"Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear..."

Jake Meador, on Tolkien's view of moral responsibility. This was published in September and I missed it.

.... There is a simplicity about Tolkien’s moral vision that is refreshing. Certainly, there are times when the answer to the right course of action is not altogether plain, and wisdom and prudence are needed to help one see the right way. But if honour compels one toward a certain action, come what may, then nothing else matters—at least not for Tolkien.

We might stumble over the centrality of honour because Tolkien draws on a moral vision largely forgotten in our day. But the wise elders of old understood that when an individual faced a question of right and wrong, they were also facing a question of honour and dishonour. ....

For Tolkien, the demands of honour wed to wisdom and prudence are generally the only demands on us when we consider what we ought to do. History is simply the stage on which we act, playing our part well or poorly. Our feet are set down at some moment in time by forces entirely outside our control, and we must decide how to walk. As the wizard Gandalf counsels elsewhere in Lord of the Rings, “All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.” But this is not how many of us think about the relationship between time and moral choice. Rather than the space in which we make choices, history has come to be one of the central inputs that informs our choices, competing with the claims of honour as defined by the moral law.

Consider the ways in which both the Right and the Left now routinely avail themselves of what might be called “the appeal to the calendar.” The Left, including former president Barack Obama, have long spoken of the possibility of being “on the wrong side of history,” as if history itself is a moral force that calls us to certain choices and will judge us should we choose wrongly. Yet the Right makes its own appeal to the calendar. Any number of moral horrors are tolerated and justified through the claim that the offending party “knows what time it is,” and therefore must be allowed or even encouraged. ....

Tolkien did not think much of such “historical” arguments. In The Two Towers, Éomer, the prince of Rohan, says to Aragorn, the rightful king of Gondor, “It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange.... How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” To which Aragorn replies, “As he ever has judged. Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.” While Tolkien certainly had a category for complex moral problems and possessed a deep understanding of the need for wisdom in approaching moral difficulties, he had no category whatever for engaging in evil to secure good ends. One’s moment in history did not let one off the hook of acting with honour. ....

Our hope is never to vanquish evil altogether, for we cannot do that. But we can act, as Tolkien says in The Return of the King:

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Those who wish to fight the long defeat well know that the “weather” facing future peoples is not ours to rule. But we can uproot what evils we encounter in hopes that our children and grandchildren might see a more fruitful crop than we ourselves ever shall ..... (more)

Jake Meador, "The Long Defeat of History," Comment, Sept. 5, 2024.