Tolkien and the Ethics of Enchantment
“The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
My thoughts here were incited by a new book entitled The Ethics of Enchantment, wihch contains a chapter on fairy stories by a friend from Academia and FB Liz McKinnell. This chapter argues that fairy tales are neither instruments of moral instruction, to instil a number of precepts and codes, nor mere entertaining diversions, to generate wonder and excitement. I agree. Fairy tales most certainly do perform an ethical function in inciting and inculcating a moral sensibility, but they perform this function by stimulating the imagination rather than delivering a concerted system of disguised moral commands. This is a strong theme in my work on J.R.R. Tolkien, and the way that his words help foster a subtle understanding of moral complexity and courage, the intersection of imagination and lived experience, embodiment and empathy. The lesson is that in showing rather than spelling out, storytellers are more influential than homilists.
These have been key themes in my own work in the field of literary ecology. There’s a chapter in my Tolkien book on fairy stories and story-telling on the lines of the above. In this book, I emphasize story-telling as stimulating truth-seeking. It is easy enough to state that ‘truth matters’ or ‘morality matters,’ and then present dense texts on philosophy and ethics establishing the claim. Such works will inspire only those who already hold that truth and morality ‘matter.’ The first and most important steps come with inspiring that belief in the first place. And there is wisdom in knowing it to be a belief or a norm, a faith. All ‘truth’ rests ultimately on assumptions that few realize are assumptions. We assume that matter exists, although this cannot be proven, since we have no way to conceptualize it otherwise. Scholastics such as St Thomas Aquinas were explicit in premising their systems on axioms which cannot be proven but without which nothing can work. The point being, such systems do indeed work; remove them and there is paralysis or endless negation. We are standing with our feet firmly planted in the air. But if we know the ground we are standing on, then we will never be in fear of falling.
Tolkien knew well what he was doing with respect to storytelling. He knew the formidable power of stories to inspire, motivate, cultivate the moral sensibility and the willingness to act and take responsibility, overcome fear, join with others in common cause. He wanted to tell stories that would bring about ‘the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires,’ that embodied a certain ‘quality of strangeness and wonder,’ that would ‘survey the depths of space and time’ and that would ‘hold communion with other living things.’ (J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London, England: Harper Collins Publishers, 2014), 4.) In the process, he created a mythology of Middle-Earth that embodies and articulates the moral and psychic truth of our own world, incites that truth within us, and brings forth the moral sensibility. He does it through fostering moral courage and moral imagination.
There is, then, a reality to fairy-stories, one that makes facts existentially meaningful:
‘The importance of stories and the existence of human beings as story-telling beings has long been recognised, but the fact has not been given the central weight it deserves. Stories have the power to persuade and move people from within, they express moral and psychic truths that make them appealing to people. Story puts us in touch with the root of the matter.’
Tolkien’s words on ‘fighting the long defeat’ are endlessly inspiring, giving us a ‘hope without guarantees,’ and a ‘long defeat’ that, in acts of love, kindness, and solidarity, gives ‘glimpses of final victory.’ Here is a link to my book on Tolkien, developing literary ecology as a moral ecology.
This article is well worth reading:
From Avatar to The Wizard of Oz, Aristotle to Shakespeare, there’s one clear form that dramatic storytelling has followed since its inception.
‘Storytelling is an indispensable human preoccupation, as important to us all—almost—as breathing. From the mythical campfire tale to its explosion in the post-television age, it dominates our lives. It behooves us then to try and understand it.’
I would set these remarks on Tolkien and the truth of story-telling against the conception of the human species arising from evolutionary biology and psychology. In recent work I have been examining the self-image of human beings as truth-seekers, noting the growing shock of some of many in the contemporary age that a lot of humans don’t actually seek truth at all. I’m interested in this shock, based as it is on the assumption that ‘truth matters,’ truth trumps all things, and that human beings are truth-seekers – or ought to be truth-seekers. That ‘ought-to-be’ should immediately tell us that there is a moral truth as well as a factual and logical one, a truth that is conjoined with (and even prior to) scientific truth. Simply put, there is a clash here between theological and evolutionary notions. God created the world to be intelligible to intelligent beings, but evolutionary psychology suggests that our minds might have evolved more to manipulate others and ourselves than to perceive the truth. If the latter is true, then survival and nothing more than that is the name of the game, and claims of objective reality and the truth about it are no more than stories we tell to survive. Those who argue that fact and logic establish the boundaries of truth and knowledge will dismiss everything lying outside of those parameters as ‘fairy stories.’ Such pejorative comment reveals a complete ignorance, born of contempt, on their part for the real meaning of fairy stories and the real importance of narrativity. Their views are reductive, debilitating, and self-destructive, sterilizing the environment until it is impossible to breath. They deny ‘the meaning of life’ as a meaningful question. The only meaning in the game of life is to stay in the game, and truth-telling is a story we tell to confirm ourselves and our actions as we go on our merry way. Or unmerry. Because there is a reality and there is a truth. And survival is not the same thing as meaning and does not satisfy the cosmic longing for meaning. Stifle that longing through intellectual austerity and hygiene, and people with either fall prey to any kind of death-dealing delusion as a surrogate or will wilt and die for want of anything to believe in, any reason to live. Detaching fact from value and exalting the realm of the former whilst fracturing the realm of the latter into solipsism, the modern age is full of surrogates. It was for this reason that Max Weber characterized the modern age as an age of ‘polytheism,’ an endless war of incommensurate values: 'old gods arise from their graves, disenchanted and in the form of impersonal forces; they strive to gain power over our lives and resume again their eternal struggle with one another’ (Weber 1991: 147/8). Weber sees the fate of the age in the rise of a new polytheism taking the depersonified, objectified form of an irreconcilable antagonism among irreducible orders of value and life. As a result, the rationalised world has become meaningless (Habermas 1991:246).
The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world."
Weber 1991:155
I am interested in re-enchantment, in restoring value, meaning, purpose, and goodness to the world. Modern disenchanting science holds the world to be objectively valueless and meaningless. Intelligent beings characterising by a deep, cosmic yearning for meaning will find such a world unintelligible. Give up your illusions! the disenchanters cry. Humans continue to cry for meaning, all fact and logic seemingly against them. That they do so, and will continue to cry so long as they are on nodding terms with their deepest humanity, should tell us something about what it is to be human. The commitment to truth-seeking depends upon and cannot survive without its theological underpinnings – God made the world intelligible to human beings as intelligent moral beings seeking to satisfy the quest for meaning. Maybe that’s my story. And maybe the truth is that the world is all stories. Stories can be good, stories can be bad. I would suggest that the world is in the grip of a bad story, or lots of stories which tell merely solipsistic truths to ensure humans are separated from one another and hence living in the cruel isolation of self-nullification. Here’s something I wrote in response to an article in The Times by Ed Conway which was headed “Facts are not sacred.”
I shall return to the idea that story-telling is more about showing than telling, about encouraging people to see and live the truth deep within their being than instructing them in the truth. This is most apparent in The Lord of the Rings. Many Tolkien scholars and lovers debate who the hero of the book is. All of them, even Gandalf, even Bilbo and Frodo, drop the baton as some point, and succumb to the temptation of the Ring. It seems to be a book without a hero. There’s ‘invisible magic’ at work, Bilbo says at one point. The hero is God, even though there is not a single reference to God in the entire work. It is God’s invisible grace that works the magic. Here are the true ethics of enchantment – it is not the intervening that matters, but the interweaving of all the elements – the reconciliation of multiplicity in the oneness of God, different elements converging in harmony and concordance.
This article on Tolkien by Rowan Williams establishes this point well. Williams notes how Tolkien’s work has been dismissed as reactionary fantasy and even labelled fascist. This is errant nonsense that I gave short-shrift to in my book. Rather than spend too much time defending Tolkien against these charges, I would be more concerned at the dull predictability of those who can only read through the filters of their divisive, self-aggrandising political causes. Such a politics will never constitute unity and community. Instead, they reproduce the very fractures we ought to be overcoming – they are power claims. Tolkien’s books issue concerted warnings on the corrupting temptation and effect of power. It effects would-be liberators every bit as much as authoritarian oppressors, even more in that the emancipators act with such self-righteousness. Tolkien’s warnings on power and his insistence on ethical humility within a carefully veiled doctrine of grace need to be taken seriously, now more than ever in a world fracturing into hostile camps between and within nations. Tolkien gives us an ethics of enchantment which is capable of healing the world, so long as we respond to its message, as we are supposed to.
"The work is ultimately a fiction about how desire for power – the kind of power that will make us safe, reverse injustices and avenge defeats – is a dream that can devour even the most decent. But it is also a fiction about how a bizarre tangle of confused human motivation, prosaic realism and unexpected solidarity and compassion can somehow contribute to fending off final disaster. Not quite a myth, but something of a mythic structure, and one that – in our current climate of political insanities and the resurgence of varieties of fascistic fantasy – we could do worse than think about."
I’m seeing nothing but false idols and tottering thrones in the world, of all kinds and at all levels. A world dividing into leaders and follows without any kind of depth. I write on Lewis Mumford and reclaiming organic life against the mechanarchy of the Megamachine below. People are growing accustomed to living a push-button screen reality, with nothing below the surface. Such atoms are ripe for collectivisation, for collective fictions and fantasies, precisely because they lack what it takes to join with others and constitute real community.
To put the point simply:
All concentrations of power are baneful, whether we look at this in political, economic, religious terms. Power, by its nature, does tend to concentrate. As Tolkien told us long ago: destroy the Ring! For fellowship’s sake, refuse the temptations of power and learn the way of ethical humility. The hobbits used technology to support their way of life, not to change it. The hobbits considered their way of life to be so was good that it didn't stand in need of changing. The hobbits didn't need 'progress,' since they didn't need to be going anywhere other than where they already were. The problem is that this is not where we are at the moment. We have been thrown out of our hobbit existence, our commons have been expropriated and enclosed. Our way of life is not good but disconnected; we are ill-at-ease and hence feel the need to change. We are misruled by the power of abstraction, our lives broken up by the tyranny and violence of abstract forces, concentrations of power that constitute external communities over against us, in the absence of our own. So where are we, then, in the balance between intervening and interweaving?
If you have a couple of hours ... and prefer to listen rather than read J.R.R. TOLKIEN '1892-1973' - A Study Of The Maker Of Middle-earth
It is neither 'man' nor 'not man' that is the problem, Tolkien argues, but the 'man-made.' 'The machine' is a solution, one that we are most prone to opt for in the age of the Megamachine. But it is the wrong solution. ‘The machine’ entails the coercion of other minds and wills, domination, the tyrannous reformation of the Earth and of our place in it.
I laboured this point in my Marx studies of 2018 with respect to the triadic relation of humanity-labour/production-nature. It is not 'humanity' vs 'nature' (or vice versa as in some forms of deep ecology) that is the important question but the specific character of the mediating term. The alienating and abstracting tendencies and forces arise within the second order mediations in the realm of labour/production, that's where the temptations and concentrations of power arise, in both visible and invisible forms, as both institutional and systemic constraint extraneous to the human community. That's where we need to focus our practical moral efforts in recreating community.
These are explicitly socialist works. Tolkien is deeply conservative and devoutly Catholic. I respond to common themes and attempt to link them together in a consistent and coherent form. I may cite varied sources in my work, and this may confuse those who like straight lines, labels, and boxes. But the world is multi-layered and multi-faceted, and I try to link it all together. It all connects in the interweaving.
Tolkien engages in a little Elvic enchantment, the kind of enchantment that the world needs. The ultimate aim of the elves is not power but art. The Ring, the ultimate machine, was made for coercion. The only solution to the problem of power and the struggle for power is the destruction of the Ring. In the long run, it doesn't matter who gained the Ring - to coerce the world and others righteously, to good ends, is tyranny and is evil.
Tolkien is a wise man and I have a great admiration for his work. I know fine well that he said he wasn't a socialist of any kind - and I am a socialist, of a particular kind. I owe allegiance not to a symbol or a label, but to the living principle; I don't make a fetish of forms and I read Marx as a critic of the violence and tyranny of abstraction. I consistently attempt to root out abstraction, the idealisation of things, insofar as these involve the etherealisation of mind and matter bringing about the mechanization of human beings.
I like the notion of combining change and continuity through an interweaving, in contradistinction to an external institutional and moral interventionism. I see real change as a matter of joining different elements together on the basis of commonality. Weaving is thus a matter of bridging the gaps to ensure that the different sites and sectors of society converge in concord around a common point. I like the idea of different elements revolving around that point. Interweaving is the art of connecting different threads, individuals, and organizations hitherto in discordant and antagonistic relation through isolation. I would set this interweaving within a commonwealth of life affirming the community and kinship of all things within a deeply interconnected ecosystem.
Only connect! urged T.S. Eliot. He may well have learned that lesson from the great Dante Alighieri, whose Comedy charts the progression from disconnection, soulless separation, and brutal cacophony in the Inferno to the reconciliation of all multiplicity in the oneness of God in the sweet symphony of Paradise.
I affirm the unity of the dream and the deed - here's to the deeds of the dreamweavers!
A recent article makes clear the extent to which Tolkien was opposed to racism and religious bigotry. Tolkien has been subject to criticisms over the years, certainly as a conservative, also as a reactionary. He had an evident dislike of technology. It is his moral views, specifically the fact that he embraced an overarching ethic in contradistinction to the liberal dissolution of values into mere value judgements. That renders Tolkien vulnerable to criticism. He is ‘old-fashioned,’ some claim. That is merely a benign way of dismissing his ethics. Other critics are far more aggressive. I addressed these in my book. I find views that Tolkien was racist and fascistic not merely wrong and misguided, but offensive, and most of all deeply disappointing. Disappointing because it reveals the extent to which how many bask in a moral shallowness. That will leave the world morally adrift, unable to successful address the stresses and strains that are sure to come. There is a softness and corruption in the moral fabric.
But if it should need saying, then I’ll say it: Tolkien was not a racist, he was a critic of racism. His criticism comes from a moral standpoint that is not the one of the modern world, and it is this that is the real source of critics’ ire and antagonism.
In demonising orcs, the ugly, monstrous enemy of the elves, did JRR Tolkien betray a belief that “some races are worse than others”? That’s the debate that has been at the heart of claims in the British press recently accusing the Lord of the Rings author of harbouring racist views.
Short answer, no. But you will have to do the reading yourself here. I find the issue tedious and time-wasting, giving a permanent platform to people with agendas other than the truth of the matter to advance.
Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, November 2008)
Dr Dimitra Fini is worth reading at length on this:
“There are authors who write with a social or political agenda. And there are authors who don’t, but their worldview, beliefs and values are implicit in the texts they produce. I believe Tolkien’s racial prejudices are implicit in Middle-Earth, but his values – friendship, fellowship, altruism, courage, among many others – are explicit, which makes for a complex, more interesting world.
In The Lord of the Rings, Middle-Earth is a place where different “races” and peoples need to come together and cooperate to triumph over what is predominantly a moral foe. The scene where Sam Gamgee is looking at a dead foe, wondering whether he was truly evil, or just a fellow being coerced into war, is far from demonising the enemy or dehumanising the “other”. Such complexities are the reason some literary works continue to be read and have different meanings for new generations.”
The values of friendship, fellowship, altruism, courage are the ones stand out clearly in Tolkien, and I call it a fellowship of all living things. I think I know where the problems come here. Many others who affirm those values also see the ‘us and them’ associated with morality plays of good and evil as an anachronism. Here is where the key division lies. Tolkien sees the reality of evil, and he sees that there are forces, recruiting among the living things of the world, that concentrate around power and coercion. I argue for co-operation. But it matters a great deal with whom we co-operate and to what end or ends. Tolkien’s work is based on an ecology of good and evil. That may divide into ‘good and evil,’ but good and evil are realities that will not be addressed, let alone resolved, by bland affirmations of unity, interconnection, and fellowship. The problem with avoiding issues of ‘us and them’ is that you leave the power of the ‘them’ unchecked, and the unity of the ‘us’ constantly exposed to the reality of evil, coercion, division.
I learned to be highly suspicious of the extent to which the narrative of interconnection has tended to be accompanied by a political and moral evasion. I understand the reasons for this ‘third way’ narrative, seeking to avoid the temptations of power and coercion. But there is a political naivety to this view that plays into the hands of the ‘them’ who govern the world.
John Dewey described the state as "a powerful instrumentality for ends as valuable as they are far-reaching," but warned of the need to avoid using this power in such a way that "the instrumentality becomes itself an end." This problem is not solved through the avoidance of politics, as though the necessary reorientation of values around interconnection and cooperation could take place without political action and organisation. Hence my concern to integrate interweaving and intervention. Dewey was not persuaded that this avoidance of political and instrumental considerations solved the problem, remarking that "not all who say Ideals, Ideals, shall enter the kingdom of the ideal, but those who know and who respect the roads that conduct to the kingdom."
Dewey is right, hence my emphasis on nurturing communities of character and communities of practice, clusters of virtuous communities that can secure the conditions for doing politics well, proceeding to scale upwards and outwards to ensure the virtuous transformation of ‘the political.’
“There is no longer a virtuous nation, and the best of us live by candlelight.”
-William Butler Yeats
A virtuous nation is composed of virtuous individuals living in place and proximity with purpose. I am committed to a democracy of place, personhood, and purpose as against the atomistic conception of the democracy of subjective opinion.
“Reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place, restore its life-supporting systems, and establish an ecologically and socially sustainable pattern of existence within it."
Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann
Rehabilitation is based upon relations and practices that are deeply rooted in community, custom, tradition. These are never fixed for all time, handed down and reproduced, but need always to be reimagined in the manner I have adumbrated above with respect to Tolkien. Rehabilitation is something that grows from a solidaristic practice that is rooted in life-giving, life-sustaining qualities of place.
But now dis-placement seems to be the height of technocratic wisdom. ‘Progress.’ Past ‘progress’ is always so bad that we are always in the process of having to go somewhere else. Tolkien referred to the "infernal combustion engine." (He took the quote from Winston Churchill). He didn't like the way that trains cut through the countryside, considering that people would be better remaining where they were or finding better ways of moving around, if move they must. It’s not so much the movement that is the problem – the obsession with speed – but the displacement. Displacement is the loss of the moral sense of place, a detachment from others, from social bonds, from culture as precious organic resources that have grown in proximal relations over time. The psychological and ecological impact of speed and disconnectedness, the assertion of pace over place, multiplied many times over by technology, industry, and population, has generated a nightmare scenario. Until 2014 I hardly moved around at all. I hadn’t had a holiday since the early 1980s. I don’t drive. I have rarely left my home town of St Helens. I was always intrigued by the fact Immanuel Kant, a philosopher I studied in depth, never once left his home town of Konigsberg. Philosophers explore the inner landscapes, and can range widely in that terrain. But immediate surrounds can contain worlds within worlds within worlds, if you know how to look. But maybe philosopher is the ultimate introspection, for those for whom the inner landscapes are far more interesting than the outer. I do not travel much. And have found contentment in place. I like the familiar. I would suggest that humanity needs to figure out ways to reduce the need/want/external compulsion to move around in such large, and exponentially increasing, quantities. Instead of facilitating and extending means of transportation, the key challenge before us is to reduce the necessity to move as much as we do. I'd be happy as a hobbit. But therein lies the problem. Human beings are creatures who set themselves gratuitous problems, pressing beyond immediate needs, seeking and hypothesizing patterns of significance. We are makers as well as minders. We can deny or attempt to repress that all we like, on account of the problems it causes, but those problems won’t go away as a result. We need to address problems rather than evade them with the promise of a workaround. Those promises are false and will break down in the interface of human reality. The quest for surplus meaning is the very thing that characterises the human species. The hobbits lack imagination, Tolkien once said. Humans don't. The mental excess which afford human beings an evolutionary advantage over non-human animals also exposes the human species to danger. The "immense psychic overflow from man's cerebral reservoir" is the condition of his creativity, Lewis Mumford wrote, but it is also a source of non-adaptive and indeed irrational impulses. That’s the human reality to address, and scientific knowledge and technological know-how is only a small part of the solution and, through a one-sided focus on them as the main part of the solution, involve us is the continuing descent into delusion.
Hence I return to my main theme: story-telling as truth-telling. We are not being asked to prove our knowledge and power through the technical manipulation of the external world (and of people). We have long since proven ourselves that way. We have shown ourselves to be a species with intelligence enough to develop systems and technologies capable of changing the world, but not the wisdom to use them to sustain ourselves healthily and happily in balance with the world. We are being asked: What story are we to live by? What myth are we to live by? Or die by? Are we human beings? Or mere would-be Lord Saurons?
"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."
The technological men of megamechanical/maniacal modernity – the one narrative to bind us all – are merely "ghosts clad in iron" (Lewis Mumford). We walk like ghosts in the mechanarchy.
For Mumford, the "myth of the machine" is and always has been the essential support of the megamachine. From the first, the modern mechanistic world-view was a faith which outran the empirical evidence, remaking the world in its own image. As against technique defined in terms of "the one best way," Mumford celebrates proliferous plenitude and multi-dimensionality. And he emphasises minding over making.
I must admit, in the oral defence of my thesis, I remember opening up with the line that "it is not power that corrupts, but the lack of power," before proceeding to argue for Marx's practical restitution of power from the alien forms to which it has been alienated (state and capital) and its reorganisation as a self-mediated social power - no alien concentrations there. It made Kantian philosopher Gary Banham laugh, "I'll have to remember that one." Power is a tricky thing. What is it? Some physical force? Some external thing to possess and use? An energy, a relation, a process? A natural growth - some Aristotelian flourishing based on essences ... I keep saying it, Marx was an essentialist, as we all are. There is an organic growth that is healthy and leads to flourishing well. Lose that - and we keep losing it - and we go headlong into the purposeless materialism of the Megamachine.
As a commentator in the video I posted above says, Tolkien struck a chord through certain themes repudiated by the livelier minds of the age. I’ll argue against cynical reason, for the source and hope that Tolkien affirms.
“Tolkien knew suffering intimately: losing his father as a young child and his mother as a boy, growing up in poverty. As a young man, his world was shattered by the First World War; he served on the front lines, and most of his close friends were killed. Yet he did not become embittered but rather embodied a joy that was all the more real for knowing its opposite. His writings bring delight to countless readers, and they do so in no small part because they spring from a thoroughly healthy and genuinely virtuous soul. In our weary, postmodern age, we are skeptical of heroes. We are chary of praising a man’s character and expect to be disappointed. Tolkien is a rebuke to our cynicism.”
He is no “saint” if by “saint” we mean someone who is perfect, but Tolkien’s life was one of quiet, yet heroic, virtue. A truly humble man with exceptional intellectual and artistic talents, he recognized that his own creativity was a gift from the Creator God, the ultimate Author and Artist. Only if we recognize Tolkien’s deep Christian faith can we hope to understand the life and work of the “Maker of Middle-earth.”
Traditionalist that he was, it seems Tolkien turned down the chance of The Beatles making The Lord of the Rings. He described the music of the beat groups as “indescribable.” Sounds like the tuneless mechanical noise of Dante's Inferno.
“in a house three doors away dwells a member of a group of young men who are evidently aiming to turn themselves into a Beatle Group. On days when it falls to his turn to have a practice session the noise is indescribable.”
He should have got the Monkees instead.