"Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total... Man (sic) has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his own creations, and has lost ownership of himself."
Erich Fromm
Quoted here
A page on this site on / Alienation, Anomie, Angst /
The Cycle of Abuse :
The link between
exploitation of women and
exploitation of animals
by Christina M. Kennedy
"The whole Christian structure has been taking a larger and larger place in my material, not least because it's so much a part of our culture, even though very few of us now go to church. Fantastic fiction has, by and large, passed by the Christian mythologies, and gone to Norse or Greek mythology for its inspiration. Think of Tolkien, who has probably written the definitive work of fantasy in the 20th Century in 'The Lord of the Rings'. Even though there are Christian values buried very, very deep in that book, the prime structure is very non-Christian, it's Norse or Celtic. And I'm not very interested in what the Norse believed, I'm interested in what our culture has buried inside it.... I've always claimed that fiction has the ability to address realities of the world, rather than just be an escape valve... Many of the things which Christianity holds dear I find deeply offensive."
So...
So you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
a walk on part in the War
for a lead role in a cage?
"Also called Strider because of his endless wandering, Aragorn is lean and unkempt. When he first appears, his clothes are caked with mud, worn and stained. While everyone else in the room socializes around a warm fire, Aragorn keeps to himself. If Boromir looks like the company president, Aragorn looks like the vagrant who helps unload the delivery truck for drinking money."-- Nice writing. And a rare example of writing by a contemporary Christian that actually makes Christians look good.
"The really great men (and women) in the history of the world have all either known how to meditate or have unconsciously found their way to the place to which meditation leads us. Even the most vigorous and gifted among the others all failed and were defeated in the end because their task or their ambitious dream seized hold of them, made them into persons so possessed that they lost the capacity for liberating themselves from present things, and attaining perspective. Well, you know all this; it's taught during the first exercises, of course. But it is inexorably true. How inexorably true it is, one realizes only after having gone astray."
Das Glasperlenspiel / The Glass Bead Game /
Master of the Game
by Hermann Hesse
p 93
"A system analyst, Jeremy Beker of Virginia, explained his attraction of The Lord of the Rings like this: 'Different from other fantasy novels, Tolkien created a perfect world. His detailed and smooth writing skills make readers believe his story is real. The world he drew was so complicated yet he used an old traditional pattern: Justice confronting/defeating Evil'. "
"If Tolkien was using old words, old settings, old epic, wouldn't modern women be out of place in the trilogy?
Yes, sure, maybe, but it completely undermines the argument that Tolkien is the author of the 20th century."
"Many critically acclaimed names such as T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett failed to make it into the top 100 selected by the 25,000 voters. George Orwell's dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four and his political satire Animal Farm reached second and third places respectively, followed by James Joyce's Ulysses, though many of those who voted for this dense novel may not have read it."
"William Gates? ... He's obviously a very smart man. And he's a nicer guy, as a human being, than a lot of his competitors. But I have to pick on Bill, instead of Bill's competitors. Because Bill physically killed and ate all his competitors. ... The older Bill gets, the uglier he gets. He's a guy riding a white horse, that turned into a runaway bronco bull, that turned into a scaly crocodile, and now, it is turning into some kind of diseased revenant. It's like the Steed of the Nazgul, those black, flying zombie horses that explode when exposed to fresh water. That's what Microsoft is like now.
These guys, these Nazgul... They used to be kings. They were originally human beings, they had wives and children and futures, they had their own little nations to govern and manage. But then there was the One Ring – One Ring to Rule Them All. One. And they couldn't resist. And they gave in. ..."
"Although it takes place in a long ago time that never took place, (The Lord of the Rings) is truly a parable for our times, so much so that I would venture to put him up there with Orwell (and far above Aldous Huxley) as the most prescient of modern writers.
... The Lord of the Rings is a parable of power and its corrupting influence, a veritable dramatization of Lord Acton's famous axiom that 'power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,' as he put it in a letter to Mandell Creighton, bishop of London, sometime in the nineteenth century. ...
If the next two installments live up to the promise of the first, then The Lord of the Rings is going to be a mighty cultural counterforce to the American drive toward Empire, which, today, seems all but inevitable. For the past decade or so, ever since the end of the Cold War, the theoreticians of "national greatness conservatism" (and their counterparts, the advocates of "national greatness liberalism") -- represented by the Weekly Standard and the New Republic, respectively -- have been telling us that we ought to establish a world empire, or at least act the part.
In the wake of 9/11, we have born-again imperialists like Mark Steyn, and the neoconservative cadre of writers who dominate the pages of National Review, declaring that now is the time to revive the theory and practice of colonialism, British-style, as a model for American foreign policy. Like Sauron, they pine for "one ring to rule them all" -- a "New World Order". The more the US asserts its role as the world's chief and only superpower, the more the city of Washington D.C., comes to resemble Mordor. Now when the neoconservatives start blithering about what Bill Kristol calls "benevolent global hegemony" as the guiding principle of American policy, I am reminded of Saruman, whose hubris was his undoing."
"... here we have the correct understanding of the theme of the novel: it is about the evils of power. More precisely, the book aligns itself against power -- not "economic power" or "social power", but specifically political power. This is also the central theme of the classical liberal political tradition. ...
This is an allegory for what actually happens in our world every day: rulers, even well intentioned and idealistic ones, are ruled themselves at the same time. They are ruled by consensus and by the spasmodic hunger to acquire yet more power than they already have. This is why the state has never been limited, as the classical liberal thinkers had hoped it would be -- because the people in charge of keeping the power of the state limited never do so. Politicians and rulers generally, always want to become more important and more respected -- more powerful, in short.
It does not matter what stirring words a politician uses to legitimize his actions; he is inside a vicious circle he can't escape. As Edmund Burke put it many years ago, 'Ask of politicians the ends for which laws were originally designed, and they will answer that laws were designed as a protection for the poor and weak (...) but surely no pretence can be so ridiculous (...)." (Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756). ...
One might object that the contemporary era implies a sort of "end of history", because democracy is perceived as the "best form of government," and provides the illusion that no government governs without the consent of the governed. Tolkien would have not agreed. Indeed, as he wrote, 'I am not a "democrat" only because "humility" and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power -- and then we get and are getting slavery' (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 1995, p. 246)"
I recently got hold of a copy of The Great Ideas Today : 1969, which contains as a "special feature" the essay by Mark Van Doren "Great Books of the Twentieth Century in Literature", in which he speculates:"On the assumption that a modern (updated list of) Great Books may some day exist, and if so that it will embrace the period, roughly a hundred years, between 1880 and whatever date at which the twentieth century shall by that time have arrived, what works of literature should be included in it?"With admirable modesty he adds that his list is only a "guess", to which any actual future list may bear little resemblance.
Included on Van Doren's list: Ring Lardner and James Thurber.
Not included: J.R.R. Tolkien.
I venture my own guess on the matter:
(Note that this is not simple partizanship on my part, for while I would argue that many other works of fantasy and science fiction deserve to be widely read and considered, I cannot in confidence predict that in the world of 2107 they will be.)