The Optimism Effect

It’s tough to look at the modern world and believe we can be optimistic about the future. The worst of humanity and its effects are in evidence all around us. But if we are not going to give in to nihilism and despair the only possible answer is hope and the belief that humanity can do better.

Star Trek is part of a utopian tradition rooted in optimism and the hope that we can arrive at a better place. In this newsletter I’ll discuss how this essential element of utopian thinking helped shape Star Trek and continues to play an important role in how we think about the future.

In the aftermath of Star Trek’s cancelation in 1969 it is very clear that fans and critics started to think about the show philosophically. Aware of the tremendous groundswell of interest and devotion to Star Trek, discussions about the show searched for an essential philosophy that could explain it. Why were fans so moved, so devoted to Star Trek?

The authors of Star Trek Lives! (published in 1975)centred their explanation on an idea called “The Optimism Effect.” It was a relatively simple concept - suggesting that optimism is the most important thing about Star Trek. The fans understood this essential optimism at the core of Star Trek and shared a similar optimistic viewpoint about the future of humanity. The authors suggest there is a unifying effect in this belief: “it reaches people who have absolutely nothing else in common except a readiness to respond to a philosophy of optimism.”

Gene Roddenberry spoke at great length about this on multiple occasions. One elegant statement he made when asked to explain the optimism effect was “It’s not all over. There will be a future, and it will be exciting, and challenging as anything we can imagine.”

What should we understand about Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry? He was multifaceted and certainly flawed. But his ideas have such a significant impact on the philosophical impact of Star Trek that he needs to be considered seriously. Although he is one creator amongst many who contributed to Star Trek, Roddenberry comes first and foremost in trying to understand why the show developed in particular directions. And if we are to consider Star Trek alongside other utopian texts then Roddenberry should be assessed and critiqued as a modern utopian thinker.

Gene Roddenberry’s biography prior to Star Trek is pretty fascinating. Born in 1921, he grew up in Los Angeles and enlisted in the Air Force to become a pilot during World War Two. After the war he became an L.A. police officer in the Public Information Division, writing speeches and consulting with television productions on the side to provide technical and story ideas about police stories. He eventually moved into writing and producing his own ideas, working first on a police procedural called The Lieutenant (also staring Leonard Nimoy) before moving to science fiction in 1964 with a pitch for a weekly adventure show set in space.

Television and movies are always team productions, but the fundamental ethos of Star Trek as a utopian view of humanity’s future came from Roddenberry and his humanist ideology. This is a big topic, and I’ll explore it in more detail over several different newsletters. For now I think the idea of the optimism effect is a good place to start. Several key Star Trek creators attributed it to him, from the key actors to other essential writers.

George Takei attributed Star Trek’s optimism effect directly to the Star Trek creator. He said “I really think it’s Gene Roddenberry. I think he’s the one who felt, very seriously and deeply believes, that we can overcome the problems of today...I think this was probably one of the most important, critical contributions that Star Trek made. The media so much and so gloomily focuses on the impossibility of man to overcome, and this was a balancing factor. We got the other side - we didn’t use that bomb.”

Star Trek writer and story editor Dorothy C. Fontana was asked about the optimism effect and spoke about its importance for a generation that grew up in the shadow of world war and mass destruction. Fontana and Roddenberry’s generation lived through World War Two and many, including Roddenberry came back from participation in the conflict profoundly changed. Fontana said,

“...Deep down we all want to be better than we really are, whether it’s in terms of the individual, in partnership, or in terms of a country or a world community. We’ve all grown up with the shadow of destruction - and look at a peaceful, successful world with formal advances in terms of philosophy and abilities to understand other beings, not just human beings, but other beings, is a goal that we’d all like to say yes, we can do that instead of the doom and gloom that’s hung over us...

We’d all like to say, “All right, we’ve survived this irrational and pretty illogical time of our development and have gone on, gotten past that danger to be better human beings, to be wiser, saner, and I think more compassionate and gentler than we are now.” I think we’d all like to look forward to that, unless you’re totally corrupt.

And yes that was what Star Trek was holding out - saying yes, we can do it - we can be that better thing than we are now.”

The optimism effect became closely so closely associated with Roddenberry that in the 1970s it began to define a sort of beatification of his personal views and beliefs in the possibilities for humanity. Even though it was an idea shared by many involved with Star Trek, its origins point back to Roddenberry.

This focus on optimism essentially captures the spirit of The Original Series and supplied a creative energy that sustained the Star Trek fandom through the 1970s until Roddenberry could relaunch the franchise through motion pictures. What Star Trek Lives depicts, however, can be deepened with some additional thought about what optimism means to utopian thought.

The Star Trek universe isn’t utopian simply because it depicts a future without poverty or inequality. Any number of dystopian possibilities could also accomplish this economic feat. Star Trek is utopian because of its faith in humanity and what might be possible once we finally overcome our limitations.

This idea can help us connect to other utopians. A rather atypical example that I want to draw on is a piece by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin in a Socialist Register issue devoted to utopianism from 2000. Drawing on sociologist Ernst Bloch, Panitch and Gindin ask how we can realize a life beyond the horrors of capitalism and suggest that the great obstacle we need to overcome is pessimism. Bloch wrote, “people who do not believe at all in a happy end impede changing the world almost as much as the sweet swindlers, the marriage-swindlers, the charlatans of apotheosis.” He believed that the enemy of a socialist future was not only capital but indifference and hopelessness.

Panitch and Gindin’s argument is very similar to Roddenberry’s, although Star Trek never made an explicit appeal to socialism like they do. What they argue in Socialist Register is that achieving socialism depends on more than a refinement of political theory. It depends on human agency and what humanity can discover about their own potential. This focus on humanity is about understanding the ideas of agency and capacity. What are we capable of achieving? Panitch and Gindin argue that we need to confront the fact that capitalism cripples our capacities and stunts our dreams. But defeating pessimism about our future necessarily involves believing that we can reach our potential as human beings. We have the agency and ability to achieve a socialist future. What makes this idea different from its liberal roots is socialism’s commitment to extending this dream to all members of society, linking a utopian future to both social justice and freedom.

Making the most of human capacities is a common goal of utopian futures, whether we want to define them as socialist or not. There’s a future newsletter in the question of whether we can regard Star Trek as either radical or socialist, but for now it is enough to add to the argument that it is at least utopian because of its faith in human capacity. Star Trek operates on a poorly defined idea of optimism but a very real depiction of human potential that can’t be linked to anything but socialism. It must be a socialist future if we are to step towards the dream of that universe.

What often seems missing from Star Trek is the sense of “how?” In the best episodes that demonstrate the optimism effect the subject of that optimism comes back to the resilience of the individual or a faith in humanity illustrated by a character. The achievements of humanity are used as the canvas for the show - space travel, mind-bending scientific achievement, the post-scarcity economy, these are the settings in which individuality and humanity are explored. This is a natural necessity for the conventions of television and character-driven drama. There are multiple examples where an optimistic faith in humanity is at the centre of the message Star Trek communicates. In “The Inner Light” Captain Picard lives another lifetime inside of an induced dream to show us the universal meaning of human connection, and endurance.

In one sense, we could criticize this as a liberal vision that struggles to break free of the constraints of individualism. But I think we could also be more open-minded and actually give some credence to the optimism effect to suggest that it is part of something bigger that is important within the utopian tradition. The question of human capacities is an important one and one that Star Trek creators have understood. Panitch and Gindin conclude their piece on optimism with a statement that illustrates this by suggesting that focusing on human capacities is at the heart of the utopian tradition. They write:

“Overcoming pessimism is not a matter of asserting a new, yet equally short-sighted optimism. Rather, it means drawing inspiration from the continuity between the utopian dream that pre-dates socialism and the concrete popular struggles in evidence around the world as people strive, in a multitude of diverse ways, to assert their humanity.”

This resonates so strongly with me because of my own politics and what I might call my radicalization compared to the ideologies all around me. I grew up with parents who were conservative and often pessimistic or cynical about people and the world. Their world view was essentially reactionary and this conflicted with how I felt about most things but could not express or even understand for the first years of my life. The dissonance of this feeling stuck with me at an almost subatomic level until I could pair my rejection of it with reading social theory, learning about history, and as ridiculous as it might sound, with Star Trek. Both leftist writing and Star Trek provided an antidote, showing me that we don’t have to be small, that life is not a zero-sum game to acquire or keep more than everyone else, and that we can and should fight injustice and unfairness wherever we encounter it. None of that is possible without optimism.

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Last week I watched the series finale for Star Trek: Discovery, “Life Itself.”

First I will say that I will truly miss Discovery. It kicked off a golden age of new Star Trek productions for the streaming era. More than that, it made some extremely bold and unusual choices that moved Star Trek in a fascinating new direction. I think in the final two seasons it ran out of steam a little bit and so it’s easy to forget the many bonkers ideas it came up with in the early years.

The spore drive was a very cool innovation, a purely theoretical science fiction idea that allowed Discovery to tell different types of stories that were unconstrained by the physics of the traditional Star Trek universe. What if a ship could be anywhere at any time? What if it required a captive animal to accomplish this? What if a man became that animal instead!? Traditionalists probably felt that it was a mushroom too far and broke too many rules, but the idea of instantaneous and limitless travel really did force people to expand their minds and consider new possibilities.

The bold take on Klingons was another Discovery choice that seemed to divide Star Trek fans. I thought Discovery was most interesting when the Klingons were involved, and the idea of surgically implanting an entire Klingon into Ash Tyler’s body was an insane Cronenberg-esque leap that made for a deeply unnerving early plot. Maybe the arrival of David Cronenberg himself a few seasons later is an important stamp of approval.

In contrast, the Discovery finale was a return to classic Star Trek optimism and wonder and a re-imagination of some very big questions about creation, the nature of humanity, and diversity. Star Trek has used a similar device before where it brings a crew face to face with a power the dwarfs human comprehension. The Motion Picture is the clearest link, pitting Kirk’s Enterprise against a mind-bending artificial intelligence that finally spawns a unique lifeform. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier took a similar idea in the opposite direction when Kirk finally meets God himself before the illusion dissolves and teaches us another important lesson about faith in human possibilities.

In its finale, Discovery positions the crew at the precipice of grasping total understanding about the origins of all life in the universe, and the potential to harness this power. They discover (ha) that the true power is not in creation itself, but in the diversity that creation made possible. Discovery ends with affirmation of one of Star Trek’s most sacred philosophies – Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. The statement seemed tailored to implicitly respond to Discovery’s most troglodytic critics who despised the racial and gender diversity at the core of the series, and in this statement the finale was a classy and touching note of defiance on the way out.

Discovery was never perfect, but no Star Trek is. It gave us a new era of Star Trek, a new reason to be optimistic about the future, which the best Star Trek needs to do. I’ll miss it.

Thank you for reading! LLAP 🖖