In the Harry Potter series, JK Rowling attempts to work in a few bland, gormless cultural critiques along the path to the final battle with Voldemort. Classism is bad, she says, since it produces such stinky and unredeemable people as Draco Malfoy and the rest of his Slytherin pals (so, roughly one quarter of the Hogwarts population). Prejudice is bad too, and bucktoothed Hermione Granger proves that despite one’s lowly birth, one can succeed through a little old-fashioned elbow grease. There’s the throwaway, and much maligned bit about Kreacher, Winky and the rest of the wretched house elves, who despite being offered the chance at freedom, fling themselves back onto the wheel (and into the bottle) because being a slave is simply what they prefer, thank you very much.
What is even more interesting though, is the blaring cultural critique in what Harry Potter doesn’t say. The books are strung through with endless references to the wizarding community being present, everywhere, but just out of sight. Our bleary Muggle eyes glaze over and slide across houses that aren’t meant for them to see. Sometimes, we notice people who look a little funny, but their mismatched raincoat and bowling shoes are their inept attempt at Muggle disguises. There is an entire wing of the Ministry of Magic devoted to making sure that wizards DO NOT, under any circumstances, do magic in front of the witless lay-people, under pain of going to a very weird prison where monsters will aggressively kiss their souls out of their mouths. There’s never any real appraisal of what that means, in a greater sense, to have a parallel society of powerful magicians living next door, everywhere. Why do they still hide? What if they didn’t? Is there a world in which things could be different? What does it all mean?
Well, what should it mean? We can forgive Rowling just a smidge, on the grounds that this is a series of children’s books (which is a controversial opinion, apparently), and she’s not out here trying to do deep philosophical work on the futility of life, or man’s cruelty towards his own race. Still, if there really were a secret parallel society of wizards running around, which was still engaged enough to have its own cabinet minister that meets with the Muggle government each year, wouldn’t that warrant even a moment of reflection somewhere in the series? We’re told that St. Mungo’s hospital can cure the incurable and bizarre diseases from all corners of the globe. Broomsticks and cars can fly, so presumably, they require no fuel besides the imagination of a wizard skilled in charms. One can even hop from one chimney to the next with a bit of powder (hopefully fair trade). Even the lowliest family presented in the book, the Weasleys, have a magical pair of knitting needles to make and mend their clothes, and magical spoons that stir their pots, meaning that manual labor is broadly unnecessary (which is ironic considering that despite this, the wizards still prefer slavery. Maybe it’s just a British thing?) Regardless, the wizarding world, it would seem, could lift the entire world out of poverty, illness and hunger, even going so far as to end wars of scarcity by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Wow!
It’s amusing that Rowling doesn’t even try to write her way out of this nuclear-bomb-blast sized plot hole. It would have been easy for Harry to say, “Gee, why don’t we use our powers to end wars of scarcity by reducing the Muggles’ reliance on fossil fuels?” Dumbledore or Cornelius Fudge could simply tut him, and refer to an earlier attempt to do such a thing, which ended up causing a greater war of some other kind. No, it seems that the wizards and witches of the Potterverse are more preoccupied with hiding the Wizarding World Cup from prying provincial eyes and opening candy shops where people can buy chocolates that make them shit their pants, than stopping the aforementioned nuclear bombs from dropping, keeping millions of people in the British Empire from starving to death, or curing cancer or HIV/AIDs. Maybe the STDs are the reason why it’s frowned upon for wizards to date muggles?
Of course, in order to bypass all of this bleeding-heart humanitarian nonsense, Rowling can lean into that ever-present invisibility cloak: the plot device of secrecy. If the wizards were found out, the book implies, bad things would happen. The many knowledgeable Potterheads can of course correct me, but I don’t seem to remember there really being an explanation of what bad things, exactly, would happen. I think there was a scant reference to witch burnings, or mass hysteria, and the world falling over on its side. It’s true that even the arrival of pleasant, peaceful aliens would probably propel our world into the same chaos as the arrival of the ones from Mars Attacks, but it seems to me that the real subtext is about more than just “the muggles will freak out, so don’t turn into a cat in front of them, okay?”
The most obvious evidence of this is seen in the mind bending speed with which the Ministry of Magic can cite a wizard for waving their wand in front of Muggles: something around 30 seconds, even for an accident, in Harry Potter’s case. Rowling may have been writing this, either consciously or unconsciously as a nod to the British public’s concern with increasing public surveillance under the Blairites in that very same era, but Rowling makes it clear that this is a net benefit to society, or at least a necessary evil. If the Ministry of Magic can’t see you magically evaporate your poo in a public restroom, the whole of wizarding society may crumble!
All of the wizards in the Harry Potter universe seem to happily go about their lives, without ever thinking about any of the wiggly plot points I’ve mentioned above. They wake up, their magical toothbrush brushes their teeth for them, and then they go off to work. After work, they can go to the pub and talk shit until the wee hours of the morning, since all of their children go to a free private school. Wait, what exactly do they do for work? Well, we can’t really say, can we? Approximately ½ of the adults in the series work for Hogwarts (although they’re often sacked after a year or two, or work the job until they are literally so old that they die and still teach as ghosts), while the rest are either shut ins (Sirius Black), home-makers (Mrs. Weasly) or do random odd-jobs like dragon taming or “washing dishes at the Leaky Cauldron.” It’s not even really clear why they have to work, since slaves cook the food, and magic can be used to do basically everything, including conjuring raw materials. Still, Harry Potter comes of age and trundles off to work, following in the footsteps of a teacher he had for one year, who he thought was actually a sort of cool, old curmudgeon, but turned out to a be an evil, psycho killer pretending to be the evil curmudgeon guy, to become a wizard cop.
It’s as if Harry might suddenly turn to the camera and give a monologue in the style of High-Fidelity (it helps that John Cusack could play a passible, mopey adult Harry): “Helping Muggles would be dangerous. Why? Well, the last time we tried that, they fainted. Stupid morons. I know, I used to live with some. A couple of them died during this whole Voldemort thing. That was pretty sad, sure, but they were just Muggles, after all. They’re not like us. No, even the stupidest and poorest among us is worth a thousand of those small, thoughtless little people. We wash dishes at the Leaky Cauldron, thank you, not filthy Pret À Manger. Sure, we could put some more beds in St. Mungo’s, do a whole “save the children” bit. But if we let in Muggles, where does it end? Goblins? Giants? French people? French giants?? No, that won’t do. They’ve got to solve their own problems. It’s not as if their lives are inextricably linked with ours or anything. Let the whole of London burn. Our buildings are all insured by Gringotts, and then we can go build somewhere nicer, maybe Beaconsfield, if those hook-nosed goblins ever pay out. Oh, I forgot. Every year, a few muggles manage to pop out future Hogwarts students, but we just bully them once they get to school so they don’t get too uppity. You see? Things here just work. Does our wizarding world have its own problems? Yeah, sure. We can’t vote, there’s manufactured scarcity, the Ministry of Magic is always watching, and I accidentally threw my wife’s knickers to the house-slave, so now she has to do all of the laundry! But solving the world’s problems is a fantasy. It would be really hard, and I might have to miss the Chudley Cannons game tonight, or take time off from throwing people into the creepy soul prison for minor civil infractions — the same one my god-father almost went crazy in. What, you thought this was a book about magic??”
As every franchise ages, we see it more clearly as the era that produced it becomes subject to our clearer hindsight. Harry Potter is a thoroughly Neo-Liberal fantasy, in which the thought of improving the world becomes a silly and unrealistic endeavor: so silly, in fact, that the characters never even stop to think of it at all, which says more about JK Rowling that it does about Harry Potter and company. Is it really a surprise that in her elder years, JK Rowling has outed herself as a thoughtless reactionary, lacking any real ability to empathize with some of the most vulnerable members of society? It seems a shame that American Republicans reacted with mass hysteria to Harry Potter on the basis of witchcraft being scary, since these represent a perfect metaphor for their Ayn Randian politics of selfishness.
“Helping the muggles is too dangerous,” the adult Hermione thinks to herself as she bursts through the fireplace into her luxurious office. It’s been a long five years, tending to her duties as the Minister of Magic. She sits down at her desk, brushing a few stray cinders from her velvet robe. Her assistant is late with her tea, as usual.
“It’s a shame they can’t improve their lot by themselves,” she thinks. “After all, I did it. Why can’t they?”
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