No, I think Tolkien is a pessimist. He has a very European Christian way of looking at the world. Everything old was greater and more impressive than the present. As time passes, magic fades from the world. The elves go away, the hobbits disappear. The age of Men comes. Small minded, selfish creatures. Tolkien told a story in which everything gets worse over time, because that's how Europeans felt about Rome for a thousand years.

Where Tolkien imagined a better past, Banks imagined a better future. That we would one day outgrow our current prejudices and ingorances, and move on to entirely new controversies in which both sides are saintly compared to those that exist today. Banks writes some of the most hopeful fiction I've ever read. It is his anarchism that allows him to imagine such a progressive society. Conservatives cannot imagine anything socially better than they have lived, only physically better.