Possum: Of course nothing I’m talking about has to do with actual fascism. I already said that. Do you not get how much fun it is to randomly call things fascist without any support whatsoever? For example, as I just said to Porpoise and Dormouse, who are watching fascist cartoons in our living room, “Ginger Nuts are fascist.”

Possum says, “The moral center is Padme Amidala who lectures him on the holistic nature of knowledge, the necessity to find consensus, the beauty of all living things, the limits one must accept in order to respect all life, etc. etc.”

Ah yes, the moral center. “What’s wrong, Ani?” “Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo.” Very inspiring. If you want to get into dialogue-quoting, I’m more than happy to oblige. It sends me into fits of uncontrollable giggles.

Of course gnosticism is one of my big beefs with the Jedi. But I rail against gnosticism so much that it’s nice to let someone else do it for a change.

Now, as for Dormouse . . . why am I responding to you online when you’re down in the living room? Blogging is strange. Anyway, I don’t really have much to say because I don’t know anything about the extended Star Wars universe. Watching six movies was more than enough for me. Sigh. It’s just . . .so . . . earnest.

I mean, yes. A number of them do run around muttering platitudes, and, in the prequels especially, there’s a definite emphasis on skill, but the Jedi really don’t see it solely in terms of acquisition of abilities and “giving things up.”

Now, cataphatic spirituality assumes that, since God created the world, creation–including other people–reflects something of God’s personality, and therefore we can come to know God better by meditating upon and participating in God’s various forms of self-revelation.

This strongly resembles the “Force,” at least in my understanding of it. The whole purpose of Jedi’s existence–as a spiritual being, rather than as a “Knight”–is to bring him or herself into closer contact with the Force, to feel this Force in all living things. It’s problematic, of course, b/c the ultimate end of the fact that the Force exists in everything, and they can feel it most when they are at peace, is nonviolence–and in Lucas’s universe, the Jedi are pledged to do battle as well as meditate. (There’s a whole fascinating digression here involving Han and Leia’s oldest son, but I won’t get into it.)

The skills and training the Jedi gain are not an end unto themselves. They’re a means to the ultimate end of better understanding the Force and its role in their lives. They’re trained to ignore their bodies and their emotions when those things can get in the way of helping other people and/or furthering their understanding and intuition wrt to the Force.

Now, as for eschewing human relationships, there are a few ways to approach this. First of all, it is problematic that the Jedi take Force-sensitive children from their parents, severing the most immediate and formative bond. However, what’s interesting is that the relationship between a Padawan and his teacher in many ways comes to fill that gap. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon clearly had a very intense, deep love between them, and Obi-Wan loves Anakin dearly. So there’s that. Prior to the fall of the Old Republic, Jedi aren’t forbidden to have any kind of relationships–they’re forbidden to have families. I don’t like it–I think it’s wrong–but I can see where family could become a serious liability in your ability to see the bigger picture–which is one of their ultimate roles, and the failure of that ability is part of what leads to the fall.

The other side of it is that Luke is the only trained Jedi left, as far as we know, after the death of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. In the Expanded Universe (the novels), Luke falls in love, gets married, and has a child with a Force-sensitive woman who eventually becomes a Jedi. Leia, who is never fully trained, but is of Jedi blood, marries and has three children, all of whom are Jedi, and who enter into sexual relationships as adults. (Except Anakin, b/c he doesn’t live past the age of 16. Darn it.) Luke’s Jedi, in fact, are breeding like bunnies all over the galaxy, and he encourages the families. So in the Expanded Universe, most of which was admittedly written before the prequels, the New Jedi Order has rejected its anti-family stance. And is, I believe, stronger for it.

There’s no real reason you should know this stuff, and you may not accept Expanded Universe evidence as canon, though it is all authorized, and Lucasfilms acknowledges it as at least partly canonical, so…yeah.

(Also, I refuse to believe that in 1000 generations, not ONE Jedi strayed from the path and fathered/mothered a child? Unlikely. I bet Anakin was just the first of many. And, hm. Do they actually say that he’ll get kicked out of the Order, or does it only damage his chances of becoming a Master if they find out he’s married to Padme? I need to check that.)

But here is where I will agree with your analysis of the Jedi. They are ideologically creepy because — like police officers in many a Hollywood film but unlike police officers in the real world — they seem to see themselves as above and beyond ordinary law. They obey a higher, mystical law (the force), from which their intuitive perception of good and evil derives. Unlike any major religious tradition here on earth, they do not submit to any code (a decalogue, for instance) except the code of their own self-righteous intuition. In other words, their logic is circular; what they do is for the good because they have some privileged emotional connection to the good. Their Jedi-exceptionalism mirrors some of the creepy qualities of American-exceptionalism, nationalism, and (you guessed it), gnosticism. If you wanted to go on a rant about the lame-ness of Jedi-gnosticism, I would back you 100% I’m wondering why you haven’t yet.

What is creepy about them is not that they assume some kind of authority and make an effort to control situations, as Otter, you so wrongly believe is the essence of fascism. Nor is it creepy that they subject themselves to a rigorous self-discipline. If that’s what “fascist” means to you, then you’d have to call college classrooms fascist, the Pope fascist, authors of texts fascist, football players fascist, any police force fascist, and, as Dormous pointed out, any monastic tradition, etc. The word loses meaning. Moreover, there’s nothing wrong with self-discipline and subjectivation (see Foucault’s second and third volumes on Sexuality.)

Rather, what is “fascist” about the Jedi is that, like George W. Bush, they believe they are above the law. This is not peculiar to the Jedi. This is one of the most popular themes of Hollywood — that the good guy has to bend the law and ignore constitutional limitations in order to put the bad guys away. All standard stuff in Hollywood, most grossly in the Dirty Harry movies.

Except that in the case of Star Wars, the case is not so simple.

And now I think we need to return to the actual plot and dialogue of the movie, something that, in addition to a sensical definition the word “fascism,” you have been avoiding. I tried to encourage you in my last comment not only to pay attention to Lucas’s intentions but also to what characters actually say and do.

So, true enough, Anakin Skywalker does constantly bend the law and see himself as above it. He argues that he can make things right because of his superior knowledge of the force, and thus everyone should follow him. Anakin is a fascist. But he is not the moral center of the movie. He is the tragedy. The moral center is Padme Amidala who lectures him on the holistic nature of knowledge, the necessity to find consensus, the beauty of all living things, the limits one must accept in order to respect all life, etc. etc. Padme’s lectures continue in the Senate, a Senate that gives into the same kind of emotionalism, totalizing world-views, and fear that Anakin did, the same kind of emotionalism, totalizing world-views, and fear that about 80% of Americans gave into after 9/11. Her lectures correlate to Yoda who also lectures Anakin not just to be more self-less and self-disciplined, but also to not give into irrational fear and to acknowledge his limitations. It is Yoda and Padem’s stress on such limitations (these checks and balances as we call them in civics class, the holistic rather than total nature of human knowledge as we call them in epistemology classes) that make the Jedi not fascist in contrast to the Sith, who mistake their interests with the universe’s.

The conundrum of Star Wars episodes two and three (that is to say, the actual story, dear Otter, let’s not forget the story) is what to do when the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the government have become corrupt. And how do we know that they are? Under what circumstances is it acceptable to appeal to a higher law in order to resist or rebel against a government that is itself unlawful? (This is what makes Star Wars different from the Dirty Harry movies, which are fascist. Dirty Harry doesn’t raise this as an ethical and epistemological question. He just shoots bad-guys.) Apparently, sometimes it is OK to rebel, but under what conditions does Padme Amidala finally take the step to switch sides and join the rebellion? It’s not a simple and clear-cut decision in the movie. Star Wars is a childish and simple film, I grant you, but what’s interesting about it is how it raises the paradoxes of ethics and governance. Does the movie handle these paradoxes well? Not really, but it does raise them, which is more than I can say for your analysis of it.

Yes, that’s a function of Lucas’ horrendous script rather than Jedi spirituality, but I think it does reflect some significant differences between Jedi silliness and monasticism. First of all, the Jedi think of spirituality or whatever it is they’re doing in terms of effort and skill. Through giving things and attachments up, you become more focused, more detached, more “advanced.” Sometimes Christian monasticism has taken this approach (setting up a “ladder” of virtues, etc.), but in the kinds of monasticism I most resonate with, you won’t find that.

While I find other monastic traditions fascinating, I am of course most drawn to Celtic Christian monasticism, which had more of a cataphatic than an apophatic spirituality.

Here I’ve got to take a break to define cataphatic and apophatic as they relate to spirituality, because Wikipedia isn’t helpful (ack! my confidence is shaken!) and the Theopedia only defines them in terms of theology, rather than spirituality (as in abstract beliefs about God, rather than ways of living out one’s religious beliefs).

People inclined toward apophatic spirituality emphasize self-denial, emptiness, the belief that the things around us can’t help us know God better. (That’s something of a caricature based on my own preferences, and I don’t think anyone is wholly apophatic or wholly cataphatic–I’m just more inclined toward the cataphatic, because I’ve found the apophatic approach to be dangerous for me personally.)

Now, cataphatic spirituality assumes that, since God created the world, creation–including other people–reflects something of God’s personality, and therefore we can come to know God better by meditating upon and participating in God’s various forms of self-revelation. For me, the cataphatic approach is characterized by joy and fullness–even if some externals resemble asceticism.

The early Celtic monastics were pretty cataphatic, which, I think, is why they did not require celibacy for monastics. Fidelity to one spouse, yes, but you could be married and have a family and still be a monastic. Marriage could be way of encountering Christ with another person. There were celibate monks and nuns, too, but it wasn’t required.

Even in more self-denying sorts of Christian monasticism, the purpose of celibacy is not simply to avoid personal entanglements but to be able to give oneself more wholeheartedly to the monastic community (Kathleen Norris has a great chapter on this in The Cloister Walk). From my perspective, that may be necessary for some personalities, but it shouldn’t be required of all monastics. I can still respect it, though, while I hold no respect for the Jedi (again, mostly because of the script).

The reason, again, is that Jedi practices are centered around skill, virtue, achievement, and impersonality. The latter, of course, ties them more directly to Buddhist monasticism, as the goal is to merge with an abstract Force rather than to know and worship a Person. As much as I respect Buddhist monks and nuns, I’m not at all drawn to Buddhist monasticism.

There you have my partial answer. And it has nothing to do with fascism in any sense of the word.

Well, the Jedi are based on a mixture of religions–including Buddhism and Christianity. They’re monks.

I don’t think you can attack the Jedi for their belief in control and inner peace without attacking the monastic traditions.

And I know you love monastic traditions. So what do you do with that?

I would agree that it’s careless to go around calling obviously non-technically-fascist things fascist. Which is why I only do so in a mocking tone. As in, “fascist” equals “anything bad”–a language use pretty widely practiced by both liberals and conservatives, by the way.

Oh, and remember how around the time Episode Three came out, both Democrat and Republican senators were doing essentially the same thing by comparing the opposing party to Darth Vader?

I wouldn’t even jokingly compare something to Hitler, though. That, for me, goes too far.

Anyway, all that to say that sometimes people can use language playfully. Even political language.

I would actually say that the Jedi Council is pretty authoritarian. Or would have become so if they hadn’t all been killed off first. They’re so confident in their own virtue that that’s where it would inevitably have headed.

Roberts associates the Jedis with fascists not because they oppose Palpatine but because they fear uncontrolled and unpredictable aspects of life. Deep human relationships, for example.

I think the main difference here is that you’re looking at Lucas’ intent, whereas Roberts and I are looking at what the movies express against Lucas’ very annoyingly earnest intent.

Anyway, thanks for biting the bait and responding–I’m surprised no one did sooner!

So, more on my first point. First, Lucas’s film very obviously is an anti-imperialist movie, because all the bad people are imperialist and all the good people fight for the “republic.” We know that Lucas was against U.S. imperialism during the Vietnam War and that he wrote Star Wars with this in mind, and we know that because he said so. The republic is democratic and civically virtuous. The tradition invoked repeatedly in all the Star Wars movies, especially during the senate debates in episodes two and three, is the 17th and 18th century Atlantic republican tradition. One of the hallmarks of this tradition was its worry that commercial imperialism (like the “federation” that we see in episode one of Star Wars) would corrupt its citizens, and the Jedi are supposed to be paragons of the civic virtue, liberal arts education, etc. that writers in the 18th century believed were essential for preserving the republic. The Jedi knights are not fascist because they do not govern. Rather, they serve and are governed by the Senate. In contrast, under the empire, the emperor and Vader use the “force” to govern. One of the confusing things in the movie is the mixture of royal bloodline and democratic politics, but actually this mixture was common in the 17th century republican tradition theorized by people like James Harrington in the 1640s, 50s, and 60s.

That said, I’m sure everyone would agree with Otter and Roberts that there are a lot of problems with Lucas’s articulation and illustration of classical republicanism, but that doesn’t mean his film is “complicit with fascist ideology.”

Second point, what is a fascist ideology? Roberts doesn’t seem to know. Wikipedia defines it reasonably as “a radical authoritarian political philosophy that combines elements of corporatism, totalitarianism, extreme nationalism, militarism, anti-communism and anti-liberalism.” Is the Jedi council authoritarian? Is it nationalist? Is it corporatist? Clearly it is none of these things. One could argue that it is militarist, but to do so is absurd – obviously the military is a military, but that doesn’t make it militarist. All militaries are authoritarian, but that doesn’t make them fascist unless the military is also the government. Likewise, religions are not fascist unless they govern countries, and they don’t.

Lastly, Roberts asks a stupid question when he says “can one have a fascist font?” Obviously, there is nothing inherent in the font that is fascist. Rather, it — like the uniforms worn by the emperor’s offices — is only “fascist” because it alludes to historical events, and that’s pretty clear from the blog that Roberts quotes. Roberts seems not to understand the difference between “allusion” and “essence.”

What ultimately concerns me about Roberts and Otter’s comments is that they repeat a very common practice among right-wing nuts like David Horowitz who accuse liberals, leftists, and political correctness of being fascist. So, here we have a movie that explicitly attacks the Bush administration (blatantly in episode three, more subtly in episode two – one of the scenes cut from episode two would have made the criticism more clear), and what does Roberts do? He says Star Wars is fascist.