The Worthless Harry?

[Tabouli]

No: HPFGUIDX 33614

kevinkimball:
>In contrast, Lewis and Tolkien present a world where truth is 
absolute and transcends the individual.  Because the world has 
absolute truth, it is also a world in which order is upheld as an 
honorable characteristic for which to strive.  Good and evil are 
two distinct things, with the rewards and consequences for the 
characters' choices reflecting absolute values.  And finally, 
adults can be good or evil, and the good are presented with 
nobility of character.<

Ahaa!  Here we have it!  A mere day or two after my musings on utopianism, an illustration burgeons forth!  (and one that looks suspiciously like something carefully prepared in advance and launched into the list to shock us out of our Satan-driven denial).

Is HP a worthwhile series?  As all of us who have read the ongoing saga of book-bannings and burnings will know, obviously *not* to people who believe that the role of literature (and especially literature for children) is to be a vehicle for clear, unambiguous moral instruction in a world full of temptation.

In the world view of such people, children are infinitely Naive and Impressionable (and rather Stupid).  Therefore, any such vehicle must be infinitely simplistic.  People and their actions must be absolutely Good, or absolutely Evil.  It must be utterly crystal clear which is which, preferably by identifying Evil Characters with distinguishing physical features or fashion choices, such as shifty eyes, thin lips, black clothing, a pentagram necklace, a sinister voice, etc.

Parents, senior religious figures (of the right religion, of course!) and teachers are by definition Good.  All their actions are unambiguously Good, whether the children think so at the time or not.  Children should show absolute reverence for this Goodness.  All Good actions must be shown to be rewarded.  The characters in black clothes with shifty eyes, pentagram necklaces and sinister voices, literal or figurative (e.g. the wicked waywards who tries to tempt the wee ones into the cinema to watch Harry Potter) are by definition Evil.  All Evil characters and actions must be shown to be punished.  Laying even a toe outside this structure might confuse children into Straying Into Evil, and therefore any book which shows any moral ambiguity is dangerous (er, doesn't the Bible itself contain accounts of incest, rape, sex, theft and so on, some of it inflicted by the Good Guys?  Better keep it away from the children...)(and as for grammatical errors, is there no end to JKR's malevolence?)

Ahhh yes.  Of course.  The people of the world can be divided into two categories, right?  Good and Evil?  Good people are noble of character and do only Good, Evil people are ignoble of character and do only Evil?  Good people are always rewarded for their Goodness, Evil people are always punished for their Evil?  You can tell the difference by the way people look, speak and dress??

Awww, come on Kevin.

I love the Narnia books, but the morally unambiguous world they present is a fantasy.  There are plenty of people who would *like* their children to inherit such a world, but let me tell you a secret... the real world isn't, and won't ever be like that!

First we have the dangerous assumptions objection.  There are some parents who, like the Dursleys, ill-treat children (quite often with perfectly good intentions).  There have been innumerable documented cases of parents, senior religious figures and teachers abusing their positions of power and damaging children horribly.  If children are raised to believe that such people are Good by definition, and should be respected and revered without question, what will happen to them if they encounter some of these?  In fact, we know what happens: the child, unable to comprehend that a Good person could be doing something that feels so Bad to him/her (note: no use of "them"!), dares not tell anyone (my parents won't believe me: they know he's Good and I'm Bad for suggesting such a thing), seeks refuge in self-blame and eventually self- and other-abuse.

Not a great advertisement for the "Children should be taught to give unquestioning respect and reverence to their elders".

As for "Good happens to the Good, and Evil to the Evil", it's pretty obvious that in some cases evil *can* pay (especially if you have the right lawyer), and that bad things *do* happen to good people.  As an agnostic raised going to a Christian church (who hopes she isn't going to offend Christians terribly by saying this), I theorise that heaven and hell are a response to this.  Surely Bad people must get their just deserts in the end... if they die happy they'll be punished all the same; likewise, the Good who die after a lifetime of pain and suffering needn't worry, because their "goodness" will ultimately be rewarded.

If the most important thing in the world is to know who the Good people are and stick with and trust them, how do you figure out who's Good and who's Bad?  Is it the books you read, or your parents, or your pastor?  Are people Good until proven Bad, or vice versa?  Who gets to define Good and Evil?  Even if the answer is "God" or "The Bible", no-one can deny that even people of the same basic religion and religious text define Good and Evil differently.  I've known Christians who have been raised to believe that all secular movies are Evil, and are not allowed to watch them.  I know one devout Christian who is a "practising homosexual" and argues that to deny the way God made him is to deny God.  Catholics define them differently from Baptists, who define them differently from people belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church.  Whose interpretation of the Bible is the right one?  Then there's the difference between "goodness" and "godliness".  Time and time again in church services we were told that you only went to heaven if you'd accepted Jesus into your heart, no matter how Good you were, and yet a lot of Evil has been done in the name of Jesus.  Who gets to go to heaven, the Evil or Sanctimoniously Neutral Christian or the Good Heathen?  If Christianity is by definition Good, does that mean the entire non-Christian world must therefore be Evil by definition?

Even a token look at this subject reveals the Terrible Truth... the real world is *NOT* like Narnia.  It is a complex place, and people are complex creatures, full of conflicting motivations and ideas and behaviour.  Narnia might be a better vehicle for bringing Judeo-Christian morality to children than Harry Potter, but Harry Potter, with its individualist/humanist focus on personal choice and responsibility, is the better vehicle for helping children explore the complexity of the real world.  It allows for the fact that not all "rules" are equal (Harry lies to protect himself and the Wizarding World, but he cannot bring himself to commit murder, even in a case where the victim would quite likely face a death penalty in some Judeo-Christian societies), the fact that different situations can be judged completely differently depending on perspective, that not all authority figures are well-meaning and infallible, and that people cannot immediately be boxed into "Good" or "Evil" on the basis of superficialities.

Perhaps the problem so many see in HP is that it teaches children that they can think and judge situations for themselves.   Sometimes their judgments and actions will misfire, sometimes they will need the guidance of a Dumbledore, and so on, but ultimately, HP tells children that they have the power to make their own decisions.  A scary thought, perhaps, but if they're going to function as independent adults (particularly in the individualist societies where most HP readers live), isn't this a pretty good idea?

Tabouli.


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