Home >> History, Ideology & Science >> Political Theory  Email  Print The Politics And Philosophy Of Harry Potter Prof. Barry Rubin - 8/25/2007 Since the Harry Potter series is so wildly and universally popular it is surprising that there has not been more examination of its sociology and cultural politics. It is rather out of step with the unfortunate times through which we are now passing. All the better for Harry Potter and his friends; all the worse for us.
None of the following in any way is intended to suggest that Joanne Kathleen Rowling consciously set out to make the points mentioned below or even agrees with them. But this article draws on the text of the book based on a simple traditional analysis to understand what the text actually says rather than an imaginative imposed “deconstruction” to distort it.
In this spirit, Harry Potter is in fact a typical example of traditional liberal—at least as it has been historically defined—democratic pluralism, which I happen to think is the best system and which is preferred today by both real liberals and conservatives.
It is precisely the standard liberalism of the 1950s to 1990s before the current high water mark of leftist encroachment on liberalism. Equally, it is the approach gradually endorsed by conservatives today who perhaps at the beginning were reluctant to accept that view but have ultimately long since done so, despite the effort of contemporary leftists to brand them as some type of fascist, racist, imperialist group.
What the book does, then, and which is a large element of its success, is to present a clear, historic standard culture—the traditional British one—as its norm while simultaneously showing a society in which those of other backgrounds, including races, are welcome and treated equally. It presents equality of genders as the proper order of things without turning this into an ideological obsession. It recognizes the need for protection of citizens and societies but also has a great scepticism of government. This society values freedom of speech and inquiry alongside respect for tradition but also includes openness toward innovation. The restriction of rights by governments in the name of an imposed proper political line (political correctness) is angrily rejected. Societies based on these principles have been the most successful in world history by just about every measurement.
The fact that there is a single “national” culture and standard—a dominant monoculture—goes hand in hand with a total freedom for subcultures. What the citizens of the British “wizard community,” as it is called in the book, do on their own time is their own business. This society includes South Asian, Afro-Caribbean, and Chinese people who play by the same social rules as everyone else.
Of course, the books cover themselves on this point by two aspects in their plot. First, the villains are those obsessed with “pure blood,” that is an ancestry unmixed with non-magical (Muggle) people. Several of the most extreme of these magico-fascists are of mixed descent (Voldemort, Snape), a clear reflection of reasonably grounded suspicions that Hitler believed he had or might have had a Jewish ancestor was a basis for his psychotic antisemitism.
Second, the bad guys seem to hate non-human sentient creatures—centaurs, werewolves, and giants—for example. Actually this is somewhat misleading since they do ally with a majority of those in the latter two categories. The racism of the villains is highlighted though it is not completely accurate. They are not averse to crossing such lines in order to win.
The Potter series’ orientation, then, is structured on the great liberal struggle of the age (though of course there were plenty of conservatives in foxholes, too) against fascism in World War Two. In this respect it is like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, parts of which were actually written during the war when the author’s son was serving in the Royal Air Force.
Of equal importance is that the Potter series is a battle for conservation rather than revolution. The characters are fighting to protect their society against revolutionary change rather than to promote it. They are surrounded by those who rationalize surrender but are nonetheless willing to die for the civilization they love. They are courageous in identifying evil in the face of obfuscation and rationalization, despite being vilified in the media and by government.
Because Potter seeks to warn of a threat from a violent evil movement he is branded a murderer, lunatic, and arrogant attention-seeker. Those who do nothing and proclaim threats are imaginary are smugly self-congratulating. They control the mainstream media, law enforcement, and eventually the educational system, excluding alternative opinions. If any of this sounds familiar, well that is for your interpretation.
As a literary work, of course, the Potter series can easily be interpreted in many ways, with readers free to insert who they wish as the villain. Still, there are certain elements that lend themselves most easily as parallels to the contemporary democratic movement in the West in its simultaneous struggle against the obfuscation of existing authoritarian threats and those threats themselves. This is especially true of the refusal of the government and media to face the danger, pretending it does not exist and advocating appeasement. Perhaps the best instance for pointing that out is the Ministry of Magic’s refusal (in book 5) to let students learn how to defend themselves from evil magic. The textbook it endorses insists that they only employ defensive measures when attacked by the bad guys, an irresistible satire on political correctness gone mental (as Ron Weasley would probably put it).
One factor that simplifies Rowling’s problems in managing the current debates is the lack of religion in the wizard community. This is a delicate matter for her. After all, witches were historically seen in modern-day religions as hostile elements (in medieval Christianity as being in league with the devil). In glorifying witchcraft she has to worry whether contemporary Christians would see the series as antagonistic and campaign against it. Still, this issue seems to have been avoided by her.
Of course, given the high level of secularism in Western society today many readers will not even notice this aspect, simply taking for granted the absence of religion. Equally, by not having religion practiced by the wizards she also avoids all sorts of problems. Does Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft permit Muslim students to leave class in order to pray? Are there chapels and other places of worship on campus? These kinds of knotty issues do not enter into the series.
Yet there is one way in which she brings in religion and it is a very revealing example. Christmas is officially celebrated at Hogwarts as a major holiday. There are no religious manifestations to this celebration (as is often true in contemporary Britain and other Western societies) but the event is nonetheless still there. This could be viewed as a bow to Christian sensibilities. Still, it is more likely the expression of an intertwining between Christmas (and by extension other elements of Christian thinking and worldview) and British society. Rowling probably simply sees this as so integrated into national culture as to be more a matter of “Britishness” than of religion. Such a concept may not survive the multicultural axe.
While a digression, it is worth noting here that the concept of “British” is what a lot of contemporary philosophical idealist thinkers (that is not intended as a compliment) call a “construction.” Its “modern” origin has been credited to King James I, a Scot by birth as Rowling is by residence, who moved from the Scottish to the British throne when England ran out of Tudors. The ancient Britons had been overrun first by the Romans, then by the Anglo-Saxons, and finally by the Normans. Yet “Britain” was a good way of subsuming differences among the Scots, Welsh, Irish, and English. Three hundred years later all of these groups retain their own identity up to a point within a single British culture. This, too, is a great triumph for “monocultural” pluralism in successfully knitting together different groups in a successful nation without suppressing any of them.
But back to Rowling. The Potter books are actually more restrictive than liberal pluralism, much less radical multiculturalism. All the students wear standard clothing (though the Patil sisters wear saris for the equivalent of the prom), eat standard British food (no pastas or curries in the Hogwarts dining room), and so on. By the multicultural standard applied to everything else, the Potter series could be attacked and called all sorts of names, presumably if it were not so popular and the would-be censors—as they always do--lacked imagination.
Remarkably, there are no foreign languages or cultures studied at Hogwarts. The number of non-British or non-white students is few. Inasmuch as it is imaginary, it is also a nostalgic Britain as it was in the past rather than it is today. Nevertheless, the Potter series also accepts the democratic liberal pluralist sense of the larger world. While there are cute references to foreign magical communities they are each an expression of traditional national cultures and histories taken from their own distinct folklore and mythology. Thus, for example, the Irish mascot is the leprechaun. It is thus a world built on clear national cultures, each treated with respect (with a bit of gentle British making fun of the French included), but every one an entity in itself. These “nations” do not act in an aggressive manner toward each other (relations are handled by a bureau of magical cooperation) but their citizens unapologetically show pride and confidence in their own national traditions, too.
Within the British magical community there is also an “other” (once again to use the post-modern terminology) but this is a diversity of different species which is legitimized since one cannot expect goblins, centaurs, or mainstream giants to adhere to the same culture as humans. Humans are in control but also restrain themselves, from laws they have made, from exploiting other intelligent life forms. While discrimination is decried, political correctness is equally satirized by Hermione’s efforts to help house elves accept her definition of freedom even though they do not want to do so.
Liberal pluralism is also championed by supporting individual rights among non-standard human “minorities” to self-expression: a half-giant’s (Hagard’s) right to join human society, a centaur (Firenze, who is cast out by his own tribe because he dares “collaborate” with humans) or a werewolf’s (Lupin’s) right to teach. In contrast, one could expect multiculturalists to justify the authority’s (Ministry of Magic) opposing this wish to acculturate into mainstream society. An authentic werewolf, one can almost hear them saying, should be out running around in the forest biting people rather than denying his true identity to join a human political organization (the Order of the Phoenix), take a potion to stop his transformation (no doubt an Uncle Tom centaur), and teach Defense Against the Dark Arts. These plot points reject the anti-individual rights’ multicultural demand that each group of immigrants reject the authority of the dominant culture to remain exactly as they have always been.
What we see in the Potter series—and which makes so many people love the novels—is the glory of a strong culture with time-tested clear standards and ideas that it educates citizens to treasure. Individuals have a right to choose; sub-cultures have a right to their own ways within the broader context. Each country has its own mainstream culture and style. Diversity is welcome but is not the ultimate value.
One of many ironies of the opposing view is that the radical vision of multiculturalism embodies the worst form of globalization advocated by those who are horrified by this phenomenon. After all, globalization supposedly projects the existence of one big world culture with many local variations, while multiculturalism proposes the creation of many “different” cultures which are actually mere mirror images of each other in that they each have the same mix of “diversity.”
If all Western countries are all going to be equal mixes of African, Asian, European, Middle Eastern ways, there would be no real differences among them. The variety of the past would be suppressed and several hundred existing national and sub-national cultures would be dissolved into one basic mixture repeated endlessly, each with roughly the same proportions of Chinese, African, and other ingredients.
Of course, though this point is never explicitly considered, the advocates of this system do not intend to see them applied to Third World countries which would remain unchanged in this respect. China and Saudi Arabia, for example, would still retain distinctive traditional identities. Only Western societies would lose theirs. And here is another gigantic irony: multiculturalists who say they reject any idea that Western civilization is superior are actually implicitly claiming that it will be better than these “backward” traditionally monoculturally national ones. Countries following this pattern would be at a higher stage than “merely” national ones like Argentina, Egypt, India or China. After all, if they have their way the countries revolutionized by radical multiculturalism would embody the ultimate and superior “good” of diversity based on having no central culture but merely being a collection of them.
Yet what if multiculturalism turns out well, an outcome in which immigrants are acculturated in the public sphere but can still keep some distinctiveness in their private lives while living under a single law that applies to everyone? In other words, what if multiculturalism means that the historic dominant culture remains in place however supplemented by other cultures from immigrant groups? Let’s call this moderate multiculturalism as merely another name for democratic pluralism.
If this is what is going to happen the result would be another, though happier, irony. For then all these newly improved, historically monocultural countries would look increasingly like a role model they profess to dislike, the original mixing bowl nation where democratic pluralism reigns: the United States of America. Think about that: universal multiculturalism, more than globalization, would produce variant-flavored knock-offs of what the designer-original America has done with its immigrants.
In effect, this is what Rowling has done for her version of Britain. Literature, of course, has many values, including promoting the readers’ happiness, understanding, and education. A great literary work contains truths about people, life, and society. So is it with the Harry Potter series. Oh, and by the way, great literary works are almost always based on a great cultural identity and tradition. Sometimes, among the best interpreters are immigrants and minority groups who have an original perspective on that society. But this is only true if they in the main accept its rules and ideas.
That is one more reason why what might be called national democratic pluralism (and Western civilization in general) is so worth preserving against the Lord—and Ayatollah—Voldemorts of the world and their little helpers.
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