Fair to Middle Earth
Even the token conservative Catholic among the extensive stable of editorial writers employed by the New York Times enjoys only limited latitude in the opinions he is permitted to express in the pages of America's most influential organ of progressive piety. Although what Ross Douthat writes is more likely to be thoughtful, coherent, and prudent than most of what is on offer in the Times, it appears that he must still make concessions. Much as Christians in pagan Rome were permitted to worship Jesus so long as they were willing to burn an occasional pinch of incense to the divinity of the emperor; just so, writing for our nation's paper of record evidently requires everyone, even the man paid to be a conservative anomaly, to offer occasional obeisance to the gods of imperial progressivism.
A piece by Douthat in the New York Times of March 7, 2021, "Do Liberals Care If Books Disappear?", deplores the decision by the custodians of the copyright to the "Dr. Seuss" books, so popular among children, to withdraw from publication six of the books, deemed by a "panel of experts" to "portray people in ways that are hateful and wrong." Even as he inveighs against this example of "cancel culture," Douthat concedes, however, that "Western children's literature really has been influenced by imperialism and racism. The Babar books have obvious colonialist undertones." Then there is The Lord of the Rings, "with its Greco-Roman Gondorians besieged by darker races from the south and east": although it is "a work of genius," still, "Tolkien's chauvinism is a real moral and artistic flaw."
These problematic assertions seem to be Douthat's bit of incense in the sacrificial fire.
The Supposed Moral Defect
Let us begin by considering Tolkien's supposed moral flaw. If The Lord of the Rings is immoral insofar as it shows a "Greco-Roman" city overcoming against all odds an invasion by "darker races from the east and south," would the "moral flaw" be removed by making the beleaguered defenders of the city dark-skinned southeasterners and their assailants white "Greco-Roman" types? Or does proper deference to equity entail that both sides be utterly devoid of distinctive physical features or local origin?
Critical race theory, an element of the radical progressive vision that the New York Times seems to have accepted without qualification, maintains that "people of color" cannot be "racist," because white men of European extraction are historically privileged oppressors of dark-skinned victims. This would seem to favor the former alternative, since the latter implies that moral judgment can be rendered in an abstract, ahistorical vacuum.
Apparently then, the moral defect of Tolkien's great work is having depicted those "darker races from the east and south" as the villains, oppressors of the white "Greco-Romans," who not only achieve victory over an apparently invincible enemy, but who also represent the better cause. The notion that such a story is intrinsically immoral depends, however, on a view of history so occluded as to be merely risible, were its effects not so troubling. The history of the world is an account of the continual rise and fall of empires, of national groups moving out of one territory and invading and colonizing that of their neighbors, only to succumb themselves ultimately to defeat and colonization at the hands of yet other groups.
The most obvious example relevant to Tolkien's depiction of a conflict between white men from the Northwest and darker-skinned denizens of the Southeast would be the conflict between Islam and Christendom. Seven hundred years before what J. H. Parry calls The Establishment of the European Hegemony, 1415–1715 (1949, revd. 1959, 1966), Muslims, within a generation of the death of Mohammed, began to spread in all directions from the Arabian Peninsula, where Islam originated. By the time of Parry's terminus a quo for the rise of European exploration and conquest, Islamic armies in the service of a succession of caliphates and empires had invaded and subjected all of North Africa and the Middle East, and parts of Eastern Europe, formerly Christian lands, and made significant inroads in central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.
Even after the European nations had begun to emerge as global powers, Islam was still a dominant force: in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Turks largely controlled the Mediterranean Sea, threatening the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain; and in 1683, Turkish armies came close to overrunning Vienna—only a generation before Parry's terminus ad quem for the "establishment of the European hegemony." Muslims have hardly been perennial victims of Christian Europeans.
Imaginary yet Representative
The culmination the Turkish effort to rule the world in the name of Islam came in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople. And this brings us back to Tolkien—and Ross Douthat.
R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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