Mania for Iconoclasm?

CONTENTS

1. Mania for Iconoclasm?
2. Patterns of Epic
3. The Designs
4. The Western Romance
5. Wars, Heroes and Modernism
6. Attack on The Lord of The Rings
7. The Attack Consolidated
8. Attack on Star Wars
9. Religion in the Epics
10. Answer from the Underground

---

A NOTE ON NAMES:

Proper names of books, films, etc. are given in italics, except that names of sections within The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars (for example, "The Two Towers", "A New Hope") are given in inverted commas.

---

CHAPTER 1

In the late twentieth century every traditional Western value, system of ethics and art form is collapsing.  The notions of chivalry, heroism, nobility and valour which permeated traditional Western culture have vanished as if they had never been.  The culture previously based on these notions is being radically transformed.

Well, possibly.  But against this background of apparently endless upheaval and collapse there have emerged popularly successful works of literature and films that reveal strong underlying elements of traditional Western values.  This offers hope for the continuation of the Western tradition, for these new expressions of the old culture have achieved not only an immediate but a lasting popularity around the world.  Such works are multiple and diverse.  Two of the most popular and significant were the long heroic fantasy The Lord of The Rings, whose first volume was published in the early 1950s, and the film trilogy Star Wars, whose first segment was released in 1977, and which have remained continuously successful.

These works, and the deep responsive chords they struck, were important as indicators of the state of Western (and, in the time of the global village, of international) culture.  This study looks principally at them as major examples, but also looks in passing at some of the many others of the same tradition -- which, despite possible appearances to the contrary, is a continuing stream in Western culture.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was relatively little that could be said against the observation or impression that the collapse of traditional "Western" values seemed to affect all aspects of life.  The anti-hero, in various aspects, seemed to dominate "high", "serious" or intellectually fashionable culture.  Serious literature and art had largely embraced Nihilism, and established religions seemed to have become, as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, a matter of "crazed clergy, empty churches, and total doctrinal confusion".  Bizarre pseudo-religious cults flourished and grew.

American failure in Vietnam cast doubts on the ultimate strength of Western arms.  Over several decades pseudo-Keynesian economics had eroded the stability and value of money, and undercut ideas of provision for the future.  There were big changes in acceptable sexual behaviour and in family structures.  A drug culture revolutionised notions of glamour, personal decorum, and even music, and a succession of playwrights revolutionised the theatre.  Positivism and situation ethics advanced from university departments to permeate the general background of intellectual life.

Much of this derived from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.  By the earlier part of the twentieth century it had come to be associated with secularisation and social transformism.  Influential names associated with this movement in various ways were innumerable.  They included, to mention only a few, Rousseau, Bertrand Russell, Frazer, Huxley, Wells, Freud, Madame Blavatsky, and Lenin. ⁽¹⁾  It is impossible to give a history of the phenomenon here, but a few examples of important spokesmen for it may be quoted.

Addressing a Komsomol congress on the subject of Communist ethical thought in 1920, Lenin stated:

Morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new society ... We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we expose the falseness of all fables about morality. ⁽²⁾

Putting the same notion in a manner perhaps more acceptable to the progressive Western readers of the day, the influential socialist historical populariser and propagandist R.H. Tawney, wrote in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, published in 1926:

Circumstances alter from age to age and the practical interpretation of moral principles must alter with them ...

In 1946 the Canadian scientist Brook Chisholm, who had built up the World Health Organisation, acted for five years as its Secretary-General, and who was eventually elected President of the World Federation of Mental Health, had written on the need to abolish ideas of right and wrong in the following terms:

The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objects of psychotherapy ... the suggestion that we should stop teaching children moralities and right and wrong ... has of course to be met by an outcry of heretic or iconoclast such as was raised against Galileo for [sic] finding another planet, [but] the fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and many other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains ... The race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil. ⁽³⁾

This may seem an extraordinary prescription to put forward in the aftermath of Auschwitz, but it was a pervasive attitude among progressive thinkers, and at times seemed (correctly or otherwise) to be simple scientific orthodoxy.  For instance, Sir Julian Huxley, well-known scientific author and former Director-General of UNESCO, said in 1962:

In adapting our old education system to our new vision a lot of cargo will have to be jettisoned -- once noble but now mouldering myths ... There are no Absolutes of truth or virtue, only possibilities of greater knowledge and greater perfection ... ⁽⁴⁾

A few years later, in 1965, Philip Johnson, speaking on the BBC with Susan Sontag, summed up the development of this outlook at a time when ideas of anti-heroism and moral relativity seemed to dominate the cultural and intellectual establishment:

What good does it do you to believe in good things? ... It's feudal and futile.  I think it much better to be nihilistic and forget all about it.

This moral relativism extended into established Western religions.  Vatican II and its aftermath revolutionised much of the Catholic Church.  Other modernists revolutionised the Protestants.  While the evangelical and fundamentalist churches gained some converts, and made notable progress in the so-called Third World, the emptying of the traditional Western churches grew apace.  Christianity was, moreover, confronted for the first time in centuries with a resurgent Islam.

Meanwhile, in what may be seen as one of the most important and enlightening comments about the politics of artistic and cultural modernism, the British Marxist art critic Sir Herbert Read wrote:

Everywhere the greatest obstacle to the creation of the new social reality is the cultural heritage of the past -- the religion, the philosophy, the literature and art which makes up the whole complex ideology of the bourgeois mind. ⁽⁵⁾

In is not necessary to subscribe to wide-ranging conspiracy theories to see how pervasive these notions had become.  Many things were happening at once, which seemed to have in common the destruction of traditional values in all sorts of fields including art, literature, ethics, religion and politics.  The New Left revolutionised the notion of Revolution itself, and these various revolutions compounded one another.  Some saw a "mania for iconoclasm" abroad, with something profoundly self-destructive at the heart of it, and, for those who cared, it was possible to read an ominous warning in Golo Mann's description of the Weimar Republic:

What an intellectual babble of voices, that Weimar Republic! ... Philosophers demonstrating that there was no longer time for any philosophy, sociologists unmasking all creeds, values and moral standards ... legists affirming that the very notion of natural justice was a hoax and any positive law, duly codified, was as good as another -- far too many people assiduously sawing off the branch on which other people or they themselves were sitting.  There was then, I should say, too much intellectual freedom ... and all of a sudden there was none. ⁽⁶⁾

Observers such as former Private Eye editor Christopher Booker in the England of "Swinging London" identified a profound cultural sickness behind the craving for the "new".  The American liberal Lionel Trilling saw a "bitter line of hostility to civilisation" as the characteristic element of the most highly-developed modern literature.  Writing later in Encounter, British social scientist Jeffrey Richards claimed, not as one revealing a radically new idea but more with the air of re-stating a truism:

Sportsmanship along with chivalry fell out of favour in the 1960s.  Satirists ridiculed them.  They were deemed old-fashioned and class-based attitudes.  The twin processes of disillusionment with the status quo and liberation from restraint are reflected in the characteristic products of 1960s cinema ... the working-class heroes of the social realist dramas, like Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ("all I want is a good time -- all the rest is propaganda") ... the ubiquitous spy films embodied the twin faces of the '60's stance -- the le Carré style (bleak, bitter, anti-Establishment tone, with suave, heartless spymasters manipulating ordinary fall guys) ... and the Bond style (conspicuous consumption, colour-supplement chic, comic-strip sex and violence). ... The whole thrust of popular culture in the 1960s constituted a massive rejection of the old value-systems. ⁽⁷⁾

Worse symptoms of cultural disease than this were diagnosed.  A couple of comments by informed contemporary observers will stand for many more.  In the London Daily Telegraph, the columnisl Michael Wharton ("Peter Simple"), one of the most perceptive and thought-provoking conservative journalists of the age, wrote in late 1967:

"Vulgarity, ridicule and spectacle.  These are the three absolutes of the New York underground drama today," says a newspaper article, "It is an increasingly successful formula."

The article describes some of these dramatic offerings:  "At the moment you can see two plays dealing graphically with narcissism and rape ... "Conquest of the Universe" is ... played in a style of exuberant lewdness ... Unnameable acts are casually performed on stage and in the final scene nine new-born infants are carved up with a dinner knife.  The whole thing is hysterically amusing."

The whole thing must certainly be hysterically amusing to the single-minded enemies of the United States in Moscow and elsewhere, who will conclude, rightly or wrongly, that a nation which permits such increasingly successful spectacles will neither survive nor deserve to do so.

As for us in the West, less single-minded and more sophisticated, what should be our critical reaction?  We may search for appropriate phrases ... "alienation" ... "problem of non-communication" ... "neo-expressionism with dadaistic elements" ... "Theatre of the Abominable" ... "fearless confrontation in theatrical terms with the human predicament in the post-Christian era ..."

But at the back of them all there seems to nag at the mind some other critical reaction, older, simpler, and more universally applicable than any of them both to art and to life.  What can it be?  "Deliver us from evil"? ⁽⁸⁾

In his 1972 collection of essays, Nine Lies About America, a vast and rich compendium of then current intellectual and cultural pronouncements, the outstanding American scholar and former trade union official, Arnold Beichman, wrote:

[O]ne must ask in sadness, and even desperation, whether a country and its culture can survive such a decadent onslaught on thought and rationality.

These warnings were not the apocalyptic prognostications of simple-minded millenarian fanatics.  On the contrary, their authors were among many wise, intelligent and cultured men, drawing what seemed to be inevitable conclusions from the cultural despair and destructiveness of the day, men whose own powerful writings may have made a real difference in preventing the coming to pass of the cultural and political disasters they warned against.

*     *     *

After the first half of the 1970s some things changed.  Dissident writers from Communist countries, Solzhenitzyn pre-eminent amongst them, did much to expose the nature of Communism to a new generation in the West, as did the stories of horror that escaping refugees brought from Liberated Vietnam.  The former editors of Ramparts magazine, a leader of anti-American new leftism in the 1960s, now called for aid to Afghanistan not as a CIA secret but as a matter of public policy and national honour.  Conservative or neo-conservative values seemed to be regaining strength in intellectual circles.  Meanwhile, economists influenced by the Austrian and Chicago schools began to reassert the values of free markets, breaking the spell of Keynes in the West.  The decade ended with the landslide victory of an American president who promised a renewed commitment to the defence of freedom and the restoration of Western military strength.  Britain saw the election of a Conservative prime minister whose values were set against statism and social engineering.  The styles of both these leaders were in striking contrast to those of their dim, time-serving predecessors.  Furthermore, they were elected in spite of the extreme hostility shown towards them by much of the intellectual, cultural and artistic "establishments" in both countries.  Not long afterwards, public responses to the British campaign in the Falklands and the American operation in Grenada showed feelings of traditional patriotism to be strong in both these societies.

Even in communist states the economic disasters of collectivism came -- at first gradually -- to be acknowledged, and in many parts of the world, with the plain failure of statist planning to deliver on its promises of material abundance, statism moved into retreat.  As an economic system, democratic capitalism operating in a free-market economy had abundantly proved itself.

Beyond this, it was becoming evident that the ethical revolution had not succeeded.  In the light of the experiences of the Age of Ideologies, the whole group of concepts associated with moral relativism was becoming utterly discredited, in societies like those of Eastern Europe at least.  Again, the voice of Solzhenitzyn was among the most important here.  In Poland, values and notions apparently hopelessly reactionary began to reassert themselves with strength and courage.  In 1984 a persecuted Czech dissident named Vaclav Havel, speaking valiantly out of an apparently endless and hopeless darkness, was able to say:

It is becoming evident that wholly personal categories like good and evil still have their unambiguous content, and, under certain circumstances, are capable of shaking the seemingly unshakeable power with all its armies of soldiers, policemen and bureaucrats ... ⁽⁹⁾

As the 1980s began, then, anti-leftists and anti-collectivists could feel they might be more than a doomed remnant vainly shouting "Stop!" to history.  But as the decade moved towards its close, they could feel more than that:  suddenly the bankruptcy of political collectivism was obvious from Hungary across the Soviet Union to China.  In one of the most astonishing political revolutions in the history of the world, Communist governments and parties in country after country of Eastern Europe handed over power or voted themselves out of existence.

There was also, in many circles in the West, a widespread if still inchoate questioning of the results of morally relativistic education, and a feeling that something had gone amiss with the application of notions and values which had been hailed by the consensus of intellectuals as progressive and inevitable.  In January 1987, Lawrence Kohlberg, a professor of Educational Philosophy at Harvard University whose theory, that moral judgement develops spontaneously in a sequence of upward stages but cannot be taught, had been enormously influential in moral education (see Chapter 5), walked into an icy tidal marsh on Boston Harbour and drowned himself.  It seemed, perhaps, symbolic of changing times.  In Afghanistan, it was shown that technologically poor tribal people inspired by an ancient faith could defeat a great scientific military power.

Setting aside the great events in Eastern Europe, however, in the West this was a strangely incomplete defeat for collectivism, confined largely to sectors of the economic front.  Collectivist dominance of acceptable cultural values and the realm of the human imagination seemed largely unchallenged.

Furthermore, there seemed in the West, if one believed what one read, to be no sense of cultural renewal.  In particular, there seemed to be a continuing decay of moral consciousness, expressed in, for example, a decline in religious values.  In one example among many of this view, the theological writer and former Jesuit priest Malachi Martin, while holding that "the Christian viewpoint is still the viewpoint of the majority", wrote in 1976 of:

[T]he insistence of latter-day opinion-makers that the religious view of good and evil is outdated. ... In our mass entertainment -- motion pictures, television, novels, theatre -- there are no hero figures and no concept of right and wrong, good and evil.  We are shown human life as alternating between a bleak despair and a desperate struggle with banal forces against which our only allies are ourselves and our own resources. ⁽¹⁰⁾

In the same year John Lennon, of The Beatles, expressed a rather similar idea:

If the kids have nobody bigger to believe in than people like us, there's not much hope for them.

Throughout these decades Leftism and varieties of Nihilism apparently held the cultural high ground.

*     *     *

It is because of this apparent state of affairs that the successes of The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars are culturally significant.  They were a small part of a thorough-going revolution, which may still be only beginning.  In retrospect, 1977, the year of the release of Star Wars, might have been a watershed.  The next year, The Times commented that it had become much harder than a decade previously to find collectivist writers (that is, political essayists) of "any mental vitality at all ... the gas has gone out of the bag". ⁽¹¹⁾  The major intellectual history of collectivist thought to be published during this period, Leszek Kolakowski's magisterial Main Currents of Marxism, ⁽¹²⁾ plainly suggested an analogy between Marxism and an organic life-cycle approaching the end of its days.  And by September 1982 it was possible for Hilton Cramer to write in The New Criterion that "Scandal no longer attaches to the idea that modernism has run its course".

Not too much importance should be given to two fantasy tales in the area of immediate practical politics, but the fact that they had some symbolic and symptomatic significance is undeniable.  The British leftist historian and CND activist E.P. Thompson, for example, claimed that President Reagan's perception of the world came "from too much early reading of The Lord of The Rings". ⁽¹³⁾  The label "Star Wars" was attached to the US Strategic Defence Initiative as part of a campaign to discredit it.

I do not intend to suggest here that these two tales created a significant change in culture or values.  The people of Eastern Europe did not need stories from another society to tell them of the necessity of resisting evil.  These tales, along with many other things, may have made some contribution in the West.  Culture is made up of many influences.  In particular, I find it easy to believe that "early reading of The Lord of The Rings" and other literature of the same sort might well help to confirm or reinforce existing moral, ethical and cultural notions.  Far more significant for our purposes here, however, was the way in which they reflected and expressed the values of a strong and continuing culture whose existence had been discounted by much conventional wisdom.

I have tried to concentrate on a cultural rather than a literary or artistic analysis of these works.  I have also tried to bear in mind Gandalf's injunction that he who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.  This study is concerned only minimally with the technical construction of either work, and hardly at all with the tracing of direct sources which may have acted on J.R.R. Tolkien or George Lucas, a game to which I see little point.  It is not a piece of conventional literary or film criticism.

Finally, I have found no alternative to using words and phrases like "popular culture", "Western", "collectivism" and "modernism" to describe briefly things which some may feel need complex and elaborate definition.  Apart from anything else, space makes such a task impossible and if definitions are felt to be inadequate I can only ask for a common-sense understanding of these terms.

---

ENDNOTES

1.  See e.g., Paul Johnson's Intellectuals (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988).  The admittedly ad hominem elements of Johnson's arguments do not detract from the great value and interest of this study.

2.  Quoted in Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford University Press, 1978), Volume II ("The Golden Age"), pages 515-516.

3.  George Brook Chisholm, "The Re-establishment of peacetime society", the Williams Alanson White Memorial Lecture, quoted in F.A. Hayek, New Studies (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pages 16-17.

4.  Julian Huxley, "Education and Humanism", the ninth Fawley Lecture, reprinted in Essays of a Humanist (Pelican books, 1966), page 127.

5.  Sir Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (Frederick A. Preager, 1986), page 16.

6.  Golo Mann:  "The Intellectuals:  Germany", Encounter, June 1955, page 47.

7.  Jeffrey Richards:  "The Hooligan Culture", Encounter, November 1985, page 22.

8.  Reprinted in Michael Wharton:  Peter Simple:  The Stretchford Chronicles (Paper-mac, 1980) pages 121-122.

9.  Quoted in Quadrant, (Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, Sydney) March 1990, page 18.

10.  Malachi Martin, Hostage to the Devil (Century Hutchinson, 1976) page 409.

11.  "On the side of Liberty", leading article, September 27, 1978.

12.  Kolakowski, op. cit., 1978.

13.  See Chapter 7.