Star Trek's Comforting Fictions
This Summer, I've been staying with my parents, and we've ended up watching television together. A lot of it is crime shows or old sitcoms (not to mention enough Fox News to kill several young elephants). But my parents also like Star Trek, especially Deep Space Nine and Enterprise.
I haven't really watched Star Trek since I was a kid, but something about it appeals to me. It took a little while for me to realize why, but I think I have.
As a kid, I assumed society was run by some ultra - competent group of people who knew what they were talking about, but life has slowly disabused me of this notion. About as long as I've cared about politics, the president has been woefully incompetent or actually had dementia. Modern medicine is one of the wonders of our age, but I've seen doctors make mistakes, often tragic ones. Scientists obviously know what they're talking about; if they didn't oil would stay in the ground and I wouldn't be typing this. When I started studying geology, it was obvious that the professors and grad students knew what they were talking about!
But still, they weren't omniscient (nor did they claim to be). Often, a professor will point out an outcrop and say we don't know what's going on there. Sure, people have hypotheses--he might even endorse one--but there's bound to be complexity, disagreement, and ambiguity.
But this isn't true in Star Trek. If Dax has a scientific problem, she can whip out her tricorder and diagnose it in a few minutes. With enough keyboard mashing and technobabble, the crew can probably fix it! Moral and human problems are more complicated, but the people solving them aren't. Unlike the real government, Starfleet seems to be staffed by competent people with good intentions. The Starfleet higher - ups are often presented as out of touch buffoons, but they have none of the banal, self - interested pettiness I've come to associate with actual leaders.
I've heard people say this makes Star Trek unrealistic, and it does. But that fantasy is exactly what makes Star Trek fun. For 45 minutes, you can ditch the real world for one where scientists are wizards and our institutions work. This is a fantasy, but it's a damn good fantasy!