This is a brilliant and challenging essay that, as such, I feel will not travel. It is noteworthy that I am leaving the first comment, and more than a week has past. But on the positive side, it has found me, and that is at least something! Alas for you, I have to engage in this one quite heavily, so prepare for extensive critique, even though I am in great support of certain aspects of what you are laying out here.
"For Wolfe, Tolkien’s philosophical contribution in The Lord of the Rings (and it is, indeed, properly so-called), is in identifying the strength of ‘the West’ not in Greek or Roman civilisation but in the ‘neighbour-love and settled customary goodness of the Shire’, where ‘everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder because everyone lived by the same changeless rules, and everyone knew what those rules were’."
So many tangents here I shall have to pick just a few! Firstly, it is absolutely the case that Tolkien's legendarium (not just The Lord of the Rings) is a philosophical contribution, but like C.S. Lewis, Tolkien's philosophy moves entirely within Christian monarchy. Both authors (perhaps only when viewed retrospectively) end up defending royalty through ideals that still just about applied at the beginning of the twentieth century, but now are very difficult for anyone to take seriously.
Does this weaken Tolkien's contribution? I'm uncertain. It certainly does not help his ideas travel philosophically, and it is noteworthy that the Peter Jackson adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, and its prequel (erroneously called The Hobbit - The Hobbit categorically not being a prequel to The Lord of the Rings) are about telling battle stories. Only a sliver of the philosophical content survives, and in the case of The Hobbit movies (which are in actuality an adaptation of the appendices to The Lord of the Rings) very little of Tolkien's ethos survives conversion.
Michael Moorcock, who was very influential for me, and highly supportive of my philosophical work (few have been!), was vehemently opposed to Tolkien's writings. I feel I owe Moorcock a representation of his position here, which is that Tolkien represents the city - and by extension the working class - in the form of the armies of Orcs, and in effect takes the side of the English rural middle class against the working class. While it is certainly possible to argue against Moorcock's objection here, I believe he is correct to have ascribed to Tolkien a rose-tinted view of the English (possibly British - difficulties here...) rural town. It is perhaps fairer to suggest that Tolkien's late-breaking opposition to industrialisation is the source of the hostility, but it is logical to see this as leading to a prejudice against the working class. Fascinatingly, Moorcock's literary (rather than fantasy) writing manages to show a similarly rose-tinted view of working class London - although he also, unlike Tolkien, deconstructs this mythology as well (especially in Mother London and King of the City).
I raise this contrast here because I personally think it is problematic to idolise the Shire in this way. One only has to think of the dreary conformity that runs as a theme within the bookends to The Hobbit, which makes Bilbo into an outsider because he decides to act in a way that is not respectable. With all the good will in the world, I could not take the Shire as an ideal of any kind, while still acknowledging that it functions in this way for Tolkien, and that readings like those you report here are certainly both available and credible.
"The heart of this ‘settled customary goodness’ is the fact that it is indeed customary."
And herein perhaps lies the problem...
"And it is a relationship that one can indeed still glimpse here and there around the world in communities which have managed to come through the past 50 years of social upheaval relatively unscathed - certainly anybody familiar with rural England or Japan will have seen (and envied) the results of it, even in the highly attenuated and degraded form in which it nowadays subsists."
I am familiar with rural England (I grew up on the Isle of Wight) and have some familiarity with Japan, since a good friend of mine lived there for many years. In both, there is a stifling conformity that undercuts any attempt to idealise these cultures, one that again Tolkien himself successfully depicts in The Hobbit. This conformity is even more severe in Japan. I admire the way Japan has held onto various aspects of its traditional culture - but I also must report my friends utter infuriation with the refusal of Japanese people to 'rock the boat', even in situations they would recognise as out of order. There is simultaneously something great and something terrible about these two cultures you single out. I don't want to take too strong a line against this here, because I do think that there is a maintenance of community in these contexts that is worthy of praise - but I could not, even with the greatest of squints, pretend that there are not commensurate problems as well.
"There is here a clear echo of what Oakeshott himself labelled a ‘civil association’ - that is, a society in which law acts only as a kind of ‘grammar’ informing social interactions and choices otherwise freely determined, and is not deployed for any specific interventionist cause. This, Oakeshott said, was the only form of morally justifiable arrangement of law, society and governance..."
Aye, but herein lies the problem, because what is currently happening is that our cultural 'producers' (to borrow Foucault so you don't have to!), of which Google is perhaps the most significant player, are managing to install a grammar that has been eagerly eaten up by the generation just reaching adulthood. They in turn have deployed this grammar in an interventionist manner (they may have been aided, in this regard, by US academics, whom I fear have abandoned the very idea of a university). The culture wars we are all acutely aware of right now flow out from this dynamic. This generation has affiliated via a network of robots, and are uninterested in the effect this has had on them, empowered as they are by youth's utter certainty. Given the ubiquity of robot intermediaries, it is difficult to see how to break this pattern. As a father of three boys, it is a problem that troubles me greatly.
In this regard, it is worth noting that I do have one hope: I read to them. Amongst other things, I read them The Hobbit. I doubt I will read them The Lord of the Rings, but I do have a copy of the BBC radio adaptation, which may well get an airing. In a situation whereby cultural power accumulates in those who control what is permitted to propagate within the walled kingdom of the internet, books from the civilisations we have lost may represent the last, best hope for resurrecting civil associations.
Many thanks for stimulating these remarks, and apologies for the length of this comment, but I lack the time to make it shorter.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I agree that Tolkien and Lewis are now difficult to take seriously, which has shifted them from being the last defenders of a tail end of a certain tradition to counter-cultural figures who are, indeed, almost now to be read as conservative critical theorists. I was planning to do a series of posts on this, if and when I ever have the time.
The thing about Tolkien and the Shire, and I think by extension rural England and Japan, is that things are more complicated than they look. Tolkien is far from idealistic about the Shire - most of the people who live thare are depicted as amiable idiots. And Bilbo's escape makes a 'man' of him. If he hadn't left, there would be no story (and, indeed, no Middle Earth, because Sauron would have won). So I'm not sure the idolisation critique is entirely fair to the text. Similarly, we can all recognise that life in a settled rural community is often dull and repetitive. There will always be people who, like Bilbo, chafe against that life, and seek escape - and those people are necessary.
This takes us back to Oakeshott, actually, who said in one of his essays (I forget which) that it's fine for individuals to play the odds, but society should back the field. Total conformity is bad, and there is a role for the 'moral eccentric'. But total chaos is a worse alternative to conformity. It's better to err on the side of settled custom, all things taken into consideration. And it is better for the state to err on the side of leaving settled norms of conduct well alone - indeed, of leaving society to its own devices for the most part. Of course, this is so far outside the Overton window nowadays that it's right down the street.
On the 'robot intermediaries' point, I don't know if you've read James Poulos's stuff - you may in fact hate it; he's an acquired taste - but he's been writing an awful lot about this subject which seems germaine, not just to this comment but your most recent post about the mind/The Mind as well. It's something I worry about a lot too, and the pace of loss and decay seems to have recently become turbocharged. How to maintain individual distinctiveness under conditions which increasingly militate against it is going to become an acute problem. All I can try with my own daughters is keep them away from screens as much as possible, read to them, and try to ensure that they are embedded deeply in the real world through family, community, church and friends.
PS - I have read a lot of Moorcock and like a good Elric or Corum story as much as the next guy, and I think he was half-right about Tolkien. The thing he misses is that the individual orcs are figures of sympathy. Orcishness - the way industrialised (and post-industrialised) society reduces people to a mob-like existence - is actually an evil thing; the unfortunate orcs are victims, not villains.
This is a great response, thank you. I completely agree that Tolkien's stories are more nuanced than the critique I offered - but I felt the essay needed that counterweight, and what are comments for if not to provide the push and pull... 😉 I would say, though, that sympathy for the Orcs is a very contemporary occurrence: Tolkien and Lewis, arguably more than any of the other adventure writers, gave us evil monsters that it was morally correct to kill.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I would be interested in further engagement in Tolkien and Lewis. In my teenage years, I loathed these authors - I never recovered from that bizarre moment in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when Santa Claus appears as an itinerant arms dealer to provide weapons to the children. But I have come full circle. I find a great deal of insight in these works now.
This is a brilliant and challenging essay that, as such, I feel will not travel. It is noteworthy that I am leaving the first comment, and more than a week has past. But on the positive side, it has found me, and that is at least something! Alas for you, I have to engage in this one quite heavily, so prepare for extensive critique, even though I am in great support of certain aspects of what you are laying out here.
"For Wolfe, Tolkien’s philosophical contribution in The Lord of the Rings (and it is, indeed, properly so-called), is in identifying the strength of ‘the West’ not in Greek or Roman civilisation but in the ‘neighbour-love and settled customary goodness of the Shire’, where ‘everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder because everyone lived by the same changeless rules, and everyone knew what those rules were’."
So many tangents here I shall have to pick just a few! Firstly, it is absolutely the case that Tolkien's legendarium (not just The Lord of the Rings) is a philosophical contribution, but like C.S. Lewis, Tolkien's philosophy moves entirely within Christian monarchy. Both authors (perhaps only when viewed retrospectively) end up defending royalty through ideals that still just about applied at the beginning of the twentieth century, but now are very difficult for anyone to take seriously.
Does this weaken Tolkien's contribution? I'm uncertain. It certainly does not help his ideas travel philosophically, and it is noteworthy that the Peter Jackson adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, and its prequel (erroneously called The Hobbit - The Hobbit categorically not being a prequel to The Lord of the Rings) are about telling battle stories. Only a sliver of the philosophical content survives, and in the case of The Hobbit movies (which are in actuality an adaptation of the appendices to The Lord of the Rings) very little of Tolkien's ethos survives conversion.
Michael Moorcock, who was very influential for me, and highly supportive of my philosophical work (few have been!), was vehemently opposed to Tolkien's writings. I feel I owe Moorcock a representation of his position here, which is that Tolkien represents the city - and by extension the working class - in the form of the armies of Orcs, and in effect takes the side of the English rural middle class against the working class. While it is certainly possible to argue against Moorcock's objection here, I believe he is correct to have ascribed to Tolkien a rose-tinted view of the English (possibly British - difficulties here...) rural town. It is perhaps fairer to suggest that Tolkien's late-breaking opposition to industrialisation is the source of the hostility, but it is logical to see this as leading to a prejudice against the working class. Fascinatingly, Moorcock's literary (rather than fantasy) writing manages to show a similarly rose-tinted view of working class London - although he also, unlike Tolkien, deconstructs this mythology as well (especially in Mother London and King of the City).
I raise this contrast here because I personally think it is problematic to idolise the Shire in this way. One only has to think of the dreary conformity that runs as a theme within the bookends to The Hobbit, which makes Bilbo into an outsider because he decides to act in a way that is not respectable. With all the good will in the world, I could not take the Shire as an ideal of any kind, while still acknowledging that it functions in this way for Tolkien, and that readings like those you report here are certainly both available and credible.
"The heart of this ‘settled customary goodness’ is the fact that it is indeed customary."
And herein perhaps lies the problem...
"And it is a relationship that one can indeed still glimpse here and there around the world in communities which have managed to come through the past 50 years of social upheaval relatively unscathed - certainly anybody familiar with rural England or Japan will have seen (and envied) the results of it, even in the highly attenuated and degraded form in which it nowadays subsists."
I am familiar with rural England (I grew up on the Isle of Wight) and have some familiarity with Japan, since a good friend of mine lived there for many years. In both, there is a stifling conformity that undercuts any attempt to idealise these cultures, one that again Tolkien himself successfully depicts in The Hobbit. This conformity is even more severe in Japan. I admire the way Japan has held onto various aspects of its traditional culture - but I also must report my friends utter infuriation with the refusal of Japanese people to 'rock the boat', even in situations they would recognise as out of order. There is simultaneously something great and something terrible about these two cultures you single out. I don't want to take too strong a line against this here, because I do think that there is a maintenance of community in these contexts that is worthy of praise - but I could not, even with the greatest of squints, pretend that there are not commensurate problems as well.
"There is here a clear echo of what Oakeshott himself labelled a ‘civil association’ - that is, a society in which law acts only as a kind of ‘grammar’ informing social interactions and choices otherwise freely determined, and is not deployed for any specific interventionist cause. This, Oakeshott said, was the only form of morally justifiable arrangement of law, society and governance..."
Aye, but herein lies the problem, because what is currently happening is that our cultural 'producers' (to borrow Foucault so you don't have to!), of which Google is perhaps the most significant player, are managing to install a grammar that has been eagerly eaten up by the generation just reaching adulthood. They in turn have deployed this grammar in an interventionist manner (they may have been aided, in this regard, by US academics, whom I fear have abandoned the very idea of a university). The culture wars we are all acutely aware of right now flow out from this dynamic. This generation has affiliated via a network of robots, and are uninterested in the effect this has had on them, empowered as they are by youth's utter certainty. Given the ubiquity of robot intermediaries, it is difficult to see how to break this pattern. As a father of three boys, it is a problem that troubles me greatly.
In this regard, it is worth noting that I do have one hope: I read to them. Amongst other things, I read them The Hobbit. I doubt I will read them The Lord of the Rings, but I do have a copy of the BBC radio adaptation, which may well get an airing. In a situation whereby cultural power accumulates in those who control what is permitted to propagate within the walled kingdom of the internet, books from the civilisations we have lost may represent the last, best hope for resurrecting civil associations.
Many thanks for stimulating these remarks, and apologies for the length of this comment, but I lack the time to make it shorter.
With unlimited love and respect,
Chris.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I agree that Tolkien and Lewis are now difficult to take seriously, which has shifted them from being the last defenders of a tail end of a certain tradition to counter-cultural figures who are, indeed, almost now to be read as conservative critical theorists. I was planning to do a series of posts on this, if and when I ever have the time.
The thing about Tolkien and the Shire, and I think by extension rural England and Japan, is that things are more complicated than they look. Tolkien is far from idealistic about the Shire - most of the people who live thare are depicted as amiable idiots. And Bilbo's escape makes a 'man' of him. If he hadn't left, there would be no story (and, indeed, no Middle Earth, because Sauron would have won). So I'm not sure the idolisation critique is entirely fair to the text. Similarly, we can all recognise that life in a settled rural community is often dull and repetitive. There will always be people who, like Bilbo, chafe against that life, and seek escape - and those people are necessary.
This takes us back to Oakeshott, actually, who said in one of his essays (I forget which) that it's fine for individuals to play the odds, but society should back the field. Total conformity is bad, and there is a role for the 'moral eccentric'. But total chaos is a worse alternative to conformity. It's better to err on the side of settled custom, all things taken into consideration. And it is better for the state to err on the side of leaving settled norms of conduct well alone - indeed, of leaving society to its own devices for the most part. Of course, this is so far outside the Overton window nowadays that it's right down the street.
On the 'robot intermediaries' point, I don't know if you've read James Poulos's stuff - you may in fact hate it; he's an acquired taste - but he's been writing an awful lot about this subject which seems germaine, not just to this comment but your most recent post about the mind/The Mind as well. It's something I worry about a lot too, and the pace of loss and decay seems to have recently become turbocharged. How to maintain individual distinctiveness under conditions which increasingly militate against it is going to become an acute problem. All I can try with my own daughters is keep them away from screens as much as possible, read to them, and try to ensure that they are embedded deeply in the real world through family, community, church and friends.
PS - I have read a lot of Moorcock and like a good Elric or Corum story as much as the next guy, and I think he was half-right about Tolkien. The thing he misses is that the individual orcs are figures of sympathy. Orcishness - the way industrialised (and post-industrialised) society reduces people to a mob-like existence - is actually an evil thing; the unfortunate orcs are victims, not villains.
This is a great response, thank you. I completely agree that Tolkien's stories are more nuanced than the critique I offered - but I felt the essay needed that counterweight, and what are comments for if not to provide the push and pull... 😉 I would say, though, that sympathy for the Orcs is a very contemporary occurrence: Tolkien and Lewis, arguably more than any of the other adventure writers, gave us evil monsters that it was morally correct to kill.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I would be interested in further engagement in Tolkien and Lewis. In my teenage years, I loathed these authors - I never recovered from that bizarre moment in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when Santa Claus appears as an itinerant arms dealer to provide weapons to the children. But I have come full circle. I find a great deal of insight in these works now.
Many thanks for the exchange!