This is a guest post by Eric Grynaviski, an Associate Professor of Political Science at International Affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of Constructive Illusions (Cornell, 2014) .He studies sociological approaches to cooperation and conflict, and international ethics.
Over the last few days, protestors have taken to the streets to combat what they believe is an evil power that will soon occupy the White House. The problem of evil has featured in rhetoric about this election, in fact, for months, as featured in the Washington Post commentary on the election. The tropes “politics is evil,” “Hillary is evil,” and “Trump is evil” have a new significance when people are confused and disoriented by Trump’s surprising win.
Perhaps because of my childhood reading fantasy novels, when I think about the problem of evil, I think about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Why? Tolkien was a member of a group of academics and writers called “The Inklings,” informally led by C.S. Lewis. For the most part, these fantasy writers struggled with organizing epic stories that grappled with the problem of evil in intense and transformative ways (see Bedeviled).
One way to grapple with the results of this election is to look at the problem of evil through their eyes. In some respects, Tolkien and his friends experienced a world similar to ours. Many fought in Europe during the First World War, and they were writing during World War II. They often depicted Hitler, whose lust for power drove Europe into chaos, as a living manifestation of evil. Tolkien’s fictional world includes Sauron (and his former boss), as a kind of living Satan, who corrupts the good through magic, promises, and fear. To meet this threat, the free peoples of the world—some men, hobbits, elves, and dwarves—team up with a wizard to fight this evil.
For Tolkien, people (or mythical creatures) are rarely innately evil. Rather, they are corrupted by their desire for good. In Morgoth’s Ring, Tolkien describes Sauron as one who “loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.” Sauron turned to Melkor—the evil figure who had been around since creation—because Melkor promised him the power to make the world orderly. Sauron lusted for power, in short, to do what he believed to be good, and only later obsessed over power for its own sake.
Saruman “falls” in the same way. Saruman had been a good wizard who wanted to help defend the free people against Sauron. To do so, he learned as much as he could about the lore of the rings. But this led him to despair: only by taking the power of the one ring as his own could he hope to defeat Sauron. Again, an obsession with the need to gain power to do good led Saruman to become evil. This model of the fall of pure souls, most likely influenced by Tolkien’s Christian beliefs, pervades his fiction.
For me, good fantasy novels have these tragic elements. The most interesting bad guys are not born evil, like Damien Thorn in the Omen movies, nor do they simply grow up petty and mean, like Sophie in the School for Good and Evil. There needs to be tragedy.
This brings me to the election. Much like then, U.S. politics has turned into a battle of good against evil, abroad and at home. It has been awhile since the problem of evil has been so commonplace when describing political opponents.
At first glance, this election does not appear tragic. Trump does not seem like a person motivated to gain power to help others and is thereby corrupted. If there is a tragic element, it is for the country. In the post-election period, there are already voices calling for us to ignore the content of the election. Excusing being mean and nasty, racist and sexist, conspiratorial and xenophobic, etc. because we want our political party to be in control is akin to an endorsement of Sauron. Those who excuse Trump’s moral failings presume that somehow, behind the scenes, some good will come from such a vile enterprise. From where I sit, I see an obsession for political power—by Trump, by Republican voters, and also from Democrats frankly. They are no longer just divorcing means and ends; they don’t care about ends beyond winning. For Tolkien enthusiasts, we are at the end of the Second Age—we are after the Fall. We have become the Black Númenóreans, who aid and excuse Sauron—the Giver of Freedom to some—because he promises power.
For Tolkien, the only way to resist true evil—political power—is to anoint those who will not use it. The power of the free people is not in force of arms. The hero among men—Strider—is a lost king whose power comes from his healing abilities and close connections to land and history. His most important actions were at the head of an unlikely band of individuals who meandered around Middle Earth, refusing to use the power that was literally at their fingertips. Legolas’ and Gimli’s power comes from their ability to overlook a history of antagonism between elves and dwarves and participate in a fellowship in which true friendship is as important as the bow or the axe. None of these figures accomplish their heroic acts by wielding political power, and they only tangentially use the force of arms to accomplish their goals (Note: I credit the Ents for defeating Saruman and the oathbreakers for the Battle of Pelennor Fields, as their contribution was necessary and sufficient to win the battle). The study of history and philosophy, with a turn toward moral thinking, is the source of their power.
What does this mean for political scientists? Studies about how to win campaigns and elections, and policy-relevant studies about how to use force to achieve elites’ ends in a world in which deportation and nuclear weapons appear to be on the table, remind me of Númenor. In the Second Age, Númenor was home to men and women who were loyal to the forces of good. Sauron, however, secretly whispered to the king the secrets of power. He told the king how to gain more power and then how to use that power to launch an armada against the Undying Lands. Sauron taught the secrets of power to people who had forgotten that the better part of politics is lodged in our moral instincts.
I would expect Sauron to do a job talk in a political science department on Númenor, armed with graphs showing the causal effect of loremasters’ songs on the king’s popularity. He would be a wiz at answering questions about causal identification strategies, and maybe had a cool experiment or two (preregistered of course). Or, he would do a nifty policy-relevant analysis of naval tactics against the elves. The question and answer session would include no discussion of the content of the songs, their morality, or their effects on the character of politics; nor would he discuss whether the armada’s goals were right. It would be interesting (loremasters are cool!), but after this election is seems by itself empty.
Political scientists remind me of Isildur, who refused to throw away the ring when he gained it from Sauron. The political science blogs I regularly read—the Monkey Cage, Political Violence at a Glance, and the Duck of Minerva, for example—have yet to publish any reflections by political scientists about the meaning of the election. The Monkey Cage second post-election post’s “Lesson 1” showed that they forgot they predicted a Trump win but now remember so it’s ok (this is a friendly jab at a colleague who I respect greatly). My bet is there will be a lot of analysis and discussion by political scientists about why Trump won, what he will do and what the effects could be, and how limits on Trump’s use of power might curtail his policy flexibility. At the moment, however, finding ways to make political science relevant by trying to better understand the ring strike me as empty. The first lesson of this election should not be about forecasting.
The protestors are closer. Many protestors on the streets over the last few nights, I think, would welcome a Frodo who could somehow throw modern politics into a volcano. Alas, I know of no volcano that would be willing to accept the grossness of the modern political system; unlike Mount Doom, it would vomit it up as to repugnant to consume.
Instead, political scientists should ask “What would Gandalf do?” One part of the magic of the characters is that they consistently remember their values: Sam and Frodo think about home and hearth, the Dwarves think about their halls of stone, the Elves think about their role in protecting nature and care of the world, and Aragorn remembers a time when the king used a model of rule that relied on autonomy and good government. These reflections on the prospect for a different world with a different politics motivated the characters.
Political scientists need to think seriously about how to incorporate the study of politics, traditionally conceived as the study about right and justice, into our classrooms, turning them, in part, into fora where we can discuss and debate the justice of mass deportations, sexual violence, racism, policing, and a host of other issues. I also hope the next four years will include more reflection on the nature of political power, the study of electoral reform, and more experimental thinking about alternative ways to think about democratic governance. Using the Trump election as a springboard for inquiry would return us to questions of ethics as central to discussions in political science.
“Sauron taught the secrets of power to people who had forgotten that the better part of politics is lodged in our moral instincts.” Hmm. Or people who had somehow come to accept that politics is all there is, and had forgotten that there is also such a thing as morality? I suppose what I am struggling with a bit here is the notion of “the better part of politics.” Personally I’d prefer the Weberian notion that politics is an arena of struggle into which those with a vocation for politics bring moral imperatives as well as a grasp of the limits of possible action. So the problem of the Númenorans is that they settled for *this world*, and forgot the existence of *another world* in necessary tension with it — which is why they couldn’t see that Sauron was evil.
It’s worse for us, because we (mostly) inhabit a disenchanted world in which science is supposed to provide us with the only defensible answers…which is why ultimately I would not be at all optimistic about Political Science providing much of the solution. (There’s a reason Boromir shouldn’t have picked up the ring and tried to bring it back as a weapon to be wielded, after all.) The kinds of class discussions you are calling for, sadly, fall well outside of the mainstream of the scholarly discipline of Political Science as presently constituted in the U.S. Maybe if we instead work to develop a better sense of the *limits* of scientific reason, we might open the way for novel possibilities like those you call for.
I’m long winded so I apologize in advance. And thanks for the response
I agree with the first part, I think. The Weberian frame isn’t
necessary to endorse the argument that “the problem of the Númenorans is that
they settled for *this world*, and forgot the existence of *another world* in
necessary tension with it — which is why they couldn’t see that Sauron was
evil.” The way you put in here reminds me more of One-Dimensional Man than
Weber for example. Especially the final
chapter where he writes that “the technical reality, the object world
(including the subjects) is experience as a world of instrumentalities.” This
is about the disenchantment of the world. The next part is more interesting for me: “they appear to common sense as the
stuff of work or leisure, production and consumption.”
The protestors, interestingly, are disproving Marcuse. They are pointing out
that the political world is more than a game of predictioneering; there are
real political consequences to living in a world in which people are willing to
hold their nose while they vote for someone who threatens mass deportation, the
use of nuclear weapons, brags about sexual violence and so on. In a sense, they
are giving Sam’s speech (if you want to be corny):
Frodo : I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam : I know.
It’s all wrong
By rights we shouldn’t even be here.
But we are.
It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo.
The ones that really mattered.
Full of darkness and danger they were,
and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end.
Because how could the end be happy.
How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened.
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow.
Even darkness must pass.
A new day will come.
And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
Those were the stories that stayed with you.
That meant something.
Even if you were too small to understand why.
But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand.
I know now.
Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t.
Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo : What are we holding on to, Sam?
Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth
fighting for.
The mass interest in
politics is driven by a confrontation with the ethical consequences of living
in the world in which alt-right people are in the White House.
The discussion by many political scientists about whether
Political Science is “dead” is entirely
different and bears out more of technology arguments in folks like Marcuse (and
Weber of course). The defense of Political Science, here and elsewhere, appears
to really be that we forecast the election right because of the popular vote,
or early forecasts, or work on populism., etc etc. It’s just a technical
defense. Looking at 3-4 blogs this morning, there is more conversation focusing
on outrage, but for the most part, it is about analysis of the election. It
strips the outrage and indignation away (in a comforting way in fact!), making
politics “appear to common sense as the stuff of work or leisure, production
and consumption.”
One part of this is just a criticism of the blogosphere. To
make political science more interesting, many on the blogosphere sell it as a
kind of entertainment and produce pretty slick products. I mean this sincerely;
some of the posts are cool looking. But, of course, it makes it way into a lot
of research that doesn’t consider issues of substance beyond what a causal
identification strategy might be able to show.
When alt-right people enter the White House, I don’t think
we should be teaching undergraduates to naval gaze at forecasting models; or at
least that this exhausts the reasons that PS as a field is not “dead.” I would
rather teach Lord of the Rings frankly.
Sorry about the formatting. Its the Sam speech I think
So while I don’t disagree with you on the essentials, I would disagree on one very important issue of genre: precisely because LOTR is high fantasy and thus more like mythology, Sam’s speech isn’t “political” at all. And to the extent that the protestors are enacting Sam’s speech they are moved by faith, endeavoring to re-enchant the world — noble, praiseworthy, but not “the slow boring of hard boards.” Sam’s speech is appropriate to any of the heroic ages, but to ours? There I get more skeptical. And to be honest I doubt that the protestors — any of us, regardless of our forms of protest — are giving Sam’s speech as much as we’re drawing a line around what we are willing to consider “politics.” Sam has an entirely different way of going on in the world.
Whether alt-right fascists are in the White House or not, I don’t think we generally ought to be teaching people to “navel-gaze at forecasting models” (although I think you are conflating two things here: if we’re stuck in the technical minutiae of the model we aren’t navel-gazing, we’re model-gazing, perhaps). Maybe in specialized classes for people who are specialists in modeling, but that’s a very very small minority of our students. For most of our students, what they need practice in is confronting the implications of their value-commitments, and developing some sense of the consequences of particular actions. If you can get that through teaching LOTR, go for it; for my part I’d rather teach sci-fi than high fantasy so that we don’t get into the whole “but there’s a natural moral order in this book that isn’t up for discussion!” problem.
Hmm… Regarding naval gazing, I think it depends where you keep your model. That is a personal choice I choose not to comment on.
When you say Sam’s speech is not the slow boring of hard boards though I wonder. The rest of that paragraph is:
Certainly all historical experience confirms–that man would not have
achieved the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the
impossible. But to do that, a man must be a leader, and more than a
leader, he must be a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word.
And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves
with that resolve of heart which can brave even the failing of all
hopes. This is necessary right now, otherwise we shall fail to attain
that which it is possible to achieve today. Only he who is certain not
to destroy himself in the process should hear the call of politics; he
must endure even though he finds the world too stupid or too petty for
that which he would offer. In the face of that he must have the resolve
to say ‘and yet,’—for only then does he hear the ‘call’ of politics.
Sounds like Sam to me. Frodo points out the stupid and petty, and Sam says “and yet.” I think we are disagreeing about Sam and not the principled point. If there is a fantasy saga about boring hard boards (which really isn’t that hard to do by hand in fact, I will repost a picture to facebook of a six year old doing it), it is Frodo and Sam’s constant march.
I’m going to go back and re-read Politics as Vocation though with your idea in mind. In general, I want to use LOTR here as a commentary on discussions of power that include no discussions about, as you say, the limits to what we should consider a legitimate politics. Sauron is beyond the bounds of legitimate politics; but the men and women of Numenor don’t care. The difference in our reads is that the characters find that value resides in what they love about “this world.” I think the same can be true today, though not for Trump.
Undergraduates I suspect like seeing the graphs, doing election pools, and so on. But I worry about the study of politics without reflecting on other elements of politics. It turns it into entertainment. I recall a passage in Weber’s exercise that talks about it this way, something about it becoming only intellectual exercise?
Regarding sci-fi, I don’t know. I think one of the benefits of fantasy is that you do not have to take the moral order for granted. Fantasy nerds take apart moral orders all the time. For example, Andy Duncan’s story Senator Bilbo (Farrell point it out) is a fun story that inverts the moral priorities in the Shire. Another example might be Novik’s stories. There is no “natural” moral order really given. Instead we have a dragon who is unencumbered by British social attitudes and has a general sense of right and wrong that shows the silliness of conventions. As time moves on and they learn, more conventions are exposed as social rather than natural (I’m a Hornblower fan, so I love those books for other reasons). In other words, sci-fi or fantasy works for teaching about politics. More in-genre than between-genre difference.
I’m a bit of a genre purist, both when it comes to sci-fi vs. fantasy (see my extended rant about this masquerading as a paper on Star Wars at the last ISA convention…happy to send it to you if you’d like to see it) and when it comes to morality. To my mind it’s not logically consistent to find something of value that is simply in and of this world, because value claims — even though they are socially sustained — take the form of a transcendental proclamation. Otherwise they’re just “you should do X because I/you/we prefer X,” and where’s the ethical imperative in that? So a world without an intrinsic moral order, a disenchanted world, doesn’t have ethics per se. But we don’t live in fully disenchanted worlds, or fully in disenchanted worlds, so that’s the tension I think Weber is highlighting: ethical imperative here, demands of practicality there, politician suspended between them.
That tension doesn’t and can’t exist in LOTR in my view because Sauron is evil and the One Ring is evil and those are non-negotiable facts of the world. Weber’s vocation for politics (and “call of politics” is a terrible, terrible translation…”Beruf” certainly does have etymological connections to “rufen,” call, and Weber plays with those, but it’s not like politics calls in Weber’s account; instead some people have a calling for politics, and that calling is Weber’s object of analysis) plays no role in such a world, and Frodo and Sam aren’t doing anything political by bringing the ring to Mount Doom; they are, as is proper to heroes in epic high fantasy, resisting evil and (ultimately) doing good (although in Tolkien, ultimate good comes from the eucatastrophe and not from human will, which is why Gollum actually destroys the ring without meaning to).
In the first paragraph, there are a bunch of interesting issues (e.g., the difference between descriptive and normative statements). You collapse it to a descriptive statement. On my view (for a later time over a drink perhaps), it would not be “should do x because I prefer x” but “should do x because x is morally preferable.”
I concede all German translation issues.
But, the only way that you find Frodo apolitical is if you concede that the Shire is good and Sauron is bad, or at least you do not ask whether the Shire is good and Sauron is bad. That is where nerdery comes in. Plenty of people have asked whether about Frodo’s and Bilbo’s political commitments.
(a) Is the Shire a fascist paradise? Firchow has a wonderful essay in Midwest Quarterly on the recreation of fascism in the Shire. Reading it forces a person to wonder why he finds the characters so ennobling when they often behave in ways that we find troubling: “I will in the course of this essay argue that certain social traits
and/or ideas can and even should be looked at as fascist in tendency, specifically the idea that the group or community takes precedence over
the individual or that certain groups or communities are innately or by
nature superior to others, especially when headed by strong leaders, and that, further and most disturbing, the superior groups are justified in
seeking to exterminate the inferior ones.” Andy Duncan plays with this in Senator Bilbo, though differently.
(b) Is Sauron bad? Yeskov “The Last Ringbearer” gives an alternative history, describing the events from the perspective of the other side. It questions pretty directly whether the values represented by Frodo (and are political values I think) are appropriate or right things for which to struggle. After all, Sauron and Sauraman represent workers and industry; the elves and the leaders of men represent early pastoral, militaristic societies who use myths of forgotten worlds to justify obedience to power.
(c) The interpersonal relations are highly charged. Class distinctions between Sam and Frodo, Gandalf’s paternalism, Bombadil’s quest for autarky, etc.
I “think” the only reason that you believe Frodo is not acting politically is that you find Frodo’s politics to be obvious given the natural order of the universe. The fun part of Tolkien debates is really unpacking and complicating the “story in depth” as it is sometimes called.
Harry Potter. Now there is a story that has no politics. Voldemort? Total scum. Who could like him? The complexities in LOTR, with careful study, are much much more interesting.
We have different operative definitions of “fun” ;-) In the terms of the novels, the Shire *is* good and Sauron *is* evil. This is hard-coded into the natural order of things as presented in the narrative. Only by adopting an externalist perspective on the world of LOTR can one raise the kinds of questions you suggest, and to my mind that’s like questioning whether the One Ring *really is* evil or even magical…or like treating sacred scripture as though it were some kind of factual historical record. Genre confusion. I get off the bus at that stop. And I go here instead: https://www.duckofminerva.com/2013/02/its-a-trap-no-really-its-a-trap.html.
And for my money the most profound treatment of this issue is actually Frank Herbert’s _Dune_, which basically suggests that scripturalization is inevitable, disenchantment isn’t the final word, and there *is* an animating moral order to the world, even a world that is apparently technological and rationalized. Tolkien, like most high fantasy authors, dodges the issue by setting Middle-Earth in the past, and building in a “fall/end of the age” narrative to explain why we don’t live there anymore.
Or, to be briefer: there is no moral ambiguity in a fantasy universe. There can’t be, and if there is it’s because the characters haven’t yet figured out the right answer…but they’re going to, because there *is* a right answer *built right into the fabric of reality*.
This depends on what you want to teach. I think the aim of adopting the externalist perspective on LOTR is two fold. (1) Why do we find the characters appealing when, on reflection, they have values that are at least curious?
(2) Why on a first reading are we so convinced that the characters are good? In other words, why on a first read do we not find Frodo’s domination of Sam icky?
On this latter point, there is a neat essay on Tolkien Studies on possible historical origins for Sam’s character.
I find books like LOTR interesting, I think, for the exact reason you don’t; the moral order *seems* obvious, but it really isn’t. Star Wars by comparison is a snoozer.
Totally agree that it depends on what you want to teach. When I teach fiction (or anything else, really) I am really not interested in getting people to think through their own reactions to the text; I’m much more interested in having people think through the argument of the text. Which is basically *all* internalist readings, whether we’re talking about fiction, political theory, or anything else. That’s basically what I do, though. We can get to external critiques only after we’ve reconstructed the internal logic, in my view, and the internal logic of LOTR simply doesn’t give rise to the kinds of questions you are raising.
In Tolkien’s universe, as in so many fantasy novels, Frodo’s domination of Sam is just a microcosm of the broader well-ordered macrocosm which includes, you know, divine beings and the like. So there is no question of a political negotiation between Sam and Frodo — there’s just the natural order of things with superiors and inferiors, and subverting that order is a Bad Thing. (I’d point to something like the house elf liberation movement in the _Harry Potter_ novels as a much more political moment, precisely because there isn’t an answer given in the fabric of the universe.)
At some later point, probably over an adult beverage at a bar at a conference, I’d love to chat more about just what you think isn’t “obvious” in the moral order of LOTR. To my mind it’s as plain as day. Whether *we* accept that moral order as somehow binding on *us*, that’s an entirely different conversation…
“Political scientists should ask, ‘What would Gandalf do?’”
Should they really? Isn’t the answer: cast a spell? Strike your magical staff down before your enemy? Get reincarnated, a bit like Jesus? That’s helpful, is it?
How about inhabiting the REAL world, cutting the self-indulgent flights of fancy, and dealing with reality as you find it, using real-world concepts, like party, class, representation, and so on? Then political scientists might be able to offer some useful insights into what is happening to US politics.
Thanks for the comment. I agree of course that party, class, representation and so on are important.
Is your view that the fictional stories we tell about ourselves have no bearing on the way we view or value the world? Or that literature (and music) has no historic role in social movements? Or just that Gandalf is a bit out there for a character to think about?
You have reduced me to quoting bad musicals:
I hereby declare this court to be in session.
Now, then, what are you here for?
We are to appear before the Inquisition.
Heresy?
No, not exactly.
You see, we were presenting an entertainment.
An entertainment?
How does an entertainment get into trouble with the Inquisition?
Perhaps they found an entertainment is not always what it seems.
Why are you here?
Somebody has to stage-manage the stage.
These two have empty holes in their heads.
Governor, if you don’t mind I should like to prosecute this case.
You, sir? Why, sir?
Poets spinning nonsense out of nothing. Blurring men’s eyes to reality.
Exactly!
Reality!
A stone prison crushing the human spirit.
Poetry demands imagination.
And with imagination, you may discover a dream.
The trial! On with the trial!
Miguel de Cervantes, I charge you with being an idealist, a bad poet and an honest man. How plead you?
“Real-world concepts, like party, class, representation, and so on” is an interesting turn of phrase. Precisely what makes those “real-world”? Is “justice” a “real-world” concept? How about “truth”? “Rights”? “Evil”?
I think the lines are a lot less clear than you imply.
Glancing through this post (“glancing” b.c I have little interest in Lord of the Rings), I come to this:
“Political scientists remind me of Isildur, who refused to throw away the
ring when he gained it from Sauron. The political science blogs I
regularly read—the Monkey Cage, Political Violence at a Glance, and the
Duck of Minerva, for example—have yet to publish any reflections by
political scientists about the meaning of the election.”
w.r.t. Monkey Cage and Pol. Violence at a Glance, not too surprising (though I haven’t read either one in a long time).
Might want to try looking at e.g. the U.S. Intellectual History (USIH) blog from time to time. It covers more than just ‘intellectual history’ so don’t let the name be an obstacle.