Ask Al Anything

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The British left has a history of being (or, at least, a reputation for having a history of being) less anticlerical than most Continental leftist traditions; Orwell, for example, was anti-Catholic but seemed comfortable with or even fond of the C of E, and the Vatican used to specifically exempt the Labour Party from its routine blanket condemnations of socialism in the first half of the twentieth century. How much of this is due to differences between British and Continental political or constitutional thought, and how much is due to differences between British and Continental religious thought?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Sure I’ve asked before, but thoughts on Anthony Crosland (and his political texts)?

Seconding this question.

Also, thoughts on Ellen Wilkinson, Jennie Lee, and any other prominent women in early Labour governments I might not be aware of?

I was also going to ask about noted Catholic Tory arch-wet Norman St John-Stevas (in whom I've become interested recently because my church has a copy of one of his books in its library) and his political texts, but I'd rather form a clearer mental picture of him on my own before I ask others for their opinions.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I actually hadn't known until looking it up just now that Crosland died in office as Foreign Secretary. For some reason I had assumed that he lived out a full lifespan and had simply been marginalized under Foot and never returned to prominence.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Do you think The Lord of the Rings is a racist text? If so, do you think Tolkien included his racial biases in the story deliberately, or by happenstance as part of a lack of thought about his own moral blind spots or lack of foresight about how later interpreters (particularly on the political right) would receive his work?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Thank you for such an extensive, informed answer (especially the part about Naipaul, which I was unaware of). Two things I would note:

1. In his letter to Forrest J. Ackerman on the abortive film treatment for Lord of the Rings in 1958, with which I'm sure you're familiar, Tolkien does describe the physical appearance of orcs as "degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types". I don't read this as indicating active or conscious real-world racial animus but I do read it as indicating somewhat greater (and thus more worrying) openness to the idea of racialized depictions of the orcs than you're suggesting. Of course, this is one remark in a corpus (i.e. the Letters, at least in their published form) that, as you point out, elsewhere consistently rejects overt racism.
2. Also in the Letters there's a lovely narrative going on in the references to the Jewish historian Cecil Roth, whom Tolkien meets in an air raid shelter in 1944 and who reappears in 1971 as a friend of Tolkien's who informs him that "the lingua franca of mediaeval Jewry was....of French or mixed French-Provencal character".

I'm in agreement with you on the lack of deliberate racist intent in Tolkien's work; however, I think there's enough content in it that becomes racialized through a modern prism that it's reasonable to investigate questions like these as something other than mere ignorance about Tolkien's worldview and influences.