(2002-12-27) David Brin On Tolkien

David Brin on Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings (and abridged Salon version). This yearning makes sense if you remember that arbitrary lords and chiefs did rule us for 99.44 percent of human existence. It's only been 200 years or so - an eye blink - that "scientific Enlightenment" began waging its rebellion against the nearly universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture... Only something exceptional started happening. Bit by bit, the elements began taking shape for a new social and intellectual movement, one finally capable of challenging the alliance of warrior lords, priests, bards and secretive magicians... And yet, almost from its birth, the Enlightenment Movement was confronted by an ironic counterrevolution, rejecting the very notion of progress. The Romantic Movement erupted as a rebellion against the rebellion. In fairness, it didn't start out that way... In this conflict, J.R.R. Tolkien stood firmly for the past... Try as he might, and even confronted with the blatant Romantic excesses of Nazism, Tolkien could not escape his own deep conviction that democratic enlightenment and Modernity made up the greater Evil... And remember this too: Enlightenment, Science, Democracy and Equal Opportunity are still the true rebels, reigning for just a few generations (and still imperfectly) in one or two corners of the Earth, after elite chiefs, romantic bards and magicians dominated our ancestors for maybe half a million years. Don't you think a little pride in that rebellion - a radical revolution-in-progress, still fresh and incomplete - might be called for?... You are heirs of the world's first true Civilization, arising out of the first true revolution. Take some pride in it.

The 99.44 percent is cute, but of course totally off the mark. Most of human existence was before feudalism, before agriculture and metallurgy - Daniel Quinn's Leavers.

This doesn't change the fact that post-lords & chiefs cultures are emerging in the face of very roughly ten thousand of years of lords & chiefs cultures - Daniel Quinn's Takers. But it offers some hope that this third phase of human existence need not invent everything from scratch - we can draw on some of what worked for the Leavers.

In Daniel Quinn's writing he makes it clear that he does not mean that we need to "go back" to the earlier way of being. Sharif Abdullah, in Creating a World that Works For All, uses three terms - Keepers, Breakers and Menders to make this more explicit. --JohnAbbe