J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress ?

[Bill Ferny]

Long before Aristotle became a tool of the establishment, his rediscovery during the High Middle Ages offered some relief from dour anti-intellectualism. Then Renaissance humanism offered a philosophical basis for valuing the individual human being as worthy in its own right. The Reformation freed sanctity and morality from control by a narrow, self-chosen club; it also legitimized self-betterment through hard work in this world, not the next. Then Galileo and Newton showed that creation's clockwork can be understood, even appreciated in its elegance, not just endured.

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Rare indeed is the opportunity to see such a trite and superfluous summation based on 19th century arrogance and 20th century reconstructionism. One who would characterize scholasticism as dour anti-intellectualism is one who can not read it because they are simply too stupid to figure it out.

After this paragraph I should have stopped reading, but you all know me better than that. I couldn’t resist. He’s right in placing Tolkien squarely with “Keats and Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, Henry James and many European-trained philosophers in spurning the modern emphasis on pragmatic experimentation, production, universal literacy, progress, cooperative enterprise, democracy, city life and flattened social orders.” Though I wonder what Keats would think of being considered a subjectivist. The author’s point is that such a view is wrong-headed:

Romanticism has come full circle, now unctuously praising the very same lords -- the über-men -- that it started out bravely opposing.

Despite the fact that this is a **** poor evaluation of the Romantic movement, it is a good example that a cursory reading of a history of philosophy text book is NOT a thorough philosophical education. Still, our author attempts to temper his over generalizations with a nod toward the “necessity for illogical tales.” (I hate to tell him but, Heideger, Hegel, and Fichte are much more logical than he.) Mr. Brin, however, can not help but fall back upon his unstudied prejudice:

Still, scientific/progressive society has been known to listen to its critics, and not just now and then. Name one feudal society whose leaders did that.

In other words, Romanticism (to include pre-Renaissance thought, and post-Enlightenment philosophy) = feudalism. This notion is even more wrong-headed than he is making the Romantic movement out to be. How does Mr. Brin account for the feudal model being alive and well in corporate America, a child of capitalism and republicanism? Anyway, can an economic and governing paradigm be used to sufficiently explain all the many societies in which it has played a role?

What is really at work with Mr. Brin? He sees the dichotomy between Romanticism (to use his phrase, even though, what he includes in the category is rather general and vague) and scientific progress as irreconcilable. This is, however, a common fallacy in our modern day. We see an insurmountable gulf between the physical and the spiritual, between the seen and unseen realities that we experience everyday. What Keats, Rossosue, Liebniz, Lonergan, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Gilson, and, yes, even Tolkien, attempted to do was bridge the gap, to give us a language to speak meaningfully about these unseen realities. The “romantic” philosophical movement attempted to lift modern philosophy from sterile etymology. If one sees their efforts as opposed to the efforts of the scientist, one completely misses what those people were trying to say. Since Mr. Brin misses the point altogether, he assumes that what these thinkers and artists are trying to do is resurrect feudalism (an economic and governing paradigm completely peripheral to the matter, in the first place). How does Mr. Brin account for the conspicuous absence of feudalism in Middle-Earth, I wonder. NAY, Mr. Brin! Far from attempting to “replace” the fruits of scientific enlightenment, the “Romantics” as you insist on calling them, attempted to see scientific enlightenment as a grand accomplishment given meaning by the dignity, fecundity, and the divination of what is truly human: the rational, loving soul.

I really don’t blame him for his obtuse sophistry, its obvious where his brain was when he should have been reading some primary sources:

For the life of me, I cannot picture more than one truly optimistic portrayal of future society in all of TV or film sci-fi.