#wrote this instead of my thermodynamics homework but ehh

[quixoticanarchy]

Hope, but not to save the world

[ @gariboth asked me something along these lines a while ago and it has been fermenting in my mind so. a whole slew of thoughts on hope and the grim relevance of LOTR ]

I think there’s a particular quality to how hope functions in Tolkien’s work that keeps it uniquely compelling: yes, stubborn hope against terrible odds is worthwhile, and that’s heartening, but what strikes me more is that at the same time, even a “victory” is never the same as fixing or saving. There is incalculable loss even in the best-case scenario, and the world that comes after you will be changed forever no matter the outcome of your efforts. The world that you have known is always ending, and it cannot forcibly be kept alive.

We see this repeatedly: “I do not believe that the world about us will ever again be as it was of old” (Haldir); “None may live now as they have lived, and few shall keep what they call their own” (Aragorn). You cannot save the world as it is, but you might preserve the possibility that there will be a world, of what kind you cannot know.  

In counterpoint you have Denethor, lamenting the failing West, declaring “I would have things as they were in all the days of my life... and in the days of my long-fathers before me.” And then, “if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught.” He clings to an order already passing, deciding that if nothing but dark futures lie ahead, he would rather die with the old world than live to see the new - of either Sauron’s or Gandalf’s design. Idealizing the past, trying to keep the present on life support, and imagining the future utterly hopeless (or as utopian, I would say) - none of these are good ways to live with the world. The clearest alternative, I think, is Gandalf’s counsel in The Last Debate: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

This dovetails well with the theme of characters/peoples considering the options open to them, and deciding that no matter the cost, inaction for fear of losing what they have is worse than the outcomes of their choices. Galadriel and the Elves, choosing to fade and lose the power of the three Elven rings; Treebeard and the Ents acknowledging that “likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later.” Gandalf in the Last Debate: “And better so than to perish nonetheless - as we surely shall, if we sit here - and know as we die that no new age shall be.”

This all hits especially hard in these times, I think, because we at a global level are staring down a future that - unless you are capable of significant fantastical thinking - does not look bright. We are on track to hit worst-case climate scenarios, inviting cascading ecological catastrophes. We are witnessing rising right-wing fascism, racism, nationalism, xenophobia, and militarism on a global scale. State violence bothers with less and less pretense. For many of us in younger generations, a stable or bright future is a laughable fantasy. We know we are living in a world that cannot be saved.

If we look for an optimistic or “saved” future to pin our hopes on, we are hard-pressed to come up with one. But if we acknowledge that any path forward involves tremendous loss and suffering, and that we do not know where we will end up, for better and for worse, we can recognize that action is nonetheless a choice left to us, and preferable to its alternative. This is not an argument for lesser evilism, but for imagining beyond whatever grim evils we seem to be bound for - refusing to believe that all options have been foreseen and determined, all paths set, all possibilities foreclosed. Weighing the current moment and the choice to act, with fool’s hope, without expectations or an end in sight.

“The counsel of Gandalf was not founded on foreknowledge of safety, for himself or for others... There are some things that it is better to begin than to refuse, even though the end may be dark” (Aragorn). Dark as in terrible, ruinous - maybe, but also dark as in unknown. You must let the world end, and you must hold space for the futures that come to contain possibilities unknown.

#this got long #i knew there was a reason i wrote down quotes while reading #wrote this instead of my thermodynamics homework but ehh #lord of the rings #tolkien #tolkien meta #hope #lotr #skravler