C.S. Lewis, Luke Skywalker and the New World Order Blues

Submitted by epppie on Tue, 08/26/2008 - 14:49.

As far as I can remember, the first Dystopian novel I read was That Hideous Strength, by C.S.Lewis.

Since then, I suppose I've read many others and seen many others in cinemas or on video/dvd; it's a major genre of our time. Arguably, it's THE major genre of our time.

http://thevlist.blogspot.com/2008/07/dont-mess-with-perfection-unnecessa...

A dystopia is like a utopia, in that both are fictions in which a perfecting impulse molds a society of unheard of joy and beauty (as in utopia), or of unimagined horror and control (as in dystopia). Arguably, every utopia is, from another point of view, a dystopia, and vice versa. In each case, there is an assumption that social structures can, in a sense, FORCE human beings to be GOOD.

It might be assumed that utopian/dystopian fictions are forward-looking, even predictive. That's only partially true - as with science fiction. The first great landmark in the field of utopian fiction, the novel Utopia, by Saint Thomas More, was surely a reaction to the authoritarian policies of King Henry the 8th. It was, I think, an attempt to argue, metaphorically, that the same political authority that could control and manipulate society for ignoble reasons (Henry the 8th seemed to care only about the wealth and power of the Monarchy), could control and manipulate society for noble reasons. As a caveat, it's been a while since I read Utopia, but that's my sense of it, taking context into account.

http://www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/more.htm

The utopian fantasies of Karl Marx (written like philosophy, but really fiction), were - at least in part - a reaction to the authoritarian crushings of lower class aspirations that Marx saw again and again in his time. I wonder if it was Marx who inspired John Stewart Mills to (apparently) coin the word, dystopia:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikip...

"The first known use of the term dystopia appeared in a speech before the British Parliament by Greg Webber and John Stuart Mill[4] in 1868. In that speech, Mill said, "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favor is too bad to be practicable.""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia

http://www.phillwebb.net/History/NineteenthCentury/Mill/Mill.htm

The first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867.

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http://pastorandpeople.wordpress.com/category/cs-lewis/

C.S. Lewis, writing in the aftermath of World War 2, during which the world's most fully realized dystopian society, Nazi Germany, had come into being and died, seemed to think (rightly, I would argue) that the fundemental dystopian urges of Nazi Germany continued to live on (in what I would call the dreams of the New World Order). Orwell seemed to feel the same way as Lewis and likely was inspired by Lewis to write his 1984 (published in 1949).

If Sir Thomas More was the father of utopian fiction, Aldous Huxley can perhaps be called the father of dystopian fiction:

"Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932 while he was living in France and England ...Brave New World was Huxley's fifth novel and first attempt at a dystopian work.
Brave New World was inspired by the H. G. Wells' Utopian novel Men Like Gods. Wells' optimistic vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novel, which became Brave New World. Contrary to the most popular optimist utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia" (see dystopia), somewhat influenced by Wells' own The Sleeper Awakes and the works of D. H. Lawrence. Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We, completed ten years before in 1921, has been suggested as an influence, but Huxley stated that he had not known of the book at the time.[1]
...

Although the novel is set in the future, it contains contemporary issues of the early 20th century. The Industrial Revolution was bringing about massive changes to the world. Mass production had made cars, telephones and radios relatively cheap and widely available throughout the developed world. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the first World War (1914-1918) were resonating throughout the world. Many characters in the story are named after influential people of the time, for example, Benito Hoover and Bernard Marx."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

http://www.lostateminor.com/2007/10/01/aldous-huxleys-the-doors-of-perce...

Perhaps, though, that distinction should go to Franz Kafka:

"His stories, such as The Metamorphosis (1915), and novels, including The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal and bureaucratic world."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka

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Exerpts:
http://www.crossroad.to/Excerpts/books/lewis/hideous-strength.htm

That Hideous Strength was written in 1945, just shortly before George Orwell wrote his classic dystopian fiction, 1984
C.S.Lewis was a deep thinker in many ways, but - though an Anglican - he was much like Catholics who obsess over the evils of modernism, without it ever ocurring to them that the problems of our times might have more to do with the way power is arranged, the way economic power in particular is hoarded and restricted, and than with modernism as a philosophy or as a culture. Orwell actually reviewed That Hideous Strength, and pointed to this problem in Lewis' work:

"His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.

All superfluous life is to be wiped out, all natural forces tamed, the common people are to be used as slaves and vivisection subjects by the ruling caste of scientists, who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves. Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself.

There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand paople to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.

His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ruled over by a mysterious personage known as The Head, is as exciting as any detective story.

It would be a very hardened reader who would not experience a thrill on learning that The Head is actually – however, that would be giving the game away.

One could recommend this book ureservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in."
http://www.solcon.nl/arendsmilde/cslewis/reflections/e-orwellths.htm

http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/about/pictures.html

Apparently, Lewis - in turn - was fond of Orwell's book.
http://www.lindentree.org/cslewis.html

Orwell goes on to criticize the religious and mystical interests of C.S.Lewis' text, so it seems likely that part of his motivation for writing 1984 was to, in a sense, extract those elements. Yet, in my view, based on my memories from reading 1984 many years ago and seeing movie versions, Orwell is a bit off target too. The 'heavy' in 1984 is totalitarian government.
I think he and Lewis would have been closer to the truth if they'd blamed their respective dystopias on Corporatism. Not on corporations, per se. Corporations in and of themselves can be a good idea, a way for groups of people to join in challenging ventures in such a way that they pool thier resources while limiting their individual risk; but Corporatism turns corporations into deathless and nearly all-powerful beings. Such beings ultimately (in my opinion) manifest a combination of greed run amuck, over-reliance on science and technology, nihilistic 'faith' in materialism, and totalitarian government. As in The Matrix, the creators of the deathless ones (be they corporations, or machines) rely on human beings for their continued existence, but also fear human free will. The same beings that can create and nourish can uncreate.

President Eisenhower, of all people, may have had the best insight into the combination of forces behind dystopia when he warned against the Military/Industrial/Political Complex in 1961.

I would argue that Eisenhower should have made that speech in 1954, when the first Bilderberg conference was held. Some believe - I believe - the Bilderberg is both the best known and least known public face of the New World Order, the ultimate expression of corporatism, of the idea that corporations, particularly corporations of the military industrial complex, represent humankind's highest achievement and must achieve gloal dominance.

For some tepid discussion of bilderberg:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9270
http://www.slate.com/id/2193220/

Maybe Eisenhower would have known to put aside his notions that endlessly massive military buildup was actually necessary for defense. But still, he defines corporatism in its penultimate stage pretty well. He actually dropped the reference to politics in his final formulation, but apparently it's there in his notes.

As Mike Gravel pointed out in recent presidential debates, what Eisenhower warned against in 1961 is simply a reality today. Our society is controlled thoroughly by the Military/Industrial/Political complex.

We've seen this in the recent unnecessary crisis between Nato and Russia; blown out of proportion by the media, it will likely propel the worst authoritarian this nation has ever seen, McCain, into the White House, while pretending to necessitate further massive expansion of the national debt so that we can build more and more weaponry; unless, of course, Russia links its military industrial complex with ours (something which may have already ocurred long since, abut which may be cloaked behind good cop/bad cop public dramas, such as the current one in Georgia).

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The New World Order is not a new thing. It may be reaching its zenith of power now, but it has roots going back centuries. Certainly the First World War and its aftermath made a lof people aware that there was a force driving society that cared only about power, that had no comprehension of good and evil - a version of what we know of as a military/industrial/polical complex. Perhaps one of its founders was the Landgrave of Hesse, who understood way back in the 1700s that winning and losing wars didn't matter. All that mattered was that there BE war, because there was money to be made in war.
This realization made the Landgrave the richest man in Europe, and - arguably - the most morally depraved.

"Although it was a fairly widespread practice at the time to rent out troops to other princes, it was the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel who became infamous for hiring out contingents of their army as mercenaries during the 17th and 18th centuries. Frederick II, notably, hired out so many troops to his nephew King George III of the United Kingdom for use in the American Revolution, that "Hessian" has become an American slang term for all German soldiers in the Revolutionary War. Frederick used the revenue to finance his opulent lifestyle. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesse-Kassel

So perhaps it's not surprising that some Germans had a headstart in being aware of the military industrial complex.

Artist Otto Dix had a very good understanding of what might be called the "three legged stool" (military-industrial-political) decades before Eisenhower.

http://artisticthoughts.blogspot.com/2006/12/otto-dix.html

Other German artists understood the "three legged stool" too, because it was probably in Imperial and then in Nazi Germany where it reached its first full flowering. Here's George Grosz' satire on the subject:

http://eldib.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/panic-of-2008/

The irony is that our democratic system of government, as envisioned and established by our founders, is also a three legged stool: a system in which power is divided between branches: Congress, Judiciary and Executive. That has been largely replaced with a Military-Industrial-Political complex. The political branch arranges war; the industrial branch provides the weaponry and supports the politicians; the military branch dominates trade routes and access to raw materials. The result is a kind of macabre perfection.

Ralph Nader has a very good discussion of Corporations in an interview here:
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/08/17/ralph-nader-corporations-...

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I particularly like That Hideous Strength not just because it was my first dystopia, but also BECAUSE of the aspect Orwell disparages - the mystical.

http://www.earlybritishkingdoms.com/bios/merlin.html

To me, C.S. Lewis' Merlin as a symbol for what Jung might call the Collective Self (very different from group or mob identity) - it is a symbol for the notion that there is a shared wisdom and understanding that lurks beneath the surface of all our petty differences. Again, this isn't an idea about brainwashed groupthink.
It's a notion that each of us understands what is going on and what to do far more than we reveal, even to ourselves.

But a lot of that understanding lies buried and dormant and, like Merlin, it needs to be awakened.

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Perhaps the greatest modern exponent of Dystopia is George Lucas. His first film, possibly his greatest, was THX-1138.

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/dvdreviews/thx1138.htm

In THX-1138, the protagonists' journey is one of escape. They are a centrifugal force.

Star Wars, though well known for shameless commercialization, indeed though well known for ushering in the worst period in Hollywood history, the period of the explosion-obsessed blockbuster series (the last 30 years of Hollywood, in other words), is very much the same movie as THX-1138, but the movement of the protagonists and the plot is towards the center, not away. They do not seek to flee their dark and dystopian world. They seek to liberate it. This is an idea later developed by the Matrix series too.

It's well known that George Lucas was influenced by Joseph Campbell.

"
Joseph Campbell often said that he thought that the artists were one group of people who could use his work on Mythology. ...
Campbell seldom went to the movies, and may not have realized how important an art form the popular Hollywood film had become by the 1970's. He wasn't particularly impressed when people tried to introduce him to a famous filmmaker named George Lucas after a lecture in San Francisco in 1983, but the two got on well and met on several occasions afterwards. Lucas invited Campbell to see all three of the Star Wars movies then made, and Joe agreed to see all three in one day in a screening room at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch near San Francisco. Campbell was amazed at how well mythological themes had been incorporated into the films, and described it later, saying: "I tell you, I was really ... thrilled. Here the man understands the metaphor. What I saw was things that had been in my books but rendered in terms of the modern problem, which is man and machine ... That young man opened a vista and knew how to follow it and it was totally fresh." (The Hero's Journey [San Francisco, 1990], p. 181-182)

Lucas had read The Hero with a Thousand Faces while working on the script of the first of the Star Wars movies, and had gone on to read the Masks of God and other writings. When Star Wars debuted in 1977, it followed the Hero very closely. Lucas said at an award ceremony in 1985, "It is possible that if I hadn't run across him I'd still be writing Star Wars today.""
http://www.online.pacifica.edu/cgl/lucas

What is less well understood (and this is Lucas' fault as much as it is anyone's fault) is that Lucas introduced a new kind of hero to Hollywood.

Young Jedi - Luke Skywalker - communing with the Force ghost of Qui Gon Jin.

Lucas' hero, Luke Skywalker, was neither the all-knowing antihero, nor the all knowing, all powerful hero so typical of Hollywood before Lucas and since Lucas. Lucas' hero was a human being on a journey, a journey at first undertaken for seemingly selfish reasons; a journey which, as it matures, becomes relevant to and bears fruits for the wider community.

Luke Skywalker starts out as a brash and selfish kid, who only wants adventure. But he learns all too quickly that his thirst for adventure is also a thirst for engagement with the wider world, and that such engagement brings both joy and responsibility.
He must leave important connections behind, and he must open himself to unconsidered possibilities.

Jonathan Young discusses the archetype of hero as explored by George Lucas (particularly, but not exclusively in connection with The Phantom Menace):

"The Jedi describe the force as an energy field that sustains all living things. An individual may sense the force as intuition, or something spiritual. It is something beyond individual skill or wisdom. Whether I say I trust my inner voice or use more traditional language, like trusting the Holy Spirit, somehow I am listening for something beyond my own calculations. I'm trying to tune into a larger field of energy and knowledge. When a Jedi advises the hero to trust the force, he is saying that we must not put all our trust in what we can know clearly. There are mysteries and powers that are larger than our knowing and seeing.
...
When we become attuned to values and energies beyond our immediate practical concerns, the effect on our lives may be enormous. Listening to the voices from deep within can change everything. Quiet pursuits like poetry and meditation can lead to daring action once you find a calling, or become aware of the needs of others. ...

In the mythic moment, the individual's issues become enmeshed with larger problems. ...

The traveler may be seeking a transcendent experience. Usually the initiate is also looking for some undiscovered aspect of himself or herself. There is some wound that requires healing....

The mentors can take many forms; an old teacher, a wise enchantress, a mysterious old magician, such as the strange creature Yoda. The wise one gives the hero something that is necessary for the quest. ...

Gaining power is a challenging process involving proving good character. The rashness of youth must be tempered. The parallels in ordinary life may be as mundane as gaining the approval of a driving examiner to get a driver's license....

Initiatory adventures often include a great confrontation between good and evil. The task that is larger than we are, the fears greater than we have ever experienced. We each discover that we can survive ordeals we did not think we could endure. If we remember the lessons up to this point, we have discovered how to work with our allies. We have learned how to master the many conflicting elements within ourselves. Most important, we know we must trust the force. We have found how to stay in the flow of some wisdom larger than ourselves.

At some point, the individual's actions must become synchronized with universal forces. This shift eases life's basic loneliness. You are enmeshed in a larger purpose. You are meant to be in a certain place and fill a particular role. You are being yourself, truly and entirely for the first time. You have energies that you never knew about before."
http://www.folkstory.com/articles/starwars.html

In Lucas prequell moview, Phantom Menace, both the young Obi Wan Kenobi and Qui Gon Jin face a foe far more fearsome than any Jedi has encountered before (or for a long time): a fully trained Sith. Neither is quite successful in the encounter, but Qui Gon does demonstrate to Obi Wan that the key issue is conquering one's own fear, that this is even more important than conquering the external opponent.

Here Obi Wan seems stranded on a tightrope of fear:

Qui Gon, by contrast, takes a moment to calm his fear, as his foe, Darth Maul, stalks in front of hm:

His centeredness, his integrity, are more important than the energy he might gain by giving in to fear and anger. He loses his duel with the Sith, Darth Maul, but he gains a more deeply integrated self, which allows him to become the first Jedi to create a force ghost. Obi Wan defeats Maul, but only because he gives way to fear and anger, to the desire to refenge. Understandable though such failure is, in the face of such provocation, it becomes a karma that haunts Obi Wan. In time, he too learns that sometimes letting go is the best way to hold on.

Luke, above all, wrestles with what Rennaisance thinkers used to call the conflicting calls of the contempative life and the active life. The more powerful Luke becomes, the more loathe he is to use his power. In his final confrontation with Vader, it is his surrender that saves the day. Later, in the Star Wars novels (the "extended universe"), his goal is not to defeat the Yuzhang Vong, but to help bring them into the universe of the Force. To many others, Luke seems increasingly weak, even feeble. But Luke understands that as his ability to impose his will grows, the utility of imposing decreases. He would end up like Sidious.

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In what might be called typical Hollywood fashion, the hero that 'came out' of Star Wars, the hero who was embraced, was Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford. Indeed, Harrison Ford went on to a highly lucrative career reprising his Han Solo role in various forms, in that other influential dystopian movie, Bladerunner, and in that other influential blockbuster series, Indiana Jones. Harrison Ford was a return to the classic Hollywood hero/antihero motif. He knew it all. He always had an answer. He was a chick magnet.

http://www.alancontino.com/cremedalecreme-pages/movies.html

Harrison Ford became the ultimate swashbuckler, a modern Douglas Fairbanks, without the acrobatics, but with a sneer and special effects sufficient to make up for it and more.

Mark Hamill has, in my opinion, gone on to a more interesting career. He has become known for characters stuck in the predicament that Luke Skywalker escaped. In Slipstream, for example, he plays a bounty hunter. In the animated Batman, he voices The Joker. He plays characters stuck in circular ways of thinking and feeling. They are incapable of looking past certain fixed ideas. Luke Skywalker might have been stuck in that circular way of thinking and feeling too, if he hadn't had the example of his father, Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader, to remind him of how terrible a fate that would be.

Like the character for whom he is best known, Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill the actor has seemingly become fascinated with trying to understand the inner spirals that can entrap a human being's spirit, the way Vader's spirit was trapped.

In a fascinating interview, Hamill discusses his interpretation of the Joker's laughter in the '90's animated series:

...he calls The Joker's laugh a "musical instrument", meaning (to me) that The Joker must fit all of his emotions into that one form of expression. It is like Vader's menacing growl, a very limited vocabulary, reflective of a spiral inwards, the opposite of growth.

Examples of The Joker laughing:

The arc of Luke Skywalker's developement as a hero is that as he becomes more and more powerful, he does less. He seems to learn that what he can do is less signifigant than what he can teach others, and even learn from others.
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When I despair, when I feel overwhelmed by the apparently near total hegemony of the New World Order (or the industrial miliary polical complex, if that phrase is easier to swallow) I find it helpful to consider what an enormous outpouring of drivel it takes to keep Merlin buried, to keep the potential for keen understanding buried in folks. That tells me that the New World Order is afraid of the ability people have to understand, personally and together. It tries to slather them, us, with drivel and propaganda every waking moment.

If one could develope super-powers, like Neo in The Matrix or like Luke in Star Wars, would one then be able to defeat the New World Order? How? Who exactly IS the New World Order? Is it not, more than anything, a way of thinking that has tendrils in each of us? If that's true we each must continue to do our best in whatever way suites our talents. to simply be our AUTHENTIC selves. Some people are loners. Some people work well in groups. Some are actiivists. Some are not. Some make pictures. Some make songs. Some grow food.

No one can predict when a breakthrough will ocurr, in human consciousness, such that the New World Order seems less compelling as an idea, less overwhelming as a conspiracy, much less when THE breakthrough will ocurr, and it takes a certain amount of faith, as does anything worth doing.

I think about Cindy Sheehan sometimes. She broke through the wall of adulation that surrounded Bush, at that time a key component of the New World Order's group brainwash. Of course, the NWO recovered pretty quidkly, but I think she hurt their plans quite a bit. Even now I think the NWO knows that many minds have somewhat awakened and are only with difficulty being put back to sleep. I don't think Cindy Sheehan had any idea what an impact she would have. So it is with each of us. No one of us knows what might make a difference, or THE differnce. People respond most powerfully to symbols, and - while bogus symbols are easy to predict (waving flags,etc.) - authentic ones are like forces of nature. They come 'like a thief in the night'.

This is a picture of the weekly peace demonstration in my hometown - right at the foot of the soldiers and sailors monument.
You can't really see them too well, but ten to twenty intrepid folks show up every week to take a stand for peace. I think peace is the best possible tribute we could pay to those who have given their lives for our country. The persistance of these demonstrators is a strong and authentic symbol. Yet they can never know how much change they've made, or not made.
They sure are a manifestation of simple faith.

We often hear activists calling out for the activist community to DO SOMETHING. I don't think that is a misguided call, but I think it is misguided to suppose that there's any ONE "do something" that can apply to each and every person. Rather, the more each of us tries to be authentic, the more powerful we become. We might not FEEL very powerful. But the feeling of power can be deceptive. I believe I've got the power when I feel the chills running up and down my back. I can't fake that feeling. That's my power feeling. That's when I know 'the spirit is with me'. It can happen when I'm talking to my cat, or laying paint on a painting. It can happen when I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea for an essay that I feel I must write.
I can't really predict it. Each of us must contribute to the peace, freedom and justice movement in our own unique way

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As frustrating as I find the rise of Obama, especially now with all the DNC hoopla, because I feel he has sucked many people into his orbit who might otherwise have been ready to challenge the wisdom of the political system dominated by the two parties that are really one, I am also comforted by it. It tells me that the New World Order had to take a big chance to try to keep people lulled. No doubt, Obama's team of advisors is more full of Bilderbergers than my cat is full of fleas on a bad flea day. He seems to be a Made Man.

But if he makes the wrong move, the progressives will jump off his bandwagon quicker than the fleas jump off my cat when she gets a treatment! And the beauty of it, in my view, is that he and his handlers will never be able to know with certainty what might be the wrong move that makes the difference. It doesn't matter how many focus groups they run. It might never happen. It might happen tomorrow.

I think that by trying to be all things to all people, he's actually painted himself into a tight spot.

Fwiw, Mark Hamill hearts Barak Obama: