Fantasy often misunderstands progress, simply because we also misunderstand progress in real life. We imagine development as a smooth ladder: swords become muskets, muskets become rifles, rifles become tanks, and tanks become starships. It is very prominently portrayed in video games as well, particularly in some real time strategy ones, such as the Warcraft, Age of Empires, Sid Meier’s Civilization series, among other prominent examples, which work with linear technology progression systems. But for most of human history, technology did not move like that. It crawled, repeated itself, refined itself, and only very late began to accelerate as wildly where we might not be able to perceive it at all.
While reading Slavoj Žižek’s more recent works and alongside them taking J. R. R. Tolkien’s books into my hands, the similarity between some of their themes dawned on me. Furthermore, this realization of what progress represents and how it is understood matters for how we read the Middle-earth of The Lord of the Rings, be it the movies or the books. If we count human civilization from the Agricultural Revolution, then civilization is roughly ten thousand years old; if we count recognizably technological modernity, meaning machines that feel like “technology” rather than improved agrarian tools, we are talking about a tiny final sliver of that span. The psychological mistake is to project our own acceleration backward, as if every society should naturally move from iron to industry in a few generations.
Warfare makes the point clearer for our eyes to see. An Egyptian soldier from the First Dynasty would not have understood every detail of a battlefield in the middle of the 16th century, but he would have recognized the basic grammar: men in formation, ranged and missile weapons, shields, horses, metal blades, and the terrifying intimacy of killing at arm’s length. The transition from bronze to iron to steel mattered enormously, but it did not abolish the basic form of war. For millennia, war still meant moving bodies toward other bodies until somebody was close enough to pierce, cut, crush, or burn.
Gunpowder changes the imaginative structure of warfare. It does not merely make armies more effective; it changes the meaning of distance, walls, courage, and bodily presence. That is why Saruman’s use of black powder at Helm’s Deep feels so alien. In the films, Wormtongue’s reaction implies discovery, not routine familiarity. Théoden’s defence assumes a world where stone, height, valour, and formation still matter. And he has faith in his stronghold that kept even his ancestors safe.
From this perspective, it can be hypothesised that Middle-earth therefore appears to sit near a late medieval or early modern threshold. If its peoples followed a broadly European developmental path after the War of the Ring, then Eldarion’s lifetime would not plausibly produce tanks, airplanes, or telegraphs. It might produce cannons, muskets, better roads, fiscal states, and centralized logistics. The point is not that Middle-earth could not change. The point is that old worlds change slowly until a system appears that makes change itself self-accelerating.
This is where the Singularity becomes the dark mirror of fantasy. The Singularity is the idea that technological change eventually becomes so fast that ordinary human adaptation cannot keep up. In that sense, it is not merely a prediction about artificial intelligence; it is a myth about acceleration itself. Žižek’s discussion of accelerationism is useful here to understand this process, because he treats it as a fantasy in which capitalism becomes permanent intensification, pushes through every stable form of life, and culminates in a post-human collective intelligence through AI and the Singularity (2025, 23). Žižek reads this fantasy not as liberation but as a desire for an endpoint, because accelerationism imagines history rushing toward a final overcoming of ordinary human finitude (2025, 23–25).
Tolkien’s world is powerful because it mostly refuses this structure. Middle-earth is not a laboratory of endless innovation. It is a memory-world, a ruin-world, a world where much of what is greatest lies behind rather than ahead. The elves do not innovate their way into salvation. The dwarves do not industrialize their way into moral clarity. Gondor does not become good by becoming more efficient. The Shire is not admirable because it is productive, but because it preserves a human scale of life.
Yet Tolkien is not simply saying “technology bad.” The deeper point is that technology becomes monstrous when it is subordinated to domination. Sauron and Saruman represent industry as command: extraction, regimentation, surveillance, breeding, furnaces, engines, and the conversion of living landscapes into instruments. Žižek’s argumentation helps sharpen this point because he rejects simple, linear ideas of progress and argues that every apparent higher stage leaves some hidden casualty behind (2025, 1). Saruman’s industry is precisely that kind of progress: it produces power, but the cost is visible in felled forests, mutilated bodies, ruined soil, and creatures reduced to tools.
This is why the good societies of Middle-earth develop differently. Their alternative is not infinite technical acceleration, but a more harmonic and balanced evolution. Rohan, Gondor, Lothlórien, Rivendell, and the Shire are not anti-change in the same way. They are anti-Sarumanic change: a type of change that treats the world as raw material and treats people as instruments. Similarly, Žižek’s point is not that we should abandon progress, but that progress has to be redefined by looking directly at the damage it produces rather than hiding the damage behind triumphant narratives (2025, 3).
Consequently, this line of thinking also gives us a better way to understand Tolkien’s anti-industrial imagination. Tolkien is not rejecting craft, skill, invention, or order. He is rejecting the industrial logic in which the machine becomes a moral alibi. Saruman can always say that he is modernizing. Sauron can always argue that he is organizing. Isengard and Mordor are, in that sense, presenting a perverse image of progress: they have coordination, production, logistics, and scale, but all of them are bent toward domination; while they also try to compete against one another and sink the world in the process. Or in other words, try to sacrifice the natural world on the altar of progress in different manners to see who can become more dominant as a result.
Žižek’s phrase “progress in general” in the context of Middle-earth is shown why no such thing exists (2025, 7). A mill in the Shire, a forge in Erebor, a palantír in Orthanc, and the fires of Mordor are all “technology,” but they do not belong to the same moral world. Žižek argues that progress must be judged from within a system and according to the potentials that system actualizes, which means that the same invention can mean different things under different social relations (2025, 7). The question is therefore not whether Middle-earth advances, but what kind of world its advances serve.
Additionally, this also explains why the speed of progress matters. Slow development allows institutions, customs, and moral expectations to metabolize change. Rapid development breaks that metabolism. Flight took humanity thousands of years to achieve, and roughly sixty years after it we reached the Moon. Mechanical computation, early programming, ENIAC, and pocket supercomputers did not unfold across geological cultural time; they arrived inside a few human lifetimes. The shock is not merely that we invented powerful things. The shock is that we invented powerful things faster than our ethical and political worlds could absorb them. Specifically, these last points are felt today when it comes to the digital space, we lack regulations, ethics and morals are dubious and we cannot preserve cultural items that were born in the virtual environment, dooming them to slow oblivion.
Žižek’s critique of accelerationism helps name this danger. He argues that the accelerationist fantasy is too optimistic (and naïve), because it imagines the post-human Singularity while skipping over the nearer dangers of ecological catastrophe, war, and social chaos (Žižek 2025, 24–25). In other words, the problem is not simply that technology might outrun us, rather the problem is that our political imagination might collapse before technology does.
This is also why a purely pastoral answer is insufficient. It would be easy to argue that Tolkien’s “good guys” are right or honourable because they are closer to nature. Nevertheless, Žižek complicates that move, as he argues that nature is not a stable, harmonious background ruined only by human hubris, because nature itself contains excess, disruption, and instability too (2025, 20). Furthermore, he also argues that traditional wisdom can prevent us from perceiving modern threats, because ecological catastrophe is not fully visible to common sense and has to be grasped scientifically (Žižek 2025, 20–21).
Exactly that point matters for Tolkien. Thus, the answer to Saruman cannot simply be “go back” as there is no pure pre-industrial innocence to recover. Even the Shire after the Scouring is not the same Shire as before. It has learned that history reaches even the places that imagine themselves outside of history. Žižek’s account of progress as constant redefinition fits here: after a real break, one cannot simply return to the old state as if nothing happened (2025, 8–10).
Therefore, the best postwar future for Middle-earth would not be technological stagnation. Instead, it would be selective development under moral limits, which would allow craft, medicine, infrastructure, learning, and defence to improve without allowing Mordor’s logic to define improvement. Žižek’s critique of Kohei Saito sharpens this distinction, because he shares the impulse to reject growth for growth’s sake, but insists that planetary-scale crises cannot be met through slowing down and decentralization alone (2025, 14–17, 98). Applied to Middle-earth, the lesson is that harmony cannot mean passivity; a good society still needs planning, coordination, and the capacity to act.
The deepest question, then, is not whether Middle-earth should industrialize. The question is whether it can develop without becoming Sarumanic. Can Gondor build without becoming Mordor? Can the Shire modernize without turning every field into a unit of production? Can dwarven craft remain craft rather than extraction or mass-production? Can human kingdoms adopt gunpowder without reorganizing their whole (political) life around permanent militarization?
Žižek gives us a severe but useful test for this. Authentic progress is not proved by novelty, speed, power, or scale. Authentic progress is partly negative: things once treated as normal, such as slavery, torture, or direct oppression, become impossible to justify without appearing monstrous (Žižek 2025, 9). By that standard, Middle-earth progresses only if it becomes harder for any ruler, wizard, or kingdom to treat living beings as material, which is one of our modern-day challenges as people are generally viewed as resources only.
That is also the real difference between Tolkien and the Singularity myth. The Singularity imagines a point where change becomes too fast for human beings. Tolkien imagines worlds in which beings are always in danger of being absorbed into systems too large for them: the Ring, Mordor, Orthanc, empire, machinery, command. Žižek’s warning against accelerationism clarifies why this absorption is not automatically progress; a future that erases politics, finitude, and conflict may be only domination in a more advanced form (2025, 24).
People underestimate how slow development used to be because we live after the explosion. We are born on the steep part of the curve and assume the whole curve was steep. Tolkien’s Middle-earth restores our sense of scale. For most of history, a sword was not obsolete after ten years. A fortress was not made meaningless overnight. A way of life could persist for centuries. On the one hand, slowness is not automatically good, and acceleration is not automatically evil. On the other hand, acceleration without moral form is Saruman’s path to a dark industrial world. This path promises efficiency, but delivers wasteland and loss, it promises mastery and delivers servitude. But above all, Saruman promises the future and burns the world that would have had to live there.
The lesson is not “against progress” in the crude sense, rejecting growth for growth’s sake is necessary, but planetary-scale crises demand more than localism, restraint, and a simple slowing of the machine (Žižek 2025, 14–17, 98). Instead, the goal is to go against progress as an idol. Thus, the main idea is that we must deconstruct the fantasy that every increase in power is an increase in civilization. Žižek’s strongest contribution is to force the question that Saruman never asks: where is the hidden casualty of this advance, and what would progress mean if we refused to hide it (2025, 1, 3, 8)? Middle-earth’s answer is that the good future is not the fastest future, instead it is the one in which invention remains answerable to the living world.
Reference
Žižek, Slavoj. 2025. Against Progress. Bloomsbury Academic.