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THE STAR TREK PERSPECTIVE AND THE MIMETIC, PRAGMATIC
AND
EXPRESSIVE THEORIES
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana (1863-1952)

What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

If we ignore the first quote, we will get the second, as John Gill learned in Patterns of Force. History may be defined as what a culture considers worthy of recollection. Of course the operative word is WORTHY!! How do we define what is worthy, especially in a SCI FI universe when what we view has not happened yet, or has it....?

What the creator (Gene Roddenberry, and his wife, Majel Barrett ) and actors from William Shatner to Terry Farrell have noted is that the dramatizations in the various franchises have indeed happened, for better or worse, and Roddenberry hopes for the former winning out in the future, His vision of a what a 24th century utopia finds worthy emanates from contemporary man's struggle to achieve perfection.

Traditionally, what is worthy may be viewed from at least four perspectives, all of which find expression in ST:

1--THEOCENTRIC--Hamlet tells us "There is a Divinity that shapes our ends..."
We may not always know the plan, but it does exist. Roddenberry, as we will see from the Humanist interview, disputes this, and our course will subject his premise to analysis and review.

2--HUMANISTIC--Protagoras noted that "Man is the measure of all things." We chart our own destiny. Here Roddenberry agrees--man can indeed achieve a utopia on earth. We will view episodes that likewise test this premise.

3--NATURALISTIC--Rousseau said in the Emile that a natural education, that is one shaped by the proper environment, will produce moral individuals. For Roddenberry, the environment is scientific humanism with moderate to no emphasis on spiritual values, although following his death, many episodes in DS-9 and Voyager become revisionistic.

4--ECONOMIC--We may argue with Marx that the great revolutions of history are products of class struggle in which the 'have-nots' struggle to dispossess the 'haves' who naturally will fight to keep what they own. Roddenberry believes that utopianism can be actualized only when poverty has disappeared. He posits technological advances, especially the replicator, as making the utopia possible. The need for money has vanished, the Ferengi not withstanding,.

Which is correct? All? None? Some synthesis? Who determines? In the words of Martha Nussbaum,

      The central task of education...is to confront the passivity
      of the pupil, challenging the mind to take charge of its own
      thought. All too often, people's choices and statements are
      not their own...Words come out of their mouths, and actions
      are performed by their bodies, but what those words and
      actions express may be the voice of tradition or convention
      the voice of the parent, of friend, of fashion. This is so
      because these people have never stopped to ask themselves
      what they really stand for, what they are willing to defend as
      themselves and their own...They are like instruments on which
      fashion and habit play their tunes, or like stage masks through
      which an actor's voice speaks.

from: Martha Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. pp. 28-29. Could these words preamble the Federation constitution?

We will begin this course by examining Roddenberrys' beliefs as articulated in an interview given to David Alexander which appeared in The Humanist magazine. Additionally, Please check my BRITISH LITERATURE and SHAKESPEARE web sites as needed for additional information regarding Roddenberry's place in the philosophical cosmos: recall 18th century enlightenment philosophy.

I. THE CLASSICAL BASE / THE MIMETIC THEORY:

A. All literature stems from the mimetic theory developed during the "Golden Age" of Greece by Plato and Aristotle. From that base comes the Pragmatic and Expressive Theory, the latter being especially important for the creative impulses that motivated Roddenberry:

  • What is the mimetic theory? See: Plato's REPUBLIC, Books III and X and Aristotle's POETICS. Click here to find the texts on line. (You may obtain a print copy instead.) Note that Aristotle's modification of Plato makes literary criticism possible. What forms (ideas) seem most frequently dramatized in ST episodes?
  • Roddenberry knew that "All subsists by elemental strife, / And passions are the elements of life." (Pope's, Essay on Man). Ironically, the hallmark of the neoclassical age is often dramatized as the suppression of passion by reason. Pope and his mentor knew better, and so did the writers who created Spock, and wrote such episodes as The Enemy Within, which bears close affinity to Gulliver's Travels. Look at Plato's view of the soul (microcosm) and state (macrocosm):

  • We will have occasion to note how the ideal man appears in the episodes we view.
  • Why does Plato have his persona Socrates use verbs of passion to express the most sublimely cognitive thoughts?. See: (Republic 490b.). Note that the classical concept of harmony and balance must work for all three elements; not just the top one. The macrocosmic correspondence likewise applies in Picard's time as well as our own.

B. ASSIGNMENT: construct a definition of human nature from the classical perspective that Roddenberry would accept. Sources:

II. THE RENAISSANCE / THE PRAGMATIC THEORY became popular in England in the literary criticism of the Renaissance. Read the following excerpts from Sidney's Defense of Poetry and note the debt to, and modification of Aristotle: Click here.

  • What Sidney adds has important implications for the genesis of ST. What did Roddenberry know that the network executives did not?
  • Roddenberry met with considerable opposition here, as we will see when viewing the series pilot he wrote called, The Cage. Firmly convinced that audiences craved entertaining and literate science fiction, he nonetheless had to content with network executives who...

III. THE ROMANTIC PERIOD / THE EXPRESSIVE THEORY:

  • The expressive theory defines the Romantic temperament. Rooted in paradox and the simultaneous rejection and acceptance of dialectical opposites., the romantics defined themselves by accepting no definitions at all. Confusing as that sounds, one may approach the creative energy of Roddenberry as positing a utopia that simultaneously embraces and rejects scientific rationalism and restrictive theology.
  • In THE PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND, Richard Tarnas offers a perspective that might have intrigued Roddenberry:

      1. Speaking of the rise of modern psychological theories of human cognition, Tarnas speaks of psychoanalysis as revealing, "...the mechanisms of resistance, repression, and projection, and bring [ing] forth a host of other insights laying open the mind's character and internal dynamics. Freud thereby represented a brilliant culmination of the Enlightenment project, bringing even the human unconscious under the light of rational investigation." ("The Changing Image of the Human from Copernicus through Freud, p. 328).

      Do you believe Roddenberry would accept Tarnas' hypothesis?