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There is a parallel, but it is shallow. The author keeps pointing out the differences between the fantasy of Tolkien and the mythology within ISIS, and the more you think about it, the less the comparison holds. Religion, from the outside, is no different than any other romantic fiction. Does that mean that all romantic fiction and religion is essentially the same? I think that is a very shallow analysis.
You could draw similar parallels to any narrative which inspires actions that seem mad from the outside. The christian right of the US has the apocalyptic narrative of the Rapture, just waiting for the right circumstances to blow into the same kind of fanatic destruction as that of ISIS.
There is an allure in pointing to the mythology as the inspiration for some misdeed as if that may provide some insight, but I don't think so. The simple fact is that it doesn't take much to inspire us humans into doing things that seem unthinkable to others. Just about any fiction can inspire just about any deed. Mark Chapman shot Lennon after reading The Catcher in the Rye. Yes, perhaps it says something about the nature of humanity. But then what?
From the outside, any of these narratives seem like cosplay, like play acting. Just look at Manson or Waco, for example. The fiction is always ridiculous. The acts are real, though.
"A lot of people like cosplay." Everyone, apparently.
I think the author is talking more 'meta' than this, about the dark side of the deep human desires and archetypes that these stories tap into. It goes far beyond the near-universal story template of the 'return of the king.' That's just one permutation. What it's really all about is the need for meaning and significance to one's life.
There's a light side too. The human need for transcendent, powerful, meaningful motives can inspire amazing achievements.
One of my favorite modern crusades-in-the-making is the colonize Mars crowd. I could see it drawing its appeal from much the same psychological basis as ISIS, but channeling that energy in a much more interesting and productive route. I can also imagine the soul searching articles of future Bourgeois critics: "why would upper middle class young people with promising futures give it all up to go try to settle a desolate, airless, radiation-bathed desert and likely die in the process?" Yet I predict they would, and in far greater numbers than we see joining ISIS.
The need for meaning and significance can drive people to do the near-impossible and inspire us all, or it can drive them to take a gun and shoot up a school or go join a death cult. I personally suspect we'll see the latter in proportion to the absence of the former. One thing this author doesn't really address is how the appeal of ISIS (and other smaller-scale episodes of apocalyptic-nihilistic violence) is rooted in the banality of our culture, and what we might do about that. We spend an amazing amount of time and energy on worthless bullshit, and an equally amazing amount of energy convincing ourselves it's important.
Well, I think your thoughts on the dark side of human desire and how it relates to fiction are very close to my own. I don't think the article is even close to probing those questions. The article is just drawing a very lazy comparison but not digging any deeper than that, insinuating that there's something specifically about this kind of "return of the king"-narrative that can inspire something like ISIS. I think that's turning the cause and effect backwards, and it's shallow. It's the "dark side of the deep human desires" as you say that inspires these fictions, not vice versa.
It's a little shallow but not wrong. It definitely got me thinking in that direction, and it's a great deconstruction.
If you are insinuating that the radical Christian right is waiting for a moment to commit the same actions as ISIS, then I believe your are completely incorrect.
They're crazy, and they expect more violence and chaos to break out, but being familiar as I am with some people who have the Rapture belief you allude to, I guarantee you there isn't a desire to commit violence against masses of innocent people. They /THINK/ violence will be committed, by Satan, against non-believers, but they will not act on it. Which means it won't happen.
No, that is not what I am insinuating. Your reading of my comment is as shallow as the article. I am insinuating that this ability to absorb a narrative and act on it, disregarding the well-being of other human beings, is innate in all humans. The Rapture narrative is only one example. I gave others. I can give another that may appeal more to someone who identifies as right-wing: Communism is a narrative, a romantic fiction, that led to horrible outcomes for innumerable people.
To believe that "they will not act on it" is a factual statement is horribly naive. People "act on it" all the time!
> The christian right of the US has the apocalyptic narrative of the Rapture, just waiting for the right circumstances to blow into the same kind of fanatic destruction as that of ISIS.
You literally say the Christian right is waiting for the right time to commit acts like ISIS.
Do you truly believe that the "Christian right" is just a specific set of circumstances away from turning as destructive as ISIS?
If you do, then you are more of a lunatic than you think Christians are.
I believe ANYONE of us is just a specific set of circumstances away from turning as destructive as ISIS. History proves it. I won't say more to avoid invoking Godwin's law.
There is no need for Godwin -- we saw that firsthand in the wars in former Yugoslavia, where many previously normal people turned (seemingly inexplicably) cruel and destructive.
Perhaps the only thing I got from that was that young people in wealthy democracies do not understand how a government like theirs works and so do not understand the power they hold within themselves.
Way too often I've encountered young adults who express both a dislike of the way things are, and a feeling of helplessness to do anything about it. For those who feel strongly about things that "should" be done but aren't, the idea of just shooting anyone who disagrees with you appeals to them.
There are two problems, one is that political change is gradual enough that its hard to see when you are young. I point out victories like gay marriage rights, civil rights before them, and the fact that prohibition, as a constitutional amendment, was reversed by the people. But I totally get how unsatisfying it is to have to wait 5 years for any movement. I also ask them to look around at their friends, for the world is made up of people who have grown up from kids, and if you look in the "CEO" ranks or the "politician" ranks you will see they cluster around ages. Those people were babies before and are running the world now, when you and your friends are their age you will likely be running the world so think about which friends you want to motivate into office and which ones you would rather not get elected :-).
The connections to Tolkien are cool, but isn't always the case with right-wing extremism? Fascists from Mussolini's regime to the Third Reich idolized imagined versions of their ancient nations. Even today, the Confederate flag represents a romanticized, fictitious version of the Antebellum South. Western right-wing extremists love to collect memorabilia of their fallen regimes, and historical reenactments are nothing if not scholarly cosplay.
Yeah.
One good thing that came out of it is that the Fascist regime (which, incidentally, didn't do very well on the trains running on time front) put some organized effort in restoring and preserving Roman buildings and artifacts.
The current crop of assholes can't even get that far and is in fact doing the exact opposite.
You should just proceed reading Simlarillion which will discourage you from persuading heroic goals.
It's a sad story of permanent apocalypse, how everything falls apart due to proud and heroic attitudes of characters.
I don't think young people will understand it tho. I only enjoyed it when turned 30.
https://pp.vk.me/c627125/v627125869/6689/GK3YLpGn9eM.jpg here bookmarked is every death of a named character in Silmarillion. It's that serious.
LotR took on a new dimension for me when I read more about the horrors of the Western Front in WW1 and a wee note that Tolkien wrote in a letter:
“My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”
https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-to...
I can't find it now, but I once read an interesting bit comparing Gandalf to a ranking officer- knowing far more about the big picture than any private, always disappearing to tackle other bigger problems, and swooping in with overwhelming support to turn the tide at the last moment when circumstances look dire for the foot soldiers.
...a dress-up festival of blood-soaked nostalgia whose very pretensions to antiquity mark it as the rankest kind of modern innovation.
This reminds me of Ernst Gellner's critique of the "natural explanation" for nationalism. There was no ancient Germany, France, UK, etc. to which the modern states can trace a lineage. (Even the Roman Empire was not in any sense Italy.) Those nations were created as a response to the modern situation, just as this zany caliphate is a response to our postmodern world.
This reminds me also of the idea of warfare as a force purifying yourself personally from the mundane failures of personality and habit that frustrate you day-to-day. It is strange to look at an advertisement such as https://youtube.com/watch?v=MZ73FEXSQRQ which I found so compelling as a preteen and which now looks laughably cartoonish.
This is utterly brilliant and absolutely needed to be said.
I don't see it as bashing Tolkien per se, but as pointing out the dark side of nostalgic fantasy. Tolkien's fiction is wonderful to read, but it can also be deconstructed pretty brutally.
There's an author who did the ultimate in this area. He told the story from Mordor's point of view:
http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/last_ringbearer/
A similar deconstruction can be carried out in the real world against, for example, the nostalgic hipsterism of people like James Howard Kunstler. I actually agree with many of Kunstler's aesthetic criticisms of suburbia, but if you dig deeply into his corpus you find a strong thread of reactionary elitism -- what I call a "white pastoral fantasy" set in an imaginary past.
Of course nostalgic fantasy isn't the only thing you can deconstruct... "progress" oriented sci-fi like Star Trek can also be turned upside down. A friend of mine sort of popped that bubble long ago when he pointed out that Star Trek is exclusively told from the point of view of military starships with world-destroying weapons. Think that might be a biased perspective? Would the "Singapore in space" federation really be a good place to live? Ever notice that there's basically no culture, music, or art?
> Ever notice that there's basically no culture, music, or art?
No culture? What are you talking about? You've got Sir Patrick Stewart performing the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan, Shakespeare, et cetera. Culture!!! ;)
More seriously: proper cultural artifacts from the future are really hard to convincingly fabricate in the context of a cultural artifact of the present. Most of the time people just toy with the world's current trends, like the gritty downtown Los Angeles nightlife of Blade Runner or the self-parody of the 1980s in The Fifth Element. Star Trek's "culture" is a shallow reflection of 1990s Hollywood trends. Witness the fetish for tribal artifacts from distant alien peoples, cherry-picked for display by the ostensibly erudite, stripped from anything resembling the visceral reality of their original context, and pseudo-analyzed in order to support some trite lesson upholding only purely modern values.
But it's okay, since we're all understanding, empathetic, tolerant, and perfectly inoffensive people, and our introspective self-examination will never reveal otherwise. :P
Good point.
It'd be easier to pull off today due to the fragmentation and fractalization of modern culture. By mining smallish, fringe, and new aesthetic movements you could portray a convincing future aesthetic to a mostly naive audience.
Toss this on the Enterprise and it'd be convincingly 24th century:
> A friend of mine sort of popped that bubble long ago when he pointed out that Star Trek is exclusively told from the point of view of military starships with world-destroying weapons.
That's not actually factually true; while military [0] crew perspective is the norm for the franchise, there are episodes of every series (at least, every series other than TOS; I'm not sure there is a good TOS example) that are told primarily from outside of that perspective.
> Think that might be a biased perspective?
Every perspective is biased. A "perspective" is just a name for a set of biases.
> Would the "Singapore in space" federation really be a good place to live?
I can see arguments on either side of whether the Federation would be a good place to live (though mostly weak arguments on either side, since we have thin and conflicting information on what life in the Federation, particularly outside of Starfleet, is actually like.)
OTOH, I can't see a good basis for the "Singapore in space" description.
> Ever notice that there's basically no culture, music, or art?
Though culture, music, and art are rarely the focus of the stories told in the franchise, there's considerable evidence that they are present; there's quite a lot interaction between the focal characters and culture, musical, or artistic events and works in the course of the various series.
You might make a case that what is shown in that regard is heavily focused on nostalgia rather than new culture/music/art, and that this is particularly true when it comes to Earth-centered human culture, but one might debate the extent to which that is intended to be what the Federation is really like on average vs. the extent to which it is what the series focusses on as an artistic device to engage the audience and provide familiar references.
[0] Noting that "military" may be somewhat disputed as Starfleet personnel in several episodes outright deny that that Starfleet is military, despite the military ranks, courts-martial, etc.
>Star Trek is exclusively told from the point of view of military starships with world-destroying weapons.
that's basically US of 20th-21st century point of view.
>Would the "Singapore in space" federation really be a good place to live?
the real question is whether an alternative is really possible. Once you get "commons" you have to put machinery in place to avoid the "tragedy".
We always have commons. The machinery we use is called "property".
I read, greatly enjoyed, and would recommend The Last Ringbearer. Only one weak part; when you get to the section of heavy, multi-layered intelligence intrigue, let yourself skip ahead if you find yourself wanting to.
> . A friend of mine sort of popped that bubble long ago when he pointed out that Star Trek is exclusively told from the point of view of military starships with world-destroying weapons.
Wait, have you actually watched Star Trek? The problem with that very thing you mention is a theme throughout the various series. Picard, et al, are constantly trying to prove the Enterprise is a science vessel and not a military one, not just to the Romulans but Starfleet itself.
"there's basically no culture"
If you want Federation with culture what you need is the Culture - in all of its hedonistic glory (at the price of humans effectively being the pets of god-like AIs - which in the case of the Culture is something I personally would be happy with).
[GCU Arbitrary please take note!]
Star Trek is basically garbage. Babylon 5 did a better job of showing the politics and strains of different cultures trying to focus on a single objective--even if it was a little optimistic at times.
Honestly, the future is probably going to look more like Red Dwarf or Lexx.
There's plenty of culture, music, and art in Star Trek- from Sulu's bonsai to Spock's lute playing to a lot missions based around seeing what some remote archaeologist is up to.
As for the article, it seems kind of self-explanatory: Tolkien's created nostalgia-based mythology is similar to ISIS' created nostalgia-based mythology. Main difference is that Tolkien actually lived in pre-WWI Britain, no one in ISIS lived during the Caliphate.
> Tolkien's created nostalgia-based mythology is similar to ISIS' created nostalgia-based mythology. Main difference is that Tolkien actually lived in pre-WWI Britain, no one in ISIS lived during the Caliphate.
Another main difference is no significant group is selling Tolkien's fantasy as reality and the basis for running real societies (outside of other fictional works, notably S. M. Stirling's "Novels of the Change".)
I am not sure it is wise over think this. Perhaps the things that we find so repulsive about ISIS are exactly what attracts certain people from western countries. They want to attack women, abuse people and kill. These are hardly unusual traits.
I think David Brin likes to make similar points, but sbout feudalism and Star Wars.