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Twenty-second in a series of posts, each one analyzing a single Captain Kirk scene from the Star Trek canon.
Kirk’s countdown | “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” | Star Trek: The Original Series | Season 3, Episode 14 | January 1969
Arrogance comes from an over-inflated sense that one’s methods and vision are superior. Pridefulness, though, is usually found in those who feel the least empowered — and who therefore behave in extremist ways. Captain Kirk is sometimes arrogant, but don’t be fooled. Despite his extreme unwillingness to bend in the face of overwhelming odds, he’s no prideful extremist.
In “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” two black-and-white aliens from the planet Charon have brought their 50,000-year struggle to the bridge of the Enterprise. Bele, a single-minded policeman in search of “traitors,” has been hunting Lokai, a revolutionary who claims his people have been oppressed. Bele is intent on taking Lokai back to Charon for a trial; Lokai asks for political asylum. Kirk tells them they are going back to Starfleet, where Lokai will be charged with stealing a shuttlecraft, and any political grievances will have to be taken up there.
Bele represents a prideful sense of right, a monochrome belief at odds with his dual-colored body; Lokai and his ideas of freedom are a cancer that will sow chaos along what Bele sees as perfectly ordered and engineered society. Therefore, using his ability to manipulate electric fields and a telepathic will, Bele takes control of the ship and steers it towards Charon. Kirk finds himself powerless, unable to wrest control of his ship from Bele. In a move that shocks even his own crew, he calls upon the computer to initiate the ship’s self-destruct sequence.
Kirk’s willingness to destroy the Enterprise and kill the 400+ men and women aboard looks, on the surface, as though it’s born of injured pride. However, although Kirk might perhaps be accused of arrogance — for assuming that his own mission is superior to any cause over which these aliens might be fighting — he’s not prideful. Threatened by death during the self-destruct countdown, Kirk doesn’t waver, whereas Bele does. Unlike Bele, a prideful being who ultimately values power (and survival) over doing the right thing, Kirk is willing to die — so long as doing so is the only reasonable course in the face of unreasonableness. This isn’t extremism… unless Socrates’ willingness to drink the hemlock is extremism.
Spock is often described as stoical, but Kirk is the true stoic aboard the Enterprise — his will a firm anchor to the just and good.
POSTS IN THIS SERIES: Justice or vengeance? by DAFNA PLEBAN | Kirk teaches his drill thrall to kiss by MARK KINGWELL | “KHAAAAAN!” by NICK ABADZIS | “No kill I” by STEPHEN BURT | Kirk browbeats NOMAD by GREG ROWLAND | Kirk’s eulogy for Spock by ZACK HANDLEN | The joke is on Kirk by PEGGY NELSON | Kirk vs. Decker by KEVIN CHURCH | Good Kirk vs. Evil Kirk by ENRIQUE RAMIREZ | Captain Camelot by ADAM MCGOVERN | Koon-ut-kal-if-fee by FLOURISH KLINK | Federation exceptionalism by DAVID SMAY | Wizard fight by AMANDA LAPERGOLA | A million things you can’t have by STEVE SCHNEIDER | Debating in a vacuum by JOSHUA GLENN | Klingon diplomacy by KELLY JEAN FITZSIMMONS | “We… the PEOPLE” by TRAV S.D. | Brinksmanship on the brink by MATTHEW BATTLES | Captain Smirk by ANNIE NOCENTI | Sisko meets Kirk by IAN W. HILL | Noninterference policy by GABBY NICASIO | Kirk’s countdown by PETER BEBERGAL | Kirk’s ghost by MATT GLASER | Watching Kirk vs. Gorn by JOE ALTERIO | How Spock wins by ANNALEE NEWITZ
SCIENCE FICTION ON HILOBROW Peggy Nelson on William Shatner as HiLo Hero | Greg Rowland on Leonard Nimoy as HiLo Hero | Peggy Nelson on William Shatner in Incubus | Matthew Battles on enlarging the Trek fanfic canon | Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail, serialized | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized | H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized | Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized | William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized | Radium Age Supermen | Radium Age Robots | Radium Age Apocalypses | Radium Age Telepaths | Radium Age Eco-Catastrophes | Radium Age Cover Art (1) | SF’s Best Year Ever: 1912 | Radium Age Science Fiction Poetry | Enter Highbrowism | Bathybius! Primordial ooze in Radium Age sf | War and Peace Games (H.G. Wells’s training manuals for supermen) | J.D. Beresford | Algernon Blackwood | Edgar Rice Burroughs | Karel Čapek | Buster Crabbe | August Derleth | Arthur Conan Doyle | Charlotte Perkins Gilman | Hermann Hesse | Aldous Huxley | Inez Haynes Irwin | Alfred Jarry | Jack Kirby (Radium Age sf’s influence on) | Gaston Leroux | David Lindsay | Jack London | H.P. Lovecraft | A. Merritt | Maureen O’Sullivan | Sax Rohmer | Paul Scheerbart | Upton Sinclair | Clark Ashton Smith | E.E. “Doc” Smith | Olaf Stapledon | John Taine | H.G. Wells | Jack Williamson | Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz | S. Fowler Wright | Philip Gordon Wylie | Yevgeny Zamyatin | AND LOTS MORE
CHECK OUT HILOBOOKS: In 2012-13, HiLobrow is serializing ten overlooked works of science fiction from the genre’s (1904-33) Radium Age; and HiLoBooks is publishing them in paperback! Here are the first six titles: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (in May, Introduction by Matthew Battles; PURCHASE NOW), Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail and “As Easy as A.B.C.” (in June, Introduction by Matthew De Abaitua and Afterword by Bruce Sterling; PURCHASE NOW), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (in August, Introduction by Joshua Glenn and Afterword by Gordon Dahlquist; PURCHASE NOW), H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook (in October, Introduction by James Parker; PURCHASE NOW), Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins (in November, Introduction by Tom Hodgkinson; PURCHASE NOW), and William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (in April 2013, Afterword by Erik Davis; PURCHASE NOW).
Thanks for a philosophical distinction much more significant than the split down these famously imperceptive characters’ faces. This essay series has made me realize a lot about Kirk’s control, and *your* essay adds substantially to the understanding that Kirk keeps many consequences in mind and outcomes in place with his intuitive but principled style of thought and action, while even the monumentally composed and ethical Spock is standing along a single and simple dividing line (human/Vulcan, passionate/rational). You also avoided the obvious parable of this episode — “racial strife is pointless” (which even as a kid I found a bit insulting, since the balance of black and white in real 1960s and ’70s [and for that matter 2010s] life was nowhere near as even as it is for these mutually blindered characters) — for a more expansive metaphor I may not have noticed at the time: the self-destruct bluff is a model to the intruding combatants; their own course will result in self-consumption too, but by degrees that show a valuing of their own lives much less than what Kirk shows in endangering it all at once, and knowing what he’s risking.
Kirk as stoic? Never quite thought of it that way! But it makes sense to me — Kirk’s ability to assimilate the output of Spock’s logical calculus, but where it might lead Spock simply to take that next logical step, Kirk had the ability to adapt his will to and then to those logical conditions and then, having made his mark, to be calm and resolute in the ensuing storm. However precise and disciplined Spock’s thinking, he lacked Kirk’s intuitive genius for command. IIRC, it was William Manchester who described this genius, in his unfinished biography of Winston Churchill, as a ‘jagged streak of lightning in the brain’. Such brilliance, without respite or filtering, would soon enough be blinding. But Kirk also had the instinct for turning insight into act.
In a battle of wills, Bele loses, not because his will is weaker, but because it unenlightened, relative to Kirk’s.
Kirk’s thought is a zen-arrow in the dark, with its most rightful target not yet known to it but pulling it in; Spock quiets the possibilities in his head by calculating the most fruitful path (in both probability and moral principle), while Kirk avoids blinding by his mental flashes by intuiting the exact moment to look away, and bring an influential act into being rather than still-birth a perfect idea. You are the bolt that’s lighting a lot of these things up for me, Esoth.
Being dispassionate is an important part of classical Stoicism, and no one could accuse Kirk of dispassion; does this mean Peter is wrong to call Kirk more stoical than Spock. No, because Peter’s essay — and the resulting conversation — illuminates Stoicism’s inner contradiction.
Take Marcus Aurelius. Despite Aurelius’s condemnation of pride and self-conceit/arrogancy in the “Meditations,” and his contrasting of those vices with such [Spockian] virtues as modesty and simplicity, a particular mode of pride is a key component of his Stoicism. Aurelius speaks frequently of [non-conceited, non-arrogant] honor — as a noun, e.g., (when speaking of his own father) “How free from all vanity he carried himself in matter of honor and dignity”; and also as a verb, e.g., “So also in thyself; honor that which is chiefest, and most powerful.” This is not dispassionate stuff. Kirk is deeply concerned with honor, both as a noun and as a verb; and though this sometimes makes him seem arrogant or self-conceited, to those who don’t know how to read him properly, he is neither. As Peter notes, if Kirk were in love with himself and his authority, he wouldn’t risk destroying himself and The Enterprise in this episode; he risks doing so because of honor.
I think Spock is a Stoic, too. Stoicism seems strict, but there is room for variation within those strictures.
Spock is full of pride, which for McCoy is synonymous with stubbornness, lack of adaptability. Kirk is the Flexible Stoic, the ideal Soldier-Statesman….
Kirk’s in love with his *best* self, and that’s the one he never cheats on — swagger is his camouflage, and sexual conquest is the pastime of his shell; an unusual partition for the disciplined personality, but the threshold between him saving his skin and having it easy and all those he’s responsible for losing the freedom to keep all their years and possibilities is the line he doesn’t cross.
Not to mention the, um, direct constituent relations he maintains to keep in contact with his people — contradiction is not Kirk’s problem, it’s his obligation; you can appear more than a person and be more than your mere self if you synthesize decisions and embody behaviors of The Many — which we secretly want from our leader, or somewhere secret even to ourselves know is the kind of leader who works best: not the “representative” of any individual or group, but the guiding, sustaining sum, or even multiple, of us.
I think another interesting series would be one examining Star Trek “self-destruct bluffs” as Adam puts it, and what it says about the characters in those countdown moments.