Sam Gamgee and the scouring of The Shire: an evocation of conservatism

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that The Lord of the Rings is the finest novel in the English language. It is also the best evocation of conservative ideas in literature. By this I don’t mean the kings and things that dominate a shallow reading of the book but the central theme: that ordinary people can and do perform incredible acts of heroism to achieve noble ends, and in doing these remarkable things, save their world.

The tragedy of Peter Jackson’s wonderful film adaptation is that its climax is the collapse of Barad Dur not the Scouring of the Shire. I understand how, at first, this coda seems incongruous – the war was won, the ring destroyed, and the King returned, why do we finish with a petty little battle in The Shire against a diminished Saruman? We end here because that is the whole point of the book, Frodo didn’t destroy the ring so Aragorn could be King, he destroyed the ring because its presence threatened The Shire – even if most people living in Hobbiton and Bywater were unaware of the danger.

The four hobbits (Merry and Pippin get such a trite treatment in many readings and adaptations including the film) after the killing of Saruman, see The Shire as a restoration project. Sam travels the length and breadth of The Shire making the most of Galadriel’s gift, not to craft anything new but to improve what is there already. The ordinary is good and conserving it for the benefit of everyone is the job of all those with power and will. What the films did was exclude this essential conservative message from the narrative while keeping the central imperative of defeating evil.

But we still need to understand what Tolkien means by evil and the infectiousness of evil. The ring’s evil is infectious but, as we see with Ted Sandyman or with Bill Ferny, evil intent is there without the ring being necessary. Most importantly, the defeat of evil leads to the restoration of previous order. The Shire isn’t turned into a buzzing metropolis but is carefully restored and conserved as a prosperous, contented place based on family, tradition and community. Sam becomes mayor not king and his choices are conservative – preserve what is best, live a good life, help my neighbours. This is the message of the book, that the person who walked into the heart of evil and returned becomes someone respected more for their community activity as for saving the world.

Now you know that The Lord of the Rings is a conservative (and catholic, although that’s another story) novel, we can gently move into a better understanding of conservatism. To do this we need to get away from the assorted caricatures of conservatism that its opponents present. The most common criticism from the left is really a criticism of liberalism – we’re told that conservatives are selfish and individualistic rather than, as socialists see themselves, focused on the common good. Yet when you read that chapter in The Lord of the Rings, you don’t see Sam Gamgee acting selfishly or as an individual focused on his own interest, his desire is to see the place he lived, his community, preserved, protected, and enhanced.

Liberals and socialists will tell you that it is progress to pull down the old mill in Hobbiton and replace it with a new, smoke-belching behemoth. Words like ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’ will trip from their liberal or socialist tongues while conservatives say something like ‘I rather liked the old mill and we didn’t lack for flour, why change it all?’ Wiser conservatives will consider how we can gently and carefully make the mill a little better without the drastic, wholesale destruction of the heritage it represents. Progress isn’t wrong but we must shape it to fit place and people rather than, as liberals and socialists demand, people having to change to fit the progress.

We see this concept reflected in, for example, gay marriage (and, yes, I know many conservatives opposed its introduction). We still have marriage, something conservatives consider important, but it has broadened its remit a little. We have lost nothing, but some people have gained – the old mill has a new stone or a more reliable power source, but it is still recognisably the old mill. Applying this approach to marginal and small acts of betterment sees a place improve without the need for the old to be smashed up in the name of progress.

Another conservative feature of Sam Gamgee’s mayoralty is good administration. The libertarian economist and blogger, Tyler Cowan invented a concept he called ‘State Capacity Libertarianism’ which observed that “(m)any of the failures of today’s America are failures of excess regulation, but many others are failures of state capacity.” Cowan notes decaying infrastructure, immigration controls and climate change all require ‘state capacity’ – or good administration as conservatives might phrase it. Although it doesn’t often feel this way in our liberal age, conservatives are, or should be, more interested in improving the managing of what we’ve got than changing things. Too often the excitement of the new sweeps us away, we prefer spending billions on a new railway to stopping our ageing water infrastructure polluting rivers. I’m sure Sam would have pointed, like good councillors everywhere, to an unfilled pothole or a broken fence and said, ‘let’s get this fixed before we talk about a new road or a fancy wall.’

The final feature of Sam Gamgee’s life (apart from the bit where he went to Mount Doom with Frodo) is the centrality of family. Sam married Rosie Cotton and they had thirteen children, perhaps a tad more than par these days but a reminder that Tolkien made family a central feature of hobbit society. Bilbo’s party at the start of The Lord of the Rings features his extended family (a gross of them) and Tolkien stresses how hobbits were keen, to the point of obsession, on the niceties of genealogy. Your average hobbit didn’t get in a jumble over what was meant by first and second cousin and once or twice removed.

Alongside community, heritage and good administration, conservatives value family. Unlike the socialists whose collective focuses on work or liberals who find any collective distasteful, conservatives consider that the basic human unit is the family. Conservatives recognise the damage done by the corrupting liberal idea of the paramount individual; a corruption made worse by the socialist predilection for insisting that mothers do paid work. If the only measure that matters is what comes from work, then family suffers. A utilitarian focus on productivity results in the fragmentation of society, a fragmentation that wealth can smooth over but which collapses the communities of ordinary people. We see women urged, bribed even, to dump their children on low paid nursery workers or childminders to return to work. Worse, liberalism’s individualism results in another collapsing institution, marriage. And just as the obsession with paid work is cruel to families, the belief that marriage is an unnecessary anachronism creates the dysfunction where nearly a quarter of families are headed by a single parent, usually a working-class woman.

We talk a great deal about the consequences of rejecting marriage and family, most notably the problem of child poverty and the impact of single parenthood on child development. But liberals don’t admit error and refuse to promote marriage and family preferring to borrow the socialist idea of taxing people to subsidise children and childcare (meaning that the poor mothers can go back into the workforce, the only place where what they do is valued). We cannot see our way to a different answer because so much that is important – rent, travel, heat, light and home – is now dependent on two incomes. It’s no wonder that the UK and USA with such high rates of single parenthood, have such high rates of child poverty.

There you have it, the essence of conservatism from one chapter in The Lord of the Rings – home, family, community, heritage, care and good administration. It’s true that governments that call themselves conservative haven’t always kept to these ideas and that many who call themselves conservatives prefer power, domination and control, the traits of Tolkien’s evil. But we still hold to these ideas and quiet voices echo them. More importantly, millions of people live a conservative life – valuing their family, cherishing their community, taking responsibility for what they see out their front door. These good people, maligned by liberals and socialists as dullards who lack great qualifications and who prefer to talk about the car parking on main street or the village fete than some high-falutin’ philosophy that promises but never delivers the perfect human society. These good people are Sam Gamgee. And the world needs more of them.

 

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