Ben Kuchera over at Polygon put up a piece a few days back entitled "Luke is right: The Jedi SHOULD be abolished." It was in response to the closing shot of the teaser trailer for Episode VIII, The Last Jedi, where Luke Skywalker stands stoically looking back (presumably at his latest apprentice) and tells them, "It's time for the Jedi to end." Kuchera's piece then goes on to explain why it is a good thing, ending with a fine print disclaimer stating he firmly believes the political principles behind the piece, but still looks forward to plenty of buttkicking in a galaxy far, far away.
Allow me to poke holes in Kuchera's poorly described theses.
First, Kuchera seems to be on the "religion = evil" bandwagon as far as his initial starting point, that people who are religious should not and indeed cannot be trusted with any sort of role in public life. While our politics here in the States certainly seems to have been hijacked by would-be zealots and hypocrites, those individuals are not entirely representative of a body of faith as a whole, and their convictions (if you can honestly call them that) stem more from political hucksterism that spiritual exploration. No less a person than Pope Francis himself has said that it's better to be a good atheist than a bad Christian, and that's a pretty bold statement for a man who heads a Church with several hundred million adherents. Secular humanism didn't simply spring into existence fully formed, but owes a great deal to Enlightenment-era thinkers who rejected the dogma of the Church without condemning the moral precepts that underlaid it. People can be monsters whether they follow a faith or not, a point more than one atheist conveniently forgets at their peril.
For The Republic
Kuchera's "study" of the situation leads him to believe that the Republic has somehow invested the Jedi Order with some sort of status or authority to go around, speak for the Republic, and lop off hands willy nilly. I submit that the Order has a strictly de facto authority rather than a de jure authorization from the Republic. While the Republic may ask for assistance with a situation from the Jedi, the Order is under no obligation to do so. Fans of Knights of The Old Republic will clearly recall what happened when the Order deliberately chose not to intervene with the Mandalorian Wars. While Revan and Malak, along with some of their friends, acted individually, the Order as a whole withheld their support from the Republic. And honestly, what could the Republic have done in that scenario? Draft them? Force an order of warrior-monks into a conflict they didn't believe in? If they could have done that, the Mandalorians wouldn't have been a threat in the first place because the Republic would have already been strong enough to stand them off. By the time of the Prequels, the Order has clearly been around for a very long time. In that time, it has gathered a thick patina of moral authority and legitimacy, something far more ephemeral than statutory or regulatory authority. Because of this, the Jedi perspective is that they work for the Republic (the nation), rather than the Senate (the government), and they're not wrong. While more than a few of them have a certain degree of arrogance, it's hard to fault them for it. After all, when you're an organization that's been around for a thousand generations, you kind of have a reputation to uphold, which also imposes certain standards of behavior which are intended to preserve that reputation. They're not the Senate's lapdogs. They want to defend the Republic. The Senate's job is to listen to the will of the people and act in their interests. The Order's job is make sure there's still a Republic worth living in.
Kuchera's condemnation of Qui-Gon Jinn is utterly sophomoric. He wastes all manner of verbiage decrying the way that Jedi seem to have unlimited police power, then lambasts Qui-Gon for not using it on Tatooine to end slavery. You can't have it both ways! Either he's a fascist for having all this limitless power or he's a feckless incompetent for not using it like he knows he can. I submit that Qui-Gon did what most people would do in a situation where there was no clear cut victory to be had. He made the least awful choice, from his perspective, based on the resources he had available and the constraints he was working under at that particular moment. He was on a mission to stop an entire planet from being strangled into submission. Ridding a second world of slavery was a side quest that he could not undertake within the timeframe he had available. We have no idea what he would have done afterwards, mainly because he had the poor grace to get himself killed. If anything, the example of Qui-Gon and young Anakin is convincing proof that the Order has no actual police powers. Qui-Gon couldn't have ordered a Republic garbage scow to come to Tatooine, much less a fleet. He certainly wasn't going to be whistling up Army troops or Marines to occupy the planet and systematically pacify it. Even his own Order probably wouldn't have been able to do much without investing a lot of time, energy, and manpower that was ultimately going to get called away elsewhere. While slavery may have been illegal as a whole in the Republic, Tatooine has always been considered to be out in the boondocks of the galaxy, outside the force of law no matter how much it might be covered under the letter of it.* In the end, the exigencies of the situation that brought him to Tatooine in the first place are also what moved him to leave the planet and bring only Anakin with him.
A Jedi's Path
The screed continues, wailing at how terrible the Jedi are for stripping people of their agency with the Jedi Mind Trick, how unaccountable they are to any sort of judicial organization for their actions, and how their training programs seem to produce mass murdering tyrants, ultimately concluding that the Jedi were wide open for manipulation and corruption. First, the Prequels do not show the Jedi at their finest. They do not show the thousands of years of relative stability and general peace that has filled the galaxy. For lack of a better phrase, the Prequels catch the Jedi at a bad time. No organization is perfect. No sophonts, human or otherwise, are infallible. The decisions made by the Council are usually made with the best of intentions, and in this period of time, those decisions added up to catastrophe. It might be argued that the Jedi were asked to take on a role that they were supremely ill suited to handling, particularly with regard to large scale interstellar war. The scenario brings to mind the words of Lyndon Johnson: "We did not ask to be the guardians of the gate. But there is nobody else." It's easy to blame the Jedi, but Kuchera completely ignores the role of the Senate in the ignominy of what came right before the start of the Clone Wars. They didn't have to elect Palpatine to the Chancellorship, not with as many possible candidates as there had to have been. They didn't have to vote him emergency powers. However much the Jedi may have stumbled, the Senate screwed up at least as badly. In the most charitable case, the Senate asked the Jedi Council to take control of the Grand Army because they trusted the Jedi to do the right thing with them. In the worst case, the Senate completely abrogated its responsibility to the citizens of the Republic and dumped the responsibility on the Jedi, basically saying, "Hey, you found'em, you lead'em." The fact neither the Senate nor the Jedi knew about the programming for Order 66 is something of a mitigating factor. Palpatine was playing a VERY long game and he played it exceedingly well.
Secondly, while it's hard to argue that the Jedi did a commendable job of making Anakin Skywalker a functional person, or at least failed to properly account for the deep seated emotional traumas he suffered from, their training programs by and large were completely successful at keeping their students from turning into interstellar murder hobos. Even if we go back in the Legacy chronology to the Old Republic Era, and count up all the Jedi who kept to the path, then compare that to those who went over to the Dark Side, I imagine we'll find that the bad guys were a pretty small minority. Darth Vader was the exception that proved the rule. Think about it: 25,000 years, give or take a few centuries, and it took THAT long for somebody to completely wipe out the Order as a functioning entity.** Though it should be pointed out that Palpatine was never a Jedi, and that Order 66 was carried out by the clones rather than Vader himself. Vader did make a key strike at the Jedi Temple, and did a lot of cleanup operations later, but he can't really take much credit for destroying the Jedi Order. Speaking of Palpatine, Kuchera's assertion that Qui-Gon Jinn's callous abandonment of Anakin's mother and the subsequent massacre of Tusken Raiders years later drove Anakin to the Dark Side is utter drivel. It would be more accurate to say that those events created a weakness in an otherwise strong willed person. A chink in his emotional armor which Palpatine was all too happy to exploit to his own ends. Even with good psychotherapy, there's no guarantee Palpatine couldn't have eventually exploited it. The man was incredibly patient.
Third, Kuchera's shrilling about the Jedi acting repressively completely ignores the event that truly started the whole damned mess: The Trade Federation blockading Naboo for the sole purpose of making its head of state surrender control and sovereignty of the system to them. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised he wasn't screaming anti-capitalist "Occupy Wall Street" propaganda slogans in the article. To give you an example which might theoretically happen in the world (albeit under some basically Bizarro World conditions), imagine California blockading all roads leading into Arizona and seizing control of all civilian airports, refusing to let any trucks or planes into the state until the governor signed a document which incorporated Arizona into California, dismissed the Arizona state legislature, and effectively destroyed Arizona as part of the U.S. To bring the hypothetical even closer towards mirroring events in Episode I, imagine the various giants of Silicon Valley banding together and deciding to carry out that sort of blockade, and declaring the entire Copper State to be corporate property. Is it not repressive when conglomerated corporate interests do it? And what did the Senate do about the situation? They asked the Order for help, and two Jedi were sent to talk with the head of the Trade Federation blockade. They weren't given secret orders to kill the commander of the fleet. They weren't told to blow up the flagship. They were sent to talk. And they were almost assassinated just for showing up. It's generally considered to be poor manners to murder negotiators, especially before the initial positions are even presented.
Fourth, the bit about how "free will" is stolen through the Jedi Mind Trick and how there's no judicial accountability for effectively superpowered beings are basically facets of a fact which Kuchera already ignored when he was bemoaning the Jedi as a religious organization. Within the Star Wars universe, The Force is real. The interconnectedness of all things isn't simply a philosophical principle, but rather an observable phenomena, one that has multiple tangible effects on the physical world. The Force may have an influence on the weak minded, but it doesn't control them, nor does it give the Jedi the ability to prevent an individual from doing stupid things once they're out of sight. In this respect, the Jedi directs a bit of pressure from that universal interconnectedness to steer an individual briefly in one direction. If the guy who was selling deathsticks was more aware of that connection, and had a stronger sense of self, the issue would have already been moot. For a real world sort of example, consider this: Suppose a friend is being stupid and is about to drive home drunk. Am I truly robbing him of his free will when I know exactly the right mental and emotional buttons to push to make him give up his keys, thus keeping his dumb ass alive? No. What happens after he gets home (safely, probably after puking in my car) is entirely up to him. I haven't robbed him of the ability to make decisions, even stupid ones. I have, however, made use of the tools and conditions obtaining at that critical moment to keep him from harming himself or others.
I honestly cannot think of what the hell Ben Kuchera was doing other than engaging in knee-jerk reactionary behavior which never once reached the reasoning centers of his brain simply because of a fortuitous coincidence in dialog from a teaser trailer. Kuchera's little screed was wrong on every possible level. George Orwell wrote, "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." For a thousand generations, the Jedi stood, always a little rough despite millennia of polishing, ready to do violence but rarely starting any course of action with it. They served as exemplars of the highest ideals, even if individuals experienced tragic personal falls. They understood the value of sacrifice, that (as another sci-fi philosopher pointed out) the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. They demonstrated that there are bigger things out there than just one person's suffering, and that even in the midst of the darkest times, new hope can and eventually will arise. They even served, on occasion, as cautionary tales of what can go wrong even with the best of intentions. Ewan McGregor truly did say it best: "We need the Jedi."
*If I recall, some maps have Tatooine as being in or very close to Hutt space, which is outside the Republic completely. Even if that had changed by the time of the Prequels, getting rid of slavery would likely have taken more than simply passing laws saying, "this is bad, mmm'kay."
**The events depicted in Knights of The Old Republic II: The Sith Lords show that Darth Treya came very close, but didn't quite manage to pull it off. Proof that it takes more than just a power hungry lunatic to topple an organization.
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