Star Trek, the Frontier, and the Borg

“We are the Borg,” the faceless cube intones in the movie First Contact. “Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” These words have struck such fear into a generation of science fiction fans that the final sentence has escaped the genre pen and become a larger cultural touchstone. Simply say the words “Resistance is futile,” and most people, sci-fi fans or not, will immediately understand exactly what you mean, and fear appropriately.

Throughout genre history, American science fiction has frequently had a frontier element. Whether it’s Han Solo promising to move quantities of goods to market without revenuer interference (“selling whiskey to Indians”), Commander Adama plotting a course beyond the Red Line (“light out for the territories”), or Malcolm Reynolds’ all-around cowboy ethic, science fiction has pilfered generously from America’s frontier mythology. That goes double for Star Trek, which Gene Roddenberry pitched explicitly as a “space western.”

Captain Kirk announced the original Star Trek by describing himself traversing the “final frontier.”  He made it his goal to encounter undiscovered peoples, several of which, in the original series, are depicted as having Native American qualities. (These qualities are broad stereotypes, and often played by White actors in heavy makeup, though that’s too many themes too address here.) Though the Prime Directive stops Kirk becoming an out-and-out conqueror, he’s nevertheless frequently a White Savior.

Perhaps that’s what made Picard’s contact with the Borg so terrifying: colonists and empires don’t like having their own actions thrown back at them. In the original series, Kirk and the Federation dealt intermittently with the Klingon threat, a metaphor for America’s interactions with the Soviet “menace,” but never investigated that in detail, perhaps because, in light of the ongoing conflict between two global superpowers, creators couldn’t face the implications. America was an empire, too.

As the Cold War wound down, though, such investigation became available to Picard. The Next Generation included more scrutiny of the Federation and its operant principles, which were primarily White, male, and expansionist. The series still held itself back in service to the tastes of its time, and Roddenberry’s humanist philosophy, but we began seeing rot and disorder among the Federation hierarchy. White humanity’s innate goodness wasn’t something the Federation could take for granted anymore.

A Borg drone (Hugh) from the episode "I, Borg"

White America’s history with indigenous peoples will never escape the taint of racism. Forced removals and the Trail of Tears; state-sponsored missionary activity designed, in no uncertain terms, to abolish native culture; the Carlisle Indian School. And that’s just our interactions with Native Americans. The phrase “Your culture will adapt to service us” accurately describes the philosophy underlying how White people viewed Native American culture until very recently—and, in too many quarters, still does.

Funny enough, while America saw itself as a bastion of rugged individualism, it painted the “Evil Empire” as a faceless collective bent on assimilating citizens’ identities into a top-down social stratum. It’s almost like, viewing from within, we saw ourselves as individuals with goals and personalities, while viewing our “opponents” from without, we considered their people the sum total of their government’s belligerent rhetoric. One wonders how Native Americans saw the Cavalry crossing the frontier.

American frontier myth, to work, always requires viewing from the White side. Whether it’s children playing Cowboys and Indians, or NASA pledging to establish colonies on the Moon and Mars, somehow the White settlers always win. But science fiction, which regularly abandons moorings in the putatively “real” world, has liberty to speculate on big themes which we’re often denied in reality, including the possibility that, someday, somebody new may cross another frontier and find us.

That’s what happens with the Borg. After decades of Roddenberry’s mythology assuming humans, mostly White males, would win the colonial enterprise, the Borg upend this assumption. They enter our space. They want to conquer us, and make us part of their, ahem, enterprise, rather than us inviting strangers into our Federation. And though, pursuant to the needs of episodic television, the humans always successfully resist the alien invaders, they nevertheless remind us, victory isn’t certain.

Our frontier myth has frequently tainted America’s interaction with the wider world, as historians like Greg Grandin have noted. The myth has faltered significantly in the 21st Century, but still basically drives our foreign policy. That’s why we need something like the Borg, to remind us that, viewed from outside, we probably don’t look like the Federation. We probably look like an anonymous mass of technological monstrosities, bent on yoking other peoples to our vision.

Jewish Jesus

1001 Books to Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 101
David H. Stern, Ph.D., Restoring the Jewishness of the Gospel: a Message For Christians

Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef was Jewish. So were his Apostles and earliest converts. Even Paul, the “Apostle to the Gentiles,” never stopped calling himself Jewish. Though Yeshua’s ministry included stops among Samaritans and Romans, his outreach centered on fellow Jews, and included extensive citations from the Hebrew Tanakh. But after the last Apostles died, Yeshua’s ministry became dominated by Gentiles. During Bar-Kochba’s Rebellion, Jews and Yeshua-followers split permanently.

Dr. David Stern, a Princeton-trained economist and lifelong Jew, became persuaded in middle age that Yeshua was the Messiah of prophecy, the promised one to reunite the scattered people of Israel. He has written about this conviction since the 1970s, becoming a leader in the Messianic Jewish community. But, half a century later, confusion remains around what Messianic Judaism means. Dr. Stern hopes to solve some of that confusion.

History hasn’t been kind to Jews who believe Yeshua fulfills the Covenant prophecy. Such Jews were rejected by fellow Jews, particularly surrounding the violence enacted by Roman conquerors. Then Gentile Christians required Jews who wanted to follow Yeshua to abjure their Judaism, contrary to Scriptural messages from Jesus and Paul. Only since the middle 1800s has the Venn diagram of Judaism and Yeshua-belief reclaimed the overlap that once dominated.

Messianic Judaism isn’t Christianity. Stern emphasizes that, the few times the word “Christian” appears in Scripture, it always describes Gentile converts. Instead, Messianic Jews remain Jews, with all the controversy of identity that this entails (for instance, should we keep kosher? Stern and his family do, but he refuses to criticize others who don’t). As such, the Hebrew Covenant continues to govern his people, who continue living under the Law of Moses.

This causes some confusion, since Paul’s letters, and to a lesser degree the Gospels (particularly John’s) proclaim believers’ freedom from the law. Doesn’t that mean the Hebrew Covenant doesn’t apply? No, Stern insists, and uses the historical context under which Paul and the Evangelists wrote to prove his point. He makes a persuasive case that, while Gentile converts live under a New Covenant, the Hebrew Covenant still governs Yeshua-beliving Jews.

Jesus as a young Jew, painted by Rembrandt

Moreover, he writes, Christians owe Jews heavily. Stern describes what he calls “olive-tree theology,” based on an analogy Paul writes in Romans, Chapter 11, that all Israel is a cultivated olive tree, onto which new believers are grafted. New Yeshua-believers needn’t necessarily become Jewish (see Acts 15), but based on statements from Paul and Yeshua, Stern believes Gentiles are grafted onto Israel, and eventually both will become one tree.

(It’s worth asserting here, that some organizations calling themselves “Messianic Jewish” aren’t Jewish in any true sense. Though they use Jewish liturgical language and selectively apply kashrut law, their theology is Evangelical Protestant. Dr. Stern doesn’t address these organizations; his interest is in actual Jews who consider Yeshua the Messiah of prophecy, and his message is unambiguous: Jews who become Yeshua-followers never stop being Jewish.)

As such, since new believers become joined into the Hebrew Covenant, Jewish believers have a different relationship with Yeshua than Gentile Christians do. Gentiles are invited into covenant which begins with relationship with Yeshua. But Jews already have their covenant; they don’t need invited in. Instead, for them, Yeshua becomes the culmination of a covenant they already possess, the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy, and the unity of the Jewish nation.

Based on this, Stern believes it’s anti-Semitic for Christians to not extend outreach to Jews. Many Christians, he acknowledges, are justifiably reluctant to evangelize Jews, because historically, Christians have used high-handedness, even violence, to forcibly convert Jews. But Stern asserts this doesn’t mean we should refuse to evangelize; it only means our evangelism must begin in humility, willing to seek forgiveness for our forebears’ failure to follow their own teachings.

This synopsis does Stern’s theology a disservice. Though brief, his book is dense with references to Jewish and Christian history, deep dives into Scripture, and careful analysis of ways Yeshua and (especially) Paul speak from categorically Jewish foundations. He carefully translates these concepts into laypersons’ language, aware that he’s writing for a diverse audience. But he doesn’t shy away from complicated theological arguments.

Recently, I’ve heard much about Gentile Christians becoming curious about their religion’s Jewish foundations. Not long ago, the firewall between Christianity and Judaism was difficult to breach, but not anymore. Dr. Stern writes for Gentiles willing to learn more about where their religion originated, and Jews eager to discover the figure Yeshua who claims to be the Messiah. Both audiences will find much to discover.

On a related topic: Indigenous Jesus

The Real Cost of Fake Statistics

Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics

We know the horror stories: schoolteachers ignoring larger goals and teaching for the test. Universities needing to create new administrative positions to handle the paperwork, then offsetting the cost by packing departments with adjunct instructors. Financiers booking profits for this quarter, while punting debits to the next quarter. Police failing to report serious crimes. Tales of trusted professionals manipulating statistics have become downright legendary.

Economic historian Jerry Z. Muller doesn’t unilaterally oppose metrics and other attempts to quantify abstract goals. They have important value, he writes, when applied appropriately. When used for internal analysis, say, or in low-stakes testing to determine progress on clearly defined goals, statistics can have powerful beneficial effects. People love metrics because, at first, they provide important information that improves our ability to pursue our purposes.

Problems arise, Muller writes, because people who aren’t familiar with important fields, believe they can stretch short-term benefits of metrics infinitely into the future. When small, underfunded schools’ funding, even their existence, gets threatened because students cannot ace standardized tests written in another state, for instance. When politicians intimidate police into keeping crime stats low. When hospitals falsify medical records to avoid Medicaid decertification.

Modern technocratic societies began demanding elaborate metrics to measure the immeasurable, according to Muller, for completely understandable reasons. New research in psychology and behavioral economics has demonstrated the subjectivity of human judgement. The demand for “transparency” in public affairs means people want abstruse topics translated into layperson language. And little seems more objective and transparent than plain, old-fashioned numbers.

In practice, though, this isn’t true. First, the metrics most often measure the areas easiest to measure, not what matters most. Schools measure questions with obviously right answers, not students’ ability to reason on nuanced or debatable topics. Financiers receive bonuses for sheer money made, regardless of stability. Militaries count bodies killed, not hearts and minds won. This results in very short-term thinking and reaching for low-hanging fruit.

This distorts the purposes served by “transparency,” and its close cousin, “accountability.” (Muller makes a persuasive case that transparency frequently isn’t desirable anyway, since it’s the opposite of nuance.) Knowing their funding and careers hang precariously, officials tasked with maintaining the metrics start gaming the system, chasing desirable outcomes. Safe streets, healed patients, and an educated citizenry become secondary to cramming the numbers.

Jerry Z. Muller

Further, this demand for metrics creates amassive mandatory bureaucracy. Government demands for more numbers from schools, universities, and hospitals have forced them to hire actuaries whose sole job is to write and refine government statistics. It’s become axiomatic recently to complain about the increasing number of administrators in public institutions. But they need those administrators to fulfill their accountability mandate—and the government needs bureaucrats to read the resulting numbers.

This comes at the expense of seniority and experience. Muller writes, correctly, that serious science calls human judgement abilities into question. But metrics are scarcely better, since they apply the judgement of the metrics writers—who frequently are outsiders to the field they measure—over the judgement of those who dedicate their lives to work, study, or practice in a field. For all its flaws, human discretion is invaluable when it originates from time-tested skills.

And don’t cite “run government like a business” here. Muller demonstrates, extensively, that corporations are just as procedural, and just as prone to distort numbers for indefensible reasons.

I’d go beyond Muller. When enormous bureaucratic institutions demand conformity to numbers, those numbers generally reflect the beige middle ground. Thus public schools with substantially Black or Hispanic student bodies, American aid agencies working in non-Western countries, and doctors treating patients ill-equipped to monitor their own wellness, eventually force the poor, the non-white, and the international, to conform to middle-class White American standards that don’t apply.

Muller isn’t entirely pessimistic about metrics. From the beginning, he studiously distinguishes misapplications of statistics, the kind of horror stories we see on the nightly news, from correctly applied numbers. He praises appropriately applied numbers, particularly those used to measure internally, as read by experienced minds. If metrics measure what matters, and people accept metrics’ limits, numbers can have powerful beneficial effects.

Muller extensively cites Campbell’s Law, which, paraphrased, states that statistics, when misapplied, always distort what they measure. Though recent studies have demonstrated this apparent truism, we keep forgetting it. Clear back in the Victorian era, the poet and educator Matthew Arnold decried how top-down measurement efforts damage what they pretend to support. Maybe, by easing up on misapplied statistics, we can improve outcomes for everybody.

What Is This Thing We Call “Lynching”?

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch

Several years ago, I had a small supporting role in a community theater production of To Kill a Mockingbird. As part of my role, I formed part of the crowd that came to lynch Tom Robinson. I had no lines, just some improv behind the speaking parts. This quiet anonymity let me watch events unfolding from behind, permitting me to notice that this was an unrealistic depiction of a lynching.

With the President’s Twitter declaration yesterday that the perfectly legal and Constitutionally mandated impeachment proceedings against him are a “lynching,” perhaps it’s time to reconsider what that word means. Because, although the tail end of the “lynching era” remains within living memory, that’s getting further and further away. Fewer people remember what a lynching really meant, and it’s getting misrepresented by people with a dishonest message to peddle.

To Kill a Mockingbird depicts a crowd of lower-class toughs from the wrong side of town rushing the prison. Their courage boosted by liquor, they work one another into a lather of rage until, propelled by their sense of moral outrage, they distract the sheriff with false leads, thinking they’ll have an undefended jailhouse door. Except they get there and find Atticus Finch guarding it with his lantern, Diogenes-like. And, of course, his rifle.

This misrepresents lynchings in multiple ways. First, it distances both Harper Lee and her intended audience of Northern White leftists from the event by making lynchers into po’ white trash. Except the history of lynching makes clear that people from every social stratum attended lynchings, including members of the professional and upper classes. In some events, lynchings became community events, with picnics and music attending.

Besides, lynchings didn’t happen by cover of darkness, and didn’t require calling law enforcement on a “snipe hunt.” The very nature of lynchings required them to happen in broad daylight, and the sheriff was as likely to hold the door as bar it. Because although lynchings were considered “extra-legal,” they weren’t really forbidden. The whole point was to showcase how the perpetrators of unlawful killings had no fear of consequences.

The President's original tweet.
Click to enlarge

By contrast, the Democratic leadership has been paralyzed by fear of consequences. Despite having a robust House majority and a President who seemingly can’t open his mouth without confessing yet another crime, Nancy Pelosi dithered for months before officially beginning impeachment inquiries, because she believed her party would suffer at the polls. This despite the proceedings being so completely legal, they’re the only trial proceeding defined in the Constitution.

Theologian James H. Cone calls lynching the closest American society had to the Roman tradition of crucifixion. Like the death of Jesus, the deaths of countless Black Americans wasn’t simply intended to kill the target, it was intended to humiliate the target. And the real audience wasn’t the victim, it was the survivors, who received the unquestionable message: your lives are in our hands.

To understand how thoroughly unafraid of consequences White lynchers really were, realize that lynchings were documented with cameras. Not only did perpetrators photograph the bodies after they’d been killed, they photographed themselves with the bodies, and sold the resulting pictures as souvenir postcards. Lynching perpetrators literally boasted about their participation in violent murders, and shared images of themselves doing it, like we share Instagrams of our dinner.

In Mockingbird, the lynchers desist their efforts when Scout Finch recognizes one of them and calls him by name. Certainly, if we acknowledge that lynchers photographed themselves with the body, getting recognized won’t likely convince them to quit. But even if Harper Lee misrepresented lynching thus, it means she believed one thing: people who committed lynchings were capable of shame. And that’s where the analogy breaks down.

When we consider who, in the current arrangement, boasts about crimes, shares images of their transgressions, and turns a profit on the effort, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the lynching isn’t being perpetrated by the Democrats. Trump and Giuliani have gleefully confessed multiple crimes, sometimes on live TV, confident they’ll face no consequences. Meanwhile, the “checks and balances” fail to do anything, because they’re beholden to extralegal pressures.

To Kill a Mockingbird is possibly America’s most widely read book about race and racism; I have difficulty determining exact numbers, but I’ve read estimates that it’s read in as many as 75% of American schools. But it sanitizes racism by shifting the onus onto poor Whites clinging to society’s margins. It depicts lynching unrealistically. And this leads directly into the President misrepresenting lynching toward himself.

Scorsese and “New Hollywood” Part 2

Martin Scorsese's longing for the auteur-driven Hollywood culture which birthed his career is, as I wrote yesterday, naïve and anachronistic. But it isn't wrong. Because the conditions which assassinated New Hollywood around 1982, currently exist again. Only this time, it'll be much, much harder to dislodge them, for two reasons. And Scorsese's abhorred Marvel Comics movies, which caused the current controversy, are only part of one reason.

I stand behind my statement that franchise spectaculars like Star Wars provided a necessary countervailing force to New Hollywood's somber introspection, while also bankrolling more esoteric fare. Initially. But it didn't take long for the economic weight of these movies to change the companies that owned them. George Lucas hadn't finished his first trilogy before abandoning his planned story and turning Return of the Jedi into a toy commercial.

However, this rapid descent of the blockbuster ethos into silliness corresponded with the first reason it’ll be hard to fix. Under the Reagan Administration, the deregulation of Hollywood meant studios were merging, while also buying controlling interests in the distribution networks and cinema chains which got their products in front of eyeballs. Dying of ennui in 1974, by 1984 the studios were flush with cash, and began using it to consolidate their market angle.

Today the big-screen market has few controls: studios own each other, their distributors, the cinemas, and now streaming services. Disney, which Michael Eisner famously saved from extinction in the early 1980s, has become a monolith, controlling Lucasfilm, Marvel, and now Fox. Amazon, once a pinch point in distribution, has become a studio in its own right. A few corporations so thoroughly control the supply end of the curve that, in essence, the entertainment market isn’t free.

This hasn’t been magic for the studios. The apotheosis of vertical integration happened with Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla remake, which opened on an estimated one-quarter of America’s cinema screens, and still died. The pattern has repeated recently, with Universal Studios’ planned Dark Universe dying in its cradle, and the DC Extended Universe apparently following suit. Though pitching to the middle is supposedly lucrative, audiences are provisionally leery.

But, as Scorsese notes, Marvel movies remain a cash cow. They’ve forestalled the terminal malaise that doomed other series, like Jason Bourne or Pirates of the Caribbean. Audiences still love them, which is the second reason studios have little motivation to abandon the blockbuster model. If, as I stated yesterday, audiences embraced blockbusters because New Hollywood became too repetitive, I can’t explain why this problem dooms some franchises, but not others.

Though the standard model holds that audience preferences drive the industry, that isn’t always so. People are naturally drawn to what’s already familiar, and resist the truly innovative. Movies now regarded as classics, from Citizen Kane and Night of the Hunter to The Big Lebowski and The Shawshank Redemption, initially died at the box office, because audiences found them too different. Risky movies often become successful only in retrospect.

So, between the entertainment industry’s monopoly practices, and audiences’ love for the familiar, there’s little motivation for studio bean-counters to approve anything too innovative. Studios once provided homes to executives like Alan Ladd, Jr., whose gut instinct on unproven properties like Star Wars proved insightful. Today, their decisions are controlled by algorithms which test whether proposed new properties sufficiently resemble what’s been successful in the past.

And because the studios also overwhelmingly own the distributors, they have manifest disincentive to permit smaller, independent producers to get into the business. Occasional upstarts like Blumhouse Productions occasionally break into the distribution business, giving self-financed filmmakers glimmers of false hope; but overall, without a contract with the majors, don’t expect your film to ever particularly go anywhere.

So, combining what I said yesterday with what I’ve written here, where does this leave us? Martin Scorsese’s naïve yearning for New Hollywood is a non-starter, because audiences don’t want that, and the film studios have become too consolidated to do something risky. Industry thinking has become very short-term. But the success of Marvel movies notwithstanding, box office receipts suggest “blockbuster fatigue”; even Star Wars is showing diminishing returns.

Conditions exist for something new to emerge. It probably won’t resemble either New Hollywood, with its self-consciously artsy flavor, or the blockbuster era, dependent on low-risk franchises. Because the five major studios have a stranglehold on the industry, it’ll take some executive willing to defy algorithms and accountants… which is rare currently. Maybe Scorsese can find and cultivate such an executive. Maybe we’re ready.