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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6257117" data-attributes="member: 42582">Of that circle of writers, the only two whose works I know are Lovecraft and REH.I just reread the opening section of Call of Cthulhu, and it has a passage that reminded me of <a href="http://media.pfeiffer.edu/lridener/dss/Weber/scivoc.html" target="_blank">"Science as a Vocation"</a> - "we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."Weber does not talk about madness - he is interested in what he calls "rationalisation" and "disenchantment", both of which are, in his useage, sociological terms for describing changes in the relationship between the scope and consequences of human action and the scope of human knowledge. But Weber does, towards the end of his essay, sayTo the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly.The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all, they do not make it hard for him. One way or another he has to bring his 'intellectual sacrifice' - that is inevitable. If he can really do it, we shall not rebuke him.There is the same idea of "a new dark age", a de-intellectualisation, as the way of coping with the knowledge that modernity brings.I don't see REH as denying the bleakness so much as putting forward a different response, closer in some ways I think to Bertrand Russell's (and also, I would say moreso, Nietzsche's): that while the cosmos itself is valueless and empty, human self-creation - including moral self-creation - is a self-generating source of value. (I think there are also hints of vitalism in REH - down to his obsession with thews and sinews - so this moral self-creation is seen as part and parcel of the being of living creatures. This is another similarity to Nietzsche.)In the first page or two of CoC, Lovecraft makes a passing reference to the vagaries of futurism and cubism. I think that the "cosmic horror/fantasy" of both Lovecraft and REH really is another expression of those sorts of modernist sensibilities that had been building up in the latter part of the nineteenth century but really peaked between the wars.  [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] has suggested that I have a failure of imagination, and that may be so: intellectually I can understand what was going on, but I find it hard to be correspondingly shocked or otherwise moved. Though, as I said earlier, I am a great admirer of Weber and think his essay remains an excellent piece of socilogical analysis and explanation. (In his reply to me above Celebrim cited from "A Free Man's Worship", 1903. I think Russell's own views changed in a more sociological direction over time, especially as the influence of GE Moore on his metaethical views was reduced.)One of the weirder features of D&D, for me, is its attempt to mix the modernism of REH and Lovecraft with the anti-modern romanticism of Tolkien. I think this mix is inherently unstable, and very prone to degenerating into sentimentality (which for me is the general tone of the Forgotten Realms and of Dragonlance).</blockquote>

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