Tweet
I'm writing an essay on HP, and I'd appreciate (constructive) criticisms from the folks here.
Here's the rough outline (there's a last section which I am yet to add).
1)Fundamentally unjust world
- Skill is a function of inheritance
- The tragedy of squibs
- The dehumanisation of the larger, non-magical world and its inhabitants
- A closed world
- A doomed and unsustainable world
- Substantiation of prejudices; the pure-bloods really are superior
2)Voldemort
- Completely self-made
- Passionately curious
- Immensely resourceful and hard-working, to escape his background
- Shown to be an inevitable product of his circumstances; leaving no escape possible to others similarly situated
- Possesses all the characteristics of a true hero
3)Harry
- Has greatness thrust upon him; did not choose his role
- Never faces any truly complex or unsolvable moral dilemma
- Reacts instinctively, not consciously
- No real ascendancy to herohood
4)Escapism, “comfortableness”, and allure of the books and their world
- A completely average protagonist
- An expectedly and conveniently bigoted conservative order of ethnically pure-blooded people
- No “difficult” ideas
- No real moral ambiguities or moral dilemmas
- No insurmountable problems or constraints in the world; anything may be revealed to be possible; too many new concepts as deus-ex-machinas
5)The message being sent out
6)The consequences of having an entire generation wean themselves on this as an introduction to literature
- The view of literature as escapism
- No real expectation of realism in literature
- An inability to comprehend reality
- An unwillingness to tackle anything harder (than light fantasy)
- A belief in revelatory rescues at the last moment
I'd request people not to comment on the parts which haven't been posted yet - this outline was just to keep your interest, and is intelligible only to me as a rough note.
Here's the part I've completed so far:
On Harry Potter and His World
1) A Fundamentally unjust world
A fundamentally unjust world is not one in which injustice exists, but in which there is no hope of justice at all. Harry Potter's world is one such. There are many reasons to make a statement of this nature, of which we shall examine the most obvious.
Skill as an inheritance
The books state that there was once a time when the magical community was completely closed, and consisted entirely of pure-bloods. The people of the non-magical community (called Muggles by the author) did not possess magical ability of any sort, and could not acquire it. Magical ability was a genetic trait, inherited by a few, and this genetic inheritance was closely guarded until it became obvious that the magical community could no longer sustain itself without mixing their bloodlines with the larger, non-magical world.
Within the magical community, a person's magical ability is directly proportional to how much magical blood they have inherited. The higher the amount of magical blood, the better wizard a person is likely to make (on average).
This is fundamentally unjust, because in reality, skills and abilities are acquired and honed by practice and exercise. This is not reflected in the world of the books. A person with little magical ability is innately disadvantaged over one with pure blood. This leads us to our logical next point.
The tragedy of the squibs
Most people, when they read the books and come across the reference to squibs, are inclined to laugh them off. But their tragedy is a deep one, and haunting and terrifying if examined closely.
Consider for a minute the situation you would find yourself in if you were born as a squib in the magical world of Harry Potter. You would be treated as an outcast by the magical community, and given only the most trivial of jobs, constantly jeered at, and you would have no hope of bettering your lot (because, as we have seen, ability corresponds to your blood, not your effort or talent). You would not fully belong to either of the two worlds described in the books. You would not fit into the world of muggles, because you would know about the magical world, and for you it would be a haunting omnipresence. You would never be able to fit fully into the magical world, because you did not share in their most basic of abilities.
What compounds this tragedy is the way these squibs are portrayed in the books. Instead of bringing out their human side, they are made objects of scorn and ridicule. Filch is an excellent example. The thought of being in a situation so devoid of hope is horrifying, yet very few people consider it when they read about squibs, because of the comic relief they are supposed to provide.
The world of Harry Potter can thus be said to be fundamentally unjust to the squibs.
The dehumanisation of the larger, non-magical world and its inhabitants
When there exists in a society a closed group of people who have power far exceeding what the wider society can possess, and when the source of this power is genetic and open only to members of the said group, there exists a tendency to dehumanise the inhabitants of the wider society, and dismiss as trivial its accomplishments.
To elaborate – given the nature of magic in the Potterverse, all human technical accomplishment amounts to nothing, because no matter how advanced human technology based on the empirical laws of this universe may become, it simply refuses to work when confronted with too much magic. This is an inherently unstable situation, because there is no barrier which stops this small group from exercising its disproportionate power and even enslaving the society it lives in, if it so wishes. It is a miracle, in fact, that such a two-tier system (of an all-controlling magical elite and a muggle populace) has not been established as yet, given that, according to the books, the magical people have existed as a secret subculture within normal human society as long as known human history.
In case such a system were to be established, there would be no hope for the non-magical people either, because of the nature of the transmission of magical ability. A lucky few would be “inducted” into the magical elite, by marriage, whose offspring would then be included within the elite to avoid magical traits from spilling over into the general population.
The system described in the books is fundamentally unjust in this regard because the situation described in inherently unstable. A group with so much power will, at some point, choose to exercise it, and the results of that would be the setting up of a system as described above. Non-magical humans would occupy a position as bad as, or maybe worse than, that of house elves.
And once set up, such a system would be impossible to break out of. The caste system in India was breakable precisely because the upper castes were not inherently superior. Racism can be eradicated only because the races are in fact equal. If that were not so – if Brahmins were more intelligent, Kshatriyas stronger and more able administrators, and so on, or if some races were actually better than some others – then racism and casteism could never have been eradicated, because they would not have been based on a false premise.
A meaningful comparison can be drawn here between how this issue is treated in a related series of books. In Samit Basu's “GameWorld Trilogy”, there are many races, of which there are four primary humanoid ones – the humans, the Ravians, the Rakshasas, the and Vanars. The story is set on a world titled the “GameWorld”. The Ravians are a race of humanoid beings, with the same external physical appearance as humans, who have mastered the technology of travelling between world, and have dreams of building an empire spanning many worlds. The Rakshasas are the magical humanoid beings who are native to the GameWorld, and comparable in power to the Ravians. They naturally oppose the entry of the Ravians into their world. As is the nature of all imperialists, the Ravians view themselves as superior – and the important thing to note is that they really are superior to normal humans in nearly every way, in terms of sheer physical and magical ability – the same way magical characters are superior to humans in every ability in the Potterverse.
Basu has left the morality of the Ravians' sense of superiority and their ruthlessness in dealing with opposition from inferior races a moral ambiguity for the reader to resolve. He has also portrayed the disparity between the humans and Ravians in very stark terms. Whether the Ravians are justified in considering themselves superior (when in reality they actually are), and treating other races as inferiors (when dealing with humans or Vanars or Asurs) or evil (when they become comparable in power to the Ravians, as the Rakshasas are), is a question open for debate. The sincerity of the Ravians in believing themselves a noble and exalted race is also shown – they are not motivated simply by greed, they genuinely believe that they are on a civilising mission.
Even in the GameWorld, the humans who have magical abilities have them only due to their being partly descended from Rakshasas. That is why they can never stand up in power to a full-fledged and powerful Rakshasa or Ravian. But this fact is taken for granted, and accepted as part of how the world works.
The Rakshasas' treatment of humans is also of interest. When some human empire proposes an alliance with them, the stance of the Rakshasas is one of bemusement – they regard such a proposal as humans would regard an alliance with cattle. Humans do not register on their radar at all, until cooperation becomes necessary to ward off the Ravians.
A closed world
The world of the books is essentially a closed one.
The disproportionate power exercised by the magical community over the wider society of muggles is such that the cultural currents affecting the wider society would likely not have much of an effect on the magical subculture, and the shared sense of being a small magical elite among non-magical people would be a sense of bonding strong enough to overcome cultural differences between wizards of differing cultures (the commonalities would far outweigh the differences – spells do not change between cultures, after all), thus making lasting change from within arising due to cultural differences also a very remote possibility.
This closedness would adversely affect the magical community, retarding its growth and progress – no lasting change would be possible from within or without.
A doomed and unsustainable world
The first and most obvious dystopian scenario (of a master/slave relationship being developed between magical and non-magical people) having been denied to us by the author (it hasn't happened yet in the books, so we have to accept that it hasn't happened yet, even though it should have happened long ago), there comes up the next dystopian scenario – a world where magic is accepted, but the overwhelming majority of people in the world are squibs or have very little magical ability in them, due to the dilution of the magical bloodlines as they mingle with the non-magical people.
Such mingling is inevitable, because of the nature of the magical world, and the way in which intermarriage between magical and non-magical people has been given sanction by the magical community. A stage will arise when there will be a small elite who will have the maximum magical ability, a larger number of people who have some magical ability, and the general population, who are all squibs.
In the course of time, this will harden – the people with the most magical ability will stop intermarrying with others, and three rungs will form – the magical elite, the semi-magical people, with very little ability, and the squibs.
No matter which way you look at it, the creation of a tiered society is inevitable in the Potterverse.
There is, however, a third possibility, which may occur if Voldemort (or his ideological successor) wins out – that the non-magical population will be exterminated as inferior, and only the magical community will be left, and the world will finally be “pure”.
Substantiation of prejudices – the pure-bloods are superior in fact
The reason that systems of discrimination based on inherited characteristics cannot last in human society after the coming of reformations in social and religious systems is because the premise of any such policy of discrimination – that some group is genetically superior to another – is false. Blacks are not innately inferior, Jews are not innately money-grubbing, untouchables are not inherently unclean, and therefore discriminating or prejudging them based on these stereotypes is wrong. However, what if they were?
This is a central question. What if all the stereotypes I provided turned out to be true? Would discrimination be justifiable them? And this is a question the Potterverse resolutely refuses to tackle. Discrimination is accepted as bad without question. But according to the books themselves, the magical ability of a person corresponds, on average, with the amount of magical blood he has. Why, then, is discrimination based on the purity of blood taboo? It makes sense, given the environment of the books – in their case, blood is, in fact, equivalent to merit.
A purely meritocratic system being unjust is the mark of an unjust world. The Potterverse substantiates prejudice, gives it the real backing necessary to make it viable and even just, and still denies it. This is contradictory and the Potterverse it itself unjust.
Second part coming up soon!
EDIT 01: The next part of the essay is up! Find it here.
EDIT 02: The third part is up. Find it here.
EDIT 03: The fourth part is up. Find it here.
Here's the rough outline (there's a last section which I am yet to add).
1)Fundamentally unjust world
- Skill is a function of inheritance
- The tragedy of squibs
- The dehumanisation of the larger, non-magical world and its inhabitants
- A closed world
- A doomed and unsustainable world
- Substantiation of prejudices; the pure-bloods really are superior
2)Voldemort
- Completely self-made
- Passionately curious
- Immensely resourceful and hard-working, to escape his background
- Shown to be an inevitable product of his circumstances; leaving no escape possible to others similarly situated
- Possesses all the characteristics of a true hero
3)Harry
- Has greatness thrust upon him; did not choose his role
- Never faces any truly complex or unsolvable moral dilemma
- Reacts instinctively, not consciously
- No real ascendancy to herohood
4)Escapism, “comfortableness”, and allure of the books and their world
- A completely average protagonist
- An expectedly and conveniently bigoted conservative order of ethnically pure-blooded people
- No “difficult” ideas
- No real moral ambiguities or moral dilemmas
- No insurmountable problems or constraints in the world; anything may be revealed to be possible; too many new concepts as deus-ex-machinas
5)The message being sent out
6)The consequences of having an entire generation wean themselves on this as an introduction to literature
- The view of literature as escapism
- No real expectation of realism in literature
- An inability to comprehend reality
- An unwillingness to tackle anything harder (than light fantasy)
- A belief in revelatory rescues at the last moment
Here's the part I've completed so far:
On Harry Potter and His World
1) A Fundamentally unjust world
A fundamentally unjust world is not one in which injustice exists, but in which there is no hope of justice at all. Harry Potter's world is one such. There are many reasons to make a statement of this nature, of which we shall examine the most obvious.
Skill as an inheritance
The books state that there was once a time when the magical community was completely closed, and consisted entirely of pure-bloods. The people of the non-magical community (called Muggles by the author) did not possess magical ability of any sort, and could not acquire it. Magical ability was a genetic trait, inherited by a few, and this genetic inheritance was closely guarded until it became obvious that the magical community could no longer sustain itself without mixing their bloodlines with the larger, non-magical world.
Within the magical community, a person's magical ability is directly proportional to how much magical blood they have inherited. The higher the amount of magical blood, the better wizard a person is likely to make (on average).
This is fundamentally unjust, because in reality, skills and abilities are acquired and honed by practice and exercise. This is not reflected in the world of the books. A person with little magical ability is innately disadvantaged over one with pure blood. This leads us to our logical next point.
The tragedy of the squibs
Most people, when they read the books and come across the reference to squibs, are inclined to laugh them off. But their tragedy is a deep one, and haunting and terrifying if examined closely.
Consider for a minute the situation you would find yourself in if you were born as a squib in the magical world of Harry Potter. You would be treated as an outcast by the magical community, and given only the most trivial of jobs, constantly jeered at, and you would have no hope of bettering your lot (because, as we have seen, ability corresponds to your blood, not your effort or talent). You would not fully belong to either of the two worlds described in the books. You would not fit into the world of muggles, because you would know about the magical world, and for you it would be a haunting omnipresence. You would never be able to fit fully into the magical world, because you did not share in their most basic of abilities.
What compounds this tragedy is the way these squibs are portrayed in the books. Instead of bringing out their human side, they are made objects of scorn and ridicule. Filch is an excellent example. The thought of being in a situation so devoid of hope is horrifying, yet very few people consider it when they read about squibs, because of the comic relief they are supposed to provide.
The world of Harry Potter can thus be said to be fundamentally unjust to the squibs.
The dehumanisation of the larger, non-magical world and its inhabitants
When there exists in a society a closed group of people who have power far exceeding what the wider society can possess, and when the source of this power is genetic and open only to members of the said group, there exists a tendency to dehumanise the inhabitants of the wider society, and dismiss as trivial its accomplishments.
To elaborate – given the nature of magic in the Potterverse, all human technical accomplishment amounts to nothing, because no matter how advanced human technology based on the empirical laws of this universe may become, it simply refuses to work when confronted with too much magic. This is an inherently unstable situation, because there is no barrier which stops this small group from exercising its disproportionate power and even enslaving the society it lives in, if it so wishes. It is a miracle, in fact, that such a two-tier system (of an all-controlling magical elite and a muggle populace) has not been established as yet, given that, according to the books, the magical people have existed as a secret subculture within normal human society as long as known human history.
In case such a system were to be established, there would be no hope for the non-magical people either, because of the nature of the transmission of magical ability. A lucky few would be “inducted” into the magical elite, by marriage, whose offspring would then be included within the elite to avoid magical traits from spilling over into the general population.
The system described in the books is fundamentally unjust in this regard because the situation described in inherently unstable. A group with so much power will, at some point, choose to exercise it, and the results of that would be the setting up of a system as described above. Non-magical humans would occupy a position as bad as, or maybe worse than, that of house elves.
And once set up, such a system would be impossible to break out of. The caste system in India was breakable precisely because the upper castes were not inherently superior. Racism can be eradicated only because the races are in fact equal. If that were not so – if Brahmins were more intelligent, Kshatriyas stronger and more able administrators, and so on, or if some races were actually better than some others – then racism and casteism could never have been eradicated, because they would not have been based on a false premise.
A meaningful comparison can be drawn here between how this issue is treated in a related series of books. In Samit Basu's “GameWorld Trilogy”, there are many races, of which there are four primary humanoid ones – the humans, the Ravians, the Rakshasas, the and Vanars. The story is set on a world titled the “GameWorld”. The Ravians are a race of humanoid beings, with the same external physical appearance as humans, who have mastered the technology of travelling between world, and have dreams of building an empire spanning many worlds. The Rakshasas are the magical humanoid beings who are native to the GameWorld, and comparable in power to the Ravians. They naturally oppose the entry of the Ravians into their world. As is the nature of all imperialists, the Ravians view themselves as superior – and the important thing to note is that they really are superior to normal humans in nearly every way, in terms of sheer physical and magical ability – the same way magical characters are superior to humans in every ability in the Potterverse.
Basu has left the morality of the Ravians' sense of superiority and their ruthlessness in dealing with opposition from inferior races a moral ambiguity for the reader to resolve. He has also portrayed the disparity between the humans and Ravians in very stark terms. Whether the Ravians are justified in considering themselves superior (when in reality they actually are), and treating other races as inferiors (when dealing with humans or Vanars or Asurs) or evil (when they become comparable in power to the Ravians, as the Rakshasas are), is a question open for debate. The sincerity of the Ravians in believing themselves a noble and exalted race is also shown – they are not motivated simply by greed, they genuinely believe that they are on a civilising mission.
Even in the GameWorld, the humans who have magical abilities have them only due to their being partly descended from Rakshasas. That is why they can never stand up in power to a full-fledged and powerful Rakshasa or Ravian. But this fact is taken for granted, and accepted as part of how the world works.
The Rakshasas' treatment of humans is also of interest. When some human empire proposes an alliance with them, the stance of the Rakshasas is one of bemusement – they regard such a proposal as humans would regard an alliance with cattle. Humans do not register on their radar at all, until cooperation becomes necessary to ward off the Ravians.
A closed world
The world of the books is essentially a closed one.
The disproportionate power exercised by the magical community over the wider society of muggles is such that the cultural currents affecting the wider society would likely not have much of an effect on the magical subculture, and the shared sense of being a small magical elite among non-magical people would be a sense of bonding strong enough to overcome cultural differences between wizards of differing cultures (the commonalities would far outweigh the differences – spells do not change between cultures, after all), thus making lasting change from within arising due to cultural differences also a very remote possibility.
This closedness would adversely affect the magical community, retarding its growth and progress – no lasting change would be possible from within or without.
A doomed and unsustainable world
The first and most obvious dystopian scenario (of a master/slave relationship being developed between magical and non-magical people) having been denied to us by the author (it hasn't happened yet in the books, so we have to accept that it hasn't happened yet, even though it should have happened long ago), there comes up the next dystopian scenario – a world where magic is accepted, but the overwhelming majority of people in the world are squibs or have very little magical ability in them, due to the dilution of the magical bloodlines as they mingle with the non-magical people.
Such mingling is inevitable, because of the nature of the magical world, and the way in which intermarriage between magical and non-magical people has been given sanction by the magical community. A stage will arise when there will be a small elite who will have the maximum magical ability, a larger number of people who have some magical ability, and the general population, who are all squibs.
In the course of time, this will harden – the people with the most magical ability will stop intermarrying with others, and three rungs will form – the magical elite, the semi-magical people, with very little ability, and the squibs.
No matter which way you look at it, the creation of a tiered society is inevitable in the Potterverse.
There is, however, a third possibility, which may occur if Voldemort (or his ideological successor) wins out – that the non-magical population will be exterminated as inferior, and only the magical community will be left, and the world will finally be “pure”.
Substantiation of prejudices – the pure-bloods are superior in fact
The reason that systems of discrimination based on inherited characteristics cannot last in human society after the coming of reformations in social and religious systems is because the premise of any such policy of discrimination – that some group is genetically superior to another – is false. Blacks are not innately inferior, Jews are not innately money-grubbing, untouchables are not inherently unclean, and therefore discriminating or prejudging them based on these stereotypes is wrong. However, what if they were?
This is a central question. What if all the stereotypes I provided turned out to be true? Would discrimination be justifiable them? And this is a question the Potterverse resolutely refuses to tackle. Discrimination is accepted as bad without question. But according to the books themselves, the magical ability of a person corresponds, on average, with the amount of magical blood he has. Why, then, is discrimination based on the purity of blood taboo? It makes sense, given the environment of the books – in their case, blood is, in fact, equivalent to merit.
A purely meritocratic system being unjust is the mark of an unjust world. The Potterverse substantiates prejudice, gives it the real backing necessary to make it viable and even just, and still denies it. This is contradictory and the Potterverse it itself unjust.
EDIT 01: The next part of the essay is up! Find it here.
EDIT 02: The third part is up. Find it here.
EDIT 03: The fourth part is up. Find it here.
Comment