Fictional Morality: Star Wars Part 2

I know I said my next Fictional Morality post would be on Dungeons and Dragons, but the first Star Wars one led to other issues that have come to my attention and that I feel bear their own post. First I'll be responding to one of the comments on the original, and then I'll talk about midi-chlorians. This post will be a bit shorter than the last one, and then I'll get back to really mulling over DnD.

The Force as Gnosis
In a comment on the first post, Wikinite said:

I always saw gnosis as being implicit within the force. Original Ben kenobi describes the force as an "energy field" which connects and binds the universe together. In empire, Yoda goes on to say that non-living things are active with the force (he specifically mentions rocks). If the force is in touch everything in the universe, and the jedi are tuned into this connection, then it would seem that they could reach out through this connection and gain some sort of gnostic understanding of things in the universe. Kind of like in Highlander when Rameriez has Conner 'feel' the stag. Similarly, since jedi are connected with every sentient being, they should be able just hope on the 'force grid' and 'borrow' someones understanding of technology. Need to fix a hyper-drive? Let me just tap into the empire's chief mechanic.

This is certainly a viable hypothesis, but I can't think of any hard evidence to support it. The existence of the Jedi Mind Trick shows that it is possible to influence the mind through the Force; likewise, Obi-Wan Kenobi's trauma when Alderaan was destroyed by the first Death Star shows that it is possible, on some level, to feel what others are feeling. We see this again when, in the climactic fight scene of Return of the Jedi, Emperor Palpatine can feel Luke's anger and hatred through the Force. Soon after, Leia knows Luke is alive.

It is also possible to send telepathic messages through the Force: Vader very clearly speaks telepathically to Luke as he is escaping Cloud City aboard the Millennium Falcon in Empire.

To my knowledge, however, there is no canonical source that proves it is possible to reach into anybody's minds and take their knowledge. This would almost seem to be contradicted by Kenobi's statement about the Jedi Mind Trick: "The Force can have a great influence over the weak-minded." Luke also fails to influence Jabba the Hutt with the Force. It is, therefore, quite obviously possible to fail when attempting any type of Force use involving the mind.

That said, the claim is certainly within the realm of possibility, I'm just not entirely convinced of its veracity. Were it true, however, that Jedi could glean all the knowledge they want by lifting it from the brains of others, I would say that that only makes their ethical foundation weaker.

First off, such a reliance on the labor of others might be seen as intellectually lazy. I hesitate to make that criticism, though, because without the work of scientists, I (and countless others) wouldn't know a damn thing about science. We are not scientists, and so we rely on scientists to make the big discoveries and then we read about them later. Likewise biologists rely on physicists to make leaps in physics and then they glean the knowledge through secondary or tertiary sources. I guess what I'm getting at is that it's not inherently wrong, in any way, to get your knowledge from others who know more than you. After all, that's what teaching is all about.

Such a ready source of free information as might be found in the Star Wars Universe, though, could lead to real intellectual laziness; Jedi don't value any knowledge because it takes half a second and little real effort to learn anything they want. In the same way that a spoiled child doesn't value his possessions, a Jedi with this ability might be very flippant about information. This is not, of course, inevitable, but a Jedi with this attitude would certainly not be a very savory person.

The real problem with the "Force as gnosis" hypothesis is the one that leads me to relabel it the "Non-consentual mind invasion" hypothesis because the Jedi are doing just that. It is unconscionable, to me, to run hog-wild across other people's brains just to get info I don't have. In a life-or-death situation, maybe, but to suggest that a Jedi will just barge into a hyperdrive engineer's mind when his ship breaks down means that the Jedi run a mental tyrrany across the universe. They are Big Brother.

The thing about learning through reading books and journals or going to school is that the people whose knowledge you're borrowing consented to it. They are giving it to you. Or selling it to you. But the point is that they gave their explicit consent for you to pick their brains when they published their book or took a job as a teacher.

In this model of Jedi knowledge, the Jedi Order gets all the knowledge it needs by spying on people, by sifting through their minds without their knowledge or consent. In this case, it seems to me that ignorance, despite their hallowed code, would be more ethical than knowledge.

Midi-Chlorians
Midi-chlorians, for the uninitiated, are microscopic organisms that exist in a symbiotic relationship with the various races of the Star Wars Universe and allow some of them to touch and manipulate the Force. They were first mentioned in The Phantom Menace, where it was implied that a person's midi-chlorian count determines, to some extent, their ability with the Force.

Wookieepedia, a disturbing meatbag-run monstrosity into the bowels of which I shall never again travel, says about midi-chlorians:

Midi-chlorians were microscopic life forms that existed inside the cells of all living things. While they were not the Force itself, they formed a link to it, acting as a sort of sensory organ through which it could be perceived.

So, symbiotic little creatures that live inside you and allow you to use the Force.

Why, then, in a world where cloning is both easy and fun, is everybody not Force-sensitive? Single-celled organisms are easy to clone. Hell, that's how they reproduce.

Wookieepedia gives some uncited information, presumably from a way-out-there Extended Universe source, that says, in essence "It was tried and it drove people crazy." There seems to be no rational basis for this. Midi-chlorians, against all probability, can and do exist in perfect symbiosis within every single living species in an entire universe. A cloned midi-chlorian is exactly the same as, and this exactly as good as, the organism from which it is cloned. Therefore, giving people cloned midi-chlorians should present absolutely no problem. This kind of poor, irrational cover-up of real logistical issues is to Star Wars as Treknobabble is to, well, Trek.

One possibility that occured to me and at least one editor of Wookieepedia is that midi-chlorians are, in some sense, like mitochondria. The problem here is that such a symbiosis, leading eventually to a complete assimilation of the smaller organism by the larger, would have an infinitesimal chance of happening on a galactic scale to every single organism. First of all, midi-chlorians would have to evolve separately on every single planet with life. Then all subsequent multi-cellular life would have to be compatible with midi-chlorian symbiosis. That this would happen to every single organism in the universe is pretty well unthinkable.

And don't say "It was the Force!" That's called deus ex machina and it's a no-no.

Let's say, though, for the sake of argument, that midi-chlorians are like mitochondria at least in that one person's midi-chlorians have their own unique midi-chlorian DNA that is non-transferable between organisms. This still presents no problem to "artificial" Force-sensitivity. Clone that person's midi-chlorians. That's it. Instant Jedi.

So we are left with, as I see it, one option. Working from what we could glean of the Jedi in the first post, that they are (despite their own claims) quite interested in keeping their privileged, elite status in the Republic. One way to ensure that status is to make sure that one cannot just buy Force sensitivity, to perpetuate the myth that it is in-born and unalterable. After all, if everybody could become a Jedi, they'd lose everything that they consistently lord over everyone else, even if only subtly.

This type of elitism is itself at the very least distasteful. If Jedi actively combat attempts to clone midi-chlorians and artificially inbue Force sensitivity, something that has enormous potential benefits for every individual involved and society as a whole, they have stepped over the line from distasteful to just plain unethical.

Of course, this is all extrapolation. There's no hard, direct evidence for any of this, but I feel it's a pretty good working hypothesis. I'm open to other claims or interpretations, so long as they stand the test of (weakly-but-reasonably-applied) real-world science and reason and aren't just deus ex machinae.

Okay, I'm done being the space opera uber-dork. It's time to be the swords and sorcery uber-dork for a while and finish gathering my thoughts on that topic.