Other people want the world as a whole to “mean something” or “be about something” and I just don’t. That’s so terribly constricting, so suffocating. I’m much more inclined to positive nihilism.
I’m reading about LotR lore lately, and I really like LotR, but all the Christianity in it distresses me. Why must the world be governed by Eru Ilúvatar’s infallible and undefeatable master plan? Doesn’t that take out all the stakes? More importantly: part of what I like about LotR is its valorization of the small and the ordinary, as represented in the hobbits but also in, you know, Tolkien’s proclivity to spend more time talking about potatoes than he needs to, and whatnot. There’s a valorization of the small over the grandiose. It’s like, finding dignity in the ordinary or something, that feels like a big part of Tolkien’s project, and I’m deeply sympathetic to that. But then he has to go and add, you know, an omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator and omnimalevolent enemy (Melkor, not Sauron) and like…
First of all I hate the combination of omnipotence and omnibenevolence, it just doesn’t work in any kind of narrative, it doesn’t work in Christianity either, it’s just *so* having your cake and eating it too. Like, Christianity itself has something of a “valorization of the small” going on but it also fails there, because (people have already said all these things) Jesus isn’t actually just some guy, he’s actually god the all-powerful and infallible lord of the universe! And he doesn’t even really suffer or debase himself except temporarily, he ascends to heaven in the end, whereas sinners are sent to hell to suffer permanently for their imperfections. And “the meek will inherit the earth” by submitting to God and doing everything he says!
Not really valorizing the small there IMO.
Anyway Christianity doesn’t succeed at this but the thing about Tolkien is he gets so close. When he says stuff (this is from one of his letters apparently, I quoted it the other day) like
It had been Sauron’s virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall, and of his relapse) that he loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction… it was the creatures of the earth, in their minds and wills, that he desired to dominate.
I’m like, yeah! I’m with you bro! But then there’s the whole thing about, well, Eru Ilúvatar’s creation was perfect until Melkor’s discordant singing marred it, and now it’s imperfect and that’s the source of all evil, but it’s also fine because Eru’s vision is bound to win out in the end, it’s like… you’re undercutting your whole thing! Eru is doing what Sauron wants to do, it’s just that he’s winning at it. Maybe the point is that Eru permits free will, or something, while Sauron doesn’t. But this still seems weak in light of the whole “Melkor as the origin of imperfection” thing. You can’t valorize the small and the ordinary without being comfortable with imperfection. You can’t make a story where imperfection is Inherently Evil, as it seems to quite literally be in Tolkien’s cosmology, and have it land for me as a critique of lust for power. Like. What do people even want to do with power except Eliminate All The Imperfections? Obviously some just want to enrich themselves, but I think Tolkien’s opposition to power-seeking plainly runs a lot deeper than just opposition to self-interested power-seeking, which is
- what I like about it, and
- why this incongruity is so frustrating.
Anyway, there’s that Scott Alexander post, Heuristics that Almost Always Work. I agree with the thesis of the post as such, but there’s this line in it that perfectly articulates the reason rationalism tends to alienate me:
The Futurist
He comments on the latest breathless press releases from tech companies. This will change everything! say the press releases. “No it won’t”, he comments. This is the greatest invention ever to exist! say the press releases. “It’s a scam,” he says.
Whatever upheaval is predicted, he denies it. Soon we’ll all have flying cars! “Our cars will remain earthbound as always”. Soon we’ll all use cryptocurrency! “We’ll continue using dollars and Visa cards, just like before.” We’re collapsing into dictatorship! “No, we’ll be the same boring oligarchic pseudo-democracy we are now” A new utopian age of citizen governance will flourish. “You’re drunk, go back to bed.”
When all the Brier scores are calculated and all the Bayes points added up, he is the best futurist of all. Everyone else occasionally gets bamboozled by some scam or hype train, but he never does. His heuristic is truly superb.
But - say it with me - he could be profitably replaced with a rock. “NOTHING EVER CHANGES OR IS INTERESTING”, says the rock, in letters chiseled into its surface. Why hire a squishy drooling human being, when this beautiful glittering rock is right there?
Bolding in the final paragraph mine.
“Nothing ever happens or is interesting”. Really? Is that what the skeptical futurist is saying? Certainly he’s saying “nothing ever happens”, that I’ll grant. But he’s not saying “nothing is ever interesting”. You added that, Scott, because to be interested you need something Big to happen. You are not filled with love for the small and ordinary, it is just wasted time and wasted space to you.
I do not particularly like the Big, at least not most of the time. I like the small quite a lot. And, contrary to their names, I think most of the world is small. The world is made of lots of small things, not a couple big things. And I often feel that the small is the only thing that’s actually real, the big tends to be illusory. As a small creature it is other small things that affect me most and matter most to me, it is my small dealings with other small creatures that are subjectively the biggest. And the various grand narratives of history, if they exist, only affect me in a diffuse and nonspecific way and are in all their specifics born out in small things.
I am very much a partisan of ordinary things, ordinary dealings, of our daily lives and our individual relationships and perhaps ephemeral but deeply felt emotions as the actual source of value in the world, from which Big things insofar as they matter at all derive their importance. And, aesthetically I suppose, I am also a defender of the inherent dignity of small things and cast-aside things (a different but closely related category). And there are close connections between the small and the vast (which is not the same as Big), and. Well, take my uquiz. But anyway.
to be candid, i have tried to read the Silmarillion about five times now and bounced off it every time. I don’t think of it as “LOTR lore” but its own separate more boring thing. I don’t think my enjoyment of LOTR would be enhanced by my slogging through it - the elves are just fine as they are in LOTR and one can presume they are all related to one another in the usual manner of aristocrats to get the sense of it without reading the fake history of their family troubles.
Tolkien’s achievement was writing a great story in the form of LOTR, not writing Lore, the value of which is extremely overvalued by “fandom”, as I keep posting all the time. Lore can be shit out. It largely belongs to the same genre as chanelled/automatic writing.
I think it is entirely appropriate, for instance, to see Tolkien’s “gotta put God in the beginning here” in the same spirit as Mark “Zompist” Rosenfelder and all the other post-Tolkienians who have some high god with too many vowels on the first page. Tolkien was being no less formulaic and automatic. I think it’s also an important part of how he “side-channelled” Christ into Lord of the Rings which appears to have been something it was somewhat important for him to believe was the case (per the letter), and extremely important for some Christian fans to believe.
Not that Tolkien Sr. even wrote the Silmarillion. He is innocent. It was written by Tolkien Jr. and cf. Brian Herbert to see the temptation of what can happens when an artistically ungifted son finds himself sitting on top of a big sf property with a bundle of lore-slush. Tolkien Sr. knew that his little creation formula didn’t belong in print, but Tolkien Jr. didn’t have that discretion.
