David Brin's criticisms

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

Wow - I've seen some reasonable critiques of Tolkien, but Brin's essay is surprisingly muddled and imperceptive. I seem to remember an equally brainless tirade against Star Wars from him. Has anyone read actually read anything by him? Is his fiction any good or is it as uninspired as this?

I read one of his stories which was pretty good, I think it was called "Crystalline spheres" or something like that. Maybe a good storyteller, but he's not as bright with essays. As far as I look at it, he's quite "out", but there's more essays like this out there (and it will take several Downs' forums to examine them all )... personally I don't bother with them, or at least don't let them influence my opinions on Tolkien (though if there is anything that may enlighten me on same point, I seek and check if it fits and then I may even learn something...).

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Brin's criticisms are of a piece with China Mieville's, and not too distant from Philip Pullman's. What all three have in common is adherence to some form of secular materialism: Mieville is a doctrinaire Socialist, Pullman a militant atheist, Brin a technolator. Not really mindsets prepared to find Tolkien's philosophy appealing!

Brin tries to make two arguments here. The first is a complaint that Tolkien doesn't share his worship of 'progress', technology always carrying us onward and upward. Well, that's true. Tolkien's youth was seared by the first War of the Machines; he was there when a generation of young Europeans were immolated in a mechanical Moloch. Why should a Somme veteran see 'progress' in the Maxim guns, the quick-firing howitzers, the phosgene gas? For that matter, why should a contemporary man, doctorate or not, have such confidence that there's nothing wrong with mass deforestation and the pouring of poisons into the air and water?

But the sillier argument, one shared by Mieville and many other leftists, is the political one. Please pay attention, Trots: Tolkien wasn't writing a political book (and didn't buy the 'all art is political' bromide). He's not arguing political theory nor advocating monarchy as a form of government: it's simply a datum of a faux-medieval world. It's not as if the Captains of the West were wickedly crushing some Sauronian Autonomous Workers' Collective! Mordor is of course a monarchy as well- but an utterly tyrannous, totalitarian monarchy, where the Ruler is also the God. Indeed not unlike the regimes contemporary with LR constructed in the name of the 'workers.'

If there is any political dimension at all to the Lord of the Rings it's the very basic contradistinction between coercion and slavery, and freedom maintained under a light and enlightened hand. It's noteworthy how egalitarian the Western rulers are- any Rider can speak his mind to Theoden, for example. For all Brin's (and others') rantings about 'hierarchy' and 'tugging the forelock,' there isn't in fact any of this in Tolkien- these are the critics' projections. For Tolkien, that government governs best which governs least; isn't the Shire effectively an anarchy?

After all there's nothing sacred about democracy, "the worst form of government ever devised, except for all the others" according to Churchill. It's merely a pragmatic prophylactic against the rise of a Caligula or a Stalin. Plato's philosopher-kings would be great, if they existed. If there were some absolute guarantee of monarchy permanently in the hands of the likes of a Trajan (or an Aragorn) we should jump on it. It's not as if our prized universal franchise has a very good track record for picking illustrious rulers!

What Tolkien really was on about, of course, was the dual evils of Pride and Power. Power, "the making of the Will instantly effective:" whether by 'magic', force, or enslavement; and the concomitant of that Pride which hold's one's Will superior to the desires or good of others. Tolkien's heroes are defined by their *reluctance* to exercise power (this hardly needs rehearsal). And Pride ineluctably goes before a fall- the "snootiest" races, as Brin calls them, are responsible for the Kinslaying, the Rings of Power, and the Breaking of the World. Truly some of Tolkiens' peoples are gifted- but when they forget that their abilities are indeed gifts, to be used for the common benefit (like Sam's box of earth) then the consequences are dire. Gandalf never forgets that he is a Steward, the 'servant of the servants of Eru' in a formulation Tolkien would have known. Denethor forgets what Stewardship means, and in his pride chooses to exercise the last element of power remaining to him- filicide and suicide.

It may be that some of the attacks on Tolkien from the Left (I'm thinking here of Mieville, not necessarily Brin) is that they alraedy have imbibed a fair dose of Sarumanism. "Knowledge, Rule, Order," in time we can control the power, and override the weakminded fools who don't relise it's for their own good.... Shippey is quite right in identifying Saruman's speech as a politician's doublespeak (a word coined by Orwell at the same time Tolkien was finishing the Lord of the Rings).

[Aiwendil]

Mieville is a doctrinaire Socialist, Pullman a militant atheist, Brin a technolator. Not really mindsets prepared to find Tolkien's philosophy appealing!

True enough, I suppose. On the other hand, I'm a leftist, humanist, anti-religious, pro-science, social democrat and LotR is my favorite book. And unless I'm quite mistaken a sizeable fraction of Tolkien fandom is similarly leftist. So either we're quite irrational or the conflict that people like Brin and Pullman see between liberal secularism and Tolkien's works is not quite as severe as they think it is.

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

True enough, I suppose. On the other hand, I'm a leftist, humanist, anti-religious, pro-science, social democrat and LotR is my favorite book. And unless I'm quite mistaken a sizeable fraction of Tolkien fandom is similarly leftist. So either we're quite irrational or the conflict that people like Brin and Pullman see between liberal secularism and Tolkien's works is not quite as severe as they think it is.

Perhaps the difference is best explained in that you, Aiwendil, accept Tolkien's myth for what it is, whereas your like-minded counterparts fail to understand that "Tolkien wasn't writing a political book", to quote Mr. W.C. Hickli.

[Aiwendil]

Perhaps the difference is best explained in that you, Aiwendil, accept Tolkien's myth for what it is, whereas your like-minded counterparts fail to understand that "Tolkien wasn't writing a political book", to quote Mr. W.C. Hickli.

I suppose that's true. However, I think there may be more to it than that. I know that Tolkien wasn't writing allegory; but if I detected, shall we say, right-wing 'applicability' in LotR I would certainly dislike it (and the same goes for any other ideology I dislike).

To put it another way, while I certainly do not take Tolkien's work to contain a political or philosophical "message", I do think that (as in all really good stories), these kinds of themes can be found below the surface. But what I find under the surface is nothing like the extreme reactionist conservatism that Brin et al. seem to find. On the contrary, the ways LotR explores issues such as environmentalism, the tendency of power to corrupt, inter-racial cooperation, and even capital punishment fit very well with my left-leaning views.

So I think that Brin and friends are not wrong merely in that they read LotR as a political work; I think that the politics they read into it are the wrong politics.

[Boromir88]

So I think that Brin and friends are not wrong merely in that they read LotR as a political work.~Aiwendil

Well said, and why did Tolkien write the Lord of the Rings? Well, let's see what he says:

'I hope that you have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings? Enjoyed is the key-word. For it was written to amuse (in the highest sense): to be readable.'~Letter 181

Then you get people like Brin and Birzer (someone else I'm not too fond of) who like to attach their own personal agendas to the story, which starts to ruin the fun for readers...as I took from tumhalad's original post.

But with those people such as Brin who interestingly enough (and you can tell just by reading the article) admits to not really 'reading' the story:

"All right, I read Tolkien's epic trilogy a bit unconventionally, starting with The Two Towers and backfilling as I went along."

who do a shoddy job of research and just start attaching their own agendas to the story to push their point.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

David Brin is a scientist talking about things that are well outside his field, among them history, philosophy, sociology and literature. The PhD that he quotes so prominently at the head of his article is in Space Science, which is why everything he says that isn't directly related to astrophysics is either egregiously wrong, grossly over-simplified or common knowledge. What he does manage to do very well is to put forward an absolutely typical scientist's view that thanks to science we are daily approaching the Utopia of Technology, from which we may infer that Science is Important and that Scientists Are Our Benefactors (does that sound to anyone else like a public information film from the 1960s?). Brin is also infected with the idea that the only alternative to American republican democracy is Stalinist dictatorship (monarchy of all kinds and in all places being the same thing by another name), and that's before we even begin to consider his apparent claim that you can have either reason or romance, never both. The sad fact is that all of Brin's opinions as expressed in this article arise from ignorance and prejudice: the prejudice of the sciences against the humanities, the prejudice of the modern against the ancient, and the prejudice of the liberal democrat against all other forms of society.

I thought I recognised this article, and I've been able to track down a thread in which we all had a good old dig at it a few years ago ( J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress?). Bill Ferny in particular makes the points I wish I could make, and others that require a great deal more education. Obviously one would normally assume that someone wanting to compare the modern and medieval worlds by the application of philosophy would have first tried to acquire an extensive knowledge of those subjects, but as the thread I've linked to above makes abundantly clear, that is not always the case. Also, quoting your degrees in an irrelevant context is pretentious in the extreme, particularly when it's done to mislead the reader into thinking that you're a professional academic, when in fact you're a writer of second-rate science fiction. If you've read Brin's The Postman (in which a character tries to improve the present by resurrecting an idealised version of the past), you'll understand just how laughable it is for him to assume an attitude of superiority towards any writer, living or dead.

I was going to end there, but my natural vindictiveness demands that I attack at least one specific point, so I'll have a couple.

It's only been two hundred years or so -- an eyeblink -- that 'scientific enlightenment' began waging its rebellion against the nearly-universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture.

Except that feudalism didn't develop as a political system until the appearance of expensive heavy cavalry on the European battlefield, before which there was no such thing. Under feudalism, all land is owned by the king, who allows his followers to use it in return for service. Each major lord has lesser lords who owe him fealty, and so on down to the serf, who gives labour, military service and a share of his crops in return for a strip of land to farm for himself. Anglo-Saxon kingship didn't work like that, nor did monarchy in Scandinavia. In eleventh-century Iceland, there was no king at all, and the country was governed by a system of assemblies open to all citizens. For half a millennium, Rome was a republic, governed by democratically elected officials, albeit with a very restricted franchise; and this system was itself borrowed from ancient Greece, where the very term democratia was coined. So such ancestors of Americans as Englishmen, Germans, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Greeks and Italians did not always live under feudalism. The Irish had developed a sophisticated system of elective monarchy, combined with a rule of law from which even the highest were not exempt, before the fall of the Roman empire; and the Africans whose descendents are Brin's countrymen organised themselves in clans that wouldn't have known feudalism if it had jumped up and given them a haircut. Most of our ancestors, no matter who 'we' are, did not live under feudalism. In fact, only a statistically minute number of people ever have. Of course, if your grounding in history came from watching Ben Hur once when you were at school you might be a bit sketchy on the differences between nineteenth-century Zululand and seventeenth-century France, but in that case you shouldn't be making sweeping generalisations about their respective political systems.

Long before Aristotle became a tool of the establishment, his rediscovery during the High Middle Ages offered some relief from dour anti-intellectualism.

If Aristotle ever became a tool of the establishment, it was around the time that his works were rediscovered, courtesy of the Moslem scholars who hadn't lost them in the first place, brought to Europe via the Kingdom of Jerusalem and translated into Latin, which is scarcely the language of the common man. However, if it's anti-intellectual for Arabic-speaking Europeans to discover a lost Greek writer through the works of Moslem philosophers, for other writers to translate his corpus into Latin for wider dissemination, and for still more to use the new learning to advance European philosophy, then it's an odd sort of anti-intellectualism. If anything, medieval academics were even more eager for knowledge and enamoured of learning than their modern counterparts, seeming to delight in all forms of academic pursuit with the enthusiasm of those for whom learning was a rare and marvellous gift. The Middle Ages were a period of constant experimentation in literature, both Latin and vernacular, allied with a rediscovery of the ancient world and the development of new philosophical ideas and political systems. One of the foundations of logical scientific thought, Occam's Razor, was propounded by a fourteenth-century friar, and William of Ockham was not the only man of his age to be developing intellectual tools or scientific theories. As for keeping the fruits of learning from the common man, Alfred the Great was personally translating important Christian works from Latin into English in the ninth century, for the specific purpose of bringing important works to a wider, less educated audience. In his translation of Boethius, he introduces the new analogy of a wagon wheel to explain the interrelationship between fate and God's foreknowledge, reducing a complex idea to an image that could be understood by even the lowliest of his subjects. If this is the feudalist anti-intellectualism of early England, I think I could live with it; and Alfred was no isolated example, but working in a distinct tradition of educational revival that goes back at least as far as Charlemagne. But of course I'd say that: being that I live in a monarchical state, I must have no freedom of expression or movement, and the obligation to turn up with bow and knife whenever Lord Clinton needs to raise troops for the Duke of Devonshire.

I think that's enough sniping from me. Doubtless David Brin was not being entirely serious when he wrote his article, as I hope he wasn't entirely serious when he decided to give a book the title Tomorrow Happens; so perhaps I should take his comments with a pinch of salt. The form of technocratic utopianism that he espouses was common coin in the 1950s, but has been abandoned by all but the most determined fantasists since then, and for obvious reasons; so perhaps there's some hidden joke that I don't quite understand. Then again, how many people outside the science-fiction community care what David Brin thinks anyway? This is scarcely going to persuade dyed-in-the-wool Tolkienistas that they've wasted their lives, and outside this forum I could probably count on the thumbs of one hand the number of people I know who have even heard of the man.

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

I suppose that's true. However, I think there may be more to it than that. I know that Tolkien wasn't writing allegory; but if I detected, shall we say, right-wing 'applicability' in LotR I would certainly dislike it (and the same goes for any other ideology I dislike).

Same here!

I always wonder when I hear these criticisms - have these critics not thought about who were the first big fans of Tolkien's work? The hippies? The counter culture? There's a very good reason they took to Lord of the Rings and it does not all have to do with copious amounts of mushrooms and pipeweed...

It always makes me laugh when both left and right pick up on the Scouring of the Shire as some kind of overt criticism of socialism, as if you look at it, Saruman is quite the opposite. And what seems to be the idealised Hobbit society? Some form of anarchism, clearly - with little state, plenty of sharing, lots of criticism of greedy people like the Sackville-Bagginses...The most 'political' in terms of left/right that Tolkien gets is to pull down, at every turn, forms of totalitarianism, from the fascistic/stalinist styles of Sauron and Morgoth to the greedy, exploitative Corporate machine of Saruman. He does have lots of Kings, but Tolkien never shies away from ripping apart any King who treats his subjects badly - these Kings may have 'divine rights' but they are very modern too in that they also have 'divine responsibilities'

I think some like to go after this surface reading that Tolkien was some antiquarian oddity what with his Kings, Wizards, Los and Beholds and whatnot. But look beneath the surface and his work is stuffed to the gills with modern ideas.

He's not an enemy of rationalism and science, but he is indeed an enemy of misapplied technology. It's no mistake that some readers have seen applicability between the Ring and nuclear weapons, and Tolkien pulls no punches that while it's fine to make Rings of Power with good intentions, with bad ones they simply become fearsome, and evil, weapons. Tolkien always makes the case for the common man too, or else why would it be Hobbits, Sam in particular, who save this world? He makes the case for giving the criminal some compassion in the shape of Gollum. He shows us how racism is ridiculous by showing us the friendship which grows between Legolas and Gimli. He shows us why we need to become tree-huggers by giving us the Ents. Blah, blah, blah....

I think only as time goes on will most people outside the fan community come to realise Tolkien's message. The world is changing now from left/right divides to other kinds of divide - seemingly that of liberty/control. For example - very odd in the UK now that our 'right' party the Tories are looking to ban seemingly everything that's bad for the environment (bye bye Plasma TV) - that used to something of the like put out by the extreme left in the 80s.

I suppose too this shows just how modern Tolkien really was.

Of course, it could just be that yet another fantasy/sci-fi writer is feeling restricted by the looming presence of Tolkien and wants/needs to pull things down a bit!

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

these Kings may have 'divine rights' but they are very modern too in that they also have 'divine responsibilities'

There's nothing modern about that idea. That the king and his senior subjects have responsibilities towards those below them is one of the underpinning concepts of feudal society. People owe allegiance and loyalty upwards, but also owe protection, patronage, good governance and charity to those below them. I think that Sir Guillaume made that point in one of his posts on the other thread, along with an interesting one about the feudal system being in operation in modern corporations. In medieval England, the system was underpinned by the idea that the king received his position Dei gratia, 'by the grace of God'. Thus the true peak of the feudal pyramid is not the king, or even the Pope, but God, the appointer and master of all kings. The ideal of our system nowadays is that each person rises by virtue of their merits to the position they deserve, and this is about as true to life as was the old feudal model. The difference is one of accountability: the feudal model officially makes someone accountable only upwards, but it is as fallacious to think that this means a lack of responsibility as it is to assume that those who are nominally accountable downwards always feel a sense of responsibility towards those they govern. God is far more terrifying an authority than the electorate, particularly when excommunication could be used to justify mass rebellion.

The above model, with God at the top, does not work for David Brin because he does not believe in God. He sees priests as apologists for an absolutist system, existing only to justify the presence and power of the governing class. But during the Middle Ages, belief in God was not restricted to Brin's uneducated and oppressed masses, but was shared by the lords who governed them. Hell was just as real a threat to them as electoral defeat is to our modern politicians, as numerous bequests of land and moneys to the Church demonstrate. Brin simply follows Karl Marx in assuming that nobody has ever really believed in religion, but that many have promoted it simply to reinforce their own positions. That the same could be said of democracy does not appear to have occurred to him, nor that in societies which nominally follow Marxist doctrine, the abolition of religion has not brought an end to the exploitation of ideals, nor even the indoctrination of the people. If the aim of scientific progress has been to put an end to the cynical manipulation of ideology, then it has been a signal failure, since even in today's democratically governed and meritocratically minded Britain, our guiding ideals are twisted to sell us particular policies. Unlike David Brin, I don't see that changing in the future: there will always be something to gain by duping and exploiting one's fellow man. If anything, there is even less moral discouragement from doing this now than there once was, since we believe the myth that people rise to the station they deserve, and we no longer believe that all our actions must be accounted for. The only commandment in a capitalist democracy is 'thou shalt not be found out'.

This is not to say that medieval societies were better than ours, but they were certainly no worse. There has always been some measure of governmental accountability, even under kings; just as the presence of a democracy doesn't guarantee that everyone's voice will be heard. David Brin's mistake is to think that fairness and democracy, scientific progress and freedom from religious persecution are all bound up in one golden system, which we can follow into a better tomorrow. This is not and never has been the case: whereas people were once locked up and tortured on suspicion of heresy, which imperilled the souls and spiritual security of their fellow citizens, now they are so treated on suspicion of threatening their bodies and their democratic freedom through terrorism. Just as the Church once handed its enemies over to the civil authorities for execution, now our democracies farm out torture to their foreign allies. Every society gets something wrong, and usually its greatest evils and achievements both stem from its most devoutly held beliefs.

As was pointed out in the older thread, though, this has little if anything to do with Tolkien, because he was not a political author. Even if we assume that he intended us to overthrow Parliament and establish a system like the ones he portrayed, we would be far from absolutism or feudalism: the model king, Aragorn, begins his reign by public acclamation, having proved himself not just by defending the realm, but more significantly by healing the sick. The society with which Tolkien most often identifies himself, the Shire, has both hereditary and elected officials, but neither group does much actual governing. Theoden is a king in the Anglo-Saxon heroic mould, very similar to Hrothgar. He is a law-giver, like Alfred, Athelstan and Edgar the Peacable, rewarding loyalty rather than obedience and punishing treachery; and he defends his people by military leadership. More importantly, before making decisions he seeks the advice of a limited witan, or gathering of the wise, just as did the Anglo-Saxon kings. The only ruler opposed to Sauron who appears to seek no opinion but his own is Denethor, who is not a king at all, and the only outright despot in the whole of LR is Sauron, whom Brin would make into some sort of hero.

I don't have time to go into much more than that, but I did want to point out that medieval societies were not dictatorships. Some of the powers wielded by governments today would have been unheard of in the tenth century, and probably hotly contested. Tolkien's kings rule by consent and with a light hand. If Tolkien meant any political message to be derived from their systems it is that a good government is fair, open and responsive to advice and criticism, and no more regulatory than absolutely necessary. However, some people are more concerned with outward appearances and terminology than spirit and substance, and to those people a president means freedom and a sovereign means oppression; they see no need to look any deeper.