Chapter Discussion: Goblet of Fire Ch. 4: Back to the Burrow

[sigurd at eclipse.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 191478

Dear Eric

You say" At the Battle of Hogwarts, a lot of the Slytherins were in a dreadful  position: What to do if your parents are with the DEs but your own  sympathies are with the DA?  Shoot at your family or your friends?  Getting them the hell out of there strikes me as a real good idea; you  wouldn't have to worry about treachery (on either side) and  afterwards, they could plead innocence."

An interesting position though ethically problematical. Does abdicating moral responsibility make one moral? Does not getting involved do what is good, right, and proper? It makes an easy life for the person unwilling to make moral decisions and choose between loyalties, but the ease does not last for long.

The conflict you frame, loyalty to friends versus loyalty to family is a classic one and the chief pre-occupation of 18th century drama and literature -- that is, NOT the choosing between the lesser of two evils, but in fact the choosing between the greater of two goods. Which is stronger, loyalty to friends, loyalty family, or loyalty to overriding principles and higher truths? That's the great dilemma in the novels of Corneille and Racine, and even Montesque, Richardson, and Voltaire (though Voltaire pretty much burns himself out on it.

But there is a greater question here. It is the abdicaton of self interest. That is, for any of those persons the overriding question is "What sort of world do you want to live in?" That is, what is the world going to be like AFTER the victory of one side or the other and simply to make no choice  means to abandon any sort of physical or moral  agency (as in being an agent, philosophically- that is a person who acts) and to leave the choice to others. Contingent on this and invoked by this is the question again posed by Corneille and others- "What if ones parents and family or friends or even the over-arching system commands one to do dishonorable things. To put it in real terms, does one exercise paternal obedience if Dad says "Come on son, we're going to put on our bedsheets and go out and whomp the "nigras!" The question faced, in the 18th century was does one owe a loyalty to every man or person and those not necessarily connected by bonds of friendship or family. That's an old one. Cain asks it of God when he asks "Am I my brother's keeper?"  So the question of loyalty to parents and friends must even in this wierd case boil down to what do "I" want, what sort of world do "I" wish to live in.

But your answer has a nother problem attendent upon it. In these grand guignols of real life, those who stay out of it and take no part risk being lumped in with the defeated and treated by the victors as no better than the vanquished enemy.  Those Slytherins who did not join him would be the first victims of Voldemort after he had polished off the last of the defenders, and in any real sense (which Rowlings averts us from) with the triumph of Potter the fate of those who stood on the side would be barely less tolerable. I don't know what is worse-- Azkaban or the firing squad. I think I'd take the firing squad. Even the most kind and gentle of society is hard pressed to leash in vengence and violence when loved ones have been slaughtered and died. Even the more or less benign American Revolution brought terrible reprisals on the Tories and loyalists, and even though it did not end in an Auschwitz, it was not pleasant at all and we did not all go back to being good friends.

Otto