In Memory of a Man Who Hasn’t Been Born Yet

Jean-Luc Picard will be born in 2305 in La Barre, a village in French wine country. He will defy a father who distrusts machines, leave Earth for Starfleet, and spend his life commanding starships. He will never exist.

I want to mourn him anyway. Few real people taught me as much as he did.

I was not yet ten when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987. I didn’t yet know what moral philosophy was. I came to know a bald man in the captain's chair who solved problems by talking, who listened before he acted, and who treated being wrong as information instead of humiliation. He was the first adult I ever saw make the act of ethical thinking look heroic.

I have spent most of my adult life working on closing the distance between his fictional time and our reality. People call universal basic income utopian. I call it a first step. Picard’s Earth didn’t eliminate poverty by accident, and it didn’t do it by asking the poor to prove they deserved to eat. It decided that every person’s survival was a given, and then let people find out what they could do once survival stopped being the primary justification for work.

Star Trek never fully explained how Earth got from here to there. That’s the part we have to write ourselves.

What I took from Picard isn’t a policy, but a temperament. He believed humanity could be better than its history, and he never mistook that belief for a guarantee. He knew the future had to be argued for, negotiated, debated, defended, sometimes even bled for. He believed in reading the classics in a world with Holodecks. He trusted people with the truth. He assumed the person across the table might be persuaded. He reasoned.

The real loss is not that Picard is gone. Picard is a fictional character. It’s that so few of the people running our world carry anything like him inside them. We have no shortage of leaders who command others. We have very few who listen to others.

Patrick Stewart gave Picard a voice. Gene Roddenberry and a generation of writers gave him a conscience. Millions of us gave him a place in our heads, where he will always sit in the captain’s chair and asks the questions we’d rather avoid asking.

He left us a destination without a map. The undiscovered country. A world where no one goes hungry and no one is worth less for being born poor. A world where curiosity outranks greed. A world where we work because we want to, not because the alternative is impoverishment.

We don’t get to wait for the 24th century. We'll never actually see it. The route there starts here though, with choices we make now about who deserves enough to live and truly explore the unknown of life itself and the mystery of how much time any of us actually has.

We have our proper course heading courtesy of Jean-Luc Picard, courtesy of Patrick Stewart. Thank you.

It's not the Hunger Games. Or Mad Max. Or Neuromancer. It's Star Trek.

Let's make it so.