Philosophy of Dumbledore (was:Moody's death...)

[muscatel1988]

No: HPFGUIDX 179564

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Sharon Hayes <s.hayes at ...> wrote:
> 
> > Betsy Hp:
> > As an author though, building a world where good and evil are 
> > going to battle for ultimate victory, it's probably a good idea to 
> > have some sense of what differentiates your good guys from your 
> > bad guys.
> > And I don't think JKR bothered with that.
> 
> Sharon:
> To my mind, it makes the books that much more interesting to have to 
> work through all the confusion and mistakes that the characters 
> undergo, to try to figure out the difference between good and evil. 
> Why should the author just hand it to us on a platter?

Mus:

But that's not really, I think, the point that Betsy Hp is making -
it's certainly not the problem that I have with the nature of good and
evil in the books.  Whenever you read a book set in another world, one
does, as a reader, have to work out what the "rules" are - what the
morality is, in other words.  We have to do it with Tolkien, with Le
Guin, with Gaiman, with hundreds of others.  That we would have to do
it with the Potterverse isn't asking anything out of the ordinary - in
that, I'm in complete agreement with you.

The problem I have, and the problem that Betsy Hp referred to, is that
the *author* doesn't seem to have decided what the moral rules of her
universe are.  What exactly about Dark Magic makes it bad?  Snape in
HBP gives us a sort of a description of its nature: " 'The Dark Arts
are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal.  Fighting them is like
fighting a many-headed monster, which each time a neck is severed,
sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting
that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible' " [HBP UKhb: 169] 
But that, in seven books, is as close as we get to a definition, and
it's not a definition at all.  It's a description, and nothing in it
would allow you to examine a given spell and determine whether it was
Dark or not.  What it's really saying is that the Dark Arts are
*chaotic*, and chaos magic is by definition neither good nor bad,
since chaos has no rules.  JKR does not provide us with the means to
determine what makes a spell Dark.

Sectumsempra is depicted as a pretty nasty device, one that we'd be
tempted to regard as Dark.  But it's hard to distinguish it from a
spell which permanently disfigures someone without warning, combined
with the application of a memory charm which renders the scarred
person incapable of remembering what had caused the scar.  That's the
combination of what Hermione and Shacklebolt do to Marietta.  For many
here, Marietta's fate was richly deserved, and I don't want to debate
it, because that's not the point.  The point is that we're supposed to
think it's deserved because it was carried out by the White Hats -
it's who does it and who it's done to that make it acceptable, not the
 procedure itself. 

The ritual that restores Voldemort to full size and strength in the
graveyard reeks of Black Magic - "blood of the enemy forcibly taken,
bone of the father unwillingly given", all that.  But there's another
spell in canon that falls under the traditional classification of
Black Magic, the one which uses a body part of another person, the one
that is essentially identity theft: the Polyjuice Potion.  What makes
one good and one bad?  Polyjuice isn't bad because Our Heroes use it.
 Voldemort's ritual is bad because he does it.

In a series ostensibly about the struggle between Good and Evil, there
are in principle two ways to go with magic.  Either there is Good
Magic and Bad Magic, or there is only one kind, whose *users* are good
or bad.  I'm quite happy to have to work out either scenario by
myself.  For me, the problem with the nature of Good and Evil in the
series is that the first option doesn't work, because the White Hats
do some awfully questionable things.  The second option doesn't work
either, because for that to work, magic itself has to be neutral, but
the author has already spiked our guns on that score, because she
tells us repeatedly that there is Dark Magic.  The hallmark of a Dark
Wizard, as far as one can tell, is that they do Dark Magic, and Dark
Magic is what Dark Wizards do.  That is a circular argument.

I find it interesting that, although JKR is purporting to be writing a
dualist universe, "good" magic is never defined - there is Magic, and
there is Dark Magic, which must mean that one is a subset of the
other.  In that case, this universe isn't dualist at all.  In the end,
what defines Magic that we are to approve of is whether the White Hats
use it (Marietta, hexing Muggles, Imperio, Crucio, etc, as well as
Reparo and Lumos)- the ends, in other words, justify the means.  But
if they do, then this isn't Good and Evil.

My problem isn't that I have to figure out what is Good and what is
Evil, rather that there's no coherent answer to that question in the
books.  I have no objection to a universe with no answer to that
question, but in that case I think it's wise for the author not to
tell me there's Good and Evil.  It's contradictory.  So either JKR is
being astonishingly cynical, or she never thought the thing through to
begin with.

Mus, who doesn't expect anyone to agree with her.