Today in History: English writer, poet, philologist, and academic J.R.R. Tolkien was born on this day in 1892. He is best known for writing The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit books, but he also had a part in translating the book of Jonah in the Catholic Jerusalem Bible, a task for which he learned a considerable amount of Hebrew.
In life Tolkien despised political power. The Ring in his LOTR series may speak to that. The invisibility that the ring grants its wearer represents state power: "power isn’t simply about the exertion of unjust force. It is about what happens next, after the exertion. Does the perp generally get away with, or not? Systematically getting away with it—or impunity—is where power truly lies. And that is what makes agents of the state different from any other bully. State agents can aggress with reliable impunity because a critical mass of the state’s victims consider the aggression of state agents to be exceptional and legitimate. That is power.
And that is why invisibility is such an apt analogue for state power. The public’s moral vision has a complete blind spot when it comes to the state. It detects acts of theft, enslavement, and murder whenever they are perpetrated by anyone else, but it is blind to the criminality involved whenever the same exact acts are committed by agents of the state. It is blind to state theft, instead seeing 'taxation,' 'fees,' and 'citations.' It is blind to state enslavement, instead seeing 'mandates,' 'prohibitions,' and 'regulations.' And it is blind to state murder, instead seeing 'war in pursuit of the national interest.'"~Dan Sanchez
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