The Philosophy of Tolkien: Why Things Keep Getting Worse

Thank you for that. Will watch the video later.

Tolkien was also fascinated by the historical composition and transmission of the written word, undoubtedly stemming from his own specialization in the medieval written word. The conceit for The Lord of the Rings was that it was his own written translation of a book written by Hobbits, The Red Book of Westmarch. Incidentally this fictional book also has a rich history with no less than five fictional additions, tracing back to writings made by Same Wise, Bilbo, and Frodo. So Lord of the Rings isn't meant to be read as a perfect representation of historical events. But as stories that have been passed down, altered, and inevitably, corrupted.

So it's safe to say Tolkien was obsessed with history and the process of writing it.

But, that's what makes it so strange that his thoughts about history were so radically different from most contemporary historians and laymen alike.

Many philosophers of history, especially those popular in Tolkien's time, thought the move from past to future represented some kind of progress. Technologically, we've gotten the wheel, the steam engine, and the frozen pizza. And morally most people would agree we became a more just society after the adoption of the bill of rights, as well as the ending of slavery, and again after the end of segregation.
Martin Luther King summed up this thinking when he said "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Tolkien vehemently disagreed. He thought that our technological progress was not entirely a good thing and that we weren't progressing morally what so ever. Proclaiming in On Fairy Stories - The way men were living in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate. While Tolkien acknowledged technology grew increasingly complex, he mocked the idea that industrialization represented an advancement for society. He witnessed his own beloved boyhood home of Sarehole despoiled by men and machinery. Its a scene which replays itself in the Scouring of the Shire, wherein trees are needlessly uprooted to make room for ugly rows of housing, and a pleasant watermill is replaced by one billowing black smoke all over the countryside.

In The Lost Road he conflates the human kingdom of Numenor's industrialization with their cultural decay: "Our towers grow ever stronger and climb ever higher, but beauty they leave behind upon the earth... Men are ceasing to give love, or care for the making of other things for use or delight."

In The Hobbit Tolkien claims technological development is a symptom of Orcish thought, commenting "Its not unlikely that Goblins invented some of the machines that have sense troubled the world. Especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them."

Those wheels and engines were rolled out for the first time in the form of tanks upon the western front. Where Tolkien at the Battle of the Somme witnessed first hand the goblin work wrought by the explosive power of modern artillery.

Despite the horrors of trench and chemical warfare, many of Tolkien's contemporaries at the time regarded The Great War as emblematic not only of technological progress in the form of more innovative means of mass killing, but as a necessary step in human history for social progress as well. Tolkien, always the pessimist, disagreed.

He believed conflict to be inevitable, and reconted years later that this idea arose as a reaction to the contemporary discussions about a War to End All Wars...

"The Idea that conflict must be perpetual arose directly from a long-held skepticism about the blandly optimistic prognoses prevailing during the great war... That, I suppose, was an actual conscious reaction from the war - From the stuff I was brought up on in the war to end wars - that kind of stuff, which I didn't believe in at the time and I believe even less now."

That conflict must be perpetual is part of his idea of history as being cyclical. Instead of there being a straight line from a primitive past to a more civilized future, Tolkien envisioned societies throughout the ages all dealing with the same set of perennial circumstances arising from unchanging human nature.

Yes it seems that beyond a certain point technology enslaves and degrades people rather than ennobling them. Formal education and 'religion' is maybe the same as well.

i'm with Tolkien, . .
bigger, faster, more bad-asser isn't necessarily better.
as a born-again "Neanderthal" i'm quite aligned with the natural way of advancement.
trying to leap-frog through evolutionary progress via technology, albeit fire was quite a useful adaptation, but still we are a not fully capable of handling the responsibilities of the advantages it offers, . .I would suggest we should prioritize the development of wisdom first ahead of ego-centric profiteering at the expense of all else.
homo sapien sapien is a crafty and clever creature but ultimately a silly and short sighted one and it has just enough intelligence to devise the means of its own extinction.

Its actually the Aryan vision of history -the cycle of history begins with Golden Age and ends up with Age of Death, later comes great change and the cycle begins again with a reset, thus if you realize at what point youre right now, you know what to expect. Most Westerners think about history as a one-way road of progress,but the cycle of Eastern Aryan/Slavic/Scythian world goes in a different direction.