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On Tolkien and Orwell
- akomtu 5y agoTo put it short, Orwell described a society where Sauron had won.
- Jaruzel 5y agoSome would argue, that he wasn't wrong...
- DocTomoe 5y ago1984 was meant as a warning, but used as a manual.
- verisimi 5y agoYes. 1984 and Brave New World - written by old Etonians and Oxbridge students (Blair and Huxley) - were imaginative works that were about setting goals for the ruling elite. A visionary guide for the governance administrators and an (unheeded) warning for the rest of us.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoI think it can also be seen as a survival manual for someone who finds themself inside such a system already.
- arethuza 5y agoNot a very effective survival manual - by the end of the book Winston Smith has been broken and will soon be executed.
- gidorah 5y agoYeah, but Big Brother loves him! Always has done, always will.
- bell-cot 5y ago"survival manual" is perhaps not quite the right phrase...but watching someone else's failed attempts at a task can be very instructive.
- arethuza 5y agoPerhaps 1984 was itself written by the Thought Police to demonstrate the futility of rebelling against Big Brother....
- n4r9 5y agoThe atmosphere I remember from 1984 was one of futility. The state had locked down sufficiently that individual rebellion of any sort was infeasible. Am I misremembering?
- KineticLensman 5y agoThat's what I remember. The state itself has the rebellion, such as it is, totally under control, like everything else.
- agumonkey 5y agoA cautionary tale.
- SuoDuanDao 5y agoI consider it a memetic inoculation - certain things, like newspeak and erasing the past, just stand out as warning signs when one has read 1984 when otherwise one just thinks, "that's kinda weird".
- agumonkey 5y agoMatrix too.
- pjc50 5y agoIt (and Animal Farm) were depictions of Stalinism from the inside - historical fiction rather than science fiction.
- zaarn 5y agoNot really? 1984 was more written in reaction to the british intelligence appartus harassing him rather than Stalin, Orwell was quite a devout communist and that brought down the hammer of the british intelligence organisations on him, trying to censor him and make his life difficult. It isn't really a historical fiction of stalinism and more of living as a communist under the red scare in the western world.
- pjc50 5y agoWhile it's true that British intelligence were interested in him, he handed them a list voluntarily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list He was a democratic socialist, which put him strongly against actually existing capital-C Communism which was totalitarian and Stalinist. The "memory hole" bit is clearly based on how Trotsky was edited out of the official history, for example. This article cites opposition to Lysenkoism as a direct influence, as well: https://lithub.com/orwells-notes-on-1984-mapping-the-inspiration-of-a-modern-classic/ https://lithub.com/orwells-notes-on-1984-mapping-the-inspira...
- zaarn 5y agoVoluntarily handing over lists didn't seem to change much. And I don't believe one part of the story aligning with Trotsky quite erases that this story much more closely aligns with the treatment of Orwell at the hands of british authorities rather than Stalin's communism. For the "democratic socialist" part I would point out that Orwell sympathized with Anarchists in the Spanish revolution at minimum.
- thisNeeds2BeSad 5y ago[flagged]
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- lvxferre 5y agoThey might have different ideas, but they're still the product of the same time and culture. They're bound to have similar world views.
- tuvi13 5y agoTwo literary giants standing on the shoulders of other giants looking far into the future and seeing how history might repeat itself over and over again.
- adamc 5y agoThe weaknesses of leaders are human weaknesses. Look at Putin.
- ppsreejith 5y agoUpdate: I stand corrected, see comments below. He served with the communist POUM and sympathised with the anarchists. > Orwell was serving with a Marxist militia in the fight against fascism, in Spain Orwell actually fought on the side of the anarchists and their side was (later) betrayed by the communists as he mentions in the book: “Homage to Catalonia” Some Quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7293191-philosophically-communism-and-anarchism-are-poles-apart-practically-i-e-in-the https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7293191-philosophically-com... https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7663572-the-fat-russian-agent-was-cornering-all-the-foreign-refugees https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7663572-the-fat-russian-age... https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7455290-it-is-impossible-to-read-through-the-reports-in-the https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7455290-it-is-impossible-to...
- jhbadger 5y agoSort of. He (and POUM) were more anarchist than Marxist. And found themselves under fire but the actual Marxists nearly as much as by Franco's forces.
- arethuza 5y agoI thought POUM were communists, just not the Stalinist version of communism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POUM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POUM
- dghf 5y agoHe sympathised with the anarchists, and in retrospect wished he'd joined them, but the group he joined -- POUM -- were Marxist rather than anarchist, though not Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist (what most people would probably mean by Communist). The group is sometimes described as Trotskyite, but I believe it had already broken with Trotsky by the time Orwell joined. But its members were indeed the target of a purge by the Stalinists and their allies in the Republican government. So Orwell was one of the few authors, possibly the only author, to have been shot by Fascists and nearly shot by Stalinists, which probably explains in part the burning distaste for both ideologies evident in 1984.
- marsven_422 5y ago
- flyinghamster 5y agoAnother theme that they share is the dangers of technology. The telescreens of 1984 and the palantíri of Lord of the Rings have a lot in common - both are subject to manipulation that can require a great deal of will to see through.
- javajosh 5y agoThis is covered in the essay, as the author notes that both men are, if not techno-phobic, then certainly not techno-philic. It's not just the Palantiri either, it's also Sauruman. Treebeard explains to Merry and Pippin: >"[Saruman] is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment" (Tolkien) The phrase "a mind of metal and wheels" has always stuck with me as a pejorative; this is in contrast with modern phrases like, "He's a machine!" said in a positive way. The mind of metal and wheels is transactional, utilitarian, devoid of sentiment. It would be more like a natural process than a person, if not for ego.
- deckiedan 5y agoFor me 'a mind of metal and wheels' was more the desire for control, conformance, and imposed will, rather than the engagement and interaction-with required for working with natural processes, trees, flowers, etc - where you can't force things to happen a specific way, you have to work with them...
- mellavora 5y ago> The mind of metal and wheels is transactional, utilitarian, devoid of sentiment. It would be more like a natural process than a person I basically like where you are going with this, but wonder why you then say that a transactional/utilitarian process is like a natural process? Nature as Tolkien seemed to understand it would be anything but transactional and utilitarian.
- javajosh 5y ago>why you then say that a transactional/utilitarian process is like a natural process? Because it's impersonal. There's no chooser, it's like the planets zooming around the sun. It is a clockwork that we can understand, but not affect. It doesn't know or care about us - we happen to live on one of the cogs, but the planetary machine would function smoothly with or without any life on the 3rd planet. Capitalism is much like this. Institutions of a certain size can be like this. Being stuck in a machine is the context of "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg [0]. It is also the subtext of the remarkable "Blame!" anime, a drama that takes place among humans and robots that live as vermin in an automated city that takes little notice of them [1]. Or a more traditional treatment, with a very powerful Mech civilization dominating humans in Benford's Great Sky Rivier [2]. 0 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl 1 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6574146/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6574146/ 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sky_River_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sky_River_(novel)
- KineticLensman 5y agoI think some of the comparisons are a bit superficial. E.g. the all-seeing eye of Sauron and the panopticon gaze of Big Brother. The supplied quotes actually show that one failed (Sauron didn't perceive Frodo until it was too late) while Big Brother's succeeded. In fact there are several places in the LoTR where Sauron is definitely not all-seeing, and fails to see what is going on, notably with respect to the heirs of Isildur, the locations of the Elven rings, the betrayal of Saruman, and others. And while I accept some of the academic similarities between Tolkien and Orwell, their own life trajectories were radically different. Tolkien's experienced the horror of WW1 but apart from that lived comfortably in domestic happiness (once he was able to marry his childhood sweetheart) in academia. Orwell had a much wider array of experiences including Imperial administration in Burma, civil war in Spain and extreme personal poverty. He was a prolific writer on social and political issues, while Tolkien, bless him, was deep down the rabbit hole of Middle Earth (as demonstrated by his writings and letters). I like and admire both authors.
- gumby 5y agoI agree: it’s more reasonable to consider them as two poles of an English literary tradition, both espousing the cause of the “doughty Englishman” (also expressed by Shakespeare’s references to the commoners accompanying Henry V), but with Orwell despairing of their state. and Tolkien celebrating it. Another contemporary whom I associate with that Weltanschauung is T. H. White, though his perspective, IMHO, is more High Tory.
- arethuza 5y agoThere wasn't really a "panopticon gaze of Big Brother" - only the Outer Party were heavily monitored as these were the only people who could be a threat to the Inner Party. Edit: About ~13% of the population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oligarchical_Collectivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oli...
- KineticLensman 5y ago> There wasn't really a "panopticon gaze of Big Brother" - only the Outer Party were heavily monitored as these were the only people who could be a threat to the Inner Party. Okay, it might not have been a total panopticon (my poor wording), but Big Brother seems not to have had the massive blind-spots that Sauron did.
- kornhole 5y agoWhen I rarely switch my GrapheneOS phone off airplane mode, I feel like Bilbo putting on the ring. The eye of Sauron is upon me.
- Barrin92 5y agoI think both fit very well within the trope that Leo Marx when talking about American literature called the Machine in the Garden[1] myth. It's a sort of story in which authors long for pastoral, naturalistic settings that are small scale and untouched by machinery, and so forth. This is both found in Orwell's democratic Socialism as well as in Tokien's idealized Christian community that is Hobbingen. Orwell of course literally attacks Stalinism and I always interpreted Tolkien's work as doing the same thing, not entirely sure how else to interpret Saruman industrializing the Shire, even though he of course always denied these parallels. Personally I never really could stand this kind of literature for a lot of the reasons Asimov talks about in his review of 1984[2]. It's parochial, technophobic, stereotypically English with its snobbish attitude towards literature, ink quills, pipes and so on and paranoid about anything that seems like popular mass culture or too large or organized in scal or in any other way related to modernity. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_in_the_Garden [2]http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
- x3iv130f 5y agoIt is worth being said that Isaac Asimov was a very passionate reader of Lord of the Rings and similarly Asimov's science-fiction works were one of the very few modern works Tolkien enjoyed reading in his old age.
- DeathArrow 5y agoEach pair of two random people will have things in common and points where they are different. This article failed to make a point, to tell us why similarities and differences between the two might be interesting.
- tdumitrescu 5y agoFor those interested in the subject, the latest Dave Eggers novel (_The Every_) is a really entertaining take on it. Starts out as amusing Silicon Valley satire about the absurdity of the tech giants, and gets very 1984 by the end.
- Maursault 5y ago> detest French cooking > Tolkien bemoaned “the medieval take-over of the English language by Norman French”. Unsure of Orwell's feelings, but Humphrey Carpenter wrote that Tolkien suffered from Gallophobia (the root is Gaul), a hatred of all things French.
- DonaldPShimoda 5y agoHence Bilbo living at Bag End instead of a cul-de-sac!
- billfruit 5y agoDo we know what were Tolkiens thoughts on Empire, and its champions like Churchill? Who did Tolkien most likely vote for? Conservatives?
- _0ffh 5y agoAs he developed more and more into an anarchist throughout his life, I suppose he was not a fan of Empire. But he was a stout catholic and somewhat conservative.
- x3iv130f 5y ago“I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust…” - Tolkien - Letter 100 "For I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!))." - Tolkien - Letter 50 Tolkien hated anything based upon coercion or domination. Whether it was machines that tore up the land and forests or people that forced others into subservience.
- DonaldPShimoda 5y ago> Tolkien [...] published The Hobbit – a quaint novel for children with dwarfish miners [...] It is certainly a minor point, but Tolkien was adamant about using "dwarves" instead of "dwarfs" and "dwarvish" instead of "dwarfish" whenever writing about Durin's folk. I find this especially important considering the author of this article later writes: > Orwell’s brand of democratic Socialism (he always capitalised the “s”) [...] If the author is willing to capitalize "Socialism" because of Orwell's preference, then I think it is not unreasonable to ask that they also use the adjective "dwarvish" when referring to the dwarves of Tolkien's writings.
- munch117 5y ago> "genuine belief in equality and democracy" Wtf? LOTR is deeply authoritarian. Sam is constantly praised for his subservience to his master. Rulers are only proper rulers if they come from the correct bloodline - the bloodline of other rulers before them. I love Tolkien for basically inventing the fantasy genre. But please don't try to paint him as some kind of admirable political thinker.
- Lio 5y agoHaha that’s so true. I always loved the way they send it up in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. There’s more than a few current “leaders” that could learn from it: King Arthur: I am your king. Peasant Woman: Well, I didn't vote for you. King Arthur: You don't vote for kings. Peasant Woman: Well, how'd you become king, then? [Angelic music plays... ] King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king. Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. Arthur: Be quiet! Dennis the Peasant: You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!