Jordan asks for stories about the late Charles Mills. I will tell just one which is perhaps appropriate because it is also a plea for assistance from anyone out there who can help.
Long ago, in the early 1990s, I received a request from the
chair of the philosophy department at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle
to serve as an external reviewer in the tenure case of a member of their
department. The candidate was Charles. I said sure and shortly thereafter I
received a packet of material. The principal item in the packet was a draft of
The Racial Contract. Well, they did not need me to tell them that it was
brilliant and that Charles deserved tenure, which of course he got. But in the
packet was also an unpublished paper that I read with the very greatest delight. It
was a racial and ideological reading of The Lord of the Rings, in which Mills
demonstrated with great wit that Tolkien’s famous trilogy was built on a
racially encoded hierarchy of European peoples in which the highest position
was occupied by the tall blonde Scandinavians (the elves), and the lowest was
occupied by the swarthy short southern Europeans (the orcs.) I read the paper with
delicious pleasure and asked Charles, after I had gotten to know him, why he
had never published it. He said he was afraid that if it appeared under his
name it would hurt his career.
Some years later, I went looking for the paper in my study
and could not find it. Now you have to understand that I am a real packrat when
it comes to anything professional. I mean, I have a separate folder for every
course I have ever taught with the comments I made on student papers, going all
the way back to 1955 when I was a 21-year-old Teaching Fellow in Rafael Demos’s
Philosophy 1 course at Harvard. I have
the notes I took in undergraduate courses and copies of the papers I wrote for
them. I wrote to Charles in great
distress, telling him that I had somehow misplaced my copy of his paper and
asking for a new copy. He told me that he also had mislaid it and that he did
not have a copy of it anywhere.
This paper is a real gem so I am taking this opportunity to
issue a plea to my readership. Does anybody out there have a copy of Charles
Mills’s paper on The Lord of the Rings? If so, I would dearly love a Xerox of
it.
26 comments:
There's been a really interesting flashpoint in the LOTR community recently because the Tolkien Society 2021 Seminar had “diversity in Tolkien” as its particular theme, and a bunch of people on the internet were really angry at the papers that they saw on the agenda. I saw a lot of complaints about how scholarship in recent years have gotten "too woke" or "this wasn't what Tolkien wanted" and things like that. (Of course, there was also a lot of love - but that doesn't get people worked up the same way.)
I disagreed with the premise of the complainers that this was a bad thing, but didn't think to really question the idea that diversity-focused readings and analysis of works was a contemporary trend! I think your friend's paper would have likely been a great hit at the Tolkien society this year. It seems like he was decades ahead of the curve.
Indeed he was. What is more, he had a sense of humor which is sometimes hard to find in such circles.
I do hope you'll find it, and I'll be sure to check this space! Allow me just to note that I recently came across an interview (I forgot with whom!!) in which I learned about Kirill Eskov's take on LOTR which starts from the idea that Tolkien tells the story from the historical victor's perspective. And which sees the elves as something like white supremacists. I haven't read it yet, but when I do, it would be marvelous to compare the two takes. (And now, when looking for some link to Eskov - here it is by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer?wprov=sfla1 - I learn that John Molyneux also has something like this - a communist retelling! A treasure to unearth!)
Well Tolkien certainly loved his Elves and perhaps they are the most elite in the Lord of the Rings. But the Elves do not exploit the Men (or the Hobbits). Nor do they occupy large areas of Middle Earth lands in the books and claim that is 'just' because of their elite status. They are rather benign as far as elites go for the most part.
The exploiter in Middle Earth is Sauron and his servants and creatures the orcs. And they are clearly defined as evil because of this desire to exploit others and either rule over them and their lands, or eliminate them altogether.
I think it is mostly a fantasy story and a good one. But if comparisons to the actual world must be made, then I think a better one is to WWI and WWII where the threat did seem to come from the south and east (at least for England).
A lot of people have a tendency to ignore, downplay or deny the flaws in their heroes whether literary or otherwise. Others are so focused on the flaws that they are blind to the merits. There is an undercurrent of racism in Tolikiens work which is evident to every moderately alert reader though perhaps not to him. The sexism is even more obvious. He imagines a world in which females almost everywhere subordinate, indeed in some cases invisible (though we are assured that dwarf-women exist they never appear on-stage). There is also the problem that as a writer he just doesn't do women. The only female character in Lord of the Rings with a plausible inner life is Eowyn, a woman who would prefer to be a man. Tolkien's female fans have long gotten used to this and made their peace with it. Peter Jackson's writing team (Jackson himself Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens) tried to address the issue in their movies by developing , playing up or (in the Hobbit) simply *inventing* female characters to cater to the fictional needs of the female viewing public. (We like to have characters we can identify with) My daughters (now 31 and 36) who had been Tolkien readers since they were about five or six, considered this a waste of time. They had long been used to Tolkien's literary sexism, had forgiven him for it and sought what consolation they needed in the works of the many female fantasy writers (many of whom are or were big-time Tolkien fans themselves) who took care to provide their readers with interesting and identifiable-with female protagonists. .You should note the racism and note the sexism in Tolkien, but that does not mean that you should not enjoy the books. (As an atheist with considerable reservations about C. S Lewis's brand of Christianity I still brought my children up on C.S. Lewis's Narnia books and delight in reading his stories to my four-yearold grandson.)
I'm not sure you need an Elves-as-Nordic vs. Orcs-as-Eastern Europeans reading of LoTR to unearth the latent racism in Tolkien, since the overt stuff is obvious enough.
To begin with, Tolkien himself distinguished between elite elven races who saw the light of Valinor (Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri) and subordinate elven races (Sindar, Silvan, Avari) whose powers are diminished until they're basically long-lived men (see Tolkien's depiction of drunken greedy Mirkwood elves in The Hobbit).
Similarly, Tolikien distinguishes between different hierarchies of Orc - namely the elite Uruk-Hai (Orcs bred with Humans) and the subordinate Snaga.
How do those distinctions play into a reading of Orcs-are-Eastern and Elves-are-Nordic? I don't think it does.
But more importantly, the real racist stuff is all pretty explicit if you spend time with the canon. You've got the "dark" races of men who fell under the sway of Sauron, including the Easterlings (Eastern Europeans), Black Numenoreans/Corairs of Umbar (fallen Western pirates, like Francis Drake), Haradrim (Arabs), and Variags (Black people). Given how obvious those references are, why would anyone think Elves represent one type of white human and orcs another? Tolkien did go on record saying that Hobbits are basically rural English people, but then again they're also the center of the the hobbit and the lotr trilogy.
I always read Elves and Dwarves and Hobbits as Tolkien's modern fairy creatures and saw the darker stuff in his depiction of Noldor-on-Teleri genocide etc. as deriving from traditional mythological tropes rather than some broad commentary on European racial and cultural hierarchies.
But hey, without access to Mills' paper in expect most of this discussion to devolve into a Tolkien nerd-off.
Well Ridiculousicculus, you are apparently a Tolkien nerd yourself. If you read the Silmarillion, the Elves (even of the Noldor- among the so called 'High Elves') also had come to be fooled by Sauron, while he also assisted in their endeavors, and suffered great loss due to their mistake for working with evil. And also the 'elite' of the humans, the Numenoreans, were also swayed by Sauron and were completely exterminated as a result- save for a few that fled beforehand.
It is mostly a story of how evil, or desire for power, can corrupt (look at Saruman), rather than a story about race. I will give you that the orcs seem mostly irredeemable. As are Sauron, and the Balrogs, and the Dragons, and the Trolls. But the whole thing is a very good, elaborate fairy tale- where you need heroes and villains- and why read so much into it?
Yes, I am a Tolkien geek.
And am somewhat ashamed to have argued about a paper that can't be found, and have never read, rather than expressing condolences about the death of Charles Mills. Kind of insensitive to say the least.
Another thing that has just occurred ot me about Tolkien.Almost nobody has an extant Mother even if they could be expected to have one. . Bilbo's parents are dead as are Frodo's (even though at fifty which is Bilbo's age in the Hobbit) he would be quite likely to have living parents. Sam has a Father, but no mother is mentioned. Denethor would appear ot be a widower (as also is Theoden) which means that Boromir and Faramir are motherless. Aragorn's mother is dead as also is Arwen's (though the latter has a living grandmother) . It seems that Tolkien not only had a problem with the literary depiction of *women* but with women in their personae as *mothers*. It really is kind of odd.
Obviously I too am a Tolkien geek: I must have read LOTR at least thirty times.
Thanks so much for your comments about Charles Mills. It happens that I was his department chair starting in 2017. I wish I knew him the way you had, but I knew him enough to second all the reminiscences about his philosophical astuteness, his integrity, and his warmth and great humor. Our department is grieving his loss, as you might imagine.
In connection with this essay, though ... Charles's faculty office was partly but not entirely cleared out. It's possible he still had a copy of the paper but didn't know he did. And then it's possible it is in his office. I'll keep my eyes open.
I had the pleasure of being in a class of Charles's in the Spring of 2019. (The class was on Du Bois, and it was fantastic..) Early in the semester Charles mentioned this paper in passing, and I emailed him after class to ask if I could get a copy. He emailed back: "Unfortunately, it was done way back when--in the epoch of floppy discs, if you even know what they are--and I misplaced the hard copy. But since I never throw anything out, I'm sure it's around somewhere..." So it might be a floppy disc you need to keep a look out for Nick! I hope it turns up.
Likewise thanking you, Prof. Wolff, for your words about Charles, and for sharing this anecdote. Charles's own anecdotes were a huge part of the pull of his classes - always funny, often revealing, always brilliantly delivered. He'll be deeply missed.
Callum, thank you. There is hope. How fortunate you were!!
Thanks for the story and your comment. I think the paper is still there, so you have to contact Charles's family members or his close friends to help find it, it may even be published so that anyone can read it.
Appreciate the post Professor. Love checking in on this blog from time to time and reading up on your thoughts.
This is something I've commented on before here: https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2018/01/philosophical-fads.html
***…Let me turn now to Professor Charles Mills, who is very eloquent in his writings and lectures on philosophy of race. One thing he constantly harps on is that the Enlightenment ideals of liberalism are solely geared towards white Europeans, that this was indeed the case since the inception of those relevant political ideas. If you read "The Racial Contract" by Professor Mills, this is a central notion you'll be introduced to. Not once in that work, or in any other papers/articles/books by Professor Mills to my knowledge (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), does he mention what would be a historical (and in my opinion very powerful) counterargument to his entire analysis: The Cornerstone Speech.
Here in 1861, a full 90 years before the birth of Charles Mills, the Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens gives a speech about forefathers of the United States and their mistake:
"The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro…The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
Apparently Stephens (and the founding fathers) didn't get the memo about classical liberal notions only pertaining to white Europeans in principle, which is a central claim Mills makes…***
I remember reading through the book and, upon hitting page 90 or so, starting to realize that there would be no effort to substantiate the central claim made. As I said in another comment further down on that Leiter post (in response to someone claiming I had misread Professor Mills):
***…Professor Mills can't seriously claim that Enlightenment style liberalism was from the start only geared towards white Europeans and hence "racialized" if the very individuals (who were white) that lived during that era easily recognized that things like freedom and equality would apply to black people. That was very much the case with the founding fathers (the consternation and criticism of slavery even at the conception of the United States is well documented historically), and Stephens seems to recognize it as such. The main point is this: How can Professor Mills tell me something to the effect of "white elites/philosophers/thinkers during that time would not view these liberal ideals as applying to blacks" when it’s incredibly obvious that many of them actually did?...***
Sadly, on that thread at Leiter reports I never received an answer from anyone. This is something that Adolph Reed constantly harps on about, the constant reification of “white supremacy” as misguided.
My thoughts are with you and others that knew the Professor, along with his immediate family and reader/admirers of his work. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Keep up the great work Professor!
@Charles Pigden, Tolkien's parents both died when he was young: his father when he was 3 and his mother when he was 12. I'd be cautious of interpreting the lack of mothers in his works as simply mysoginistic.
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Good news. Linda Martin Alcoff announced at yesterday's memorial session for Charles Mills (https://www.caroundtable.org/) that she has a hard copy of Mills's essay on Tolkien, and that plans exist to publish it in a posthumous collection of Mills's work.
You might consider contacting her for more information.
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