Ethics – The Final Frontier

Remember the opening words to every episode of the original Star Trek series? William Shatner would say: “Space: the final frontier …” Then the theme music: a series of fourths: dut, da da. And the backup singers: Ah, Ahhhhh …. Ah Ah Ah Ah Ah.

Notwithstanding Shatner’s Montreal roots, Star Trek was quintessentially an American show. The notion of frontier is intimately bound up in the American mythos. It represents both opportunity and danger. The rush to open the American West was fuelled in part by gold, by big trees and their logging potential, and by the resources of a vast ocean. But it was also ungoverned. People played fast and loose with the rules, or made up the rules as they went along, or threw out the rules altogether. There were bank robberies, “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters, posses, and hanging judges. Or so the movies would have us believe. There may have been no small measure of nostalgia at work in the election of a Hollywood president who had starred in Old West roles.

The frontier is the landscape where a particular kind of story plays itself out. If our imagination were a movie studio, the frontier would be one of its sound stages, a place where we could give life to the Old West tension between opportunity and danger. It’s important to remember, though, that this is only a story. While voters can be forgiven for believing that Ronald Reagan really was a frontier maverick (surviving an assassination attempt lent credence to what was, after all, only a fiction), William Shatner and the stars of succeeding Star Trek franchises have made it obvious that the notion of frontier is easily translatable to locales that don’t exist.

It’s trite wisdom among literary theorists that there are only two stories and both were written three thousand years ago: The Iliad and The Odyssey, the war and the quest. Every subsequent story has been a variation of one or the other, not because Homer was universally influential (I’m certain there were many ancient Chinese storytellers who had never heard of the Greek poet), but because these are the only stories possible. We are either resolving conflict or discovering things. Add to this Pogo’s insight about the nature of war (“we have seen the enemy and it is us”) and the two stories collapse into one: the quest. Stories of war stand as symbolic accounts of interior journeys.

All men need war. Not so they can live out The Iliad like a role playing game, but so they have an excuse for their quest. Interesting that we call the place where battles are fought a “theatre of operations.” Maybe it’s testosterone that drives us men to seek out more than we already have: more gold in the West; more women in the East; more knowledge in the skies. A restlessness seizes our bones, we travel to the “theatre,” we play out a drama in our contrived frontier, and those of us who survive return to our homes and loved ones, and once we are settled and have reflected on our journeys, we realize that whatever it was we took away from the experience, we took away in our heads and in our hearts.

Early in the summer, I played out my own middle-aged version of this story. I left wife and children and flew to Scotland. I was well armed – prepared to shoot anyone and anything (with my camera). I saw strange and terrible sights (addicts in the east end of Glasgow, graffiti in back alleys, drunken Scots smashing bottles in church parking lots). And I came home a man. I think that’s how the narrative goes.

Note that I didn’t accomplish anything—or at least nothing measurable by any gauges or meters. The net distance of my journey was zero. I ended up at the place I started. And yet things did change. The place I returned to looked different, because I was looking at it through fresh eyes. And I was prepared to encounter it differently because I was feeling renewed.

One of the things implicit in the Star Trek preamble is that frontiers—at least on earth—are running out. It’s getting harder and harder to find places to take our quests. An extreme adventure is no longer an undertaking for that rugged and legendary character; it’s a two-week trip you book through your travel agent. The people manning the Antarctic weather station now get pissed off if they can’t login to Facebook. And there’s a full-time garbage detail cleaning up all the crap that companies of adventurers have left on the slopes of Everest.

In the same way, war as the occasion for quest (conquest) and as the occasion for bringing a generation of youth to manhood, is a way of life whose time is running out. John McCain has stated that, if necessary, the US should be prepared to remain for another hundred years in the middle east. And yet this is impossible. The escalating ease of destructive technology guarantees that a century of exposure to American “civilization” would leave a wasteland. The world is simply too small for such small thinking.

One of the problems lies in our inability to recognize metaphor. We treat Frontier as a literal space whose emptiness is an opportunity for exploitation. But when taken literally, we lose sight of the fact that Frontier has always already been occupied. People already lived in the American West when white Europeans arrived, and when (in an 1878 publication titled Jesus is Coming—wikipedia cites the date as 1881) William Blackstone proposed the idea of an Israeli settlement for Jews, he believed, as did most Westerners of the day, that the land on the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean was empty. And so Palestinians were thought of in much the same way as First Nations peoples in North American, Australia and Russia. Our quests, when taken literally, are never quests, but invasions. (And, yes, I am implying what you think I’m implying: the modern state of Israel exists because a few old men were too stupid to interpret a metaphor appropriately.)

If we take literally the Star Trek preamble, then our forays into space will likewise be invasions. We won’t exploit and destroy other people, but we will exploit and destroy other environments. I fully expect that within a hundred years, the lunar surface will be pocked with garbage dumps.

If the problem is one of taking literally what ought to be interpreted metaphorically, then is there a final (non-literal) frontier? Are there still places we can take our metaphorical quests without disappointing this need we seem to have for rites of passage?

As I’ve already suggested with my travel example, interior quests are always possible. However, of the many frontiers available for invasion, perhaps the terrain most in need of exploration and mapping is Ethics:

• What does it mean to be good?
• What does it mean to lead a good life?

One of the reasons this Frontier is so little understood (like a dark continent) is that Religion has obscured it from us. Just as talk of “wild savages” once persuaded us that the Cree and the Iroquois were less than human, so too does talk of “godless heathens.” We dismiss and sometimes discriminate against self-declared atheists, justifying our stand by reasoning that morality is impossible unless grounded in a religious conviction. Therefore atheists must necessarily be bad people.

However, this stand also blinds us to the opportunities (and dangers) which lie in the Ethical frontier—in particular, the opportunities and dangers of personal responsibility. This has a Wild West “feel” to it. I may have to make up some of the rules as I go. I may have to throw out some rules altogether. The quest might be arduous. It might even take me my whole life. But when I’m done, I might be able to return to the place where I started and say that I’m a man.