Star Trek by M. Keith Booker

Author:M. Keith Booker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Star Trek and the Utopian Future

However successful (or unsuccessful) it was in conveying the specific concerns of the countercultural political movements of the 1960s, TOS shared with these movements a vision of the possibility of historical change toward a better future—something that also set it apart from the dominant mode of American culture in the 1950s and early 1960s. One of the most unfortunate effects of the anti-communist rhetoric of the peak Cold War years of the 1950s was a widespread tendency to equate utopianism with communism, thus tarring all attempts to imagine a better future with the same anti-communist brush. Conversely, one of the driving forces behind the idealism of many of the political movements of the 1960s was an attempt to overcome the cynical legacy of Cold War anti-utopianism and restore the time-honored American belief in the possibility of moving forward toward an improved world. For example, the “Port Huron Statement,” issued in 1962 as a manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and written by Tom Hayden, declares the radical agenda of the new group and explains that this agenda is necessary to overcome the growing conformism of an American populace that was no longer capable of envisioning alternatives to the status quo. According to this manifesto,

the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will “muddle through,” beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well.[15]

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