I would like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and Jesus.

I think the Objectivist obligation on the teachers is clear: their vision compromised by the forces of faceless bureaucracy, they must blow it to high heaven. Unless every student comes out of that course a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (one of them, anyway,) the ghost of Howard Roark will be quite disappointed.

Anyway, Narnia.

If we’re going to start on ambiguity, I read the title as meaning ‘I’m going to thank my parents, (who are) Ayn Rand and Jesus’ and have still not entirely recovered from the momentary contemplation of that as a marriage.

I forget who was that said that there is a moment in a child’s life when he is reading the Narnia novels and some grown-up tells him “Of course, you realise that Aslan is really Jesus”

I think I was in my thirties before I realised this. Had my Catholic education made me more devout I suspect I’d have worked it out about twenty years earlier and without having to be told. I sell children’s books now, in a Catholic country. Forget the kids, should I tell the parents what the novels are all about?

I went to see Rush at Wembley Arena in, I think, 1982. Loved them then. But like Ayn Rand, they’re for kids, and intellectually developed but emotionally underdeveloped kids at that. This is probably quite an objectionable thing to say, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

thanks very much for the link, Robert! Via one of the commenters below, some substantiation for my claim that Ayn Rand wouldn’t necessarily have been in favour of this; toward the end of “The Fountainhead” press baron Gail Wynand orders his newspapers to print editorials in support of Howard Roark (and rather ridiculously, his printers go on strike as a result, because they are that passionate about architecture criticism). Roark more or less spurns this offer of help, commenting that although it’s clearly Wynand’s right to use his newspapers to push a political message, it’s probably not really an effective way of promoting Roark’s ideas.

I suppose one could argue that this is not so much Objectivism in action as part of Roark’s general character as an ungrateful[1] bastard, because although Roark’s obviously a Nietszchean superman, he’s not really a 100% pure Messiah character like the good guys in “Atlas Shrugged”. But I think it’s at least indicative.

[1] And a pretty stupid one too. There are loads of architectural clients who don’t mind all that much if the aesthetics of your building are out of tune with popular taste if it’s really practical and cheap – factories, the Army, bridges, prisons, grain silos etc. Why on earth did Roark decide that the sensible thing to do was set up a specialist architect’s practice that only ever designed private homes and large showpiece public buildings?

Zamfir, the crucifixion is the central event, more or less, in LWW. The Lion and the Witch agree that she gets to kill Aslan (in a rather gristly method for children, of course) in exchange for some sort of metaphor for sin getting removed from the world. They sanctify their compact with Deep Magic, which is supposed to represent Mosaic law or something.

Then Aslan comes back to life and says ha ha, you chump! My dad has access to Deeper Magic! A rather nasty trick, all in all, what with the reneging on treaties and subjecting young children to such a sight, but we can console ourselves that the Witch probably would have broken the deal if she could, too.

Hopefully.

Rand’s “Objectivism” just seems to be a hodge-podge of various 19th century thinkers. I will note Lysander Spooner and Max Stirner for example. I don’t know that she ever read these guys, but the similarities are striking.

I enjoyed Rand when I was around 18. By 20 I think I got over it. People would do better to read Thomas Hobbes “Leviathan”.

I reckon that you can only understand the delirious reality-free extremism of Ayn Rand by realizing that she wasn’t an American novelist but a Russian intelligent.

yes, that was the joke; “I would like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and Jesus” is occasionally seen in stylebooks as a justification for the “Oxford comma” after the last item in a list.

Or “Harvard comma” as we Yanks call it.

the students are going to end up fucking hating capitalism for ruining an otherwise perfectly decent novel.

Given that, to a large extent, the humanities are structurally dependent on the hatred of capitalism, or at least the ‘modern and postmodern conditions,’ this seems like quite a good strategy. Back in the 70s you could rely on them hating capitalism because of injustice, poverty and the threat of a lifetime of wage labour, but these days they grow up knowing about and being comfortable with the ideas that WalMart is evil and the government works on behalf of corporate interests, the Che T-shirts are interchangeable with EastCoast Choppers or Bacon is a Vegetable. How, then, to work them up to accepting post-Marxian critique?

and the kid realises that he can never trust an adult again
best thing I’ve read all day. Never trust anyone who tries to push C. S. Lewis on you. What about when the kid realises Tolkien’s orcs are Turks/Boche/early modern proletariat?

there is no such thing as “oak syrup” and thus no commercial use for an oak forest after all[7] other than for the timber
Oak can be quite successfully coppiced, so timber does not have to equal tree death. Growth rate is extremely slow and there are no longer vast forests of oak awaiting the axe, so the destruction of capital involved in chopping an oak down is starting to look unattractive. See the Globe Theatre project for methods of gathering oak with minimal environmental destruction.

Rand is a perfectly good novelist, very visibly in the tradition of Victor Hugo (who she greatly admired).

Hey! You! Put back that Victor Hugo were you found it and step back now! Slowly! MmMkay?

… Apart of that : the footnotes are lagging behind the technology. Still no hyperlinked multiple choices ones? C’mon!

“And a pretty stupid one too. There are loads of architectural clients who don’t mind all that much if the aesthetics of your building are out of tune with popular taste if it’s really practical and cheap – factories, the Army, bridges, prisons, grain silos etc.”

It is rare for any of these to be architect designed, though. I know there has been a bit of a craze recently for ‘bridge architecture’ but generally they are just bunged up by engineers (and all the better for it in many cases). I’m sure there has been an architect designed factory or two but I bet they were pretty much useless.

Of all the dreck through which I was required to slog in my undergraduate studies, “Atlas Shrugged” was the one that made me finally throw up my hands and get the Cliffs Notes. I simply could not make it through an entire chapter without zoning off/falling asleep.

Well, that and The Inferno. But that one was only because of time constraints.

Like Jesus isn’t an allegory. CS Lewis, damn his eyes, took allegory even more meta than it had been.

As I understand it, academic freedom mandates that the teacher of a class decides what is or is not part of the discipline(s) taught in that class. This is not a decision left up to university administrators. These grants are a violation of academic freedom.

At least that’s a view as I understand it.

I also think that there’s a clear line which ought to prevent professors from accepting or soliciting grants that are conditional on specific changes to the education that they give their students. Quite apart from anything, are they going to tell the students they’re doing this? And it’s also, as noted above, arguably contrary to Randian ethics too.

I once had a university english prof insist that the correct usage was ‘it is hoped’ (rather than ‘hopefully’); the tension with his prior imperative to avoid the passive voice seems to have gone unnoticed. (NB: Use of passive voice here is not inadvertant [and of course here I’m getting back at my h.s. english teacher who objected to my use of litotes — an objection that did not go not unheeded.])

[11] I think the basic problem is that people are selectively down on utterance modifiers. As in comment 31 — dave doesn’t mean “If someone paid me personally” but “I am expressing a personal opinion: If someone paid me.” “Hopefully” can mean “I am hopeful when I say this.”

I see the paper I linked says that utterance modifiers are intonationally isolated but I think it’s pretty clear that they don’t have to be. — “He’s frankly a waste of space” sounds OK to me.

I’m going to assume that the moment someone tells you that Narnia is an allegory must be before you reach the end and [SPOILERS] Aslan tells the characters that they’ve all been killed and gone to heaven except for Susan. That hung a lampshade on it. God that ending pissed me off, and it’s the only thing I remember about it. Further discussion here (mostly I’m whoring that post because I like the coinage “crapstone,” meaning “the last volume of a multi-volume work, which sucks,” and would like to spread it.

Like the other dave says, I don’t know what the big deal is. I would totally read Atlas Shrugged for $500,000. (Although my guess is that Watchmen is better.) The only Rand I’ve read is Anthem, which is officially the stupidest thing I have ever read. I think the point of that book was to stand to Objectivism [TM] as the Narnia books do to the scriptures; but please.

Speaking of Narnia, I read them all as a tyke, and even then I was rolling my eyes at the ham-handed Xian imagery. Good comments from matthias and rea (great quote!). I actually think the thing that did it for me was that when Aslan came back his mane had been shaved off (plus his insufferably infinite melancholy, I suppose). I’m not sure now why that struck me that way, but there it is.

I don’t mind “hopefully,” but what the heck is a “scunner”?! (Where you from, boy?)

utterance modifiers.

Hey, that’s the most useful thing I’ve learned on a blog all week!

On the topic at hand, Ayn Rand is crap. She’s a crap writer, a crap thinker, and influenced in the direction of crappiness, well, everything she influenced at all. And people who like her and her books are vicious halfwits.

“Perfectly decent novel”? Um, no.

I’ve often wondered what oak syrup would taste like. This is a case of trusting ancient tradition — presumably, the ancient Native Americans tested all the trees, and only maples are suitable. I assume you could tap any deciduous tree in a climate with a sudden spring thaw, so it must be that other saps are inedible. But do we really know? Have we tried getting sap from other trees? Howard Roark, or whatever the character’s name was, would tap the damn trees to find out.

There seems to be a lot of “I will pay you cash money to teach the meth-fueled revenge-rants of a self-absorbed bint who never got over not inheriting daddy’s fur farm” going around. I guess pay-for-ignorance isn’t just for think-tanks any more.
.

“Scunner” means approximately “feeling of aversion tinged with nausea.” I believe it’s Scots.

I’m with 37 and 44 on Narnia. It’s beyond me how anyone with the faintest acquaintance with Christian doctrine could miss Aslan = Jesus. Of course I was an adult when I got around to them, but still.

As for Rand, I will have no truck with her or with anyone who does. The worst of it is that I have been banking at BB&T because they have a branch a block from my house. Switching will be a pain.

As with Pilgrim’s Progress, as with Narnia, as with all such books, the students are going to end up fucking hating capitalism for ruining an otherwise perfectly decent novel.

I’ve only read anthem by Ayn Rand (which was at best very imperfectly decent); and fair point about Narnia (though it is not, of course, true that everyone has that reaction); but does anyone feel like this about Pilgrim’s Progress? I read it as an adult, and loved it taking it as an allegory; plenty of people just plain hate it; but I refuse to believe that anyone reads it, and then later goes, “Oh wait, that was allegorical? Shit! I thought Ignorant and Despair and Gospel were just common 17th-century English names!”

It’s popular now to whine about how allegorical meaning makes a work somehow impure, but that’s just because you’re used to modern novels and realism; back in my century (the second CE), we liked to read even Homer allegorically, and thought the better of him for it.

I started THE FOUNTAINHEAD in college, and it was so unrelievedly bad that I couldn’t reach pg. 100.

I think I bailed out on two of her books in under a hundred pages each, maybe sixty. There should be some sort of Ayn Rand Insensibility index determined by pages read.

I think my fastest defeat was at the hands of Philip Pullman and the Golden Compass: I lasted a page. Now that I look at it again it doesn’t seem all that awful but following on the Harry Potter heels didn’t help.

I actually made it through both “Anthem” and “We the Living,” the latter having qualified me for martyr status in some societies. They were both crap.
.

I am with #47 in not objecting to the allegory in Narnia per se. But the way it is done is pretty ham-handed.

The Lord of the Rings is superior to Narnia in proportion as its Christian subtext is less blatant.

it’s just not true to say that her books are badly written in the way in which, say, Jeffrey Archer’s are

Whose are? They still suck…

I remember reading The Land of Far Beyond, Enid Blyton’s kids’-version of Pilgrim’s Progress. When the kids get to the City of Happiness, this dude called Jesus turns up and takes their Burdens off their backs. I laughed — it seemed so random to have a Bible character in an Adventure story. Like when Leonard Rossiter turns up in 2001: a Space Odyssey.

I had a niece who recently found out there’s no such thing as Santa (a little too late, I might add) and to her credit she immediately picked up on the pattern. “If Santa isn’t real, then the Easter Bunny isn’t real, and God isn’t real!”. Good job.

English, for good or ill, moves on and “presently” can mean “currently”. Since I’m using Princeton as a reference feel free to blame Americans for ruining the word.

Much as I usually love to Blame America First, according to the OED, Chaucer was talking this way in 1425.

?a1425 (c1380) CHAUCER tr. Boethius De Consol. Philos. V. pr. vi. 122 The science of hym..lokith in his simple knowynge alle thingis of preterit ryght as thei weren idoon presently ryght now.

I believe that Fowler points out that Shakespeare used “presently” for “immediately” (as in “bring a surgeon presently”), and pointed out how far we had come from that (“the docter will see you presently”).

“I don’t believe I have to advocate that people accept Ayn Rand’s philosophy,’’ said Patricia Roberson-Saunders, who holds the chair. Roberson-Saunders, who will present Rand with other texts, said students will benefit from reading about a world view held by “people with whom they will have to work and for whom they will have to work.’’

So we have two scenarios envisioned here by Professor of Objectivism Roberson-Saunders.
A) Students at Johnson C. Smith University will in the future be working with Objectivists.
B) Students at Johnson C. Smith University will in the future be working for Objectivists.

True to form, the notion that Rand-believers could be supervised by non-Rand-believers is not considered.

Rand is a perfectly good novelist, very visibly in the tradition of Victor Hugo (who she greatly admired). She writes long books but so did Hugo. Her characters break off into irrelevant philosophising but so does John Buchan. She doesn’t make any more use of superhero characters or bizarre coincidences than Lee Child. The last half of Richard Wright’s Native Son consists of one character making a political speech and nobody objects to that because it’s a good political speech, and so is Howard Roark’s speech at the end of The Fountainhead (I am not going to defend the radio address at the end of Atlas Shrugged – that one is incomprehensible).

Right, all of these writers had a single quirk that didn’t manage to ruin their novels, and Rand’s books had all of them.

rea> Roark of course is Frank Lloyd Wright, more-or-less, and that’s what Wright did.

Apparently, Lloyd Wright viewed Rand as a crank and set impossible conditions when she approached him to design the sets of the Fountainhead movie. Also, Wright’s politics can reasonably be defined as socialist: he wanted to give every American a land grant.

Incidentally, to be boring, it looks like the historically black college in Charlotte is Johnson C. Smith, not UNC-Charlotte which has been another recipient of BB&T’s, um, generosity.

I think she’s thinking this:
— My students will be sane. Most of them are black, and just about none of them come from not-ridiculously-privileged backgrounds.
— My students will have the benefit of my teaching them to read this crap with a critical eye.
— They will work in law firms and business offices for white right-wing children of privilege, people like Alan Greenspan, because America is not a meritocracy.

I do not think she’s imagining that Randians rule the world through the force of their inexorable will. I would guess she understands well that the ruling class rationalizes their privilege by reading Ayn Rand and making strings-attached donations to schools of opportunity.

Again with the failed bullet list.

You know, I can’t find the survey with Google, but one did show up this week. Terrifyingly, amongst American men over thirty the Bible was first, and among the other top ten highlights were Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and The Lord of the Sodding Rings

Funnily enough, Ayn Rand hasn’t featured in any of the British top 100 novel lists I’ve ever seen, and I’d be willing to bet she wouldn’t even figure in the top 1000. That’s probably because we’re afraid of success, and fond of communism.

Or – and I just throw this out there for shits and giggles – we don’t have wingnut lunacy forced on us as children.

Either/Or. I suppose it depends upon what your definition of “Art” is.

True to form, the notion that Rand-believers could be supervised by non-Rand-believers is not considered.

Silly #65, you miss the obvious: it isn’t that they don’t think it’s possible, it’s only that to a Randoid, the beliefs of the supervised are irrelevant to the vision of the supervisor.

Strike the number 70 from comment #74 and substitute the number 71.

Quitting while I’m ahead, now.

Zora: depends if you like landscape and/or hiking, which is what the book is actually about. There’s also lots of war and fantasy racism, but not many Difficult Choices or Personal Growth, except for Gollum. Watch the movies first: if they don’t make you sick, you might like the books.

#75:
“…we don’t have wingnut lunacy forced on us as children…”
Keeping in mind that very few indeed are the responsible parties who willingly and knowingly “force wingnut lunacy” on anyone. It’s mostly just been accomplished by a body of troops in close array who are convinced beyond argument of their rightness in certain basic matters. So convinced of that rightness that it passes through our days indistinct, like the air, like the cycling hum of electricity in municipal wires, invisible, inaudible.
Teachers must believe in their fitness to teach, and the appropriateness of it, but it’s specious and a little ignorant to begin with the assumption there can be no lunacy in your own presentation, or in those you learned from when young.
Many false and error-ridden premises were taught as fact up until quite recently in all our universities and schools, absurdities forced down the minds of young eager students as undeniable fact, in fact.
The commonest excuse for this is our narrowing focus, our clarifying lenses, our archives of erudition and discovery. We’re getting better at it. We’re getting closer to not only the larger truths of where and what we are but to ways of getting at that truth and verifying it that are increasingly larger in scope and more accurate at the same time. Cheers for all that. But there are fundamental assumptions about what’s going on here that are going unchallenged mostly because they’re not spoken, because they’re such basic tenets of reality as we know it they’re unquestioned.
Some of that, some of our unquestioned assumptions about where this is and what we’re doing here will prove to have been mistaken enough to qualify as a kind of lunacy, a blindness of the reason, an internal rendering of the outer world founded on bedrock that turns out to have been made of paste and cardboard and paint, though not specifically wingnut in character.
A little charity for the other side. It’s late, many of them are tired and discouraged, weighed down with compunction and embarrassed regret. It’s charity that distinguishes our myopic self-interest from theirs, or should.

For a cogent analysis of what The Lord of the Rings is actually about, see this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDFz3cvTaFw&feature=related
Apparently, it’s really about encouraging us to be quirky and individualstic by all exercising the same consumer choices . . .

Or perhaps sodomy and cock rings.

If only Tolkien had had the requisite vision. This would have been a far better book.

My main button having been pushed, I can’t not respond. Possibly I can make a post short enough that somebody will read it.

LotR is not a novel, but a romance. Criticism applying standards appropriate to the novel is misplaced.

Tolkien was certainly a racist by instinct, since almost everybody is, but not on principle.

Tolkien was an orthodox Catholic, a monarchist, and a last-ditcher in the battle against literary Modernism, decades after the Modernists had won.

He was not an imperialist or a warmonger either, but a conspicuously humane person. He would have been as appalled as anyone by the Bush administration.

At the center of LotR is a Kantian protest against the universal practice of treating other people as tools to accomplish one’s own ends. The book is intricately constructed and dovetailed to illustrate this theme, of which the Ring is the central symbol.

The central journey in the book is Frodo’s journey toward the realization that Gollum, who is deliberately made a corrupt and revolting as a creature with a soul can be, is just as entitled to humane treatment and respect as anyone else, and is capable of redemption. (The claim that no one in the book undergoes significant change is ludicrous. Frodo is utterly transformed — “sanctified” is the word Tolkien used.)

A lesser writer would have had Gollum reform and prove Frodo right. In fact, we are shown Gollum almost repenting — but Frodo never knows that he was right.

Funnily enough, Ayn Rand hasn’t featured in any of the British top 100 novel lists I’ve ever seen, and I’d be willing to bet she wouldn’t even figure in the top 1000.

And it’s worth keeping in mind that Rand is more or less unknown outside of the anglosphere.

Say what you will about Ayn Rand’s writing and/or philosophy, she certainly had a colorful love life.

For a wonderful parody of the Rand cult see this:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/mozart.html

Concerning:

English, for good or ill, moves on and “presently” can mean “currently”.

Definitely for the worse. If “currently” means “now” and “presently” means “in the near future” we have a useful pair of meanings. If “presently” means “now” we have two words for “now” and no words for “in the near future.”

I reckon that you can only understand the delirious reality-free extremism of Ayn Rand by realizing that she wasn’t an American novelist but a Russian intelligent.

Yes indeedy because as Richard Pipes has shown deirious reality-free extremism is quite alien to the American national genius…

ejh:I manged to get through the first chapter of Starship Trooper – very much a political speech – and it struck me as very coherent and not at all libertarian.

I don’t know what happens in chapter two.

Hitler invades Poland.

LotR is most directly descended from Eric Rucker Eddison, not Sir Thomas Malory or the Norse sagas; of course it makes sense to critique it as a novel.

Begging your pardon, as Sam Gamgee would put it, but this is not right. Tolkien’s project was his own, and he embarked on it as an undergraduate, though none of the product saw the light of day until after is death — the Silmarillion, which I find unreadable though some people admire it.

LotR of course grew out of The Hobbit, which is essentially a joke — the introduction of a member of the Edwardian minor gentry into a “heroic” world cobbled together from various Germanic texts. (Except for the hobbits themselves, almost everything in the book can be referred to a particular source.)

LotR itself was begun in response to the publisher’s insistent demands for a sequel. Tolkien was stuck with the Hobbits, wildly anachronistic as they are. For me as for the general public, their continuing presence is what gives the book its significance.

Tolkien is on record as admiring Eddison’s skill while disliking his viewpoint, which Tolkien chracterized as “cruelty and arrogance.” (Eddison and Rand — now there are two authors with a similar outlook on life.)

Eddison of course has merits Tolkien did not share. If you want vividly drawn characters, you will find them in Ouroboros, though the bad guys make much more of an impression than the good guys. And he was good with sex! Though it is noteworthy that the bad girls are sexy and the good girls are not.

Begging your pardon, as Sam Gamgee would put it, but this is not right.

Sorry, Tolkien’s project was influenced by Haggard, not Eddison. My mistake. But the basic point is that it was part of an emerging milieu of adventure and romance writing in novel form, so claiming that it was not a novel will not hold water.

Doctor Slack: I’m not really clear what’s at stake in the novel/romance debate, but the suggestion that Tolkien was influenced by (presumably H Rider) Haggard is a bit startling. Evidence?

On the orcs-as-proles suggestion: Tolkien certainly writes low-level villains as slightly embarrassing stage cockneys (no more embarrassing than Orwell’s, though). More charitably, orcs are working class soldiers, of whom Tolkien had presumably met a few as a WW1 army officer.

On the racism claim: I’ve already suggested that Tolkien is centrally concerned with corruption brought about by power. Orcs are victims of that corruption in others: they’re not (as a racist might claim) acting out their own inferior nature, they’re expressing someone else’s evil will. Again, perhaps, they’re the victims – on both sides – of WW1. But that might attribute more political awareness to Tolkien than seems plausible.

I’m just thinking aloud here, really…

I move that the lack of environmentally sustainable lesbian subaltern voices in Chapter VI of the Silmarillion provides damning evidence of Tolkien’s repressed anthropocentric heteronormativity and that all remaining copies in the Student Union bookshop be returned to the publisher with a strong worded letter of complaint forthwith!

@105: But what about Galadriel?

rm wrote: Aragorn spent much of his younger decades (before 60, maybe) living or traveling in Harad…learning to respect their ways and trying to turn them towards the Good.

Like an Anglican missionary in Africa, perhaps?

As for the ‘power corrupts’ theme in LotR, Tolkien clearly presents power in the right hands (inherited power) as a good thing: Galadriel, Elrond, Gandalf, Aragon etc. Sauron’s power (self-wrought not inherited) challenges the established order of things hence its evil.

Further, Dan, you didn’t specialise in catering to the stockbroking needs of the poor, did you?

a) assuming India is part of the “non-US anglosphere”, that is where you will find a strong following for Ayn Rand. And why not; that nation, unlike the rest of the anglosphere including the US, is moving towards capitalism instead of thrashing it.

b) crap and toilet paper: shocking lack of diversity in the excoriation of Atlas Shrugged. What’s wrong with you people? Well, maybe it is indicative of where your brains reside.

c) paraphrasing the ubiquitous ‘well it kinda got me when I was a teen, but thank goodness I grew up and now see it is crap.’ Worth noting that the late teen-early twenties is the window when most humans despair of holding their higher visions against cynicism and give up. This coincides with encountering the sink-drain crappy professors who majored in giving up and are qualified for only regurgitation of the party line with the purpose of squashing any high opinion of the United States and/or pure capitalism. Suggest the drop-off in being inspired by Rand coincides not with maturing but with accommodation to the common. For those who never had any affinity (encountered Rand as crap right away), unfortunate you didn’t read her earlier.

d) from the Objectivist point of view, success at funding profs/departments/schools who elect to teach this book is a meager rejoinder — a candle in the wind — to the monolithic bought-and-sold education establishment, largely beholden to taxpayer-funded bureaucrats — and patrons/intellectuals — whose statist agendas dominate. If this be a “bribe” (Daniel) than make the most of it. Unless the statists are suddenly now willing to forgo the Big Bribe.

e) Daniel: >>>[1] I also note that the author isn’t much of a Rand student. Ayn Rand absolutely was not an advocate of “free markets”; she was an advocate of capitalism and of monopoly capitalism in particular. << This is so wrong that I wonder if Daniel really gets Rand at all. If you are going to characterize Rand, you should at least respect her highly visible, highly supported and highly flown flag about this: She proved that capitalism equals free markets and cannot be alienated from that identity. Therefore, she advocates both capitalism and free markets. As such, she consistently condemned coercive (government-driven) monopoly. She would not call the cartel-ized corporate social democracy currently in place in US “capitalism.” If you wish to conflate capitalism with anti-free markets and coercive monopoly, you are free to attempt to make that point. However, it is inaccurate to state that Rand did.

Otherwise, great thread!

Sincerely,
John Donohue
Pasadena, CA

In fact, I suspect Rand’s parents would say much the same thing:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/incest-couple-had-another-child/2008/04/07/1207420263808.html

Can anyone name a single intelligent Randian?

Oh, I can name many. Here’s one: Tara Smith.

Of course, if, as I suspect, your criteria for intelligence includes not being a Randian…

“It’s not about the narrative structure” of course quoted from 104, not 103.

People shouldn’t be so defensive. LotR has a politics; it’s Tolkien’s politics, not just that of his time and place; and it has clear affinities with some major strains of reactionary thought.

None of which is to pass moral judgment on author, or on books or to deny their pleasures; my father read the whole series to me and my brother when we were 6 or 8 years old, I’ve reread them all (and most of the other Tokieniana out there) various times since. But altho the racism of the books needs to be situated in a larger worldview and genre, it’s real and important and needs to be thought about, not dismissed with musty PC jokes as in 105.

(Also, what happened to the preview? i want my free ice cream with sprinkles, damnit!)

The orcs are acting out the innate nature that was bred into them in ages past by Evil.

Yes, exactly. By stipulation, the Orcs have no souls and are not redeemable. (You can see Tolkien twisting and turning in an unsuccessful attempt to deal with the theological implications of this.) they are so for reasons.

It is altogether unreasonable and against the evidence to infer from this that Tolkien believed this about any group of humans in the actual world. Various racists do believe this of various groups of actual humans, but is Tolkien to blame for this? (He was nearly struck dumb with indignation at the suggestion that Germans should be exterminated as inhuman after the war.)

Tolkien clearly presents power in the right hands (inherited power) as a good thing: Galadriel, Elrond, Gandalf, Aragon etc. Sauron’s power (self-wrought not inherited) challenges the established order of things hence its evil.

The issue is how power is exercised. The striking thing about G, E, G & A is that they never, or almost never, compel anyone to do anything. Examples could be multiplied without limit.

“Haradrim” is a plural, by the way.

Thank you for the information on BB&T’s “generosity”; a family member will probably be inspired to move his bank account.

Re: My parents, Ayn Rand and Jesus.

Anyone ever heard the Bloodhound Gang’s “A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When the Stripper is Crying“? The part about Mickey Mouse and Jesus? Ah, memories…

“Inherited power and authority are always the only legitimate power and authority in the books. There’s no ambiguity about this at all.” Even if this is true, being inherited isn’t what legitimates power: as roac and I have both suggested, what legitimates power is how it’s exercised
Sam, I’m with you up to a point there – look again at The Hobbit’s portrayal of Bard the Bowman and The Master of Esgaroth (a dry-run for Denethor and Aragorn). The former pretty obviously knows how to exercise power because of his lineage, the latter fails to do so effectively precisely becauae he has none to speak of and is driven solely by commercial gain.

117: “Haradrim” is a plural, by the way.

I know. Since Tolkien never refers to them in anything other than the plural, I usually just go ahead and pretend this is the singular form as well. (I’m sure it would be possible to construct a plausible singular form from all the info on his languages, but I’m not that fanatical.)

It is altogether unreasonable and against the evidence to infer from this that Tolkien believed this about any group of humans in the actual world.

Ehhh, I find it rather implausible that the constant appearance of tropes like this and like the evils of race-mixing* in his fiction can have no relationship whatsoever to the author’s inclinations, publicly confessed or otherwise. But at any rate, I’m just not that interested in splitting the last possible hair about whether Tolkien the man was an according-to-Hoyle bigot or not. The question was whether there are racist tropes in the books, and the obvious answer is yes.

(* We’re specifically told this is the cause of the deterioration of the blood of Numenor.)

120: as roac and I have both suggested, what legitimates power is how it’s exercised.

And it just so happens that the people with the wisdom to exercise it correctly generally stem from respectable royal lines, unless they’re angelic beings like Gandalf. Even the hobbits come from distinguished stock. So this isn’t much of an answer to Lem’s point.

I still think that there are good reasons for not doing so – that the theme is better read as a romantic concern for corrupted nature

Such an explanation is also perfectly plausible, it just wouldn’t be exclusive of racism.

Dr Slack at 131:

“And it just so happens that the people with the wisdom to exercise it correctly generally stem from respectable royal lines, unless they’re angelic beings like Gandalf.”

I addressed that point.

“Such an explanation is also perfectly plausible, it just wouldn’t be exclusive of racism.”

Lots of things aren’t exclusive of racism, right down to liking vanilla more than strawberry icecream. The point is that it’s a non-racist central theme which explains those tropes you’re reading as racist.

(There’s a stray “someone” in there…)

We’re specifically told [race-mixing] is the cause of the deterioration of the blood of Numenor.

We are also told that Gondor was almost destroyed in a civil was initiated by those who could not countenance the accession to the throne of an heir with non-Numenorean blood. The rejectionists being quite explicitly the bad guys.

Tolkien’s declaration (in a BBC interview, I don’t have a citation) that ‘the dwarfs are obviously the Jews’

I am not familiar with the interview in question in the published Letters, tolkien says that the Dwarves are reminiscent of the Jews in a situational sense; as being exiles and nowhere at home, and taking on the coloration of the other peoples among whom they are in contact. (My copy of Letters is elsewhere or I would find the reference.)

The passage that has always made me cringe in this connection is from <The Hobbit: There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money . . .”
On the other hand — as I am surprised nobody has pointed out yet — Tolkien was outraged by Nazi racialism, and he had great admiration for a fellow don who taught Jewish history.

sorry, forget to close off my italics there…

well…Daniel could post and apologize for his error as pointed out in 113e and others could comment on my contention in 113d that it is the monolithic academic culture that is sutured into place ideologically by money, and the BB&T funding of Atlas Shrugged is a tiny knife cut against that leviathan.

136: Yes, Sam would be the obvious exception.

And yes, obviously Tolkien is a more interesting writer than Rand. I take that as a given.

I’m sure it would be possible to construct a plausible singular form from all the info on his languages, but I’m not that fanatical.

Haradben.
other people are fanatical for you.

Doctor Slack:

[My claim that Tolkien ‘can be read as seeing the world as corrupted from an original Eden’] does not count as addressing the point. Whether or not … there’s monarchist ideology going on has nothing to do with whether they see the world as corrupted from an original Eden. It’s irrelevant.

No, it’s not. We’re trying to understand what politics LOTR dramatises. My tentative account is an alternative explanation for the phenomena which you explain by claiming that those politics are purely monarchist/racist, and there’s plenty of evidence for that alternative explanation. For another example: the Shire is an Ealing-comedy England with class and wealth divisions, but also shared values and the possibility of cooperation in adversity, and no obvious monarchy. The final sections of LOTR are about resistance to Saruman and Wormtongue’s industrial corruption of that rural ideal. (Do I need to note, again, that I don’t share these politics? I’m just trying to understand them).

No, the point is that concern with corrupted nature is usually a component of racism, and this particular trope is occurring in a work that manifests other obviously racist tropes, so there’s no particular reason to read it as a “non-racist central theme.”

Even if it were true, which I doubt, that ‘concern with corrupted nature is usually a component of racism’, that wouldn’t show that people who are concerned with corrupted nature are racists (compare ‘All dogs are mammals, therefore all mammals are dogs’). And our argument is about whether the ‘other obviously racist tropes’ are, in fact, racist.

One could ask if there is actually anything wrong morally [as opposed to practically] in yearning for a pre-industrial idyll?
Well I think someone needs to point out the impracticality thing to The Countryside Alliance & that enemy-of-the-people Charles von Battenberg . . .

No.

I blame Tom. He didn’t close his italics and here we are now.

Double-close them.

At the risk of losing what remain of my right-on credentials, may I point out that it looks fine in Internet Explorer?

Anyway, there is something about this whole discussion that reminds me of this…

No, don’t stop now. The exploited elf-maidens of Morthgar are depending on you…

“One could ask if there is actually anything wrong morally [as opposed to practically] in yearning for a pre-industrial idyll? ”

Has someone said there is?

“as opposed to the alienated intellectuals like Marx who were content to sit through the misery in the belief that it would all turn out alright in the end…”

Hmmm, I seem to recall Marx becoming rather famous for advocating revolution of some sort. I think he even wrote some sort of a manifesto about it or something. What was that called?

Well, on this at least we have comity:

“For another example: the Shire is an Ealing-comedy England with class and wealth divisions, but also shared values and the possibility of cooperation in adversity, and no obvious monarchy. The final sections of LOTR are about resistance to Saruman and Wormtongue’s industrial corruption of that rural ideal.”

Perfectly fine as a description. Honestly, I’ve just been pounding away at what seems to me like denialism about racial tropes, because it’s a habit that annoys me and I see no good reason for it. I’ve not been engaged with any larger project about visualizing the books’ politics; lots of good work has been done on that outside comments threads.

Sam C-

It has been interesting. And even tho I’m more on Doctor Slack’s side of the debate, I’ve particularly enjoyed your contributions.

As for Engels, he’s exactly the sort of pompous killjoy he thinks he’s mocking.

Dr. Slack: I don’t see anyone denying that Tolkien was in some sense a racist. What those on my side have been maintaining is that (1) he was no more racist than the run of Englishmen of his class and background; (2) his racism was instinctual and not rationalized. To put (2) another way, racism was not the organizing principle of his world-view; Catholicism was.

It is always frustrating to me that discussion of Tolkien ends up so often with its drive-wheels spinning in this particular mudhole, when there are so many more interesting things to talk about.

As for the assertion that longing for a pre-industrial Eden always and everywhere equals racism: I don’t get it. By which I mean that I don’t merely disagree, I don’t perceive the data from which the conclusion is supposed to follow. How do “mud people” enter into the argument about waterwheels v. steam engines? (Not that that is an argument I want to get into.)

(1) he was no more racist than the run of Englishmen of his class and background; (2) his racism was instinctual and not rationalized.

One of the frustrating things about these discussions is that racism as a pesonal moral failing completely crowds out racism as an analytic category, in more poeple’s minds.

The argument being made by Doctor Slack, myself, and others is that:

* A central feature of LotR is the division of people into a number of distinct races, each with inborn, immutable personal and moral qualities.

* With both races and individuals, visible physical characters are strongly linked to inward moral character.

* Attempts to exercise power or authority above one’s station are almost always disastrous if not outright evil, while those who have properly inherited their authority almost always use it well. (Contra Sam C. at 126, Theoden is not a counterexample.)

* Even among e.g. hobbits, individuals’ traits are generally presented as typical of their lineage or ancestry.

* These ideas have strong affinities with the main currents of what we call racism, or are even constitutive of it.

And, irrelevant with regard to the books themselves, but important in the larger discussion:

* Many of Tolkien’s “races” have rather obvious affinities with real-world “races” — Dwarfs-Jews, Haradrim-Arabs, etc., as Tolkien himself acknowledged.

Finally, it ought to go without saying but obviously doesn’t:

* Most 20th century literature — even heroic fantasy — was not organized around racial types in this way.

Obviously Tolkein wasn’t some “pure” racist who made orcs dark-skinned because he just disliked dark-skinned people. But unmotivated racism of this type *doesn’t actually exist* — racism is *always* rooted in some larger worldview within which it is rational.

There’s a weird faux-naive literalism that comes into these discussions. In a way, it would be nice if there were some other word for “seeing people’s personal and moral qualities as the product of their ancestry and marked by their physical appearance”, since “racism” has become such a red flag that people will go to absurd lengths to deny its presence in works like LotR that are obviously saturated with it.

One can still enjoy the books despite this (I think a lot of the defensive raction from folks like Roac is based on the idea that if they acknowledged the racial tropes in LotR they’d have to give up Tolkien. I like Lord Jim, too.) And of course, there is an important difference between the allegorical racism of LotR and the literal racism of The Bell Curve or whatever. But regardless of Tolkien’s stated personal beliefs, his books are saturated with racial thinking through and through.

The first point on your list, about the division of the people of the world into elves, dwarfs, whatever, is certainly something that can be said to have affinities with racist thought, especially if there are echoes of real-world racial stereotypes. It certainly seems to me like a weird way for any grown-up to view the world, and this is one reason I don’t consider any of this stuff to be ‘literature’ and haven’t read any since I was about 15. However, you could make the same argument about Star Trek, Star Wars and–as far as I know–most other ‘genre’ fiction.

Finally, you do realise that your assertion that, for example, Eliot’s politics (as expressed in his poems) do not diminish the value of his poems is at best a very, very controversial one?

I’m tired in general and tired of this discussion in general. But one more response to Lemuel Pitkin.

In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen depicts an aristocratic family living luxuriously on the proceeds of sugar estates, which certainly depended for their profitability on the brutal exploitation of African slaves. If Austen didn’t know this, it was through an effort of will, yet she never manifests the slightest disapproval. (The filmmaker who made the novel into a movie apparently felt the need to set this right.) In full recognition of this blind spot, I choose to regard Jane Austen as the greatest of all novelists in English.

You are not going to convince me that your understanding of the nature and extent of Tolkien’s monarchism/racism (I have to agree with Engels that you are conflating several phenomena under one label) is correct and mine is wrong. I have spent too much time and thought on the subject. But if you did, it wouldn’t change my assessment of his literary merits. Which, in my view are considerable, though certainly not on the same order as Austen’s. That is the view I would love to defend, but here I am, doing the racism number over and over again.

Most 20th century literature—even heroic fantasy—was not organized around racial types in this way.

Do you know, do you not, that Tolkien’s Elves and Dwarves were not his invention, but a given of his project? And I invite you to produce an author of Tolkien’s generation who wrote egalitariaan heroic fantasy. (I further require that the candidate have some perceptible literary merit,)
As far as I know Austen’s novels remain in the curriculum of some universities at least. Do you approve?

‘Strong affinities with racism’ applies to the elves and dwarfs thing, which imo is a fault but hardly justifies calling his work ‘saturated with racial thinking through and through’.

The other stuff you dragged in is neither here nor there. Yes, Tolkien’s view of the world is archaic, reactionary, superstitious, infused with a nostalgia for a vanished monarchic or aristocratic order which we all know to be deeply unjust. In fact, I’d say that that is blindingly obvious. So much so that criticising him for the lack of social mobility in Middle Earth or the gendered division of labour among hobbits seems somewhat beside the point, and to be as amusingly anachronistic as Monty Python’s anarchist peasant.

Arthur: I am your king!
Woman: Well I didn’t vote for you!
Arthur: You don’t vote for kings.
Woman: Well how’d you become king then?
[Angelic music plays…]
Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king!
Dennis: (interrupting) Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcicial aquatic ceremony!

Just to be clear: I don’t think that the presence of racism in a artist’s work disqualifies it from being a work of art. If it did, we would have to throw out a large part of what is usually considered to be literature. I do think that there are some political and moral views of which it is impossible to imagine legitimate artistic expression and racism, if taken to sufficient depths, can be one of them.

[redacted]

Hey, can I change the subject partially? I teach Huxley’s _Brave New World_, and there are elements in the book that clearly seem racist (the feelie of the helicopter rescue, the fact that the most fertile ovaries seem to come from Africa, etc) and sexist (all the important characters in the book are men, Lenina is clueless, etc) but it’s not clear to me whether this is because 1) Huxley himself is racist/sexist, 2) Huxley is simply projecting the views of his time into the future without thinking about it, or 3) he’s trying to subtly indicate that some of our prejudices are going to make it into the Brave New World, and that “perfection” is never perfect.

If I could get some evidence for one of these positions, or some other that I haven’t considered, without having to do a ton of reading (his other works, biographies, etc) that would be great for me, and also my students. (I’m willing to do some reading, if someone has a specific something I should read). Can anyone help me out here?

Oh, I missed this in 170: “It certainly would because whatever else this is it isn’t racism. (The essential concept, namely race, is absent.)” Actually, race — and particularly the concept of “scientific” race at its height in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — is precisely this kind of concept. It doesn’t have some absolute demarcating line from prejudices about working-class folk with too-low foreheads; it’s just that when you got into the business of factoring in specific markers of “race,” like skin colour or sloped eyes or hooked noses or presumed Satanic ancestry, things tended to get much more virulent.

Long time since I’ve read Wells or Huxley, sorry.

Hey, I wasn’t calling everything racism, you racist, you.

I didn’t say it did. However, where one appears, you can pretty reasonably expect to see the other.

Wells was a truly great and epic racist, even for his time and cultural background. On the other hand, he objected strenuously to the genocide in Tasmania, so that’s OK.

Inasmuch as I am interested in Tolkien’s theory of group identity and propensities, as expressed in his young adult fiction(1) I’m interested exactly in the blurry line between race, ethnicity, nation class and political affiliation – partly because these all seem like categories that get blurred together here in the real world.

Clearly, race, ethnicity and nation refer to/identify different groups of people (although, if we can possibly separate the idea of nations from that of nation states, I’m not quite sure what the difference is in imagined community between ethnos and nation). Also, it might (just might) be possible for an individual to disavow their nation (?), but it’s famously not possible for them to do the same with race.

Is there, though, any meaningful difference between the kinds of chauvinism that attach to the three categories? Is there any difference in the things people do or abhor on grounds of race, ethnicity and nation? Is there a reading of Tolkien (whose books are, in the end, immured in ideas of race, ethnos and nation) that can help us understand these categories? Tolkien really doesn’t present us with a discussion of these things: just a world constructed out of them. Can we deduce ideas of personal choice or the tyranny of the superego from a comparison of the Balrog and Gandalf, both of whom are presented as maya spirits with their agendas set for them by higher powers?(2)

I’m thinking that Tolkien doesn’t quite give us the tools to do so, which is why we end up trying to puzzle out his own cultural structures and assumptions, as reflected in his fiction. Perhaps there’s another sort of discussion to have, though: one about the cultural hooks he uses to present his various racethnotional groups and their behaviours: one that takes his categories seriously, for the purpose of discussion, and tries to work out what he is saying with them.

(1) I’m fairly confident in this anachronistic label, since I believe he wrote at least partly for Christopher and was reviewed pre-publication by Unwin’s 11 year old son.
(2) And they end up in some weird fiery passage through death and resurrection, fighting all the way down, in an aside from the main plot, so god knows what’s going on there. Probably religious, like we needed that in the discussion.

where one appears, you can pretty reasonably expect to see the other

Guilt by association, in other words.

seems to be trying to blur the boundaries between racism and different but related prejudices, I don’t much like.

But the boundaries *are* blurry, whether you like it or not.

But I didn’t intend to get into this discussion in the first place, so that will be it from me.

We’ll see about that!

“Guilt by association, in other words.”

Induction from one was very commonly used to justify and support the other during the period we’re talking about; hence the renewed vogue for phrenology in the early century, for instance. But of course, pointing out the obvious features of the period is dirty pool, since it’s plainly impossible that this cultural atmosphere had any influence on writers. My bad.