On the Morality of the Jedi

by Vispma

On the Morality of the Jedi is a blend of fanfiction and philosophy that aims to apply the work of Friedrich Nietzsche to the Star Wars universe. When an introspective but naive Padawan is paired with a veteran and intemperate Knight, their greatest enemy may not be Separatists but rather one another. Yet making their peace with the Jedi Code - and each other - may come too late.

1. Introduction

In the course of my sprawling, decades long fandom of the Star Wars universe, I've heard a great many things. I've heard the theory that the Empire purposefully destroyed the Death Star to nip popular support for the rebellion in the bud by branding the Alliance as terrorists (After all, they had the resources and the Wookie-hours to build a spare); I've entertained the idea that Obi-Wan is actually a clone named OB-1 (which explains why Old Ben doesn't recognize R2-D2 or C-3PO in the Jutland Waste when he rescues Luke from the Tusken raiders in A New Hope); and I've even argued on behalf of Ewoks while railing against Gungans (at least Wicket never introduced legislation paving the way for a dictator for life). In other words, you could might even say that I've flown from one side of this geek galaxy to the other, and I've heard a lot of strange stuff, but I've never heard anything to make me believe two oft-mentioned contentions: first, that Stars Wars is principally for kids, and second, that the Jedi Order is anything but an organized religion. Let's take each of these assertions in kind, for I believe that what is at stake in each of these contentions is ultimately very much the same concern.

The assertion that the Star Wars films - but really the whole axis of comic, games, and toys - is primarily a work of fiction made to be consumed by kids is as old as A New Hope (which is to say, 0 BBY). These space westerns were Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces," sophisticated enough to work as a framework for a compelling work of cinema for adults, but simple enough (or universal enough, if you believe folks like Levi-Strauss) for children to understand and appreciate. It always seemed to me that this line of reasoning was never really controversial until the prequel trilogy was released. Shakespeare said it best when he famously wrote, "Hell hath no fury like that of nerd-rage." In other words, by 1999, the chickens had come home to roost: the children that the original Star Wars had seemingly been "for" had grown into adults, with discretionary income and opinions of their own.

Admittedly, Lucas' heavy-handed film-making merited much of this scorn. Though I am no Mr. Plinkett, I have no love for Lucas' treatment of his own creation. I feel only a strong sense of antipathy towards what we fans got in Episodes I-III and a weak sense of longing for what might have been. Yet whining about the theft of one's childhood has never sat well with me. Like one ought to respond to dreadful but protected Free Speech not by banning objectionable speech but by countering it with more speech, Star Wars fans who were disappointed in Lucas' prequels should not waste their breath berating what are objectively poor films, but rather ought to respond with their own, superior treatment of the Star Wars universe.

And we have. For ways to attempt redress (or just catharsis), I recommend the 2009 film Fanboys; Darth and Droid's fantastic treatment of The Phantom Menace(1); Hong Jacga's re-visioning of the events between a Episode III and IV (2); and/or more generally Dave Filoni's rather adroit treatment of the kids-or-adults audience issue in The Clone Wars and Rebels.) I think fans of Star Wars understand the tone, theme, and spirit of Star Wars better than its original creator, and the stuff we have collectively created, I think, proves me right - fingers crossed that this extends to J.J. Abrams.(3)

But this attempt at the reconstruction of Star Wars by its older fans has invited a counter-reformation of its own. Tired of the shrill tenor of adult Star Wars fans, many people paint us as bitter purists with no social lives who simply need to grow up and move on. To spill the wind from our sails, the counter-reformation has attempted to destabilize the grounds of geek-critique by resurrecting the assertion that Star Wars has always has been and always will be intended for consumption by children. For my part, I tend to think that most these folks are just aggrieved to have to listen to us older fans who feel slighted - think of the 2010 documentary The People vs. George Lucas - and therefore their efforts can be dismissed as ad hominem. However, that does not necessarily mean that the point about the audience question is resolved.

A Question of Audience

This audience question is clearly contested ground - but it does not have to be an acrimonious debate. Indeed, perhaps the best and most reasonable of these kinds of counter-reformation pieces is a 2012 essay written by associate Professor Bret Asbury titled "Don't Give in to Hate: How a Child of the genial Star Wars trilogy learned to love the prequels." Asbury's thesis is simple: as a self-identified fan of the original Star Wars, he regarded the prequel films with utter contempt - that is, until he had a son. Watching Episodes I, II, and III with his own son (let's at least hope he had the good sense to screen the Machete Cut)(4), Asbury was struck by the fact that the effect these films had on his son were similar to his own upon watching the original trilogy. "I reluctantly allowed him to watch Episodes I-III, and was surprised to discover that he liked them just as much as Episodes IV-VI, if not more so," Asbury writes of his son. By the time he reflected on the fact that he, a grown man, was sitting on the couch watching The Clone Wars on Cartoon Network, "it finally dawned on me that as a thirtysomething veteran of the original trilogy, I was no longer a member George Lucas' target audience." This seems sensible enough to me - but then Asbury drops his thesis like a proton torpedo down an exhaust port: "These movies are for children. Let me say that one more time: They are children's movies, like Wreck It Ralph or Madagascar or Alvin and the Chipmunks. I now see clearly that the original trilogy is not nearly as good as we'd like to remember it-and Episodes I-III are on equal footing with, and at times surpass, their predecessors."(5)

Let that sink in for a moment: 1977 is to 2012 as A New Hope is to Wreck it Ralph? Those are fighting words, sir.

So what does Asbury have to back this up? The acting in the original trilogy is staid. Like the original trilogy, the special effects of the prequels are pretty compelling for their time. The plot is not exactly logic-proof. ("How is it that the whole of Luke's excursion to the Dagobah System and primary training with Yoda takes place in the same temporal window that Han and the rest of the crew spend hiding out and being chased by a Star Destroyer?") In light of this evidence, Asbury suggests that geek-critique as a genre overlooks the larger point: "Rather than continue the misguided, nostalgia-soaked veneration of the first trilogy, it's time to hand Star Wars back over to its intended audience and celebrate the fact that today's children will soon have nine Star Wars films to treasure," Asbury concludes.

Writing at io9, Germain Lussier lights upon a similar conclusion: "Who is Star Wars for now? With Disney at the controls, Star Wars doesn't seem to be for a 30 or 40-year-old fans anymore, if it ever was," Lussier muses. "More than ever, Star Wars is for 10-year-olds who can grow with it."(6)

These are fair points. And Asbury himself concedes that in many place, the prequels are difficult, if not impossible, to defend. But is he right about his larger contention? Is Star Wars really for kids?

Full disclosure: I've never seen Wreck it Ralph. I realize a host of classic Disney films seem to require the traumatic death of a protagonist's parents in the opening five minutes of their "kids movies." In other words, I get it - when you're a movie-going kid in 2015, you grow up fast. But am I crazy to think that we might call Wreck it Ralph a movie for kids because a busy parent could leave their children to watch it without being concerned it may contain themes of oppression, violence, warfare, or feature zero instances of traumatic maulings, dismemberment, or patricide?

I'm not sold by Asbury's claim that Star Wars are kid's movies in the same way Wreck it Ralph is. However, rather than delve further into that question, I'd like to ask a different one, a more pragmatic one: if the intended audience for Star Wars is in fact primarily children (and I am not saying that it is) in the same way that film like Wreck it Ralph most certainly is, what messages are we sending them when we screen Star Wars?

Even as committed fans, we have to admit neither Star Wars trilogy is exactly a beacon of progressivism - or even very attentive world-building for that matter. For starters, the first trilogy is notoriously devoid of female characters; Leia and Mon Mothma are the only that come to mind in a galaxy which I presume in all its diversity must certain contains species that biologically, let alone socially, defy gender binaries. The galaxy MUST be inhabited by more than two human women. In a related concern, love and romance are a central theme of the both trilogies ("I know," you might respond roguishly) but it is all heterosexual love and romance. Though the canon got its first LGBTQ character in Moff Mors, a character in Star Wars: Lords of the Sith novel written by Paul Kemp, it's hardly enough; these characters need screen time.

And this brings me to another point: Star Wars is a very embodied universe - slave Leia's curvaceous-accentuating bikini, Anakin's creepy lust for Padme rollicking in the grass of Naboo, the traumatic loss of Luke's hand by his own father's blade - yet the films don't really acknowledge or deal with issues of gender politics. Some have speculated that the Star Wars universe is one where such concerns have faded into the background of daily life and as such isn't an issue to the denizens of this universe.(6) But this strikes me as wish fulfillment with a sci-fi patina. I mean, after viewing all six seasons of The Clone Wars - a story which principally follow Anakin and his female Padawan Ahsoka Tano as they go gallivanting across space in the Republic Navy fighting the Separatists - I couldn't help but think, "Gee, on all-male crewed Venetor-class cruiser, where does Ahsoka find a bathroom?"

At this point, we might imagine an Asburyian rebuttal: "That's the rub. These films and shows don't need to address where Asokha finds a bathroom because their audience is composed of children. Children aren't concerned with Simone de Beauvoir and gender and power like you are. You can't burden these films with concerns they are not equipped nor intended to meet."

To this, I would say: if Star Wars is really for kids, doesn't that mean these films should invite extra scrutiny, not less, for targeting children? Not to mention, this might be a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away, but the story of Star Wars is ultimately still for us here on Earth.

And boy, do we still got problems down here.

This brings us to the second contention: that the Jedi and their religion are super problematic.

A Religion Hiding in Plain Brown Robes

That the Jedi are portrayed as warrior monks a part of a religion, especially in the prequels, is not a new insight. But the Jedi are not just any religion; their monkish order is shaped into a very particular organization (a paramilitary force led an un-democratic command hierarchy that recruits child soldiers) and has a very particular theology (an absolutist metaphysics that compels its believers to asceticism). The Jedi's depiction as the nominal heroes of these films (particularly in the prequels) is not neutral exactly a neutral proposition. What kinds of practices are we valorizing here?

According to the canon, the Jedi Order has existed for thousands of years, pre-dating the founding the Republic. Their Order was organized to resist the dark side Force-users among them, those of whom indulged in the covetous, erratic, and spiteful side of the divided pool of metaphysical power from which Force-sensitives draw their strength. Although this mission statement had very little to do with that of the Republic's, it did not stop the Jedi Order from moving its headquarters to Coruscant. There the Order set up shop as the Republic's religious enforcers, peacekeepers, and informal diplomats. The thousands of Padawans, Knights, and Masters, trained in lethal art of war and commanding powers that bordered on the magical, were governed only by a High Council composed of their eldest and more respected peers. How exactly the Republic governed the Jedi, assigned them to missions, or made them answerable to Republican lawmakers is largely unknown. From the films and shows that composed the Star Wars canon, the best answer seems to be that the Jedi deferred to the Senate through a system of precedence, but this relationship appears only to be the practice of tradition. Which organization actually served the other is left ominously ambiguous.

Whatever the case, there is no denying that this arrangement resulted in a strange tension between the secular, democratic, and pluralist Republic and the orthodox, spiritual, and monastic Jedi Order that made both institutions particularly vulnerable to being pitted against one another. Though the Jedi repeatedly claim to be serving the Republic, it is clear from the films that the public was skeptical of their loyalty. This anxiety about the Jedi was easily exploited by Palpatine when he alleged that a Jedi coup had tried to overthrow the office of the Chancellor. Whose fault is that? I would image that the public had good reason to be nervous about the role of the Jedi in their government. It would be hard to blame these citizens for cheering on the demise of the aloof religious order of monks installed near their halls of governance by the duly constituted civil authorities - can you imagine a private parochial temple, closed to the public yet home to thousands of armed monks, answerable to no facet of government suddenly grafting itself on to the White House?

The troublesome organization of the Jedi Order is just the tip of the iceberg. The Jedi Code itself, the governing doctrine of the Jedi, created an unimaginative intellectual orthodoxy within the ranks of the Jedi, enforced by an internal government which punished heretics and compelled obedience. For example, Qui-Gon Jinn, a Jedi Master who charted his own course largely independently of the Jedi Council, was regarded by the elite as a Grey Jedi and had his name spoken in hushed whispers of exasperation. This is the same Qui-Gon that was a certified Jedi Master who took on an apprentice to pass down his Jedi knowledge, dutifully took on missions to handle trade disputes at the Order's request, gave his life to protect the Queen of Naboo whose welfare the Jedi Council had pledged to protect in the face of the Jedi Order's mortal enemy, the Sith. Sounds like a real heretic to me. Jinn's reputation betrays the extent to which the Jedi Order is rigidly conservative. There is no denying: the Jedi Order was fundamentalist, its Jedi Code absolute.

But perhaps most reprehensible of all, the Jedi Code demands that Jedi recruits begin their training at the Temple at a very young age. The audience of Star Wars first learns of these age parameters in Episode VI, when an exiled Master Yoda tells Luke that he is too old to undergo Jedi training. This invocation of an age limit is of course just a manufactured obstacle for Luke to overcome - a task he fails to pass with much humility - for it would be insane of Yoda simply to elect not pass on his Jedi knowledge to the one person who might be able to overthrow Darth Vader and communicate it to future generations. Still, when we visit the Old Republic of the prequels, we see that Younglings and Padawans are, as Yoda alluded to on Dagobah, quite young indeed. How did they arrive at the Temple? It is insinuated both in the films and in other mediums that Force-sensitive children are brought to the Temple while they are extremely young so as to facilitate a lifetime of training and indoctrination, sometimes at an age when these Younglings could not possibly provide their consent. Moreover, if Anakin is any example, the Jedi Order does not afford many of its Younglings to often see their parents, if at all.

So the Jedi kidnap Force-sensitive children, indoctrinate them in an eternal war with the Sith and the Dark Side, and train them to be little more than child soldiers; and these are the heroes in Star Wars?

Yet more than its problematic organization is the deeply disturbing theology of the Jedi. Animated by their theology of the Light Side of the Force, the Jedi seem to have declared war on their own humanity. Indeed, if there is one crystalline teaching offered from the six-going-on-seven films worth of Jedi teachings, idioms, and sayings from the Star Wars universe, it is that the Jedi regard emotions as nothing but trouble. The Jedi clearly have learned to hold all emotion, feeling, and affectivity in contempt. The Jedi Code orders its adherents to feel no sympathy, remorse, pity, or compassion - for anyone, including themselves. Where does this antipathy for affectivity come from?

Of course, the mystical power the Jedi command have metaphysical antecedents on Earth. The Force in the Star Wars universe clearly mixes elements of Eastern religions - the Force might be akin to Chinese notions of qi, the Daoist's dao, Buddhist dharma, or even the Indian concept of prana - while the Jedi Order itself embodies some elements of the western Judeo-Christian structures of organization and integration with the state. Common to all of these sources of inspiration is the subordination , if not dissolution, of the Self. And while I would be first in line (second only to David Hume) to suggest that the essential, innate, or cohesive Self is but a fiction, I am also careful not to deny my own embodied existence, an existence that is saturated with affectivity. To do so would only commit an act of violence on myself, a supreme act of existential alienation. Yet this denial is exactly what the Jedi Code mandates: that its adherents alienate themselves from their own bodies and their own emotions. In their rush to excise the dangerous feelings of the Dark Side, the Jedi end up throwing out the baby with the bath water. Selflessness, the eschewing of that idealized Self, then becomes an exercise in the oblivion of one's feelings. In this race to purge themselves of all affection, the Jedi annihilate their own humanity.

This is not a reading of the Star Wars films or interpretation of Jedi teachings that requires a squinty-eyed highfalutin and theoretically speculative analysis in order to see. You don't need to look very hard to find it - instead, it makes up a central part of the Star Wars cosmology. In Season Three, Episode 1 of The Clone Wars, Jedi Master Shaak Ti explicitly states, "A Jedi does not feel concern." No two ways about it. If this is too tangential source material for you, try Yoda's response to an obviously distraught Anakin in Revenge of the Sith: "Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose." Moreover, Yoda's famous refrain of "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering" is, like many Jedi-isms, laudable in a prima facie way, especially when considering Asbury's contention that Star Wars is for kids: Don't be angry, don't be fearful, and don't resort to violence. But what happens when Luke disobeys Yoda and strikes out to rescue his friends based on his affection for them in The Empire Strikes Back? "If you end your training now - if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did - you will become an agent of evil," Yoda warns Luke. Luke ignores this advice. As a result, he gets his best buddy hauled off in carbonite, loses his hand, and goes to some very dark places. In Return of the Jedi, we see a much more stoic Luke confronting his father, as if he's learned to suppress his feelings. The moral of the story is clear: feelings get you hurt.

Thus the morality of the Jedi compels its adherents to a bitter asceticism, the denial of one's own feelings for the illusion of the service towards some greater meaning. I'm sorry, but is that a desirable message for an audience of children? That this might not be a desirable message should be reason enough to agree that Jedi Code, insofar as it governs the conduct of the supposed heroes of Star Wars, needs to be critically analyzed.

The Genealogy of (Jedi) Morality

Enter Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is hardly the only thinker who can be brought to bear on the troubling issues of the Jedi and their Order, but his consideration of the Christian disdain for embodiment, the annihilation of human affectivity, and ascetic ideal parallels my concerns with the Jedi. This insight comes primarily from Nietzsche's 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality, a genre-defying work of speculative history, philosophy, ethics, and poetics. I highly recommend it, but here is the relevant précis:

Nietzsche's critique in Genealogy is split into three parts, each focusing on a specific aspect of the development and consequences of Christian morality. I do not intent to write a detailed summary of his argument or provide much of an exegesis here. For our purposes, we needn't get too specific about his argument in three acts; instead, I would like to focus primarily on the term "morality" itself, an idea which unifies all three of his treatises.

To properly understand what Nietzsche is up to in the Genealogy, it is useful to make a distinction between what we commonly refer to as morality - constellations of ideas concerning what is right and wrong- and the morality that Nietzsche has in mind: a cluster of answers to questions like "What are the qualities or traits of a good or virtuous person? What do I owe others? What is the ultimate point and value of human life?"(8) The emphasis on answers is my own, because it clarifies for me exactly what Nietzsche is arguing and how it is different from an ethics. Instead of asking an ethical question such as, "What is the answer between right and wrong?", Nietzsche is far more interested in knowing - and castigating - individuals or groups who claim to have such authoritative answers at all.

It is absolutely critical to understand that in light of his use of morality as a technical term, Nietzsche's rejection of morality is not a license to steal, pillage, and kill. Here we might distinguish between a morality and an ethic. For Nietzsche, ethics are naturalistic, nominal, and experiential; in other words, the values that ground ethics are made in the world of experience, not discovered or acquired by reference to supernatural power or any other a priori source. Moralities, particularly religious moralities, are the opposite. Moralities are obstacles to be overcome towards a true humanism, training wheels that must be shed along the way if we are to grow into fully-fledged moral persons. Nietzsche's writing was thus intended to strike a blow for the cause of what he called "immoralism." Immoralism then is simply the rejection of a morality, not a wholesale abandonment of our concern for ethical conduct. Nietzsche is thus striving for a post-moral world, when human kind abandons prescriptions of behavior from institutions, religions, or Commandments. Instead of submitting to nihilistic moralities, we should strike out and decide what to do and how to think for ourselves.

Morality in this sense is not just a collection of moral rules; rather, it is also a pathology that results from suffering certain dominating commitments. But what does Nietzsche's depiction of morality have to do with the Jedi? For Nietzsche, the most dangerous component of Christian morality is its asceticism. Christian asceticism is a response to the world's perceptible meaninglessness, a reaction to a void of meaning in the world by creating meaning where there apparently is none. "That the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui; it needs a goal, - it would rather will nothingness that not will," writes Nietzsche.(9)The discomfiture of a world without meaning Nietzsche regarded as Weltschmerz, "an emotional state in which the predominant tone is a feeling of pain or sadness because of the inadequacy of the world" according to Clark.(9) This is not only the point of departure for Christian asceticism as a kind of escape, but it is also the catalyst for Luke Skywalker to become a Jedi. After his aunt and uncle are murdered by the Empire, Luke says with great melancholy, "There's nothing for me here now. I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi lime my father." The hero's journey - into the jaws of the morality of the Jedi - has begun.

We should pay particular attention to Nietzsche's claims regarding asceticism, for these are perhaps the most relevant aspect of his work in juxtaposition with Star Wars. In the Christian morality, asceticism takes its form in two theological practices: a denial of one's affectivity and the belief in life after death. Notably, the Jedi Code reenacts both of these tenants as well.

First, the ascetic suppresses their affectivity in an effort to transform what would otherwise be meaningless into something to serve a greater purpose. Like denying yourself dessert might make you feel a more virtuous dieter, so too does asceticism transform one's denial and self-suffering into an act of greater meaning; in the Christian context, denial of affectivity was the hallmark of purity or holiness. Look no further than the monkish tradition of chastity in the service of God as a scenario where one's suppression of affectivity serves a greater purpose. For the Jedi, this would be the feelings of the Dark Side; hate, anger, or passion that must be carved out of the Self like a cancer. This ascetic impulse leads the ascetic to deny not just trivial feelings but her feelings entirely: "An ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here a ressentiment without equal rules, that...would like to become lord not over something living but rather over life itself, over its deepest, strongest, most fundamental preconditions," writes Nietzsche.(10)

For non-ascetic people, meaning might be found in the embrace of pleasurable, creative, and constructive experience. Emotional satisfaction, a job well done, a service rendered, a duty fulfilled, an accomplishment - these are sufficient for creating contingent meaning in life. But for the ascetic, these things are mere trifles, causes for distraction. Therefore, the ascetic turns these affections into sin. By treating them as sinful and then refraining from feelings, emotions, and sensation, the ascetic transforms these human tendencies into something to be triumphed over. "Whereas pleasure is felt and sought in deformation, atrophy, in pain, in accident, in the ugly, in voluntary forfeit, in unselfing, self-flagellation, self sacrifice.," observes Nietzsche. "This is all paradoxical in the highest degree: we stand here before a conflict that wants itself to be conflicted, that enjoys itself in this suffering and even becomes ever more self-assured and triumphant to the extent that its own presupposition, physiological viability, decreases."(11) Thus, the ascetic manufactures meaning out of thin air by trying to assert her will to power over her own self, for "any meaning is better than no meaning at all."(13)

Second, in their obsessive focus on life beyond this one, Nietzsche criticizes the ascetic for their embrace of nihilism. Life in the present is to be treated only as a stepping-stone to a more transcendent plane after death. The ascetic "relates our life (together with that to which it belongs: "nature," "world," the entire sphere of becoming and of transitoriness) to an entirely different kind of existence, which it opposes and excludes, unless, perhaps, it were to turn against itself, to negate itself: in this case, the case of an ascetic life, life is held to be a bridge for that other existence," bemoans Nietzsche. "The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for a different existence, an existence somewhere else, and in fact the highest degree of this wish, its true fervor and passion."(14) If this world we find ourselves living in is only a cheap, meaningless, and transitory on, the ascetic yearns to be released for its bonds - this was the condition of the Christian ascetics according to Nietzsche. It also seems to be the case for the Jedi, who seem to bank on the idea that they will rejoin the Force when they die.

For the Jedi then, the existence of the Light side of the Force is the altar upon which they deny their affectivity and embrace their nihilism. The Force provides the central meaning of not just a Jedi's life, but all lives. It provides them with direction, destinies, fate. "Your destiny," Obi-Wan tells Luke, "lays on a different path than mine." It flows through you; it partially commands your actions. "The Force will be with you, always."It makes events occur for a reason. It is cosmic therapy.

The ascetic depiction of the Force through the Jedi Code is thus the solution to the feeling "that something was lacking, that an enormous void surrounded human - he did not know how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of meaning."(15) Here is the intersection of asceticism and morality. Morality itself is, as Clark argues, "an ascetic interpretation of ethical life."(15) In this way, Jedi morality of letting go of your feelings, absolving your commitments to others, and surrendering all possessiveness as a means to be one with the Force negates, denies, and suppresses more humane possibilities for the conduct of its followers.

Therefore, I wish to subject the Jedi Order and the Jedi Code as it is articulated in The Jedi Path to a similar critique as that which Friedrich Nietzsche makes of Christian morality in his Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche was clear what he thought the alternative to asceticism was: animated by one's recognition of their finitude, Nietzsche's vision for an immoral human life was a vivid and fully immersive personhood, an opting-in to experience what all the world 's affectivity had to offer. "To free the human soul from all its moorings for once, to immerse it in terrors, frosts, blazes, and ecstasies in such a way that it is freed from everything that is small and small-minded in listlessness, dullness, being out of sorts as if by a bolt of lightning: which paths lead to this goal?" he mused. (11) Certainly not the Jedi Path.

Does Nietzsche's critique work for the Jedi, who, as it is heavily suggested in the Star Wars universe, do seem to rejoin the Force in some life after death? Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan both accomplish this, not to mention the appearance of Yoda and Anakin's ghosts to before Luke. As a grizzled Han Solo tells an incredulous looking Finn and Rey, "It's true. All of it. The Dark Side. The Jedi. They're real." This could be a fatal flaw for trying adapt Nietzsche's argument to Star Wars: the Jedi really do live on after death! But as Yoda reminds Luke on Dagobah during his Jedi indoctrination, "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter," pinching Luke's flesh. Regardless of their actual attainment of life after death, the dualism between the transcendent and the temporal, the eternal and the finite, the spirit and the material is an ascetic hallmark ever-present in the Star Wars films. The Jedi, eternal though they may actually be in some regard, are then still ripe for Nietzsche's critique, in both style and substance.

A Note on Style

As I am seeking to emulate Nietzsche's argument, I have tried to adopt the style of his Genealogy. Regarded as a literary scholar, it took the world some time to recognize that Nietzsche was a first-rate philosopher. This is because Nietzsche writing is highly literary and eschewed the conventions of philosophy of his day. Genealogy is no exception; it is written in a highly literary style, divided into three treatises composed of numerous aphorisms. I have attempted to parrot this style in a narrative, dividing scenes and their import into discrete chunks and throwing in a small dash of breaking-the-fourth-wall as Nietzsche did to speak directly to his readers. Of course, I am departing from Nietzsche in writing a narrative, a story of fanfiction, to couch my critique of the Jedi instead of a dry, formal, and academic treatment. For that is why we all love Stars Wars, after all: it's a good story. And while I am not confident that this style will be as conducive a vehicle for my narrative ruminations as it was for Nietzsche, it was a fun and useful experiment for me; I hope it reads similarly to you.

In writing this story, I tried to restrict myself to drawing upon materials, characters, and events explicit to the new Disney-Lucasfilm defined canon. As such, I lean heavily on the chronology, characters, and events of two animated shows, Dave Filoni's The Clone Wars and Rebels. However, restricting myself to the medium of the screen was impossible, I indulged in print only in the close reading of Chronicle Books' 2013 The Jedi Path and the Book of the Sith. These works are truly wonderful examples of epistolary fiction, and contain the annotations of many Jedi and Sith characters in their margins that deliver on the task of world building in the Star Wars universe. Unfortunately, Disney-Lucasfilm have declared these books to be heretical - they have now been labeled "Legends" - and have been excised from the canon. As such, I have cited them in the most tentative ways possible, yet The Jedi Path and the Book of the Sith are so rich in their explicit codification of the theology, metaphysics, and politics of the Light and Dark Side of the Force that they cannot be ignored by any serious student of the Star Wars universe.(17)

Our protagonist in this narrative critique is Faetosa Rei ("Fay-TOE-sah Ray"), a young Pantoran woman. Blue-skinned with yellow accents to demark kinship status, Pantorans are a species of sentient humanoids that appear in the peripheries of the prequel films and The Clone Wars hailing from the eponymous moon of Orto Plutonia. I thought it important to be guided through the critique by a non-human in order to decouple Nietzsche notions of humanity with actual humans - Corellians, Aleranaanians, or Lothalites, by example. In this way, On The Morality of the Jedi strives to the science-fictionalization of Nietzsche's Genealogy, a critique that sidesteps racial or species pluralism to focus on the "humanity" of sentient people.

In other words, I believe Nietzsche's critique is equally applicable to a human person immersed in a Christian morality as it is a Pantoran indoctrinated in the Jedi Code. This telegraphing is provocative, for it transfers Nietzsche's concern for the existential health of humanity away human's finitude, and lights upon the foundations of sentience or personhood. There is a great deal assumed in this move. To put this in the form a question, would Nietzsche's critique of Christian or Jedi morality be substantially different if we were talking about say, Wookies, who live for upwards of several hundreds of years? Though I cannot answer that question here, it is a compelling exploration for future study.(18)

Sharing On The Morality of the Jedi prior to the release of Episode VII is fortuitous, for a central function of this story is to raise the stakes of Luke's decision to resurrect (or not) a new Reformed Jedi Order. In the EU, Luke founds a new Jedi Academy on Yavin (specifically, the Jedi praxeum ship Chu'unthor, now similarly axed from the canon) and does away with the more monkish trappings of the old Jedi Order: his students are not compelled to wear uniform robes, they are not taken from their families at such a young age and, thematically critically, marriage becomes an acceptable practice for Jedi Knights. Of course, this liberalizing turn - Jedi Vatican II, anyone? - has been erased with the rest of the EU, so the sky is the limit for Abrams and Kasdan and Kennedy's new Luke Skywalker. I hope then that On The Morality of the Jedi sets the stage for us fans in focusing our particular attention on the way Episode VII handles the legacy and theology of the Jedi Order. We deserve a better class of heroes than the Jedi of the prequels, a new generation of Jedi who will eschew all the life-denying parts of the Jedi morality - its orthodoxy and absolutes and asceticism - and embrace the virtues of non-Force-adepts like and Han, Chewie, or even R2-D2: courage, audacity, and loyalty.

Finally, in light of this critique, should the Jedi be considered the real villains of Star Wars? I don't think so. The Jedi lay claim to a set of wholesome practices and values; a commitment to peacekeeping, helping others, and living for causes beyond your own interests. "Take care of yourself," Luke tells Han on the eve of the assault on the Death Star, "I guess that's what your best at, isn't it?" Selflessness, in so far as it is depicted in Star Wars as a tendency toward sympathy, empathy, service, altruism, or compassion is a wonderful ethical message for audiences of all ages. But selflessness as a metaphysical suppression of the Self and its attendant affectivity as the Jedi do is nothing more than asceticism at its worse.

One final thought. The extent of these considerations - the metaphysics of the Force, the theology of the Jedi, gender politics and embodiment, etc - might strike some fans or skeptics as ridiculous, but that's the thing: as an adult, I can't help but bring with me adult concerns to these films and shows, concerns that I feel they ought to address, not just for my sake, but for everyone's sake. If Star Wars is really intended for kids, we ought to think even more carefully about what these stories convey. It's one thing to make a film the valorizes as heroes space wizards whose training excises their pity, remorse, or empathy - in other words, their humanity - if you anticipate your film will be watched by those with the ability to discern why this might be problematic. But kids? I'm not so sure they have that capacity.

Star Wars is much like modern myth. It re-articulates the hero's journey for a new generation. That's powerful stuff. But if it is a modern myth, we must admit that kids listen to Star Wars, as I know I did. Like Stephen Sondheim warns in Into the Woods, "Careful the spell you cast/Not just on children/Sometimes a spell may last/Past what you can see." Indeed, the day people stop cosplaying as Jedi, brandishing tubular lightsabers, and casting Jedi Mind Tricks on their friends is the day we don't have to worry about this anymore.(19) But until that day comes, we should think critically about the imprint of Star Wars films upon our imaginations, regardless of how grown-up we may have become, because that is Star Wars' true Force: making us feel like kids again.

Note: The ten chapters that constitute this work will be serially published every week until the release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens on December 18, 2015. You can also find this work on Wattpad at story/53025110-on-the-morality-of-the-jedi. While I do not claim any rights to characters, properties, or trademarks belonging to Disney or Lucasfilm or their respective owners, I maintain any and all claims to my original work herein.

Endnotes:

1) See: Darths and Droids by the Comic Irregulars.

2) See: Webstoons "Star Wars" by Hong Jacqa.

3) See: Short film "Summer of 78'".

4) See: Absolutely No Machete Juggling: Introducing the Machete Cut by Rod Hilton.

5) Bret D. Asbury, "Don't Give in to Hate: How a child of the original Star Wars trilogy learned to love the prequels - and why we should all look forward to Episode VII" Slate (2012). Accessed October 25, 2015. articles/arts/culturebox/2012/11/star_wars_episode_vii_the_lucasfilm_disney_is_a_good_thing_for_the_

6) Germain Lussier, "We're Facing Star Wars Overload, And it Scares the Crap Out of Me." (2015). Accessed October 25, 2015. /were-facing-star-wars-overload-and-it-scares-the-crap-1722202632

7) For an excellent primer on some of these issues in philosophical contexts, see Jason T. Eberl and William Irwin, Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful than You Can Possibly Imagine. Chicago: Open Court, 2005.

8) Maudemarie Clark, introduction to On the Genealogy of Morality, by Friedrich Nietzsche (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), xxvi.

9) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 67.

10) Ibid, 94.

11) Ibid, 83.

12) Ibid, 84.

13) Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 117.

14) Ibid, 83-86.

15) Ibid, 117.

16) Maudemarie Clark, introduction to On the Genealogy of Morality, by Friedrich Nietzsche (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), xxiii.

17) The Book of the Sith offers what I believe is the most plausible, reasonable, and least-offensive explanation and treatment of medichlorians that almost makes their existence in the canon palatable. Nevertheless, there will be no mention of medichlorians in The Morality of the Jedi.

18) By way of preliminary hypothesis, Wookies, though graced by their biology with long life, are still mortal; thus my reading of Nietzsche and the terror of the eternal return seems equally applicable to a human who can live a century and a Wookie who can live for four. Still, I hope someone will soon write Thus Spake Chewbacca and settle the question once and for all.

19) Let us hope this day never comes.