The new Star Trek is a veritable self-righteous orgy of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, and regressive politics. Shatner may have been snubbed; young kirk may be cockblocked, strangled, punched, and beaten black and blue; and spock may initially get the big chair and the girl. But at the end of the day, the old series uneasy, tense balance between the interest of community and individual, between head and heart, between justice and revenge is absolutely smashed to smithereens. The history of Star Trek, and by implication, the Federation, is rewritten thanks to the revenge fantasy, nihilistic "rage against the it was" illogic of David Lewisian anti-philosophical possible world theory that rewrites spock, whose the dual origins posed the dilemma upon which the always tenuous moral and intellectual weight of the original series depended, as simply human. As Kirk.
The principle dilemma of the film, a film that at every turn underlines, repeats, and adds exclamation points to its kirk-egaardian moral lesson (and, at the end of the day, this movie is Sunday School; it exists, with all its shiny whizbangery, soley to convey a Message) is, appropriately, the logical inconsistency of that message: don't be governed by reason, unless passion demands it.Let's put this another way, so that the last great moral philosopher (because last moral philosopher--his successors are consequentialists, or amoral, philosophers, and so not comptetion), Immanuel Kant, can roll over in his grave more thoroughly: it is unreasonable to be too reasonable, where too reasonable is determined by the law of non-reason. In Kant's language: the movie proposes a hypothetical rather than categorical imperative: act independently of your inclinations only if you are inclined to do so. Or, more radically: your duty is to act in accordance with duty if and only if it is not done out of duty.
This moral appears in multiple ways, but most clearly, of course, in the twin, and morally clone, tales of revenge that move the plot. First, there is Nero, a Romulan seeking revenge for the death of his wife, which he tenuously blames Spock for, but in the true spirit of the passion for retribution, takes out first, on the entire population of Vulcan, with the intention of expanding his wrath to every planet in the federation.
Second, there is his mirror, Spock, who watches his planet be destroyed and, under the careful moral tutelage and urging of author and audience, follows Nero's example and does the same: destroying the (in the original timeline) last Romulan, in effect, succeeding in his own act of genocide in retribution for Nero's failed act of genocide. This mirror moral (il)logic is endorsed explicitly by Spock's father, Kirk, and by Spock's older self, who he encounters at the end of the movie preparing to seek out his own private Palestine to rebuild the Vulcan race.
The moral, explicitly put: It is immoral to restrain the passion of anger by reason. One should not ask whether righteous indignation is being expressed proportionately, justly, or effectively. To do so is an active wrong against the inviolate holiness of personal passion. This is the same moral that Kirk (in virtue of the leap of faith into the absurd!) effectively and consistently always stands for as a character, but now with out any counterbalance: the Star Trek universe becomes a thoroughly homogenous, manichaen, one-worldview-universe. Kirk's law: no one has a right to law, we ought to break law on principle, we have the right to make our lawlessness into a law has, in a parody of Kant, been transformed into a law of nature.
Let's make it more explicit. Spock learns that Nero was right, that his action was just, because he did not commit the grave moral crime of the Vulcans - doubting that passion = justice. If Nero was wrong, it was only in his failure to successfully eradicate his arbitrarily chosen enemy. The beauty of this movies attempt to positively portray this deeply, deeply illogical moral worldview is that it serves as a practical demonstration of Kant's refutation of moral relativism. Kant argued that you are welcome to reject the notion of morality altogether, but if you affirm it, you--out of conceptual necessity--affirm a categorical, universally binding and unconditional imperative at its basis. If this is true, then we can demonstrate that a purported moral law is false by "universalizing the maxim", imagining it as a law of nature, and discovering that it is logically impossible. For example, we cannot make a natural law out of occasionally lying for consquentialist reasons, since a world in which this is a natural law would be one in which trust is not possible, making lying impossible.
In this case: a world in which the total extermination of one's enemy becomes a natural law is impossible, since the original exterminator must have already been exterminated, making the so-called cycle of violence not endless, but impossible to begin. The movie highlights this absurdity by demonstrating that it can only be effected through time travel: through the intersection of two distinct possible worlds. Or: through the rejection of the law of non-contradiction. Put differently, through the completion of Nero's mission: the extermination of logic, of the vulcan in Spock and of the vulcan race.
