Continued from Part 1 Here
The theme of the original Star Wars saga is the battle between good and evil that blazes between competing civilizations and rages within the heart of every man. The crucial political lesson we learn from the Star Wars saga is that the powers-that-be are often playing both sides. The great philosophical lesson is we only court disaster when we try to get the greatest good out of the greatest evil. Ultimately, however, the Star Wars saga is a Father and Sons story and we’ve began reading Father and Sons stories a long, long time ago—at least since Turgenev. But we’ve only started reading about our sons shooting up their schools a few decades ago. Is this some new form of evil? Inevitably we learn that each of these shooters had no strong father figure in their life, and in their despair and desperation they were seduced by the dark side and corrupted by evil until consumed by it. They became “masters of evil” who inhabit wretched hives of scum and villainy.
School shootings and gang shootings cut to the heart of the problem with America; it is being overrun with masters of evil who never had good fathers. Almost all of these foundlings go through the hell of abandonment, alienation, isolation, and desperation, and are never taught about heaven or how to be men, much less heroes. They're not taught how to construct—or even imagine—a life worth living, so instead they nurse their grievances into ruthless fanaticisms that lead them, step-by-step toward purgatory.
We can easily imagine how these shootings might have been prevented if some surrogate father would have taken an interest in the kid, if a stepfather, uncle or grandfather, a pastor, a teacher, or a Scoutmaster would have tried to connect with the boy in time to turn him away from the dark side.
Freud’s greatest apprentice, Carl Jung said that the reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories. I don’t think Carl hit on the whole truth but perhaps he hit on a bit of a deeper truth. Sometimes a kid just needs someone to whom he can tell his story and get advice on how to write the next couple chapters. Someone like Salinger’s catcher in the rye who could assure the angry boy that, “you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
Mothers can fill almost every role of the absent father, but she cannot show him how to be a man. And only another man can confirm a boy’s masculinity. A mother cannot—as the incarceration rates of men without fathers proves. She can emasculate him, but she cannot fully affirm him. Boys can only learn how to be men from other men. They are going to imitate the men in their life. If they don’t have actual fathers, boys desperately need strong surrogate fathers. Someone like, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
And sometimes even that is not enough. Despite Kenobi’s best efforts, his boy Anakin became Darth Vader (Dark Father) and all Obi-Wan could do is disappear, change his name, and keep watch on Vader’s hidden son. But when fate called, Obi-Wan answered, and even gave his own life so that the boy could escape a cruel fate and become a great knight in his own rite. That kind of loyalty of fathers to sons is exemplary, but it is what is most lacking in our own age.
I am hardly the person to suggest how to motivate these tragic fathers to redeem themselves by committing themselves to raising their boys, nor would I suggest how we might best encourage the men who are already doing a good job parenting their own kids to take on the additional role of lost boy finder who can bring them into the light. We’re almost at the point already when we need to consider cloistering in enclaves precisely to keep out the masters of evil while we raise our own kids and keep the flame alive so that even if darkness falls, there will still be a flicker of light.
Let me conclude this essay on a note of hope, a word of caution and a plea. This new Star Wars series is set at a time after the Jedi had lost and darkness had fallen across the galaxy. But Obi-Wan kept the faith. He and a few others kept the flame burning for a lost cause. T.S. Eliot explained that we fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.
But we are promised from an authority higher than even the Emperor that any triumph of evil will only be temporary. Even though Obi-Wan had given up hope for the Dark Father, his son had not given up hope and still saw the light in his father. Luke knew something Solzhenitsyn discovered when he was locked away in the gulag archipelago, that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart . . . And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.” No matter how consumed with evil a man may become, there is still a shred of goodness in him, and that shred is the means of his redemption and salvation. When that tiny shred of goodness is united with the light side of the force (i.e. God’s grace) it can be stronger than any evil and can even undo the most powerful empire.
But when there are legions of abandoned boys are left wallowing in the darkness and bloodlust of their videogame world, they become capable of unspeakable evil, and I get a baaad feeling about this. It’s time to heed Burke’s warning that the only safety for good men is to anticipate the worst possible evil of bad men. We need warriors at our gates, but we also need more men to join Plato’s Cave Search & Rescue Squad to bring these darkened hearts out into the light.