How Star Trek invented DEI

Values. Whenever some poor soul gets cancelled, sacked, scalped etc., there’s almost always a bland, impersonal statement from the institution carrying out the scalping. In third-person corporatese, from the moral high ground, such pronouncements will conclude with the sentence: ‘The comments of Person X do not align with the values of Institution Y.’ Where do these mysterious values originate? From which particular pile of decomposing matter were the spores of these holy secular values spontaneously generated? Frankly, for a lot of this, I blame Star Trek.

It seemed so innocent back in the day, this story of the crew of a massive space warship in the 23rd century. (Hilariously, the series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry, and his inheritors always denied that the Starship Enterprise even is a warship. It was just bringing peace and harmony to the galaxies on a mission of friendly exploration, which is why it used US naval ranks and was bristling with phasers and photon torpedoes.) 1960s Star Trek was, first and foremost, colourful, rip-roaring fun.

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But even then, in its original raw-dogging 1960s version, something rather peculiar happened at the end of every episode. About three minutes before the credits, either as events climaxed or in their aftermath, Captain Kirk would start pontificating, delivering one of his moral proclamations, usually to do with peace, love, the Californian way, etc. My dad’s face whenever this happened – and it always seemed to come as a surprise to him – was a picture. He would turn red and start to hurl critical comment in the face of William Shatner. ‘Here comes the sermon,’ he’d groan.

We keep hearing about how Britain has changed in the last decades, and it surely has. One of the big ways in which it has changed is that we used to laugh at this Kirkian moralising. It was culturally very alien to us. Nowadays it’s everywhere, in its #BeKind form, from politics to pop. (To be fair, even Americans could find it a bit sickly too. The Shatner sermons are not all that different from what Star Trek’s exact TV contemporary Batman was satirising.)

Star Trek itself – in all its multifarious and dwindling, shagged-out incarnations – has become consumed by it, as if those end-of-episode platitudes were what it was actually about, and why people were tuning in. Younger readers can’t know how genuinely popular Star Trek was in the 1970s (when it wasn’t even being made). It was a mass culture phenomenon, not a nerd cosplay lifestyle.

What were these values? It was a series made in a western liberal democracy, so you’ll be surprised to hear they were the values of western liberal democracy, with a dash of non-specific, non-religious ‘do as you would be done by’. This is utterly mainstream stuff; mostly it was cant, a fig leaf for American military domination.

Ordinary, then. But something about it being set in the future puffed the thing up, and particularly in retrospect, it is viewed as groundbreaking, progressive, etc., when it was merely mirroring prevailing trends. The claims made for Star Trek are extraordinary, as if its racial mix and better roles for women were daring and gobsmacking. Meanwhile, literally in the very next studio on the lot, the ethnically integrated cast of the original Mission: Impossible series were doing exactly the same thing, without any of the hoohah or homilies, in a series set in what was then the present day. Surely that’s more notable for 1966?

The big problem with Star Trek’s precious values is that they mistake the very specific cultural mores of postwar western liberal democracy for human nature. Everyone is just like us, or they want to be just like us. There are no enemies and no bad cultures, just friends we haven’t met yet and customs we don’t understand. If they don’t like us, it must be our fault. But apologetic and aggressive is a terrible combination. It’s what drunks are, after all.

The terrible category error of mistaking ethnicity for culture infuses Star Trek, the warmed-up Rousseau noble savage fetish that’s behind many of the hugest mistakes that western liberalism made, and continues to make, over the last 60 years. The Vulcans even have a fetish object called the IDIC – ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations’. How’s that working out for everybody?

I looked in on the first series of the recent Star Trek reboot Discovery, and the syndrome was even worse, with the added horror that the family-friendly bonhomie of its predecessors, their saving grace, had been exchanged for nerdy, involved plots and bowel-loosening dollops of 2010s diversity, equity, and inclusion waffle. I imagine this was how being bombed by Obama must felt.

The Star Trek franchise, as it nears its 60th anniversary, is in trouble; the recent TV film Section 31 has received stinking reviews and ratings, and the multiple strands of its expanded universe are flailing. I think this is because it’s an old concept from a lost age, a problem with many of the tired, superannuated brands that haunt modern popular culture. I would urge President Trump to sign an executive order declaring a moratorium on studios wheeling out aged properties. We desperately need new stories and characters, brand-new thoughts. The long 20th century finally feels over, for good or ill. Star Trek, with its tedious and discredited utopian DEI waffle, belongs there as a fond memory – not in the 23rd century, or even the 21st.