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Star Trek is a heroic space adventure.
Throughout its different incarnations, the Enterprise's basic mission has always been: To explore. And we should identify this Final Frontier with the great European Age of Discovery that started with Portugal's Prince Henry in the fifteenth century.
As Evan S. Connell relates in A Long Desire, Prince Henry the Navigator, Prince of fifteenth century Portugal, and the man most responsible for initiating the great European voyages of discovery, was also the first to issue official slave hunting licenses to his retainers. The first one back from raiding villages along the Guinea coast wrote his liege: "And at last our Lord God, who rewards every noble act, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service . . . they took captive of these Moors, what with men, women and children, 165, besides those who perished or were killed."
In 1452 the Bishop of Rome spoke out and gave his official blessing in a papal bull. As Connell reminds us, "'Dum Diversas' authorized Portugal to attack Saracens, pagans, and unbelievers, to capture and keep all their goods, and reduce the owners to slavery."
Eventually the English took over the slave trade. Over the last 400 years, 20 million West Africans became slaves, and most ended up in what is now the United States of America.
The Crusoe "mythos" is racist by definition. It is invidious because it is invisible and because it justifies itself. It is also eminently successful, perhaps the most successful ethic in the history of the world. The proof is trumpeted everywhere. The Crusoe "mythos" of free enterprise has driven the west's engines of progress to phenomenal levels. The Crusoe "mythos" is self-sustaining. Even when fragmented into components, it continues its inexorable, relentless motion.
The Protestant ethic has evolved into the American mystique. It is the western "mythos," a product of popular culture so pervasive as to be invisible, a seamless thread through our culture. A western ethic that has been steadily going global. And what we Americans call "globalization," the other 96 percent of the world calls "American imperialism."
Enough stuff and nonsense has been written about the Samurai Businessman to chokehold a sumo wrestler. When the old Bushido face brought shame, death and destruction in its defeat in World War Two, Japan put a new face on its samurai and set out to build a new economic empire.
Both Michael Crichton's book Rising Sun and the 1993 movie of the same name deal head-on with the effects of Japan's own version of Robinson Crusoe's free enterprise. The Crusoe "mythos" has gone corporate, multinational, global. The Crusoe "mythos" has become the new Japanese "mythos."
We must remember several other things. That the Japanese do not subscribe to the Protestant Ethic. They are not Protestant. That, regardless whether it's located in California or Ceylon, Malaysia or Tennessee, the Japanese production facility is identical to the production facility back in the home islands. That every important position will not be filled by a local, but by a Japanese national sent out from the home islands just for this specific job position. The Japanese do not play by the same rules. Nor does any other major Asian trading partner we have. Mainland China and Singapore, for instance, are both Confucian societies. One is still nominally Communist, while the other is pure capitalism. The subcontinent of India is one of the fast growing nations; the Protestant Work Ethic will be a bust there. As the PBS documentary The Pacific Century noted, East Asia is growing twice as fast as either America or Western Europe, while 40 million citizens of the USA live below the poverty level.
Yes, Rising Sun has a message: If we do not understand the rules we play by, how can we understand their rules? But an even more important message is shrouded in fictional mists. What ultimately happens to Man Friday also has important reverberations in the post-modern global marketplace.
The basic storyline to Robinson Crusoe privileges the white entrepreneur Crusoe and denies Man Friday any chance to share in the wealth. With any story that's part of Our Master Story, the final questions must be: Who wins? Who loses? Who gets the rewards? Who doesn't? Will everyone share the rewards fairly?
Remember the Clinton Health Plan and consider what two major nations in the world still do not have universal coverage. South Africa is one, and the United States of America is the other.
Who has coverage in America? The wealthy, of course. Most of the middle class. The indigent poor of America have coverage. But 38 million of the working poor have none.
Health Care. We must ask who suffers. The wealthy don't; they have health care. The working middle-class don't suffer; they have health care. The indigent poor don't suffer; they have health care. Who suffers? The working poor suffer. The uninsured suffer.
It is easy to forget that we are all in this republic together. Perhaps some of the resentment and frustration felt by the Man Fridays of this world can be traced back to the Crusoe "mythos."
As Ian Watt remarks in his 1951 essay, "Robinson Crusoe as a Myth,"
"Crusoe later avoids any possible qualms about keeping Friday in servitude by the deferred altruism of a resolution 'to do something considerable for him, if he outlived me.' Fortunately, no such sacrifice is called for, as Friday dies at sea, faithful to the end, and rewarded only by a brief word of obituary compassion."
Albert Camus in The Rebel commented upon this deferred altruism:
"Progress, paradoxically, can be used to justify conservatism. A draft drawn on confidence in the future, it allows the master to have a clear conscience. The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves."
As I mentioned earlier, ethnic sidekicks generally don't live to share the wealth.
In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales, Natty Bumppo lived to be almost ninety years old, and even as an old man Natty was still rescuing white women (his last one from her abusive fiancee), still evading the Sioux, still able to escape both a prairie fire and a buffalo stampede. He died surrounded by his closest friends, both white and black.
However, Bumppo's faithful Indian sidekick Chingachgook dies in Bumppo's arms partway through the series (right after Bumppo saves him from a nasty forest fire), just as Friday dies in Crusoe's second tale of rogue capitalist adventure. Actually, Chingachgook dies in Cooper's first Hawkeye novel The Pioneers (1823), but like Mister Spock, he rose again from the dead for the sequels.
Oh, and yes, Man Friday does die in the sequel The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published, like its predecessor, in the same Year of Our Lord, 1719.
* * *
Robinson Crusoe "naming" Friday has another modern corollary, as Herman Wouk points out in This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life:
"Economists know that contrary to the popular impression, slaves do not work hard. A slave civilization is slow-moving and easygoing; we still have traces of one in the American South. Take away a man's rights in himself, and he becomes dull and sluggish, wily and evasive, a master of the arts of avoiding responsibility and expending little energy. The whip is no answer to this universal human reaction."
Despair is the absence of hope. Robinson Crusoe named his island the Island of Despair. But as Albert Camus wrote in The Rebel, "There is in fact, nothing in common between a master and a slave; it is impossible to speak and communicate with a person who is reduced to servitude."
If the dominant culture doesn't nurture your soul, doesn't give you the stories that provide explanations to your cravings and questions … You can construct your own stories.
Danny Glover and
Mel Gibson in
Lethal Weapon 4
The legacy of Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday continues to impact upon and influence events. That Crusoe-Friday "mythos" echoes, reverberates through the financial markets, the academic world, through Hollywood's every creation, through our entire Way of Life. That there is a vast underclass cut off from the dominant culture.
A "mythos" that seems geared to keeping people of the "wrong" skin color in their place can very easily become a national policy. Some feel it already has. For too many African-Americans, both the AIDS and the crack epidemics have been deliberately and consciously manufactured by the dominant white culture as forms of genocide against African-Americans.
I myself have heard this particular story on the streets far too often to not suspect it may in fact be the dominant Point of View on the mean streets of America. And those in power positions can deny this genocide exists. But they won't be believed by those who feel they have been and are being shafted.
* * *
Robinson Crusoe glorified the European colonizer and his point of view toward underdeveloped countries. Now, two centuries later, that POV is viewed as a villain. Many of us are appalled by those megalomaniac deeds.
As soon as Crusoe put a name to the other man, Man Friday's previous identity — all of it — disappeared, vanished, forever. Man Friday — as a nonwhite — became a parody of a white man, an apprentice white man. As he is patronized and derided by the master race's master narrative, he is brought to more servitude and contempt. Naturally, his resentment grew.
Robinson Crusoe helped consign all people of color into "primitives" who needed "civilizing" by white folks. It fed the patronizing attitude of the colonizers and divided the world into the haves and the have-nots.
That "master-slave" relationship created a new idolatry. The nonwhites of the world were told to put their faith in the white man and worship him. The unsubtle message of Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din: if you die for the white man, you get to go to Heaven. Gunga Din really was "a better man than" the narrator. No way in hell would a white man die for him! No way in hell.
If you feel that's not what our Master Story still teaches, consider the Lost Battalion of Vietnam. Those 500 South Vietnamese commandos who were parachuted into the north during the 1960s and who were then immediately written off by both the US Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. The white boys said the South Vietnamese soldiers were Dead On Arrival — but over 200 survived more than two decades in prisons and resurfaced to point out the lie. The survivors have asked only for their back pay for all the years in prison. Who among us would ask for so little?
NEXT: What are some other aftershocks of Crusoe?
