Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 186555


> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Going back to the post that inspired this one, as Montavilla47 pointed out, not every reader is going to enjoy going back for a reread.  I think JKR would have been asking too much of her young readers if she expected them to do as much.  So I think it was a bad writing choice if that was indeed her intention.

Pippin:
But young readers who love a book read it over and over again. OTOH, if they  didn't like the book or were indifferent to it, why would it have any great influence on the way they think?


Betsy_Hp 
> But as far as Harry not re-examining so that I'd be forced to, I'm not made squirmy about it on *my* account.  It's Harry that I'm bothered about.  Yes, I *do* expect him to have a "wow I should have known" moment.  Because he gleefully watched an adult mistreat a schoolboy. 

Pippin:
Sorry, but where is this gleefulness in canon? *Ron* is gleeful. Hermione is indignant. The narrator doesn't tell us how Harry felt. It's certainly easy to imagine that he felt gleeful, but in that case we can imagine his later chagrin as well. More likely he didn't know how he felt, except intensely curious about "Moody".


> Betsy Hp:
> But I *did* pick up on this.  It was kind of red-banner as far as I was concerned. That's what makes me squirmy.  Not that Harry missed small things, he missed *massive* things.  At least as per me.  *I* thought about the implications of Neville being alone in the classroom with the man who tortured his parents to madness at a time when he was emotionally vulnerable.  I thought about it, and thought about it, and the books never dealt with it at all.  In fact they go the opposite way and have one of Neville's classmates praise that DE in front of him.


Pippin:
I'm not sure what you're getting at, here. Yes, Neville was manipulated in a very ugly way. But Harry and the readers certainly find out how that feels when Harry thinks that Dumbledore betrayed him. It's  far more immediate to explore the issue that way than to have Harry speculate about Neville's feelings. 

One of the things that make HBP a good read for me, in spite of the unfortunate chest monster, is the way Harry is so proud of himself for recognizing the attempts of Slughorn and Scrimgeour to manipulate him, while all the time he's doing backflips for Dumbledore. 

As for Harry's classmates, the official line in OOP is that the fake Moody was a maniac who *thought* he was taking orders from Voldemort. It's not clear that anyone but the Trio even knows who the imposter really was, much less that he was a genuine DE and had a history with Neville. 


Dean isn't being deliberately tactless by remarking on Fake!Moody's skill as a teacher, he's just ignorant, and part of that ignorance is Neville's own choice.

We might notice that despite whatever admiration he retained for fake Moody's methods, Harry doesn't put the DA under the Imperius curse to show them how to resist it.  


Betsy_Hp 
> I will say, I don't recall Harry ever struggling with his own moral awareness.  *That's* what I was missing. 

Pippin:

But that's an adult thing, and Harry's status as an adult is deliberately ambiguous. It's pointed out that in real world Britain a seventeen year old  is legally a child -- an innocent. 

 JKR writes the story so that innocents who identify with Harry  can continue to do so, while adults can recognize that Harry couldn't  make the decisions he makes as an adult without knowing that  moral failures are a part of being human and that everyone shares some responsibility for the existence of evil in the world. 

But taking responsibility does not mean beating yourself up.

Harry blamed himself for not being able to save Cedric and relived the moments leading to his death over and over again. That's the dawning of his moral awareness. But when JKR's characters define themselves as moral failures, it's paralyzing.  It doesn't empower them to change. 

What empowers characters to change, in canon, is believing that they can and should make a difference for others. If they believe that, then it doesn't matter how bad they feel about what they did before, still less whether they could or couldn't have prevented the consequences.

Do you think it mattered to the people who were being threatened by Grindelwald how  much responsibility Dumbledore bore for the death of his sister? Do you think Goyle cared that one of the people who saved him from burning to death was a Dark Arts supporter and another had once used the cruciatus curse and they're possibly not sorry about it?  Who cares whether they're sorry or not?

Aberforth accused Dumbledore of  getting over the death of their sister. What he really wanted was a scapegoat -- he wanted Dumbledore to have the guilt instead of him. But what mattered was that Aberforth's help was needed and he could give it, if he wasn't lost in feeling sorry for himself and hating his brother. 

Lupin is always very sorry for what he's done, he re-thinks constantly, and it doesn't do diddly to stop him from doing the same things again. In canon, knowing that someone re-thought what they did doesn't  provide any assurance at all that they won't do it again. 

Percy is made to admit he was a ministry-loving git, and what's the point? Fred, who thought it was so important to get that straight, is dead moments later.  

 
> Betsy Hp:
> You won't be prevented and, if you're a good guy, you don't have to re-think it if you *do* use it. 

Pippin:
But that's the point of free will, that no one can force you to accept moral responsibility. 

Betsy Hp"
Which yes, doesn't fit in with my "little fictional mythology of good guys and bad guys".  Again, it's why I'm squirmy about these books.  (I'm old-fashioned in that I see the "mythology of good guys and bad guys" as neither "little" nor strictly "fictional".  There's a lot that's foundational and instructive to real-life issues in those sort of mythologies.  It's why they're still told, I think.)

Pippin:
I called it a "little fictional mythology" because the people who are seriously dealing with evil in our society don't divide the world into good guys and bad guys. IMO that's not the way that modern philosophy and theologians and human behavior experts talk about evil. 

I love, love, love Tolkien. But the only moral responsibility for evil that a good guy has in Tolkien is not to seek power above his station. That's fine if you believe in the feudal system, and maybe Tolkien did. But I think JKR is trying to get us to consider that maybe we believe other things now.

That mythology has a lot of power, as you say, but  it can be manipulative as well as inspiring, and I think  JKR shows how it's used to create scapegoats. Young James and Albus think that way because they have to think that way.  As children they need to believe in their own innocence and in the innocence of those they depend on, and so they need to see evil as coming from Outside.

 But adults don't have to believe that, and canon says we ought to be suspicious when anyone tries to lead us in that direction.

Pippin