Identifying with Muggles in Potterverse WAS: Re: DD at th...

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 158242

> 
> Betsy Hp:
> I've loved every single thing you've written, Ken.  And I agree with 
> it totally.  As a total Humanities girl, I feel I should also point 
> out how important my exposure to the Sciences were.  Each discipline 
> introduces you to a different way of thinking, of problem solving.  
> It's cool to dive into one particular discipline, but I think it's 
> important to have some sort of exposure to as many disciplines as 
> possible.
> 
> Hogwarts, unfortunately, concentrates pretty solely on the 
> pragmatic.  Which has its place, of course.  But it cannot replace 
> the Humanities. Or the Sciences for that matter.  (Harry doesn't 
> take a single math type class.  That's just as horrifying as the 
> lack of literature, art and music, IMO.)

Ken:

Thanks for the kind words. I hoped for rather more support on this
here than I seem to be getting. Maybe this group is not nearly as
heavily populated by literature majors as I always imagined.

You are exactly right about science being equally important. It should
be important to Hogwarts students too but to a large extent magic
plays the role that technology plays in the Muggle world so I can
forgive the lack of basic science more easily. In fact magic *is* a
technolgy. An author with a better understanding of that might have
had more Muggle technology taught at Hogwarts because understanding
one technology is generally helpful for understanding others. 

Science and math education for all is so much more important in the
real world since our economy is based on them. Anyone who wants to
grow up to be a good citizen and a wise voter simply must understand
basic science. Things as diverse as gun control, energy policy, and
medical policy simply cannot be understood without understanding
science. As a working professional technologist I can tell you that
you almost never hear proper technical explanations of anything in the
media. And you *never, ever will* hear one from a politician. 

> Betsy Hp:
> 
> I wonder if it has to do with when the WW went into hiding.  Did 
> they hide before the Renaissance?  It would go along way towards 
> explaining the darkness of their world.
> 

Ken:

All the discussions here about magical bullies and helpless Muggles
have given me some cause to think about the Separation and I have come
up with a theory. Unlike many here I do not think I would routinely
feel helpless or fearful when dealing wizards and witches, assuming
that they really existed. In all honesty I probably would just drink
the mead and have a laugh over the toffee. These wizards and witches
are not like those of folk tales. They are just like us but they have
a talent to do magic instead of, in my case, calculus. So I don't
think I would be fearful in their presence any more than I am in the
presence of real people who are younger, bigger, stronger, quicker, or
more atheletic than I am. We depend on our common culture to prevent
normal interactions from turning into violent ones where we might be
at a disadvantage. And this is a culture that is nearly worldwide at
this most basic level, the WW shares it too. You can't depend on it in
some isolated tribal areas of, say, South America where standards of
decency differ strongly but in the majority of the world you can
expect to be treated with a commonly held basic standard of decency by
strangers.

Not all human interactions are or remain at the level of basic
courtesy. Among real humans a range of behaviour can occur that can
end with tragic, lethal results in extreme cases. The same thing would
happen in confrontations between wizards and Muggles. The
"powerlessness" that is often attributed to Muggles here is not
absolute. It is true that a Muggle has no response to intermediate
level attacks like a Leg Locker Curse the way he could respond to a
punch in the face with a kick in the groin, for example. That does not
make the Muggle powerless. Unfortunately it means that the Muggle has
to respond to any slight escalation of a conflict with a wizard either
by using deadly violence, or by turning the other cheek and hoping for
the best. A club, a knife, a sword, or a Colt 45 will kill a wizard. A
wizard can block a punch in a way that leaves the Muggle truly
helpless. A bullet trumps an AK if it gets there before the wand can
be pointed and those words can be uttered/thought.

So as population density rose and conflicts between Muggles and the WW
became more frequent the Muggles would have adopted this "kill first
and ask questions later" strategy for dealing with interpersonal
conflict with members of the WW. That would have forced the WW into
the Separation that we see in HP. They would have been overwhelmed and
exterminated in open warfare, segregation was the only option.

If you want to accept this theory as reasonable then I suppose the
disdain the WW holds for things Muggle, including our high culture,
can be seen as an outgrowth of the bitter conflicts that lead to the
Separation. It's not a good thing, maybe these books should have been
about healing the breach instead of defeating a monster like LV. But
they are not my books, I have no vote in the matter.
  
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Exactly.  That's the saddest thing, to my mind.  That these solid 
> English families have no idea about Shakespeare, for example.  Have 
> no clue about the many contributions their nation has made to the 
> world.  And they don't have the equivilant.  (Honestly, how could 
> they?)  Certainly, *they* don't know what they're missing, but it 
> makes me sad for them.
> 

Ken:

Yeah, I know. Even in the one Muggle subject they teach, Astronomy,
their efforts strike me as pathetic, as I've mentioned before. England
has a wonderful professional astronomer and popular astronomy author
in Patrick Moore who would love to give a guest lecture series at
Hogwarts. Steven Hawking, perhaps our (humanity's) greatest living
astrophysicist, lives in Cambridge. Because of the demands of his
profession and his terrible illness I doubt he lectures at grade
schools and high schools very often, or at all. I suspect he would
make an exception for Hogwarts.

It is a little surprising that an author would build a world like
this. In my reading experience the fictional worlds authors create
tend to be more cultured than real life, not less. I'm not sure how
many here would have read Jean Auel's "Clan of the Cave Bear" series
but the gentility of her ice age European societies is laughably
implausible. Some of the counter arguments that people have raised to
show that members of the WW are cultured do have merit. I don't think
that an unseen cultural curriculum at Hogwarts does. Perhaps Rowling
sees her wizards and witches as being as well educated in these
matters as we are but in her focus on her primary story she never
realized that she had neglected to show us how they get to be that way.

My parents did not teach me about culture, the good old American
public school did. Yes, even this somewhat politically conservative
and definitely religously conservative Baptist agrees that it takes a
village to raise a child.  

Ken