From a couple of years ago:

Why Tolkien Hated Dune

This is an exploration I would like to continue, because what it suggests is that fantasy is actually an extension of philosophy and because philosophy matters -- to us.

J.R.R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert were both fantasy writers in English, way back in the day. Lord of the Rings was published in 1954-1955, and Dune was published in 1965. They were radically different in one way, though. J. R. R. Tolkien, you see, was an act deontologist, which meant that he thought that it was good to do good things, that there were things you could do that would be good in and of themselves regardless of the results. Frank Herbert, you see, was a consequentialist, which meant that he judged anything you did solely by its results.

Tolkien, the individual, may also have disliked Herbert's writing style. Also it is easy to say that Herbert was cynical about religion, whereas Tolkien was quite religious. But these are side-notes.

And, lastly, from the blog:

Religious differences aside, the central argument between the two authors is the moral one. Tolkien is a modernist (or even pre-modernist); Herbert is a post-modernist: Tolkien encourages everyone to follow a single template of goodness; Herbert encourages cynicism and doubt of the institutions that produce templates, and shows the anguish experienced by Paul when he is forced into a template to survive.

So, for the rest of this diary, I want to discuss war, and then I want to return to my own opinions on Tolkien and Herbert.

The Iranian ruling class is in the last analysis composed of act deontologists, though their straitened circumstances forced them to consider the hard, tough realities of being a ruling class in the world after the Seventies. It would seem that the prevalence of dissidence and of chaos in Iran is a consequence of their reluctance to face tough realities. They try to do things they think are good in and of themselves. Their imam issues fatwas: "this is what you should do because it is a good-in-itself thing to do." We can contest their moral judgments, but it appears pretty clear that they have such judgments. Act deontology explains the structure of the pseudo-democracy in Iran: there are these groups which decide things, some of which are elected, and some of which are dedicated to what the religious elites think is doing the right thing.

The consolidated ruling class of the US is cynical, postmodern, and consequentialist by professed belief. One can see this professed belief in the universal elite admiration for Henry Kissinger, so as it says in the publisher's blurb for Greg Grandin's book on Kissinger: "Believing that reality could be bent to his will, insisting that intuition is more important in determining policy than hard facts, and vowing that past mistakes should never hinder bold action in the future, Kissinger anticipated, even enabled, the ascendance of the neoconservative idealists who took America into crippling wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

But you can see that their consequentialism is only half-baked, because what really matters to them, far more than consequences, is their own hubris and egoistic self-importance. They don't really care about the obvious and widening gap between their reassurances that they will eventually be seen as the good guys -- Donald Trump issued some of those yesterday -- and the horrific consequences they have inspired. One can see this disconnect in choices like: twenty years of war in Afghanistan, or the war in Ukraine, or, I don't know, Gaza, or the Epstein files. They'll try to kill off Cuba, yeah, whatever, like they kidnapped the President of Venezuela or something. They are bombing Iran at present because Iran was on some list -- I think it was Wesley Clark who revealed the names on the list -- governments the US has at this point already overthrown. What of "philosophy" they might have appears as a collective personality disorder, although the guiding philosophy of the US elites has a real ancestry which can be traced through the concept of the Noble Lie as read in Plato's Republic, and as picked up by Leo Strauss.

One can conceive that at some point Western civilization will lose its ability to do philosophy, leaving nothing behind but the narcissistic, ego-ridden, dementia-plagued people our elites put into the White House, and the creatures of money who do their bidding. Everyone else will have to organize their own society from scratch. Think of creating an alternative to Western civilization as act deontology: you do it not because you will succeed but because it is the right thing to do.

At any rate, I would like to conclude with some reflections upon Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and of Herbert's Dune. The Lord of the Rings was the scene for an imaginary world Tolkien called "Middle-Earth." "Middle-Earth" was an imaginary world in which act deontology mattered independently of consequences.

Of the characters in The Lord of the Rings, perhaps the biggest act deontologist is Gandalf, the wizard. We may assume that to a certain extent he speaks for Tolkien. There is a section early on in the first book titled "The Shadow of the Past," in which our hero Frodo is brought up to speed on the One Ring, which he possesses. Frodo is told of Smeagol/ Gollum, who once possessed the One Ring, and who was turned into a rather twisted being by that ring. And thus, at one point, Frodo exclaims:

"Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death."

And Gandalf tells Frodo:

Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.(p. 69)

Gandalf continues:

"I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many - yours not least.” (ibid.)

Thus, you see, one is merciful to an individual like Smeagol/ Gollum, given who he is, not because this will inspire some previously-known fortunate end, but rather because one is not able to deduce the consequences of killing Smeagol/ Gollum. And so one falls back on act deontology: doing something because it is the right thing to do. "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

The character of Frodo is the tale's hero simply because he carries the One Ring to Mount Doom, where his will fails him and he refuses to cast it into the volcano. At that point, the tortured characeter Smeagol/ Gollum, beneficiary of the mercy of both Bilbo and of Frodo, bites it off Frodo's hand and falls into the volcano himself. This was the one event determining thhe good end of all of Tolkien's tales. As a result of Smeagol/ Gollum's fatal misstep, Sauron is destroyed and cast out of Middle-Earth. Middle-Earth is thusly saved not by any prediction of how the Ring would come to be destroyed, as this was a completely chance series of events, then, but by grace.

When he was young, Tolkien and his three male friends went bravely off to fight in World War I. The consequences of it all were that half of his peer group died. For the most part Tolkien survived because he contracted "trench fever" at some point and was sent back to England for the remaining duration of the war. So there was an example of a world in which consequences mattered a lot more than the acts themselves -- our grim little world. Tolkien's fantasy is explicitly not that.

The world of Dune was a world existing in the shadow of the Butlerian Jihad. This is summarized in brief in the Wikipedia page for the Dune franchise:

As explained in Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is a conflict taking place over 11,000 years in the future. (and over 10,000 years before the events of Dune), which results in the total destruction of virtually all forms of "computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots". With the prohibition "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind," the creation of even the simplest thinking machines is outlawed and made taboo, which has a profound influence on the socio-political and technological development of humanity in the Dune series.

The Dune universe is thus a place in which there is nothing of the sense of progress which we might once have had in our society. At least one can say that all of the science-fiction devices one reads of in Dune are biological. And the possiblity of space travel in the Dune universe can be controlled, leaving everyone stuck on one planet unless otherwise allowed. A byproduct of these fictional developments is that the Dune universe is about as far from being an enlightened Star Trek utopia as one can possibly get. The result is an endless repetition of palace intrigue, which became terminally boring. You think "fine, everyone loses, I wasn't rooting for you anyway." When I was young I read this stuff, but I did not finish reading Children of Dune when it was initially serialized in Analog in 1976.

Herbert's consequentialism, as it stands, apparently shines through in the novel God Emperor of Dune, which I have not read. The idea, apparently, is that the character "Leto II" becomes a dreadful tyrant, and that his tyranny, bad as it was in itself, is what causes the good end of the novel. Moreover, in Herbert's fantasy universe, it must be said, there are people who can see the future. That detail makes Herbert's consequentialism easier to argue.

As Tolkien pointed out, fantasy is the most important branch of fiction, and science fiction is a branch of fantasy. Sure, in fantasy you can do anything you want. But real fantasy has rules and imagined history and attempts in its own ways to impress readers with the notion that they could actually put their heads into a particular work. There's a reason, though, that the great works of fantasy are at least fifty years old. (There might be a couple of exceptions.) The common US elite picture is this: we ascended to the mountaintop a long time ago: now we do what's on the list. All else flows from that vision. Philosophy and fantasy are things of the past. Bombing, however, is still in vogue.