I have been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. To be honest, it is not the first time. Or, I suspect, the last. The whole “beam me up Scotty” gives me metaphysical anxiety – is it the same person? Other aspects make me cringe – the utopian ideas. And “The Crazyhorse” makes me giggle.

Yesterday I was thinking about the Borg and the Captain as I watched Descent. There is a way that the whole Borg thing is very Kierkegaardian – the anti-single-individual. Yet at the end of the episode, Picard talks about the common good and it made me think of Fear and Trembling.

Picard is the Tragic Hero who sacrifices the self for the universal. But I was thinking about Christians and the common good. It is like love: “God is love” (1 John 4:16) but love is not God. The common good is not God. Working for the common good is not always working for God. And sometimes the common good can be anti-God.

I think I often mistake an idea for a person. I can only relate to a person, I can only love a person, but I can know an idea. I like The Imitation of Christ on this: to know is to take in but to love is to give. An important idea to hold before me – I am called to love people! And that loving is not always the same as the common good because it calls me to sacrifice.

Anyhow, that was much more involved than I had intended.