So Much for The United Federation of Planets

I don’t know if you’ve noticed yet, but neo-nationalists are ruining our utopian dream of an eventual United Federation of Planets a la the Star Trek franchise. Donald Trump. Vladimir Putin. Nigel Farage. Marine Le Pen. The Law and Justice Jaroslaw twins in Poland. Norbert Hofner’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party in Austria. The authoritarian Vicktor Orban in Hungary. The AfD in Germany (Germany!). They’re all fucking it up big time. And you should be very, very concerned.

Liberal Utopia

Surely you remember The United Federation of Planets from whatever iteration of the Star Trek franchise you’re most familiar with. It’s basically a giant interstellar federal republic comprised of planet-states from all over the Alpha and Beta quadrants. Just FYI, that’s half of the Milky Way galaxy.

Federation planets are united democratically under the principles of universal rights, liberty, equality, shared scientific enquiry and advancement, fair trade, and mutual protection. It’s kind of like the United Nations on steroids, only not shitty like our United Nations. Essentially, it’s a liberal utopia whose universal moral and political principles are projected into space, and it’s beautiful.

Granted, how exactly humanity gets to this liberal utopia from mid-20 century modernism is more than a little bit unclear. One rather glaring omission, for instance, is the story of how the sausage got made from an economic perspective.

In the age of The United Federation of Planets, the United Earth exists in a post-scarcity economy. There is no money. And while there is military rank in Starfleet, it’s ultimately a classless society. In this regard Star Trek’s liberal utopia looks a lot like a Marxian utopia where forces of production and distribution become so efficient that labor is rendered obsolete, and human beings spend their time creatively engaging in self-expressive activities.

What’s missing–and incredibly relevant for our present historical moment–is the story of how liberal economy course corrects after its ugly detour into neo-liberalism. We’ve watched how free market ideology served as a cold war check on the undemocratic centralized planning of the Soviet system only to mutate into the undemocratic centralized planning of Wall Street-owned technocrats and the European troika. What’s missing is the story of how decoupling global economics from democratic steering mechanisms to concentrate wealth in the hands of a tiny elite eventually leads to a classless society that embraces democratic republicanism. Now that’s a story I’d like to hear! If we knew how that worked, we in the democratic West  might be able to to see a path of escape from the specter of fascism that faces us today.

The Star Trek mythos simply side steps these historical complications and shows us what life is like once we come out on the other side. This is a shortcoming of all utopian projections, but it’s also their virtue. By painting a plausible picture of an idealized human future, Star Trek’s liberal utopia helps us to make sense of who we are in our best light, where we came from, and what we might strive to become tomorrow. It provides structure and content to our hope.

Possible Futures

While this is science fiction, and while it’s certainly far off on our horizon of possibility, I want to argue that an eventual United Federation of Planets is at least in principle a real possibility. As logicians put it, I want to demonstrate that it is a possible world. Consider the following.

According to Universe Today, the Milky Way galaxy alone has an estimated 800 billion to 3.2 trillion planets. That’s just our galaxy. According to Science blogs there are an estimated 200 billion galaxies. Whoa! So let’s do the math, shall we? 3.2 trillion x 200 billion = ah heck, I’m a humanities guy. I can’t even math that high. Let’s just say that there are a fuck-ton of planets. Like grains of sand on the earth there are planets.

With so many planets out there it’s pretty clear to anyone who didn’t receive their scientific education in a Kansas public high school that the odds are extremely high that some of these planets–perhaps quite a lot of them–support life. Some might only have life forms with the sentience of refrigerator mold, but some are likely to be inhabited by rationally self-aware creatures like us.

If somehow we were to meet these self-aware aliens (big “if”, I know), I’d like to think that we would be civilized and evolved enough to recognize them as persons worthy of moral respect like the decent space-Kantians Gene Roddenberry lead me to believe we are. And I’d also like to think that if their civilization was advanced enough, these alien creatures would reciprocate this respect.

Of course even setting aside the science fiction part, this suddenly all seems wildly fantastic from the point of view of the end of the 15th year of the 21st century. Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America. This is a man who, if we are to take his rhetoric seriously (and I think we have a moral responsibility to do so), struggles to recognize Mexicans, muslims, and women as persons worthy of moral respect. How do you think someone like Donald Trump would cope with a blue reptilian cyclops from the Beta quadrant who writes romantic poetry and kicks ass at three-level chess? Not well, I suspect. And at present there are a disturbingly large number of someones like Donald Trump in the world.

This begins to get at my major point. Even if you are willing to grant my claim that a future United Federation of Planets is a possible world, given the recent rise of neo-nationalist movements it certainly doesn’t seem all that probable from a moral-political perspective, and–this is key–it seems less probable now that it did even ten or twenty years ago. Our utopian future is falling apart.

Terra Prime

The fourth season of the TV series Star Trek: Enterprise has a storyline spanning two episodes (Demons and Terra Prime) that seems eerily prescient in light of recent political developments in the US and Europe. To those unfamiliar, Star Trek: Enterprise is a prequel to the original 1960s Star Trek series. It takes place in the 22nd century (not that far off), in the early days of the Federation.

In these episodes we find diplomats from several planets meeting in San Francisco to establish a cooperative and peaceful Coalition of Planets. Liberal utopianism is off to the races! Negotiations are unexpectedly disrupted, however, when members of a nativist, anti-alien organization called Terra Prime attempts to undermine the negotiates and drive all alien lifeforms from earth.

Beuller? You hearing this?

To accomplish their objective, Terra Prime operatives commandeer this huge array on Mars, a giant energy beam designed to deflect comets and asteroids from colliding with the earth. They aim the array at Starfleet Command in San Francisco and threaten to destroy it unless all alien species vacate the earth immediately. These Terra Prime folks mean business! They’re going to make Earth great again!

Now here is the part that seems eerily prescient today: to gain popular support for this unlawful threat of violence, as well as the racist ideology behind it, the members of Terra Prime manipulate popular sentiment with a bit of propaganda and truth distortion. The earth had recently suffered an attack from a hostile race of aliens, you see, so human fear and suspicion of aliens was running high.

To fan the flames of xenophobia among the earth’s human population, members of Terra Prime cloned a child from DNA stolen from Commanders T’Pol (a Vulcan woman) and Tucker (an earth man) of the Starship Enterprise, creating the very first human-alien hybrid being. They then ‘revealed’ this child via global media to the citizens of earth as fake ‘evidence’ of a ‘race-mixing’ plot designed by liberal Coalition types to dilute humanity’s genetic purity.

The leader of Terra Prime also argued that if more and more aliens were allowed to roam around on earth, humans would eventually find themselves being treated like second class citizens on their own homeworld. Finally, he argued that the earth had become extremely unsafe to native inhabitants due to so many undocumented aliens running around the earth doing who knows what.

Any of this ringing a bell? These episodes were directed by LeVar Burton in 2005, eleven years before Brexit and Trump.

In the television episodes, members of the Starship Enterprise narrowly thwart this xenophobic plot, which allows the United Federation of Planets to grow and flourish into the organization the Star Trek franchise is famous for. But from a 2016 perspective a more plausible ending shows Terra Prime succeeding. They destroy Starfleet Command. Aliens are rounded up in internment camps and either deported or exterminated. Planet earth goes it alone. Terra Prime!

Exterminating the Future and Rewriting the Past

From the perspective of this alternative neo-nationalist ending, the future exploration of space looks very different, and yet not exactly unrecognizable. Instead of a United Federation of Planets, space transforms into some Hobbesian State of Nature, a realpolitik nightmarescape where humanity endeavors to subjugate and exploit ‘inferior’ races until eventually some technologically superior species hands our asses to us (which won’t be hard since we will have abandoned science and the free exchange of knowledge and ideas at that point). It’s white supremacism writ large; Hitler’s Germany loosed on the Milky Way.

Lest you fret too much about this dystopian Terra Prime racist-nativist possible future, you can rest assured that it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll ever be in a position to fuck things up that badly on an interstellar level. You see, in order to have competing possible futures, you first have to actually have a future. And from the perspective of events of 2016, humanity doesn’t appear to have much of one. That’s because the Terra Prime episode actually already happened, complete with the alternative racist-nativist ending, not in the 22nd century but rather in 2016. Brexit happened. Trump happened. Nativist neo-nationalist movements are rising all over Europe. And it looks like we can expect more of the same to come.

The positive thing about it is just that it depicts a future, and that is somehow reassuring, that there is going to be a future. -Brent Spiner, commenting on the Star Trek Franchise

Suddenly the future’s just not what it used to be. For that matter the past isn’t what it used to be either. My grandfather’s generation is called The Greatest Generation because they lived through the Great Depression to fight and defeat fascism in Europe. What do we call them now? The Race Traitor Generation? What sense can we make of them sacrificing their lives to defeat fascism only to watch their children and grandchildren grow up to willfully hand their democratic freedoms over to fascists? What was the point of their sacrifice? Are we supposed to root for the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark now?

Turning back to the question of the future: consider what would have to happen before a possible world where the Earth is a member of a United Federation of Planets could materialize. I suspect that the geopolitical requirements are pretty similar to those that would be required to solve our planet’s global warming crisis (let’s call this massive existential threat #1) or to defuse the growing threat of nuclear destruction (let’s call this massive existential threat #2).

Help me here. What do those requirements look like? Respect for the rule of international law? A functioning United Nations (United Federation of Nations)? A universally shared sense of project and purpose (save humanity!)? International cooperation, the unimpeded movement of peoples, an open marketplace of ideas, and the free exchange of information? Heavy investment in education? Heavy investment in scientific research and technological development? Is this on the right track? I’m asking regardless of who or what you voted for in 2016. I’m asking even if you didn’t vote. Am I missing anything?

One other ingredient comes to mind: time. We need enough time for all of this to unfold. And there’s the rub. We have to manage not to nuke or poison ourselves into extinction, and we’re already in hail Mary territory as far as stopping global warming from cooking most of the species on earth (including our own) to death.

Unfortunately, the neo-nationalists are having none of this morally mature world-saving business. Rather than an open society and the free exchange of ideas, neo-nationalists advocate nativist isolationism and antagonistic, bellicose international relations that heighten the threat of nuclear war. Borders are sealed. Immigrants are attacked. Vulnerable minorities are threatened. International treaties are abandoned. The free movement of people is halted. Religious bigotry and white supremacism are embraced. Scientific consensus regarding global warming itself is cynically and routinely dismissed, and scientists who study global warming actually receive death threats from right-wing extremists.

So much for The United Federation of Planets. Commenting on the utopian value of the Star Trek franchise, Brent Spiner (who played Lt. Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation) once remarked, “The positive thing about it is just that it depicts a future, and that is somehow reassuring, that there is going to be a future.” Well apparently we can’t have a future any more, because white people don’t like brown people. Who the hell are we now as a species? Where do we think we’re going?