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Originally Posted by davem
All of which probably makes no sense, because I'm trying to type this while nursing a teething six month old. Please feel free to pull the forgoing to pieces....
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Lucky you! Babies are just a wonder... well, they keep being wonderful later on as well...
I'm not wishing to pull your post to pieces but I'd like to add a different perspective to it.
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Originally Posted by davem
So, while Pullman can play games with evil, Tolkien cannot. Tolkien knows evil for what it is & can't pretend its otherwise than it is. Perhaps its true that Pullman's work does reflect the belief that this is an age of anxiety & that to him things are 'more complicated & murky', but I don't think things were that way for Tolkien. He'd seen the reality of evilmore starkly & clearly than Pullman & to him things weren't at all murky - they were clear & simple. Good & Evil to him were the same as they had always been, & it was a matter of recognising them & fighting against them.
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What I see as the problem here is that Tolkien surely knew evil and good firsthand but that was not along the lines of the armies like "we Brits good - those Germans bad". Still in his books baddies are bad as such and goodies are good (with the exceptions to the rule already noted here). I could easily see Tolkien thinking "war evil, massmurder evil, killing-industry evil - peace good, compradeship good, sacrifice beautiful" with his own experiences. But why did that led him to make orcs or Sauron or Morgoth or... more or less pure evil or bad as the enemy?
Okay. Even if Morgoth or Sauron might be interpreted symbolically or allegorically to stand for evilness itself, the bad in the world, the wars he depicts look just like the absurd waste of human life in both World Wars and still the other side in his stories are just heroes and the others are purely black. And that means the basic soldiers.
So I'm a bit puzzled about that.
Also, today we can't make that division into the goodies and baddies that easily. It's a shame but also something we should rejoice in! I'm no relativist myself but I think we have to admit that the enlightenment views that brought relativism about are the greatest achievements in our own culture.
Before the enlightenment we thought that all those who agreed with us were good / right / pure / civilised (etc.) and those who disagreed with us were bad / evil / wrong / inhumane / lower / devillish (etc.). It's only a good thing we have gotten rid of that thinking. Well most of us have. Good riddance!
But as soon as we start to see shadows of grey instead of just black and white we get into problems. How can one justify a view or stance if it's all just shades of grey?
It's practically impossible today to think of all the German or Russian soldiers of the second world war as immoral beasts or subhuman monsters. We know now that most of them were loving fathers of their families, brave fellows of their mates, guys who were just thrown into the situation they were thrown.
But the orcs were bad by nature - because of the way they were born?
Something bothers me here.