In Defense of Us

We need civilizational pride, not shame

This first appeared as an essay in American Mind.

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For centuries, science fiction has captured the Western imagination, fueling our sense of the future with tales of wonder as well as words of warning. But in modern times, the genre has all too often fallen captive to writers who have gone sour on humanity itself. In a recent episode of the new Star Trek series Picard, the crew crashes in Los Angeles in the year 2024. There, amid a throng of vagrants and ICE agents, an alien resident on Earth since the eighteenth century condemns the backwardness of the human species.

The scene is hardly an isolated incident. The hopelessness and stupidity of humanity is one of the show’s central themes. How willfully ignorant does a TV writer have to be to believe that someone—even an alien—who witnessed hundreds of years of human history, watching things improve rapidly, would somehow end up with a hostile view of the early twenty-first century? We have serious problems to fix, but an eighteenth century human would laugh about what we include as problems in the twenty-first century. One of the problems the characters complain about as a prime example of humanity’s failure is “online disinformation”—as though this issue legitimately ranks among war, pestilence, and famine as a problem of historical significance. Somehow, the more petty our foibles, the more harshly they condemn us…

Check out the full piece in the American Mind!