past and future hero of a present mythology of the future: James Doohan as Scotty.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Star Trek: A Mythology of the Future
by William S. Kowinski
“We’re here to remember one of the heroes of the Scottish culture,” begins Black, festooned in a red Enterprise uniform T-shirt and speaking in a Glaswegian burr, as he takes the microphone. “Cmdr. Montgomery Scott—Scotty.”
A ripple of laughter washes through the audience at the pub. Black pauses in mock ignorance.
“Why are you all laughing?” he ask mischievously.”
“Pub Pays Tribute to a True Scot—Canadian James Doohan”
by Jane Ganahl, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug 23, 2005.
Most myths are set in the past, implying that the age of heroes and defining deeds is in the remote long ago. This is especially appropriate for certain kinds of myths, such as explanations of how the world or a people came to be; the foundation stories of a culture.
But in the modern era, a belief in progress through time made myths of the future possible. There is also the sense of a challenging future shaped by changes we can’t really foresee. This is especially true about the far future and the “final frontier” of outer space, which adds the dimension of territory unknown to us, and probably filled with immense yet not completely defined dangers, as the great oceans and the lands beyond them were in the past of many cultures on earth.
The future, and outer space in particular, create conditions that encourage new mythologies---that may even call for a mythology of the future, to give us some framework for conceiving how humanity can see itself in this future.
Still, when such a mythology exists in the present, it can cause some confusion and, let’s say, temporal anomalies. When a contemporary man named James Doohan died, something of a hero in his own right as a severely wounded veteran of D-Day, the character he is best known for playing is suddenly the center of a controversy: where in Scotland will Montgomery Scott be born in several hundred years? Three cities want to claim him now, and erect a plaque in his honor. According to the SF Chronicle’s Jane Ganahl, it’s led to “quite the tempest” in Scotland’s press.
But this temporal oddity only emphasizes an important feature of mythology: whether the heroes and events described in the myth are said to be in the past or in the future, the mythology is very definitely in the now. It is the effect on the present that makes myth important.
This is especially relevant to America, where Star Trek itself was born. Native American cultures have many stories of their past. But as a nation, America has few. Because our age is characterized by looking ahead, and because the future has always been essential to the American identity, our culture is also defined by myths of the future. It may well be that our foundation mythology is the mythology of the future.
But just because the future and outer space furnish the occasion for myth, and our culture has the need, doesn’t mean such myth will emerge. If the Star Trek saga is that mythology of the future---and no other story or set of stories has a better claim---it is only because of all the things it did right. Many of these elements were carefully thought through, some the product of apparent accident, some of a special time, some of artistic responses to the times and to the exigencies of form and business, some to inspiration, talent, intelligence and soul, and much which can be essentially attributed to love.
text continues after photos
by William S. Kowinski
“We’re here to remember one of the heroes of the Scottish culture,” begins Black, festooned in a red Enterprise uniform T-shirt and speaking in a Glaswegian burr, as he takes the microphone. “Cmdr. Montgomery Scott—Scotty.”
A ripple of laughter washes through the audience at the pub. Black pauses in mock ignorance.
“Why are you all laughing?” he ask mischievously.”
“Pub Pays Tribute to a True Scot—Canadian James Doohan”
by Jane Ganahl, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug 23, 2005.
Most myths are set in the past, implying that the age of heroes and defining deeds is in the remote long ago. This is especially appropriate for certain kinds of myths, such as explanations of how the world or a people came to be; the foundation stories of a culture.
But in the modern era, a belief in progress through time made myths of the future possible. There is also the sense of a challenging future shaped by changes we can’t really foresee. This is especially true about the far future and the “final frontier” of outer space, which adds the dimension of territory unknown to us, and probably filled with immense yet not completely defined dangers, as the great oceans and the lands beyond them were in the past of many cultures on earth.
The future, and outer space in particular, create conditions that encourage new mythologies---that may even call for a mythology of the future, to give us some framework for conceiving how humanity can see itself in this future.
Still, when such a mythology exists in the present, it can cause some confusion and, let’s say, temporal anomalies. When a contemporary man named James Doohan died, something of a hero in his own right as a severely wounded veteran of D-Day, the character he is best known for playing is suddenly the center of a controversy: where in Scotland will Montgomery Scott be born in several hundred years? Three cities want to claim him now, and erect a plaque in his honor. According to the SF Chronicle’s Jane Ganahl, it’s led to “quite the tempest” in Scotland’s press.
But this temporal oddity only emphasizes an important feature of mythology: whether the heroes and events described in the myth are said to be in the past or in the future, the mythology is very definitely in the now. It is the effect on the present that makes myth important.
This is especially relevant to America, where Star Trek itself was born. Native American cultures have many stories of their past. But as a nation, America has few. Because our age is characterized by looking ahead, and because the future has always been essential to the American identity, our culture is also defined by myths of the future. It may well be that our foundation mythology is the mythology of the future.
But just because the future and outer space furnish the occasion for myth, and our culture has the need, doesn’t mean such myth will emerge. If the Star Trek saga is that mythology of the future---and no other story or set of stories has a better claim---it is only because of all the things it did right. Many of these elements were carefully thought through, some the product of apparent accident, some of a special time, some of artistic responses to the times and to the exigencies of form and business, some to inspiration, talent, intelligence and soul, and much which can be essentially attributed to love.
text continues after photos
What’s Mything in the Present?
What can mythology mean when it’s applied to the future? It depends on what mythologies represent in the present.
Some believe myths are to cultures what dreams are to individuals. The literary critic Northrup Frye says this explicitly: “Ordinary life forms a community, and literature is among other things an art of communication, so it forms a community, too,” he writes in "The Educated Imagination." “In ordinary life we fall into a private and separate subconscious every night, where we reshape the world according to a private and separate imagination. Underneath literature there’s another kind of subconscious, which is social and not private, a need for forming a community around certain symbols….This is the myth-making power of the human mind, which throws up and dissolves one civilization after another.”
But if myth is a reflection, an artistic retelling of a culture’s dreams, it later functions as a kind of guide. We emulate heroes of our myths. There’s a fine example of how this works in a Star Trek novel, “Gulliver’s Fugitives” by Keith Sharee. On a world where products of the imagination are illegal because stories are not factual, a rebel group of readers and storytellers hides in caverns below the surface. But these people do more than read and memorize the old texts to preserve them, as in Ray Bradbury’s classic story, “Fahrenheit 451.” Each becomes a character, a mythic hero. Their leader is Odysseus. He takes on the characteristics of the Greek hero, and Counsellor Troi spots him going through rituals to reinforce his identity as Odysseus, though he was a minor government functionary in his previous life. (It’s title also refers to one of the mythological frameworks consciously used in Star Trek, Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” But more about that later.)
For it isn’t just Star Trek fans who emulate their heroes, who even don their costumes and speak their words. This in one way or another is how myth works in many cultures. Nor are the Star Trek fan fictions something new under the sun; ordinary Greeks told each other stories about Odysseus that Homer never wrote.
That's really what all the attention to "franchises" is eventually about, and the expectations of merchandizing and business synergy: the hope that the core story takes on a life of its own as a living mythology. As creator of "The Simpsons" and "Futurama" Matt Groening observed in an interview, "Audiences expand the mythologies of a creator's world." His first example is Star Trek.
Broadly speaking, myths are stories that help people find meaning in their day-to-day lives. It may be the arc of the story—some people believe a governing American myth is what’s called the Horatio Alger story: “Strive and Succeed.” (The H.A. stories themselves are more complicated, and more like mythic stories and fairy tales; the hero often succeeds by a fortunate encounter, with the help of a mentor, a king or a Merlin of big business.) Or it may be a figure in the story we recognize, that defines our view or relationship with, for instance, the Mother or Father, and gives a resonance, a depth it didn’t seem to have. It may simply validate what we felt but didn’t realize.
But the most familiar response is emulating the hero. It doesn’t have to be the singular or main hero, either. Lots of mythic tales are about groups of heroes, each with a special skill. There are a lot of mythic tales in various cultures that are their versions of the Fantastic Four or the crew of the Enterprise.
Mythic heroes inspire people to emulate their qualities or some aspect of their behavior in their own lives. Someone doesn’t have to dress up as Odysseus or Athena (or even in the soldier's uniform) to emulate bravery, and they don’t have to go to war or the hunt in order to be brave in their lives. Just as it’s not necessary to wear Vulcan ears to examine whether words match actions, and consequences match intentions “logically,” or to honor diversity. And no one has to wait for 24th century medicine or society to learn from watching Dr. Beverly Crusher how a woman might handle being a professional, even a doctor, while being a mother on her own.
Myth provides us with archetypal characters we can use to define ourselves as our age and roles change. You can start by identifying with Harry Potter or Herminie Granger, and later identify with Dumbledore. In Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry personified aspects of himself and the idealized self in Kirk, Spock and Bones. Later he more consciously reflected on his feelings and aspiration as a boy with Wesley Crusher, and his older self in Captain Picard, a combination Hero and Wise Old Man.
In the blizzard and excessive speed of everyday life, beset by time and emotional demands, in a culture that offers only suspicious guidance, we need to find our heroes. "One must think like a hero,” wrote May Sarton, “to behave like a merely decent human being."
What can mythology mean when it’s applied to the future? It depends on what mythologies represent in the present.
Some believe myths are to cultures what dreams are to individuals. The literary critic Northrup Frye says this explicitly: “Ordinary life forms a community, and literature is among other things an art of communication, so it forms a community, too,” he writes in "The Educated Imagination." “In ordinary life we fall into a private and separate subconscious every night, where we reshape the world according to a private and separate imagination. Underneath literature there’s another kind of subconscious, which is social and not private, a need for forming a community around certain symbols….This is the myth-making power of the human mind, which throws up and dissolves one civilization after another.”
But if myth is a reflection, an artistic retelling of a culture’s dreams, it later functions as a kind of guide. We emulate heroes of our myths. There’s a fine example of how this works in a Star Trek novel, “Gulliver’s Fugitives” by Keith Sharee. On a world where products of the imagination are illegal because stories are not factual, a rebel group of readers and storytellers hides in caverns below the surface. But these people do more than read and memorize the old texts to preserve them, as in Ray Bradbury’s classic story, “Fahrenheit 451.” Each becomes a character, a mythic hero. Their leader is Odysseus. He takes on the characteristics of the Greek hero, and Counsellor Troi spots him going through rituals to reinforce his identity as Odysseus, though he was a minor government functionary in his previous life. (It’s title also refers to one of the mythological frameworks consciously used in Star Trek, Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” But more about that later.)
For it isn’t just Star Trek fans who emulate their heroes, who even don their costumes and speak their words. This in one way or another is how myth works in many cultures. Nor are the Star Trek fan fictions something new under the sun; ordinary Greeks told each other stories about Odysseus that Homer never wrote.
That's really what all the attention to "franchises" is eventually about, and the expectations of merchandizing and business synergy: the hope that the core story takes on a life of its own as a living mythology. As creator of "The Simpsons" and "Futurama" Matt Groening observed in an interview, "Audiences expand the mythologies of a creator's world." His first example is Star Trek.
Broadly speaking, myths are stories that help people find meaning in their day-to-day lives. It may be the arc of the story—some people believe a governing American myth is what’s called the Horatio Alger story: “Strive and Succeed.” (The H.A. stories themselves are more complicated, and more like mythic stories and fairy tales; the hero often succeeds by a fortunate encounter, with the help of a mentor, a king or a Merlin of big business.) Or it may be a figure in the story we recognize, that defines our view or relationship with, for instance, the Mother or Father, and gives a resonance, a depth it didn’t seem to have. It may simply validate what we felt but didn’t realize.
But the most familiar response is emulating the hero. It doesn’t have to be the singular or main hero, either. Lots of mythic tales are about groups of heroes, each with a special skill. There are a lot of mythic tales in various cultures that are their versions of the Fantastic Four or the crew of the Enterprise.
Mythic heroes inspire people to emulate their qualities or some aspect of their behavior in their own lives. Someone doesn’t have to dress up as Odysseus or Athena (or even in the soldier's uniform) to emulate bravery, and they don’t have to go to war or the hunt in order to be brave in their lives. Just as it’s not necessary to wear Vulcan ears to examine whether words match actions, and consequences match intentions “logically,” or to honor diversity. And no one has to wait for 24th century medicine or society to learn from watching Dr. Beverly Crusher how a woman might handle being a professional, even a doctor, while being a mother on her own.
Myth provides us with archetypal characters we can use to define ourselves as our age and roles change. You can start by identifying with Harry Potter or Herminie Granger, and later identify with Dumbledore. In Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry personified aspects of himself and the idealized self in Kirk, Spock and Bones. Later he more consciously reflected on his feelings and aspiration as a boy with Wesley Crusher, and his older self in Captain Picard, a combination Hero and Wise Old Man.
In the blizzard and excessive speed of everyday life, beset by time and emotional demands, in a culture that offers only suspicious guidance, we need to find our heroes. "One must think like a hero,” wrote May Sarton, “to behave like a merely decent human being."
Star Trek As Myth of Change
Myth often expresses or supports the values of a culture. That’s somewhat true of Star Trek, but as a mythology of the future, Star Trek has a very striking feature that no Star Trek in our future should neglect: it is not afraid to offer an alternative to values and resulting behaviors that predominate in the present.
For example, Star Trek challenges our culture’s assumptions about the defining role of money. It’s become almost a truism that the most vibrant myth-making in America and perhaps the western world comes from popular culture: not just the comic book superheroes, Disney revisions of old tales, or even the temporary heroes of the TV show or movie that seems to capture the spirit of the moment. The writer Ken Kesey claimed that the mythic hero of America was Superman.
But our mythology is also at least as powerfully represented in television commercials as in the programs. One of the myths of our culture is that money and consumption are the key to happiness. Star Trek provides an important alternative to this, as we’ll explore in more detail in a later installment.
But the primary alternative vision Star Trek makes into a mythology is the nature of the future itself. Star Trek presents a view of the future that opposes the apocalyptic visions that were prevalent when it began, and may still be. I’ve used part of the following quote before, but to me it’s a perfect summing up of that aspect of Star Trek’s approach.
Mike Malotte, Commander of Starfleet (or president of the International Star Trek Fan Association), was on the phone to me last summer describing the kind of visions of the future that prevailed before Star Trek. They were “about people who weren’t on earth because they were either escaping it, it was so overpopulated and polluted that people couldn’t live on it, or it was a charred cinder because we’d screwed ourselves over. Gene’s Star Trek was really the first science fiction show of its time that showed a future where, hey! We actually learn from our mistakes, and we bettered ourselves, and we banded together and we headed out for the stars.”
We would expect our myths of the future to express difference, because in our society we expect change. But most projections into the future foresee change only in technology, and not in how it might be used differently. To see humans changing themselves, and being changed by the encounter with the immensity of space and a diversity of other intelligent beings, is a rare, valuable and essential aspect of the Star Trek mythology. There will be more precise speculations about how this was accomplished in future installments.
Myths live also because they are good stories: people want to hear them, they want to know what happens next. And there’s one kind of mythic story that our age responds to best.
Myth often expresses or supports the values of a culture. That’s somewhat true of Star Trek, but as a mythology of the future, Star Trek has a very striking feature that no Star Trek in our future should neglect: it is not afraid to offer an alternative to values and resulting behaviors that predominate in the present.
For example, Star Trek challenges our culture’s assumptions about the defining role of money. It’s become almost a truism that the most vibrant myth-making in America and perhaps the western world comes from popular culture: not just the comic book superheroes, Disney revisions of old tales, or even the temporary heroes of the TV show or movie that seems to capture the spirit of the moment. The writer Ken Kesey claimed that the mythic hero of America was Superman.
But our mythology is also at least as powerfully represented in television commercials as in the programs. One of the myths of our culture is that money and consumption are the key to happiness. Star Trek provides an important alternative to this, as we’ll explore in more detail in a later installment.
But the primary alternative vision Star Trek makes into a mythology is the nature of the future itself. Star Trek presents a view of the future that opposes the apocalyptic visions that were prevalent when it began, and may still be. I’ve used part of the following quote before, but to me it’s a perfect summing up of that aspect of Star Trek’s approach.
Mike Malotte, Commander of Starfleet (or president of the International Star Trek Fan Association), was on the phone to me last summer describing the kind of visions of the future that prevailed before Star Trek. They were “about people who weren’t on earth because they were either escaping it, it was so overpopulated and polluted that people couldn’t live on it, or it was a charred cinder because we’d screwed ourselves over. Gene’s Star Trek was really the first science fiction show of its time that showed a future where, hey! We actually learn from our mistakes, and we bettered ourselves, and we banded together and we headed out for the stars.”
We would expect our myths of the future to express difference, because in our society we expect change. But most projections into the future foresee change only in technology, and not in how it might be used differently. To see humans changing themselves, and being changed by the encounter with the immensity of space and a diversity of other intelligent beings, is a rare, valuable and essential aspect of the Star Trek mythology. There will be more precise speculations about how this was accomplished in future installments.
Myths live also because they are good stories: people want to hear them, they want to know what happens next. And there’s one kind of mythic story that our age responds to best.
Whatever Comes
Missing from most discussions, scenarios, studies, predictions and even most stories concerning the future is one essential ingredient: adventure.
The word derives from the Latin, ad venio: whatever comes. Whatever the future is, it’s coming, and going out to meet it in a spirit of adventure is very human, and very attractive.
“The oldest, most widespread stories in the world are adventure stories,” writes Paul Zweig, beginning his book The Adventurer, “about human heroes who venture into the myth-countries at the risk of their lives, and bring back tales of the world beyond men.”
Right away, the adventure story recognizes a world beyond the ordinary human world, whether it is the world of nature or a supernatural world---and in many stories, it’s both at the same time.
“Our modern disregard for adventure reveals how thoroughly domesticated is the view we have come to take of our human and cultural limits,” Zweig comments a little later. “Man, we have decided, is the laboring animal whose ability to create value depends upon his infinite capacity to buy and to sell: his time, his work, his very life.”
Part of this view, Zweig says, is to consume adventure stories as nothing more than unimportant entertainment. But the soul seeks adventure, and adventure nourishes the soul.
When adventures become personally and culturally important, when the imagination goes on that journey, they become mythic. Such adventures take us out of the ordinary, even if they are inner explorations. In terms of the future, outer space is the vast unknown that symbolizes future possibility, but it is fascinating in itself: full of untold wonders.
Adventures of the past took heroes into magical forests, across oceans to strange islands, through jungles to hidden cities, atop mountains where monsters lived, and into the underworld. Where else on earth is there to go?
“We’ve now conquered the planet so there are no empty spaces for imagination to go forth,” Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers. “One of the wonderful things I think about the adventure into space is that the narrator, the artist, the one thinking up the story, is in a field that is not covered by our own knowledge. Much of the adventure in the old stories is where they go into regions that no one’s been in before.”
Campbell, who shaped many of our current ideas about myth, may have been something of a story consultant for George Lucas and Star Wars. But when he talks about the adventure in outer space, he echoes Star Trek.
This is appropriate. Star Wars is a kind of illustrated monomyth (Campbell’s description of what hero myths of many cultures have in common). The Star Wars saga is terrific and resonant storytelling with moral application to our world and even to our future, but it does not claim to be about the human future.
While many other adventures, before and since, have used outer space as their landscape, they have not really explored that other “undiscovered country---the future.” They often place contemporary figures in space, which in the best of these stories also has resonance, meaning and application to the present, and encourages viewers to identify with the characters. They have aspects of myth. But they are not mythologies of the future.
Missing from most discussions, scenarios, studies, predictions and even most stories concerning the future is one essential ingredient: adventure.
The word derives from the Latin, ad venio: whatever comes. Whatever the future is, it’s coming, and going out to meet it in a spirit of adventure is very human, and very attractive.
“The oldest, most widespread stories in the world are adventure stories,” writes Paul Zweig, beginning his book The Adventurer, “about human heroes who venture into the myth-countries at the risk of their lives, and bring back tales of the world beyond men.”
Right away, the adventure story recognizes a world beyond the ordinary human world, whether it is the world of nature or a supernatural world---and in many stories, it’s both at the same time.
“Our modern disregard for adventure reveals how thoroughly domesticated is the view we have come to take of our human and cultural limits,” Zweig comments a little later. “Man, we have decided, is the laboring animal whose ability to create value depends upon his infinite capacity to buy and to sell: his time, his work, his very life.”
Part of this view, Zweig says, is to consume adventure stories as nothing more than unimportant entertainment. But the soul seeks adventure, and adventure nourishes the soul.
When adventures become personally and culturally important, when the imagination goes on that journey, they become mythic. Such adventures take us out of the ordinary, even if they are inner explorations. In terms of the future, outer space is the vast unknown that symbolizes future possibility, but it is fascinating in itself: full of untold wonders.
Adventures of the past took heroes into magical forests, across oceans to strange islands, through jungles to hidden cities, atop mountains where monsters lived, and into the underworld. Where else on earth is there to go?
“We’ve now conquered the planet so there are no empty spaces for imagination to go forth,” Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers. “One of the wonderful things I think about the adventure into space is that the narrator, the artist, the one thinking up the story, is in a field that is not covered by our own knowledge. Much of the adventure in the old stories is where they go into regions that no one’s been in before.”
Campbell, who shaped many of our current ideas about myth, may have been something of a story consultant for George Lucas and Star Wars. But when he talks about the adventure in outer space, he echoes Star Trek.
This is appropriate. Star Wars is a kind of illustrated monomyth (Campbell’s description of what hero myths of many cultures have in common). The Star Wars saga is terrific and resonant storytelling with moral application to our world and even to our future, but it does not claim to be about the human future.
While many other adventures, before and since, have used outer space as their landscape, they have not really explored that other “undiscovered country---the future.” They often place contemporary figures in space, which in the best of these stories also has resonance, meaning and application to the present, and encourages viewers to identify with the characters. They have aspects of myth. But they are not mythologies of the future.
Deep Impact
In the recent past, the word “myth” was used to denote a story that isn’t true, usually an “unscientific” superstition. But when Picasso said that “art is a lie that tells the truth,” he describes the mysterious power of imagination and story. Fiction and myth tell many truths on many levels. (And it’s now become fairly fashionable to point out instances where old stories or myths, like many American Indian stories, apparently describe actual historical events, like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but in metaphorical language.)
Myth uses the language of symbol and what Carl Jung called “archetypal,” or relating to deep forms in the psyche. We respond to archetypal images instinctively—“They impress, influence, and fascinate us,” Jung writes. Archetypes ”can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time.”
When a particular mythology is truly alive in a culture, those symbols and archetypes are felt, not necessarily noticed. And even the storytellers are only partly aware of them. The unconscious may be less than conscious, yet provides us with intuitions and insights and information that usually escape consciousness. That’s where myth operates.
Yet myths are primarily stories, set in a particular time and place, with an audience usually of a particular culture. Those first audiences understand the nuances and details that often are lost on later audiences, or on people in different cultures. The stories we’re told in school are great myths may seem confusing, even nonsensical (so the way “myth” is used to mean something fantastically untrue). When there’s little to relate to, they even seem boring. We can’t figure out why they’re supposed to be so great.
But to understand how those first audiences responded to these stories, you only have to listen to fans talk about Star Trek. They know the meaning of the smallest references, the history of the characters and their relationships, what the technologies do and don’t do, and so on. The Star Trek universe is alive to them, just as the mythic worlds were alive to their first audiences.
The experience of early audiences to old myths was probably even richer, especially in traditional cultures that changed slowly, for their lives and ways likely weren’t very different from those in the story. They also probably understood the symbols and the meaning of behavior better, because those symbols and those clues to behavior were still alive.
Mythical stories are full of wonders, rich characters and breathtaking plots. Within them is comedy, tragedy, romantic love, melancholy, hilarity, villainy and nobility, earthy events, and mystery and magic.
They are about the great mysteries of life and death, the questions of will and freedom and fate in the lives of gods and humans, and the roles and stations in life in a given society. They may speak a rich language of suggestion, allusion, symbol, metaphor and ambiguity.
They can be about creation, destruction, the human virtues and, quite often, human weaknesses that lead to sorry ends. Through their explorations, both outer and inner, they are eventually about what it means to be human. This is another identifying feature of Star Trek. It seemed to be Gene Roddenberry’s chief obsession, and his insistence on specifically exploring this question in the early episodes of Star Trek and The Next Generation, set the template for the whole Star Trek saga.
It’s no wonder that Star Trek fascinates those who study mythology, as literature and as psychology. Myths speak to the soul about the soul, and about the soul of the world.
In the recent past, the word “myth” was used to denote a story that isn’t true, usually an “unscientific” superstition. But when Picasso said that “art is a lie that tells the truth,” he describes the mysterious power of imagination and story. Fiction and myth tell many truths on many levels. (And it’s now become fairly fashionable to point out instances where old stories or myths, like many American Indian stories, apparently describe actual historical events, like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but in metaphorical language.)
Myth uses the language of symbol and what Carl Jung called “archetypal,” or relating to deep forms in the psyche. We respond to archetypal images instinctively—“They impress, influence, and fascinate us,” Jung writes. Archetypes ”can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time.”
When a particular mythology is truly alive in a culture, those symbols and archetypes are felt, not necessarily noticed. And even the storytellers are only partly aware of them. The unconscious may be less than conscious, yet provides us with intuitions and insights and information that usually escape consciousness. That’s where myth operates.
Yet myths are primarily stories, set in a particular time and place, with an audience usually of a particular culture. Those first audiences understand the nuances and details that often are lost on later audiences, or on people in different cultures. The stories we’re told in school are great myths may seem confusing, even nonsensical (so the way “myth” is used to mean something fantastically untrue). When there’s little to relate to, they even seem boring. We can’t figure out why they’re supposed to be so great.
But to understand how those first audiences responded to these stories, you only have to listen to fans talk about Star Trek. They know the meaning of the smallest references, the history of the characters and their relationships, what the technologies do and don’t do, and so on. The Star Trek universe is alive to them, just as the mythic worlds were alive to their first audiences.
The experience of early audiences to old myths was probably even richer, especially in traditional cultures that changed slowly, for their lives and ways likely weren’t very different from those in the story. They also probably understood the symbols and the meaning of behavior better, because those symbols and those clues to behavior were still alive.
Mythical stories are full of wonders, rich characters and breathtaking plots. Within them is comedy, tragedy, romantic love, melancholy, hilarity, villainy and nobility, earthy events, and mystery and magic.
They are about the great mysteries of life and death, the questions of will and freedom and fate in the lives of gods and humans, and the roles and stations in life in a given society. They may speak a rich language of suggestion, allusion, symbol, metaphor and ambiguity.
They can be about creation, destruction, the human virtues and, quite often, human weaknesses that lead to sorry ends. Through their explorations, both outer and inner, they are eventually about what it means to be human. This is another identifying feature of Star Trek. It seemed to be Gene Roddenberry’s chief obsession, and his insistence on specifically exploring this question in the early episodes of Star Trek and The Next Generation, set the template for the whole Star Trek saga.
It’s no wonder that Star Trek fascinates those who study mythology, as literature and as psychology. Myths speak to the soul about the soul, and about the soul of the world.
Where the Star Trek Myth Begins
It’s unlikely that Gene Roddenberry and the other creators of Star Trek set out to create a mythology. But they were people who wanted to say something, who wanted to live in the universe of stories, and given the requirements of our culture, who needed to make a living.
The Star Trek mythology has its own creation myth. As Gene Roddenberry told it, by early 1964 he was frustrated because the television networks wouldn’t let him openly write about contemporary issues for television series drama, specifically the series he created and produced, “The Lieutenant,” which was set in the present.
But what if he could do it through disguise? “I recalled that when Jonathan Swift was writing Gulliver’s Travels, he wanted to write satire on his time,” Roddenberry said later. By setting his adventure in Lilliput, “he could talk about insane prime ministers and crooked kings, and all of that…Children could read it as a fairy tale, an adventure, and as they got older they’d recognize it for what it really is. It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects, happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by. And it did.”
This feature of Star Trek’s storytelling---the allegorical or metaphorical dimension—became a major part of its identity. Many years later, Roddenberry described his realization that he could do what Swift had done as a kind of religious experience.
There were many mythologies and stories that influenced the Star Trek saga. But Gulliver’s Travels was an important one in many ways. According to Desilu executive Herb Solow, he and Roddenberry worried about how to get TV viewers to believe in the reality of this strange new universe of the future. In addition to their many efforts to create and show a plausible future, Solow suggested a narrative tactic he remembered from “Gulliver’s Travels.” These experiences among fantastic societies no one had ever seen were described matter-of-factly with the vocabulary of a traveler’s report. Because Gulliver talked about them as if they had already happened, it suggested to readers that they should accept these events as having happened. Solow advised they use this approach for Star Trek. Even though the events were to take place in a future inaccessible to the viewer, they could be presented as stories or reports related by a narrator who had already experienced them. This became the subtle tactic of the “Captain’s Log” that began episodes, and also provided useful for exposition and reminding viewers what they’d seen before the commercials.
But according to Solow, he and Roddenberry talked about Swift’s book so much that for a brief moment, they were going to call this new series, “Gulliver’s Travels.” But Swift didn’t invent this kind of story, where there is a second meaning or application beyond the literal events of the tale. Allegory has a rich literary history. In medieval Europe, it was consciously used to synthesize the classical tales of Greece and Rome with Christianity, and to show connections between the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.
Allegory was used in 5th century works like “Psychomachia” (meaning “Soul War”), in which the characters were personified qualities, the virtues of Hope, Chastity and Humility in battle against the vices of Pride, Wrath and Avarice. The moral dimensions beneath the literal remains a feature of many allegories, though the literal story is likely to be told through recognizable and individual characters.
In Star Trek, allegory is most obvious in the original series, when the crew encounters beings on “the planet of the week” that create moral dilemmas or reveal aspects of humanity in contrast to the beings and situations the Enterprise encounters. Sometimes the allegory’s application to contemporary issues is overt, as in the famous episode on racial prejudice, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” with Frank Gorshin as an alien whose face is half white and half black, out to kill his counterpart who he marks as evil because his face displays these colors on opposite sides. When these stories work, they are exceptionally powerful.
But most of the best Star Trek stories have an allegorical aspect, even in later series when the accumulated Star Trek universe itself became the ground of their reality. Various interpretations and applications of these “meanings” are often what Star Trek fans discuss, and argue about passionately. They, too, are essential to Star Trek’s nature, and its soul.
But allegory is not just a separate technique or a historically defined kind of story. Allegory, as C.S. Lewis noted, “belongs not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind. It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms.” Neuroscientist and literature professor Mark Turner believes that the kind of thinking exemplified by allegory, which he calls “conceptual blending,” is basic to human thought and language.
Modern allegory has less of a one-to-one correspondence, a single image or character with a single meaning, as the 5th century allegories did. But it is another aspect that allows the reader or viewer to participate in the myth, by seizing an underlying meaning or application to contemporary concerns, and by identifying with the characters and situations, however alien they are on the surface.
Roddenberry expressed his delight that network censors didn’t see this aspect of Star Trek---but from the beginning, its fans did.
GR and associates set out to create a saga of adventure stories, and allegories within them. GR in particular was consciously trying to create a plausible but alternative vision of the future. But their first task was to successfully do this according to the story genre they were using, which was science fiction, and the story-telling form: the television drama series.
Intention is one thing, execution is another. How did they get all this to work? More on that story---on Star Trek as drama, television and science fiction---next time.
It’s unlikely that Gene Roddenberry and the other creators of Star Trek set out to create a mythology. But they were people who wanted to say something, who wanted to live in the universe of stories, and given the requirements of our culture, who needed to make a living.
The Star Trek mythology has its own creation myth. As Gene Roddenberry told it, by early 1964 he was frustrated because the television networks wouldn’t let him openly write about contemporary issues for television series drama, specifically the series he created and produced, “The Lieutenant,” which was set in the present.
But what if he could do it through disguise? “I recalled that when Jonathan Swift was writing Gulliver’s Travels, he wanted to write satire on his time,” Roddenberry said later. By setting his adventure in Lilliput, “he could talk about insane prime ministers and crooked kings, and all of that…Children could read it as a fairy tale, an adventure, and as they got older they’d recognize it for what it really is. It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects, happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by. And it did.”
This feature of Star Trek’s storytelling---the allegorical or metaphorical dimension—became a major part of its identity. Many years later, Roddenberry described his realization that he could do what Swift had done as a kind of religious experience.
There were many mythologies and stories that influenced the Star Trek saga. But Gulliver’s Travels was an important one in many ways. According to Desilu executive Herb Solow, he and Roddenberry worried about how to get TV viewers to believe in the reality of this strange new universe of the future. In addition to their many efforts to create and show a plausible future, Solow suggested a narrative tactic he remembered from “Gulliver’s Travels.” These experiences among fantastic societies no one had ever seen were described matter-of-factly with the vocabulary of a traveler’s report. Because Gulliver talked about them as if they had already happened, it suggested to readers that they should accept these events as having happened. Solow advised they use this approach for Star Trek. Even though the events were to take place in a future inaccessible to the viewer, they could be presented as stories or reports related by a narrator who had already experienced them. This became the subtle tactic of the “Captain’s Log” that began episodes, and also provided useful for exposition and reminding viewers what they’d seen before the commercials.
But according to Solow, he and Roddenberry talked about Swift’s book so much that for a brief moment, they were going to call this new series, “Gulliver’s Travels.” But Swift didn’t invent this kind of story, where there is a second meaning or application beyond the literal events of the tale. Allegory has a rich literary history. In medieval Europe, it was consciously used to synthesize the classical tales of Greece and Rome with Christianity, and to show connections between the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.
Allegory was used in 5th century works like “Psychomachia” (meaning “Soul War”), in which the characters were personified qualities, the virtues of Hope, Chastity and Humility in battle against the vices of Pride, Wrath and Avarice. The moral dimensions beneath the literal remains a feature of many allegories, though the literal story is likely to be told through recognizable and individual characters.
In Star Trek, allegory is most obvious in the original series, when the crew encounters beings on “the planet of the week” that create moral dilemmas or reveal aspects of humanity in contrast to the beings and situations the Enterprise encounters. Sometimes the allegory’s application to contemporary issues is overt, as in the famous episode on racial prejudice, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” with Frank Gorshin as an alien whose face is half white and half black, out to kill his counterpart who he marks as evil because his face displays these colors on opposite sides. When these stories work, they are exceptionally powerful.
But most of the best Star Trek stories have an allegorical aspect, even in later series when the accumulated Star Trek universe itself became the ground of their reality. Various interpretations and applications of these “meanings” are often what Star Trek fans discuss, and argue about passionately. They, too, are essential to Star Trek’s nature, and its soul.
But allegory is not just a separate technique or a historically defined kind of story. Allegory, as C.S. Lewis noted, “belongs not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind. It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms.” Neuroscientist and literature professor Mark Turner believes that the kind of thinking exemplified by allegory, which he calls “conceptual blending,” is basic to human thought and language.
Modern allegory has less of a one-to-one correspondence, a single image or character with a single meaning, as the 5th century allegories did. But it is another aspect that allows the reader or viewer to participate in the myth, by seizing an underlying meaning or application to contemporary concerns, and by identifying with the characters and situations, however alien they are on the surface.
Roddenberry expressed his delight that network censors didn’t see this aspect of Star Trek---but from the beginning, its fans did.
GR and associates set out to create a saga of adventure stories, and allegories within them. GR in particular was consciously trying to create a plausible but alternative vision of the future. But their first task was to successfully do this according to the story genre they were using, which was science fiction, and the story-telling form: the television drama series.
Intention is one thing, execution is another. How did they get all this to work? More on that story---on Star Trek as drama, television and science fiction---next time.
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.
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