Defeat

"Caradhras had defeated them."  This is how this week's chapter, "The Ring Goes South," ends.

Lord of the Rings is a story.  As such, we expect certain patterns.  One major pattern of storytelling is overcoming obstacles.  If a protagonist is facing a difficult situation, they will overcome it.  This is how stories progress.  If the protagonist cannot overcome it, the story necessarily suffers.  Why have a problem that is not, eventually, defeated?

So it is a bold decision of the Creative Wizard to have the Fellowship of the Ring be defeated by the first obstacle they encounter.  Caradhras is a mountain, and as they try to climb it they get assaulted by snow.  It's unclear whether this is bad luck, Sauron or Saruman, or the mountain itself, but the snow threatens to bury every last one of them.  There is no pushing onward.  They must turn back.

What can we learn from this?

There are lots of quotes about failure.  But they all try to be optimistic.  They want to put a positive spin on it.  This reflects the larger cultural norm.  We rarely talk about our failures.  We sometimes talk about our struggles or our shortcomings or our imperfections or what we hope to change but that dodges the conversation on failure.  Failure is rough and harsh and it sucks.  It is easy to see why we avoid it.

But failure is real, and we can't always spin it toward a happy ending.  I wrote a whole graduate paper attempting to theologically justify the Holocaust.  But no matter the answer we land on, the holocaust must be deemed a failure of humanity.  There is nothing to be learned that should not have been already known or could not have been learned otherwise.  And while "never again" is a good slogan, "never" surely would have been better.

The AIDS crisis is another good example of harsh failure.  It killed hundreds of thousands of people.  Here's a good visual of how it impacted the LGBT community.  The failure was partly because of the strength of the disease and partly due to politicians refusing to take it seriously.  But a failure it was, and many paid the ultimate price because we did not defeat it.

It may sound like I am admonishing - that humans failed by allowing and perpetuating the holocaust and that Americans failed by not responding to the aids crisis sufficiently.  And in these examples indeed I am.  But failure is not always worthy of punishment.  Every failure is not a moral defeat.  Similarly, not every defeat teaches a lesson.

The Creative Wizard, by opening the second volume with a dramatic and complete defeat, seeks to remind us of the odds the Fellowship faces.  They are only nine, trekking through dangerous terrain towards more dangerous terrain.  There may be some personal growth, but ultimately this will be a march of attrition.  Indeed, unless my memory fails me, every enemy encounter they have for the rest of this book will result in the loss of a companion (Gandalf falls to the Balrog and Boromor is slain by Uruk-Hai).  This is not a heroic quest to retrieve a boon, but to destroy a burden.  Failure means total annihilation.  The journey is not to improve the world but to prevent it's destruction.

In his notes Tolkien blamed the current situation of Middle Earth on the Elves.  The article is a long one - here is the relevant piece:

In several places, Tolkien openly stated his authorial judgment that the
elves who made the Three Rings were ultimately to blame, having set the stage for
tragedy in Middle Earth. They made their own rings (preceding Sauron's One Ring)
in order to control the world, stopping time and preventing change,
forbidding anything to die and decay and thus blocking the potential for
new growth. In an oft-quoted letter, Tolkien wrote:
"They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical
Middle Earth because they had become fond of it ... and so tried
to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce."

But now they hide their three Rings, because they know they are not to be used, but they cannot destroy them.  They are bound to their mistakes.  They failed and all of Middle-Earth must reckon with it.

Defeat is often considered a cause for inspiration.  "Like the phoenix rising from its ashes," and all that.  I get it, and as a teacher I agree the optimist spin is useful.  But I think it is also instructive to consider the uselessness of defeat.  The waste.  The void.  The energy and time you cannot get back.  The resources spent.  The friends you might lose.

The Creative Wizard gives us a chapter that begins with hope and ends in utter defeat.  The Fellowship must turn back, having lost time, energy, supplies, as well as secrecy.  Birds have been seen flying in unusual patterns near them and they deduce they are spies sent to seek out their location.  "That cannot be helped now," says Gandalf, since there is nowhere to hide but in the snow.  All the optimism, what little they had, is lost.  They must proceed ever under the shadow of this initial failure.

On further reflection, there is one concrete benefit to failure - it helps one develop empathy.  If you never fail, but others do, you may consider their defeats to be personal.  They were defeated, but you've never been.  And given the importance of community to healthy living, being able to bond over failure and understand failure in others is a critical skill.  I think our society romanticizes failure a little bit, but certainly demonizing it is a bad solution.  It's probably worse.  It's probably better to live in a world that is too optimistic than is too pessimistic.  But that's a discussion for another time...

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