David Kyle Johnson
That's how we are gonna win. Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love.
—Rose Tico, The Last Jedi
Some fans have suggested that the titles of the Skywalker Saga films are in the wrong order. Episode IV: A New Hope should've been “Return of the Jedi” – since the Jedi begin to make their return after being all but wiped out. Episode VI: Return of the Jedi should've been “The Last Jedi” – since, once Yoda dies, Luke is the last living Jedi. And Episode VIII: The Last Jedi should've been “A New Hope” – since Luke's sacrifice in his battle with Kylo gives Rey and The Resistance a new hope in their struggle against the First Order. As Poe puts it, “He's doing this for a reason. He's stalling so we can escape. … We are the spark that'll light the fire that will burn the First Order down. Skywalker's doing this so we can survive.”
But The Last Jedi's title is far from its most controversial aspect. Consider how Luke Skywalker is portrayed. He's a recluse who's seemingly given up hope, tossing aside Anakin's lightsaber and calling for the Jedi to end. This seems to betray Luke's character. As Mark Hamill himself put it to The Last Jedi (TLJ)'s director Rian Johnson, “I fundamentally disagree with virtually everything you have decided for my character.”1 Many fans echoed Hamill, thinking this character change came out of left field. Medium writer Joseph Choi said that TLJ's Luke was “a terrified and cowardly old man committed to dying alone wallowing in regret … a big middle finger to anyone who grew up believing in Luke Skywalker.”2 Indeed, many fans said TLJ ruined Luke Skywalker.3
Did it really? Or was TLJ's depiction of Luke not only predictable, but spot on? Maybe, far from ruining anything, it helped make The Last Jedi (as Mark Hamill eventually admitted) “the most sophisticated Star Wars movie since Empire.”4
Before the release of TLJ, David Goodner, at the website Waging Nonviolence, said “It would … betray his character arc, if Luke Skywalker became anything other than a staunch pacifist in The Last Jedi.”5 Why? Think about what happens at the end of Return of the Jedi (ROTJ). Emperor Palpatine tells Luke that acting violently is the way to the dark side: “Take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete.” He's delighted as Luke fights Vader, especially when Luke goes on the offense. It's only once Luke rejects violence, and literally throws away his lightsaber, that he becomes a Jedi and gains his victory. This was the culmination of Luke's character arc, nearly the last thing we saw him do in the original trilogy. Before, he used violence, but now he's like older Obi‐Wan, who for the most part used nonviolent methods (e.g. mind tricks and distractions) to achieve his goals. Everyone wondered how Luke would react to being offered his lightsaber by Rey at the end of The Force Awakens (TFA). But we should've expected him to throw it away – just like he did before – and to eventually, nonviolently, sacrifice himself, just like Obi‐Wan did in A New Hope (ANH).
In TLJ however, Luke is not only a pacifist; he's rejected the way of the Jedi, even calling for the Jedi Order to end. Could we have seen this coming? I did, in January 2016, after watching TFA.6 How? In TFA, Han clarifies that Luke “…was training a new generation of Jedi. One boy, an apprentice turned against him, destroyed it all. Luke felt responsible … He walked away from everything. The people who knew him the best think he went looking for the first Jedi temple.”
To defeat that apprentice – Ben Solo/Kylo Ren – Luke wasn't going to train more Jedi, since they might turn just as easily as did Ben. But why did not Luke, as he put it in TLJ, “walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order?” Because that would probably just make things worse.
Something that struck me about TFA was how, over the time since ROTJ, the Force and the Jedi had become myths, something that not even Rey thought was real. In the prequels, the Jedi were so established, and their abilities so obvious, that Force‐use was more like a science. But since the fall of the Empire – really since its inception – the Force and Force powers were relegated to the status of myth. Consider how those around Vader reacted to him in ANH: “Do not try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion…” And that's what it is: a religion. That's why Vader finds their “lack of faith disturbing.” The Jedi Order is a religious order – as is the Sith. And this is especially true at the beginning of the sequels, where those who believe in the Force, like Lor San Tekka, do so without any evidence – by faith.
But this means that all the chaos and bloodshed we saw in the prequels, and even the original trilogy, was a result of two religious factions bidding and fighting for political power. The Clone Wars, Order 66, the creation of the Empire, the destruction of Alderaan, a Super Star Destroyer, and two Death Stars – all of this due to one religious faction running the show while the other one wanted to.
This is reminiscent of how religions fought for political power in seventeenth‐century England. Then, the Church of England was in power, but the Puritans wanted to take over the government in the name of what they saw as God's will. To do so, Oliver Cromwell called for the head of Charles I (and got it) and a bloody civil war ensued. When Cromwell died a decade later, the resulting power vacuum led to even more violence. Things eventually resolved, but not before another rebellion and a couple more exchanges of power. Religious factions fighting for political power produce a lot of war and bloodshed.
Witnessing such events inspired Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704) to write prolifically on the role of government and religion's relationship to it. Hobbes (loyal to the Crown and the Church of England) argues in Leviathan that, to prevent religious wars, the sovereign (the King or government) should choose a religion (it does not matter which one) and impose it on everyone with an iron fist.7 This might not be ideal – what if the “wrong” religion is imposed? But it's preferable to the bloody alternative.
In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke argues for a better solution: a separation of religious and political power.8 Religion should be a private affair; politics and government should be a secular (non‐religious) matter. If religion is mixed with government, a fight for power between religious groups is inevitable. And since religious matters cannot be settled by reason and argument, they can only be settled by violence. So we'd all be better off if religion had nothing to do with government. No religious belief should be outlawed, Locke argues, unless it's violent or endangers the life, liberty, or property of others – but it should remain something that individuals choose. It's not something that should be imposed through political power. Locke's work inspired the United States' founding fathers (as Thomas Jefferson puts it) to erect a “wall of separation” between religion and government.9
After watching TFA and learning about Luke's self‐imposed exile, I wondered whether Luke had concluded something similar. The Jedi and Sith fighting for power cost the galaxy billions of lives. Maybe, like Locke, Luke concluded that we'd be better off if devotion to the Force was merely a matter of private conscience – if neither the Jedi nor the Sith had anything to do with government. So he resolved to make his Jedi devotion a merely private affair. Or maybe, like Hobbes, Luke concluded that it does not matter which religious faction is in charge, as long as none are fighting for power. It's not ideal, but the Sith imposing their version of order on the galaxy might be preferable to the chaos of trying to overthrow them in the name of the Jedi.
It seems I wasn't that far off. Consider Luke's words from the film's novelization (that echo what he says in the film):
If you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, from the birth of the Sith to the fall of the Republic the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy. Hubris … At the height of their powers they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire, and wipe them out … it was a Jedi Master who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader … [After Vader and Palpatine died] [f]or years there was balance. I took no Padawans, and no darkness rose. But then I saw Ben, my nephew … In my hubris I thought I could train him…10
We all know how that worked out and perhaps can understand why Luke thought it time for the Jedi Order to die.
In fact, Luke may have taken it a step further. In 2017, I wrote about the question of guilt by association – the moral culpability that goes along with group membership.11 This is different that the ad hominem logical fallacy “guilt by association,” where a person's argument is dismissed because of a similarity they share with another (bad) person. The question I am concerned with is, if a group you belong to acts in ways that are morally wrong, must you leave that group if you do not want to be somewhat guilty of the atrocities yourself – even if you yourself did not perform them? After all, isn't such a fear of “guilt by association” why many lifelong Republicans left the Republican party before and after Trump's presidency? Isn't this why people left the Catholic Church in the wake of the child sexual abuse scandal?
This question seems especially acute for religious affiliation. If a Muslim concludes that Islam is sexist, are they obligated to reject the faith or be guilty of sexism themself? What level of culpability do you have as a Hindu, who promotes the idea that cows are sacred, for those who beat Muslims to death because they eat beef?12 Such questions do not have easy answers, and it's probably a matter of degree. Someone who believes that God exists but does not belong to any specific religion does not share as much culpability as, say, someone who belongs to the Westboro Baptist Church (the “God Hates Fags” people who protest military funerals and Jedi‐worshipping comic‐cons). But an atheist, who openly renounces belief in God, does not bear any guilt by association for moral crimes done in God's name.13
According to the novelization of TLJ, Luke sought out the Jedi texts, not to study them but to destroy them; he just had not been able to bring himself to do it. He was contemplating his last failure to do so when Rey arrived at Ahch‐To. So it seems not only that Luke wants to avoid guilt by association by renouncing the Jedi, but also that – like many who leave their religious faith in the wake of realizing how much damage it has done – he's actively trying to tear it down. Sure, religion does some good – it inspires charity and love in some and comforts others. But it's also responsible for three Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, 9/11, countless jihads, the KKK, the Thirty Years War, Manifest Destiny (i.e. the slaughter of Native Americans), the French Religious Wars, the Armenian genocide, the aforementioned English civil wars, abortion clinic bombings, and it contributed to the Holocaust – and these are just events in the Middle East and the West. We could begin an Eastern list with the Thuggee murders and Buddhist atrocities against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Religion: many would argue that we'd be better off without it. Similarly, Luke could argue, would not the galaxy be better off if the Force, the Sith, and the Jedi remained a matter of myth and legend? And this, perhaps, is why Hamill concluded that TLJ is so sophisticated: it's the first film to entertain the notion that the Jedi are anything but perfect saints.
So far, we have seen where Luke's head is at the beginning of TLJ – why he does not immediately jump at the opportunity to fly off and help Rey the moment she arrives. But he's eventually spurred into action. Does this mean he changed his mind and abandoned his previous views? About the Jedi, yes – it seems so. As he gladly tells Kylo, during their battle on Crait, “I will not be the last Jedi.” Maybe he concludes the Jedi do more good than harm after all. But about his pacifism, it seems not; his response to the threat of Kylo and the First Order was truly that of a pacifist.
To understand why, it will be important to understand a bit more about pacifism and the varieties in which it can come. Absolute pacifism is the idea that all violence and war is morally unjustified and thus should be avoided at all costs. Now, some pacifists are not absolutists; some are opposed to war but think that personal violence can, sometimes, be justified – like in self‐defense. But among the absolutists, there are different camps. There are deontological pacifists who think that violence and war are never justified, in principle, regardless of the consequences. For them, nonviolence is a moral duty. And then there are consequentialist pacifists who think violence should always be avoided because it always makes matters worse. If violence caused more benefit than harm, it would be justified – but it just never does. And this latter view, it seems, describes TLJ's Luke Skywalker.
To understand Luke's position, it's important to understand that (contrary to popular opinion) pacifism is not a call to inaction; when something wrong occurs that could be stopped by violence, the pacifist is not obligated to stand around and do nothing. Especially when it's an act of violence, the pacifist is obligated to stop it. To do so, though, they must take nonviolent action. For a deontological pacifist, this is because violence is always inherently wrong. For a consequentialist pacifist like Luke, it's because violent action always makes matters worse.14
This tracks with a very common pacifist argument against war. Think about the Korean and Vietnam Wars. They were fought mainly because of Truman and Eisenhower's “domino theory” – the idea that, once one capitalist society fell to communism, they all would. But not only did preventing North Korea from “communizing” South Korea not prevent North Vietnam from trying the same thing with South Vietnam, the later failure to prevent Vietnam from becoming a communist country had very little long‐term negative effect. Not only did it not lead to a domino effect of capitalist nations turning communist, but Vietnam is now a peaceful nation in good standing with the United Nations. They have an embassy in Washington, DC, and the United States has one in Hanoi.
In making this argument, the pacifist is not saying that communism is a better system than capitalism, or that South Koreans would've been better off under communism. Instead, the suggestion is that Korea (and the world) as a whole would've been better off, all things considered, had military action never been taken in Korea at all. And if this is true, that would've left Korea communist. Whatever benefits South Korea has seen under capitalism, the consequentialist pacifist thinks these aren't enough to justify the horrors of the Korean War; Korea would now likely be no worse off than Vietnam or China.
While the pacifist might be right about Korea or Vietnam, complete absolute pacifism is difficult to defend in all circumstances. Take World War II. “A nonviolent movement,” President Obama once pointed out, “could not have halted Hitler's armies.”15 Nevertheless, Luke seems to be a consequentialist pacifist in TLJ, right to the bitter end. Think of how he defeats Kylo Ren. He does something that cannot possibly be violent: he appears as a “Force projection” that cannot touch Kylo – only distract him. This is the quintessential example of a proactive, nonviolent action that stops a violent one. Indeed, if Luke's view changed at all over the course of the film, it was in rejecting the misconception that pacifism called him to inaction, and instead realizing that it called him to action of the nonviolent type.
Defenses of pacifism are overt in the novelization of TLJ. Consider what Poe thinks to himself after Finn demands that they go out and help Luke in his fight against Kylo:
Was this the same Finn who'd insisted he wasn't here to join another army? And not so long ago, he [Poe] would have reacted the same way – looking for anything he could fly and blasting off across the plains. But he'd learned there were other ways to fight – and that those who chose them were not less brave.16
The novel opens with Luke having a dream about what his life would've been like had he never gotten involved (in ANH). He lives on Tatooine, married to a woman named Camie, managing his uncle Owen and aunt Beru's moisture farm (who both got to live a full life). The galaxy is “at peace” under Imperial rule, and he lives a perfectly contented life.17
Later, Luke tells Rey that sailing ships have arrived on the island of Ahch‐To for their monthly raid on the caretaker's village. When she demands they spring to action, Luke says,
Do you know what a true Jedi would do right now? Nothing. If you meet the raiding party with Force, they'll be back next month – with greater numbers and greater violence. Will you be here next month? […] That burn inside you, that anger thinking what the raiders are going to do? The books in the Jedi library say ignore that. Only act when you can maintain balance. Even if people get hurt.18
As is also revealed in the deleted scene shot for the film, it turns out the “raid” is actually a monthly feast – which is perhaps what the monthly raids turned into over time, in the absence of a violent response. Luke's philosophy, it seems, was best captured by Rose, after she saved Finn from sacrificing himself: “That's how we are gonna win. Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love.”
Ultimately, Mark Hamill, after conversations with director Rian Johnson, agreed with Johnson's take on Luke: “I was surprised at how he saw Luke. And it took me a while to get around to his way of thinking, but once I was there it was a thrilling experience. I hope it will be for the audience too.”19 Interestingly, the idea that Luke would question – in his old age – the violent role that he and the Rebellion played in the Empire's demise is not contrary to the vision of the original creator of Star Wars, George Lucas. According to Peter Sciretta at Slash Film, the story that Lucas pitched to Disney for Episode VII was one where “30 years after the fall of the Empire, Luke had gone to a dark place and secluded himself in a Jedi temple on a new planet … meditating, reassessing his whole life.”20
And this is perhaps the best reason for retitling Episode VIII “A New Hope.” Luke gives the Resistance a new hope not only by sacrificing himself, but also by showing Rey a different way to be a Jedi. Granted, it takes her a while; she goes on the violent offensive quite a few times early on in Episode IX, but every time it's clear that she's acting, wrongly, in anger – like Luke did. In her battle with Palpatine, however, her combat moves are mainly defensive – only deflecting and dodging blaster bolts to let the Emperor's guards kill each other, and repelling the Emperor's Force lightning back at him while Palpatine wants her to kill him in anger. That Rey, by the end, is a new kind of Jedi is symbolized by the color of her lightsaber: “yellow optimism.”21
Of course, at the end of Episode IX, the Resistance wins the day with an impressive show of violence. This, perhaps, highlights the objection to pacifism that those who are pacifists only have the freedom to be such because of the efforts of those who act violently. At the same time, however, we have to wonder whether the victory earned by the Resistance will be as short‐lived as the Rebellion's victory in ANH or even ROTJ. How often does violence actually make things better? We're told that it does – that it's often necessary – but Palpatine also told Anakin that resurrecting the dead was a dark side ability; Episode IX taught us it comes from the light. Perhaps those in power – like the Canto Bight elite – who profit from violence are manipulating us just like Palpatine manipulated Anakin. Perhaps that's also what those who say “TLJ ruined Luke Skywalker by making him nonviolent” are doing. Instead, I suggest that Luke's growth as a character into a pacifist, one who recognizes the real consequences of violence, solidifies his status as the definitive guardian of peace and justice. Perhaps Luke Skywalker is not the last Jedi, but the ultimate Jedi.