The Anti-Machine Soul:Dark Green Ethics In The Lord Of The Rings

Twentieth century British author and scholar J.R.R. Tolkien has long been recognized as an authority in Old English and Anglo-Saxon philology. Nevertheless, Professor Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology is still stuck in an awkward quagmire of mixed reception. To take his most important fiction-The Lord of the Rings-for example, sixty years since its publication, the book’s response has ever been heavily divided between overt disdain or bemused silence from mainstream critics, and enduring popularity among common readers. During the 1960s, the book’s severe criticism of industrialization, technology, mechanization and modernity first began to receive wide attention from the public amid the tide of the Ecological Revolution, and the rise of ecological philosophy during the 1970s and 1980s gave the work’s explicit ecological underpinnings firm academic support. Tolkien’s staunch anti-modernist stance may partially account for modern literary theories’inapplicability to the text, and yet the central problem lies in the shared destructive logic of anthropocentrism by philosophy which fails to grant moral considerability to nonhuman nature, and modern literary theories that dismiss this masterpiece-with Middle-earth itself as its protagonist-as escapist literature. On the green spectrum of ecological ethics, ecocentrism, with its darkest hue, challenges the very logic most uncompromisingly. For Tolkien, anthropocentrism is closely connected with a Machine mentality which not only refuses to admit the more-than-human existence of nature, but also negates human beings’ responsibility for nature as moral agents. Tolkien’s Machine stands for the coercive will imposed upon both human and nonhuman nature, the concrete expression of which is the modern magic-technoscience savaging nature and humanity. His downright detest against the anti-ecological Machine finds a potent expression in The Lord of the Rings, striking the root of the worldwide ecological crisis. In the work he portrayed two ethically contrasting forces:on the one hand, there are the emissaries of the annihilating Machine blighting nature:Saruman the Wizard (with his irredeemable anthropocentrism and rhetoric of Progress), Sauron the Dark Lord (with his autocratic rule of the ecologically devastated Mordor and his tyrannical Megamachine, the One Ring) and their servants, the Orcs (with their ecocide and homicide as war machines); these will be discussed in the first place. Then there are the anti-Machine dark green friends of nature:Hobbits with their simple and sustainable agroecology and their dark green virtues, Elves with their aesthetic appreciation of nature, preservation and creation of Middle-earth’s beauty, and recognition of cultural and ecological diversity, and Ents with their defense of wildness values and restoration of the wild. Moreover, Tolkien’s lovingly detailed elaboration of the flora and fauna of the whole realm of Middle-earth potently affirms nature’s more-than-human, intrinsic value independent of human interference:this serves as the third part of the body. Tolkien’s Faerie is saturated with such pagan animistic values and enchanted wonder as to serve as a magnificent mirror image of our fragile Earth, already Machine-stricken, being ever under the threat of the Machine and yet still evoking the hope of healing. Based on the text, this thesis aims at proving the strong ecocentricity of the narrative with an eco-ethical eye through the threading anti-Machine soul of Tolkien. Middle-earth is a site of struggle between the Machine-driven anthropocentrism and the anti-Machine ecocentric ethics, bearing close resemblance to our present-day world swept by massive ecological degradation under the mechanism of the Machine. At the same time, it envisions a future in which humans and nonhuman nature, uncoerced, find a common home at peace. And so it is hoped that this thesis, while exploring the profound ecocentric insights of the book, is able to highlight the common responsibility for the Earth community shared by both modern literary works and theories.