Yes, the case of patronizing praise meant to manage and handle him, ideally before he loses his shit completely and does something even more reckless and irreparable. The same way Hermione or Dumbledore or anybody else really handles him. And the thing is that they are not wrong, it is exactly how they should treat him.
EDIT: By the way this is in strict contrast with Three Investigators, where boys are main heroes who often interact with adults, there is literally a trope where adults invite them to eat sandwiches and drink tea in similar context to what McGonagall did. But the boys treat these situation as adversarial social tests. Jupiter Jones uses his intellect to put adults off balance and get information that he needs, Bob uses his charm and boyish charisma to get special perks and information using his childish innocence and Pete who is muscle of the operation often uses that opportunity to scout the area or nick important item, and he also has his own moments of direct and no nonsense talk. If they are patronized, they understand it and treat it accordingly - mostly dismissing it as manipulation and maneuvering around. I think this is much more in line with experience of modern boys who are invited in teacher's office to be talked to.
I did right now, and as far as I understand this is what counts?
What most of us can’t do is lead men. Leading men is what counts. That’s the real job, but it comes with these other tasks.
So leadership is some je ne sais quoi, ability to get results via mysterious means? I think it can work from the outside, but it does not work in literature where you have access to internal monologue of main leader and his underlings. I actually think that people really underestimate how moronic Harry Potter was and how he was managed by everybody else. Here is one passage of angry Potter being called to professor McGonagall office after he had altercation with Umbridge:
“Well?” said Professor McGonagall, rounding on him. “Is this true?” “Is what true?” Harry asked, rather more aggressively than he had intended. “Professor?” he added in an attempt to sound more polite. “Is it true that you shouted at Professor Umbridge?” “Yes,” said Harry. “You called her a liar?” “Yes.” “You told her He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is back?” “Yes.” Professor McGonagall sat down behind her desk, frowning at Harry. Then she said, “Have a biscuit, Potter.” “Have — what?” “Have a biscuit,” she repeated impatiently, indicating a tartan tin of cookies lying on top of one of the piles of papers on her desk.”
Calm down, have a biscuit and let me tell you what to do right now before I lose my patience with you. A classical treatment of ancient hero in sagas of old, right? Achilles was known for his ability to take shit from bureaucrats like that, sit down and sip his tea waiting to be berated about how awful he is.
At best, Harry was treated as a loose cannonball, a moron to be managed by everybody: Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hermione and the whole Order of Phoenix. Even Draco Malfoy. Otherwise he would fall flat on his head and die instantly. Potter is no backroom manager moving chess pieces or anything like that. At best, he is a brute field player who has to be managed by the likes of Granger or McGonagall, who are Willie Randolphs of the story.
Moreover Potter does not even work as a traditional reckless hero like Beowulf or Achilles. He is literal subversion. He lacks any agency in achieving Kleos/Glory, all his victories are result of pure luck, his blood chemistry through his mother or through administrative support of whole organization with private armies. He is not an individual hero like Beowulf who gets angry, sails across a sea to tear arms of Grendel by his bare hands. He is no Conan the Barbarian who stands proud in defiance of gods, wizards and the world with his honor, strength and good steel in his hand. Neither is he Odysseus using his guile and cunning, or Batman devising strategies, plans and gadgets to put him on even playing field with monstrous villains of his world - if there is any such hero in that story it is Hermione. Potter is damsel in distress, a MacGuffin to be protected by multi-billion operation, the best wizard who ever lived and literal Order.
He is not a leader. If that was the case, any moronic lottery winner who is managed by his mom would be voted as a president of the country. That is why Potter is no hero for boys and men. He is subversion of heroic archetype and no sophism and mythical leadership je ne sais quoi will save that fact.
georgioz
1d ago
He addresses it in a reply to one of the comments, but the reply is mostly “there are prejudices in older works that don’t matter because the conflicts no longer exist” (for instance, the Pharisees in the New Testament)
You could not be farther from truth. Pharisees specifically were the most powerful faction of Jews at the time, they formed the central religious authority of Sanhedrin and they formed the core of what later came as Rabbinic Judaism. Saint Paul himself was a learned Pharisee, taught by famous rabbi Gamaliel and many of his ideas actually reflect this reading of Old Testament. So in that sense Pharisees live to this day in a very literal, historical sense.
More generally, Pharisees represent the legalistic tendency of any moral philosophy. They have parallels everywhere, the age old "letter of law" vs "spirit of law" conflict. You see it in discussions such as Originalism vs Living Constitution interpretation of constitutional law. You see it in day-to-day adherence to your local HR decrees in your company etc. It may be one of the most important and impactful conflict today.
They were not asking about the capacity to make factual generalizations, but specifically about ascribing moral responsibility for an individual's actions to a demographic group they belong to.
Yes, people put moral responsibility and duties based on group characteristics. I have a duty to pay taxes and adhere to some regulations etc. You as well as OP operate under certain moral system, maybe utilitarianism or harm reductionism and you use them to impose moral duties on other people based on group characteristics. That is why I used women or SNAP recipients as an example. Women can get pregnant, therefore you have moral duty to accommodate them in various ways. What seems just like logical and descriptive term bleeds into moral categories and duties.
You can, I suppose, argue that being a bigot is good and/or rational, but you can't really argue that assigning collective moral responsibility to a demographic group on account of the actions of a specific member of that group is not bigoted.
Yes, for example some lunatic shoots up a school and now millions of individuals get their second amendment right curtailed for it. Again, we will evaluate a complex individual to a few characteristics such as "gun owner" which paints him morally as potential gun shooter and thus he has to have moral duties. And if you defend your right to own a gun as an individual, you are blamed as supporter of gun shooters in a very normative way. All policies paint a broad brush, evaluate individuals based on limited attributes and ascribes moral duties. It is just that policies the OP thinks of as good/rational are exempt of that, because they are good and rational while other bigots who have different way of evaluating the same are "bigoted" in pejorative way. It is pure Russel's conjugation.
You're confusing different kinds of things (see the normative/positive confusion above as well). "SNAP supporters" and "women" are both groups in the sense that they refer to multiple people, but they are different kinds of category.
They are all group characteristics that are basis on moral duties for other people. That is the category. Women get special treatment in all kinds of situations just because they are women and you are assigned moral duty to accommodate. SNAP recipients are evaluated by narrow criteria such as their gross income and some asset classes and if they pass, you have moral duty to pay taxes and literally feed them no matter if they are drug addicts or if they hide their income or assets etc. They are of the same category despite being millions of individual people with individual stories, and all of them are evaluated on narrow criteria, which then serve as a basis for you to have moral duties even if you never met them and if you live thousands of miles away.
I just have to reiterate that all the above categories, moral evaluations of groups and moral duties are put onto individuals are based on a very specific moral framework. You even put blame on people such as tax evader, gun control law criminal etc. It is seen as objectively bad and even punishable by law. But that punishment is based on prior narrow characteristics: you are a bad person because you own a banned gun, and the gun is banned because it causes school shootings.
And I can even grant you the definition of a bigot. Somebody is a bigot because he holds all Muslims as morally culpable for promoting Islamism that leads to terrorism. Another person is a bigot because he holds all gun owners and their defense of 2nd amendment as morally culpable for school shootings. But then if everybody is a bigot, the word loses its differentiating power and becomes an empty word.
The phenomenon you are describing is just plain old bigotry.
It is interesting to start your argument with moral appeal, with ethos. It really has to rely on a very specific definition of bigotry, which usually just goes into equivocation. I can use two examples: the first one being a literal group characteristic. For instance only women can get pregnant. It is a factual claim over billions of people. It attributes a characteristic to just that one group. Then there is the other angle, where suddenly some group characteristics do not have the same moral weight. E.g. everybody who supports any group wide policy such as Affirmative Action or SNAP is a bigot.
So no, the true steelman is that people use selective definition, equivocation, rhetoric and other underhanded tactics to selectively manipulate ungrounded morality to paint somebody as a bigot, while they put themselves outside of the same examination that would position them as bigots. Mostly utilizing weakly grounded and unspecified moral rules - e.g. some form of harm reductionism or utilitarianism, which again just collectivizes individual experience such as harm or utility, relying on the same ethos that enabled them to mark other people as bigots. Everybody evaluates other people on some group characteristics, it is not just some "availability heuristics".
I agree that the structure of the book is Harry centered. We only have access to his internal monologue and his perspective and we do not have access to Hermione. But there is a long tradition of such a story, even in English literature: the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson dynamics.
In fact it fits quite well. Potter similarly to Watson is the brave one, somebody who acts, who goes wand in hand to brave dangers and who is center of the perspective and action. Holmes similarly to Hermione is the hidden genius who comes and goes with solutions, he is the central figure who solves thing behind the scenes and which are to be often utilized by Watson. Crucially, not having access to Holmes internal monologue makes him more of a mysterious figure, which makes him less of a Mary Sue. And he is undisputed main character of the story.
In Harry Potter it is of course not as explicit as Watson's subservience and worship of Holmes. Plus Hermione is only one of many such characters, where Holmes is the ensemble of the system: Hermione, Dumbledore, McGonagall, Snape, Moody, Order of Phoenix etc. who do the heavy lifting behind the scenes: plotting, planning, protecting, building structures which Potter then visits as a curated explorer exactly how Watson has his own adventures that were sanitized by Holmes genius.
In the end I do not "identify" with Potter. He is not a leader, or a hero. He is brave and he possesses good qualities, but his victories are result of luck and/or insane work of much more important people behind the scenes. If anything, Hermione is the one who really is the hero as she shares enough of the "view time" from the story perspective with constant input into various plans. That would be my argument.
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