Fantasy Against the Machine

If you're looking for an example of the antipathy that fantasy might have towards science fiction, That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (1945) would be a place to start. One of the basic ideas in this blog is that, being about the past, fantasy and weird fiction (other genres, too) tend towards conservatism. Science fiction is of course about the future and tends to be progressive. That's not a perfect formulation. There is conservative science fiction and progressive fantasy and weird fiction. That Hideous Strength in particular, though, is fantasy rather than science fiction and conservative rather than progressive. The author's opposite--a figure he pretty effectively skewers in That Hideous Strength--is H.G. Wells, a father of science fiction in Britain.

My formulation is useful in its way, but it goes only so far. As always, we should take things as they are and not try to theorize too much, label too much, categorize too much, least of all intellectualize too much. Too many of the horrors of the past century have come from intellectualized systems and from the desire to turn things and people into collectives and categories rather than to recognize and accept them as individuals. Marxism, for example, is a progressive intellectual system that seeks to collectivize, that is, to render individual people into masses. It's a crime and an injustice to murder one person. Masses, though, can be slaughtered without hesitation or compunction.

There were other mass movements that worked their horrors during the twentieth century. Nazism and fascism were two. The facile mind calls them far-right or rightwing, less often conservative. Another imperfect formulation. Nazism and fascism were, I think, more complicated than any of that, certainly irrational and hard to describe. They were backward-looking in their way, but they were also progressive, collectivist, and socialist. We should always remember that: nazism and fascism were socialistic systems. Mussolini was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. The Nazis had the word socialism in their very name. I'm not sure that these two groups tried to hang their hats on an intellectualized idea like Marxism did. There was a pretty large dose of irrationalism and romanticism in them, especially in nazism, I think. In contrast, the Marxists liked to pass off their system as strictly scientific, never mind such antiscientific ideas as Lysenkoism. Marxists understood then and understand now that if it's scientific, it is, in our modern age, held to be undeniable and indisputable. We have with us now the pejoratives "anti-science" and "science denier," a term that I believe is meant to invoke the far more pernicious idea--a neo-nazi idea, I guess--of being a Holocaust denier. If you question The Science™ you're basically a Nazi, you Nazi, so don't do it. We should remember that Nazis especially had their own brands of pseudoscience, including racial "science." On the other hand, they also came up with real-life, hard-science gadgets such as jet engines, guided missiles, and rockets, in other words, the stuff of science fiction.

I'm writing about this now because of a real-world development of which I was totally unaware until I read about the Italian elections taking place today. (I write on Sunday, September 25, 2022.) The expected winner of the premiership is Giorgia Meloni. (She will make the second female conservative or supposed conservative to take control of a European government this month.) It's probably not too strong to say that progressives hate her. They probably also fear her. (The hate may come from the fear.) They call her far-right and say she's a fascist. I don't know the ins and outs of these things. Good luck trying to understand the intricacies of Italian politics--unless you're Italian. Politics seems to be one of their national hobbies--there is no word for "hobby" in the Italian language--passions, obsessions, and pastimes all rolled into one. It's no coincidence, by the way, that manifesto is an Italian word. They turn to us for hobbies, we to them for manifesti. Anyway, I find that Signora Meloni is a fan of fantasy, especially J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. In fact, she considers the books "a sacred text." (1) And she attended at least one of Italy's Hobbit Camps (Campo Hobbit), an institution I had never heard of until today. Things are getting interesting.

So--or allora because we're talking about Italy--if you read about Giorgia Meloni and Hobbit Camps, you are likely to see the words "fascist" and "far-right" over and over again. (See if you can get someone to give you a nickel every time you read them.) For example, here is a link to an article called "How 'Hobbit Camps' Rebirthed Italian Fascism" by John Last, from the website Atlas Obscura, dated October 3, 2017. It's an interesting article, even if it seems meant to scare you. (There is talk about people dressed like the fascists of old, yet all of the pictures in the article are of typical non-scary 1970s people. The flags are a little worrying, though.) There are also attempts to tie Tolkien to fascism and fascist ideas. But then that's a standard tactic for progressives, who seem to fall back on their own faulty formulation, that everything they don't like is fascist. Just look at our current president, John Gill, who has stopped short of calling half of his fellow Americans fully fascist by his use of just two syllables, sem- and -i-, this while standing in front of a lurid, blood-red background, flanked by two faceless members of his military, while shouting and shaking his fists in anger. (2) Sometimes irony can be pretty ironic. (3)

And now I wonder if any government, political party, or political movement has ever been based on a work of science fiction or a science-fictional idea . . .

Anyway again, we should be wary of writers and journalists who let their own ideas about things distort their writing and reporting. If you have already drawn the conclusion that Giorgia Meloni and Hobbit Camps are fascist, then every bit of evidence that you find can only confirm that conclusion. There is no longer any room for balance or straight presentations of fact. Maybe she is and maybe she isn't. Maybe they are and maybe they aren't. But write about those questions. Look for those answers. Don't tell us what you think. We don't really care what you think. And especially don't tell us what to think. Given the facts, we're smart enough to draw our own conclusions.

To get back to C.S. Lewis (remember him from the beginning of this essay?), well, he and Tolkien were friends. Both were Christians. Both were conservative. Both were authors of fantasy. Both were more or less traditionalist and anti-modernist. One at least had some antipathy towards science fiction, especially a prominent author of science fiction, H.G. Wells. Do we know anything about how Tolkien felt about science fiction?

Allora, finally, we have a literary work of the twentieth century, written by a Catholic and culturally conservative author, which has been embraced by what may actually be a pagan political movement. (Remember, believers in Christ hold up a different book as their lone "sacred text.") That political movement may or may not be rightwing or fascist, meaning it may or may not be some possible weird combination of progressive and conservative; working class and middle class; backward-looking and forward-looking; irrational, romantic, and pseudoscientific; and so on. It may or may not hold certain cultural and historical or pseudo-historical ideas that may or may not be diagnostic of fascism. But it's about to take the reins of power in Italy. I have a feeling that it's not fascist and not scary after all. But we're supposed to believe that it is because people who adhere to the other side--a side responsible for its own myriads of atrocities during the last century--tells us to believe that. It's all so convoluted that you could write a book--maybe a long trilogy complete with maps and songs--about it and maybe still not wear out all of the possibilities. And all of this follows the birth week of both Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. What an interesting world we live in!

Notes
(1) According to Jason Horowitz in his article "Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy's Potential New Leader," in the New York Times, September 21, 2022.
(2) John Gill, of course, is a character from Star Trek, which has also been called fascist.
(3) Here is a link to another article, "Of Hobbits and Tigers: The Unlikely Heroes of Italy's Radical Right" by Tobias Hof on the website Fair Observer, December 23, 2020.

"Faramir," an episode from the Hildebrandt Brothers' J.R.R. Tolkien calendar for June 1977, the month during which the first Hobbit Camp was held in Italy and just six months after Giorgia Meloni was born. Sorry for the digital watermark. I guess some numbskull on the Internet believes that he owns this image just because he digitized it. These things are like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant and calling it his.

Update (Sept. 27, 2022): The news is now that Giorgia Meloni will in fact be prime minister of Italy. She will be the first woman to hold that position. I think that's supposed to make her "historic," but good luck hearing anything about that in the mainstream media. Instead, the drumbeat message of the past couple of days is that she's a fascist. That will go on I'm sure. I have seen a few videos of Signora Meloni speaking in that time. Now I know why the left hates and fears her so much, for she stands firmly and fiercely against their organizing principle, which is that there shall be nothing to intervene between the individual and the State, and now, in the twenty-first century, all of the State's associated corporate and transnational bodies. Let's remember Mussolini's words, which are in contrast to Signora Meloni's: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."

In the videos I have seen, Signora Meloni speaks for faith and family and against the State, for her own nation and people and against internationalism, transnationalism, and globalism, for the things that make us individual, spiritual, and human and against corporatism, consumerism, and materialism. It's worth noting that her opposite, Ursula von der Leyen, German of course, now speaks with all arrogance of "the tools" by which Signora Meloni will be made to heel and the Italian people presumably punished for choosing her. It was a democratic election but with an undesired outcome, and so the media howl and Frau von der Leyen and people like her scheme and plan against it.

In seeing the video of Ursula von der Leyen, I remember two things: First, I remember something that my Italian friend told me, that in World War II, the Nazis did not want to let go of Italy, that they treasured it more than any other place they had conquered. You can ask Italians now how Germans in their country conduct themselves and how they see and treat bell'Italia and her people. Second, I remember the film Roma città aperta (1945) in which the Italian people are shown as being for life, family, children, and humanity. They are full of hope and strive to be free. In contrast, their Nazi occupiers are sterile, perverted, oppressive, despairing, and anti-human, seeking only "morden, morden, morden!" Those are the unforgettable words of Captain Hartmann, who also says, "We Germans refuse to realize that people want to be free."*

We'll see how things go. One thing I know for sure is that we--humanity--will live and be free. Those arrayed against us can only perish along with all of their grand ideas, which are built of course upon foundations of slime.

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*Another imperfect formulation: Giorgia Meloni as the Italian Pina (played by Anna Magnani) versus Ursula von der Leyen as the German Nazi Ingrid (dubbed by Roswita Schmidt). Maybe we can work Klaus Schwab into that formulation somehow.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley