Captain Kirk and the Art of Rule

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Editor’s Note

This essay originally appeared in the anthology Faith, Reason, and Political Life Today, edited by Peter Augustine Lawler and Dale McConkey, and published by Lexington Books in 2001. It is reproduced here by permission of the author, editors, and publisher.

All rights reserved. This essay may not be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher.

Star Trek is the only television show to have directly posed the question: “What is the Good?”[1] Over the course of seventy-nine episodes, this question and related Socratic inquiries were pursued. Star Trek paid generous homage to the philosophic and religious traditions that make up the Western dialectic. A sampling of some of the episode titles reveals the extent to which the series acknowledged both Jerusalem and Athens. There is “The Apple,” “Journey to Babel,” “The Way to Eden,” and “A Taste of Armageddon,” along with “Plato’s Stepchildren” (initially to have been titled “The Sons of Socrates”), “Who Mourns for Adonais?,” “Bread and Circuses,” and my favorite title “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”

Because the show employed a number of writers and directors over its three-year run, interpretation is made more difficult. There is not the same consistency of vision that one expects when dealing with a single author. Nonetheless, the guiding presence of the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, really did give the series a particular stamp. Certain themes emerge as fundamental. Uniquely among television shows, Star Trek began each episode with a spoken invocation. For those of you who don’t have it ingrained in memory, it goes as follows: 

Space … the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations — to boldly go where no man has gone before.

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Diana Schaub, “Captain Kirk and the Art of Rule,” in Peter Augustine Lawler and Dale McConkey, eds., Faith, Reason, and Political Life Today (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2001). Republished on TheNewAtlantis.com on September, 8, 2015.
Paramount Pictures
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