I never promised that I wouldn't talk about things which were a little off the beaten path, although in this case I promise that there is an applicable point to the discussion and not just esoterica about fictional things.
Let's talk about Star Wars. I'm not ashamed any more; Star Wars is a touchstone of culture, and even if you don't like it, you probably know it. Geeks are out of the closet. N.B. Geeks, I'm going to talk about the prequels, but I'm not doing a movie review, I'm just using it to illustrate a point.
In case you don't know, or in case you weren't paying attention, or in case you need to know what I'm doing with it, the Jedi are basically a combination of kung fu and Zen monks with a bit of the X-Men thrown in there for good measure, because unfortunately, not everyone can become a Jedi. The reasons why don't matter. And because they've got the whole "Eastern mysticism" thing going on, they deal in emotions. But because they're not Zen monks, they don't want you to give up all emotions. Just "fear, anger, agression," and a bunch of other ones as circumstances permit. Never mind that you can beat the ever-living fuck out of someone with a sword made of lasers; as long as you do it with sweetness and light in your heart, you're okay.
But if you stub your toe and make a table explode with your mind because you're sick and tired of your damn roommate moving his furniture into places it shouldn't belong and then you take all the splinters and drive them, one by one, into your roommate's face until he looks like a poster for Hellraiser... apparently that's not the good stuff. The "Force" gives you phenominal cosmic power, but the second you start using it for evil, you're in the Dark Side of the Force, and you'll end up creating a machine which destroys your enemies and is powered by the sadness of kittens.
The real bitch of it is that if you see a mugger robbing an old lady and you think to yourself, "Mace H. Windu, I've had it with all this fucking crime. You know what? I'm going to blow that motherfucking mugger up!" And you cackle with glee as you create an arcing blast of energy which causes the mugger to explode in a fine mist of blood and gristle, which you then cause to spell out your name on the pavement... turns out that, even though stopping an old lady from being mugged isn't evil, and you're still on the Dark Side because you were angry and aggressive.
Now I'll agree in the last example that the Jedi are probably right and making a mugger explode, no matter what the motivation, is probably not good. But if you get just as angry, but you use the power of your mind to make the mugger give the purse back, then drop his pants and demand a spanking, while no one would think that that was unjust punishment (well, maybe the mugger) the Jedi would still mark you down for a black facemask and James Earl Jones voice because you were doing it with anger and aggression.
But I'm not really interested in arguing their relative morality in this case. Fine, so they consider why you do something before judging it good or bad; I think that's perfectly valid. That I don't agree with their judgments doesn't make their methods wrong. No, what I want to discuss is the fact that, as a religion, the Jedi are seriously out of whack when it comes to this Dark/Light Side business, and I think it bleeds over into real life, as well as being a pretty good reasony why they failed as a religion/temple/organization/School For The Gifted.
Jedi are either Light Side or Dark Side. And as Yoda says, "Once you start down the Dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny." Which means that, as a young Jedi, you get mad at your roommate and, rather than making his head explode, you make him punch himself in the nuts repeatedly. Oops, sorry, that's Dark Side nut-punching, and now you're screwed and should start picking out a nifty Darth name.
I'm not a fan of the prequels, which is hardly a radical statement to make. But I think the redeeming factor, the reason that the prequels can exist for me, is the prophecy of which Anakin is supposed to be the fulfillment. I say that with a degree of self-deprecation because the prophecy is, under any scrutiny, simply something George Lucas threw in to justify anyone giving a good Goddamn about Anakin in the first place. Sure, he's got lots of Force, but big deal. But if he's going to be the prophecy messiah One, then there's some reason for him to be involved in big things. It's crap. So it's in spite of, rather than because of, George Lucas' reasons (I'd give him the benefit of the doubt, but why?) that I have this belief.
Most people probably either dismiss the "prophecy" as I did above (it's certainly not mentioned as much after the first one) or believe that the Jedi Council got it wrong and that Luke is Jesus instead (which is rather like the wise men screwing up and giving Joseph the frankincense). There's a case to be made for that, I suppose, if one cares to make it. If one regards the prequels as a bad dream and sticks to the legitimate movies, it's clearly Luke's story, and he clearly gets to be the Jesus figure. The problem with this interpretation is that it ignores the prequels, which, bad as they are, do exist, and if you're going to deal with the prophecy you have to deal with the prequel from whence it cometh. Also, if you look at Luke, he does sweet fuck all to be Jesus after the first movie. Which is why people are so confused by Return of the Jedi (that and the Ewoks). They want Luke to be the savior, but he gets his ass handed to him and has next to nothing to do with the Rebellion's victory in the battle with the second Death Star. Sure, he's tangentially involved with the death of the Emperor, but the Empire was losing before the Emperor died. He would have been blown to stellar dust along with everyone else had Luke not been there. Yes, there is value in distraction, but Luke didn't go there be a diversion. He went to try to convince Darth Vader to turn away from the Dark Side...
Hand on; we'll come back to that because it's important.
The other issue, aside from the fact that the prophecy thing is weak tea at best, is that "balance" is a pretty loaded term here. If you've got a system of dichotomy, where good and evil, light and dark, or whatever opposites you use, are at the ends of the scale, fantasy epics seem enamored with the idea that there needs to be "balance," like good needs evil in order to exist. I'm not sure why all fantasy religions are dualist almost to the point of Manichaeism in this way, but whatever the reason, it's usually an incredibly unsophisticated dualism. I'm not going to debate moral dualism in religion, but if your religion requires Hitler in order to have Gandhi, there's something wonky. So to think that "balance" between Light and Dark is a good thing smacks of the same thinking, one which would say that in order for the Jedi Light to shine, it needs to have Darkness in which to do so. Which means that, deep down, the Jedi need Darths or they can't be good, and that by eliminating (or at least driving underground) the Sith, they have opened themselves up to the rot that destroys them.
Bullshit.
The rot that brings down the Jedi isn't corruption or a lack of evil for them to be good against. It's not possible to be "too good." If you're "too good" then what you're calling "good" isn't good. Good is the thing of which you can never have enough. Note that I'm not talking about piety or lawfulness or any of that. Hell, even things which would be hard to argue aren't good can be, if they result in bad things happening. There's always room for more good; there's always a way you can take what you're doing and make it better.
No, the Jedi's problem of balance is that they won't let you be anything less than perfectly good. A little introspection is a healthy thing, but to be a Jedi you either have to live in constant fear that everything you're doing is just one more link in some kind of Jacob-Marley-esque chain, if Jacob Marley had wound up as a Force ghost trying to keep Darth Scrooge from winding up in a black mask. And even that doesn't work because in order for Marley-wan Jacobi to prevent Scrooge from turning to the Dark Side, he'd have to go back in time to a time before Marley was dead because by the time Marley was able to intercede, Scrooge would have been well and truly Darthed. Not to mention that Darth Scrooge is not a name that any self-respecting Darth would take. He'd probably be Darth Moneygrubber or something like that.
In short, to bring this discussion to a place where it's more than an esoteric discussion from the nerdery, the Jedi have a problem with redemption. They're clearly not Calvinists because they don't believe in predestination ("Always in motion is the future."). But they clearly haven't been thinking their own theology through, because if what they say is right, ain't a single Jedi getting into Jedi Heaven, or Nivana, or whatever. If they were Buddhists, they would definitely be of the Theravadan pursuasion, hard-core, because not only are no non-Jedi getting into Jedi Paradise but most Jedi aren't either.
Which rather goes contrary to the whole philosophy of the Force being everything. Sure, the Jedi are good at making the Force do things for them, but that shouldn't make them any more or less "Force-beings" than anyone else. And there's no Karmic wheel of rebirth to speak of, so it's not like they're going through lives to perfect themselves. Yoda doesn't say anything like, "Luke, dying am I; back to the Force Wheel am I going where hopefully in my next life, less Dark Side will I be. If lucky you are, born as less of a dumbass will you be the next time reborn are you." Plus, rather gives the edge to Jedi who happen to come from races that don't live 900 years.
So the Jedi are getting it wrong, and not because they need more evil, but because they don't want you to ever fuck up. Get pissed off at your roommate and restrain yourself to making him give himself only one sharp punch to the sack? Too bad; we're not Catholics up in here. Confession is something you shouldn't do because then we'll probably throw you out and/or do unpleasant things to ensure that when you inevitably become Darth Nadbreaker, you'll have a hard time doing anything bad from inside a black hole (that, at any rate, is how I'd solve the problem).
It's fascinating that Evil usually has a much better performance policy. If you're good and you lose it and punch a few nuts, you get to spend a lot of time thinking about how sorry you are for what you've done, in the best case. If you're evil and one day you feel like letting a cute bunny live, your supervisor rarely writes you up and makes you say 10 Kill Marys* and 20 Our Dark Lords. Evil usually wants you to be Evil when they want you to be Evil, but in your spare time, you can do whatever, as long as you're not actively hurting Evil. Good generally doesn't want you to do anything not Good, even when no one's watching and you haven't had sex in decades. Not a good recruiting strategy: "Be a Jedi! Come be trained to have all kinds of cool powers except the really cool ones, then never use any of your powers or think naughty thoughts." Versus the Sith: "Join the Sith! Whatever the fuck you want! Yeah, we're allowed to swear, use force lightning, and have sexual encounters the likes of which you wouldn't believe even if you'd seen them, but you'll have them if you just get on board with the whole 'anger' thing."
Plus, there's no retention policy: "Be a Jedi! Unless you screw up at all, in which case your two options are death or Darth, though we recommend death." "Sith! Where all Jedi eventually wind up unless they live a lie, and who really wants to do that?"
Anyway, back to the point of discussion. The Force doesn't need balance. The Jedi need redemption, and not that the organization needs to be redeemed, but that they need to have a concept of forgiveness, atonement, redemption, what have you. And I would argue that, if you watch the movies the way Lucas wants you to watch them, the inescapable fact is that Anakin Skywalker is the fulfillment of that prophecy, even if it's a bit late for most of the Jedi. Because who else brings balance to the Force?
It's not Yoda. Yoda goes down believing the same crap he always did. It's just possible that maybe he should have gone into the Cave of Unpleasant Personal Knowledge himself, because I imagine it would have shown him rejecting Jedi after Jedi, all of whom turned to the Dark Side. And the sad thing is, he'd probably see that and think, "Gee, why is it showing me this? They turned, I rejected them, they went full-on Sith. QED." (Yoda talks normally in his own head). But maybe the cave would have made him see that the Jedi he was rejecting was himself, over and over, for things he'd actually done. Maybe he would have seen that taking responsibility is important, and that maybe, hiding in a swamp waiting for Jesus to show up isn't what makes you John the Motherfucking Baptist (a 1976 Blacksploitation film starring Rosie Greer as Salome and Cleavon Little as JTMF Baptist).
Nor is it Obi Wan, who may be a Force ghose but should probably be accompanied by several lawyers indicating that the statements of Mr. Kenobi do not reflect his opinion or that of anyone else. He spends the entire first movie being the worst teacher ever (one wonders how Vader got to be any good at all, but let's be generous and assume that Kenobi's just a little Rusti-Wan) and lying to Luke about almost everything. Sure, Luke is a snotty little shit and he's acting like every single spoiled kid ever who winds up in a karate class where the teacher actually cares about more than just kicking through boards, but if you're training David, when it turns out that you're going to hit the Goliath stage of things a little ahead of schedule and that Goliath is actually a giant ball of death, maybe now is not that time to continue with your "Philosophy of Slingshots 101" course.
Be that as it may, Obi Wan has a chance to realize his mistake. He betrayed his friend, his brother, his student, and quite possibly the only person he ever cared about, in service of an ideal which is short-sighted and flawed. If there was ever a time when you say, "Hmmmm, maybe I need to get writing on 65 or so theses to nail to the door of a Jedi temple somewhere," I'd say it would be right about when the Jedi tell you to betray your friend for nothing more than being young. Because, let's face it, while the Jedi want to get 'em young so they can properly indoctrinate them while they don't have enough cognitive development to question the intelligence of the rules, they also then release onto the world what are essentially teenagers with raging erections and abstinence-only sexual educations. If your training in how to be good consists of "Don't be bad," then you need to update the manual a bit.
So Obi Wan gets his chance, and it looks like he's going to learn something, but instead of apologizing (yes, I know, at this point George Lucas didn't have the whole back story figured out and Vader was just supposed to be the Big Bad) and saying that he deserves whatever Vader wants to do to him, Obi Wan makes with the cryptic and vanishes into a puff of smoke so he can go on giving Luke bad advice and lying to him. "So what I told you was true, from a certain point of view." No. No it wasn't. It made you seem like less of a dick, and since you never actually told Luke the whole truth even when you finally owned up to your lie, he still had to figure out the whole "maybe I can bring my father back" thing for himself.
I'd like to think that Obi Wan and Yoda both learn the error of their ways when Anakin shows up at the end. They don't seem surprised to see him, so maybe he showed up to them first and let them know. Maybe he let all the dead Jedi know, because the dead Jedi, right or wrong, surely didn't bring balance to the force. They didn't do bad things, any more than Yoda and Obi Wan can be blamed for their complicity in the Jedi system to a point. But the rest of the Jedi Council and the Jedi of the galaxy who were snuffed out by the Dark Side certainly didn't do good. They died in the fight against a monster they created, and while that's fitting, it's merely fitting.
And lastly, Luke didn't bring balance to the Force. He helped, sure, but if he had died and then Vader and the Emperor had gone up with the Death Star, no Force balance would have happened. He turned away from the Dark Side, but in his case that was a bit like looking down the path and deciding that, tempting or not, the other path was a better one. He might have taken a step or two, and that he was able to turn back is commendable and certainly not something the Jedi of old would have been able to countenance, but he still was only affirming that it takes more than just not being evil to be good, and that he wanted to be good.
Here's where people have a problem with Return of the Jedi (aside from Ewoks). Many people think that Luke is a failed messiah because he doesn't get to sacrifice himself for his friends. He does very little, in the grand scheme of things; he finally sees himself, recognizes his past failings, and renounces them, but then he gets his ass handed to him by the Emperor. Lesson? Don't jump off the Empire State Building? He should have, in letting go of hatred, tossing aside his weapon and renouncing the Dark Side, somehow defeated evil by his very sacrifice.
But the secret (perhaps even to George Lucas himself, because chances are extremely good that this interpretation is only possible because Lucas steals from good sources) is that the story isn't about him, and never has been. He just has to be there to see Jesus. He goes through Hell and comes out the other side, but he's not the one the story needs to sacrifice. If he dies, he can't take the balance and bring it to everyone else. He can't take this new reconcilliation and spread it if he explodes or is incinerated by evil for no good reason. He must be there at Golgotha (yes, I am full-on going there) and then he has to survive, even if it means he doesn't share in the glory. He has to see the resurrection on the moon of Endor as he burns his father's armor.
Because Anakin is the Messiah, the One, the fulfillment of the prophecy, the one who brings redemption. He is so far down the Dark Path that not only is it dominating his destiny, it's probably somehow leeching back into the past and dominating that as well. No, he's not the Emperor (can Satan be redeemed, or is irredeemability part of what makes one Satan?) but he's as close as it gets. And rather than sticking to what he knows is true and realizing that there's no hope for him, that he made a mistake and can never come back from it, he says "Fuck it," and turns around anyway. Maybe he doesn't know he's turning. Maybe he just thinks he's going to save his son and then die trapped in the Dark Side forever. But he still turns.
In the end, that's what's important. People think that, if you've done bad things, you have to feel bad and sorry and apologize sincerely and only then can you be forgiven. But it's what you do that matters. Even if you don't make amends because of a desire to do so, to be forgiven, making amends is the important thing. Do the right thing first and figure out why later. Save your son first and realize that it wasn't you saving him after all, but the other way around. That's why that moment between Luke and his father at the end of Return of the Jedi are so important (and why RotJ is the best film, Ewoks notwithstanding, but I'm being much more controversial when I say that than when I said the prequels were bad).
Whatever you believe, you can learn something from the Jedi. Humans are imperfect. If you expect perfection and remove the imperfect from your religion, either you're lying to yourself or you'll soon be out of your religion as well. Inclusion and redemption rather than exclusion and retribution. Think about it.
* "Kill Mary, full of knives, darkness is with thee. Now she is among dead women and if Jesus were alive we'd kill him too. Holey** Mary, pray for mercy as we jam even more dull knives into you, now is the hour of your death, Zmen." I'm going to Hell anyway so I thought I'd have plenty of reasons.
