Tea at Trianon: Tolkien Shows Us Ourselves

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 17, 2022

Tolkien Shows Us Ourselves

From Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative:

In his famous lecture and essay “On Fairy-Stories”, Tolkien claims that fairy-stories hold up a mirror to man, that they show us ourselves. One way of testing the veracity of Tolkien’s claim is to see how his own fairy-stories, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, hold up a mirror to humanity. Do we see ourselves in Tolkien’s stories? Do we see our neighbours?
Let’s work our way through the various anthropological labels that we have appended to ourselves to see whether these various facets of humanity are present in Middle-earth.

The “scientific” label that we’ve given to ourselves, homo sapiens (“wise-man”), is evidently a misnomer. Nobody in their right mind would consider the defining characteristic of humanity to be wisdom. Failing to distinguish between cleverness and wisdom, the children of the superciliously self-named “Enlightenment”, did not really mean that humanity was wise but merely that we are clever. They didn’t really mean that we are homo sapiens but that we are homo technologicus. It is interesting, therefore, that Tolkien makes the distinction between wisdom and cleverness in The Hobbit. He tells us that “goblins … make no beautiful things, but … many clever ones”:

It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once … but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.

Lacking wisdom, and admiring technology over virtue, latter-day orcs, as homo technologicus, had invented weapons of mass destruction, capable of killing millions of people, such as nuclear bombs and man-made viruses.

Another label that modernity has appended to man is homo economicus, whose role in life is to serve as a producer and consumer of marketable products. Homo economicus has no telos, no purpose, merely a marketable function. The danger of this materialist and consumerist way of seeing ourselves is described in The Hobbit as the “dragon sickness”, which afflicts those who are so attached to their material possessions that they become possessed by them. Bilbo Baggins suffers from the dragon sickness at the beginning of the story. He is a creature of comfort addicted to the creature comforts who refuses to leave his hobbit hole comfort zone. This is why Gandalf tells him that embarking on the dangerous quest with the dwarfs will be good for him. He needs to learn the art of self-sacrifice, the art of laying down his life for others, which is the art of love itself, in order to free himself from his attachment to “stuff” and his addiction to comfort. The fact that the mission is successful in healing him of the dragon sickness is evident in the dying words of Thorin, whose own dragon sickness proves fatal. “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold,” Thorin confesses to Bilbo, “it would be a merrier world.” (Read more.)