Scapegoating Slytherin (was:Punishing Draco )

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 143967

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "horridporrid03" 
<horridporrid03 at y...> wrote:

> Betsy Hp:
> And black and white, and basically doing exactly as Sydney and 
> Lealess spoke of -- creating a scapegoat that everyone can jeer at 
> and hate and comfort themselves by saying "Oh yes, those 
> Slytherins, bad sort them".  And diametrically opposed to 
> everything Dumbledore, and I believe JKR, has been saying all along.

Stemming from the adherence to the blood ideology.  I do believe that 
Dumbledore and JKR have been solidly condemning that principle all 
along.

> Because if you're right than it means that blood does shape a 
> person.  It's just that Slytherin chose the wrong blood to champion 
> and Gryffindor picked the right one.

That's not what I was saying.  I'm saying that Slytherin's insistance 
on the blood principle itself is something with tendencies to evil, 
because of how it conceptualizes human worth.  It's not a case of 
half-bloods being better than purebloods or any reverse consequence; 
it's the case of saying "you have predetermined value from these 
abstractions regarding your parentage" that's wrong.

> Betsy Hp:

> I guess you're trying to say that all those who say Slytherin is 
> not the universal source of all evil are avoiding the blood issue.  
> And yes, that was Slytherin's bugaboo.

Hyperbole does nothing to bolster your point. :)

It does look more and more like the blood issue is really one of 
JKR's prime motivators and what she considers one of the most 
important thematic issues that she's addressing.  'Half-Blood' makes 
it into the title of a book, and it's now somehow mixed into Snape's 
murky motivations as well as Voldemort's entire program: we get to 
see his history and we thus see even more clearly how he takes it and 
runs with it.

> But it's an interest that *can* be positive.  An interest in your 
> family, your culture, your traditions; a desire to maintain such 
> things; all of that can be positive.  Draco's love of his family is 
> positive.  Percy's rejection of same is considered bad form.  
> Everyone gets on Harry for not being more interested in his 
> parents, his blood.  For that matter, Dumbledore uses Harry's blood 
> to protect him.  

There's a massive difference here.  Harry should be more interested 
in his parents because of *who* they are as people, not *what* they 
are as exemplars of some category...especially when, as JKR says, the 
category labels are created by people to whom they matter.

And for the people who they matter for, like Lucius Malfoy, they're 
immutable and completely essentialist.  They're not only or even 
primarily cultural, because culture can be acquired and adopted, one 
can be accepted into a culture (even hereditary ones, like musical 
gharanas in India).  Unless, of course, the definition of the group 
is done like the DE pureblood factions do...and Slytherin's 
own "whose blood was the purest" seems to toe a very similar line.

> An interest in bloodlines can certainly be used negatively, but 
> it's not necessarily negative or evil in and of itself.  (Or should 
> I tell my grandmother to stop researching our family tree?  Should 
> the various Highland games that occur all over the USA be stopped 
> as a bad idea?  Should Native Americans get over their desire to 
> teach their children their own culture and language?)

Interest is not negative.  But again, Slytherin as described by the 
Sorting Hat, and Slytherin as carried out by its dominant exponents 
in wizarding society goes way beyond 'interest'.  The issue at stake 
is also not only tight-knit cultural groups, but the very concept of 
civil society.  The DE ideology wins, and the wizarding world loses 
the idea of an open society with a culture which people can become 
members of and argue over and change, in favor of something defined 
strictly essentially.

> > >>Jen: 
> > There's no way around the fact all the Founders except 
> > Hufflepuff were discriminatory about who should go into their 
> > houses, based on what they believed to be most important.
> > <snip>

But they're not discriminatory with the same kinds of factors.  
Slytherin is the genuine essentialist, Ravenclaw and Gryffindor look 
for virtues (now in the Aristotelian sense), and Hufflepuff opens up 
to everyone.

>>>Nora:
>> I think (I think) JKR tends to think of the qualities of
>> Gryffindor as tending to positive uses more often than negative...
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Ah, so we really *are* ignoring Peter Pettigrew than? 

No, being as I said 'tending'.  Peter is, of course, the exception 
which helps keep things from resolving into too clean of patterns.  
But I suspect I know what the answer would be if you asked her about 
the ratio of Gryffindors to Slytherins in the Death Eaters.

> Betsy Hp:
> Actually, young Tom Riddle, striding into magical London all by his 
> little eleven year old self, or confronting his father when only 
> sixteen, could be seen as quite courageous.  Harry wanting to be a 
> great quidditch captain, or taking NEWT level Potions could be seen 
> as quite ambitious.
> 
> They're both rather neutral, in the end.

I don't think they are, because I think JKR is slanting things in her 
favor quite a bit on how she conceptualizes courage (Neville standing 
up to his friends to do what is right serves as her model for that) 
and how she thinks of ambition. 

Slytherin blood ideology reminds me very uncomfortably of the old 
(and not so old) admissions criteria of the Ivies.  Deliberately 
slanted to admit those who went to the approved prep schools and came 
from the proper families; modified to keep it that way when too many 
Jews were being admitted because they were allowing merit too much 
weight in the system.  Women--absolutely right out.  Priority given 
to the children of alumni, which creates the legacy system.  William 
Buckley complained bitterly about Yale ceasing to become the kind of 
place where your whole family went, and thought it was ridiculous 
that some boy from P.S. 12 somewhere had equal chances as someone 
from Andover.

Do I think that way of thinking about people is evil?  Solidly in the 
ordinary vices, and the kind of cancer which does profound damage to 
a society as a whole.

-Nora notes there's good readin' out there on that subject