Monday, October 20, 2025

Part I

Decolonizing Tolkien? The Attempt to Deconstruct J.R.R. Tolkien is a Parable for Deconstructing the West and Truth Itself

Higher education is in turmoil. No great news there. But what we learned day by day is that the virus that has been basically spreading through higher academia, particularly the elite levels, is now filtering down to lower levels as well. And so the intellectual corruption that really began in the academic elites just, well, given the way elites work, others want to basically copy the elites. They want to emulate the elites. That’s why the elites have so much influence.

And so what kind of academic nonsense goes on at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, pretty soon it’s showing up elsewhere. And the same thing’s true across the Atlantic Ocean where when you look at, say, the United Kingdom, Great Britain, the reality is that you have the elite institutions, Oxbridge as they’re often referred to, most importantly Oxford and Cambridge, and then the other institutions basically follow their lead.

It’s also true that in some of these situations, you have all kinds of developments that take place in which you just have academics trying to make a name for themselves by reaching out with some form of modern critical theory or some kind of academic nonsense indeed to gain a reputation. And I’ll just say this, they deserve a reputation. It’s just not a reputation that anyone should want to emulate. I want to make reference here to a major article that appeared in the Telegraph, very influential London newspaper. In this case, the article is by Judith Woods and the headline is this, “A Degree Used to Mean Something. Now students are Taught to Decolonize Tolkien.” All right, the subhead of the article “From Taylor Swift Studies to a Woke Analysis of Lord of the Rings, Complete Guff [that means nonsense] is Being Passed off as Education.” All right. So we’re not particularly surprised by nonsense and higher education, but it would be, I think, very interesting to many people on both sides of the Atlantic to know that elite universities and academic institutions are basically places where the inheritance of Western Civilization is invisible or openly critiqued and denied, or it is just put away as something no longer of great interest. And modern critical studies, studies of popular culture, the current fans of the day, they take over everything.

I had a major faculty member at one of the leading universities in this nation tell me that in the English department of his university, there isn’t a single undergraduate course taught on Shakespeare. That tells you just about everything. That’s not just an invasion of Western civilization. That is an attempt to subvert it by forgetting it. And by the way, it’s not just forgetting it. It is basically deconstructing it and denying it. Judith Woods tells us about a course that is now taught at the University of Nottingham there in the United Kingdom. She says, the course “invites undergraduates to interrogate Tolkien,” that means J.R.R Tolkien, “his Anglo-Saxon imagery.” She goes on to say that the latest example, the name of this course is “Decolonizing Tolkien et. al.” That means Tolkien and others. She writes, “Actually, that sounds relatively sensible,” that is interrogating J.R.R Tolkien’s Anglo-Saxon imagery, “until you get to the bit where students are expected to critically unpick Middle-Earth’s racial hierarchies and examine intersectional mythic identities or whatever.” She concludes “the module’s core text states maligned peoples include Easterlings, Southerans, and men from Herad.” In case you were wondering, it says, “Tolkien’s treatment of the fictional races exhibits ‘anti-African antipathy’.”

All right, so this turns out to be really interesting. Lord of the Rings is particularly of interest to young Americans, and of course many of them continue that interest. It has awakened many young Americans and young American Christians and in particular young American Christian males, boys and young men, to the wonders of literature and to what amounts to a mythopoetic retelling of Western civilization that also, to a considerable extent, recapitulates the Christian story. Now in order to understand this, you have to see that you have now very liberal academics who are going after the Lord of the Rings saying that it is a dark story for more reasons than one. 

And by the way, they’re not really concerned about with the great meta-narrative of Lord of the Rings. They want to take apart what they see is its remnants of colonialism and racism. They talk about the difference between light and dark in Lord of the Rings. And they point to the fact that many of the creatures of the dark, many of the characters from the dark, they basically represent evil, while the article argues that those who show up as white are more likely to be righteous. But of course that ignores the fact that Saruman, who is one of the darkest figures in moral terms, actually is depicted in white. And so that really blows part of this theory.

But the larger thing to understand here is that the imagery between light and darkness doesn’t come from J.R.R Tolkien at all. It comes actually even from Scripture itself. It goes back to God’s act in creation of separating the light from the darkness. Light and darkness represent good and evil. They represent God and the enemies of God. They represent what is morally right and what is morally wrong. And that’s not a form of ancient racism. That wasn’t even a part of the picture. But of course everything now is read by those in post-colonial studies, those who are operating from the worldview of critical theory, those for whom the only main dynamic in human history is a racial discrimination dynamic. Everything has to be put into that category, and thus the Lord of the Rings has to be deconstructed along with the rest of civilization.

The argument here is that there is racism, there is racial superiority that is baked into every cake when it comes to literature, when it comes to the western canon, when it comes to Western tradition, and of course the larger project of Western civilization. But the article in the Telegraph goes at the point that you can only say this if you haven’t read Lord of the Rings, you haven’t honestly engaged the text, you don’t understand the historical context and you’re just out to make a point, or you could also say to make an academic reputation.

Picking up on that theme, Michael Deacon, who is citing here the article by Judith Woods, says that if you want to understand how the left is misconstruing, and I think deliberately misconstruing Tolkien, he says, “If you’re an author of fantasy novels and you’re anxious to avoid accusations of bigotry from left-wingers, simply make all your monsters Israeli, then no one on the left will complain.” There’s a lot to that of course. But we’re also looking at a bigger picture. We’re looking at those who are trying to deconstruct Western civilization, and one of the ways you do that is by trying to deconstruct Western literature because literature is one of the chief artifacts of the civilization.

Furthermore, when you’re looking at Lord of the Rings, you are looking at a meta-narrative. You’re looking at a three-volume work of literary genius in which J.R.R Tolkien is telling a massive story. Now there’s stories within stories within stories. And the fact is that Tolkien was a literary genius. He’s able to create the stories within the stories, within the stories and make all of it compelling. You’re also looking at a phenomenal scholar of ancient history and ancient literature, particularly that of Northern Europe and of that particular realm. And he was a master of the languages as well to an extent that almost no one in his generation was. There is a considerable argument that J.R.R Tolkien resurrected some entire areas of study in terms of the background of what became Western civilization.

But it’s really important to understand that Lord of the Rings, for example, the three-volume work and of course it’s tied to other works as well, it’s this giant mythological or mythopoetic retelling of a story that at least echoes biblical Christianity. It is also a massive narrative in which light and darkness play very important roles, and those roles aren’t racist.

Genesis isn’t racist, and the Lord God Almighty isn’t racist when his act of creation is described at one point of course as the separation of the light from the darkness. The Old Testament isn’t racist when it speaks of sin and evil as dark. Jesus isn’t racist when he discusses and makes very clear the difference between the children of light and the children of darkness. Nor are the Gospels racist when, for example, we are told that when Jesus was born, light has come into the world. There are more than echoes of course of all of that in the Lord of the Rings and in the entirety of J.R.R Tolkien’s work.

It’s also important to understand that his biography is a part of this as well. You’re talking about a man who was orphaned as a very young boy who had some very, very deep pain in his life. You’re talking about someone who was brilliant, but it took time for that brilliance to emerge and someone who was self-taught in some ways, in other ways of course, he had a prestigious university education, but the point is he made himself into a scholar. He basically recovered a good deal of just an understanding of Northern Europe’s languages and its mythologies and all the rest. He was also a literary genius. The Lord of the Rings, you can go and you can see the map on which he gave the entire landscape of the metanarrative in which he talked about the habitation of this group and that group and how he kept everything straight with the genius of a mind that quite frankly was able to resuscitate languages and was also able to tell a story on a scale that is basically unprecedented in the 20th century.

The entire modern project of critical studies, critical theory, critical approaches to literature, deconstruction, structuralism, all the rest, including efforts just to take a psychiatric or a psychological analysis to everything, that entire approach basically destroys literature. But we need to know it’s not just about destroying literature, it’s also about destroying civilization, an entire civilizational project. And we need to recognize it’s not just that. If you’re going to deny the categories of light and dark, in moral terms, of light and darkness, when it comes to, say, divine revelation, you’re trying to deconstruct western civilization. You’re trying to deconstruct light and darkness in terms of the moral manifestations. You’re trying to deconstruct Western civilization and the central text of Western civilization. You’re trying to deconstruct objective absolute truth. You’re trying to deconstruct anything that stands in your way of your own secular model of ideological liberation. That’s the project going on here.

I want to go back to where we started. This also indicates the utter corruption of many disciplines and of the modern university in so many ways. You can really divide universities these days or colleges these days between the kind of university that would hire the kind of people to come up with and teach this class and those who wouldn’t. Sadly, those in the second category are far fewer, and it’s very important that Christians or any defender of Western civilization understand what is at stake here. It won’t stop with J.R.R Tolkien.

Part II

The Spread of Assisted Suicide: The Moral Warnings from Great Britain and Canada Cannot Be Ignored in the U.S.

All right, while we’re talking about darkness and frankly trying to destroy Western civilization, let’s be very clear that there is also a very evident momentum right now towards denying and destroying human dignity, and that comes down to assisted death or assisted suicide as it’s often called or medical assistance in dying, which is the most common modern euphemism. And this is taking place on both sides of the Atlantic as we’ve seen. Britain, the United Kingdom is currently debating very threatening legislation on this front. But it’s also true that if you’re looking for one of the most radical experiments in human history when it comes to assisted suicide or euthanasia, you don’t have to go very far. All you have to do is look across America’s northern border because Canada is right now one of the most radical experiments ever undertaken in terms of the embrace of the culture of death, and it has happened with record speed.

Christians have long warned that when you start down this particular trail, you can’t just stop arbitrarily. But when you look at some of the other nations that have gone into this and even started much earlier, even decades earlier, it is clear that momentum is now picking up. It took longer for even those very liberal nations to move very far with this. And then of course momentum gained, and thus they’re almost all the way down the road on this. You’re now talking about euthanasia or what’s called assisted suicide or medical aid in dying even for children and teenagers. And you could just put behind in the ancient past when supposedly it was going to be limited to those with a terminal diagnosis. Oh no, it’s gone far beyond that.

And the same thing is true in Canada, although in Canada it’s happened faster. I have discussed on The Briefing that brilliant cover story in the Atlantic, not a conservative magazine, but the Atlantic ran this cover story with the headline, “Canada is Killing Itself.” I think you can probably make the connection between the first story of our consideration today and this one. I want to go to an article that appeared in the current edition of The Spectator by Dan Hitchens. The headline is “Canada’s Assisted Suicide Laws are Out of Control.”

Okay, I really appreciate the article. And I just want to argue that almost from the very beginning they have been out of control, and that’s almost by definition. That’s the way this works. All right, Hitchens writes, “Death somehow seems like the wrong word, so Canada’s euthanasia doctors have adopted other terms for what they offer. Each lethal injection is called a provision. Stephanie Green,” he writes, “a Vancouver Island doctor, who used to work in maternity services, prefers delivery.” So did you hear that? We’re talking about killing a human being, and that is now defined as a provision. Or as this former maternity doctor says, a delivery.

Hitchens goes on to say, “Since Canada’s parliament introduced euthanasia in 2016,” let’s just stop, less than a decade ago, “a new vocabulary has arisen. Those with a terminal illness whose death is reasonably foreseeable or track 1, those who have no such diagnosis but qualify through grievous and irremediable conditions of track 2, and assisted suicide has become not merely assisted dying, but medical assistance in dying,” which is he says, “some patients understandably believe means palliative care as opposed to lethal injection and which is universally referred to with a jarring and faintly macabre acronym if you want die, you ask for MAID.” Let’s remind ourselves that’s medical assistance in dying. Let’s just remind ourselves that means some form of suicide, and it’s coming with state sanction. It’s even coming with state provision in some cases.

Dan Hitchens goes on to say that it appears that in Canada, the nation has “sleepwalked” into a moral maze with no exit in which euthanasia becomes a solution for its social problems. And by that, he means the homeless, the depressed, the poor, the chronically ill, “Those let down by the system or stuck in long waiting lists all are at risk of finding themselves on track 1 or track 2.”

Now I think some people reading this article or hearing about it would think this is an exaggeration. I assure you it is not. If anything, it’s very hard to keep up with the situation as it deteriorates in Canada. You write an article or you talk about it on The Briefing and the next thing you know just days later, another significant jump has already taken place.

The numbers are amazing. In Canada right now, one in 20 deaths comes by some form of euthanasia. That’s one out of 20. Now when you have movement towards the legalization of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, whatever you want to call it, and euphemism is the order of the day, the culture of death always lies about what it is. If you’re going to go down the road towards legalized euthanasia, medical assistance in dying, physician-assisted suicide, whatever you want to call it, and euphemism here is the order of the day and it’s dangerous.

But if you want to start down that road, you don’t start with the voluntary euthanasia of children who don’t even have a terminal diagnosis. No, you start with people who are, we are assured, at the very end of their lives, they’re looking at intractable suffering in the last months of their lives with a terminal diagnosis. And then you say, “Well, psychological suffering is a form of suffering, so we need to include that too. It’s no longer a terminal diagnosis that leads to death.” And then you make the argument that individuals have the right in this era of personal autonomy, have the right to define when they think they should live and when they think they should die. And who are we to judge and say that assisted death is morally wrong?

And then you have people, we know this right now, that Atlantic cover story and this article by Dan Hitchens published at The Spectator both make the point that there is an economic pressure upon persons regardless of their diagnosis just to get out of the way before they cost too much. Hitchens also helps to underline the fact that there are many people who are looking to the state for help and the state offers instead assisted suicide.

Hitchens, in a very descriptive way, indicates the moral equation going on here when persons are basically told they need to get out of the way. He talks about the logic here, which includes not only physical ailments but mental illness and sometimes just growing old. He cites a writer on Substack named Rose Lyddon. She has offered what he describes as a remarkably candid polemic against the proposal in the UK in Britain concerning assisted suicide.

I want to read you this section, “Relating her long history of mental illness,” she wrote, “when you’re deep in it, it’s very hard to argue against suicidal logic. The pros seem to vastly outnumber the cons. Living through each day is unbearably painful and you can see the pain and material damage you inflict on those who care for you. You’re a drain on state resources. The National Health Service has nothing to offer and considers you a nuisance who’d probably be better off dead. You lack the skills even to get dressed or to feed yourself, let alone change anything about your state of life. Loss of income and housing happens easily and it feels like nothing can stop the decline. It’s very difficult to feel hope or to attribute any value to your continued existence, which seems a net negative on every level.” She concludes with this sentence, “The only defense against going through with suicide is it’s not being on the table to start with.”

Okay. In moral terms, in worldly terms, that’s incredibly significant. When you put voluntary death on the table, you’re not just arguing that it ought to be available under certain circumstances. Before long, the society loudly or softly is saying, you ought to get out of the way, and here’s one way to do it. Writing about the current press for legalized physician assistance in dying or euthanasia in Britain, she writes this, “Enshrining, a right to suicide in law will initiate a cultural shift that can never be undone.”

Okay. Now that may sound like a radical proposal, something that can never be undone, but you look across the world, particularly in Europe and in other liberal nations, and what you see is that there is full evidence that once it is in place, once the culture of death is established in law, once it works its way with an economic logic and a new moral logic, pressing out the Christian worldview and replacing it with a new secular worldview in which human life has nothing but utilitarian value, once that is in place, it’s hard to know how it could ever be pushed back and how recovery could ever come. And so the warnings that are coming from Great Britain right now, and even the warnings right across our northern border, they are so stark that it would be moral insanity not to see them, not to make them known, and not to do everything possible to make certain that same logic does not spread further in the United States.

And let’s be clear, there is no reason to believe that a national border is going to serve as an effective moral border. I think we all know that’s not how it works. Today this is in Canada. We already have proponents of the very same kind of model legislation here in the United States. We need to understand what it is, and we better have arguments against it at the ready.

Part III

A Parable from Great Britain: Prince Andrew Surrenders Use of Royal Titles as the Scandals Surround Him Continue to Build

Finally, for today, a parable, a massive parable of moral importance coming from United Kingdom. Prince Andrew has voluntarily, we are told, relinquished his royal titles, including the Duke of York. He will no longer serve as a member of the Order of the Garter. And we’re also told that he has been officially not invited to such things as Christmas celebrations at Sandringham. That means with the royal family, with the King and the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the Princess of Wales and others. This in the aftermath of the unfolding revelations concerning the Prince and his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, child prostitution, all kinds of things. Just absolutely horrifying.

Recent developments made very clear that the prince lied about his background and about how long he’d been involved with Jeffrey Epstein. You also had the revelation of one of the women at the center of this tragedy committing suicide after having made very serious allegations against the prince.

The moral equation is this Buckingham Palace, which is to say the monarchy, came to the conclusion that Prince Andrew simply had to go. Of course there’s some problems here. The big problem is his title Prince doesn’t come by any kind of government warrant. It comes by heredity. He is the direct descendant, the son of a sovereign. In this case, Queen Elizabeth II. And yet we are talking about a moral parable. And we need to kind of take it apart for a moment because obviously we’re talking about sin in one of its most horrifying forms represented by child sex abuse, prostitution, sex parties, all the rest, Jeffrey Epstein buying his way into quarters of power that wouldn’t seem to be possible for someone of his background.

But there’s some fascinating things that go on here. One of the things is the fact that monarchy is available at retail, at least to some extent. You can buy class, you can buy social standing by somehow gaining financial influence with a royal family. And in this case, you’re looking at the second-born son of the queen who is the Duke of York, and that title goes back to the 14th century. It’s a massively old title.

Mark Landler of the New York Times reports it this way, “Losing the Duke of York title is a particularly bitter blow, Royal watchers say, because it dates back to the 14th century and is traditionally bestowed on the second son of monarchs. It has also been Andrew’s primary calling card in the restless life he has pursued since his glamorous youth as a war hero, an eligible bachelor.”

Now, Daniel Boorstin, former Librarian of Congress in the United States referred to a new phenomenon in the modern age of people who are “famous for being famous.” That’s the cult of celebrity. But when you look at monarchy, that’s one of the oldest cults of celebrity in world history. You don’t have to have the modern age to have the kind of moral that tend to surround thrones and those who are the descendants and the relatives of monarchs.

When you’re talking about Prince Andrew, you’re talking about someone who has led a remarkably privileged life. Let’s just say, if anything, that’s an understatement. It stretches even the understatement of understatement. He’s had an incredibly privileged life, but he has given himself to all kinds of moral scandals. This isn’t the first, moral scandals concerning selling his name, selling his reputation even to foreign authorities and foreign interests. Being involved even with people who are suspected of being spies for regimes such as communist China. He has been involved in scandals related to his role as kind of a ambassador for the United Kingdom, trying to build business connections. Turned out it at least appears he was building those business connections, but for himself rather than for Britain.

There isn’t a real job description for someone who’s the Duke of York, but the expectation is moral rectitude. And that’s where I really want us to think as Christians. If you’re going to have a monarchy, what would be the justification for monarchy? And of course, there’re biblical roots for this. And even the British monarchy, by the way, when it comes to the ceremony of crowning a king, when it comes to a coronation ceremony there in Westminster Abbey, one of the main refrains, one of the main themes comes from the Old Testament and from Old Testament kings claiming even a continuity of those kings.

But of course, when you mention Old Testament kings, you’re mentioning good kings and evil kings. You’re really talking to go back to where we began about kings of light and kings of darkness. And you are looking at the fact that the only excuse for monarchy in the modern age is to set an example, to be a unifying figure within the society, to set a model for emulation. And for that matter, to represent the civilization for what it is. Well, there are limits to just how clearly any one person can do it, but you know what? The rules really don’t allow for someone to be involved in the horrible things Prince Andrew has been involved, with that scale of grotesque immorality and have any possibility to claim you’re acting on behalf of the nation. Rather than being a model of moral rectitude, you become a parable of absolute moral collapse.

And you know this points to the importance of moral credibility and to the transience, the vulnerability, the fragility of moral integrity and moral reputation. But here’s something that is deeply biblical. Once you destroy it, it is virtually impossible to get it back. It is a priceless commodity. Prince Andrew has destroyed it, and frankly, he’s destroyed the reputations of so many others around him. And you understand that this is now coming with grave consequences. But the consequences that Prince Andrew and all of us should fear, they’re not the consequences of losing a royal title in this age. It’s the consequences of facing God as judge in the next.