The Scourge of The Dark Side...Tolkien and Modernism

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Hot, crispy nice hobbit

Tolkien's work only embraced the ideals, not the details.

Actually, what I was saying is that the ideal was better then than the idealogues now.

Originally Posted by Hot, crispy nice hobbit

But I can't agree with the notion that "the past is better, and it only exists in books these days". Think Black Death which wiped out more than 30% of Europe's population.

I think we can all honestly say that we could do without looking like a peasant from a Bruegel painting ("Awww, look...Junior's got his first goiter! That'll hide his pock marks."). Neither would we wish to be subjected to polio or death by a simple toothache. Technology has its place, but rampant technology and its encroachment on the environment is heading us towards a global disaster so profound that one day we might look back on the era of the Black Death as a Golden Age for humanity. 'Tis all relative, and one could say that Tolkien was prophetic in his environmental views.

Originally Posted by Hot, crispy nice hobbit

It is certainly much more pervasive that this other worldview is glorified in an ocean of discourse we call the Internet.

In another discussion somewhere on this fora, we were discussing college curricula and the fact that many American colleges (I can't speak for the Europeans) have adopted the current worldview with a militancy that would make Stalin blush. Classicism in literature is eschewed for what amounts to an extended Sociology course.

The University where I graduated from -- which once had a vibrant variety of professors and literary views (from almost Stoic Classicists to Kerouac-addled ex-hippies to avant-garde post-moderns), has now been so thoroughly saturated with the post-modern worldview that a post-graduate English lit. syllabus has more to do with marxism, absurdism, feminism, class and racism, lesbianism, and a horde of other isms which, in and of themselves, are fine discussion points and pertinent to current world affairs, but are more applicable to sociology, psychology or poli-sci. One can only scratch their head and ask, 'Excuse me, is their anything that actually pertains to literature in any of these courses? I'd really like to read a poem, if that's alright with you.' I am sure the query would only be met with derision: 'If you don't have an ism, you can't read any poetry. How can you read your poetry without any isms?'

The world-weary cynicism, blanket disapproval of literature for its own sake, and the almost oppressive reliance on psychological motivations which tends to be the primary focus of the current worldview was summed up by C.S. Lewis in his book The Abolition of Man. Lewis spoke disapprovingly of an English lit. school book authored by two individuals wherein they quoted a well-known story regarding Samuel Coleridge listening with interest to two tourists regarding their impressions of a waterfall:

...one called it 'sublime' and the other 'pretty'; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust.

The authors of the book Lewis was deriding comment as follows:

'When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime", or shortly I have sublime feelings...This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something; and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.'

Lewis then goes on to question the author's woodenheadedness, and the obvious assumptions that arise when using such narrow thinking; he states that there is an objective beauty and not merely a subjective use of predicates to mirror one's psychological mood. That is what seems to be missing from the current equation.

I am rambling and have consumed far too much coffee this morning, which I must admit is sublime.