[Bill Ferny]

MotW,

It is nearly impossible to disagree with your position in the last post. But for Mr. Brin its not so much a matter of the scientific/democratic age doing away with a non-egalitarian culture and replacing it with a completely egalitarian model, but a model more egalitarian. It’s a matter of degree. And if left to its own, science and democracy will eventually conquer all the vestiges of Medievalism.

The problem with Mr. Brin’s way of thinking is that he has replaced one golden cow with another. He sees scientific progress and democracy as the save all, so in reality he puts the technocrats into the role of the sovereign, and he places the politician into the role of the moralist. Sure it does away with the old the kings and priests, but sets up a whole new gang of kings and priests, except now these new kings and priests have all the wondrous inventions of science and cultural progress, like nuclear bombs, biological and chemical weapons, mass production industry, advertising, and mass (free?) media

But, he would say to that argument, these new kings and priests are open to criticism from a free press. How many kings and priests of ages of old were open to criticism? Of course, there is some truth to this statement. However, the new media is a condition, a manipulative condition, that can and is used to serve the new kings and priests, especially when one considers the fact that the technocrats are the drivers of the new media. (Do gallop polls gauge or shape public opinion?)

Mr. Brin laments Tolkien, because he knows, deep down inside, that romantics exist because of the many failures of the Enlightenment’s golden cow.

MotW,

In regard to your first post, I still think Tolkien was a Romantic in the spirit of Sir Walter Scott. There are things in the world, the fruits of “progress,” that disturbed Tolkien. An ideal that is inherent was that unquestioned progress is wrong, it is the kind of progress that leads to domination and tyranny of an order that far surpasses any domination or tyranny known before. He, like so many other “Romantics,” questioned Mr. Brin’s golden cow (the Tower of Babel, perhaps?), and so for Mr. Brin, Tolkien is most certainly an enemy of progress, the kind of progress that Mr. Brin holds dear.

Like Sir Walter Scott’s nostalgic past, it is rather doubtful that the time Tolkien was nostalgic for ever really existed. However, the values and ideals that they sought did exist as an alternative to modernism, and no doubt still persist in the world today, despite the technocrats and political moralists who rage against them.