Star Trek and Moral Judgment

Conservatives can also rejoice that the ST TNG future is a universe in which women continue to take the names of their husbands (including Beverly Picard in one of the final episodes) and continue to take on the nurturing roles in society (Doctor, Counsellor).

The serious point is that you cannot but imagine the future to be rather left-wing if you want to avoid the typical tale of Last Judgment. & vice versa: any future imagined to be ending in some kind of Armageddon is one which at some point in time turns right wing.

It’s merely a matter of conceivability; possible worlds & all that.

It’s the happy end that forces the hand of the screenplay writers ;-)

I’m as liberal as they come, but couldn’t watch ST:TNG, partly because the plot template. Every conflict was resolved when it turned out that the monster/alien/bad guy was merely misunderstood, more frightened of you thant you are of them, or actually wronged by evil colonial earthmen. And if people/aliens just learn to tolerate others and share their toys, everything will work out fine.

Very good advice for living, not so good for dramatic tension.

#6–

right; it is always a mistake to think that rules for drama can be read as rules for living. the neo-cons seem to believe that “civil society” requires a lot of scenes of our heroes back-lit by explosions. they are wrong.

there’s a reason why the old chinese curse says “may you live in an interesting narrative arc.”

any future imagined to be ending in some kind of Armageddon is one which at some point in time turns right wing.

Oh, I don’t know, there are a few hilarious novels written by a few paranoid people involving hellish futures where Al Gore, gay marriage, and rampant abortion have all but destroyed the world. The comic book “Liberality for All”, featuring Sean Hannity and Oliver North as freedom fighters against they tyranny of tolerance, is a neat example.

It’s also mildly funny that Potemra misses the fact that Jean-Luc Picard was modeled on Michel Foucault, right down to Foucault’s favorite catch phrase, “make it so.”

I’ve wondered for years why conservatives are so obsessed with whether some person or policy or whatever is “conservative” when damn few liberals of my acquaintance are similarly obsessed with whether something or someone is “liberal.”

#9–

it was seeing this that moved smokey robinson to remark, “what a prize toupee!”

Well gee between the one-world government, and the actual lack of money or desiretherof, I am shocked to find out that there is liberalism going on in the casino.

It’s not exactly subtle about this stuff. STTNG is a liberal freaking utopia.

Oh, and the depiction of the Ferengi (sp?) should have sealed the deal if nothing else. Considering STTNG started in the 80s, and ran through the 90s it’s amazing how liberal the show is.

Oh, please. Conservatives liked ST:TNG because they like to beat off to Troy.

I always felt TNG was infuriatingly wishywashy. They jumped the shark with Hugh the little wooden Borg boy.

It’s actually even worse. One of the sort-of hidden plot engines in ST-TNG is that all the major characters in the series acquired an assortment of family members– even the android ended up with a mother, a father, a brother, and a daughter– and many of the stories in the series were about how space warfare was really a kind of domestic drama. And, it generally turned out that ‘family values’ are really quite consistent with tolerance, rule of law, due process, progress, etc. Not your favorite wingnut message, one would think.

Because, CJ, in the words of their once infallible leader, they must know if the person in question “stands with us or against us.”

I’ve wondered for years why conservatives are so obsessed with whether some person or policy or whatever is “conservative” when damn few liberals of my acquaintance are similarly obsessed with whether something or someone is “liberal.”

Labels grow in importance in proportion to the person’s ignorance of the principles behind the labels.

Thankyou ch.p. for reminding me that Whoopie was the bartender on the Enterprise. At the time for some reason this was not hilarious enough, either as an allusion to the Love Boat or on any other level.

MattF also reminds me how much the show was about the Galactic Triumph of the Therapeutic. Everybody needed the talking cure, all the time, even the androids and arguably the Borg.

Michael Bérubé 12.23.09 at 2:14 pm
wrote:

It’s also mildly funny that Potemra misses the fact that Jean-Luc Picard was modeled on Michel Foucault, right down to Foucault’s favorite catch phrase, “make it so.”

________

In his update he also claims that Picard is a “Gaullist”.

I’m going to search my old VCR tapes of that series to find the one about the war in Algeria that got Picard run out of office and started a near-revolution, I think I missed that one the first time around.

Rilgeria-five?

“conservative militaristic values of loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage.”

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here but I reject your premise. In fact I reject it up your ass with a splintery wooden stick, m’kay? Last time I looked, the values of ‘conservative militarism’ included lying your way into wars of aggression and skulking behind the lines while other, better men and women who understood the difference between militarism and military service died for those lies.

alex, would you consider relaxing a bit if it were pointed out to you that “x’s values” can mean “the values espoused by x” as well as “the values practiced by x”?

i mean–i think we can agree that marital fidelity is a conservative christian value while at the same time noting that they espouse it a lot more often than they practice it.

Of course, the ST show conservatives most loved to hate was Deep Space Nine. There, you had a black leader, and worse, the subtext included a wry and witty attack on capitalists in the form of the Ferenghis. Their “Rules of Acquisition” were an ironic take on Ayn Rand’s principles of “selfishness” and they were always in fear of workers revolting or striking for more money against them. Socialist sensibilities ruled happily with freedom of thought and speech, and due process against the dictatorial capitalist mindset…

Of course I loved that! ST:DSN was also unique among the ST shows because the others were a space version of Wagon Train, and DSN was Gunsmoke…Am I dating myself too much here? :-)

Seriously? Picard? Conservative?

Potenta (sic) must not have reached the arc where the Federation suspects traitors in its midsts (allegory for terrorists/commie bastards) and Picard refuses to join in with the neocon warmongers counter-terror forces, who actually turn out to be the real aliens in disguise.

Too…there’s this:

Picard is deemed the ultimate delegator of authority, knowing “how to gather and use data better than any other Star Trek captain.” His leadership style “is best suited to a large, process-centric, either geographically identical or diverse team”.[13]

conservative militaristic values of loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage.

But wait, what makes them militaristic? Or conservative? I resent the idea that I have no call on them. (Take this poem, for example. Here we see an exhortation to, I think, all of these virtues. And yet Zbiginew Herbert was not a soldier. )

Militaristic in that they are presented in a militaristic setting. Star Trek is very much a military story, presented in probably the most favorable light you can present the military. One might ask why so many liberals enjoy TNG when it casts the military in such a favorable light. But to do so would be to paint liberals with as large a brush as many of you have painted conservatives. But I digress.

Walt; how precisely do I seem to understand liberals?

It’s also mildly funny that Potemra misses the fact that Jean-Luc Picard was modeled on Michel Foucault, right down to Foucault’s favorite catch phrase, “make it so.”

The Foucaultian implications of phraseology in Star Trek TNG? Sounds like the topic of a paper at the next meeting of the MLA.

FWIW:

“In one memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise encounters a derelict starship full of twentieth-century humans in suspended animation. One of them is an ace investor and dogmatic libertarian capitalist. As soon as he is revived, he demands that the Enterprise turn around immediately and return him to Earth, where his large fortune (compounded annually for four hundred years) awaits him. Captain Picard demurs, explaining gently that wealth and poverty, luxury and want, became obsolete on Earth long ago; in the twenty-fourth century, each person has enough resources to live a full life and no one’s life is wasted.

“It is Picard’s tone that speaks across the centuries to us viewers — the same tone that an educated twentieth-century person would use in explaining to a visitor from an earlier era why, for example, we no longer burn widows or expose girl babies on mountaintops or torture captives or enslave other peoples. We have outgrown all that, we would explain patiently to our visitor; we can no longer, with a good conscience, inflict or ignore suffering on such a scale. And the still more grown-up humanity of the future, Picard seems to be saying, will consider the accumulation of vast wealth and power by some, while the lives of many others are stunted, to be equally benighted. I suspect that a great many Star Trek viewers were converted that evening to a belief in the comprehensive welfare state.”

http://www.georgescialabba.net/mtgs/1998/04/economic-justice-by-stephen-na.html

…and the troll arrives

If conservatives are so enamored of Picard, I can think of a few things that will get them all head-explodey…

1) Picard was a French cheese eating surrender monkey.

2) His role in the Drum Head episode.

3) His torture at the hand of the Cardassians presented it as bad and ineffective.

The Coast Guard is a military service.

Yeah, Americans treat it that way, and group it under DoD but it isn’t really a military service (and I don’t intend to deride it with that comment). It’s law enforcement/search and rescue, whatever Department it falls under. In Canada, the Coast Guard is under Fisheries and Oceans. Perhaps there’s no bright line, but it’s definitely not the Marine Corps.

NASA is explicitly civilian, and though most shuttle pilots are military/ex-military for the flying experience, NASA’s missions are (publicly at least) scientific, and civilian scientists make up much (most?) of the shuttle and space station crews.

Anyway, others have questioned your premise that “military=conservative” so to the extent Star Fleet is a military org (and I don’t deny that it is to some extent) it is a liberal vision of what such an org would be like. Yes, it is hierarchical, but not needlessly authoritarian – people don’t salute, or come to attention every time they address a superior, there’s no anthem, no flag, no “hooah!” jingoism – it’s a real stretch to consider star fleet a conservative military vision.

I thought the reason conservatives liked Picard stemmed from that whole bald head fetish that people like George W. Bush exhibited (see also Jeff Gannon).

“Make it so,” indeed.

We have a President who walks around barking “Make it so!” without ever leading.

Yep, sounds like Picard to me.

Of course I loved that! ST:DSN was also unique among the ST shows because the others were a space version of Wagon Train, and DSN was Gunsmoke…Am I dating myself too much here? :-)

Nope, not at all. I loved DS9 as well, as it was the first show of the post-Roddenberry era and so could get a little more into the gray morality of some of the Federation tactics and explore the logical end to some of its more fluffy ideals.

They don’t have currency but Gold Pressed Latinum was a limited wealth commodity in itself, treated like a hard currency by the Ferengi and by Star Fleet as well (though they used it mostly for gambling and to finance Quark’s ill-advised schemes).

They also introduced the concept of Star Fleet having a black ops division, which puts a not-so nice face on your utopia. Why do you need a dirty tricks brigade if everyone cooperates? Well, sometimes not everyone wants to cooperate and so they need some persuading.

They also got a bit more into the sticky ethical issues left over from the Eugenics wars, that even though transhumanist genetic tinkering is illegal and generally considered abhorrent, some people still did it.

And then there was the whole Dominion War, which would give the Neocons nightmares, what with the bad guys being the imperialistic assholes who hire mercenaries to do their dirty work and the Federation winning through diplomacy and hard work rather than just neat tactical tricks.

NewsCat @ 13 & Keith @ 54 (Subject: DS9)

This is loosely related to the moral universe of Star Trek: specifically, Deep Space Nine. It’s something that occurred to me a few years ago, and I just want to throw it out there for anyone familiar with the show.

Is it just me, or has anyone else been struck by the similarity between the characterization of the Ferengi and the stereotypes of medieval Jewry?

Now, as I am an infrequent commenter and in any case among the newer commenters on this blog, rest assured that I am neither defending nor seeking to encourage antisemitism of any kind. (This is the Internet, so I just want to be clear.)

Take a look at the conception of the Ferengi. Physically, they’re short and ugly, with big noses and ears, and weak chins. They’re greedy, conniving, untrustworthy, and have made a religion of money. If I recall correctly, they’re not actually part of the Federation of planets; instead, they exist as outsiders who are tolerated because they offer services that no good Federation person would offer — even though plenty of good Federation people make use of these services.

Now, the above picture is pretty distasteful when considered in light of my argument; but, please tell me where the above differs from the historic stereotypes in European culture — most especially the middle ages? The “high concept” during the middle ages was that money, usury, and materialism were all part of the sullied, earthly pursuits. (Of course, the reality was much different.) This is essentially the same religiosity of the Federation. I can understand the Ferengi being somewhat demonized, in light of this conception; but the actual characterization seems to be a strange coincidence.

Am I off base? If I am, please tell me. I like Star Trek, and I’m actually a big fan of DS9. But, when this similarity first occurred to me, my reaction was WTF?

I always felt that the plot themes and dramatic irony played out in ST:TNG were a weekly themes that expressed philosophical paradoxes that revolved around questions such as, ethics, morality, human condition, etc. Of course if you are the type of person who filters everything through a liberal/conservative lens frame then of course that’s what you would discern. I always enjoyed the plot lines for working out scientific and philosophical quandary. If you take a good look the plot is thick with this. The representation of the Q and his obsession with human or the Borg as a collective consciousness without an ethic outside of there own race. I could come up with a million examples

At least, that’s my guess. I’m sure Armin Shimerman would have noticed if he had spent a decade playing Space Shylock.

In preparing to take the role of Quark, he said, he drew heavily on his study of Shakespeare. He saw a parallel between Quark, the Ferengi bartender on the “Deep Space Nine” space station and Shylock, the Jewish merchant, in the Christian society of Italy.

In one memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise encounters a derelict starship full of twentieth-century humans in suspended animation. That dogmatic libertarian capitalist also tells Picard that the military is the last refuge for incompetents who are afraid to take risks. I always wondered why Picard didn’t jettison him for that.

Oh no Michael Bérubé you had me going on that whole Slavoj Zizek was in Slapshot thing, you aren’t going to fool me again.

@28
Arguably ST:E devolved toward the end into T’Pol psychoanalysis, so I wouldn’t include her in that list–she was only a couple of steps more together than Hoshi Sato (who nearly had a breakdown a day or two out of port IIRC).

But whoever’s idea it was to put civilians on the Enterprise D needs to have their head examined.

Oh no Michael Bérubé you had me going on that whole Slavoj Zizek was in Slapshot thing, you aren’t going to fool me again.

Oh you are so silly. Zizek was never in Slap Shot. Everybody knows Pierre Bourdieu was in Slap Shot. Zizek was in The Big Lebowski.

Walth @ 59 & S. McG. @ 60

It seems I’m always late to the party.

What NomadUK said @5.

Wielding paralipsis in a way that would do any superficially clever but unpleasant 15 year old proud, Nathan writes:

One might ask why so many liberals enjoy TNG when it casts the military in such a favorable light. But to do so would be to paint liberals with as large a brush as many of you have painted conservatives.

I’m guessing that you gained your knowledge of how liberals regard the military (and vice versa) from your years of service, am I right? Me, I see things a bit differently. But then, I served in the same infantry division as Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, so obviously some ACORN subversive was slipping something funny into our MREs.

Anyway. For your edification, allow me to present you to MajGen Smedley Butler, USMC, twice recipient of the Medal of Honor. I’m sure it would have been important to him to know that someone like you “admires the military”.

@ #67:

I assume you know that “Lebowski” is Slovenian for “other”. Which means that Zizek’s presence in the movie refutes his entire philosophical edifice.

(And maybe this was the point all along and I’m just dense but, don’t MF and PS actually look (superficially) alike – tallish, slender, and bald-before-it-was-hip?)

They’re desperate for cultural validation of their ideology.

This can be shortened in many cases to “They want to be cool.”

Actually, an impressive review of the film suggests, the major topic of the film is that of inheritance, which one can argue is also a major topic for conservatives.
The review is here http://www.pandalous.com/topic/star_trek_the

Another issue, which is mentioned in a different review in the same discussion is one of emotions, where in a way is also problematic for conservatives.

ean-Luc Picard was a moral hardass where the Captain Kirk of the earlier show was more of an easygoing, cheerful swashbuckler.

Reading this bit again, it makes me wonder which Star Trek he’s watching. It certainly isn’t the one where Kirk, faced with the prospect of letting the Klingons as a species die because their planet is undergoing ecological collapse says, “let them!” all because one killed his son. If that’s not a moral hardass talking, then I don’t know what is.

(On the flip side, Picard was known to buckle a swash or two, going off on a whimsical archeological dig with a con woman while on vacation and mowing down Borg with a holographic tommy gun).

Oh, and Michel Foucault looks much more like either a) Gunter Meisner, who played Mr. Slugworth in the 1971 Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, or b) Peter Swanwick, who played The Supervisor on the 1967 Prisoner series…

Conservatives like TNG because it is about a ship that runs with almost perfect military doctrine, regardless of the values of the Federation. The ship is under the complete, unquestioned control of the Captain. This is what they like. Discipline.

It’s authority porn for them.

Samizdata stands with the ferengi on this issue: http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2001/12/the_trouble_with_the_federatio.html

Outside of utopia, I am sure the ferengi are much less warlike than the federation and much more likely to have been raising the universe’s average standard of living by trading with whoever, rather than pussying about with that so-called “prime directive”, that left sentient life mired in war and scarcity until they reached the morally arbitrary technological barrier of warp speed.

Much as I love ST, especially DS9, I prefer Firefly for its grim scepticism of government intervention and utopian dreams. Pity it proved a little too out of step with the mainstream to survive more than the single season that it did.

Magistra @ 77:

It’s still straight white men as the main heroes, women in ‘nurturing’ roles and no gays at all. (DS9 and Voyager changed the first two, but not the last).

Not so. Dax and Kira both appeared as ‘gay’ (Dax hooked up again with a wife from a former host, and evil-mirror-universe Kira was certainly toying with the idea of non-consensual intercourse with her ‘real’ counterpart).

The tolerance of the instruments we have won’t let me make so fine an adjustment to our sensors, but I think I can do that if we really need to!

Are we starting a silly TNG quote thread?

Wesley – “I can’t solve the equations!”
Traveller – “Begin by letting go of your guilt”

In the new version, the Jews were the Ferengi.

Or, as Jonah would say, “The Ferengi are the Jews of Federation Fascism.”

Or something like that.

Also.

May I close this thread @ 95?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf9oD_xl8mI&feature=relatedhttp://

http://www.jandrewedits.com/

I have never heard of “make it so” being a favourite phrase in the Foucauldian discourse – and I’m also a bit surprised at the idea of a well known French intellectual gay man as role model for a US straight military hero – albeit fictional. But life is surprising – damn – beam me up Scotty.

88: slapping them off with a loud smack
Watch it mister! This is a family blog.

There are plenty of other plausible interpretations for the “races” of various ST aliens. Given that TNG premiered before the end of the Japanese Bubble economy, I think the “Ferengi=Japanese” correspondence is very reasonable. Klingons as Russians, Romulans as Red Chinese — those are totally reasonable as authorized readings. While I’m certainly not going to argue that this is “reading too much into” pop culture, I think there are some resistant readings that make sense as well. Ferengi as US corporate culture makes sense to me. And the later Klingons as the more bellicose varieties of US tradition-bound conservatives is hard to gainsay. Ultimately, in the context of an episodic narrative with many different writers, and in which individual characters each have their own narrative arc, it seems a little silly to try to pin down any facet as a perfect correspondence.

@99 I don’t think that’s quite a resistant reading (if I understand you right). I’d say the Shylock, shady carpet-dealer, Japanese, and greedy capitalist readings of the Ferengi all go together, because those stereotypes resonate deeply with each other. There’s a certain habitus that the first three, as anti-Semitic or Orientalist caricatures, share with that of the greedy capitalists–the juxtaposition of hyper-patriarchalism, shameless greed, and a short (weak), and ugly physical form. The illegitimacy of capitalist greed/power is emphasized by juxtaposing it with physical weakness and ugliness (if they were tall and broad-shouldered and had more human-like faces, we would just see them as “powerful”, not “greedy” or “cunning”).

IIH, to a first approximation: Mundanes ~ Muggles

I do think it’s fascinating which topics people have latched onto as interesting to them. I have little wish to watch these episodes a second time, and at this point I’m more interested in what people think about what really amounts to a paint by numbers kind of writing. Evidently nobody is interested in any of the questions regarding spirituality that are raised in the later series, for example, and only vaguely interested in the heavy handed use of therapeutic language in the earlier ones.

Hey, all I really need to know I learned by watching Star Trek.

Frankly, if more non-geeks took some lessons from it, the world might be less of a shithole than it is.

On the subject of heroes and villains and the politics of Star Trek, I humbly point you folks to this blog post I wrote a few years ago:

http://ragesoss.com/blog/2007/02/24/human-identity-and-science-fiction/

Rereading it after this discussion, it strikes me that maybe one thing conservatives find appealing about ST:TNG is that the Federation is Western civilization triumphant, with Euro-American values forming the basis of not just all human civilization, but of all the alien species of the Federation as well. It makes [libertarian SF author and critic] David Brin proudly proclaim “I am a member of a civilization.”

My friends in high school were all Trekkies, and the ones who now identify as conservatives definitely tend toward the libertarian rather than authoritarian end of the spectrum. I wonder if that’s true in general of conservative TNG fans.

What has “Hail Mary” got to do with anything?

There is more than a touch of Humpty Dumpty about this entire exchange of comments. You can’t say “I meant ” something to capture something when it doesn’t convey any such meaning, and blithely flinging around words like “liberalism” and “conservatism” without any sort of definition isn’t political comment but just an exercise in feeling good about yourselves. If a plot in Star Trek or any other fiction shows up an action as good, viewers of any political persuasion are expected to accept it as related to something they themselves believe- this is called “making a popular programme” . To adopt the terminology temporarily for the sake of argument, only a very few, if any, extreme liberals or extreme conservatives are downright evil, and it is worth bearing in mind the possibility that the rest are trying to work towards something they believe to be good. Identifying the nature of this good would be preferable to dismissing huge swathes of the population with imperfectly understood epithets.
A further point: whether or not Foucault was given to saying it I have no idea, but “make it so” has been a naval command for centuries.