Are the Jedi a Religion? (Part Two)

PART ONE

Yoda and Luke, young and sweaty, in Episode V

Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, describes an encounter with the Dunkers, an German Anabaptist denomination. Like Anabaptists throughout history, the Dunkers were widely criticized as heretics, for devising novel doctrines, which they mostly transmitted orally. Franklin suggested the Dunkers dispel such criticisms by publishing their precepts. The leader rejected these terms, refusing to bind believers in perpetuity to understandings they have right now.

Like millions of Americans, I didn’t encounter this exchange directly; I read it in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. The Dunkers, formally the Schwarzenau Brethren, have evolved into so many separate orders from pressures of doctrinal revision that the group Franklin encountered barely exists anymore. Few Anabaptists published books until the Twentieth Century, when cheap printing and widespread literacy made book-writing downright mandatory.

The comparison between Dunkers and Jedi isn’t obvious in the Original Trilogy. Sure, the Jedi, whom we encounter personally in Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, aren’t doctrinally rigid. Kenobi, in Episode IV, exhorts Luke to let the Force flow through himself, but doesn’t offer concrete beliefs. Only Yoda offers anything resembling doctrines, in Episode V, and even then it’s vague; Yoda speaks in aphorisms pilfered from Buddhist and Abrahamic traditions, not really Scripture.

In the prequels, we get insights into what Jedi actually believe, though like Yoda’s teachings on Dagobah, the Order discusses its beliefs obliquely. We get mentions that Jedi don’t form material attachments, including marriage, and don’t seek revenge. We know the Jedi have a Code, because Obi-Wan tells Anakin his refusal to obey that Code keeps him off the Council. As with much in the prequels, though, exact details are offloaded into ancillary literature.

By Episode VIII, we discover the Jedi have sacred texts, which Luke guards on planet Ahch-To, but has apparently never read. Doctrine has become, for the senescent Jedi, something to protect and defend from entropy, not something which guides his living. Formal, fixed doctrine has become his justification for not engaging with a chaotic galaxy. This perhaps explains why, spoiler alert, Yoda’s embodied ghost destroys the Jedi library at the climax.

Yoda and Luke, aged and transcendent, in Episode VIII

The collision between lived belief, and fixed Code, reflects where it’s originally encountered. Luke learns Jedi principles in places of sweaty organic growth, the Tatooine desert and Dagobah swamps. Obi-Wan and Anakin, however, discover Jedi teachings in the Jedi Temple, built on the Republic’s capital planet and physically attached to the halls of power. Luke studies amid farms and wilderness; Anakin studies surrounded by built environment and compulsory law.

When we first directly encounter the Empire’s capital city-planet, Coruscant, in Timothy Zahn’s 1991 novel Heir to the Empire, we see an entire world-spanning arcology. In direct rip-off of Asimov’s capital-planet Trantor, Coruscant is so thoroughly over-built that lower levels, given entirely to savagery and animalism, lie uncharted beneath the governing upper layers. The Empire’s id and superego, chained together on one planet, forever forbidden to communicate.

The prequels, which place higher premium on continuity and world-building, necessarily describe Jedi belief in far greater detail than other films. This comes across concretely in the prequels’ aggressive use of cities as their principle setting. The Jedi Code demands adherents have strict degrees of self-control, and never, ever indulge their ids—as people dwelling in cities generally must, because close quarters and density require closely policed etiquette.

Throughout the movies, the Skywalker family’s character arc takes center stage. But for Jedi spirituality, Yoda’s development seems most important: in the prequels, he defends doctrinal purity at first and last. Jediism, for city-dwelling Yoda, connected to power, involves accordance with textual accuracy. No wonder, through the prequels, Yoda appears physically younger, but angry, scolding, always demanding greater compliance from Padawans and younglings.

Yoda of Episodes V and VIII, by contrast, has changed his credo. He demands Luke live entirely in the present, conscious of what the Force requires of him right now. I’m reminded of German theologian and Nazi resistor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote that, in Eden, Adam didn’t need to consider right and wrong; he just knew God’s will. All Christianity, for Bonhoeffer, involved restoring this state of perfect understanding, so we can act entirely in the present.

We can understand Jedi belief, therefore, as evolutionary. Inscribed into texts and honored in temples, it became inflexible, unresponsive to a galaxy populated by living beings. Stripped of official standing, forced to practice where people live, it becomes, like Dunker theology, responsive to believers’ changing needs. The Temple is the theology of a dying republic. Dagobah is the theology of living insurgency.

PART THREE

Are the Jedi a Religion? (Part One)

A friend recently zapped me with this puzzler. We know, from Episode IV, that both Han Solo and Governor Tarkin identify the Jedi as a religion—Solo calls it a “hokey religion,” and Tarkin tells Darth Vader he is “all that is left of your religion.” Yet the characterization of the Jedi as a religion hasn’t always sat well with everybody. If the Jedi are a religion, what are their doctrines and beliefs? Where are their houses of worship? What is the Jedi god?

Superficially, the Jedi resemble a religion, or at least a religious order. They share belief in a transcendent Force binding reality, and practice physical and mental disciplines to attune themselves to it. Yoda, in Episode V, talks expansively about belief. The prequels reveal the existence of a Jedi temple, Jedi robes, even Jedi haircuts. Like Tibetan or Dominican monks, they have a progress, from novitiate to adept to master, representing spiritual stages.

Does this, however, make them a religion? The U.S. Marine Corps shares a haircut, uniform, celebrated headquarters, order of ranks, physical and academic drills, and shared principles, spoken aloud much like Christianity’s Apostles’ Creed or Islam’s five daily prayers. The Corps even has its own hymn! Yet nobody would mistake the Marines for a religious order. Clearly the making of a religion starts deeper than the movies’ superficial traits.

We immediately get crossways on the difficulty of creating a meaningful definition of the word “religion.” When George Lucas wrote Episode IV, originally entitled simply Star Wars, the ascendant definition came from Princeton anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in his 1966 essay “Religion as a Cultural System.” Geertz’s definition is so influential that it deserves quoting in full: religion is

(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-standing moods and motivations in men [sic] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

Admittedly this looks opaque, but Geertz clarifies his meaning sufficiently that readers, at least those familiar with dense “academese,” can follow his meaning. Geertz’s definition seemed so airtight to Euro-American scholars that it obtained in scholarly circles for about four decades. Thus it dominated during the years both the Original Trilogy and the prequels had pop culture standing.

This definition, in context, pretty concisely encapsulates many science fiction religions: Jedi, Frank Herbert’s Bene Gesserit, and Philip K. Dick’s Mercerism. But in the Twenty-First Century, Geertz’s system has come under criticism for primarily describing Christianity, and most especially Protestantism as practiced in North America and Northern Europe. It sees religion as both private (“I believe”) and separate from mechanisms of public order.

Geertz’s critics, led primarily by Talal Asad, note that other religions don’t see the Enlightenment-era division between individual faith and community structure implicit in Geertz’s definition. In the loose cultural confederation sometimes called “the West” we have Christianity, which describes belief, and Christendom, which describes a territory where Christianity has been historically widespread. Islam or Hinduism are, by contrast, both faith and people, simultaneously.

(Judaism’s maintenance of unique identity through ritual, even as belief in God dwindles, deserves mention here, though explication can wait for later.)

In Episode VIII, Luke Skywalker seems to reflect this distinction. He advocates ending the Jedi Order, on the expectation that by doing so, the Force will devolve outward to everyone. (How this will happen without mentorship, he elides.) Where the old Jedi hoarded their knowledge inside a Temple, enforced purity tests upon its novitiate, and purged apostates, Luke apparently wants everyone to access the Force equally, regardless of membership in any formal order.

Luke’s arc within Episode VIII apparently moves toward reconciliation of the Asad and Geertz models of religion. By the end, Luke recognizes the importance of the Jedi as centralized order of career religious within a larger mass of citizen believers. Just as Benedictine monks and Sufi mystics hoard nothing fundamentally from mainstream Christians and Muslims, respectively, Jedi needn’t necessarily hoard Force access from anyone else—though like medieval monks, they apparently did.

Therefore, within the canonical movies, the Jedi have religious trappings which reflect Western society’s struggle to reckon with religion in itself. The Jedi’s diminished importance within faith in the Force parallels organized religion’s diminution, even as less systematic spirituality remains widespread. But that doesn’t really express whether the Jedi are a religion. For that, we need to consider what the Jedi actually claim to believe.

PART TWO
PART THREE

Batman, Edward Cullen, and the Mythic Actor

Robert Pattinson

Last week, Warner Brothers announced their tentative casting of British actor Robert Pattinson as Batman—and the Internet collectively flipped its shit. People posted wrath to social media, shared windy YouTube videos, and even started an online petition to revoke this casting. The screeching eerily resembles the same anger that followed Ben Affleck’s announced casting in 2013. Internet users apparently have nothing to do except get pissed off by popular culture.

The Pattinson-related outrage relates heavily to his prior prominent role, Edward Cullen from Twilight. Some criticism is explicitly sexist: because he headlined a “girl” franchise, he’s tainted for a boy-friendly property like Batman. Others dog-whistle their bigotry, talking about how an actor carries past roles into new ones (then complaining about shparkles). These complaints probably are the minority, but are voluble enough to sound more prominent than they are.

I’m tempting fire here, but I’ll say it: there’s something to this.

Djoymi Baker, lecturer of Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, writes that actors playing multiple roles serve functions similar to retellings of classic myths in ancient times. Homer could tell myths about Odysseus, say, possibly composing them fresh; but he could also throw in something comparing Odysseus to Jason, and audiences would respond immediately. Understanding one myth made understanding other myths simpler thereafter.

Actors do something similar. When William Shatner, say, appears as Denny Crane in Boston Legal, Dr. Baker writes, his bodily presence carries past roles, like Captain Kirk and T.J. Hooker, onto the screen with him. Every actor contains elements of past performances. Baker calls this an “intertext,” a critical term which usually refers to ways one text comments on another, like Marvel interpreting DC. Except Baker’s model makes the actor personally a “text.”

Every character Robert Pattinson plays will draw comparison to Edward Cullen, just as every Bill Shatner appearance draws Captain Kirk comparisons. Some actors resist this: while Shatner has embraced being Kirk forever, Leonard Nimoy resisted being Spock for decades, and failed. Other actors, like Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Robert Patrick (T-1000,), and Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates) were forced to accept their lifelong association with just one role.

Dr. Baker, however, specifically cites Batman as a modern mythological figure that, like Achilles, gets transformed through successive retellings. Each new Batman telling, including the 1960s television series, the Burton/Schumacher movies, Christian Bale’s version, and the DCEU, has referenced and commented upon previous manifestations. Simultaneously, they’ve also differed from whatever came before, thus advancing our appreciation of the character.

Pattinson as Batman will bring the role a youthful sexuality it hasn’t previously had. Though previous big-screen Batman portrayals have been both attractive and sexual, like Michael Keaton or Christian Bale, the sex has always remained at a tasteful remove. Because Pattinson’s persona involves the first adolescent fumblings toward romance, any attempt to not address this history in his Bruce Wayne portrayal would merit condemnation from fans and critics alike.

Three actors, one role: Michael Keaton, Adam West, Christian Bale (click to enlarge)

Directors wanting to avoid actors’ prior history have only one realistic choice: cast actors with no history. Legendary screenwriter William Goldman describes the decision to cast Kathy Bates, a relative unknown, in Misery: James Caan, the male lead, had a history of personal struggle and substance abuse that meshed with his character. But we know nothing about Annie, nothing. Kathy Bates was, for the audience, a complete blank slate, capable of shifting like a storm.

Studios know actors have professional histories. Sometimes they even bank on that: Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock, and Samuel L. Jackson are bankable properties whom audiences expect to propel stories in certain directions, and purchase tickets specifically to see that happening. We know what we expect from these actors, and they pretty consistently deliver—with occasional minor diversions and surprise reversals.

Having said that, however, I must acknowledge that actors sometimes reset their histories altogether. A seismic rift exists in Michael Keaton’s career between everything that came before Batman, and everything after. When discussing earlier movies, like Mr. Mom and Beetlejuice, it sometimes feels like discussing a completely different actor. Batman so completely changed Keaton’s career that he never shook it, which he acknowledged with 2014’s Birdman.

Such reversals, however, are rare. 1989’s Batman reset Keaton’s career, but forced Jack Nicholson to redouble on a character type he’d been playing, to greater and greater degrees of caricature, for twenty years. So yes, Robert Pattinson will probably meld Edward Cullen into Bruce Wayne. If they’re smart, his producers will lean into this. Because actors are, themselves, the carriers of modern mythological form.

Death Can Only Be Understood By the Survivors

This beautiful long-haired house panther is my boy Pele. I know remarkably little about his backstory. I don’t know where he came from, how many homes he’s had before mine, or even how old he is. The only clear, inarguable fact I know about him, is that I adopted him from my co-worker Jeff during the upheaval surrounding Jeff’s expensive, acrimonious divorce. And that Jeff died last week.

Pele loves to cuddle in my lap and bury himself under my arm. He loves laps so much, in fact, that I’m typing this essay with great difficulty, because he’s draped himself across my forearms, with his paws wrapped around my left arm in a big bear hug. He desperately craves human attention, and when he discovered that I sleep lying on my side, curled into a semi-fetal position, he decided the center of that curl is a pretty cool place to be.

Jeff loved alcohol. Though he was a frequently diligent employee, who didn’t hesitate to accept additional task assignments and overtime hours when needed, he also repeatedly showed up to work at 7 a.m. with beer already on his breath. He told giddy stories of various exploits he’d accomplished, stories which almost invariably began with him already being wasted. He had one of the worst cases of alcoholic rosacea I’d ever seen.

I hesitate to say too much, because Jeff was actively in my life less than one year (I’ve known his cat nearly three times as long as I knew him), and because he leaves behind a ten-year-old son who doesn’t need a dark cloud over his adolescence, or anyway a darker cloud than he’ll have growing up without a father. But I’m a writer, and like most writers, I can’t comprehend difficult situations without writing about them. I hope Jeff will forgive me.

Problem drinking is widespread in my workplace. At least three co-workers are capable of drinking a twelve-pack on a weeknight and still showing up for work the next morning. One co-worker won’t be eligible to have his driver’s license reinstated until 2021. I’ve witnessed colleagues arriving for work so thoroughly hung over, they needed to find secluded spots away from bosses’ gaze to grab quick naps before beginning the productive day.

Alcohol is, of course, a painkiller. Before scientists invented anaesthetics, they used brandy and bourbon to numb patients before surgeries and dentistry. Nowadays, people use alcohol to numb their brains from the maladaptive effects of lifelong trauma. Scratch below an addict’s surface, I have learned, and you’ll find somebody who survived something horrific, usually at a very early age. The issue isn’t whether, it’s what.



Sadly, I never knew Jeff well enough to understand his full story. He fleetingly mentioned an adversarial relationship with his own father, but always changed the topic quickly. He was determined to not repeat his father’s mistakes with his own son; but he also hadn’t yet grappled with his own history, and therefore needed to numb the pain artificially. So he surrounded himself with living things he could love.

Besides Pele, he had two dogs, an energetic little lapdog and the chillest retriever mix I ever met. As his marriage crumbled, and he saw less of his son behind a difficult custody battle, he doted religiously on his animals. But as his divorce dragged on interminably, he couldn’t make house payments, and eventually needed to move back in with his mother—a humiliating concession in a 46-year-old man. So he needed to re-home his animals.

He was red-eyed, and even drunker than usual, the day I arrived to take Pele home with me.

Not much later, Jeff got into a heated argument with a manager and walked off the job forever. I only saw him twice after that. Both times, he had his son with him, as well as his wits. But I heard stories from other colleagues who ran into him without his son. His drinking had apparently intensified; one reported he’d begun suffering minor hemorrhages because his capillaries were shot. I also heard he’d begun shuffling when he walked, like a much older man.

I wonder whether Pele is capable of understanding Jeff’s absence. Like me, he knew Jeff less than one year. I’ve cuddled Pele and talked to him about what happened, but he just blinks his pretty golden eyes, so I don’t know. I’m typing this through tears, while Pele purrs contentedly in my lap. Maybe he knows he’s loved right now. Maybe that’s enough.

Shame On You, Governor Ricketts

Wednesday Pete Ricketts, the Republican governor of Nebraska, tweeted this piece of absolute bilge:

Nebraska is a #prolife state, and we support the brave pro-life champions and their work in Alabama and Georgia.https://t.co/WCUGYqZliM

— Gov. Pete Ricketts (@GovRicketts) May 15, 2019

Without doubt, my response to Governor Ricketts’ worthless message is colored by my beliefs. I’ve described myself as a Pro-Choice Christian, because my faith requires me to refrain from imposing myself on others’ most harrowing medical choices. Ricketts, by contrast, throws his weight behind one of America’s most authoritarian mandatory birth laws, implying he’ll push something similar in Nebraska soon.

Let’s make something clear: Nebraska’s current political climate, while deeply opposed to abortion, is anything but pro-life. Nebraska has one of America’s highest maternal mortality rates, especially in poor and rural areas—and remember, most of Nebraska is rural. Nebraska’s investment in early childhood education is dismal. While other conservative states impose an abstinence-only sex-ed curriculum on schools, Nebraska has no statewide standards whatsoever.

That’s saying nothing about what many opponents call a clearly pro-life issue: Governor Ricketts has actively campaigned to reinstate, and expand, the death penalty. After Nebraska’s legislature repealed capital punishment, Ricketts, who was born rich, used his personal money to fund a referendum drive to get it restored. He then executed Nebraska’s first criminal in twenty-one years, despite having to illegally import drugs from India to do it.

So if this is Governor Ricketts’ idea of “a #prolife state”, God help us if he ever decides to become pro-death.

Governor Ricketts opposes the Affordable Care Act, and continues actively slow-walking a Medicaid Expansion bill approved by a majority of Nebraska voters, on putatively libertarian grounds. He doesn’t want federal or state government getting involved in economic issues. Yet both the Alabama abortion law, and Nebraska’s continued support for capital punishment, are massively authoritarian. You cannot kill people, or regulate uteruses, without circumscribing other people’s freedoms.

There’s an important distinction, though. Governor Ricketts, like many current right-wing mavens, quietly elides the economic impacts of his policies. The ACA would pinch insurance providers, who are overwhelmingly rich: insurance is one of America’s most lucrative private industries. Women who seek abortion, by contrast, are generally poor—and overwhelmingly likely to be even poorer after being denied safe, legal abortion.

Governor Pete Ricketts
(official portrait)

Based on the evidence, it appears Ricketts (who, again, was born rich) sides with money. His talk of having anti-abortion ethics is strictly a rhetorical condom; he will support whatever positions further enrich the wealthy, and further impoverish the poor. Any attempt to recreate the Alabama abortion law in Nebraska, without improvements to WIC, Head Start, public schools, and other instruments of collective betterment, will clearly make the poor even poorer.

One only need read summaries of these new, aggressive anti-abortion laws to understand this. The leading issue, for me, is the stipulation requiring police to investigate every miscarriage as potential homicide. Much coverage of this stipulation has focused on the fundamental lack of knowledge about reproduction this implies. I’d go further: when societies provide prenatal medical care below the standards available, miscarriage is an economic issue.

That is to say, poor women are more likely to miscarry, because they have less access to appropriate medicine. Therefore, under these laws, they’re more likely to be considered criminals, and have to defend themselves against serious accusations, than better-off women. So they’ll have to spend money they don’t have on criminal defense, going into debt to cover the expenses, locking themselves into further intractable debt.

Therefore the law that Alabama Governor Kay Ivey just ratified, and which Governor Ricketts implies he’d like to replicate, isn’t a passive defense of life. It’s an active effort to legally and morally punish poor women for being poor, and for being women. It isn’t a benevolent act designed to protect children, no matter what rhetorical spin advocates place upon it; if it were, it would include basic schooling and medical care.

So, let me address Governor Ricketts directly: Sir. If you continue this path, you’ll first lose all libertarian credibility forever. You cannot champion libertarianism for rich people, while increasing authoritarian intrusion in poor people’s wombs, without people noticing. Many voters may applaud this high-handed action on moral grounds, so whatever. But libertarians will forever notice your authoritarianism, and they generally have long memories.

But that’s only your first loss, sir. More seriously, you’ll lose the support of Nebraskans who will see you increasing police presence in conservative rural areas—which are your base. They’ll see your representatives interrogating women in hospital beds. They’ll see you actively criminalizing poverty. And sir, they will notice, and they won’t let you forget this shame.

Common Decency as Radical Resistance

This stock art shows how companies want us to think their call centers
run: orderly, efficient, and generally positive in mood

My co-worker loves receiving robocalls. Seriously. When he receives a robocall at work, he takes great pleasure in putting the call on speaker and finding ways to antagonize and provoke the poor minimum wage earner on the other end. It can be pretty funny to watch him prod the poor, hapless human operator… if you forget the worker, who probably needs the job pretty badly.

Back in the 1990s, when landlines still mattered, I spent a year working in a call center. That work is handy for desperate people, because it's one of the few remaining jobs where you can apply, get hired, and start training, on the same day. But it also makes you massively unpopular with customers. I had strangers compare me to a pickpocket, a prostitute, and Lt. William Calley.

In my day, most insults directed at telemarketers were class-based, attacking us for being poor. Nowadays, as advanced technology let's calls travel cheaply from places like Lahore and Mumbai, my co-worker has shown me an added component of telemarketer hatred: racism. My co-worker regularly dumps on callers for being brown, living outside America, and having an accent. That's where things get especially cringey.

Though I admit these insult comedy shows have their moments, I can't ignore that he's dumping on poor, off-white, and international workers for not resembling him. It's racist, classist, and ethnocentric. Worst of all, while reducing his targets to impotent rage (most aren't allowed to hang up; some don't even have a disconnect button), he isn't hurting the people who profit from this commercial-grade annoyance.

Then I remember Eunice.

More than twenty years later, I don't remember whether Eunice was even her name. Maybe I’m imputing that upon her. I remember her voice sounded old, even slightly frail, when I called her, which was relatively late in my shift. Because of the two-hour time zone difference, I probably reached her approaching sundown in her area. After all this time, I only clearly remember one thing:

She engaged me in a conversation running nearly ninety minutes.

Let me emphasize that, lest you miss the importance. An aged woman named (possibly) Eunice kept me talking, in a friendly and convivial but completely aimless manner, for nearly an hour and a half. I don’t know whether Eunice was lonely.  Maybe she hadn’t had a meaningful, low-pressure conversation in weeks. Maybe I was the first person to talk like a friend in ages.

As the conversation wound down, about fifteen minutes before my shift ended, Eunice said the one thing I remember most clearly: “Thank you, sir. You seem like a nice young man. I hope you find what you’re looking for.” Of course, at that moment, I wasn’t looking for anything besides my paycheck. But looking back, I suspect Eunice knew something about life’s arc that I had yet to learn.

In real life, call centers are chaotic places. Emotional breakdowns are common.

My co-worker thinks he’s performing some bizarre kind of resistance against robocalls by antagonizing the human operators who eventually pick up. In my telemarketing days, potential customers I called thought they did likewise by calling me insulting names or slinging vulgarities. Yet none of these loud, angry demonstrations even registered with managers who pressured us to perform or risk returning to unemployment.

Eunice, by contrast, actively stopped the system for ninety minutes. Did Eunice know I was forbidden, by company policy and FCC regulation, to hang up before she did? Probably not. But she knew, if she kept me talking, I wasn’t making more calls, annoying more people, running up profits for management. For ninety minutes, Eunice successfully lowered my stress level, while running up costs for management.

That, friends, is positive resistance. Eunice transformed a routine call, an annoyance for her and a drudgery of late capitalism for me, and transformed it into a humane connection. She didn’t shout, unload, or act boorish. She didn’t attack me for needing a paycheck. She simply hijacked an impersonal action of cube-farm enterprise, and turned it into a moment of pure, unadulterated humanity.

I didn’t realize Eunice performed an act of resistance for nearly fifteen years. Only looking back later did I realize how radical, anti-capitalist, and anti-establishmentarian an act it was for her to have an unscripted conversation with a stranger. My need for money allowed me, under company guidance, to turn her into a commodity… and myself into a machine. She turned me back into a human. Then she let me do likewise for her.

Only years later could I recognize how revolutionary that really was.

At Prayer in the Temple of Commerce

I needed, this weekend, to make a last-minute purchase at a big-box retailer. I won’t name names, because this isn’t about particular chains. However, after biking to the store, winded and tired, I stumbled into a sort of no-space. The air was climate-controlled, the aisles spacious and well-stocked. The floor was without feature, while the ceiling was so high that, like clouds, I couldn’t distinguish specific details; I could’ve been literally anywhere on the planet.

In the epilogue to Greg Grandin’s book The End of the Myth, Grandin mentions America’s collective outrage to discover, at the height of the Trump Administration’s “family separation” policy along the border, that many children, isolated in a nation where they don’t speak the language, got warehoused in a prison that used to be a WalMart. Officials didn’t even need to change the building much; they applied their brand, and voilà, it was a prison.

Like many Americans, I initially felt the intuitive gut-clench of fury upon learning children, children, were treated in this way. But, stepping into such an arcology of modern commerce this weekend, I realized: that’s who we are now as Americans. We live in a world of modularity and bigness, a culture that celebrates the vast and complete interchangeability of life’s corners. The total correspondence between WalMart and a prison isn’t a bug, it’s the system.

Visit any randomly selected big box retailer or enclosed shopping mall on Saturday afternoon. Notice how different age brackets respond. We adults often accept the necessity of these basilicas of commerce, and circulate constantly, eyes down and feet constantly in motion, interacting only with our designated in-group, not unlike prisoners in The Yard. However, children, not yet socialized to these environments, absolutely hate them, and often scream bloody murder, until they learn to accept fate.

Think about that difference. Children, still beholden to the first-order impulses that reflect human evolution, God’s creation, or whatever, want to run, play, meet new people, and build communities, as children do. Adults resign themselves to the environment, and go along to get along. Do stores and malls socialize adults into complicity with a system totally counter to evolutionary drives? Not by themselves, certainly, but they’re part of an elaborate system to accomplish this goal.

Shopping for hardware this weekend, I realized, the owners had successfully isolated me from the outside world. Was it sunny or gloomy out? If I hadn’t just been outside five minutes earlier, I couldn’t have told you. What about social conditions outside: rich or poor? Peaceful or violent? Who knows? I’ve visited big-box retailers from the West Coast to Kansas City, and once you’re inside, you could be on the moon for all you know.

Converting one store into a prison, thus, isn’t any big stretch. Industrious entrepreneurs have converted abandoned big box retailers into schools, public libraries, and suburban megachurches. Because ultimately, they all feed the same base impulse. Complete isolation made me believe I could assuage the emptiness inside by purchasing batteries, bananas, or tube socks. Change the interior layout of the building, and you can fill that emptiness with wisdom, salvation, or penance. It’s all modular anyway.

Because fundamentally, as humans, we know we’re missing something. Christians once tried to plug that absence with God’s love, while Buddhists encouraged us to disconnect from the material world and become pure spirit. Religion has retreated from the greater discussion of human experience, at least in our time, leaving a vacancy without any ready-made solution. Big box architecture accentuates this absence, then encourages us to assuage it with… well, with whatever they’re selling this week.

In one of philosophy’s most misused orphan quotes, Michel Foucault famously wrote: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” The interchangeability of these buildings emphasizes, to Foucault, their identical purposes in social formation. They isolate individuals from their core evolutionary drives, and redirect them to whatever authorities consider admirable. One wonders why, writing as late as 1977, Foucault’s famous list didn’t include the already ubiquitous malls and K-Marts.

No wonder Siddhartha or Saint Anthony didn’t just abandon their lives while seeking transcendance, they abandoned built environment altogether. Because this isn’t an individual function. The entire social arcology serves to redirect humans to accept a power hierarchy that, if we could run and climb trees, we’d immediately realize is artificial. For all their faults, churches and temples encourage us to look up and aspire. Big box architecture forces us to look down, and comply.

Why I'm Not a Socialist

A factory is nothing without its people

When I worked at the factory, my life was dominated by machines. Simply reaching my workstation meant getting around whizzing forklifts and huge stamps that turned rolled steel into components. At my workstation, my responsibilities began with a loading hopper, ran along a conveyor belt, and ended in a crimp-seam setter. The line then proceeded through a paint sprayer, drying oven, ink-jet printer, various options for packaging, and a robot for loading the shipping pallet.

Whenever I hear leftist advocates encouraging socialism, citing Marxist slogans like “workers control the means of production,” I can’t forget that line. In order to manufacture simple, widely used car parts, we had millions of dollars in specialized equipment, and as noisy, difficult, and onerous as these machines were, making the parts without them would’ve been even worse. Yet I cannot help wondering whether I, or any reasonable employee, ever want to own this equipment?

We’ve heard the word “socialism” flung around so wildly recently that it means little. From tinkering around capitalism’s edges, to near-beer communism, so many philosophies now wear the name “socialism” that it’s difficult to discuss the topic without bogging down in technicalities. But to some degree, all socialisms agree that workers should control the fruits of their labors. And I cannot imagine how that’s possible without owning the production system, which I don’t ever want.

It’s impossible to improve the outcomes of labor without massive capital investments—and yes, they’ll remain capital investments even if we exclude “capital” from our vocabulary. Without the machines streamlining our production line, the fuel filters we manufactured would’ve been more expensive than a car. They would’ve required hand-tooled, painstakingly sealed, individually painted… I could continue. Point is, these million-dollar machines kept labor output affordable, so you can afford fuel filters without a second mortgage.

So. The machines are necessary for manufacturing. But should the people operating the machines own them? I say no. Currently, the corporation owns the equipment, which ties them, and only them, to their massive sunk cost. Employees, unhappy with factory conditions, could hypothetically walk away. Management, chained to the equipment they own, are stuck with it, and with their jobs. That’s the deeper problem with owning the means of production: eventually it owns you too.

I saw this daily with certain employees: specifically maintenance mechanics. Unlike line workers, like me, who had no ownership stake, mechanics owned their own tools. Many of these tools are very specialized, having only one or two uses, but the mechanics needed to own them. This resulted in a buy-in totalling thousands of dollars, just to do their job. These mechanics couldn’t change careers, at least until they’d paid the amortized cost of their tools.

A factory is nothing without its machines

Worse, it didn’t just tie them to one career; it tied them to one employer. In our small-ish community, there were only three about three employers who could provide work to machinists, meaning labor price couldn’t float. If the machinists withheld their labor, they could only travel to two other workplaces… where they’d probably worked already. Thus, by tying workers to their very expensive tools, employers weakened workers’ bargaining positions. Basically the opposite of socialism.

When workers own tools, they own their jobs. This isn’t entirely bad, and it explains why, working construction now, I had no problem buying my own impact driver and cordless circular saw. But once you own your job, your non-work life changes consummately. Once I owned carpentry tools, I didn’t just do carpentry during the day; it became my off-hours hobby, partly to justify, if only to myself, that I hadn’t bought into my job.

To put it another way, you don’t just buy your tools, you buy into your tools. There’s a categorical difference between owning about $200 worth of power tools, and owning thousands, even millions, of dollars of specialized equipment. If my colleagues and I banded together to purchase the fuel filter production line, we’d own the output of our labors, certainly, Herr Marx. But the production line would also own us, preventing us from walking away.

Farmers should own their land. Carpenters should own their tools. When you describe conventional, multiply skilled jobs, this makes sense, as workers can decide independently to contract with capital as equals, or employ themselves. But industrial production doesn’t work that way. Human labor and physical capital multiply one another, at the expense of single, non-portable skills. In manufacturing, “equality” requires workers to be able to walk away. Which they can’t, if they’re chained to ownership.

See also: Why I'm Not Conservative Anymore