This is what leads us to the absurdity of trying to stem the tide of single motherhood by cutting off funds for welfare recipients who persist in conceiving children out of wedlock. Such is their faith in the existence of Economic Man that they cannot conceive of any social good or ill having anything other than a financial cause and a financial solution. When economists make love, are their motives really financial? How do pre-fiscal primates manage to survive, having no motive to reproduce?

  The new post-Marxist religion calls itself Free Market Capitalism, but in their ignorant and impenetrable unconnection with the reality of human life, they are the equal of the most ardent Marxist, and their meddling with law is as ignorant and maliciously indifferent to the true yearnings of individuals.

  There are plenty of other religions that insist that their dogmas be accepted. The “Pro-Choice” movement claims that only their opponents are religious, but then behave just like Crusaders, declaring their victims to be neither human nor individual, so they may be killed without remorse, and their opponents to be so deeply wrong that not even the slightest accommodation can be given them. If it were not tragic it would be bitterly hilarious to watch as the very people who decried the police state tactics of those who tried to stifle dissent during the Vietnam War now invoke the RICO statutes against anti-abortion groups and have enacted special bans against protest speech within view or hearing of abortion clinics, making anti-abortion speech the most limited speech in America. Nazis can march in Skokie, pornographers can tout their wares on the Internet, but Catholics can’t march in front of Planned Parenthood. No matter which side of the abortion debate you’re on (and there is a middle ground, despite the rhetoric of the true believers on both sides), it should be frightening to us all to see how one religion has managed to subvert the Constitutional protection of free speech. But that is how true believers in a new religion act—they are so sure they are right that anyone who opposes them must either be malicious or such utter fools they are not worthy of consideration, and any law may be bent to eliminate them.

  The gun fanatics of the NRA, who insist that assault weapons and concealed handguns are a necessary component of a civil society; the anti-family lobby, who demand that the courts strike down every rearguard action of the beleaguered survivors of the old “middle-class morality” the racial separatists who denounce anyone who does not adhere to the tenets of the faith as a “race traitor” or “inauthentic.” New words, but they still mean “heretic” and, as Clarence Thomas can tell you, the Inquisition’s flames burn as hot as ever.

  COOPTING SCIENCE

  I HEAR A LOT of talk about the dying churches of America, but what I see are waves of religious fanatics taking possession of the institutions of influence and power, and doing their best to suppress all dissent. But because they do not call themselves religions, because they have no god available whose name can be invoked to give their beliefs authority, they all claim scientific justification for their commandments. For it is science that is perceived as the revelator, even though science itself, when properly practiced, does not even enter into the moral arena. There is not one of these groups that does not try to marshal supposedly scientific data to “prove” their point, just as scholars would search for quotes from Aquinas or Gamaliel, Augustine or Maimonides. While some of those who invoke science as an authority in public life may be correct on a particular point, their data almost never prove anything at all, and usually are merely a function of biased instruments or biased interpretations.

  The traditional religions—those that call their gods gods and their prophets prophets—are hard-pressed to compete, for the one thing all the new religions agree upon is that the old religions must be utterly cut off from any influence in society at large, while the new religions try to work out ways to share the reins of the state and the cultural institutions of school, press, and entertainment media. Those who believe in traditional religions find themselves to be the only sizable minorities that it is legitimate to exclude and whose ideas it is legitimate to ban, all in the name of separating church and state. The churches that have tried to accommodate themselves to the new religions are merely erasing the distinctions that were their only reason for existing; the churches that fight the new religions find that they have few weapons when the press, the schools, the media, the courts, and the government bureaucracy are almost exclusively in the hands of their triumphant and uncompromising opponents.

  I have spoken of the situation in America, because that is the nation I know best, but as I’ve traveled to or corresponded with residents of other Western or Westernized nations, I think it is not unreasonable to say that most other nations are well along the same road—some, indeed, farther advanced, and few lagging very far behind.

  THE SURVIVAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

  IN ALL THESE religious struggles, designed to obtain uniformity of behavior if not of thought, almost no one ever takes the time to examine ideas. We get arguments and information, but little philosophy, for we are virtually prohibited from hearing any idea that cannot fit onto a button, a bumper sticker, a headline, or a sound bite.

  In the midst of this chaos, science fiction is the one place where moral philosophy can still be explored, in public, with an ardent audience that cares about the ideas being discussed. Certainly academic-literary fiction offers little in this area—long before the term “political correctness” was in use, the ac-lit establishment was giving serious consideration only to a very narrow range of ideas and literary techniques and subject matters, and the multicultural movement has made only the most cosmetic changes in this practice, primarily eliminating from the canon the non—politically-correct holdovers from earlier eras while replacing them with ethnically diverse, relentlessly monotonous affirmations of the prevailing moral philosophy.

  Science fiction is not immune to this. Being the pious literature of the deus scientifica, it serves sometimes as scripture, sometimes as commentary, and embarrassingly often as “faith-promoting stories” for the new religions—Sunday school literature, if you will, and of the kind well-mocked by Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer, story after story in which, if you just put your faith in science and don’t get sidetracked by competing religions, all will come out well; or, because you did not give full faith to science, you are punished by an implacable universe.

  But it is still possible, in the science fiction community, to write stories that explore genuinely strange or unpopular ideas, and many readers still respond with enthusiasm to such moral experiments as, for instance, Octavia Butler’s entire oeuvre, and such stories in this anthology as Walter Jon Williams’s morally heartstopping story “Dinosaurs” and Isaac Asimov’s prismlike “Robot Dreams.” Many science fiction stories have such moral complexity they would leave the purveyors of soundbite religions speechless—if they read them, which, of course, they don’t, for if they were the kind of people who sought out such experiences, they could hardly utter their platitudes and slogans as if they had meaning.

  For science fiction, at its best, has the capacity to take its readers into societies that have never existed, or give ironic twists to the familiar milieux so that all meanings are transformed. By reading science fiction, we are given a different kind of revelation than that which comes from the founding prophets of the religions competing for control in our world today. It is a revelation that gives, not easy answers, but extremely perplexing questions; it is a revelation that, at its truest, shows us a world of extraordinarily complex moral dilemmas in which there are few clear choices, and yet in which choices must be made. Yet despite such complexity, I find none of these writers indulging in despair, claiming there are no decent or noble choices and therefore no reason to keep trying to find them. Instead, they share the fundamental optimism that underlies the very enterprise of storytelling: the belief that societies of individuals can be formed and are worth forming, that they can be improved if not perfected, and while the consequences of error can be devastating, the consequences of doing nothing may be worse.

  “Time’s Rub” and “Rockabye Baby,” for instance, explore death, not just by showing us the banality of an ordinary human death, but by isolating some aspect of death and showing us the consequences of altering it. In “Rockabye Baby,” how is the hero’s choice morally different from suicide? I think it is, and yet it is also unbearable; in the end, it leads me, at least, to an affirmation of life with all its pain. What we are certainly not getting from these stories is dogma. The best of science fiction takes us away from the nightbound clashing of ignorant armies to the bright firelight of the storyteller, who torments and satisfies us, both at once, as he spins his complicated tale, explaining to us the otherwise inexplicable shadows on the wall.

  That is science fiction at its best…and yet there is also Star Wars.

  LIVING IN THE STAR WARS UNIVERSE

  THE CALVINIST ROOTS of the Star Wars trilogy are plainly visible, for George Lucas is no more able to escape his upbringing than any other storyteller. Just as Mark Twain lived and died in a Presbyterian moral universe despite his almost desperate efforts to ascend from agnosticism to the lofty realm of atheism, Lucas’s story clearly owes much to moral views he would have absorbed from the religion, however lightly experienced, of his childhood.

  Thus, at the end of Return of the Jedi, to Lucas it feels right to have Darth Vader be completely redeemed and take his place beside Obi-Wan and Yoda in a sort of mentoral trinity in the afterlife. To me, with a very different moral worldview, this was almost unbearably wrong: Darth Vader had willingly chosen to murder millions of people through his abstract orders, and many individuals with his own hands or in his own presence. His supposed redemption comes because he refuses, at the last moment, to kill his own male offspring and instead betrays and murders the man who has been his teacher and ally for decades. Excuse me, but if, say, Hitler had ordered Himmler to murder his own son, and Himmler had killed Hitler instead, would that make him the moral equal of Churchill or Eisenhower? (Come to think of it, we do have all those smiling “trinity” pictures of Winston, Franklin, and Uncle Joe…)

  But there’s something more complicated than “mere” Calvinism here. Indeed, I suspect that the Calvinist influence was quite unconscious, while the business of the Force may have been a deliberate attempt to express a philosophy. And the philosophy has taken root. One can find the Force as the foundation of many a new-age religion. More importantly, however, the idea of the Force may well be the entire religious experience of many thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans.

  Yes, they know it’s a movie. But in the deepest recesses of the mind, where we create our moral universe, I don’t believe we make distinctions between fictional and “true” stories. Indeed, we have to convert our real experiences into fictional stories before we can assign any moral value to them at all. That is, we never store our memories without a moral context, for we cannot even remember them without some assignment of why things happened as they did. And it is impossible to experience causality of deliberate behavior without a moral context.

  What that means is that members of the audience of Star Wars, caught up in the spell of the story, take into their memories not just the raw events of the light-saber duel between Vader and Kenobi, but also the moral framework: what the fight means and why it matters. When Vader wins and Kenobi dies, it seems to be cause for despair; only we do not despair. Why? Because we saw that Kenobi deliberately let down his defenses. He chose to die. And because we know him to be wise beyond others’ ability to comprehend, we must think that something good will come of his death. When we store that event in our memory, we associate it with a crisis in the struggle between the creative and the destructive, the light and the dark, and at the moment of its occurrence we know that it will certainly lead to something good, even if it seems to be something bad.

  It isn’t just the clashes between titans that affect us that way, either. Han Solo’s confrontation with the bounty hunter is similarly freighted with moral implications. (And if you know the bounty hunter’s name without having to look it up, I hope you will take this kindly, but you need to turn off the VCR and go take a walk outside or read a book or build a house with President Carter.) Han Solo kills the bounty hunter, but we do not regard this as an evil act. Why not? The moral context apparently allows killing to protect one’s own life, and sneakiness and dissembling are apparently virtues of the righteous—we are clearly intended to like Han Solo even though he’s a man who scoffs at honor. That he is revealed later to have honor is relevant in the killing of the bounty hunter. We are being told, and thus we dutifully record the memory, that Han Solo is to be enjoyed and admired for his cynicism, dishonesty, and disdain for the law.

  In short, this is a universe out of order, and so those who are disorderly are closer to the true underlying moral order than those who adhere to the generally accepted norms. This is true in the underworld where Han Solo functions, and in the wider society, where we identify with the rebels (who are amazingly free of factions and careerism) and see the white uniforms of the imperial storm troopers as symbols of a hated order that has to be overthrown.

  What George Lucas no doubt intended as merely one aspect of a story he was telling has for many people become the scripture, the mythos, of a “religious” movement that, from its origin in the 1960s, has developed into the primary civic religion of America in the 1990s. Lucas is not responsible, of course, for what has been done with the Force; but part of the phenomenal ticket sales of the rerelease were, I think, due to the fact that many people experience the film in a way far beyond anything a filmmaker is likely to wish for.

  What is this civic religion that recognizes Star Wars as its Testament? It’s a religion in which it’s easy to see what we’re against but we have no clue what we’re actually for. We have deep faith in a magical Force that will cause the right thing to happen if we only close our eyes and lunge, while those who persist in trying to do what is rational or—most loathsome of all—maintain the established order are irredeemably evil. So when Darth Vader turns away from the Dark Side at the end of the third movie, to the true believers it really is enough, for in so doing he has presumably brought down the entire structure that existed to serve the will of the Wicked Witch of the West—er, pardon me, the emperor. (Okay, so that wasn’t really a slip. I just wanted to point out that Lucas and Star Wars didn’t invent this moral worldview. It’s been growing on us for a long time.)

  In all of this, we are given no clue of what the light side of the Force actually is, or what kind of order, if any, the rebels will set up in place of the imperial system. At every point, it is enough that we like the good guys and hate the bad guys. Good guys are human, Like Us, or fuzzy and warm and endearing like ewoks, or small and gnomic and nonthreatening like Yoda. Bad guys are slimy, non-mammalian creatures like Jabba the Hut, or are encased in smooth hardware like the storm troopers and Darth Vader, or are deformed—defaced—like the emperor or Darth-under-the-mask. The light side is Nice; the dark side is Nasty.

  It is hardly surprising that three two-hour movies should create at best a shallow moral universe. On the contrary, Star Wars, far from being the shallowest of movies, may well be one of the most sophisticated, since at least it admits that it is about moral choices. (I’ll spare you a comparison between Star Wars and such morally puerile ephemera as The English Patient; suffice it to say that Star Wars comes off rather well.)

  Nor is it the degree to which many audience members seem to take the viewing of Star Wars as a religious event that depresses me. In a world where Pulp Fiction’s author is fêted by the cultural elite, it’s a relief to see that George Lucas is the bard of the masses; it could be so much worse.

  No, the worrisome thing about Star Wars is that the cultural elites in America and, to some degree, throughout the First World, have also embraced precisely that moral universe. Starting in the 1960s, the academic-literary community was divided into the light side and the dark side, the rebels and the empire, and now an alarming number of people in the most influential positions in our society make all their moral decisions as if the only determinant of right and wrong is whether it works to the advantage of the good guys (us) or the bad guys (them), without regard to the moral context or meaning of the act itself.

  Thus we have the spectacle of women’s groups turning their full fury on Clarence Thomas, a man whom every credible witness affirms as a decent, honorable fellow, particularly in his treatment of women, based solely on the testimony of one woman whose uncorroborated story is shamefully inadequate as evidence; while the same elite, despite its claim of looking out for women who are preyed on by men in positions of power, turned its back on Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, whose stories were much more credible, and whose charges were against a man, Bill Clinton, who has long had a reputation for womanizing. (Unlike Thomas, Clinton seems to have a shortage of friends willing to step forward and say, with a straight face, “Bill Clinton would never do anything like that!” Quite the contrary, with the White House intern sex scandal unfolding as I write these words, it seems obvious that those closest to him share the belief that regardless of what happened in this particular case, it is precisely the kind of thing he would do.)