The Future? Make It So

A few weeks ago I was talking with my friend and co-worker about Star Trek. We had each just discovered that the other was a fan, so naturally we couldn’t help but gush about it. There are quite a few reasons why I’m a big fan of the Star Trek franchise as a whole, but while we were comparing notes, my friend mentioned something I hadn’t even considered before, and which has since stuck with me and has even become for me yet another rallying point in the show’s favour. He noted how the general trend of contemporary sci-fi/fantasy film & TV is to become grittier, darker, more cynical, and more bleak. Even the bold primary colour blue-red-yellow of Superman, possibly the most optimistic vision of a superhero ever created, has been tinted and faded into gunmetal greys and sepia tones of Zack Snyder’s vision, to suit the pessimism of our age.

What my co-worker pointed out, which is no secret of course, is that the overall trend is for these shows to become either more post-apocalyptic or more dystopian; what he appreciated about Star Trek, and I immediately agreed with him on this, was that it is so refreshingly neither of those things. In fact, it is just the opposite. Unlike every other major sci-fi franchise that comes to mind, Star Trek alone seems to be the only one that is unapologetically utopian in its outlook. I had always admired the show for its commitment to high ideals, but I never considered it in such blunt terms as “utopian”. This is a term we in our jaded age tend to look upon with scorn, or with pity at best. Yet that is pretty much what Star Trek is.

While sci-fi is often an excellent vehicle for telling cautionary tales about human folly and arrogance, too seldom do we see a picture of humanity at its very best. Star Trek seems like an outlier in its optimism. It takes as a given that humanity has overcome virtually all of the ills currently facing us today. And if that wasn’t ambitious enough, it goes beyond that and asks what we would do if we as a species didn’t have to worry about things like inequality or poverty or war or environmental degradation. The particular answer that Star Trek offers is that we could put our energy and resources into some great, lofty aspiration, such as exploring space and meeting different species and learning about the vast cosmos we live in. Because why not?

The crew of the Enterprise is not one of space warriors (Star Wars), or outlaws (Firefly), or refugees (Battlestar Galactica). Rather, they are explorers, diplomats, and scientists. They are people going out into space because they think that that’s a pretty amazing way to live their lives. The Starship Enterprise’s mission, which in my 90s childhood was recited by Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, was simple: “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” I think there’s something beautiful in that statement. Even that notorious split infinitive feels right.

Of course the concept is farfetched. Currently space travel is an option available only to astronauts and perhaps intellectually-inclined billionaire playboys and literally nobody else. Even then, our version of space travel is currently restricted to the moon, and maybe eventually Mars. But the fact that anything beyond that is inconceivable is a result of our current perspective in time. The fact that it is this way now does not mean it will be this way always. Maybe none of us will be alive to see interstellar space travel, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen. Future generations may not be subject to as earthbound a fate as we have been, just as we are in many ways better off as a species than our forebears were. Star Trek casts its view forward into the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th centuries, when we earthlings don’t have the problems we do now.

Of course even if we could reach that point as a species there’s no guarantee space exploration will look anything like that. And I don’t think everything in Star Trek is something we have to strive for, anyway. As much as I adore this franchise, it has had some pretty corny moments. And just because humans have found stability and peace and a place at the table among other intelligent life forms, there is still conflict within and between galactic governments. For example, the United Federation of Planets, of which Earth is a member, was once at war with the Klingon Empire, (the two superpowers being rough stand-ins for the NATO and the Soviet Union). After that, the Federation had become embroiled in conflicts with other species, such as the Romulans, the Cardassians, and perhaps most terrifying of all, the Borg. And all is not necessarily well on the home front. There is as much political intrigue within the Federation itself as there is on its borders. After all, the series would probably not resonate with 20th and 21st century viewers if there was no conflict whatsoever in the 23rd and 24th centuries.

And after all it does seem extremely unlikely. The age of Starfleet and the Federation was only possible because all the right conditions were in place at just the right time: humans had discovered faster than light travel called Warp Drive, at the very same time that another more advanced species, the Vulcans, were in the neighbourhood, and happened to take notice of our quantum leap and thereby decide we were worthy of their attention. And all of this only came about after we finally triggered an apocalypse and finally got World War III out of our systems and came to our senses (so in a way the earth of Star Trek is like a post-apocalyptic utopia). The likelihood of all of those conditions being met is extremely unlikely. So maybe it’s cruel to imagine such a bright future when it is all so very depressingly out of reach. At the end of the day, we may not ever get to that point at all.

But, if I may boldly say, that doesn’t necessarily matter. What matters is that we imagine a possible future for ourselves at all. A good one, to boot. What matters is that we envision a better present; that we exercise our imaginative powers toward this end. Furthermore we must do this on a regular basis, and if we don’t do this on a regular basis we won’t be able to break out of this destructive cycle we have found ourselves in, and we will succumb to despair. Despair is essentially a crisis of the imagination. It is, as Lesley Hazleton puts it, “the inability to imagine oneself into the future…a failure of the imagination–of the human ability to conceive of a different reality, and to act accordingly.”* For this reason I believe that art, specifically narrative art, can be a powerful antidote to despair.

Envisioning a world like Star Trek can have the at least temporary effect of making our current world a little more like Star Trek. A little more tinged with wonder and curiosity. A little more of Captain Kirk’s boldness, a little more of Deanna Troi’s empathy, of Picard’s diplomatic poise and Janeway’s commitment to a life of principle, a touch more Spock-like logic, and a generous serving of Data’s curiosity. If this is escapism, then it is a highly useful kind of escapism. Star Trek is not really about the future, after all. It’s about us, here and now, and what we could be if we put our collective minds to it. It can have the effect of seeing the best in ourselves. It can even have the effect of making us for a time a little more optimistic.

I’m temperamentally wary of optimism. Too much of it can quickly devolve into Pollyanna-ish delusion. But honestly I’m not sure we have to worry too much about that right now. We need hope. We need to imagine good worlds not yet born that we can bring into being, however much time that may take, and however painful that may be. We need the optimism of Star Trek to counterbalance the grim view of dystopian fictions, the post-apocalyptic wastelands, the worlds of extreme decadence and decay, filled with heartless villains and slightly less heartless anti-heroes. I do love those kinds of stories as well, and I’m glad they exist, they should not have a monopoly on the imagination.

The future will not resemble anything we imagine, but we will shape it whether we are conscious of it or not. We are shaping it right now. Not just with trends in technology and politics and culture, but moment to moment on a personal level. Like it or not, we are always creating our future. So we might as well take responsibility for our creative agency. And if we don’t make the effort to imagine something, anything at all, then there will be no future to project ourselves into. And if all we can imagine is one dystopia after another, then that’s all we’ll ever get.

*Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, Hazleton, 2016