race, sex, and God in The Lord of the Rings

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I recently finished reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to my 11-year-old daughter, three decades after reading those books to myself and then largely forgetting them. We enjoyed them. The story was a little too violent for her, and there was not quite enough psychological depth or development for me, but it was great on plot and large-scale imagination.

The main argument against Tolkien is an alleged lack of psychological complexity and nuance. After reading the trilogy to his daughter, Edmund Wilson wrote: “there is little in The Lord of the Rings over the head of a seven-year-old child. … There is never much development in the episodes; you simply go on getting more of the same thing. Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form. The characters talk a story-book language that might have come out of Howard Pyle, and as personalities they do not impose themselves. At the end of this long romance, I had still no conception of the wizard Gandalph, who is a cardinal figure, had never been able to visualize him at all. … How is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes as those above? The answer is, I believe, that certain people – especially, perhaps, in Britain – have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. They would not accept adult trash, but, confronted with the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which delighted in Elsie Dinsmore and Little Lord Fauntleroy and which seems to have made of Billy Bunter, in England, almost a national figure.”

Most of this is unfair in detail. (I can visualize Gandalph quite clearly.) Wilson’s deeper aesthetic is also subject to debate. I am reminded of the quarrel between H.G. Wells and Henry James. James claimed that the only true source of excellent fiction was “the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner.” In other words, you should write about what you know, and the merit of your work is the perceptiveness and depth of your observations. But that implies a narrow scope, a small canvass. Art can also explore vast differences in real (or possible) worlds. Wells had a point when he described James as “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.” Wells, Tolkien, and other fantasy writers are interested in getting well outside of the cage in which they think bourgeois realists like James (and Wilson) have fenced themselves. I am open to both sides, myself.

While we read Tolkien, I was quietly thinking about three themes that are relatively subtle:

1. Race: In our world, there is only one hominid species, and all the so-called races are completely equal morally, intellectually, spiritually, and physically. In the Middle Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien, however, there are several hominid peoples: “men,” dwarves, elves, hobbits, orcs, wraiths, ents, and perhaps others. They are not equal. In particular, orcs are worse than all the others: intellectually and morally inferior. If you lived in Middle Earth, you would want to see all the orcs exiled, confined to reservations of some kind, or cured of their defining orcness.

It’s a fictional world and therefore not literally a racist commentary on ours. J.R.R. Tolkien apparently held egalitarian attitudes toward Jews and Africans. But what does it mean to invent a world in which there are inferior races? And what should we think about the specific portrayal of the orcs? It seems to me that each of the peoples of Middle Earth evokes a culture from our earth: Hobbits are Englishmen out of nursery rhymes and folk tales; elves are Celts; dwarves are Germanic or Nordic; and orcs … I think the orcs are Turkish. They carry scimitars, and their language sounds like a parody of Turkish. They are physically dark, in contrast to the fair elves, and submissive to their despots. These are European stereotypes of Turks, which, in turn, may carry a whiff of the ancient Greeks’ views of Persians.

2. Sex: One way in which Tolkien is a children’s author is the sexlessness of the story. All the characters are male except for some very remote and idealized ladies. Sam is deeply embarrassed by the thought he might marry Rosie–like a 13-year-old. The one truly passionate connection is between Sam and Frodo. I have no problem whatsoever with same-sex attraction, but I wonder whether Tolkien thought of the connection as romantic.

3. God: Apparently, Tolkien (a devout Catholic) once wrote, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

As a learned believer, a professional medievalist, and a student of allegorical Christian literature, Tolkien was entitled to that reading of his own work. But I find it surprising. In a Catholic story, I would expect evidence of a single, benign creator; providence as a determining force for good; posthumous judgment of individuals; and a divine sacrifice that saves the world. Perhaps the ring is found by Bilbo for Providential reasons, but that is a very subtle and implicit explanation, if it’s true at all. Frodo sacrifices, but he is not a Jesus-figure. He sacrifices much less than his life and he is only a mortal hobbit to start with. Nobody has a relationship with anything like a personal God. The ethic of the Lord of the Rings seems mildly ascetic and spiritual, but more pagan than Catholic. Perhaps Tolkien thought that by deliberately suppressing all the explicit points of Catholic faith, he could make the story pervasively and fundamentally Christian. But he may have succeeded instead in creating a world that fits other religious views even better.

an overlooked win for civic renewal: federally qualified health centers

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My chief complaint about the health care reform of 2010 was its apparent failure to include active citizens as designers of the bill (the public could have been asked to deliberate about health reform, as Senators Wyden and Hatch proposed), or as proponents of the bill (the administration could have unleashed a grassroots movement to demand passage), or as active participants in administering health care (the bill could have empowered health insurance co-ops).

Yet the bill actually contains many excellent provisions that have received little attention. One reform is a major increase in the authorized funding level for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FGHC). The extra money should raise the number of such centers to 15,000. An FQHC is a local provider, serving a needy community, that gets favorable Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates, access to the National Health Service Corps, and other federal supports. It must be a nonprofit organization or a public entity, and it must have a board of which more than half are current clients of the center who demographically represent the population that the center serves.

Overall, the trend in public administration has been toward centralization and expertise. Based on data collected by Elinor Ostrom, I estimate that the proportion of Americans who serve on any public board has declined by three quarters since the mid-20th century, due to consolidation of public authorities and the replacement of elected offices with professional positions. This means that we have lost powerful educative experiences for our citizens. At the same time, our public institutions have grown remote and distrusted, and we have missed the energies and ideas of people not deemed to be “experts.”

Controlling health care costs is a classic “wicked problem,” involving complex, interconnected systems, rapid and unpredictable change, valid but conflicting values and interests, and misaligned motives. In general, wicked problems are best addressed by decentralizing control and empowering mixed groups of people, including those most affected by the problem. The administration’s support for Federally Qualified Health Centers promotes this populist approach and deserves recognition.

could we crowdsource civic renewal?

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I am professionally and personally committed to “civic renewal“: strengthening the capacities of citizens to solve problems, influence government, and create public goods. In the past, citizens gained those capacities as members of organizations, but we have lost most of the relevant ones. On the other hand, we now have the Internet and all its tools for online engagement. Could we bypass organizations and create a loose, self-organized, completely voluntary network for civic renewal?

“Crowdsourcing” means issuing an open call to collaborate on some common task, such as improving open-source software, contributing entries to Wikipedia, or detecting fraud and abuse in a government’s budget. Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a sophisticated statement of the crowdsourcing idea, albeit without a specific focus on civic renewal.

Helpfully, Shirky invokes Ronald Coase’s “theory of the firm,” first proposed in 1937. Coase set out to explain why firms existed, since one might expect that in a market, individuals would simply come together to produce and sell goods. In fact, that occasionally happens: some independent movies are made by ad hoc teams that hold together only for the duration of the production. But independent films are unusual; much more important in the global marketplace are relatively durable companies that have administrative hierarchies, clear boundaries, fairly stable personnel, and offices that serve regular functions, such as payroll, legal counsel, and sales.

Coase explained that the transaction costs necessary to put together ad hoc teams were usually too high; firms were more efficient, even though their bureaucracies introduced costs. One could say the same thing about not-for-profit associations in Coase’s era. Like firms, the NAACP, the Knights of Columbus, and the League of Women Voters saved transaction costs for individuals who were interested in working together.

However, as Shirky argues, information technology has now reduced transaction costs to the point that it is often no longer necessary to create firms or other organizations. He offers (pp. 31-33) a compelling example: the “extravagant and weird” Mermaid Parade in Coney Island, New York. This annual event is evidently worth documenting and describing in detail. Decades ago, it wouldn’t have been covered unless media companies sent reporters or someone organized a newsletter just for the parade. They would have needed funding, personnel, and an audience. But now, anyone who takes a picture or writes a blog post about the Mermaid Parade can cheaply give it away online. Moreover, if people use common phrases to identify (“tag”) all descriptions of the parade, then anyone who searches for those tags will find a whole anthology of descriptions and photos. The most popular material will rise to the top in the search results.

In this case, the traditional functions of a magazine are rendered superfluous by technology. So we should consider whether we could avoid the challenges of creating or strengthening civic organizations by issuing an open call to “crowdsource” civic renewal. In past eras of reform, organizations were certainly essential. The League of Women Voters was founded by women’s suffragists in 1920, on the eve of their winning the right to vote, as a durable mechanism for improving the quality of American democracy. In the same era, the great reform senator Robert M. La Follette tried to spark civic renewal with the People’s Legislative Service, the Progressive Party, and the NAACP, all groups that he founded or played a role in starting. Almost 50 years later, Ralph Nader launched Public Citizen and John Gardner founded Common Cause with similar methods and motivations. In each of these cases, leaders recruited members to contribute dues that paid for professional staff and overhead.

But in January 2010, a documentary filmmaker and political theorist named Annabel Park simply wrote a short manifesto on her Facebook page against the Tea Party, the conservative grassroots movement that had sprung up soon before. She defined her opposition not to conservatism but to divisiveness and negativity. Many thousands of people joined her on Facebook and began to form the alternative network that she recommended, called the Coffee Party. In less than a month, Park also had a video on YouTube that called for a movement, and within weeks, more than 400 face-to-face meetings of the Coffee Party had been held. By voting online, members of the free and open movement chose financial reform and campaign finance reform as their priorities and began to lobby Congress.

At first national meeting of the Coffee Party, in Louisville, KY, the legal scholar and activist Lawrence Lessig electrified the audience with a proposal to “crowdsource” campaign finance reform. In contrast (although not in opposition) to the traditional campaign finance reform organizations, such as Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, Lessig had created a loose, online network called Fix Congress First to lobby for reform. Visitors to his website were asked to organize local house parties, “spread the word,” pledge not to contribute financially to any federal candidates who refused to back reform, and contact Members of Congress. Because of a combination of its goal (nonpartisan political reform) and its format (loose, voluntary, and viral) Fix Congress First was a perfect match for the Coffee Party.

It would be risky to make any predictions about these developments so early in their history. I certainly hope they succeed and believe that they will contribute to the goals I care about. Yet I doubt it is fully possible to crowdsource civic renewal. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor who has deep understanding of democratic theory and civic themes, has been experimenting with crowdsourced journalism projects: efforts to generate valuable news and information by issuing open calls to volunteers. He has observed three preconditions for success. First, in a crowdsourced project, because people no longer sit together to discuss assignments, you need “extreme clarity about tasks and goals.” Lawrence Lessig, for example, asks volunteers to call specific members of Congress to ask them to support particular legislation. Rosen has had equal success posting lists of people who need to be interviewed and asking volunteers to conduct the interviews and post their notes online. But asking people to construct a whole news article, design legislation, or govern a local asset would require too much discussion and deliberation to succeed by crowdsourcing.

Second, an open call for assistance must go to a pre-existing group with a “shared background narrative.” In Rosen’s example, participants in the liberal blog Talking Points Memo were able to collaborate online on very short notice to scan a ream of leaked Justice Department documents to find embarrassing evidence about the Attorney General. They were successful because they already agreed on that goal, its importance, and what would count as relevant evidence. Most of the prominent examples of successful crowdsourcing come from domains such as software design, in which the goals are fairly self-evident. But politics is laden with values and is profoundly contentious, so that virtually no two people have exactly the same political objectives and beliefs. If their relevant values and ideas differ, they need to talk before they collaborate. They can certainly talk online instead of face-to-face, but their conversation needs structure and moderation. They can only crowdsource a problem once it has become a discrete element of some larger political project that they already share.

Finally, the example of Talking Points Memo points to a condition that is somewhat less explicit in Rosen’s presentation. The people who receive an open call must know and trust the person who sent it. As Rosen says, “If people have been following you, then you can enlist them.” For example, when the British newspaper The Guardian asked its readers to examine former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s financial documents to determine the sources of his income, they did so because they had expertise to contribute, they had received a clear request, they disliked Blair, and they trusted The Guardian. If I issued a call to help with some aspect of civic renewal, my friends might help. But my friends are not very numerous, and other people would have no reason to trust me or even to notice my call. The examples of successful “viral” messages, like Annabel Park’s manifesto for the Coffee Party, are vastly outnumbered by messages that no one reads but our own narrow circle of friends.

For civic renewal, these requirements create serious challenges. We do not have many people or organizations that are capable of issuing calls for help to large numbers of loyal followers. The hep they need is subtle and complex: developing ideas for legislation rather than simply calling members of Congress to vote for it. And even within the nascent civic renewal movement, differences of values, priorities, and tactics are profound, so participants would (understandably) want to debate before they acted. If the Coffee Party can morph into an organization, I will be excited. It has not shown that organizations are superfluous.

In short, I think crowdsourcing techniques will be valuable once we have moved to the point where we agree that we need information, money, or people to contact government or boycott particular industries. Those do not seem our most pressing needs at this point, except in areas like campaign finance reform where appropriate legislation is already before Congress. (But note that even a large number of phone calls will probably not get such legislation passed against the interests of major industries and incumbent politicians.)

Ian McKellen’s Now is the winter of our discontent

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I admire unexpected, imaginative stagings of Shakespeare that are not stunts but that reveal meanings in the original text. There are many such moments in Ian McKellen’s film version of Richard III (1995). He has cut and edited Shakespeare’s text heavily, but his reading is powerful and illuminating.

This clip shows the first 8 minutes, including Richard’s famous opening soliloquy, “Now is the winter of our discontent …” The movie actually begins with a preceding, wordless scene in which Richard murders Edward, Prince of Wales and Henry VI to put Edward IV (“the son of York”) on the throne. That scene vividly conveys that we are in England around 1930. There has been a fascist takeover, involving the military officer corps and the aristocracy, with the royal family as at least titular rulers. And there has been a bloody split among royal factions. The analogy to the Wars of the Roses five centuries earlier is provocative.

The clip opens with quick shots of several buildings that will serve as scenes and symbols in the film. Among others, these include St. Pancras Station, a great Victorian building (transported in the film to Westminster), which is Edward’s seat of government, and St. Cuthbert’s church in London, a fantastic example of late-Victorian Arts and Crafts style architecture, where a “merry meeting” will occur. These buildings stand for the old world (pre- World War I) that is Edward’s. Richard will govern from the fascist-looking, quasi-modernist Senate House building of the University of London. The soundtrack, meanwhile, is a big band rendition of Marlowe’s “Come Live with Me and By My Love,” which nicely marries the music of the 1930s with the language of the 1600s.

Before anyone speaks, we are quickly introduced to all the major characters. To name just a few, the loving Queen Elizabeth is shown playing and dancing with her innocent young son, later to be murdered in the Tower. The King is shown as a sick and aging Edwardian. The Duke of Buckingham is a cigar-puffing magnate, conspiring with the uniformed Richard like a Weimar industrialist with Hitler. Earl Rivers is the dissolute fellow leaving a tryst with a cabin attendant on a Pan Am flight.

Richard’s opening lines are presented as a public speech, not a soliloquy. From “Now is the winter …” to “… fright the souls of fearful adversaries,” he is addressing the court with a toast. (See 5:39 to 6:44 on the video.) These sentences are usually presented as sarcastic–delivered privately by a venomous, hunchbacked villain to himself or the audience. But they are literally words of praise, and in this rendition, Richard addresses them smilingly to the Yorkists.

But then, with “He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber” (line 22), Richard is alone, standing before a urinal and then a men’s room mirror. These are the kinds of private places where we rue our own deformities of body and of spirit. Richard then catches our eye in the mirror, turns directly to the camera, and tells us the truth: that he is “determined to prove a villain.” Throughout the movie, Richard will almost always dissemble to other characters but speak truthfully into the camera. Finally, around line 32, the scene moves to the Thames Bankside where Clarence is being transported to prison, and Richard becomes a narrator of events happening in real time.

McKellen has shrewdly divided the 35-line soliloquy into four rhetorical sections, delineating them with changes of settings and perspective, and thus revealing what I think is the real structure of the speech. The whole film is rich with such insights and recovers some of the original shock value of Shakespeare’s over-quoted but under-appreciated early play.