if I just had the presence of mind and the wherewithal and the chutzpah and the bandwidth and the executive function and the energy and the mental resources and the spoons and the right attitude and the capacity and the gumption and th
my friend was testing perfumes out at the store and she sniffed a bottle and anounced "ngl this bitch kind of sucks" The girl at the counter suddenly looked really sad, and my friend was like "I'm sorry, I wasn't talking about you." And the girl looked up and said "No don't worry, I didn't think that, but I just crushed a ladybug with my shoe" We both took a peak over the counter. she'd stepped on a red m&m
The best part is that they were inspired by a diary entry from 1775, written by a 12 year old tailorâs apprentice who had been left unsupervised all day and decided to make a suit for a cat. Hereâs a link to the blog post about it, but Iâll just paste the whole diary entry here:
âI had been at work about two months when Christmas came on â and here I must relate a little anecdote. The principal [the tailor] and his lady were invited to a party among their friendsâŠwhile it devolved on me to stay at home and keep house. There was nothing left me in charge to do, only to take care of the house. There was a large cat that generally lay about the fire. In order to try my mechanical powers, I concluded to make a suit of clothing for puss, and for my purpose gathered some scraps of cloth that lay about the shop-board, and went to work as hard as I could. Late in the evening I got my suit of clothes finished; I caught the cat, put on the whole suit â coat, vest, and small-clothes [breeches] â buttoned all on tight, and set down my cat to inspect the fit.Â
âUnfortunately for me there was a hole through the floor close to the fireplace, just large enough for the cat to pass down; after making some efforts to get rid of the clothes, and failing, pussy descended through the hole and disappeared; the floor was tight and the house underpinned with brick, so there was no chance of pursuit. I consoled myself with a hope that the cat would extricate itself from its incumbrance, but not so; night came and I had made on a good fire and seated myself for some two or three hours after dark, when who should make their appearance but my master and mistress and two young men, all in good humor, with two or three bottles of rum. After all were seated around the fire, who should appear amongst us but the cat in his uniform. I was struck speechless, the secret was out and had no chance of concealing; the cat was caught, the whole work inspected and the question asked, is this your dayâs work? I was obliged to answer in the affirmative; I would then have been willing to take a good whipping, and let it stop there, but no, to complete my mortification the clothes were carefully taken off the cat and hung up in the shop for the inspection of all customers that came in.â
'why is so much politically-focused genre fiction centred on monarchies' many reasons, but one which I think deserves attention: monarchy is an obvious way of tying together the dysfunctions of the domestic to those of the state
I thought I might write up some meta/analysis around Tolkienâs conservative âenvironmentalismâ being uncritically viewed as an objectively âcorrectâ opinion, and viewing it through a temporal lens, ie what it was that influenced my approach to fics like Unsightly or The Culling of the Cormorant or Snakebite. I was initially not going to post it because I feel like this is a subject that can easily be misconstrued into âoh you think caring about trees sucks huhâ when that is literally the opposite of what Iâm claiming. However, my circus, my monkeys, etc.Â
Anyway, Tolkienâs pastoralism and conservationist spirit are often treated as though they were the singularly politically uncomplicated parts of his imagination (especially by those who really want everything they consume to be morally âpureâ lmao), but I don't think that is at all true. And I also think that much of the environmentalism within the books has less to do with environmentalism itself and much more to do with his ideas around temporality, ie I think the reason many adaptations or readings of his work fall flat in attempting to discern his thoughts on trees is because they ignore how the legendariumâs ecological stances are deliberately bound up with its stances on historical continuity, inherited custom, settled habitation and relatively stable social relations. To conserve in name trees and fields, and through them conserve certain relationships between people, land and time.Â
Which is why I think âpastoralismâ is a more appropriate category to describe the appealing treefucker spirit of the books than âenvironmentalismâ. To very quickly go into the difference: environmentalism begins from the ecological fact that landscapes are dynamically indifferent to the boundaries placed around them, while pastoralism begins from a human community already situated within a landscape and asks how that community might preserve its relationship to said landscape. And the reason I prefer sticking to pastoralism is because Tolkien repeatedly assigns moral weight to the passing of time, and the effect of time on the people occupying a landscape.
The social ideal of the Shire, so prevalent on this website that you actually have people calling it a communal anarchist utopia and what not, is how it exists in perfect correspondence with its own, localised landscape, where everything belongs to a continuous historical organism ever since the three nomadic Hobbit-groups settled and intermingled within the region. So far from being anarchist, I think the utopian quality of the Shire rests in a fantasy that history stopped changing the fundamental terms on which a community exists. He doesnât actually even say itâs a utopia, or make a narrow hard-conservative argument of all change being objectively bad, but is quite clear that all change comes from âwithinâ, from local and regional actors in the service of a greater national cause. Frodo saves Middle Earth, and in doing so, saves the Shire.Â
To return to the Shireâs utopian status, as I have said before elsewhere, the Shire is not exactly an egalitarian peasant commune, the Shire is like. Idk man. Devon. Surrey. The Bagginses and Tooks possess histories and estates while the Gamgees occupy a different social position, though labour is largely invisible because the rural economy is aestheticised into a state of abundance. Sam's relationship to Frodo is genuine and profoundly important yet also its a relationship whose feudal residue isnât ever stated to be directly oppressive. The social order is legitimate because it is imagined as reciprocal and organically evolved.
As a subject of study, I do think Tolkien's pastoralism becomes more interesting if you donât simply call it nostalgic or resistant to progress, and once again I think heâs probably spinning in his grave like a chicken on a spit whenever it is flattened as such. The guy doesnât once say all change is bad. He is perfectly capable of imagining desirable change, eg Aragorn's restoration transforming a âdegradedâ political order. He does, however, distrust change that severes itself from inherited forms. Itâs the basic âRETVRNâ formula: good political change is restorative and returns something to health, while bad political change assumes that society can be redesigned according to an abstract theory of change (sorry for the nonprofit speak, I am in recoveryâŠ).
And across the books, Tolkien repeatedly makes organic growth the standard against which modernity fails, and his ideal social forms often tend to develop gradually and acquire complexity without being deliberately engineered. Saruman does pollute Isengard, yes, but his pollution involves the sudden reorganisation of living systems according to an externally imposed logic, and Mordor takes this to its extreme, where the landscape itself becomes a military-industrial apparatus.Â
In his very famous 1951 letter to Milton Waldman he describes the central conflict of his mythology partly in terms of the desire for domination, and generally across his letters he repeatedly returns to the relationship between machinery, power and the pitfalls of imposing oneâs will upon the world, wherein his hatred of industrialisation is inseparable from his hatred of instrumentalisation. And this is very interesting! He is a clever and extremely well read man, who can clearly see how mass industrialisation is and has thusfar been a transformation in the relationship between humans and the non-human world, and he actually is hostile to the concentration of power that accompanies technological mastery. Bro would actually fucking hate Amazon, because he recognises the violence involved in treating living things as objects; and disagrees with the idea that more productive capacity constitutes social progress. And honestly, same! I think so too! Hi-5 bro!Â
But the difference between me and Tolkien is that the alternative he imagines is a return to embeddedness where production is embedded in locality and people embedded in local community, local community embedded in inherited custom, and all three embedded in a wider national landscape of differing peoples with a similar goal. And this is why the theme of âbelongingâ and positive social bonds in Tolkien also very much fascinates me, where itâs often one of the things people are most compelled by and one of the reasons many are drawn to the legendarium, including me, even though itâs clear that the opposite of domination, for Tolkien is not emancipation but an idea of belonging, which is a different and difficult ecological category.
If the âvalueâ of a landscape is measured exclusively through the history of a specific community's relationship to it, you cannot avoid the question of who legitimately belongs there. And while there is a definite attempt to resolve that question through traditional racial exclusion, he also repeatedly distinguishes between peoples who are of a landscape and transformative forces that arrive from outside it. And these boundaries are not geographical alone, because Khand, Harad and RhĂșn are both part of the same landmass that makes up Middle Earth and Beleriand.Â
It isnât that Tolkien outright says ânatives good, foreigners badâ, because I genuinely just find it uninteresting when the conservative argument is made in that flat and extremely boring register and wouldnât even care enough to analyse it. But Arda is full of migration, exile, intermixture and displaced peoples, across ME, Beleriand and Valinor, not to mention how NĂșmenĂłrean history itself is founded upon migration, the War for the Jewels kicks off when the Noldor cross the sea, the awakening of the elves is followed by a mass migratory movement, so on and so forth, an entire mythology structured by movement across landscapes across thousands of years, where time itself conveys political authority.Â
Conservatism at its most simple definition is a theory contingent on the spiritual and moral authority of accumulated social forms, ie the Burke-ian idea that institutions accrue legitimacy through development rather than fact of establishment. And thatâs what I think is really interesting in looking at Tolkienâs pastoralism through the temporal lens, how he consistently trusts what has grown over what has been made. And so, if you look at it from that light, sure, Tolkien absolutely is a conservationist in the most literal sense of the world, because, and I am quoting from my own fic here sorry, though I use it in a very different context:
Do you understand now? How every successful conservation project must be, at its core, an explanation of why other people should care about something precious to you? A study of what has been lost already, and why, and what could be lost that might be worth saving, and why.
Because I anticipate this line of questioning, please note I donât actually think thereâs inherently reactionary about distrusting industrial capitalism or defending local ecological knowledge or opposing the commodification of land or arguing that human communities should exist within rather than above ecological systems. I agree with all of that, but I do think itâs worth looking at how Tolkienâs agreement with the same attaches those positions to a further proposition, in which the existing inherited community is itself an ecological good, needing only minor internal tweaks.Â
Returning to his environmental approach, the threat to the Middle Earth landscape is consistently depicted as a destruction of accumulated time, and the âdying worldâ of LotR presents us infinite varieties of ruin, all characterised as the long defeat. And when social continuity is treated as analogous to ecological continuity, the immigrant moves from another participant in a society's continuing history to a symbol of ecological rupture, or a natural disaster.Â
ââŠthe enemy increases and we decrease. We are a failing people, a springless autumn⊠childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry.â
Faramir, commander of forces in a territory directly bordering âthe Haradâ, where Haradrim incursions are common in Ithilien.Â
And this is, mind you, written all in the context of the English countryside in the âfinal daysâ of Empire where inward migration from âthe coloniesâ is still not as much as the âoutward migrationâ to them, yet is now noticeable enough that it becomes a ânationalâ problem instead of an urban one constrained to docks and industrial cities. And like I just said, the apparent timelessness of the English countryside is itself the product of substantial privilege.Â
I can actually give a pretty good example! Iâve lived in a couple of rural areas in the UK (and much of it in Oxfordshire itself) and I can tell you that much of the English pastoral landscape today is inaccessible because land has been fenced off, or âconservedâ, as private property or agricultural land. Ie itâs pretty easy from that position to see the romantic pastoral idealâs real face: a landscape engineered to be represented as belonging to all ânative Britsâ culturally while being materially controlled by a tiny fraction of said ânative Britsâ.
Which is incredibly funny to me personally because the most recent example of this whole sentiment is how Oxfordshire has actually become one of the first counties in the UK to ban people hanging English flags on public property like lamposts. For those outside the UK: this is a recent occupation explicitly associated with far right groups, because there are extremely active groups doing that in rural Oxfordshire⊠not so much in the city of Oxford itself, because obviously the city is pretty diverse thanks to the university, and this brand of brave patriot generally tends to be too cowardly for the âfinding outâ stage of âfucking aroundâ. And the argument re: the far right hanging up flags on lampposts isnât exactly a case of progressives claiming that Union Jacks are racist or whatever. But a flag is universally agreed to be a very efficient instrument for turning an abstract political claim into a claim about space and says, in effect, that this specific piece of public landscape should visibly signify a specific national community.Â
The crucial seeming paradox here is that rural Oxfordshire was the first place in the country where this specific brand of ugly far-right activism, so often presented in the media as an urban problem due to increased interaction with immigrants, has ramped up to the point even the courts took notice. Because rural Oxfordshire is one of the wealthiest and most heavily protected parts of England, marked by large concentrations of inherited land, prestigious rural settlements, aristocratic landholdings, large conservation areas and wildlife conservation projects, AONBs (places legally declared as âareas of outstanding national beautyâ) historic estates. And extremely powerful cultural investment, historically and in present day, in the idea of the English countryside. A third of the countryside in the region is owned by the Mountbatten family, of âPartition of Indian Subcontinentâ fame, and several estates lay empty because they used to belong to Russian oligarchs for decades before their assets were frozen in 2022.Â
Basically, apart from Oxford itself and the university population, much of Oxfordshire doesnât actually resemble the migrant-populated, working-class urban environments through which contemporary anti-immigration politics is usually explained and âjustifiedâ, and the county is full of basically variations of Tolkien himself, ie people considered as âgenteel conservativesâ (đ). Yet it still was a place where explicitly far-right mobilisation became particularly intense, and this a mobilisation not being carried out through the aristocratic population (many of whom live full time in foreign countries, including the Bahamas and the UAE) but the middle+working class white British population who form the rest of the regional majority and share this âpastoral utopiaâ.Â
What wouldnât Sam do for his Mr Frodo?Â
And in doing right by his Mr Frodo, he does right by the world.Â
Which, in terms of both class and race, I think should make us suspicious of an account of anti-immigration politics based exclusively on the idea of contact. If hostility was just a reaction to the experience of proximity to an unfamiliar/undesirable demographic, youâd think the most homogeneous rural regions would be the least anxious about immigration. Instead, you find anticipatory nativism, which is the political depiction of a threat to an imagined community whose defining characteristic is having not yet been irreversibly transformed. Which is a sentiment Iâve seen myself across rural Germany as well (although âapparent timelessnessâ is somewhat easier to counter in that setting, for a myriad of reasons).Â
Anyway, the case of Oxfordshire shows the anxiety is not âthese people have changed my villageâ, because they havenât. Instead of that, itâs âthis village is one of the last places these people have not yet changed, and we have to prevent it from doing soâ, where itâs not driven by the desire for an imagined past or utopian present but rather the fear of a counterfactual future. Which is exactly what plays out with the Hobbitsâ storyline: the high drama of the Scouring of the Shire is plonked right at the end of the book after the main war, very interestingly going against established narrative formula, serves to prove that the Hobbitsâ fears and anxieties about the possible plight of their homeland were absolutely correct.Â
The temporal-ecological undercurrent in the legendarium is just so interesting in that itâs a fantastic demonstration of how the conservative pastoral imagination tends to first turn a historical and social arrangement into a landscape and then turn the landscape into what is deemed natural. And thus, defending the arrangement is equivalent to defending nature itself, and anything that alters these arrangements can consequently be described as ecological destruction. So the flag-lampost people, ie the hardest and most explicitly far right version of contemporary British conservatism, are simply just radicalising the idea that a place has an authentic historical character which political action ought to preserve, which is a deliberately embedded idea within the English pastoral tradition.Â
And this rhetoric absolutely works! You have âordinaryâ white British working class folk trying to drive a small handful of immigrants out of a region where the vast majority of the landscape is inaccessible to said white British working class folk. And the rhetoric works because there is something worth conserving. The rural English landscape is beautiful, mass industrial development can destroy ecosystems, capital displaces communities, national approaches flatten local particularity, the urban housing market transforms villages into commodities. The rhetoric works because it engages with undeniable material contradictions, which is fine, and then offers a more âhumaneâ cultural homogeneity as the ecological solution, which is dangerous.
Because in a world of urban alienation and climate collapse, the desire for continuity is incredibly tempting even for people who in any other situation would not be radicalised so far rightwards. And I think Tolkien and other writers like him are at their most perceptive when insisting that a human life cannot be reduced to economic utility. Itâs the perfect bait for economic and social discontent, the equivalent of blaming some Indian Deliveroo rider being the sole reason for your unemployment: there was once a place of abundance in which we all belonged together and had more than enough, and it is possible to get it back.Â
Which I think leaves us with a more uncomfortable yet more interesting question than whether or not Tolkien was a ârealâ environmentalist. Because he was! He genuinely is one! He enjoys his trees! Every good character is some brand of treefucker! But his environmentalism is part of a larger conservative ontology in which an accumulated past leads to a presumption of legitimacy. In the legendarium, home is morally privileged over elsewhere, continuity over rupture, inheritance over invention, development over upheaval, and restoration over transformation. And these are all ingredients for a very humane critique of industrial capitalism, but only in the right hands. Outside them, it just turns the preservation of a social landscape into a moral environmentalist imperative.
And Iâm saying this partly because I get really fucking annoyed when people respond to this sort of critique in bad faith and intellectually lazy ways like âoh so youâre saying the Shire is fascistâ or that âloving English hedgerows is now a cancellable offence huhâ or âis Tolkien the only problematic writer in your eyesâ. Nobody said that. I like a hefty hedgerow myself. I think all writers should be some brand of problematic. I am only saying that the legendariumâs underlying ecological conceit is often read as a politics detached from his views on race and gender, when it is absolutely establishing a conservative and reactionary theory of belonging by framing it in a compellingly emotional ecological register.Â
Across the trilogy (and also across much of the writing of Beleriand), the landscape moves gradually from a vessel through which history has passed into evidence of whom said history, and thus the landscape, belongs to. The conservative pastoral is excellent at playing this remarkable trick of making migratory history and power structures disappear by actually preserving its traces, giving you ancient walls without enclosures (Shire, Girdle of Melian), ancient borders keeping out a dehumanised Other (say, Gondor-Harad) without the breaches (Haradrim boys being taken to Gondor as âtributesâ), or certain contested territories without the complexity of conflict (âHarondorâ, Umbar).Â
Iâm not at any point denying that Tolkien was a genuine lover of the English countryside and the pastoral environment. He was! He genuinely did care about it! I just think that, imo, caring about the environment does not make someone ecologically progressive. What I want from ecological progress is less consoling and probably more difficult, ie I want to defend the conditions under which there can still be a future that doesnât need to look like the world which produced us, and I give very little fucks about preservation because preservation always comes with custodians and custodians always come with curatorial decisions. I think that ecological conservation, at its most compelling, should have nothing to do with the preservation of anything that is or once was, and everything to do with defending the natural worldâs capacity to pleasantly surprise us. As Elros says in the bird fic:
Still, the natural world is indifferent to our accounting. It keeps no column marked those deserving of death. Remove the cormorant and the mullet multiply until the eelgrass thins beneath them, empty the eelgrass and the fry lose their nursery. All of us are stumbling sword-first in the dark, dealing victorious wounds in the name of righteous restoration. Even though the world is composed not of victors but of a series of obligations: weed to current, current to fish, fish to bird, bird to salt, salt to rain.Â
Perhaps this is why the cormorant never sees his dive as an act of faith in the continuance of the world, and enters the water as desperately one day as it does the next. Why it expects no praise for taking what permits its little world to persist and continues to dive despite the twanging of the bow, refusing to accept that its place in the world is deserving of punishment. Perhaps that is why the infant chicks eagerly open wide for both beak and blade. Perhaps the only common inheritance among all living things is a moment of surprise at the cruelty of the world. Perhaps every creature understands this, bar us. Perhaps it is we alone who have conceived of the survival of another as theft from oneself. How lonely it feels, to walk this remarkable world after learning such a thing.Â
re. the point abt organic growth, interesting also to consider the ideological history and origins of the "organic" movement in the UK, esp. in ideas of nature/naturalness/health/goodness/trustworthiness v. trade/commerce/money/unnaturalness/deceptiveness/corruption -
The writings of Sir George Stapledon (1882â1960), a leading agricultural scientist and Professor of agricultural botany at Aberystwyth, indicate the similarity of left-wing and right-wing organicist visions, and point to the difference. Opening his 1935 book The Land Now and Tomorrow, Stapledon explained that his initial intention to confine the subject to purely agricultural implications had become impossible: âTo-day, however, that is not enough, for the land must be considered in relation to the nation as a whole.â Since the land was the place closest to nature, its protection meant the best guarantee for the future of the nationâs health: âunless rural England is provided with the amenities and facilities necessary rural England and rural psychology are doomed â and then the driving force behind the English character would be lostâ. The problem, as Stapledon saw it, was that this threat was very real indeed:
We take trouble to produce stock seeds and stock animals. The country is the place in which stock men are produced, or, alas! now we can only say in which stock men can and should be produced. âŠThe era of industrialization and urbanization has nearly killed rural Britain, and it is the deep-going psychological influences that count for aye or nay. Let rural Britain die completely, and the whole superstructure will totter to ruin. It is just and only just not too late to stop the rot, but only heroic endeavour will suffice.
Similarly, the organicist dietician Lionel Picton argued that â[t]he very soil is often degenerate, exhausted by the non-return of the natural waters and the substitution of chemicalsâ. This eugenicist vision combined with a vitalist call to action on behalf of the sacred bond between nation and land was no doubt what lay behind the decision of Stapledon and Picton, as well as other leading agriculturalists such as Albert Howard, to associate with, if not actually to join, the Kinship in Husbandry group.
...
The answer â echoing Ludoviciâs anthropological claims â is to be found in the writings of Lymington, Massingham, Gardiner, Blunden and the rest of the Kinship in Husbandry group, as they contrasted the âgreen and pleasant landâ with the ravages of modernity:
In loving service to the soil men see each season how death may be cheated and learn how they must always protect the sound seed from the weeds, and how close breeding makes fine types of stock. ⊠if the best are to survive it must be by careful tending and protection from weeds and parasites. If only to relearn this ancient lesson, regeneration of the soil must come before national revival.
...
The war then actually helped strengthen organo-fascist claims. Henry Williamson, for example (another author whose fascism is underestimated by his hagiographers) felt able to combine an appeal to wartime sentiment with âharderâ organicist views:
It has taken a war to put British farming on its feet, and to bring back to us generally the idea that work is the true basis of life in the world. A nation that neglects its land, and its peasants â which are its root-stock â will perish. The idea of living by easy money is no good. Napoleon said that toil produced a hard and virile race, while trade produced a soft and crafty people; and that is true. We British are hard and virile, and we must have overseas trade in order to build up a high standard of life; but the cut-price, get-rich-quick idiom was beginning to spoil that hardness and virility. The by-products of that past epoch were overintellectualism, spiciness and hyper-stimulation of feeling: too many cocktails, too-glamorous movies, a rootlessness showing itself in artistic distortion; pavementism. These things were an emanation of the same system that produced the dole-queues, slums, malnutrition, the âclass-warâ. The war has brought us back to the fundamentals of life; and when it is over, on the basis of our new, hard economy, we shall build a fine civilisation in this country, and its Empire, on the simple virtues of life.
-- The Far Right & Back-to-the-Land, Dan Stone in The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain ed. Gottlieb & Linehan
additional to the scouring of the Shire cited above, some resonances to consider:
-- the difference in depiction of the Master of Lake Town and all other more pastoral/rural peoples, with an attitude of disdain towards trade and commerce; the depiction of the Master as essentially cowardly and soft and incapable of handling war, especially
-- the image of Sam "regenerating" the "poisoned" Shire with soil received from Galadriel, from Lorien, itself a recreation in some ways of Doriath and w the mallorns, a memory of Valinor in the West
-- the ways in which Lotho Baggins and other "half"-men are described in the scouring of the shire, again as essentially sly and cowardly; all traits attributed to a kind of deceptive and non-masculine behaviour in the English conservative imaginary
it's just frustrating how you can point out that none of the problems with AI are new and people will interpret that to mean "everything is fine and we just have to accept this new normal", rather than understanding that to mean "we need to change our thinking and tactics to address these issues more broadly and at their root causes instead of buying into AI exceptionalism, which may involve reevaluating other technology we're already alright with"
i guarantee you no person with a conscience is Pro Data Centers Poisoning The Water, and there are a lot of reasons why someone would want to point out that this phenomenon predates ai that don't just come down to running interference for tech industry ghouls.
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