Hard to believe I first wrote this post back in November of 2011. Two and a half years later, I feel more strongly now than I did then. I want you to read this again, please. I just finished my classes for spring, and as I do every term, I told my students this:
Our founders knew they were putting together a grand experiment in whether common people could truly self-govern in a concept called The Republic. Today, you are the ones wearing the lab smock; you are the ones watching the beakers and the dials…the future success of the experiment rests with you.
As I shared this term, several students grew more aware of what is at stake in the country….and the huge hill to climb we have to actually fix our issues. They aren’t running from the challenge or unwilling to undertake great sacrifice to put things right, but they do see the enormity of the task. And, perhaps as one suggested to me privately, it is too late. The cliff we are headed towards, perhaps already tumbling over, is too close to avoid.
There is, however, a potential solution…which I share at the end of this reposted blog writing. I only can pray that we, as a people, will decide to truly go back there!
This past summer [in 2011], I took my daughters to see the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings that was back in the theaters for a special run. It was a blast! During the last night watching The Return of the King, I was struck again by how powerful Tolkien’s words and ideas are.
Recently, through things at my church, at the College and even in the world, my concern about our national loss of values has again arisen. Far too many things, books I have read, interviews I have heard, conversations I have participated in, have reinforced just how far we have slid as a culture and as a nation.
If you remember the movie, Gandalf the wizard, the spiritual guide and protector (in Tolkien’s world, he is a lesser angel sent down in the guise of a wise old man) has come to the ancient city of Gondor. With him is the small hobbit, Pippin who rode in the protection of the wizard. As they come to the highest hall of the city, Pippin is asking about the city and the old tree that appears to be dead.
Gandalf begins to explain to Pippin about the tree. The movie makes short work of this, but the tree is critical to understanding the lore of the city of Gondor because it reflected a link back to an ancient time when the humans who founded Gondor were great. It is a long story and told by Tolkien briefly in the Appendix A of the Lord of the Rings book, and more clearly in his masterful work The Silmarillion.
Back to Numenor
The short version is that once the humans had a great and powerful civilization called Numenor, a connection back to an even greater past at the dawn of the world. That civilization, that nation held as part of their national imagery a tree that was descended from the great tree of the beginning of time (something of an allusion by Tolkien to the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden, and its Tree of Life and Tree of Good and Evil). Well, the humans grew proud of their power and in the process, their great civilization was destroyed except for a few faithful ones who fled destruction and then ultimately founded Gondor.
When they built that new city, they planted a seedling of the former great tree. The tree represented a link to their past, to a time when they were great and the humans were wiser and had greater honor.
Pippen cannot understand why the soldiers continue to guard the now dead tree (or seemingly dead tree). Gandalf’s answer illuminates the issue:
“They guard it because they have hope. A faint and fading hope that one day it will flower. That a king will come and this city will be as it once was before it fell into decay. The old wisdom born out of the west was forsaken. Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry or in high, cold towers asking questions of the stars. And so the people of Gondor fell into ruin. The line of Kings failed. The white tree withered. The rule of Gondor was given over to lesser men.”
Now, the book does not have this specific exchange, but Tolkien makes the same point throughout the writing, as well as in the aforementioned Appendix A. In fact, the entire story of the Lord of the Rings is partially a story of redemption of man as Aragorn, the last true descendent of the former civilization, needs to bring back honor to the race of humans. He needs to do this because the humans have become “lesser.”
How did this happen? Tolkien shows in detail what the movie gives in a quick quote. They exchanged the values of their past, the values that made their civilization great, for lesser things. Tolkien talks about how the great humans began to marry people from lesser races.
Of course, in our world today, the idea of “lesser races” hits us in a bad way; we do not think that one race is better or stronger than another. I don’t mean to imply that Tolkien was in some way a racist; I have no idea what he thought in that regard. But he is using the imagery as a way of showing how this once great civilization declined.
At one point, they all knew of their story, their past, their values and each held to it strongly. Those of the nation who did not are shown in the story as evil or as undermining the society. They had achieved greatness because of the very values that now were being lost as people forgot who they were. As they married others who did not know the national story, the knowledge was lost.
History became legend, legend became myth
The movie shows this point earlier, back in the opening monologue of The Fellowship of the Ring. There, the voice over tells us, “Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. So, history became legend, legend became myth.”
This is, I fear, where the USA is today. We have forsaken old wisdom, old ideals that created the setting for our success. In place of the old wisdom, as Gandalf said, leaders have wasted national resources on wealth or fame; energy has been misplaced “musing on heraldry or in high, cold towers asking questions of the stars.”
Like Gondor, the USA is headed towards a point where others will say “the people of the USA fell into ruin.”
Can this crisis be averted? Yes, but not through some national rah-rah story, nor through angry efforts of people trying to “sit-in” an open park in protest. Instead, we can avoid the experience of Gondor (or of Rome or other great past civilizations) by returning again to the “old wisdom born out of the west.”