Following up on a previous discussion question, here are some of my own thoughts. In particular, while the right side of America is in thrall to a spirituality ruled by evil, the left side has lost the spiritual awakening that arose in the late 60s and 70s. Emblematic of that is STAR WARS saga, in which between the first three films and these most recent three, a profound loss of soul is evident. Big picture in miniature.

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[Recently, I posted here a discussion question under the title "What Kind of Sacred Principles Do We Need?" (at www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andrew_b_060921_a_discussion_questio.htm). It is a discussion that should be an ongoing one, I believe, and it is in that spirit that I post here a few thoughts of my own that bear upon the questions I asked there. I may share some additional thoughts of mine on these themes in the near future.]

Some people have commented that they don't like the word "sacred." Admittedly, finding the right words are difficult whenever one speaks of deep matters. Indeed, as the mystics have said across the centuries, the deeper one goes, the less adequate any words are.

For now, at least, in the absence of any better words to use, I will stick with sacred. But I will also attempt to clarify what I mean by it by citing what I wrote in a discussion question I posted last month on my own website, "Where in Your Life Do You Encounter the Sacred":

For this discussion, the realm of the "sacred" will not necessarily have anything to do with any specific religious beliefs. What is meant, rather, is a sense of meaningfulness that is so big and full –and perhaps transcendent-that it breaks through our mundane experience of our world into something deeper.

I recognize that this will not solve all the problems: some people have such strong and aversive associations with the language of religion that there's no getting around that associative obstacle; other people may lack any direct personal experience of "meaningfulness that is so big and full--and perhaps transcendent" that it requires the kind of language that religions have employed to designate a breakthrough into other planes or realms of value or of our existence.

But there is no net that will catch every fish....

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One of my paramount concerns when it comes to the spiritual condition of America --"spiritual": there's another word doubtless problematic for many-- is that the "right" in our times has had a greater spiritual intensity about its values and goals than has the "progressive" (or "liberal" or "left") side of our divided society.

Even if the right has come under the sway of "daemonic" spirits, has been seduced into believing that evil forces represent the righteousness in whose garb they dress themselves, this has not lessened the power that comes from breaking through the mundane. Hitler would never have been able to mobilize his nation so effectively had he not connected them with something big and deep. (One of the more insightful biographies of Hitler is entitled THE PSYCHOPATHIC GOD.)

The discrepancy between the daemonically empowered right and the mundanely proasic liberal part of America brings to mind the famous line from Yeats, in his poem "The Second Coming":

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

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For someone who lived through, and fully participated in, the 1960s and 1970s, this spiritual shallowness of the progressive element of America comes as a big disappointment. It was not always so.

From amid the confusions and the errors and the sloth that were also part of the counter-culture, there are also a genuinely positive spirit that gave voice to some of the "sacred values" which our nation and our world genuinely need.

Part of this concerned a transformation of the human relationship with the rest of the natural world. In addition to the political dimension of "environmentalism" --indeed, the source of the passion that gave that political movement its impetus-- there was a spiritual dimension. In the matter of just a few years, the idea that there is something sacred about the biosphere --about the Creation, as some would also express it-- became a powerful force in America.

This spirit seems to have dissipated in today's America --even when we bother to talk about environmental issues, one would scarcely think that something deep and sacred is at stake-- but we can still get a sense of the former deeper vibrancy of such values from some old movies.

Just a few that come to mind mind: FERN GULLY, THE DARK CRYSTAL, STAR WARS. The list could easily be expanded.

To watch these films with an open mind and heart is to get fed at a deeper level --particularly concerning the sancticty of life in a broad sense, and concerning the possibility of a deep grounding of goodness in the incredible interconnectedness of living systems-- than is much to be found in the films of the present day.

In THE DARK CRYSTAL, the tyrannical overlords of that dying world --the Skekses-- survive by draining the living essence of other creatures and absorbing that essence into their own petty and putrid selves.

Something of that sort seems to have happened to the deeper values that were emerging into our society back a generation ago: the husk of those values remains, but much of their living essence --their connection with a sense of the sacred (the "so deeply meaningful")-- has been drained away.

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If I had to choose one emblem of this drainage of the spirit over the past generation in would be the transformation of the STAR WARS saga, and of its principle creator George Lucas.

I am not going to claim that the original STAR WARS movies were works of art that belong with HAMLET or THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. But there is a good reason why those films became important parts of the American culture of their era. They are not only good clean "space cowboy" fun. They also resonate at a spiritual level.

I used them as sources of spiritual teaching in my bringing up the two children of mine born in the late 1970s. For me, they continue to work on the mytho-poetic dimension. Deeply embedded in the action are many of the best elements of the cultural and spiritual ferment of America during that time of turmoil.

When I heard that Lucas was going to be making a new batch of STAR WARS movies, I was excited by the possibilities I could envision.

ere's a guy who had overseen the creation of what I thought to be important cultural messages before, and who is now going to invest in the fulfillment of his own most important creation. He has had decades to think through how best to build on his previous achievement. And he has all the money he could need to translate his vision to the screen.

And what's more, because of the global reputation of the earlier works, he has a whole new generation ready to receive his message.

I envied his opportunity to speak deeply to an audience that might be numbered in the hundreds of millions!

But oh, how Lucas squandered that opportunity.

The technical parts of film-making have progressed impressively in the new parts of the Saga. But in terms of the spirit-- forget it! It is flat. Sterile. Utterly without the vision, without the aspiration, without the sense of the sacred, that can be found in the early trilogy.

I could hardly believe it.

Inferring that the spiritual drainage visible between the two sets of films must reflect the course that Lucas's own spiritual path must have taken, I concluded that Lucas must have lost even the awareness of what his first STAR WARS movies had contained.

If that were not so, then even if he felt incapable himself of creating a worthy successor to that first trilogy, he could have found creative talents to do it for him-- the way an aged former great athlete would be able to recognize which young players take the game to a high level even if he himself can no longer play at that level. My first-born son and a handful of other creative young people who had deeply absorbed the earlier films could have fashioned a worthy sequel for Lucas.

But Lucas went ahead without any true spiritual spark to complete a project that seemed to have no other purpose that to capitalize on the "market" for his "brand." Mammon seems the only god that informed the second coming of Star Wars.

Even the basic creative choice showed the failure of spirit: where the early films focus on a young man on a quest to align himself with the Force and to serve the liberation of worlds, the later films focus on the young man who gives himself over to the dark side.

In today's America, which has itself given itself over to the dark side, this failure of the spirit and of the creative imagination was a profound betrayal of what had been glimpsed, and given some creative expression, in the earlier time.

Lucas and these latter day "prequels" reveal in miniature the spiritual failure of that part of America that was quickening a generation ago, and thus also the present profound need America has for a spiritual renewal --a re-connection with the sacred-- on the part of America's progressive side.

Authors Bio:
Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST. His previous books include The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, for which he was awarded the Erik H. Erikson prize by the International Society for Political Psychology.