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Star Wars Prequels

Journal Captain Splendid's Journal: Food for thought 21

Journal by Captain Splendid

Lind:

If there was a moment when the culture of enlightened modernity in the United States gave way to the sickly culture of romantic primitivism, it was when the movie "Star Wars" premiered in 1977. A child of the 1960s, I had grown up with the optimistic vision symbolized by "Star Trek," according to which planets, as they developed technologically and politically, graduated to membership in the United Federation of Planets, a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN. When I first watched "Star Wars," I was deeply shocked. The representatives of the advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization were now the bad guys, and the heroes were positively medieval -- hereditary princes and princesses, wizards and ape-men. Aristocracy and tribalism were superior to bureaucracy. Technology was bad. Magic was good.

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  • If you only knew the power of the Dark Side...

  • I read the article. Meh.

    Lind, or whatever the dude's name is, seems to forget how awful the giant tenant housing was. Massive government programs when run with sanity work, but they seldom are. That is the advantage of small local government.

    The left's antipathy towards nuclear power and GM is stupid. The right's hatred for abortion and insistence on foolish mysticism is downright harmful. The author's insistence against rail though is just ignoring the facts about oil.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chill ( 34294 )

      I'm not sure the specifics were the point. No, large housing projects weren't the answer. The point was a belief in general advancement of the civilization thru scientific progress, knowledge and application of technology.

      This, versus the rose-colored-glasses hindsight view of how much better it was in the past. Or rather, it could be if we mixed the right parts of the 19th and 21st centuries.

      Actually, I think this was the whole point Bruce Perens was trying to advocate with his site "Technocrat". Advan

  • "But few would disagree that the Europe of Charlemagne was more backward in its mindset, at least at the elite level, than the Rome of Augustus or the Alexandria of the Ptolemies."

    I'd disagree with that, right out. The Rome of Agustus and the Alexandria of the Ptolemies were a thin veneer of civilization built on massive amounts of chattel slave labor. While slaves still existed in the Europe of Charlemagne; they were largely indentured servants, people working off debt for education or housing. And as l

    • And yes, replying to myself, blockquoting FTA:

      Here’s an idea. America needs to have a neomodernist party to oppose the reigning primitivists of the right, left and center. Let everyone who opposes abortion, wants to ban GM foods and nuclear energy, hates cars and trucks and planes and loves trains and trolleys, seeks to ban suburbia, despises consumerism, and/or thinks Darwin was a fraud join the Regressive Party. Those of us who believe that the real, if exaggerated, dangers of technology, big govern

    • The wording in the article could stand to be clearer, but I got the impression that it was not so much that the Dark ages were a complete step backwards, more that there were some major steps backwards (mostly due to religion) which, when looked upon from a safe distance can be shown to be reactionary, useless and damaging to overall scientific and cultural growth.

      • And I'd disagree with that- it was in fact a time of moving from primitive superstition-based religions to a more rational religion. We're just spoiled by having the scientific method available to us.

      • A dark age is an inevitable consequence of powerful authority, acquired either through secular political science or the use of mysticism. I can't single out religion, any more than is possible to single out republicans for the bullshit. It's the raw desire that has to be addressed.

        It could be the movie reflects a certain "disillusionment" with high tech and withdrawal after being battered with fuel shortages and blathering about "austerity and sacrifice". The tech was supposed to solve all that, so the thou

        • BAH! I should've stayed with my first impressions:

          ...if we must read Star Wars as something other than someone talking that old hack and fraud Joe Campbell a leeeetle bit too seriously, then let me just remind you that the "advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization" was an evil empire run by a cyborg monster and an evil wizard, and that in almost every visual detail its model was not the New goddamn Deal, but the Third fucking Reich. - IOZ

          Took me a while to find out who Joe Campbell was:

          Lucas disc

          • Took me a while to find out who Joe Campbell was

            !

            • It gets worse. I never read Hitchhiker either.

              My real point was that the blogger only confirmed my thought that everybody's reading too much into what was essentially John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, David Carradine, and Darth Vader as the burning oil rig. Classic Americana all the way. Only the setting had changed.

              Lucas is evil [blogspot.com]...

      • They were a complete step backwards. But they also reformed society, eliminating slave based economy of Rome.

        And what's funny? It was the Islamic expansion that did the most harm. There was never much learning in Europe. Gaul was to be avoided, same with Spain. Germany was hostile territory. But the Levant was an area of great learning with many books. Muslims eliminated these books in several different purges, but most notably that of Saladin and Caliph Umar [slashdot.org]. Essentially, Muslims kept that which wa

        • You know, and I've said this before, I really don't have a huge problem with slavery. At least not the kind of slavery that details specific rights, etc. and provides a path to emancipation.

          Honestly, it wasn't until a bunch of rabid white guys started conflating slavery with racism and eugenics that it got the bad rap that is has today.

          Also, let's be honest about something else while we're at it. There are still millions of "jobs" in dozens of "democracies" around the world which do not differ great

          • That's strange. Did someone mess with my URLs? They used to point to two different Wikipedia articles....

  • Sagan's book is a must-read for anyone who hasn't.

    And for was this schism noticeable, just take a look at the obsession with magic, pseudo-science and mumbo-jumbo in popular entertainment.

    Take a look at the television line-up, for example. The number of shows that revolve around psychics, people who can see/hear/talk to ghosts, have magic powers, believe in magic/voodoo/paranormal and the like.

    Throw in the "serious" discussions people just had on astrology with the discovery of a 13th sign in one of the an

    • Take a look at the television line-up, for example. The number of shows that revolve around psychics, people who can see/hear/talk to ghosts, have magic powers, believe in magic/voodoo/paranormal and the like.

      I actually really don't have a problem with fare like this in general. It's the fact that once useful channels like Discovery, TLC and the History Channel are filled to the brim with this kind of crap that really make my blood boil.

      Ah well. Still got Mythbusters.

  • It wasn't just "magic" that was shown as superior to technology in Star Wars, it was royalty.

    It's not coincidental that the first president elected after the release of the first Star Wars was Ronald Reagan.

  • Dude, Star Wars is wizard, don't you be knocking it!

  • The Dark Ages happened, the Church was bad for humanity for a while, and dirty Muslins did preserve the Classics, advance mathematics, and establish some of the more humane and enlightened states at the time.

    MH42 is polite enough, but he is apparently a member of (or enamored with) radical Traditionalist Catholic groups. They could, uncharitably, be called hate groups based on their anti-Islam rhetoric. They are everywhere on the web, from /., to blogs [insidecatholic.com], to edit-warring on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

    Note that should interes

  • Or, rather, David Brin [salon.com]. Twelve years ago.

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