The Millennial Sovereign, the Real Story of Star Trek, and the Problem of Charisma
What is it that makes a human person more than just another human person?
This is a rather important question, to which many highly conflicting answers have been given.
We are, most of us, surrounded by people day in and day out, both in person and through media and social and political structures. Most of these people we do not, really, know particularly well. Some of these people want things from us; from some we want things; and some of these people will not just want something from us: they will want us. So how do we decide, among all these people, who we will pay attention to or not pay attention to, trust or not trust, listen to or not listen to, obey or not obey? How do we decide who we give ourselves to, as friends, lovers, helpers, leaders, followers, servants?
This is a crucial question when it comes to individual relationships and individual lives; but it is in many ways even more crucial when it comes to the lives and destinies of whole groups and peoples and nations and Empires. In our personal lives, we can (if we choose) exercise prudence and wisdom and take our time and think our way through who we trust and who we give to and who we give ourselves to. When it comes to the realms of public culture, political culture, especially mass-media culture, we frequently are under far more pressure, and have far less to go on. How do we decide who is telling the truth in a public war of words between two politicians or influencers or apologists or academics talking about something we know nothing about? How do we decide who to trust, to whom to give our money, our time, our attention, our vote, our obedience, our trust and love and devotion, when our choice actually matters, for ourselves and others?
There are many answers to this basic question, ranging from the rational to the romantic to the utterly insane. One common answer throughout history is charisma.
Faith and Reason
Recently, I had something of a revelation, and realized, quite plainly, that for all the power of analytical reason, all the power of deduction and induction and dialectic and logic, the fundamental reality is that most of the most impactful decisions in our lives are not made on the basis of any of these things, but rather on the basis of trust, which is to say, faith.
In this, it is foolish to treat reason and faith as mere opposites. We are confronted, day in and day out, with numerous decisions with a great degree of impact on our own or others' lives. Where will we live? What kind of work will we do? Who will we love, or date, or marry? Who will we be friends with? What will we spend our days doing, or our weeknights, or our weekends? The only rational way to deal with these decisions, and others like them, is through trust: which is not irrational, but a distinct modality of reason in itself. One of the primary modes of human reason, in fact, one of the modes we use most often day to day, is precisely the rational analysis of whether things and people around us are trustworthy. Will that step hold my weight? Is there space for my car to make that turn? Will this barista put extra cream in my coffee if I ask? Will this person get angry at me if I tell them the truth? Will this person go on a date with me if I ask them? Should I marry this person? Will this person murder me? Should I start running now?
Starting from the time we were infants, we all learned numerous ways, explicit and conscious and implicit and unconscious alike, to evaluate other people and decide whether they were trustworthy. Most of what we have done in the years since has been to take that mix of conscious and unconscious, explicit and implicit methodologies and mix them and mold them and add to them and take away from them and change them and break them and remake them and hopefully use them as the beginning of a web of actual, permanent, committed relations. In all that, though, without a doubt, we have sometimes evaluated correctly, and sometimes incorrectly.
In none of these cases, though, did we possess enough information, and a clear and explicit and effective enough methodology, to make our decisions in a straightforward analytical way. We really did not know, and could not have known, what this person would have done in these situations that were, for us, future and hypothetical--before we tested them. And yet we had to make a decision any way.
This basic fact--which may seem paradoxical and shocking and terrifying and possibly even nihilistic to many educated intellectuals, but is obviousness itself to the humble and poor and children--is not just an accidental falling short, overcomeable by some imaginable increase in technical knowledge.
Analytical reason (and what many people confuse it with, technical reason) does very well for the sort of problems it is designed to solve: which is to say, problems where we must rationally resolve and analyze and comprehend a given concept or object or creature according to their abstract essences.
Beyond that, there are, of course, many mathematical and statistical and probabilistic methods to make certain types of technical decisions involving incomplete information--methods that have proven themselves extraordinarily effective, en masse, at doing things like making rocket ships to the moon that reliably do not explode and planes that reliably do not fall out of the sky and protecting us from earthquakes and typhoons and plague and famine and death. Indeed, there is a persistent strain in modern intellectual life (that includes my uncle the theoretical physicist) which would argue that these probabilistic methods, or more rough-and-ready approximations thereof, are in fact what most generations of humans have meant by trust and faith, so that when we decide whether to marry someone or support a particular leader or take a particular path in the woods we are in fact, consciously or unconsciously, going through some probabilistic calculation of the mathematical odds of the person I marry turning out to not love me, the leader I support turning out to be a genocidal monster, and/or the path I take in the woods leading to a grizzly bear.
In reality, though, it should be fairly obvious from our own experience of our own cognition that this is not, in fact, how our minds typically work. I did not, in fact, consider all possible cases involving this relationship, or this path, or this political figure, and then select a subset of them; nor did I even consult the available quantitative data on grizzly bears in the Continental US or political popularity or marriage and divorce before making my decision.
This, again, is not a mere falling short of ideal reason, but the contrary: since it is, in fact, more rational to approach these decisions in the ways we typically approach them than to engage in such probabilistic reasoning.
The reason for this can be simply stated. Statistics and probability by their very nature have to do with quantified information, numerous individual instances homogenized and turned into numbers and fractions and calculations: and the unavoidable reality is that all the most important things affecting our lives, including most essentially the people in them, are by their very nature one-time, unique, singular, and unrepeatable.
Statistics may tell us that 8 out of 10 people who marry their high school sweetheart with black hair and a large nose straight out of college later get divorced: but statistics can tell us nothing at all about the dangers and potentials of marrying one particular high school sweetheart with black hair and a large nose. For this, an entirely different sort of knowledge, and an entirely different kind of decision-making, is required. We cannot, in the end, really effectively quantify our black-haired, large-nosed sweetheart: all we can really do, here and now, is to try to get to know her, in the direct, interior ways in which only one human person can know another: and on this basis choose whether to trust her or not. No set of actions in her past or ours can provide us with a sufficiently accurate probability grid for her actions in the future. Yet if we truly know a person, we can in fact come to directly know and understand the things from which all human actions flow--human nature, human personality, and one particular human heart. And once we do know these things, we can choose, trust, depend in a way that is far more certain and reliable than our relationship with any standardized screw or safety-tested airplane.
In the end, then, our reliance on trust, on faith, is not merely a flaw in the plan, a fatal falling short--it is intrinsic to our lives as such, and corresponds to our highest dignity. As human persons, all the most important things about ourselves (what we want, what we need, what we should and can do) all have to do with other people, with the world, and with God. And all of these things are things we can know, but not things we can comprehend in the analytical-technical ways beloved of modernity: that is, reduce to a formula, a method, totally possessed and totally manipulable at our whim. They are things we can receive, even receive truly and in their totality: but not things we can dominate.
Even, then, when we make what anyone would consider a rational decision (thought through, deliberated on, consulted, tested), we are entrusting ourselves to an outcome that is dependent on others rather than ourselves, on the world rather than our mind, on God rather than our will, and so fundamentally escapes the grasp of our knowledge and our control. And this is the only way for us to be happy.
What is Charisma?
This is supposed to be a blog post about charisma; also about Star Trek and millennial sovereigns. Let me, return, then, to the concept of charisma.
As argued above, we all develop over the course of our lives a large set of habits and principles and gut feelings to help us evaluate whether the people around us should be trusted. One of the most fundamental of these, of course, is the basic ethical concept of character or virtue. Is this person a good person? Does this person have virtuous dispositions and habits?
These questions draw on a rationalized (and Christianized) version of a much more basic process that exists in most cultures in one form or other. We all have some idea of morality, some idea of what actions are good and bad, valuable or worthless or offensive, and we all possess some ability to apply this idea of morality to the dispositions and habits and acts of others.
We do not, however, always and as a rule make our decisions on who to trust based on these ethical principles. As a simple matter of fact, human beings are not entities who habitually or necessarily regulate their behavior according to an external, abstract schema of value. We are, rather, beings who regulate their behavior according to internal and constitutive relationships to goods which they perceive, in order to possess the good, enjoy it, become it, and so be happy. We act out of these relationships as much as for their sake, evaluating people not just according to some abstract schema of values, but based on their relations to us. Within these personal relationships, each party is irreplaceable, and each gives the other something that can be given, in a fundamental sense, by no other.
We do not, however, merely measure ourselves according to the good, or act based on our relationship to it, we desire it--and in particular, we desire it in a mode and degree that goes beyond our own capacities, and so is either relatively or absolutely transcendent. This transcendent object of desire may variously take the form of the true, the good, the beautiful, the real, the perfect, the complete, the powerful, the intensely pleasurable, the transgressive, the strange, and/or the divine; and the practical role of ethics in human life is really to evaluate and integrate and relate these various modalities and appearances of the good to each other to form a single, stable, and coherent character or way of life.
Our relations with other people, too, can only be understood, finally, in relation to human ends and human desire, or, in other words, our relationship to transcendent good. In many areas of our lives, we actively seek people who possess something about them, some visible or invisible sign or mark or scent or savor, that in some way, to us, speaks to us of this transcendent good we desire: whether that is something as immediate as physical beauty, as mundane as technical skill, as unimaginable as political power, or as final and unanswerable as divinity.
This idea of charisma, of a mark that makes us trust and follow someone in some way that transcends not only reason in the analytical sense, but even reason and trust and relationship in the typical human senses, is, I would argue, absolutely central to human history. To take one obvious example, something about an Austrian ex-serviceman and political radical named Adolf Hitler made many millions of people, ranging from the poor to the intelligentsia to the highest authorities of the German academy, devote themselves to him, submit to his will and his commands, display his image and repeat his words and believe in his beliefs, in a way that obviously goes beyond any typical evaluation of his moral character or immediate physical qualities. To take another, even more obvious example, something about a poor carpenter from Palestine named Jesus ultimately convinced a shockingly large number of people in his own day and age that he was the long-awaited Messiah and absolutely unique embodiment of supreme divinity--and untold billions of people in succeeding centuries.
Both of these are obvious and extraordinary instances of this general principle of charisma; but once we recognize the basic principle, we can recognize its presence, as it were, everywhere: and notice an immediate, and rather obvious, problem with this principle. Do most of us, most of the time, in fact choose who we will be attracted to, fall in love with, even marry on the basis of a rational evaluation of character and trustworthiness? Do we not, rather, follow some imprint, some savor of the transcendent, that in some way suggests to us the transcendent object of our infinite desire? And have most societies, most people, throughout the totality of history in fact decided what leader to follow, political or religious, on the basis of a rational evaluation of their moral character and beliefs? Have they and we not, rather, followed a leader who in some way savored of the divine, a Pharaoh or prophet or Messiah or embodiment of national unity or champion of progress, who promised us the transcendent unity, the transcendent purpose and meaning and finality, that we desired all along?
If this is true, though, then, as I said, a rather immediate, and rather large problem immediately presents itself: how do we evaluate these charismas? How do we discern on what a given charisma is based, on what explicit or implicit beliefs it depends, what transcendent or pseudo-finality it aims at, and whether all this is in fact good or evil, real or counterfeit, true or false? Are we, at least in this, finally beyond the realm of reason altogether, doomed to either desperately submit or desperately reject, at random, beyond recall, forever?
Without some rational and effective method to evaluate the charismatic figures and signs we encounter, , analogous to the mix of instinct and belief and experience by which we evaluate individual people, we will find ourselves blown about by every wind, subjected to every figure of power or promise or destiny. All we will have, at best, is a mere irrational attachment, a mere tribal membership: this is my Messiah, this is yours. But even in this, we will have, quite literally, nothing whatsoever to distinguish Jesus Christ from Adolf Hitler.
Hence the purpose of this post: to meditate on the promise and danger of charisma by looking at two books that both, in their several, extraordinary different ways, reflect on this issue, by presenting the portraits and historical profiles of men with charisma, men who were successful at convincing those around them that they bore the mark of something unique, something special, something that savored of the transcendent object of all our desire.
On this basis, men made decisions, and trusted, and followed--and suffered terrible things, and changed the course of history.
Charismatic Lords of Conjunction
Indeed, one of Moin's most fascinating theses is the centrality of the figure of Timur, conceived of precisely as a messianic/millennial "Lord of Conjunction" whose divinely ordained task it had been to violently dissolve the old order of things, to all Islamic constructions of kingship during this period. As he argues, much of the religious and sectarian landscape of the Near and Middle East during this period was "heretical" in Islamic terms in its frequent, explicit or implicit, dalliance with the idea that Islam was itself nothing more than one transitory epochal order of things, established by Muhammed as a Lord of Conjunction and ordained to last, like all previous epochs, for exactly one thousand years, and hence due to be superseded by a new order any year now.
It may seem odd to move directly from the world of late Medieval Islamic kingdoms to the world of mid-20th century American television production. One of these worlds, after all, is seen in its relation to our own lives as distant, exotic, mysterious, foreign; while the other is seen as immediate and mundane to the point of (practical) boredom. What could they possibly have in common?
Yet this comparison is much more complex than it first might appear. There are in fact many fundamental ways in which the unstable, conflictual milieu described by Azfar Moin, rife with charismatic claimants to power through moral transgression, is rather closer to the world and worldview of 2024 post-pandemic America than the secure, secularized, professionalized world of 1960s Hollywood. Likewise, there are many ways in which the televized production and inception of Star Trek has been far more thoroughly mythologized than the histories of the Mughal or Safavid dynasties. The latter, it is true, have been used in academic debates over secularism and in modern narratives of nationalism; but the former has been made the basis for a contemporary fandom cult and convention cultures and Internet debates. Can there be any competition?
Like many of the mythologizations of culture integral to the mid-to-late-20th century American Empire, the Story of Star Trek as received by most people through guidebooks and behind the scenes books and glossy magazines and television specials is based around a rather historically unique conflict between the young versus the old, the progressive versus the conservative, the rising generation versus the declining generation. The trope of a young person inspired by new ideas and new visions having to convince their unsympathetic patriarch to relax an outdated tradition or let in a new practice is so common in American art that it barely registers. The youth are our future, the octogenarians that run the corporations and the military and the government solemnly intone at each and every ceremonial occasion. In the case of Star Trek, similarly, it was a young idealist named Gene Roddenberry who successfully eluded the conservative forces of the Television Networks and the Studios and brought in stunning, progressive ideas latched onto by a generation of revolutionary youth, and so helped usher in the Modern World. Amen.
Yet the truth is that in practically every instance in history, the novelties of a rising generation have been driven by the concerns and preoccupations of the generation or generations before. The leading lights of the Baby Boomers were not themselves Baby Boomers, but members of the so-called "silent generation" born prior to WWII--and most of those were in fact driven and inspired by even older people. Bob Dylan transparently worshiped Woody Guthrie; Elvis was merely a downmarket version of Little Richard; and so on
This basic reality struck me very fundamentally when I first read what is without a doubt the best behind the scenes book on Star Trek TOS ever written: Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. This book flows from the pens of two of the three men arguably most responsible for Star Trek's actual production in the 1960s. And what I find most fascinating about it is not any of the random, juicy bits of information about the methods and practicalities of television production in the 1960s, but the character of the people--men and women, actors and producers and corporate executives and wives--found therein.
Put simply, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story is the story of a generation of American professionals: secularized (Jewish or Catholic or Protestant), workaholic, alcoholic, normatively married, but to a large degree casually sexualized and sexualizing and not infrequently profligate.
This generation is emphatically not the Baby Boomer generation, the young children and teenagers and college students that watched Star Trek on television from 1966-1969 and spent the next forty years mythologizing it and turning it into a mass-market, consumerized religion. It is not even the generation before them, who watched the show as young professionals or young married couples or young families and continued to enjoy its mass-media products intermittently and fondly over the decades to come.
In the year Star Trek premiered, 1966, Gene Roddenberry was 45 years old, had been married for nearly twenty four years, and had two daughters; Bob Justman, the principal producer of the show and one of the authors of Inside Star Trek, was 39 and also married; and Herb Solow, their up-and-coming executive champion and the other author of Inside Star Trek, was 36 years old and a widower with two daughters.
Of course, even this trio contained a generation gap that was, in its way, just as important as that separating them from the younger generations. Put simply, Gene Roddenberry and Bob Justman had served in WW2; and Herb Solow had not. This was, in its own way, responsible for quite a number of the basic disjuncts between the three men, visible most of all in Herb Solow's greater moral strictures and inclination to follow rules and basic social conservatism. Justman and Roddenberry's relationship, though, had gaps of its own; for Justman was born to a Hollywood production family and had served only two years during WW2 in domestic duty, whereas Roddenberry was raised a Southern Baptist and had served as a bomber pilot during the height of the war in Europe and then worked various odd jobs before entering Hollywood. From this can be derived Justman's intimate understanding of the Hollywood production process and ease with the personalities of its stars and behind the scenes personnel, as well as his relative innocence when it came to the darker side of these things.
Still, whether they had gotten shot down over Europe or merely endured basic training or merely gotten involved young in the corporate world, these were all men who lived by and in mid-century American industrial and corporate and mass-media systems: which is to say, men who knew how to operate within strictly hierarchical systems, how to follow rules, how to take orders, and how to toe the line; who knew how to regularly and unexceptionally push their bodies and minds to do more, faster, with less, to the point of total physical and mental breakdown, and men who knew how to regularly and rapidly recover from these breakdowns and depressure and vent and blow off steam and then return to work again; and men who knew how to get away with things, where the gaps were and where rules could be safely bent or broken.
It is hardly an accident that the years and decades after WW2 saw an extraordinary explosion in corporate labor and productivity, accompanied by a concomitant explosion of membership in virtually every institution of American life with strict rules and discipline. In WW2, a number of men absolutely unprecedented in all of human history had been drafted into the army, trained, disciplined, abused, had killed and watched friends die and worked impossibly hard and learned to shrug off physical danger and physical and mental strain and injury and how to break rules and blow off steam in bars and brothels all around the world and back again. When these men returned home, they flooded into industries and corporations and churches and monasteries, desperate to continue living in the basic way that had for them become simply normal and natural and even necessary. Whatever the system, whether that of the television industry or the Catholic Church, they clung to the structures and rules and discipline, and just as naturally bent these rules and blew off steam and often blew those institutions entirely to pieces in the process.
Roddenberry, for his part, left the Air Force and immediately went through stints as an airline pilot and a police officer, in both of which positions he found himself in uniform and hierarchy and structure and danger as before. Justman returned to the bowels of Hollywood, where he worked himself with as much or more discipline than any army cadet. And many, many millions of their contemporaries did more or less the same thing, in one area or another.
Far, far more than the Baby Boomers--who were in reality a generation of innocence, raised by people they knew not at all in blissful ignorance of all that had gone before, and living out unconsciously and at random whatever myths or fantasies were fed to them by their parents' generation through mass-media--it was this generation, and their immediate predecessors, that broke and remade the world.
Within this world, neither Herb Solow, nor Bob Justman, nor Gene Roddenberry were at all unique. The motley crew of actors they assembled--angry, insecure workaholic strivers desperate for affirmation and higher pay--were likewise totally unexceptionable to the world around them.
Yet for many people--many younger people especially, children and teenagers and young couples who had never known anything but the all-encompassing, sheltering systems of post-WW2 American created and run by the hard-nosed generations before them--these people, and what they created, were different. Star Trek was not just another television show, another science fiction tale based on stories by men in their '40s or '50s, and incarnating militaristic and corporate values from the World Wars; it was a modern myth of liberation and freedom, a Gospel of a new world and a new world order. The men who made it, these insecure strivers and hard-working alcoholics and ex-soldiers, were Apostles, prophets, emblems of youth and vitality and the future. And Gene Roddenberry...
Well, let's talk, for a minute, about Gene Roddenberry. For many, many, many years, ever since I was a small boy reading Star Trek BTS guidebooks, I have wanted to write about the Myth of Gene Roddenberry. For almost as many years, I have wanted to disprove it, debunk it, destroy it, by any means necessary.
And yet, now that I am older (though not nearly as old as Gene Roddenberry when he wrote Star Trek), I find that what I want most of all is merely to understand this myth, to fathom or begin to fathom how it is has endured all these decades, through the whole Baby Boomer generation and beyond, through JFK and Nixon and Reagan and Bush and Obama, and how it continues to endure in the era of MeToo and (alleged) Cancel Culture. For virtually everyone to ever engage with Star Trek, including not only fans but distant strangers and cultural commentators and critics and its own creatives, Gene Roddenberry has for the past sixty years been held up as a kind of secular saint, a visionary prophet who embodied progressive values and hope and optimism and made them real and impactful in the world. I simply want to understand: where did this myth come from? And how has it continued to endure, despite everything?
Because, to put it simply, Gene Roddenberry was not a nice man. I knew this already reading guidebooks from the 1990s. I know it even more now, especially after reading Inside Star Trek. Justman and Solow record, with straightforward analytical detail, an extraordinary number of ways in which Roddenberry, from the beginning of his engagement with Star Trek to the end, was a lying, conniving, sexually abusive scumbag.
To begin with, most of the things Roddenberry said, both while the show was running and afterwards, to fans and the press and the studio about behind the show and its genesis were deliberate and bald-faced lies. Roddenberry was not responsible for the show's fabled diversity, which he had implemented against the studio's stringent opposition: in fact, NBC had a strong pro-diversity policy and had pressured him to include more ethnically diverse and especially African-American characters in the show when his initial drafts had been virtually all-white. Roddenberry did not hire Nichelle Nichols to play Uhura to make a statement about strong black female professionals; he hired her because she was his mistress, and in so doing fired the only existing black actor on the show. He, similarly, did not hire Majel Barrett to play Number One in the show's original pilot to make a statement about feminism, and he did not remove her because the studio was uncomfortable having a strong woman in a position of power; he hired Majel Barrett because she was also his mistress, and he removed her because NBC found out. The show was not renewed for a third season after a sudden, spontaneous upswell of "ordinary fans" led by the ordinary Trimbles; the Trimbles were Roddenberry's personal friends and the entire campaign was orchestrated and overseen by Roddenberry and billed to NBC's affairs department while he lied about it to them. Et cetera.
The production of Star Trek, in fact, could be told succinctly, if not particularly perspicaciously, through a series of Roddenberry's peccadillos. Roddenberry hired Alexander Courage to write the iconic theme song to Star Trek; and then secretly wrote lyrics to the song that were never recorded in order to steal a large share of his royalties. Roddenberry worked himself to the point of a mental breakdown and then took a trip to Hawaii "alone" to recharge, saying goodbye to his wife, and then saying hello to his mistress sitting in the airplane seat beside him. Roddenberry "kept" this mistress, Majel Barrett, in an apartment close to the lot, hosting parties there and finally writing her another role (of Christine Chapel) for her when she demanded that he do so. Roddenberry ran an effective and at times public "casting couch," having sex with actresses and aspiring actresses in his office by an open window to the amazement of such visitors as Harlan Ellison. Roddenberry participated eagerly in all costuming sessions for female guest stars, helping to design their wardrobes and hairstyles and making them as revealing as possible. Roddenberry then insisted on last-minute "costume checks" in which he felt up said female guest stars while insisting to the costume designer that he take more and more and more fabric off their bodies. Roddenberry left the show before Season Three, refusing to write or oversee anything despite his Executive Producer credit, but returning unexpectedly to insert a single scene of dialogue featuring a "Vulcan IDIC Pin": which he promptly began selling through a new memorabilia business. Roddenberry stole film props and gag reels and even entire rolls of film from the set to sell for this new business. And so on and so forth.
Justman and Solow recount all of these details with obvious discomfort, disdain, and at points even clear moral condemnation. Both participated in the same basic culture as Roddenberry: but both regarded him as having gone, clearly and manifestly, off the rails, like many an older man intoxicated by the fumes of youthful rebellion and sexual revolution in the 1960s.
When I first read Inside Star Trek, I was surprised to discover that it quickly shaped itself in my mind, not into the story of a television show and its production, but into a story about relationships, families, marriages, and their breakdown. This overtly workaholic and all-encompassing culture was naturally productive of peccadillos, and just as naturally destructive of families, which had been removed violently from the center of life and meaning and shunted off to small patches of stolen time and energy on the peripheries.
And yet, within this culture, some families survived, and some did not. Solow, amid professional drama and last minute deadlines, took his kids to school and returned home to them at night and spent time with them on the weekends. Bob Justman saw very little of his wife, returning late at night and often falling asleep exhausted in his office and not returning home at all. And yet, during the rare time they saw each other, in the early morning before work or on vacation after a nervous breakdown, they enjoyed their time together, and stayed married. Shatner and Nimoy, meanwhile, both got their first divorces due to the long hours and late nights on set. Gene Coon, another workaholic producer, in his rare moments away from writing hired a private detective to track down his first love from college, then abruptly and without warning abandoned his wife to be with her; and died a few years later, utterly exhausted by work and wracked with guilt.
Even within all this human drama and dysfunction, though, Roddenberry stood apart. As Justman dutifully worked himself to a breakdown again and again and again and again returned home to his wife, Roddenberry began smoking marijuana and sleeping at Majel's apartment, interspersing his writing duties with boozy staff parties or stints spent riding through the streets with his mistress on motorcycles dressed in matching leather outfits, rarely and finally never returning to his wife and children at all. In the end, he abandoned both his family and his show, and started anew as an unattached travelling speaker and aspiring cult leader. In this, he did, in truth, herald the new era of a certain kind of sexual and personal freedom that would be, in the end, the strange accompaniment to the utter domination of professional and corporate and Imperial America.
And yet...the most shocking thing, to me, about the book Inside Star Trek is the degree to which even Justman and Solow, men who knew Roddenberry personally, who saw him at his worst, who suffered him at his worst, continued to regard him with mythologizing awe. When both men met Roddenberry, both saw something in him, something unique, something profound: according to Justman, he believed then, and continued to believe decades later, that Roddenberry was "the most advanced man" he had ever met. Justman in particular, viewed Star Trek with almost religious fervor and devotion, savoring the incredible novelty and meaningfulness of the experience of working on the show even as he pushed himself closer and closer to a breakdown. And this same sense of mission and devotion may be found in various forms in many or most of the people to work on Star Trek, both at the time and even more in retrospect.
In my earlier writings, I hazarded the belief that much of the myth of Star Trek, and much of the cultic devotion of its fans and creatives, emerged only in the 1970s, as Roddenberry toured the nation with his traveling show and malaise spread from shore to shore. This is true for many people in America, and even most people directly involved with Star Trek.
But from reading Inside Star Trek, it is clear that many people who knew Roddenberry, and many people who worked on Star Trek, and many people even who watched and encountered it, viewed it with this quasi-religious fervor from the beginning; and many people, even before the show came out, viewed Roddenberry himself with a similar reverence.
Roddenberry, then, clearly had charisma of a sort. Yet what was this charisma?
Clearly, it was not moral charisma, that sense of even extreme ethical goodness found in saints and their secular equivalents. Just as clearly, it was not charisma in any obvious personal sense. Roddenberry, as Justman and Solow alike attest, was a singularly unimpressive figure in person, a large, painfully shy, and stunningly awkward person who spoke extremely quietly, mumbled, and seemed mostly incapable of dressing or grooming himself. He was manifestly not someone capable of smooth-talking women, or charming executives, or overwhelming crowds of people. In the days of Ackbar and Ismail, he would never have been seen as embodying divine power.
To understand Roddenberry's charisma, then, we need to understand the context and conceptual nexus from which he emerged, within which his particular charisma was constructed. When we understand this, I believe, we will understand a great deal about our own civilization, the civilization that emerged of the World Wars and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, and what separates it from earlier civilizations.
To sum up, the civilization and this Empire of mid-century America, while run for the most part by hard-working professionalized technicians like Solow and Justman, has for many decades now selected its leaders not based on such professional or technical qualifications, but based on a unique form of mass-media charisma. And Roddenberry had this charisma, in distinctive ways and to distinctive degrees, even among his peers.
(1) First of all, there is the simple fact that Roddenberry was, as we say, a "creative," a storyteller engaged in creating narratives and characters. From the time of Homer and before, people have seen something magical, something almost divine, about the ability to create, to bring new things and people and whole worlds into (quasi-)being. Hence, from almost the beginning of time, creatives have been connected to the divine, have been seen as in some way channeling or making present or even embodying divine power and the ends of human desire.
While Inside Star Trek is at pains to recognize the numerous contributions by numerous creatives that went into the original Star Trek, both authors acknowledge Roddenberry's prime role as both the originator of the idea and concept and setting and characters for Star Trek, and the work-horse behind a great deal of the practical writing and rewriting of the majority of its scripts through its first two seasons. Creativity is a strange and powerful thing; and Roddenberry had it. On the most basic level, then, Roddenberry originated the idea for a television show that went on to become very popular; and so naturally people who liked this show assigned him a certain charisma based on that fact.
More than this, Roddenberry was someone who used his creative power to tell stories, not only about others, but above all about himself. Justman and Solow alike describe in great detail Roddenberry's penchant for self-mythologization, the spinning of highly colored and effective narratives about every aspect and incident of his life. Roddenberry had had a very interesting life by any standards: serving in WW2, piloting jet airliners, crashing several times, working as an LAPD officer, and so on. And yet in every instance, Roddenberry did not merely recount his life, but embellished it, characterized and exaggerated and falsified and fictionalized to the point of open lying. Even people like Justman who knew that he was lying were, frequently, swept along by these stories; and the fans of his show who he aggressively proselytized and profited from starting in 1969 and continuing for the rest of his life were, naturally, totally receptive to each and every story, and each and every lie, and did plenty of embellishment of their own.
This does not, however, explain why Justman, Solow, and others who worked with him to a large extent granted him charisma as well. To understand this, we must remember that creativity does not only or primarily have power for those who passively receive it through media; it has as much or more power for those who actually participate in it. Creative labor is, for those who engage in it, an exhausting and all-encompassing thing that naturally and necessarily comes to involve the whole person, body and soul, and naturally and necessarily transcends human control or power. Hence, creative collaboration usually operates according to a kind of natural, communicative hierarchy, where a certain priority and power and hence a certain charisma is granted, even or especially by other creatives, to the man behind it all, the overall director or producer or showrunner or auteur or visionary.
This charisma Justman and Solow and others granted to Roddenberry because without following his creative vision and relying on his creative efforts to a very large degree, they quite simply could not have made the show Star Trek; and, more than this, because without investing themselves into the show, committing themselves to it, depending on it, pouring themselves into it creatively and socially and physically, and hence in a very profound senes believing in it, they could not have made the show Star Trek either.
(2) Secondly, and closely related to the above, there is the more immediate, contextual element of the secularized, corporate-disciplinary nature of mid-century American society after the World Wars. Beginning with colonization and industrialization but taking its most potent form during the World Wars, many millions of people had been torn from their traditional communities and systems of meaning, families and small towns and farms and local businesses and churches and monasteries, and inserted into a vast, standardized nationalistic military-industrial system that in WW2 came to encompass the whole world. Whether consciously or unconsciously, people within these systems had ceased to invest themselves and live their lives and hence find the meaning of these lives in religion and family and community, and begun to find it primarily or solely within their national and/or Imperial and/or military and/or corporate and/or professional surroundings. Justman and his peers were no different--in fact, as ex-military men, as older men, as Hollywood men, even as (mostly) Jews, Justman and others like him were significantly ahead of the general curve of America.
Whether corporate or military, the basic reality of these new national-industrial-imperial-corporate systems is that they functioned in highly hierarchical and highly arbitrary ways--that they were systems where certain people were in charge, and gave the orders, and certain people followed them. Likewise, they were systems that featured numerous managers and workers and technicians called upon to work extraordinarily hard and make extraordinary sacrifices--and so employed potent ideologies to make people feel that this work and these sacrifices were meaningful.
Hence, Solow and Justman and many others invested themselves in their work and their place in the corporate hierarchy; and so, necessarily, invested themselves in Roddenberry as well.
(3) A third reason following from this is that Roddenberry was someone who had, to a significant degree, the makings not only of a creative in the ordinary sense but of a political and religious ideologue and sect-leader. Roddenberry could not only tell stories; he could not only tell stories about himself: he could articulate ideas. He, like all the other most powerful men of the 20th century, could use stories and creativity to teach, to convert, and to propagandize.
This, in Justman's own telling, was the main reason why he was ultimately so impressed and devoted to Roddenberry, despite his feet of clay. Roddenberry could articulate his vision for Star Trek not merely as narrative fiction, but as predictions, as beliefs, as sociology, as ideology, claims about the world and the future to inspire corporate obedience and action. It was here that Justman found Roddenberry strangely compelling, found him "the most advanced man" he had ever met.
Nor was this an accident. Roddenberry was good friends with L. Ron Hubbard, and the two men discussed at various points the idea of starting their own religion, for monetary and sexual reasons alike. L. Ron Hubbard, after starting off as a science fiction writer, ended up making a living as the explicit leader and founder of a religious cult (according to many accounts largely for tax reasons); Roddenberry merely made a living off of touring and giving talks and writing and publishing books and producing television shows and in all this declaring the overriding importance of his own ideas and the need for people to commit to these ideas personally and financially. The two are, of course, entirely different cases.
The main reasons why Star Trek became so popular are easily explicable based on its basic narrative and artistic properties. It was a fun show; it was a show with strong, bold, likeable characters; it was a show featuring an agreeable mix of the strange and wondrous with the familiar and understandable. Yet there can be no denying that one of the principal reasons why Star Trek has endured so long, and gained such a cultural status, is the widespread belief that it in some way embodies or carries with it a certain vision of the world. This alleged vision of the world has changed entirely since 1966, as the views of general society and educated professional progressives have changed; the belief in this vision has been, nonetheless, enduring.
For someone like myself, unavoidably and tragically a person of ideas, there is nothing more frustrating than engaging with claims about Star Trek's revolutionary or optimistic or progressive vision of the world. There was nothing at all remotely original or even particularly interesting about the generic grab-bag of militarist and American-nationalist and progressive and anti-religious and sexually-promiscuous ideas espoused by Roddenberry in the '60s; any more than the even more generic ideas espoused by him in the '70s and '80s. For all its reputation as a show of ideas, Star Trek has, for the most part, been as thoughtless and unconcerned with ideas, and as swept along by the American Zeitgeist, as any other popular television show.
Most people in the world, most people in America, though, are not people of ideas. This is even more true, paradoxically, in a world of mass-media and military-corporate systems where most people to survive must commit themselves blindly and totally to vast systems of technical power they have no understanding of or control over. Roddenberry was an awkward science fiction nerd and television writer and con man; but he could articulate ideas when called upon to do so, however awkwardly, however unoriginally, and however generically. And this, put simply, gave him power: the same kind of power, in fact, that rocketed all the sectarian religious leaders and rock stars and film stars and presidents and dictators of the 20th century to power and kept them there.
There has never been such a powerful tool of dominion as the use of mass-media to spread ideology in the service of industrial-military-scientific-technical power. It is this which has run the world since the World Wars, selected its Presidents and Prime Ministers and dictators and anointed its priests and prophets; and Roddenberry's charismatic power is merely a small, negligible footnote in this broader story.
(4) Finally, and most fundamentally, mass media in our civilization functions, most essentially, as a sort of charisma in itself. If the question of charisma is "when is a human person more than just another human person," the essential answer of American modernity is "when they are on television."
At the heart of this is what Baudrillard correctly identified as the essentially religious and sectarian idea of "simulation," which for him is simply identical with Anabaptism: a real, unrepeteatable thing is repeated, reconstituted, reconstructed in terms of interchangeable and repeatable and infinitely communicable symbols, and this repetition is more real than the real thing. A real thing cannot be repeated or interchanged or communicated infinitely and instantaneously to everyone everywhere; but a simulation can be. And these simulations are, to an ever-increasing-degree, the real rulers, even the real gods, of our Empire.
Hence, Gene Roddenberry appeared on television, and in numerous books and magazine articles and news articles and documentaries and Youtube videos, as the hallowed, sainted Creator of Star Trek and Great Bird of the Galaxy. And whatever the real, unrepeatable man Gene Roddenberry may have been like to those who met him, this simulation of Roddenberry is more real than he. The cult of Roddenberry can survive the open knowledge and dissemination of his bad behavior and lies and crimes precisely because none of these things in any way actually attacks or undermines the actual basis of his charisma, which is the mere fact of his being repeated and discussed and narrativized.
In fact, the negative stories about him in practice often add to his charisma. Like the messiahs of Medieval Islamic kingship, Roddenberry is and always has been worshiped and followed not despite his transgressions of human reason and morality, but because of them. As during the Islamic millennium, people expected and in a sense demanded the dissolution of the old order and the supersession of a new epoch, many people in the 20th century demanded, in a far more fundamental sense, the destruction of the old and the beginning of the new. That they chose a 45-year-old ex-cop who espoused ideas that in most cases were more than a century old is certainly ironic; but Roddenberry did his level best to show himself nonetheless as a true champion of transgression and the dissolution of the old and the coming of the new: certainly in sexual and religious matters, if not, perhaps, in gender equality or labor rights or economics.
Still, whether he is censured or praised, the simple reality, the unavoidable reality of our time, is that Roddenberry has become a myth, a symbol, taking his place within the illusionary symbolic cosmos of mass-media. Every time the story of Roddenberry is told, the charisma of Roddenberry is renewed. Like other such symbols, corporate brands and dead revolutionaries and dead ideas, he has taken his place as one of the gods of the American Empire.
Of course, in reality the man Gene Roddenberry is dead; and the simulation that has taken his place derives neither pleasure nor profit from his continuing adulation.
Future Charismas
In any political and social and religious system, there is a natural tension between institutional power and charisma. This is not an absolute divide, let alone a contradiction; for institutions often, even normatively, run off of charisma of various sorts, using it to mete out rewards and benefits and to grant power. And charismas, as argued above, frequently run off of institutions and people's commitment to and lives within them.
Fundamentally, though, when institutions and the shared ideas and beliefs and concepts and ethical systems that underly them are strong, both in practical power and in moral legitimacy, people can to a large degree operate within such institutions and live their lives without having to make the kind of overriding, all-encompassing decisions that involve charisma in more extreme forms. The more the basic legitimacy of institutions is challenged, though, the more people must, in every area of their life, making important decisions on the basis of charisma in more extreme and irrational dimensions.
In the year 2024, it is fair to say that our basic institutions, and the ideas and ethical systems and beliefs that underly them, have never had less moral legitimacy; and it is also fair to say, concomitantly, that the lives of ordinary Americans have never been more dominated by irrational and ideological and sectarian and mass-media charismas. In every area of American life, whether partisan politics, family life, business, livelihood, lifestyle, art, entertainment, people live their lives and make their choices not based on ethical evaluations or trusting relationships with people they know, but in what can only be called devotion to charismatic mass-media figures.
We do not merely live in houses whose appearance we conform to our own comfort and aesthetic preferences; we live in houses we have designed to correspond in every detail to the aesthetic proclaimed by Chip and Joanna Gaines or Marie Kondo or some other HGTV couple or lifestyle maven. We do not merely wear clothes that we like; we shape our aesthetics and our entire appearance to correspond to some "influencer" or aesthetician or another. We do not merely watch movies; we identify with and engage in fandoms and devotional cults produced or analyzed or promoted by some charismatic artist or critic or influencer who we venerate in a way fundamentally modeled after the veneration once granted by Star Trek fans to Gene Roddenberry. We do not merely vote for a party or cause or politician; we plaster our cars and our lives with mottoes and statements created by charismatic politician or political commentator or ideologue. And we do not merely attend our local parish or local church and listen to the parish priest's homily; we follow and repeat and gain all our knowledge about our own religion from charismatic lay journalists or thinkers or apologists or Youtubers or TikTokers.
As I said at the beginning of this overly verbose essay, there is nothing in itself wrong or even suspicious about the human penchant, indeed the human need, to commit ourselves to other people, to desire and seek to attain transcendent goods through other people; and there is nothing wrong with the basic human and rational need to decide which person to trust and which not to trust based on features that are in some way or another charismatic in the sense of transcendent regular analytical reason. It is both normal and natural for us to make conscious decisions about who to trust, and how much to trust them; it is the essential, rational skill of living as a human being in the world.
This, though, is entirely the point; that to normalize commitment and trust is to precisely and totally reject the unconscious, desperate, utterly and increasingly and intrinsically irrational forms of charisma foisted on us by the mass-media figures and con-men and would-be messiahs proliferating in ever more alarming numbers all around us. We do not need to simply choose one messiah among others to worship and serve and devote ourselves to; we do not need to believe that Roddenberry was an advanced human being and bellwether of the future.
We can, instead, live lives of faith in a much more human and rational sense. We can commit ourselves rationally and stably to other persons and live out those commitments rationally and stably, live in and out of friendships and communities and families and nations and (hopefully) the one Church of Christ, giving ourselves totally and fulfilling our transcendent desires fully, and yet fully rationally.
And in and out of this stability, as we wander through this strange world of shadows, encountering all of its strange people and rulers and television producers and soldiers and creatives and messiahs and gods, and decide who to trust--and who not to trust.
In this, I firmly believe, is the only hope for us and the world.
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