Harry Potter and Modern Love
A comment on an earlier post sparked a reply I would like to share with my readers. On the topic of faith being the substance of things hoped, a reader with the regal but abbreviated name of Richard A writes:
“There’s no calculation. This isn’t a business transaction, where we’re constantly doing a cost/benefit analysis of continuing as we are.”
And that is exactly where all modern philosophy falls short, and harms those who study it, whereas scholastic and ancient philosophy flourished, and did good to those who study it: God in the Middle Ages, and the gods among the pagans, were not analyzed as if the topic were a scientific study or an economic transaction, weighed in terms of costs and benefits, or a calculus of uncertain probabilities.
Aristotle talked of happiness; Plato talked of love; Aquinas talked of joy.
Man’s relation to God is a love affair, a loyalty like that of steed to knight, knight to king, lover to beloved, child to father, friend to friend.
Please note all these types of love are ignored in the modern day, or sexualized, or diminished, or distorted.
The love of pet to man is revised to be a love as between equals, as pets are called animal companions.
The patriotic love of knight to king is incomprehensible to the modern. I suppose the love of patriots for the constitution and laws of our republic might be analogous, but the constitution, despite the repeated slanders to this effect, is not a living document.
Romantic lovers in the modern day, if the depictions in popular entertainment and media and academia are to be believed, ever think of casual and meaningless sex, usually in terms of attempting some new unhealthy perversion in order to revive zest where ennui now rules, and never in terms of marriage and children.
Filial love is replaced by the common theme in popular literature of children being innately wise, and fathers being either sexual predators, rapists, or dimwitted buffoons.
Mother love is scorned: the role of mothers in modern society is to kill children in the womb, so that Democrats can sell the wee body parts for money.
As to the love of friend for friend, while the attempt to miscast the love of Samwise for Frodo as sexual failed, the attempt to cast LeFou’s friendship for Gaston as erotic in the latest Disney film was allowed. No Disney officer, and no censor at home or abroad, ruled the film out of place to show children, or the general public.
The perversion is now portrayed as normal, and the normal thing (which is to condemn it as perversion) is now portrayed as abnormal, hateful, nasty, stupid, cruel, wicked and possibly criminal. Indeed, nearly all virtues, not just chastity, are so portrayed these days.
The love between friends has been so vehemently stuffed into he memory hole in the modern day, it is now routine, at least on the shows I watch, for comrades in arms and fast friends to describe their relationship as “family.” Almost no other word is used.
And, of course, the familial affection felt between family members is never so portrayed, not in popular shows of this type.
The most recent portrayal in popular culture of such a thing is the love of Harry’s mom for Harry Potter, which miraculously saved his life, and the camaraderie of the extensively Wesley family.
But Harry Potter is superversive and countercultural; the foolish establishment ruling our popular entertainments have yet to realize that the work is drenched in Christian theme and outlook.
Or perhaps they feel Potter can be turned to their purposes. After all, someone convinced the authoress to announce that her wise old wizard character was a sexual pervert after the fact, an idea having no support in the text. This was a telling blow in the culture war, and delivered just when it could do the most damage to impressionable young minds, but engender no feasible backlash or boycott.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
