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has now given us a tin heart as a substitute, thus fulfilling that dream in reverse. To regard technology as a contribution to human life is one thing; to think of technology as the means of raising the status of human nature is to repeat the mistake of Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, who returns from his last voyage having discovered a society of beings that look like horses but display a rational understanding that far surpasses anything that Gulliver has experienced in human company, and develops a loathing for the human species. Totally misanthropic, he rejects his wife and children and chooses the company of horses in the barn. A preference for the products of technology must surely have the same result: an actual demeaning of the truly human and a consequent rejection of the company of people in exchange for the barn and the company of horses (or mechanical dogs). The capacity for reasoning and feeling, for choosing and valuing, is distinctly human. Insofar as it blinds us to this human distinctiveness, humanizing technology ultimately results in dehumanization.

16

“A Certain Point of View”: Lying Jedi, Honest Sith, and the Viewers Who Love Them

SHANTI FADER

Not long after our second (or was it third?) viewing of Attack of the Clones, my boyfriend and I became involved in one of our not-uncommon debates about Lucas’s galaxy in general and the Jedi in particular. As we argued the finer points of Jedi philosophy and mindset, he commented, “Isn’t it interesting how the Jedi lie so much more than the Sith, and yet they’re supposed to be the good guys?”

Jedi enthusiast that I am, I automatically leaped to their defense—only to be stopped by the realization that he was right. The Jedi do an awful lot of lying and shading of the truth for a religious order that’s supposed to be on the side of virtue. Obi-Wan Kenobi lies to Luke about his father; Yoda misleads Luke when he arrives on Dagobah; and Mace Windu covers up the fact that the Jedi are losing their powers. By contrast, the Sith do a surprising amount of truth-telling for villains. Count Dooku tells a captive Obi-Wan flat-out that the Senate has been infiltrated by a Sith. Senator Palpatine, aka the Sith Master Darth Sidious, worms his way into power without speaking a single literal untruth.151 And, of course, in one of the most famous moments in Lucas’s entire epic, Darth Vader tells Luke the devastating truth that Obi-Wan had withheld.

The more I thought about it, the more it baffled me. Honesty is generally seen as a virtue (except when someone asks you “Does this make me look fat?”), and lying as a terrible, hurtful vice. Why, then, would Lucas have his Jedi lie and his Sith tell the truth? As far back as Plato and Socrates (fifth and fourth centuries B.C.), philosophers have been wrestling with the puzzle of truth and falsehood, in the process coming up with a varied and fascinating array of ideas. I certainly don’t pretend to have the answer to what truth really is, but in this chapter I’ll explore several possibilities raised by philosophers and reflected in Lucas’s intriguing paradox.

Just the Facts

The search for truth is as old as the first human being who wondered about the meaning of existence, and as modern as the movies playing in today’s multiplex. One of the primary purposes of mythology and religion is to seek the truth about our purpose in this life. “What is truth?” Pontius Pilate famously asked Jesus—and philosophy itself might be seen as an endless search for an answer to that question.

But what, exactly, is truth? On the simplest and most literal level, truth is what corresponds to the facts—to be true, a statement has to correctly represent the way things really are. I can say, “The ticket line for The Phantom Menace stretched all the way around the block.” This statement is true if the ticket line did stretch all the way around the block, and false if I’m exaggerating due to my sore feet. George Lucas envisioned the Star Wars movies, Carrie Fisher played Princess Leia, and John Williams wrote the score: these are