Corrupted by the Ring

You could just imagine the aging hippies with their dogeared copies of Lord of the Rings and "Frodo Lives!" bumper stickers wigging out. Which was maybe the point.

In a Seattle Times column yesterday, Bruce Ramsey (while simultaneously plumping the Howard Ahmanson-funded Discovery Institute) lays claim to LOTR as the property of conservatives.

Ramsey argues, essentially, that J.R.R. Tolkien's worldview embodied a rejection of modernism and political power for its own sake, positions that he sees as quintessentially conservative.

He has a point, actually; as he writes, "Lord of the Rings is an implicitly conservative book." Unfortunately for Ramsey, his thesis unwittingly illustrates the utter corruption of modern conservatism -- which, in the thrall of the movement that now claims that name, has long since ceased to represent anything genuinely conservative, and instead now simply embodies power-mad corporatist reactionarism.

There's little doubt that LOTR, as Ramsey writes, is infused "with themes of perseverance, loyalty, sacrifice, redemption, mercy and hope." Those are not, however, exclusively conservative values in the modern political context; certainly, one can find them throughout modern liberalism as well. Moreover, Ramsey even notes "Tolkien's obvious distaste for mechanized industry" -- which is a revealing point indeed.

One of the central turning points in the War of the Rings, in fact, comes when the Ents -- the long-living shepherds of the trees that constitute the forests of Middle Earth -- rise from their slumber and bring an end to the evil depradations of the wizard Saruman. The latter, it must be recalled, has incurred their wrath by destroying the forest, the natural world that for Tolkien was the chief symbol of the conservative values he extolled.

That same ethos has remained alive in this century. Indeed, that is the core meaning of the word "conservationism" -- and if anyone today represents this old-fashioned conservatism, it is the people who are trying to keep intact the remnants of that natural world -- our old-growth forests, our endangered species, our alpine lakes and streams, our canyons and mountains and oceans, and most notably, our historic global climate.

And those people all are acutely aware who they are up against. Namely, modern "conservatives."

These "conservatives" are the people who would loose the modern-day Sarumans on our natural resources, ripping up our forests and burning them in great fires. They are the people who would transform the family farms that closest resemble the humble hovels of Hobbiton into sprawling corporate tracts, replete with monstrous holding pens for tens of thousands of pigs, cattle and fowl whose offal flows into our streams and watersheds. They are the people who simply shrug and assure us that we just have to "adjust" to the realities of global warming.

Today's "conservatives" in fact are moral relativists of the worst sort -- because materialism, the power of money and possessions and property, is their ruling ethos, and all genuine morality is crushed under its heel. Preserve old-growth forests? Keep salmon from running extinct? Heavens, no! Not if it costs jobs!

They are the same people, it must be noted, for whom political power has become an end in itself. In recent years this has been reflected in the strikingly anti-democratic intitiatives undertaken by conservatives -- the Clinton impeachment debacle, the 2000 election outcome, the Texas redistricting process and the California gubernatorial recall, as well as the ongoing demonization of liberals, all with the ultimate goal of turning America into a one-party state.

And as Ramsey observes:

... "Rings" does reflect its author's politics in a general way. The Ring offers power over people. That is political power. The bearers of the Ring do not wield this power for some social good, or even their own defense. They decide to destroy it.

The Lord of the Rings gives us a perspective on a genuine, old-fashioned kind of conservatism that is fundamentally humanist and simultaneously traditional, one that reveres the old world and rejects modernism for its own sake. Modern "conservatives," by contrast, are the minions of a dogmatic movement that worships at the altar of "progress" and "free enterprise" -- corrupted by the never-ending ring of power and money.

And, like Isildur or Gollum, they are incapable, clearly, of even perceiving their own abasement.