Professor Julian Womble (40:56)
The next theme. Oof, y' all the next theme. And our last theme for this episode is one that really assesses something that comes up for us a lot and has come up a lot in these episodes because of the way that Dumbledore uses children. And so this theme was one that came up about child soldiers and the failure of the adults around them. And this one, the people had feelings. Sarah Marie wrote, the need for child sacrifice wasn't inevitable. It was manufactured over decades of adult failure. If you don't dismantle supremacy, if you don't protect Voldemort vulnerable. I was gonna say Voldemort kids vulnerable. Kids like Tom Ridd early. You eventually end up saying there's no other choice. The war feels sudden, but it's not. It's the result of a lot of decisions not made when people had time. Eric wrote, war is generational trauma. Even when children aren't literally conscripted. Societies that choose war accept that their children, broadly defined, will carry the cost forward. Violence doesn't end with people who fight it. It spills into the next generation, whether we acknowledge it or not. And Nadia wrote, the alternative possibilities are only limited by our lack of imagination. I've said this before and I will remain on this hill. We seem to like hills here. That's true. Many of us have many hills. Wherever the CMT universe is, there are a lot of inclines. Nadia goes on to write, when did society decide that children were worth sacrificing in this war? Because Minerva told children to leave. Molly expressly told Jenny not to fight. Colin's parents. Colin's parents were not there. And as Muggles, I very much doubt agreed to his involvement in the battle of Hogwarts. War is awful, always. I don't know when society consented to children being sacrificed. This is crazy to think about because I think that we, and I use this language a lot because I do think that especially when you're reading it as children, we are conditioned to see the student's role in this as something that is necessary, as something that is right, as if they needed to do this. And I really am invited to think about the current state of things, particularly in the United States. But after this week of absurdly heartbreaking violence that we have experienced around the world, there is a way that I think, and I think particularly in the United States, there's a way in which there is this expectation of children to just figure it out. There's a very kind of. During the French Revolution, it's attributed to one person, but historians are saying that it wasn't her who said it, but this idea of apres nous les deluges, right? Like after us the flood, right? So like all the decisions of previous generations come like that. Younger generations just have to deal with all of the problems, right? And there's a way that, especially at Hogwarts, it strikes me that people really do operate from this idea that the kids need to be involved in this. And we learn, and we as readers learn very early on first book that the war is coming to the doorsteps of Hogwarts. It's in the basement. It is in the Chamber of Secrets. It is breaking in through trap doors. It is a rat sleeping in your bed. It is your defense against a Dark Arts teacher. It's inside the castle. And thus it is incumbent upon students to then figure out how they are going to navigate that. And we are like, that's cool. Because it's an Adventure, Right. And I think that there is a tension that comes along with that the older we get and the more we realize that actually everything that the students went through is the byproduct of neglect on the part of the adults. And I think fundamentally it is a societal illness. Because magic, because there's a belief structure about what students and children who are magical can navigate, because magic can fix the problem. And I've said that a lot, and I will continue to say it because I think that the privilege of magic is what then leads people to not care about children in the way that we now recognize they probably should have been cared about. And I didn't even sing because that just came out as I was reading through those comments. But now it's my turn. Did I change the key or did I just. Anyways, it doesn't matter. I think that that's going to be the new vocal friends. If the first theme was about survival and the second was about harm, then this theme is about responsibility. And particularly it's asking the question, who bears responsibility for a war that ultimately requires children to fight it? Because one of the most persistent refrains in the post episode chat was there's no other choice or some variation of it. And for many of you, that statement itself was the thing that demanded interrogation. There's a question of, is it always wrong when you have children fighting? And it seems to me that we agree that child soldiers is wrong. These are not things that are inevitable. This was kind of baked into the structure that this is how this was going to go. As if those children didn't have other adult people who were attached to them who could probably have done some things. This idea of child failure, right, was created by decades, decades of adults not doing things that they probably should have done. A society rooted in supremacy, unwilling to protect vulnerable children and unwilling to dismantle harmful institutions during peacetime, right? Apres nous les deluges. At this point, it all feels sudden, but the reality is that it is not. Sarah Marie shows us this, right? It's not sudden. When you leave something to fester, it is going to grow. And once it grows out of your control, you're gone. Who takes care of it from that particular vantage point, though, war isn't a problem, it's a symptom. And I think that Nadia helps us kind of sharpen this particular critique by refusing the claim that imagination stopped at inevitability. We're invited to consider what was treated as unthinkable rather than what was actually impossible. Could voldemort's return have been delayed? Could the Triwizard Tournament have been prevented? Could the Ministry have formed an adult military force instead of relying on students? Could Hogwarts have been less porous as a recruitment pipeline? The point isn't that any one alternative guaranteed success. It's that inevitability is often retrofitted after the harm occurs. Right? One of the things that I've often maintained, right is that so many people in the magical world, particularly Dumbledore, are very reactive. And so things that were avoidable did not get avoided because everyone's reacting. And I think this is where the tension becomes real because I don't think everyone accepts this framing. Right? I think that there were some people who pushed back that, you know, there were institutions there that were compromised and the adults failed repeatedly and Harry was part of the structure. Like he had to do this. Right? You can't design a victory mechanism around a child and then claim that the child shouldn't be involved at some point. The moral horror does not negate the necess the necessity. The what? The necessity of strategy. And then we have other people come in and remind us, right that this is just the byproduct of war even when children are not conscripted. Right. Societies that choose war make the children pay the price. War is never contained to those who choose it. It echoes and spills and marks and sullies generations. So then we're left with a question that doesn't have a clean resolution. Was the involvement of children a tragic necessity or a predictable outcome? Of what? Of adults refusing to do the work when they had the time. And I think at the end of the day, both can be true. I think at the end of the day, it's not just that children had to fight. It's that they fight because the adults told themselves the moment for prevention had passed. Right. We can hold these two things together. If when Voldemort fell the first time, things had changed, people had reconciled their feelings about the war, realized what had happened, recognized the first time when students and young people were the ones who were giving their lives that there might be another way for us to do this then perhaps we wouldn't have necessarily had to have had it happened the way that it did. Perhaps Harry would have been the only sacrifice which still would have been one child sacrifice too many for me. However, the fact that the soil of Hogwarts Castle after the Second Wizarding War is saturated with the blood of children is never something that's lost on me. Earlier failures were easier to live with than later sacrifice. Maintaining systems felt safer than dismantling them. Once the crisis is averted, the range of choices narrows to the least bad option left. When you place all of your ills of the society into a single solitary entity, a person, you don't think that there's anything else to fix. At what point did the adults decide that the children would be the ones that it would have to pay for their lack of engagement with reality? And what's more is how often do societies make this decision without naming it? How often are younger generations the one that pay the price? I think about this a lot as a millennial in the United States of America, where the cost of doing anything is literally a thousand dollars. Anything. $1,000. The idea of being able to buy a home, absurd to me. The idea of being able to do so many things that older generations could do when everything cost 2 cents. Outlandish to me, I couldn't even imagine it. And so much of this is because the problems of the past didn't feel like problems because everyone could still afford things, so no one cared. Because we don't care until we care. We're not concerned until things are concerning. We don't worry until we have to. And what we don't realize is that someone is going to have to pick up the slack. And by that point, older generations are established, they've benefited from all of these things. And then what's more is they look down on the younger generations and say, you all are lazy. And it's like, oh yeah, that's what we are. We're lazy. That's interesting, because when you had everything handed to you, when you could have fixed the problem and addressed the concerns, you didn't, because you didn't need to, because those were not problems for you. And it is not lost on me that we spend so much time as a global society worrying about children while also leaving them a world that is desolate at best and expecting the children to be the ones to fix it. Aprenus les deluges after us, the flood. I think ultimately the story doesn't ask us whether we approve of child soldiers. It asks us whether we are willing to do the kind of adult work that makes child soldiers unnecessary, that makes it unnecessary for younger generations to clean up our messes. Whether we are willing to disrupt systems before they demand sacrifice, recognize inevitability not as fate, but as the cumulative outcome of choices made and avoided over time. It's true that Dumbledore fought a war he inherited, but the harder question is whether he helped create the world that made it and made war unavoidable. And if that question makes us uncomfortable, I think it's because it's not really about him at all. It's about us. It's about what we as a society are willing to do and how much we are willing to lean into our own discomfort. How much we actually truly care about future generations, even if it means that we may lose some of the things that make us comfortable in order to keep that comfort for them. How much we believe that our own past decisions might have implications for people's future outcomes. How much we care about the future and other people's lives that extends beyond our own. Foreign. We have now reached the point in the episode where I am going to reflect on some of the brilliant thoughts that you all have brought to bear over the last six episodes for this final reflection on Dumbledore. I really want to sit with a theme that has been quietly flowing underneath every episode that we've done, whether we've named it explicitly or not. And that is the power of projection. But more specifically, what happens when projection hardens into delusion and how that delusion, when paired with power, shapes not just individual lives but entire societies. One of the most important things to say at the outset is that nothing about what Dumbledore wants is inherently bad. Wanting a child's family to care for him isn't bad. Believing that people deserve second chances is not bad. Wanting to imagine a world that is kinder and fairer and less cruel than the one you inherited is not bad. Those feel like absurdly and objectively human desires, moral desires, even. The problem is not the desire. The problem is what happens when that desire becomes insistence, when it becomes so tightly held that it overrides evidence, reality, and the one word that I've used in every single episode, Accountability. Because Dumbledore doesn't simply hope that the world is better, he acts as though it already is, even when the evidence in his face tells him a different story. He leaves Harry with the Dursleys, believing that blood will translate into care, that families will do what families do, despite Minerva McGonagall, who has spent time observing this, tells him that that's not true. And when that belief proves false, he doesn't meaningfully intervene. He simply shifts the narrative. He comes in one day, kind of tosses him around with a little bit of magic, and then he leaves. He looks at Tom Riddle and wants to offer a clean slate because he remembers arriving at Hogwarts, I believe, carrying the shame of his father's imprisonment and the stigma surrounding his family. He wants to believe the world can be fairer to him, to Tom. But instead of responding to the child that Tom actually is he responds to the child he wants to him to be. He hopes that he will become. And to me, this is where projection becomes dangerous. Because it can look like empathy at first but when it ignores evidence, it becomes delusion. And delusion, when paired with the kind of power that Dumbledore has becomes catastrophic. There's a line that I've repeated a lot throughout these episodes that Dumbledore gives us and I just keep coming back to it because I think it really does sum up his character in a lot of ways. Because I'm cleverer than most men, my mistakes are correspondingly huger. I think that can be read as humility, but I don't think it actually is humility. What I think that that line actually reveals is that when you are as intelligent, as persuasive and as revered as Dumbledore you can convince yourself of almost anything, including things that aren't true. The belief that your vision of the world is the most ethical one including the belief that your intentions matter more than outcomes. The belief that you alone understand the stakes. And this is where Dumbledore's delusions fully crystallize. Because he doesn't just believe that he can carry the burden alone he fundamentally believes that he must carry them alone. And it brings up something for me that I don't know, that we've actually quite talked about, not explicitly, but the reality is, and this may feel like an attack for some of us, but. And it is for me as well, but the reality is, is that Dumbledore never asks for help. Not really. He doesn't bring other adults fully into the truth. He doesn't meaningfully share moral responsibility with people in his orbit who probably could, like McGonagall. He doesn't distribute power across the community he leads. He gives tidbits of information to people who he knows are indebted to him and who will believe and listen to him without much questioning. He asks children to shoulder impossible burdens. He brings Harry to the cave. He sends Harry to retrieve memories. He parcels out knowledge strategically rather than collectively. And I don't think it's because there's no one else capable. I think it's because asking for help would require vulnerability. And vulnerability to Dumbledore and to many of us, feels dangerous. Here's what I now believe is Dumbledore's deepest delusion. He Convinces himself that being vulnerable enough to ask for help would ruin everything. That if he involves others fully, he will destroy them. That if he plans something that fails their suffering will be on his conscience. That his presence in other people's lives inevitably brings harm. And that belief does not come from nowhere. It comes from Grindelwald, Ariana, Aberforth. Dumbledore projects the damage of his past onto his present and tells himself that the most ethical thing, the greater good, means that the most responsible way for him to go about trying to save the wizarding world from Voldemort is to do it in isolation. But isolation doesn't eliminate harm. It just concentrates the power in. Concentrated power, unchallenged, becomes dangerous because there is no one there to interrupt it. I think this is why McGonagall can't be fully included. Not because she's incapable, but because she would ask questions, she would demand justification, she would force Dumbledore to explain himself. She would hold him accountable. And we see numerous times through this, she tries her best to do it. Isolation protects delusion. And what makes this unsettling is that Dumbledore frames his isolation as sacrifice. He believes loneliness is his lot in life what he deserves because of the mistakes he made when he was younger. There's a moment at the end of the third Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie which do it that way you will. The Secrets of Dumbledore where everyone is celebrating at the end on a snowy night and Dumbledore walks away alone. And I think that moment tells us something important. He doesn't just accept his isolation. He believes it is morally correct and necessary and worth it. He has turned his loneliness into an ideology. But the. The terrifying part of all of that is that Dumbledore is not the one who pays the cost for these delusions, for these beliefs, for this particular ideology of isolation. The cost is paid by Harry, by Tom, by his colleagues by his family by Hogwarts students by an entire generation shaped by war. And layered on top of that is another projection, the greater good. The greater good becomes not just a political philosophy, but a psychological shield. A way to justify, without sitting in it, reckoning you don't have to. Not asking questions, not having to think about the role that your decisions played in other people's trauma. And I think that this is a fine line to tread, right? Because there is something genuinely beautiful about imagining a better world. There's something so outlandishly hopeful, especially in times like this, where things feel so bad. There's something so hopeful about believing that things can change. I was in class teaching on the last Harry Potter book and I ended the lecture and I was like, isn't it ridiculous? Like, nothing changes in this world. And one of my students said, yeah, but like, professor, it could. Like we don't get enough information. Like, it is possible that Harry and his friends learned from this and tried to change the world. And I was like, I don't know, I don't believe it. And they just were very effusive in their belief that even though it's not on the page and maybe there's not a lot of canonical support for it, that it is possible. I think that there's something so beautiful about that and something also so aspirational about refusing cynicism. But I also think that there's a difference between vision and denial. Vision requires reckoning and denial ignores evidence. I think Dumbledore over and over and over again chooses the latter because Dumbledore's delusion is not unique. It's part of the broader structure of the wizarding world that so many of us have talked about. In the post episode chat, Voldemort is treated as an aberration rather than a product. And his defeat is treated as transformation rather than interruption. The war ends. The world assumes it's healed, but nothing actually changes. All of the supremacist ideology, the institutional hierarchies and the ministry all remain intact and fundamentally unchanged. Voldemort is God, but everything that made him possible remains. And this begs a larger question that some of us brought up. How do you rebuild a world that has never admitted that it was broken in the first place? By the end of the series, we have two, maybe three generations of people who have lived through profound trauma. People who survived the first Wizarding War, people who endured Voldemort's return, and children who grew up under occupation, fear and violence. And nowhere do we see meaningful collective reckoning. Wars end. Grief does not. It's interesting. I was talking to my therapist yesterday and I was talking about, we were talking about grief and I pulled a quote that I loosely remember from WandaVision where Vision says to Wanda, what is grief if not love? Persevering. And I also think that it's like, also, what is grief if not fear? Persevering ideologies remain. After Voldemort falls, damage remains. None of it is named. And if because it's not named, it can't be repaired. Dumbledore was so focused on getting rid of Voldemort that he never truly asked what the world would look like afterwards. He never reckoned with how Voldemort came to exist in the first place. The role that he played when he could have stepped in and helped Voldemort see a different way. When he first met him at 11 he never asked what role society played in sustaining the conditions that allowed for Tom Riddle to become Lord Voldemort. And that's why the answer to was it worth it Is so complicated. Because, yes, Voldemort was stopped and yes, Harry's sacrifice was necessary. But the necessity is not the same thing as transformation. Defeating the Big Bad is not the same thing as fixing the world that caused the Big Bad to exist in the first place. You cannot manifest a better world by pretending it already exists. Especially when there are other things and other people involved in the world. Especially when in order to make the world a better place you have to involve those other people in other things. Manifestation can become dangerous when it assigns roles to others. Martyrs sacrifice collateral without their consent. Hope without honesty becomes delusion. And victory without accountability becomes stagnation. Dumbledore teaches us that what happens when we confuse endings for solutions and what makes this especially haunting is Harry. Because Dumbledore projects himself onto Harry, but he also projects the version of himself he wishes he had been. The one who didn't walk alone. Dumbledore never learns how to ask for help, but he allows Harry to have it. He doesn't teach Harry to rely on Ron and Hermione, but he doesn't stop it. And in many ways, that does matter. And we have to give credit where credit is due. Harry survives not because of Dumbledore's worldview but because he doesn't inherit all of it. He tries, right? There are numerous moments, numerous moments from the age of 11 where Harry is trying to go it alone. But he's so fortunate to have these two people in his life who are absolutely like, you're not doing this by yourself. And it is their understanding of what is needed from them that keeps Harry going. It keeps him alive. It keeps him as seen as one can be. They are the lighthouse in the storm that is his existence. And they also offer him hope. So when we ask ourselves the question of what does Dumbledore ultimately teach us about ourselves? I think he teaches us that stopping harm is not the same thing as repairing it. That urgency can eclipse care. Crisis can justify cruelty. Survival can be mistaken for success. And most dangerously, I think he teaches us how easy it is to believe that victory absolves us of responsibility for what happened along the way. You can't heal a society that treats trauma as the price of victory instead of the work that comes after. And you can't rebuild a world without naming how and how it broke and who broke it, and what role we might have played in the damage. You can't make the world better by refusing to see it clearly. Dumbledore's not a monster, he's not evil. But he is profoundly unwilling to be seen by others and by himself. And that unwillingness shapes everything. The danger is not believing the world can be better. The danger is believing that your vision of better exempts you from listening, from sharing, from asking for help. To me, that's Dumbledore's legacy. And I think if we're willing to learn from it, maybe it doesn't just explain why the wizarding world stays the same. Maybe it tells us why our world stays the same. And more importantly, how we can go about making sure that it doesn't stay the same for future generations. This has been another episode of Critical Magic Theory. I'm Professor Julian Womble and if you like today's episode, first of all, thank you. Please feel free to, like, rate, subscribe and do all the things that one does where pods are cast, y'. All. We did it. We made it through Dumbledore. We made it through Snake. I can't believe it. And just in time for the holidays. Look at us. What a gift we've given ourselves. If you want to give more gifts, please feel free to join us for the post episode chat on Patreon patreon.com criticalmagictheory where you can join as a paid subscriber or you can just join for free and be a part of the post episode chat. This is our last new episode, but there will be other episodes coming through the week. A special Christmas episode coming next week. Y', all, thank you so much for your support of this podcast and being in community with us. I can't wait to see what the new Year brings for us. Until then, be critical and stay magical, my friends. Bye.
