To boldly go where DEI has gone before: Star Trek’s enduring lesson on diversity

The passing of Walter Koenig (90) and Patrick Stewart (86) this week has deprived the Star Trek universe of two of its most recognisable spacefarers. Koenig played Pavel Chekov, the spirited Russian navigator aboard the 23rd-c. USS Enterprise (NCC-1701). Stewart commanded the starship's 24th-c. successor bearing the same name (NCC-1701-D) as Capt Jean-Luc Picard. Their passing offers an opportunity to revisit the franchise's greatest innovation: diversity, equity and inclusion.

For all its mid- and late-20th-c. American characteristics - its missionary spirit, civilisational missions, and everyone speaking fluent (even if Russian-accented for Chekov) American English - Star Trek understood something many modern corporations, and their anti-woke critics, have missed. DEI is not principally a moral decoration but an operational advantage. Consider the original USS Enterprise. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), half-human and half-Vulcan, supplied logic where humans were too emotional. Hikaru Sulu (George Takei), a Japanese helmsman, navigated without geopolitical baggage. Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), a Black woman - remember, the US passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 outlawing de jure racial segregation only two years before Uhura first appeared in Star Trek - handled communications without anyone questioning her qualifications. Chekov, a Russian, navigated a US-led spaceship in a TV show at the height of the Cold War.

Nobody was aboard to satisfy an HR spreadsheet. They were there because the spaceship needed them. Picard's Enterprise extended this principle, accommodating Klingons, androids (think AI) and assorted species whose recruitment would have given contemporary immigration authorities nervous breakdowns. Only competence mattered, not conformity, something that Silicon Valley may well remind Washington today. Modern organisations obsessed with DEI quotas, or their abolition, can learn a few things by boldly going places where no man - woman, or any other gender - would dither to go for the fear of being 'too politically correct'.