The Muggles are Alright

Not sure how many readers of this blog caught Penny Red’s post on Harry Potter this week, but it’s worth a read. No seriously, it is. Whether you agree with it or not (and I have some reservations), it’s undeniably thought-provoking, and while Harry Potter might seem to be nearly as trivial a topic for a blog post as the rebranding of mushrooms, it makes some good points. But the really interesting question, in my view, isn’t whether or not the Potterverse is inherently fascist and hierarchical – I’m prepared to grant that it is, at least for the purposes of this post. Rather, it’s the more general question of whether or not we should be worried about the books you read as a kid affecting your views as an adult, and Penny seems to pretty much take it for granted that we should:

Harry Potter is exciting, in large part, because it allows everyone’s childish fantasies of oligarchy, order, genetic determinism and celibate adventure to run rampant. All young children are little fascists : they can’t help it, but in growing up, we learn healthier politics along with how to wipe our own bums and tie our shoelaces. The Potterverse – magical as it is – performs a calcifying spell upon that healthy, questioning politics.

Now, earlier on in the same post she says that she loved the books as a kid, so clearly JK Rowling didn’t succeed in calcifying Penny’s political development, and the same could be said for all those of us who read the Narnia books when we were young but still reached adulthood with our godless leftism intact. (I also managed to get through a brief period as an avid Tom Clancy reader when I was about 13 without coming over all neocon, but that’s by the by.) Penny clearly isn’t claiming that the Harry Potter books unfailingly warp absolutely everyone’s minds, in the same way that the fact that tobacco’s addictive doesn’t mean that everyone who ever smokes will automatically develop a two-packs-a-day habit. But she clearly thinks that reading Harry Potter will have a detrimental effect on the development of a significant proportion of the population.

I’m more than happy to grant that the appeal of Rowling’s books is that they offer an escapist fantasy – that much seems completely uncontroversial. But must we assume there’s an inescapable link between fantasy and the real world, as Penny seems to? It’s interesting (though admittedly a bit strange) to contrast this view with the generally permissive consensus among liberals when it comes to unorthodox sexual tastes like bondage and sadomasochism. With regard to those, we seem perfectly happy to accept that people can distinguish between fantasy and reality, and that there’s no reason to assume that someone who enjoys tying up another consenting adult in the bedroom is any more likely to start abducting strangers and doing the same thing to them. So why the discrepancy?

The fact that Harry Potter books are principally (though of course by no means exclusively) read by kids might seem to make a difference here – Penny in fact cites precisely that as the reason why she thinks it’s important. Children are undoubtedly more easily influenced than adults, so it’s easy to see why this might be a cause for concern. But it’s a matter of degree – Penny might have cried when, as a child, she came to the end of the first book “because according to the rules of the book she was destined to be a Muggle forever”, and as far as I can remember my 11-year-old self’s reaction was probably similar. But while there were many ways in which I was pretty stupid when I was a kid, I never really thought a letter from an owl was a particularly likely prospect, and I doubt Penny did either; the distinction between reality and the world of Harry Potter was pretty clear even at that age. It’s for that reason that I’m not particularly worried about the possibility of millions of children taking the message of bigotry and entrenched hierarchy that Penny sees in the books to heart. Clichéd though it might be to say it, they really are just stories.