fall from grace
I forget what exactly I typed into Google, but somehow I ended up at this archived discussion about the motif of static history in stereotypical fantasy. It’s true, Western Civilization seems to be obsessed with the idea that things were better in the past, and things really suck now. Tolkien called this idea ”The Long Defeat,” specifically referring to the Fall of the Noldor, from a state of Valinorean grace to becoming refugees fleeing Middle-Earth furtively in the night.
The idea is basically an interpretation of the Christian concept of Original Sin, in which humanity started off in the bliss of paradise, which then becomes corrupted. But one wonders how much the idea of the fall from grace is influenced by the historical devolution of the Kingdom of Israel, from a conquering people that subjugated all of Canaan, to a conquered people subject to Rome, and eventually scattered across the world, a people without a nation.
And I also wonder if this idea of devolution was reinforced in Christianity, which eventually became the state religion of the Roman Empire. One of the most traumatic ruptures of the history of Western Civilization is the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Dark Ages that arose afterwards lasted for nearly a millenium. (Interestingly, these are the exact Dark Ages on which most fantasy universes are based on.)
But modernity seems to contradict this idea with the mythic notion of Progress™. Looking back at the past 150 years, though, I can’t help be impressed by the Moore’s Law-like progression of not only technology, but of society as well. 150 years ago, the steam engine was finally (re)invented. Non-Europeans were seen as subhumans. Monarchy (either constitutional or absolute) was still the most dominant type of government. Now we have nuclear power, the Internet, cell phones, recombinant gengineering, and receptor-targeted pharmaceuticals. Representative democracy is the norm for government, and people of color have made significant strides in civil rights.
It tends to be a Western-chauvanist view of the world, but the mythology is nonetheless compelling, starkly contrasting to the notion of the The Long Defeat and also to Eastern philosophies of cyclic time. And in the end, it may be a victim of its own success, as the trajectory of progress becomes asymptotic, subject to the laws of diminishing returns, and eventually culminating into yet another Dark Age. (The U.S. seems to be following this particular course, with the culture’s degeneration into religious superstition and its disdain for the scientific method.)
But the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of the European nation-states is not the only dark age in Western Civilization.
The one that intrigues me the most is the still unexplained downfall of Mycenaean Greece, resulting in a 300 year dark age until the rise of the Greek City-States. I first came across this idea while reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan. He speculated about whether Greek civilization might have pioneered not only the Industrial Revolution, but the Space Revolution as well, if it had not suffered this period of decline. Consider that before the Common Era, Greek philosophers already had a rough theory about the nature of matter, speculating that everything is made up of indivisible, elementary particles. Not only did they figure out many of the core principles of physics and engineering that are still in use today, Hero of Alexandria had even invented a prototypical steam engine by the 1st century CE. Imagine if things had happened 300 years earlier. Would humanity have reached the stars nearly two millenia earlier? (To imagine how much time the Greek Dark Ages were, consider that 300 years ago, the United States of America did not even exist.)
Other civilizations have had similarly tumultous Dark Ages: China has had several. (I’m most familiar with Three Kingdoms Era after the collapse of the Han Dynasty.) The Mayans have that unexplained period of deurbanization after the 9th century AD. But I wonder if members of these particular civilizations feel the same trauma about the fall(s) of their respective civilizations as Westerners feel about the fall of the Roman Empire. I wonder if the difference can be attributed to the fact that both the Chinese and the Maya are culturally disposed to believe in cyclic rather than linear time.
But back to Tolkien: you might argue that his legendarium exhibits an unnatural historical stasis from the First Age to the Third Age, but even when just examining technology, it seems clear that the Noldor were far more advanced in the First Age than they were in the Third. Using Arthur C Clarke’s dictum about the equivalence of magic and technology, I would argue that the Silmarils, the delving of Nargothrond, the founding of the city of Gondolin, even the Palantirí, are evidence of technological skill that are afterward lost completely. And while Círdan was Teleri, there are inklings that Vingelot, the ship he built for Eärendil, may have actually been a starship. And in the Second Age, Númenor was an ocean-faring civilization that had established ports all over the world, and even discounting the apocrypha of The History of Middle Earth in which Númenoreans had airships and Melkor had helicopters and ornithopters, Númenoreans were still far advanced compared to the Dúnedain of Arnor and Gondor.
While I am a scientist and therefore have a biased view of history, I can’t help but believe that technological and social progress are inextricably intertwined. Cities could not have developed without agriculture. Banking and accounting, while helped greatly by the invention of the double entry ledger, but would not have been possible without the vast amounts of wealth procured by the exploitation of the Americas, which in turn would not have been possible without the advances in shipbuilding and navigation, which in turn was dependent on advances in astronomy. The Protestant Reformation was aided greatly by the invention of the printing press, as were democratic revolutions. The principles of mass production and the assembly line led to the widespread use of the automobile, which made time and distance shrink, which contributed to the homogenization of the U.S. (already started by the steam engine and the railroad), and these technologies started to dispel provincialism.
Movies, and then television were necessary precursors to global capitalism. Without an relatively democratic society backing it, it’s doubtful that the Internet would’ve flourished. The personal computer and cell phones were direct consequences of the encryption and code-breaking technologies of WWII.
Given the Valar’s exercises in terraforming during the Age of Legends and the Noldor’s smaller scale exercises in environmental engineering and fashioning of artifacts, I’m not sure you can say with absoluteness that Tolkien was against technology per se. A more nuanced interpretation would be that he despises the excesses of technology, most literally evoked by the industrialized wasteland of Mordor, and also by the despoilment of the Shire.
Tolkien’s proto-environmentalist message is embedded in Gimli’s vivid description Aglarond and how the dwarves would not callously exploit the mines for treasure but would turn it into a sustainable habitat.