Star Trek & Human Rights

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many thanks to Keith for this summary and for continuing to motivate us all with your important work.  
 

 

A few months ago, President Carbahal and Bill Kopper invited Keith to give a talk on his work, but gave him strict instructions that the presentation had to do with something beyond refugees and war.  Hence: Human Rights and Star Trek.

 

For several years now, Keith has taught a Freshman Seminar course directed at STEM students using the Star Trek television franchise to introduce core concepts and problems in Human Rights Studies. This is possible in part, because Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991), Star Trek's creator wanted to use the show to explore tough questions and ideas - something he first did as a writer for Golden Age television Westerns including "Have Gun, Will Travel."

 

Sci Fi shows, like Westerns, before them, give writers a chance to abstract social conflict and human rights issues of contemporary relevance into a timeless past or future where their examination is safer, as it were.  Episodes from the original series like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," examined race, or "The Devil in the Dark" (Chuck Snipes' favorite episode) explored ideas about the definition of sentience and who (or what) has human rights and why?  The statement of the Horta, "No Kill I," illustrates a critical concept of reciprocity of rights in human rights theory, for example.  As Star Trek was reintroduced in the late 1980s with Star Trek: The Next Generation, shows reflected critical issues from that era, including torture and genocide.

 

Among the most recognized episodes of that time was "Chain of Command, part 2," during which Captain Jean Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, is tortured by Gul Madred - a Cardassian played by David Warner.  During the interrogation, Captain Picard notes, "Torture has never been a reliable means of extracting information; it is ultimately self-defeating as a means of gaining control.  One wonders why it it still practiced." 

 

Keith noted that within a decade, during the Bush administration, the popular cultural pendulum had swung the other way, from heroes being tortured by villans to TV shows like "24" where heroes were committing torture with impunity.

 

Concluding with a discussion of "I, Borg," an episode during which the crew of the starship, Enterprise, forgo an opportunity to defeat their most intractable enemy, the Borg, by infecting them with a "computer virus" that will shut down their cybernetic parts.  They concluded that such actions would be genocide and make them no different from their enemy.

 

Instead, by treating a captured Borg drone humanely, respecting his human rights, and affirming his individuality - he even takes a name - they set in motion a chain of events which contributes to the collapse of the Borg collective, by infecting him with an idea about rights.  It is resonant of what the architect of Czechoslovakia's transition to democracy, the playwright Vaclav Havel once wrote, of the spread of the human right to live in the truth and oppose authoritarianism, that we can "trace the virus of truth as it slowly spread through the tissue of the life of lies, gradually causing it to disintegrate..."