But are humans better? We think we are, but so did the Nazis, and the Americans who committed genocide to “win the west”. Both used superior technology to forward their aims. The Romulans, Klingons and Cardassians certainly don’t think we’re better. Something I liked about DS9 was how the Cardassians were not cartoon bad guys like the Klingons, they were layered and nuanced, as you say, projections of human societies.
If you take obeying the Prime directive as a gauge of human virtue, it was broken many times in the shows. Perhaps the message was not “we are better”, but “we are striving for these ideals”. A mission statement. That works for some people and not for others, witness all the uncharitable Christians.
I think what those other characters you mention really have are profound insecurities about their place in the Federation’s utopian society. The others on TNG (and most on TOS) do have their personal ambitions and motivations and insecurities, but they know that they belong in the society and that their value to it is accepted without question. When they temporarily lose that comfort (e.g. Picard after he came back from being Locutus of Borg) they get more interesting.
DS9 has a lot more characters who question Federation society and values and their place in it, despite (or perhaps because of) their proximity to the awful Cardassians, the damaged Bajorans, and the greedy Ferengi.
Meanwhile, on Voyager the support of Federation society is for all practical purposes unavailable to them. Janeway tries to preserve it within the ship, but that doesn’t last long and they have to backslide to more “primitive” and “barbaric” practises to get home. A story about their trying to adjust back to Federation life when they [spoiler!] did make it home would be interesting.
Actually I think that’s one of the defining characteristics of our species: Man is the being that walks on two legs and judges his neighbour (apologies to Dostoyevsky). Of course we love pointing out the hypocrisies and judgmentalism of religious folks. And we love it for the same reasons they love being judgmental: we are tribal; and we have a permanent (and mysterious) need to justify ourselves morally.
These are not first class ingredients for a utopia.
Nice analysis of those 3, but I disagree about the rest of the characters. Very few of them have a discernible ambition or desire other than to do their job well. This peaked with Riker turning down promotion to command. If a US Naval officer did that he’d be sent in for a psych evaluation. On the other hand, on DS9, almost every character has layers of often conflicting motivations and loyalties.
They had their own conflicts and ambitions, but they were personal and, to a viewer, mundane: Do I accept that promotion when I’m happy at my current job? I’m a smart and successful guy, so why do I have trouble finding a girlfriend? How do I set an example as a disciplined leader while also knowing when to break the rules and take risks? How can I be a shrink and still have these terrible issues with my overbearing mom? I’m a successful and educated doctor but feel overwhelmed raising a genius teenaged boy after my husband died.
You could transplant any of those situations into other genre series set in contemporary societies and, with TNG-quality showrunners, they’d seem a lot more compelling. But by the same token those dilemmas seem dry and boring and trivial in the TNG setting in part because none of those things are going to lose the characters their jobs or their place in the meritocratic and human-centred society they support unquestioningly.
Those are pretty trite, not the existential conflicts most of the DS9 characters had. Even the single parenting issue was far better written on DS9, but perhaps I’m blinded by how much I hated Dr Crusher. In a show teeming with sanctimonious characters she was the worst.
To get back to the OP: The other day I picked up and started rereading (again) Niven’s ‘Protector’ set in his Known Space timeline. He really did have an interesting utopia/dystopia going in that golden age before Kzinti contact. Long life, provided by harvesting organs from criminals. A secret police organization devoted to suppressing dangerous technology. But peace and prosperity otherwise, even though it’s not a post-scarcity society. Was this under analyzed? Would it be an unsustainable balance?
Part of post-Marx leftist thought can also be the perspective of Marxist thought being very much a product of the industrial age. And that capitalism versus communism can be a false dichotomy based upon viewing society(ies) through the lens of the contemporary nation-state, which encourages hegemony of one sort or another. The notion that ANY system of economics can/must prevail is an artefact of 19th century imperialism that most people have apparently not grown out of yet.
I might not understand what you are saying there. But what I meant was that acquisitiveness of capital and influence requires a captive audience to exploit, whereas egalitarian societies I think do not. So capitalist cultures are going to be more invested in people being born into a system and by default inheriting its implicit goals and values, and actively (violently) discouraging the questioning of those implicits. In egalitarian groups based upon voluntary service, the focus might be based more upon facilitation, rather than cooptation, resulting in more diversity and less need for centralized control.
That depends upon whether you see hierarchy as voluntary, or imposed. Multiple separate organizations can certainly maintain their own distinct hierarchies - they do it all of the time. Something mandatory for inclusion in one group might even be forbidden for inclusion in another.
You could choose to see it that way, but I think that would say more about you having an all-or-nothing ideal than anything else. There is no definitive “we all” in reality, only groups of people who subscribe to how they think they should live. I encounter a desire for one authoritative way even among some on the left. That if I don’t believe in private property, that nobody can have it. That if some groups want to be capitalist, that everybody needs to accept capitalism. In short - I think that an arguments about people which polarize into nobody/everybody are lazy and unrealistic, but that is for better or worse what most people who I encounter are willing to understand. That is not a dig at you! But I think that society conditions people to find solace in simplistic solutions which excuse parts of the status quo (e.g. authoritarianism).
Sure. And when the societal consensus is monoculture, I think that this drives coercion by conditioning people to believe that they are all competing towards the same goals.
That’s my point. They are trite and not existential in the context of TNG and the characters’ place in society, but in the context of genre TV drama they’re standard character-development fare that can be written well or not. I think the TNG writers did a workmanlike job on that, and the DS9 ones a better job.
Crusher is a character that got away from them. It looks like she was intended as a “will-they/won’t-they” long-arc love interest for Picard and to be Wesley’s Bemused Mom, but both fizzled out quickly as the other two characters were given different priorities. The writers tried a few other approaches, including ignoring her, hooking her up with guest aliens of the week, and once making her a special ops commando. Nothing took. All she had left was her authority and secure position as ship’s doctor without McCoy’s quirks. So I can see why she ended up as exactly the smug character you hate and I find boring and dislikable.
I’ve only read bits and pieces of the Niven Known Space universe. I like them as stories and he’s the master of hard SF, but there’s a strong libertarian proto-techbro sensibility underlying a lot of his stuff (esp. about who is worthy to make decisions in society and who is not) that would make me question how sustainable his balance is.
I’m not sure what exactly you’re referring to by “libertarian proto-techbro sensibility”. Can you specify the work or theme? His frequent collaborator Pournelle was all in with that stuff, Niven not nearly so much. But he understood some of the problems at the time he wrote them. The novel ‘A Gift from Earth’ had a human colony take the organ issue that was in equilibrium on Earth and go full on dystopia with a ruling class harvesting organs from an underclass. A short called “The Cloak of Anarchy” showed that the utopian peace was really at gunpoint, when a park’s law enforcement drones are disabled people reverted to their normal savagery.
He was affected by Pournelle’s outlook more as time went on, understandable when you’re working with a collaborator with very strong views for that long. But the foundation was there already in a highly meritocratic and technocratic outlook where the heroes were all engineers, pilots, and scientists (I’m sure there’s a Heinlein influence there). It’s great that he understood the problems that occur when those guys lose control of their technologies (a frequent theme), but the only way he sees to restore peace and a semblance of utopia is for them to take control again. There’s no in-between solution.
"Elon Musk floating a “creepy private colony on Mars for ultra-rich survivalists who can shell out $200,000”
Even here in Phnom Penh no one would say $200K is ultra-rich. Musk very explicitly said that he thought of this as within the reach of the middle class. And that it would be something akin to buying a home. Where did you got the “private colony” from?
And Mars is certainly not being touted as a place for survivalists to ride out whatever conspiracy that will end the world. In fact the chances of survival, or at least a significantly shorter life is more likely.
Diseased Space Hippies you mean.[quote=“john_c, post:60, topic:97065”]
Do you disagree with the following from TOA? If so, why?
our fondness for dystopian narratives …
[/quote]
Personally I find dystopian narratives duller than dishwater (with the exception of say Mad Max movies) but the complaint here is like complaining that people enjoy going on roller coasters.
However the thing is most SF “dystopian narratives” arent that at all. Famous example being how Gibson, interviewed in Paris Review #211 said that the Sprawl was never intended as a dystopia but rather a hopeful reaction to the world that shaped him.
On the rare occasions when I go to my local mall (I used to be more of a fan when bookstores and music stores were a thing), I notice that most of the stores are women’s clothing stores. Those seem to have avoided being killed by Amazon and digital downloads.
My main objection to DS9 isn’t on its own merits, but that it just isn’t Star Trek. Trek isn’t meant to be a soap opera serial, you’re supposed to be able to watch a single self-contained episode without knowing who anyone is or in what context and still pretty much get the point. The other Trek serieses stayed pretty close to that (well, I don’t know about Enterprise, since I could never get past that opening theme song.)
If they’d shifted DS9 to a parallel universe and called it Babylon 4 I’d have had no problem with it at all. EDIT: Except for those fucking kids. Every one of them grated on my nerves something fierce.
Well, it’s a little bit like if all the customers of the rollercoaster were bulimics who only wanted to throw up. Sure, it’s a free country, but I would say, don’t enable that.
I disagree. The great majority of TNG and Voyager episodes (or two-parters) were comprehensible on their own. Okay, maybe it helped to know what the Borg or Species 8472 were about, but even if you didn’t know the whole backstory you could pick up on it pretty quickly. There was rarely a need for an intro reminding viewers what happened in the previous episode.
