Impossible Owls: Essays

by Brian Phillips

The point is, The Next Generation depicts a strict military hierarchy acting with great moral clarity in the name of civilization, all anti-postmodern, “conservative” stuff—but the values they’re so conservatively clear about are things like peace and open-mindedness and concern for the perspectives of different cultures. “Liberal” values, in other words. You could say, roughly, that the Enterprise crew is conservative as a matter of method and liberal as a matter of objective. They sail through the universe with colonialist confidence sticking up for postcolonial principles. Starfleet has a Prime Directive … but it’s explicitly noninterventionist! This is so weird that it’s almost hard to notice; your mind slides over it. But it’s fascinating in numberless ways. Picard is both indisputably the most patriarchal Star Trek captain and indisputably the least likely to punch anyone in the face. No one is more individualist than the individuals of the Enterprise (“If there’s nothing wrong with me, maybe there’s something wrong with the universe”—Dr. Beverly Crusher, “Remember Me,” 1990), but their individualism has led them to reject most forms of private property (because it actually holds them back, they’re so boldly individualistic) and embrace ultracentralized health care. It’s nuts, but it’s also a vision of the American psyche that, if you can get into it, makes a lot of fine things suddenly seem possible, and makes some debilitating anxieties simply fall away.