LOTR is right wing propaganda?
Just saw a clip of the Daily Wire’s Bret Cooper talking about how some left wing publication said the Lord of the Rings was right wing propaganda.
What’s funny to me about moments like this isn’t that it’s absurd to think of LOTR in these terms, but that Cooper seems to be completely clueless about what Conservatism and “right wing” even mean. Because the left is basically right about LOTR.
Tolkien, not Burke or Scruton, is probably the single most excellent writer of Conservative “thought” primarily because his fiction isn’t dialectical or didactic. He presents his philosophy through art not ideas. One of my best friends once told me that Frank Herbert is Godless yet full of religion, whereas Tolkien is Religionless but full of God. That is what makes both of them such powerful writers in such opposite directions. There is no hope in Herbert, only power, pain, mystical confusion. Tolkien is full of hope, hope in the face of evil.
No character in Tolkien is doing philosophy and yet the work perfectly puts forward a fully realized view of life through its narratives and world building. Even reading Tolkien in some sense gives meaning to life, it goes beyond prescription and describes deep truths wrote into the very bones of the world. It is in almost every sense a holy text, wholly dedicated to the reenchantment of the soul through myth.
Tolkien’s world is both anarchic and monarchic. It sees natural hierarchy and fundamental equality as unopposed realities. It sees freedom as connection to land more than complex systems of production. It understands that people groups are often forced by their leaders into doing what they should not. It is both anti capitalist and anti socialist without ever broaching the idea of these systems. It slices the Gordian knot of existence in the modern world, providing not a reactionary piece of politics but transportation to a more heavenly place.
It is right wing propaganda without even being actually right wing. The escape Tolkien still provides us is not to a land far far away, but to the present. Holy Myth does not give us truths or romances of an age gone by that we can’t return to, it meets our hearts and minds in the present and communicates eternal truths. It latches us not onto the past but to the eternal present where the church militant is fighting the forces of darkness alongside Michael and the host of heaven, seeing that God has already won the victory.
This goes beyond right and left, leaving them utterly behind, but the right is able to accommodate it in a way the left can’t. That is why Cooper doesn’t get it, and why so few culture warriors do. Truth and beauty are what are must offensive to the left. We must seek to inhabit God’s kingdom not institute it by any means. The kingdom is here, breaking down racial barriers, and making kings of paupers and paupers of kings. And yet we wait for the return of the king, fully expecting Him any day now, because He returns to us all the time. But some day fully.