CT Why didn't Obi-Wan or Yoda tell Luke about the Midi-chlorians?

I never understood why Obi-Wan or Yoda didn't tell Luke about the Midi-chlorians since they are an important part about the Force.

 

Luke left Yoda before he completed his training.

 

Because knowing what they are and how to find them is knowledge best suited for somebody building & training a new generation of Jedi. It makes the most sense to discuss that once the Sith are beaten instead of wasting precious time going over things that aren't particularly helpful for somebody in Luke's situation.

 

Simple. Because midi-clorians weren't invented by Lucas until he made TPM, almost 20 years after ESB. Nobody had ever heard about them at the time of the OT. And I don't think anyone needs yet another retcon in the OT to include midi-clorians. Maybe some extra dialog with the Yoda puppet during the death scene in ROTJ where Yoda tells Luke in detail about them? No thanks.

 

They went old school with Luke's training. The ancient Jedi didn't know about midi-chlorians. They understood the Force. They didn't know yet that there were scientific ways to detect it.

 

How do you know they didn't?

 

For the in-universe reason, I'd say it's because they didn't need to at that time. Telling Ani about them is one thing; it was seemingly a time of peace and Ani would be presumably spending the rest of his life among the Jedi. Thus, they had the luxury of providing a more extensive teaching curriculum. For Luke, it's a different story. They're at war, and Luke's going to be on the front lines pretty quickly. There's no time to go into things that can wait. Stick to the basic facts: lightsaber combat, levitation, Force visions, stay away from the Dark Side, mission comes before absolutely everything else. Just what he needs for the battlefield. Once Vader & Palpatine are gone, then they can go from the bachelor's degree to the master's course.

 

Well, if the ANH novelization is any indication of Lucas' early thoughts about the Force....

Kenobi nodded. "I forget sometimes in whose presence I babble. Let us say
simply that the force is something a Jedi must deal with. While it has never been
properly explained, scientists have theorized it is an energy field generated by living
things. Early man suspected its existence, yet remained in ignorance of its potential
for millennia.

"No one, not even the Jedi scientists, were able to truly define the force.
Possibly no one ever will. Sometimes there is as much magic as science in the
explanations of the force. Yet what is a magician but a practicing theorist? Now,
let's try again."

Plus there's this:

George Lucas: "I read a lot of books about mythology and theories behind mythology; on of the books was The Hero of a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, but there were many others, maybe as many as fifty books. I basically worked out a general theory for the Force, and then played with it. The more detail I went into, the more it detracted from the concept I was trying to put forward.

 

There is no particular reason to think he didn't.

Obviously Yoda told Luke a number of things we as the audience didn't get to hear because it wasn't necessary. Presumably he told him about the Living Force, the Cosmic Force and so on. If he didn't then he would have at some point.

That's the actual production reason of course but in story terms that's irrelevant because TESB was after the story told us about them in TPM.

There is no actual retcon needed as the story was designed to flow the way it was once the actual retcon of TESB took place which made "Star Wars" Episode IV because Empire was Episode V.

 

The midichlorians had not been created by Lucas until 1997.

 

The simple answer is that they did and Lucas knew about them when he told Leia, "The Force is strong in my family." In other words, it's a genetic concept.

However, Lucas had not come up with the concept. Plain and simple. I recall reading somewhere that he a rudimentary notion of the Force being controlled by genetic advantages, but I doubt that was true.

That said, reading the Darth Plagueis novel helps one to better understand and appreciate this concept of mid-chlorians. Besides, can you imagine Han Solo or Lando using the Force? No. I like JJ Abrams, but I disagree with him on this topic. Luke, Yoda, Darth Sidious, Satele Shan, Nomi Sunrider, etc. have a lot of midi-chlorians. Chirrut Imwe has far fewer, but he still uses what he has. End of story.

 

They did, offscreen.

 

We're not talking about Lucas's early thoughts, though.

But regardless of that, your own excerpt supports the notion that the Force is to a significant degree a scientific concept:

"While it has never been properly explained, scientists have theorized it is an energy field generated by living things."

As I've pointed out before, an "energy field" is itself a concept based on science, and here it is in fact explicitly stated that this is a theory formulated by "scientists."

"No one, not even the Jedi scientists, were able to truly define the force."

"Jedi scientists" are literally being talked about here.

"Sometimes there is as much magic as science in the explanations of the force."

Sometimes there is as much magic as science in the explanations of the Force. A pretty weird statement to make if the Force is entirely magical and has nothing to do with science.

And speaking of Joseph Cambpell, here are several quotes from him dealing with the relationship between science and mythology:

"Between mythology and biology there is a very close association. I think of mythology as a function of biology; it's a production of the human imagination, which is moved by the energies of the organs of the body operating against each other. These are the same in human beings all over the world and this is the basis for the archetypology of myth. So, I've thought of myself as a kind of marginal scientist studying the phenomenology of the human body, you might say."

--Historical Atlas of World Mythology

"I would say that all of our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives the spiritual import -- what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion. Religion is the recognition of the deeper dimensions that the science reveals to us. What is in conflict is the science of 2000 B.C., which is what you have in the Bible, and the science of the twentieth century A.D. You have to disengage the messages of the Bible from its science. "

--Joseph Campbell, from an interview with Jeremy Mishlove

"What I'm trying to say is that the structuring of a mythology is conditioned by the science at that time. There's no use constructing a mythology based on an archaic science. I wouldn't know what to do with an atom, but I do recognize that when we had a Ptolemaic cosmology there was a whole interpretation of the relationship of the earth to the different planes of the universe that was mythologized. What happened to that was it was given an ethical and moral value, the stages of a ladder of the heavens represented the stages of the psyche."

--The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work

Campbell thought that modern science needed to be mythologized for cultural consumption (in just the way that Lucas did it both in the original films and in the prequels). In fact, as you can see here, Campbell was of the belief that all religion throughout history was simply a mythologization of the known science of the time.

 

As well as their inability to "truly define the Force".

Lucas realized that too much explanation of the Force was a bad thing.

And those scientists could simply be trying to explain something in the only terms they can understand. Doesn't mean they are correct, or even close.

 

In-universe, it was hardly relevant to Luke's training at the time. Qui-Gon only told Anakin about it because he asked. Not to mention Yoda didn't have one of those blood sample bits of tech.

 

Because midichlorians had not been created by Lucas until the 1990s?

 

Midi-chlorians aren’t the Force, thus introducing them was completely independent of “defining the Force.”

indeed! And he never did that.

 

By the time period of ANH, Yoda and Obi-Wan had got together and decided what a ridiculous notion midichlorians were and had made a pact never to mention them again.

 

A more likely explanation was that they knew from experience that telling a Skywalker who hasn't been trained that they've got an astonishingly high midi-chlorian count doesn't always work so well...

 

Well, since the Force is created by and links together all living things, all living things are able to tap into it to one extent or another. Midi-chlorian counts or other physical things may have an influence on how strong that link is, but the link is never fully absent. (Sorry, TLJ; Luke can't cut himself off from it completely. He can only ignore it.) Plus, training and study can better enable one to know how, why and when to use it, but that link still exists even without it. So, while Han or Lando can't levitate objects or mind-trick someone, who's to say their occasional flashes of insight or gut feelings aren't Force-related?

 

You sure about that? There's plenty of film examples of Force users hiding from each other, and old EU characters such as theY Vong and Ysalamiri that could push the Force away.

 

Yeah, so? Seriously, I don't understand how this undermines the fact that "Jedi scientists" exist and have a working understanding of the Force. The text says that "[n]o one, not even the Jedi scientists, were even to truly define the Force" (emphasis mine). That wording suggests that the Jedi scientists, though even they were not able to fully define it, came the closest to doing so--which is borne out by the fact that they're the ones who theorized it was an "energy field," the explanation given to Luke by Ben Kenobi.

And? "Too much" is subjective.

But the "energy field" explanation is exactly the one that is given in the movie and frequently cited by anti-midi-chlorian fans as being "mystical." It is also the only explanation given in the original movies. Again, this is the theory of the Jedi scientists we're talking about.

Sorry, your own excerpt pretty explicitly refutes the point I think you were trying to make.

 

The novelization literally states, "While it has never been properly explained..." and "No one, not even the Jedi scientists, were able to truly define the force."

 

There was simply no reason to. Luke was already marked as being strong in the Force being the son of a powerful Jedi. The midichlorians were originally a way to quantify a person's relationship with the Force, thus giving a way to identify Anakin's potential. Sure, using the OT's logic, Qui-Gon could have just "sensed" Anakin was strong with the Force, but that doesn't give justification for taking him to the Jedi as the Chosen One.

 

very good! And obviously, since midi-chlorians neither explain nor define the Force, the novel isn’t contradicted. That was easy.