Harry Potter craze in context

The Triumph of Magic over Science

The fifth Harry Potter book is finally out, much to the joy of desperate librarians and English teachers everywhere. Weighing in at 870 pages, its relatively longer gestation period in the brain of author J.K. Rowling is understandable.

The story begins, as always, with Harry back in the clutches of the bullying, philistine Dursley family-to most kids an accurate representation of their own underage predicament. But of course Harry continues to be special, somebody a breed apart-which is also a status kids are a cinch to identify with.

While youngsters the world over hungrily devour the new volume at a hundred pages an hour, the alarm of the "antimagical" community also continues. Just as these (mostly Christian) traditionalists have warned, the Harry Potter phenomenon indeed correlates with markedly higher interest in the occult, the Wiccan religion, and "witchcraft" in general.

But this interest is part of a trend already well underway in the Western world. Many have noted how scientific and magical ways of thinking seem to advance and retreat, expand and contract at each other's expense in the course of human events.

The poet W.B. Yeats developed an entire aesthetic symbolism based upon the periodic waxing and waning of two spiritual forces within what he called "gyres"-Science, Rationalism, Intellect, Objectivity, Morality, Democracy, the Masculine versus Art, Magic, Instinct, Subjectivity, Feeling, Aristocracy, the Feminine.

Like the determinists' cosmic pendulum overcorrecting its swing, like Hegel's dialectic of Absolute Spirit "negating the negation," history seems ever to be contesting the previous decision and striving to overturn it.

The artist Vassily Kandinsky believed that "constant correction is required from the angle of the irrational." But what is happening now goes way beyond mere "correction." We are witnessing an entire world-Western rationalism, empiricism, materialism, positivism and progressivism-driven to its farthest limit, exhausted, disintegrating and beginning to collapse into its opposite.

The feminine has been associated since the dawn of humanity with magic and the irrational, and women have never wielded as much power individually or as a sex as they do now in the West.

More women than men have been admitted to institutions of higher education every year since 1992. At American colleges and universities this year, more than 130 females will be enrolled for every 100 males. (Expect very few MRS degrees to be granted.)

Women are "masculinized" by taking over male roles and professions, to be sure, but those roles and professions in turn become "feminized." The effects of this are readily seen in the media, politics and education, where emotional, confessional "sincerity" now overrules dispassionate objectivity.

The question no longer is "Do you think that's right?" but "Do you feel comfortable with that?"

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of young men who would once have been college-bound appear to have vanished off the face of the earth, and no one seems terribly concerned.

What has Harry to do with all this?

Simply that in a culture where scientific thinking is going extinct, people begin to view power over the world in magical terms, because to them the scientific method is indistinguishable from sorcery. Power over the world, over others, continues to preoccupy everyone more than ever, but mastery of scientific knowledge and technique is no longer understood as the means to that end.

At Hogwarts, Harry and his friends "study" such topics as divination, defense against the Dark Arts, spells, charms and potions, herbology and transfiguration. Yet their magic feats consist of little more than a wand flick and a snatch of pidgin Latin.

As for the use of their supernatural powers, Robert H. Knight put it best in Culture and Family Report of Oct. 1, 2002):

"In 'Harry Potter,' power is gained through occultism as an end in itself. . . . Harry freely uses power to avenge himself against his rivals. By contrast, Frodo [in Lord of the Rings] is pure enough to resist the temptation to use the ring of power for anything but his mission, which is to destroy the ring, not co-opt its powers."

The lazy, amoral, "magical" worldview waxes at the expense of both science and religion. But we'd better hope that magic really exists, because it's going to take a whole lot of magic and a few miracles as well to maintain a high-tech society with a low-tech population.

Mrs. Coombs is a freelance writer in Croflon, Md.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Jul 14, 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved