Wow what a treat, previously unreleased tolkien satire on one of my own hobby-horses. Put in an order with my local bookstore, so excited to read this!

It's fair to say that after all the descriptions of the shire vs isengard etc in the LoTR, his position on mechanization and cars isn't very surprising, but it's quite extraordinary for this to show up.

Tolkien really was a serious reactionary.

I’m not a fan of cars or environmental damage but the idyll that he puts on a pedestal just didn’t exist for the vast majority of humans in Britain (let alone elsewhere in the world)

Tolkien continues to be quite prescient then. The Automobile has been an unmitigated disaster for mankind, the environment, and society. It destroys the environment, it makes cities less pleasant to live in, it kills people, it causes extra friction to social interactions that damages social bonds.

Tolkien was probably right in that he would have hated to live in 2026. We are literally building machines designed to replace people like him.

And yet, I can't help thinking that I would hate to live in Tolkien's time. When I was around 10, in 1975, I built a giant computer out of a cardboard box. To me, a computer was the same as a spaceship--something I would never own. Then in 1978, I saw an ad for a TRS-80 personal computer, and my world flipped.

Even now, in my 60s, I can't wait to sit down and start programming (with or without AI). I've had a long, fruitful, and extremely fun career with computers, and I can't imagine what I would have done without them.

Does that mean it's all relative? Whatever we're used to, that's what's good and any change is monstrous? Or is there really such a thing as progress and degeneration? Is it possible to say our time is better or worse than Tolkien's in some absolute sense?

I don't know. I think if you take a Rawlsian perspective, and imagine being a random person of the era, I think being born today is far preferable to being born in 1892. On every measure--childhood poverty, violent deaths, even air quality--2026 is better than 1892.

And that improvement is due almost entirely to technology--to the machine.

Tolkien and Lewis came by their luddism fairly, having both survived the horrors of trench warfare.