The One Conservative Thing about the Star Wars Universe

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My favorite alt-right reading of Disney’s The Acolyte is found, of course, on Reddit. Its title: “Woke, Wobbly and Steeped in Feminism.” Its substance: The new Star Wars show is way too Black, doesn’t have enough white people, has no white males of note, and the white women who are Jedis “appear like they are all lesbians.” As if this were not enough, the key planet in the series is run by a lesbian community. A Black woman is the queen of these galactic witches, and her daughters (conceived without a man) are Black and have—get this—a white mammy.

A person with the handle Efficient-Hold-2734: “I watched it. It’s complete woke bullcrap. And the hate against white males is real… In the second episode [we see] two white Jedis. One is very [unsympathetic] and the other one just kills himself for feeling guilty… A Jedimaster who kills himself. What a BS.”

What this group wants is a return to the basics, to the unwoke Star Wars, but this is not possible because Star Wars has never been not woke.

As its creator and first director, George Lucas, explained to James Cameron (the father of Blockbuster Marxism), the inspiration for the Rebel Alliance was the “Viet Cong.” Put two and two together and you get the US as the Galactic Empire. Can’t get more woke than that. In fact, the only right-wing thing about Star Wars and its latest spin-off, The Acolyte, is the concept and function of the Force.

What is the Force? If it is anything like the force that’s described precisely by a science developed on earth called physics, then it can only be the experience of a push or a pull. That’s about it. There is no force that exists outside of experience. It is experience.

In the Star Wars universe, which is physically much like our own as far as I can tell, we get the sense that force is something you can tap into, but this can only be an obfuscation or illusion. There’s no pushing and pulling without things. The social translation of this fact is expressed as law enforcement, or air force, or ground forces; or armed resistance, or resistance movement, or underground resistance. Both are forces in the mode of a push. This is all that Jedis are really doing. Pushing things around. No matter how spectacular or mystical-looking, their Force is the same as that which holds a plate on a table, that makes an apple fall from a tree, that has the moon go around and around.

Why does the Jedi Order hide this very ordinary fact? Clearly to keep their followers clueless. It is in their interest to conceal the Force’s universality and worldliness. Be it the Jedi Order (the Force for good) or the Sith Order (the Force for bad), there is in essence only one side. The dark side.

Episode 7 of The Acolyte, for example, introduces “a Force vergence,” which is “a place that makes the Force—and, by extension, Force powers—far more powerful.” The Jedis are searching for this sacred stuff on the “non-Republic planet of Brendok,” the planet of the lesbian witches. This world was once dead, but now (100 years before Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) it’s very much alive, and the Jedis think the Force vergence is behind the planet’s regeneration. But what they are looking for is something that the scientists on Earth discredited long, long ago (the 19th century), the Life Force; it’s also called “vital heat,” or “spontaneous generation,” the process by which life suddenly pops out of lifeless matter.

But there is nothing special about life or piss, for that matter. In the words of the great anti-vitalist chemist Friedrich Wöhler: “In a manner of speaking, I can no longer hold my chemical water. I must tell you that I can make urea without the use of kidneys of any animal, be it man or dog. Ammonium cyanate is urea.”

Force vergence, however, is really just another word for energy, which can increase the power of a pull or a push. Energy is also used to perform work, as it is defined by physics: to make something move. If that something doesn’t move, no matter how much force is applied, then no work is performed.

Lastly, there is in Star Wars and in all of its spin-offs a confusion between Force and non-separability, or, as Albert Einstein put it when expressing horror at the key assertions made by the founding theorists of quantum mechanics, “spooky action at a distance.” A Jedi can perform work without conventional contact. By simply raising a hand, he/she/they can send an object flying across a room or a forest. This is non-separability. The Jedi and the object are obviously entangled, or, to use a neologism by the philosopher and physicist Karen Barad, “intera-acting.”

To be fair, Barad believes all things intera-act. And in this sense, which is far more democratic than Jedi Order, there is no border between the spooky-seeming quantum realm and the sober Newtonian one of forces, of pulling and pushing.