Once the publicity for the Jedi workshop started to skyrocket (or is it skywalk?) I got asked a particular question over and over again.  Even if it wasn’t asked explicity, I could see it in people’s smirking eyes, and feel it in draft left by their open mouths.

“You don’t think all this Jedi stuff is really real, do you?”

It’s not as silly a question as it first sounds.  After all, there are people out there who take this Jedi thing very seriously.  Some have built the beginnings of a religion around it.  Others talk earnestly of trying to live out ‘the Jedi way’ and of their temptations toward ‘the dark side’.

I had two standard responses, both of which I think are still pretty much on target.  The first was, no, I don’t think Jedi are real.  I’m only using Star Wars as a platform from which to launch a learning experience involving things that are real - skills in communication, concentration and control.  I’m trying to make it interesting, that’s all.  The second was related to it.  Do the Scouts have to believe that the works of Rudyard Kipling are literally true in order to profit from Kim’s Game or accept Akela as a model mentor figure?

I’m still thinking of answers to this question, and here’s some arguments I’ve come up with.  Tell me what you think.

(1) Philosophically, there is no such thing as the ‘really real’.  All viewing of reality is ‘seeing-as’ (as, for example, with Jastrow’s duck-rabbit, made famous by Wittgenstein.  The meaning of reality is the use we put it to, what we do with it, how we choose to apply it in our lives.  (Again, thank Wittgenstein, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, for this insight.)  All our knowledge of the world has a personal element; this includes even scientific descriptions of the world, which are supposed to represent the pinnacle of objectivity.  (Thomas Kuhn, the great philosopher of science, again used the duck-rabbit to illustrate his notion of a ‘paradigm shift‘ or the sociological/subjective element in scientific advancement.)  Nuff said!

(2) Do characters have to be historical for us to regard them as role models or inspirational heroes?  Alexander the Great modeled himself on Homer’s Achilles, while Teddy Roosevelt took inspiration from a character in one of Marryat’s books.  Many detectives draw stimulation from Sherlock Holmes, while leaders look to Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth.  As Martin Seligman says in his classic book, Authentic Happiness (138), “Role models and paragons in the culture compellingly illustrate a strength or virtue.  Models may be real (Mahatma Gandhi and humane leadership), apocryphal (George Washington and honesty), or explicitly mythic (Luke Skywalker and flow).”  I didn’t make it up, you know.

(3) There’s something about the ideal of a warrior-monk – which is essentially what the Jedi are – that strikes deep into our subconscious.  There have been many historic examples of warrior-monks in both East and West.  Believe it or not, there were plans in the 60s to form a New Age kind of warrior-monk for the US Army (known as the First Earth Battalion).  There was also an alleged attempt to create a super-soldier by the US in the 70s.  The name of the venture?  Project Jedi.  I kid you not.  Go here for an interesting attempt to base life coaching on the ideal.

So what I’m basically saying is… (1) the Jedi can be ‘real’ in some sense (2) even though they are fictional characters (3) because of their psycholgical impact and mythological resonance.

So get over it.

Image credit: lodefink via Creative Commons.