Pride and Prejudice (regarding Hogwarts Houses)

[anna_l_milton at hotmail.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 22538

Dear all,

The massively outnumbered Snape fan on this list is back (BTW, I 
wouldn't actually mind having him for dinner, provided that we 
discussed Ayn Rand and F.A. Hayek), this time to launch her two knuts 
upon the matter of House prejudice.

As you might not have noticed (come on, there are soooo many people 
in this list it's not exactly easy to keep track of them all), if 
perchance I stumbled into the HPverse, the Sorting Hat would put me 
squarely into Slytherin. In fact, I did numerous on-line sorting 
tests (including the *official* one at harrypotter.com) and they all 
unanimously placed me in Slytherin. The point here being is not that 
I don't mind - it's that I was actually very pleased with the 
results, because Slytherin is *gasp!* my favourite House.

The question being: since they get the bum rap in the HP world, why 
am I so glad to have all those oh-so deplorable personality traits?

Because they're not deplorable traits at all and I'm beginning to get 
a little tired of all this hand-wringing over a quarter of the 
wizarding world's population. Let's face facts here: what are the 
typical Slytherin personality traits? Ambition, cunning, wilfulness, 
self-determination, a certain disrespect for established authority. 
Now, are these traits *intrinsecally* bad? Not at all. In fact, every 
personality trait (with the exception of homicidal mania, but I'm 
talking normality here), taken by itself, is morally neutral. What 
decides of its morality is the ends for which it is used. And 
ambition is no less likely to be found at the service of a 
disreputable cause than docility or courage. I apologise for going on 
a tangent here, but consider totalitarian regimes: they all had ample 
space for all of the Hogwarts House qualities - ambition for the 
party cadres, courage for the soldiers who had to conquer the 
assorted "Lebensraum" (sp?), intelligence for the theorists and 
propagandists (five-year plans, anyone?) and rule-following and hard 
work for the common citizens.

Don't get me wrong, I love the HP books through and through, but they 
are not some sort of divinely-inspired scripture that is absolute 
truth and cannot be challenged without incurring in blasphemy. They 
have their flaws, and I'm not just talking about The Plot Holes that 
Shall Not Be Named. Throughout the books, the supremacy of courage is 
a constant theme, but anyone knowledgeable of History knows that it 
is not courage that matters, but the cause it serves. Courage may be 
a noble virtue, but lots of people showed extreme courage fighting 
for slavery and dictatorships, didn't they?

Which brings me again to the Slytherin qualities. Now we're all 
adults here (or at least most of us are), and we all know that the 
real world isn't as much like Harry Potter as we'd like it to be. My 
point being? That if it were not for the Slytherin personality 
traits, we'd all be still living in grass huts. It was George Bernard 
Shaw (he would have been a Slytherin) who said that all progress 
depends upon the unreasonable man. And indeed, I cannot see how 
progress can be accomplished without ambition, wilfulness and a 
certain contempt for the accepted way to do things. Now if the cause 
at which people place these traits is either unworthy or socially 
unacceptable, they are naturally going to have bum raps. And knowing 
human nature, the faults of the one become the faults of the many. 
Hence the fallacy of the missing middle when applied to Slytherins: 
just because all Death Eaters are Slytherins (which isn't true, 
anwyay), it does not follow that all Slytherins are DEs, just like 
because all geese are birds, it doesn't follow that all birds are 
geese. This is one of the first fallacies one is taught in Logic, but 
human nature isn't much likely to work according to the laws of pure 
logic anyway.

Now, the cause which some Slytherins espoused, out of whatever 
reason, is wrong in moral terms, as we are all tired of knowing. But 
many other causes throughout history were not morally wrong but 
socially unorthodox, which didn't stop people who espoused them from 
being considered as social pariahs. Think being eyed with suspicion 
by your peers is bad? Try being burned at the stake. Now, if you 
delve a little into these famous visionaries/outcasts, you find out 
that, personality-wise, they are disproportionatelly Slytherin. 
Meaning: great accomplishment usually comes from a mixture of 
ambition, wilfulness and unorthodoxy. But constantly rejecting 
authority also sometimes entails the acceptance of immoral ideologies.

The point of all this rambling being: some Slytherins were DEs. They 
should be punished for that. Others were not. So leave them alone. 
And it would be nice to see HP characters stop treating ambition and 
cunning as the marks of the Anti-Christ. And of course I'd love to 
see a tri-dimensional Slytherin character (apart from Snape). Have 
you noticed how they all seemed to be crude caricatures, even in 
their looks? But since JK seems to be stuck to the idea of Gryffindor 
being the Alfa and the Omega of the wizarding world, I doubt it's 
going to happen. If only she reminded herself that she is only able 
to make money out of her books because some ambitious and cunning 
people somewhere in time thought it could be very profitable for all 
if something like the free-market existed...

I apologise for the rambling.

Slytherinly yours,

Diana (a.k.a. A. L. Milton)
Free-market libertarian
Slytherin all the way
11 inches, yew and unicorn hair