Strange that he refused to ride in a car, or hated machinery. I didn't know this. This is typical of commune-loving hippy types who want to regress rather than progress.
Remember, Pol Pot from Cambodia who forced everyone out of the city to go "back to nature". Not a nice philosophy to not believe in human progress.
Don't mind that he liked fields, trees, etc.
Strange that he refused to ride in a car, or hated machinery. I didn't know this. This is typical of commune-loving hippy types who want to regress rather than progress.
Remember, Pol Pot from Cambodia who forced everyone out of the city to go "back to nature". Not a nice philosophy to not believe in human progress.
Whoah, there. Not so fast. The Bolsheviks in the USSR and the Communists in China both believed in human progress, and in technology, and they killed a lot more people than Pol Pot did.
In any case, Tolkien's conservatism was that of the classic belief in a golden age: the very opposite of the idea of progress, in that the further one got from the golden age, the more degraded and corrupt the age became...and there was no going back to the golden age (unlike Pol Pot, who, like the other communists, did believe one could create, or "return", to a golden age). Tolkien's conservative pessimism should never be compared to a Pol Pot; it is the very opposite of any kind of utopianism.
Moreover, Tolkien was against not just modernity but against force and tyranny in general (which he associated with modernity). He was not about to force anyone to give up technology; as he puts it somewhere in the Two Towers, where Gandalf and Treebeard are discussing Saruman: Treebeard says that he feels sorry for any caged thing, and might act in a similar way to Saruman if his own forest home had been destroyed and he was trapped, to which Gandalf responds that Treebeard had never plotted to cover the earth with his forests and to choke off all other kinds of life.
That's pretty much Tolkien's worldview: it is not just that he does not care for the technology, but that he dislikes the modern tendency to push it into all realms of life and to transform the entire world into it's own image, no matter who objects and no matter how it (modernity) tends to smother all differences and to turn the world into a single, vast, homogenous sameness.
Comparing this kind of resistance to modernity to Pol Pot is a prime example of what is wrong with progress-worshipping modern "conservatism".