Scott McLemee reviews David Hellerstein’s The Couch, the Clinic, and the Scanner: Stories From Three Revolutionary Eras of the Mind.

Scott McLemee rounds up upcoming university press titles focused on science, medicine and the natural world.

The latest catalogs from scholarly presses are full of reminders—were any more needed—that a new presidential election cycle is grinding to a start, if indeed the last one ever really ended. I started to compile a list of electoral-adjacent books for this column, only to feel an urge to go outdoors and forget about what the next 20 months have in store. (At times there are definite therapeutic benefits to seeing squirrels.)

Returning to work, I started to assemble a different list. Several recent or forthcoming titles focus on the natural world, including the human organism and how it navigates its environments. Here follows a digest of some books that seemed particularly interesting. Quotations come from descriptions by the presses. All titles have been or will be published this year.

Three of the titles promise insights into developments in the life sciences. Alfonso Martinez Arias’s The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life (Basic Books, August) “draw[s] on new research from his own lab and others” to challenge the genome-centric perspective of recent decades. It seems that “nothing in our DNA explains why the heart is on the left side of the body, how many fingers we have, or even how our cells manage to reproduce.” These and other important determinations are made through “a thrillingly intricate, constantly moving symphony of cells.”

That perspective is in general accord with Michael J. Reiss and Michael Ruse’s line of thought in The New Biology: A Battle Between Mechanism and Organicism (Harvard University Press, June). Acknowledging the explanatory value of treating biological processes as “a more complicated version of physics, one that can be reduced to the behavior of organic molecules,” they nonetheless emphasize the “need to view life from the perspective of whole organisms to make sense of biological complexity.” While their subtitle refers to a “battle” between mechanistic and organicist thinking, the authors themselves offer a pluralistic take: “Organicist and mechanistic approaches are not simply hypotheses to be confirmed or refuted, but rather operate as metaphors for describing a universe of sublime intricacy.”

At some point, that intricacy gives rise to organisms capable of emitting (and responding to) signs. Gary Tomlinson’s The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning (Zone Books, February) incorporates “emergent thinking about evolution, new research on animal behaviors, and theories of information and signs” in search of “the origin and place of meaning in the earthly biosphere.” Meaning making is not a human monopoly. Nor is it available to all creatures great and small. The author “discerns limits to its scope and identifies innumerable life forms, including many animals and all other organisms, that make no meanings at all.” But for the animals capable of generating and understanding signs, “they shape meaning-laden lifeways, offering possibilities for distinctive organism/niche interactions and sometimes leading to technology and culture.”

The semiotician Umberto Eco memorably defined the sign as anything that can be used to tell a lie. Humankind has no monopoly on that skill, either. Lixing Sun’s The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars: Cheating and Deception in the Living World (Princeton University Press, April) treats the natural order as swarming with prevaricators: “Possums play possum, feigning death to cheat predators. Crows cry wolf to scare off rivals. Amphibians and reptiles are inveterate impostors. Even genes and cells cheat.” Dishonesty is an evolutionarily beneficial policy, “giv[ing] rise to wondrous diversity.” The ability to “exploit honest messages in communication signals and use them to serve [an organism’s] own interests” or to “exploit the biases and loopholes in the sensory systems of other creatures” is “a potent catalyst in the evolutionary arms race between the cheating and the cheated.”

As a possible antidote to bio-cynicism, we have Benjamin Meiches’s Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics (University of Minnesota Press, June). Taking up “the role of animals laboring alongside humans in humanitarian operations,” the author “examines how these animals not only improve specific practices of humanitarian aid but have started to transform the basic tenets of humanitarianism”—in particular its anthropocentrism. Through “integrating nonhuman animals into humanitarian practice, several humanitarian organizations have effectively demonstrated that care, compassion, and creativity are creaturely rather than human.”

The organisms Amber Benezra studies in Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking With Microbes (University of Minnesota Press, May) are intimately involved with humanity, for good and for ill. Moving between a genome sciences lab in the United States and a field site in Bangladesh, the book interrogates how “the interrelationships between gut microbes and malnutrition in resource-poor countries” are handled across disciplines. The author considers “how microbes travel between human guts in the ‘field’ and in microbiome laboratories, influencing definitions of health and disease, and how the microbiome can change our views on evolution, agency, and life.”

Two co-authored books anticipate the shape of things to come for the human body itself—at least for humans with access to good health care.

Instead of “wait[ing] for clinical symptoms to appear before they act”—then dosing patients with medication and “invasive procedures from which they derive no benefit”—doctors will have access to the genomically informed treatments described by Dr. Leroy Hood and Nathan Price in The Age of Scientific Wellness: Why the Future of Medicine Is Personalized, Predictive, Data-Rich, and in Your Hands (Harvard University Press, April). Besides our genome maps, they will use data from blood tests “and hundreds of other inputs, all analyzed by artificial intelligence” to “detect the early onset of disease decades before symptoms arise, revolutionizing prevention.”

Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield’s Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life (Princeton University Press, March) describes similar developments in terms of a cyber-doppelgänger that will be able to “help predict your risk of disease, participate in virtual drug trials, shed light on the diet and lifestyle changes that are best for you, and help identify therapies to enhance your well-being and extend your lifespan.”

Adrian Johns looks at an earlier moment of progress-mindedness in The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, April). In the early 20th century, researchers began “devis[ing] instruments and experiments to investigate what happened to people when they read” in order to study “how a good reader’s eyes moved across a page of printed characters, and they asked how their mind apprehended meanings as they did so.” What they learned then shaped classroom instruction, as well as public awareness of “drastic informational inequities, between North and South, city and country, and white and Black.”

For every stride forward, there seems to be a step or two backward of the sort anatomized by Michael D. Gordin in Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, March). Unfortunately the term itself is emotionally charged and slippery of definition. And even if we agree that alchemy, astrology, “pyramid power” and T. D. Lysenko’s contributions to Soviet agricultural science all qualify, it is not clear that it’s possible to identify “a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science.” The author examines particular cases of “doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science,” past and present, arguing that, from them, “we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today.” No doubt it will be banned from some libraries.

Three years ago Peter Burke published The Polymath (Yale University Press), an illustrated history of what are usually called Renaissance men or women. Burke, an emeritus professor of cultural history at the University of Cambridge, defines polymaths as having “interests that were ‘encyclopedic’ in the original sense of running around the whole intellectual ‘course’ or ‘curriculum.’” The label certainly applies to Leonardo da Vinci—although he also shows the contrast between interdisciplinary scholarship and Renaissance virtuosity. The latter also requires some combination of artistic creativity, practical skill and inventiveness, as observable in Leonardo’s command of anatomy, painting, drawing, mathematics, architecture, engineering, music and military science (to keep the list short).

Burke lists 500 polymaths from the past six centuries (with a scattering of true Renaissance-model geniuses, such as Benjamin Franklin and Emanuel Swedenborg) and devotes his book to finding patterns among them. He makes the interesting suggestion that polymaths do not reject the necessary role of specialists in producing knowledge but complement it by making connections across the disciplinary boundaries. That seems likely. But the fascination of reading about polymaths also derives, in large part, from the sheer mental exuberance they display.

The polymath embodies a greater intensity of attention than the non-polymathic norm. “An overdose of curiosity, long known as the libido sciendi and described by the polymath Francis Bacon as ‘inquisitive appetite,’ is surely the most general as well as the most obvious characteristic of the species,” writes Burke.

His new book, Ignorance: A Global History (Yale University Press), pivots to the complete antithesis of “inquisitive appetite.” As discussed in this column 15 years ago, a whole body of interdisciplinary scholarship now focuses on questions of ignorance: its varieties, sources and consequences. Last year saw the arrival of the second edition of the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, updated from the 2015 original. Clearly it is a growing field.

Burke notes that while the Routledge handbook has 51 contributors, not one of them is a historian, a situation that has not changed in the new edition. Besides trying to fill a gap in the literature with a broad historical narrative, Ignorance is a call for his colleagues to pursue their own investigations. “Many have referred to ignorance in passing,” he writes, “but few have yet placed it at the center of their enquiries.” But for his part, Burke regards the work of social scientists and philosophers who refer to the “the ‘production’ or ‘fabrication’ of ignorance … [or to] ‘strategic’ ignorance” with skepticism. In place of notions of ignorance as socially constructed, he prefers “to remain close to ordinary language whenever possible” and opts “for a relatively narrow definition of ignorance as absence”—a vacuum of knowledge or information, so to speak.

What this understanding yields in practice is a series of general essays treating ignorance from two general perspectives. One looks at the concepts and metaphors used to characterize ignorance and how they relate to knowledge that (eventually) fills the void. Ignorance depicted as a “cloud” or “fog”—or as a form of blindness or immaturity—accompanies any grand narrative of Enlightenment: the advancement of learning then figures as a spreading of light, a curative treatment or progress into a higher stage of development. More specific forms of ignorance follow from the social distance between groups: between men and women, or missionaries and “natives,” or layers of a complex organization.

Burke’s second set of case studies focuses on the fundamental role of ignorance in any number of endeavors such as war, business and governance. Military conflict involves “planning for the future despite knowing that the future will not go according to plan,” and the “fog of war” (uncertainty, at any given moment, concerning the position and strength of the forces in combat) presumably derives from literal clouds of smoke on the battlefield. More generally, this portion of the book concerns situations where one side in a transaction will benefit from reducing its own ignorance and/or increasing that of the other side.

In his book on polymathy, the author posed the idea that it might be an almost paradoxical side effect of the specialization in academic research. His consideration of the history of ignorance points out another set of unintentional consequences:

“The rise of new knowledge(s) over the centuries has necessarily involved the rise of new ignorance(s). Collectively, humanity knows more than ever before, but individually, we do not know more than our predecessors.”

Thus does Burke complicate his otherwise straightforward definition of ignorance as a sort of naturally occurring absence of knowledge—while still keeping a distance from those who pursue, in his formulation, “what they call ‘agnotology,’ the study of the ways in which ignorance is produced or maintained, as opposed to ‘agnoiology’ the study of ignorance in general.”

The agnoiologists will presumably be receptive to Burke’s common-language notion of ignorance. At the risk of stumbling into a turf war, I have to point out that the agnotologists are clearly right to press for a more active concept of ignorance. Ignorance can be—and is—produced, cultivated, monetized. Aggressive and demanding varieties of it have emerged and are, in some places, taking control of curricula. Burke prefers to think of deliberately propagated ignorance as a matter of deception. And often enough it is—so fair enough, up to a point. But it must not be generalized beyond its suitability.

Consider the re-emergence of beliefs about the flatness of the earth and the sun’s rotation around it. Adherents to this view form a subculture that is entirely too dynamic, and cannot be explained as a matter of deception, apart from self-deception. The odds of profiting or benefiting from persuading anyone of flat-earth doctrine seem very long. And the adherents sometimes exhibit the aforementioned “inquisitive appetite” piqued by calls to “do your own research.”

The libido sciendi can take perverse forms. It is not that valid knowledge is unavailable. Ignorance has simply rejected it—crowded it out with preferred alternatives, using powerful tools for disseminating information to destroy a real understanding of things. The history of ignorance will be of value to the extent it helps us comprehend the forms it is assuming in the 21st century.

Scott McLemee reviews Peter Burke’s Ignorance: A Global History.

The word “condescension” once had a positive connotation, unlikely ever to be revived. It referred to a variety of gracefulness or tact possessed by some individuals born into the upper echelons of the social hierarchy. Condescension in what we might call the complimentary sense was a knack for dealing well with people of lower standing—not as equals, to be sure, but agreeably enough to spare them any uncomfortable self-consciousness about their low status. That’s what one of Jane Austen’s characters has in mind when lauding another character for her condescension.

Two hundred years later, no hint of praise attaches to the word. At some point those in a position to exercise condescension presumably figured out that people on the receiving end felt less gratitude for it than had been assumed. A more common response was resentment—though that word, too, has had a strange career, as Robert A. Schneider recounts in The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion (University of Chicago Press). As late as the second half of the 18th century, a theologian or moral philosopher could treat resentment as a reasonable response to something offensive or unjust. Resentment might even be necessary to a peaceable society, provided it led to reconciliation and forgiveness.

The author, a professor of history at Indiana University at Bloomington, would clearly prefer that resentment of the more conciliatory variety be cultivated now, even though little in his book makes the wish seem plausible. The Return of Resentment takes up a position at the crossroads between social and intellectual history, but much of the traffic feeding into the intersection comes from the 24-hour news cycle. The introduction opens with a sampling of reporting and commentary from the past few years in which political and cultural conflicts around the world are treated as manifestations of resentment—of being “slighted or ignored or despised or abandoned or humiliated,” to borrow a British journalist’s useful catalog of triggering emotions.

Paring down this wide-ranging but tightly constructed book into the barest possible summary requires a sketch of the mood in question. Early usage of “resentment” allowed for its application to any lasting memory of emotion, although the unhappy sort prevailed. For the most part resentment involves a persistent sense of injury. The harm is experienced as deliberate, unjust or unacknowledged by whoever caused it. (See also: condescension.) And while the feeling might be directed toward worthy ends, what resentment more typically inspires is a desire for revenge. It goes unsatisfied except in the sufferer’s imagination, which tends to make it keener. Resentment then becomes the emotional equivalent of a festering wound. It resembles anger, jealousy, envy or indignation (and may involve some combination thereof), overlayed with feelings of powerlessness and, often, of shame.

So understood, resentment is not just an emotional reaction but something akin to a syndrome or a disposition. It takes on a social as well as a psychological aspect when the sense of injury is widely shared; it may become political when the sufferers identify particular institutions, populations and leaders as inflicting the pain. While identifying resentment as a perennial tendency—evident in biblical narratives, for one—Schneider traces its emergence as a social factor to early modernity (the 16th through 18th centuries), with concern over its political expression developing in the wake of the French Revolution.

The sharpest formulation treating resentment as an epochal force comes in the late 19th century with Friedrich Nietzsche’s identification of ressentiment as a spiritual corrosive, secreted by the weak and poisoning the strong. The French word now serves in other languages as the preferred term when discussing Nietzsche’s understanding of the phenomenon. Ressentiment is a collective hatred of slaves for their masters—in particular, for the aristocratic absorption in noble action, free of self-consciousness or concern for anyone’s else’s judgment or well-being. The slaves wallow in their abject powerlessness and come to think of everything strong as evil, with their own weakness and shame being signs of their own goodness.

Schneider takes Nietzsche’s ressentiment as both highly influential and profoundly unoriginal—a translation of his century’s widespread and generally antidemocratic anxiety over “the people” (biding its time before taking revenge on the social order) into an ahistorical scenario about an imagined age of stable social pyramids. Other thinkers have reworked the concept of ressentiment into rather less melodramatic terms. But Schneider pointedly sticks to the common English spelling, applicable to anything from minor individual disgruntlement to ferocious and ideologically cohesive mass movements, except when discussing the Nietzschean understanding of it in particular.

The problem, in Schneider’s perspective, is that categorizing something as the product of ressentiment prejudges the sense of injury as invalid and probably pathological. It obliges no attention to questions of justice and of the possibility that the grievances are justified, or should at least be given a hearing. The same can be said for dismissing McCarthyism or other strains of conspiratorial thinking as expressions of “status anxiety,” a term favored by Cold War liberal academics in the 1950s and ’60s. (Schneider makes valid points about evidentiary holes in the liberal academics’ analysis, but he sidesteps the issue of whether resentful sentiments expressed in such movements have any justification.)

The Return of Resentment moves along a number of narrative tracks, not all of them noted above, and its long final chapter refers to a sizable portion of the more thoughtful books in the “what the hell is going on?” genre called forth by the past several years. Growing economic inequality, changing demographics and social norms, and algorithmic echo-chamber effects are all familiar and credible factors. Schneider goes beyond them to consider our tendency “to think of resentment as an emotional trait of ‘others’—which is to say the embittered and angry ‘left-behind and threatened.’” On the contrary, he points out the element of resentment seemingly baked into the human life cycle, with the young and the old prone to rounds of mutual condescension. This is not an optimistic book, but it takes notice of subtler strains of contempt that keep people from trying for anything better.

Scott McLemee reviews Robert A. Schneider’s The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion.

Someone once explained to me that she had found the key to J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels: they turned out to be allegories of the Cold War and possible thermonuclear catastrophe.

This was ingenious, or at least imaginative. It felt downright pedantic to mention The Hobbit was published in 1937, or that most of The Lord of the Rings was written before the end of World War II. The interpretation, if valid, implied an element of prophecy that the author never claimed. Anyway, it was not clear what insight into the books themselves would follow.

That said, this student of Tolkien had at least one salient critical premise: more can be going on in a work of literary fantasy than just make-believe. And when the author is someone with an expertise in Anglo-Saxon philology, which Tolkien (1892–1973) taught at the University of Oxford for decades, the quasi-medieval ambiance may be something besides escapist stage-setting.

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit: Realizing History Through Fantasy: A Critical Companion (Palgrave Macmillan), Robert T. Tally Jr. avoids reductive shortcuts while also presenting Tolkien’s first work of fiction as deeply historical. The author, a professor of English at Texas State University, says little about Tolkien’s life and times yet nonetheless develops his analysis around a major bio-bibliographical point: The Hobbit, as with the three volumes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy that followed, overlapped with Tolkien’s legendarium (a vast mythology modeled on the Finnish epics and Nordic sagas he studied) but also differed from it fundamentally by being novelistic.

Pursuing a line of thought opened by the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs in The Theory of the Novel (1916), Tally understands The Hobbit as existing in a radically different order of things from the epic. In epics we find figures of heroic nobility who embody the virtues admired by both gods and humankind. (Everybody knows what heroism is and what the virtues are.) By contrast, the novel is a literary form suited to a secular modernity. Its characters are made of common clay. There is little consensus over values and even less that is foreordained. And in those respects, The Hobbit is populated by novelistic characters created by an epic-minded author. Hobbits are not magical or supernatural; they are, basically, small humans. Nor are they inclined to adventure, having a strong preference for the comforts of ordinariness. And when their world goes into upheaval, their stories naturally resonate with human experiences of massive change.

I asked the author a series of questions by email. The following transcript incorporates his answers, slightly edited for length, with his cooperation.

Q: You don’t historicize The Hobbit in the naïve or narrow sense of interpreting it as a fictionalized response to real-world events. Your approach owes a great deal to the American Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson—the subject of your first book. What does it mean to read Tolkien as a Jamesonian?

A: “Modernism” is a dirty word among many Tolkien enthusiasts, and perhaps for Tolkien himself, but I see his desire to “create a mythology for England” as a powerfully modern thing to attempt, more like Yeats or Joyce than most mere medievalism. Also, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are clearly novelistic in form, even if they deal with “epic” or “romantic” ideas.

In his work on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson refers to the “attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.” Coming from an entirely different direction politically, I think Tolkien was deeply concerned with the modern world’s inability to “think historically,” and thus his desire to connect elements of the medieval historical world with our own time, even if—or especially if—that meant using fantasy as a way of sort of tricking us into “realizing” history.

That’s my thesis, I guess, if there is one in particular. Tolkien’s own personal position on this comes with a conservative, traditionalist and religious sensibility, but I hope that a sort of “political unconscious” to this can show how there is a Marxist critical interpretation available that could show how the fantasy form and the stories themselves can serve more liberatory ends. In this, of course, I am following Marx on Balzac, Lukacs on Walter Scott, Jameson on Wyndham Lewis and others, or similar ways in which Marxist criticism has found value in “conservative” artists.

Q: Before following up on that, let me ask you about treating Tolkien as writing some kind of allegory of World War II or the Cold War, or what have you. What are your thoughts?

A: In his 1966 preface to the paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien himself explicitly repudiates the WWII allegory, noting that much of the plot was already worked out beforehand. But he does indulge a bit in speculating how that would’ve looked, with Sauron as a sort of Hitler and Saruman as Stalin (e.g., Saruman’s brief faux alliance with Sauron being something like the Molotov-Ribbentrop [Pact]? Saruman was never on Sauron’s side, of course, as becomes clear in the text itself). Anyhow, Tolkien writes:

“The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.”

Tolkien then distinguishes between his views of “applicability” and “allegory”: “the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” So I guess we can say that, if The Lord of the Rings helps people make sense of the War or the Cold War, that’s perfectly acceptable, so long as they don’t assume Tolkien himself intended that to be the only way to read the novel.

Q: You quote Lukacs’s description of the typical hero in Walter Scott’s historical novels as “always a more or less mediocre, average English gentleman [who] generally possesses a certain, though never outstanding, degree of practical intelligence, a certain moral fortitude and decency which even rises to a capacity for self-sacrifice, but which never grows into a sweeping human passion, is never the enraptured devotion to a great cause.” That sounds exactly like Bilbo Baggins! But Tolkien’s long-term creative effort—from which The Hobbit and the later novels spun off, to the author’s own surprise—was a grand cosmic mythos modeled on Nordic and Finnish sources, which only became available to readers posthumously. How does the “realism” of The Hobbit (so to speak) connect with the author’s mythopoetic side?

A: The “accident” of The Hobbit forced Tolkien to make decisions once his invented world was in print. Of course, any other writer might well have treated it as a one-off, and even the demand for a sequel would not have required that he bring in this history of the Noldor and their wars with Morgoth, the fall of Númenor, etc. But Tolkien had this passion for myth, language and world-building, so he tried—in his view, he likely failed—to integrate everything. In The Hobbit itself, apart from the reference to Gondolin (”the Goblin Wars”), Moria, the Necromancer (whom we learn is Sauron) and a few other things, the world doesn’t require any knowledge of the earlier mythmaking.

Bilbo provides us with an intermediary between the present and this mythic or legendary past, and as such, allows us to connect the lessons of the distant past to our own historical situation. I follow Lukacs (and, I guess, Hegel) in the sense that there is both a continuity and a break between the epic and the novel, and Bilbo is an utterly novelistic hero (or nonhero) who suddenly finds himself in an “epic” adventure, as represented by a world-historical individual like Thorin, plus the fantasy elements (pre-eminently, the dragon Smaug). This winds up “working” very well, even if Tolkien himself was troubled by the anachronisms and other misfits.

In his early drafts of the Silmarillion story, he played with different ways of getting at the history, including a bizarre sci-fi version where some Oxford professors travel in time to the era of Gnomes in the First Age. (Another version had a bard from that era jumping into the future [our present], I believe.) But with Bilbo, we “discover” this grand history along with the protagonist, who is contributing to the “making” of that history even as he comes to recognize that he is a part of it.

Q: The eminent British science fiction and fantasy author Michael Moorcock has long been a fierce critic of Tolkien—among other things, for a narrative tone he compares to Winnie the Pooh. While The Hobbit is unapologetically a work of children’s literature, you find more of interest In Tolkien’s storytelling voice than Moorcock does. What, in sum, is he missing?

A: Isn’t “Epic Pooh” a marvelous essay? I think Moorcock’s critique is well taken. Indeed, some of what Moorcock is complaining about in works like The Lord of the Rings are the things Tolkien advocates for in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” in particular, the role of “consolation.” As far as the childish language goes, Tolkien himself somewhat regretted the narrative style (”silliness of manner”) used in The Hobbit, and it changed in The Lord of the Rings (even more so in the attempts at The Silmarillion). But Moorcock notes that even in The Lord of the Rings, elements of this Pooh-like conspiratorial narrative voice is there.

By the way, I do not think Tolkien is a great prose stylist, although he often has marvelous turns of phrase, and his description of places can be really good at times. The dialogue is not always very good, especially among the “great” [characters such as] Aragorn. For me, the “world” itself is the real star of Tolkien’s work, so the narration and description are all part of that.

I don’t think Moorcock is wrong, but I do think he’s taking his initial antipathy and failing to move beyond it. He is sympathetic to Orcs like I am, but he mentions this only to dismiss Tolkien for making them “the old Bugaboo,” whereas I am interested more in engaging with Tolkien’s “world” in which these attitudes—and the attitudes of Grishnákh and Uglúk, Shagrat and Gorbag—are on display but also available for critique.

A big part of Jameson’s relentlessly dialectical approach, what he calls in the last chapter of The Political Unconscious “the dialectic of ideology and utopia,” is the sense that there is always something “positive” to be found in even the most ideologically suspect or “negative” text. I was talking with one of Fred’s former grad students, who related that Jameson had told him something like, “If you cannot find something of value in the text you’re reading, it may have more to do with your reading than with the text itself.” Along those lines, I’m pretty sure I mostly agree with Moorcock, but I am also on the lookout for things about Tolkien that can be rallied to the side of “utopia” (in Jameson’s sense). The great socialist fantasy writer China Miéville once notoriously referred to Tolkien as “a wen on the arse of British fantasy,” although he later wrote a blog post in which he listed “Five Reasons Why Tolkien Rocks.” I suspect Miéville is right both times!

Q: Well, this is awkward … You’d like to reclaim Tolkien for a utopian left project, but his fiction enjoys a cult following in the European extreme right. It has for decades. In the U.S., a recent Tolkien-inspired TV series drew howls of outrage for casting non-Caucasian actors as hobbits. White supremacists seem to be staking a claim for Middle Earth as some kind of homeland. Do they have a case?

A: It’s a somewhat difficult question, but the short answer goes something like this: Tolkien himself would almost certainly have opposed the far-right use of his work, but that work does contain a lot that fuels their beliefs.

Famously, Tolkien was very critical of Hitler and of fascism, arguably because he supported an even more conservative, less demotic and less modern form of racial-cultural bigotry! That is at least in part the argument of Australia-based historian Robert Stuart, whose book Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth came out last year. Stuart details in chapter after chapter the racism (or racialism) to be found in Tolkien’s writings or personal views, yet each chapter ends with a defense of Tolkien against white supremacists, neo-Nazis, etc. Stuart’s book is the best yet as far as research into the question of racism in Tolkien, but he basically insists that Tolkien’s racism would still not be fodder for the far right today.

I find that a bit unconvincing. If you are a white supremacist, you will undoubtedly find a lot in Tolkien to support your views. Nearly all “good” characters are “fair”-skinned, for example, whereas most of the enemies are “swart” or “slant-eyed.” If the “West” is where the so-called “free peoples” are from, the enemy armies are made up of many Easterlings, Southrons and Orcs, who, as Tolkien wrote in a letter, were to appear “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” There are also “Wild Men” who fight for Saruman (they are described as “dusky” or “dark”), but then Ghan-buri-Ghan and the Drúedain fight for the “good guys,” so it’s not entirely one-sided as far as light and dark features go.

Tolkien also likened the Dwarves to “the Jews,” although he does so in a somewhat admiring way. (However, as Stuart notes, this sort of “philo-Semitism” is itself racist, inasmuch as it views “the Jews” as a completely separate and distinct people from other Europeans.)

So, yes, there is much in Tolkien that serves as legitimate fodder for the far right wing’s racist beliefs. A bigger problem is the simplistic good-versus-evil arguments that are attached to the racial hierarchy, and there Tolkien at least provides glimpses of different ways of reading. One of the reasons I think reading Tolkien “against the grain” is needed is to counter the interpretation by the far right, and Tolkien does give us enough detail and sometimes ambiguity (or, really, complexity) to justify these readings. So I argue.

Q: Tolkien had a place in what we now think of as 1960s counterculture, extending at least through Led Zeppelin lyrics from the 1970s. Back then, if you could write your name in Elvish script, you also assumed that hobbits smoked more than just tobacco. The Hobbit and the Rings trilogy must have been on many a rural commune’s shelves. The books haven’t changed, but everything about their reception has. How do you historicize all this?

A: I don’t know that the hippie, rock ’n’ roll, counterculture enthusiasm for Tolkien is, in fact, all that different from the right-wing love of Tolkien today. Not only have we found that many on the putative left back then later became right-wingers—how many of those Summer of Love types voted for Reagan in ’80 and ’84, after all?—but we’ve also seen a shift in what counts as left/right at the cultural level in the U.S. The anti-authority sensibility that made us cheer for Billy Jack or the Bandit in the 1970s is almost a defining feature of the Trumpers or Tea Party types in the last decade. I think of Rambo, who in First Blood was leftish, long-haired, fighting a bigoted sheriff, but soon the avatar of American empire.

Some of it had to do with the timing. The Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954–55, but the paperback edition came out in 1966. I suppose “escapism” is part of its appeal, along with the idea of a quest-adventure (and a sense of purpose and meaning that accompanies it). In class, we often joke about the hippie-like hobbits who smoke a lot of “pipe-weed,” are notoriously unambitious, if not lazy, and always have the munchies. (Ever the linguistic stickler, Tolkien regretted using the term “tobacco,” a Carib word unknown to medieval Europe, in The Hobbit, which is why “pipe-weed” is the preferred term in The Lord of the Rings.)

Then there’s just the genre, where a taste for adventure stories becomes so central. (Even Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick, seen as themselves countercultural, had some of that appeal, right?) Tolkien was convinced that there’s always been an adult audience for fantasy/myth/etc. of The Lord of the Rings, and he viewed the popularity of the novel as a vindication of that. The anti-industrial, pro-“nature” stuff also likely had great appeal for “counterculture” types, and perhaps the idea of a “just war” even appealed to many in the antiwar crowd. (That they could so easily overlook the racism is pretty telling.) Tolkien himself was appalled by the response of (especially) young Americans, whom he referred to as his “deplorable cultus” (deplorables!).

By the time Gen Xers like me read The Lord of the Rings, the hippie thing was a bit of a joke. (I did read The Harvard Lampoon’s “Bored of the Rings” with relish.) Perhaps my sympathy for Saruman and even Sauron comes out of my time—anti-Reagan, etc.—but I don’t know that my sympathies would’ve had that many adherents among people my own age. Many have noted that the Peter Jackson movies, which introduced millions to The Lord of the Rings, came out in December 2001 (2002 and 2003), making it the first major epic-franchise of the post-9/11 and War on Terror era, the landmark event for millennials. Certainly, there were those who saw some allegory in those times, just as today we heard pro-Ukrainian folks referring to Russian soldiers as “Orcs.”

Q: Speaking of which, I understand you regard the Orcs (called “goblins” in The Hobbit) as an unjustly maligned community and have taken up antidefamation advocacy on their behalf. How’s that going?

A: Yes, I am a notorious Orc sympathizer. In fact, the first thing I ever published on Tolkien was my pro-Orc article, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs.” I initially submitted it to Slate or Salon, but it was rejected, so I added my footnotes and submitted it to Mythlore, a Tolkien studies journal. That article discusses the origins of Orcs in Tolkien’s world—he debated their origins (corrupted Elves, initially), but in the end, according to [J. R. R.’s son and literary executor] Christopher, Tolkien viewed Orcs as being corruptions of Men—and his own misgivings about them. Specifically, Tolkien thought that, as sentient beings, they ought to be able to be redeemed (like Gollum, say), but then they are not treated as such in the books. I think it is clear from the text that Orcs are just people, a race or several races of people, perhaps, but they are so literally “demonized” that, unlike the “evil” men (Dunlendings, Easterlings, etc.), they are killed (never captured) without remorse. Legolas and Gimli even play a game over who can kill the most Orcs, a lurid spectacle, especially since we’ve at that point already met Orcs who don’t even want to fight in the wars.

Tolkien provides enough information in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to show the “humanity” of the Orcs, and that’s why I’m such an advocate. They have families, “capital” cities (hence larger societies), multiple languages, different cultures, as well as human, all-too-human desires, as comes out in the dialogue between Shagrat and Gorbag, for instance. (They wish for an end to the war, and they long for a world where there are “no Big Bosses.”) I also don’t trust the Elves, a hereditary elite of immortals for whom change itself is seen as “evil,” whereas many of us—even the less Orkish ones—would like to see more change in the world.

Humorously, I gather that Tolkien in his personal life often referred to anyone boorish, loud, mean-spirited or uncouth as “Orcs.” (For instance, I read that, when he heard a noisy motorcycle ride by, he’d mutter, “Orcs!”) In a way, then, Moorcock was right to interpret the orcs as “the Mob—mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence,” since that’s sort of what Orcs are in the stories. What they are not is demons, monsters like the Balrog, say.

Scott McLemee interviews author Robert T. Tally Jr. on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit: Realizing History Through Fantasy: A Critical Companion.