Worf has feelings

There are some terrific episodes in ST:TNG season 5, but more than anything else this is The Season When Worf Gets in Touch with His Feelings. This happens over the course of several episodes, primarily through Worf’s interactions with Troi — and yes, I know they become an item later on. But let’s forget about that for now.

In “New Ground,” Worf’s son Alexander is misbehaving, and Worf tells Troi that he has decided to send Alexander to a Klingon school.

Troi: I see.

Worf: [Pause] You disapprove.

Troi: I’m not here to approve or disapprove of how you raise your son. My concern right now is how this decision is going to affect you. How will you feel when Alexander’s gone?

Worf thinks about and answers her question, and she tells him “You can’t hide from your feelings” along with other similar therapeutic maxims, which he takes on board. But that’s not what should have happened. Here’s what should have happened:

Worf: Of course you disapprove, and you mean me to know that you disapprove. If I were making a decision you approved of you wouldn’t ask any questions. I am proud to be an officer in Starfleet, and I see many virtues in the culture of the Federation, but one of the most annoying elements of your culture is its faux-neutral paternalism. You judge other cultures by your own values, and what you primarily want — indeed, demand — from other cultures is that they share your pretense of being nonjudgmental. The whole point of bringing a Klingon like me into Starfleet is to transform me into an acceptable facsimile of a Federation liberal — and I have to admit that the long slow process of gentle but constant pressure and manipulation is having an effect on me. But let’s not pretend that this softening of my Klingon sensibilities isn’t your purpose in this conversation, and the purpose of your Captain in having me on the Enterprise. Over time I will become more like you, but none of you will become more like a Klingon, will you? But I ask you to have this much respect for me: for the next few minutes, set aside the pretense and admit your disapproval of my decision. Then we may discuss the matter openly and honestly.

(Surely some right-wing cultural commentator has written “The Feminization of Worf: A Lamentation.”)

The inability of liberalism to interrogate its own premises, and its own level of commitment to those premises, is well-known to anyone who has encountered a regnant liberal society. Another 5th-season illustration of this willful blindness comes in the episode called “Ethics,” in which poor Worf, having been subjected already to liberalization, is now subjected to a spinal injury which costs him the use of his legs. He is operated on by Dr. Russell, a surgeon who turns out to be a habitual risk-taker: some of her previous patients had died while undergoing experimental procedures. And indeed her operation on Worf, while at first apparently successful, goes badly wrong, though the wrongness gets corrected and Worf eventually regains the use of his legs.

Afterwards, Dr. Crusher denounces Russell’s methods, and Russell shakes her head and walks away without a reply. But she could have, and should have, answered thus:

Russell: You know, Dr. Crusher, that Worf planned to enact the Hegh’bat, the Klingon suicide ritual, and only refrained because this operation offered him the possibility, which you could not offer him, of restoring the use of his legs. If I had declined to perform this operation, Worf would be dead. Is that the outcome you would prefer? To maintain your elevated principles at the cost of your colleague’s life?

To which the likeliest answer from Dr. Crusher is that she and the other members of the Enterprise could have dissuaded Worf from performing the Hegh’bat — that is, convinced him to repudiate his own culture’s ideals and replace them with those of the Federation. But for lovers of the Federation this would have been an unpleasant conversation to have — better for Dr. Russell to walk away in silence and spare us the discomfort.

The Federation on steroids: that’s Iain M. Banks’s great creation the Culture — about which I wrote at some length here. The Culture has its own version of the Federation’s Prime Directive, but here’s the thing: a prime directive is not an unbreakable directive. And as Carl Schmitt taught us, even the most liberal society, perhaps especially the most liberal society, must be prepared to declare a state of exception — the point at which the fundamental principles of the social order must give way to something more … rigorous. Banks’s Culture has a unit called Special Circumstances, and the whole point of Special Circumstances is to exist in the state of exception. Special Circumstances is where the liberal utopia becomes decidedly illiberal. A conversation from one of Banks’s novels:

“In Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws — the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe — break down; beyond those metaphysical event horizons, there exist … special circumstances.” She smiled. “That’s us. That’s our territory; our domain.”

“To some people,” he said, “that might sound like just a good excuse for bad behavior.”

Sma shrugged. “And perhaps they would be right. Maybe that is all it is ….But if nothing else, at least we need an excuse; think how many people need none at all.”

My comment at that point: “The liberal conscience at its self-soothing work!”

(There’s actually a Banks short story, “The State of the Art,” in which representatives of the Culture investigate the Earth and see clearly that the “incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species” that runs the place ought to be eradicated. However, humanity has produced Star Trek. So it’s a wash. They leave us alone.)

I bet there’s not going to be a story arc on ST:TNG in which Riker, inspired by Worf’s courage and honor, strives to transform himself into a Klingon warrior. But there ought to be.