March 23, 2003

The Danger of Simplification
Chambers

Thank you Brett C. for your response. I'm sure Tolkien believed that fantasy is applicable to reality, when it deals with realistic characters in realistic circumstances.(You can read that in his essay on Fantasy, in The Tolkien Reader) It just gets a little scary when people start relating the wars, and accusing other people of being Sauron, or Gandalf for that matter.(pure good or pure evil). We should keep in mind that these characters are not human beings, and for good reason. They would not be realistic if they were human. People want so bad for things to be simplified. A government that makes war for various reasons, simplifies it for the people, in order to avoid opposition. It's easy to do, because people want simple. They want to think that the world's problems can be blamed on one man, whether it be Bush or Hussein, just as Middle Earth's problems can be blamed on Morgoth and Sauron. This is not the case. I hear everyone trying to simplify and compare, but it seems to me the truth gets distorted in the process.
I did not mean to say that people should not have opinions at all about the war. I have strong opinions about the war, although I don't feel this is the place to share them, because I can't relate the War of the Ring to the War in Iraq, without distorting the truth. Just as Tolkien said his story is so very different from World War 2, it is also very different from the war today. Be careful not to simplify/distort the truth in order to compare the two.