"Good soldiers follow orders."
Allow me to refresh everyone on the Clone Wars, that galactic conflict that pitted the Republic against the Confederacy of Independent Systems. While the Separatists amassed a vast droid army in anticipation of the war, the Republic was caught off guard with only its Jedi peacekeepers to mount a defense. They were forced to utilize legions of clone troopers to bulk up their forces.
Unbeknownst to most, however, was that a single dark force pulled the strings on both sides, using the war as a means to achieve absolute power. The Sith lord Darth Sidious even went so far as to have the Kaminoan clone-makers include a special biochip in each warrior that ensured their obedience concerning Order 66, a devastating initiative that would see the clones turn on their Jedi generals and slay them in the final moments of the war.
While this is all mostly reveled in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, it is even more fleshed out in the excellent animated series The Clone Wars, which ranks among the best Star Wars fiction out there. Concerning the clones themselves, it does a fabulous job fleshing out their nature and their budding individuality. Clones such as Captain Rex, Fives, Echo and Heavy become characters all their own, despite their numbered existence and shared genetic origin.
During the show's sixth season, a particular story arc beginning with the episode The Unknown sees a clone by the name of Tup experience a psychotic episode. The secret implant in his brain (explained as an "inhibitor chip" by the Kaminoans) malfunctions and he initiates Order 66 early, killing one of his Jedi commanders. While Tup ultimately dies, his brother Fives -- an elite ARC Trooper -- investigates, learns more of the truth and is forced to flee. However, seeing as the saga of the Clone Wars is ultimately a tragedy, he is doomed by this revelation.
The four-episode arc, written by Katie Lucas, is quite good and it actually comes hauntingly close to some of the ideas bound up in Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind hypothesis. While the idea takes a fair amount of unpacking, the short version is that ancient humans were not conscious in the modern sense of the word. Prior to roughly 1200 BCE, the brain used language to convey experience from the right to left hemisphere. A hallucinated voice -- such as the one Tup hears during his episode -- would have told an individual what to do during a novel situation. Modern consciousness, therefore, is a learned development tied to metaphorical language.
This too has an analog in Clone Wars, as we see in this exchange between the Kaminoan clone manufacturer Nala Se and Sidious' apprentice Lord Tyranus:
Nala Se: I am certain the malfunction to the inhibitor chip is an aberration.
Lord Tyranus: And how do you explain the renegade?
Nala Se: I’m afraid the Jedi have inspired creative thinking in some of the clones. That is the cause of this type of divergent behavior.
Creative thinking that inspires divergent behavior? Divergent thinking? That sounds a lot like the breakdown of the bicameral mind to me. Again, Jaynes argued that modern consciousness, as opposed to the bicameral model, was a "cultural invention." In The Clone Wars, we have the loyal clone troopers, very much like painless warriors of the Iliad -- and then we have the enlightened Jedi, who must struggle through inner conflict and seek solace in some of the very sorts of meditative practices and introspective philosophies that would have hasted the spread of modern consciousness, according to Jaynes, during the fifth and sixth centuries BCE.
I'm not saying its a perfect fit -- nor do I argue that Jaynes' hypothesis is 100 percent accurate -- but I do love the way this contemplation of consciousness and the Clone Wars line up. I wonder if one might imagine the victory of the Sith in this phase of the saga as a victory of Bicameral thinking over modern consciousness? As clone troopers are gradually replaced by human storm troopers, cloning technology is no longer necessary to enforce rigid adherence to authoritarianism in the galaxy. What does this say about our modern times here on Earth?
I thought I'd close out with the introduction from Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith, the novelization by Matthew Stover, which is quite good as well and captures a sense of the mythology in the saga:
This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.
It is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is a story of the blurred line between our best and our worst.
It is the story of the end of an age.
A strange thing about stories --
Though this all happened so long ago and so far away that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also happening right now. Right here.
It is happening as you read these words.
This is how twenty-five millennia come to a close. Corruption and treachery have crushed a thousand years of peace. This is not just the end of a republic; night is falling on civilization itself.
This is the twilight of the Jedi.
The end starts now.
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