An Attack on STAR WARS !

Toward a Hybrid Paradoxical Stance on Non-linear Intelligence

Q: What’s the matter with Star Wars?

Ah — the perennial question!

There was a profound cultural moment in the late 20th century when it seemed like George Lucas’ Star Wars (TM) franchise was going to provide society with a Joseph Campbell-inspired, neo-Jungian, inter-generational “myth cycle” for the epoch of electromagnetic technology — properly situating human heroism and mental strength for an existential battle between the forces of diverse ecology & mechanical industry.

Nope.

Today it is disturbingly easy to complain about this failed cinematic mythology. Most of the official Star Wars products are simply not “star wars-y enough.” Their ability to regenerate the original mythic potency is vexatiously insufficient. Even the new installments that are viewed favorably might simply be the result of — lowered expectations. Lucasfilm & Disney have been spending (rather than building) the evocative cultural capital that erupted with the first two films in the 1970s.

No surprise. Corporate bureaucracies are notorious for bungling mythic franchises. How many of the Star Treks are amazing? What happened to the last seasons of Game of Thrones? Why do most DC comic book films flop? Dr. Who has dwindled into trite social faddishness. Most sequels and reboots suck. (See my discussion with Damien Walter…)

With vast sums of money and access to the best minds in the world, the success of large-scale collective imaginary tales is strangely sporadic. This is not only because it is a difficult and complex challenge — but also because they do not even really try.

Market incentives, social morality fads & the implicit structure of “meetings” all converge with a basic insensitivity (on the part of producers) to the deep subconscious vitality of the material. The result? Nihilistic trends dominate the forms of entertainment that our culture requires most.

Nihilistic?

Yes. Endless versions of self-neutralization. Plots that go nowhere. Unimaginative mere repetition alternating with arbitrary twists. Depressurization of the pathos. Forced characters that do not earn our emotional investment. Action scenes that do not stimulate our neuromuscular systems. Special effects that look and feel un-real. Scenarios that cancel out the intrinsic constraints of the pretend universe. And a pernicious cynical attitude that treats hardcore “fans” (i.e. the experts on the affects of the franchise) as trivial obsessives or retrograde degenerates who should either be publically scorned or else superficially serviced with the trite inclusion of the nominal contents of the franchise. Just give them a lightsaber battle and they’ll be happy — it doesn’t have to be good, reasonable, evocative or in proper tempo. These magpies will pick at any shiny thing!

You see, I could talk endlessly about degenerate trends in popular mythic entertainment. Or I could explore what Star Wars meant to me as a boy. I could articulate why I still check out each new film in this fictional universe. But that’s easy, all-too-easy.

I want to try a deeper cut.

It may be time to attack the very essence of Star Wars.

What if it has not been bungled? What if it was broken, corrupt, toxic from the very beginning? Perhaps the things we loved were signs of our own sickness? To paraphrase Nietzsche’s remarks about Wagner: I love him, he is the greatest genius of our age and yet his music and dramas are deeply unhealthy, not good for people — especially Germans.

Maybe Star Wars is bad for people — especially Americans. Why not? A great man is not necessarily a good man. Leni Reifenstahl’s “TRIUMPH OF THE WILL” is truly a great film but also a terrible piece of Nazi propaganda sourced in a perverse and ultimately self-negating worldview.

Does Star Wars really present the contemporary avatar of the “hero with a thousand faces” — or is it perhaps (like Wagner’s Parsifal) just some corporatist pseudo-saga about a whiny brat who deserts his family, sentimentally ignores all Reason, seeks out his own destruction, refuses to fight back against great evil, wins by sheer luck and then establishes a weak, corrupted training academy that is easily destroyed and leads him to emotional collapse and pointless self-sacrifice?

And what about this infantile nonsense whereby the rogue smuggler Han Solo (smuggled into our hearts through the posturing charisma of Harrison Ford) famously yells at an objectively correct robot: “Never tell me the odds!”

Never?

We love that cavalier dash of risk-taking, and admire his trust in implicit skills, sure, but isn’t this all too similar to the narcissistic dismissal of the challenging quality of facts that predominates in flat-earthers, creationists, Islamic jihadists, fundamentalist Mormons, steadfast Biden voters & preposterous Putin defenders?

The idea permeates the Star Wars universe that being indifferent to criticism and statistical realities is somehow a “magical power” that must never be questioned. In the final battle scene of the very first film, an elderly ghost tells our protagonist to ignore the pertinent digital data and instead act on his witchy instincts.

Now I am, of course, a strong advocate for subconscious, implicit, embodied & indirect intelligence BUT the moral lessons of Star Wars seem worryingly aligned with the perverse mood of an anti-intellectual culture that treats their untrained unconscious minds as a divine reservoir of secret knowledge and power.

This notorious contemporary culture of obesity, malnourishment and toxic consumption — a culture of the decadent abdomen — nonetheless wants to make snap decisions with their preposterous “gut” instinct.

Our cultural myths must help us to (more intelligently) use our intuition but we should also be vigilantly asking which sort of intuition is being invoked? Not all non-rational approaches are equal.

In the classic Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman lays out the case for treating our psyche as two distinct personalities. System 2 pursues accuracy through mental effort by burning glucose while System 1 makes very fast, efficient “associations” whether they are relevant to reality or not. This primtive, quick system of knowing is not a dummy but it is implicated in many cognitive biases that cause completely inaccurate, or wildly outdated, information to feel exquisitely natural.

I am in greater danger on the car ride to the airport than when I am on the airplane — but the latter situation feels much more terrifying. In some respects my instincts are backward. I don’t want to ignore statistics (like Han Solo) but, instead, I would like them to inform and update my intuition. Otherwise, my quick sense of truth will remain adapted to ancient paleolithic environments in which we no longer exist.

We pay higher salaries to taller people when they are in no sense more competent. We worry about strangers and schools when the number one threat to children are their parents. We think food that falls on our own floor is a little safer than food on someone else’s floor. These basic feels might be built nonsensically into our attempts to “trust the Force.”

Still, Daniel Kahneman doesn’t know everything.

Perhaps instead of Systems 1 & 2, we are talking about the Conscious/Unconscious couple found in Psychoanalysis and Surrealism? Or maybe the better description is the Left/Right brain pairing from Ian McGilchrist. There are several different styles depicting the split that is pointed toward in the moral lessons of Star Wars.

It is a division between the putatively “dominant” consciousness of strategic representational thinkers — compulsively freezing the world into static and simplified symbols that build up into endless complications and overviews. This form of intelligence treats wholes as if they are nothing more than elaborately interlinked maps of all the parts. These modes of experience are characterized by fantasies of individuality, the dichotomy of freedom vs engagement and the disembodied theory of humanity vs nature. Such people are always trying to explicate the root of things, propose strategies that are impersonally true for everyone & sketch out the most efficient pathways that explicitly lead from here to there.

The “alternative” mode is an implicit, embodied style of knowing. It does not need to understand how it is solving problems — it only has to stay fluidly focused on the indirect influence of its response to immediate relational and sensory circumstances. It embodies the power of holistic and unspoken insights applicable to a world of constant dynamic flux. There is nowhere solid to stand. Instead, you must use the Force. Perhaps you use it like the virtuous equanimity of the Jedi Order. Perhaps it flows through you like the intense emotion friction of the Sith. Or maybe is the dialogical relational novelty of Gray Adepts like Qui-Gon Jinn? There seem to be several approaches of varying success.

The basic proposal, however, should be quite familiar to us. Many impressive leading-edge “thought leaders” have proposed that we must switch from deficient reasoning (Gebser) to a more fluid aperspectival holism — accompanying a rebalancing of patriarchy by the rise of the Feminine, the Return to the present moment and a sensitized opening to unstructured omnidirectional causality.

However, most the people proposing this shift actually turn out to be highly rational. They were making a rigorous linear representation of the way that the nonlinear patterning becomes workable.

I’ve argued elsewhere that Alan Watts is an exquisite example of a “left brain” presentation of “right brain” modalities. He epitomizes the straightforward, reasonable & linear-linguistic presentation (from an educated modern individual) concerning the circular, holistic, indescribable, wave-like, mysterious, undifferentiated, non-hierarchical, sensory-imagistic and non-strategic way of being in the world.

Such people typically promote a radical shift from one mode to the other but, nonetheless, they actually perform a sophisticated complementary relationship between these two styles of being & knowing. These are the people who write academic books to explain how Zen koans are inexplicable. Clearly they favor both the inexplicable AND the explicable in a way that is not clearly presented in the content of their communication.

I’m tempted to say that this insufficient transrationalism fails to depict the interactive simultaneity of both modes and, therefore, does not facilitate a broad, multi-domain resonance between people trying to engage both sides of themselves in various different styles.

Ultimately, it seems to me, we need to maximize fraternity between people who are getting better at enacting both the rational & a-rational — the statistics/computer mind & the lucky mysterious force of Nature. To do this, I feel, we must depict the relationship of both modes within the self-reflective mind while it is engaged in fertile communication and oscillation with the non-reflective mind.

And if I wasn’t correct then how could I have drawn the following pictures?

You see my point — that we need to go further in both directions WHILE representing the complementary openings & limitations of both modes in synchronized bilateral profundity. This means, initially, that each mode is represented as equally primordial.

If you’ve read any “new thought” from the 20th century then you probably have heard that all nouns are secretly verbs, all things are processes, all unities are multiple & all agents are ecological. And perhaps these books had “chaos” or “quantum” or “tao” in the title. I read them all myself and I do not dispute the validity of their basic intuition.

However, it is also true that verb is a noun.

We could just as easily imagine that the seemingly separative world of static identities, arranged in hierarchies, is actually the best, most efficient way to relate properly to the complex flux of transrational reality. Maybe the finite is the best depiction of the infinite and the concrete symbol is the most useful way to experience a fluid, unbounded cosmos of evolving signs? A “complex symbiotic process” is a fixed and particular idea — otherwise it would not be available as a conceptual alternative to objects, things & limited selves.

Paradox creeps in quickly.

Although we may want to propose a highly mobile world in contrast to an eternalized human simplicity, that very image is itself an eternalized human simplicity. And rightly so. The proper “left brain” model, which must accompany the development of “right brain” skill, is that of both “hemispheres” perpetually negotiating a paradoxical interplay that exceeds each of them.

So maybe you will now think of this every time someone points out that STAR WARS IS WRONG AND TERRIBLE…