“There are but two paths. Inherit the order of this world, or destroy it.
But only a true monarch can make such a choice.”

Some time ago, Jonathan Pageau made a video — that so barbed my attention that I am writing about it all this time later — on the symbolism of Star Wars, in which he notably decried what he viewed as a significant symbolic confusion that pervades the original trilogy of films in the series, namely that the Emperor, the looming, shadowy antagonist slowly unveiled over the course of the trilogy, turns out to be a shriveled, decrepit goblin of a man, costumed to look as though he stepped into this fantastical world of vibrant colors from a black-and-white creature feature. The problem, to Pageau’s sensibilities, was that “emperor” is an archetype historically enveloped in solar imagery: white robes, gilded laurels, radiant halos and the like. Meanwhile, the Emperor and his domain of Star Wars’ celestial setting is far more lunar in its depiction: colorless uniforms, a moon-shaped space station, etc. What Pageau seems to miss is that this inversion is, if even implicitly, by design, by virtue of Star Wars subsisting within the broader mythology of liberalism.

Pageau has himself more recently taken to critiquing the World War 2 Mythology, and it is no secret that 1977’s Star Wars is drenched in the imagery of WW2 via Hollywood, from a conceptual level with high-intensity dogfights and literal sturmtruppen to the practical usage of WW2-era weapons like the Sterling submachine gun as props. WW2 as told in the Allied imagination instantiates, and in many ways epitomizes, the liberal mythical struggle for liberté, egalité, fraternité by a plucky, diverse band of underdogs against tyranny, repression, and bigotry perpetrated by regressive, bourgeois-accented imperialists. Star Wars draws this thread with little subtlety to explicitly cosmic, universal heights.

In the aftermath of the second war-to-end-all-wars, the liberal novus ordo seclorum was left picking up the pieces, trying to assemble the aforementioned narrative from the debris amidst the ideologically-fueled and industrially-accelerated destruction which had ravaged Europe — the land which a century prior had been supposed to be on the brink of Enlightened bliss. Part of this sense-making process materialized into the show trials of various Nazi conspirators and officials, purely matters of pageantry given that the moral verdict had been rendered far before any legal one, culminating in that of Adolph Eichmann, who Hannah Arendt notes was really too bumbling to be the “Architect of the Holocaust,” notwithstanding the Holocaust was far too vast and multifaceted to have been designed by one man. Nonetheless, Eichmann became the liberal West’s scapegoat in lieu of the deceased former Führer.

Arendt’s characterization of the Jerusalem trial of Eichmann shines light on the symbolic inversion at work in the liberal mythology. Certainly, the trial was less juridical in its aims and really something of a coping mechanism for a world grappling with the horror of what was obviously a “crime against humanity” — a term that more-or-less had to be invented to describe the scale of the Third Reich’s evils. But therein lies what Arendt identifies as liberalism’s greatest difficulty in coping with the Holocaust: can a state be criminal? In practice, history has since answered the question by the establishment of international tribunals and bodies like the United Nations, the development of the concept of an “international law” to which even nation-states would be subject, thus theoretically annihilating the ambiguity. But these developments are predicated on earlier philosophical foundations of liberalism, namely, the cornerstone concept of “rule of law.”

A certain Little Corner of the Internet has hosted some interesting converzations recently in the realm of political philosophy, with many fine observations on liberalism’s shift from “rule by law” to “rule of law.” The former represents the historic precedent of virtually all pre-modern societies, in which the “state,” even not-so-conceived, whether embodied in a monarch, chieftain, or senate, issues forth the law in order to impose its will upon the people. With the emergence of the primacy of “the consent of the governed” as the source of legitimacy, the law becomes an a priori, self-existent, self-evident ruler over the state itself. Constitutional government in the Anglosphere can therefore be traced all the way back to the Magna Carta, a seed of popular constraint on regal power through legal means that would blossom in America into a system in which the law no longer proceeds from the King’s power, but rather the King’s power (or President’s, rather) is a product of the law to which he owes the legitimacy of his office. It is only through this paradigm shift that the notion of a “criminal state” is even preconditioned for intelligibility, as it is essential that a criminal is under the law rather than over it.

George Lucas’ imagining of the Dark-Lord-qua-Emperor presents this threat symbolically as the ultimate, cosmic Enemy in the liberal mythology, depicting the monarch through inverse imagery as criminal. Such a villain embodies the Hitlerian danger to the liberal good, which is anachronistically traced back to George III as well, defined as the legitimation of illegitimacy, the literal instatement of criminality. But, like so much of modernity, this liberal sensibility has its roots in Christianity, specifically via Protestantism. The church-state dichotomy which developed in the West paved the way for the reformers to become criminals on a theological rather than strictly legal basis (though this statement can hardly do justice to the complexities of the time), leading Protestants into a tension between spiritual convictions and worldly powers. This tension became naturally explicable in biblical terms of the “prince of the power of the air,” from which issued a stark challenge to the medieval Roman Catholic notion of divine legitimacy as inherent in ecclesial offices in an automatic sense. That is to say, Protestantism opened the European world of divine rights of nobility and legitimacy on the strict basis of bloodline to the possibility of legitimacy based on pre-existent truth, accountability of clerics to sacred Scripture, of councils to Holy Writ, and eventually of rulers to their subjects.

All of this has profoundly eschatological significance, which is no doubt a part of why so many Protestants came to view the Pope as the prophesied antichrist of Revelation. The asperity between Protestants and Roman Catholics in many ways boils down (or boils up) to the nature of authority, which cosmologically pertains to the nature of the present place in the eschatological timeline, i.e., who it is that presently rules the earth. Is the Devil still the prince of the air? Or has God already put all the earth under Christ’s feet? Are earthly powers considered a terror to evil and a boon to good unconditionally? Or is their authority conditioned on fulfillment of that divine role? Protestantism proved that there is room in the Christian imagination for the Devil to dress up as an angel of light, and therefore for crooks to parade as Kings and Popes.

The Dark Lord archetype in much of Western fiction is basically presented in these very Christian terms, drawing from the distinctly biblical symbol of the traitorous Adversary. The Devil’s power is real insofar as it is derived from divine endowment and has actual purchase in the earth, but at the very least its use is illegitimate and he is destined to have his rule taken from him. He and his minions are false gods soon to be toppled. Where the post-Christian seems to depart from this Christian stream, however, is in the axis along which legitimacy of the established power is framed. For example, unlike Tolkien or Lewis, for whom the defeat of the White Witch or the Dark Lord, the illicit sovereign, necessitates the return of the divinely-rightful monarch, for Lucas the archetypal hero forgoes pretensions of glory in his ascetic, monastic devotion to the restoration of democracy, even despite his blood relation to the ruling authority, which is viewed as a curse in need of youthful redemption. Where Dante put traitors in the pit of Hell, the modern imagination puts tyrants. This change in many ways leaves the Devil in his medieval prison, but his cellmates are drastically substituted as the locus of morality turns.

As many have noted, the WW2 myth has an obvious devil, but no obvious hero. The liberal imagination, by its nature, perhaps cannot have a moral paragon, because one of its capital virtues is freedom in the pursuit of happiness. To confine the aspirations of those living within its structure would contradict the whole endeavor. This, in part, probably explains Star Wars’ enduring possession of American consciousness. It presents a universe averse to emperors, kings, gods or masters. This would explain the devolution of the films from the turn of the millennium with their sloppy-but-earnest contemplation of corruption and dissolution of political liberty to the more recent repetitious, nonsensical, self-satisfied shilling of the perpetual underdog story. If the rebels become the establishment, they’ve worked themselves out of a job. Sounds a bit like the company making this stuff, eh?

As Paul Vanderklay has noted about The Lord of the Rings, this is why the film version of Aragorn must dislike the thought of assuming his rightful throne. It is why Disney must perpetually pretend not to be a vast and powerful hegemonic force, but instead a progressive “voice” of compassionate representation for the “voiceless.” It is why multimillionaire celebrities and politicians must pretend to be “normal people.” The only establishment a liberal can tolerate is one he can’t see, one that is disguised, one that doesn’t look like an establishment, or at least doesn’t look too much bigger than himself or beyond his control. In practice, this has evidently not produced the intended effect, but merely given the Devil a new disguise to wear. Rather than dressing up as a King, he can evade detection in the common garb of the proletariat. Revolution after revolution in the modern era, from America to France to Russia, has shown that the Devil is perfectly capable of presenting himself as liberator to those who are only wary of tyrants. And as France and Russia showed particularly clearly for those of us removed from their circumstances, the ravenous pursuit of freedom produces the worst tyrants. Each of these three revolutions’ respective relationships to secularism is informative.

Popular culture, demonstrably thoroughly awash in the cultural presuppositions of modernity, begs the question regarding whether the criminal state is even a coherent idea. An immoral state is certainly comprehensible with a view to divine law, insofar as that constitutes a moral dimension to which all earthly powers are subject. Prior to the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the Holy See systematically provided adjudication of this moral dimension in most of Europe, which was only made possible by certain broadly shared assumptions regarding the relationship of the secular and the sacred. But abuses, grievous moral failures and injustices undermined faith in the power of the Papacy to function in that capacity, which ultimately contributed to the religious fracturing which has seemingly not ceased since then. Without a common religious understanding, much less a common religious institutional superstructure, a return to the medieval means of wrangling immoral states is tenuous. Modernity has, at least on this level, instituted secularity as an attempt at new common religion, and groups like the UN constitute an attempt at a secular magisterium which can by “purely rational” means, without appeal to supernatural law, stand in judgement over kings and nations.

One of the great obstacles to this enterprise is, yet again, another liberal capital virtue: autonomy. This has largely been the conundrum of U.S. foreign policy since the end of WW2. The idea of national self-determination strikes a resonant chord with America’s origin story as an inherent good, but this is confounded by the internal contradiction of a nation’s apparent right to choose something other than democracy. How can the U.S. adjudicate that Vietnam must not be communist if communism is the Vietnamese people’s choice? It is evident that this whole metanarrative balances precariously on the aforementioned difficulty of America’s nature as the successful rebels, the established revolution, the global empire of freedom, the authority on mitigating authority. Liberal-inclined critics of America’s international stature are quick to denounce her role as “world police” because it naturally grates against some degree of national autonomy.

But the tension persists because law cannot enforce itself. Modernity is fond of the expression that “the pen is mightier than the sword,” but this is only circumstantially true. Laws don’t arrest people, police do. Laws don’t interpret or apply themselves situationally, they need judges. Laws don’t proclaim themselves, either, no matter how “self-evident” they seem, they require lawmakers to whom they can ‘seem’ at all!

It is my opinion that there is simply no principle which can solve this problem. States are made of people, despite modernity’s best efforts to source objectivity from systems, and people are sinners. A moral state would have to be something other than human. Many delude themselves that AI fits this superhuman calling, as though it were not itself a distinctly human invention. AI can only do what bureaucracy and constitutions and elections already do: merely simulate wisdom.

It is more obvious in pre-modernity that legitimacy has always been the child — or at least the ward — of force. The Hundred Years’ War provides a terrifically messy example of what medieval negotiation of sovereignty looked like. Ultimately, even force is subservient to chance. The cosmic monarchy is absolute. The working of the Divine will is far grander than the pretensions of royal lineages or the mastery of statecraft. There is no predicting a Joan of Arc, who might turn up out of obscurity to turn the state on its head. God’s will is borne out in that which happens, history is itself the movement of His Spirit, and His intentions are more mysterious than the heavens are lofty. If it were not so, Job would not have suffered.

The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts. — Psalm 46:6 (RSV)