In fact, J.R.R. Tolkien was himself far more critical of the situation portrayed in his universe than any but a few of his myriad readers ever chose to notice. Certainly more self-critical than most of his contemporary readers or those watching the new film trilogy.

In several places, Tolkien openly stated his authorial judgment that the elves who made the Three Rings were ultimately to blame, having set the stage for tragedy in Middle Earth. They made their own rings (preceding Sauron's One Ring) in order to control the world, stopping time and preventing change, forbidding anything to die and decay and thus blocking the potential for new growth. In an oft-quoted letter, Tolkien wrote:

"They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle Earth because they had become fond of it ... and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce."

There are moments scattered throughout LOTR when Tolkien seems to be warning that Romanticism can lead one down the road to genocide. He was disturbed to see the Nazis, for example, embrace many of the same Nordic mythic stories and symbols that he used as source material.

In other books, like "The Silmarillion," Tolkien went deeper into this self-exploration, even going so far as to cast an analytical eye upon the elvish hierarchs of Middle Earth, in much the same way that Isaac Asimov reevaluated his Second Foundation and the meddlesome-patronizing robots of his famed science fictional universe. (This is the kind of self-examination the "Star Wars" cosmos desperately needs, alas, while there's still time.)

Indeed, many academics have cited the obvious parallel between the retreat of the High Elves in LOTR -- who abandon Middle Earth to return "west across the sea" -- and the dissolution of the British Empire that began with the emancipation of India about the same time that Tolkien was writing his epic. In fairness, J.R.R.T. did not rail against this change: He saw it as regrettable but inevitable -- like the end of his mythical Third Age, an approaching time of iron, when aloofly noble figures like Elrond and Galadriel must go back whence they came.

But those self-critiques never had the widespread readership or influence of the original LOTR. And ultimately, Tolkien could never bring himself to cross the gap that another Oxbridge don was writing about at roughly the same time -- the infamous "two cultures" gulf that C.P. Snow mapped between the world of science and the world of the arts.

Try as he might, and even confronted with the blatant Romantic excesses of Nazism, Tolkien could not escape his own deep conviction that democratic enlightenment and modernity made up the greater evil. That hated trend, he feared, would ruin all the beauty that he found in tradition. In aristocratic-mystical hierarchies. In the ways of the past.

It all seems rather a pity, in light of what happened later, during the final third of the 20th century. For Snow's gap between two cultures began to be crossed, time and again, by unfettered spirits who simply refused to accept primly drawn categories. I wish Tolkien could have lived to see how easily this chasm is traversed now, in both directions, by technologically savvy artists and by scientists who love art.

Indeed, science fiction bridged the two-cultures gap with a superhighway. But that's another story.

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Having trouble picturing this dichotomy I'm painting? Between Romantics and followers of Ben Franklin's pragmatic Enlightenment?

Well here's another way of looking at it, focusing on how people view the time orientation of wisdom.

All creatures live embedded in time, though only human beings lift their heads to comment on it, lamenting the past or worrying over the future. Unique portions of our brains handle this temporal skepsis. Prefrontal lobes, the "lamps on our brows," ponder tomorrow, while swaths of older cortex can flood with vivid memories of yesterday, triggered by the merest sensory tickle -- as when a single aromatic whiff sent Proust back to roam his mother's kitchen for 80,000 words.

Obsession with either past or future can almost define a civilization. Worldwide, most cultures believed in some lost golden age when people knew more, mused loftier thoughts and were closer to the gods -- but then fell from grace. Under this dour but recurrent worldview, men and women of a later, coarser era can only look back with envy, hearkening to remnants of ancient wisdom.

Recognize this motif? It drenches every page of "Lord of the Rings." It is the old classic, the eternal verity -- the worst of all human clichés.

Only a few societies ever dared to contradict this dogma of nostalgia. Our own scientific West, with its impudent notion of progress, brashly relocated any "golden age" to the future, something we might work toward, a human construct for our grandchildren to achieve with craft, sweat and good will -- assuming that we manage to prepare them. Implicit is the postulate that our offspring can and should be better than us, a glimmering hope that is nurtured (a bit) by two generations of steadily rising IQ scores.

Of course, the very notion of progress is anathema to nostalgic Romantics. These Romantics needn't be anti-technological, though they almost always reject science. I've already mentioned a renowned sci-fi pop-epic that, despite techie furnishings, relentlessly preaches the nostalgist party line -- an ideal society ought to be ruled by secretive-mystical elites, unaccountable and self-chosen based on inherent qualities of blood. The only good knowledge is old knowledge. (No wonder it all happened "long ago, in a galaxy far away.")

Let me avow upfront that I share the more recent, upstart belief in universities, democratic accountability, science and human improvability -- one that questions the fated persistence of "eternal" stupidities. Above all, any "golden age" lies in our future. It has to. Or what are we striving for?

Anyway, people with my view had better be right. Because if humanity is as obstinate as the cynics and Romantics believe, we shall surely go extinct quite soon.

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This may seem a dour picture I am painting, especially in light of the surge in popularity of feudal-magical fantasy.

Was Enlightenment a transient thing, already starting to flicker out as we return to our older fascinations? Back to Joseph Campbell-style heroes and traditional epics, with their paeans to kings and traditional, pyramid-shaped hierarchies? There are those who see this cloud rolling over us, a returning fog of Romanticism.

"Change and technology are so pervasive a part of daily life that for the most part there's no magic to it anymore," says Vivian Sobchack, a professor of film and television studies at UCLA. "The promise of science and technology has been normalized. The utopian vision we had didn't come to pass. The magic would have to come from somewhere else, and we found it in fantasy."

She has a point. Witness the most amazing accomplishment of NASA -- managing to turn the exploration of space into a huge snore.

Or, as Lev Grossman put it in his Time essay:

"Popular culture is the most sensitive barometer we have for gauging shifts in the national mood, and it's registering a big one right now. Our fascination with science fiction reflected a deep collective faith that technology would lead us to a cyberutopia of robot butlers serving virtual mai tais. With 'The Two Towers,' the new installment of the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, about to storm the box office, we are seeing what might be called the enchanting of America. A darker, more pessimistic attitude toward technology and the future has taken hold, and the evidence is our new preoccupation with fantasy, a nostalgic, sentimental, magical vision of a medieval age. The future just isn't what it used to be -- and the past seems to be gaining on us."

Grossman's view is intelligent and thought-provoking -- though at the surface also quite easy to disprove.

For example, which cyberutopias might he be talking about?

"Soylent Green"? "Blade Runner"? "Rollerball"? "Silent Running"? "1984"? "Fail-Safe"? "The China Syndrome"? "Terminator"? "The Hot Zone"? "Logan's Run"? "The Postman"? "Fahrenheit 451"?

These don't strike me as exactly utopias.

For the life of me, I cannot picture more than one truly optimistic portrayal of future society in all of TV or film sci-fi. With the sole exception of "Star Trek," most of the SF we've viewed in the last 40 years has been relentlessly critical of perceived technological or social trends. Far from utopian, these films have served us well by dramatizing potential failures. To coin a term, they have been self-preventing prophecies, helping us work out our fears and exploring dark possibilities.

Yes, one result has been a lessened sense of confidence, a sadly stylish fatalism in an era of unprecedented goodness and competence. Paradoxical, yes. But by any metric, these dark warning tales have been far more useful than all those sword and sorcery flicks that try to teach us about good and evil by portraying the former as always pretty and the latter, always, with red, glowing eyes.

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