Thursday, December 14, 2006
Why Sci-Fi Can Teach Us A Lot
We live in a very complex world, one marked by war, scarcity, and the challenges that come from people with different cultural backgrounds and different values. What can help us think about these challenges (aside from the Bible that is)? How about Star Trek?
Look, I don’t usually consider myself a sci-fi nut (that is open for discussion). But since marrying my wife 11 years ago I have found myself drawn to science fiction, especially movies and television shows.
I am one of those very few people in the world who thinks that the best sci-fi television show of all time is Deep Space Nine (aka DS-9). Most Trek fans have a low opinion of it, but I love it, and mostly because I find it to be the most realistic (from an understanding of human realities, certainly not of space, which continues to be viewed as a two-dimensional reality). And I love it because I think it has something to teach us about the realities of our world we live in today.
First my brief synopsis of the Trek Series
Star Trek (Original) – Very optimistic, very 1960s, very groovy. It forced a lot of people to ask question that were very timely in the 1960s. That is why it is still a classic, and in fact continues to ask some hard questions. But its optimism sometimes drives you crazy.
Star Trek Next Generation – Next Gen is the series that gave us back Star Trek, so its hard to be critical. But I am. The show was a perfect example of a humanist, secularist, optimistic view of humanity that as I watch now often makes me want to throw-up. Replicators and Holo-Decks take away the whole notion of scarcity. Picards speech to Cochran’s assistant in First Contact about no money, want or whatever is something right out of the U.N. worldview (that would be the same U.N that allowed 1 million Rwandans to die in a genocide that we promised would happen “Never Again”). The only good episodes are those featuring the Borg, because they force reality back into the equation.
Voyager – My second favourite series, again because it is real human beings living with real ethical and moral challenges and the constant impact of both scarcity and being the minority worldview. I will give her credit, Captain Janeway kept the Prime Directive, though too often the results should have been their death which they always managed to avoid.
Enterprise – On too short to really make a firm opinion, but I found it interesting to see how the Star Trek worldview slowly evolved. They did a good job with it.
But DS9 dealt with the basic realities of conflict, war, forgiveness and the real possibility of death, defeat and end of your culture. Yes, the main setting for DS9 (the final three seasons at least) is war. Hey, war has been a human reality since the beginning, so get over it people. We outlawed war in the 1920s and 1930s, and that didn’t work out so well, did it?
Watching DS9 now, a decade after its run, in a world were war is a renewed reality, where we want to seek peace but we are dealing with people who often (like the Jem Hadar) seem to be ontologically against peace with us, it really does raise some great questions for us to think about. I encourage you to watch the episodes (you can check them out at many local libraries or catch them on SPIKE at noon MST. In many ways the writers of DS9 seemed prophetic as they wrote about the realities that we in the West are facing today:
1) What do you want to do when you don’t want to fight a war anymore?
2) How do we deal with casualties that are lost for seemingly little gain?
3) How do you make the other side trust you?
4) Will you kill the other side if they reject your offers of peace?
5) How do you counteract a worldview that sees that things need to follow some existential and ontological “order of things” that you find morally repugnant?
6) What things are worth giving your all for?
Anyways, if anyone is wondering what sci-fi might have to teach us about the challenges of the Global War on Terror, check out the final three seasons of DS9 and see what you find.
