Moral Ambiguities in the Harry Potter Books. Part II. 

Secrets and Lies/Guilt and Guilt-Tripping. 

Voldemort, Dumbledore, Snape, Hagrid, and Harry. 

Yearning to be able to live with oneself.

“I knew my brother, Potter…Secrets and lies, that’s how we grew up, and Albus…he was a natural.”

Aberforth on his brother Albus Dumbledore.

What do you call a man who takes an infant boy and raises him for sixteen years so that the boy can be slaughtered as a sacrificial lamb for what the man considers to be the greater good?  A madman? A monster?  Professor Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?

Leaving a Baby on a Doorstep: Guilt and Guilt-tripping in the world of Harry Potter.

As the first of the seven Harry Potter books opens, Professor Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, leaves baby Harry and a note on the doorstep of the home of Harry’s aunt Petunia and uncle Vernon Dursley.  The note contains the news that Harry’s parents, who are a wizard and witch, have been killed and that Petunia’s sister Lily had died trying to protect Harry.  The note leaves Harry to the protection of his aunt.

Petunia hates with a passion the magical world that her sister Lily had come to inhabit.  She had excised Lilly from her life as a result and has regularly pretended that she knows and cares nothing about her sister and her sister’s life.  We come in the course of the books to see that Petunia knows and cares a lot more about the magical world than she lets on to those around her.  And we find out in a later book that Petunia’s animosity stems largely from the fact that she had been rejected as being a muggle – a non-magical person – when she had tried to get into Hogwarts.  Envy of her sister and resentment against Hogwarts seemingly fuels her subsequent hostility toward Harry, whom she grudgingly accepts in her household but treats very badly.

Nonetheless, although Petunia routinely mistreats Harry and begrudges him the clothes on his back, she doesn’t send him off to an orphanage as her husband’s aunt recommends.  She seems to feel enough guilt about having rejected her sister, and would feel shame if she rejected Harry, that she takes Harry in and takes some care of him as he grows up.  Seemingly, she could not live with herself if she abandoned her nephew as she had previously rejected her sister. 

It was a strategic coup on Dumbledore’s part in leaving Harry on Petunia’s doorstep.  He has successfully taken advantage of her shame and taken her on a guilt-trip that ensures Harry will have a safe place to pass his early childhood.  But at what moral price?    

Opening with the emotional blackmail of Petunia Dursley, thereafter the books are powered largely by guilt, shame, and guilt-trips, with the actions of the main characters largely motivated thereby.  Voldemort, Dumbledore, Snape, Hagrid, Harry – each is motivated in large part by shame and guilt.  

Dumbledore is widely regarded as a white knight in the books.  But here at the start of the tale, we see him emotionally blackmailing Petunia.  And we see him placing Harry in a home where Harry is regularly mistreated for ten years with seemingly little intervention by the headmaster.  And, as we later find out, Dumbledore is the headmaster of a school that is run with slave labor. 

What does the author expect us to make of this?  What do we make of it?   Dumbledore is a hero to readers of the Potter books.  And he remains a hero to Harry despite placing Harry where he is mistreated by the Dursleys and despite grooming Harry to be murdered by Voldemort.  What kind of hero is this?   An imperfect one, as he himself insists.  And that’s the point.

I think we are supposed to see Dumbledore as a morally ambiguous hero, which is how he sees himself.  It is the reason he has repeatedly refused the position of Minister of Magic.  Universally regarded as the most powerfully magical wizard of his time, Dumbledore admits that he is afraid of what he might do with so much governmental power.  He might be able to do good with that power, but he also might be tempted to do evil in pursuit of what he thought was good.  It is a morally ambiguous situation.  Moral ambiguity is almost everywhere in the Potter books, and I think we are expected to see the necessity of dealing with it as a central message of the books.

Guilt and the Order of the Phoenix: Rising from the Ashes. A Tale of Two Orphans. 

Like Hogwarts, the coalition of anti-Voldemort forces seems at first glance to be ideal, a group of good-hearted people dedicated to doing good in the world and to each other.  But underneath this surface of good will are individuals with guilt complexes, all of whom are trying to live down their individual shame and guilt through efforts that coincide with the anti-Voldemort campaign. 

Animated by a mixture of motives, some idealistic, others darker, they use guilt-tripping, a form of moral blackmail, as much as good will to get each other to engage in their campaign.  Not a convocation of pristine do-gooders, they are good people, but most with bad consciences.  Idealists, but most with darker motives as well.  They warrant a closer examination and a more complex evaluation.  Like most real people.

The wizarding world of the Potter books is a guilty world full of guilty people.  Many wizards had supported Voldemort during his reign of terror.  Most of them claimed afterwards that they had been under a curse that made them do Voldemort’s bidding, but many of these were faking it.  And many of those who opposed Voldemort seem to suffer from survivor’s guilt.  Harry Potter wakes up one stormy night to find himself in a bright and shiny magical world, but with a good deal of darkness at its heart.

The wizards’ world is a traumatized community trying to live down the horrors of Voldemort’s ascendency.  As the first book opens, Voldemort’s attempt to kill Harry has rebounded and brought him down, but during the course of the next sixteen years as Harry grows up, people continue to cringe at Voldemort’s name and there is ongoing suspicion of wizards who supported him but who claim they were cursed into it.   As in post-World War II Germany, everyone claims that they really didn’t support the dictator or his murderous regime.  But that leaves almost everyone under a cloud.

Anxiety permeates the society.  From beginning to end, the Potter books are driven by characters suffering from feelings of guilt and shame.  The main characters, both good and bad, try to live down things from their pasts, things that are individual to each but that intersect with the social trauma of Voldemort’s reign of terror.  All of them trying to overcome their shame and live with themselves.  Significantly, most of them, including Voldemort, Dumbledore, Hagrid, Snape, and Sirius, among others, came from broken families and suffered from a lack of maternal love. 

Voldemort, originally named Tom Riddle, is an archvillain whose doings and undoing are at the center of the books’ plots and trigger most of the action.  A damaged boy from a muggle father and a squib witch mother, he became a semi-human specter that haunted the magical world.  Abandoned as an infant, his father returning to his muggle family and his mother dying in childbirth, he grew up in a desiccated orphanage.  He later gutted his own humanity by committing murders that enabled him to split his soul into multiple parts, ostensibly ensuring his immortality, but leaving only the least humane part of himself to interact with the world. 

Despite taking the grandiose name of Lord Voldemort, he is driven by shame.  Shame for his parents, shame for his orphaned childhood, and shame for his own mortality.  Feeling that no one cared for him, he cared for no one.  Feeling powerless as an orphan, he became obsessed with power, and obsessed with immortality as the ultimate power.  Psychologists report that children raised without love commonly have feelings of inadequacy and inferiority but at the same time develop aggressively narcissistic personalities.  They feel like failures but lash out at others out of envy and revenge. 

Voldemort’s response was to seek revenge against the world by becoming a super wizard capable of dominating other wizards and terrorizing muggles.  But he cared for no one, so he also hated himself.  He was a loser even if he won, which helps account for the vehemence with which he pursued his goals and punished those who doubted him or got in his way. 

Many other characters in the books, both good guys and bad, were trying to live down shame and guilt, and find a way to live with themselves.   Among the good guys were Dumbledore, Snape, Hagrid, Lupin, Sirius, Neville, and Harry.

Dumbledore was a good man who was also motivated by a bad conscience.  He had two guilty secrets.  First, he was trying to live down his youthful infatuation with the evil wizard Grindelwald and Grindelwald’s ideas of muggle suppression in the interests of the greater good.  These ideas included sacrificing innocent people if they got in the way, a variation of the ends justifying the means.  Dumbledore was so ashamed of his dalliance with Grindelwald and his interest in Grindelwald’s ideas that he kept these infatuations secret from everyone during his lifetime except for his brother Aberforth, who knew about them firsthand. 

Dumbledore subsequently rejected any ideas of wizards ruling over muggles, but he never completely abandoned the idea of sacrificing innocent people for the greater good.  We see this in his treatment of Harry: he repeatedly lied to Harry and set Harry up to be killed as a means of being able, in turn, to kill Voldemort in the interest of the greater good. 

Dumbledore had a second secret that he was also trying to live down, which was the responsibility he felt for his sister’s death.  Her death was a direct consequence of his relations with Grindelwald and haunted him up to his own death.  In sum, Dumbledore was good because he was a good man but also because he was trying to atone for his guilty secrets.

Snape was a particularly complex and ambivalent character.  He became a Death-Eater seemingly in order to live down the shame of his low-life parents, but then became a double-agent for Dumbledore as atonement for his failure to save Lily Potter from death.  He is morally torn, hating Harry out of resentment and envy toward Harry’s father, who goaded Snape at every turn and got Lily, the girl Snape worshipped, at the same time secretly committed to protecting Harry because Harry is her son.  His good side triumphed over his bad, but led to his death.

Hagrid was trying to live down the secret of his mother being a giant but also the shame of his being ejected as a student from Hogwarts because he had supposedly opened the Chamber of Secrets.  Lupin was living down the shame of being a werewolf, a curse for which he seemed to feel guilt as well as shame.  Sirius was living down the shame and guilt of his Death-Eater family.  Neville was living down what he felt as shame for the lunacy of his parents who had been tortured to near death by the Death-Eaters, a secret he kept from his school mates.  And more…..  Shame and guilt all around.

Finally, how to account for Harry?  Like Voldemort, Harry was orphaned in infancy and raised in a loveless environment.  But whereas Voldemort developed into a narcissistic monster, Harry became a humble and caring person.  In the first book, Harry was able to retrieve the sorcerer’s stone from the mirror, whereas Voldemort could not, because Harry did not want to use it.  This is one example of Harry’s selfless dedication to others.  At the end of the last book, Harry gets rid of the unbeatable Elder Wand that Voldemort had stolen from Dumbledore’s tomb because the wand posed too much of a temptation and threat to others.  This is another example of Harry’s selfless dedication to the greater good, but at a sacrifice to himself and not to others.  That’s the key.

How was it that Harry turned out to be so good while Voldemort turned out to be so bad?  A difference between their infancies might be a key.  Voldemort’s mother died in childbirth so that he had no love from the moment of his birth.  In contrast, Harry had a year of unconditional love from his parents before their deaths, seemingly enough to make a difference.  As Dumbledore repeatedly claims, love is the ultimate magic and Harry had enough of it to make a difference. 

Evolutionary psychologists claim that empathy is built into us as humans and then we either develop it during the course of our lives or it dies out. Infants exhibit empathy in their first year and can show concern for others’ pain and suffering.  Harry was seemingly formed as an empathetic and caring person in his first year with his caring parents.  It carried him through his childhood with uncaring relatives.  In Voldemort, empathy had no chance to develop.  To the contrary, antipathy towards himself and others thrived.

Harry also has a memory of his mother’s sacrifice even though he cannot consciously remember it until he is much older.  Her love has its impact and lasting effect.  It seems to humble him and help him to grow as a kind and caring person despite the neglect and emotional abuse he gets as a kid.  When Harry finds out that his parents died because Voldemort wanted to kill him, he was thereafter motivated to try to live down what he felt as his responsibility for his parents’ deaths.  He lived because his mother died.  His repentance was to be willing to die to save others, as he does in the last book, and for that reason, he is able to come back from the edge of death and defeat Voldemort.

Guilt-Tripping for the Greater Good: Two Wrongs Make a Right?

Where there are feelings of guilt, there are opportunities for guilt-tripping.  That’s both good and bad.  It’s good because if a person can be guilt-tripped, it implies that the person has a conscience or sense of shame which can be leveraged to get the person to do the right thing.  But it’s also bad because guilt-tripping is essentially an underhanded manipulation, a moralistic form of blackmail, a coercion for the greater good.  Guilt-tripping is an example of a second wrong trying to make the first wrong right.  And it implies a sense of superiority and an arrogance on the part of the moral blackmailer.

In the Potter books, almost everyone except for Harry uses guilt-tripping in trying to convince others to agree with them.  That is an essential difference between Harry and the others.  Dumbledore, for example, guilt-trips Snape into protecting Harry based on Snape’s love for Harry’s mother Lily and Snape’s failure to save her life when Voldemort went after Harry.  Dumbledore, Lupin, Mr. Weasley and Sirius repeatedly guilt-trip Harry into curbing his behavior, telling Harry that he should not take risks when his parents died trying to save him. 

Most dramatically, Voldemort guilt-trips Harry into allowing Voldemort to kill him by telling Harry that Harry’s colleagues are dying to save him and that no more of them need to die if he gives himself up to Voldemort.  Harry can’t live with himself with his friends dying in his place so he gives himself up to be killed. 

In contrast, when Harry tries to get an embarrassing memory from Slughorn, Harry appeals to Slughorn’s affection for Harry’s mother, Lily, and to Slughorn’s solidarity with the anti-Voldemort forces.  Harry was thereby essentially asking Slughorn to behave himself the way he would want others to behave, and appealing to his connection with them.  Likewise, when Harry asks the Gray Lady about her diadem, he appeals to her sense of solidarity with the occupants of Hogwarts and asks her to behave in the way that she would want them to behave.      

The first book opens with Lily Potter having sacrificed her life to save Harry.  She seems instinctively to know that she could not live with herself if she didn’t do that.  And her decency ended up living on in Harry.  The last book closes with Harry sacrificing his life so that his colleagues might not die.  He could not live with himself with them dying because of him.  And his decency ends up giving him new life and giving his colleagues immunity to the killing curses of Voldemort and his Death Eaters.  Because Harry thinks well of others, he is able to think well of himself and do the right thing. 

An Ambiguous Ending: An Unwanted Beginning?

The Potter books are death defying, literally.  Ghosts of dead people wander around.  Pictures of dead people talk and move about.  Life-like images of dead people emerge from the wands that killed them.  Horcruxes of a person live on when the person dies.  A sorcerer’s stone makes an elixir that prolongs life indefinitely.  A resurrection stone brings the dead back to life. 

The series opens with Voldemort desperately seeking the Sorcerer’s Stone so as to return to full life and with Harry denying the stone to Voldemort but also eschewing the stone for himself, which is how he could retrieve it from the magic mirror.  For Voldemort, life itself is more important than anything in life.  He is a man without principles or loyalties or concern for anything but himself.  For Harry, life is for caring and for being honorable, even if it means death.  The last book closes with Harry eschewing the resurrection stone and seeking death for the sake of his comrades.  His so doing ironically brought life to himself and to them.  Love turns out to be the ultimate magic.    

The books have, however, an ambiguous ending that could portend more troubles in the future.  The ambiguity has to do with the unbeatable Elder Wand that has historically been connected with so much evil.  Has it or has it not been safely disposed of? 

In the complicated world of wands, the Elder Wand acknowledges loyalty to the person who last defeated its previous master.  Since it was Draco Malfoy who disarmed Dumbledore, mastery of the Elder Wand went from Dumbledore to Draco.  Then, when Harry disarmed Draco of Draco’s ordinary wand, Harry also became master of the Elder Wand even though it was still buried in Dumbledore’s tomb.  Although Voldemort subsequently took the Elder Wand from Dumbledore’s tomb, he was not the wand’s master.  First Draco was and then Harry was.

At the end of the last book, when Harry secretly confides to the picture of Dumbledore that he had secretly returned the Elder Wand to Dumbledore’s tomb, Harry claims that he has thereby safely disposed of the wand.  So long as Harry dies undefeated, no one else will ever be able to master the Elder Wand again and the all-powerful and all-too-dangerous weapon will never tempt or be used by anyone else.  Dumbledore approves of what Harry has done. 

But, wait a minute.  What if someone comes along and takes Harry’s regular wand from Harry?  The Elder Wand will belong to that person.  And what if that person discovers the secret that the wand is in Dumbledore’s tomb?  The cursed wand will be set loose on the world again.  Harry and Dumbledore are engaging in secrets and lies again.  And they are dangerous.  The only way to really get rid of the Elder Wand is for Harry to break it.  Which is what he does in the movie version of the books. 

That is a better ending if you really want to provide a definitive end to all the troubles.  But not if you want to leave open the ambiguous possibility that troubles could recur.  A main moral of the Potter stories is that secrets and lies open a Pandora’s box of troubles.  The first book opens with secrets and lies which lead to a host of troubles that are eventually resolved.  But the last book then closes with more secrets and lies.  Is there no end to this cycle?  Is the final message of the books that we are doomed to secrets and lies, a Pandora’s box of troubles forever?

Writing in April, 2025, we are living through a time in which secrets and lies are flourishing and in which a self-styled wizard and Voldemort wannabe has come to power.  It may be particularly pertinent at this time to be reminded that moral ambiguities need to be clarified so that they don’t pave the way for evildoers, and that truth must at all times be spoken to power.

Burton Weltman   4/25

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