Two of our favorite carbon units
Monday, August 15, 2005
Star Trek: Story and the Soul of the Future
by William S. Kowinski
There can be little doubt that the Star Trek saga has created the most widely shared vision of the future in our time. The examples tumble around us. Its cultural influence is reflected in so many references that they pass by without much notice.
It's there in a feature film as seemingly distant from the Star Trek universe as Steven Speilberg's The Terminal, a contemporary comic drama about a man (played by Tom Hanks) trapped in the between-world of a large airline terminal, unable to return to his country yet without the proper papers to officially enter the United States outside the terminal doors. One of the characters, a young black woman who works there, turns out to be a Trekkie who goes to conventions dressed as Yeoman Rand. When another employee is about to propose to her, he flashes the Vulcan hand sign, before revealing the engagement ring.
The Trek universe has simply become part of ours. In an article on an aspect of human behavior first published in the New Yorker and included in his forthcoming book, biologist Robert Sapolsky writes, "If I were a Vulcan researching social behavior on Earth, this would seem like an irrational mess." It isn't even particularly relevant to readers that as far as we know, no planet Vulcan, or extraterrestrial intelligences called Vulcans, exist. Yet Sapolsky's meaning is clear. He is not even simply referring to an alien point of view on Terran behavior, but to a particular kind of view---one attuned to seeing things as logical or illogical. He does not have to explain Vulcan culture, or that it is Star Trek lore. He assumes that reader of the New Yorker will know.
But even more specifically, it is just about impossible to think about the future without thinking about Star Trek. In the improbably popular movie called What the Bleep Do We Know which uses quantum physics to discuss the relationship of thought and reality, one physicist more or less complains that people don't understand the significance of a certain experiment (in which the same dot of matter appears in two places at once) because they're used to Star Trek's transporters and replicators. People simply assume these things exist, or will.
Another person interviewed in "What the Bleep" refers to human beings as "carbon units," the exact terminology used in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There's even an appearance by Armin Shimerman, who played Quark on Deep Space 9, to cement the bond.
Why do so many people know the fundamentals of the Star Trek universe? Why can they easily identify Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Captain Picard and Data? Klingons, Vulcans, the Borg? Transporters, warp drive, red alert, the starship Enterprise? "Beam me up, Scotty," "Make it so," "Live long and prosper"? And for almost as many people, much more?
The most fundamental answer is they remember aspects of the Star Trek universe, and have a general impression of the Star Trek future, because they learned it from stories. For Star Trek isn't just a vision of the future, it is a set of stories. That turns out to be very, very important.
text continues after photos
by William S. Kowinski
There can be little doubt that the Star Trek saga has created the most widely shared vision of the future in our time. The examples tumble around us. Its cultural influence is reflected in so many references that they pass by without much notice.
It's there in a feature film as seemingly distant from the Star Trek universe as Steven Speilberg's The Terminal, a contemporary comic drama about a man (played by Tom Hanks) trapped in the between-world of a large airline terminal, unable to return to his country yet without the proper papers to officially enter the United States outside the terminal doors. One of the characters, a young black woman who works there, turns out to be a Trekkie who goes to conventions dressed as Yeoman Rand. When another employee is about to propose to her, he flashes the Vulcan hand sign, before revealing the engagement ring.
The Trek universe has simply become part of ours. In an article on an aspect of human behavior first published in the New Yorker and included in his forthcoming book, biologist Robert Sapolsky writes, "If I were a Vulcan researching social behavior on Earth, this would seem like an irrational mess." It isn't even particularly relevant to readers that as far as we know, no planet Vulcan, or extraterrestrial intelligences called Vulcans, exist. Yet Sapolsky's meaning is clear. He is not even simply referring to an alien point of view on Terran behavior, but to a particular kind of view---one attuned to seeing things as logical or illogical. He does not have to explain Vulcan culture, or that it is Star Trek lore. He assumes that reader of the New Yorker will know.
But even more specifically, it is just about impossible to think about the future without thinking about Star Trek. In the improbably popular movie called What the Bleep Do We Know which uses quantum physics to discuss the relationship of thought and reality, one physicist more or less complains that people don't understand the significance of a certain experiment (in which the same dot of matter appears in two places at once) because they're used to Star Trek's transporters and replicators. People simply assume these things exist, or will.
Another person interviewed in "What the Bleep" refers to human beings as "carbon units," the exact terminology used in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There's even an appearance by Armin Shimerman, who played Quark on Deep Space 9, to cement the bond.
Why do so many people know the fundamentals of the Star Trek universe? Why can they easily identify Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Captain Picard and Data? Klingons, Vulcans, the Borg? Transporters, warp drive, red alert, the starship Enterprise? "Beam me up, Scotty," "Make it so," "Live long and prosper"? And for almost as many people, much more?
The most fundamental answer is they remember aspects of the Star Trek universe, and have a general impression of the Star Trek future, because they learned it from stories. For Star Trek isn't just a vision of the future, it is a set of stories. That turns out to be very, very important.
text continues after photos
King Story
As far as I know, there hasn't been much new thought on how to approach the future since that flood of study and books in the 1960s and 70s I wrote about last time . But a growing appreciation has been developing of the role of stories. No longer dismissed as frivolous entertainments and childish fantasies, stories have emerged as vitally important in the most basic ways.
Storytellers always knew this. "Once philosophy was stories, religion was stories, wisdom books were stories," fictionist Ronald Sukenick wrote in the 1970s, "but now that fiction is held to be a form of lying, even by literary sophisticates, we are without persuasive wisdom, religion, or philosophy."
But soon the various roles of story were being discovered by other disciplines. Psychotherapist Robert Coles used literary stories to teach in medical school, because narrative raised issues in a particularly meaningful way, and then in his practice, because patients identified with characters and felt that someone else had felt what they felt. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum used literary stories to teach in law school, because they dramatized public issues and infused them with real human experiences and responses.
They all found that stories unlock empathy, and inspire the moral imagination. But others began to see even more basic functions for story. Neuroscientists realized that human memories are stored in stories, and soon, that all thinking involves stories. "Narrative imagining-story-is the fundamental instrument of thought," writes Mark Turner, a neuroscientist, cognitive scientist as well as a Professor of English. " Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining."
"Knowledge is stories," wrote Roger C. Shank, former director of Yale's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Narrative is explanation, and explanations are narratives. So in the age of science, writes William Irwin Thompson, "Science is the storytelling of our time. By telling stories about our origins, from the big bang to the African savanna, science is really telling stories about what and where we are and where we want to go from here."
But not all stories are created equal. As we know, some stories are better than others. That becomes clear when we go back to the future.
As far as I know, there hasn't been much new thought on how to approach the future since that flood of study and books in the 1960s and 70s I wrote about last time . But a growing appreciation has been developing of the role of stories. No longer dismissed as frivolous entertainments and childish fantasies, stories have emerged as vitally important in the most basic ways.
Storytellers always knew this. "Once philosophy was stories, religion was stories, wisdom books were stories," fictionist Ronald Sukenick wrote in the 1970s, "but now that fiction is held to be a form of lying, even by literary sophisticates, we are without persuasive wisdom, religion, or philosophy."
But soon the various roles of story were being discovered by other disciplines. Psychotherapist Robert Coles used literary stories to teach in medical school, because narrative raised issues in a particularly meaningful way, and then in his practice, because patients identified with characters and felt that someone else had felt what they felt. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum used literary stories to teach in law school, because they dramatized public issues and infused them with real human experiences and responses.
They all found that stories unlock empathy, and inspire the moral imagination. But others began to see even more basic functions for story. Neuroscientists realized that human memories are stored in stories, and soon, that all thinking involves stories. "Narrative imagining-story-is the fundamental instrument of thought," writes Mark Turner, a neuroscientist, cognitive scientist as well as a Professor of English. " Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining."
"Knowledge is stories," wrote Roger C. Shank, former director of Yale's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Narrative is explanation, and explanations are narratives. So in the age of science, writes William Irwin Thompson, "Science is the storytelling of our time. By telling stories about our origins, from the big bang to the African savanna, science is really telling stories about what and where we are and where we want to go from here."
But not all stories are created equal. As we know, some stories are better than others. That becomes clear when we go back to the future.
The American Clock and the World of Tomorrow
If there was one idea that got America through the Great Depression of the 1930s, playwright Arthur Miller suggests, it was the future. "Then and now, you have to wonder what really held it all together, and maybe it was simply the Future: the people were still not ready to give it up," a character said in Miller's play, "The American Clock," set during the Depression. "Like a God, it was always worshipped among us, and they could not yet turn their backs on it. Maybe it's that simple. Because from any objective viewpoint, I don't understand why it held."
It was in some ways the immigrant's dream of America and the future rolled into one that dominated the first third of the century (when immigration to America was at its highest), despite the terrible hardships of the 1930s. And as the 30s ended, there was the glittering promise of technology.
It was all on display in the great 1939 New York World's Fair," with its twin themes of "The World of Tomorrow" and "Dawn of a New Day." (This year's film, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is set in 1939, and borrows the look and spirit of the Fair's technology as well as its name.)
The Fair was full of wonders, from the gleaming white Trylon, the shimmering Glass Center and the bold Perisphere that exhibited the shining "Democricity" of the future. Fairgoers saw household robots and a couple of puppets from Chicago named Kukla and Ollie demonstrating a new technology called television.
Visitors reclined in chairs on a conveyor belt to glide through General Motor's "Futurama," which arrayed before them the future of 1960: happy healthy people living in throw-away houses, working in soaring white skyscrapers or clean modern factories, going home to green villages on fourteen lane freeways scientifically built for safety, with automatic radio-controlled traffic. Because of technology and efficiency, a soothing voice said, there would be little disease, and most of America would be forest again.
But almost as soon as the World of Tomorrow opened, the world of 1939 crashed into a decade of horror: nations falling to mechanized blitzkriegs, concentration camps and genocide, in a world war that brought destruction for the first time from the air: the first bombing campaigns against civilians and cities in the London Blitz, the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, then the saturation bombings of German and Japanese cities, culminating in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each with one atomic bomb.
The technology of destruction advanced so quickly during the war that its feverish momentum continued afterwards, seemingly and alarmingly out of control. Hopes for the future continued, but they depended on whether humanity could survive its most devastating inventions.
So just after World War II and as the atomic arms race began with bewildering speed, H.G. Wells' study of the future was revived, but with a different emphasis than in the 1890s, or even in the dreams of the 1930s. Future study was revived to predict nightmares.
If there was one idea that got America through the Great Depression of the 1930s, playwright Arthur Miller suggests, it was the future. "Then and now, you have to wonder what really held it all together, and maybe it was simply the Future: the people were still not ready to give it up," a character said in Miller's play, "The American Clock," set during the Depression. "Like a God, it was always worshipped among us, and they could not yet turn their backs on it. Maybe it's that simple. Because from any objective viewpoint, I don't understand why it held."
It was in some ways the immigrant's dream of America and the future rolled into one that dominated the first third of the century (when immigration to America was at its highest), despite the terrible hardships of the 1930s. And as the 30s ended, there was the glittering promise of technology.
It was all on display in the great 1939 New York World's Fair," with its twin themes of "The World of Tomorrow" and "Dawn of a New Day." (This year's film, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is set in 1939, and borrows the look and spirit of the Fair's technology as well as its name.)
The Fair was full of wonders, from the gleaming white Trylon, the shimmering Glass Center and the bold Perisphere that exhibited the shining "Democricity" of the future. Fairgoers saw household robots and a couple of puppets from Chicago named Kukla and Ollie demonstrating a new technology called television.
Visitors reclined in chairs on a conveyor belt to glide through General Motor's "Futurama," which arrayed before them the future of 1960: happy healthy people living in throw-away houses, working in soaring white skyscrapers or clean modern factories, going home to green villages on fourteen lane freeways scientifically built for safety, with automatic radio-controlled traffic. Because of technology and efficiency, a soothing voice said, there would be little disease, and most of America would be forest again.
But almost as soon as the World of Tomorrow opened, the world of 1939 crashed into a decade of horror: nations falling to mechanized blitzkriegs, concentration camps and genocide, in a world war that brought destruction for the first time from the air: the first bombing campaigns against civilians and cities in the London Blitz, the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, then the saturation bombings of German and Japanese cities, culminating in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each with one atomic bomb.
The technology of destruction advanced so quickly during the war that its feverish momentum continued afterwards, seemingly and alarmingly out of control. Hopes for the future continued, but they depended on whether humanity could survive its most devastating inventions.
So just after World War II and as the atomic arms race began with bewildering speed, H.G. Wells' study of the future was revived, but with a different emphasis than in the 1890s, or even in the dreams of the 1930s. Future study was revived to predict nightmares.
The Wrath of Kahn
An adjunct of the Douglas Aircraft Company called Project RAND created its first future oriented study in May 1946, called "Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship." But that wasn't the future that seemed most crucial.
The government and military wanted to know the future of nuclear war, for any other future depended on the answers. Everyone knew almost immediately that nuclear warfare had the potential to destroy the world's civilizations in fairly short order. But those in charge wanted better information, a more realistic idea of what might happen, in order to plan to fight and win it, or to avoid it or survive it.
So even though the independent RAND Corporation would produce a long list of reports on urban problems, health and education, its early fame and the development of its systems for studying the future came from its work on nuclear war.
The new futurism's intellectual energy came mostly from the new approach to organizing and understanding information called systems analysis, which emerged from MIT at the end of World War II. Together with game theory and information theory that developed in tandem with it, systems analysis generated conceptual tools such as cross-impact analysis, modeling and simulations that made creative use of early computers.
The key insight that encouraged the futures field to blossom was probably the idea of alternative futures, promoted by the most visible and controversial figure in the field, Herman Kahn. In assessing future risks and possibilities, Kahn assembled packages of causes and effects. There wasn't just one possible future, he argued. Change a variable here and there, alter an assumption slightly, put in a new variable you hadn't considered, and suddenly, there is a different future.
Applied to nuclear war, it figured in various ways in which the war could start and proceed, who had how many nukes where, and which side's nukes got in the air first and whose would be destroyed, and by what proportion. Those different packages of variables acting in different time sequences resulting in different outcomes---different "futures"---Kahn called "scenarios."
That word is fairly familiar to us today, as meaning a particular imagined situation. We have different "scenarios" for how the school year will go, or how to get the money for a new car. Each sequence of video game play is often an acting out of a Kahn scenario. But before Kahn, "scenario" mostly meant the story in a theatrical production, such as an opera. A scenario is a kind of story.
Basically that's what Kahn was doing: he was creating narratives resulting in alternative futures. Unfortunately, his scenarios were all horror stories. Not only were the outcomes horrible, but the terminology governing how the stories went were ghastly in their bloodless abstraction: the main characters were missiles with particular "throw-weights" dispatching "megatons" of radiating cyclones of fire, resulting in "megadeaths." The difference in the various scenarios turned out to be statistical: how many megatons resulted in how many megadeaths.
These scenarios resulted in analyses that were further abstracted into doctrines like Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD), a name that seemed all too accurate. Yet it was the basis for policy governing the future.
With all of this, plus his penchant for insane-sounding paradoxes like "the rationality of irrationality" and "thinking the unthinkable," Herman Kahn became one of the principal models for Dr. Strangelove. And the stories of the future became nothing but nightmares.
But the dreamlike stories of the future told in the 1939 World's Fair exhibits and the nightmare stories told by RAND (and picked up by the movies) had a common weakness: they had no real people in them. They had no texture, no life, no human complications or decisions, no emotions, not even simple human logic. No soul.
An adjunct of the Douglas Aircraft Company called Project RAND created its first future oriented study in May 1946, called "Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship." But that wasn't the future that seemed most crucial.
The government and military wanted to know the future of nuclear war, for any other future depended on the answers. Everyone knew almost immediately that nuclear warfare had the potential to destroy the world's civilizations in fairly short order. But those in charge wanted better information, a more realistic idea of what might happen, in order to plan to fight and win it, or to avoid it or survive it.
So even though the independent RAND Corporation would produce a long list of reports on urban problems, health and education, its early fame and the development of its systems for studying the future came from its work on nuclear war.
The new futurism's intellectual energy came mostly from the new approach to organizing and understanding information called systems analysis, which emerged from MIT at the end of World War II. Together with game theory and information theory that developed in tandem with it, systems analysis generated conceptual tools such as cross-impact analysis, modeling and simulations that made creative use of early computers.
The key insight that encouraged the futures field to blossom was probably the idea of alternative futures, promoted by the most visible and controversial figure in the field, Herman Kahn. In assessing future risks and possibilities, Kahn assembled packages of causes and effects. There wasn't just one possible future, he argued. Change a variable here and there, alter an assumption slightly, put in a new variable you hadn't considered, and suddenly, there is a different future.
Applied to nuclear war, it figured in various ways in which the war could start and proceed, who had how many nukes where, and which side's nukes got in the air first and whose would be destroyed, and by what proportion. Those different packages of variables acting in different time sequences resulting in different outcomes---different "futures"---Kahn called "scenarios."
That word is fairly familiar to us today, as meaning a particular imagined situation. We have different "scenarios" for how the school year will go, or how to get the money for a new car. Each sequence of video game play is often an acting out of a Kahn scenario. But before Kahn, "scenario" mostly meant the story in a theatrical production, such as an opera. A scenario is a kind of story.
Basically that's what Kahn was doing: he was creating narratives resulting in alternative futures. Unfortunately, his scenarios were all horror stories. Not only were the outcomes horrible, but the terminology governing how the stories went were ghastly in their bloodless abstraction: the main characters were missiles with particular "throw-weights" dispatching "megatons" of radiating cyclones of fire, resulting in "megadeaths." The difference in the various scenarios turned out to be statistical: how many megatons resulted in how many megadeaths.
These scenarios resulted in analyses that were further abstracted into doctrines like Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD), a name that seemed all too accurate. Yet it was the basis for policy governing the future.
With all of this, plus his penchant for insane-sounding paradoxes like "the rationality of irrationality" and "thinking the unthinkable," Herman Kahn became one of the principal models for Dr. Strangelove. And the stories of the future became nothing but nightmares.
But the dreamlike stories of the future told in the 1939 World's Fair exhibits and the nightmare stories told by RAND (and picked up by the movies) had a common weakness: they had no real people in them. They had no texture, no life, no human complications or decisions, no emotions, not even simple human logic. No soul.
The Hearts of the Incalculable
There are several basic problems with predictions, trend-analysis, alternative scenarios of the future. Predictably, H.G. Wells caught at least one of them almost immediately, when just a few years after he invented the science of studying the future, he repudiated it.
He announced it, fittingly enough, in the book that resulted from his first visit to North America. In an extraordinary reappraisal of his "Discovery of the Future" address, he withdrew his idea that there could be an exact "science" of the future.
"Much may be foretold as certain, much more as possible, but the last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the hearts and will of unique incalculable men," Wells wrote in 1908. "With them we have to deal as our ultimate reality in all these matters, and our methods have to be not 'scientific' at all for all the greater issues, the humanly-important issues, but critical, literary, even-if you will---artistic."
But of course! The future depends on human decisions that cannot be calculated, for they come from "the hearts and will of unique incalculable" men and women (and children.)
So how can anyone realistically talk about the future at all? Calculation, and that kind of knowledge---and the kind of story that results from it--- is part of it, but not the whole. The future is found not only with the story of science, but the literary, the artistic.
A truer story of the future would seem to be like a truer story of the past: one that has people in it, that looks at how people react to situations, that includes their passions---their hates and their loves, their fears and empathy, their selfishness and altruism, their weaknesses, and their thoughts about their weaknesses, what they learn or don't learn, and the behaviors that result.
To make a truer story requires more than calculation and applying theories, as powerful as they are. It requires applying fantasy and surmise, and using the inspiration and judgment of intuition and imagination. The best stories, which are often the truest stories on as many levels of life as possible, must have soul.
So how was Wells able to predict so many things about the future, in support of his initial theory that a science of the future was possible?
"Measured against what most scholars and experts were thinking in the early years of the century," Wells expert W. Warren Wagar writes, " Wells' uncannily accurate prophesies are a disturbing reminder to the specialized intelligence of the advantages of amateurism in social analysis. With no training and only random reading, he managed to outguess the professors."
It turns out that, whether he realized it or not, it was because he was a storyteller, a literary artist. His predictions, after all, were either in stories, or followed his most imaginative storytelling phase in the 1890s, during which he wrote nearly all the stories he is remembered for today.
But such stories aren't just a matter of really good characters, realistic and exciting action and good plots. There is a way of thinking and feeling that brings more of life together---all those elements that make up a future. Stories are synthesis, not analysis. Analysis commonly breaks things down into parts, or sees one element in relation to causes and effects. Synthesis combines, creates wholes, out of which meaning emerges. The synthesis of story is complex: it may mix factual reporting, inspired surmise, projections of emotion, and so on, in a synthesis that can be taken as a literal account, as metaphor, character study, as moral lesson or fable, as playful allegory, and so on--often several levels working simultaneously. Story thinking is synthetic thinking---and a great deal of the synthesis is in the mind and heart of each reader, where the reader's experiences and ideas evoked by the story are added to its synthesis.
Wells's markedly synthetic way of thinking," writes critic Roslynn D. Haynes, "imparted to his work an extraordinary unity and a philosophical dimension... ultimately, each entity is seen, at least implicitly, in relation to every other." It is this ability to apply both thoughtful analysis and evaluative intuition, to recognize patterns and recreate some outline of everyday complexity, that produced so many insightful predictions.
"The end of all intelligent analysis," Wells maintained, "is to clear the way for synthesis." One form that synthesis takes is story, combining fact and fantasy, numbers and individual decisions, logic and emotion, history and originality, literal and metaphorical meaning, and more.
It worked for Wells. And some 70 years later, it worked for Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek.
There are several basic problems with predictions, trend-analysis, alternative scenarios of the future. Predictably, H.G. Wells caught at least one of them almost immediately, when just a few years after he invented the science of studying the future, he repudiated it.
He announced it, fittingly enough, in the book that resulted from his first visit to North America. In an extraordinary reappraisal of his "Discovery of the Future" address, he withdrew his idea that there could be an exact "science" of the future.
"Much may be foretold as certain, much more as possible, but the last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the hearts and will of unique incalculable men," Wells wrote in 1908. "With them we have to deal as our ultimate reality in all these matters, and our methods have to be not 'scientific' at all for all the greater issues, the humanly-important issues, but critical, literary, even-if you will---artistic."
But of course! The future depends on human decisions that cannot be calculated, for they come from "the hearts and will of unique incalculable" men and women (and children.)
So how can anyone realistically talk about the future at all? Calculation, and that kind of knowledge---and the kind of story that results from it--- is part of it, but not the whole. The future is found not only with the story of science, but the literary, the artistic.
A truer story of the future would seem to be like a truer story of the past: one that has people in it, that looks at how people react to situations, that includes their passions---their hates and their loves, their fears and empathy, their selfishness and altruism, their weaknesses, and their thoughts about their weaknesses, what they learn or don't learn, and the behaviors that result.
To make a truer story requires more than calculation and applying theories, as powerful as they are. It requires applying fantasy and surmise, and using the inspiration and judgment of intuition and imagination. The best stories, which are often the truest stories on as many levels of life as possible, must have soul.
So how was Wells able to predict so many things about the future, in support of his initial theory that a science of the future was possible?
"Measured against what most scholars and experts were thinking in the early years of the century," Wells expert W. Warren Wagar writes, " Wells' uncannily accurate prophesies are a disturbing reminder to the specialized intelligence of the advantages of amateurism in social analysis. With no training and only random reading, he managed to outguess the professors."
It turns out that, whether he realized it or not, it was because he was a storyteller, a literary artist. His predictions, after all, were either in stories, or followed his most imaginative storytelling phase in the 1890s, during which he wrote nearly all the stories he is remembered for today.
But such stories aren't just a matter of really good characters, realistic and exciting action and good plots. There is a way of thinking and feeling that brings more of life together---all those elements that make up a future. Stories are synthesis, not analysis. Analysis commonly breaks things down into parts, or sees one element in relation to causes and effects. Synthesis combines, creates wholes, out of which meaning emerges. The synthesis of story is complex: it may mix factual reporting, inspired surmise, projections of emotion, and so on, in a synthesis that can be taken as a literal account, as metaphor, character study, as moral lesson or fable, as playful allegory, and so on--often several levels working simultaneously. Story thinking is synthetic thinking---and a great deal of the synthesis is in the mind and heart of each reader, where the reader's experiences and ideas evoked by the story are added to its synthesis.
Wells's markedly synthetic way of thinking," writes critic Roslynn D. Haynes, "imparted to his work an extraordinary unity and a philosophical dimension... ultimately, each entity is seen, at least implicitly, in relation to every other." It is this ability to apply both thoughtful analysis and evaluative intuition, to recognize patterns and recreate some outline of everyday complexity, that produced so many insightful predictions.
"The end of all intelligent analysis," Wells maintained, "is to clear the way for synthesis." One form that synthesis takes is story, combining fact and fantasy, numbers and individual decisions, logic and emotion, history and originality, literal and metaphorical meaning, and more.
It worked for Wells. And some 70 years later, it worked for Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek.
The Soul of Story
That way of creating synthesis of feeling and thinking that is essential to good storytelling, is also very close to how a number of contemporary writers define soul.
There are many ideas of soul. Basically, "soul" refers to what makes you alive: the breath of life. To many people it means what is essential, what determines who you are. Some cultures and religions believe in an immortal essence or soul. Some cultures believe each person has two or even three different kinds of souls. Some believe the soul is inside the body; others that our individual bodies are inside one great soul.
But there is a body of thought that sees the soul in terms of an active principle, a process, a perspective, rather than a thing. There are threads of this idea in Greek philosophy, early Christian thought, in Buddhism and other systems of belief and inquiry into the human condition.
This idea of soul---which is perhaps best known from Thomas Moore's best-selling books, like Care of the Soul, or James Hillman's The Soul's Code---doesn't exclude the others, but conceives of soul as a mediator, a balancer, even a harmonizer, between the head and the heart, between the physical and the spiritual, between "the doer and the deed."
Both the usual senses of soul and this contemporary sense of soul apply to Star Trek. But two elements of this second sense apply especially to Star Trek as story. First, this sense of soul stresses complexity, balance and synthesis. "Soul logic can be recognized by the fact that it synthesizes rather than analyzes," writes Robert Sardello, in Love and the Soul.
Second, the imagination is very important in doing the work of the soul. In fact, Carl Jung sometimes suggests the soul and the imagination are one. Again, this applies to envisioning the future through story.
"The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening one's own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination an illusion," writes Thomas Moore. "It is the other way around. Fact is an illusion, because every fact is part of a story and is riddled with imagination. Imagination is real because every perception of the world around us is absolutely colored by the narrative or image-filled lens through which we perceive. We are all poets and artists as we live our daily lives, whether or not we recognize this role and whether or not we believe it."
"As long as there is a sense of soul," Sardello also writes, "there is a sense of a future."
Story of the soulful kind is essential to the soul of Star Trek. It is because Star Trek tells stories in a saga, with particular characters over time and in various situations, in a well-conceived, evolving but basically self-consistent and plausible story universe, that it is able to create a memorable vision of the future, shared by so many.
It is that synthesis in the substance of story that sparks the imagination yet provides a basis for understanding. Fans at a Trek convention can share and disagree. They can argue interpretation and meaning, but they are basically talking about the same story universe, the same future. A convention of futurists has no such story in common, nor are the individual stories they tell as realistic---because they lack comprehensive imagination, and they lack soul. They aren't as realistic because they lack fantasy.
Yet, in another way, many futurist projections are total fantasy, because they aren't grounded in human behavior. They are about technological possibility, not how people use technology, or what the technology may mean in the whole of life. They lack the essentials of a good story.
There is much more to tell about the strengths of Star Trek storytelling: why the kind of story it tells is especially apt, and its type particularly powerful. How its first incarnation as a mid-60s television show, by intent and by accident, helped give it the qualities that enabled it to create a lasting vision of the future.
All that is for next time, in the episode entitled: Star Trek: A Mythology for the Future.
That way of creating synthesis of feeling and thinking that is essential to good storytelling, is also very close to how a number of contemporary writers define soul.
There are many ideas of soul. Basically, "soul" refers to what makes you alive: the breath of life. To many people it means what is essential, what determines who you are. Some cultures and religions believe in an immortal essence or soul. Some cultures believe each person has two or even three different kinds of souls. Some believe the soul is inside the body; others that our individual bodies are inside one great soul.
But there is a body of thought that sees the soul in terms of an active principle, a process, a perspective, rather than a thing. There are threads of this idea in Greek philosophy, early Christian thought, in Buddhism and other systems of belief and inquiry into the human condition.
This idea of soul---which is perhaps best known from Thomas Moore's best-selling books, like Care of the Soul, or James Hillman's The Soul's Code---doesn't exclude the others, but conceives of soul as a mediator, a balancer, even a harmonizer, between the head and the heart, between the physical and the spiritual, between "the doer and the deed."
Both the usual senses of soul and this contemporary sense of soul apply to Star Trek. But two elements of this second sense apply especially to Star Trek as story. First, this sense of soul stresses complexity, balance and synthesis. "Soul logic can be recognized by the fact that it synthesizes rather than analyzes," writes Robert Sardello, in Love and the Soul.
Second, the imagination is very important in doing the work of the soul. In fact, Carl Jung sometimes suggests the soul and the imagination are one. Again, this applies to envisioning the future through story.
"The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening one's own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination an illusion," writes Thomas Moore. "It is the other way around. Fact is an illusion, because every fact is part of a story and is riddled with imagination. Imagination is real because every perception of the world around us is absolutely colored by the narrative or image-filled lens through which we perceive. We are all poets and artists as we live our daily lives, whether or not we recognize this role and whether or not we believe it."
"As long as there is a sense of soul," Sardello also writes, "there is a sense of a future."
Story of the soulful kind is essential to the soul of Star Trek. It is because Star Trek tells stories in a saga, with particular characters over time and in various situations, in a well-conceived, evolving but basically self-consistent and plausible story universe, that it is able to create a memorable vision of the future, shared by so many.
It is that synthesis in the substance of story that sparks the imagination yet provides a basis for understanding. Fans at a Trek convention can share and disagree. They can argue interpretation and meaning, but they are basically talking about the same story universe, the same future. A convention of futurists has no such story in common, nor are the individual stories they tell as realistic---because they lack comprehensive imagination, and they lack soul. They aren't as realistic because they lack fantasy.
Yet, in another way, many futurist projections are total fantasy, because they aren't grounded in human behavior. They are about technological possibility, not how people use technology, or what the technology may mean in the whole of life. They lack the essentials of a good story.
There is much more to tell about the strengths of Star Trek storytelling: why the kind of story it tells is especially apt, and its type particularly powerful. How its first incarnation as a mid-60s television show, by intent and by accident, helped give it the qualities that enabled it to create a lasting vision of the future.
All that is for next time, in the episode entitled: Star Trek: A Mythology for the Future.
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