So, we may endorse the special regard for our own countrymen that patriotism involves, but we are justified in doing so, according to Nussbaum, only to the extent that such an attitude serves the interests of all people and doesn’t require that others suffer so that we may prosper. If Americans give special care and attention to other Americans, and Chinese give that same sort of care and attention to other Chinese, and similarly with all of the citizens of each country, then everyone will (at least, in theory) be taken care of and prosper. Patriotism can thus be a virtue when it serves the interests of the citizens of all countries; it becomes a vice when it fosters and promotes injustice and inequality. Figuring out when this occurs can be difficult, as Ron’s struggles with the point of the Triwizard Tournament demonstrate, but it seems that Nussbaum leaves us a good deal of room to be patriots while still respecting the rights of people in other countries.
The Importance of Community
Being a loyal and patriotic member of a group doesn’t necessarily mean that you regard the members of your group as morally superior to everyone else. That is the difference between the patriotism of a Gryffindor and the bigotry of a Slytherin. But what is the value of group membership itself? Is your well-being dependent on your being a member of a well-defined community with clear boundaries and an unsullied connection to its historical traditions? Or might life in a community whose rich cultural traditions are insulated from the rest of the world be stifling and an inauthentic response to our modern situation?
It’s pretty clear how the Death Eaters, with their mantra of preserving the purity of wizarding blood, would answer this question. To thrive, wizards must keep their kind free from any intrusion from the nonwizarding world. So afraid of the outside world are they that Voldemort kills the Hogwarts Muggle Studies teacher, whose crime, aside from liking Muggles, was advocating cultural mixing and “the dwindling of the purebloods.” 11 The Death Eaters clearly think that flourishing as a wizard—living the good wizard life—requires being a member of the wizarding community, a community they believe must be kept pure and undiluted.
The idea that human flourishing requires membership in a community that is united by common traditions and cultural practices—an idea taken to violent extremes by the Death Eaters—is known in political philosophy as “communitarianism.” Communitarians believe that participation in the life of some particular community provides meaning for our lives and is the source of our value systems. Indeed, drawing on Aristotle’s claim that human beings are “political animals” and so can’t achieve their full humanity outside of a “polis” (roughly, a small political community), some communitarians assert that our very identities are tied to the community we are a part of. To understand how our identities are “constructed” by our membership in communities, think of Harry’s identity as “the Boy Who Lived.” This is central to how Harry sees himself, how everyone else sees him, and what he takes as his obligations and values. Nearly everything about Harry is centered on this role he has played in the wizarding world. Removed from that world, with its history, alliances, family relations, and traditions, Harry wouldn’t know who he is or what he should do. Indeed, we get a sense of how Harry is without the wizarding community when we see his life lived “under the stairs,” before he enrolls at Hogwarts. His misery could be ascribed to his removal from his home community.
Strong versions of communitarianism see community membership as a basic human need—like the need for food and shelter—which can seem reasonable once we recognize the importance of having a sense of who we are, a set of values, a meaning, and a life purpose. The crucial point is that according to communitarians, we get these only from belonging to groups united by common traditions, memories, cultural practices, and so on. If such communities are so essential to our well-being, there’s good reason to think that we should work to preserve these communities and ensure that they do not disappear into the cultural melting pot. According to communitarians, our well-being is threatened when we are removed from these meaning-conferring communities or when our community is threatened from outside by the forces of assimilation or modernity.
But, of course, communitarians would have problems with the Death Eaters’ tactics. Preserving strong cultural bonds is all well and good, but, surely, that doesn’t require violence and acts of domination. Surely, the mixed-blood wizards and other magical creatures need not be persecuted, and Muggles need not be killed in order for the wizarding community to preserve its identity. Matters get a little trickier when preserving cultural traditions involves violations of the liberty of members of that culture. Recent debates about the treatment of women in certain cultures—from female genital mutilation in certain traditional African cultures to the social oppression of women in certain Islamic cultures, just to name two—turn on the question of whether preserving cultural traditions or safeguarding individual liberty is more important. If we can’t figure out how to preserve our culture without oppressing others, we may have a good reason to rethink communitarianism.
Human Flourishing and the Preservation of Dying Cultures
Let’s say we figure out a way to draw this line and decide to preserve certain cultures that are under threat of dying out or being assimilated. Is that a good thing? Is it worth our time and effort to do so? Does something bad take place when a minority culture (such as the Amish or Native American tribes) gets swamped by the relentless tide of modernity? Would it be bad if all of the centaurs left the Forbidden Forest and assimilated into the wizarding world, taking jobs at Hogwarts (as Firenze did), in the Ministry of Magic, or at Zonko’s Joke Shop? Should special steps be taken to preserve dying or threatened cultures? Communitarianism provides one reason for doing so: the well-being of the people of that culture depends on its continued preservation. The implication is that if a culture dies out, its people will be cast adrift in the modern world and will suffer as a consequence of no longer belonging to their home culture, with its history and ancestral traditions. Is that right? Do people really, as the contemporary philosopher Jeremy Waldron puts it, “need their rootedness in the particular culture in which they and their ancestors were reared in the way they need food, clothing, and shelter”?12
So, which view of human well-being is correct? The communitarian view that people need rootedness in a traditional culture in order to live full human lives? Or the cosmopolitan view that true human flourishing requires being a sort of cultural immigrant who moves among many cultures, mixing and integrating bits and pieces of different traditions?
According to some philosophers, one powerful reason in favor of the cosmopolitan view of the good life is that it is the only reasonable response to life in the modern world. Perhaps centuries ago, when human communities were largely isolated from one another, the good life required continual membership in some traditional community. But in a modern, interconnected world, where people of different faiths, ethnicities, races, and nationalities mix every day, whether online or on the streets of London, Mumbai, or New York, human flourishing requires an ability to move comfortably among different traditions. As Waldron puts it, thehybrid lifestyle of the true cosmopolitan is the only appropriate response to the modern world in which we live. We live in a world formed by technology and trade; by economic, religious, and political imperialism and their offspring, by mass migration and the dispersion of cultural influences. In this context, to immerse oneself in the traditional practices of, say, aboriginal culture might be a fascinating anthropological experiment, but it involves an artificial dislocation from what actually is going on in the world.13
Earlier, we saw cosmopolitanism as a view about the equal moral worth of all persons; here, cosmopolitanism is being offered as a view about what is necessary for human flourishing. It’s more a view about the value of mixing and moving between cultures than it is about the moral worth of people, but the Harry Potter books make strong arguments in favor of both kinds of cosmopolitanism. In rejecting the racist view of Lord Voldemort, the books ta
ke a stand in favor of the equal moral worth of all persons. But when we think about how Harry was able to defeat Voldemort, we see that much of his success was due to his ability to move among cultures and his willingness to work together with people from different ethnic groups. Harry can move as easily in the Muggle world as he can in the wizarding world; his best friends are the pureblood wizard Ron, the Muggle-born wizard Hermione, and the half-human, half-giant Rubeus Hagrid. He talks to snakes, works with centaurs and goblins, and even befriends a house-elf, a hippogriff, and a phoenix. Intercultural fluency is perhaps best demonstrated by the many characters who are part-this and part-that. In addition to Hagrid, there’s the werewolf Remus Lupin, the Animagus Sirius Black, the part-veela Fleur Delacour, and the half-human, half-horse Firenze. If there’s a moral lesson at the heart of the Harry Potter books, it is an endorsement of both sorts of cosmopolitanism—the idea that all people are of equal moral worth, and that flourishing in the modern world requires an embrace of other cultures and an ability to navigate among them.14
NOTES
1 Adlai Stevenson, “The Nature of Patriotism,” in Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, edited by William Safire (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 70.
2 Leo Tolstoy, “Patriotism or Peace,” in The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy, vol. 20, edited and translated by Leo Wiener (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1905), p. 472.
3 Emma Goldman, “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910), pp. 134-135.
4 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals, translated by H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 96.
5 Deathly Hallows, p. 440.
6 Order of the Phoenix, pp. 206-207.
7 Goblet of Fire, p. 187.
8 Ibid., pp. 422-423.
9 Ibid., p. 723.
10 Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), p. 13.
11 Deathly Hallows, p. 12.
12 Jeremy Waldron, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25, no. 3-4 (1991-1992): 762.
13 Ibid., p. 763.
14 Thanks to Anne Gilson LaLonde for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
8
DUMBLEDORE’S POLITICS
Beth Admiraal and Regan Lance Reitsma
Political libertarianism teaches that the primary value that government should protect and respect is the personal liberty of each of its citizens. According to standard libertarian thinking, personal liberty is of such significant moral value that the only morally justifiable political state is highly restricted. Its only legitimate task is to protect its citizens from force, fraud, and theft.
Is Albus Dumbledore a political libertarian? Even more, does the Harry Potter series support a libertarian political agenda? Several Potter commentators seem to think so. In Harry Potter and Imagination, Travis Prinzi argues that “it is not difficult to see” in Dumbledore’s behavior and attitudes a small-government libertarian.”1 And Prinzi describes the Potter series as a “political fairy tale,” with an “embedded” political philosophy, whose “libertarian element” is “crucial to the plot and morality of Harry Potter.”2 In the article “Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy,” Benjamin Barton, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, argues that the Potter series contains “an impregnable invective against government,” an attack that he encourages the libertarian movement in America to take advantage of. 3 (Listen up, ardent lovers of liberty.)
Potter fans might wonder why Prinzi and Barton make these claims. The Potter series doesn’t read like a libertarian manifesto. Wouldn’t an extended argument for a libertarian political philosophy need to speak overtly and often, as many libertarians do, about the virtues of the free market and the vices of the modern, liberal welfarist state, not to mention about the folly of engaging in “entangling alliances” with international organizations akin to the United Nations ?4 But market deregulation, antiwelfarism, and a conspicuously robust conception of national sovereignty simply aren’t major themes in the Potter books.
Also, there isn’t any direct evidence that Dumbledore favors a minimal “nightwatchman” state. Though he at various times holds several very influential positions within the wizarding world—Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, and the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot—at no point does he advocate any general political philosophy: monarchist, communist, fascist, liberal democratic, libertarian, anarchist, or other. And nowhere does Dumbledore spout any of the stock slogans commonly associated with libertarian theorizing. He never pronounces, for instance, that “the government that governs least governs best” or that each person has “a natural right to full self-ownership.”
On what grounds, then, do Prinzi and Barton base their libertarian interpretations?
Is Dumbledore a Libertarian?
Prinzi gives three basic arguments for the thesis that Dumbledore is “libertarian-minded.”5 First, Dumbledore is suspicious of political power. Second, he advocates personal freedom and political equality. Third, he has a “hands-off management style” that fits with a libertarian belief in a hands-off, laissez-faire government. Let’s consider these three arguments.
First, Prinzi points out that Dumbledore clearly distrusts political power. How could he not, since he so often sees it misused? The Ministry of Magic, instead of being a help in time of need, is often an obstacle to defeating Voldemort. The Ministry was completely ineffective in preventing Voldemort’s reign of terror during the Dark Lord’s first rise to power. And as Voldemort’s evil forces steadily and ominously gather again in Goblet of Fire, Percy Weasley and others at the Ministry are hard at work writing an officious policy about cauldron-bottom thickness. All the while, Dumbledore must work behind the scenes to undermine the Dark Lord’s plans. Also, the Ministry operates unjustly in suspending Dumbledore from his duties in Chamber of Secrets, in condemning Buckbeak in Prisoner of Azkaban, in charging Harry with underage use of magic in Order of the Phoenix, and in trying to impose Ministry control over Hogwarts that same year. Each time, Dumbledore must find a way to steer the course of events to a just conclusion. Dumbledore is, no doubt, smart enough to draw the conclusion that people in power often cannot be trusted.
What’s more, Dumbledore clearly understands firsthand how corrupting power can be. In Deathly Hallows, he admits that “power was my weakness and my temptation” and says that he turned down the post of Minister of Magic several times because he had “learned that I was not to be trusted with power.”6
Do these considerations show that Dumbledore is “libertarian-minded”? No. This argument is a non sequitur. The conclusion simply doesn’t follow from the supporting evidence, for libertarians do not have a monopoly on the idea that power corrupts. Political theorists of a variety of persuasions accept this claim. The U.S. political system, which today is far from libertarian, attempts to limit the “corrupting influence of power” by implementing a system of “checks and balances.” No one branch of the federal government—the executive, the judicial, or the legislative—is allowed to have overriding power over the other two. The point is that there are mechanisms to limit the power of any one person or any one government agency, other than by implementing a libertarian political system. In fact, Lord Acton, who coined the famous saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” was a traditional Catholic who did not favor a minimal, nonmoralistic state.
Prinzi’s second argument is that Dumbledore shares with the libertarian tradition a strong devotion to the value of personal liberty. No doubt, he does. It is one of his most notable and praiseworthy traits. For instance, Dumbledore’s treatment of the enslaved house-elves who work at Hogwarts reflects such devotion. Dumbledore thinks the institution of house-elf servitude should end. As Pri
nzi is right to emphasize, Dumbledore happens to favor, for strategic reasons, a gradual approach to changing the system.7 He chooses not to call for the immediate emancipation of house-elves because the elves, having been educated (or, as Hermione says, “brainwashed”) to take pride in their identity as servants, would be deeply offended by the idea that they want to be free. Dumbledore understands this and offers the house-elves the right to be paid for their work and to receive time off but doesn’t compel them to accept payment or vacation time. Dumbledore’s policy allows the house-elves to live with the idea of greater freedom and, when they are ready, to decide for themselves when they would prefer to be free. This gradualism itself can be seen as a way of respecting the personal freedom of the house-elves (though it amounts to letting them, for the time being, choose to be less free).
The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles Page 12