Moral Ambiguities in the Harry Potter Books. Part I.
Utopian/Dystopian Aspects of the Magical World.
Magicians/Muggles and Their Discontents.
“We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”
Albus Dumbledore.
What do you call a society that proclaims all beings are equal and should be free, but then practices slavery and secretly keeps the slaves in a basement? A Dystopia? The Confederate States of America? Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?
Overview and Underview of the Harry Potter books: Looking for meaning and effect.
I love the Harry Potter books. I have read each of them several times (They are addictive). I have listened several times to the recorded reading of the books by Jim Dale (He does a really great job). And I have watched the movies several times (Good productions albeit weak translation of the books into scripts). The books connect wonderfully with young readers and are also appealing to adults. A magical combination. But still open to questioning.
Like many novels, the Potter books operate on a surface level of meaning but also have deeper meanings and effects on readers that are often overlooked. In the case of the Potter books, these meanings point up a darker side of the main characters and the wizarding world. The three institutional foci of the books – the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the anti-Voldemort Order of the Phoenix, and the wizarding world itself – look great from the outside but have morally ambiguous insides.
These ambiguities are seemingly no accident. I think that we readers are expected to ponder the dark sides of these characters and their institutions. That is the point of this essay, Moral Ambiguities in the Harry Potter Books, Part I, that focuses on the institutions and a following essay, Moral Ambiguities in the Harry Potter Books, Part II, that focuses on the characters. The essays ask some questions and examine some aspects of the Potter books that are often overlooked but that are a big part of their messaging. Asking questions, recognizing ambiguities, trying to live with inconsistencies. These make up a large part of the moral of the stories.
A World of Guilt: A Guilty World.
Moral ambiguity in the Potter books starts with the wizarding world itself. It is a world that is founded on a guilty secret and sustained by a packet of lies. The secret is that there is a society of wizards and witches interspersed within the society of the muggles. The wizarding world is in but not of the muggle world, with the result that muggles know nothing about the wizards. And any accidental incursion of wizardry into muggle affairs is covered over by wizards with memory wiping and lies. In turn, wizards know very little about muggles. Wizards have deemed this separation and secrecy to be of dire importance to both wizards and muggles. The rationale has seemingly been that if the existence of the wizarding world was widely known, it would be the ruination of both the magical and the muggle societies.
The magical society would be ruined, wizards seem to think, because if muggles knew that there were wizards amongst them, muggles would be constantly demanding that wizards provide magical solutions to their problems. Wizards would be overwhelmed by an impossible number of insistent demands for magical remedies. And many of these would likely be problems that could not be magically solved anyway, much to the irritation of the muggles.
Knowledge of wizardry would also, the wizards seem to think, ruin muggle society because muggles might conclude that work was not necessary since their magical neighbors could take care of everything with a little mumbo jumbo and the flick of a wand. Muggle institutions, muggle morality, muggle civilization could not continue to exist under these circumstances.
Muggles also had little sense when it came to magic. Whenever, for example, muggles suspected that there were witches around, they would raise a ruckus in their communities and go about murdering people who weren’t witches. The fact was that any genuine witch could easily either avoid persecution with a charm to confound the persecutors or seem to accept the punishment of burning at the stake, pretending to be burned when they really couldn’t be harmed thereby. It was a lot of hullaballoo and harm that did no one any good.
In sum, the wizards have concluded, it was the better part of wisdom to keep their magical society a secret. But it is a guilty secret. Guilty because, as a result, wizards and witches live in a privileged world with benefits they don’t share with ordinary people. They can, for example, use magic to solve their own life-and-death problems, but they cannot help their non-magical neighbors in the same situations. Wizards and witches must stand by and watch their neighbors suffer and die from things they might be able to remedy in a minute.
It would require a massive indifference to the suffering of others for wizards not to feel empathy for the muggles and feel guilty in turn. To my surprise, we do not see much of this empathy and guilt among the wizards in the books, which makes, I think, for a morally ambiguous message. What are we to think about being a privileged person?
The wizards’ situation is not unlike the privileged position of well-to-do members of first-world nations today as compared to poverty-stricken members of third-world countries. Modern technology seems like magic to most of us in any case, first-worlder and third-worlder alike, and for well-off first-worlders to monopolize the medical and other technological wonders of our modern age seems similar to the monopoly of magic by wizards and witches in the Potter books.
The privileged position of both the wizarding community and wealthy first-worlders seems unfair and contrary to the ethical Golden Rule that we should treat others as essentially members of our own family. It is a rule that is at the base of almost every human moral code and that otherwise underlies much of the messaging in the Potter books. In theory, but not always in practice.
Wizards and witches are expected to treat each other as equals on a one-for-all, all-for-one basis. And they are taught at Hogwarts to be sympathetic towards muggles. Sympathetic – feeling sorry for their problems and their inadequacy as muggles – but not empathetic. Not as equals. Magical people clearly feel superior to muggles and frequently make fun of the things that muggles have difficulty with that wizards and witches can do with the wave of a wand.
In the last of the books, Ron Weasley, Harry’s best male friend, boasts to Harry that he passed a muggle driver’s test by confounding the tester, magically befuddling him so that he didn’t notice the mistakes Ron was making. This is a potentially reckless arrogance as we know from an earlier book that Ron is a lousy driver. It’s funny, but what is the message?
This mocking attitude toward muggles’ problems and muggles’ struggles can be seen as a way of avoiding or disposing of guilt feelings that wizards and witches might have when they think about their magical advantages and privileged existence. Do first-world people do the same? Do we?
By the rules of the world that Rowling has established, the elitism of magical people and the secrecy about magical people’s abilities seem to be necessary outcomes of the situation she has created. But there is something about this situation that she seemingly wants us to think about. Because this is not the only way to envision magic and magicians as part of an otherwise ordinary world. It can be done without setting up an elitist hierarchy of magicians, keeping them secret, and giving them a monopoly of the benefits of magic.
Ursula Le Guinn has, for example, done this in several of her books, most particularly in her EarthSea series. In these books, the hero Ged is a young boy who, like Harry Potter, discovers he is a magician and goes off to a school of magic to be trained in taking advantage of the uses and avoiding the abuses of his powers.
Ged lived in what we might categorize as a low-technology medieval society of peasants, craftspeople, merchants, noblemen, and magicians. Magicians were thoroughly integrated into EarthSea society, and were fitted into the social hierarchy based on their skills. Most magicians were in the class of craftspeople and were part of what we might call the middle class. Some low-level magicians were essentially peasants, living with and behaving like peasant farmers. A few of the best magicians acted like nobility and were treated as such.
Unlike the wizards and witches in the Potter books, the magicians in EarthSea had a socially constructive purpose to help ordinary people and ameliorate the problems of everyday life. They enhanced the peasants’ crop yields, encouraged rain in times of drought, aided in the defense against invaders, and helped cure diseases and heal injuries. In Le Guin’ s world, magicians are public servants. Magic is to help others, not yourself.
Although magic was no secret in EarthSea, magicians were expected to keep their methods secret from ordinary people in order to prevent the misuse and abuse of magic by untrained people. Some magicians, nonetheless, went bad and sought to use their skills to gain power or to harm people, similar to Grindelwald and Voldemort in the Potter books. Bad magicians had to be opposed by law-abiding magicians, like those at the EarthSea magicians’ school and like Ged as he grew up.
In different ways, Rowling and Le Guinn raise similar issues about whether and how specially gifted and powerful people can get along with ordinary people and their ordinary society. Le Guinn sets up her magicians within an ordinary society. Rowling sets up her wizards and witches outside of ordinary society. Rowling’s method turns the magical people into a conspiratorial elite, and turns the struggle against Voldemort into a secret war between secret cabals.
In so doing, Rowling implicitly raises questions about whether conspiratorial elitism is a good thing. Muggles were the chief victims of the Death Eaters’ violence. Aside from just informing the muggle Prime Minister about the situation, could and should the wizarding community have alerted and engaged the muggle community in the struggle against Voldemort? Might that have been fairer and more effective?
Warts on Hogwarts: Hostility in the Curriculum and Slaves in the Basement.
One of the things that I like most about the books, and I think the same goes for most Potter fans, is Hogwarts. On its face, Hogwarts looks like a wonderful place that every kid, and most adults, would love to attend. But underneath, literally, it has serious problems. There are house-elf slaves in the basement, bitter competition between students and academic houses, and an academic house, Slytherin, that has historically been the source of almost every bad wizard and is full of unscrupulous teenagers. In sum, although Hogwarts may superficially appear idyllic, like most real institutions it calls for a closer examination and a more complex evaluation.
Hogwarts is a school for children who have been magically identified as having magical abilities. The goal of the school is to train children in how to do magic but also, more importantly, when and how not to do magic. The school is designed to support the primary goal of keeping the wizarding world a secret and ensuring that wizards don’t interfere with muggle society so that muggles, in turn, will have no cause to interfere with the wizarding society.
Hogwarts is on the surface a wonderfully warm and welcoming place for young witches and wizards. The school is full of surprises, virtually alive, and effectively a central character in the books. The place is in many ways an adolescent’s dream. Every meal a feast. Every mess automatically cleaned up. Full of friendly ghosts. Helpful people in pictures. Rooms appearing when you need them. The school is a homey place in which students don’t feel like out-of-place freaks as they often do in muggle society.
But as an educational institution, Hogwarts has many flaws and failures. That it produced Voldemort and the Death Eaters is a prime example of its failures. That Voldemort, then known as Tom Riddle, could have become the Head Boy of the school, the highest position for a male student, is another. Hogwarts is a secret and secretive school in a secret and secretive society in which people often hoard knowledge for their own purposes. And that can be problematical.
Almost no one, for example, seems to know that the arch-villain Voldemort was originally Tom Riddle. Dumbledore knew it but he didn’t tell people. And to the end, Dumbledore swore Harry to secrecy about what they were finding out about Voldemort’s early life. Dumbledore may have done this for strategic reasons that he thought were in pursuance of the greater good, but it was clearly a mistake and much to everyone’s harm in the long run.
The educational problems with Hogwarts begin with the academic organization of the school. Students are divided into four academic houses based on their intellectual orientations and social inclinations. Organizing the school this way was a compromise among the school’s four founders who had different ideas about what kind of student should get a magical education.
Gryffindors are chosen for courage and fortitude. Ravenclaws for acuity and wisdom. Hufflepuffs for caring and humility. Slytherins for cleverness and ambition. This sort of organization into houses was common among English schools from the Middle Ages when Hogwarts was supposedly founded. But it results in a truncated official curriculum and a hidden curriculum of hostility. And it is not considered good educational practice among muggles today.
The official curriculum ends up reinforcing students’ existing inclinations and largely neglecting students’ shortcomings in other areas. Each of the four inclinations can be a good thing if they are promoted together. Promoted separately, however, they make for a one-sided person. It is a truism in modern-day muggle pedagogy that cultivating each student’s multiple intelligences and inclinations is the best educational practice. Maybe the wizards at Hogwarts could and should have learned something about education from the muggles around them?
Most disturbing was putting all of the aggressive, ambitious and often unscrupulous students in one house, Slytherin House. It essentially created a prime breeding ground for dark wizards. We are told that every wizard that ever went bad came from Slytherin House. That should come as no surprise. Slytherins are by nature devious and dominating. Putting them together reinforced these inclinations, often to the point of pathology. The Slytherin House emblem is symbolically a serpent, as in the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
The situation was exacerbated by the encouragement given to academic and athletic competition between the houses. Competition both promoted hostility among students and demeaned the educational goals of the school. The implication was that education is a zero-sum game in which the goal is to do better than others rather than do better with them. This may be good for sports but not for academics.
Knowledge is an inherently cooperative enterprise. And difference among students can enhance learning when it is encouraged as a fount of creativity, but not when it is the basis for hostility. Education works best when it facilitates intra and inter-group cooperation At Hogwarts, the grouping of students into houses exacerbated differences into hostilities. It is an instance where intentions may have been good but the practice was bad.
The case is similar with regards to house-elves. Dumbledore talks a good game about the dignity of all species, but Hogwarts is a haven of slavery and the school is cared for by enslaved house-elves. House-elves are little humanoid creatures who live in the basement, make the feasts, make the beds, do the laundry, clean the rooms, and otherwise keep the school running. When Harry and Hermione discover that house-elves are doing all the house work at Hogwarts and in many wizarding households as well, muggle-raised Hermione is outraged and begins to campaign for house-elf freedom. Wizard-raised Ron, however, takes house-elf slavery for granted. As does almost every other wizard and witch in the books.
House-elves haunt the background of life at Hogwarts and in the wizarding world. They are supposed never to be seen or heard. They are a secret that is sustained by a lie, i.e. the pretense that everything is magically done without any effort by anyone. A wonderful society, the wizarding world, secretly built on slavery. A guilty secret that is never discussed. Almost all the house-elves are portrayed as being happy with their lot and as resisting being freed. This makes for a morally ambiguous situation, to say the least. While slavery has essentially been abolished in the modern-day muggle world, it still thrives among the wizards in the Potter books. As with educational practice, maybe the wizards could and should have learned something from their muggle neighbors?
The Moral of the Story.
The Harry Potter books operate within fictional institutions full of moral ambiguities. A purpose of portraying them in this way seems to be to encourage us readers to think about them and about our own society full of moral ambiguities. Writing in April, 2025, we are living through a time full of moral and immoral ambiguities that until recently would have been considered a dystopian fantasy if it had been suggested as the setting for a novel. It is a time most ripe for thinking about our institutions and about their moral aspirations and immoral practices.
Burton Weltman 4/25
historyaschoice 