Play is Logical

"Yes, play, Mr. Sulu. The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play"

-Spock (Star Trek TOS, Shore Leave)

Well hello again everybody! As it turns out, the appropriate length of time between my last post and this one turned out to be 9 months. And what a 9 months it has been. Since then, I have taken a new job and moved to a new city, so examining Star Trek through a lens of learning and leadership seemed to fall off my priority list. I'm back though, and I sincerely hope that it will be less than 9 months before I post again.

While not posting though, my wife and I have been continuing our Star Trek by stardate viewing marathon. Allow me to catch everybody up a bit on where we are. When I last wrote, I was in the midst of Star Trek: Enterprise, and many of my observations had to do with Archer being developmentally young in terms of Star Trek leadership. Many of things that guide other captains such as the existence of the Federation and the Prime Directive were not yet established, requiring Archer to essentially figure it out as he went.

Even though it is not the purpose of this post, I feel a certain amount of empathy for Archer now that I don't know that I was able to back in May. My job (in real life) right now is as the sole employee of an emerging nonprofit. Essentially, it's my job to figure out what this nonprofit will be, how we will pursue our mission, what the culture will be for future employees, and what protocols we will use to manage all of the aforementioned things. It's a hefty task. There's no guidebook. In fact, I'm literally writing the guidebook as I go and experience what sorts of guidance this organization might need. In the future, for better or worse, the actions that I take towards that objective will likely influence the way that this nonprofit functions after I'm gone. It's an interesting conundrum when you know that what you're doing has an impact but you don't know what that impact will be. I think to some extent Archer felt the same way and, as I've mentioned a few times, chose to do the next right thing instead of focusing too much on long term effects.

Anyway, we finished Enterprise (with the exception of the last episode which chronologically doesn't happen till sometime during The Next Generation), and moved on to Discovery. Discovery marked the first Star Trek episodes I've seen in a long time that were new to me. I'm not going to dive too much into Discovery at this point even though we have completed the first two seasons. This is for two main reasons. First of all, as it is currently airing I'm a little cautious about spoilers. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Discovery predominately focuses on a different type of leadership than the rest of Star Trek cannon. Discovery is notable because it's main character - Michael Burnham - is not the captain of the ship. Every other main is operating from a place of "designated leadership", i.e. captainhood. This means that in addition to making decisions that impact the crew, they are expected to make those decisions. There is protocol (to some extent) surrounding those decisions but more importantly to my point there are mutually agreed upon roles and obligations in that leadership capacity.

By making Michael Burnham the main character, the Star Trek universe shifted some leadership pedagogy into "peer leadership" and "active followership". Don't misconstrue my intention to gloss over this a bit right now as an indication that I think this is less important. Instead, I find these types of leadership to be some of the most important and developed aspects of leadership. By portraying secondary or non-designated leadership, Discovery is showing a very advanced form of leadership. I think that to best talk about what this means, I will wait for a while in this blog to address it. The topic will come up again in some of the most recent additions to the Star Trek universe including (I expect) Picard, Lower Decks, and season 3 of Discovery. It's at that point that I plan on coming back to this topic and having some Discovery-specific posts.

So with that pre-amble, let's move on to what started it all, The Original Series. I'll be honest, TOS is hard for me, and it always has been. It was made in the 60's with no expanded universe to draw from. In a way, TOS as a series is similar to Archer as a captain. Nearly every decision that is made during TOS has had profound impact on all of the incarnations of Star Trek that came later (even those that according to when they take place happened earlier). This idea of making it up as they go can be clearly seen in the first few episodes with the nonsense that was stardates, Spock's nearly bi-polar personality switches between emotion and logic, and the entire original pilot (The Man Trap) which the Star Trek universe was all too ready to completely ignore (with one notable exception in a TOS episode) until season 2 of Discovery when it became a prominent plot driver. In addition, to my millennial eyes, the futuristic technology as portrayed in 1966 looks comically outdated for 2021. Mostly however, the thing that is toughest for me to watch is the rampant sexism that occasionally borders on rape-y. I'm aware of how many progressive moments there are in this series, and how far they clearly had to go. As a result, for the most part TOS has been a process of "let's get through it and get to 1990's era Star Trek". I know that TOS was important for foundational plot development, but beyond that I feel often reminded of why The Next Generation was my favorite.

That being said though, as the series moved into its second season it began to occasionally find its groove. I started to see elements of the altruist utopian future that is portrayed in other versions. Everything is still viewed through a perspective that doesn't really work today, and there are some aspects that do.

One of the episodes I'm referring to Shore Leave, and includes the quote that I started this post with. In this episode, the crew of the Enterprise find themselves on a mysterious planet where strange things happen. Knights, monsters, storybook characters, and many other things that have no business being on a far away planet seem to run amuck. Little did the crew know that the entire planet was set up as an amusement park by an alien species to simulate stories of its visitors. It's kind of an early version (in Star Trek lore) of a holodeck, but planet-wide. When the scenario is revealed as a device for people to play, Sulu is absolutely shocked. Right before the alien is about to express the value of play, Spock does. He says "Yes, play, Mr. Sulu. The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play".

Holy cow there are some things to take away from that sentiment. Let's break it down as best as we can using some ideas of play pedagogy. First of all, there is an idea that the more redundant play seems, the more necessary it becomes. I think that we can see that clearly in how today's children interact with the world. Children today are far more stressed than I was 30 years ago (and I was invariably far more stressed as a child than my parents were 60 years ago). Children today have to deal with the consequences of an "advanced society". Those include increasingly rigorous academic expectations, a very full scheduled agenda most days, the reality that their social network expands much further then their own playground friends thanks to the internet, and let's throw a pandemic in on top of that. It seems that there is simply no time to play. That, however, is when play becomes the most important. Play is the brain's way of resetting, of creating, of discovering, and of exploring. The less time is available for play, the more we must utilize for it.

The next takeaway from this has to do with adults. In many ways, adults have a more "complex mind" than children do. We know more facts and have more experiences. Our personalities are more permanently formed and our goals more clearly set. So why is it that adults cannot learn as quickly and efficiently as children? While our minds might be more complex, the minds and imaginations of children are often more engaged, flexible, and receptive to more information. So in saying that play was important, Spock was indicating that it is necessary for creativity that is necessary to living in a complex society. The more superfluous play feels to us as adults, the more important it is that we are able to give into free play at times. It almost feels... illogical.

But it's not. The third takeaway from Spock's message is that the need for play is, in fact, logical. It is very important that Spock was the one to give this message. To some people, it might have made more sense for the half-Vulcan to be skeptical of play and to have Bones critique him for not understanding human emotion. It definitely would have tracked with their relationship throughout the rest of the series. It didn't go down like that though. The voice of reason and the voice of play, became the same voice. Why is that? I believe that it is because logically, play can be broken down into safe experimentation. Imagination can be thought of as "calculating different scenarios". And fantasy play is essentially a logic exercise into differing possibilities. If logic is predicting the results of something based on an orderly examination of the event, then it is completely impossible without play.

So what's the takeaway here. First, everybody needs play. Even though play will likely look different from person to person (or Vulcan), at its core it is a crucial time of exploration and experimentation without risk. Secondly, play is productive. Not just because it's fun to do, but also because it engages the "what-if" aspects of our brain. Third, play becomes more important as individuals and societies continue to advance. A complex world requires a complex mind. It requires a mind that can analyze different possibilities quickly and come up with solutions that haven't been thought of before. It requires a mind that rather than doing the same thing every day is comfortable doing new things and changing. In essence, a complex world requires a mind built on logic - the logic of play.