprints or details maps; instead, they point vaguely toward possible futures, giving us direction that may help us organize our present whether we end up in those specific futures or not. Or as another philosopher (me) put it ten years ago in a post about Star Trek's 50th anniversary, Star Trek is a "regulative ideal" (strictly speaking, we can't know whether it's true, but it's not irrational and it can regulate our thought and behavior).
Another way to put this: Star Trek gives us hope rather than optimism. Optimism tells us things will get better. Hope tells us they could.
And that's why I think Star Trek is essential in times like the mid-2020's when optimism exists in short supply (I feel less optimistic than I did at Star Trek's 40th or 50th anniversaries). Progress is not guaranteed. The naysayers may be right, after all.
But if we can enjoy Star Trek, from its serious depths to comedic heights and all the mediocre and plain silly points in between, then maybe we do have some direction toward thinking something better than more of the same cultural enshitification peddled by the petty priests of 21st century techno-capitalism and neo-feudalism. And if we can think it, we could, as one famous Starfleet captain is fond of saying, "make it so."
Happy 60th anniversary, Star Trek! May we work toward something somewhere in the direction of a Star Trek future!
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