Leaning Right

The political spectrum (yes, politics again) has, for over 200 years now, been the standard model for representing political views, adopted by both the media and laymen alike. It’s not hard to see why; the concept of judging every political view or party by a measure of left-ness and right-ness makes it very simple to understand and easily all-encompassing, allowing various groups to be easily compared to one another without a lot of complicated analysis and wordy explanations. The idea comes from the French revolution towards the end of the 18th century; in the revolutionary parliament, factions among political figures were incredibly divisive and the source of open conflict, so much like home & away fans at a football match they attempted to separate themselves. Those sitting to the left of the parliamentary president were the revolutionaries, the radicals, the secular and the republican, those who had driven the waves of chaotic change that characterised the revolutionary period. However, as the revolution went on, another set of views formed running counter to the revolutionary ideas of the left-sitters, and who quickly found their way into an equally tight-knit group on the right hand side of the hall; those who supported the principles of the monarchy, the prominence of the church in French society and politics, and the concepts of hierarchy and rank. It goes without saying, of course, that those populating the right-wing, as it would become known were mainly those who would benefit from these principles; the rich, the upper class (well, what little of it that hadn’t been killed off) and the high-standing.

And, according to the Big Book of Political Cliche’s, right wing=bad. Right wing means uber-capitalist, aristocratic, a semi-tyrannical overseer extorting money from the poor, innocent, repressed working classes and supportive of stealing from the poor to give to the rich. The right is where racists are to be found, old-fashioned bigots out of touch with the real world, those who think slavery was an excellent business model, and the neo-Nazis (I realise I may be pushing the envelope on what the stereotype actually is, but you get my point).

However, when one analyses the concept of right-wingedness (far more interesting than the left, which is all the same philosophy with varying degrees of mental instability), we begin to find a disparity, something that hints that our method of classification itself may be somewhat out of change and in need of a rethink. Right wing is considered to incorporate both a socio-economic position (pro-capitalist, laissez-faire and ‘get the poor working’ in very broad terms) and a social equality one (racism, sexism, discrimination etc.) akin to Nazism, and nowadays the two simply do not align themselves with the same demographic any more.

I mean, consider it purely from the ‘who votes for them’ angle. In Britain, the (nowadays fairly nominally) right-leaning Conservative party finds it power base in the country’s richer areas, such as the Home Counties, and among the rich & successful capitalists, since their quality of life can be put down to the capitalist model that Conservatism is so supportive of (and their benefits from taxation are relatively small compared to the help it provides the poorer demographics with). However, far-right parties and political groups such as the British National Party (BNP) and English Defence League (EDL) tend to seek support from right at the opposite end of the social ladder, seeking support from the young, working-class, white skinhead male sphere of existence. Both of them draw support from a predominantly white power base, but beyond that there is little connection.

This is not something solely prevalent today; the Nazi party are often held up as the epitomy of right-wing for their vehemently racist ‘far-right’ policies, but we often seem to forget that ‘Nazi’ is just a corruption of ‘Natso’, short for ‘National Socialist German Workers Party’. The party’s very title indicates that one of their key areas of support was for ‘the German Workers’, making a similar appeal as the communists of the time. Although their main support was eventually found in the middle  and lower-middle classes (the upper end of the social ladder considering Hitler a poor upstart who would never make anything of himself, demonstrating exactly how out of touch they were with the real world), the Nazi economic policy that put Germany through an astonishing economic turnaround between 1933 (when the Nazis took power) and 1939 was closely centred around the socialist ‘public works & state-controlled business’ model that Franklin D. Roosevelt had recently adopted to lead the USA out of The Great Depression. Many socialists and communists would doubtless have approved, if any of them hadn’t been locked up, beaten up or on their way to forced labour camps. In terms of socio-economic policy then, the Natso’s were clearly less ‘National’ and more ‘Socialist’.

We are, then, presented with this strange disparity between the economic-policy based ‘right’ and the racism-centric ‘far right’. The two were originally linked by the concepts of nationalism and traditionalism; from the earliest days of the political spectrum the right wing have always been very much supportive of a return ‘to the old ways’, of thinking nostalgically of the past (usually because there was less left-wingedness in it) and that the modern world is getting steadily worse in the name of ‘progress’. One feature identified in this vein is that of immigration, of foreign-born workers entering the country and ‘stealing our jobs’ (et cetera), in their view devaluing the worthiness of their own country. This has made the idea of nationalism and extreme patriotism a stereotypically right wing trait, and the associated view that ‘my country is better than yours’. This basic sense of the superiority of various races is the key rhetoric of ‘Social Darwinism’, a concept pioneered by the Nazis (among others) that suggests that Charles Darwin’s ‘Survival of the Fittest’ principle should be applied to the various races of humanity too, and that the ‘better’ races have a right of superiority over the ‘lesser’ ones (traditionally ethnic minorities in the west, such as middle eastern and black), and this too is a feature of many far-right viewpoints.

But the field has changed since those ideas were pioneered; the modern world that we live in is for one thing a lot easier to traverse than before, meaning that those rich enough to afford it can easily see the whole globe in all its glorious diversity and wonder for themselves, and our increasingly diverse western society has seen a significant number of ‘minorities’ enter the top echelons of society. It is also true that using cheap, hard working labour from immigrants rather than from workers with trade unions makes good economic (if often not moral) sense for large corporations, meaning that the ‘rich capitalist’ demographic who are so supportive of conservative economic policy are no longer the kind of people who worry about those ‘stealing our jobs’. This viewpoint has turned to the opposite end of the social spectrum, the kind of people who can genuinely see their jobs being done by ‘foreigners’ and get jealous and resentful about it; it is these people who form the support bas for right-wing populists and think the EDL know what they’re talking about, and in many ways that is more worrying. The rich having dangerous, extreme views is a serious danger, but there are comparatively few of them and democracy entails just one vote each. The number of young, angry, working class white men is far larger, and it is this demographic that won the BNP a seat in the House of Commons at the last election. Will this view get more or less prevalent as time goes on? I would like to think the latter, but maybe we’ll just have to wait and see…

Advertisement

An Opera Posessed

My last post left the story of JRR Tolkein immediately after his writing of his first bestseller; the rather charming, lighthearted, almost fairy story of a tale that was The Hobbit. This was a major success, and not just among the ‘children aged between 6 and 12’ demographic identified by young Rayner Unwin; adults lapped up Tolkein’s work too, and his publishers Allen & Unwin were positively rubbing their hands in glee. Naturally, they requested a sequel, a request to which Tolkein’s attitude appears to have been along the lines of ‘challenge accepted’.

Even holding down the rigours of another job, and even accounting for the phenomenal length of his finished product, the writing of a book is a process that takes a few months for a professional writer (Dame Barbara Cartland once released 25 books in the space of a year, but that’s another story), and perhaps a year or two for an amateur like Tolkein. He started writing the book in December 1937, and it was finally published 18 years later in 1955.

This was partly a reflection of the difficulties Tolkein had in publishing his work (more on that later), but this also reflects the measured, meticulous and very serious approach Tolkein took to his writing. He started his story from scratch, each time going in a completely different direction with an entirely different plot, at least three times. His first effort, for instance, was due to chronicle another adventure of his protagonist Bilbo from The Hobbit, making it a direct sequel in both a literal and spiritual sense. However, he then remembered about the ring Bilbo found beneath the mountains, won (or stolen, depending on your point of view) from the creature Gollum, and the strange power it held; not just invisibility, as was Bilbo’s main use for it, but the hypnotic effect it had on Gollum (he even subsequently rewrote that scene for The Hobbit‘s second edition to emphasise that effect). He decided that the strange power of the ring was a more natural direction to follow, and so he wrote about that instead.

Progress was slow. Tolkein went months at a time without working on the book, making only occasional, sporadic yet highly focused bouts of progress. Huge amounts were cross-referenced or borrowed from his earlier writings concerning the mythology, history & background of Middle Earth, Tolkein constantly trying to make his mythic world feel and, in a sense, be as real as possible, but it was mainly due to the influence of his son Christopher, who Tolkein would send chapters to whilst he was away fighting the Second World War in his father’s native South Africa, that the book ever got finished at all. When it eventually did, Tolkein had been working the story of Bilbo’s son Frodo and his adventure to destroy the Ring of Power for over 12 years. His final work was over 1000 pages long, spread across six ‘books’, as well as being laden with appendices to explain & offer background information, and he called it The Lord of The Rings (in reference to his overarching antagonist, the Dark Lord Sauron).

A similar story had, incidentally, been attempted once before; Der Ring des Nibelungen is an opera (well, four operas) written by German composer Richard Wagner during the 19th century, traditionally performed over the course of four consecutive nights (yeah, you have to be pretty committed to sit through all of that) and also known as ‘The Ring Cycle’- it’s where ‘Ride of The Valkyries’ comes from. The opera follows the story of a ring, made from the traditionally evil Rhinegold (gold panned from the Rhine river), and the trail of death, chaos and destruction it leaves in its wake between its forging & destruction. Many commentators have pointed out the close similarities between the two, and as a keen follower of Germanic mythology Tolkein certainly knew the story, but Tolkein rubbished any suggestion that he had borrowed from it, saying “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases”. You can probably work out my approximate personal opinion from the title of this post, although I wouldn’t read too much into it.

Even once his epic was finished, the problems weren’t over. Once finished, he quarrelled with Allen & Unwin over his desire to release LOTR in one volume, along with his still-incomplete Silmarillion (that he wasn’t allowed to may explain all the appendices). He then turned to Collins, but they claimed his book was in urgent need of an editor and a license to cut (my words, not theirs, I should add). Many other people have voiced this complaint since, but Tolkein refused and ordered Collins to publish by 1952. This they failed to do, so Tolkein wrote back to Allen & Unwin and eventually agreed to publish his book in three parts; The Fellowship of The Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of The King (a title Tolkein, incidentally, detested because it told you how the book ended).

Still, the book was out now, and the critics… weren’t that enthusiastic. Well, some of them were, certainly, but the book has always had its detractors among the world of literature, and that was most certainly the case during its inception. The New York Times criticised Tolkein’s academic approach, saying he had “formulated a high-minded belief in the importance of his mission as a literary preservationist, which turns out to be death to literature itself”, whilst others claimed it, and its characters in particular, lacked depth. Even Hugo Dyson, one of Tolkein’s close friends and a member of his own literary group, spent public readings of the book lying on a sofa shouting complaints along the lines of “Oh God, not another elf!”. Unlike The Hobbit, which had been a light-hearted children’s story in many ways, The Lord of The Rings was darker & more grown up, dealing with themes of death, power and evil and written in a far more adult style; this could be said to have exposed it to more serious critics and a harder gaze than its predecessor, causing some to be put off by it (a problem that wasn’t helped by the sheer size of the thing).

However, I personally am part of the other crowd, those who have voiced their opinions in nearly 500 five-star reviews on Amazon (although one should never read too much into such figures) and who agree with the likes of CS  Lewis, The Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times of the time that “Here is a book that will break your heart”, that it is “among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century” and that “the English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and those who are going to read them”. These are the people who have shown the truth in the review of the New York Herald Tribune: that Tolkein’s masterpiece was and is “destined to outlast our time”.

But… what exactly is it that makes Tolkein’s epic so special, such a fixture; why, even years after its publication as the first genuinely great work of fantasy, it is still widely regarded as the finest work the genre has ever produced? I could probably write an entire book just to try and answer that question (and several people probably have done), but to me it was because Tolkein understood, absolutely perfectly and fundamentally, exactly what he was trying to write. Many modern fantasy novels try to be uber-fantastical, or try to base themselves around an idea or a concept, in some way trying to find their own level of reality on which their world can exist, and they often find themselves in a sort of awkward middle ground, but Tolkein never suffered that problem because he knew that, quite simply, he was writing a myth, and he knew exactly how that was done. Terry Pratchett may have mastered comedic fantasy, George RR Martin may be the king of political-style fantasy, but only JRR Tolkein has, in recent times, been able to harness the awesome power of the first source of story; the legend, told around the campfire, of the hero and the villain, of the character defined by their virtues over their flaws, of the purest, rawest adventure in the pursuit of saving what is good and true in this world. These are the stories written to outlast the generations, and Tolkein’s mastery of them is, to me, the secret to his masterpiece.