Star Trek, Injustice, and Our “Real” World

Lieutenant Saavik (Kirstie Alley) and Captain Kirk (William Shatner)
discuss the meaning of the Kobayashi Maru exercise

“A no-win situation is a possibility any commander may face.” Captain Kirk speaks these words to Lieutenant Saavik, his newest bridge officer, after she endures the Kobayashi Maru test. To science fiction fans, this moment from Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan is iconic, establishing the moral complexity of the movie, and the later franchise. The words “Kobayashi Maru” have become, among fans, a shorthand for moral impossibility.

Science fiction often defaults to simple ethical binaries: the Jedi vs. the Sith, for instance, or the Federation vs. the Klingons. Even authors like Isaac Asimov, who pooh-poohed simple black-and-white, often had their novels end with heroes and villains clearly established, even if we needed to adjust our viewpoint partway along. So the Kobayashi Maru, while not diminishing the Federation’s supposed goodness, nevertheless admitted that “good” is seldom clearly defined.

When this movie dropped, in 1982, I didn’t understand this. Sure, I could understand that doing right sometimes came at personal expense; when we feed the hungry, we still need to pay for the food. But on macro-scale issues, like the themes of justice and war often addressed in Star Trek, I wasn’t prepared for this. I was eight years old; my family was Republican at the height of the Cold War. Right and wrong, I believed, simply existed.

I enjoy science fiction and fantasy, in part, because they’re free to address sweeping ethical themes in ways other genres aren’t. Mysteries, Westerns, and “literary” fiction have anchors in real life, and cannot contradict what we know about reality (even if our “knowledge” is sometimes misinformed). Science fiction and fantasy don’t have this; they create worlds afresh every time. There’s no need to reconcile their reality with ours.

That said, exactly how science fiction addresses certain themes changes with the times. Original Star Trek often upheld White colonial stereotypes of intrepid homelanders taming savage species; the first-ever episode, “The Man Trap,” featured a vampire species invading the Starship Enterprise. Despite its notably racially diverse cast, Star Trek was a powerfully White story, reflecting the unambiguously triumphant early-Vietnam culture of 1966.

By 1982, things had changed. America has survived Vietnam, Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” years, and Ronald Reagan’s reactionary militarism. Gene Roddenberry’s cheerful humanism of 1966 seemed remarkably dated, and the belief in unquestionable American goodness hardly seemed true. Maybe the Soviet Menace still needed quashing, but would that triumph mean anything if it cost America its soul?

If these conundrums seemed difficult in 1982, they’ve only gotten worse since. America arguably won the Cold War, but then immediately burned down the edifice we’d built to fight it, as I’ve written before. America stopped subsidizing arts and education, and perhaps not coincidentally, we’ve seen a rise in racism, even overt Naziism. America has become darker, more violent, more brutal—dare I say, more Klingon-ish.

Fixing these problems creates new problems. It seems straightforward to institute hate-speech laws to silence Nazis. But as journalist Mick Hume writes, governments, when invited to squelch some noxious speech, have a history of using that authority to silence all forms of dissent. Do Americans really want to invite another Cointelpro explosion, even if it muzzles Nazis? I have no easy answers. It’s a real Kobayashi Maru problem.

Am I, like Spock, willing to die to preserve my ship and shipmates from destruction? I can’t answer that easily. I maintain fantasies of charging heedless into enemy fire to save the kitten, but I haven’t always done so. On occasion, I’ve literally broken up fights with my own body; other times, I flinch from even small confrontations. I’d like to live in a more just world, but die for it? I’m not really so sure.

Maybe another science fiction franchise matters here. The original Battlestar Galactica, in 1978, featured the human race driven to near-extinction by nuclear assault from faceless robotic invaders. Definitely a Cold War metaphor. But by the 2004 reboot, the conflict had become more nuanced. The robots were attractive, even sexy, while humans descended into infighting. Humanity’s survival seemed much less of a foregone moral conclusion this time around.

Star Trek, in 1968, simply assumed that the Federation’s eternal outward expansion was good for everybody. In 1982, it assumed this expansion would exact a price upon humanity. By 2019, Captain Picard had abandoned Starfleet, and the bridge crew of Discovery were battling one another. Our team’s innate goodness had abandoned us; our loyalties needed tested to destruction. Congratulations, nerds: we’re now living aboard the Kobayashi Maru.

 

Follow-up:
America, and the Klingon Way