Shared Text Note: ‘The Voldemort View’

Readers here know that I like to note instances of allusions to Harry Potter in current media pieces as a marker of the degree to which Ms. Rowling’s novels have become and act as our “shared text” in the 21st Century. Today’s reference (H/T to Charles, who knows my thoughts on Education courses and degrees!) is from the National Review Online’s ‘Corner’ page in an entry written by John Derbyshire, the author of We Are Doomed. That blogpost, ‘Gapology,’ discusses the three explanations of the so-called “achievement gap’ in education, the last of which — the common sense one never-to-be-named in politically correct academic circles — is tagged “the Voldemort View.” Mr. Derbyshire after this allusion then adds another Potter reference, this time to the climactic confrontation in Philosopher’s Stone, that no one not very familiar with that book will ‘get.’

I think Potter-philes, the great unwashed horde of Fandom as well as its Pundits, for the most part imagine that loving Harry Potter and having an in-depth familiarity with the Hogwarts Saga is a token of a Progressive or liberal spirit, not to say leftist political leaning. Remember the bumper sticker ‘Republicans for Voldemort’? Certainly Ms. Rowling’s million Pound donation to the Labour Party, her recent anti-Tory editorial, her 2008 announcement that any Democrat was preferable to a Republican in the White House, and her support of the ideologically hard-to-the-left ‘Harry Potter Alliance’ make that notion understandable.

That the National Review, a citadel of conservative political thought, uses Potter references with no little facility in its resistance to the left, then, is only that much more evidence that Ms. Rowling’s works have achieved a remarkable universality.

I found the following aside at NRO this morning relevant to our discussions here, too. In a post called Life’s Rich Pageant, Mike Potemra reviews a book with this comment about the importance of fiction — and the greater importance of real life:

Rutler reveals that Bill Buckley “regularly sent me [his novels] in the vain expectation that I would read them; they were not his best writing, and I do not read novels anyway, as every day in real life is more thrilling than any fiction.” Let not the reader jump too hastily to accuse Rutler of philistinism here; I believe he’s on to a very important truth. Why, after all, do we read fiction? Is it not, in large part, to try to understand our common human condition, to make sense of its bewildering diversity, to make joyful discoveries about it? What Rutler is celebrating is precisely that diversity that so baffles us — what John Duns Scotus called haecceitas, that irreducible this-ness that God had in mind in creating an individual. (Scotus, by the way, is a writer I have long recommended to my colleagues. “Scotus for Ramesh,” I like to say.) I think Rutler is not condemning fiction so much as contextualizing it — suggesting that fictions bear to life somewhat the same relation that books about contemplative prayer do to contemplative prayer. They help, but their orientation is toward an object greater than themselves, and the time comes when they must be left behind.

‘Haecceitas,’ or ‘this-ness,’ of course, is just another name for ‘Quid-ich,’ right? And so what if reading “extends our being” as C. S. Lewis wrote if we confine our being to ‘being readers’?

I ask your thoughts on this passage and ‘the Voldemort View,’ and I ask as well for your findings of Shared Text items, popular allusions to Harry Potter that assume the listener or reader knows Potter canon well.