So I’ve seen this image drifting across social media, as they do, and it got me thinking. (No, surely not you, Nenstiel!) Fans of both Fred Rogers and Star Trek will recognize this thought process. The “Mirror Universe,” a recurring Star Trek thread, depicts an interstellar civilization controlled, not by a United Federation of Planets, but by an Imperium. The Mirror Universe is antidemocratic, violent, and ruled by the strong.
Star Trek fans love the Mirror Universe to the exact extent we generally admire Gene Roddenberry’s underlying humanist ethic. Roddenberry believed the modernist myth that all human history marks an unwavering path from caveman savagery, through an arc of warring tribes and nations, toward an ultimate gleaming future defined by peace, prosperity, and the shedding of divisions. Human societies are always moving from mud-dwelling to utopia.
This involves a sort of civic Calvinism. Okay, Roddenberry himself was personally atheist, and believed the arc of history would move away from religion and “blind faith.” But in accepting the modernist myth, Roddenberry believed the Calvinist precept of “Total Human Depravity,” the principle that humans, left to ourselves, are selfish, venal, and angry. John Calvin believed Jesus Christ would redeem this innate venality; Roddenberry trusted in an evolving state.
Fred Rogers, a Presbyterian minister (a form of Calvinism), had a difficult relationship with Total Human Depravity. He didn’t accept the maxim that humans are innately bad, and that Christianity must purge our sinful desires. But alongside icons of childhood like Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak, Rogers recognized that children live in long-term states of intrinsic powerlessness. Children lash out, sometimes violently, because they have no other tools available.
Many ex-kids, especially we who preferred to think and build rather than compete and vanquish, have chilling memories of childhood authority. I understand now, as I couldn’t then, how many schoolyard bullies were simply reenacting the power dynamics they learned at home. But that didn’t matter when they’d literally form crowds intended to corner me, shouting and screaming and shoving. The only thing I understood then, was my own powerlessness.
Rather than stopping the constant low-grade violence, school authorities encouraged us to mollify the bullies around us. Not even metaphorically, either: my parents literally told me that bullies acted out of their own terror and pain, and they needed somebody willing to embrace them, regardless of their inappropriate behavior. My family literally told me that it was my Christian moral duty to befriend the kids who made me terrified to go to school.
Current sociology suggests early humanity wasn’t violent, despite what Freud, Marx, and Calvin believed. Little evidence of warfare exists before humans became settled. But then agriculture, with the limits of space and resources, took over. Just as the Biblical Cain, a farmer, killed his brother Abel, a herdsman, so early civilization invented war, and the scars which war produces. Humans had to learn how to be angry, violent, and resentful.
The meme jokes about Mirror Rogers claiming children are weak. But our Fred Rogers acknowledged that same weakness. The difference is, Fred Rogers didn’t see weakness as something to exploit or punish. Like Jesus, Fred Rogers encouraged children to embrace their weaknesses. He authorized us to care more deeply, to reach out to those suffering, to love without reserve. He didn’t promise it wouldn’t hurt, only that we would emerge.
Star Trek’s Mirror Universe, like its Klingon Empire, depicts a society ruled not by humanist values, but by chest-thumping displays of strength. Because Roddenberry realized, despite his ideals, that some people never outgrow their childhood vulnerability stage. We’ve all worked in jobs where the biggest assholes have the most friends, because just like on the schoolyard, scared peers never stop trying to constantly mollify them.
Roddenberry, an atheist, and Rogers, a Christian, shared an underlying belief that rule by fear seems enormous when we’re in its midst, but can never truly last. Roddenberry believed society itself would reach a stage of development where it shackled our violent impulses, but the shadow self, the dark mirror, would remain. Rogers believed the fight would never truly be won, but which side we chose would define our lives.
Because yes, fundamentally, children are weak. Humans are weak. We spend our lives vulnerable to money, violence, and injustice. We never outgrow our weaknesses; we only reach a stage of development where our weaknesses no longer rule us. Whether we reach that individually or together, we’ll all, hopefully, reach a point where weakness is no longer shameful.
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