On Forgetting the Lessons of The Hobbit

As part of a nationwide literacy campaign, a pledge was passed out when I was in fifth-grade. It was the mid-eighties and each student was asked to sign an agreement promising to abstain from television for a month in an effort to encourage them to read. I was the only one who refused. My first memory is of being carried into a movie theater, and television provided a similar fix. I liked the after-school cartoons and the slate of classic 70’s shows that ran after them, followed by the “Big Movie at 8,” which, even then, I could feel filling the voids of my mind like water into a glass of rocks. I wasn’t going to give that up without a fight. Later in life, applying to film school, I recognized that these nightly cinematic forays were an education unto themselves, and those films sit on a shelf in my head next to the books I’ve read.

I remember standing by the teacher’s desk, being encouraged to just sign the pledge; I remember my parents being involved; I remember arguing that most of those who signed it weren’t actually going to do it, and developing a greater understanding of how adults could value compliance more than honesty. In the end I didn’t sign, and I remain happy with that decision decades later. My primary reason for choosing this battle wasn’t that I was hopelessly addicted to network programming, though I may have been, but rather that since I had arrived in school, I’d developed the notion that certain members of the faculty thought I perhaps read too much.

My mother recounts me catching her in a lie at age two by pointing out that the sign on the toy store she had said was closed read O-P-E-N. Later in life I’d hear that “knowledge is power” and understand immediately what that meant. The first “adult” book I recall reading cover-to-cover was Bill Cosby’s “Fatherhood.” Certainly much of the humor escaped me but I distinctly remember roaring with laughter in my second grade classroom when I hit the punchline of the story about his adolescence that ends with “But Dad, I’m Jesus Christ!”

My childhood during the neon-chrome 80’s was fraught with information-overload that seems quaint by today’s standards, but which was enough to make my little head spin at times. The world was full of saturated vibrancy with talking heads on the television squawking out ominous omens tinged with nuclear anxiety. Despite this, I was happy to live in a fast-paced era that contrasted in my mind with what I perceived as the slower moving, but more polite black and white times that had come before. Then, one day they wheeled televisions into all of the classrooms and had us watch a space shuttle explode.

For weeks the schools and news had been hyping a lesson taught from space by a teacher who was to be sent into orbit. When the shuttle carrying her and six others burst into plumes and began drifting back towards the earth, not even the adults present in the classroom that day knew what they were looking at, so they left the screens on until realization set in and they rushed to turn them off. Afterwards they were silent. We were suspicious, but it wasn’t until I saw my mother, a teacher herself, crying in the kitchen that night that I actually understood.

Looking back, things make sense. A generation that had been glued to their screens since they’d watched Lee Harvey Oswald get assassinated live on TV had the audacity to wonder how we’d become addicted to the same drug, but considering how things have unfolded regarding our relationships with screens, perhaps their concerns were valid. Seemingly, the worry reached a crescendo around the time of that pledge, but by then it was too late, we’d all seen Christa McAuliffe and the others falling in flames down to the beach.

Television had always elicited intense emotion in me. My first memory of grief is the cancellation of Manimal. I wept, inconsolable, but books were my true intoxicant of choice. Reflecting now I wonder if their permanence had anything to do with that. They were always there, static doorways to other worlds, reliable and endlessly available, unlike other offerings at hand. As if dreaming, I pored over a textbook about mythology and a massive Time Life tome about the universe, searching for correlation. The house was full of books and televisions and in these things I found escape from the earliest I could manage. The Monkey’s Paw and script for I Shot an Arrow were revisited endlessly in those early years. Escapism can be richly rewarding if done right.

There is an enormous debt of gratitude I owe to thousands of books that have changed me, but if I must choose one, I will leave Richard Adams and John Lilly behind and go back to the third grade, when I first read The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s prelude to The Lord of the Rings, about a hobbit who, by way of a wizard’s invitation, finds himself reluctantly thrust into an epic adventure involving a dragon, in which he acquires a magic ring that turns him invisible, unaware that it belongs to The Dark Lord Sauron, who will do anything to get it back. Later, in middle school, I would discover that many of the “smart kids” as well as a not-insignificant number of “troublemakers” had already read The Hobbit as well. I believe this speaks to important lessons in the book.

I won’t go into too great depth about how the story of Bilbo Baggins, who is shy and small and not a fighter at all, finds within himself all the qualities necessary to succeed in his adventures, despite being employed nonconsensually as a burglar. He offers children who are unable to relate to warriors or wizards outside-of-the-box roles to cast themselves in as they proceed through life, and therein is a great measure of the book’s appeal. Stories of misfits abound as there is a universality to feeling out of place, but for a certain type of child these stories do more than offer entertainment or lessons, they grant an opportunity to identify with someone other than themself on a deep and profound level.

Then there is the journey, with its promise of riches and threat of death, but also the big reveal at the end that the experience itself is more important than the destination, and trope though it may be, that the real treasure is the friends you make along the way. It may all seem obvious now, but for an eight-year-old these were big concepts, delivered in a tantalizing way where each chapter left me wanting more of the story and a hunger for others like it.

A year or so after I first read The Hobbit my mother loaded her parents and two children into a twenty-seven foot motor home and drove us out west. For her, this was a trip to explore history; we followed The Trail of Tears a while and were asked to reflect how easily those miles passed on motorized wheels, and what it might have been like for those forced to walk. We visited battlegrounds and stayed on what were then called “Indian Reservations,” but for me, at the time, the trip was an adventure that harkened back to National Lampoon’s Vacation and, of course, The Hobbit.

Years later I’d drive cross-country again with a friend of mine in her bare-bones Toyota that didn’t even have a clock. During each of these experiences Bilbo Baggins was a constant companion, serving as a reminder that the journey, itself, was the reward. His in-book memoir is titled There and Back Again, and I wondered for years if I would ever manage to find something to say of value enough to do the same, knowing that these trips could serve well in that endeavor. Then a dark depression took hold of my heart and any desire to create, or even exist, fled from me for decades.

Things are better now, much better than I ever believed possible, and though I credit my mother’s love and ketamine as the foremost reasons for that, I acknowledge how the books I read helped as well. People don’t read novels the way they once did, and I see that as a danger to our society. Books provide a way to experience life from someone else’s perspective and I believe this fosters empathy and a sense of scale about the realities of existence that are important in facilitating the sort of bonds and concessions required to evolve.

This quality is not only not encouraged by the endless scroll of sound-byte entertainment offered by for-profit platforms using the attention economy to turn our precious time into money, it is eradicated by engaging with these systems. At best, books can provide a near-psychedelic experience as one “falls through the page” as Stephen King puts it. That ability to exist for a time in another world in another life is a gift, not only in offering an escape from one’s likely troubled own reality, but also in allowing one the capacity to more fully understand the connections and universalities that form the foundations of the world we live in.

However, like anything worth doing, this requires an investment of time to achieve. When was the last time anyone reading this read a hundred pages straight without looking at their phone? There are those among us who are compelled to check their device after every paragraph or even every sentence. No matter where we fall on this spectrum, this is costing us. Our attention has been eaten by corporations with little of value offered in return.

Towards the end of The Hobbit, with the dragon slain and the world seemingly set right by our band of adventurers, things take a grim turn when greed rears its ugly head. The climax of the book is “The Battle of the Five Armies,” fought between Men, Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, and Eagles with a mountain full of gold and gems as the prize. Bilbo is there, of course, but he chooses not to fight, instead putting on the magical ring he acquired and sitting out the battle invisible to the eyes of all the combatants. I suspect this was the most important lesson of the book for me.

By then it is clear to Bilbo that the collective sense of entitlement to the hoard, present even in his friends, is folly and they should be grateful to still have their lives. Instead they are willing to squander their second chance after surviving the dragon in pursuit of material gain. Bilbo is unwilling to join them in their pride and refuses to die for their honor. From this I learned that sometimes the right decision is not to fight. Growing older I have seen people in real life tear each other to shreds over perceived differences, sadly underscored by the fact that there was not a dwarf, elf, orc, or eagle in sight. The Hobbit was instrumental in forming my relationship with metaphors and how to apply them to life.

So what am I left with, all these decades later? Thanks to Peter Jackson and his movies I don’t feel the need to recount the plots of these stories, so, on some level, Tolkien’s concepts have percolated through the nerdy ecosystem I grew up in, into the mainstream culture. So why, then, do they seem so unlearned? These are stories about the value of companionship, yet I see a world suffering an epidemic of loneliness. These are stories about how a single, small person can stand up to power and persevere through wit and ingenuity, yet I see a world where many people do not even have the adequate knowledge to question the authorities that oppress them.

In Watership Down, by Richard Adams, Frith, the Sun, addresses the first rabbit El-ahrairah, telling him, “All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.” I weigh this against the lessons of The Hobbit, and more so The Lord of the Rings. The heroes of these three stories eschew open combat in favor of stealth and intelligence. Via the same wizard’s invitation, Frodo Baggins, Bilbo’s nephew, sneaks into Sauron’s realm and destroys the ring his uncle found, which was the source of The Dark Lord’s power, by throwing it into the volcano Mount Doom.

Mine is the microgeneration sandwiched between Gen X and the Millennials named “The Oregon Trail Generation,” after a ubiquitous educational computer game we all played at school. We were born alongside the personal computer and grew up in lockstep with it, our adolescences forged by interacting with bulletin board systems and the early internet. With computers in our elementary school classrooms, the technology became normalized for us, even as it remained arcane to many in the older generations. We were forced to learn how to interact with the machines via a command line interface, absent any sleek graphical interfaces, at least until the machines grew up, too.

The computers started talking to each other around the same time we started making significant social connections as well, thrusting us into two worlds of interaction during a time when it is critical to learn how to navigate such systems. It’s hard to believe, but in the early days of the internet, people were more polite than they were in real life. By age fifteen I thought that this connectedness would buoy humanity into a utopia. I have never been more wrong about anything in my life. I had forgotten what I had learned from The Hobbit.

Greed and power corrupt anything they touch, and I was too blinded by hope and naivety to see how such elements would eventually change the landscape of the internet. The older generations came on board late and seem to not fully grasp the ramifications of a connected world, and the younger ones were born into it, with no concept of any alternative. These mindsets have provided fertile ground for profit-driven enterprises to exploit the users of their products, who mistakenly believe the services to be “free,” when they are, in fact, paying with their minds. Have you checked your device since you started reading this? Have you wanted to?

What the tech platforms call “engagement” causes bursts of dopamine in our brains. Payoffs rendered in likes, comments, and DMs turn us each into neurochemical slot-machines and the entities pulling our levers don’t care that this has a net-negative effect. In fact, fostering negativity generates more responses, further driving wedges between the tribal factions they have created. The cost is not only in the shortening of our attention spans, but also in our ability to empathize with anyone who is not the same as us. It is not unthinkable that we may see a civil war in our lifetimes, though sitting where I am, in the closest one can find to The Shire in America, the idea seems as impossibly far away as it did to the Bagginses.

Those of us who are aware of the insidiousness and unfairness of the systems intertwining our lives can no longer hide. We may find ourselves resistant, though not impervious, to the siren song of the technology, but we must remember that it will outpace us, and if we are not quick to act, we will surely eventually succumb to some offering placed before us by machines so attuned to our likes and whims that they know us better than we know ourselves.

With that in mind, I believe open warfare is folly. The ideological lines are too strong. Instead what must happen is that we must stealthily offer warnings, not about this side or that side, but rather offer a meta-analysis of the systems providing the framework for the divisiveness. As always, it is critical to follow the money, and realize that the powers that be are playing a zero-sum game with wealth in this country and barring some drastic change in how things are done, enough of the money to effectively account for all of it will wind up in the hands of a very few.

Lies can build towers of cards to rival Babel, but The Truth can be a wrecking ball. The powers that be care less now for facts than they ever did, and there are those who say this is “the post-truth era,” whatever that means. In her novel Seeker’s Mask, P.C. Hodgell writes, “That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.” I believe it is time for those who can, to more forcefully speak truth to power, as spending our energies trying to convince each other what is “right” distracts from the systems preying on all of us.

Together we can turn our attentions, in whichever way we can, to calling out these nefarious machinations where we see them, and we need not look far. We can seize the totems and fetishes that empower the lords of these systems and cast them into the volcano, but the time to act is now, a wizard invites us.