[HPforGrownups] Plumbing. Electricity.

[Peg Kerr]

No: HPFGUIDX 1551



Rita Winston wrote:

IIRC Hermione told Harry in GoF (in reference to 'bugging')

> that electricity and electronics cannot work around Hogwarts
> because the magical field is too intense. (OH!!! Perhaps that, rather
> than nostalgia, is why the Hogwarts Express is a steam train?
> Boiling its water with magic rather than with coal?)
>
> The Muggle Studies homework essay "Why do Muggles need electricity?"
> suggests that the wizard folk believe that Muggles have to invent
> ways to imitate the things wizards do by magic and therefore invented
> electricity, internal combustion engine, gas light, steam power, wind
> mills, water mills, because Muggles don't have candles and hearths
> that burn without fuel and can't make an object move without using
> some kind of energy from a power source (muscle power, etc) and so
> on.

This relates to the very interesting article I've mentioned before by a
Professor Alan Jacobs at

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0001/reviews/jacobs.html

who argues (as a reassurance to nervous Christians who worry that Harry
Potter promotes evil/satanism/occult) that magic in the HP books is in
actuality simply a different kind of technology, with its own rules and
quirks, which needs to be taught to students and mastered.  Here's a
extended snippet from it:

"People today, and this includes many Christians, tend to hold two views
about witches:
first, that real witches dont exist, and second, that they arent as bad as
the evil
masterminds of the Salem witch trials made them out to be. These are
obviously
incompatible beliefs. As C. S. Lewis has pointed out, there is no virtue in
being tolerant of
witches if you think that witchcraft is impossible, that is, that witches
dont really exist. But
if there are such things as witches, and they do indeed invoke supernatural
or unnatural
forces to bring harm to good people, then it would be neither wise nor good
to tolerate
them. So the issue is an important one, and worthy of serious reflection.

It is tempting to say, in response to these concerns, that Harry Potter is
not that kind of
wizard, that he doesnt do harm to anyone, except those who are manifestly
evil and
trying to do harm to him. And these are significant points. But an answer to
our question
must begin elsewhere.

The place to begin is to invoke one of the great achievements of
twentiethcentury
historical scholarship: the eight volumes Lynn Thorndike published between
1929 and
1941 under the collective title A History of Magic and Experimental Science.
And it is
primarily the title that I wish to reflect upon here. In the thinking of
most modern people,
there should be two histories here: after all, are not magic and
experimental science
opposites? Is not magic governed by superstition, ignorance, and wishful
thinking, while
experimental science is rigorous, selfcritical, and methodological? While
it may be true
that the two paths have diverged to the point that they no longer have any
point of
contact, for much of their existenceand this is Lynn Thorndikes chief
pointthey
constituted a single path with a single history. For both magic and
experimental science
are means of controlling and directing our natural environment (and people
insofar as they
are part of that environment). C. S. Lewis has made the same assertion:

                        [Francis Bacons] endeavor is no doubt contrasted in
our minds with that of
                        the magicians: but contrasted only in the light of
the event, only because we
                        know that science succeeded and magic failed. That
event was then still
                        uncertain. Stripping off our knowledge of it, we see
at once that Bacon and
                        the magicians have the closest possible affinity. .
. . Nor would Bacon
                        himself deny the affinity: he thought the aim of the
magicians was "noble."

It was not obvious in advance that science would succeed and magic fail: in
fact, several
centuries of dedicated scientific experiment would have to pass before it
was clear to
anyone that the "scientific" physician could do more to cure illness than
the old woman of
the village with her herbs and potions and muttered charms. In the
Renaissance,
alchemists were divided between those who sought to solve problemsthe
achievement
of the philosophers stone, for example (or should I say the sorcerers
stone?)primarily
through the use of what we would call mixtures of chemicals and those who
relied more
heavily on incantations, the drawing of mystical patterns, and the
invocation of spirits.

At least, it seems to us that the alchemists can be so divided. But thats
because we know
that one approach developed into chemistry, while the other became pure
magic. The
division may not have been nearly so evident at the time, when (to adapt
Webers famous
phrase) the world had not yet become disenchanted. As Keith Thomas has
shown, it was
"the triumph of the mechanical philosophy" of nature that "meant the end of
the animistic
conception of the universe which had constituted the basic rationale for
magical thinking."
Even after powerful work of the mechanistic scientists like Gassendi the
change was not
easily completed: Isaac Newton, whose name is associated more than any other
with
physical mechanics, dabbled frequently in alchemy.

This history provides a key to understanding the role of magic in Joanne
Rowlings books,
for she begins by positing a counterfactual history, a history in which
magic was not a false
and incompetent discipline, but rather a means of controlling the physical
world at least as
potent as experimental science. In Harry Potters world, scientists think of
magic in
precisely the same way they do in our world, but they are wrong. The
counterfactual
"secondary world" that Rowling creates is one in which magic simply works,
and works
as reliably, in the hands of a trained wizard, as the technology that makes
airplanes fly and
refrigerators chill the airthose products of applied science being, by the
way, sufficiently
inscrutable to the people who use them that they might as well be the
products of
wizardry. As Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, "Any smoothly functioning
technology gives
the appearance of magic."

The fundamental moral framework of the Harry Potter books, then, is a
familiar one to all
of us: it is the problem of technology. (As Jacques Ellul wrote, "Magic may
even be the
origin of techniques.") Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is in the
business of
teaching people how to harness and employ certain powersthat they are
powers
unrecognized by science is really beside the pointbut cannot insure that
people will use
those powers wisely, responsibly, and for the common good. It is a choice,
as the thinkers
of the Renaissance would have put it, between magia and goetia: "high magic"
(like the
wisdom possessed by the magi in Christian legend) and "dark magic."

>>>

According to this understanding of the novels, then, the Muggle world and
the wizarding world are marked by two different types of technology (and
perhaps two different understandings of technology), one of which (the
muggle world) is mostly unaware of the other (the wizarding world).  And yet
there must be some occasional overlaps and cross-fertilization.

Peg