Why are wizards so incompetent? (Was Face it, there is a reward for being nice (

[amiabledorsai]

No: HPFGUIDX 140444

Katherine:
>Joking aside, the incompetence of many of the adults of the WW is a
problem in the series. The corruption I don't have a problem with; it
strikes me as pretty realistic, actually, especially given that the WW
is a small, insular, inbred community where everyone knows (or at
least knows of) everyone else. Cronyism and backhanders flourish in
that kind of environment...

...The incompetence, though... yeah, that's a problem. To a certain
extent you can hand-wave it away; John Schilling remarked on
rec.arts.sf.written that:

"the Wizarding world is noticeably backwards in its approach to, well,
just about everything that isn't Wizardry. Which is actually
plausible, given how useful Wizardry seems to be for lots of things
the rest of us have had to resort to Extreme Cleverness for."

In other words: they don't need to be smart, they can do magic!
>Cop-out, I know, but it works if you don't push it too far...


Amiable Dorsai:
I don't think it's a copout, I think it's central to the background of
the story.  People who are raised in a world where 2+2 is sometimes 4
and sometimes whatever you need it to be, and where you can easily
pour a gallon-and-a-half out of a 1-quart jug, are going to have a
different sort of logic than you and I.  It would be wrong if Wizards
and Witches, especially purebloods, thought and acted precisely like
Muggles--particularly if they live lives deliberately isolated from
Muggles.

In addition, the Wizarding World is a small town.  If you push the
numbers really hard, and squint a little, you can make the total
population of Wizarding Great Britain 20 thousand humans. A more
likely number is one to two-thirds that.  They simply haven't the
population to produce more than a few creative geniuses per
generation.  Ideas filter in through the Muggleborns and half-bloods,
but are probably resisted by the Purebloods, and once accepted,
interpreted by them through the filter of their own culture and
knowledge.  Pureblood "incompetence" is a logical consequence.

Ink spent on the resulting hilarity is not bad writing, it's good
entertainment. And a fascinating inversion of the "man from Mars"
trope, where we, seeing the WW through Harry's eyes, are the aliens
attempting to understand the logic of a culture that proceeds from
different postulates than our own.

Amiable Dorsai