Alan Jacobs

Fort Worth Botanic Garden

This is a typically rich Adam Roberts post, bubbling over with a range of wonderful ideas, any one of which blazes a trail that it would be delightful to follow and extend. I just want to take up one theme here.

This is the passage I’m especially interested in:

This is part of a much larger project for Tolkien. He saw the world as broken, but his interest was in trying to making it whole again. He believed healing is possible (specifically, he believed healing is possible through Christ, because his Catholic faith was a central part of who he was) and he wrote his fantasy to explore that conviction. This is the core thing that separates his art, and therefore the promiscuous body of commercial fantasy written in imitation of his art, from the High Modernist stream. And it’s this that brings me back to Greek tragedy, and the reason why it so captured my spirit back when I was young: an individual broken, in my various unexceptional if painful ways, as I was and am; living in a society fragmented in a larger and more dangerous manner as we all are. The thought that healing might be possible evidently spoke to me profoundly, as it continues to do.

I would say that healing is not only possible for Tolkien but inevitable — and yet inevitable in a very curious way. That magnificent moment in The Lord of the Rings when Sam, having expected to die on Mount Doom, awakens to find that he is alive and so is Frodo and so is Gandalf and so cries, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” — surely this is the most perfect embodiment in his writings of what Tolkien calls “eucatastrophe”:

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale — or otherworld — setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

I think the key phrase here is “fleeting glimpse” — fleeting, not lasting. The Prologue of LOTR, “Concerning Hobbits,” tells us that hobbit were “more numerous formerly than they are today,” and that they “avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find.” Then, in the second chapter, after the description of Bilbo’s disappearance, we’re told that “eventually Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold, became a favourite character of legend and lived on long after all the true events were forgotten.” So right from the beginning Tolkien is emphasizing that he is telling a story about a world long-forgotten and cultures long in decline, that even the people most affected by the titanic events he’s about to relate eventually lost all memory of them.

Then, near the end of the book, Gandalf reminds his colleagues that, should Sauron triumph, his rule will be “so complete that none can foresee the end of it while the world lasts.” Yet, should they manage to defeat him, their triumph cannot possibly be so permanent:

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

That all victories over evil are contingent and limited and temporary is a strong theme here — and the forgetfulness of all the races of Middle Earth tends to reinforce those limits, and makes the return of evil more likely even among those who start out with “clean earth to till.” This is why Galadriel says of herself and Celeborn that “together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat” — a phrase that Tolkien adopted for himself, as in this letter: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

There will be, then, a “final victory,” but that will be (to return to the quotation from “On Fairy Stories”) “beyond the walls of the world.” Within the walls of the world all victories, all healing, will be temporary and imperfect — eucatastrophic only in the short term. In the longer term the effects of even the most heroic and righteous deeds will seem so narrow and brief that they will scarcely seem worth doing.

Which is why, for Tolkien, the best impetus to heroic and righteous deeds comes from some intuition of a final victory not in history but beyond history. To lack that intuition while clearly seeing the “long defeat” of history clearly is the curse of Denethor — not a person, for all his wisdom, to envy. For Tolkien, the suspicion that there is some perfect righteousness “beyond the walls of the world” is what prompts righteousness and generosity in the here and now. It’s what might make some of us strive to “uproot evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after might have clean earth to till.” It’s what might make someone pity Gollum and be kind to him, an act which, as Tolkien says in another letter, can be seen only as “a piece of folly, or a mystical belief in the ultimate value-in-itself of pity and generosity even if disastrous in the world of time.”

It’s a tricky thing that Tolkien is asking: neither to succumb to despair (like Denethor) nor indulge the presumptuous delusion that one’s victories can be everlasting, but rather to live, simply, in hope.

Sam Jordison on Rebecca West:

She had written troubling accounts of the Nuremberg trials, spoken up about repression under communist regimes (and had done the same for fascist ones in the decades before the second world war) and taken to the streets with suffragettes (later falling out with many of their leaders). She had set down hundreds of thousands of sparkling words in novels, non-fiction books, reviews and journalism. And throughout it all she had demonstrated an enviable ability to set fire to everything.

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

There’s no one to punish Facebook if Facebook fails. Facebook’s trying to head off regulation by doing this, this transparency effort. But ultimately, transparency doesn’t matter. The same practices will occur. Facebook is committed to being a factor in global politics. And it not only wants to make money off it, more importantly, it wants to matter. Facebook wants to be the place where we conduct our politics.

Here’s what I don’t understand: Vaidhyanathan says this and much worse about Facebook, but also, in the same interview and elsewhere, discourages people from leaving Facebook. “By removing yourself from Facebook, you remove yourself from the concern. If you are active on Facebook and you watch how people relate to each other and how it affects you, you can be sensitive to the larger condition.” I don’t see how this follows. I don’t see why you have to be on Facebook to critique Facebook, or to see the damage it does. I ditched Facebook in 2007 but that hasn’t “removed me from concern” about the social and political damage it’s doing. Is Facebook really going to be responsive to people who stay on it no matter how foul it becomes? 

Riccardo Mori:

The WWDC will start in less than a day at this point, and I have no wishlist to share. I used to get excited before this kind of Apple event; now I’m just trepidatious. Once I used to look forward to the next thing Apple would introduce, I used to wonder What are they going to show us? Now I anxiously wonder, What are they going to break this time? The list of things I wish Apple would fix is getting longer and I won’t bore you once again with my complaints, so I’ll condense everything into a single wish — I would like for Apple to reassure me as a long-time user and customer. Reassure me that they have a plan, that they have the most important things under control, that they’re not like one of those motorised toy cars that keep crashing against obstacles at maximum speed, then change direction randomly until they hit the next obstacle, and so forth.

Freddie deBoer sent me this:

In Roman times, “belief” in the gods, as we understand it, was irrelevant. An atheist was not someone who didn’t “believe”, but someone who refused to take part in the civic rituals which kept the city and republic healthy. Someone (maybe Cicero?) might privately be as skeptical as they wished, as long as they performed the rites; failing to do so, regardless of private belief, would be to put the community in danger for no reason. In the American liberal bourgeois civic religion, there are two central rites the neglect of which makes you an “atheist” in that sense, someone letting down the side: voting, and awareness. Many, even some of the most self-righteous about voting, do not believe that it changes anything, but not to vote is unthinkable. The rage expressed about the man in the NYT who, unable to deal with the constant outrages of the age of Trump, refused to read or watch the news media, shows that awareness, too, is a civic sacrament. Despite the fact that he was doing some physical action to improve the world, his refusal to perform the holy rite of awareness was endangering the community out of some perverse selfishness, like a Roman sitting out an imperial triumph. “I don’t do enough,” they say, “But at least I know what’s going on in the world.”

Which put me in mind of a passage from Paul Kingsnorth’s fascinating book Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist:

After years of living in cities with barely any contact with the ground, fuelled by anger and righteousness, driving myself into the ground, I decided to exchange activism for action. I decided to dig in, to use my limited powers to improve at least one small square of Earth, and to write, sometimes, about what I discovered by doing so.

Not everyone has been impressed with this approach. Some environmental activists in particular have reacted with anger. All this talk of grief and acceptance has sounded to them like a dangerous abdication of responsibility. It’s all very well for you to run away from the ‘fight’, I have been told, but this is the fate of the Earth we’re talking about. Forests are falling; the climate is changing. Millions of people are going to die, and you are advocating doing nothing. Are you depressed? Are you burned out? Whatever is wrong with you, you need to stop talking, because you are getting in the way of the necessary work.

My first reaction to responses like these was to defend myself, but when I got past that, I found I could easily understand their perspective. But I still thought there was something missing. Only two ways of reacting to the current crisis of nature were offered. On the one hand, there was ‘fighting’. This fighting was to be aimed at the ‘elite’ that was destroying the planet – oil companies, politicians, corporate leaders, the rich. On the other hand, there was ‘giving up’. Giving up meant not fighting. It meant running away from a necessary battle. It meant being selfish. It meant ‘doing nothing’, and letting the planet go to hell.

All of this hinged on a narrow definition of what doing something involved, and what action meant. It seemed to suggest that action must be something grand and global and gestural. Small actions were not actions at all: if you couldn’t ‘change the world’ there seemed little point in changing anything.

David Brooks:

The real problem with the modern meritocracy can be found in the ideology of meritocracy itself. Meritocracy is a system built on the maximization of individual talent, and that system unwittingly encourages several ruinous beliefs:

Exaggerated faith in intelligence. Today’s educated establishment is still basically selected on the basis of I.Q. High I.Q. correlates with career success but is not the crucial quality required for civic leadership. Many of the great failures of the last 50 years, from Vietnam to Watergate to the financial crisis, were caused by extremely intelligent people who didn’t care about the civic consequences of their actions.

All his other points are excellent also, but I have been thinking a lot lately about the damage done to our culture by the trust we place in people simply because they score very high on texts designed to measure g. That’s how you end up with a world run by functionally sociopathic technocrats.

And if you want to know what I mean by “functionally sociopathic,” here you go.

This morning after church we stopped at Milo All Day to pick up kolaches, a cinnamon roll, a pain au chocolat, and, of course, biscuits. I told Teri to try the biscuits first, and after about three bites she said, ‘That may be the best thing I have ever put in my mouth." If not, it’s pretty darn close. (Also, we have now eaten our week’s quota of carbs.)