The ring of power
In 2005, the Guardian published a story about two Japanese men, soldiers, one 85 and one 87, who appeared out of the Mindanao, Philippines forests, where they’d been hiding since World War II, not knowing that the war had ended sixty years earlier. Apparently, they’d deserted during the war and feared that whole time they’d be court-martialed if they were found out. Prior to their re-emergence, there had been seven other Japanese soldiers in the former Pacific Theater who’d remained at their posts, so to speak, long after the war ended, the last of whom didn’t get word of Hirohito’s surrender until 1974.
I’m reminded of these stories today observing from a safe distance the vestiges of the political left and right of yesteryear. Or perhaps the more appropriate analog is the Battle of New Orleans, fought fifteen days after a treaty was signed in Ghent ending the War of 1812.
Even at the turn of this century, the left with whom I was then affiliated was waging its own long-past civil war with the Tralin-Stotsky debate.
As Vonnegut once said, “So it goes.”
I myself dropped out of the war, such as it was, in 2009, after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. I could no longer justify the fantasies that had sustained me since the September 11 attacks with regard to the “antiwar movement.” We (the embryonic antiwar effort) had started out as a tiny enclave of dissidents standing against the post-9-11 hysteria, then grown as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had stuttered into incoherence against the insanely optimistic prognostications of the neoconservative advisors of the Bush administration.
At one point, we were staging historically huge “antiwar” demonstrations. That ended when the liberal darling Obama was elected, whereupon, after less than three days in office, the new President ordered drone strikes that missed their purported “Taliban” targets and killed nine civilians, including children . . . and the entire “antiwar movement” went silent as the tomb.
There had never been an “antiwar movement.” That was our wishful illusion, one I pumped up with great vigor. The “movement,” it turned out, was an “anti-Bush movement,” motivated more by familial party loyalty and PMC prejudices about George Bush’s lack of refinement. The war, once it went sufficiently wrong, just provided the pretext. The left, who’d done most of the heavy lifting between 2001 and 2008, had been used then discarded like a post-coital condom.
Those of us who managed to let go of our fantasies and our denials had noticed something else along the way — the absolute failure of sixties-tactics like mass demonstrations. What had worked in 1963 Birmingham, the ruling class of the 2000s had discovered, could be cancelled by simply ignoring us. All head-to-head conflict is like this, of course, a perpetual cycle of adaptation, of measure, counter-measure, and counter-counter-measure, each dancing within newly emergent contexts.
Ruling class media played its part for both Bush and Obama warmaking, dutifully stoking America’s militarism and assisting in the requisite cover-ups; but I’ll resist detailed digressions here to illuminate the more general role of invisibility in which the media is a major accomplice in all late modern eras, with the financial, technocratic, and military classes as the principal perpetrators.
In the great Tolkien trilogy, Lord of the Rings (not the movies), the author centers his narrative around the ring of power, which is not — as many have surmised wrongly — some deeply mysterious metaphor. It is quite plainly about . . . well, power, of the same kind described as the third temptation of Christ in the wilderness in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke — the power to rule.
The ring of power in The Lord of the Rings is also very similar to the one in the Greek myth of Gyges — a ring which makes its bearer invisible. With invisibility, one can act with impunity; and impunity (the second temptation of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, btw) is the foundation of the power to rule.
What, you may ask, does this have to do with those who are still fighting wars that have already ended?
Well, when the ring was alienated from its master — a power-mad sub-angelic being who shifted shapes over the ages —it fell into the hands (or at least the range) of others, where the temptation of invisibility worked its villainous magic. In the story of Gyges, the listener is invited to imagine him- or herself (imagine it yourself, now) having such a ring. What temptations attend your fantasy? Vouyerism, theft, manipulation, revenge? Aren’t all these, and the impunity of invisibility, aspects of power?
Contexts are constantly evolving, sometimes with dramatic punctuations, and yet the ring of power persists, passing from one group to another and another.
It’s fairly easy to trace this evolution in American politics of the last twenty years (or the last hundred, or two hundred). Take the characters from the Bush II post-911 era, Republicans all then, and then turn your TV onto MSNBC, a fully owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, and there they are — all the neoconservatives we loved to hate when the tanks rolled into Mosul and George W. Bush embarrassed the technocratic class with his verbal gaffes and mindless miscues. Meanwhile, the neoconservatives’ former allies, the evangelical right, are rubbing bellies with right-wing libertines and gun-nuttery militias, morphing into something we might vaguely describe as post-Trumpism — a goulash of chilialism, nationalist neo-reaction, exurban white panic, and plain anti-technocratic frustration. As incoherent as this newly formed alliance seems, it’s making headway precisely because the formerly bi-partisan and ever more gerentocratic neoliberal managerial class is withdrawing into the keep of the Democratic establishment as it’s exhausted troops hemorrhage credibility in failure after failure.
They’ve become visible. They no longer enjoy impunity.
It’s as if the ring has fallen out of the grasp of its last possessor, and the scramble is on to see who can seize it next. The question becomes, then, who is best positioned to do just that? Democrats? Republicans? Techno-oligarchs? China? Russia? No one . . .? Has the ring rolled into a drain, leaving multiple combatants fighting for something lost? Are we all Japanese soldiers left behind in Pacific jungles, or embattled Brits and Yanks pointlessly bayoneting one another at Rodriguez Canal?
In Tolkien’s antediluvian world, the destruction of the ring did not end conflict or destroy evil. The scouring of the Shire happened subsequent to the ring’s destruction (led in secret by the enfeebled Saruman).
Tolkien himself despised such modern phenomena as eugenics, Weberian disenchantment, and the destructive advances of industrialism. He is often denounced now for not having access to today’s cultural grammar about these things, but that’s garden variety retrojective liberal bullshit — the kind of cheap and easy, proto-authoritarian virtue-signaling you can find in super-abundance on Twitter. The kind of thing I myself indulged in when I was trading cannon shots as Jackson and Keane battled it out for nothing east of Lake Pontchartrain. As a disabled veteran, then, I’ve mutated into one of the brontosaurs who happens to think there are things we can still learn from old Tolkien.
Tolkien held a somewhat “fatalistic” view of history, wherein each age becomes increasingly disenchanted and inhospitable, even after evil is partially set back (as with the destruction of the ring). He was a Christian with the parousia always in view, allowing him to live with this “fatalism,” and he was a personalist in the same sense as Kierkegaard, e.g., neither an “individualist” in the modern sense, nor a modern “collectivist.” The world, and history, in this view, are post-lapsarian . . . fallen, broken by sin.
My own personal trajectory was atypical, in that I was kept busy during most of the first half of my adult life as a soldier, becoming a left-wing political activist only at the age of 45; so in a sense I was beginning approximately at the point of most 25-year-old left-wing “activists,” albeit with a bit more life experience. I was, then, an experientially-enhanced 38-year-old leftist when I resigned (sort of) from the political war (at the actual age of 58). Admittedly, I’ve fallen back into the temptations of politics again and again since then out of pure habit (and bouts of fear); but I’ve meanwhile also become a septuagenarian. I’m a reader, and old readers often become more avid students of history as our futures become more obviously truncated. I also converted to Christianity in 2008, and I can’t begin to describe here how dramatic that change was and continues to be.
It’s the culmination — up to this point — of all these experiences that leads me to agree in general terms with Tolkien’s parousia-inflected “fatalism.” In short, I’m near to losing the last vestiges of my formerly naive faith in the modern fantasy that this post-lapsarian world will find its way to some comfortable stability, or that anyone anywhere at any time has the capacity to make the world over in some secular ideal’s image. My renewed interest in history only bears me out on this.
As an Illichian Catholic, I’ve also got a new bead on power. My former comrades were certainly not opposed to power. They just felt it was in the wrong hands. Even today, we see the liberals who denounced Trump for his ham-handed power grabs themselves promoting everfresh forms of the hyper-censorious, authoritarian, surveillance society . . . even promoting World War III in the bargain.
When Jesus went into the wilderness, all three temptations presented by the Satan (which means tempter) were the temptations of power. Bread from stones to pacify the masses, impunity (like that which comes with invisibility), and the power to dictate to the nations. To worship power, power itself, is to worship (unknowingly perhaps) the tempter to power, to worship the devil.
We have no idea what the next month, or next year, or the next decade holds. Nor who might pick up the ring of power. I’ve learned, if I don’t forget it in a moment of panic or despair, not to fight wars that are long past . . .
“Despair, or folly?’ said Gandalf. ‘It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.’
‘At least for a while,’ said Elrond. ‘The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.” (The Fellowship of the Ring)