Tolkien: Liberal or Conservative
Professor Bainbridge, following the lead of TCS: Tech Central Station - Ringing in a Liberal or Conservative New Year asks whether Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a liberal or a conservative work, ProfessorBainbridge.com: Tolkien: Liberal or Conservative. His anlysis concentrates on technology and capitalism. Putting progress and economics aside for the moment, we should not forget that Tolkien maintained that the novel was, as noted here and here, "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work". Considering the increasing hostility of the American (and European) left to Christianity and Catholicism in particular, it would be difficult to say that the work was not conservative, at least in some regard.
Back to the questions of progress, nature and economics. Mark Shea rightly tells us that Tolkien "had a view of the sacredness of creation which was sacramental and Christian and yet, if articulated by any Catholic today, would in all likelihood be derided without trial by 'conservative Catholics'." Peter Mirus writing for Catholic Culture tells of "Tolkien's use of trees as symbols of life and goodness, and the corruption of trees as symbols of evil and death." When I first read Mirus' article, I was reminded of Georg Orwell's essay "A Good Word For The Vicar of Bray", where Orwell, at a time when England's forests had been quite devastated, praises that much maligned flip-flopping cleric for having planted a yew tree which Orwell came upon centuries later. You could say Tolkien had liberal sentiments.
Of course, the Catholic view of the world does not always fit easily into the modern boxes of liberalism and conservatism. After all, Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum is critical of both collectivism and unfettered capitalism. It is for this reason that folks such as Chesterton advocated a third way in concepts such as Distributism. (A Distributist Page.) Despite Francis Fukuyama's assertion that we had reached the end of history, we may yet reach an economic model that resembles such a third way, where politics are highly localized, property ownership more widely distributed and man lives in better harmony with nature. Small government, small busines and responsible stewardship don't sound liberal to me. Perhaps this was Tolkien's view. I would not be the first to say it was.
p.s. Bush's talk of an "ownership society" has to me echoes of Distributism.
Back to the questions of progress, nature and economics. Mark Shea rightly tells us that Tolkien "had a view of the sacredness of creation which was sacramental and Christian and yet, if articulated by any Catholic today, would in all likelihood be derided without trial by 'conservative Catholics'." Peter Mirus writing for Catholic Culture tells of "Tolkien's use of trees as symbols of life and goodness, and the corruption of trees as symbols of evil and death." When I first read Mirus' article, I was reminded of Georg Orwell's essay "A Good Word For The Vicar of Bray", where Orwell, at a time when England's forests had been quite devastated, praises that much maligned flip-flopping cleric for having planted a yew tree which Orwell came upon centuries later. You could say Tolkien had liberal sentiments.
Of course, the Catholic view of the world does not always fit easily into the modern boxes of liberalism and conservatism. After all, Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum is critical of both collectivism and unfettered capitalism. It is for this reason that folks such as Chesterton advocated a third way in concepts such as Distributism. (A Distributist Page.) Despite Francis Fukuyama's assertion that we had reached the end of history, we may yet reach an economic model that resembles such a third way, where politics are highly localized, property ownership more widely distributed and man lives in better harmony with nature. Small government, small busines and responsible stewardship don't sound liberal to me. Perhaps this was Tolkien's view. I would not be the first to say it was.
p.s. Bush's talk of an "ownership society" has to me echoes of Distributism.
posted by BarbariansAtBay at
1:40 PM
