We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emili Jashinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on ex at fdr LST,
and if you want to support our work, you can head over subscribe
to the premium ad free version of our website at the Federalist dot com as
well. I'm joined today by my colleague John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at
The Federalist and also the author of a book that I am so excited to
read. John. Thanks for joining the show and when does the book come
out? Again? Thanks Emily. I have to give a covey that I
have a head cold, so if it sounds like I have a head cold,
I do. The book comes out at the end of March. It's
called Pagan America, the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come.
So this is actually a perfect topic to begin on because I'm curious how many
times you reference J. R. R. Tolkien in Pagan America. You
know, my wife was teasing me about this at various points in the writing
of the book because she thinks I reference them, maybe too many times,
but I tend to think I didn't reference them enough. But yes, I
do reference them in the introduction and in various chapters, but you know,
not in a gratuitous way. It's all very germane to the topic at hand.
So it's not and you know, I know what you're probably thinking.
No, it's not all references to the Lord of the Rings. There are
references to his letters and some of his other other writings as well. Look,
I make no apologies. I'm a big Tolkien fan, have been since
the third grade when I first read The Hobbit and so yes, and I've
been reading a book, a biography of a new biography of Tolkien as well,
so he'd been on my mind. Let's say, well this. My
interest in John's interest in Tolkien was peaked originally when I heard that John dressed
up as Gollum for Alloween going a year and it was such an amazing story
that I took an interest in John's interest, which turns out out on somewhat
of a fanaticism. But John just might kind of bring everyone up to speed,
listeners up to speed on why this book Pagan America might have so many
entirely Germane references to Tolkien in it, and I think this is a great
you know, distillation or window into your worldview, especially in you know,
as it's coalesced in the last ten years or congealed in the last ten years
about Pagan America and how that sort of fits in with this lifelong interest.
Well, one of the things that he says in one of his letters is
that he explains to his correspondent that he is a Christian, and indeed a
Roman Catholic, and so he is accustomed to view history as a long defeat.
That's his phrase, is a long defeat. And he has a kind
of tragic view of history. And and as as a Christian, he can
see the modern how the modern world is anti thetical to Christian civilization. And
you know, keep in mind, this is a guy who lived through He
was born right at the end of the nineteenth century. He fought in World
War One, he was middle aged Oxford professor and father for during World War
Two, and died in the nineteen seventies. So he saw, you know,
the worst parts of the twentieth century. And I think he understood that
the world that the modern kind of industrial world that was that was ushered in
mostly during his lifetime, was one that was antithetical to Christian civilization, to
the Christian faith, and to all of the values that we get through Christianity
that makes our civilization possible. And so he had this kind of tragic view
and and and he coined, you know, sort of put it in this
great way, I thought, is that we fight the long defeat. We
understand that the world is is dying, the world is passing away. As
Christians, we hope for or a new Heaven and a new Earth. And
in the meantime we fight the long defeat, and we don't we don't give
up on this world, and we don't give up on uh one another,
on our civilization, but we do understand that it is passing away. And
that is as as Saint Paul said, that we fight against the powers and
principalities of darkness who have to some degree have rule over the over the world.
And there's a battle going on. And you see this all through his
writings, not just The Lord of the Rings, but all of the extant
writings that are that are connected to to his Middle Earth Legendarium. Probably the
greatest exposition of this kind of Christian cosmology is the first you know, eleven
or twelve pages of the Silmarillion, which is sort of where he gives kind
of the creation story of Middle Earth, which is basically totally Christian and totally
awesome too. So you could have a podcast where you just you know,
read out loud from the Silver Allian. I think that would be a lot
of listeners would would appreciate that the origin story of the Middle Earth is distill
they make it's fun of me all you want, Emily, but you know,
I'm right, it's incredible, all right, keep going, John,
Where else do I talk about him? There's a chapter in the book Nothing
that we need to make this whole podcast about my book. But there's a
chapter in the book. You know, maybe I should back up a little
bit and and explain what the title means when I talk about Pagan America.
What I'm talking about is the the end of the Christian era in the West,
right, the Western civilization was was created by the combination of Christianity with
with you know, the the Greco Roman world, right, and so you
have Athens and you have Jerusalem together and you get Western civilization. It always
depended on the Christian faith though to propagate the morality and the virtues that were
necessary for that for our civilization to flourish. And indeed, you know,
the American experiment specifically relies on Christianity in a way that you know, when
you really look into like the Founders and the generation before the Founders, and
what they said about what it was that they were doing, it was explicitly.
It wasn't an explicitly Christian project in the sense that they weren't sort of
like setting up a Christian empire. But they understood that the kind of society
that they were setting up was one that could only be undertaken by people who
were faithful Christians, who were religious people, whose morality and whose principles were
formed by religious faith. And they said so explicitly. Of course, the
most famous line is John Adams who said that our republic is only fit for
moral and religious people, and it's not it's not possible with anything but that
kind of a people. So he was talking about Wickens though, of course,
right, well, that I mean, but that actually is the the
interpretation that a lot of sort of like you know, secular you know,
liberals would put on it. And say like, oh, moral and religious,
So that means wickens too. Rite, He's not saying just Christians,
No, he's talking about Christians. They were all talking about Christians. And
if they weren't talking explicitly about about a certain you know, sect of Christianity
or denomination of Christianity, they were speaking broadly of the Christian faith. They
weren't thinking of Muslims, right or Wickens. So so you have you have
this American experiment, and it relies on Christianity, and and even the values
that undergird are like Bill of Rights, things like individual liberty and you know,
the consent of the government, and free speech and freedom of religion and
things like that. Those all of those stem from principles and values that flow
out of Christianity. If you take Christianity away, there's no basis for those
things anymore. Like individual rights, for example, is derived from the doctrine
of Imago Day that man is created in the image and likeness of God,
and so he has inherent dignity and worth and rights too. And one of
the things that I do at the beginning of the book is kind of in
brief trace back, you know, how these things were articulated in really in
medieval Catholic Europe. You know, the idea of individual rights. You can't
just do whatever you want to other people because you have power. That mentality
that might makes right powerful do what they want. That is a pagan virtue
and that defined the pagan world. And my argument in brief is that as
Christianity fades in America, we are going to return to a to a pagan
morality and a pagan way of organizing society. And that is not going to
be a country that any of us want to live in, even people who
are not Christians, because it's going to be brutal and violent and oppressive and
ruled by the powerful, and the weak and the powerless will be completely subject
to a powerful class of people who do basically whatever they want, which is
historically fairly in the norm. Yeah, that's the norm, right. What's
said is that we devise a system based on truths that would overcome the norm.
Historically. That's what's so remarkable about the American system, the Western system
of government, and that's what we stand to lose. And John I wanted
to ask about how Tolkien, who's who's dealing with the world that such a
turning point historically, How did he deal with Nietzsche. He's not writing that
long after Nietzsche, and he's writing when Nietzschism is sort of popular among elites
or in certain quarters of the elites. And I asked that question in the
context of the debate right now that sort of royal some you know, certain
niche corners of the right about whether Christianity uh sort of necessarily generated woke ideology,
that woke ideologies in some ways premised on and maybe Protestantism or something like
that. How is Tolkien dealing with Nietzsche when he's writing He never wrote,
you know, in his correspondence or in any of his other writings directly about
Nietzsche, as far as I understand, or as far as I know.
Maybe maybe I'm wrong, and some listener will call me out on that,
but he did. You the idea that liberalism or or extreme liberalism, like
wokeism, flows out of Christianity or as a consequence of Christianity, I would
say, is a is not right. And I think Tolkien would say the
same thing. It's a perversion of Christianity that discards much of the Christian inheritance
and specifically the Catholic inheritance of Europe. He the thing to understand about Tolkien
is that he was deeply Roman Catholic, was a devout Roman Catholic. He
was formed by you know, the pre Vatican to Church. He had memorized
the entire canon of the Mass in Latin. The Canon of the Mass,
for our non Catholic listeners, is the part of the Mass that doesn't change
from season to season. It's always the same, uh said in a certain
point in the Mass is the canon, and it's and it's constant because anyway
he he he was totally formed by the Catholic faith, and so his and
I would argue that to fully understand his writings, uh, the Lord of
the Rings and all the writings associated with the Middle Earth, you can't have,
you know, a deep understanding of them without without seeing and understanding his
Catholic faith and and uh seeing the ways that that that faith shaped his creative
output, his literary output, uh and and imbued it with with that faith.
So I would say that The Lord of the Rings is deeply Catholic work.
I don't there's playing people disagree with about that. Uh. Tolkien wasn't
like C. S. Lewis in the sense that he didn't write he wasn't
an apologist for Christianity. He didn't. He didn't write apologetics or nonfit essays
arguing for the faith. He didn't. He wasn't explicit in that way about
his faith. But he his view was that Christianity was what he called a
quote true myth. So his view is that all of mythology is sort of
trying to get at something that is fundamentally true about the created order and about
human beings. And that's with Christianity you have, you have the fulfillment of
all mythology. God becomes man, sacrifices himself to enter so that man can
enter into communion with God and redeem the world. And that that understanding Christianity
from a sort of mythopoetic point of view is the proper way to understand it,
and also to understand all mythology right and by extension, much of human
history tree as well. So to someone to answer your question sort of roundabout
way, to someone like Nietzsche who who kind of sees Christianity as a slave
religion, as imbue or is infecting civilization with these weak principles that are going
to destroy it. He would have totally rejected, would and did totally reject
that view of Christianity. Number two, Like, but you get a little
bit nerdy here, because this is a podcast about Jaror Tolkien. How you're
going to get at before it was a straight shock. This is just normal
stuff, you know, probably you know, really you know, really familiar
to everybody. Barroom banter. Yeah, exactly. The you know, we
forget and we have have have lost our vocabulary about the virtues into a large
extent that that we're part of sort of Christian christendom for for a long time.
And I'm thinking of things like magnanimity. Right, most people don't even
know what that means. It means a desire or a striving toward greatness,
right, And a character like Aragorn was was perfectly encapsulated the Christian virtue of
magnanimity. Right. He wasn't he wasn't a tyrant or a despot. He
didn't hunger and seek for power. He saw it and was and bided his
time and sacrificed greatly himself in order to finally achieve greatness. That's so Nietzsche
kind of had this like caricatureized view of Christianity. I don't think he understood
it very well, for one thing, and propagated this notion that Christianity,
you know, that there were no like martial values or there was no greatness
in Christianity, which is ironic because you know, he's a guy who's living
in European civilization that was created, you know, the greatest kind of civilizational,
a flower of civilization, right, living in nineteenth century Europe, with
the greatness of Christ and to them all around him, and he thinks that's
it's a slave religion for weaklings. Well, how did Europe happen then?
If that's the case anyway, I so long answer to say, I think
I think Tolkien would have understood and would have thought Nietzsche's view of Christianity was
totally wrong, much like the view of Christianity that we see on the left
today. They have no idea what Christianity is and they and they really have
no idea that our entire society depends on these Christian morals and principles for its
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which has been one of the more interesting I've probably mentioned it too many
times on the show since it happened, but it's one of the more interesting
parts of a in here c I Lee's conversion to Christianity, which you wrote
about John really wonderfully, and I was curious about it that I actually went
behind the paywall over at Unheard and watched her full long conversation and read the
transcript, and I found it's been much more. It's fleshed out much more
than just the original essay wise, and that was brought on by a really
important book, which is Tom Hollinds Dominion, David Harsani and I had Tom
Holland total honor to have him on the show a few months back. But
to your point, John, it's like we've lost and Holland emphasizes this too,
it's like we've lost the vocabulary to understand all of this so much so
that myths are not recognized as sort of Christian stories and I shouldn't even say
stories, but as Christian myths fundamentally. And I want to ask you about
that, about the myths that the Left tells itself about Tolkien, or about
the way Tolkien is now sort of perceived in our society in some ways because
as children are imbibing Tolkien today, as they still do, you know,
very often it's not recognized for what it very obviously clearly is. Yeah,
and that's so I answer that. But let's but I want to say word
about Tom Holland too in a way. So I in the same introductory chapter
of my book that I quote Tolkien talking about the Long Defeat, I quote
at length from Tom Holland's Dominion, which is which is a great book and
an important book, but it gets one big thing wrong. And it's at
the end, right he goes through, you know, fifteen hundred years of
Christian history and explains how our whole civilization depends on these things that come from
Christianity. These concepts and morals and ideas about society and about individuals, about
families, about government power, all of these things are completely derivative and totally
dependent on Christian faith. Not only that, but he even explains how at
the end of the book he starts getting into how even expressions of sort of
extreme liberalism and or wokeism also, you know, come from Christianity. I
would argue that they're they're sort of like distortions of Christianity. But even as
distortions, they they have their they have their source in a Christian understanding of
the world. You know, even something like I think he references this at
the end of the book, the Me Too movement. That kind of a
movement, and this is part of this point. That kind of a movement
would have been impossible in a pagan society because because if a powerful man like
Barbie Weinstein had taken advantage of of young young women actresses that were that he
was doing things for, you know, and getting them jobs or whatever,
that wouldn't have been a problem in the Roman Empire. Right, it's only
a problem. We only see it as a problem because we have this idea
that there should be something like consent, That that we have this idea that
powerful people shouldn't shouldn't abuse their position to gratify themselves. Right, we have
the slave morality, right, we we right what nature we call the slave
morality? But what what what a Christians would understand? The reason that we
have the idea of consent, The reason that we say that the powerful man
shouldn't be allowed to just rape a woman because he wants to, is because
that woman has inherent dignity and worth as a child of God. Right and
so anyway, So, so Holland goes through this sort of really well,
goes through centuries and centuries and Christian history, teasing out this idea in all
these different ways. But when he gets to the end of the book,
he doesn't quite He pulls this punch right at the end and said, he
essentially said, there's no reason to believe, and I'm paraphrasing him here,
that these these virtues are these these ideas that have been the foundation for Western
civilization will quickly go away, will quickly fade. But I think that that's
wrong. I think that there's every reason to believe that if the faith goes
away, the ideas are going to go with them. We may cling onto
them. I think that's the period of history that we're in right now.
We may cling onto them as a start of echo of their source, as
an echo of the civilization that that that was created out of these ideas and
these virtues. But there, But but it only takes a few generations for
for for things to change completely. And there's a lot of examples of this
throughout history. But if you have if you raise a generation or two on
the kind of uh, you know, pagan values and and and distortions of
Christian values that we that that are in the mainstream today, it's not going
to take very long. We already see things like, you know, race
consciousness coming back, you know, the joke of being. You know,
a thirteen year old spends two hours on TikTok and then he's quoting Osama bin
Lad. Right, that's what I'm talking about, Right, If you don't
chatechize the upcoming generations. To my education was so important to Christian Europe,
it was so important to the Founders. They understood if we don't educate the
upcoming generation to have these values and to have this religious sensibility and moral sensibility,
then our society is going to fall apart. So that and that,
in a way is a jumping off point for my book is to say Holland
about that, he's not right about that. And the rest of the book
is showing the ways that the things that are happening right now that show that
these things are going away quickly and they're being replaced by new kind of morality
which is decidedly pagan. And when I say pagan, I don't mean people
are going to be like, you know, bowing down to idols of artivists
and Zeus in Times Square or something like that at all. Yes, I'm
not saying that. It's not that that's the only thing that's going to happen.
Uh, that's not the key thing. The key thing about paganism and
something I say at the beginning of the book can be summed up in the
phrase nothing is true and everything is permitted. It's a kind of materialism and
a moral relativity that allows the powerful to do as they please and the week
to suffer what they must. Uh. And and that was and that's why
pagan societies are have throughout history for in large part also been slave societies,
and slavery and paganism, Uh, you know go together perfectly. Uh.
And and that that is what we as we embrace moral relativism, as we
embrace the idea that nothing is true and everything is permitted, we are going
to return to a pagan morality and a pagan society, which is to say,
a slave society. So well, I was gonna say so. Tolkein
sort of illustrates the virtues of Christian mythology with his own myths. What did
he have to tell us in his myths about the dangers? What warnings are
there as people are maybe rereading token themselves thinking about Tolkien right now as we're
talking about it, or thinking about, you know, how they teach their
children Tolien, what warnings are there in his work about what could be to
come? Well, one of the main things that you get in terms of
morality from Lord of the Rings, let's say, is that evil is real
and good is real, and they're distinct and it's possible to know the difference.
And that is a kind of moral clarity that comes from Christianity and comes
from his Roman Catholic faith. There's no there's none of this sort of you
know, woke liberal postmodern sensibility that you know, good and evil are?
Are you context dependent? To quote Claudine Gay and Liz McGill. Uh,
you know the who said that recently before Congress about anti Semitism. Evil is
not context just dependent, you know it is. It is a rejection of
the good and a perversion of the good. So one of the things you
see in uh Salon right and uh and before him going to get nerdy on
you melcoor right, who is the valor? And that Sara is a mayar
who is a you know, archagel below Melcore. And once Melcore was bound
and sent into the eternal darkness, Sauron lived on. And he's the main
villain that we know about him. But all that to say, my boyfriend
is going to yah. I was going to say, Phil will know what
I'm talking about. He can get you up to speed afterwards. So so
the the villains in Lord of the Rings, they hate the created world as
it is. They hate free You know that that the different peoples of Middle
Earth have a measure of freedom. They hate the messiness and the disorder of
it. Right, which is always something that that uh, that something that
comes up in Tolkien, that something comes up in Cus Lewis's writings as well,
is that the the those who are evil, uh, they they hate
disorder, they hate freedom, they hate uh, and they want to impose
control, right, They want to impose the society to take it back to
Pagan America. This is society and Middle Earth that Sovereign wants to create as
a slave society. It's perfectly ordered, uh, according to his will,
right. And uh. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is that
he he cannot create himself. Evil does cannot has no creative power. It
can only distort uh what is good. So the Orcs, for example,
are are not creatures that sa has has created himself. And there's there's different
accounts of like the origines story, like the evil creatures like Orcs and the
spiders and whatnot that are in Middle Earth. And and there's and there's some
conflicting accounts because you know, Tolkien was kind of working this out over the
course of decades that that he worked on all of this while he was doing
his his you know, being a professor at Oxford and everything. But the
Orcs are are are corrupted elves, right, the goblins are are corrupted ends
and and and that's a feature you know that that comes from Tolkien's very Christian
and Catholic understanding of God's creative power. That what God creates, as it
says in Genesis that he saw what he had created, and he saw that
it was good. So the things that God creates are good. Evil cannot
create anything good. It can only distort what God has created. And so
we see that that that's sort of like a you know, really and really
dramatic mythopoetic ways is brought out in the Lord of the Rings story. You
know, the whole land of Mordor has laid waste by by by sal On
it by his armies and and and for whatever it's worth too, Tolkien understood
that like machines and the corruption of nature and the abuse of nature, uh,
we're also part of this wicked, evil, distorted morality. Uh.
So that you know, Salama, for example, you know, destroys all
the trees as part of his creating this war machine of the you know,
the white hand of his army of works that he's going to send out.
So anyway, that's one example to what to answer your question of how this
Christian morality comes out in Tolkien's legendary, in his Middle Earth myth that that
is a distinctly Christian is a distinctly Christian morality and Christian understanding of good and
evil, not just that they exist objectively, but like what evil is and
what good is. And John, I know that we've talked about this before,
but another thing we've almost lost the vocabulary to talk about because we've become
also numb to hyper novelty. That's one of the functions of high tech hyper
novelty is that you're sort of a frog in a boiling pot. I imagine
you've you could fill actually pages withscussion on Tolkien technology. But the sort of
irony poisoned Zoomers of America. Are you resurrecting the unibomber and having a lot
of fun with it because you know, actually it was onto a couple of
things, And there's some of that in you know, the the world that
Tolkien is reacting to and that he's writing about. So as people are sort
of maybe particularly and I should say, John did not pitch this as a
conversation about his book at all. I just realized literally as we were beginning,
that there are probably a lot of Tolkien references in the book, but
as we sort of take that lens, there are the lurch towards paganism in
America right now to this conversation about technology. What does Tolkien tell us as
we're thinking about TikTok and Osama bin Laden to the point you just made,
what can we find in his work about that he had a he had a
deep distrust of the industrial of industrialism and end of the machine age. In
fact, a funny anecdote is that he, you know, later in life,
as he became the internationally celebrated author revert he published The Hobbit in nineteen
thirty seven and and it did well, but The Lord of the Rings wasn't
published until the fifties, and so he was sort of like I had been
a professor an academic at Oxford for many, many years, but he wasn't
like famous in the way that that he became after the publication of the Lord
of the Rings. And so you know, all these interviews that that that
interview requests that came in and correspondence as that came in, he was asked
to record a portion I believe of the Lord of the Rings or for some
media media thing. And but before he would have to have his voice recorded
on the recording machine, he he did a brief exorcism right on the tape
recorder and prayed the our Father in Gothic over it. Because because the idea
that you would you would that your voice would be captured by this machine forever.
Uh. He understood that that wasn't necessarily uh, just a mechanical thing
that was happening. That there was that that your your voice is your own,
and that there's something mystical and spiritual that that that our whole reality is
shot through with the with the with a spiritual reality, and that there is
uh that our physical world and the spiritual world are intertwined. And so you
every time you start, uh, every time Gmail tries to autocurr that's right,
immediately do an exorcistm R. Yeah, I'm constantly shouting at my computer
in Laddin. Uh he you know, And it wasn't This wasn't unique to
Tolkien, right. Cs List writes about this too. A lot of a
lot of men of that generation who who were born into sort of not not
that they were born into a pre industrial world, but they were young men
who maybe fought in World War One or who witnessed World War One. They
understood that a new world was coming into being, a mechanized, industrialized world
where even warfare was industrialized and was able to just lay waste in a way
that that warfare had never had never done. Churchill talks about this too his
experience in the Boer War in the eighteen nineties. He was horrified at what
sort of modern armaments and modern military tactics were able to do, and he
thought it it unnatural, and he wrote about it at the time, which
you know, then ironically, much later in life he would be overseeing Britain's
war effort in World War Two, which was which were many orders of magnitude
more destructive than the Boar War. But these men understood that there was something
unnatural about a fully mechanized, fully industrialized society that ignored the spiritual reality,
you might even say, the the mythic or mythopoetic reality of our world.
That things are not you know, that we don't live in a coldly materialistic,
rationalistic world. That that's a lie, that that the world is just
a world of things, uh, and not a world of beings and of
intelligences and of spiritual realities that are just as real as you know, the
tape recorder, let's say. And so that was something that now I've been
talking for so long, I forgot your initial question. But to give you
an example technology, that's right. So to give you an example of Toulkin's
relationship with technology, that that's the kind of they looked out at a world
of exploding technology through that lens and understood that technology wasn't necessarily our friend.
And that's something that I think, you know, we've talked about this at
the Federalists before and we've written about it, but conservatives over the past you
know, eighty years or so have not engaged that question, the question of
technology the way that they should. There's been even among conservatives, has been
kind of a passive acceptance of the inevitability of technology and the neutrality of it.
Right, that technologies is this neutral thing, and what matters is what
you do with it. Do you use it for good or do you use
it for ill? Tolkien and Lewis and all of these guys. Chesterton,
they would have rejected that understanding of technology and they would have said, know
that technology is not neutral. All technologies impose a cost. And one of
the things you have to grapple with is is the cost worth It? Is
the cost greater than the benefit of this technology. And I think that's something
we have completely not has not been part of the discussion about, you know,
something like social media, smartphones, you know, the ubiquity of the
Internet and screens in our lives. No, there's been yeah, podcasts,
you know, people should probably stop listening to this podcast right now and go
outside and start, like, you know, chopping wood. You can multitask.
I guess you can put your earbuds in and then go chop wood while
you keep listening. But the idea that technology imposes the cost that you can
see that in the Lord of the Rings as well. It's very interesting.
In one of his letters, Tolkien talks about the notion of power and the
word power as well, and one of the things he says is that whenever
he uses the term power in the Lord of the Rings, it's almost always
in a negative sense, that that exercising power for the beings in Middle Earth,
not just sort of elves and dwarves and men, but but the but
the sort of spiritual beings like Sauron Uh and the wizards like Gandolf and Suraman.
Power is something that that God alone. It comes from God alone,
and all the all all other power that's exercised is derivative from God's power.
And so obviously a creature like Sauron distorts God's power uses it for ill.
He seeks to aggregate more power to himself and and impose his will through power
and and creature like Gandolf, who, by the way, again Phil Phil
will can explain it to you later. Gandolf is is an an angelic being
the order of the Blue Wizards, was sort of sent by the Valor to
Middle Earth to help you know, the elves and men in the Third Age,
and and so so Gandalf also has power, that is that is given
to him by the kind of archeanngelic beings that have ultimate governance over Middle Earth,
the val Are, who themselves are the archaegels of the Louvatar, who's
the god of Middle Earth. Anyway, Gandalf, Gandalf has given this power,
but he says at one point that and I can't remember if it's in
the Lord of the Rings or this is in the Silver Alien, but it's
it's made clear that the power that's given to the Blue Wizards, they are
very circumscribed and how they can use their power, and so, which is
why you don't see Gandalf out there like shooting lightning bolts out of his staff
and like just laying waste the armies of Sauron. Right. He is there
to assist man and elves and peoples of Middle Earth in their struggle against Sarn,
but he is very circumscribed in when he can use the powers that he
has, how he can use them, what he uses them for, and
what context he's able to use them. And so it's it's uh, it's
very much in contrast to to a creature like Sorron or one of the Order
of the Wizards who ends up becoming enthrall to sorrow Saramon, who was the
most powerful the wizards, but he ignores the limits that was placed on his
power and seeks to and then he seeks to become more powerful himself, and
it becomes this like you know, horrible villain and who lays waste the countryside.
So this idea of technology throwing it back to technology. Technology amplifies our
power, uh, the power of mankind in amazing ways. But I think
Tolien would have understood that that amplifying your power your abilities, uh, does
come into cost, and it is something that we need to exercise great caution
for it. It's not an unmitigated good, and we can see in our
society now helpless ways in which the new power of the Internet and of social
media have done incredible damage, especially to younger people and the generation now coming
up with it. In ways. I think that if if there ever is
a restoration in Western civilization, we will look back on it and say,
like, what the hell are we doing with this technology? We destroyed whole
generation of kids. Well that's bleak but appropriate. I'm really excited. Buy
my book Pagan America for more bleak content like this. If you would have
been horrible, can go buy America. No. I mean, obviously,
the fundamental message of any of any book that John would write is a hopeful
one, because our hope is not in this world. So John Daniel Davidson
Pagan America out in March can people pre order it now? They can,
It's on Amazon. You can pre order it now. And of course you
know we'll be talking about it more at the Federalists. Be a close to
publication. I'll say one more thing. If you're about to sign off on
the connection that you asked earlier about, you know, Christian themes in in
Tolkien's Legendarium, one really potent. One kind of just came to mind because
I was talking about Gandolf. You know, anyone who reads The Lord of
the Rings will be familiar with this scene in the minds of Maria when they
barely escape because they they you know, they've awoken the bow Rog. And
and Againdolf is like, you know, he says, fly you fools,
you know, and he turns and to face the bow Rog while the rest
of the fellowship escapes. There's a famous scene of this in Peter Jackson's not
very good film adaptation of Lord of the Rings. And he fights the val
Rog and we're we're to understand he dies. He dies fighting this balrog down
in the depths of the of the of the Earth. But he comes back.
He's sent back, right, He's he is resurrected in a way.
It's very Christian uh theme there sent back to continue helping the peoples of Middle
Earth. But he's changed when he's sent back, he's changed. He's no
longer Gandalf the Gray, He's Gandalf the White. And we even have this
this scene where he first reveals himself to Aragorn and Himli and Legolas, and
he says, I believe to Aragorn, you know, do you not recognize
me? And it's very derivative of of uh, of the account in the
Gospel where Jesus uh you know, appears on the road to amais to the
two disciples who don't recognize him, and he expounds to them that all of
the scriptures in the New Testament, uh, and their hearts are burning within
them, and then you know, he disappears and they're like, and then
they realize who it was. It's very reminiscent, you know, of that.
There's there's the Gandalf being Gandalf the White, you know, and there's
there's been this change in him. It's almost his glorified of of Gandalf right,
just like the glorified Christ returned to the disciples and taught them and spent
time with him. He was really there physically. They touched to the wounds
in his hand, in his side, but he was a resurrected, glorified
version of himself in the flesh. And so we have that in sort of
the Resurrection and Return of Gandolf as well. Maybe a bit obvious, but
I didn't want to go without mentioning that since this is a podcast about supposed
to be about Tolkien and not about my book, I'll say too perfect that.
Mark Hemingway recently published the Federalist Notable Books of twenty twenty three. My
only entry in that for this year is a book that just came out in
September by Holly Ordway, and it's called Tolkien's Faith and it's a spiritual biography
and it's about Tolkien's Catholicism and how it informs his work and his life.
Really great book. Highly recommend recommend that as a new worthwhile work on JRR.
Tolkien. There's not very many of them, but this one is well
worth the time for fans of Tolkien out there. Maybe you can get it
for Phil Emily, You're like, I was just thinking that, but it's
too late. At this point. There's twelve days of Christmas. Christmas goes
until January sixth to Epiphany, so you have time Tolkien book a day.
Yeah, that would actually be that would be an awesome gift. Go over,
well oh man, oh Man, John Daniel Davidson, what a pleasure.
I'm so excited to read your book. And this was a fascinating conversation.
Thank you as always, thanks for having me on. Emily. You've
been listening to another edition of The Federalist for radio hour. I'm Emily Dashinski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more.
Until then, the lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray, I heard
the fat voice, the reason, and then it faded away. Mm hm