Force Fields of the Mind: Kurt Lewin and the Psychology of Change

What is interesting to me about the particular moment in the ways that Tolkien has been taken up by larger figures in our culture is because they're doing it in this kind of weird science fictiony register, right? Like calling your surveillance company Palantir. And this guy who says something like, you know, we got the computer from Star Trek, but we didn't get the teleporter or the matter replicator or something like that. And again, it's absurd to be like, well, we got computers, but where are our matter replicators from Star Trek? That's like watching the Wizard of Oz and being like, well, we made yellow bricks, but where am I flying monkeys? (laughing) Like, in what other point in time would we ever look at a genre of fiction and be like, the world has failed because it didn't turn out like this. Like, what other point in human history with that conversation have made sense? And so the technological way that Tolkien is being picked up, I think to some degree, it's about capture. He would hate that Palantir is called Palantir. He would not like this. He's a man who thought airplanes should not have been invented. (upbeat music) Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb. And I'm Moira Donovan. And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right. (upbeat music) So Adrian, today we are lucky to be joined by Michael Lutz, a really interesting writer, thinker, podcaster. In 2017, he earned his PhD in English literature from Indiana University. And his academic work he focuses on early modern drama. But for our purposes, we are here with Michael as a podcaster who is a part of the range touch network and it covers a lot of these like kind of cool, nerdy things that we also like to touch on here on in bid with the right. So it's podcasts like games, studies, study buddies, just king things where they read all of Stephen King in order. - So good. - And most recently, he is with Sheld by genre, which is how you found his work, right Adrian? - I've been listening to the range touch network for quite a while. My entry is a show that I think you were not involved in, which is mages and murder dads, which was two of you colleagues playing Baldur's Gate, all the games, which I am obsessed with. And so that was my entry. He's like, wait, there's more. And that's great to know. - That's I think the range touch experience. Like, wait, there's more? Like I had no idea. There was also a King show and so I listened to that. And yeah, so people are very much encouraged to check that out because there's going to be something for you there. If the deep dive into the Silmarillion doesn't get you, and maybe the Fallout series will, which you are part of. Yes. - But Adrian, today we have Michael here to talk about one of your favorites and this colossal item of fandom, creation, fandom, politics, fandom, community making, as well as a massive literary touch on its own right, which is of course Lord of the Rings. And Michael, thank you so much for joining us for just a casual touch on something very, very big. - Yeah, yeah, no problem. I mean, I've spent the entire year talking about these books. So why not with you as well? - You wake up, you pull out your copy of the tales of the children of urine and you're like, all right, let's do this. Back to the Tolkien minds. Yeah, I mean, we've been talking about sort of fandom and right wing fandom on this podcast for a little bit now. But this really feels like, as more as saying a classic case, at the same time, it also feels like an early case, a place where sort of fans had to figure out what it meant to really want to follow a book as more than the casual reader, whatever the opposite of a fan is, right? Like there are millions of people have read the Lord of the Rings that came out in 1954 and been like, that was lovely, the end, right? The fan is the person who cannot do that. He was like, oh, I'm gonna study that map. I'm gonna make sure I exactly understand where Erie Boer is in relation to Rudar or whatever, and Dunn and Nangworth have. - Exactly. And, you know, I mean, the quay, but there is a king missing between these two, right? Like it's a book that really invites you not to be done with it, maybe even to the point of making a podcast for the better part of a calendar year. And so it became a very early, I think, object in these kinds of fan wars and a place where I think a certain kind of right wing fandom can articulate it itself. And so we're really excited to get to talk to you about this, Michael, but I thought maybe we'd start off with what I sometimes call the Ali G question, like, what is the Lord of the Rings? - Right, it's always good to set the ground. And in case you're a listener who somehow hasn't heard of the films that warped culture about 20 years ago, the Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy novel, sometimes called a trilogy, although he intended it to be one book, but published in three volumes. From 1954 to 1955 by J. R. R. Tolkien, who was a philologist and Oxford professor. And it is a, I mean, when I say fantasy novel, you are probably thinking of Lord of the Rings, even if you don't know about Lord of the Rings, because it is where a lot of the tropes that we today recognize in terms of market category fantasy get solidified. There are elves, there are dwarves, there's lots of maps, as you've already mentioned. There is a solemn quest. This is the main matter of the book, is that the realm of middle earth is under siege by the dark Lord Saron, who many, many years ago forged secretly a very powerful ring that he lost at his last defeat. And if it were to be recovered by him, then his forces would overrun the entire continent. So it falls to a young hobbit or a halfling, right there. They're short folks, a little happy folks, mining their own business, having festivals and whatnot. - Carey feet. - Yes, hairy feet, Frodo Baggins, a hobbit. The ring falls into his possession, and he is joined by a crew of other hobbits of men, a wizard, an elf and a dwarf, as they set off across middle earth in order to destroy this ring by taking it to Mountain Doom, right on Saron's front step, but is the only place where the ring can be destroyed. And that is kind of big picture what that is about. It's about these folks and how they make their way across this continent in various groups. It is an adventure novel, but it is also increasingly, as it goes on, very much a war novel, and it is fantasy. It's got a lot of other stuff that has nothing to do with that. - Yeah, which is something I want to ask you about later as well. The way that some genres sort of drop out as the genre of heroic fantasy develops. I mean, I got to just say that is an incredibly good summary. We tried to summarize Wagner's Ring of the New Belongs on this podcast. It took us five and a half hours, which is kind of the length of one of the operas. So I mean, I stand in awe of your summarizing acumen there. (laughing) - What has always appealed to me about token, in particular, is that he does, as you say, sort of create this vast world that has its own interior logic, its interior politics, which have like a material basis, like it matters to fight Sauron. It like matters how he is getting his war fighters and how he is getting his material to wage that war. It's always very interesting to me, but also it has its own languages. It has like a lot of its success or an imitator properties, sort of like vague and non-committal, but definitely discernible reference to human history in our real world. So there's a lot of ways in for a reader. So can you gloss for us just briefly, not just what these books are, but what the reader response to them was? - So the interesting thing about Lord of the Rings in this instance is that it is a sequel. There is a predecessor book, a children's novel called The Hobbit that was published by Tolkien in 1937, and so that in many ways provides an entree for people in general, right? Many people read The Hobbit and then go on to read Lord of the Rings. Aside from that, there is a kind of like vast media empire around Tolkienalia as such, right? It was probably my journey here, right? That I read like a Dragon Lance novel, reading the Tolkien's successors and then moving backward to see where this stuff kind of gets settled. There's so many places in culture where you're going to find a Tolkien tie in at this point, right? It's a media franchise. There's video games. There's the movies that I already mentioned that were massively, massively popular when I was in middle school. That was really a sea change because prior to that point, you had to be a real nerd like me in order to know what language legalist spoke or whatever. And so we've really seen Lord of the Rings go from something that was very popular in its day. This is also something to be clear about. This was not like something that just a couple of people liked in the fifties. It was very popular, very well received. The well-known poet, W. H. Auden, also a translator of some North poetry. He was an avowed fan of the series. And one of the most delightful facts I've ever learned in my life is that there was an early Tolkien or like Middle-earth Lord of the Rings fan mailing list that operated out of Oxford. It was operated by a student. And at one point, the student who operated that had to go to Tolkien and ask him how to write the book. to deal with WH Auden who kept writing in character as Gimli to have arguments with people. (laughing) - That's amazing. - That's actually amazing. (laughing) It's like, what do I do about WH Auden? (laughing) - Right, the great thing about WH Auden and he had to ask you about WH Auden, it's making it really hard. - Gimli being the dwarf. - The dwarf. - The dwarf. - WH Auden loved Gimli. (laughing) - I mean, who doesn't? This is a pro Gimli podcast. Just a side note, by the way, the Dragon Lance novels is how I learned English. So, oh. - Wow. - Yeah, shout out to Margaret Weiss and Tracy. - Yeah. - So that's who we have to blame. (laughing) - Yeah, exactly. That was the end of the 30. (laughing) - Oh, I'm not kidding. - After that, yeah. So there is this kind of explosive popularity and then there is the kind of industry first stoked by Tolkien himself who clearly wanted to keep writing Lord of the Rings, but sort of didn't know how to do it. And then specifically his son, Christopher, who, I feel like you on the podcast tend to have a very charitable reading of him, but it is either possible that he felt himself a co-author and wanted to kind of keep the creative process going or that he was milking that cow for whatever it was worth. Whatever it is, it was a series that once it was finished, wasn't finished. It was just material being promised and or delivered. You know, the sumo really comes out right after Tolkien's death in '77, but then the history of Middle-earth, which is honestly sort of where I got off the train. I was like, oh my God, this is a lot. It's just people's notes, I don't think. Like I would love for a person to be doing something in the next 20 pages. - But yeah, so it's also an object that has sort of evolved as people, you know, like odd and have gotten fixated on it. - Yeah, and it's very of a piece with the whole thing because we've talked about the novels, but obviously there's so much more material that Tolkien produced. And some of that is because he was writing this for something like 60 years on and off, right? As a young man, he fought in World War I biographically. This is often observed. It was a hugely important experience for him. And it's shortly after returning from the war that he begins working on what is typically called the Legendarium and what he calls his Legendarium, I think at some point, which is Middle-earth writ large. It is a collection of notes, ideas and drafts. Iterations upon reiterations. So even before we get to the Hobbit, we have a whole bunch of material, some of its poetry, some of its the construction of the languages that you mentioned, Moira. There is so much background material that is not in the story, but which contributes to the story so much so that Tolkien really kind of set the Hobbit there just incidentally, like looking back, he did not think, oh, I'm going to write the Hobbit and then I'm going to write the Lord of the Rings and then I'm going to write the Silmarillion. The Hobbit kind of came together and he realized he could fit it into this larger Legendarium or like pieces of it grew out. And then that became its own story. The Hobbit was a successful novel. And so that's when people started asking for a sequel. And that is when production of Lord of the Rings begins and Tolkien finds the tone shifting. It gets a little darker. It is a more mature adult novel. If the Hobbit is for a younger reader, Lord of the Rings is what they read five to six years later when they're in high school getting ready to graduate. - Yeah. - And so he finds the tone going a little bit darker and he finds more and more the Legendarium is starting to impress upon the story that he wants to write. And he wants to be able to have all of that information available to the readers. Also, the books are coming out sequentially, you know, one, two, three. And so he's also getting reader mail and he's very open about answering letters. And so people are sending him questions asking about like how does the calendar work and the shyre? What is going on with the elves and reincarnation? What is the metaphysics of all of this? And he's answering it, right? This is one of the things that makes the Tolkien deal so I think appealing to fandom. And, you know, I don't say this in a denigrating way, but to nerds, right? Because if you're the type of person who watches a thing or reads a thing and then you think, well, wait a minute, what about that little guy in the background? Why did he do that? Why did he say that or what is his name? And you want to press on it. The Tolkien stuff is great because if you want to press on something, there's a chance that Tolkien wrote at least a little bit of that somewhere in his notes because he was clearly thinking through this constantly. We recently found out that in some of his notes, like Tolkien worked through how elves get divorced. Oh, because he realized that this would be a problem because they live forever and they can be reincarnated. And so he had to think through how does elf divorce work? So that's textually present somewhere. If we then found out that he pitched sitcom to like, you know, the honeymooners producers and was like, what about an immortal couple? That's not how to get divorced. (laughing) Why are you all out of that? Oh, the middle earth honeymooners. This speaks to like the core, like foundational nature of fan participation in Lord of the Rings, right? Like it's not just something that sort of sprung out after these canonical texts. It was almost a quasi collaborative enterprise as Tolkien built out this world because his readers were participating and they were sort of like pressing on the logic and the hints and the sort of lacunas in his own world building to get that authority to come in and fill in the gaps. Exactly. With the difference being that Tolkien was available and made himself available to actually answer these queries, right? Like between 1954 and 1973 when he passed away, you literally could just write the man and be like, what's the deal with elves and divorce, right? Where a lot of fandom sort of at the time, especially science fiction fandom, I feel like was like horizontally networked and didn't include the author as often. Here there was a centralized authority that was extremely happy maybe due to the fact that he had retired, right, as he wrote the Lord of the Rings and had nothing but time on his hands, right? Who was very happy to be like, I will answer your elf divorce questions or I will answer your calendarium questions or I will answer your questions about allegory, et cetera, et cetera. And who also, this is an interesting fact about him that I only learned from your podcast who had kind of a people pleasing quality with these things. Like he wasn't, they're almost literary creations, these letters. They're not, he comes down from the mountain with kind of pronouncements about Middle Earth but you can sort of feel him like riffing and some stuff contradicts the other stuff and some of it, especially when it comes to like how done is this and what kind of a book is it gonna be? He's just like, oh, you know, whatever you want to hear, this service and fan service is really there. But it's taken by the fans, of course, it's like kind of, yeah, it's pretty authoritative. - Yeah, this is one of the things that we've talked a lot about over the course of Shell by genre this year. As we've been doing the Hobbit and all of Lord of the Rings in the Sumerillion and reading all of this ancillary material and thinking about what is kind of the fandom's relationship to Tolkien? How does the fandom tend to think and talk about Tolkien? And what are the things that get maybe papered over a little bit? And one of them is precisely the fact that Tolkien could be variable. There's a strong desire to take a thing that he said at one point in time and act as if this was always the case. When in fact, just as an example, there are two wizards in Middle Earth who don't show up in any of the mainline books, but they exist and they come into the story very briefly and then they leave. And it's not contained textually anywhere what happened to them. But you can find in two different places Tolkien responding to two different questions where he's like, oh, well, you know, I think they went off and they died in the wilderness. They failed in their mission. And then sometime later, he's answering the exact same question and he thinks, oh, well, I think, you know, they did their work and they did something that contributed to the overall flow of the narrative. So, you know, dependent on how he felt that day, how that gap got filled in. But then also on top of just the fact that fandom really wants authors to have had like one specific answer that they gave at one point in time and there's no variability, there is this constant grasping for more material that is outside of the normally published that if you look in the wikis for instance and you start tracking like citations in the fan wikis, like what are these wikis pointing to for facts? You'll get things that are pointing to the actual novels but then you'll also get things, the history of Middle-Earth volumes that you mentioned that are Christopher Tolkien assembling essentially just the rough drafts, right? The things that are in process and there is this very interesting thing that happens in this fandom where stuff that is like explicitly draft material, explicitly incomplete is nevertheless relied upon as quote unquote true for the world. - It's the Q Gospel. - Right, right, and you find Tolkien himself again and the letters later on complaining about this a little bit where he thinks, oh, I think it might have been a mistake for me to promise, so if you've read Lord of the Rings at the end of the last book Return of the King, there's a huge chunk of the appendices that provide a bunch of information, things like how the calendar works in the Shire, in case you wanted to know that they have three days of the year, they don't count and all this other stuff. Part of the reason he puts this in there is because people are writing him letters asking how this stuff works and he has enough charity to him where he, you get the sense that he almost feels disappointed when he doesn't have an answer to a question and so he wants to come up with the answer and then you have him in the letters complaining to his publisher where he's like, I don't know why I promised all of this, feel like I'm losing my mind, I can't get all of this to fit together. And there's a real habit in fandom, I think, for us to take the creator and be like, Oh, look at the perfect clockmaker who knew what they were doing and assembled it all. And then stood apart from the object and let us enjoy it. And that's just, Tolkien was a fun guy and had, you know, his, his idiosyncrasies and he had his true genuine talents in his sincere commitments. And also he's a man who's writing letters to his publisher saying the map is hell. I did not pay attention to the distances the way I should have. And now the map doesn't work. I mean, what's interesting is that you're drawing out, I think, kind of a psychological foible in fandom. We want the creator to have the answers. But of course, there's a way you can crack open Lord of the Rings and experience it as a, you know, high fantasy tale told by a semi-ownish narrator. But the book from the get go kind of claims it's actually a palimpsest of various traditions of the story of the Lord of the Rings. So Tolkien, ever the philologist is sort of telling us, Oh, this is actually a kind of a composite. And there's like question of a sourcing here, right? Like a lot of people sort of flip through the early stuff concerning hobbits, et cetera. But it's very clear. The book gets spoiled, I believe, in that early section where they're like, well, when they all returned from doing the thing at Mount Doom, you're like, well, what? You know, they compiled these notes, right? And so the book actually is telling you like, I, the author, I'm not fully in control of this. I am the editor, I'm an editor fiction here. And of course, it's all made up. But that seems like it's actually kind of telling any fan, well, look, this object is not definitive. Yeah. And then, and if you look at Tolkien's letters that way, that he's just like, look, I'm speaking as a different scribe in each letter, right? And where's the truth? I don't know. You have to sort of composite it and like check it against each other and see what you think is most likely. But that's not how people read it. They read it as sort of ex-cathedra, ex-cathedra. It's a very useful and interesting way of phrasing that because I think the other kind of side of Tolkien is that as we often say on the show is my co-host Cameron often says, right? He's a man who wants to print the legend. He is not above in some of his letters when someone points out something and is like, oh, this is a really smart thing you did of him being like, yes, it was very smart of me wasn't it? And haven't I done something very clever here? You know, there are some letters where you can tell he is kind of less concerned with, oh, no, how do I make the map work? And he's more preoccupied with kind of his aesthetic philosophy and what that means. This is the other important thing is that Tolkien is a deeply committed Christian. He is a Catholic and he has an aesthetic philosophy called subcreation that essentially boils down to and this is putting it very, very briefly and he does not expound upon it too much. But the idea is God as the creator of the universe made us human beings. And one of the ways in which human beings are made in God's image is that we too are makers like God. And so in human beings creating things or subcreating because God creates everything from nothing, human beings take the stuff that God has created and then they recreate it into new things. That is in Tolkien's mind how you honor divinity, right? Like that's why we're on earth is to make good stuff for other people to enjoy. And I think there is a part of his kind of persona that really, you know, because he sincerely holds these beliefs. If he's getting people who are really enjoying his work, he feels like, you know, he's doing something right. And at the same time, it also results in this interesting dynamic where if someone is reading your stories and maybe not getting them in precisely the way that they should, they might be, you know, messing a little bit with the most holy and important project of your life. And this can result in some really heightened emotions. So, you know, we have some of the letters where Tolkien is, he's giving his feedback, for instance, on an early screenplay draft for a film of Lord of the Rings that was floated in the 60s. And the comments he has for that screenwriter in terms of how they are misapprehending the nature of a ballrog, for instance, very, very acidic. So there's a charity, right? And then I think that charity is born out of a kind of, I think good outlook, but then I think it also warps around into this kind of policing behavior that should also probably sound pretty familiar if you've ever been in a fandom or a community dedicated to a thing, right? Who is dedicated to the thing in the right way? There is a built-in exotericism, esotericism kind of dyad here, right? Like, there's always a way to know better, to understand it better, to be in the service of the object better than others. And, you know, in some way, having read the book is the worst thing you can do, because that's when you're, you're just casual, right? Like, you know enough to upset everyone else. And then you have to push on, you have to understand it or grab hold of it better than your buddy in school, who also has been toting around the books. One other thing I wanted to ask about is the question of genre, because the podcast is called Sheldon by genre, and Lord of the Rings kind of invents this subgenre of high fantasy. But am I wrong to think that there's also a bunch of genres that sort of get less acknowledged and that sort of have to be sidelined? Like, it starts out really as a social novel, kind of about English people. I feel like the, the hobbits are fairly clear stand-ins for people that he knew. And there's a lot about very funny bits that really would not be out of place in like a Balzac novel or like, I don't know, dance to the music of time or something like that. A theft of silver spoons, that sort of thing. And then in fandom, I feel like that sort of attention, like fandom consists both in hyperattention, like I'm saying this is an empirical observation. Lord of the Rings fandom became about a certain kind of history of this object and then filing off other histories. The fact that like very clearly Tolkien is kind of influenced by the Victorian social novels in describing the world, the hobbits. Or as you say, the fact that the war novel is probably somewhere in the background, in the latter half of the trilogy, sort of the seasons of the background in favor of like, well, when did Tolkien decide to create the Mayar in this way? Or when did he? So like, you're elevating one version of how the object came to be. And you're kind of dismissing the other. Does that seem right? Uh, yeah, right. I mean, I think one way of locking in on this, because this is a thing that is interesting to me as an academic that you mentioned, Moira, that my background is in early modern drama, which is Shakespeare and stuff. And so if you wanted a kind of pressies for a thing that I think about a lot in literature in general, it is something from the beginning of Henry V. There's a prologue who comes out and addresses the audience and says, hey, this is obviously a paraphrase. Hey, just in case you didn't notice, you're in a theater right now. And you're not going to see like the fields of France where the actual Henry V did his battle, right? And we're not going to have a full army. It's not going to be the whole thing. But and this is the precise phrasing. There's a request to quote, let us upon your imaginary forces work, right? And this is very commonplace in in drama of the period. And it's just saying the audience like, hey, like, play along if the special effects don't look great, kind of give us some grace. Yeah. Suppose within the girdle of these walls. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And so one of the things I think about a lot in terms of literature is precisely this question of how do things ask you to let them upon your imaginary forces work, right? How do our art objects solicit our imaginative activity? Yeah. And one of the things that Tolkien does through what you mentioned, the kind of metafictional conceit that all of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit and the Sumerillion were actually this kind of composite bound volume. That's very much again, Tolkien is playing like the academic joke that this is the type of medieval bound to him called a miscellany or something that actual medievalist academics spend their time taking apart translating, figuring out how they were made, trying to date things, where did these texts come from, who transcribed them so on and so forth. All of these things that Tolkien had a deep familiarity with, he makes into this metafconceit that then the readers and the most dedicated fans can then really hook into and let it go to work on their imaginary forces. Because it does this really fascinating redirect where any question you might have about say characterization or a phrasing or the way that information is parcelled out that might in one sense be traditionally considered an authorial failing, but this is poorly communicated or I don't like this character beat. I'm not sure why the narrative is treating this character this way. All of those things that could be criticism of an author get redirected into faux metafictional concerns about like, well, what if this text was actually in the keeping of this clan for this many years, which is why this person is actually minimized in the text, right? So rather than say the position of a character like Arwen who is an important female character who does not appear or she appears in the sense that she's in the text, but like literally does not step into the narrative and start speaking until the very end of the third book, something that you could say happened there is Tolkien was writing the stuff in time and at some point midway he was like, uh oh, I wanted Ergon to marry Arwen and I didn't set her up right. but the books have already been published. I need to do something. Suddenly that misdirects to, well, how is the text assembled, right? We redirect from what the author might have actually thought or done into this place of play, right? Of imaginative play that allows us to maintain the sense that the object is not an art object in the normal sense, that it's not like embedded in the world and subject to history and time, but that we are in fact ruminating on a different world that we can know truths about or we can speculate about the truths, right? More I can tell when nerds love this stuff. Michael, can I ask, we've now talked a lot about the object itself and we haven't really gotten to, you know, your own history with this object, and I think that might be a good way into the second half of our conversation. Like, what was your path to or through Lord of the Rings fandom? So I did the normal thing. I read the Hobbit when I was like 10 or something, 10 or 11, and I was like, okay, that was interesting. I was not super into fantasy as a young person just in general, but after I'd read the Hobbit, that's when guys that I knew had also read the Hobbit and who had read the Lord of the Rings were like, oh man, now you've got to read Lord of the Rings. And so I do that. And I had a pretty good time. I found some very interesting things there, but ultimately I ended up kind of drifting toward science fiction more as I got older. And I was still thinking about Tolkien and all that stuff. And being a, you know, this is the 2004, 2005 era, right? The movies come out 010203. Obviously, that brings you back into the Tolkien fold. And at that point, I'm one of the people who's like, yeah, the movies are an improvement because they streamline the novel. At this point, just for the record, I'm completely opposite. Like I love the ways that the novel gets lost and all these weird little things and the movies cut out all the soul and heart. But at the time, that's really where things were, right? That was the genre space. And I'm also an early adopter of the internet. I was on the internet way too early, probably. And my parents were like, yeah, good on him. He's not out crashing cars. Instead, what I was doing is I was hanging out on live journal. Wow. Takes me back. Yeah. Hanging out on live journal in the discussion circles for a bunch of libertarian and right-wing speculative fiction authors because I had gotten wrapped up in that through reading Ein Rand. And I'll tell you, these people had thoughts about Tolkien. They really had thoughts about Tolkien and those movies. And it's very interesting. I mean, I've listened to your episode about, oh, some people who tried to game the Hugo Awards, right? And, you know, wouldn't you know it? Some of these guys were in these discussions that I was reading, right? And we were talking about, oh, have you read the blog by this mold bug guy? Oh, God. He's got some really interesting ideas about monarchy. And these are people who are, as you might tell, I'm reading Ein Rand and I'm reading libertarian science fiction live journal. I'm skewing a bit right word in my youth. And as I grow older, there could have been entire episode about this. I peel away from that. But some of it is because I am in this live journal community and realizing like, oh, these people are like genuine monarchists in whatever sense that means. Yeah. And so the fandom that I had experienced like in person, which was like the dudes that I play D&D with because their dad played D&D with them. And he told them to read Lord of the Rings, right? This very like local and frankly, you know, wholesome as wholesome as a bunch of teenage boys in the middle of nowhere ever are, that the genre fiction engine plugs me into this online circle where there are all these people who are talking about how now, you know, postmodernism has destroyed the West and Tolkien for them is this kind of exemplar of a kind of moral seriousness and an intellectual sobriety that is now missing from genre fiction, which is too concerned with. And this is a little too early for them to have really settled on like woke as a pejorative or whatever. Right. But there is a real sense that the market is not paying as much attention to the things that they should be paying attention to, which is like the inheritors of Tolkien who are us because we are also all Catholic and believe that there should be a king because that's also Tolkien's position, right? His politics is that there should be monarchy, but in a really weird, confusing way where he also thinks there shouldn't be a state. Well, that's true. Right. There's just like this weird melange is coming together of people who are fans, but also people who consider themselves kind of intellectuals and philosophers. And they consider the fictional works that they read adequate for deriving like true moral lessons about social life and how we should structure reality. And I I pieced out and I went to school and I made friends. I was very lucky in that I got into college during like the two to three year period before smartphones brought the internet out. So I eventually turned actually pretty strong against Tolkien for quite a while because I had associated him so much with kind of these reactionary impulses in the fandom. And it was, you know, after grad school as I began to think more seriously about genre literature. And really, like once I went back and read the books and realized like, okay, Tolkien was a conservative like he was an anarchist. Yeah. But these people are also doing a lot of work to sand off the things about Tolkien's perspective on the world that would trouble him. For instance, he was anti-racist, like openly admittedly so, right? The books might not always display that in the best way, but like that was an opinion that he had. And so being able to really see in Lord of the Rings or the fact that that's a book that's pretty explicitly committed to an ideal of pluralism is helpful, right? It's helpful to keep that in mind. Now you should also keep in mind that it's a vision of pluralism that is predicated on their being always an eternal outsider who hails from the east, but and the great chain of being that sort of like everyone integrates into, yeah, yeah. This strikes me as a recurring theme that we encounter a lot here on the bed with the right, which is like a lot of conservatives are just kind of like bad readers, right? Like, it does not strike me as particularly outlandish from the little that I do know of Lord of the Rings to be like, no, this is a artistic product by a conservative whose conservative politics are evident in the text, right? But you don't have to read or even appreciate a work of art as if it was revelation, right? Like the fact that J. Error token was a monarchist is not in itself actually an argument for monarchy. And that seems to be like the logical leap that gets made in a lot of fandom spaces. And it strikes me as a burden of authorship that token himself seems like very ambivalent about when you're describing him being like, ah, shit, I committed to all these plot points and like logical rules of my world that I'm not actually sure I want to commit to or hold up or are appropriate. It seems like he's being given this role by his readers both in that early fandom space and in these subsequent far right appropriations of his work that are not necessary and also not exactly what he wanted. Yes, that is absolutely the case. And I think there's another one of his letters that is fascinating is someone writes in to ask him about how elf and human intermarriage works, right? Because we learn that elves and humans can have children together. And genetics don't seem to exist in Middle Earth, right? They don't have modern science, but someone writes in and asks, Tolkien, well, how is this happening then? And Tolkien, he jumps through a bunch of hoops thinking like, well, I think maybe it could do like this and it could do like this. And then he eventually cashes out on. And actually, this is getting weird. And I don't like thinking about it this much. And if, ah, if the creator himself were to make Middle Earth real, he can figure that out. Right, I've given you like half a try here, but beyond that, you might be thinking about this one too much, right? And that's the trap. I love the idea of Tolkien like coming to terms with like slash fiction for the first time. I'm sorry, you've given a lot of thought this is there. Like, well, I could share some drafts with you. Like, oh, I would ask you not to, please. Yeah. It's also like, this is a world where you can have magic. And that is acceptable to the readers, but like not miscegenation, right? Like, it's a little like, guys, the suspension of your disbelief is coming at like revealing moments. And I think this is a recurring thing in a lot of these fandoms. And we talked about this a little on our episode about the sci-fi fandom. It's like, okay, these guys can imagine spaceships and time travel, but they can't imagine like a future with black people in it. And it's the sort of failures of imagination or the failures of willingness to take a leap in a work of fiction can be like very, very telling for the kind of fandoms that arise. Yeah. So Jordan S. Carroll is an academic who has a book called Speculative Whiteness from I believe MIT Press. He's been on the pod. Yeah. As I say, and his take on this, I think is really, really good because the way that he understands this kind of dynamic is that the reactionary fans in doing this obstinate lack of speculation about obvious things, right? What they're trying to do is they're trying to assert that like actually we are the only ones who can speculate. And we are trying to say that we, though straight white men, we are the best at speculating. And we are only to speculate about these things, right? We're not going to speculate about all that other stuff that's like not important. We are going to speculate about the important manly. stuff that contributes to the value of the West and all that. What might seem like a lack of imagination can also be read as a kind of power move, pointedly choosing not to expend your imagination. So that gets us to, I think, the first sort of mode of right-wing fandom that I'm interested in, because you're both saying this, this kind of selective approach to no politics please, right? In a lot of right-wing fandom, especially around the Peter Jackson movies, where there was a lot of like, you know, you're politicizing Tolkien, which often sort of appeal to his hatred for allegory, right, to sort of say like, "Oh, he said this is just supposed to be a story." But then they sort of can't stick to that themselves, and it's not really supposed to be just a story, but as Jordan Carroll book points out, it's supposed to be a story exactly with the meanings that they attest to, and the other ones are too speculative or the wrong kind of speculation. Yeah, the interesting thing about the allegory comment, because it gets trut about so much, is that it runs into this problem where no one seems to really agree on what allegory means, because I think in like the vernacular, right, and in just like everyday speech, we tend to use allegory pretty loosely, and there's definitely a strain of fan who loves to use the allegory line to be like, "No, this story does not mean anything. This is a description of how a wizard lived in a tower, and if you think that wizard meant anything, or if you want to derive like a lesson from what that wizard did, you're doing it wrong." And then that's, you know, one way of doing that, and then it involves overlooking the fact that in the introduction to, I think it's his second introduction to Lord of the Rings, there is a line where Tolkien says, speaking of this wizard in the tower, he was like, "Now this is not an allegory about World War 2, but if it were, here's what would happen." Saruman would not be deposed. He would actually have been imprisoned by the people who won the war, and they would have sent him to work on making the magic nuke, right? They would have made him into Oppenheimer. And so, as you're saying, Tolkien himself is like, "This story is not an allegory, and also if it were an allegory, here's exactly how all the pieces would fit together." But he does offer, and this is not something that people talk about much. He does offer in another letter what he calls "applicability," because he clearly knows that people read stories and think about the world that they're actually in relative to the one that they're reading about, and this idea of applicability, right? He says, "The different races of Middle-Earth," right? This is the letter to Milton Waldman, one of the potential publishers where he's talking about how like elves and dwarves and hobbits and men are all different aspects of the same thing, which is humanity, right? That like actual human people are many, many things, but these races are his way of trying to focus in on different aspects of what it is to be a human being, which is not allegory, right? And this is what I think when Tolkien talks about allegory, he is thinking of allegory in like an academic sense. Spencerian allegory. He's an Oxford professor, right? Well, he's thinking of CS Lewis, and he's like, "No one hears Jesus, guys." Yes, right. Like he does not want allegory in the sense that like there's a one-to-one translation of things, but he does not seem to have a problem with the idea that yeah, you interpret a book and come up with ideas and themes and those have relevance to your daily life. Like this man isn't writing a 1000-page novel where industrialism is going to destroy everyone because he doesn't care about industrialism. Right. Like he believes that. Yeah, and the fact that the Shire is some kind of portrait of his own country and kind of a parody thereof, but also deeply in love with it. There's clearly kind of nationalism that comes there. One second part of these modes of right-wing fandom that I was thinking about was and this may not even be actually just a right-wing thing. You mentioned how the races on Middle Earth has a lot of them, and there is that that's uncomfortable. I was thinking about the last time I heard of a large-scale allegorization about this is with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and where Ukraine started to refer to Russian soldiers as orcs, which is so interesting because of course they come from the east, they are you know, sort of un-differentiated. At least if you happen to be a Ukrainian person being barreled down on by them, and so the thing that I was interested in is what we could call the moral geography of Middle Earth. There is a lot of good things come from the west and go to the west and are sort of sort of declining into the west. You know, you're just like, "Fuck it out, I'm going to Valor and live forever." Meanwhile, there are undifferentiated masses with uncomfortably racialized appearance coming in from the south and from the east, and you're like, "Okay, I can see why a milionopolis would find a lot to like about this." Yeah, and after the films, which of course is like prime were on terror time, the movies really, I'm not accusing those films of having like explicitly adapted themselves into like were on terror propaganda, but I think because they adapt the story into the form of a Hollywood action movie, which stands off a lot of the rough edges that make this situation, which is present in Tolkien and is not great, the things that at least indicate that he had a slightly more nuanced take on some of it, right? So there's like a very famous scene where Samwise, one of the Hobbit characters, sees a dead soldier, one of the Easter lings, and he thinks to himself like, "Oh, that was a guy." And he had a house and he lived somewhere and he had rulers and they told him to come here and now he's dead here in this river, like thousands of miles from home. And how many of these people are just people who have been sent here, right? And you know, the movie does not have that. Instead, it just has a really ossified version of that East versus West. Like, are you going to stand and fight with us against this? And that, you know, comes forth very, very strongly, but it is again built on the fact that Tolkien does have a moral geography. Things to the north and the west tend to be pretty good, although if you're talking about the Somarillion things in the north are actually really bad because that's where the devil lives. Oh, that's true. The devil lives in the north there. Or if you've seen the first season of the rings of power, which. Oh, yes. Apologies, yes. But yeah, it is very much just like European cultural chauvinism recycled into a fantasy world, right? The thing about Middle Earth also is that we talk about maybe a third of what is actually all of Middle Earth's landmasses. It seems based on some of these maps that have been produced, all the characters that we know they all hang out in a very specific area that is more or less analogous to Europe and Northern Europe. And then the rest of the continent is like Eurasia. There's also kind of something that looks a little bit like Africa in there. So yeah, there's absolutely this way that the novel sets up. The engine of it is an East versus West conflict. And conflict is necessary, is built into the structure of the world for Tolkien like that. Yeah. It's sort of the double wages of colonialism, right? There's a colonial imagination to the way Tolkien conceives of his world. But then when you get to the early 2000s when they're filming in New Zealand, right, you get the fact that Peter Jackson, who I think is sensitive to some of these issues, is then kind of insensitive to the fact that like if he just casts a bunch of indigenous New Zealanders as his orcs, it's like, well, Peter, man. If there's now, now you have a Mayori guy screaming in like heavy makeup at like gorgeous Orlando Bloom, like, you don't you don't see how a white supremacist might look at that and like it. Yeah. And it thinks like the opening scene at Bilbo Baggins's birthday party, we're in the Shire and it's only Hobbits, right? Very appealing to the sort of person who wants to be like, yes, all people should be in their own places. And again, you can point at the books and be like, actually, like the Hobbits are friends with dwarves right in the books. Like this is slightly more diverse in as much as that means anything in this context, right? But the movies make these decisions that just kind of produce images that are very useful for certain types of people today. Yeah. There's a kind of blood and soil imaginary that often is refracted through language. In fact, that has either been imputed to the books or that in some cases just is there. The other thing I wanted to ask about is sort of the question of declineism, right? I mean, like, is that something that white supremacists like to because it just feels like the whole talking cosmos only works if the world is kind of becoming objectively worse. Although the joke, I guess, is that by becoming worse, it's becoming our world, right? It's like, we're basically end product of like inshitification. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we are the orcs. We find out that orcs have like badge numbers and logistic supply lines, right? That's the that's the terror that you learn when you get to Mordor is like, oh, they've got a database. But yeah, the declineism is interesting to me because certainly, yes, I think that that can put you in a right winged mindset. I think it leads very much to the conservative and the small seat conservative kind of thing, right? If you believe that everything is leaking out of the world, then yeah, you want to like hold on to it and keep everything in places as much as possible. But I think what is interesting about maybe our current moment is the ways in which for token that declineism is almost like a quietism, right? It's just like Galadriel in the novel, right? She calls the history of the world the long defeat. We're just petering out. And Tolkien seems to have been like, yeah, and that's just kind of what happens, right? Bad things happen. And then maybe something good happens. Tolkien's also very dialectical, right? The best thing in the world will happen. And then the worst thing in the world will happen. But because of the worst thing, something good might happen. And then because of that good thing, a bad thing, and because of that bad thing, a good thing, right? This is all part of his theology as well and sort of the Odyssey. But what is interesting to me about the particular moment in the ways that Tolkien has been taken up, particularly by larger figures in our culture, is because they're doing it in this kind of weird science fictiony register, right? That's a very interesting view because that's like the progressive positive version of the future, right? Or not even progressive, but the sense of enlightenment lineaways go up, right? That like things should have been getting better and now suddenly they're getting worse. And in order to make them get better again, we have to do X, Y, and Z because we didn't get, and again, it's absurd to be like, well, we got computers, but where are our matter replicators from Star Trek? That's like watching the Wizard of Oz and being like, well, we made yellow bricks, but where are my flying monkeys? Like in what other point in time would we ever look at a genre of fiction and be like the world has failed because it didn't turn out like this? Like at what other point in human history would that conversation have made sense? And so the technological way that Tolkien is being picked up, I think to some degree it's about capture, right? And so I think to some degree for people like Teal, this is about capture, right? This is about whatever it is that folks like that see in this. I think it's genuine. I think that declineism might be a part of it, but I'm not enough of a psychoanalyst perhaps to parse out exactly how past and future are getting muddled here because that is what's happening is we're taking this kind of backward-oriented like think of the hierarchies of old and how cool they are. That type of reactionary thinking is also being processed through this speculative forward-looking science fiction type thinking with the fancy stuff being used as labels for the science fiction stuff. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, I think you're exactly right. There is an element here of kind of retro-futurism and it's grafted onto an object that really doesn't lend itself to that at all, right? That really is in the end nostalgic to a fault. It's a writer who sees around himself only decline and sort of tries to make kind of an argument for settling into that decline and being decent and kind of being measured and temperate within an overall atmosphere of decline, right? Yes. Which I'm guessing may have something to do with the empire that was currently crumbling around him, but probably not in ways that he necessarily reflected on that much, but I mean, he's born in South Africa. He's in a world that is not the world that he was born into and that in some ways is appreciably he thinks are appreciably worse. They're obviously much better for people in South Africa. Well, I guess not in '74, but there is an element here, right? But like, how does settle into the world that decline has created? And that of course is something that someone like Peter Teal is not going to be able to accept, or Elon Musk too. And my guess is it's a moment where the appropriation really sort of runs up against the overall vibe of the thing, right? It's it like you only have to crack open the Lord of the Rings briefly to like understand that this is, you know, we can quibble about the details about the, you know, the southern soldier we can think about, you know, Tolkien's letters, but this should become obvious from page one that this is ultimately a story of decline and the story of that having made us who we are, which is of course also something that like the medieval epics he's drawing on often sort of partake of where there's a little bit of like, well, this used to be better, but it's important for the fiction that you agree to that and you stipulate to that. Yeah, it's just so abundantly clear reading Lord of the Rings just even lightly. It's so abundantly clear because Gandalf the wizard basically turns to the reader and says this. He's saying it to a hobbit, but he might as well be saying it directly to you, the reader, where then again, a paraphrase, but you know, it's not down to one person to save the world like you get put into the world gardening language is very important here, right? That you are put into the world and you plant what you can and you dig up the weeds that you can and that is what you do. You don't take on the heroic, I am going to be the guy who is going to get this decline to finally stop who's going to get it all locked into place because that guy is a villain, right? That's Saruman. That's that evil wizard who was supposed to be a good guy and then said, listen, things seem like they're getting pretty bad, but I think if I can just like become the Dark Lord's second lieutenant, I can keep everything on lock and I'll finally get this stuff straightened out and we can stop all of this. That grandeur, the delusion of grandeur is something that Tolkien has very little patience for and it's probably the thing that these particular readers are most explicitly ignoring in terms of their engagement. Yeah, just to drive that point home for listeners who have not read the books, the technology Saruman uses in order to stave off what's worse is called the Palantir. So, yeah, subtext is truly dead. We know the Palantirs are evil, but listen because that's true, right? The Palantirs are evil and he says, but I can use it. It will be okay. It'll work for me. Once again, conservatives are bad readers. I'm telling you. Well, I'm glad that you got out of the clutches of right wing Lord of the Rings readership both because I think eventually Peter Teal would have showed up and tried to take your blood, which I don't think you want. Oh, I think about that a lot. I think I'm like, oh man, I know people who would chose differently and yeah, I've never asked them, are you a blood bag, but it's occurred to me. I've wanted to ask. And then just also because it brought you to your wonderful podcasts. And I think that, you know, a really big recommendation. If anyone felt like, hey, this is pretty fun. I need more. Well, you are in so much luck because the range of touch has you set up. It's daunting. You guys have much longer episodes than we do here and in bed with the right, but they're worth it. Hey, some freaks love that. The true freaks. Should go find Michael. That's what we're for. We're for the true freaks. Yeah. It's really astonishing. I am amazed by the amount of content you guys are able to produce and at such high quality. And thank you. And we really thrilled that we got to do talk with us about this wonderful set of novels. And really this whole genre and about it's very diverse and at times be develing fandom. So thank you so much, Michael. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you, Michael. This was a blast. If you're down, I'd love to have you on again because I learned so much. Oh, I would love to be back. Thank you so much for having me. In bed with the right, it's made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com. Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshi Zumi and Katie Lau. Our title music is by Katie Lau.