Utopia Talk / Politics / seb goes back in time

Sam Adams rank	Tue Apr 21 23:51:29 https://x.com/DailyGondor/status/2042197939548835871?s=20
Seb rank	Wed Apr 22 07:49:43 The most depressing thing about the alt-right's appropriation of Tolkien is how *thoroughly* they have read the books to capture all sorts of details while absorbing not a single iota of the meaning.
williamthebastard rank	Wed Apr 22 10:16:07 Tolkein was always vulnerable. A bit too fascinated with dividing subjects into good and bad races, as was the current trend in those times.
Seb rank	Wed Apr 22 11:05:41 WtB: That's also not what he was doing. Orks exist because Sauron and Melkor need minions from a narrative perspective. The entire point of most of the rest of the novel is all people have the capacity for good, all people are redeemable. He then spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile his actual theological views on race, free will, redemption and the divine as applied to Orks. If they are created by God, they must have free will and individually capable of redemption. They cannot be created by melkor, because evil cannot create and give a soul. But narratively he wanted a group of generic loyal badies. At a very fundamental level he absolutely did not believe in the idea of good and bad races and the existence of Orks was in his mind a plot hole.
williamthebastard rank	Wed Apr 22 11:13:03 Hes subconsciously thinking far too much about races for his own good. Thats obvious. You can even trace them to humans, the blond elves are clearly Nordic for example, the Hobbits are clearly the idealistic version of honest, down-to-Earth English workers, who like a friendly pint after a day mending the house, salt of the earth dont you know
williamthebastard rank	Wed Apr 22 11:16:02 Theres nothing saintly about famous figures. You are allowed to criticize them, you dont have to be in hallowed awe like americans are of celebrities. Common criticism of Tolkein is that he was reflecting one aspect of the racial discourse of his time without realizing it, and another is that he wasnt a particularly elegant stylist. There are, of course, lots of positive things to be said about him as well
williamthebastard rank	Wed Apr 22 11:22:02 "He then spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile his actual theological views on race" So he himself obviously saw parallels to racial theory in his writings if he felt he had to spend the rest of his life on that topic
Sam Adams rank	Wed Apr 22 11:31:58 Lmfao you are actually doing the meme.
Seb rank	Wed Apr 22 12:01:01 WtB: Class, not race. Elves are Nordic coded (and again not as much as you think in the actual texts) because he was picking them up from Nordic myths. Hobbits are very much the English middle class. But do you think the men if Gondor are specifically coded as *not* English? Or just a different socio economic class? You are certainly allowed to criticise figures, but the kinds of speculations you are making so actually need to fit the facts, and this guy left a volume of written material about his thinking on the design of middle earth, its culture and his own values commensurate with what you would expect for an elderly Oxford professor of literature. Enough that people have made multiple PhDs out of analysing it. I'm not saying your speculations are wrong because I don't want them to be true; I'm saying they are wrong because there's been (frankly excessive) investigation into Tolkein's invented world and his design of it which contradicts your claims. "So he himself obviously saw parallels to racial theory in his writings if he felt he had to spend the rest of his life on that topic" Yes, but this is the point. Your suggestion is he was consciously or unconsciously sorting people into good and bad races when his stories and his own writing about his stories explicitly contradicts that; to the point he spent a very long time ruminating on having crafted an "evil" race to serve the narrative but that being fundamentally incompatible with the internal logic and personal philosophy. And within the text we see the same thing: Silmarillion you'd know how the good "high men" of numenor largely fell to corruption, and the lovely 'good' elves are actually largely the survivors of a bunch of pretty bad behaviour. Not descendants of, mind, many being literally the same people that were part of a revenge quest pursued against divine wishes involving crimes against god and humanity. Galadriel, for example, came to middle earth because she desired to rule a kingdom which she couldn't do in the undying lands. Her scene in LoTR is specifically about her redeeming herself by having finally abandoned that vanity). So yes, it's entirely possible to project racist white supremacy onto it. That is exactly what the US Alt-right does in their quest for spiritual ballast. But you are sort of doing the same: lazy surface reading, missing much of the explicit text and subtext (let alone meta information the author provides).
Seb rank	Wed Apr 22 12:12:30 Anyway, to the key point: LoTR isn't a story about how evil was defeated through force of arms by the all conquering martial prowess of the white master race represented by Elves and Gondor. It's a story about how evil is fundamentally stems from the will-to-power over others, and cannot be defeated by trying to acquire more power but for good (Gondor is hollowed out by centuries of war, Roha corrupted and Saruman has become the literal thing he is fighting); but a multi-racial group committed to the pursuit of individual virtue is able to achieve divine redemption of the world through choosing abdignation of power. Can you tell Tolkein was a catholic? Just a bit.
Seb rank	Wed Apr 22 12:13:23 It is not at all subtle - even NaMBLA ought to be able to get it.
williamthebastard rank	Wed Apr 22 12:32:02 "Scholars and commentators have said that Tolkien held outmoded views on race, as seen in the Middle-earth stories, based on his depictions of the relationship between evil and race (the main races being Elf, Dwarf, Hobbit, Man, and Orc).[1][2][3] Robert Stuart says that Tolkien was a "racialist" since he writes of races with different attributes, and then proceeds to analyse Tolkien's use of black and white (including his antipathy to racism and apartheid from his mother's experience in South Africa),[4] the nature of Orcs, the racial connections in his language, antisemitism, and the apparent hierarchy of races and lords within them.[5] Stuart concludes that "Tolkien's legendarium is suffused with racialist imagery and, at times, imbued with racist values".[6] The folklorist and Tolkien scholar Dimitra Fimi examines Tolkien's use of and attitudes to race in her 2009 book Tolkien, Race and Cultural History. She notes that scholars including Anderson Rearick, David Perry, and Patrick Curry have criticised or defended Tolkien on "racial charges". In response, she says that Tolkien wrote mostly "when race was still a valid scientific term", while scholars still held "ideas of the nature of Man and his place in the world" etc etc etc Note: Racial is not a synonym for racist
Seb rank	Wed Apr 22 12:44:28 WtB: Note though, this doesn't support you proposition: that he was "too fascinated" with "dividing subjects into good and bad races". He certainly gave his races characteristics*, and he even created a generically "always evil" race in the Orks for narrative purposes; but couldn't really reconcile that with his views that good and bad *necessarily have* to be characteristics of individual free will not something that flows from race. *And I think today we would still recognise culture can influence individuals; and in Tolkein's fantasy world culture and race are often almost coterminous.
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