Sunday, April 08, 2007

Tolkien and Evil

Today in The Sunday Times - on Philip Zimbardo's evil and on the new Tolkien.
Posted by Bryan Appleyard at 5:17 am

12 comments:

  1. Richard HaversApril 08, 2007 6:50 am

    Given that my feelings about LotR are exactly like yours Bryan I've just ordered the Children of Hurin from Amazon.

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  2. AnonymousApril 08, 2007 11:15 am

    "there is an unfolding drama of history and salvation throughout the work... Nevertheless, his dreams of ancient, epic struggles between good and evil do feel like a way of making sense of the meaning-less, globalised slaughter of the 20th century."

    I'd suggest the meaninglessness of the slaughter is an idea borne of a lack of awreness of life as an a spiritual arena, which is contrary to the thoughts of, for example, Jesus. The Nazis were very deeply embedded in the occult, and if we allow ourselves the liberty of upsetting the facile rationalist materialist version of life, this was/is an opening of self to the Unclean Spirit, Satanic forces, etc. Think ouija board on a very grand scale. And within this context the mass slaughters of wars can be seen as continuing the historical thread of human sacrifice to the diabolical, or the extermination camps as practical satanism. Similarly, the dropping of atomic bombs or the annihilation of Dresden. Related to your Zimbardo article, evil is a force one gets sucked into, and what tends to be whitewashed out of contemporary notions of Christianity is the idea that especially amongst pillars of society were "children of evil" who were consciously rather than unconsciously, spiritually satanic. "Satan who is the Prince of this world" meant in a far more literal sense than is imagined. Or as St Paul wrote, 2For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." But all that is hidden shall be revealed.

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  3. SteveApril 08, 2007 12:11 pm

    Good Lord, Bryan, it makes me very happy to find someone else who finds the prose of LOTR just unbearably dull. I have always felt a real oddball, as I have read quite a lot of science fiction, and nearly everything by CS Lewis, but just could never get into Tolkien at all. Even the movies failed to charm me, as I found the exposition of who was who sadly underdeveloped in the first one (no doubt not a problem for the other 98% of the audience who had already read the book 3 times,) and my interest faded again. I didn't bother with the second and third movies. (Well, I have seen snippets of them, particularly the computer generated massed armies. However, when it becomes so obvious I am looking at manufactured spectacle, it loses impact for me.)

    You do appear more capable of appreciating him; I have always had a feeling that people were being conned somehow into finding more mythic significance to the stories than they really contained. Is the slow demise of general religious education in government run schools the reason youngsters seize onto Tolkien in substitution?

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  4. BritApril 08, 2007 1:36 pm

    In your Tolkein piece you mention The Once and Future King. That deeply strange book also had a profound effect on me.

    The ant colony where EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY, the wild geese on the plain, and the ugly, ape-like Lancelot - they all still haunt me.

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  5. AnonymousApril 08, 2007 2:15 pm

    I'd agree with the dulness of the lOTR writing also, Steve. My only other journey into the fantastical realm was Philip Pullman's Dark MAterials trilogy which I found extremely enjoyable.

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  6. AnonymousApril 08, 2007 4:33 pm

    Bryan
    Well-written piece on evil. TI don't think that we can ever let the individual off the hook for evil by pointing to the system or the environment or nurture. Denying responsibility is another way of dehumanizing peopel, for it is our free will and responsibility for our actions that separates us from animals.

    That is why I have such trouble with Christian theology surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is based on a substitutionary theory of guilt, the idea that the sin of one person can be redeemed by the punishment of another. Its scape-goatism pure and simple. It's an ancient form of collective justice that no civlized society recognizes today, but Christians attribute to their God.

    I had a quite vigorous though civil debate with Adrian Warnock last year over this point. The flaws with the Christian position on evil are, it seems to me, twofold. One, it condemns all sin equally: God hates the white lie equally with murder, all men are punished with death for the existence of sin. Secondly, it is very much like Zimbardo's systematic explanation of evil, with the system being humanity itself. We are born fallen, which is another way of saying that we have no choice. That salvation is something that can only be given and never earned underlines the point that we really don't have free will.

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  7. AnonymousApril 08, 2007 7:33 pm

    I don't think those who rationally discourse on the spiritual via theology have much in the way of knowledge as to what they are talking about. The spirit fills and letter kills etc.

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  8. Neil ForsythApril 08, 2007 10:08 pm

    Apropos of your piece on evil, the inestimable Gordon examines your uncertainty/imagination ethic in the context of personal and political morality in the modern era. Undoubtedly, systems (all systems - social, political and moral) reduce uncertainty and, to a greater or lesser extent, stifle our imaginations. Consequently, within systems, the individual's abilty (or need) to engage in moral reasoning can be severly curtailed. In my view, to be a moral person, one must practice being moral. And evil will not flourish so readily among people who can work out for themselves the difference between right and wrong.

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  9. Gordon McCabeApril 09, 2007 12:03 am

    I was most surprised when I first heard, last year, of the plan to publish 'The Children of Hurin'. As I understood it, everything Tolkien ever wrote about the children of Hurin had already been published in The Silmarillion, The Unfinished Tales, and the relevant volumes from the History of Middle Earth. Does the current book do anything more than join together a number of the previously published fragments?

    The 'Narn i Chîn Húrin' in the Unfinished Tales is a proper narrative account, and when joined to 'The Wanderings of Húrin' in Volume 11 of the History of Middle Earth, it concludes the story told in the Narn. I'd be surprised, Bryan, if the concatenation of these two previously published narratives differs significantly from what you've read in 'The Children of Hurin'. Perhaps, however, there's a few extra bits.

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  10. Rebel with CauseApril 09, 2007 12:14 am

    Could not get past p.2 of LOTR but saw films as entertainment (and some good looking men!).

    On evil and Zimbardo's book - I reread your piece and also listen to him recently on Democracy Now. Hm, system vs individual debate crops up all over in our society. Just look at politics or NHS. It seems to me to be particularly germaine in the exploration of leadership.

    Management, when practiced with clear intent, creates systems through intentional design. Or, they come into being bit by bit and the impact of their functioning is as much a mystery to those in charge as it is to those stuck in their midst. In my experience, the later is almost always the case. Total systems management is a myth, even in Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia.

    So, I fully agree with your conclusion Bryan that we are responsible for our actions. It brings me to revisit my long confirmed observations that world is basically populated by cowards. What is missing is courage, moral or otherwise.

    But then we do not teach such things any more, do we?

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  11. Bryan AppleyardApril 09, 2007 5:23 am

    It has crossed my mind that, perhaps, Christopher is a better writer than his dad. But, if he has written significant parts of this, then people have been telling fibs, big ones.

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  12. Gordon McCabeApril 09, 2007 4:32 pm

    But if there's been no editorial invention, then, as I suspect, 'The Children of Hurin' is simply material which has already been published.

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