In Response...
The Fascist Ideology of Star Trek: Militarism, Collectivism, & Atheism
One and only one person can give steering and engine orders at any one time....The commanding officer may take over the deck or the conn...In taking the conn from the officer of the deck, the captain should do so in such a manner that all personnel of the bridge watch will be notified of the fact.
Watch Officer's Guide, A Handbook for all Deck Watch Officers, Revised by K.C. Jacobsen, Commander, U.S. Navy, 11th Edition [Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 1981, pp. 68-69]
I have always liked Star Trek. I watched the original show in the 60's, waited eagerly for the first movie in the 70's, and then later in the 80's got hooked all over again on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It has been good television, good science fiction, and occasionally even good film. Some things, nevertheless, have driven me crazy: (1) Picard and Riker both giving commands, in tandem, on the bridge is absurd. One person has the conn or has the deck on a ship, and it is dangerous to have any confusion about that (see quote above). As Executive Officer, Riker wouldn't even be on the bridge in ordinary circumstances. (2) There doesn't seem to be anything like a regular watch on the bridge. In one show a big point is made that only a full commander can have bridge command, but nothing is more common on the show than to have scenes where all the senior officers of the ship are in some conference or other, leaving who knows who directing the ship on the bridge--unless there are full commanders who aren't part of the regular cast. The writers don't seem to know what naval lieutenants are for--to be the officers of the deck. And (3) Star Trek has never known what admirals are for. The first Star Trek movie has a farcical conflict over whether Admiral Kirk or the newly assigned captain will assume command of the Enterprise. One wonders what Horatio Nelson and Captain Hardy were both doing on the HMS Victory. Later, Star Trek: The Next Generation refers to the Enterprise as the "flag ship" of Star Fleet, without apparently realizing that a flag ship is a ship with a "flag," i.e. a flag officer, an admiral. A Star Trek admiral seems to be some kind of shore officer.
These absurdities, however, can be easily forgiven. Less easily forgiven or forgotten are the more troubling messages about the nature of the future, the nature of society, and even the nature of reality. Star Trek typically reflects certain political, social, and metaphysical views, and on close examination they are not worthy of the kind of tribute that is often paid to Star Trek as representing an edifying vision of things.
In a 1996 newspaper column, James P. Pinkerton, discussing the new Star Trek movie (the eighth), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), quotes Captain Picard saying how things have changed in his day, "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force; we work to better humanity." Perhaps Picard never stopped to reflect that greater wealth means greater material well being, which is to the betterment of humanity much more than any empty rhetoric. But this is typical of Star Trek. A first season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "The Neutral Zone," has Picard getting up on his high horse with a three hundred year old businessman who is revived from suspended animation: The businessman, naturally, wants to get in touch with his agents to find out what has happened to his investments. Picard loftily informs him that such things don't exist anymore. Indeed, poverty and want have been abolished, but how this was accomplished is never explained. All we know is, that however it is that people make a living, it isn't through capitalism as we know it. Stocks, corporations, banking, bonds, letters of credit--all these things seem to have disappeared. We never see Picard, or anyone else, reviewing his investment portfolio. And those who still have a lowly interest in buying and selling, like the Ferengi, are not only essentially thieves, but ultimately only accept payment in precious commodities. In the bold new future of cosmic civilization, galactic trade is carried on in little better than a Phoenician style of barter, despite the possibilities of pan-galactic banking and super-light speed money transfers made possible by "sub-space" communications.
Too much of Star Trek has always reflected trendy leftist political sentiments. It was appropriate that John Lennon's "Imagine" should have been sung at the 30th Anniversary television special: Capitalism and religion get little more respect from Star Trek than they do from Lennon. Profit simply cannot be mentioned without a sneer. The champions of profit, the Ferengi, not only perceive no difference between honest business, piracy, and swindle, but their very name, the Hindi word for "European" (from Persian Farangi), seems to be a covert rebuke to European civilization. At the same time, one can find little in the way of acknowledgement of the role of religion in life that, whether in India or in Europe, would be essential. Although exotic extraterrestrials, like the Klingons and Bajorans, have quaint religious beliefs and practices, absolutely nothing seems to be left of the historic religions of Earth: There are no Jews, no Christians, no Moslems, no Buddhists, no Hindus, no Jains, no Confucians, and no Sikhs, or anything else, on any starship or settlement in the Federation. (Star Trek is, not to put too fine a point on it, what the Nazis called "Judenfrei," free of Jews [note], a condition that Marx also anticipated with the death of Capitalism--though Leonard Nimoy did introduce, subversively, the hand sign of the Hebrew letter "shin" to signify the Trek benediction, "Live long and prosper.") With no practitioners, there are no chaplains for the crew--no ministers, no priests, no rabbis, no mullas, no brahmins, no monks, no nuns. The closest thing to religious advice is the tedious psycho-babble of counselor Troi.
Why there is this conspicuous absence of religion is made plain in a third season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "Who Watches the Watchers?" It concerns a planet of people who are still at only a pre-industrial level of development but who are related to the Vulcans and, presumably because of this, are so intellectually advanced that they long ago ceased to believe in anything so absurd as a God (so some races are just smarter than others?(!?)--sounds like some kind of racism). Because a Federation observing post and its advanced technology is inadvertently revealed, one of the natives mistakenly takes Captain Picard to himself be the God of ancient belief. He spreads the word among his people. The rest of the episode is then taken up with how this folly can be undone without otherwise distorting the natural development of the natives. In the end, they realize that Picard is not God, and they continue on their previous path of atheistic wisdom.
Such a story is so blatantly hostile to theistic religion, that it is astonishing that it provoked neither comment nor protest. Perhaps the messages contained in science fiction television are simply not noticed. Movies have a somewhat higher profile and, indeed, the futile quest for God in the fifth Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier, provoked the comment from Michael Medved, a political conservative and devout Jew, that it was the same old "secular humanism." Even the aforementioned religious beliefs and practices of the Klingons and Bajorans seem to consist of little more than ritual and mythology, and one is left with the impression that respect for such things is motivated more by cultural relativism than by a sense that they might contain religious truths of interest to others. The Star Trek universe is one without religious truths--where the occasional disembodied spirit can be explained away with talk about "energy" or "subspace."
If daily life is not concerned with familiar economic activities and the whole of life is not informed with religious purposes, then what is life all about in Star Trek? Well, the story is about a military establishment, Star Fleet, and one ship in particular in the fleet, the Enterprise. One might not expect this to provide much of a picture of ordinary civilian life; and it doesn't. One never sees much on Earth apart from the Star Fleet Academy and Picard's family farm in France--unless of course we include Earth's past, where the Enterprise spends much more time than on the contemporaneous Earth. Since economic life as we know it is presumed not to exist in the future, it would certainly pose a challenge to try and represent how life is conducted and how, for instance, artifacts like the Enterprise get ordered, financed, and constructed. And if it is to be represented that things like "finance" don't exist, one wonders if any of the Trek writers or producers know little details about Earth history like when Lenin wanted to get along without money and accounting and discovered that Russia's economy was collapsing on him. Marx's prescription for an economy without the cash nexus was quickly abandoned and never revived. Nevertheless, Marx's dream and Lenin's disastrous experiment is presented as the noble and glorious future in Star Trek: First Contact, where Jean Luc Picard actually says, "Money doesn't exist in the Twenty-Fourth Century."
So what one is left with in Star Trek is military life. Trying to soften this by including families and recreation on the Enterprise in fact makes the impression worse, since to the extent that such a life is ordinary and permanent for its members, it is all the easier to imagine that all life in the Federation is of this sort. Not just a military, but a militarism. In the show, this actually didn't work out very well. In the beginning, Star Trek: The Next Generation wanted to remind us of the daily life, children in school, etc. on board; and more than once the "battle hull" of the ship was separated from the "saucer" so that the civilian component of the crew would be safe from hostile action. This cumbersome expedient, however, was soon enough forgotten; and we later forget, as the Enterprise finds itself in desperate exchanges with hostile forces, that small children are undergoing the same battle damage that we see inflicted on the bridge--unless of course it is brought to our attention because there is a story with a special focus on a child, as with Lieutenant Worf's son. In Star Trek: First Contact, crew members are being captured and turned into Borg. Does that include the children? We never see any. Do Picard's orders to shoot any Borg include Borg who were human children? This disturbing situation is completely ignored by the movie. Star Trek, therefore, cannot maintain its fiction that military life on a major warship will be friendly to families and children.
In the 20th Century there has been a conspicuous political ideology that combines militarism, the subordination of private economic activity to collective social purposes, and often the disparagement of traditional religious beliefs and scruples: Fascism, and not the conservative Fascism of Mussolini and Franco, who made their peace with the Church and drew some limits about some things (Franco even helped Jews escape from occupied France), but the unlimited "revolutionary," Nihilistic Fascism of Hitler, which recoiled from no crime and recognized no demands of conscience or God above the gods of the Führer and the Volk. Certainly the participants in all the forms of Star Trek, writers, staff, producers, actors, fans, etc., would be horrified, insulted, and outraged to be associated with a murderous and discredited ideology like Fascism; but I have already noted in these pages how naive philosophers and critics have thoughtlessly adopted the philosophical foundations of Fascism from people like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger to what they think are "progressive" causes in the present day.
This danger has come with the corruption of the idea of "progress" away from individualism, the rule of law, private property, and voluntary exchanges--in short the characteristics of capitalism and the free market--into collectivist, politicized, and ultimately totalitarian directions. Star Trek well illustrates the confusion, ignorance, and self-deception that are inherent in this process. Dreams of Utopia have turned to horror in this century so often, but the same dreams continue to be promoted just because they continue to sound good to the uninformed. As Thomas Sowell recent wrote about the determination of many to find Alger Hiss innocent of espionage, regardless of the evidence:
Hiss is dead but the lies surrounding his case linger on. So do the attitudes that seek a cheap sense of superiority by denigrating this country and picturing some foreign hell hole as a Utopia.
Star Trek has a Utopia to picture, or at least a world free of many of the ills perceived in the present, but it doesn't have to deal with anything so inconvenient as the experience of history. Star Trek is free to disparage business and profit without the need to explain what would replace them. Star Trek is free to disparage religious belief and ignore traditional religions without the need to address the existential mysteries and tragedies of real life in ways that have actually meant something to the vast majority of human beings. And it is particularly interesting that Star Trek is free to do all this with the convenience of assimilating everything to the forms of military life, where collective purpose and authority are taken for granted. Captain Picard does indeed end up rather like God, come to think of it.
Okay, so apparently the fictional world of 24th interstellar military service does not accurately match the current military layout. Gene Roddenberry surely must be kicking himself for that blunder. But honestly, comparing Star Trek to Nazism?
The writer here complains that in the future, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc. seem to be a distant memory, one that is looked down upon and ridiculed. In an utopian society where hunger and poverty are abolished, the writer complains that the way it was done is never explained and that realistically, if an attempt to remove wealth and currency from society would be devastating. Lighten up, man! The reason the "great solution" never reveals itself and just "is", is because it's a fucking fantasy television show!
Star Trek was created at a point of political and social upheaval in America. The Civil Rights movement was still chugging along, and the feminist movement was pulling out of the station. Also, we had just been in two major wars (WWII and Korea) and were getting quagmired in another (Vietnam). We also had a nuclear scare (Cuban Missle Crisis), a presidental assasination (Kennedy), and a little thing called the Cold War. Humans in a time of dissonance look for leaders, for new thoughts and ideas, which is why we in America had the communist and anarchist witchunts after WWI and WWII. Star Trek offered what America wanted; a view of the future where humankind was united under one goal: the acquisition of knowledge. Star Trek was the epitomy of what human beings should be. Our world was (and is) plagued with pain. Billions starve and live in poverty. No decent human being wants another to starve or need. The economic and political atmosphere in Star Trek is impossible to achieve. We are a race that feeds on competition, power, and fear. They aren't necessarily bad qualities; only at times we seem to overindulge on these like you would sweets or alcohol. What Star Trek did, was fight through the pain and give hope to millions, much like the song "Imagine" does when millions hear it. Most importantly, if we could trade stocks and bonds for a society where poverty and hunger are no more, replace the need to work with the want to work, exchange making goods to get rich for making goods to enrichen, why shouldn't we?
The writer blasts Star Trek's athiesm. I disagree on labelling the show athiestic. The show is not about human religion, but human inclusion. An unfortunate aspect of religion is that it tends to exclude, to divide the believers from the non-believers. Star Trek was right in taking the secular approach. In a show about "seeking new life and new civilizations", not to mention the social ingredients at the time of its invention, inclusion is more important than exclusion. This is not to say that Star Trek does not depict religion. In one episde (hell I can't remember the NAMES), a young boy asks Picard about death. Picard explains that everyone has different views, and what's most important is to find a meaning that makes sense to you (you being the little boy). Also, countless alien cultures incorporate religion. The Klingons and Kelis, and the Bajorians with the Prophets come to mind. Both are not ridiculed, but revered. Those who do ridicule these religions and religious practices on the shows tend to be portrayed as the villianous, or out of touch, or ignorant. In Deep Space Nine, a majority of the plot revolves around the Bajoran religion. Religion is portrayed for humans as well. Chakotay from Voyager is a deeply religious 1st Officer, although admittedly it is for a Native American religion.
Even though I cite examples of religious tolerance and portrayal in the different series, the writer of the article is right about one thing. There is a lack of on screen portrayal of the major religions on Star Trek. In a futuristic society that prides itself of tolerance and inclusion, religious differences are just that; differences. Humankind is viewed as one entity and to give humankind one religion like Christianity, like they do the Klingons with Kelis and StovaK'or, would be insulting to the millions who do not share in that religion. Why would it have to be just one religion? Because (again let me reiterate), Star Trek is about a ship that flies through the Galaxy, not human religion. There is the utopian hope with Star Trek that our religious differences have been put aside for the greater of mankind. Plus, tackling human religion as a storyline would be so demanding to truly do it justice that it would not leave room to explore alien religions. Lastly, the alien races are really a reflection on ourselves as humans. The fact that the show brings religion up (whether it be a real religion or a show-created one) denotes its importance to our society.
Lastly, the writer comments on the communism of Star Trek. I disagree. The StarFleet (the military arm of the Federation) is socialist. But, since I have lived in the military ecosphere for 20 years of my life I can guarantee you, so is our military. The freedoms we as Americans cherish like freedom of speech, right to assembly, right to bear arms, right to privacy, protection from illegal search and seizure, protection from forceable self-inciminazation; they are all checked at the gate once the guard checks your ID card (trust me, I learned from experience.)
In the end, it's just a television show that presents a future we can be proud of. And a future where need is no more, and knowledge is the zenith of our universe, is a bright one indeed.