Star Wars: A Humanist’s Paradigm

Below you will find one of just a small handful of essays that survived the great purge of my 18th year, whereby I decided to shred all my intellectual achievements, awards, and accolades that point. With the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker this December 20th, it is perhaps time we revived this essay before it, too, fades into oblivion.

Einstein feared that we would lose our humanity and become hollow automatons, the lives of which are dominated by technology. Unfortunately, his fear is all too real. In Star Wars, we realize his fear by immersing ourselves in the futurism of an era we rapidly approach—an era in which humanism and its values wane while nihilism and its antagonisms wax. The Star Wars franchise attempts to abridge the practical implications of the abandonment of humanism with the hope that its values will not perish, but survive and one day thrive. Star Wars thus suffices as a vision of a world in which freedom prevails over bondage, democracy over authoritarianism, creation over destruction.

Before we can delve into this argument, we must first examine the Star Wars universe and come to understand it in relation to our world, for the film itself becomes more meaningful when fully contextualized. We must, for example, understand that the same divisive forces that shape our world apply to the Star Wars universe before, perhaps, we can see how these forces could lead from our world to the world we observe in Star Wars. Moreover, we must distinguish between the terms freedom, bondage, democracy, authoritarianism, creation, and destruction before we can determine how, as we will see, they apply to the forces of the Empire and the Rebellion, and then again how they apply to the world in which we find ourselves presently enmeshed. We can furthermore compare these applications to qualify the relevance of the connections we make between our world and that which we see in Star Wars.

Let us distinguish between a couple of our terms for demonstration: the terms—freedom and bondage. In a robustly democratic society, freedom refers to a state in which an individual may act of themselves, whereas bondage alludes most powerfully to enslavement, but aligns itself with every instance in which an individual acts of another and not strictly of his or her own will. Consequently, we often hold that an individual is somehow limited or compromised whereupon that individual cannot think, feel, and act of their own accord without the coercion or even the forced bondage of others.

With a dollop of preliminary analysis behind us, it is now altogether possible to now relate these terms to our world and that of Star Wars. In Star Wars, for example, the drones of the Empire are treated merely as objects of war by the evil lord Darth Vader and his inner council. While the inner council exercises tremendous power, the drone serve as obedient slaves that carry out the machinations of the Empire and that have been dehumanized and indoctrinated to such extent that they seem unfazed by the death of their closest “companions” and appear to readily accept their position within the system, however much it may marginalize them not only as subjects-of-a-life, but as full-fledged members of our moral community. In our world, we also have drones, but these we often call infantrymen. Such infantrymen were made, in the First World War, to fight and die in trenches through the slow, grueling process of trench warfare, and then again in the Second World War (though more generally in mobile confrontations rather than in trenches). Regardless, all this death was the result of feuding powers that exploited their human resources, turning military men and civilians alike into victims of the destruction and horrors of war.

It is also possible to draw further, more detailed connections. We may, for example, see the chilling connection between the Empire and past fascist states, especially the Third Reich, in everything from helmets and uniforms to atrocity and rhetoric. Here we are some examples: while the Third Reich sought to eliminate dissident intellectuals and politicians, the Empire sought to annihilate the forces of the Rebellion; while the Third Reich utilized concentration camps to systemically eliminate sub-populations, such as the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, the Empire harnessed the power of the Death Star to destroy entire planets and populations; and while the Third Reich strove for world domination, the Empire strove for absolute intergalactic control.

Despite the incredible analysis that can result from making such connections, it is perhaps best to return more immediately to the core argument of this essay. When we now consider the terms democracy and authoritarianism, we can see how militaristic operations tend toward the latter. However, we have yet to speak of democracy, let alone determine its tendencies in the context of this film and our world, for which we will now examine the forces of the Rebellion, particularly in contrast to the forces of the Empire.

The Rebellion consists of a motley people living together in the last military installation that opposes the Empire, on a small, lush planet. As Luke, Hans Solo, and Princess Leia enjoin these the last remaining forces, the Death Star looms nearer and nearer, its austerity in the blackness of space an omen to this a bastion of life and this the last stronghold of animalkind. Rapid preparations are made for the jet-fliers to disembark on a mission the failure of which would mean certain death. Just before Luke departs, however, he manages to embrace a friend from long ago and confronts Hans about his selfish behavior. Despite the incredible tension in these final few minutes, we witness a kindness of which the drones and their cold leaders are not capable of expressing and hear a heartfelt exchange that would be impossible among the unprincipled, mechanical, and faceless drones of the Empire. So sets out Luke and the freedom-fighting pilots.

While it is true that these pilots may serve the same purpose as those who fought in the trenches during the First World War, their endeavor is altogether more worthwhile, regardless of however hopeless it may seem. They fight not simply against the Empire, but the evil it encompasses. It is for this reason that we do not feel as though their rights have been violated and why we despise the seemingly heartless, mechanical drones whose victory against the Rebellion would only entrench the deprivations of emotionlessness and heartlessness and, with them, those human capacities for good-will and love. That the Rebellion sees not defeat is of great significance; that the Rebellion is victorious, however, is of profound significance. It symbolizes no less than the triumph of humanizing forces over desensitizing, dehumanizing evils, the greatest vision, perhaps, that humanity has ever grasped.