The Reason Many Despise Tolkien's Work

Faux Protests and Outrage

We have been recently working through Matthew Dickerson's A Hobbit Journey (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press/Baker Publishing, 2012).  Dickerson has a PhD from Cornell and teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.  In A Hobbit Journey, he attempts an exposition of Tolkien's world-and-life view as it emerges in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

At one point he takes up the issue of why Tolkien is loathed by many of the high priests and prophets of our secularist age. He argues that it is due in significant part to Tolkien's notions of objective morality and moral responsibility.  He explains:

Objective morality--or what some people call "moral absolutes"--is a definition of good and evil that is real and true for every person (and every culture), regardless of whether that person (or culture) happens to believe it to be true. [Dickerson, op cit., p. 127.]

Tolkien's mindset believes in objective morality and moral absolutes.  The modern world does not.  Therefore, for many amongst the chattering classes and the Commentariat, much of his corpus appears odd, at best, childish,simplistic, and superstitious at worst.  His is the shawl of the Grand Anachronism.

Dickerson employs an illustration to explain the contrast between Tolkien's philosophic and religious principles and those of the modern age.

Consider a computer virus.  No matter how inconvenient or destructive it is, a computer virus is just an impersonal collection of computer code composed of bits (zeros and ones) on a computer.  A virus has no will of its own and cannot be considered evil or immoral. . . .

Now suppose that a person who commits a heinous crime is only acting as he or she is programmed to do, as a materialist world view states is the case. . . . Then by no means can that person be evil; only the programmer of that person can be evil.  In this case, however, the programmer is believed to be a blind, impersonal force.  In short, where there is no choice at all, there can be no moral (or immoral) choice.  In a merely material world, we may at worst consider another person's actions as inconvenient to us; we cannot call them "evil" or "immoral."  Or, if we do, then we are really only calling "immoral" the universe itself . . . . I any case, the word immoral has no meaning in this context. [Ibid., p. 128.]

Does this sound familiar?  It is everywhere around us.
  The materialist world--the worldview in which we in the West live and move and the vast majority have their being--has no moral guilt, only inconvenience.  When people commit terrible crimes--no problem.  The "system" has just become inconvenient.  It must be adjusted and changed to become more amenable to our views.  Society has failed.  The government must do something--and that something almost always has to do with changing and adjusting the environment.  Tweak the program.  Hence the people spit, bray, and protest--to the governmental authorities--to get off their lazy backsides and do a few program tweaks to adjust the system.  It's all facile and easy really.  Naturally, when gummint fails in its re-programming efforts (all too often making the inconvenience worse) the people get really, really incensed.

In summary, two fundamental notions dominate our modern world.  The first is that because all there exists is matter--atomic and sub-atomic particles whizzing around--there is no objective morality or absolute evil.  Whether the sun shines or not on a particular day is neither bad nor good.  It just is what it is.
In any case the word immoral has no meaning in this context. We are stuck saying, as the famous twentieth-century materialist philosopher Bertrand Russell writes, "When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is the result of antecedent causes."  The language of "good" and "evil" (or "wickedness") has been replaced by that of "convenience" and "annoyance".  That's why Tolkein's corpus, which insists on the existence of absolute good, and of true moral evil, is regarded as fundamentally stupid, for that silly idiosyncratic had not subscribed to the materialistic world-view.

Secondly, what the secularist and materialist world regards as moral virtue or goodness is only what it has grown used to and what the electrons and sub-atomic particles that make up our beings have determined by their all-encompassing programming.  Consequently when what we have become familiar and comfortable with starts to become uncomfortable or annoying, it is realistic or reasonable to believe we can reprogram ourselves and our society.  We can reprogram ourselves into homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals--and whatever, for example.

But in this modern worldview there is a catch.  The only moral absolute is that no-one may deny or question this world view.  We must tolerate all, except the intolerance of any who dare reject materialism.  If anyone becomes judgmental and intolerant of others, the sinister implication is that they are not true believers in materialism and secular atheism.  Being heretics, they deserve judgement and punishment.

And our retort to that damning accusation is merely to point out that indeed the accusation is true: we are definitely not believers in materialism and secular atheism.  We have, moreover, noticed in passing that the high priests and prophets of secularism don't like exposure.  They don't like to be identified as being advocates for a peculiar worldview and religion in their own right.  The enemy's strongest weapon is to bray about the certainty of his position. He would much prefer not to have to argue for it.  

It is precisely at that point that the dragon has lost his scales and is vulnerable.  As the old adage has it, "Methinks he protests too much."