Meta Treks: A Star Trek Philosophy Podcast

Narratives and Metanarratives in Star Trek.   Throughout Western history, grand narratives, or metanarratives, have been used to define who we are and where we should be going as a people. These metanarratives have included things like the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, Democracy, Marxism, Emancipation, and many other competing metanarratives that have made up the tapestry of Western civilization.   Star Trek, likewise, has its grand metanarratives, which tie together individual stories and narratives into a unified message about the future potential of humankind. These Star Trek metanarratives include things like technological progress, political unification, eliminating economic scarcity, and so on. But having seen the collapse of many of these grand narratives of Western civilization, or at least their dark underbellies, many people in today's postmodern times now take a skeptical view, or even a cynical one, about the plausibility of these idealistic grand metanarratives.   In this episode of