The devil is *fine*.
Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It comes on at one in the morning in WGN, and they happen to presently be airing the absolute peak of the shows quality, season four. I am consistently amazed at the depth of the storytelling in a way I never was before; in the past, I got far too caught up in my love for everything good about Deep Space Nine that I tended to write off The Next Generation for being episodic alien-planet-of-the-week sort of stuff, with cranky special effects and a ship that amounted to a luxury hotel in space. I’m still not a fan of the fact they they stage plays on the ship, but let’s move past that.
As I said, they’ve been showing season four, which happens to include some absolutely amazing episodes, from “The Best of Both Worlds, part 2,” to “The Loss,” in which Deanna Troi loses her empathic abilities, to “The Wounded,” in which a rogue starship captain is causing a bunch of havoc in Cardassian space (featuring the first appearance of the Cardassians and of Marc Alaimo) to “Devil’s Due,” which aired last night. “Devil’s Due” is yet another entry into Trek’s ambiguous relationship with religion.
It’s in a long tradition of Trek dethroning false gods. From Vaal in “The Apple” to, um, God in The Final Frontier and again and again and again, this is a franchise that has long loved to cast down myths and make the universe a safer, if less mysterious and more boring, place. I’m being overly critical, of course, but the recurrant theme is that people are capable of making their own paradise without the need for gods, at least false ones. This episode deals with that quite explicitly.
According to Ventaxian lore, a thousand years ago, while the planet was in the midst of ecological disaster and war that threatened to destroy them all, a devil figured named Ardra arrived, and promised to provide the planet with a thousand years of peace and prosperity, at the end of which the planet and all its inhabitants would be given over to her. Lo and behold, a thousand years pass, and Ardra arrives, with all the great powers she was purported to have (nothing, of course, that the Enterprise wasn’t capable of), and claimed her planet. But of course, it wasn’t really her, and after an episode’s worth of tormenting Picard and the planet, she’s revealed to be a con artist, but the real tour de force is Picard’s demonstration that Ardra, even if this really was her, hadn’t accomplished anything; the Ventaxians had made their paradise themselves.
It’s an article of faith in the Trek universe that our unmitigated potential is immense, if only we would claim it for ourselves, and as much as I love these shows, I can’t help but disagree. In the solely-material world of The Next Generation, even folks of terrifying and godlike power like Q are to be resisted decried, fought and simply dismissed. What gods there are – from Q to Trelane to Flint — are mercurial at best. Instead, consistently, purely human potential is glorified, even when its a madman like Khan, who is treated with a bizarre admiration for the entirety of “Space Seed.”
This is, of course, at odds with the Gospel, with Catholicism — while we do believe that mankind is capable of great things, we predicate that greatness on the loss of self and submission to God, who raises us up, and not on our own efforts at greatness, which, we have seen countless times, and inevitably doomed to crash and burn. Pride goeth before the fall, and all that. Star Trek presumes, though, that material progress will eventually be matched by spiritual progress, that mankind will eventually figure out what to do with the horrifying things we’re capable of. It’s the only explanation I can think of as to how the people of the twenty-forth century aren’t entirely fixated on the holodeck. And yet, how little evidence we really see for that in the show!
No, instead, we have the same weak, fallible people. They haven’t grown. The fight and falter and stumble and trip, face addiction and corurption, fight wars, grow paranoid (Ben Maxwell, “The Wounded”) and harbor grudges and nurse hatreds. They’re us, just us, and we’re supposed to presume they’ve overcome their spiritual decay? No, they haven’t overcome a thing. In fact, all the evidence suggests that what Star Trek shows us is a military, fascist dictatorship. There’s no religion. There’s no economy. As one article I read so appropriately put it, “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?”
Ronald D. Moore, one of the brains behind Deep Space Nine and the genius behind Battlestar Galactica, was consistently stymied by this; why, he wanted to know, is everyone obsessed with Starfleet? Why does everyone just say “there’s nothing I want more than to put on the uniform and explore the galaxy”? So he tried to write characters for whom this wasn’t true. He gave us journalist and writer Jake Sisko, and was the driving force behind Wesley’s eventual abandonment of his Starfleet path. And yet, the question presents itself; there’s no economic life, there’s no spiritual life; the only human accomplishments left are either learning Tae Kwan Do at the adult learning annex or joining the military. In the military, there’s meaning. In the military, there’s purpose. There’s direction. There’s moral force.
And so, Starfleet is everywhere. They’re on the Federation council. They have their own commander-in-chief. We’ve even seen them stage a coup. It’s the only thing that commands any kind of loyalty; it even has a spiritual force to it. Picard reminds us in “The First Duty” that “the first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth, be it scientific truth, historical truth, or personal truth,” and that if that cannot be accepted, one does not deserve to wear the uniform of the Fleet. Indeed, we find again and again that within the confines of the military establishment, there is endless search for personal meaning, from Data to Worf to Troi to Bashir and again and again and again and again. It seems that the only place in the future you can find meaning in yourself is in the last form of public service out there.
Star Trek is all about casting down false gods, except the biggest of them all: Starfleet itself.
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July 8, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Gina
OK, I had to comment on this one. (HUGE trek fan)
Even though I enjoyed the episode, I just couldn’t swallow DS9’s Captain Sisko’s (I think he was a captain by then—been a long time since I saw it) explanation of humanity’s big turnaround, when Gabriel Bell came on the scene and began to make such a difference: “they just started to get it together,” or some trite statement to that effect.
Of course, the reason the writers were not able to come up with much better than this was the fact that there is no real basis for this kind of phenomenon. Governing bodies of all kinds are guilty of destroying the human spirit, not setting it free (that’s something only the Lord can do). Most definitely, the Star Trek universe depicts a very idealistic, benevolent form of communism, a way of life only achievable on television.
But it sure is entertaining.
July 8, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Michael
Sigh. I’ve never considered myself a Star Trek fan — space opera just isn’t what I go to science fiction looking for. But my wife is. And in the end, I’ve watched every episode of every series, most more than once. Likewise the movies (although I’m rarely happy with them). So I guess that means I must be a fan. Of the bunch, Next Generation is probably my favorite, at least when it was at its best.
And yes, I’ve always been bothered by the things you’re talking about — the company line that all gods are false, and the rosy view of a human nature that has supposedly “evolved” more in four centuries than in all the centuries previously. [A la old-style Liberal Protestantism, come to think of it.] Not to mention the weird conviction that, even despite a few belligerent outliers, the military is essentially a rational and benevolent force.
A lot of this, as I understand it, come straight from Roddenberry’s personal convictions. He liked the Army, and intensely disliked religions, which as he said “vary [only] in their degree of idiocy.” All of which is why it was DS9 — after Roddenebrry’s death — that was able to relax a little bit, and at least acknowledge the fact that people have religious convictions, which in turn shape their societies. Not to mention its running subplot about Section 31, the “bad apples” secretly subverting both Starfleet and the Federation.
Yeah, it’s weird watching all these shows that are rooted in a worldview that I absolutely reject — that may be why I’ve never really quite clicked with them. And yet I watch them, with none of the guilt attached to watching, say, Triumph of the Will.
July 8, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Mary
On the importance of Starfleet — you might find this interesting.
July 10, 2009 at 1:07 pm
CEK
I thought that this was kindasorta addressed in Generations, the hollowed out morality of Star Trek, when both Kirk and Picard are dealing with being the last of their families. It had never occurred to either of these men that there was something other than ambling around the Galaxy (and enjoying the odd sultry alien vixen).
And I always figured The Federation to be a communist’s wet dream packaged into a Huxleyesque fantasy world. No economic freedom, no religion; just military, freesex and artificial stimulations. So yea, when I was 12 – 16, I thought it was the bee’s knees.
Now? Not so much.
July 10, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Brian Visaggio
CEK, I’d encourage you to go watch DS9, then.
August 24, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Elliott
Let me preface by saying that I am not a Catholic (though I was raised one).
Now, first of all, we need to clarify something about Starfleet: while the nearest word to describe it would be “military,” this concept is very misleading to what starfleet is about, namley the pursuit of truth through DISCOVERY. For religious people, I see quite cleary why this is problematic. For them, the truth is already available in the form of their God–the absolute final truth is known to this being and is available opaquely through his prophets who I suppose received his knowledge telepathically. To accuse the Federation of being a facsist state is hysterically ironic coming from a Christian perspective, as God is the supreme dictator of the Universe from whom anything and everything of value can only be received as an act of generosity–never earned or deserved. Starfleet is an organisation (yes it has a command structure borrowed from our military history because organisations should be, well organised) dedicated to the pursuit of specifically scientific truth, because in order to expand one’s knowledge of the Universe in the post-Cochran world, one must venture into potentially hazardous and truly alien reaches (as Q points out in TNG’s first episode). Remember what it took to reach the communist ideal: 1) A devastating war worse than any we’ve seen in real life so far, 2) the discovery that we are not the centre of the universe and the only centient form of life and 3) the forced removal of capitalism which is the cause of hunger, disease and war. DS9 was a concession to mainstream thinking and totally antithetical to trek. Star Trek never claims that humanity’s evolution is complete, and dealt frequently with the conceit of groups or cultures that believed in an arrogant superiority (the Engineered society in TNG, the Cardassians, the Borg), humans understand that their journey is never over–that they must always endeavour to boldy go–however, that doesn’t mean they concede to the masochistic view of the religious that the material world is of no real value. There are no easy answers, a fact that is finally accepted in the Star Trek Universe, a state of humanity’s growth out of it’s childhood into it’s uncredulous, non-wishthinking and self-examining maturity.