Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh has a 4,700 word article marking the 40th anniversary of Star Trek’s appearance on television.
Cavanaugh does a nice job of weaving together a history of Trek in its various forms and its long-running appeal and cultural impact.
If that point seems tangential, it contains the most important kernel of Star Trek’s appeal: its rejection of the notion that progress would leave us diminished, less sure of our genders, our free will, or our humanity. The representative science fiction film of Star Trek’s era, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, paints a largely bleak future of dull, robotic humans, hostile and powerful central computers, and an endless Cold War; the movie’s only note of optimism comes at the end, with the possibility that a human being might leave behind his body and his humanity, and be reborn as a cerebral super-being. Star Trek’s future, skeptical of super-beings and dehumanization alike, shows progress and technology mostly allowing people to be more human, not less—more manly or womanly, better fed, smarter, healthier, and wiser. Its important message, as one Reason Online reader put it, was its simplest: “Technology solves problems.†And even when high tech causes problems it won’t defeat us, as Captain Kirk proves in countless episodes that have him arguing computers into self-destructing—the most ludicrous being an incident where he disables the Enterprise’s powerful electronic brain by having it compute pi (3.14) to its final digit.
This optimism, more than any correct guesses about wireless telephony, police use of Tasers, or the shape of 21st-century neoconservatism, was the dangerous message of Star Trek. The dystopian science fiction of the late ’60s and early ’70s (to which Star Trek was a rare exception) shares something with contemporary hysteria over stem cell research. Both claim to fear that the advance of science will hurt us, but their real fear is that it won’t hurt us. Because if human life really is getting better, then maybe you’ve wasted your life fearing the unknown, clinging to useless traditions, missing out on better things ahead.
Source:
Happy 40th Birthday, Star Trek. Tim Cavanaugh, Reason, August-September 2006.