Choose Wisely

Sure, people sometimes look at the past from the perspective of privileged classes. Ancient Rome or Middle Ages were anything but glorious for poor folks. We should stop romanticizing them.

That was actually my first impression when I started watching TOS and TNG. But the more episodes I saw, something about the show started to rub me the wrong way, almost like under the utopianism, something more sinister was being smuggled in. Maybe I'm just a hypersensitive Zhdanovite, but here was how I ended up formulating my unease with the Star Trek universe:

1. Most explicit philosophy in the show tended to have an individualist slant. Picard, in one of the very first episodes, wonders if humanity has a right to hunt the crystalline entity, because humanity's imperative to survive does not neccesarily outweigh the entity's need to find food; I can see Kim Il-Sung wanting to beat Picard over the head for this. In another episode, Picard tells Data that "you are a culture of one, no less valued than a culture of a billion." In context, this makes sense, because Data is an android and the only one of his kind; but you do wonder how something like this is going to be interpreted, and why it was put on American TV. But worst is the episode where a couple of Americans from the 20th century are brought back to life after being found in cryogenic stasis. For a long time, everything is entertaining enough, contrasting their selfish ways with the more utopian life aboard the Enterprise, but then there's this deeply uncomfortable scene (or at least I found it so). One of the group, a former billionaire, learns that money has been abolished, and that nobody strives after wealth anymore. "Where's the challenge?" he asks. "What do you live for?" Then Picard drops the bombshell: "The challenge," he says "is to improve yourself -- be the best you can be." Had there been something about "serving the people" "expending yourself in their service," etc., the scene might have embodied the spirit of Lei Feng. Instead, the federation seems to be more about the Jeffersonian "pursuit of happiness."
2. This might just be the constraints of a 40 minute episode, but all the major problems facing humanity seeemed to be solved, not by collective action, but by the brilliance of a few technocrats (Geordie LaForge -- actually my single favorite character -- comes up with a new way to configure the phasers, or Counsellor Troy has prophetic dreams). Wesley Crusher, I think, made the theme too obvious, which was one reason he was so roundly hated.
3. Women on the show: in TOS, the female members of the crew were uneccesarily sexualized, with that goofy miniskirt uniform which seemed explicitly designed to not be practical on any kind of planetary environment. There was also a whole lot of "leering" from Kirk, Bones, and the other male members of the crew, and attitudes like this were never really challenged. TNG fixed this somewhat, but there was still "bone every female in the galaxy" Riker, and he seemed conceived as the character a male audience would most indentify with. Then we have the movies, with things like an alien supercomputer indentifying a female member of the crew as a "mass of conflicting impulses," etc.
4. Most seriously, the whole thing seemed set during and after a kind of Space Cold War, with the "Soviets" (Klingons) as the definite Bad Guys. In TOS, they were portrayed as "Asiatic barbarians:" quarellsome, uncivilized, and generally inferior to the federation technologically (though able to make up for this with superior numbers). Rather obnoxiously, they are equated with both the USSR and the Nazis, but this is a trick US liberals love to pull. In TNG, the Klingons have transitioned to being heroes, but only after the events in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where the Klingons experience a Chernobyl-like disaster that wrecks their entire economic system, causing them to seek help from the federation. The mighty Klingon Empire, in short, becomes Yeltsin's Russia, complete with Yanks to the Rescue. I seem also to remember an episode in TOS where the federation and the Klingons are both arming different sides in a planetary civil war; Kirk concludes that matching whatever armaments the Klingons supply is not violating the prime directive, which in the context of 1960s American can only be a metaphor for increased US presence in Vietnam.

Maybe I'm seeing this all through an American lens (though it is an American show), and in any case it's been years since I watched any Star Trek. But there you have it.

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