I'm arguing that there is nothing inherent about conservatism that inhibits the arts, and I brought those writers up as an example. I think the reason the arts are dominated by leftism is quite simply tribalism and nepotism.
I 100% agree I think this is the real reason. You can especially see this with book publishing right now where it's very hard to become a published author unless you fill a diversity quota checkbox. This is the main reason ex Bioware developers are begging for jobs on Bluesky because the more they signal their allegiance to the club the more likely it is they'll find jobs at leftist aligned companies.
Tolkien you know btw was an academic, and someone deeply interested in language.
Find me a conservative today that doodles little art pieces while in the trenches/in uniform, or who looks at modern America and thinks “what this needs is it’s own mythology”.
I think you're misunderstanding why Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings. The primary reason he spent 15 years writing the book and actually finished it was because of his son. He wrote the Hobbit as a bed time story for his son, and wrote The Lord of the Rings as a book to motivate his son while he was at war. While he had other esoteric motivations this was the primary reason he wrote the book.
Exception that proves the rule.
Tolkien is one of the most influential authors of the 20th century and almost singlehandedly invented a genre that is one of the most popular in existence to this day. And he wrote the Lord of the Rings for his son, expressed he made it a story with Catholic themes unconsciously and it's filled with themes inspired by how he felt seeing the UK become less pastoral overtime. It's unquestionably a conservative work. Tolkien isn't the exception it's more accurate to say he's the rule and everything else is just a perversion.
Modern conservatives literally degrade and dismiss Tolkien’s academic pursuits(literature, history, linguistics) all the time “that’s college liberal clap trap, go into business or a trade school”.
In Tolkien's day going to college wasn't yet a scam.
They are good people, but they tend to stick to the familiar, they tend to be disdainful of curiosity and abstract pursuits and they tend to have relatively simplistic mental frames for understanding people and the world in general.
"I'm a conservative but conservatives are simple minded and retarded"
"Whaaat why is this opinion so controversial?"
Obviously not 100% of them but in general the conservative mind leans towards the concrete, the practical, black and white, and the road more traveled.
These things are completely unrelated towards if someone is artistically minded or not. It's actually just buying into modern stereotypes surrounding artists to suggest the idea that preferring minorities get welfare = being an artist.
1 : Conservatives, especially american ones, are less creative and focus more on religion. You can find a Retvrn to Tradition band in Europe singing about Crusades or Vikings dime a dozen, with 100 youtube followers.
Religion is one of the most powerful motivators in human history for making art. If you consider architecture art, cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. Notre Dame took 182 years to build. It motivated people to work on something that they knew their grandchildren wouldn't see.
3 : Youth don't read nor do they write anything that isn't fuji fanfics. So young creative rightists won't be in art school, they'll be making le based soyaks.
Reading does not preclude people from creating artwork. The majority of people who built Notre Dame were illiterate. The main reason that we don't commonly associate conservatives with making artwork is entirely because the vast majority of artwork people actually see right now is massively funded corporate projects. Which are staffed by nepotistic leftists.
One of the things associated with openness is creativity and 'art'. This doesn't mean all liberals are creative, as I said the big 5 traits can be broken down further, but it does mean the very trait that makes you a liberal and the trait that makes you creative are the same, so the proportion of liberals who are creative is higher.
But as noted conservatives can be high in openness too, and so are fully capable of being creative - but the proportion is lower, and social stigma - people who are low in openness place low value on creativity so most people in a conservative person's social circle may look down on someone attempting it, lowering the numbers even more.
I personally think this is academic nonsense similar to Myers Briggs. Creative thinking is just finding solutions to problems. From an entirely metatextual view, that is all it is. It is why we associate clever solutions to issues as thinking creatively. And how one represents that is entirely dependent on an individual by individual basis. I wouldn't be surprised if you'd find better data correlating interest in art with IQ. Fun fact for many people the main reason they started learning to make art was just to alleviate boredom.
To use an example of a right wing artist using artwork to express his feelings towards the world: Steve Ditko.
The idea that creativity is tied to openness and being rigid/inflexible to change is a quality not seen in artists is just wrong. Auteurs are often associated with just that same personality trait. Steve Ditko spent 20 years making essentially the same comic over and over again with Mr. A after he stopped making Spiderman.
Lovecraft arguably had "liberal" views, while if you ignored his social and religious and economic conservatism, Tolkien, with his loathing of racism and anti-Semitism, could be considered actually "liberal" himself.
From a purely modernistic perspective maybe? The Lord of the Rings has a persistent theme of generations in the past being greater than the modern day. The race of men as they were closer to their creator in time were taller, stronger and lived longer. And overtime they became worse. This is a theme throughout the novel, like the Ents describe how their forests have become worse overtime. The race of elves have long been in decline despite being the dominant race originally. This was an idea that Tolkien himself strongly believed and was most likely inspired by how he thought his home was better when it was mostly countryside.
If being a liberal = "liking jews" then I guess Tolkien isn't a conservative.
