Epic Pooh-poohing
As an apt follow up to our last topic, this is but a brief but telling quote from Michael Moorcock concerning Professor Tolkien:
Like Chesterton, and other orthodox Christian writers who substituted Faith for artistic rigour he [Tolkien] sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalized in such fiction because, traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo. They are a type familiar to anyone who ever watched an English film of the thirties and forties, particularly a war-film, where they are represented solid good sense opposed to a perverted intellectualism. — from Michael Moorcock, EPIC POOH
The paragraph come from an essay by Mr Moorcock, author of the Elric stories, where he attempt to prove, ah, pardon me, I misspoke, where he asserts without even making a token attempt at proving so as to buffalo the unwary, that Professor Tolkien’s popularity can be explained by saying the childish rhythm of Tolkien’s language lulls we admirers of Tolkien into sleep. Because we Tolkien fans are stupid and infantile fools, dontcha know.
The paragraph is exceptional in that it contains an error or two in every line. Let us note them, line by line.
First, we orthodox Christian writers do not substitute faith for artistic rigor, whatever that means. The comment is merely a slander, or a sneer, meant to create the impression that Christianity (which can properly take credit for the novel, the cathedral, and polyphonic music) is naturally unartistic, and that antichristianity (which can properly take credit for absurdism, cubism, atonal music) is artistic.
If it is objected that Moorcock here means only that some orthodox Christians substitute faith for artistic rigor, and G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien are among those few, the comment is a slander or a sneer delivered against two men of letters of considerably more accomplishment than enjoyed by the author of SWORDS OF MARS.
To be fair, Mr Moorcock wrote considerably more books than this, or, to be precise, endless variations of the same book, all with the same main character, the Eternal Champion, and the same dreary plot, that life is a disappointing betrayal. The themes and plots are predigested. I know of no author in the fantasy field who exercises less artistic rigor.
Second, the honest workingmen are the main bulwark against Mr Moorcock’s chaos because, unlike the rich elite and the morally crippled intellectuals, they are honest. They work for a living, and not in the field of arts and letters, which goes a long way toward detoxifying an intellectual from addiction to bogus theories, nihilism and radicalism. Honest workingmen whine less than the Moorcocks of the world. Hence it is merely honest to portray honest workingmen as honest.
Moorcock portrays workingmen according to the sterile and unimaginative categories of the Class Struggle, in this case condemning them as collaborators with the sinister forces of the status quo, on the rather dubious grounds that they are the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social order. Here, one is left to speculate whether Mr Moorcock knows any workingmen, or whether, like Marx who never set foot in a factory in his life, takes all his opinions about real world conditions from unreal theory, speculation, and daydream. Workingmen complain.
For those of you who have forgotten, the Class Struggle was for decades, the one-answer-fits-all punchline of every line of thought a leftwing so-called intellectual ever ventured. The utterly unimaginative nature of the rote answer was attractive in that it required no thought and no imagination to recite. One merely eructated it on command, like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Then in the 1980’s the fashion changed, and so the Class Struggle was flushed down the Orwellian memory hole, and replaced with the struggle against classism, racism, sexism, Islamophobia and Homophobia, which is the new rote of the updated leftist liturgy.
If his accusation seems strangely tin-eared or anachronistic to you, dear reader, keep in mind that the endless, dreary, boring, and foolish accusations with which we Christians and our uncertain Conservative allies are universally drenched will sound just as anachronistic in a few years when the fashions change again. Or do you actually think that everyone who wants to keep sodomy or other sexual mental diseases from being presented to his little boys as normal and laudable is motivated by and only by pathological hatred? Everyone? All faithful Christians whatsoever? The Pope? Mother Theresa? The 22 canonized martyrs of Uganda? How is it that thirty years ago we were all of us motivated by and only by a pathological desire to win the Class Struggle?
Moorcock then indulges in the one inescapable folly of the Left. He attributes a secret and sinister motive to his feared and hated enemies, in this case, Christians. We Christian writers (so his wondrous power of mind reading tells us!) do not portray honest workingmen as honest because we like honesty. Oh, no, that would be too obvious a motive, and if that were true, no one would have any need to listen to an oracular gypsy seer like Moorcock.
By peering into his crystal, consulting the cards, and reading the lines on the palm of a frog strangled at midnight in a graveyard, he alone can tell us the secret and occult knowledge that he is privy to only he — or perhaps countless other radical intellectuals, who all talk the same way and use the same rhetorical tricks and utter the same accusations. Our real motivation is a desire to crush Little Nell by maintaining the current social order, and we like the dumb brutes and chumps who work with their hands because they are docile.
I would like the reader to notice that every intellectual who plays this trick of pretending to be a mind reader never, for a reason not hard to guess, I say again NEVER sees any motive in his enemies except the darkest and most selfish. And yet somehow the motive of his fellow radicals, anarchists, and politically correct nincompoops are always saintly. The view of mankind is simplistic and stupid to the point where it cannot be made more simple: Christians are devils without a spot of white and intellectuals are angels without a spot of black. There cannot be a good reason to portray honest workingmen as honest in a novel. It must be part of the Conspiracy of Bad People that the famous economist Karl Marx uses to explain everything and justify everything.
Strange that the famous economist Karl Marx has the same theory as the shaggy-haired crazy man who sits outside the gas station all day carrying a hand lettered sign.
So where were we: ah, yes. The loyalty of Sam Gamgee to his beloved master Frodo is not due to Tolkien admiring loyalty and wishing to portray it in a story, nor was it Tolkien’s muse drawing a parallel between the faithfulness of poor Peter the fisherman to his master, but rather, it was because the Secret Conspiracy of Bad People sent Tolkien a telegram and commanded him to aid in the suppression of the discontent of the proletarian by means of telling a fairy story about Middle Earth. Those, clever, clever Bad People.
And what was it that Mr Moorcock, himself a product and a promoter of perverted intellectualism, says about perverted intellectualism? Ah, that the honest workingman is a stereotype spread by British movies of the interwar and war years, when the Democratic and Christian West was straining its every nerve and muscle to fight to the death National Socialism and Fascism and Imperialism, the three most clear examples of what perverted intellectualism produces once divorced from traditional Western thought, that is, from Christ. Here, at last, I can find no fault with what he says: such films did indeed portray honest workingmen as having the common sense to resist what the perverted intellectuals were peddling. I merely say such films were made because such men could and and did. Would that we had such men here, now.
The rest of the essay in which Moorcock humiliates himself by mocking his betters continues in a like vein, and is not worth examining.
The perverted intellectuals, in the final analysis, are one-trick ponies, and they have only one trick, which is to call good thing evil, and call evil things good. A variation on this trick is to call a good thing good for the wrong reason, that is, to bless it in the name of whatever is evil about it; or to say and evil thing is evil precisely where it is good.
The way to call a good thing evil is to attribute to yourself mind-reading gypsy powers, which enable you to penetrate all masks of hypocrisy and deception, and to attribute to the good thing you wish to demean a secret, often subconscious, motive that ranges from the ignoble to the utterly despicable. The way to call an evil thing good is to declare moral perception to be beyond human power. No one can know what is truly good or evil. Therefore the mindreading gypsy is allowed to call you “evil” when you make an moral observation that is blatantly, nay, painfully obvious to everyone.
It takes true genius to read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and discover the hidden secret sinister agenda to oppress and despoil the workingmen of England. Or banal lunacy.
This banal lunacy is called Political Correctness. The reason why it is banal is that you, dear reader, have been exposed to it every hour of every day of the last forty years or so of your life, so much so that to some of you it might come as a real shock to realize that people like Mr Moorcock cannot in any possible way know the real and hidden motives of people like Professor Tolkien.
If your schoolteachers, dear reader, never taught you how to think rigorously, clearly, critically, rationally, and skeptically, and if your popular entertainment never portrays those who do think rigorously as heroes but always those who emote, this is the reason why: so that you will never once ask the simple question of how the gypsies learned to read minds.
Answer: They never learned it. It cannot be learned. There is no such thing as mind-reading. The perverted intellectuals are just pretending.
No gypsy can actually read minds.
Let me tell you their secret: All Leftist economics, politics, policy, philosophy, art, and so on is mere a pretense by know-nothings to secret and Gnostic and supernatural knowledge. They pretend they know how to slow the rise of the oceans. They do not. They pretend to know the infinite variables needed to run an economy from a central planning board. They do not. They pretend to know what social justice is. They do not. They pretend to know the secret springs and actuators which move the human mind into motion, including whether words like ‘bossy’ hinder the development of little girls into the leaders of tomorrow. They do not. They pretend to know the inevitable utopian future to which socialist evolution inevitably leads. They do not.
They pretend they know why some men are successful while others flounder, and that this is due to a rigged game or crooked conspiracy of all powerful capitalists or an evil white patriarchy. They know nothing of the kind.
They pretend they know what the main moral crisis of the age is: white racism and the smothering oppression of the Puritans against sexual expression. This is not merely indifferent and irrelevant to what the main moral crisis of the age is, it is the exact opposite.
They know less than the honest workingmen. (Whom, oddly, they seem to think complain least and last about unfairness in the social system.)
They know NOTHING about real life, and damned little about the books and learning of the West which allegedly is their particular providence of expertise. They are in rebellion against reason, and revolting against reality.
The moment you realize that one thing, that one thing one which their entire intellectual structure of excuses and justifications and lies and obfuscations depends, once you realize that they cannot read minds, and all their accusations of base and evil motives are nothing more than confessions of their own rotten motives warping their own sick psychology; once, in other words, their whole arrogant pretensions to be the mental and moral superiors of man in every way better than they, then they will have no more power over you. Then their Dark Tower falls as suddenly and swiftly as Sauron’s once the One Ring into which he placed all his power and all his hope is dissolved in the fire of skepticism.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
