By Wayne Allensworth
I loved the original Star Trek series when I was a kid. Sci-fi fascinated me. The show fired my imagination and, I think, in a developed industrial society, the call for exploring a new frontier resonated with the memory of those of us whose ancestors settled an America that was already far behind us. “Exploring new worlds” and the “final frontier” had a poetic ring. America was aiming for the Moon, boldly “going where no man had gone before.” And, as so often, catchy theme music added something intangible to the show’s aura. The ethereal theme seemed to emanate from a starship gliding through space, though no sound is there. It didn’t matter.
The implausibility of the show’s plot lines didn’t seem to matter. How come every new world the Enterprise crew explored had enough oxygen for them? And why did so many of the aliens look like us? Everybody spoke English. Not to mention all the time travel and the highly unlikely “beam-me-down” transporter. Star Trek was a space opera, in some ways echoing old Westerns about frontiersmen in a wild, wooly expanse of a mythic landscape. Only this time the “landscape” was infinity.
Memorable characters like Captain Kirk, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov and Uhura cemented the deal. The show’s liberal messaging — the multi-cultural crew itself was a 1960s civil rights signifier — was clear enough, as was its assumption of practically infinite technological “progress.” But something else was going on, and I’m not sure whether the show’s creator Gene Roddenberry was consciously aware of it: first that Federation of Planets’ galactic globalism included Star Fleet crews who had Scottish and Russian accents. They were people who reflected the cultures they came from. Chekov and Scotty even debated the merits of vodka vs. Scotch whiskey. They would have been bloodless and less human without it. “Diversity” depends on differences and on boundaries. A crew of androgynous universal pod people wouldn’t have appealed to us as the crew of the Enterprise did. And, judging by the space babes Kirk and company encountered, neither Roddenberry nor the TV execs who backed the show ever doubted that.
But the Star Trek character relationship that stuck with me was that of Kirk’s Science Officer Spock and Enterprise Medical Officer, McCoy. In retrospect, I better understand why. I think that what those characters represented, something Roddenberry must have felt himself, is useful in shedding light on human cognition. McCoy and Spock were a shorthand version of the opposing views of our brain hemispheres. The ever-present clash of rationalism with intuition. Of logic and emotion.
I’ve written a number of articles centered on Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory of human cognition. The Right Hemisphere (RH) and Left Hemisphere (LH), as McGilchrist posits, are complementary. They are a complementarity of opposites, both true in their way. But the RH is, or should be, the “the master” in the relationship, the LH “the emissary.” So long as that proper asymmetrical relationship is preserved, then our perception of the world is more veridical and humane and retains a reverence for the sacred based on intuition that itself is rooted in human experience. Both takes on the world are true, but one is truer than the other.
The RH sees the world intuitively and holistically, and in context, recognizing that Truth, Beauty, and Goodness inform our lives positively, projecting the intrinsic value in the cosmos. It provides a guide to living that is general and flexible, capable of adjusting to situations. It’s Christ telling the Pharisees that the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath. It knows that love, friendship, patriotism, and faith need no explanation, and, indeed, cannot be explained explicitly.
In contrast, the LH perception of reality has been a highly effective means of narrowing our mental focus to deal with immediate local problems. It zeroes in on an urgent issue, on problem solving, and thus must be explicit in its explanations. It marshals procedures and rules to deal with our immediate life needs. They themselves spring from experience but become abstractions and rigid formulas in the LH’s theoretical view of reality, which denies the validity of “common sense” takes on reality that cannot be measured or quantified. The LH view likely evolved as a survival mechanism. The LH thrived on developing laws, tools, formulas, and structure in our lives. It wants explicit explanations to dictate determined outcomes. As such, it cannot — because grasping, control, and manipulation are what it is about — comprehend the intuitions of the heart. The LH emphasizes theory over experience and rejects what cannot fit into a neat procedure. It is the religion of the Pharisees and the certainty of ideologues. Or cold logicians. It is the basis of Cartesian doubt of our senses and emotions, trusting only in rationality.
The RH-LH divide is a matter of how sharp a resolution one uses in perceiving the world. The LH draws a problem into sharp focus — which insurance policy to choose, how to repair an appliance, setting bureaucratic regulations, drawing up power grids or building a bridge — though its take on specific issues then has to be, should be, judged by the RH, then incorporated into a holistic view of reality that accounts for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. To allow the LH to usurp power and even suppress the RH’s intuitive and more empathetic worldview is to invite the Will to Power to assume the cognitive throne. And that Will to Power is manipulative and demands precision, wishing to measure what cannot be measured, and to bureaucratize and quantify human relations. A human world in its thrall will lose its collective mind — madness is the dead end it reaches. I think we are there now.
In Star Trek, Spock, the cold, logical Vulcan, is the character who resists emotion — it’s irrational, you see — and displays a sort of autistic, flat persona. I suppose that a Vulcan view of reproduction would simply be as a means of mechanically continuing the species, though I’ve wondered just how one can rationalize or justify why the species must be reproduced. Isn’t that a value judgement? In any case, Spock represents the mindset of the LH.
Dr. McCoy, or “Bones” as Kirk calls him, as in “Sawbones” — an expression one would think had been long lost by the 23rd Century — is the humane, if sometimes irascible, voice of humane empathy and a sense of obligation that goes far beyond a clinical view that reflects his rank as ship’s medical officer. McCoy’s view is the RH’s take on the world — one can’t quantify or rationally justify morality as mere instrumentality. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty have a value all their own that needs no explanation. The stuff that makes life worth living and gives us meaning. In one episode (See the compilation below), McCoy and another crew member save Spock in an avalanche. Spock tells “Bones” that the logical thing to do would have been to leave him behind and save themselves. “I’m sick and tired of your logic!” says McCoy. “That is most illogical,” replies Spock. Whatever Spock contended about emotion being the root of violence, I think the cold lack of empathy we see in psychopaths tells us something else. Viewing humans as “meat computers” is hardly the way to a better world.
If you need a refresher on the banter between Science Officer Spock and Dr. Leonard McCoy, just watch the clips below. They say it all.
The interplay between these characters was to my mind the most memorable aspect of Star Trek, for it intuitively picked up the clash of two opposing worldviews that are embedded in the human psyche. For all his futurism, Roddenberry was at heart on the side of grounded humanity. I doubt that the Star Trek production team and cast saw it in those terms or realized the deep chasm between their galactic globalism and what its implications were, but the show had a human heart. “Bones” was essentially a throwback, the “Doc” character in countless Hollywood melodramas, the voice of humanity and empathy. As for Spock — his best moments were when he, too, displayed a touch of that same humanity. He was, after all, half human. The LH emissary acknowledged, however reluctantly, the validity of the RH’s claims. Even as a kid, I was always on the side of McCoy. I watch reruns of the old series with new eyes nowadays, seeing what was beneath the surface of the show’s cartoonish plots. Its cheesy sets and costumes that seemed to have been bought at Kmart didn’t and don’t matter. It’s the human relationships that were the real draw, making the improbable scenarios so compelling.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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