Does utopia haunt your dreams?
Odd question, I know, but the first rule of writing is “Hit ’em hard and fast.” Or is that boxing? Regardless, for all its oddness, it’s a fair question. Are you, like so many humans before you, haunted by the thought of utopia?
Is that not our white whale? A society with no struggle nor pain, no want nor need unmet, a world in which we can do anything, achieve anything, be anything we could put our minds to? Is that not what founded this country? The American dream is utopic in its belief. It’s part of what drove the waves of immigration. It’s the thing that we will always want, and yet, because of our own humanity, cannot achieve.
I’ve seen utopia tackled often in fiction, it’s one of the more interesting dissections to take apart. “Logan’s Run” promises 30 years of hedonistic freedom in exchange for a lifespan marked complete by the appearance of a black spot. “The Giver” instead takes away hedonism, emotion, and joy, for a world in which humanity has no memory, no shared belief, no ability to feel the heights or the pitfalls of reality.
Are these utopic? Well, in one sense they are, but in another, they’re awful, twisted, horrifying worlds. There is no want or need unmet. There is suffering, sure, but none of the kind that plagues the world we live in.
What if utopia is horror? What if utopia is the death of humanity, a subtle death, one we don’t notice? What if utopia kills us without us realizing it for a moment?
Of course, if you’re reading this, you’re probably wealthy, privileged, and in the First World — you already live in some people’s utopia. I have running water. I have the ability to drink clean, fresh water, any time, for free. Is that not utopian to someone who grew up a millenia ago? Is it not utopian to someone who lives now, too?
I don’t really intend to delve too deep into utopia. My friends think I’m a dreadful bore when I ask them about the cosmic horror of a humanity un-humaned, so instead I’m here to talk about “Star Trek,” and if this were a video, I’d play the theme right now.
“Space… the final frontier…”
“Star Trek” is a silly show. It’s a very silly show, actually, it’s so implacably silly that it has whole episodes that are just pastiches of other episodes played entirely straight. There is a scene where multiple characters do a “Ocean’s 11” style casino heist, and then that scene has a throwaway line about race relations in 1950s Las Vegas! That’s the sort of political discussion I can get behind! I don’t have to use my brain at all!
It also displays an Earth more war-torn and destroyed than ours. There is a Third World War. There is a Second American Civil War. There is a eugenics war. There is so much suffering and hardship and pain and death and —
There is still, as there always will be, humanity.
See, science fiction at the dawn of the post-war age was something very unique. There was a sort of elitist optimism that humanity was, to put in the words of an extraordinary racist — and unfortunately the architect of much of the science fiction landscape of mid-century America — “the Northern Europeans of the universe.” What John W. Campbell meant by that, in between abusing his writers and arguing in favor of… many bad things, was that humanity was not only destined to conquer the universe, but also uniquely suited to that role.
Of course, it reeks of neocolonialism, and it poisoned how science fiction looked at humans for years, culminating in the sort of counterculture pushback that occurred after Campbell & Co. stopped puppet mastering science fiction. If you ever wanted to know why so many novels involve humanity being bad and brutal, and aliens being good and gentle, you know why.
I see you, James Cameron. I see you.
“Star Trek” picked up on that a bit. Not to the level of Campbell. No, humanity isn’t shown to have some eugenics-inspired preternatural power over the universe, but humanity is shown to have evolved past all that could hold it back. We are not merely human. We do not sacrifice, or bend, or give up on our humanity, we do not lose what makes us who we are, and yet, we are granted the dreams we have dreamt.
In “Star Trek,” humanity finds utopia.
It’s not the utopia of “The Giver,” nor “Logan’s Run,” nor any dystopia hiding behind some utopic vision. Earth is, as many characters quote, paradise — a paradise that remains untouched.
There are multiple references to 9/11 in “Star Trek.” (By “references,” I mean things that are the “9/11” of a particular era of that show.) In “Deep Space 9,” there’s a terror attack on Starfleet perpetrated by an alien species capable of changing shape and — crazily enough, I’m about to explain post-9/11 American responses using a television show meant for kids 13-years-old and up. (Man, I really thought I was gonna do something with my degree.)
Crisis aside, the episode begins with martial law, then blood tests, and then distrust and fear, and the fear grips you because anyone could be a changeling, anyone could change their shape, they could be your neighbor, your friend, your boss, your father —
“Star Trek” refuses that world. “It is easy to be a saint in paradise,” complains the stoic captain. But to keep a paradise pure, it cannot be destroyed by fear and uncertainty. The good guys win, the bad guys explode, roll end credits. It’s nothing like what really happened when a terror attack hit American soil. It predicts the paranoia, the fear, the checks, the suspecting, initially, yes. What it didn’t predict is that we wouldn’t stop doing it. It’s been 23 years. I still get stopped by the TSA. America is no paradise, and when it faced its crisis it responded in the way that the writers hoped it wouldn’t.
We’re only human, after all.
It’s a serialized show, nothing bad can happen. But this episode reveals what “Star Trek” believes — it’s so brutally modernist I can’t help but respect it. No, the good guys won’t bend the knee in fear of something terrifying, Good Rational Logic and Reason will defeat any opponent given sufficient time and sufficient desire.
By the way, “Deep Space 9” is the morally grey “Star Trek.” This one grapples with such things like, “Is it okay to gas a planet” or, “Terrorism: Good or bad?” and yet it somehow, no matter what, makes sure we know Earth is paradise. No money, no wants, no needs, anyone doing anything they want at any time, and it all just works.
It’s no wonder we don’t spend much time on Earth. It’s no wonder that the only time we do is when that paradise is under threat. It makes sense that for a show that puts a utopia at the heart of its entire universe that the paradise is rarely mentioned.
There’s a reason that in a world without want or need, people still strap themselves into tin cans and hurtle at unknowable speeds into nearly certain death and risk their lives, and do it again, and again, and again.
Because utopia is boring. Even when it’s interesting, it’s boring. A utopia! On Earth! I don’t care. I want to know what drives people off Earth. I want to know what makes people want to leave utopia, to run away from utopia, because a real utopia has no walls keeping its denizens in. A real utopia wants people to do what they want — so what makes people want to leave? If paradise is available, what could possibly drive you away from it?
The answer to that is the same as why there are so few utopias in fiction. Even the best utopias rely on that subtle death of humanity. Even the most interesting and most hopeful utopias tell their stories not through their own settings, but the settings of those who choose to leave it. Because running is the thing that made us apex predators millenia ago, and running away from utopia is what makes us fundamentally human.
The utopia of Star Trek is less evil than “Logan’s Run” or “The Giver,” and yet, people run from it all the same, because we cannot accept perfection. It is no sin to live and breathe happily, but humanity, as a people, cannot resign itself to that fate.
I’m not sure if that’s something to feel good about.
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