CHAPTER 10
The successes of The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars provide some answer to the cultural despair of many conservatives confronted with the apparent decay of traditional values, and to the despair of many anti-collectivists confronted with apparently well-entrenched collectivist and leftist values in areas of art and the imagination. It is an answer not merely to the now-discredited doctrines of leftism in the old-style sense of political Communism, but also to the much newer and more widespread and pervasive feelings of nihilism and alienation that appear to be succeeding them in many intellectual circles in Western society. It is an answer from the Underground, from traditional values driven into a "bootleg" form, an answer in children's language, it might be said, but an answer still.
Cultural modernism and political collectivism are not all-conquering, and perhaps, as Frodo says when, in one of the darkest moments in The Lord of The Rings, he sees a small flower growing like a crown on the ruined and defaced statue of an ancient king: "They cannot conquer forever!" The advances that modernism and collectivism have made may be more apparent than real.
Indeed this may now seem an overly cautious statement. Perhaps not only has the advance of collectivism been halted, but its retreat has begun. As we have all seen, the 1980s closed with what seemed a miracle, as the apparently immovable monoliths of the East European Communist States went down in an avalanche. Many things and people set it in motion, not least the determination and steadfastness of the leaders in that decade of the two greatest Western nations, but among the chief movers was an obscure Polish electrician: the image of a simple, humble man defeating and bringing to its knees a great tyrant state was not confined entirely to the realms of myth and fiction. By late 1989, Hungary's Communist Party had voted itself out of existence and the country was looking to the restoration of Saint Stephen's Crown to its flag, a non-communist government was formed in Poland, the East German, Czech, Bulgarian and Romanian regimes were in their death-throes and in China students had died beneath a home-made Statue of Liberty. A few months later it appeared that the break-up of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was beginning.
Watching, in November 1989, the amazing scenes of rejoicing crowds surging through breaches in the Berlin Wall, and then, a few days later, a half-million people in Prague cheering Alexander Dubcek's return, it was possible to think for a moment of the scene from "The Return of the King" in which, with the Ring destroyed and the Black Gate broken, "the power of Mordor was scattering like dust in the wind". Such triumphalism in the contemporary world would be premature, but it was still a more than merely notable sign of the times. The economic and political bankruptcy of collectivist doctrines was obvious. In the Soviet Union, in an astonishing piece of symbolism, a public religious service was held for the Russian royal family late in 1989, a brass band stumbling through the unfamiliar notes of "God Preserve the Czar".
On New Year's Day, 1990, President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia said:
Throughout the world, people are surprised that the acquiescent, humiliated, sceptical Czechoslovak people, who apparently no longer believed in anything, suddenly managed to find the enormous strength in the space of a few weeks to shake off the totalitarian system in a completely decent and peaceful way. We ourselves are also surprised at this, and we ask where the young people, in particular, who have never known any other system, find the source of their aspirations for truth, freedom of thought, political imagination, civic courage and civic foresight. How is it that their parents, the generation which was considered lost, also joined in with them? How is it even possible that so many people immediately grasped what had to be done, without needing anyone's advice or instruction? ...
[M]an is never merely a product of the world around him, he is capable of striving for something higher, no matter how systematically this ability is ground down ... the humanistic and democratic traditions -- which are often spoken about in such a hollow way -- nonetheless lay dormant somewhere in the subconscious of our nations ... and were quietly passed on from one generation to the next in order for each of us to discover them within us when the time was right ... (70)
It now seems certain that the cry "They cannot conquer forever!" is not all a matter of whistling in a gathering darkness. It is echoed by Michael Wharton, in his moving autobiography, The Missing Will. In that he writes:
[T]he barbarians, the materialists, the atheists, the levellers, the worshippers of perverted science, the destroyers of hierarchy and ritual splendour, would take over the world -- though not, of course, forever. To believe that would be ultimate despair.
The tale of the unexpected luck of widows' sons, of the knightly Quest, of chivalry against odds, of the slaying of dragons, of the noble king, the valiant warrior for good, the penultimate confrontation with the supreme Enemy, and the final, unexpected, unreasonable joy and reward remains, despite the propaganda barrage of a century and more, a central part of the Western psyche. It lives in chains of a sort, but it lives.
The tales that Bilbo, half-furtively, loved once in The Shire, are still the tales that are loved in the West. And Bilbo's remembering that he loved them was, at the beginning of The Hobbit, the first step towards living them in great adventures of whose coming true he had never dreamed.
The statement that "Tomorrow belongs automatically to no one" is the truth. Even as the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe seemed to be crumbling into dust, the question was being asked: "If Communism is dead, what will replace it?" Tolkien began, but never finished, a sinister tale set about a hundred years afier the downfall of Sauron called The New Shadow. And, again, as C.S. Lewis said in his first review of The Lord of The Rings:
But the text itself teaches us that Sauron is eternal ... that is its moral: a recall from facile optimism and waiting pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into Man's unhanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived.
Leftism is already trying to hijack the new revolutions in Eastern Europe. The long-established leftist hegemony of images and ideas is shown with pitiful clarity by the fact that the Chinese students had no more appropriate term than "Fascist" with which to curse their murderers. In Europe and the West in general much, perhaps most, of the intellectual attack on old-style Communism today is couched in terms of its development having betrayed or perverted collectivism, not in terms of collectivism being evil in itself. The anti-collectivist revival in economic and political thinking, and the popular and social revolt against Modernism, seem to have barely begun to impinge on much of the realm of ideas, on "higher" culture and art, as yet, and it is ultimately by the power of ideas with which the world is governed.
In the political world at the time of writing, China is slipping back into darkness. A lack of practical idealism and moral courage is shown in many aspects of Western political life and its political leadership, in things from niggardly aid to reborn Poland to the abandonment of Lithuania and of many brave and suffering but inconvenient Asian refugees.
On a less dire but still important scale, a lack of moral courage at the political level can be seen in many of the structural malaises of Western societies, inhibiting plainly-needed reforms that require a modicum of political leadership and the courage to tackle influential vested interests, as well as the courage to trust electorates to perceive long-term benefits in initially painful measures.
The cultural malaise identified in works from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind to Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities seems so pervasive that sometimes it is signs of cultural health rather than cultural sickness that seem exceptional and remarkable. Much of Western education, too, is an unmitigated disaster area. The magnitude of the cultural challenge is daunting. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe does not mean the "End of History" but a drawing of new battle-lines.
Still, if it cannot be said that the ideas of the intellectual West seem healthy or whole as yet, there are signs that the darkness can lift. The values of nobility, heroism, chivalry, can still touch hearts and minds all over the world, at least no less, it seems, than they ever did.
When the forces of collectivism and a particular type of cultural modernism, with their monopoly of much of the media through which cultural values and ideas are identified and publicised, speak so much to each other, their domination seems complete. But epic and history too are full of examples of armies, apparently all-conquering in their pride, that came after their collapse to be seen as dupes of their own propaganda. The other side was stronger than it looked.
It is fitting that these two works, whose unexpected successes and triumphs showed that the allies of the permanent things are legion, should repeat this story in their own histories.
The Emperor in the Star Wars galaxy was, as the end, a decaying, decrepit thing. As Tolkien said of Sauron, by the time he was demanding from his subjects the honours due to a god, he was in fact weaker than ever before.
Tomorrow belongs automatically to no-one, and we not only see and applaud from afar the tale, told to entertain or stir, of the heroic quest against great odds, but live in the same tale still.
The success of these two works shows that, for friends of the permanent Western values, there is hope. Those things that are summed up in words like heroism and nobility still touch the imagination of humanity. From The Lord of The Rings come the lines of Aragorn:
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
This is not a plea for conservatism as such. Western values and conservatism are by no means always the same thing, though recently they have been in de facto alliances in many places. What it says is this: many of the economic and intellectual arguments for freedom against collectivism and leftism have been won. In art, culture and imagination the values of the essential Western heritage can also win.
ENDNOTES
70. Quadrant, March 1990, page 19.
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