re: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power S1, Episode 3 Thread | Amazon | Available Now

You mean Qweaun

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Progressivism says that humanity is perfecting itself, becoming more virtuous. That is a lie, and Tolkien knew it. The Christianity that Tolkien followed fundamentally teaches that "there is nothing new under the sun," and human nature does not change. Conservatism recognizes that we can learn from the past, instead of automatically insulting it as a more primitive time, and pretending that we are the moral superiors of our ancestors.

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I am typically aligned more than not with your viewpoints on a philosophical level, but this is a rather contradictory statement no?

I mean if you can learn from the past, is that not with the end goal of improving on the faults of your ancestors and therefore, in a word, “perfecting,” or better put, improving ourselves? And if we are improving ourselves as a collective, is that not comparatively placing humanity on a morally superior plane? I would certainly argue that the humans of America today that don’t drown witches based on superstition and absurd subjectivity, enslave races, commit mass genocide, and believed bloodletting cured viral diseases are of a higher moral and intellectual fabric, more virtuous as you will, on the whole.(which is not to say societies, or humanity as a whole, is not capable of backsliding, we certainly are capable of that, and seem to be in the midst of it happening in America)

And if one would disagree, there would seem to be no point in attempting to learn lessons from the past if humans can no more improve their constitution and wisdom from how we existed 500 years ago.

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Now, can we go back to discussing the show and the plot?

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Interesting theory I have come across regarding Halbrand (that I don't think has been mentioned here, or much anywhere):

King of the Dead; the Oathbreaker. So far, that fits (a lot) better than Sauron, or one of the Nazgul.

I just don't see him swinging bad, but I could see him coming back to Middle Earth, gathering up the people of the Southlands, initially promising to fight on Elendil and Isuldur's side, and then deciding nah, we're going to sit this one out.

The other direction I could see him taking, is bring his people North, and they eventually become the people of Dale and the Rohirrim (the Rohirrim were originally in the North).

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I mean if you can learn from the past, is that not with the end goal of improving on the faults of your ancestors and therefore, in a word, “perfecting,” or better put, improving ourselves? And if we are improving ourselves as a collective, is that not placing humanity on a morally superior plane? I would certainly argue that the humans of America today that don’t drown witches based on superstition and absurd subjectivity, enslave races, and believed bloodletting cured viral diseases are of a higher moral and intellectual fabric, more virtuous as you will, on the whole.(which is not to say societies, or humanity as a whole, is not capable of backsliding, we certainly are capable of that, and seem to be in the midst of it here)

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The problem, Bronc, is that Pride is the foundation of all other sins. The belief that we are better than our ancestors is fundamentally why fail to learn from the past. It is the belief of Boromir, who believes that he is virtuous enough to take hold of the Ring and use it.

And no, Bronc, we are not improving ourselves as a collective. WWII shattered that notion for Europe. Our barbarism simply takes new forms.

A hundred years from now, if Jesus has not yet returned, a new generation of progressives will look back at horror at the sins of our age. They, for example, will shudder at the monstrous evil of chopping up and deforming children in the name of "affirming their gender." They will blanch at a society that encouraged women to kill their unborn children. To my right-wing friends, I will say that they (as Tolkien knew) will judge us for destroying God's creation and chopping down our rainforests. And their judgment of our society will be just, even as they repeat the cycle.

That's why Tolkien is so important. He knew that evil is never truly defeated, but only reappears in new and unfamiliar forms.




Edit: A hundred years ago, a Progressive generation believed that Prohibition would create a more just society.

Consider the leader of the temperance movement: Carrie Nation.

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Nation is best known for a Pulp Fiction-style storming into bars and pharmacies dressed in stark black-and-white outfits, often surrounded by a phalanx of women also dressed in the temperance uniform, all of them chanting Biblical-sounding slogans expounding on the evils of liquor while Nation bashed the place to smithereens with a hatchet. Sometimes, she used rocks and a hammer, too, glass and wood flying everywhere as stunned drinkers watched and cowered.

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She was a suffragist (Susan B. Anthony was also prominent in the temperance movement.) She also urged women to stop wearing restrictive corsets, which she said affected vital organs (they did). She also told women to stop wearing tight clothing. And she bought a huge house and sheltered women who had been battered and abandoned by alcoholic men.

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Progressives believed that the banning of alcohol would create a more just society, one free of domestic violence and slavemaster of addiction. It didn't work, because human nature doesn't change. Instead, Prohibition created gang violence, the Mafia, etc.

Do we even need to talk about eugenics? Progressivism today is just as smugly convinced as the progressives a century ago that the past was evil, and humanity can be perfected. Those lessons have to be learned again and again.

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SPOILER if you don't know this story

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I have the sneaky suspicion that some of the folks complaining probably haven’t watched/read much beyond the LOTR trilogy.

Anywho.

Episode 3 was decent. Numenor was gorgeously done. Interesting to see the Orcs burning under the sun compared to what we see in the later age. Seeing Isildur young was a little jarring considering.

While I don’t hate Galadriel, she’s not exactly my favorite part of the show at this point. I’m more intrigued by her counterpart imprisoned in the Southlands at this point and how that plays out.

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The belief that we are better than our ancestors is fundamentally why fail to learn from the past. It is the belief of Boromir, who believes that he is virtuous enough to take hold of the Ring and use it. And no, Bronc, we are not improving ourselves as a collective. WWII shattered that notion for Europe. Our barbarism simply takes new forms.

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Yeah this is nonsense. But again, then what is the point of looking to the past if not to improve the present and pave the way for a better future selves? The statement you made remains irreconcilable unless it is merely a futile exercise used only for self masturbatory purposes and no actual achievable goal.

You can’t simultaneously claim we need to look to history to better ourselves as a people while claiming we can’t actually ever better ourselves as a people.

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A hundred years from now, if Jesus has not yet returned, a new generation of progressives will look back at horror at the sins of our age.

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Setting aside your nonsense that removing a woman’s rights to their own body is somehow an objectively morally superior conceit, you are once again contradicting yourself in these statements(and doing that thing that would annoy me on Pelicans Talk where you try and do that politician thing and pander to both perceived crowds, but lean toward the one you think holds majority in the room). If people are recognizing such things, in your words, as morally abhorrent and have made corrections, the existence of additional ills doesn’t change the fact that people as a collective whole morally evolved.

Unless you want to make the argument that the people of 5000 years ago that believed in enslaving based on race, killing your child for talking back, raping woman was a man’s right, and believed covering yourself in feces and piss while killing the local Jews cured plagues, and that such people are of equivocal moral constitution as those today, yeah, I think we are on an objectively superior moral plane in comparison. But feel free to make the argument..

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Progressivism is a malleable and shifting term like liberal or conservative that in no way actually draws a straight line through history.

You seem to be doing that thing where you remove context and look at words and misapply them to make points

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Is your argument that there was no such thing as progressives a century ago? Or that they weren't really true progressives?

If so, I'd like to know who you think that the first real progressives were. I guarantee that, whatever time you pick, I'll show you a movement full of hubris with fruits of rottenness.


Edit: And I don't believe that we can't improve society. Quite the contrary. Of course we can, and that is also a message of Tolkien's.

But we can only do it through humility, through awareness of our sinful nature. We can't do it through Pride. That's also the message of the Lord of the Rings. The reason that Frodo can bear the Ring to Mount Doom is because, deep-down, he knows that the Ring is too powerful for him to use it. There are moments in The Return of the King where we see that both Gandalf and Aragorn would have been very strongly tempted to use the Ring, if it had not already passed out of their grasp.

And yet, even Frodo is overcome in the end. Temptation is incredibly powerful, and no human is ultimately able to avoid sin. We cannot perfect ourselves -- the only reason that the Ring is destroyed is because of a divine ordering of events that allows it to be so.

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There is no way a true Tolkien fan can be okay with this show.

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As I’ve said, true Tolkien Fans enjoy his work for different reasons.

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Is your argument that there was no such thing as progressives a century ago?

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No, there absolutely was, but progressives a century ago were largely white, middle class, social conservative and pro-labor. Progressive presidents included majority Republicans: Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, and McKinley.

Meanwhile Democrats, which you can find a common thread with FDR in terms of expansionist safety net policy(which some progressives shared), was also home to the Dixiecrat coalition. Which was the stalwarts of maintaining Jim Crow in the south.

And all of this saw a major reshuffling after the Civil Rights Act and the Southern Strategy of Atwater/Nixon. Where former Dixiecrats and southern social conservative progressives began to increasingly caucus more and more frequently with Southern Strategy Republicans, until they simply became one by the late 90’s.

Progressivism as a phrase largely came back en vogue in the aughts and 10’s as a way to differentiate from the third way democrats of the Clinton era. But to claim there was some straight line between Prohibitionist Republican progressives and the left of center liberals branding themselves that in the 2010’s would be incorrect.


….but all of this is going WAAAAYYY off topic. My only point is that I think that initial statement is irreconcilably contradictory and disagree that humans can’t morally evolve. We have and can. Not always in a straight line, not always perfectly, but it would be a dark existence if we truly couldn’t. And while I’m not a Tolkien scholar or anything, humanity can’t change was not the message I really took from his work

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There is no way a true Tolkien fan can be okay with this show.

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I'm going to disagree with this. I am, and have been, a Tolkien fan for over 40 years, long before we had any hope of seeing LOTR on the big screen in live action. And so far, I am okay with this show.

The bigger story is very interesting to me, and I've loved the visuals. Never thought I'd see Numenor or Khazad-Dum as actual, reach-out-and-touch-it sets.

Galadriel and Elrond aren't how I visualized them, but quite honestly, they weren't in Jackson's movies either.
Things like that happen when you make movies (or TV shows) out of books.
*I was also a fan of Conan before the movie, both the pulp novels and the comics. Arnold is big and buff, but doesn't otherwise look like Conan, either as described or as illustrated. Jason Mamoa's depiction is actually a lot closer... and that movie was also a lot closer to the books.