Tolkien: an enemy of progress?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

I'm not really starting a new thread but responding to an old one now trapped in the archives. As per the instructions given by Mister Underhill in the Stickie, I will provide a link to the old thread and then just respond here.

Seems to me that Tolkien both was and was not an "enemy of progress" depending on how one defines progress. He is steadfastly against the increasing industrialisation and automation of human society and human relations. But this is not, I am sure, something that he would have regarded as "progress." To Tolkien's mind, such 'advances' were merely extensions of a very old and now archaic way of thinking about human beings into new realms. That is, the old and all too human desire to control and regulate has itself become technologised: now, instead of attempting to maintain control of nature through a participatory form of magic or ritual, we enforce our control through technology (mechanical, structural even theoretical). True human advance would, I think (according to the Professor) be something that is human-centred: that is, something that actually shows or develops some kind of progress in the human.

This is why I think he is very much against mechanisation and technologisation of human relations -- because it hinders human progress rather than fosters it. His look toward a world like the one he (re)creates in Middle-earth is not a backward gesture at all, but a reaching forward to a realisation in which human beings embrace that true progress and advance comes with the nurturing and development of the self and the community, not through the development of new techniques whereby self enforces control over the community, or nature.

He is not anti-technology. Magic is a form of technology, but one that operates in concert with nature not to dominate it. Technology, to Tolkien, seems to be amoral and outside considerations of good or bad. It is the application of that technology by humans, and in pursuit of human interests, that brings it into the realm of good and bad.

So I would say that, no, Tolkien is not an enemy of progress, only an opponent of the progressive erosion of human relations with each other and nature by the human attempt to control both with a technology that is committed to domination rather than co-operation. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Tolkien was himself as progressive as they come, in his ability to anticipate a world view and a value system in which human beings see themselves as parts of an organic whole (be that the ecosystem or human society) rather than as individual participants in some kind of competitive race with and against each other and the natural world.