It’s impossible to overstate the influence that Star Trek had on me when I was a kid.
“Oh here we go again, another nerdy white Gen-Xer opining about some dumb sci-fi show — show us your doll collection, nerd.” First of all, they’re action figures. Second, I’m not talking about “I became an engineer because of Scotty” or “Spock made me want to do stuff with computers, so here I am in IT” territory. I’m talking about “I literally would not be anywhere close to the person I am today, and might even be in jail, or dead” territory.
Like a lot of people in my generation, I come from a “broken” home. “Broken” in the sense of, “Americans decided at some point that the traditional ‘nuclear family’ model is the only right one, and anything that deviates from that is bad, and you should feel bad.” Things started out traditionally enough: my emotionally distant and abusive father went to work and paid the bills, my mom stayed home and did all the “wifely duties”, and I did what American kids tend to do: loudly demand more stuff and absolutely lose my shit if said stuff did not end up in my little hands right then and there.
My parents got divorced a few months before I turned 10. Not long after that, my mom found herself a boyfriend. And not too much longer after that, he moved in with us.
I’m not gonna go into too much detail about that guy, or about my father before him, but the details don’t really matter. What matters are the broad strokes: I knew, deep down in my bones, that neither of those guys were people I should look up to, much less emulate. They were both examples of what not to do, of who not to become.
I wasn’t even 11 years old before I solemnly swore that I would never end up like either of them. Despite not having achieved many of the other goals I set for myself during that same era (though I’m sure NASA will be giving me a call any day now… ), that was one goal that I have indeed managed to achieve. Don’t be like them: I’m not. Don’t do what they did: I haven’t.
It took me a while to realise why I was able to make this decision in the first place. How does a 10-year-old kid reach the conclusion that his dad isn’t someone he wants to be when he grows up? How does an 11-year-old kid realise that his mom’s live-in boyfriend is a total loser and someone whose opinions on life, the universe, and everything are meant to be taken with a planetoid-sized grain of salt?
I mean, it’s not like I had any other positive male role models in my life… or did I?
In real life, no. Every man I knew in real life was an exemplar of mid-20th century toxic masculinity in one way or another, and this was decades before “toxic masculinity” was even a recognised concept. Back then, it was just called “being a man”. Like so many things, we simply didn’t know any better back then. Or, at least, the men who loomed large in my real life didn’t. I, somehow, knew there was something better worth striving for, an ideal I could set for myself that had very little to do with my dad’s or my stepdad’s image of what a “real man” is.
Here now is where the prologue ends, and I finally start talking about Star Trek. I’m old enough that, back in my day, they didn’t call it “The Original Series” with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest of the Technicolor gang. Back then, it was just Star Trek. It hadn’t yet become the monolithic franchise that it is in the 21st century, though it had already become a cultural juggernaut years before I was even born. Its 55-minute TV episodes were glitzy (by the standards of the era) and action-packed (ibid), but they were also sneaky little bite-sized morality tales in the same vein as Aesop’s Fables or the Biblical Proverbs. And there was no higher paragon of morality and virtue in the show than stoic stalwart Spock, whose struggle to control his emotions and inability to understand the motives and motivations of those around him strongly resonated with the pre-teen version of me. The guy might be an alien, but here was an example of someone facing the same problems I was, and overcoming them, and here’s the critical part: he did it without being an asshole.
In the absence of any men worth looking up to in my real life, I looked up to Spock instead. I reined in my completely out-of-control emotions (I was a holy terror when I was a child, and I’m amazed my mother didn’t murder me to death). In truth, I probably went a little too far in the other direction with respect to rejecting feelings and embracing logic — just like Spock did — and that’s something I still struggle with. But at the time, it was absolutely the right decision and the right direction, and if I hadn’t been able to make that change, I would never have ended up as the more-or-less productive member of society that I am today.
To put it more succinctly and bluntly, Spock inspired me to get my shit together. I kept my shit together because of Picard.
Some friends my age didn’t really get Picard. They looked up to Kirk, and since Riker was basically Kirk 2.0, they yearned for a day when he could be in charge instead. But for me, something about Picard’s cool, measured approach to situations highly appealed to me. More than that, it was his adherence to a personal code of honour and ethics, and steadfast devotion to deeply-held principles, even when they came in conflict with the prospect of his own survival, that gelled with my own developing self-image. Picard was a man whose first duty was to the truth, and for whom absolutely everything else in his life was in furtherance of the pursuit of whatever truths might be left in the crucible once the flames had died down. It was a far cry from the “adults” (really just asshole teenagers who grew bigger) that I knew in my real life, who were a variety of scammers, grifters, and cheats. For those dudes, “honour” was really just another word for “respect”. They didn’t know the real meaning of honour, the one that Picard displayed, and the one I embraced and still live by to this day: do the right thing, the right way, every time, no matter the personal cost. Do what is right not because you expect to be rewarded, in this life or any other, but simply because it is right. Do what is right not just when it’s easy, but also and especially when it’s hard.
The other ideal that Star Trek as a broader franchise instilled in me is stated outright in an episode of The Original Series, called “Is There in Truth No Beauty”: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, or IDIC for short.
If you were to break down and distill all the hundreds of hours of the entire franchise to one guiding principle, it would undoubtedly be that of IDIC. The idea behind it is that instead of using how we differ from others to set hard “us versus them” lines in the sand, and to use those lines to define who will be persecuted and who will be doing the persecuting, we instead should embrace what makes us different, because understanding and embracing those differences ultimately makes all of us better for it. This principle is demonstrated on a pretty literal level in Star Trek, where the mostly human crew generally treats whatever alien of the week they come across with the same dignity and respect that the humans would show one another, no matter how weird the aliens’ foreheads might look or how strangely 80s their fashion decisions might be.
It’s this notion of IDIC that’s probably the most fundamentally utopian concept in all of Star Trek. Warp drives, transporters, replicators — these are all fundamentally world-shaking technologies that would most definitely change the course of our evolution as a society and as a species, but it’s the idea of IDIC that shows us how we, as humans, can evolve and change our minds.
And today, in 2023, we have a very long way to go before we even get close. Some pockets of our civilisation are even actively trying to halt, or reverse, our progress toward that utopian ideal.
The latest sideshow in the three-ring circus of far-right politics is the weaponisation and demonisation of the word “woke”. According to their pundits and politicians, we are expected to believe that “wokeism” and “woke politics” and “woke ideology” is the worst crisis our species has faced in the entire history of ever. My latest pastime is mentally substituting the word “egalitarian” every time I hear one of them say “woke”, and then listening to these political equivalents to prosperity preachers rail against “egalitarianism” and “egalitarian politics” and “egalitarian ideology”.
Because that is, essentially, what they are doing. They’re passing laws against teaching the very real history of oppression and racism in the United States. They’re trying as hard as they can to tear down hard-fought equality for LGBTQ+ people. The group currently dead-centre in the far-right’s crosshairs is transgender people, but 20 years ago it was homosexuals, 30 years ago it was Mexicans, 60 years ago it was blacks, and 100 years ago it was women. There’s always a new group for them to target for oppression and ridicule, though of course they don’t frame it that way. The right obfuscates — and has always obfuscated — its intentions to keep rich white dudes at the top of the societal pyramid by insisting that extending rights and privileges to “others” means taking rights away from them, and from you. If women can vote, that means a man’s vote counts for less. If blacks can sit in the same section of the restaurant as whites, that means whites are somehow demeaned. If Mexicans can immigrate to the USA with impunity, that means the “native” Americans are made lesser by their presence (the irony of this ideology goes unnoticed). If gays can marry each other, then by GAWD, what’s next?! And if those transgenders can use the same bathrooms as the rest of us, who’s to say what they’ll demand next?
What the far-right wants people to believe is that human rights are somehow in limited supply, and that giving rights to one group inevitably means taking them away from someone else. This was exactly the thinking behind their attack on Affirmative Action policies in the early 1990s: they didn’t focus on the fact that disadvantaged black people were being given greater access to university admittance and employment prospects, but rather that those prospects were being taken away from more deserving whites. Giving gays the right to marry wasn’t about giving them the same rights as heterosexuals; instead, it was — somehow — an attack on the “sanctity of marriage” that would somehow demean and denigrate the very concept of marriage itself.
The far-right is very much not interested in the concept of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, thank you very much. In fact, I’d bet a large sum of money that if a modern-day episode of Star Trek came out that explicitly endorsed the notion of IDIC, the Fox News commentators would absolutely lose their goddamned minds at how “woke” Star Trek had suddenly become — utterly missing the fact that Star Trek has been “woke” for almost 60 years already.
The simple fact that the far-right fails to recognise or deliberately obscures in order to maintain the long-standing status quo of power is this, and this has been one of my favourite sayings for a couple of years now: human rights are not non-renewable resources. Giving more rights and privileges to disadvantaged people does not mean taking those same rights away from the people who have already been enjoying those same rights and privileges for decades… or centuries… or millennia. Lifting those people up to the same or similar level as your own doesn’t mean that you have somehow been brought down — it doesn’t mean that they are better than you now. It means that you are now on a level playing field. It means you don’t get a 90-metre head start in a 100-metre dash, not that they are suddenly getting the same head start that you have always enjoyed.
A lot of embracers of far-right ideology are hiding behind the security blanket of “beliefs” so they can continue to ostracise groups they don’t want to embrace. They don’t want to make a cake for a gay wedding. They don’t want to wear a rainbow logo on their football jersey. They don’t want drag queens to exist, period. And if you criticise or confront them over this, holy shit here comes the woke agenda again trying to control what Americans can’t and can’t do (again, the irony of this ideology goes unnoticed).
What really doesn’t make sense to me about any of this is what, exactly, these people are afraid of losing. What does it cost them to make that cake for the gay couple? What real impact on his life does it have for that footballer to just wear the damned rainbow logo? Exactly who the hell in the entire history of civilisation has been harmed by the presence of a drag queen? I don’t understand the fear, but more than that, I don’t understand the effort that people have to go to in maintaining that fear, or worse, encouraging other people to maintain and spread that fear.
“If we teach kids about homosexuality, they might decide to be gay!” Yeah? So what? Where’s the harm? If you’re trying to say that homosexuality is fundamentally immoral and wrong, you’re not sounding a whole hell of a lot different from your parents or grandparents who were saying the same thing about miscegenation, insisting they’d disown their white daughters if they ever brought a black man home with them.
What today’s constant pulpit-thumping against “woke” really boils down to is exactly what my playful mental substitution of “egalitarian” for “woke” suggests: the far-right doesn’t want to embrace Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. They want one ideology, one religion, one economic system, one nation under one God, indivisible (so long as they get their own way), with liberty and justice for, uhhhhhh… not… woke.
These people don’t know what they’re missing. I’m a straight dude, but I’ve gone out dancing with gay guys heaps of times, and it was fun as hell every time. I’ve known several transgender people, and aside from the initial confusion around what pronouns to use, interacting with them had no negative impact on my life whatsoever. It simply makes no difference to me what these people do behind closed doors, either alone or with each other. It doesn’t matter to me at all, beyond the basic hope that they get to do whatever the hell they want to do with their own lives, just like I do.
If we’re ever going to advance as a species — and if we’re ever going to deserve that advancement — we have to embrace our differences instead of using them as guidelines for where to erect barriers, and ghettos, and cells. More than warp drive, transporters, or replicators, that’s the one thing in all of Star Trek that we need most if we’re ever going to have any hope of reaching our true potential.
When you say “woke”, I hear “egalitarian”. And I embrace — and hope for — Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.