were_lemur | Jedi and Community in the Old vs. New Republic

Inspired by my ongoing (bad cold inspired) glomp of all the Star Wars movies -- I'm was actually about halfway through ANH before I got called down for dinner, but it's inspired more by the EU stuff than the Original Trilogy, since that stops before the restoration of the Jedi.

Also, I should mention that my reading of the EU hasn't been what you'd call thorough or exhaustive (I originally wrote exhausted, which is an amusing commentary in and of itself.) I haven't read any of the NJO books, for example. But from the few I've read, there's a profound difference on how the Jedi relate to community.

In the Old Republic, the Jedi were set apart from the community they protected. Taken from their families of origin as infants, raised communally, forbidden to marry -- in other words, any kind of "attatchment" to members of the wider Galactic community.

By contrast, New Republic Jedi are fully integrated into the community they serve. Luke and Leia are both married, (Luke to a fellow Jedi) and both parents. And there's also Corran Horn and I think a few others.

I can't help wondering if, had the O.R. Jedi had allowed -- and acknowledged -- the importance of attatchment, they would have been more able to survive the events of the prequel trilogy. In fact, it seems that a lot, if not most of, the mistakes made were directly related to the lack of understanding of the importance of attatchment -- of relationships.

By forbidding marriage, the Jedi set up a situation where Anakin married secretly. He couldn't just come to Yoda and say "hey, I've been having dreams about my wife dying in childbirth, could you, y'know, reccomend a good doctor?

Though based on Yoda's response when Anakin came at the question obliquely (basically telling him that he shouldn't be attatched, that he should practice letting go of the people he was attatched to) was far from a helpful one. In fact, it seems like exactly the wrong thing to say to someone so obviously under strain. Again, by underestimating the importance of attatchments, Yoda left Anakin with no source of solace within the Jedi order, leaving him no choice but to turn outside it.

The Jedi Council, as a whole, also refused to acknowledge that Anakin's loyalty to then-Chancellor Palpatine might put him in an emotionally untenable position when they asked him to spy on the Chancellor for them. In fact, it played right into Palpatine's scheme, destroying Anakin's belief in the principles that the Jedi Order claimed to have stood for (but that's an entirely different meta.)

All three of the failures reached their fulfillment in the moment when Anakin had to choose between Mace Windu (who had expressed his distrust of Anakin all along, and was a member of an order which had forced him to hide his marriage, denied him comfort when he needed it, and and had asked him to betray a friend) and Chancellor Palpatine, who had been his friend and mentor for years, had trusted him with the secret of his Sith-hood, and who offered him a chance to save the woman he loved -- is it really a surprise that he chose exactly the way he did?

From a wider perspective, too, the Jedi setting themselves apart probably didn't help their cause any. When Palpatine accused the Jedi of treason, there was nobody there willing to stand up for the Jedi. A great deal of that, it could be argued, might stem from the fact that nobody had any personal connection to the Jedi. Nobody could say "hey, my brother/wife/cousin is a Jedi, and I know they wouldn't do this. Nobody, in short, was there to get outraged on behalf of the Jedi. Becuase Jedi don't marry, and force-sensitive children are taken away as infants, never to return. Is it any wonder that there might be, deep down, a lingering cultural resentment of that fact?