Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...years of cranial evolution, man (and Desilu Studios) produced a television series about "Space, The Final Frontier," an NBC show featuring a starship called the USS Enterprise that could on a good night travel quite a few times faster than the speed of light, and a crew of 430 human and other beings ("carbon-based units" as they came to be called) determined to "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations: to boldly go where no man has gone before...
Kirk's counterpart, Lieutenant Commander Spock (Leonard Nimoy), prized cold logic. Half-human, half pointy-eared green-blooded native of the planet Vulcan, the ship's science officer delighted in complex calculation, excelled at the mystical mindmeld and the mundane "Spock pinch," and continually confronted the fluctuations of Kirk's human emotions with rigorous Vulcan rationality. Even though he often sparred verbally and physically, with Kirk and Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley), the crusty old ship's surgeon from Georgia, Spock demonstrated that his heart was in the right place (about where the liver is in humans...
...obscured by the simplicity of the characters and the weakness in the plot. We do not perceive the Enterprise crew as thinkers but as doers, whose own motivations are as clouded as those of the enemy they are combating. We end up learning more about the enemy than the human beings. We can assume that Roddenberry meant us to view the alien as a projection of ourselves. It was a good idea, a common theme in Star Trek, but one overwhelmed by the film's flaws...
...short, the representation of sociobiology as the naively nativistic hypothesis that human behavior is the result of noncultural, ineradicable, fixed genetic expressions which vary massively between humans is a gross and malicious misrepresentation which is wrong on all counts...
When one looks into the eyes of those who have lived through Dachau and Auschwitz, the Gulag and the Cambodian holocaust, Vietnam in the 1960's and Vietnam in the late 1970's, the terror in Kampala and the tanks in Prague, they bear witness to the same human reality. The barbed wire in South Africa, Brazil Russia and Chile, Berlin and China is the shadow of the barbed wire that is stretched through our minds. The seed of that darkness is everywhere, and our hope lies in the fragile unfolding of our knowledge of the common roots of human...