We Hobbits are a Merry Folk:

An Incautious and Heretical Reappraisal of J.R.R. Tolkien

an article by David Brin, Ph.D.

An abridged version of this article appeared in the late-December 2002 online edition of Salon Magazine.

Currently published in Tomorrow Happens.
Copyright © 2002, by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

Having trouble picturing this dichotomy I'm painting? Between romantics and followers of Ben Franklin's pragmatic enlightenment?

Well here's another way of looking at it, focusing on how people view the time orientation of wisdom.

All creatures live embedded in time, though only human beings lift their heads to comment on it, lamenting the past or worrying over the future. Unique portions of our brains handle this temporal skepsis. Prefrontal lobes -- the "lamps on our brows" -- ponder tomorrow while swathes of older cortex can flood with vivid memories of yesterday, triggered by the merest sensory tickle, as when a single aromatic whiff sent Proust back to roam his mother's kitchen for eighty thousand words.

Obsession with either past or future can almost define a civilization. Worldwide, most cultures believed in some lost golden age when people knew more, mused loftier thoughts and were closer to the gods -- but then fell from grace. Under this dour but recurrent worldview, men and women of a later, coarser era can only look back with envy, harkening to remnants of ancient wisdom.

Recognize this motif? It drenches every page of Lord of the Rings. It is the old classic. The eternal verity. The worst of all human clichés...

Only a few societies ever dared to contradict this standard dogma of nostalgia. Our own Scientific West, with its impudent notion of progress, brashly relocated any 'golden age' to the future, something we might work toward, a human construct for our grandchildren to achieve with craft, sweat and good will -- assuming that we manage to prepare them.

Implicit is the postulate that our offspring can and should be better than us, a glimmering hope that is nurtured (a bit) by two generations of steadily rising IQ scores.

Of course, the very notion of progress is anathema to nostalgic-romantics.

These romantics needn't be anti-technological, though they almost always reject science. I've already mentioned a renowned sci fi pop-epic which, despite techie furnishings, relentlessly preaches the nostalgist party line - - an ideal society ought to be ruled by secretive-mystical élites, unaccountable and self-chosen based on inherent qualities of blood. The only good knowledge is old knowledge. (No wonder it all happened "long ago, in a galaxy far away.")

This struggle isn't happening only in mass media. It surges at the highest intellectual levels. A century ago, one of the founders of science fiction, H.G. Wells, maintained an ongoing debate with the grand doyen of English letters, Henry James, over what constituted an interesting and worthwhile novel -- whether there was more value to be found in introspection and past-oriented reflection, or in pursuing speculation and forward-looking conjecture. Whether the objective world, teeming with facts, should have a voice in fiction, or if all should remain subjective, as safe and aloof from reality as an incantation.

Within their ivory towers, literary academics have long declared James the winner. Leon Edel, in his biography of James gushes:

"The victory long after was James's. Wells's social novels have been judged at this distance as obsolescent. James's novels, those which left out fact but dealt truthfully with human dilemmas, have more vogue today than they ever did."

Edel leaves out, conveniently, the fact that Wells's novels and stories are read in dozens of languages by tens of millions of people around the world to this day. Meanwhile, in the words of author and critic Greg Bear:

"Today, James is a favorite of the lush, golden-hued costume dramas of Merchant-Ivory, PBS, and the BBC. He describes a time and a place without genocide and swift burning death. His nearly sexless courtships are an anodyne for the boneless chaos of modern mating. Henry James is an exemplar for those who see life as a fall from a golden age, and who choose, in their reading at least, to exchange all their modern conveniences for well-dressed, bloodless dooms and the frustration of lives too wrapped in structure. His world seems as remote to us, and as perversely attractive, as the palaces in Frank Herbert's Dune."

For the French, a similar role is filled by Proust and his ilk -- who are idolized for their long and pretty ruminations about 'eternal verities.' Verities that must remain fixed and constant, offering traditionalists (here I call many of them romantics) a deep sense of comfort. Human beings should not be plastic or capable of growth.

Look closely at the deep-set implication; the whole notion of 'verities' requires that all generations be subject to exactly the same traumas and mistakes and angst as their forbears. Forever. Like insects in amber -- or creatures stabilized by Tolkien's elvish rings -- we never change.

People who believe in this constancy of human nature feel deeply threatened by any branch of literature that dares to disagree. And nothing is more grating than the suggestion -- inherent to real science fiction -- that children might learn from the mistakes of their parents. That future generations may move on from old concerns to new ones, beyond our ken. From Virgil and the Vedas to Plato, Shelley and Proust, James and Tolkien, all the way to Updike and Rowling, this prevalent tradition spanned five continents and forty centuries. Some rage, others fizz; but all grumble at tomorrow.

Let me avow up-front that I share the more recent, upstart belief in universities, democratic accountability, science and human improvability -- one that questions the fated persistence of "eternal" stupidities. Above all, any 'golden age' lies in our future. It has to. Or what are we striving for?

Anyway, people with my view had better be right. Because if humanity is as obstinate as the cynics and romantics believe, we shall surely go extinct quite soon.

(What's the standard romantic response, when anyone mentions the prospect of human extinction?

"Good riddance!" they mutter, expressing a smugly fashionable misanthropy.

And science is portrayed as soul-less? Oh, please....)

This may seem a dour picture I am painting, especially in light of the surge in popularity of feudal-magical fantasy.

Was Enlightenment a transient thing, already starting to flicker out as we return to our older fascinations? Back to Campbell-style heroes and traditional epics, with their paeans to kings and traditional, pyramid-shaped hierarchies? There are those who see this cloud rolling over us, a returning fog of romanticism. Or even worse, the obligate, inherited aristocracies of feudalism.

"Change and technology are so pervasive a part of daily life that for the most part there's no magic to it anymore," says Vivian Sobchack, a professor of film and television studies at UCLA. "The promise of science and technology has been normalized. The utopian vision we had didn't come to pass. The magic would have to come from somewhere else, and we found it in fantasy."

She has a point. Witness the most amazing accomplishment of NASA -- managing to turn the exploration of space into a huge snore.

Or as Lev Grossman put it --

"Popular culture is the most sensitive barometer we have for gauging shifts in the national mood, and it's registering a big one right now. Our fascination with science fiction reflected a deep collective faith that technology would lead us to a cyberutopia of robot butlers serving virtual mai tais. With The Two Towers, the new installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, about to storm the box office, we are seeing what might be called the enchanting of America. A darker, more pessimistic attitude toward technology and the future has taken hold, and the evidence is our new preoccupation with fantasy, a nostalgic, sentimental, magical vision of a medieval age. The future just isn't what it used to be, and the past seems to be gaining on us."

Grossman's view is intelligent and thought-provoking -- though at the surface also quite easy to disprove.

For example, which cyberutopias might he be talking about?

Soylent Green? Bladerunner? Rollerball? Silent Running? 1984? Fail Safe? The China Syndrome? Terminator? The Hot Zone? Logan's Run? The Postman? Fahrenheit 451?

These don't strike me as exactly utopias.

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. With the sole exception of Star Trek, most of the SF we've viewed in the last 40 years has been relentlessly critical of perceived technological or social trends. Far from utopian, these films have served us well by dramatizing potential failure modes. To coin a term, they have been self-preventing prophecies, helping us work out our fears and exploring dark possibilities.

Yes, one result has been a lessened sense of confidence, a sadly stylish fatalism in an era of unprecedented goodness and competence. Paradoxical, yes. But by any metric, these dark warning tales have been far more useful than all those sword and sorcery flicks that try to teach us about good and evil by portraying the former as always pretty and the latter, always, with red, glowing eyes.

Finally, may I offer a little mind-stretching exercise? Let's start by remembering that history is written by the victors.

How do we know that Hitler was as bad as we are told?

We know because we live in a democracy that has given Holocaust deniers plenty of opportunities to make their case, and all they ever come up with is blatant drivel, ridiculous scenarios that are laughably easy to disprove. That's how. We see and hear countless witnesses to the Nazi horrors, conveyed via a media that, for all its faults, is relatively free. As implausible as the story of deliberate mass genocide might have seemed, in fiction, the reality was undeniably true and worse than anything previously imagined.

Allied propagandists did not have to make up any of it.

Ah, but things were different in kingdoms of old, where one official party line was promulgated and alternative sources of information got routinely squelched. And that's in every kingdom, mind you. Go ahead, name one where it didn't happen. (Note how the Norman propagandists went to work on poor old King Harold, even as his body was cooling after the Battle of Hastings.)

My point? Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.

So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?

Isn't some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?

Yes, I'm having fun with words like "really" -- relating to a made-up story. But come along with me for a minute. Next time you re-read LOTR, count the number of examples... cases where powerful beings are vastly uglier than anybody with that kind of power would allow themselves to be. Why? How does being grotesquely ugly help you govern an empire?

Then unleash your imagination to take the story a bit farther. Have fun!

Ask yourself - "How would Sauron have described the situation?"

And then -- "What might 'really' have happened?"

Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy. This clearcut and undeniable fact. Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.

Hm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil dark lord"?

Or might they instead have thought they were the 'good guys', with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elves and their Numenorean colonialist human lackeys?

Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the Ring War -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and movie-makers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle-Earther! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return... bringing more rings.

Heh.

All right, we don't have to go quite that far!

Here's a milder version. Those orcs and low-elves and dwarves and dark-skinned or proletarian men who fought for the Ringlord were fooled by Sauron's propaganda.

Fair enough. Even that slight variation adds flavor to an already-great tale, making you pity Sauron's dupes a little, even though you still cheer as they're slaughtered down to the last private and orcoral.

Come on folks, a little empathy.

Instead of railing against 'evil,' try to understand it. That's always been the best way to defeat it.

Am I pulling your leg? You bet! I don't take speculations about fictional villains quite that seriously.

My real point is much more general. It's this --

Don't just receive your adventures. Toy with them. Re-mold them in your mind! Keep asking "What if...?" It's how you get practice not just being a passive consumer, or critic, but a creative storyteller in your own right.

And remember this too -- enlightenment, science, democracy and equal opportunity are still the true rebels, reigning for just a few generations (and still imperfectly!) in one or two corners of the Earth, after elite chiefs, romantic bards and magicians dominated our ancestors for maybe half a million years.

Don't you think a little pride in that rebellion might be called for? A radical revolution-in-progress, still fresh and incomplete.

A rebellion that (among many other things) taught serfs like you to read so you can enjoy epic books and picture things different than they are.

One that makes vivid movies that cater to your taste for adventure.

One that, for all its imperfections, gave you a better chance than in some peasant village of old.

One that has a long way to go, but has at least turned our eyes around to face the future.

Self-critical almost to a fault, this culture may not be as romantic as those old kingdoms... but isn't it better?

You are heirs of the world's first true civilization, arising out of the first true revolution. Take some pride in it...

Let's keep enjoying kings and wizards. But also remember to keep them where they belong.

Where they can do little harm.

Where they entertain us.

In fantasies.

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