Spengler Breaks Harry Potter Spell

WE´VE ALL LEARNED to love Harry Potter, the teenaged wizard who has taught a generation of children to read. Spengler begs to differ. He does not see a harmless lovable fuzzball; he sees decline and decadence. He sees readers submitting to a philosophy that says you can be special by remaining just who you are. “Harry (like young Skywalker) draws his superhuman powers out of the well of his `inner feelings.´”

But this gets it all wrong, complains Spengler.

The spiritual tradition of the West, which begins with classic tragedy and continues through St Augustine´s Confessions, tells us just the contrary, namely, that one´s inner feelings are the problem, not the solution. The West is a construct, the result of a millennium of war against the inner feelings of the barbarian invaders whom Christianity turned into Europeans.

The great heros of western literature learned that they needed to change. Elizabeth Bennet needed to overcome her pride, “Dickens´ Pip must look past the will-o´-the-wisp of his expectations; Mann´s Hans Castorp must confront mortality; Tolstoy´s Pierre must learn to love.” And Goethe´s Faust must also transform his character. “Failure to correct defining flaws, of course, leads to a tragic outcome, as in Dostoyevsky or Flaubert.”

This being Spengler, you expect the appeal to Pope Benedict XVI, late Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and you are not disappointed.

Of course, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker are merely going with the Zeitgeist, and its peculiar corruption of the German cult of creativity that leaves out the theme of preparation and merely focuses on the Aha! moment of impulse.

That is the problem. All real creators know that creativity is a matter of work, graced perhaps with a single gift of epiphany, and often paid for by years of unrequited labor. Potter and Skywalker are telling us a lie.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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