Liberalism as a violation of the Prime Directive

In a comment on Academy of the Overrated, Roxanne Cooper noted, ironically, that, "In nearly every [Star Trek] episode/ movie, they violate the prime directive for the greater good."

Definitely true, at least when it comes to the original series.  In fact, it's a running joke among fans who have speculated that in the future, that is, in the time of Next Generation and Voyager, Star Fleet and the Federation have instituted dozens of regulations probably known as Kirk Rules specifically designed to prevent starship captains from boldy going where no one has gone before as boldly as Kirk went there.

Violations of the Prime Directive, which forbade interference in the development of indigenous cultures, was probably punishable by summary execution.

"Mr Worf, issue those people loin cloths, teach them the wonders of indoor plumbing and the joys of the missionary position, and then arm them against the Cardassian-backed rebel guerrillas."

"I'm sorry,  Captain, but under Starfleet Regulations and the Laws of the Federation I must now blast you with my phaser."

"Understood, Mr Worf.  Make it so."

Actually, in the fictional construct of Star Trek, the Prime Directive was a simply a plot device, an obstacle that the writers could throw in Kirk's way whenever it seemed that he was having too easy a time of it in a story they were working out.  It was like the Neutral Zone and the edge of the galaxy and the Organian Peace Treaty, a big Stop and Think sign for Kirk and the gang to keep them from rushing too quickly to the solution of the problem of the week.

The Prime Directive did not really matter to Gene Roddenberry.  In spirit, he was with Kirk every time Kirk threw the rule out the airlock.

Violating the Prime Directive was part of Star Trek's essential liberalism, its Kennedy-esque can-do-ism.   The Enterprise's mission was ostensibly scientific.  They were out there to learn what else was out there.  But in show after show Kirk and the crew did more teaching than learning.

The basic lesson they were imparting was what it means to be human.

To be human was to be curious, open-minded, innovative, fair, decent, peaceful, constructive...civilized.

Spock was ashamed of his human side and he considered being reminded of it insulting. Or at least he pretended to be that way.  But calling someone human  was the highest compliment Kirk could think of, which is why at Spock's funeral he said, even knowing how his dead friend had felt about the word, "Of all the souls I have enountered, his was the most human."

And it was, in that Spock was the most civilized of all the characters.

Violating the Prime Directive meant spreading civilization, and the show's idea of a civilized society was a Liberal society, a society in which everyone counted, where everyone had a voice, where everyone was free of fear, hunger, want, and ignorance, where everyone was free to be themselves, to be human.

(Conservatives objecting to these descriptions of Liberalism and civilization should remember that at one time in the United States Conservativism was a form of Liberalism, that at one time conservatives did not have serious problems with John Stuart Mill.  It's only recently that your intellectual leading lights have decided that conservativism is a form of monarchism.  But if you think that what you are supporting is that old-fashioned Liberal Conservativism you haven't been paying attention to the people who run the Republican Party.)

Once upon a time, starting in 1945 or so, Liberals decided that violating the Prime Directive was a good idea and adopted it as the country's mission.  The first great violation was the rebuilding of Japan.

Then there was the Marshall Plan.

Kennedy became President on the promise to bring "vigor" ("vig-ah!" as he said it) to the job.  He meant that he was going to more actively violate the Prime Directive than Eisenhower had.

The dark fallout of this was the Bay of Pigs, the attempts to kill Castro, the Congo, and Vietnam.

But the Peace Corps was also conceived as a violation of the Prime Directive.  The difference between it and our military adventurism was that the people whose cultures we are interfering with have asked us in to intefere.

Some cultures need to be improved.  Some need to be so improved that they require almost eradication.

Liberals who are rising from their chairs to scream objections at this point need to stop and ask themselves, Just what do you think you're advocating when you talk about improving the lot of women and children in Third World countries?

The problem is how to do this without causing more harm than good.  It is very hard to bring civilization to the natives without losing your own sense of what civilization means, as Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad tried to tell us.

In noting Kirk's devil-may-care attitude about violating the Prime Directive, Roxanne added that this "is why [Star Trek] is a favorite among the neo-cons."

If it is, it's a sign of their vestigal Liberalism.

The original neo-cons were Cold War Liberals whom time had passed by.  They were people who were spooked by the Cuban Missle Crisis and who were got so scared of the Rooskies they couldn't learn the lesson of Vietnam---you can't civilize people at the point of a gun.

You can't bring civilization to the natives by being uncivilized.

I can think of only one episode of the original Star Trek series in which violating the Prime Directive wasn't just a plot device but a thematic concern.  It was called A Private Little War.  In it Kirk, revisiting a planet that he had explored when he was a young ensign and where he had found a native culture he saw as living in a Garden of Eden in a state of prelapsarian bliss, finds that the Klingons have corrupted things by giving guns to one of the tribes and starting a war.  Kirk decides that the only way he can restore peace is by creating a "balance of terror"---he gives guns to the other side.

He hates doing it.  He even equates himself with Satan introducing the serpent into the Garden of Eden.  He knows what he's beginning is an arms race, that the Federation and the Klingons will be competing to give their side military advantage and that "peace" will actually be a state of perpetual war in which not enough people are killed on either side so that one side or the other can acheive victory.

A Private Little War aired just as things were beginning to go horribly wrong in Vietnam---not that they had ever been going right---but I don't think Roddenberry was merely reacting to the news from Saigon, although he was clearly one of the few people in the country paying attention at that time.  The episode was about the whole strategy of the Cold War, which had become for the United States a matter of violating the Prime Directive not in the interests of the people whose culture we were interfering with but of doing it solely in our interests---violating the Prime Directive was not an act of civilizing; it wasn't progressive anymore; it was simply, starkly, fearfully defensive.

In A Private Little War, Kirk has no choice if he wants to prevent not just the genocide of one tribe but the enslavement of the other side by the Klingons.  But the episode doesn't end with a shrug of Oh, Well, what are you going to do?  It ends with a desperate questioning of self and of mission:  There has to be a better a way, but what it is it?

If the neo-cons love Star Trek, they missed that episode.

Comments

[Roxanne]

I predict you're going to get smacked around by the multi-culturalists here. Good luck.

[Shakespeare's Sister]

You are such a huge nerd.

(Which I trust will be acknowledged as the compliment it is intended to be.)

[Roxanne]

BTW: Violating the PD was the primary driver in that episode where Kirk has to decide whether or not to save a Depression Era social worker (played by Joan Collins) in The City on the Edge of Forever. If he saves her from getting crushed by a car, "she will start an effective pacifist movement that will delay the United States' entrance into World War II, thus allowing Hitler's Germany to develop the atomic bomb first and conquer the planet."

[Lance]

Rox, you're probably right. Maybe I can distract them with a discussion of cliterectomies and the sex slave trade. If not, I'm doomed. It was nice blogging with you.

[Lance]

Oh yeah, that was a great one! I have to watch it again. Haven't seen it in a long time.

[Tom]

The Prime Directive seems to have run something like this: "Don't interfere in pre-warp-drive cultures, unless they give you an excuse." Typically, the crew would run into a planet where some AI (usually disguised as a god) ran the society and everyone blindly obeyed the god, and when a redshirt died Kirk would have his Gulf of Tonkin rationale for completely tearing down their political and social structure and giving them a short paragraph about How To Live before warping off to the next planet, never to return (and never to find out how badly he'd fucked up their lives). About the only time that this sort of thing was shown to be bad was in "Patterns of Force", in which another Federation citizen (not Kirk, oh no) tried to introduce a good version of Nazism to another planet, with predictable results. (This episode is infamous for the scene in which Kirk and Spock are stripped to the waist and flogged, which singlehandedly launched the slash fic genre.)

[sfmike]

I could care less about "Star Trek," but your defense of civilized liberals really struck a chord.

"You can't bring civilization to the natives by being uncivilized" pretty much sums it all up. Alexander Cockburn over at Counterpunch has been publishing a diary of his lecture tour in India which is a longer version of the same sentiment.

I love going to Mexico, speaking my crappy Spanish fluently, and what I've noticed over the years is that their culture is so much older, richer and more "human" than most of the United States. The best interactions between the two cultures tend to be personal rather than organized, such as the American hipster types helping create internet sites for local businesses just because they like them.

[Lance]

Tom, we have Patterns of Force rising up to the top of our queue at NetFlix. But I forgot about the flogging scene. Now you've got me re-thinking whether or not I'll show it to the kids.

Your summing up of the show's attitude toward the PD is dead on, and funny.

That habit of Kirk's of flying off into the sunset never to come back and see how things he messed with turned out comes back to haunt him in Wrath of Khan, though.

[Agi T. Prop]

You are such a huge nerd. -- Shakespeare's Sister

Count me in too. I've actually attended a Star Trek convention (but I didn't go that far to actually dress up as one of the characters). It must have been about twelve years ago at the height of Next Generation. I was a teen back then and was very excited to see Patrick Stewart speak.

Excellent analysis Lance. I've always pondered the political symbolism behind Star Trek. But I grew up with Next Generation so I'm not familiar with the original series, although I've seen all the Kirk films.

It seems to me that Kirk was always more willing to break the rules than was Picard.

[dave]

an interesting read,lance,but i remember
that episode quite differently.
every step of the plot made it seem
that kirk HAD to escalate. sympathized,
didn't feel good, sure, but was basically
in lock-step with any of jedgar hoover's
1960s speeches -communism is a virus that
must be fought unquestioningly,24/7, to
hesitate is to falter, is a weakness our
enemies are waiting to pounce on.
i'm rambling, but the basic point-a liberal
facade disguising a paranoic worldview.

i see the script as a manipulative cold-war
relic, not that different from the worst
twilight zones. i don't really care about
the outerspace stuff, but as an allegory for
vietnam, i think it was extremely harmful
propaganda: in making kirk's choices tragic
but noble, the writer tried to morally bookend
this episode with the lincoln/genghis khan
episode. i.e. the difference between us and
our enemies is not actions,not methods, but
our good intentions.
good-heartedness is a pretty fucked-up
rationalization for protracted low-intensity
conflict, eh?

[Lance]

Agi T,

Picard was hemmed in by all those Kirk Rules, one of which, at least during the first season of TNG, was that the Captain couldn't go along on every single landing party.

Excuse me. "Away team."

Dave,

You may very well be right. It's been a while since I last saw that episode. But I remember Spock's and McCoy's objections carrying more weight and of course it was Kirk's old friend's wild wife who was demanding more fire sticks, which didn't give Kirk the best possible ally in selling his ideas about fighting back to the audience. But Kirk definitely believed he had to do what he did and he was the hero of the show. Still, he does compare himself to Satan at the end. I think that's got to count as a counter-argument. Or at least a sign of creeping self-doubt.

I don't see Kirk's argument, whether we're supposed to sign on wholeheartedly or not, as J. Edgar's though. I see it as Bobby Kennedy's.

At one time it was the good Liberal argument.

That other episode you mention, the one with Lincoln, that was godawful. I hated that one when I was a kid and I hate it now. We have such good intentions, my eye!

[Exiled in NJ]

I went to Lance's blog and a Trekkie convention broke out. Alas, I am still trying to figure out who was Number 1 in the Village.

[Pepper]

I so wish I could find some meaning in 'TJ Hooker,' as I'm more familiar with that than William Shatner's other fine work ...

Just sayin' I like the message. You are right. Regarding some cultures, I do want them improved. I can't let the right of a culture overwhelm women's rights in particular. If that takes eradicating certain cultures in favor of women's rights, so be it.

Now I'm going to rise from my chair and ponder how to make everyone's lot better without shooting and bombs. I definitely won't find the answer in 'TJ Hooker.'

[Lance]

NJ,

Sorry about that. This is what happens to one's intellectual reference points when one lives in a house whose cultural and artistic life has to encompass the interests of 9 and 12 year old boys. I often wonder what's going to happen to my arguments when they become teenagers. Will they go from boyishly charming to adolescent?

Pepper,

What about the tao of Boston Legal?

[Linkmeister]

"What about the tao of Boston Legal?"

Or worse, Priceline?

[Exiled in NJ]

Not to worry, Lance. With only 10-12 episodes, there was little meat to sink the teeth into with The Prisoner.

Housemate Pam detests Shatner, thinking that he got away with murder.

[Pete]

Regarding "Kirk Rules" there was an aside joke about this in
DS9 ( Episode where the main characters are blue-screened into the original "The Trouble with Tribbles")
One of the future Time Cops tells Sisco

"James T. Kirk. The man was a menace. Seventeen separate temporal violations."

[mds]

BTW: Violating the PD was the primary driver in that episode where Kirk has to decide whether or not to save a Depression Era social worker (played by Joan Collins) in The City on the Edge of Forever.

Actually, the Prime Directive didn't enter into their reasoning at all. McCoy had utterly changed the past by saving the social worker, which caused the Federation and the Enterprise to cease to exist. (The landing party was preserved because it was in the vicinity of the Guardian of Forever.) Kirk had to allow her to die to restore the existence of his entire universe, not to comply with Starfleet regulations. Only in the later series (with such stories as the DS9 tribble one Pete invokes) did the notion of a "temporal prime directive" appear.

There, that's this week's geek quota taken care of.

[Domoni]

Just a pointer to Star Trek in the Vietnam Era by H. Bruce Franklin