I have a piece up this week on the Atlantic about violence in the new Hobbit movie.
The post has generated a long comment thread. I posted several comments myself here and there…and I figured I’d highlight a couple of my longer ones here since I don’t know that anyone will read them otherwise. They’ll be a bit disjointed…but what the hey, it’s a blog.
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I think there’s a lot of truth to this. But Tolkien could also see racial antagonism (as between Elves and Dwarves, for example) as evil and hurtful. And the Hobbits (especially Sam) are kind of supposed to be working class too, in some ways.
As with the violence, I tend to see race as an issue that Tolkien struggles with, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.
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I don’t think sentience in and of itself predicates against the logic of genocide. In fact, I know it doesn’t. On the contrary, genocide really only makes sense in terms of sentience — you don’t use genocide to refer to the mass killing of the dodo, for example. The fact that the Goblin wants to find out what they’re doing first before killing them also seems beside the point. The issue isn’t whether they always fight each other in every circumstance; the issue is whether Tolkien presents goblins, orcs, etc., as people who can be good or evil or in between, and who it is a sin to kill if you don’t have to, or whether he presents them as vermin who should, ideally, be exterminated. I think he tends very much to present them as the second.
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No…it’s quite different. Twain was a committed anti-racist; Huck Finn is explicitly committed to racial equality in a way that was very courageous for its time…and for our time, for that matter.
Tolkien’s stance towards race is a lot more ambiguous. And…for those who say it was just of its time, it’s worth noting that Huck Finn was written a fair bit before LOTR. There were people at that time (Langston Hughes, for instance) who were anti-racist. Tolkien’s stance certainly could have been a lot worse — but comparing him to Mark Twain definitely shows up his limitations in this area.
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I think you can see the enjoyment of violence in, for example, Beorn’s attitude towards killing goblins, and the book’s satisfaction in the dead goblin and warg he displays in front of his door. Or in Legolas and Gimli’s contest to see who can kill more orcs. Or even perhaps in the Ent’s spectacular destruction of Isengard.
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Saying evil is real, and embodying that evil in a particular race or group of people — that’s the logic of genocidal violence. The claim that you need to kill every one of the enemies because they are genocidal — that’s how genocide is justified too. To say that it’s a fantasy sort of misses the point as well — genocidal fantasies are also fantasies. That other tribe, over there, isn’t *really* unhuman — it’s a story you tell. But stories can have real results. Fantasies can kill.
Like I said, this is a tension in Tokien’s work, not an absolute. He very eloquently argues for peace and mercy in many way. But he also finds genocide appealing. That’s the case for most of us (it is for me — I like lots of bloody body count films.) I think Tokien actually makes us think about that, sometimes quite deliberately. How do you fight Sauron without being Sauron? How do you pick up that ring without becoming the ring’s servant? Those are pretty important questions, not less so because Tokien sometimes (not always, but sometimes) seems swayed by Sauron’s logic of murder and force.
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Kirill Yuryevitch Yeskov told the story of Middle Earth from the point of view of the orcs. Only available in Russian alas. http://readin.com/blog/?id=2491
Wait what am I talking about — it is translated into English at http://fan.lib.ru/e/eskov/last_ringbearer_engl.shtml
It’s the whole revolutionary justification of the lovable underdog slaughtering the soulless robot-animals that govern him. Even the rape-revenge genre that you love borrows from this.
The way to deal with violence is to to make it frightening and depressing. That can be enjoyable as well, and I don’t think most people can live without some form of violence.
I don’t think it’s “enjoyable as well.” I think it’s enjoyable, often predominantly.
And yes, I absolutely love lots of violent cultural product, from Johnny Ryan to rape revenge to horror films. I don’t think the ubiquity of those products, or my investment in them, means that they don’t matter, though. Rather, the fact that there are so many films that are in love with genocide is maybe a way to see or think about the extent to which genocide is more of an option for most people than we necessarily like to credit. Everybody wants that ring, even hobbits.
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gen·o·cide
the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.
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From dictionary.com
Does Tolkien argue the Orcs should be exterminated, despite their noxiousnes? No.
Thus, this “The Genocide Against the Orcs” heading is of a piece with “Beaty stole all his ideas from me” or “James Bond is a rapist.” Inflammatory rhetoric aimed at utterly guiltless folks, whether employing guilt-by-association, or as a “joke” (let’s see if this “Bart Beaty is a plagiarist” bit of humor gets taken seriously and spread online by the same dumbasses who uncritically swallow and spread links to “The misogyny of ‘V for Vendetta'” and such), or as “don’t try and distract me with the facts, I’m a feminist”-type thinking.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Saying evil is real, and embodying that evil in a particular race or group of people — that’s the logic of genocidal violence.
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Because some people then proceed to commit genocide, does that make it a law, by which Tolkien is guilty?
Consider all the centuries that Jews have been despised and persecuted; despite the occasional slaughters, only one regime in all the world seriously tried to delete them from existence.
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…stories can have real results. Fantasies can kill.
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Therefore, no fiction whatsoever should depict anything unpleasant. Even hateful acts shown as vile rather than cool or morally admirable are no protection from condemnation by the More-Enlightened-Than-Thou gang, always busy looking for reasons to show how morally vile everybody else is.
Couldn’t one also say, “News stories can have real results. Reporting can kill”? Consider all the anti-Muslim hostility generated by the 9/11 attacks, how the Nisei suffered because of that pesky Pearl Harbor news coverage. And two black men saw “Mississippi Burning” when it came out; enraged by the vicious racism depicted therein, they afterward went out and killed an innocent white man.
Re “sympathy for the Orcs,” might I recommend Stan Nicholls’ “Orcs” books: http://www.amazon.com/Orcs-Stan-Nicholls/dp/0316033707 . I’d bought and enjoyed the first two books, back in my flush-with-cash days. Fun stuff, avoiding stepping on the Tolkien estate’s toes…
He does actually suggest the orcs and goblins should be exterminated. At the end of the books he talks about people hunting them down out of existence, and that being a good thing. It’s not especially subtle or anything.
Orcs are described as black-skinned. I wonder if Tolkien was influenced by his years in South Africa?
…And Gollum was black-skinned too!
Race need not enter into the equation, however; one would need to study the rest of Tolkien’s writings to reach such a conclusion. After all, due to humanity’s diurnal nature, we are prone to fear the dark. Black is considered a color of evil throughout many world cultures; even some thoroughly dark-hued African tribes look at “black” in a negative fashion, even if the overall consensus of the continent is positive.
Check out the “Cultural Meanings of Color and Color Symbolism” at http://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/cultural-color.html ; overall, black has a bad rep.
“SYMBOLISM IN AFRICAN CULTURE” ( http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=007334 ) tells how…
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The black colour is a symbolic colour for funerals in almost all parts of Africa. It is the official mourning cloth at funerals especially the one that involves a person who died at unripe age-not the death of an old member. The white colour is a symbol of purity and joy, which usually worn at funerals especially the type that involves a dead old member.
[And, in a breakdown of colors per country]
WHITE
Ethiopia: Illness, Purity1 Nigeria: Good Luck, Peace1
South Africa (Zulu): Goodness1
Zambia: Goodness, Cleanliness, Good Luck
BLACK
Ethiopia: Impure, Unpleasant
Nigeria: Ominous
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Google’ing “was tolkien racist,” found this subject intlligently explored in: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Racism_in_Tolkien%27s_Works .
Which also notes, re the “genocide” question:
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Orcs however, are not men. Unlike the wicked men who serve the Enemy, who might have been enslaved or beguiled, orcs are portrayed as irredeemably evil, or at least having a redemption outside the scope of the narrative. The origin of orcs is not clear, but they may be products of Morgoth’s sorcery, or the descendants of tortured and ruined elves. Regardless of their origins they are not presented as a natural race, indeed there is no mention of orc women, children, villages, or culture. Perhaps inspired by his Roman Catholicism, Tolkien’s orcs may have more in common with demonic armies than foreign ones.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
[Tolkien] does actually suggest the orcs and goblins should be exterminated. At the end of the books he talks about people hunting them down out of existence, and that being a good thing. It’s not especially subtle or anything.
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I’d have to read the section for myself; I’m used to (following the color-symbolism vein) your seeing a light grey and outragedly condemning it as deepest black. Like “The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf’,” therefore, I’m inclined to be dismissive even if you might be right.
Which Tolkien book is that in, please? What section of it?
It’s at the end of LOTR; the orcs are disappearing from the earth, everyone’s happy.
It’s a moral good to kill orcs and goblins (ask Beorn.) If it’s a moral good to kill them, it’s a moral better to kill more of them. That’s the logic of genocide. They have no moral standing; they’re there to be killed.
It’s a common trope in fantasy, from Alien to Buffy, really. But the commonness doesn’t make it insignificant (nor does it make Tolkien evil or anything. But it does speak to the tension around violence in his work.)
Oh…and Tokien’s pretty obsessed with pure bloodlines and suchlike. Doubt it’s South Africa that’s the culprit; probably standard British racial/class ideological mixing. Again, I think it’s a tension in the work; he also obviously thinks that racial animosity (between dwarves and elves, for example) is bad in some instances.
The problem becomes all the more troubling when Tolkien writes dialogue for the Orcs and Goblins. They come off as nasty, sneering, evil…people. They have personality. They’re not just mindless video-game monsters to be chopped down by Duke Nuke’em.
So, yeah, I say genocide.
If a race of beings is nothing but pure evil who want nothing more than to destroy you and cause nothing but harm and destruction to everything around it, then genocide of that race is a good thing.
My suggestion is to not apply racial theories from Middle Earth to the real world. Two major differences: magic-based races and clearly defined pure evil.
Ah, right on time.
I wonder, Charles — do you think orcs exist? Are they really pure evil? Or, you know, did Tokien set them up that way in order to make it justifiable to slaughter them?
While you’re contemplating that, you might also think about how slaughter of various peoples is justified in the real world. I would suggest that it is justified by fantasies in which the people in question are said to be pure evil.
The orcs don’t exist, so advocating their genocide is not (to say the least) morally equivalent to actually committing genocide. But fantasies have something to do with how people approach reality, and Tokien’s fantasies mirror in their structure the ways in which people with genocide on their mind justify their actions.
“My suggestion is to not apply racial theories from Middle Earth to the real world. Two major differences: magic-based races and clearly defined pure evil.”
Sure, books don’t precisely map onto reality. But if it didn’t have anything to do with reality, no one would read it, or think about it, or care about it. Do you want to think about themes of bravery in the book? Do you want to think about what it has to say about evil? Do you want to analyze characters? Is what Frodo does relevant? He’s not a human, right? So how can we apply what he says to anything people do?
The answer is that, while what happens in the book isn’t real, the person who wrote it is real, and the people who read it are real. It speaks to us. And one of the things it speaks about is violence…and evil. And one of the things it says, very strongly, about evil, is that evil is not something over there, that cannot affect you. It calls to everyone — not least in their fantasies.
I’ve mentioned this before, but…it always throws me when people who are obviously extremely committed to thinking about art insist that the best way to honor art is to assume that it has nothing to do with people’s lives. It’s like there’s this panicked fear that if we admit that art affects us, then…censorship! So in order to forestall the philistines, the supposed aesthetes out-philistine the philistines, insisting that art is utterly irrelevant to everyone in every way that matters. It’s a bizarre dynamic. It crops up incessantly, maybe especially among comics folks who seem doomed to be forever haunted by the shade o Wertham. Still, no matter how often I see it, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.
I’ve always heard they were supposed to be Nazis, not a race. Tolkien denied that.
What’s interesting about it to me, I suppose, is as I stated above: it gives you an allowable use of genocide. Under absolute conditions (a. pure evil exists and b. it is clearly defined), it could be a moral action. People have to make up their mind whether those absolute conditions have ever obtained in reality. I say they haven’t, nor will they ever. Sure, I agree with you that slaughter has been “justified by fantasies in which the people in question are said to be pure evil.” But I’m not a Wayne LaPierre kind of guy believing guns don’t kill people, fantasies do. If you want to read a really existing race into the orcs, then you will find some meaningful justification of genocide there. But that’s you and whatever crazy genocidal maniac who’s read Tolkien doing that. Otherwise, Tolkien demonstrated that wiping out a group of people isn’t absolutely bad. The onus of proving when you should ever do that is on the people trying to justify genocide in the real world. (By the way, how often is genocide really the consequence of a belief in the pure evil of the other being destroyed? When it appears, it’s mostly a marketing tactic. It is used, but genocide is rarely ever simply reducible to the good/evil fantasy.)
Just to add to that: the value of Tolkien’s work isn’t morality. I suppose people can talk about the friendship between the hobbits or whatever, which is fine. But as far as the metaphysics of good battling evil, that’s a lot of nonsense that I just wouldn’t apply to reality, nor should anyone else (including you). I should think it’s the fantastic world he created that’s his ultimate contribution to literature. It’s really a magnificent feat of creativity. But a lot of critics aren’t comfortable with celebrating such things. It has to be about morality. Bullshit, I say. That kind of thinking ultimately gives us Soviet realism. Blah. Tolkien is pretty much useless as a moral guide (again, in terms of the big picture).
I think the idea that creativity exists somewhere off to the side of how people live their lives (which is what you say when you say it has nothing to do with morality) is, again, the desperate philistinism of the aesthete.
You’re sort of scuttling around though. You want Tolkien to be a limit case, which means you do think he has something to do with morality. It just all has to be couched from somewhere where you keep assuring us that you don’t really believe it — which seems both unnecessary and a little silly, don’t you think?
I think Tokien’s got a pretty profound moral vision, which goes way beyond absolute evil/absolute good, and definitely encompasses questions about morality, race, genocide, and evil. I don’t think he has definitive answers about those things, but I absolutely think that he’s got smart things to say about them. He’s not just the greatest dungeon master ever; he’s a thoughtful and meaningful artist.
As for whether people believe what they say when they call the victims of genocide evil — of course they do. Hitler really thought the Jews were evil; many in the US really thought that the Japanese were evil subhumans. People in the South definitely thought that blacks were subhuman during slavery. The idea that you can easily compartmentalize propaganda and what people deep-down feel is really confused. Propaganda comes out of what people really feel and shapes what people really feel. Similarly, persecuting someone tends to make you hate them, just as hating them tends to make you persecute them. Orwell’s not really as thoughtful in general as Tolkien, but even he understood that much.
Quick question– are all the orcs in LOTR soldiers? I’m not seeing anyone discussing the issue of combatants and non-combatabts. War is hard to section off from civilians, but it is an ethical boundaty that matters.
It definitely is. Orcs are pretty much created for war, as far as I can tell; there don’t seem to be any orc children, let alone orc females.
I don’t think that necessarily goes against what I’m talking about, though. One of the ways you justify genocide is basically by collapsing the categories of combatant and noncombatant — or by letting the first completely overwhelm the second. The fact that there’s no orc identity outside combat again seems to mirror the way that people conceive of their enemies and make extreme violence justifiable.
As an example — I would guess that Truman was not thinking a whole lot about Japanese women and children and civilians when he gave the ok for the bomb. He was thinking about Japanese combatants.
One thing other fantasy writers (some of them fans of Tolkien) have criticized him for is that they say reading his work, you feel you cant really trust him when he tells you the orcs are pure evil, as if he never displayed the sort of perception of these things that you could trust.
Same with how you get modern fantasy writers doing a critique of an old fairy tale in the form of a story “how it really happened before the whitewashing”.
Not that it makes me an expert or anything — but I’ve been thinking about these things in part because over the last couple of years I’ve edited a bunch of books on various genocides(including one on the Kurds, one on Kosovo, one on the Satlinist purges, one on Bangladesh…and just working on ones on Sri Lanka and the anti-communist killings in Indonesia.) FWIW.
Oh, Noah, it’s just so silly to talk about the genocide of orcs. That’s ultimately what treating them as some serious statement about reality gets you. If concern for orc welfare is what a true aestheticism requires, I’ll stay a philistine. What about the noncombatants? Are there orc children? Are there women? Didn’t they come out fully formed? I can’t remember. Anyway, yeah, it’s a limit case that doesn’t exist, except in the formal heaven. It has no bearing on reality. If you’re going to focus on morality, then Tolkien’s work isn’t the best fiction to turn to. I would agree that Tolkien’s every bit as thoughtful as Orwell, though, just not in terms of morality.
You certainly see collapsing of combatant/noncombatant categories in imperial vs. guerrilla warfare.
I don’t know how you can not see the ring as a meaningful statement on morality, Charles. The violence it provokes from both humans and orcs is the same violence. And the resolution is messy.
Or, hobbits and orcs, rather.
The problem, Charles, is that fantasies of genocide are always limit cases. They’re always extreme and ridiculous; they are never anchored in reality.
You really think the Orcs are more preposterous than Nazi fantasies about Jews? Than racist caricatures of blacks? I think you’re failing to see how important limit cases are, or how quickly people are willing to let their fantasies go there…and then let those fantasies affect how they treat people.
I think Tolkien makes a lot of moving statements about the necessity and difficulty of interracial and intercultural cooperation as well. I think though (as you demonstrate) that if you don’t take the orcs seriously as a problem, it’s difficult to take the rest of his moral vision seriously. And since the moral vision is really the heart of his work, you end up just liking him because he made up languages or some such, which seems really like an impoverished reading, to me at least.
I remember seeing Joan Rivers saying dropping the bomb on japan was a good thing “saved a lot of lives”. I really dont know my war history very well, couldnt tell you about the circumstances/stakes, but it seemed like a shitty thing to say.
Opinions?
Robert, the post facto argument for dropping the bomb has always been that it ended the war more quickly, and therefore there wasn’t an invasion of the Japanese home islands, which would have been bloodier.
I think that’s…a stretch. Counterfactual history is difficult, but I don’t really buy the idea that the allies had run through all possible options. One of the sticking points, if my understanding was correct, was letting the emperor continue to be the emperor…and they eventually did that anyway after the bombs. (Or that’s my understanding; I could have garbled it.)
Also…I really don’t think Truman was balancing death tolls or anything. He had the bomb; we were at war, he dropped it. We’d already made it clear that we were willing to kill basically as many civilians as it took. I think making it out to have been some thoughtful moral calculus is deeply deceptive.
I’ll restate my position: There’s nothing preposterous about Tolkien’s fantasy of orcs, because he knew they didn’t exist and denied that they were an allegory for any particular group in reality. That’s quite different from some racists in reality believing ludicrous things about another group of people. In the first case, Tolkien dictates what makes sense in his madeup world. In the latter, the racists do not, because the world isn’t actually created by them. So, there’s nothing preposterous about orcs really being pure evil in Middle Earth, but it’s highly preposterous that Jews are pure evil in ours.
“I think Tolkien makes a lot of moving statements about the necessity and difficulty of interracial and intercultural cooperation as well.”
This is still possible to appreciate while still seeing orcs as a morally problematic representation of evil in the real world.
And what about the realworld belief in genocide against demons and the other minions of Satan? That’s a far more troubling fantasy than Middle Earth, since people really do believe in it.
correction: “This is still possible to appreciate *without* seeing orcs as a morally problematic representation of evil in the real world.”
So you’d agree Joan Rivers was wrong to say it was a good thing with such confidence?
Me? Yeah. Any glowing, celebratory statement about the destruction of 100s of 1000s of people is inherently problematic. Killing civilians who don’t all support the horrible acts of their leadership is unavoidable, but to be happy about having to do that is deeply troubling to me. I don’t have the requisite knowledge to evaluate the death bean counting measures involved, though. I’m skeptical that the bomb saved lives in the end analysis, though. But I do think the strategy was discussed, but probably Truman was more concerned with saving American lives. In that case, the bomb probably did save lives.
When I was reading about japanese cinema, there was some references to a lot of painters and when I looked up a lot of them, it often said large chunks of their work was destroyed by that bomb. It is difficult to comprehend the horror of a bombing like that, but just something like that about old art helps it hit home for me, even if it seems unimportant compared to the deaths.
Again, Charles, you can only make your position coherent if Tokien’s world and our world can be partitioned off from each other neatly and completely. The orcs aren’t an allegory…but there are other ways than allegory for fictions to be meaningful. They might, for example, duplicate patterns of thought or modes of thinking that exist in the outside world. In fact, you’d think they probably would, since Tolkien and his readers both live in that outside world.
That’s not true, at all. We’re just disagreeing on which parts one should try to apply to the real world. True, pure evil isn’t something that I would import, nor do I believe Tolkien intended anyone to import it. As I said, you can still appreciate and apply the morality of the relation between elves and dwarves without believing that the orcs are Tolkien’s view of the most evil beings in the real world instead of a tool of a pure, abstract, fantastic evil. That you have to either accept your view or be committed to rejecting every aspect of the books is a sophistry convincing only you, my friend.
Also, I believe fictional fears are rooted in real fears. It’s actually that conviction that leads me to an appreciation of fictional worlds that depict moral worlds that I don’t actually agree with. If someone can make you feel something of a fear about something that you don’t think it’s right to fear, that adds something of significance to your life. That’s true even if the creator isn’t actively or intentionally condemning that fear the way you would in your moral thinking. Too often you have problem with art that doesn’t explicitly condemn whatever you believe needs condemning. I think it’s enough to have the audience inhabit that mental constellation after which they can make up their own mind on how applicable it is to the world in which they really live.
Regardless, pure evil is so fanciful to me that a story needs to have something else for me to care much about it. I suppose that’s connected to the way I would read real world ideological positions: any assertion of pure evil tells me that it’s bullshit, so can be readily dismissed. You’re either the kind of person that takes it seriously, lending it credibility in life, or you dismiss it in reality and fiction.
Well, we’re just repeating ourselves. I guess I’ll just say that the appeals to Tolkien’s intent seem really weak. No author is ever the last word on their own work, but Tolkien in particular has always seemed to me to be particularly cagey about interpretations of his work. In the thread on my atlantic article, though, people were saying that he was uncomfortable with the irredeemability of the orcs, and toyed with the idea of trying to mitigate it. He saw it as a potential problem, anyway, even if you can’t bring yourself to, for whatever reason.
Hah! I was just about to ask if you believed in evil.
I think the disconnect here is that you’re failing to appreciate how very strong the idea of pure evil is as a motivator. It’s extremely strong — and it anchors calls to genocide. So, whether or not you believe in pure evil, the fact is that lots and lots of people believe in it, and act as if they believe in it. So a book about pure evil has a lot to tell us about how people behave and why.
Well, I’m not denying that people have simplistic moral views, only that it’s particularly morally troubling if Tolkien invented one for a fictional world. Culpability belongs to those who believe pure evil realistic. I’m not surprised when people have trouble telling fantasy from reality.
As for author intentionality: imagine a social construct that we call ‘Tolkien’ that’s constructed from a constellation of written words and spoken audio signals. We then interpret that determination as if it had a self, expressing interest in what all the words in the constellation are meaning. ‘Intention’ is, in this case, but an interpretation based on these authorless words grouped together by accident like so many cosmic monkeys banging away on typewriters. (Or we can just simply admit there’s an author in accordance with Occam’s razor.)
There’s an author; I just don’t think that he’s always the best or final arbiter of his work.
And…I’m well and truly confused now about your moral take on the book. You’re saying that Tolkien’s moral view is simplistic, but that he shouldn’t be considered culpable for that because it’s not really his view since he was writing fiction? Because writers of fiction don’t actually have any investment in their themes? Because Tolkien’s LOTR isn’t meant to have any connection to anything, it’s just a cute fantasy story, and so his simplistic morality can’t be blamed for…what, anyway?
The whole issue of culpability is maybe the problem? I’m not blaming Tolkien for causing harm or whatever. I’m interested in how he deals with these of evil and violence, which I think are important because evil and violence are very important in our world. That’s a big part of why he’s a great writer — because, for example, it’s possible to critique and question his view of the orcs *from within the context of his story.*
It’s interesting that you’re willing to see fictional fears as related to real fears, but fictional hate is somehow not related to real hate. I don’t really follow the logic there.
I think there’s a way to appreciate a somewhat evil artist (like Kipling, whom the orc-perspective Russian novelist quotes). Maybe Wyndham Lewis has some heartbreaking flourishes (I’ve never read him, I don’t know), but he’s a fascist. So’s Ezra Pound. There are questions about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, but it’s hardly the case that someone’s ethics don’t affect their art. If Eazy-E or Burzum nuanced their worldviews, it would improve their music.
I’ve got the first 6 Burzum albums but I was never able to find anything racist in them, the 6th one has some story notes about beautiful blonde blue eyed people but I missed any proper racism. I need to get the post-jail stuff. Apparently he changed the title of “Belus” from “The White God” because he didnt want people to think it was a race rant album.
Tell me about Eazy E.
I know emotion is a hot topic in cognitive film studies, but I haven’t read enough of it to comment appropriately. But my view is that there’s a real connection between fictional affect and its real world counterpart, and that includes hatred. But if there’s real hatred in Middle Earth, it’s the orcs that are the ones primarily doing the hating. I don’t find pure evil real enough to ever cross over and apply to the real world. It is a fault with any book that uses it. To answer your confusion: Tolkien is culpable for what he writes, but not for some critic who decides to take him to task for an allegorical connection he didn’t make. I suspect that, based on the limited stuff I’ve read and heard, Tolkien had a much more nuanced worldview than the way he viewed orcs. He appeared to have been happy to leave some fantastic creations to fantasy. Admittedly, he’s never going to be a favorite of mine because of the purely fantastic aspects. I’m currently going through the whole shebang, so I might change my mind, but I think his this simplistic morality is a narrative or diegetic weakness, but not a moral one. As he sets it up, the orcs should be killed without a moral qualm. If he had wished to make that a life lesson for us, then he’d be morally culpable. However, that’s your wish, not his. I mean, from what I remember he suffered terrible loss during WW1, knew about realworld trauma, and probably just enjoyed a world that allowed something of a breather from all that. To hold him morally accountable for not treating the orcs as if they were some real colonized people is ridiculous. You could’ve, however, said that it makes his book too simplistic. I’d be okay with that. Calling it immoral (even by implication) is the problem.
This is a bizarre discussion. I never said he was immoral, or that he should be held morally accountable — whatever that means in this context. He’s an artist; I’m interested in what his work has to say. One of the things it talks about is violence. In some cases, it talks about that in terms of mercy and peace. In others, he follows the logic of genocide, by imagining evil embodied in intelligent creatures, and making it a moral good to kill them.
His hate has a shape that hate takes in the real world. I think that’s worth thinking about. You seem not to, for reasons which seem to vacillate, but which I can’t really characterize because it seems mostly incoherent.
I guess this is it:
“As he sets it up, the orcs should be killed without a moral qualm. If he had wished to make that a life lesson for us, then he’d be morally culpable.”
It’s just all intentionality; he never says “treat people like orcs,” so he can’t possibly have meant anything by the way he thought about the orcs. The shape of his hatred, or the structure of the way he thinks about race, can’t matter because — fantasy! he was in WWII! handwaving!
I mean, if you think that LOTR is a breather from trauma rather than a representation of it, I guess I don’t know what to tell you. That seems so clearly wrong to me that I guess it makes sense that our readings don’t have many points of connection.
Yeah, it’s bizarre. If you’re not saying Tolkien was defending genocide with any realworld import, then I can’t see your making a coherent point here. Unless, you’re saying using genocidal logic isn’t immoral, which is equally baffling for how clearly wrong that would be. Surely, it’s disingenuous for you to claim that you’re not calling Tolkien immoral when it regards his treatment of the orcs. What are you saying, otherwise: that’s it’s just a story? Well, that’s what you trying to take me to task for. Was it just empty rhetoric? Possibly, but I’m giving you credit that you meant something more, so you’re clearly making a moral claim about Tolkien’s worldview here based on the genocide of orcs.
what you *were* trying to …
Using the logic of genocide in a story isn’t the same morally as using the logic of genocide to actually kill people. That doesn’t mean the two have no relationship with each other. But Tolkien’s morality doesn’t end with the logic of genocide; as I said, it can be critiqued from within the morality of his world fairly easily.
I think it does have moral consequences, but Tolkien’s moral world is too complex to just condemn him, for lots of reasons. I was talking in the piece about the tensions in that world. But yes, taking it seriously means, not that you have to condemn tolkien for immorality, but that you have to be willing to discuss the ways in which his moral world is flawed, or points in problematic directions.
Again, you actually agree with me as far as I can tell on the description, right? Tolkien really is advocating genocide against the orcs; it’s a moral good to kill them, so killing all of them would be an even greater moral good. You just feel that that can have no actual moral connotations, basically because you think that Tolkien’s world as a whole is ethically empty.
Just to go back…even in your own reading, you don’t think that a former traumatized soldier seeing the enemy as utterly evil — that can’t possibly connect up to anything about the way soldiers conceptualize each other on the battlefield? And that has no moral implications to impart, no insights into the way that violence functions?
Last question first: sure, but that’s the soldier’s responsibility, not some author of a children’s tale. I don’t have a moral problem with simple tales of good versus evil (narrative is another matter). My moral problem is with religion and other simple minded views of the world that are taken seriously. Watching Star Wars and condemning it for its lack of nuanced portrayals of Storm Troopers is just plain goofy. It’s not watching Star Wars or reading about killing orcs that’s led soldiers to see the other side as monsters. Training and their upbringing has a lot more of a role to play there. So, yes, the view is similar, the reality is not. In one case, the other really is pure evil, because those are the diegetic rules; in the other, the reductive view is what’s evil (except, of course, in realworld cases where the other is evil, e.g., Nazis and the like).
And from what I can tell, wiping out all the orcs is a good thing in the diegesis, so I agree with you. I also agree that this isn’t the only moral relation in the series, so I’m only arguing about the morality of Tolkien’s view on orcs. It’s moral, because they are purely evil, and not passively so. I know this for sure, because that’s the way he set it up. This isn’t particularly dramatic for me, but it’s certainly not a moral problem. It’s not any more sophisticated or complex than Lucas’ treatment of the Empire (maybe less so, if one considers Darth Vader). Works when you’re a kid (maybe not on little Domingos, but it did on me), but not so much as an adult.
Furthermore, it’s highly dubious that people who view their antagonists in war, or foreigners, or differently colored neighbor down the way as evil have ever done so because of some analogical mapping from fictional monsters. Think about it: a soldier sees all Japanese as evil because he, what, associates them with vampires or some such that he knows don’t exist? No, but because they are trying to kill him, or he believes they are, and there’s a lot of social support for such fear, all targeted at the Japanese directly, not allegorical tales involving monsters. Hatred in life just doesn’t come into being from analogical mapping to fictional examples. Rather, the fictional fear works because it evokes the real world fear we feel about the unknown or the other or truly frightening historical acts.
(And I’ll re-emphasize that we’re talking about fantasies here with creatures that have no clear realworld corresponding being, not some movie like My Son John that is directed propaganda against the particular realworld group of American communists. That’s a different argument.)
I guess if you were making a joke like Tarantino did with King Kong, there wouldn’t be an issue. But if you really think King Kong is an immoral film, because it advocates the slaughter of black people brought over here in chains who covet our white women, the joke’s no longer on the movie.
(And, yes, I’m aware that King Kong’s death is somewhat tragic, but it is depicted as something that has to happen at the end. Anyway, you get my point, I trust.)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
It’s at the end of LOTR; the orcs are disappearing from the earth, everyone’s happy.
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“Disappearing from the earth”? That sure is a nebulous phrase, making it seem like a natural process, their numbers dwindling away because of disease, old age (no orc women and children to “replenish the ranks”!), etc. If they were unnatural creatures, created by magic, with the destruction of their creators new orcs could no longer be produced, either. (They’d probably tend to kill each other off if not provided with others to victimize.)
It certainly would make liberal-minded folks happy if Republicans and frothing religious fundamentalists would “disappear from the earth”; that doesn’t mean the liberal-minded are in favor of exterminating them…
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It’s a moral good to kill orcs and goblins (ask Beorn.) If it’s a moral good to kill them, it’s a moral better to kill more of them. That’s the logic of genocide. They have no moral standing; they’re there to be killed.
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Were those orcs being killed for no reason at all, or for some transparent fiction of a “reason” (they’re not like us, so they must be evil) — the actual “logic of genocide” — or so that the “good guys” could take their land to settle there?
No, the “moral good to kill orcs and goblins” was because they had, in effect, declared war upon the rest, or were ravening predators. It was “good” because it was in self-defense.
If after the defeat of Sauron and Saruman some orc Gandhi had convinced the orcs to forswear violence, and the humans/dwarfs had still kept on slaughtering them, that then would be genocide.
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Oh…and Tokien’s pretty obsessed with pure bloodlines and suchlike.
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Ah, the old “obsessed” bit; whereby some bit of a creator’s work is thereby pathologized, exaggerated out of all proportion into a sick-and-twisted obsession.
Is it not a common theme in archaic folklore and tales — of which Tolkien was an expert, and a theme he followed — to make much of the ancestral lines of important characters? Why, in the Old Testament we get all those endless lists of “begats.”So, some could then say, “The Bible is pretty obsessed with pure bloodlines and suchlike!”
And, as noted in a site whose link was posted earlier ( http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Racism_in_Tolkien%27s_Works ):
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…according to his own claims, Tolkien denounced Hitler, Nazi beliefs, “race-doctrine” and apartheid and praised the Jews, calling them a “gifted people”…
The Númenóreans of Gondor fell to infighting because of a supposed need for racial purity, especially concerning the ancestry of their king (the Kin-strife), and grew weaker as a result. In this affair, the villain was the pure-blooded Númenórean Castamir while the hero was the half-Númenórean Eldacar…
-Kings, princes, heirs and noblemen as protagonists is not necessarily an advocation of blood nobility, since it is a theme and concept common in myths and fairy-tales. Also, Samwise Gamgee represents the common man, and sees insights that more “noble” characters apparently do not, such as the true situation of the human enemies. Note that in a letter (#131), Tolkien states that Sam is the chief hero of the whole book.
-There are no truly “perfect” peoples in Tolkien’s writings. Given that Tolkien loved trees and nature in general, having his Numenoreans wantonly cut down trees for ships is decidedly negative. The Noldor rebelled against the Valar and killed their fellow Elves.
[From a personal letter of Tolkien’s] “[I] should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”
[From a valedictory address to the University of Oxford in 1959] “I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones..”
[From a letter to Christopher Tolkien, who was stationed in South Africa during World War II] As for what you say or hint of ‘local’ conditions: I knew of them. I don’t think they have much changed (even for the worse). I used to hear them discussed by my mother; and have ever since taken a special interest in that part of the world. The treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain, & not only in South Africa. Unfort[unately], not many retain that generous sentiment for long.”
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Re racism and genocide:
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While the Easterling and the Haradrim are dark-skinned people in the service of the Enemy, the Woses are primitive, small, and alien compared to other peoples (their chief Ghan-buri-Ghan only wears a grass skirt) yet they are valuable allies (in The Return of the King). While Tolkien does not mention their skin colour, they were considered monsters by the Rohirrim who hunted them as animals, which the narrative explicitly condemns. However in the First Age they were counted as Edain, or noble Men, and were allies of the Elves.
Tolkien portrays racism within the “heroic” races as unabashedly negative. Elves and Dwarves distrust each other. Some Elves hunted the Petty-dwarves as animals, as did the Rohirrim to the Woses. The friendship between Legolas and Gimli is portrayed as unusual but commendable, and several scenes illustrate them learning to understand and respect each other’s cultural differences…
It is notable that there is apparently racism within the ranks of Orcs as the Uruk-hai held themselves as superior to the common Orcs, whom they called snaga (slave).
The point-of-view characters of the book — the hobbits — are themselves of a race that is frequently described as being overlooked, under-estimated, and lightly regarded by the other races of Middle-earth, yet they often demonstrate far greater courage and nobility than the races who denigrate them.
[Personal Tolkien writing] “There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don’t know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.”
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(Emphases added)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…do you think orcs exist? Are they really pure evil? Or, you know, did Tokien set them up that way in order to make it justifiable to slaughter them?
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As stated in my preceding comment, the orcs weren’t “justifiably” killed because they were evil, but because they had gone to war with innocents.
Likewise, it was “justifiable” to kill other humans who — swayed by Sauron and Saruman, deceived — went to war with innocents.
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..The orcs don’t exist, so advocating their genocide is not (to say the least) morally equivalent to actually committing genocide. But fantasies have something to do with how people approach reality, and Tokien’s fantasies mirror in their structure the ways in which people with genocide on their mind justify their actions.
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Where there is a danger or unpleasantness is that fictionists find it useful to “plug into” the same innate mechanisms (suspicion of the Other; thinking that beautiful is Good and ugly Bad; sweeping moral generalizations; etc.) to propel their plots, make us feel what the creators want us to, that can also feed real-world hatred, prejudice, violence.
A useful tactic; the brilliant graphic designer Milton Glaser praised “the power of the cliché” to communicate easily and powerfully. Needless to say, though, this power can be used for evil, as well as good.
As I’d noted in commentaries at https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/05/dont-harsh-on-my-genocidal-fantasies/ :
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That a story uses the “Us. Vs. Them mentality” actually indicates it’s plugging in, consciously or not, into the very same root of racism itself.
I’d always been troubled by how making an enemy group vampires, sub-human mutants, and such, thereby made it OK for fictional heroes to pursue genocidal policies against them.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I think the idea that creativity exists somewhere off to the side of how people live their lives (which is what you say when you say it has nothing to do with morality) is, again, the desperate philistinism of the aesthete.
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Ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!
What was actually said was…
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Charles Reece says:
…the value of Tolkien’s work isn’t morality….It’s really a magnificent feat of creativity. But a lot of critics aren’t comfortable with celebrating such things. It has to be about morality. Bullshit, I say. That kind of thinking ultimately gives us Soviet realism.
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So, he’s not saying that ” creativity…has nothing to do with morality”; his argument is with the attitude (by holier-than-thou moralizers, naturally) that “It has to be about morality”; a work is REQUIRED to have “moral meaning” enforced upon it.
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Noah Berlatsky says: [to Charles]
I think though (as you demonstrate) that if you don’t take the orcs seriously as a problem, it’s difficult to take the rest of his moral vision seriously. And since the moral vision is really the heart of his work, you end up just liking him because he made up languages or some such, which seems really like an impoverished reading, to me at least.
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Well, if one thinks (indeed, predictably states as a self-evident fact) that “the moral vision is really the heart of his work,” not to focus on that aspect would understandably be seen as “an impoverished reading.”
And anybody who doesn’t see the obvious “truth” that preachifying about morals is what “The Hobbit” and LOTR are Mainly All About is, therefore, some geeky doofus who “[likes] him because he made up languages or some such,” and probably keeps a set of elf ears in their sock drawer, too.
And Charles’ not taking “the orcs seriously as a problem” is akin to not considering the Joker seriously as a statement about “criminals.”
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Again, Charles, you can only make your position coherent if Tokien’s world and our world can be partitioned off from each other neatly and completely.
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No; saying, for instance, that taking the conflict of Batman vs. the Joker utterly seriously as a “law versus crime” Moral Statement is absurd isn’t the same thing as maintaining that the “Batverse” and “our world can be partitioned off from each other neatly and completely.”
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[to Charles] And…I’m well and truly confused now about your moral take on the book. You’re saying that Tolkien’s moral view is simplistic, but that he shouldn’t be considered culpable for that because it’s not really his view since he was writing fiction? Because writers of fiction don’t actually have any investment in their themes? Because Tolkien’s LOTR isn’t meant to have any connection to anything, it’s just a cute fantasy story, and so his simplistic morality can’t be blamed for…what, anyway?
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Um, your view of his position is itself simplistic. Because an author may find it useful to simplify moral complexities — indeed, it’s often utterly necessary — to smooth over moral or philosophical difficulties in a work, doesn’t mean they must go to the extreme of not “actually hav[ing] any investment in their themes.” (Emphasis added.)
And, can’t a work be more morally nuanced in some areas, less so in others?
Re dropping the Bomb (two, actually) on Japan, the pro’s and con’s are pretty mushy, with statistics of allied casualties of an invasion varying massively.
Still, the Japanese started it; committed hideous acts of mass murder; as battles to take Pacific islands they held proved, they were willing to fight savagely to keep them, so imagine what fanaticism for protecting the Sacred Homeland would’ve inspired; the psychological shock of the obliteration of two cities by single bombs served to crush the warring spirit of the Japanese, thus facilitating their acceptance of peacefulness and democracy; and Stalinist Russia was placed on alert that America possessed a weapon they could not match.
So…bombs away! I feel for those who suffered (and have read about their ordeal), but when a country starts a war, innocents suffer.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I’ve been thinking about these things in part because over the last couple of years I’ve edited a bunch of books on various genocides (including one on the Kurds, one on Kosovo, one on the Satlinist purges, one on Bangladesh…and just working on ones on Sri Lanka and the anti-communist killings in Indonesia.)
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Eeesh! I’m glad you’ve got the work in these harsh economic times, but my sympathy for all the pain and cruelty you’d have had to deal with, even at a remove. As Nietzsche put it, “if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
The full quote actually ties in to the theme here: “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
…Returning to and thinking about that full line some more after tweaking the rest of the post, further depths are revealed.
If you see your enemy simply as a monster (rather than a being who may have positive qualities; with greater complexities than their “evilness”; capable of changing their ways), then it’s understandable (“We’re battling with monsters, after all!”) one would be driven to behave in a similarly monstrous fashion in response to their aggression.
Was appalled to read in the WW II “Flyboys : A True Story of Courage” ( http://www.amazon.com/Flyboys-A-True-Story-Courage/dp/B000ESSSGG ) a couple of pages of how Japanese soldiers, parachuting after their aircraft were shot down, or helpless in life rafts after their ships were sunk, were strafed and machine-gunned, blown to bits by Americans rather than allowed to surrender. The author noting that not only were these incidents not concealed as war crimes, but that films of them were shown in theater newsreels, with a commentator gleefully cheering on the massacre.
Okay, Charles; from my view, we basically agree except that you don’t like Tolkien enough to take his moral world seriously. Since I don’t think that the issue is analogical mapping anyway, I don’t have any arguments with you there either.
So that’s enough for me for now. Have a good holiday!
The name “orc” is an Old English word for “demon”. Tolkien chose this name not because orcs *were* demons – they were not; they were not any kind of supernatural being – but because “a real flesh-and-blood creature which is pretty much as close to a demon as such a creature could be” is a fitting description of an orc. They were explicitly created to be evil beings by Morgoth; there is no way within the published corpus that they can be redeemed, “cured”, or induced to reform. As long as they exist they will inflict suffering on those around them out of the sadism and love of evil which is inherent in their nature. The motivation for killing them is of the same nature as the motivation for killing flies or germs; the difference between orcs and flies is that flies and germs “do evil” (spread disease) as an unintended side-effect of surviving, which they can neither avoid nor understand, but orcs do evil because they are “programmed” to enjoy doing it; they know exactly what they are doing, they do not need to do it but they do do it because they want to, and there is no way other than killing them to stop them behaving like this. To argue against exterminating orcs is like arguing against antibiotics.
Orc women and children do exist; they reproduce in the normal mammalian fashion. By origin and design they are more or less bred like farm animals by Morgoth, and later by Sauron and Saruman; there also exist self-governing colonies of “feral” orcs. We are given no details of what life is like for orcs in these colonies but it is safe to assume that it is not much fun.
All the orcs we get to see in the tales are combatants. In the majority of cases we are given no clue as to whether they are male or female, and they are often referred to as “it”. Whether orc women fight alongside the orc men but you can’t tell t’other from which, or whether they spend their lives as captive breeding machines in Dark Lords’ orc-farms, or something else entirely, is a matter of pure guesswork.
“No author is ever the last word on their own work, but Tolkien in particular has always seemed to me to be particularly cagey about interpretations of his work” – An author is without question the last word on their own work. The test of validity of anything other people say about their work is whether the author confirms or denies it. If you want to know some detail about the construction of your house you may ask a surveyor to guess but if you want to know for sure you ask the builder who built it. To argue that other people know more than the author does about their own work, especially when as in Tolkien’s case the work represents a whole lifetime’s effort, is unbelievably arrogant. The tone of the sentence implies that such a view is taken as axiomatic among critics, which if true is a collective arrogance even more egregious.
Tolkien was “cagey” (though that would not be my choice of adjective) about interpretations of his work largely because pretty well everyone (apart from his children and a few others who knew him intimately) consistently got it *wrong*. Having put an immense amount of thought and love into it he was naturally not happy about “I know better than the author” types trying to represent it as something that – as he of course knew better than anyone – it was not.
Peter Jackson is just such a meddler – using the standard film-maker’s invalid excuse of “it has to be changed for the screen” which is a mendacious shorthand for “it has to be changed because I am interested in making money, not in faithfully representing the original work” – and it is *absolutely*not* valid to take the films as any kind of reference. Yet many of the comments on this page give the impression that the commentor knows the films first and foremost and is not familiar with the books. If you do not know the books, you are not in a position to comment on Tolkien’s works; the films are not Tolkien, and to know only or mainly the films is worse than knowing nothing at all.
Concerning the nuclear attack on Japan, it is commonly presented with the implication that it was a sudden devastating attack visited out of the blue on a more or less untouched mainland. This is not the case at all. The Americans had become very, very good at igniting entire Japanese cities by carpet-bombing with conventional explosives and were systematically devastating Japan by such attacks, in most of which the death toll was higher than in either nuclear attack. The argument that the bomb was required to stop the war quickly is almost comically upside down; by that stage the Manhattan Project scientists were well aware that there was a good chance the war would be over before the bomb was ready, and they had been breaking their backs to make it into a deliverable weapon while there was still an excuse to use it and observe its effects on a real target. The nuclear enthusiasts even had to make representations right at the top of the command chain to have the USAF refrain from carpet-bombing four or so specific cities – of which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two – so that they would remain as intact targets to serve as specimens to observe the effects of nuclear attack.
“An author is without question the last word on their own work. The test of validity of anything other people say about their work is whether the author confirms or denies it”
Nope. Virtually no critic, either academic or otherwise, thinks that’s the case, or writes as if it’s the case. Authors are an interesting source, but they’re by no means the last word on their work. At the very least, since authors are human, it seems like there has to be some room for them to make mistakes, yes?
“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
? J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
(Emphasis added)
I have always looked at the Orcs as being more of a metaphor for weapons since there only purpose is destruction and war they don’t have any real culture or anything and there is a lot of evidence to suggest they are not even fully sentient and Tolkien advocating there destruction could be like someone advocating the destruction of weapons to put an end to war then there is also the highborn bloodline thing i just take that as something to do with the era Tolkien lived in