Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Why They Wrote Deep Space and Sacred Time: “…we were faced with the universal parental problem of how passively we should admit media fantasies into our family’s cultural life.” At family dinners, they’d find themselves disassembling favorite television shows “to see how they ‘work’ both as pleasure-giving entertainment and as part of the process of cultural reproduction.” So, why not take it to another level and write a book about disassembling Star Trek in such a way?
On 80’s/90’s Trek: “[80’s and 90’s Star Trek offered]…an extraordinarily hopeful view of the triumph of human values in an uncentered cosmos, and a prime example of this ability of myth to achieve its own sort of reconciliation where none seems philosophically possible.”
Now, I must admit that while these narratives have good intentions and serve their purpose as myth, they also invite dangerous thinking about humans as being in the right to lord themselves over the “other.” Or that human values are universal constants. While postmodern and cultural relativist arguments are not invalid in a vacuum, to base your worldview and thinking on these precepts is just as inevitably dangerous as giving into the moral relativism and the concurrent pushback of moral absolutism that has emerged in the early 21st century. Instead, we should seek a happy medium: common goals and motivations to drive us forward even when we disagree on details; we are all just striving for not only survival, but purpose and meaning in a chaotic universe.
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on a Certain Bumper Sticker “The art of the automobile bumper sticker reached new heights with one that read, simply, ‘BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY.’ It’s rare for so rich a joke to be contained in four words. One can almost hear the crisp, commanding voice of the space traveler who may feel out of place on this planet but will presently be whisked to a better, more orderly and heroic realm. Or perhaps the forlorn hero is fated to drive around for eternity in this primitive Terran vehicle, patiently waiting to effervesce into the ether.” (From Deep Space and Sacred Time)
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Ancient Ideas: “It is sometimes startling to see what ancient ideas can appear in futuristic guises.”
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Certain Recurrent Questions Stemming From the Self’s Awareness: “Who am I? What makes me myself and not someone else? Where are my boundaries? Can my boundaries become violated, and could I be invaded by something that is not-I? Why do I sometimes feel divided within? Am I my memories, and if so what does it mean to forget? Could some of my self slip away, and if so, could it be regained? What does the continuity and integrity of the self entail? Is my separate self-identity something that can or should be transcended? Am I more or less than my body? What happens to the self when I die?”
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Collectivists: “Collectivists may claim to care for one another, but their devotion is dutiful, generalized, passionless; their ‘caring’ is nothing more than a submission to the sterile abstraction of the collectivity.” This reminds me of many social media interactions, where much of the feeling of community is illusionary.
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Gender in Original Star Trek: “…gender is portrayed as the very loom on which all intelligible experience is woven, and as something that can not be transcended any where in the universe.” It’s quite a reductionist view that held back the power of many classic Trek stories, just as suggested by the authors of this book.
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Interpretation VS Forcing Order: “…while orderly patterns of interpretation can enhance the richness of our appreciation, an excess of order can suppress the imagination and limit the possibilities for transcending familiar patterns.” How much order and how much ‘honest chaos’ is about right?
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Popular and Cutting-Edge Academic Writings on Myth: “While popular writings on myth have explored the idea of myth’s universal wisdom and its nourishing effect on the culture and psyche, cutting-edge academic scholarship since the 1980s has taken quite the opposite path. Some of the most sophisticated work in these fields has lately been influenced by a loosely related family of theoretical positions bearing such intimidating labels as deconstructionism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, neo-Marxism, or critical theory. Their general strategy is to “interrogate” cultural phenomena in order to unmask their covert political agendas- agendas that maintain gender in-equality, racism, colonialism, class differences, and other forms of privilege and exploitation. Critical theory, as we shall call this family of approaches, is not easy to describe to the lay reader, partly because it is sometimes framed in complex jargon, but also because it introduces innovative and sometimes counterintuitive–ways of looking at ordinary things. Yet, although critical theory is demanding and often obscure, it has produced some of the most influential ideas of contemporary social theory, including perspectives that can enrich one’s understanding of Star Trek.”
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Star Trek’s Playfulness: “There is an element of playfulness in Star Trek that so challenges our traditional conceptions of the self that one might think its sole purpose were to create instability.”
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Stories: “Even those things that are not produced by the human imagination — the fossils in a geological stratum, or the stars in a cosmic nebula — are intelligible to us only when we put them into the context of a story.”
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on the Future: “The hypothetical future is our sacred time, the realm where our deepest fears and longings are assayed… both traditional myth and science fiction provide narratives that probe these unrealized possibilities of being.”
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on the Inexorable Self: “While some non-Western cultures view the self as a node of social relations and responsibilities, modern Western culture inclines toward a view of the self as a closed unit pursuing its private interests through a cost-benefit calculus. Commentators on American culture, in particular, have noted the great importance that we place upon the autonomy, integrity, and independent interests of the individual.’ To be one’s inexorable self is to stand calm and assured before the universe.”
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on the Myths We Live By: “One can and must, as Joseph Campbell notes, ‘live by’ some myth or another. At the same time, one must be prepared continually to step outside the framework of the most cherished myths and to view them with a critical eye, suspecting that they may be partial and limited and that we might imagine a more liberating and comprehensive mythos. The polarities of faith and skepticism need not be resolved in favor of one or the other, for it is within the charged field between these poles that the most fertile play of critical imagination will thrive. To be a reflective person is to be more than a passive carrier of cultural codes; it requires that one cultivate the ability to navigate within these codes and, simultaneously, to step back, see how they work, and evaluate them with a critical mind. The habit of experiencing things on more than one level—of being in two places at once without becoming lost—may compromise one’s innocence, but it also places one more actively “in the loop” of cultural production and allows for a more direct participation in the dynamic of cultural creativity.”
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on the Problem of Evil in Star Trek: “Although Star Trek takes the problem of evil seriously, its expositions of evil might bolster our hopes that it can be dealt with as a complex human, rather than a religious, problem: (1) good and evil, as depicted in these stories, may be complex and elusive rather than simple and absolute; (2) evil is not stronger than good, and it does not triumph; (3) evil is not more deeply imbedded in the human spirit than good, and is probably less so; (4) evil does not have a supernatural origin and does not require a supernatural cure. In the end, even the discussion of human evil opens the door to human self-redemption.”
Other Notes
Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on How Writings Are Never Free From the Time in Which They’re Written: The authors bring up a crucial point by Edward Said, author of Orientalism, that “learned and imaginative writings are never free, but are limited in their imagery, assumptions and intentions.” Those limitations, as suggested by the authors, come from “the language available to them through the existing cultural milieu (environment).”