My son Simon recently confessed to me that he hadn’t sung the real words to the hymns he was supposed to be singing in church last Sunday.  When the rest of the choir, his brother Ben or the other little boy named Jeffrey, were singing about Emmanuel and the Word being made Flesh, Simon sang his own lyrics:

“I just sang, ’Star Trek is my true religion’ over and over,”  he told me.

Of course it’s impossible not to believe in something.  For instance, my family belongs to a neighborhood Episcopal Church despite my own ambivalence about the usefulness of such institutions in today’s world of networked wonder and dissolving public spectacles.  I’m not quite sure what going to church means when even the God of Mammon, the almighty dollar or digit, has been reduced to a corpse lying in the streets of Athens.  Why praise the old God when the new one is deader than a doornail, when the only move this God can make has to be coerced?  Today’s God only appears animate when pushed about by the Fed or the European Central bank.

Still, it’s impossible not to believe.  Even atheism seems to require some God out there, some particular somebody, for us to deny.

“It’s true,” Simon said.  “Star Trek is my religion.”

I asked myself, “What kind of religion is Star Trek?” And to answer that question I decided to rewatch some of the old movies. I started with the first one: Star Trek the Motion Picture.

In 1979 Paramount proclaimed that STTMP, an Enterprise built for the big screen, would tell the story of the greatest mystery ever to threaten mankind.  The marketing department also promised, more optimistically, that the human adventure was just beginning. The film aimed to fulfill these two promises. Modeled as much on Kubrick’s 2001 as the original Star Trek television series, STTMP attempted to work as an independent entity.  It was a real movie and much more than any of the other films that came later, the first one aimed to deliver at least the impression of some broader cultural significance.

And this explains why the first Star Trek movie is so ponderous, boring, and dated now.  It is also why the first Star Trek movie is the most abstractly religious of the bunch.

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” —Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann

Star Trek is a science fiction religion which means that Star Trek is a religion without God.  Star Trek came to the big screen well after the death of the old God, and just a bit after the decline of the new one. Coming after the mid-seventies recession the new Star Trek can’t help but be the story of how the crew of the Enterprise tries to wipe the blood off and start again.

Perhaps the way to understand STTMP is to realize that, just as in the movie 2001, the machine is the most human character in the whole picture.  That machine is the villain V’Ger, and as a space probe heading back to Earth to get some answers it is different from HAL because V’Ger is more directly and thus more abstractly human. HAL was human because he expressed conflicted human emotions while the rest of the cast behaved robotically or like animals.  V’Ger, on the other hand, is the most human because it is the abstract conflict that drives human emotions.  Alan Dean Foster’s story for Star Trek the Motion Picture tells us about humanity’s problem, about what it is that makes us human, but it tells us this through a story about a machine.

SPOCK: Captain, V’Ger is a child. I suggest you treat it as such.

KIRK: A child?

SPOCK: Yes, captain, a child. Evolving, learning, searching, instinctively needing.

DECKER: Needing what?

McCOY: Spock! This thing is about to wipe out every living thing on Earth Now what do you suggest we do? Spank it?

SPOCK: It only knows that it needs, Commander. But like so many of us, it does not know what.

In STTMP the probe V’Ger is searching for God, for meaning, for some way to make its existence count, while the humans in the movie appear to already have the answer to that question.  The answer is SEX.

SPOCK: Jim… This… simple feeling is beyond V’ger’s comprehension.

The movie was made in the 70s so its no wonder that what V’Ger needs to do after discovering that God is dead is learn to copulate correctly.  But, let’s face it, the answer to the question isn’t what’s interesting about the movie.  What’s interesting is how that answer also fails.

Spoiler Alert:  Here’s how the movie ends.  Commander Decker decides to do it with his old girlfriend Ilia in order to teach V’Ger about the simple feeling Spock was mentioning earlier. Ilia has been transformed into a robot version of herself.  She is just a projection of V’Ger at this point, a cipher, and Decker will fill the void that IlIa has become so to speak.  Decker offers to be God.

In STTMP Ilia the robot represents reality or nature.  She is both a representative of V’Ger, and the thing V’Ger is looking for.  When Ilia was real she was a Deltan.  She was a member of a species known for its sexual prowess and appeal.  Deltans emit a strong pheromone that make them sexually irresistible and, according to the back story to be found in novelizations, fan literature, and online, Deltans screw so well that a regular human risks going insane if he or she beds down with one of them.  For Deltans sex is a way for two people to merge into one mind and poor human men are simply not prepared nor equipped for the experience.

This is the fantasy of the phallic mother-the notion that through the body we might find God again. But despite this false ending, this assurance that God can be found in the body, that we can go home again, is not the real conclusion at all.  In the end, after Decker and Ilia act out the fundamental fantasy and merge, monkey and robot, into one being, there is still an abyss. The reality of God’s death returns.   Back on the Enterprise Kirk files his report on the mission and lists Decker and Ilia, not as dead, but as missing.

And this is how it always is on Star Trek.  God has gone missing and Star Trek has had to rush in to replace him.  Blinky light aliens, omnipotent children and pranksters, mad robots, snake heads, Vulcans and finally the Enterprise itself, all of it is there to fill the gap.

God is dead and yet we go on believing.

My son Simon doesn’t sing about God anymore.  Instead he sings that Star Trek is our true religion. I tend to agree with him.

Totality as a Goal

Radiohead’s 1995 hit Fake Plastic Trees is a song about longing after a reality that has already disappeared.

She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love
But I can’t help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run

Now we live in a world where these lines about “the real thing” evoke an advertisement for a soda pop much more than they evoke thoughts about philosophy. In 1969 the Coca-Cola corporation replaced its “Things Go Better With Coke” campaign with the slogan “It’s the Real Thing,” and since then the real thing has been associated with soda pop. In a way reality was replaced by sugar water.

This is the dilemma that we have. How can we create a harmonic, balanced, and real society now that reality has disappeared and been replaced with Coke?

Maybe we should take a look at what we’re after. What is the real thing? I’d like to suggest that it is a Totality or the idea of a natural social world. Finding the real thing, our true selves, isn’t a matter of just looking, but also means doing some rearranging. To find the Totality we have to put everything in its right place including ourselves and each other. It’s a matter of shifting where we stand and how we act towards one another, because we ourselves are already merely the result of the social order. The philosopher Aristotle said something like this when he argued that the city-state is naturally prior to the individuals in it, because individuals cannot perform their natural functions apart from the city-state, since individuals are not self-sufficient.

What we are after is a harmonic totality, a way to be in the right place, but we’ve got a problem.

Totality as a Problem

How do we know that we’re not already in the right Totality, or, to put it another way, that Coke isn’t the real thing? After all, Coke is a commodity and in our society social relations are determined by relationships between commodities. How is it, if people or individuals really are created by their social relationships, that we might object to the commodity form or any other kind of social relationship? One answer is that maybe we don’t really object to the system or the Totality at all? That it really is impossible to object. After all, if we are only the result of our social relationships then any objections we find ourselves making would actually just be a part of the social Totality.

Another way of putting this is that we are, ourselves, just expressions of the social Totality. We’re like characters in a movie or a video game. We are the Fake Plastic Trees in the Radiohead song.

Why did Karl Marx oppose the fair distribution of goods in a society wherein every worker had the equal right to receive the “undiminished proceeds” of his or her labor?

When I asked my son Benjamin how goods or commodities were distributed in the Federation of Planets he didn’t miss a beat:

“They use Starships,” he said.

And when I asked him why they needed credits on Star Trek he answered, quite sensically that they wanted to make sure everyone knew who worked the cameras and that kind of thing.

However, as sane as both these answers were, it seemed to me that I was a long way off from communicating the true meaning of my questions to him. He probably knew something was up which is why he was using common sense against me in such an unsparing way, but I plunged ahead with my own predigested line of inquiry.

“No. I don’t mean the credits at the beginning and the end of the show, but those Federation credits that they’re always talking about. If they have those replicators that can make a ham sandwich, a phaser, or a pint of mediocre Romulan ale, why do they need credits? What are the credits for?

He thought about this for a moment and then mentioned how today, if you’re honest, you have to spend money on music downloads even though you could get it for free. So probably Kirk and Spock got paid in Federation credits so they could pay people who designed really good sandwiches or chairs or whatever. Sure, the technology meant that you could get the chair for free, but then the designer of the chair wouldn’t get paid.

“But why would the designer need to get paid if he could get his Romulan ale free? You see what I mean?”

This returned us to the original question, or would have, if my son hadn’t decided to skip ahead of me down the sidewalk. The six of us, my wife and our four kids, were headed down Woodstock, a busy street with four lanes of traffic, to a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall next to a BiMart. The commingling of agendas, my daughter was debating whether or not Boo the dog really was the cutest dog in the world with my nine year old, while my seven year old stepped dawdled in front of me so that I had to slow down to a crawl in order to avoid stepping on his heels.

Anyhow, I was left to my own inner devices to solve the riddle of why Captain Kirk would need Federation credits on a space ship where there was such a thing as a free lunch.

Now Marx’s scathing Critique of the Gotha Program in 1875 might help us to understand some of the difficulties Roddenberry faced when imagining his TV utopia. Despite aiming at a storyline wherein poverty and want had been eliminated as mankind quested after the stars, if you watch the program you’ll see that Roddenberry can’t helpe slipping back or regressing to 20th century ways of thinking. All the women on the Enterprise wore miniskirts and beehive hairdos because Roddenberry Feminism didn’t go very deep, but the problem of money, of whether or not a Federation officer was paid in Federation credits, just what it meant to live beyond that kind of economy, that was another kind of difficulty. Imagining that world in a convincing way could never be achieved on television or through any other contemporary art form. Imagining a world without money, without want, this would change so much about the world, so many things that we take for granted, that simply to imagine this kind of world would require that one was already on the way towards living it.

So what Marx offers in the critique of the Gotha program isn’t a positive vision of a socialist world, nothing like a fully developed storyline, but rather he points out how many ways one can go wrong when trying to think of how a communist or egalitarian economy might function.

For example, when my son Ben’s answer that the problem of the distribution of goods could be something solved by spaceships is both the kind of mistake that Roddenberry would make, and a legitimate answer. On Star Trek the challenge isn’t determining who gets what ham sandwich or even who gets what spaceship, but rather the question is it collectively determined how what to make and what to do? What was the basis of organizing society’s production of itself? What kinds of relationships between individuals and groups of individuals will function to reproduce the world. What will motivate that reproduction if the threat of starvation is eliminated?

All Marx could tell us was what we wouldn’t do in such a world. For instance, he responded to the German Social Democrats when they wrote: “Labor is the source of wealth and all culture, and since useful labor is possible only in society and through society, the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society.” Marx pointed out that labor actually isn’t the source of ALL wealth, but is rather only the source of what he called “exchange value” under Capitalism. That is, labor produces the value that allows for commodities to be exchanged profitably in a market, but often a use value of a product will be produced the qualities inherent to the product. Also, Marx asks what’s hidden in that word “society?” What does it mean to say that “useful labor is possible only in society”? Marx answered:
Thirdly, the conclusion: “Useful labor is possible only in society and through society, the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society.” A fine conclusion! If useful labor is possible only in society and through society, the proceeds of labor belong to society — and only so much therefrom accrues to the individual worker as is not required to maintain the “condition” of labor, society.

That is, if we want to live in a world without want, where the threat of starvation is not the prime mover and motivator of production, then we’ll have to imagine a new society. And in imagining this future world we’ll find that the current society will not be able to provide us with any supporting basis for the new world.

This connects to the question of how goods are distributed in Start Trek: Not so much by Space Ships, but socially, and remember that the social, or society, isn’t neutral.

Before the USS Enterprise came around the history of societies was the history of class struggles. All of life before the Federation was a struggle between masters and slaves, Capitalists and workers, but after Spock came on the scene all that changed.

Back to my walk with my family: Before we arrived at the Chinese restaurant Simon offered answer to my question about how good’s are distributed in the world of Star Trek. He said that the purpose of the Enterprise was to search out life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no man had gone before, and that this 5 year mission was the basis of their economy. This was a much better answer than “Space ships.”

The economic questions that we need to ask about a Star Trek universe won’t be about how to distribution goods. Those questions will be, in fact, answered by such trivial suggests as “on Star Ships” or “using transporters.” The economic questions we have to ask about Star Trek will be about how to travel to anothe worlds. Will we really need a Captain if we hope to get there? Just who will we say that we are? How could we say anything without a master?

The dream of Star Trek, of a world without want, a world where the whole goal will be to improve ourselves, is that we might be heroes. That we might become our own heroes. The fear is that most of us will be cast as red shirts and just get to watch while William Shatner kisses the Orion slave girl. The fear is that we won’t be able to name ourselves, or find a collective and yet starring role in history.

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Here’s what the Rhetor and Philosopher Daniel Coffeen had to say about the story.