It’s early 2002 and I’m driving to work with the radio sharing heartbreaking news of the deployments and death of troops in Afghanistan. A beat-up car passes me on the highway with huge patches of rust on the hood and a trash bag where one of the windows should be. On the back bumper is a faded sticker with a series of religious and cultural symbols that, when placed next to each other, appear to spell out the word “coexist.” 

“That,” I say out loud to an imaginary passenger in my car, “is no longer possible.”

Tribal markings

I once had a professor at SCAD who told us “A bumper sticker never changed anyone’s mind.”

We use them, he elaborated, in order to identify other people who already agree with us on whatever value the bumper sticker is promoting. They are tribal markers meant to help us locate members of our specific “tribe.”

Another bumper sticker might read “Don’t Like My Driving? Call 1-800-Eat-Shit.”

Nobody is going to dial that number in order to report this driver’s traffic transgressions. Nobody is going to read that missive and decide that they were wrong to judge this driver’s abilities (or lack thereof) behind the wheel.

The best possible outcome from this bumper sticker is that someone will read it and think “right on, man!” because they too wish to tell other complaining drivers to “eat shit.”

Similarly, the entreaty to learn to “coexist” will not appeal to anyone who thinks of war in a positive light, or who wants to enact violence upon their fellow citizens who follow different faiths. In fact, it’s more likely to inspire anger in that kind of person.

“Coexist” as an entreaty only appeals to a person who already believes in social, religious and racial harmony. It only helps identify like minded people, not to change the minds of people who disagree.

Homage, parody, mockery

Mere months later I started to see alternate versions of this image: one where the letters were the logos of different video game consoles, another where they were symbols of different geek fandoms like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Trek and Star Wars, and another where the letters were abstractions of the symbols and cowls from various different superheroes.

These variants, while slightly tongue-in-cheek made a lot of sense in that they could still be seen as an entreaty for groups who were at odds (perhaps not nearly as much as the fundamentalists of world religions are at war) to find a way to love one another and peacefully share a community or society.

Once the homage versions appeared, the parody began. There were versions of the image where the letters were made from gun company logos. There were versions where the crescent moon of Islam was replaced by dynamite. There were versions where the same graphic letters were used to spell out new words like “toxic,” or “confused,” or even “up yours!” The goal of these parodies was clearly not any form of appeal to harmony or community, but rather to mock such appeals as naive, foolish, or even dangerous.

The social contract

Sociologists and philosophers talk about what is often referred to as “the social contract,” this is the mutual agreement between humans to work together for a common goal… essentially to “coexist.” At its heart, the social contract only works if we can agree that there are more benefits to peaceful cooperation than there are to conflict and strife. Somewhere along the way, as humans developed more complex concepts of society, this included concepts tied to collectively protecting the weak and defenseless members of the tribe, regardless of their current contributions to the group. This makes sense when you consider that the weakest members of any tribe or species are typically those who are temporarily injured or those who are too young to have developed the strength or the skills to defend themselves. Protecting offspring seems self explanatory, particularly in primates, because giving them a chance to survive to maturity increases the odds of the group’s survival and perpetuates the genetic impact of the adults on the world around them. Protecting those who are temporarily incapacitated must’ve developed later as the concept that at least some of those adults would return to full capacity, and contribute to the overall success of the group.

As these two strategies compounded a new phenomenon occurred: adults began to live past reproductive age. This meant that there was a new class of beings in the society, those who could no longer add to the group’s genome, but still could contribute to the overall success in ever diminishing capacity. Conceptually, this meant that a new philosophy would have to evolve, the place of the “elderly” person within the tribe. And this was really the origin of the concept of a “social safety net,” a mechanism that allowed for the possibility (or the inevitability in the case of old age) that every member of the tribe would, near the end of their life, require more and more tribal resources in order to continue living. The concept would expand to encompass those with cognitive or physical disabilities.

Diversity arises

Once primitive societies began living long enough to expand, grow, and travel, they began to encounter other primitive societies. While this naturally triggered an innate xenophobia brought about by the impulse to hoard and protect resources, in some cases diversity also became valued. Our ancient ancestors could not have known about the biological benefits of genetic diversity, but the natural consequence of tribal diversity is a biological robustness that inbreeding cannot compete with. Diverse offspring had advantages that inbred ones did not, and could thrive and survive long enough to give birth to more and more diverse offspring with more advantages.

Each roll of the genetic dice led to random physiological factors that favored the “edge cases” that a rapidly changing world might present. Some had slower metabolisms and were prone to develop a cushion of fat on their bodies which could see them through famine, or protect them from harsh winters. Some had darker skin that favored survival in harsh equatorial climates and high temperatures. Some had sinewy lean bodies and were better able to run or swim, favoring more nomadic conditions where prey animals might migrate over vast distances. In some parts of the world diversity became valued as the reason for survival rather than the cause for fear and conflict.

In those value systems, taking a stance against diversity meant hoping or planning for the collective downfall of the tribe. Xenophobia was shunned as counterproductive and even dangerous behavior.

The Starfleet future

One of the things that fascinated the world about the vision of the future presented in the original Star Trek series was the concept of humanity united and reaching the stars together. Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, intentionally created a diverse representation of humanity on the bridge of the Enterprise, one that showed every gender and race he could conceive of taking leadership positions as the best and brightest of humanity.

Extrapolating backwards from how we could get to the level of excellence and cooperation that would cause humans to abandon war and partisan strife in order to cooperate on the goal of interplanetary exploration, Gene looked to the trends of human history to build his fictional history of the Enterprise. He saw the trends towards the social safety net and valued diversity as being historical indications of a rational species transcending its limitations. He imagined that in such a world, unchecked capitalism would be restrained. He postulated that war would be abolished by treaties and agreements; and that the causes of war like religious extremism, destructive greed, and limited resources would be overcome by scientific thought, judicious and restrained socialism, and efficient welfare programs.

The show’s 1987 sequel, “Star Trek: the Next Generation,” took this historical narrative even further. In the first episode the crew confront a god-like alien entity whose limitless power reflects the apex of sentient evolution. He puts them on a mock trial, and dredges up a dark part of humanity’s past as an example of why they must be unfit for the task of galactic exploration. The entity, Q, says: “…You slaughtered millions in silly arguments about how to divide the resources of your little world. And four hundred years before that you were murdering each other in quarrels over tribal god-images. Since there are no indications that humans will ever change.”

The stalwart Enterprise crew disprove his assumption that humans are incapable of transcending the limits of our “primitive” past by solving a mystery and acting with compassion rather than self interest, and here Roddenberry underscores his point that the best hope for human evolution lies in abandoning the harmful ideologies that were rooted in self interest: greed, racism, violence, and hatred.

So what does this have to do with “coexist?”

The Enterprise denied

If a rational storyteller like Gene Roddenberry could only conceive of an intergalactic future of humanity where our petty differences were set aside, the moment our society began to mock the concept of “coexist” the possibilities of Star Trek evaporated.

Since those moments in the early 2000’s we’ve seen: a global economic crisis brought on by the greed of unchecked and unregulated capitalism, numerous environmental disasters brought about by the ecological damage that humans have wrought on the planet, wars and genocides driven entirely by religious extremism, coordinated efforts to jail or harm human beings because of their gender or sexuality, and the resurgence of powerful authoritarian politicians who promise violence and retribution against political opponents… and are popular because of it.

If you ever wonder how we got to a world where an extremist religious organization like The Heritage Foundation can launch a manifesto that details a step-by-step plan to rewrite American culture and restructure government by reinterpreting the constitution… the first step along that path began with derision or apathy towards the very concept of coexistence. When harmonious cooperation is no longer a societal value, the social contract collapses, and human beings regress to a primitive state that predates the very innovations that made us succeed and survive as a species.

When politicians can run entire campaigns on the slogan that they are “anti diversity,” and no one within their party calls them out on how damaging that is to society or to the human species as a whole, the regression towards violent tribalism is plainly visible.

If we are ever to reach the stars, to transcend the limits of the planet that created us, we must set aside those values espoused by xenophobia, greed, and religious extremism. And if we cannot do that, we doom ourselves both literally and figuratively.

But for one very brief moment in human history we tried. And as Q said: “You just don’t get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.”