Slashdot Mirror
David Brin Responds to Star Wars Issues
himi writes
"After his articles on what was wrong with the Star Wars
movies were linked here, David
Brin's mailbox got flooded - as per usual. He's posted an interesting
reply to most of the points raised in those emails.
It's a good read, even if you don't agree with him. "
First off, I'd like to summarily dismiss all of Brin's arguments that so-and-so must have planned for someone else to do something by acting like they wanted to opposite. This assumes that the characters are, in fact, demi-gods and have the ability to entirely manipulate every one's actions, taking into account that they can place barriers and assume that the foe will defeat the barriers. Brin says
and
VADER's the one who sent the secret plans to Leia's ship! He arranged for the droids to get away, and coincidentally land just a few miles from his hidden son! Remember how, a little later, he talks Tarkin into "letting them go so we can trace them"? Likewise, he's the only close-up witness to Obiwan disappearing, when he supposedly "killed" his master in that sword fight! (Maybe he actually helped Obiwan pull a vanishing act.) Note that the "fight" with Obiwan distracted the guards & helped let Luke get away!...
Brin goes on to suggest that Vader/Anakin planned the entire course of the movies starting from his escape from Tattoine just to overthrow Palpatine by arranging for Luke to distract Palpatine at a critical moment. Finally, Brin offers a quicker way for Anakin/Vader to meet his life-long goals and chides Lucas for not seeing this simpler method.
My complaint with this entire criticism is that people, no matter how powerful, simply don't plan that far ahead. Brin accuses Palpatine of planning for Amidala to escape just in time to win him the senate. He then wonders why anyone had to die if this was the plan all along. This is ridiculous. The reason these movies (at least 4-6) are fun, is watching how powerful figures react to unpredictable events.
Darth Maul isn't out to kill Amidala, he's out to kill the Jedi, thus leaving her without advisors other than Palpitane. If Maul had succeeded, he would have fixed what (to me) is the biggest plot hole in the movie, the whole "let's send a committee rather than an army" bit in the Senate. Exsqueeze me? They had *just sent* a committee, two Jedi knight ambassadors, and the Trade Federation had destroyed their ship and its crew and attempted to murder the ambassadors via multiple means. Said ambassadors were available as witnesses. Just exactly what would be enough evidence for the Senate?
Oh, and Luke *did* matter in ROTJ; without his Force skills, the Ewoks would never have attacked the Stormtroopers.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Try the "culture" universe from Iain Banks.
That's an interesting suggestion in terms of Brin's argument.
On the one hand, the Culture is held up as some sort of endpoint for the rational questioning of all things in society and the ultimate permissiveness of individual tastes: the egalitarian utopia which Brin asks us to struggle toward. It has no money, no laws, no violence or coercion, no secrecy outside your own head. (Plenty of values and social norms, though.)
On the other hand, the gap in power between the Minds and the human population is effectively disenfranchising. Most of the humans give their lives over to the one thing where competition with machines doesn't mean anything: having a good time. One could argue most of the machines are up to the same, but where the moral exercise of power requires the most complete understanding of the consequences of your actions, the important decisions must lie with the Minds. More to the point, the stories always focus around the experience of a single protagonist, often a person to some degree outside the human norms of the culture. A "throwback" or a "barbarian". These characters act as demigods to the societies the Culture intervenes in, usually by natural talent, other times by technological or ethical fiat, but they are also shown to have been instruments of the Minds that are the real movers behind the plot.
What little is described of the Culture's origins says they developed from a splinter group of humans who started a somewhat radical society and left the mainstream when it got unfriendly. (secessionist fandom anyone?) From isolation it grew into one of the dominant civilations in the galaxy, either by luck or the strength of its open development model. Presumedly they still work this way, because the Minds see it as the most efficient way to run things. Indeed, it seems to be be their evolution, not that of the humans, that's keep to society stable for millenia. Marain, the language the humans speak was designed by the Minds, and humans tend to drift into less utopian modes of thought when they stop speaking it. Witness the "almost inhuman detached passion" required to prosecute antagonists in a way least damaging to both sides, or the common occurence of characters gone native in "primitive" (meaning less egalitarian) societies. Perhaps this is an unfortunate 'way out' a la LeGuin's Disposessed.
How-we-get-there-from-here aside, I'd like to ask, "The best way to keep things running compared to what?" We're led to believe it's "compared to everything", like RMS's contention that open development makes sense from a rational point of view without an appeal to ideology. This has always rung false to me, like Star Trek's claim that the the android Data has no emotions. I think the Vulcans got it right: logic tells you the consequences of your actions, but it doesn't tell you with of those consequences you'll prefer. That comes down to values, or feelings, or something we don't understand from a technical point of view yet.
The message I've always taken from the Culture novels is that it's the values the society is based on, the values the Minds grew up with, that make it what it is. The consequences of our power to affect each other, which has only been magnified by technology, can't be avoided. Our only hope is to find ways of dealing with each other that improve our lives and avoid the miseries of the past for all of us. And that's what David Brin is talking about.
Oops ... posted in the wrong place ...
Here's one curious thing I have noticed about R2D2, C3PO and droids in general. Droids appear to be very common (the tiny Naboo ship had at least three of them). There's probably thousands of worlds, hundreds of thousands of ships and perhaps hundreds of millions of droids in the Star Wars galaxy.
So why is R2D2's serial number so short?
If we assume that a droid's serial number can consist of any combination of four letters and/or numbers, then there are only 36 ^ 4 combinations, or 1,679,616 different serial numbers, which would barely cover the number of droids found on a small, backwater world such as Tattoine.
On the plus side, R2D2, as always, has a lot of hack value. He is also clearly running Linux: R2D2 did not bluescreen once in the whole of the Star Wars series. The only times R2D2 failed that I can recall were hardware failures such as an external electrical overload (Jawas, Endor) or being shot in the Death Star trench.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
1. That individual rights can exist under a non-democratic government, and are unrelated to democracy.
2. That history is changed only by elites.
This statement is bizarre. These things cannot exist but in a democracy. If there is no way to hold leaders accountable, then you can not stop them from silencing speech or making people "disappear".
And how do you suppose these rights become law? In the US, they were voted on by ratifing the Constitution. What do you think is more credible and more likely to endure: rights declared "inaliable" by those who choose them and with the power to ensure their protection through the process of democracy, law, and public criticism, or by rights granted abirtrarily by a dictator or ruling elite? Consider what happens when power is transfered to another elite. The most enlightened king can have a tyrant son.
With a significantly reduced reign and less power. And they can be removed from power without bloodshed. And anyone can become a politician.
But being able to criticize that government, and select that government from the most qualified canditates DOES mean you get good government, or at least the best available.
That is circular reasoning. Any example of someone who has changed history is automatically had the "spear-carrier" status removed. But the fact is many people who had humble beginnings have gone on to change the world. Martin Luther King, Jonas Salk, and Albert Einstein are just a few examples.
Or look at this way. Of all the people born to be elites, how many have turned out to be mediocre? Certainly more than those who haven't!
And what did that party do as soon as it had power? It outlawed other political parties and silenced public criticism. There was no democracy when almost all of the atrocaties were committed. The German people and their rulers were at fault, not the democratic model of government.
Besides, this is a pathetic argument against democracy, considering the number of autocratic governments which have committed atrocities throughout history.
Offtopic sidenote: The fact that you prefix "supposed" in front of "ethnic cleansing" says about your bias. I assume you get news from the international wire services in Greece. Whatever you think of NATO's intentions, or the indepndance of the media, the fact is that thousands were murdered by the Serbian army. I've seen mass graves on TV, and heard survivors describe how the entire adult male population of villages were rounded up and shot. It happened. You can't fabricate stuff like that and get away with it, at least not in countries with competing news services and laws against censorship (ding ding, only in democracies!). The only part that people don't agree on is the accuracy of the estimates of the number killed. Some claim that the numbers are being inflated to help justify NATO's bombing, but that does not mean it didn't happen.
One objection I've never heard, and this surprises me, is that Star Wars is a wonderful missed opportunity.
The Star Wars universe is a huge and well developed context in which many different, interesting tales could be told. Unfortunately, because they're marketed to kids for toy sales, the movies, books and comics are juvenile. I enjoyed Phantom Menace once I remembered it's directed at ten year olds, and concentrated on the special effects.
The fallout from that marketing angle is througout all the movies. The force is no longer a mystical element of the universe; it's a microbe that people have in greater or lesser quantities (leading, however, to the tantalizing possibility of bottling and freebasing it). The wars aren't fought with blood and bone, but with plastic aliens that get knocked down and don't get up. The insulting caricatures of other cultures were used for comic effect, with little thought to how adults might interpret them.
Surely I'm not alone in feeling cheated of what could happen if those movies were directed at adults. Whatever mythic quality they have is diluted to uselessness by the action figures that follow.
Star Trek movies make the same mistake, to a lesser degree. In Insurrection, Federation shuttlecraft come with a karaoke machine as a standard option, and the Enterprise can be flown with a Sidewinder joystick. I nearly puked in the theatre when I saw that.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
What I found most disturbing in the whole affair, and the only point I will address, is that Brin's objection is Lucas presenting a story that supports the opinion that democracy might be inherently bad.
This being an opinion I currently hold, I would like to offer a couple of comments. Brin seems to be confusing several of the underlying concepts of American society and over-generalizing about how your political system works.
Democracy is not a cut-and-paste solution. Democratic governments vary greatly, and the principle behind democracy is elected government. A lot of other things that exist in American democracy and various other types of government in the Western world, such as human rights, international law, freedom of speech and expression etc. have little to do with democracy in itself.
I am not an American. I am Greek, and I live in Athens, the place where democracy was born. I would like to point out that the ancient Athenian democracy came with little of the sprinklings and egalitarian human-rights laws that come with most modern forms of government. And it didn't work well. It didn't work well at all, and it could be argued that democracy was largely to blame for Athens' fall and decline after the Pelloponesian War.
I've also read the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as several plays by Evripides (in the original, no less!) and would like to wonder about how they differ with the kind of stories Mr. Brin advocates.
For one thing, Mr. Brin agrees that a story must have heroes. And, believe it or not, this is the way history works. I'd like to see someone come up and disagree with me when I say that a handful of people have made an incredible impact on the history of human civilization while most people did indeed play the role of un-named spear-carriers. Especially in the case of war, the decision to go to war is usually taken by a small group of leaders to whom many have sworn allegiance by one means or another. It was the American government's decision to start the war in Kosovo over supposed ethnic cleansing just as it was Agamemnon's decision to start the war in Troy over the abduction of Helen.
The only moral objection that Mr. Brin brings up is how the elite is selected. The only difference he really sees between the Homerian demi-gods and everyday-Joes-cum-heroes is that one is selected by fate / hereditary rights / genetics while the other is selected by a handful of people around him. For Mr. Brin, the deciding difference between Agamemnon Atreides and Bill Clinton is that Agamemnon was king because he was the son of Atreus, while Mr. Clinton is president because of the small percentage of the American public that actually voted, more than half chose him over the other candidate.
The fact that he's at least partially responsible for bombing the houses of people in Serbia, half way around the world from the Oval office, is not the problem. Supposedly, our beloved democracy would have struck him down in his place if his action was morally reprehensible.
Please get me straight. Although I do take interest in these matters, I do not wish to debate the moral right of this or that leader to wage war against another nation. That is a matter of a different discussion. What I am debating is Mr. Brin's point that all the good in society comes from the fact that our leaders are elected.
Let me tell you something you might have forgotten. The Nazi government was elected, through due democratic process. The public loved them. For the average German in the 30s, a government that promised freedom from the economic hell imposed by the winners of WWI and getting rid of the Jewish commercial elite that they believed was the source of all their problems (there, another elite creeps into place). HITLER AND THE NAZI PARTY HAD A DIRECT MANDATE FROM THE GERMAN PEOPLE, AND YET THEY ARE STILL THE CAUSE FOR SOME OF THE WORST ATROCITIES EVER COMMITTED .
Mr. Brin supports that power corrupts, and that despots invariably become egotistical and power-hungry, incapable of acting in the best interests of their people. Just because a (relatively small) bunch of people picked an elected president over his opponent does not mean that the above cannot apply to him as well!
Democracy is, IMHO, just another way to pick an elite. But the way the world is governed at the time being means we NEED an elite. We just switched from passing the crown down from father to son, and are now passing the mandate from politician to politician.
The average citizen might have an opinion, and even a valid and just way of thinking about how the country should be run. But he might not. Putting the decision of one political party over another in the hands of the public does NOT mean you get good government.
This is Slashdot, a site for geeks, people who see ourselves as an intellectual elite. Saying that if more people pick a Democrat over a Republican (or the other way around) means we get good government is like saying that having people pick Windows over Linux (which they do, mostly, and the reasons, though bad, apply equally to democracy: lack of choice, lack of support, bad media coverage, lack of education and awareness, lack of interest) means they get good computing.
If George Lucas wants to thrash democracy, let him. You might disagree with him (and me), but it's a valid point and not unethical or morally reprehensible. Mr. Brin's point about GL thrashing a culture that has been good to him is invalid. GL is thrashing ELECTED GOVERNMENT, not the institutions that allow freedom of expression and opportunities for financial success. The two do not go together hand-in-hand. You can have one without the other. And in ALL forms of government to date, be it monarchy, aristocracy, communism, tyrrany, democracy or anything else, (perhaps not socialism? But the examples are few and far apart, and hard to judge) an ELITE has governed the masses, who have had little say in government except when they rebelled or went to the polls to exchange one elite for another. The question here is how an elite is selected. Elected government might be the best we have so far , but it is not close to being a good and effective system. You can judge individual elites (e.g. Nazis were bad, JFK was good, Agamemnon was bad, Pericles was good etc.) but you will find that the way they were brought into power has little to do with their effectiveness. Mr. Brin's objection to this I find appalling.
Give a monkey half a brain and still he's bound to fry it - Placebo
Huh?
This is what passes for intelligent commentary on the internet?? The best you can say to repudiate Brin is to say that your "take is that Brin is simply jealous"?? Yet you start out by saying that you're out of your league, both because his vocabulary baffles you, and you can't follow a relatively straightforward, albeit complex, dissection of trends in comtemporary science fiction.
You dismiss Brin's argument because you can't understand it. That doesn't disprove it: deriding him for using ten-dollar words says NOTHING about whether his criticisms are valid. Then you offer jealousy (since you either can't, or won't, invalidate his argument intellectually) as... what? Proof that he's wrong, or proof that we should all keep our heads in the sand and just listen to the rich guy, because he's got all that money and thus must be doing something right??
Gee -- too bad you didn't take the time to get a dictionary, or a more intelligent friend and have them explain what Brin was talking about. Because your response merely proves most of the points he was making.
But hell, what do *I* know? I'm just jealous of Lucas' billions, right?