Only a Sith thinks in absolutes...
teratologist offered a heads-up to this link showing that, as she puts it, Orson Scott Card is acting a damn fool again. This link reminded me of something I've been thinking about lately, mostly due to a random discussion about Revenge of the Sith. It has, I guess, to do with that impulse to
One comment that I have gotten many times in HP fandom that always brings me up short is some version of: I just don't see how you can say that [bad character, usually Draco] is as bad as [good character, usually Harry]. This brings me up short because I've never set out to say such a thing. There are ways I might think two characters are similar, but that doesn't make them the same, and anyway I rarely think about questions of which person is worse than the other unless I absolutely have to choose between them. I've just never been interested in those kinds of questions and find it really difficult to judge two people as "equal" or "the same" because everyone person is such a complex thing in him/herself. Now, perhaps whatever I'm trying to say I'm not saying well so another person is justified in asking if I am saying these characters are the same--then I can just clarify that I'm not saying that and move on. But other times I feel like it's more the impulse of people to want to do that, to deal in absolutes where there's only the choice of which one is better than the other, so we can name that the "good" one and the other the "bad" one, and then go about justifying the one and condemning the other.
I see this the other way round too, though, where people are quick to want to say, "Ah, see, this person is doing the same as this other person. They're all just the same, one's just as bad as the other." Or, as seems to be the case with some people in interpreting ROTS: The Jedi are the ones who are evil! In HP fandom this would, of course, be that the Gryffindors are the ones who are evil while the Slytherins are good--an argument which, I must confess, I have never actually seen made, but I have seen referred to as if somebody is making it. The point is one can say that both sides are unappealing and still be interested in the individual ways they are unappealing. Choosing one over the other because you have to isn't the same as embracing your choice with enthusiasm.
Star Wars has often been criticized for being childlike, simplistic and goofy--and it is those things which is why we love it. But these recent discussion about something being "exactly the same" made me realize that moral questions, even in childlike, simplistic and goofy universes, are more complicated than they appear. The comment in question was talking about the flaws of the Jedi (which I agree with the person in the above link are intentional on George Lucas' part) and s/he said that s/he found it chilling when Yoda said to Anakin the exact same thing the Emperor said to Luke in ROTJ--iow, they're at heart exactly the same. I thought that was a very good catch that the two lines are similar--but disagree that they are the same. The Jedi and the Sith do have certain core principles in common; they are similar in many ways, but they are also different (opposites in some ways) and that's significant too. The lines in question were: "Your faith in your friends is [your weakness]" from ROTJ and "You must let go of that which you fear to lose" from ROTS and I want to talk about them because they show, imo, how the ideas of SW are really very consistent--and also because I think Yoda's cool.:-)
These lines are similar on the surface but really are saying the exact opposite. In context, in ROTJ, the Emperor has just told Luke that he knows about the plans to knock out the shields on Endor and destroy the Death Star, and that he knows these plans will fail. Luke says his over-confidence is his (the Emperor's) weakness and the Emperor replies that Luke's faith in his friends is his (Luke's). The Emperor does *not* consider loving another person a bad thing (that is, he doesn't consider it a bad thing when others do it; he doesn't seem to love anyone himself)--on the contrary, throughout this scene and throughout ROTS he *encourages* the Skywalkers to focus on their love for others in a very specific way. He wants them to think about how they can't bear to lose those people. In his line to Luke the Emperor is not telling him to stop loving or worrying about his friends--he wants him to do that. He's telling him that he can't have faith in his friends to take care of themselves. It's the exact same thing that caused Luke to leave his training early to run after Han and Leia. He knew they were in trouble and in pain and had to protect them or risk losing them one way or another.
Not that this is a silly fear--it's quite possible Luke's friends will fail and be killed. Yoda knows this too, and that's the possibility behind his own line to Anakin: You must let go of all you fear to lose. He's not telling Anakin to not love his friends and family, he's telling him to love them without holding on to them. I don't know much about Buddhism, but I do Vipassana Meditation, which is related, and I think the core principles of the two are the same: everything passes away. Suffering arises from craving and avoidance, so you must learn detachment. That's the basic idea of Vipassana. If you get an itch while you're meditating, rather than scratch it, you observe it in a detached way until it disappears. Thus you learn that everything rises and passes away. You don't have to constantly be reacting to outside forces. The people you love, including yourself, are no more permanent than that itch.
The Jedi do love each other of course--Obi-wan loves Anakin and Qui-gon obviously (though not as obviously as in the fanfics, maybe;-). The idea is not to stop loving the person, but to love them without needing to possess them and hold them, because you will not have them forever. The goal you're going for, ideally, is to love someone completely selflessly, so that you don't love them because you feel good when they're around, you just love them for themselves. Yoda and the Emperor are saying the exact opposite thing: Yoda tells Luke to have faith in his friends, to let go of his fears of losing them (even accepting that he might). The Emperor is telling Luke not to have faith in his friends because that will only lead to losing them. It is the emperor who more probably thinks that caring for others is a weakness, because he thinks caring=needing. Yoda separates the two.
That is, of course, played out even more obviously with Anakin's being tempted by immortality. There's nothing wrong with immortality--the Jedi not only seek it too but gain it, as Yoda tells us at the end. They gain it, in part, by not being afraid of physical dying. (I know as a kid I was puzzled the first time I saw Obi-wan's death--why did he let Vader win?) The Emperor, by contrast, must stress that death must be feared, and that it's the physical life that must be protected at all costs. The short-sightedness of Sith immortality is obvious even in Palpatine's description of it: he tells Anakin about the Sith lord who conquered death...and was murdered by his apprentice who is now the immortal one. Err, then that would mean he hadn't conquered death, because he's dead now, as you will be four movies on. This is a pretty common juxtaposition of ideas, imo. LOTR uses it too--the ring freezes things and keeps them from changing, which is why the ring bearers do not age. But they are never fully immortal; their lives are just stretched over more years, a sensation that feels, according to Bilbo, like butter scraped over too much bread.
For an example of the kind of love this can produce again, Anakin is kind of the poster boy. By the end all he can think about is Padme being taken away from him to the point where she doesn't want him anymore. Looking beyond the more heavy-handed aspects of the stuff in ROTS (you lost her yourself because you slaughtered a bunch of children!) it makes sense in the overall storyline. Anakin is afraid of change (I believe he says so outright in PM). He is threatened by a baby (who will take Padme from him in a sense), threatened by the idea his old ideas are wrong, threatened by changes in government. He's still smarting over the loss of his mother, something that's symbolically probably represents something really regressive. In fact, he's never had a wit of interest in who is father was...I wonder if that in itself is a sign of his being stuck at an earlier stage of development because it seems like that's how these things work: you leave the nursery and then you focus on your father instead of your mother. Anakin constantly looks to the past with regret; Luke has more trouble waiting for the future, according to Yoda. Obviously Anakin has father figures--plenty of them. But he chooses the one who seems like the easiest, the one who tempts him with security and safety while Obi-wan and Yoda are big meanies by comparison. Of course in the end Anakin's love of Padme turns completely self-centered because his feelings for her are more important than Padme herself. He can't really love anyone who isn't giving him what he wants.
What does that have to do with absolutes? Well, probably nothing except that my mind went from one to the other. Or not--because this distinction between the two ideas, while subtle, is still the idea around which the entire Star Wars series revolves. It's consistent, it's laid out clearly, it's coherent and, imo, holds up. I think, though, that it may be deceptively simple given the way the Jedi and the Sith are being discussed because when it comes down to it, this is what's important about the two groups, not the name of the government with which they are associated (although those governments do work as reflections). Individual Jedi can be flawed, stupid and downright wrong--and they suffer the consequences of these things. "Return of the Jedi" as a title can refer to Luke, who ends the series with the potential to start a new Jedi Order that learns from past mistakes. Darth Vader's final act is a complete rejection of his former priorities; he completely gives up control, destroying the Emperor with no one to take his place. The Jedi of the title can therefore also be the Jedi Anakin Skywalker, who never really went away, but finally understood the true difference between his former masters and his present one, and thus gained immortality.
One comment that I have gotten many times in HP fandom that always brings me up short is some version of: I just don't see how you can say that [bad character, usually Draco] is as bad as [good character, usually Harry]. This brings me up short because I've never set out to say such a thing. There are ways I might think two characters are similar, but that doesn't make them the same, and anyway I rarely think about questions of which person is worse than the other unless I absolutely have to choose between them. I've just never been interested in those kinds of questions and find it really difficult to judge two people as "equal" or "the same" because everyone person is such a complex thing in him/herself. Now, perhaps whatever I'm trying to say I'm not saying well so another person is justified in asking if I am saying these characters are the same--then I can just clarify that I'm not saying that and move on. But other times I feel like it's more the impulse of people to want to do that, to deal in absolutes where there's only the choice of which one is better than the other, so we can name that the "good" one and the other the "bad" one, and then go about justifying the one and condemning the other.
I see this the other way round too, though, where people are quick to want to say, "Ah, see, this person is doing the same as this other person. They're all just the same, one's just as bad as the other." Or, as seems to be the case with some people in interpreting ROTS: The Jedi are the ones who are evil! In HP fandom this would, of course, be that the Gryffindors are the ones who are evil while the Slytherins are good--an argument which, I must confess, I have never actually seen made, but I have seen referred to as if somebody is making it. The point is one can say that both sides are unappealing and still be interested in the individual ways they are unappealing. Choosing one over the other because you have to isn't the same as embracing your choice with enthusiasm.
Star Wars has often been criticized for being childlike, simplistic and goofy--and it is those things which is why we love it. But these recent discussion about something being "exactly the same" made me realize that moral questions, even in childlike, simplistic and goofy universes, are more complicated than they appear. The comment in question was talking about the flaws of the Jedi (which I agree with the person in the above link are intentional on George Lucas' part) and s/he said that s/he found it chilling when Yoda said to Anakin the exact same thing the Emperor said to Luke in ROTJ--iow, they're at heart exactly the same. I thought that was a very good catch that the two lines are similar--but disagree that they are the same. The Jedi and the Sith do have certain core principles in common; they are similar in many ways, but they are also different (opposites in some ways) and that's significant too. The lines in question were: "Your faith in your friends is [your weakness]" from ROTJ and "You must let go of that which you fear to lose" from ROTS and I want to talk about them because they show, imo, how the ideas of SW are really very consistent--and also because I think Yoda's cool.:-)
These lines are similar on the surface but really are saying the exact opposite. In context, in ROTJ, the Emperor has just told Luke that he knows about the plans to knock out the shields on Endor and destroy the Death Star, and that he knows these plans will fail. Luke says his over-confidence is his (the Emperor's) weakness and the Emperor replies that Luke's faith in his friends is his (Luke's). The Emperor does *not* consider loving another person a bad thing (that is, he doesn't consider it a bad thing when others do it; he doesn't seem to love anyone himself)--on the contrary, throughout this scene and throughout ROTS he *encourages* the Skywalkers to focus on their love for others in a very specific way. He wants them to think about how they can't bear to lose those people. In his line to Luke the Emperor is not telling him to stop loving or worrying about his friends--he wants him to do that. He's telling him that he can't have faith in his friends to take care of themselves. It's the exact same thing that caused Luke to leave his training early to run after Han and Leia. He knew they were in trouble and in pain and had to protect them or risk losing them one way or another.
Not that this is a silly fear--it's quite possible Luke's friends will fail and be killed. Yoda knows this too, and that's the possibility behind his own line to Anakin: You must let go of all you fear to lose. He's not telling Anakin to not love his friends and family, he's telling him to love them without holding on to them. I don't know much about Buddhism, but I do Vipassana Meditation, which is related, and I think the core principles of the two are the same: everything passes away. Suffering arises from craving and avoidance, so you must learn detachment. That's the basic idea of Vipassana. If you get an itch while you're meditating, rather than scratch it, you observe it in a detached way until it disappears. Thus you learn that everything rises and passes away. You don't have to constantly be reacting to outside forces. The people you love, including yourself, are no more permanent than that itch.
The Jedi do love each other of course--Obi-wan loves Anakin and Qui-gon obviously (though not as obviously as in the fanfics, maybe;-). The idea is not to stop loving the person, but to love them without needing to possess them and hold them, because you will not have them forever. The goal you're going for, ideally, is to love someone completely selflessly, so that you don't love them because you feel good when they're around, you just love them for themselves. Yoda and the Emperor are saying the exact opposite thing: Yoda tells Luke to have faith in his friends, to let go of his fears of losing them (even accepting that he might). The Emperor is telling Luke not to have faith in his friends because that will only lead to losing them. It is the emperor who more probably thinks that caring for others is a weakness, because he thinks caring=needing. Yoda separates the two.
That is, of course, played out even more obviously with Anakin's being tempted by immortality. There's nothing wrong with immortality--the Jedi not only seek it too but gain it, as Yoda tells us at the end. They gain it, in part, by not being afraid of physical dying. (I know as a kid I was puzzled the first time I saw Obi-wan's death--why did he let Vader win?) The Emperor, by contrast, must stress that death must be feared, and that it's the physical life that must be protected at all costs. The short-sightedness of Sith immortality is obvious even in Palpatine's description of it: he tells Anakin about the Sith lord who conquered death...and was murdered by his apprentice who is now the immortal one. Err, then that would mean he hadn't conquered death, because he's dead now, as you will be four movies on. This is a pretty common juxtaposition of ideas, imo. LOTR uses it too--the ring freezes things and keeps them from changing, which is why the ring bearers do not age. But they are never fully immortal; their lives are just stretched over more years, a sensation that feels, according to Bilbo, like butter scraped over too much bread.
For an example of the kind of love this can produce again, Anakin is kind of the poster boy. By the end all he can think about is Padme being taken away from him to the point where she doesn't want him anymore. Looking beyond the more heavy-handed aspects of the stuff in ROTS (you lost her yourself because you slaughtered a bunch of children!) it makes sense in the overall storyline. Anakin is afraid of change (I believe he says so outright in PM). He is threatened by a baby (who will take Padme from him in a sense), threatened by the idea his old ideas are wrong, threatened by changes in government. He's still smarting over the loss of his mother, something that's symbolically probably represents something really regressive. In fact, he's never had a wit of interest in who is father was...I wonder if that in itself is a sign of his being stuck at an earlier stage of development because it seems like that's how these things work: you leave the nursery and then you focus on your father instead of your mother. Anakin constantly looks to the past with regret; Luke has more trouble waiting for the future, according to Yoda. Obviously Anakin has father figures--plenty of them. But he chooses the one who seems like the easiest, the one who tempts him with security and safety while Obi-wan and Yoda are big meanies by comparison. Of course in the end Anakin's love of Padme turns completely self-centered because his feelings for her are more important than Padme herself. He can't really love anyone who isn't giving him what he wants.
What does that have to do with absolutes? Well, probably nothing except that my mind went from one to the other. Or not--because this distinction between the two ideas, while subtle, is still the idea around which the entire Star Wars series revolves. It's consistent, it's laid out clearly, it's coherent and, imo, holds up. I think, though, that it may be deceptively simple given the way the Jedi and the Sith are being discussed because when it comes down to it, this is what's important about the two groups, not the name of the government with which they are associated (although those governments do work as reflections). Individual Jedi can be flawed, stupid and downright wrong--and they suffer the consequences of these things. "Return of the Jedi" as a title can refer to Luke, who ends the series with the potential to start a new Jedi Order that learns from past mistakes. Darth Vader's final act is a complete rejection of his former priorities; he completely gives up control, destroying the Emperor with no one to take his place. The Jedi of the title can therefore also be the Jedi Anakin Skywalker, who never really went away, but finally understood the true difference between his former masters and his present one, and thus gained immortality.