1.16.25: WE ALREADY HAVE A GREAT AMERICAN FANTASY
The New York Times’ Ross Douthat has issued a bold call to the nation’s creatives: create the “Great American Fantasy.” Just as J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings to give his own country a distinctive mythology, the time is ripe (per Douthat) for a U.S.-based novelist or screenwriter to build an “American subcreation—one that’s…as organically linked to the real New World as Middle-earth is to England.”
I, for one, am as sympathetic to the columnist’s call as anyone. I rally to his claim that our society has an unmet “hunger for a certain kind of popular art” that only good fantasy can reliably fill. But unfortunately for Douthat’s thesis, albeit fortunately for the nation as a whole, the “subcreation” he’s talking about already exists: it’s called Star Wars.
Let’s be clear: I’m not talking about the Star Wars prequel movies, sequel movies, Disney television series, book tie-ins, or video games. In my opinion, those have too many faults to compare with the likes of the Lord of the Rings. Moreover, they are too stylistically and thematically inconsistent to constitute a coherent mythos. But the original Star Wars trilogy, relabeled after its release as Episodes IV-VI, satisfies the requirements for the “Great American Fantasy” (GAF) on every count.
In fairness to Douthat, he considers this possibility. “You could argue,” he grants, “that space opera…is actually the key American contribution to the fantasy genre,” before simply stating that “that would take a separate essay to unpack.” Well, here is that essay. Let’s begin the unpacking.
First, what precisely are the aforementioned requirements for the GAF? Douthat never so much as lists them out, so I’ve done my best to extrapolate them from his article here:
- The GAF must be a kind of “back story” to modern America, but set in a fictional universe.
- The GAF should channel the most “enchanted” components of American culture, such as Bible-Belt Christianity or New-Age spiritualism.
- Quoting Tanner Greer, the GAF “needs to be grounded not in other fantasy titles, but [in] American literature, the American experience, the myths of our people.”
- In contrast to European fantasy, the GAF must “match…the scope and scale and impossibly wide horizons” of the New World.
Now, as someone who grew up revering my family’s VHS copy of A New Hope, I may be exhibiting motivated bias, but I think it’s obvious that Star Wars checks off all the boxes.
What is the films’ “Galactic Civil War,” for instance, if not a mash-up of modern America’s three most formative conflicts recast in a “galaxy far, far away”? Like the War for Independence, it’s a republican rebellion against imperial overlords with British accents, replete with callbacks to ancient Roman history. Like the Civil War, it’s, well, a civil war. And like World War II, it amounts to an existential struggle between freedom fighters and a blatantly Nazi-esque totalitarian regime.
Similarly, what’s more true to America’s religious past than the code of the Jedi, which (at least in the original trilogy) eschews Old-World hierarchy, doctrine, and form in favor of California-style pop psychology (“trust your feelings”), a space-ified Transcendentalism that Ralph Waldo Emerson would have felt at home in, and folksy wisdom? The Jedi master Yoda even speaks with the syntax of a Jewish-American grandma, as a writer for the Week points out.
Turning to Douthat’s third requirement for the GAF, I struggle to think of any story that combines as many archetypes of “the American experience” as does Star Wars. There’s the lonely, colonial farm boy who dreams of adventure while fending off the natives, the roguish cowboy with a heart of gold, the fast-talking rich girl who (like an old-school Hollywood heroine) knows how to take care of herself, and even the treacherous gambler-turned-“respectable” businessman. Throw in an unsavory cantina, a bounty hunters’ lair, the Redwood Forest, and a not-so-subtle analogue for nuclear weapons, and you have a potent collage of American cultural totems.
Finally, what better way to mirror the New World’s “scope and scale and impossibly wide horizons” than to place the GAF in space? Star Wars’ otherworldly setting is all the more appropriate because space is a distinctly American frontier. Its exploration simultaneously calls back to the exploration of the Old West and showcases the United States’ ongoing obsession with technological achievement. What’s more American than an astronaut?
There will be some who take the opposite view to this. They will say the “stars” in Star Wars are what disqualifies the series from being the GAF, because they make it science fiction, not fantasy. But as I see it, a work of science fiction must be dedicated to interpreting the implications of scientific trends for the future of this world. A story about faraway, sword-fighting space wizards set “a long time ago” is purely fantastical.
The sword fighting and wizardry, on the other hand, present an apparent problem. They clearly reflect the Arthurian-Wagnerian milieu that Douthat encourages American fantasy to divest from. Nonetheless, on a parting note, I would suggest that this hint of the Old World is actually Star Wars’ greatest strength, for it acknowledges that the New World is just too new to ignore its European roots.
The “myths of our people,” to borrow Greer’s formulation, lose their substance without reference to the myths of Greece, Rome, the Nordic countries, and the Christian West. What’s more, the history of modern America has been the history of the United States’ re-engagement with (and in some ways salvation of) the best of the Old World. Star Wars portrays both of these dynamics beautifully by having its farm boy become a knight and its cowboy fall in love with a princess, and by having an “ancient [if low-church] religion” determine the galaxy’s fate.
Perhaps I’m making too much of what are essentially glorified B-movies. Then again, perhaps not. Star Wars may not be the Lord of the Rings. It may be a collection of lowbrow adventure flicks. But the United States is, after all, a lowbrow place. And if the original trilogy’s lasting impact on American society is anything to judge by, Star Wars isn’t just a serious work of storytelling: it is our GAF.
6.18.24: RECLAIMING THE CHRISTIAN IR TRADITION
I am very grateful to Tom Milosch for his thoughtful critique of my article, “Christian Schools Must Teach International Relations Differently.” Moreover, as Milosch is a teaching professor, I am certain his practical knowledge of “Teaching IR Christianly” exceeds my own. Nevertheless, I wonder if Milosch’s article exhibits symptoms of the very problem I wrote my article to address.
In my article, I critiqued Christian educators for accepting the perspective that IR theories may be fundamentally false, i.e. based on incorrect core assumptions, and still be valuable. As believers in Truth, I argued, we should hold IR theories to the standard of truth. When a natural science theory is found to be false, for example, it is either revised or rejected. Why should IR theories be treated differently?
Milosch, in contrast, though he advocates the application of Christian values to IR, nonetheless takes the standard IR line that theories are “inherently…flawed,” but still valuable as “analytical tools we use to understand and interpret our world,” even when their flaws are “known and understood.” “A worthwhile IR theory,” he adds, must further “mutual flourishing and security” when subscribed to by policymakers. But that theory’s “worth” appears to be technically independent of its accuracy.
This perspective is problematic for the reasons I laid out in my article: It departs from the scientific principle that theories should be rejected or revised when falsified, and by suggesting that ideas can be useful without conforming to reality, it calls into question the existence of any reliable account of the world. This does not endanger Milosch, because he has recourse to Revelation, which can be trusted as true when reason cannot. For non-believers, however, the notion that all theories are “inherently…flawed” could lead to nihilism.
I believe the root of this problem is definitional. Milosch, channeling the predominant IR view, describes theory as “the use of inductive reasoning and hypothesis testing to understand cause and effect relationships,” which “relies on observable, measurable data” and “ignores the much larger pool of [not observable or measurable] human knowledge and experience.” This definition may be uncontroversial to a modern humanities department, but it would be very controversial to most Christian thinkers throughout history.
The word “theory” comes from ancient Greek. For the ancient Greek-speaking Christians, as for the medieval philosophers who succeeded them, it formally meant “contemplation,” but broadly referred to any account of the world whose value lay in its truth, as opposed to a “practical” account of the world, whose value lay in its usefulness.[1] Already, we have diverged from most modern IR educators, who define theory as, in Milosch’s words, a “knowledge tool” (emphasis added).
Beyond this, most ancient and medieval Christians rejected the notion that only “observable, measurable data” could legitimately inform theory. To the contrary, they freely informed their theories of IR and politics in general with all the knowledge at their disposal, including not just Revelation, but anthropology, ontology, natural theology, and more. The vast majority of this knowledge was irreducible to “data”: When Augustine originated just war theory in Contra Faustum, for instance, he relied on his understanding of Scripture and ethics, not “hypothesis testing.”[2]
One may object at this point that the modern definition of theory does not do away with these value judgments, but simply distinguishes them from facts, which is an improvement at best and a merely semantic development at worst. But the value/fact distinction is actually at the core of the issue. Christians historically recognized that because humans are both physical and spiritual beings, we can only make sense of human affairs by referring to both physical and spiritual realities.[3] This means the social sciences, if not the natural sciences, must integrate, not separate, physical perception, reason, and the “apperceptive” (interior, participatory) experience of values.
In the words of the political philosopher Ellis Sandoz: “[I]t is…evident that the material and the quantifiable do not exhaust the whole of…reality…. No account that takes only these factors into consideration can form a sufficient basis for understanding man in his humanity or for understanding the science of politics.”[4] In fact, when IR scholars attempt to build political theories on facts with no reference to values, those theories frequently prove false, as the case of foreign policy realism demonstrates.[5]
Of course, IR theories informed by spiritual realities can also prove false, and even unfalsified theories cannot tell us how to solve concrete political problems, because all social science theories, by their classical definition, deal more with the abstract than the particular. This means Milosch is right to assert that only the virtues of wisdom and prudence can show students how to finally judge or act on IR concepts.
But the fact remains that Christian educators tread on dangerous ground when they accept the standard IR view of theory. Per the Christian intellectual tradition, theory should not be valued for its usefulness, but for its truth, and theories of human affairs will always be inadequate if they restrict themselves to “data.” Can we really “teach IR Christianly” while diverging from this tradition? I hazard the answer is no.
[1] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Simon & Schuster: 1945, p. 34.
[2] Bk. XX, sec. 74.
[3] Eric Voegelin, New Science of Politics, University of Chicago Press: 1952, pp. 11-12.
[4] The Voegelinian Revolution, Transaction Publishers: 2000, p. 148.
[5] Brian C. Schmidt and Colin Wight, “Rationalism and the ‘Rational Actor’ Assumption’ in Realist International Relations Theory,” Journal of International Political Theory, 19:2, pp. 158-182.