What Patrick Stewart’s Picard understood about power, faith, and the courage to listen.
Give an actor a captain’s chair, a starship, and a voice like Patrick Stewart’s, and he can probably convince an audience of almost anything.
That was part of what made Jean-Luc Picard so compelling. When he stood up to speak, you expected the argument to be settled. He had the bearing, the vocabulary, the extraordinary ability to make a pause feel like something everyone else ought to respect.
Which is why some of his best moments came when somebody told him he was wrong.
With Stewart’s death on October 28 at age 86, I’ve been thinking about why Picard has always been my favorite captain. The loss is personal in that peculiar way the death of an actor can be personal: you never knew the man, but you knew what it felt like to spend time with his work.
And the scenes worth returning to aren’t all speeches delivered from a position of certainty. Sometimes they involve a man discovering that his certainty has become dangerous.
As an attorney, an actor, and a person of faith, I find those scenes especially hard to shake.
Each of those worlds gives you opportunities to sound convincing. Being convincing, unfortunately, doesn’t guarantee that you’re right.
In Star Trek: First Contact, Picard’s hatred of the Borg threatens to consume his judgment. His reasons are understandable. They violated his body, took control of his mind, and used him against his own people. He knows what they can do because he has lived through it.
But knowing the enemy does not mean he understands what the fight is doing to him.
Lily Sloane sees it. She challenges his determination to keep fighting and compares his obsession to Captain Ahab’s. He has been explaining the moral progress of his century to a woman from the past, and now she has to confront him about his desire for revenge.
I love the discomfort of that scene.
We’re accustomed to the hero making a speech that finally brings everyone else around. Here, the person we trust needs someone to interrupt him. The audience has to sit through the possibility that the captain’s magnificent voice has been making a terrible decision sound reasonable.
Stewart lets us see the humiliation of recognition. Picard has to hear himself.
There’s a lesson there for anyone who has ever won an argument and felt a little too pleased about it. You can have the better vocabulary. You can know the history. You can explain exactly how you were hurt. The person standing across from you may still be seeing something you refuse to see.
That possibility should trouble us more than it does.
In the practice of law, persuasion is part of the job. You develop an argument, anticipate objections, and work to make your position clear. But you also have to notice when a fact doesn’t fit. A polished argument can become a trap if you grow more attached to delivering it than to examining it.
The same danger follows us into our homes, our churches, and the organizations we lead. Eventually, somebody says something inconvenient. What happens next tells people whether it is safe to be honest with us.
Picard doesn’t always pass that test immediately.
In “I, Borg,” the Enterprise rescues an injured Borg drone who comes to be known as Hugh. Picard initially supports using him to carry a destructive program back into the Collective. Beverly Crusher objects. Geordi’s time with Hugh complicates the plan further. When Picard finally engages with Hugh as an individual, he changes his decision.
The detail that matters to me is that other people get there first.
Beverly doesn’t need her captain to discover compassion before she practices it. Geordi’s experience gives him something Picard needs to hear. Their disagreement serves the ship.
That makes the Enterprise a more interesting place than a vessel full of people waiting for one exceptional man to supply their consciences.
It also makes Picard worth following.
A leader who must always be the first to understand, the strongest in the room, and the final authority on everyone else’s experience will eventually become very lonely. Worse, the people around that leader will learn to keep useful things to themselves.
I think about that as a Christian.
There is plenty in my faith that should make me cautious about my own certainty. Confession requires admitting that I have something to confess. Repentance requires the possibility of a different direction. Forgiveness requires an honest account of harm.
None of those practices works particularly well if I’ve already decided that my intentions excuse my behavior.
Yet it is easy to turn faith into a defense of ourselves. We can become so practiced at explaining what we believe that we stop examining how we behave toward the person in front of us. We can ask for humility in everyone except the person whose judgment we trust most: our own.
Picard’s struggles give that problem a face.
He can sincerely believe in the dignity of life and still need Beverly Crusher to insist that he look at an injured being differently. He can believe humanity has matured and still need Lily to call him on a very old human failing.
I recognize that distance between conviction and conduct. I suspect most of us do, when we’re willing to look.
As an actor, I also admire what Stewart was willing to risk in those moments.
A beloved character can become a monument. Every scene starts protecting him. Every disagreement exists to prove him right eventually. The audience gets reassurance, but there is less and less of a person left to watch.
Stewart allowed Picard to be proud, defensive, wounded, and difficult. The dignity remained, but you could see the effort beneath it. You could see a man struggling to live up to principles that did not become easier merely because he could express them beautifully.
That is a demanding kind of hope to put on television.
It asks us to believe that a person can face something ugly in himself and do something about it. It allows correction to be part of a life we still admire.
And it gives the rest of us very little excuse to hide behind our titles.
I will always enjoy the speeches. Of course I will. Give Patrick Stewart a moral argument and a camera, and I’m listening.
But when I think about what I want to carry forward from his captain, I come back to the people who could challenge him – and to the moments when he finally let them reach him.
There are people in my own life whose disagreement deserves more patience than I sometimes give it. People who may understand the consequences of a decision better than I do. People I need to hear before I begin preparing my response.
Remembering Picard ought to involve making some room for them.
The next time someone tells me I’m wrong, I hope I can leave the speech unfinished long enough to listen.
