An old friend, someone whom I like and respect, recently told me they hated something I wrote.  I believe he was sincere in what he had to say.  And although I was startled to read his email, I am also still smiling, several hours later.  This is why.

This friend is someone I knew back when I was 19, and because much of his writing has been with a pseudonym, I won’t identify him here, except by gender.  We’d been out of touch for decades, but I recently read a book in which he was mentioned, so I looked him up online and sent him a letter.  I have always been grateful that when I knew him, he had me read an essay by Albert Camus about the death penalty, which changed how I felt about it.  Up to that point in my young life I had assumed the death penalty made sense, but with this essay I realized that when “we” execute someone, each of us who are within the collective whose government carries out the execution are ourselves thus complicit in violence.

Unfortunately, we’re all complicit in violence far too often anyway.  This war we have in Iran, for example – it’s clearly one person’s project, but it’s in the name of our government, and even if we didn’t vote for the man who thought it would be a cool thing to do, we’re still stained by it.

Influencing that particular warmonger isn’t within our capabilities, for the most part.  But opposing capital punishment is, and now I do.

My friend changed my mind!  What an unusual thing!

Since then, he and I have exchanged several emails, and I decided to send him the essay I wrote for my wedding four years ago.  It’s called We Are All Time-Fractals, and it connects my partner’s lifelong interest in fractals with my own research on what makes things salient (Part Two of the essay) and the broader implications of political communication (Part Three).  But, as a light piece of writing to commemorate our wedding, it’s also full of whimsical elements, with references to Dr. Seuss, One Piece, and so on.

At the very end, I asked, “What happens when we think about the future?  Which futures do we recognize ourselves in – the dystopias so popular in young adult fiction? The post-monetary, idealistic pluralism of Star Trek?  Which patterns from the past should we choose to carry forward for the next generations?  If we’re aware of these compelling patterns that we value now, these “fractals” of culture, maybe we can make better choices.”

My friend took exception to the Star Trek reference.  He hates Star Trek, or “Star Dreck” as he referred to it.  I wasn’t acknowledging the many problems of the Star Trek universe.  And I agree, it does have many.  Why is it so militaristic?  Why are so many, many of the admirals such horrible human beings?  How can so many problems be solved with a single simple gesture?

But the context in which I mentioned Star Trek’s idealized future was a wedding, and at weddings we express generic wishes for a good future, free of problems and cares.

We don’t mean this literally.  Of course we want our friends and loved ones who get married not to have to experience genuine life crises, but that’s not what these generic wishes are saying.  What we literally want the bride and groom to have is well-founded trust in each other, excellent communication, and the skills to work through their life problems together.

In other words, using Star Trek to suggest a “post-monetary, idealistic pluralism” is a metaphor for the kind of future where serious problems are few and people will work together with sincerity and good faith.

We don’t literally want Star Trek to be our futures, just the good parts of it.  The point of that type of science fiction is to “bracket out” a whole category of social problem – economic insecurity – to focus on other problems in a narrative context.  I’ve written elsewhere about this type of “bracketing,” and how in real life it isn’t always a responsible thing to do, because we can so easily forget that others are facing problems unlike our own.   With Star Trek, we make believe that no one has to worry about food and housing and basic security, and that lets us focus instead on other categories of problems.  In the Star Trek universe, these problems are typically “us versus them” and other problems of living near and among those who are different from us.  This type of story is worth telling.  We can get genuine insights from them, occasionally even from Star Trek.

And yes, Star Trek idealizes the slick technology we often associate with the future.  Star Trek ignores the value of being intimately connected to one small place on one beautiful planet, and working toward that planet’s health in many small ways, rather than relying on one big tech fix in the nick of time.  Personally I prefer Deep Space Nine to the other Star Trek shows – it’s about relationships and ethics, not heroic technology. 

So when I evoke Star Trek as a possible future for humanity, I’m being figurative, not literal.

It makes me think of Santa Claus, actually.  When I was growing up, we got gifts from our parents, grandparents, and others on Christmas Eve, and then on Christmas morning, we’d get to discover what “Santa Claus” had put in our stockings overnight.  I was shocked, years later, to learn that some of my friends had been hurt to learn that Santa Claus wasn’t real and that their parents had deceived them.

I had never thought that Santa Claus was literally true.  The Santa language was a type of language that we used in this context, a metaphor for the parental filling of stockings that let us connect in our imaginations to a beautiful but certainly fictional world at the North Pole.  Nothing literal at all.

Closely related but more serious is the debate between the famous theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother Richard.  It highlights what I think of as the two main categories of Christians (and Jews, and perhaps Muslims).

Reinhold Niebuhr was one of the most important public intellectuals of the first half of the 20^th century, inspiring Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others.  But even though he was an important Christian thinker, he didn’t believe in God in the same way his brother did.  Richard Niebuhr, an ordained Protestant minister, believed that God literally exists, separately from humanity, before humanity, and eventually after humanity, an independent force in the universe.  Reinhold, by contrast, was more aligned with Immanuel Kant in saying that if God exists like that, it’s nothing we can ever fully know, but, as Reinhold taught, that wasn’t what mattered.  God is a useful idea, what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson would call a “conceptual metaphor,” a handy way to talk about transcendent ideas, a psychologically useful way for humans to align themselves with doing what’s right.  Some Christians believe God literally exists, but for others, talk of God is a language short-cut for conversations about ethics and community and finding meaning in life. The sense of Presence they can experience with religion may be from an independent God, or it may be something special that we cannot understand, or it may be an ordinary phenomenon of social animals… we cannot know.

Or more closely related to the topic of this blog, political messaging…

I honestly don’t think that today’s Progressives believe in Progress literally.  Of course, few modern Americans believe in the same type of Progress that inspired people a century ago.  Technology has made our lives easier in some very concrete ways, but it has also brought new horrors unfathomable to people in the past.  We still want medical progress, and we still want to work toward a world where everyone has opportunities and can get their basic needs met, but there are many contexts in which Progress is not what today’s Progressives want, like, say, stockpiling advanced weapons technology or monitoring people’s private lives or covering the world with schlocky “development.”  The Progress of Progressives is not a pure thing; it’s not literal.  It just means aligning our lives and actions with our deepest values, and hoping we can thereby improve things for at least some others.

Meanwhile, science fiction has changed so much since the 1960s.  These days, science fiction has become one of the most important avenues for criticizing modern life.  Today’s  science fiction “heroes” are more like Martha Wells’s protagonist, “Murderbot,” a futuristic robot with organic tissue and human emotions, who has to escape from being enslaved to those who are invested in all of those bad types of Progress, and in the process discovers the possibility of friendship and learns to find bits of hope.

That’s my thing, personally – bits of hope.  I don’t believe in grand gestures to shake up the world, but I think we can each try to live our lives responsibly, and I believe we can collectively make some improvements in the world for others.

In the close of his email, my friend urged me to find “greater distance from basic banalities.”  It’s an excellent thought to keep in mind.

But in the context of a wedding, as metaphors for hope and good wishes, basic banalities may be just about right.