Can Tolkien’s classic be read as an allegory about the dark forces of globalisation?
Larry Elliot
It’s what a generation of superannuated hippies have been waiting for – the big- screen version of The Lord of the Rings.
With Sir Ian McKellen as the wizard Gandalf, JRR Tolkien’s epic is being filmed in some of the more remote and beautiful parts of New Zealand.
Thirty years ago the book was up there with Sgt Pepper’s and the Tibetan Book of the Dead as one of the indispensable counter-culture artefacts for the 60s generation. Although it has always sold well – and, to the chagrin of literary critics, continues to head lists of readers’ favourite books – it was never really as influential in the dour 70s or the nakedly aspirational 80s as in the summers of kaftans and magic mushrooms.
That may all be about to change. Assuming it is not the turkey to end all turkeys – a distinct possibility despite having a budget as big as Titanic’s – the celluloid version of the exploits of Frodo Baggins could again become the bible of the counter-culture. Why? Because the story seems to chime perfectly with arguments of anti- globalisation protesters in Seattle and Washington.
For those who have never read it – or were too stoned at the time to remember it – The Lord of the Rings is the tale of a bid for world domination by the Dark Lord, Sauron, who has forged a ring of power with which he can enslave the whole of Middle Earth and thereby force every realm to submit to his will. Sauron genetically engineers a race of ugly warriors, orcs, and presides over a military-industrial complex that delights in destruction and the despoliation of the environment.
Patrick Curry in his book Defending Middle-Earth draws the obvious conclusion.
“It needs no allegorical special pleading or stretch of the imagination to see that our Ring is the malevolent amalgam of the unaccountable nation- state, capitalism in the form of transnational economic power, and scientism, or the monopoly of knowledge by modern technological science. Like Tolkien’s ring, there are apparently no limits to its potential mastery of nature and, once it’s on the finger of its collective principal servants – that is, completely removed from any democratic accountability – no way to control it.”
A few years ago, when globalisation was sweeping all before it, this sort of argument may have been dismissed as the ridiculous fantasy of those harking back to a golden age that never was. Anybody who didn’t sign up with the inexorably logical, efficient and scientific world that global capital served up was branded as one of the “stop the world I want to get off” brigade.
Frankly, this was always a ludicrous argument. If you’re in a machine hurtling towards the edge of a precipice, of course you want to stop it and get off. The question is whether globalisation can deliver on its promises or whether it is the sort of human, economic and environmental dead-end that the “stop the world” clan says it is.
Seattle and its aftermath have forced supporters of globalisation into a rethink. For the first time in years they have been obliged to find a justification for the way the world is heading, rather than repeat ad nauseam that there is no alternative.
One such justification – and an elegant one – is made in an upcoming book, A Future Perfect, written by two journalists from the Economist magazine, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. It concludes that there are pros and cons to globalisation, but more pros than cons.
“Yes, it does increase inequality, but it does not create a winner-take-all society, and the winners hugely outnumber the losers. Yes, it leaves some people behind, but it helps millions more to leap ahead. Yes, it can make bad government worse, but the onus should be on crafting better government, not blaming globalisation. Yes, it curtails some of the power of nation states, but they remain the fundamental unit of modern politics. Globalisation is not destroying geography, merely enhancing it.”
But the economic benefits of globalisation are only half the story, say the authors. Globalisation has to be put in its proper political context – “as an extension of the idea of liberty and as a chance to renew the fundamental rights of the individual”. Globalisation has not – as some of its critics suggest – involved an exchange of master, with the faceless corporation replacing the faceless state, but instead is a force for personal liberation.
This is an interesting turning of the tables, suggesting that if there is a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, we’ve all got it completely wrong. The globalisers are the hobbits, not the dark lords, and the sooner those who care about the poor, the environment and human rights recognise the fact the better it will be for everyone. But especially, no doubt, for those who are already doing very nicely, thank you.
Despite this attempt to hail the new golden dawn of globalisation, what seems to be happening is that the old politics is reasserting itself. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a great vacuum was left when communism was brought down by its internal contradictions. That hole is being filled, slowly and incoherently perhaps, by those groups railing against the way the world is run. This would probably be happening even were globalisation running smoothly, but the process is being accelerated by the fact that the new world order has suffered some teething troubles.
These look likely to persist. Late last week, for example, the dollar fell sharply against the euro on the foreign exchanges as dealers finally woke up to the idea that the party may be over on Wall Street. The correction in the euro- dollar rate has a lot further to go, with the possibility that we are on the brink of the climactic forex crisis of the past decade – that of the mighty greenback. With its massive current account deficit, its wild speculation in unproductive assets and its reliance on hot money from overseas, the United States resembles the economies of Southeast Asia that went belly-up in 1997 and 1998. The difference, of course, is that the US accounts for about 25% of global gross domestic product. We could all be in for a very bumpy ride.
But there is more to the backlash against globalisation than the gyrations of the financial markets. More striking has been the reaction against the notion of scientific progress, epitomised by resistance to genetically modified food and expressed in its most public form by Prince Charles in his recent Reith Lecture.
Now it seems obvious that some of the wilder accusations against science are not only wrong, but dangerously wrong. Scientific discoveries have brought countless tangible benefits to the world, from labour-saving devices that provide us with more leisure time to drugs that help us live longer. Yet when it comes to GM foods, and biotechnology more generally, there is a sense that science has been captured by the profit motive and has lost its moral compass. As David Korten put it in his book, The Post- Corporate World, the yoking together of objective science and corporate money has resulted in a system “in which power and expertise are delinked from moral accountability, instrumental and financial values override life values, and what is expedient and profitable takes precedence over what is nurturing and responsible”. Scientists would strongly deny that any of this is true, but that, to a large extent, is irrelevant, because more and more people believe it to be true.
In the end, life is not like The Lord of the Rings, and we should be thankful for that. We need more than people who know about herbs to keep us healthy, and we need more than a hierarchical, feudal system to keep us in food. Middle Earth, as described by Tolkien, was a deeply illiberal place.
But if science is now viewed with mistrust, markets with contempt and globalisation with trepidation, the fault lies not with those who have been protesting in Seattle and elsewhere, but with those who, piece by piece, have dismantled the institutions that once underpinned the international system, ensured security for the weak as well as the strong, and helped save capitalism from itself.
Defending Middle-Earth is published by Floris Books; A Future Perfect will be published by Heinemann in July; The Post- Corporate World is published by Berrett- Koehler