I think it's high time to add a new deceit to an already beefy list of delusions. If you recall, I regard the life of Fat, Cholesterol, Language, and Love as heavily misconstrued and wasted by the culture. What of Religion, that textbook word unknown to any individual faith or myth? What of that word used by distant disoriented sceptics to dissect and compartmentalise a universal state of Awe into the reflexes of environmental, social, and psychological forces, all determined by 'Nature'? I've already implied that Religion ought to be added to the above list, serving as a mirror or indicator for other perversions. That is, the good in it, like the good in fat, words, or love, is rarely got. Why? Because it, like global warming, comes at us all pervasively yet subtlety, cosmically yet locally. We can’t PINPOINT it. We smell religion in a pot of milk as much as in the Milky Way. Logically, the Milky Way cannot have anything more wondrous about it than a pot of milk. But that's exactly not the point, unless you're a religion analyst. If Existence itself becomes a miracle, a mindbending wonder, we've already come halfway to orthodoxy. Disbelief is suspended in awe the clearer we see our porridge. The more hum-drum the reality, the more fantastic it becomes – because it teems with inborn wonder as well as evinces greater things still. We don’t need the ‘spectacular’ in order for us to stare in awe, but neither do we need the godless anti-mythic Modern to blind us from the Stupendous.
What happens when modern popular culture finally scoops some cosmic cream?
We get Star Wars. Much better than textbooks or Joseph Campbell, and like Puff the Magic Dragon compared to Smaug, Star Wars isn't fit to replace any mythic worldview preceding it. If Christianity was blind to Nature, Star Wars is blinded BY it. These Jedi stories barely oust any meany judeo-christian negatives without sculpting a world of far greater horror. An eternal vista of sidereal cafeterias sides with treeless plains of red spectrum slag. All vegetables live indoors. All travellers travel indoors. All fast movement happens indoors. To do one’s daily work, you fly around indoors, imprisoned in an amusement park of heart failure speed and lung-smother space. The cosmos pulses with trapped thought, minds swell like gaseous beams of energy.
Suddenly that porridge you are eating seems either really hum-drum, or a bowl of Salvation. Either way, EVERYTHING about porridge is more religious than Star Wars. Once again, we have it all wrong. If it weren't for Hobbiton, we'd be even more sunk.
Let’s hear in bold print how Yoda is going to save us.
“Be careful of the fear of loss. It’s a path to the Dark Side.” And remember, Drain yourself “of everything you fear to lose.”
For the life of me, I can’t understand this, no more than I understand ‘the Dark Side’. Fear, fearlessness, pleasure, pain and painlessness can ALL (indirectly) lead to dark deeds, if dark deeds do exist. They could equally lead to deeds of Light. Surely the emotional state is beside the point. Draining yourself of all you fear to lose - it may help free you from pain and pleasure, but it won't help those who fear to lose YOU. It's also a good way to shun loving anything too much; and this noncommittal stance may itself be a dark deed. As an antedote to Yoda’s advice, I think the theistic religions have more to offer: Namely, that emotional commitments are no more a sin or risk than emotional ‘equilibrium’ (sterility), and often less. It’s the deeds and beliefs, not the emotions, which count. Emotions are there to help you, if you let them, and they’re more ancient than meditation.
What’s perhaps most philosophically absurd in Star Wars is the focus on EMPTINESS versus ANGER as the ulimately desireable state. The focus is strange, because both anger and emptiness are mere secondary, learned emotions. The primary emotions are sadness, joy, love and awe, and they may be subverted into other states (depression, fear, anger, serenity, resignation), each of varying usefulness. None of these states, in my view, are all bad per se, but the idea that emptiness trumps anger when NEITHER emotion is common to newborn babies strikes me as laughable. I think both anger – productive forms of anger – as well as emptiness, i.e. serenity and equanimity, may be beneficial, but neither one has the moral edge over the other, nor is either one ideal. Sadness and happiness will get you plenty farther. Resignation has a long association with succumbing to heroic defeat and death. Plenty of chieftains of old resigned themselves to death in battle or to sacrificial execution; Hitler resigned himself to suicide. Was he angry at the time? I doubt it. (Actually, he was a trembling whacked out meth addict!)
“Do not miss or mourn people who die [or whom you lose].”
(Yoda also warns Anikin more generally of forming too strong attachments to others lest these feelings lead to suffering, injury, and split loyalties. In other words, emotional ‘equilibrium’, or better yet, serene Emptiness, is the ideal.)
Emotional sterility, again, supposedly gives you a moral edge, and more self-control. Ironically, emotionally austere people can injure others just as much passionate people, if not more, since they are less likely to forgive, relent, lavish, embolden, or weep for remorse. They are also more likely to reject suitors, and leave them hopeless and jilted. How many raging females has Yoda jilted and left to exact their vengeance on the cosmos?!
"Search your feelings!"
Well, I would if I had any. You told me to relinquish them all, you toady Imp.
“Attachment leads to jealousy” [Therefore, avoid attatchment.]
So attachment leads to JEALOUSY. Ah. Ooooo. Oh. So? Where’s the moral teaching here? Why is jealousy ‘bad’? Because it may lead to suffering? Well, so may lack of jealousy! Must attachment lead to jealousy? And why is suffering necessarily bad? Doesn’t it depend on the context - the why, what, and how, the cause, motive, result of the suffering? In other words, ignoring the ethical dynamic of human action and experience leads to nonsensical proscriptions, Yoda Yarns, Thous-Shalt-Nots without depth.
For sake of argument, let’s say that, regardless of context, ALL suffering really is evil. By this, I mean the circumstance itself is evil, as well as the paths along which such suffering becomes possible. Alas we’re not out of our conundrum. What the blazes is Evil? Yoda already alludes to it in circular fashion (er, evil is suffering, weren’t you listening?). Yes, but what constitutes the evilness of it? Evil is a not just the experiencer's state or perception (which, we all know, are relative to the victim anyway), it implies a moral category as well. Not according to Yoda. Nope. Categories are extensions of our ego, and lack any explanatory force. Perhaps Good-and-Evil Dualism is an extension of Yoda’s ego then, since he seems to love that category.
It's no use calling something Bad if you can't pinpoint why. Destruction, Death, Immortality, Suffering may all be Good in some contexts. Is delight in another's suffering Bad? In my view, Yes. But that's because Good and Bad are not amoral tensions or poles, but one is derivative of the other. Bad is a manipulated shortfall of sham Good, that's all. Delight itself is Good, but delight in another's pain is Sham Good. There's nothing cosmic or eternal about Bad. It's a sham. If we don't have a belief and intuition about Good, Bad has no meaning, moral or otherwise. I don't think Bad means much to Yoda - he's just squeaking about the Force. If the wellbeing and pleasure of a living thing is Good, or some mini good branching off from some cosmic Good, then it's easier to see how torture is evil. The act of torture is petty - it's cosmically blind. The wrongness of it far exceeds the wrongness of suffering in general. By this token, not all suffering need be evil, even if the state represents some sort of fall from the ideal. We make a distinction between pain and torture, and for good reason. Suffering may happen 'accidentally', as a helpful warning, or as a result of health being restored to the sick. Ever get a virus? The suffering you feel is your body's helpful attempt to kill the virus.
Do listen to me and Yoda, and don’t get all glossy eyed! You twits. This is weighty, and no lethargic levity is allowed. Yoda really does believe in Dualism, or at least he tries to. Dualism, in this form, has nothing to do with the ancient Good-versus-Evil struggle of fairy tales. It has much more to do with late Indo-Iranian philosophy of religion, and finds expression in Buddhism and somewhat in Zoroastrianism. It teaches that each FORCE (there’s that word!), both Good and Evil, are co-eternal and co-equal, and CO-EXIST. Begad, they’re even CO-DEPENDENT, and that's worrying. They exist in eternal polar tension, balancing one another out, and staying very wary and aware of each other. Each is necessary in its own way, and each exists somewhat APART from moral categories. Hence the word force, amoral and vague. In fact, so morally neutral are they, that the labels and roles may sometimes be flipped, and no earthling may quite tell the difference. In either case, it’s important to understand that neither position has the high ground, for they exist to hold each other in balance. Neither one will ‘win’, neither one is more all-defining or basic, neither one is a perversion of the other, and neither one existed before the other, since both exist in eternity past and eternity future. Star Wars, finding that teaching unpalatable for an unconsciously Judeo-Christian audience (itself included), works in just enough Semitic Monotheism, the teaching of one ultimate reality - eternal Good, to excuse its plot of an inferior, morally failing Dark Side.
Blind to this unworkable contradiction, Star Wars tries to stick to its Indo-Iranian guns, and shoots itself down in the process. Is Yoda really who we think he is? Or is he just a Sith Lord who’s achieved Force Balance in himself, having chosen to go too far to neither the Good Side nor the Dark Side? Yes, I do think so. But Star Wars wants you to think he’s a compassionate Ghandi too, not just a well balanced individual.
Well, I think Jinnah had more compassion than Ghandi, just as Christ has more than Yoda. Christ communes, seeks to give us complementarity and unity with the Deity through the path of interpersonal co-mingling, while restoring the original spark of Creation to all things in an act of generous extravagance. This creates infinite unity and diversity, infinite individuality and co-mingling. Buddha (Yoda) meditates, seeks to relinquish all attachments to external things and beings, and thereby empty his awareness of all pain or bliss until no conscious thought is left but that of an expanding and contracting Universe. This creates unity (with something), but forever annihilates diversity and individuality. Deities, or other beings, may not intrude their creativity upon this cherished Nirvana, but they may chill out and join up. Such beings would otherwise be intruders. I hope they intrude.
By now, you should feel distinctly and resignedly anti-religious, and quite un-aweinspired for the whole harlequinade of spiritual apologetics. I’ve done no more or less than Yoda himself would have done. I've given you a talkin, after my own fashion. You now prefer to deny or submit your soul, experience Life maybe, but never read about it again. I understand. You choose well. But I haven’t led you down the path to Awe here. I’ve only given you a textbook to it. If you want Myth, pure unadulturated story populated by Beings, I suggest you read (or have read aloud to you) George MacDonald’s Lilith, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillian, or Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men. You may also consider oral folk poetry: the Kalevala, the Vedas, the Avesta, the Poetic Edda, the Book of Leinster, the Lebor na hUidre (Book of the Dun Cow), Siberian fairy tales, Iroquois prophecies, Aborigine dreams, or the Psalms. If you must see a movie, try The Silver Chair, Watership Down, Kristin Lavransdatter, or the 1973 Wicker Man.
