I wrote a post last week about Tolkien, fantasy, and escape that attempted to make a relatively nuanced argument that fantasy escape can be a healthy thing if one is truly imagining a world that represents a reality that is more real than the prison in which we are currently confined. It is healthy if, for instance, it inspires or wakes us up to aspire to a nobility of spirit that we have been unaware of or need reminding of. So some fantasies are qualitatively better than others if what is imagined is truly ennobling in some way. Vulgar fantasies of wealth and fame and power, not so much.
Tolkien's romanticism imagines a world before the twilight of the gods, i.e., before it became disenchanted. It is suffused with nostalgia in that sense, and there is no future in nostalgia. But it is a world in which many of its characters have a nobility of spirit that is no longer found in our most important public figures, and that needn't be the case. There are ways in which figures of the past can be represented that inspire us to find ways to retrieve it in a contemporary key. That's why we read the classics--or should. There is no going native in the past, but we have much to learn from the ancestors, who knew many things that we have forgotten.
And because we live in a secular, disenchanted world does not mean that we must always do so. I believe that in the long run the human project is to find the interior spiritual resources to renew the face of the earth, to create such a world if enough humans could find within themselves the nobility of spirit that could do it. But such a project cannot be accomplished by people who might want such an outcome but haven't the spiritual maturity to effect it, and such people are dangerously naive if they think that if they dominate in the political sphere they can restore by fiat what has been lost or forgotten.
And so it was depressing but not surprising to learn in this piece in the NY Times about the Italian far Right's Giorgia Meloni's assertion that Tolkien's LOTR is sacred text:
But in Italy, “The Lord of the Rings” has for a half-century been a central pillar upon which descendants of post-Fascism reconstructed a hard-right identity, looking to a traditionalist mythic age for symbols, heroes and creation myths free of Fascist taboos.
“I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” said Ms. Meloni, 45. More than just her favorite book series, “The Lord of the Rings” was also a sacred text. “I don’t consider ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fantasy,” she said.
...
“The genre of fantasy in Italy has always been cultivated by the right,” said Umberto Croppi, a former member of the Italian Social Movement who is now the director of a national association of public and private agencies in Italy’s culture industry. He said that the two worlds shared a “vision of spirituality against materialism, a metaphysical vision of life against the forms of the modern world.”
Tolkienism, as I'm sure Tolkien would be the first to tell you, is bad religion. But this speaks to what I've been writing about here for quite some time now, which is that people are inherently religious, and that in a secular society they will adopt bad religion rather than none. Cosmopolitan Liberalism represents the "None" category in questionnaires that ask what one's religious affiliation is. And in the U.S. the Democrats have become in public perception the party of None.
And so since the traditional churches have worked so hard to undermine their spiritual authority and offer no robust healthy alternative, bad religions proliferate like weeds. None seems a perfectly understandable response. I don't belong to the Nones, but I don't think politics should be about metaphysics, but about solving practical problems that affect the common good. But I recognize that in a time when the churches have largely failed to deliver good religion, people will grab onto any kind of bad religion. And politics--whether on the Right or the Left--is always bad religion when it becomes an arena for achieving one's metaphysical fantasies.
Another example of this was rather poignantly represented in this week's Paola Ramos's Field Report in which she meets with Republican Mayra Flores and her Evangelical supporters. Flores is interesting because she is a Republican from the religious right who flipped a traditionally Latino-dominated district from blue to red in a special election earlier this year. What makes this show poignant is Flores's sincerity, her basic decency, and her naïveté. She's is in way over her head for failing to understand how her personal story is being manipulated by fascistic forces that I'm sure she would disavow if she understood better what's really happening.
One of the basic ideas through Ramos's show is how many Latinos who habitually voted Democratic have come to discover that Democrats simply don't represent their values, which they define as God, family, country. The Republican Party, in their view of it, comes much closer to representing those conservative values than the Democratic Party, so why do they just mindlessly vote Democrat? That's very powerful question to pose to Latinos who have voted for Democrats not out of conviction but out of habit. There are a lot of Latinos in Texas and elsewhere right now that are being confronted with that question, and what answer do the Democrats have for them? That they're not as mean as Republicans on immigration?
That is very weak tea compared to the need so many people feel for their politics to align with their deepest metaphysical longings. That's what explains both Meloni in Italy and Flores in Texas--there is this deep desire for a more meaningful politics, a politics that is not just about fixing bridges and paying medical bills, a politics that aligns the world down here with the world up there--"thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven", a longing that seeks a cure for the disease of secular disenchantment.
I understand that longing, but I also understand how easily it is demagogued. Demagogues understand these longings, and they understand how to channel what should be the focus of religion into a place where they don't belong, which is politics. It is one thing for one's religious commitment to inform his or her political choices; it's another to force those religious commitments onto others in the political sphere.
Conservatives have always been very alert to the dangers of immanentizing the eschaton when the imagined eschaton is Leftish, but less so when it is Rightish. The inevitable result, whether Left or Right, is a cure that is worse than the disease. Politics should not be where you find your life's meaning. In a pluralistic society, meaning comes from diverse cultural sources--religions, philosophies, customs, traditions--that must be respected in their diversity. The political sphere should only be concerned with finding consensus about solving practical problems that affect us all as Americans. Whether or not you agree with the solutions that Democrats propose, they are serious about solving problems in a way that the GOP just isn't. The question going forward is whether the Democrats' utilitarianism, which is proper for politics, can compete with the GOP's metaphysical project, which is proper for religion but not for politics.
Flores's pastor is a key figure in her political success. Whether or not he is a demagogue, I don't know. But it's clear that he's very ambitious--and has adopted as his slogan the Trumpian "Make America Godly Again". I'm sure in his own mind he sincerely believes he's ambitious for God, not for himself. But so do all religious fanatics believe that. Hopefully that fanaticism will be repellant to most non-evangelical Latinos in Texas, but who knows? Again there's a naïveté here that is both touching and frightening. And what's frightening is that in Flores's success, the GOP sees a strategy for winning over a traditional Democratic constituency, and the Democrats as they are currently constituted have no effective antidote, at least none that I'm aware of.
UPDATE 9/10/22: It turns out that Mayra Flores got whooped in the regular election for her seat 53% to her 44%. Fun while it lasted.