As we've seen and has been pointed out in the shows, humans are as violent as the klingons, logical as the vulcans, paranoid as the romulans, greedy as the ferengi, cunning as the cardassians, relentless as the borg, stupid as the kazon, empathetic as the betazoids, adaptable as the founders, and so on in various measures as various situations require. Now from a writing perspective, it makes a ton of sense that the various alien species all represent a highlighted and magnified aspect of humanity in much the way the olympians did to the ancient greeks, but from an in-universe perspective what can explain why humanity is the way it is, how it went from nuclear annihilation to being one of the most powerful and influential species in the galaxy in ~300 years?
Because, and I say this as a decided non-humanist, Star Trek's overall philosophy is insanely humanist. Ergo, it views us with rose-colored glasses.
One of the core ideas of Star Trek is that humanity can, and would, survive. That it would actually thrive when the celebration of differences and mutual cooperation became more important than separation due to differences. So, of course humanity is going to be looked at more positively, because that's the initial conceit of the franchise. The other side is that when writing stories, they are going to be for a human audience. Even stories with animals are usually anthropomorphized , assuming a quality of a human in some way. Tolkien spoke on this in his letters that all stories are, by necessity, a human one, because they are for humans as an audience, and discuss the human condition. As noted, humans have all of these qualities of other races from Star Trek, except I think it would be better to say that these races espouse a certain human quality., both ones we could consider savory, and ones more unsavory. From an in universe perspective, I think the biggest quality is simply the fact that humans are adaptable. They grew out of destruction and recognize their own foibles and sought to remedy that fact, going out in to the vacuum of space, eschewing safety in the name of knowledge. Other worlds have gone out from other motivations, and so adapt to various degrees or conquer.
Quite so. Still, being a kid when first encountering the dialogue, I felt a bit uneasy when Spock mentioned there would be at least two MORE world wars after Hitler. (TOS was nothing if not a violent-utopian combo.)
I mean, we still have a dark side. TOS was quite clear on that, while future installments would downplay it.
One of the areas where later Trek lost me. We went from explorers to missionaries preaching the greatness of humanity.
While in the glory days, the most popular TREK character of all kept struggling against, rejecting or even dissing on humanity in general....
It only loses me if it does not acknowledge the potential for darkness. But, then, we as humans are great at fooling ourselves. We refuse to learn from history, and deny our capacity for great evil. But, the flip side has to be that we all have a hero living inside of us, capable of helping out other people around us. It's why TOS stands apart for me from Trek. It espoused a balance, rather than an excess. Closer to Aristotle and his virtues for my preferences. Don't we all struggle?
That depends on how long one lives, perhaps. But Spock does all three, while struggling since his youth to a far greater degree.
I have seen all three from various humans in my life. I have also rejected my humanity to one degree or another. I think if more people were actually honest about their struggles we might see an improvement of empathy.
For much of Earth history, China, India, and the Middle East were the most powerful civilizations and Europe was a relatively impoverished backwater. But that very backwardness compelled the Europeans to use the more advanced technologies and knowledge they acquired from the East (from stirrups to decimal numerals to the printing press to the magnetic compass and the lateen sail, and of course gunpowder) to expand its reach and power. China was advanced enough to have an industrial revolution 700 years before Europe did, but it had no incentive to, because it was already powerful and prosperous and other nations came to it in search of trade and alliance. Europe's Industrial Revolution was driven by the need to gain faster travel to obtain the wealth of the East, and to invent factories that could create trade goods competitive with Asian textiles, pottery, and the like. So that greater need, that very lack of prosperity and power compared to the rest of the world, drove Europe to expand rapidly and go from an overlooked backwater to the dominant power on Earth in just a few centuries. Earth as portrayed in Enterprise is much the same. It's a backward power trying to catch up and prove it can play with the big boys, so it has a strong incentive to expand and grow, while the older, more established powers like Vulcan and Andoria have a stable status quo that they don't see a need to change. An additional thing I like about Enterprise is how it showed that humanity became an important power, not because humans were superior in any way, but because as the newcomers on the scene, we were a neutral party and didn't have the centuries of historical baggage that led Vulcan, Andoria, and Tellar to mistrust one another. So humans were the only ones who could act as neutral intermediaries and make alliances with the others. We became important because we were the only ones the others trusted. Not really. Spock said in "Space Seed" that the Eugenics Wars were the last world war, so the intent at the time was probably that the Eugenics Wars and the Third World War mentioned in "Bread and Circuses" were the same thing. It wasn't until "Encounter at Farpoint" retconned WWIII to take place in the mid-21st century that fandom began assuming that the EW and WWIII were two separate conflicts, glossing over what "Space Seed" asserted.
And over the years, they or those stereotyping them distilled aliens' values down to simple core motivations/beliefs. Whereas, humans haven't been widely interacting with aliens long enough to say that we can be described in one word/sentence like most/many agree other species can.
Another thing we can see in adjectiveless history is that in the past societies had never been too concerned about discrimination and genocides. The white man orders, the black slave obeys; that's the order of things. Genocide, just another way to do war. And then WWII and the Holocaust happened. Initially, it was just a war between an expansionist country and those in its way. Concentration camps and the ideas of Hitler about Jews were known, but nobody cared too much. But when the war ended, the concentration camps were liberated and the full scale of what had transpired there came to public light... the collective horror and shame of the human race as a whole was enough to kickstart a complete change of mentality. Genocide became fundamentally unacceptable under ANY circumstances, and movements for the rights of minorities started everywhere. It was not a 180º change, and those movements had to face resistance before eventually prevailing, but the change happened. So yes, a horror that is big enough CAN force a change in the human race, because it has already happened.
Started there, but it has persisted throughout the franchise. Especially, now. Which makes sense, because the people who write and produce the shows now largely grew up with Berman Trek. Just doesn't work well, for me.
More true than you know. Kirk regularly found himself on worlds that were very different from the human norm, and either he or circumstances had often changed this by the time he left. Sometimes, it's very likely, to the detriment of that world.
Christopher - if I didn't know better I'd say you could infer that Europeans are essentially the Pakleds of the real world. I like it
I always think Star Trek makes humanity the outside observer, and all the aliens are aspects of humanity. In that way, it makes the audience reassess those parts of our culture. I think of it as The Twilight Zone perspective. You can analyze issues and use metaphors to talk about issues in science-fiction indirectly and get through to an audience that might not watch it if it was actually about that topic. If you talk about race relations openly and directly, it can come off as preachy. If you show a half-white, half-black alien species that hates the other half of his species for being half-black on the other side, then some people will get it and watch the story.