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The (First) Final Frontier: The Enduring Appeal of Star Trek and The Moral Imagination
One of the things that has been keeping me sane in (solitary) lockdown is movie nights with my friends. With two close guy friends from high school, in particular, I have a weekly date for a movie at 8 p.m. EST (1 a.m. GMT) and this week it was my turn to pick the film. I had given the selection a fair bit of thought ahead of time, and presented them with a few options that I thought would be fun to watch; we settled on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
One of my friends had never seen any Star Trek property, and the other had only seen the new films, although his dad had been pressuring him to try the older ones. At the end of the film, they were so taken by what we had watched that it was decided we are going to Zoom again to watch an episode of The Original Series (any of my selection) and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock on Friday.* Such an enthusiastic response left me wondering, what exactly is the magic of the original films and show?
I am not much of a sci-fi fan and tend to be picky about TV because I don’t watch particularly much, so it surprised even me how much I enjoyed TOS the first time I watched it in high school. Although I’ve dabbled in the other properties, none of them ever provoked the lasting affection or interest that the ‘66 series and its movies did for me. Likewise, the friend that had seen the new J.J. Abrams films had never bothered with the originals because, though he thought the new movies were good, he didn’t think they were special.
At its core, I think that the most outstanding part of the films and show is their fundamentally conservative message and embrace of the moral imagination. By a conservative message I don’t mean that TOS subscribed to the economic principles of Milton Friedman or celebrated the thought of Russell Kirk, but that, within the framework of a quite progressive society, it had surprising fidelity to some very Burkean ideals and ideas about man and his nature.
Part of what brings this message to the forefront is the setting of the show. A lack of physical money and the presence of the United Federation of Planets, among other things, suggests to viewers that the crew of the Enterprise hails from a post-scarcity system, something some fans describe as a “utopia.” They, though, have escaped the utopia and traded the sure and steady for danger and adventure. As much as anything, Captain James T. Kirk is a cowboy, setting off for brave new worlds armed with a phaser and a set of quite traditional principles (duty, honor, honesty, etc.) that he intends for both himself and those under his leadership to live by. Such an openly paternal, though not condescending, figure might find little affection among critics today.
And the crew of the ship is as much bound by personal fealty and love as shared ideals. Indeed, it is the true diversity of viewpoints resident on the vessel, especially among the three main characters (headstrong Kirk, logical Spock, and compassionate McCoy), that allows it to operate as smoothly and successfully as it does. I’ve always thought the conception of the triumvirate as the divided parts of a whole both beautiful and valid, and the idea of the divvied up heart, mind, and soul speaks to a view of man as a creature that needs more than reason to thrive, and at the same time benefits from control and strong moorings.
Those relationships form the most obvious manifestation of that conservative message, showing that even hundreds of years in the future, in space, and among aliens, the fundamental need of man for love and companionship has not perished (very Burkean, indeed). Each man judges the other for his actions and ideals, not his position on the ship or status as a part of a particular race (much as McCoy antagonizes Spock for his duel heritage, he extends the same fierce protectiveness and exasperated affection to the alien, albeit with a different flavor, as he does to Kirk), and they are improved by their tripartite bond. Purely as a viewer, this evolving, complex relationship is the most compelling part of the series, a high wire act of mutual love, annoyance, fear, and hope that becomes its narrative and emotional core.
I think it’s instructive to explore one episode for an example of the holistic reality of this message. Take “The Empath,” from Season 3. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy encounter and are imprisoned by a race of science-oriented, emotionless humanoids on a dying planet, and, after a series of failed escape attempts and injury at the hands of their captors, the captain must choose which of his two officers will undergo an “experiment” that has a high chance of rendering him either dead or insane. The morality play that ensues, both between McCoy and his superiors and Kirk and the Vians, would be, at its fundamental level, as at home in Shakespeare as in outer space. In other words, “human” nature, across species and time, never fails to assert itself, and the moral quandaries which plagued Elizabethan noblemen do likewise to 23rd-century space officers, their answers coming from a similarly ancient source.
Certainly, there is much to make fun of in the original Star Trek series. William Shatner’s sometimes hammy acting, and seemingly pathological need to be shirtless at least once an episode, aliens that look curiously like small dogs donning party store horns, Leonard Nimoy’s heavy eyeshadow, and Kirk-fu all strike a less-than-serious chord and render some parts of the series basically unwatchable, but its fundamental message, skillfully conveyed in so many aspects, makes it a special cultural product despite these shortcomings. The magic of Star Trek is in the world that it builds, full of fresh possibilities and diverse, full characters who encounter the inevitable challenges of every human life with all of their flaws and triumph and fail.
*Update: We watched The Search for Spock and, after some negotiation, an episode of TOS, “The Enemy Within,” last night/this morning (there’s a time difference between us and it was 5:30 a.m. by the time I got off the call), and I am happy to report that all enjoyed the movie and the show, and we learned the valuable life lesson that you can tell the evil product of a transporter accident by the (frankly unsightly) amount of eyeliner he is wearing.
Published in General
I haven’t seen that since the first run. Thanks for making my day.
Yup. “They’re still livestock!”
I knew exactly what you were talking about….”Burn, Galactica! Burn!”
Only God can create an immortal soul made in His Image. God granted man participation in that creation through the natural process of reproduction. The idea that man can, on his own initiative, manufacture immortal souls made in the image of God is, well… blasphemous.
The worst outcome is elevating a machine to the dignity of an actual human being. It’s bad enough that in our culture people care more about whales and abandoned dogs than they do human beings snuffed out in the womb. At least whales and dogs are living creatures. When we get to the point that machines compete with human beings for our sympathy, we are doomed.
Computers can already be programmed to be very good simulators of human behavior. But that is all they will ever be – simulations. Forgive me for bringing in an entirely different scify universe, but the Terminator series is useful here. In the second movie, a Terminator identical to the one in the first movie comes back, but this time it is programmed to defend John Connor rather than terminate him. The first Terminator generates fear and loathing in us, while the second generates respect and even, in the end, affection. Yet they are identical machines, the difference only being slightly different programming. The self-sacrifice the Terminator makes at the end of the second movie is but a simulation of true human self-sacrifice, which is founded in free will. Its just the programming as much as the murderous intent of the first Terminator is only programming. The same thing is true with Data. It’s all simulated behavior.
That’s an interesting way to put it: Christian without Christ. I think that was the Enlightenment dream. Resting on a thousand years of Christian civilization, Christian habits and the Christian frame of mind had become so embedded in people that they thought it was a natural viewpoint. Who, then, needs Christ when what He taught is just common sense to us?
That is where sin comes in. Sin is a worm in man’s nature that, without connection to Christ, gradually corrupts us at the core of our nature, in our intellect and our will, individually and culturally. David Hume and John Locke didn’t imagine that their project would end up in assembly line abortions and gay marriage, or transgender bathrooms. Neither would they be impressed to the extent that entertainment is our new God, with cathedrals replaced with football stadiums and celebrities the new nobility, our obese and ignorant lower classes wasting their lives away on YouTube.
The secular dream is that we can have Christianity without Christ. The dream is fulfilled in Star Trek, and that is why it is so compelling. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that were actually true? That sort of hope and secular optimism is refreshing but, alas, an illusion.
The behavior may be blasphemous but is the idea? I think you would agree based on your description the Data is the moral equivalent of a human clone. The question then is not whether man can manufacture souls but whether god will ensoul the personalities we create, even when in their creation we sin by attempting to play God.
Somehow I tend to think of original sin as the outward limit of our collective punishment. To live with the full range of human intelligence and aspirations, even given time emotions, without a soul, sounds like a particular kind of hell for that personality, which I don’t think we can stop from treating as having some kind of subjective experience of its own existence. More than that, such a soulless intelligence would be terrifying in terms of its capacity for wrongdoing, all the more terrifying for the fact that without a soul it could not be called evil. There’s a reason why Lore, who is evil, while a compelling villain, is nowhere near as terror inducing as the Borg who are essentially a force of nature.
Whether in the case of clones or Data, providing our creations with souls seems more of a remedy than a reward for our hubris.
Thinking about this more, Oftenwrong Soong’s tower of babel like ambition to create synthetic people makes Data and Lore more problematic examples than are necessary to demonstrate the point. Star Trek’s sentient holograms like Moriarty or the Doctor are better examples. Both start out as preprogrammed automatons, but their experiences and complexity compound to create an evident self-consciousness, which causes the humanoid characters around them to feel morally if not legally obligated to them. At no point did their creators set out to manufacture a soul. In fact that was the opposite of their intent, which was to create human simulacra which could be guiltlessly killed, bedded and exploited in Westworldian fashion. It’s as if the show’s creators, in showing these characters’ sped up evolution implicitly ascribe to a theistic account of human evolution which finds a divine spark at some indefinite place along our journey from beast to man. At one moment they are mere projections,and at another, no one can say exactly when, they have souls.
I’m reminded of John C. Wright’s excellent Golden Age trilogy in which the legal system has developed to the point of having as one of its primary responsibilities judging when artificial intelligences, often duplicates created for the purpose of multitasking, become sentient and entitled to legal personhood.
I don’t think I would agree that Data is the moral equivalent of a human clone. Human cloning, like test tube babies, involves sinful intervention in natural processes, but they are still natural processes and so have all the natural consequences, including the generation of human beings. No process of manufacture can ever produce those natural consequences. We can’t manufacture life from non-life (cloning generates life from life), let alone manufacture intelligent life from plastic and silicon. The best we can do is manufacture simulations of them.
I’m not as familiar with the Borg as you are, I didn’t watch much Star Trek beyond the original series. I agree that a “soulless intelligence” is a terrifying prospect, but I also think it is a contradiction in terms. Intelligence and will just are the soul. I also think “personality” just is the soul. A thing without a soul doesn’t have a personality – at most it has a simulation of one.
We should remember that computers of the future can’t, in principle, do anything that computers now can’t do. Or even computers from the 1950’s couldn’t do. Alan Turing proved that a long time ago. They will just be able to do what they do a lot faster than they do now. And if computer simulations of human behavior from the 1950’s or today don’t impress us to the point of speculating that they have turned into living souls, speeding up the processing doesn’t change anything, no matter how impressive the simulations become.
We are getting into some deep philosophical waters here – which I don’t mind at all – that could be its own thread entirely. I’ve written enough already to indicate that I think such a thing is impossible. It’s a misnomer, I believe, to call them “artificial intelligences” at all, when much better would be “simulated intelligences.” Then we wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that when the simulation becomes good enough it somehow becomes the real thing.
Yes please.
I second that idea! And I’m delighted that a serious discussion resulted, at least somewhat, from my not so intellectually deep post.
Denny Crane.
If people are interested in the topics of AI, human intelligence, the soul, and the mind, Edward Feser is a great resource. His book “Philosophy of Mind” is outstanding.
We watched Balance of Terror last night and it is still great. Someone wrote about marriage and family, and the episode starts with a shipboard wedding that is interrupted by an ongoing attack on an Earth outpost. As it turns out, the bride is a subordinate of the groom! I guess they don’t conduct sexual harassment training in Star Fleet.
I also noted that the phasers in the episode behaved more like photon torpedoes than the beams one normally associates with phasers.
Iluvatar and the Dwarves.
Oh. I guess I’d better get the [flowerbed] out of here.
I am fine with replacing humanity with synthetic life if the synths are more beautiful, more intelligent and more moral.
@majestyk started one once.
We must keep in mind the distinction between what is possible in the real world and what is possible in fiction. Fiction is not required to follow the physical and metaphysical laws of the real world.
We’re talking about Star Trek.
Philosophical analysis about reality, even if correct and decisive, does not decide whether Data is a person.
That question is decided by a simple hermeneutical question.
Does the story tell us that Data is conscious?
Data often demonstrates characteristics that would indicate he is conscious. He has a sense of self. He is self-conscious in that he can perceive himself as an object (being for itself if I remember my existentialism correctly). He is self reflective and seeks to ponder the nature of his own existence. He can put himself deep into a task and think creatively (being in itself, perhaps?).
In the story, he passes the Turing test.
I say conscious.
Can anything tell any of us that anyone else is?
Keep in mind: decaf expressos do exist.
Can we define what life is before we try to decide if something is alive?
Yes.
Stories tell us things. The Ring of Power is bad, and Data is conscious. It’s how the stories go.
I mean outside of stories. Empirically.
Ah.
In the real world, can anything tell us that someone else is conscious?
Don’t make me get all Plantinga up in here, bro.
I always kinda admired Star Trek’s Harry Mudd, pudgy, crafty, unburdened by excess scruples and able to get hold of wealth and also surround himself with major babes (Mudd’s Women) or beautiful obedient synths (I, Mudd). It was an incredible waste of resources to use the Enterprise as a law enforcement tool against Mudd’s minor infractions. Like siccing an aircraft carrier against crab pot poachers.
I suspect a world full of virtuous, attractive synths would almost certainly be run by Harry Mudd types.
From the sublime to the absurd, it certainly seems like most commenters were right when they suggested that Captain Kirk, as a man of science, was will to experiment with anything and anyone in the universe.
A minor point. The major babes were not major. They were taking some sort of illegal substance making them appear to be major. It was a con.
And yet–the woman willing to work hard, willing to be a companion to a man in a rough world, and smart enough to figure out the easy way to get the dishes clean . . . .
How is that NOT hot?
It’s Proverbs 31. It’s great.