Anti-Climacus

Give Alan Jacobs his due on this point:

Modern liberalism likes to think that all our problems are epistemological: we are afflicted by never knowing with sufficient clarity what we ought to do. Our fictions tend to reflect that assumption. Tolkien, not being a modern liberal, thought it more interesting to explore situations when people know what they need to know but may lack the strength of will to act on that knowledge. He might say, and with some justification, that contemporary literary fiction is not simplistic in regard to such problems but oblivious to them.

Which is true enough on the assumption that all of the fiction that sets itself in World War II, for example, is about epistemology and not will (perhaps those are non-modern liberal fictions?). The obvious retort is that the modern liberal will say that Tolkein's ontology is too simplistic. Jacobs identifies characters in LOTR who vacillate over the wisdom or merit to one side or the other, but this is no response to the charge of a morally simplistic universe, as it still remains the case that Sauron is evil and the people opposing him are good. Whether any particular character ends up on one side or the other is of narrative interest but immaterial to the moral structure of the books. It's simply not possible to imagine for LOTR even the very simple "Magneto was right"/"the Empire are the good guys" interpretations sometimes given to X-Men and Star Wars (and even then, this is only one slight step up in moral complexity).

Now, I'll grant that there is a place for fictions which concern will and not epistemology; but certainly there's much to be said for fictions that recognize the difficulty of recognizing the correct thing to do because the world rarely plays itself out in such simple terms?