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Is the Star Trek Future Possible?
April 13th, 2009
For a change, I’m not talking about science here. I think some of the Star Trek technology will be realized in the future, and some is pure fantasy. Still, I give them credit for trying on that front. I just wish they’d avoid the time travel…but I have already digressed.
The issue I want to write about briefly is the aspect of the show, at least from The Next Generation onward, that suggests that we can learn to live in peace, all races, all types of people, in harmony.
Adrien Veidt from Watchmen, “the smartest man in the world,” whichever weird world that is, would say that we could but only if given an external enemy. Unfortunately, I think there is some truth to that, but fortunately I think it’s also not the complete truth.
First, some background from a study I thought was highly illuminating (and for which I’d love to rediscover the link, but not today apparently). People stereotype. It’s useful to do so, as stereotypes have some basis in reality and knowing something about somebody you’ve just met has advantages. It’s not foolproof by any means, but evolution works based on probability, not perfection. Anyway, the study indicated that people notice three things when they see someone (in this case in photos): gender, age, and race. It’s easy to understand that age and gender will be useful to recognize in evaluating a person’s relationship, or potential relationship, to one’s self.
The race thing is something of a red herring, as it turns out. The study continued and had a phase where the people in photos had a clear affiliation of some sort, as in wearing clothing associated with a sports team. Then the third thing people noticed changed from race to that association.
What people are actually looking for is markers identifying someone as “on my team” or “the other team.” In other words, tribe. Race, historically, has been a quick way of identifying someone as different. If you don’t have race, you look for other clues, which may be obvious like fan clothing, or subtle like facial features, grooming, other clothing choices, etc. We really want to sort out people as fast as possible, to pigeon-hole them, and while I applaud people who think they don’t do that, or try not to do that out of respect for individuals or some sense of fairness, I am not sure I’d believe them. It’s hardwired. We make these snap, instinctual judgements.
As someone who has travelled a lot outside the United States, and who has plenty of foreign friends from all sorts of places and of all sorts of races, it is still ridiculously easy to make friends with almost any random American you find abroad. Ex-pats have their own hangouts in cities everywhere and even though they may have turned their backs on Nationalism in a way that few do, there’s still a strong urge to recognize the tribal tie.
So, in a way, all we have to do is get people to think of fellow humans, all fellow humans, as being on the same team. The same tribe.
That’s hard.
Threatening aliens that want to kill humans would certainly do it. I hope we don’t have that in our near-future, but it is the case in the Star Trek universe. What it would seem that happened in the series was to go from Kirk’s era where humans banded together against a large and dangerous universe, with different races all serving together on the Enterprise, to the Next Generation, where the team expanded to the Federation in an even more obvious manner and new alien races were viewed not necessarily as threats, but as potential Federation members.
I don’t mean any of this to say that humans aren’t capable today or in the future of being monsters. Slavery, murder, rape, even genocide, are things that happen today. They used to happen more regularly and were more acceptable in the past, so I think we’ve made progress. People can be conditioned to accept almost any reality, no matter how horrible, but the flip side is that we can also be conditioned to expect the best from ourselves and each other. The fraction of people in the United States, if not the world, who find various forms of hate and discrimination continues to drop. Not as fast or as steadily as most would like, but it is a different culture than past decades and the good guys are winning.
The biggest problem I see to this in the end is not racism. Racism ceases to be that third thing as soon as you don’t recognize it as what defines someone’s tribe. Melting pot countries like the United States, Brazil, and many European countries have a step up on this, although still have a lot of problems with it (and I’ll come back to one big problem with the US in a second). Places like China lag behind given the past history of isolationism combined with steady control of information.
I was talking to my Chinese buddy here yesterday, and he told me about growing up in the Cultural Revolution. The government told them that China was the best country in the world, that it was the best place with the best system and the best of everything. These were lies by any objective measure, but people believed it because they didn’t have any place else for comparison.
This, unfortunately, is the case too often in the United States, too. Most Americans don’t know much about other countries. Most Americans do feel like the United States is the best place in the world. Now, I think the United States does top the list of a lot of categories and is a good place in many ways, but they have more freedom in the Netherlands when it comes to sex and drugs, and many countries on the average have better, cheaper, and healthier food and slimmer, healthier people. I’m not a big soccer fan, but the best soccer is not in the United States, and that is a measure important to much of the world.
So I think nationalism and religion are the huge remaining problems for the Star Trek future. On the Enterprise, Chekov, Uhuru, Kirk, Scotty, Sulu, etc., were humans and Starfleet first. Even Spock was half-human, but fully Starfleet. You don’t tend to see racism as an issue on sports teams today. What you get at the highest level are things like the Olympics and wars, struggles between nations.
Religion was, for the most part, simply eliminated from Star Trek. Religion tends to be quite divisive. Religion, more so than race, is how people from other countries still do group themselves and self-identify. I am concerned that even if we found an external enemy, among the stars or our own creation (Terminator, Battlestar Galactica), we’d still have this sort of religious strife.
I’ve rambled enough. Humans I think are in principle capable of achieving the vision of Star Trek, but our culture must develop in ways to make it standard and children have to be raised with this expectation. Nationalism and religion are inherently enemies of this, as intrinsically powerful and divisive forces. I think they should be kept as far away from the children as possible, but that seems like a pipe dream, as people want to indoctrinate their own kids into their own tribes, and these are the two strongest today.
So I guess until we’re attacked by bug-eyed monsters trying to convert us to their religion, we’re doomed to fall short of Gene Roddenberry’s vision. If only the smartest man in the world would do something…
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“Nationalism and religion are inherently enemies of this, as intrinsically powerful and divisive forces.”
So very true. And unfortunately we are still so far away from eradicating them. Maybe we are fundamentally too clanic, as a species, to ever outgrow these.
Psychology and psychoanalysis tend to prove that putting oneself in a sub-group, creating clans and territories, building distinctions between “me” and “you”, opposing for the sake of opposing, are necessary conditions for building one’s identity. That’s why any totalitarism holds the “army of clones” models as the highest form of social organization possible. People can only be brainwashed into unity. As soon as they are free to think, they’ll divide and fight. That’s a terrible irony.
In later seasons of Deep Space Nine you can see an us-versus-them mentality and group thinking between Starfleet people and non-Starfleet. In fact, it always seems to me (and there were a few episodes that examined this possibility in DS9 and TNG) that Starfleet posed a risk to the long-term democratic utopia of the United Federation of Planets, because Starfleet could degenerate into a militaristic dictatorship pretty quickly.
The “us-versus-them” thing, which is sometimes called “ethnocentrism” is something that evolutionary psychologists and standard old experimental psychologists have done a lot of work on. It’s a critical aspect of genocide studies and so forth. Robert Axelrod and Ross A. Hammond did some work with cellular automata models to show that ethnocentrism can, in their models, sustain cooperation. It helps guard against freeloaders. But, you can get around it through reconceptualizing “us” and “them” in ways that get you to treat others decently.
It is possible that whatever brain structures make us prone to pronounced ethnocentrism were advantageous in our evolutionary environment, but are less so today, so whatever makes those structures create the more serious extremes of racism or ethnocentrism might may no longer be favored by natural selection or sexual selection. If so, we may evolve to be less prone to stereotyping and ethnocentric prejudices. If we meet with other civilizations that have had a few thousand generations of evolutionary pressures to be less ethnocentric, we may find that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are “over” the stage of ethnocentrism and racism, and that may be our destiny as well.
As to religion being an especially strong tool for “us versus them” thinking, I’m not aware of any good recent empirical evidence for this from the psychologists and sociologists who study such things. There are many good measures of religiosity, religious belief, religious practice, and so forth, and we also have many good measures of intolerance, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and so forth. If religious beliefs are an independent variables that strongly predicts dependent variables of hostile anti-out-group prejudices I’d like to see the studies. I think the fact that societies that are more isolated (and thus more parochial and suspicious of outsiders) tend to be more religious and less secular, and also more prone to stronger “racist” or “ethnocentric” beliefs, but I’d say the religiosity and racism being correlated is more likely a result of the cultural stage of development.
It seems possible to me that modernized and highly educated people who retain strong religious belief (like average Americans) tend to be more open to outsiders and less prone to racism and strong out-group hostility. But then, I’m a student of Church involvement in the Civil Rights movements, the anti-war movements, and movements for modernization within 19th Century Persian and Ottoman cultural contexts. So, my guesswork is probably biased by the sorts of histories and anthropological writings I have encountered.
– Eric
“It is possible that whatever brain structures make us prone to pronounced ethnocentrism were advantageous in our evolutionary environment, but are less so today, so whatever makes those structures create the more serious extremes of racism or ethnocentrism might may no longer be favored by natural selection or sexual selection. If so, we may evolve to be less prone to stereotyping and ethnocentric prejudices. ”
You can’t really talk about “evolution” in this case. Biological evolution would take hundreds of thousands of years before our “brain stucture” could be rewritten.
And applying natural selection and evolution to social studies and civilizations is… well, not very scientific, to say the least. “Extreme racism” or any kind of strong rejection of “the others” is not biological and can only be transmitted by means of education and environnement, which means it can disappear when social context is adequate, and reappear under different social circumstances. I don’t think we “evolve out of it”, not in a few thopusand years at least. The only thing we can do is provide a society where material abundancy, social welfare and open-minded education would educate people out of it. Temporarily. People, when put in a situation with scarce ressources and fierce competition, will instantly return to clanic mentality.
As for alien species… Well, it is really anthropocentric to assume they would have reached any kind of human-like set of values. For what we know, an advanced alien species could be naturally unable to feel any kind of hostility towars anything, or it could be naturally maniacally enclined to murdering anything different from itself… Who knows ?
Eric, in response to:
“As to religion being an especially strong tool for “us versus them†thinking, I’m not aware of any good recent empirical evidence for this from the psychologists and sociologists who study such things. There are many good measures of religiosity, religious belief, religious practice, and so forth, and we also have many good measures of intolerance, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and so forth. If religious beliefs are an independent variables that strongly predicts dependent variables of hostile anti-out-group prejudices I’d like to see the studies. I think the fact that societies that are more isolated (and thus more parochial and suspicious of outsiders) tend to be more religious and less secular, and also more prone to stronger “racist†or “ethnocentric†beliefs, but I’d say the religiosity and racism being correlated is more likely a result of the cultural stage of development.”
I’m a little shocked. I’m not talking just about racism at all, but division. Specific religious teaching in the world today leads to horrors like 9/11, suicide bombing and much of the underlying problems in the middle east (e.g., Israel vs. the Arab world), rampant homophobia and opposition to gay rights (see the Mormon’s influencing the voting in California last election cycle), opposition to science and rational thinking (e.g., issues of evolution/creationism, stem cell research, etc.), opposition to environmentalists (the end times are coming so why worry, and anyway God gave us the planet to use as we see fit), the lack of educational opportuntites and regular abuse of women in many Muslim populations, etc., etc., etc.
And sometimes it’s a simple as what I saw yesterday on an internet forum. A woman praised Adam Lambert, American Idol contestant, but lamented that it was such a shame he was gay and was going to go to hell, ending with a “God bless.”
Religion is not totally bad, and has its good points, but at its core is a belief in the supernatural, revealed knowledge, and human abuse that can lead to almost any arbitrary outcome, good or bad. My brother had a bunch of high school friends who all decided, after they grew up and got saved, they had to stop seeing their atheist friend. Islam and many offshoots of Christianity see non-believers as soley for conversion, destruction, enslavement, or some other manner of minimization.
That you don’t speaks to your kind nature and your belief’s system’s lack of certain shortcomings.
I’m labeling “religion” as the source of divisiveness and discrimination because it has this ridiculous power and preys on people’s ability to be willing overlook reason. Certainly living in the world today are billions of people controlled by it in active or covert opposition to billions of others. We can blame some recent genocides on religious affiliations.
I don’t believe you can separate the capacity or quality of being religious from what happens when that religious identity is so regularly and so often turned to evil in ways great and small. As soon as you can dupe people into swallowing one unsupportable lie, you can get them to do anything.
I mean, I can go on forever here. Every large, organized religion, as well as many small ones, exploits and expands the differences between people toward their own ends. Just because there are also religions that espouse Star Trek sort of ideals doesn’t forgive “religion” as a dominant divisive force for our species.
The real killer part of this is that there is the potential to have a religion that unites and possesses these noble sentiments. Unfortunately, pretty much every one like that is destroyed from within or without by much more aggressive forms. Jesus himself taught a lot of good, unifying things, but today most powerful Christian groups focus on the divisive elements to grow and enrich themselves. This is a form of evolution. The groups that place a premium on their way or no way and missionary work are selling their product and have much more success than those that say it’s okay not to be like them.
Mike, you are right to focus on “what divides people”, whatever it is, more than on religion. People need divisions. When they have religion, they use religion. When they have race, they use race. And so on. Many so called “religious” conflicts are actually clanic fights for territory, using religion as a demarcation line.
The most obvious one is the “israeli-arab” thing. I happen to have lived in Middle East, some years ago now. People were not that religious, actually. Muslims never asked me anything about my religion. They didn’t give a shit.
In Middle-East, belonging to this or that cult means that you belong to a community of people sharing common interests, who help each other out. When Muslims fight Christians or Jews, they don’t fight about ideologies or theological reasons. They fight because the muslim community has provided them with roads, hospitals and schools, and they in return want to defend that. Same goes for Christians (Maronites there) or Israeli. True believers fighting out of ideology are a minority. Most people use “muslim” or “christian” as a clanic reference more than a religious one.
PS – Sorry for any bad english. Sorry if I over-post, too… Nothing going on at work today, except posting on blogs here and there…
nomadz, no problem posting a lot. You’re cogent and interesting, and always welcome.
I am fine with the “clan” or “tribe” terminology. National and religious affliations seem the strongest two to me these days, with race, class, and other distinctions being less important.
I agree, probably impossible to eliminate short of the toltarian mind control you suggested, but maybe what we can hope for is some reduction in these differences to the level of that of mild fandom. That is, if Yankees and Mets fans can see themselves as fellow New Yorkers first, and happily tolerate their different team alligiences, that’s fine. But when the differences come from country and religion, that’s when there is the potential for real distrust, paranoia, and conflict in the name of the State and in the name of God.
I’m very interested in that subject, especially when applied to fiction. I’ve been a science fiction fan since childhood, but my academic background is more focused on “soft” sciences (linguistics, and some sociology and ethnology) and as a result I’m a little picky about this and I’ve always hoped to see more accuracy in the depiction of social mechanisms and behaviours in hard science fiction. Many hard science writers (and some not-si-hard) are excellent when it comes to the tech and physics, but I’ve always been disappointed to read novels where futuristic societies were described in very simple terms, when it wasn’t just utter nonsense. One of the most convincing works I’ve read in that field was KSR’s Mars Trilogy (even if I’m not actually a big fan of his works as far as other aspcsts are concerned). He did a real work while investigating ideological, economical and political factors, depicting the evolution of the martian society from a small quasi-utopic group of enlightened scientists, to a large number of plausible factions.
Carl Sagan used to rationalize in the same line. And I agree.
Anyway, I am not sure if humans wont keep finding stuff to keep dividing themselves in tribes. Like in Uplift Universe… religions basically disappeared, but humans divided themselves between the ones who think we evolved naturally and the ones that believe we were uplifted eons ago.
Maybe the only solution, in the real world would be for us to uplift ourselves… genetic manipulation to remove these tribal genes that were important so long ago but arent anymore… or are they (will we become naive idiots in the face of threatening aliens, like when humans make contact with the Kzin in the Known Space books?)
Ironically (or is it?), the most spiritual person (by far) of the original series was Spock….
Due to the civil rights movements, we aren’t supposed to discriminate amongst race, gender, age, and religion. My feeling amongst this list is that the weakest one on this list is religion. Why? We can’t choose our age, race or gender but we most certainly can choose our religion. So I predict that in law, eventually there’ll be a demoting of religion from a fundamental right to one that is fundamental only after deferring to the other rights.
Of course will this ever change when roughly 80% of people are religious?
” Of course will this ever change when roughly 80% of people are religious?”
In the USA maybe. In Europe it’s quite the other way around. I’m always surprised how much religion seems to matter un the US. In most european countries, christians get laughed at all the time.
Well, I also see a lot of problems with Muslim immigrants not adapting to Europe much at all and maintining strong differences, often with tragic consequences.
There are certain practices humans have that are just not very conducive to living together well. I have them, too. I respect people’s rights to believe any damn thing they want, but I don’t respect a lot of those beliefs and will tell them what I think when asked. Problem is many people take their irrational beliefs very, very seriously.
I’d thought about including politics in the discussion, but I think politics are too local. On an international scale, not many people care abut political parties in other countries one way or the other.
“Well, I also see a lot of problems with Muslim immigrants not adapting to Europe much at all and maintining strong differences, often with tragic consequences. ”
Yes, that’s a big problem these last few years. It’s a new trend. Christians are used to be laughed at. Muslims aren’t and ask for religious rights no other religion has in Europe. They use the “racism” card everytime someone tries to oppose them (yes, I know… Islam not a race… but that’s how they play that game…) and trie to sue anyone who laughs at them. Actually it’s very often a ghetto problem – I’ve known a lot of “muslims” whose parents were actually atheists, or at least not really religious, who “re-converted” as a way of finding their place in a community, after feeling rejected by society.
“I don’t respect a lot of those beliefs and will tell them what I think when asked.” And that’s a good thing. People aren’t confrontationnal enough. If they were, they would be less serious about themselves.
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