more Tolkien, politics, society

[eub]

(a scion of here)

stresskitten wrote:
However, his consistent message about those individual choices is that the temptation to seize power, even for the sake of coercing good, is a temptation toward corruption, and that those who are given power and retain goodness are those who stay humble and use it to serve.

Agreed. And on the other hand, to shirk power, as Aragorn was tempted to, is almost as wrong as to seize it. Neither overstep nor understep one's duty, yeah? Ideally no duty is higher or lower: all offer the same chance of selfless service, the object of which may happen to differ.

In LotR I think this kind of allotted duty is a fusion of Christianity and older culture. My impression, and correct me if one of his letters says "That eub, he's on crack," is that Tolkien felt deeply sympathetic towards, hmm, pre-feudal Northern European cultures. (Middle-earth references a historical grab-bag, but I can't actually think of any outright feudalism.) I imagine Tolkien's sympathy was with their entire kind of life; I'm certainly not saying it was all driven by a taste for their various systems of more or less customary social roles. It's all of a piece -- but that piece happens to be one that's distastefully alien to a modern American reader.

I don't remember what Brin was saying, and I don't care to reread it, but Tolkien is anti-modernist (for aesthetic reasons, not political, but that's not the point), and I suspect Brin of high modernism. Tolkien doesn't intend a political stance, but his sympathies are uncongenial to political democracy, or to Marxism. In many ways old Iceland was far more egalitarian than 21c U.S., but it was not democratic. I don't know what Tolkiend personally thought of democracy, and I'm not saying it can't be logically reconciled with his work, but I do think the bent of his work lies against it.

(Sometime, if you like, prod me to rant about how certain talking-animal fantasies with multiple species read to me like they're coding for some kind of squicky determinism.)

Comments

[eub.livejournal.com]

[...] if you're assuming that he was unsympathetic to democracy just because he wrote about monarchies, I think that's pretty weak.

That's not what I'm trying to say. Let me exaggerate to make the point: the spirit of political democracy is that individuals are fungible. (Purely pragmatic democracy has no interest in this, hence "could be reconciled".) LotR disagrees.

It might be worth going outside the text. Would these be representative quotes?

"I am not a 'democrat' only because 'humility' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power—and then we get and are getting slavery,"

"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)-or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy,"

I think that the real division here is not anti-modernism versus high modernism, it's those who are primarily interested in what individuals go through versus those who are primarily interested in how things should be structured and organized.

That's a useful division. I don't see that it invalidates the other. If Brin's calling Tolkien anti-modernist is really missing the point, not just making a different one, please explain how?

He wanted England to have a myth cycle of its own,

A project not undertaken in a vacuum... Whig history may not be strictly a myth, but I say it serves the purpose.