Fudge and Umbridge: The Lessons of Obviously Unfit Power-Brokers
If Plato faced great challenges in securing incorruptible political power in his ideal republic, the challenges facing governance in the more practical, though magical, world of Harry Potter must be nearly insurmountable. With Dolores Umbridge’s acts of umbrage in her year of tyrannical rule at Hogwarts, Cornelius Fudge’s refusal to believe clear evidence of Voldemort’s return, and Rufus Scrimgeour’s tactless blandishments to Harry in exchange for his service, there is good reason to question whether proper rule in the wizarding community is even possible. Is the Ministry destined to be corrupt? Rowling’s characters have much to teach about the nature of political power as we examine a few possible candidates for Minister of Magic: Umbridge, Fudge, Voldemort, Dumbledore, and Harry.
No fan of the Potter series would consider Dolores Umbridge a model citizen, let alone a just ruler. In fact, Umbridge’s relentless onslaught of rules, vicious detention measures, and Gestapo-like tactics for gaining and maintaining control might make us wonder why she was not in Voldemort’s cohort, rather than the Ministry’s.10 Nevertheless, she holds positions of power in the series—both at the Ministry and at Hogwarts. A Platonic evaluation of her time as a leader must be negative. She provides an object lesson in how not to rule.
Readers can understand Umbridge’s unsuitability for rule from two simple facts. First, that she lacks all of the necessary virtues Plato discusses in the Republic—courage, wisdom, justice, and self-control. Umbridge’s lack of self-restraint is a particular weak spot. All it takes is one snide remark, and her passive-aggressive rage is unleashed—hardly something Plato would expect of a successful philosopher-ruler. Second and more important, all of Umbridge’s torment tactics reveal her inner lust for power. Take, for instance, Harry’s detentions with Umbridge in Order of the Phoenix. She instructs him, “I want you to write ‘I must not tell lies,’ . . . as long as it takes for the message to sink in.”11 This “sink in,” as we all know, is quite literal. And her cruelty seems only to increase, relative to the amount of power she is given. As the year progresses and as she attains a more prominent role of authority at Hogwarts by the Ministry, her decrees multiply, as do her detentions. We might even speculate that her incremental increases in authority merely fuel her lust for more power. One thing is certain, though: Plato would have expelled her from his Academy.
Whereas Umbridge never rose to the position of Minister of Magic, the almost equally dangerous and inept Cornelius Fudge did. Part of what made him such a poor Minister was his perpetual fear of losing power. This concern fostered dictatorial tendencies that manifested in a control of the press. The Dark Lord’s return to power was partly due to Fudge’s failings as a leader. For example, when Harry announced that Voldemort had in fact returned, Fudge resorted to trashing Harry in the press in order to maintain his own public image—an image that only got worse once the truth came out.
Umbridge’s position as the Hogwarts High Inquisitor is another example of Fudge’s attempts to maintain power in unjust ways. Recall how at the beginning of Order of the Phoenix Harry is brought to court for producing a Patronus to protect himself and his cousin, Dudley, from dementors. The dementors were not supposed to be away from Azkaban. To cover up the Ministry’s mistake, Fudge brings Harry to trial and does all that he can to tilt the scales against him. He moves the time of the hearing, for instance, in an attempt to make Harry late and to prevent Dumbledore from attending. All of this goes to show that Fudge’s virtues as a ruler are at best dubious. He craves power, but his insecurity leads him to use that power for his own advantage, rather than for the public good. He stumbles over himself in his attempts to maintain power, which prevents him in the end from keeping it. So, like Umbridge, Fudge lacks the key features Plato described as necessary for successful ruling, particularly courage, wisdom, and self-control.
Voldemort and Dumbledore: Two Tempted by Power
Self-confidence and decisiveness are certainly not qualities lacking in Lord Voldemort. Even during his humble beginnings in the orphanage, Tom Riddle was drawn to power. “He was already using magic against other people, to frighten, to punish, to control. The . . . strangled rabbit and the young boy and girl he lured into a cave were most suggestive.... ‘I can make them hurt if I want to.’”12 Contrary to the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s dictum never to use another person merely as a means to an end, Riddle used others as a means to feed his desires and ambitions. The fledgling Death Eaters, “a group of dedicated friends,” were not friends at all—only followers.13 “Riddle undoubtedly felt no affection for any of them,” Dumbledore tells Harry.14 Riddle’s great intelligence and social cunning were a deadly pair. A great suck-up, as well as a skilled wizard, he was a star at Hogwarts not only with his cronies but with the faculty as well.
This attitude reveals Riddle’s unwavering egocentrism—a trait that gets more pronounced as he becomes Lord Voldemort.15 Two clear examples of this excessive self-love also reveal Voldemort’s intense craving for power and his paradoxical ability to harm himself in securing it: the murder of Lily Potter and the creation of the Horcruxes. Despite his key follower’s wishes, Voldemort kills Lily, Severus Snape’s great love. Perhaps Voldemort feels that Snape will not leave his side, regardless of what he does; perhaps he does not care. Voldemort’s quest is his own, and others are valued by him only as tools to serve his own desires. His lust for immortality, even at the cost of splintering his own soul, is the ultimate proof of his evil and his propensity for tyranny. Finally, we cannot neglect Voldemort’s schemes to gain power at the Ministry. Although he realizes that his reputation prohibits his direct seizure of power as Minister of Magic, he lusts after the office’s powers and plants others there as instruments of his desires.
With his ruthless egotism, keen intelligence, and tyrannical tendencies, Voldemort fits perfectly into Plato’s category of “least trustworthy rulers.” Perhaps a character better fit to rule is Albus Dumbledore. He “was offered the post of Minister of Magic, not once, but several times,” and he is, after all, the most philosophical character in the Harry Potter series, making him the obvious choice as philosopher-ruler.16 Nearly every tale concludes with a lesson from the wise sage, brilliantly tying together the previous year’s events with all of their manifold meanings. In Half-Blood Prince, while engrossed in the Pensieve, Dumbledore delves into questions regarding human nature and the moral psychology of evil, giving Harry and us important clues as to what a ruler ought to be like. Dumbledore even exhibits all of the key traits a philosopher-ruler must have. He is courageous, just, and wise, and has self-mastery—or does he? In Deathly Hallows, we learn that Dumbledore was tempted by power in his youth, along with his friend and soon-to-be dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald. He admits of this period that “I had learned that I was not to be trusted with power . . . that power was my weakness and my temptation.”17 Many years later, after having realized his dangerous will-to-power, he is tempted again by Marvolo Gaunt’s ring, the ring that ultimately shortens his life.
What makes Dumbledore venerable, even with these flaws, is his self-knowledge.18 Plato’s teacher, Socrates, instructed his students to know themselves; Dumbledore had enough self-knowledge to know that he could not be trusted with power. This simple realization makes the crucial difference. It prevents him from accepting the offer to be Minister of Magic, which would confer the power he so desires. And so, although unfit to rule, as it turns out, Dumbledore never reaches the dark lows of Grindelwald or Voldemort—although he potentially could have. Dumbledore promotes justice in the wizard community simply by knowing himself, resisting the power he craves, and passing his lessons on to his students. Had Dumbledore succumbed to his own temptations, Voldemort might have had a competitor as the most sinister character of Harry Potter. Dumbledore’s Socratic self-knowledge and Platonic teachings reveal the qualities that virtuous Potter characters embody. They have self-knowledge and are guided by justic
e, courage, and wisdom. Perhaps the best exemplar of these traits is Harry himself.
Harry’s Cloak, the Ring of Gyges, and the Temptations of Power
As it turns out, Harry can be trusted with power. How can we be sure? Recall Plato’s Ring of Gyges.19 It measures our probity, or incorruptibility, by asking what we would do if we were invisible. Rowling resurrects Plato’s character-o-meter with Harry’s Invisibility Cloak. Throughout the series Harry has countless opportunities to abuse his unique power. He never once, aside from breaking some minor rules (such as staying out late), used it to his own advantage at the expense of others. Unlike Gyges, Harry certainly did not kill and seize political control. He instead sought to use his power for the greater good—the real greater good, that is. In the face of an opportunity for advancement, Scrimgeour’s offer of Harry’s dream job, Harry seeks not his own interests but those of the entire wizarding community. As Harry learns of Horcruxes, the most dangerous idea in all of dark magic, he is not tempted to seek eternal life through murder as was Voldemort. Rather, Harry relentlessly searches to destroy the Horcruxes, employing his cloak for the purpose. As early as Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry displays this admirable quality. As he faces Voldemort for the first time, at age eleven, Harry looks into the Mirror of Erised and finds the Sorcerer’s Stone in his pocket. Dumbledore’s enchantment, allowing the stone to be found only by someone who had no intention of using it, reveals Harry’s lack of selfish desire.
Harry’s indifference to the lure of power, it turns out, is the very quality that both Plato and Dumbledore celebrate as conducive to wise and just statecraft. Harry certainly possesses the other necessary virtues to rule, such as courage, justice, and self-restraint. But so do many others. Therefore, it really is this piece of Platonic wisdom, revived and put at the fore of Rowling’s world, that ought to guide our search for those fit to rule. Although Harry is ordinary and easy for readers to relate to, there really is something magical about his immunity to the lust for power.
NOTES
1 Both Plato and Alcibiades were students of the great Athenian philosopher Socrates.
2 Plato, “Seventh Letter,” 324b-324c.
3 Ibid., 324d.
4 Ibid., 325a.
5 This term is often rendered “philosopher-king,” but we find this misleading because Plato—ahead of his time here, as often elsewhere—believed that women were perfectly capable of fulfilling the duties of this highest political office.
6 Plato, The Republic, 494b-494d.
7 Ibid., 521a.
8 Ibid., 520d.
9 Ibid., 360b-360c. One finds the same theme in the relatively recent film Hollow Man, where a decent research scientist played by Kevin Bacon becomes invisible and goes on a rampage worthy of Gyges himself.
10 Plato himself is deeply suspicious of the unnecessary multiplication of rules and regulations, which only serves to cheapen their value. See Republic, 425e-426e.
11 Order of the Phoenix, p. 266.
12 Half-Blood Prince, p. 276.
13 Ibid., p. 361.
14 Ibid., p. 361.
15 Interestingly, plenty of defenders of a more enlightened egoism would suggest that Voldemort’s egocentrism was self-defeating because it contained the seeds of his destruction. Had he truly loved himself more, he would have realized that the best way to promote his own interests was not to be so transparently egoistic.
16 Deathly Hallows, p. 717.
17 Ibid., pp. 717-718.
18 For more on this theme, see Gregory Bassham’s chapter on Dumbledore in this volume, “Choices vs. Abilities: Dumbledore on Self-Understanding.”
19 This parallel is noted in David Baggett and Shawn E. Klein’s “The Magic of Philosophy,” in Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), p. 3. Notably, another philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), asked himself the same question that faces Gyges and Harry: “I have often asked myself what use I would have made of this ring?” His answer turns out to parallel Harry’s actions—namely, that he would use his power to promote the public good. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, translated by Charles Butterworth (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), p. 82.
PART FOUR
THE ROOM OF REQUIREMENT: A POTTER POTPOURRI
10
IS DUMBLEDORE GAY? WHO’S TO SAY?
Tamar Szabó Gendler
On October 19, 2007, before a packed audience at Carnegie Hall in New York City, J. K. Rowling made a remarkable announcement. In response to a question about whether Albus Dumbledore had ever been in love, Rowling announced that she had “always thought of Dumbledore as gay.”
Reaction was immediate and emphatic. Within two days, close to 3,000 comments had been posted at the Leaky Cauldron message board, with another 2,500 at MuggleNet. There were articles in Time and Newsweek, reports on CNN and NBC, and even an op-ed piece in the New York Times.
Responses fell into three categories. Some readers were delighted by the news. As one Leaky Cauldron poster wrote, “You go Jo! Finally a strong, wise, non-stereotypical portrayal of a gay man!”1 A second group was dismayed. “I am extremely disappointed at Jo for her comments on Dumbledore. It was not necessary for her to promote such a perverse lifestyle in connection to a series of books that millions of children will take interest in now and in the future,” wrote another.2 But the most interesting type of response was the third. These readers responded to the declaration by challenging Rowling’s authorial authority. “Unless she decides to write Book Eight, Ms. Rowling has missed her chance to impart any new information about any of the Harry Potter characters. If the series is truly at an end, then the author no longer possesses the authority to create new thoughts, feelings, and realities for those characters,” wrote one reader.3 “To insist on ownership (as she has done) and the right to define or re-define those characters as she sees fit after the fact, is to insist on an absolute control over the literary experience of her readers she cannot possibly have,” wrote another.4
On its surface, this third response is perplexing. After all, at the Carnegie Hall interview, Rowling revealed all sorts of things that are not explicitly part of the Harry Potter stories. She told the audience about things that happened after the Potter books end, about things that happened before the books begin, and about things that happen during the books. But no one wrote in to comment that Neville Longbottom didn’t go on to marry Hannah Abbott or that Remus Lupin, prior to Dumbledore taking him in, didn’t lead “a really impoverished life because no one wanted to employ a werewolf ” or that Petunia Dursley didn’t “almost wish Harry luck when she said good-bye to him” at the beginning of Deathly Hallows—all of which were things that Rowling revealed only in the course of the interview.
What we face here is a version of what philosophers call the problem of truth in fiction.5 Are there facts about what is true in the world of a story, and if so, what determines those facts? Is it simply a matter of the statements that are canonically expressed by the story’s author? What role is played by the story’s readers (or hearers) or by what the author was thinking? What about conventions governing the genre to which the story belongs? And so on.
Truth in Fiction
Because we’re trying to determine whether a particular statement is true in a work of fiction, one obvious strategy would be to think about the problem in analogy with nonfiction. So let’s ask: how does a historian or a biographer go about determining whether a particular statement is true? Well, she looks at the way the actual world happens to be, using things such as archival documents and historical records and archaeological evidence. On this basis, she might determine that the statement “George Washington was president of the United States” is true. It’s true because (in the actual world) George Washington was president of the United States.
How would this go in the fictional case? Can we learn that “George Weasley was a Gryffindor Beater” is true (of the world of Harry Potter) by learning that (in the world o
f Harry Potter) George was a Gryffindor Beater? In the case of George Washington, we looked at the actual world. So, in the case of George Weasley, we simply have to look at the Harry Potter world. The problem is, we don’t really know which world that is. After all, presumably there is some other imaginary world—call it the world of Harry Schmotter—where George Weasley happens to be Seeker for Slytherin. And another—call it the world of Harry Plotter—where George happens to be Chaser for Hufflepuff. And what about the world of Harry Putter, where they play golf instead of Quidditch? Or the world of Harry Hotter, where they wear bathing suits instead of robes? The problem, as the philosopher David Lewis (1941-2001) pointed out, is that “every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some [imaginary] world is.”6
So, it’s simply not useful to think of the task of the (fictional) storyteller as being like the task of the (real-world) historian or biographer. It’s pretty clear that the historian is engaged in an act of discovery, and it’s pretty clear what kinds of things she’s discovering. Only one world is the actual world, and the hard part for the historian or the biographer is figuring out what happened in it. But there are as many imaginary worlds as there are imaginative possibilities, so the hard part for the fictional storyteller is deciding which imaginary world to tell us about. And it’s far from clear whether to call this an act of discovery or instead to call it an act of creation.7 To put the same point in a slightly different way, the problem with figuring out whether “George Weasley was a Gryffindor Beater” is true (of the world of Harry Potter) is the problem of figuring out which one of the infinitely many possible imaginary worlds is the world of Harry Potter. And that leaves us right where we started.
The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles Page 15