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. In a letter to his son he wrote: "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ monarchy . . . Anyway, the proper study of man is anything but man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The medievals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that — after all only the fatal weakness of all good things in a bad corrupt unnatural world — is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way."
The Ring in his Lord Of The Rings series may reflect his views on this. 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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