Star Trek, Liberalism, and the Future

10May09

I’ve seen a couple of people link to this Chris Bowers piece and other politics of Star Trek related posts.

Star Trek is a rare phenomenon in popular culture: a detailed, future fantasy universe that is both based on our own past and that takes an overwhelmingly positive view of our future. Most popular culture science fiction either views the future in negative terms (The Matrix, Phillip Dick) or as an indecipherable “other” (X-Files, Arthur C. Clarke). Star Trek is an unusual view of our future simply because it is so darn positive. Poverty has been eliminated. Humans are free and united. People live to be over 100 years old on a regular basis. There isn’t even any money! As Jean Luc Picard puts it, in the future world, individuals do not search to acquire wealth or power, but rather “to better themselves.”

I’d posit that the Gene Roddenberry utopia holds better then many of the dystopia presented in other works of science fiction. Within the Start Trek social program there are 4 main pillars of the Utopian vision. I’d propose that the majority of them are actually goals we’re moving towards.

Pillar 1- The end of poverty and related depravities. While we’re not moving as quickly as some might have hoped for in the 1950s, poverty is being reduced on a global scale, and the state of economic and development policy making is improving. I think it’s reasonable to postulate that the state of poverty has and will continue to move closer rather then further away from Roddenberry’s vision.

Pillar 2 The end of the cash nexus. There clearly hasn’t been any movement towards organizing our society outside of the use of currency and I’m not holding my breath waiting for it to start. However, looking on a long term time frame there has been clearly a drive to limit the comprehensiveness of cash as your means to access services. While even the most socialist countries still have user fees, much of the world has shifted much of their society out of the cash nexus. It’s likely this trend will accelerate over the next 100 years.

Pillar 3 The end of (earth bound) War. Believe or not the wars have gotten less frequent and less bloody. The 21st century is well positioned to be dramatically less bloody then the 20th century. Political integration is also slowly, but surely progressing.

Pillar 4 General improvement in the state of human nature. There are a whole swath subtle indications that humans simply don’t behave the way they often do in today’s society. For starters, the The Next Generation Enterprise appeared to go without alcohol. I find this aspect of the Star Trek utopia to far and away the least defensible. There is just no reason to believe people are going to stop using drugs, or generally improve their behavior in any dramatic way.

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Tags: Liberalism, Star Trek, The Fuuuture