Amazon, Tolkien,
and the
American Technocracy
Dr. Ben Reinhard
Seldom has a television series generated so much controversy as Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The trailer alone became the subject of white-hot internet controversy within days of its release, pitting devotees of Tolkien against defenders of Amazon. Each side scored its victories. On the one hand, the American version of the trailer was ‘disliked’ millions of times on YouTube, and video essays criticizing the project accumulated hundreds of thousands of views; on the other, prestigious media outlets such as The Atlantic characterized critics of the show as racists and fretted about the impact of ‘toxic’ fans. The debate rolled on in the following months, and it seems unlikely that it will crest any time soon. We have lately witnessed Amazon Studios scrambling to shore up support for the billion-dollar project, while critics have dug in and redoubled their attacks.
For all its heat, however, The Rings of Power controversy has generated surprisingly little light, as neither the show’s critics nor its defenders have shown that they possess any clear sense of what Tolkien’s work is actually about. Or perhaps not so surprising. The simple truth is this: never has a society been so ill disposed to receive Tolkien’s vision as twenty-first-century America, and never has a company been so poorly qualified to safeguard Tolkien’s legacy as Amazon Studios. Quite the opposite is true: our modern technocratic society (and the trillion-dollar company that serves as its avatar) are very nearly the picture of Tolkienian evil.
This is admittedly a sweeping statement that requires some justification. But in attempting to connect Tolkien’s idea of evil with contemporary American society, we run into a snag. Evil is deucedly difficult to define — and as Gandalf reminds us, it is perilous to study the arts of the enemy too deeply, for good or for ill. This is by design. The Augustinian Tolkien recognized that evil is a privation: it has no positive being of its own. Because of this, if we seek to explore Tolkien’s idea of evil, we must first attempt to understand his vision of the Good.
Here we are on much firmer ground. As Tolkien’s bluntly stated in his letters — and as any careful reading of his magnum opus will make clear — “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” Tolkien’s faith provides the central metaphysical truth in his world: namely, that God alone exists necessarily, and everything else exists because he in love wills that it should. Because of this, and like the Anglo-Saxon poets he studied so closely, Tolkien understood that everything we have — not only our possessions but even our talents and temperament and existence — is a gift from the Creator. Thus Tolkien’s metaphysic leads directly to one of the central motifs in his fiction: The Gift. “It is a Gift!” Niggle cries when he sees his painting made real in paradise. The island paradise of Númenor is properly named Andor, the Land of Gift. As Tolkien makes clear in the Silmarillion, the very existence of the world is a gift of Eru Ilúvatar — “the One, the Father of All.”
The idea of the gift is so central to Tolkien’s thought that even death itself becomes a gift in Tolkien’s mythology — if only we understand it correctly. Where Elves are given the gift of immortal life on Earth, Man was made to pass beyond the bounds of this world into the embrace of the Father. But all rational creatures are restless until they rest in God: and death is the means by which this happens. For this reason, the Elves — despite their longevity and greater natural happiness — envy mortals their death, calling it “the Gift of Men.”
All, then, is the gift of God; a basic natural theology and piety flow from the recognition of this fact. The first, fundamental obligation is to gratitude: we must give God thanks for the gifts he has given us. Here it is surely significant that the single overt religious observance in all The Lord of the Rings is Faramir’s thanksgiving before his evening meal. When we search more deeply in Tolkien’s fiction, however, we find that thanksgiving is everywhere: the feast of thanksgiving is the great festival among the Elves in Valinor and among the men in Númenor (the highest form of either civilization); indeed, Tolkien’s letters reveal that even the hobbits’ famous giving of birthday gifts springs from a natural religious disposition towards gratitude. This is the foundational duty in Tolkien’s world. As we did not create ourselves, we owe, as our first debt, gratitude toward the one who did.
This is the foundational duty in Tolkien’s world. As we did not create ourselves, we owe, as our first debt, gratitude toward the one who did.
This piety carries with it certain negative obligations as well. Because all we are and have is the gift of God, we must not clutch at it too tightly: God can recall the gift when he will. Moreover, because God has created us, we must accept the conditions in which he did so; that is, we must accept both our duties absolute (towards God) and contingent (towards family, home, and country). Tolkien’s heroes are strongly bound by such unchosen obligations. Thus Samwise Gamgee, the true hero of The Lord of the Rings, remains unshakingly loyal to his Master, his family, and his own small corner of the Shire: and all this is presented as a praiseworthy and even necessary devotion. 
Thus Aragorn quite literally carries the legacy of a millennia-old house and wages his ancestors’ unending war against the evil of Sauron; his eventual triumph vindicates the labors of countless generations. These duties are not always simplistic, and higher and lower duties can exist in tension. So the Elves help to destroy the Ring, though doing so will result in the loss of their homes in Middle-Earth, and so Faramir is nearly brought to ruin in balancing his obligations to his father (a very high good) with his obligations to the Good itself.
Even when complicated, Tolkien’s sense of the Good is clear: it demands gratitude, limit, and duty. In theory, then, Tolkien’s evil would be the negation of this — and this is exactly what we find in his fiction. Indeed, when a man turns to evil in Tolkien’s works, his actions tend to conform to a fairly predictable pattern. We can trace three intertwined stages of the Tolkienian fall, each of which can be paralleled to movements in contemporary American culture.
The first stage is the domination of lust, whether for possessions or power. Avarice turns away from the thanksgiving due to the Creator and trusting contentment in his promises; the soul desires to own more and to own it more securely. Examples of greed in Tolkien’s works are not far to seek. Fëanor, the greatest of the elves, falls from bliss to ruin due to the “greedy love” he has for his own craftsmanship; Smaug lounges on his golden bed; the dragon-sickness of greed inflames Thorin and Company; and of course Gollum obsesses over his Precious. Alas, avarice is not easily sated: greed leads to ever-greater greed. Greater power is required to satisfy the greater appetite, and so lust for possessions naturally gives way to a the lust for power. Tolkien notes that Sauron — and ‘saurian’ men — have a special fondness for the labor-reducing effects of Magic and the Machine. “The basic motive . . . is immediacy: speed, reduction of labour, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect.”
Are we any different? We live in ease, we Americans of the twenty-first century. Our subscriptions to Amazon Prime give us access to a dizzying array of products to suit any imaginable appetite, many of which can be obtained with twenty-four-hour delivery (Sundays not excepted). We have been conditioned to think that all our desires must be satisfiable instantaneously and with minimum effort and at our perfect convenience. This sense of entitlement extends even to our amusements: The Rings of Power, of course, streams on demand. The knowledge that labor is rarely really reduced, but rather shifted to others (to Amazon’s hourly employees who deliver the product, the Chinese thralls who fashion it, or the good and tortured earth from which the raw materials are wrung) and thereby concealed need not trouble us at all.
The increase in wealth — and the increase in power necessary to attain it — leads us to new dangers, the second stage of the fall. The masses may be numbed by a never-ending stream of fundamentally unreal pleasures: cheaply produced goods, degraded entertainment, and addiction to smartphones or pharmaceuticals. But what of their masters, whose natural appetites are — by any imaginable standard — fulfilled, or even glutted? There is only one solution: with their natural desires wholly satisfied, the great must conquer nature itself to enable yet greater enjoyment. As one of Amazon’s heroines says, “Each of us, every one, must decide who we shall be.”
This deeper corruption is also seen in Tolkien’s works. The Elves of Eregion craft their Rings — and enable Sauron to make the One Ring — in a vain attempt to stop the flow of time and gain the ability to enjoy their possessions uninterrupted. The Númenóreans’ enjoyment of their possessions makes them unwilling to leave them — and so they become obsessed with the idea of escaping death (that is, rejecting the Gift of Men): “their wise men laboured unceasingly to discover if they might the secret of recalling life, or at the least of the prolonging of Men’s days.” Eventually, the desire to escape death leads to open rebellion against God and the Atlantean downfall of Númenor itself.
This trend, too, finds its reflex in the modern world. It has become distressingly easy today to find advocates of transhumanism — the belief that natural limits of human nature can be conquered by technological improvement, genetic engineering, and neural implants. Humanity can be improved, made stronger, faster, more clever. In sum, the transhumanists seek to turn man into god. Unsurprisingly, the great transhumanist aim is to cheat death itself. Amazon finds itself implicated in this second fall as well: Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, has invested significantly in Altos Labs for that purpose. Once again, our modern life has imitated Tolkien’s art: Tolkien noted that “counterfeit immortality” was always the great temptation of the Enemy: the pursuit of it leads “the small to a Gollum, and the great to a Ringwraith.” The masses become enslaved to their desires, enabling the great to aim at immortality. It is, one reflects, a curious bargain.
The masses become enslaved to their desires, enabling the great to aim at immortality.
This brings us to the final stage of the Tolkienian fall. Evil does not stop at rejecting the sovereignty of the Creator; in short order, it seeks to supplant him altogether. The devil’s “I will not serve” swiftly becomes “I shall be served” — and thus the rebel sets himself up as a rival to or counterfeit of God himself. Diabolus simius dei, the theologians teach, the devil is the ape of God. Because God is, in Tolkien’s world, displayed chiefly as the Giver of every good and perfect gift, evil most especially imitates his generosity. This is in fact the central lie of Sauron throughout Tolkien’s entire legendarium. When Sauron deceives the Elves, whose craft and skill he will pervert to make the Ring, he does so as Annatar, “the Lord of Gifts.” He teaches the men of Númenor to worship Morgoth — the devil in Tolkien’s mythology — as “the Lord of All, the Giver of Freedom”; elsewhere, he hails Morgoth as “the king of all earthly kings / the greatest giver of gold and rings.” The devil demands the place of God; had Sauron won the War of the Ring, Tolkien points out, he would have forced all the subjects of his worldwide empire to worship him.
Choose ye this day whom ye will serve. Here, and nowhere else, do we find the central conflict of Tolkien’s work. As he wrote to a friend, the War of the Ring was, in fact, a holy war. “In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not basically about ‘freedom’, though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour.” In Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, as in Cardinal Manning’s England, all conflict is ultimately theological.
Here, perhaps, the less that is said the better. Surely we are in no danger of this — surely? We would never see diabolism openly asserted, never see an outright war on nature, never see tyranny exalted as freedom — and surely we would never see these things embraced at the highest levels of power. The leaders of a rebellion against God would never cast themselves as the great liberators of mankind, freeing their brothers from the shackles of obedience and superstition. And whatever else, surely the unaccountable executives of Amazon (and Facebook and Google and Microsoft) would never use their massive power coercively.
Would that it were so. Instead, we see time and time and time and again that the ruling ideology of our international technocracy is firmly and directly opposed to Tolkien’s vision of the good. Liberation over limits, appetite over discipline, and power above all — these are the rules of the modern world, and woe betide the man who dissents.
With our world so nearly under the domination of Sauron, what is to be done? There is no Ring to destroy to break the power of evil once and for all, nor any invading army to oppose by force of arms. But recognizing the problem is itself the first step towards resistance. Once we realize how thoroughly the power of the Ring has permeated our culture, we can begin to push back, reclaiming our sanity and freedom foot by foot.
There does not seem to be a universal solution; specific steps will vary according to the abilities and needs of a given individual or family. For some, this may mean downgrading to a ‘dumb’ phone; for others, sharply curtailing smartphone use. It could mean a commitment to never buy online what could be purchased in person. It could mean dumping Amazon altogether, along with all its works and pomps. More positively, resistance could mean engaging in activities that are natural but arduous: writing a poem, planting a garden, raising a family.
Here, alas, we confront an uncomfortable truth. Whatever a family might choose to do, it will, regrettably, have only limited success. A man can’t but breathe the air he’s in, and in a culture as deeply polluted as ours, the corruption is bound to have some effect. This too is a twenty-first-century reality foreseen by Tolkien. In his Akallabêth, the tale of the downfall of Númenor — he charts corruption of Númenórean society and its division into two parties: the King’s Men, given over to power and pleasure and rejecting the old pieties and religion, and the Faithful, who keep to the old ways as best they can. Despite their noble commitments, even the Faithful “did not wholly escape from the affliction of their people,” and the fear of death that consumes their countrymen burdens them as well. As our culture wallows in formerly unimaginable corruption, we are unlikely to fare much better.
Yet hope remains. We return at long last to that Thing the professor put first, in his fiction and in his life: recognizing the sovereignty of God and rendering him the thanksgiving that is his due. As Tolkien wrote to his son Michael, “Out of the darkness of my life. . . . I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all.”
Though it demands complete and unconditional surrender, the great Sacrament of thanksgiving gives our day-to-day relationships “the complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every heart desires.” When this right worship of God is not placed at the center — of a soul, a family, a nation — all our works, however noble or well intentioned to begin with, are doomed to failure. When it is, our stumbling efforts — however feeble or misguided — cannot go very far wrong.
