First off, how’d the peaches go? Pretty well, but the overabundance problem sorted itself right out in that about half of them turned out to be too rotten to really use. (The reason I got such a big order was that they were ‘seconds’ which needed to be eaten right away, and I waited slightly too long.)
The remainder were soft and ripe, which I felt meant that uses that required whole slices or big chunks were a mistake. So I went ahead and made the peach barbecue sauce, which worked beautifully and will again later this week. (Though I also discovered that lamb ribs, which I’d never cooked before, require a little bit of extra butchery to really be easily eatable off the bone.) And I made peach-buttermilk ice cream rather than the popsicles, with lime juice rather than the lemony baobob powder that the recipe in Rise calls for. That worked really well.
For no reason in particular this morning, other than seeing the same damn threads on certain subreddits that I’ve seen a hundred times before, essentially devotees of a particular cultural franchise or work of popular culture squaring off against one another about some perennial controversies, I am thinking about why I will never reconsider my devotion to the way Luke Skywalker’s life was handled in the film The Last Jedi.
In some circles, discussing The Last Jedi is pretty much like discussing transubstantiation at the height of the Reformation. It’s a doctrinal line that sorts people into militantly opposed congregations.
I am able to be ecumenically-minded in some ways about the movie. Yes, on watching the film again, there’s some terrible and clumsy material. The entire slow-motion chase through space is a strange premise and doesn’t really fit with the long-standing aesthetics and world-building of Star Wars. The sidequest that Finn and Rose go on is a narrative disaster and a misfire in terms of developing Finn’s character. (The sequels cast John Boyega—brilliant!—had a great idea about the basics of the character in the first film—terrific!—and then squandered the actor and the character in progressively more horrifying ways.) Other controversial choices I can be indifferent to, if it buys peace with the faction that hates the film: Leia flying through space, Vice Admiral Holdo making a suicide run with a tactic never seen before in the film.
But Luke being a bitter, burned-out hermit who has come to the conclusion that the Jedi were badly flawed? That’s fantastic. It’s completely right at every level. It’s a classic ‘hero’s journey’ trope, if that what you’re into—the old hero, tired and defeated at last, despairing that no matter how hard he’s fought and won, his enemies remain a threat to everything the hero loves. It’s right specifically for Star Wars given what the first sequel put into motion—a resurgent Empire whose most powerful servant is Luke’s nephew. It’s right as tragedy and as redemption. And then Rian Johnson threw in another beautiful gift by making Rey someone who is new to the story, not a relative of anyone else—and with that and the brief coda of an ending, Johnson made the Force once again a philosophy, a concept, a mystery, rather than a mutant power passed down through a dynastic lineage.
So what am I doing here, besides relitigating an argument that will never die? What’s the deeper thought? What I’m mulling over really is that the contemporary American institutional and political hostility to humanistic learning, to humanistic conversation, both inside and outside of the academy, is costly in ways we don’t really appreciate. There are two particular arts of living together with people unlike ourselves that we are losing track of that are rooted in the humanities. The first is something I tend to associate with the ethnographic method and with the novel as a literary form but which is philosophically older: the structured, disciplined commitment to think about what it is like to be someone else.
The second is more relevant to embracing—or rejecting—the way that the story of Luke Skywalker has been told. It’s about how we have and explain our devotions while also learning to understand them as particular, as personal, as individual. It’s about learning to take the dictum de gustibus non est disputandum, “that you can’t dispute matters of taste”, seriously while at the same time learning to ignore it. If you believe too much in the maxim, it means that all the things we argue about with such passion are irrelevant, groundless, meaningless, that they’re just epiphenomenal byproducts of the unfathomable variety of individual psychologies. Those passions matter to more than ourselves and they are not just a product of personal taste. Humanism provides the grounds for explaining why they matter: why a story is better this way rather than that way, why a text means this rather than that, why a doctrine or idea leads to salvation or damnation. And yet it also can provide a humility, an understanding that the genesis of our interpretations and attachments is more than (and less than) reason, that in those passions are other motivations, some of them unknown even to ourselves.
Intellectual historians, theologians and political philosophers have all observed that many of the key commitments that bind liberalism and humanism together derive some of their force from a slow-developing consensus that the catastrophic violence of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe could only be resolved with two key simultaneous moves: first, the power of the state and religious authority had to be uncoupled and second, all citizens of a state would have to learn how to live with one another whatever their religious affiliations. It’s not the only “origin story” for either liberalism or humanism that matters, but it’s an important one.
The problem with a lot of centrist scolds who demand that no one be cancelled, who assert that the free people of a free society must listen to all ideas and entertain all interpretations with equanimity, is that they’ve lost the art of balancing “you can’t dispute matters of taste” with “the meaning of culture and ideas is a life and death business that ought to stir our deepest passions”. Of course culture can hurt you, wound you, destroy you—or save you, lift you up, inspire you, sustain you. That’s why it matters so much, whether we’re talking “what should happen to Luke Skywalker at the end of his story” or “what matters most in the end, faith or good works”? But the grain of truth in the prim finger-wagging is that at the other end of spectrum, some people are losing the art of putting their own interpretations in brackets, of taking interest in how other people can read or hear the same thing, be of the same place and type, and come out the other side of those experiences with a very difference sense of what they mean and how to be in the world.
I think universities have been one great place to get trained in that kind of simultaneous mindset. It very much takes training for most of us, though there are those savants who acquire that wisdom just through the business of living. Once upon a time, I think a lot of mainstream churches were too, but that hasn’t been so for a good while. And oddly enough, under the right circumstances, social media—or other civic meeting grounds—can be (but are not inevitably) ways to learn the art of holding passions about culture at the same time as being able to go outside oneself, at least social media before it got turned into a giant Skinner-box via algorithmic weavings on commercialized platforms.
Our institutional abandonment—and general scorning—of humanistic thought may not be the reason we’ve lost the art of holding our passions and dispassions in the same moment. (And perhaps I must be skeptical that we ever had that art in any great degree.) But I will lament nevertheless and say that whether that loss is real, and whether it is the cause, it is at least a visible symptom of our inability—and that some of the people who most urge us to hew strictly to the dispassionate regard for all ideas are one presentation of the illness. We should have our devotions and the arguments that stem from them and yet be able to contain all that in an artful choreography that flirts along the edges of a violent chasm and yet never ever is in danger of falling in.
Image credit: "Luke Skywalker-5" by gswartz_photo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.