In October 2020, Dr. Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, gave the plenary address at the Harry Potter Conference held at Chestnut Hill College. The following is a transcript of the video from that address.
The Deathly Hallows: How Literature Helps Us To See the Evil in Politics
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Timothy Snyder: Thank you very much. It’s a thrill and a pleasure for me to be able to do this. I’m very grateful that I’ve been invited for a number of reasons. One is to make the connection with Chestnut Hill College, which looms large in my mind, because it is where my colleague who I very much admire, John Lukach, taught for his entire career in the United States. He was an excellent historian who wrote about some of the same things I wrote about, someone I could look up to. The other reason I’m thrilled but also humbled to do this is that you are taking part in the Harry Potter Academic Conference, and you’ve kindly included me for the reason that Patrick gave, mainly that I mentioned Deathly Hallows in my little book, On Tyranny, which is about political resistance. But unlike the rest of you, I’m just someone who has read the books. I’ve thought about them politically a little bit, and I’ve been very happy to have the occasion to read them again, especially now. They resound with me, resonate with me, harmonize with me, inspire me, especially now in October of 2020, given where we are in American politics. I’m very glad to have the occasion, but I don’t want to give at all the impression that I’m an expert on the literature of Harry Potter. I’ve read the books, but until this evening I’ve only ever talked about them with my dear friend and colleague, Sarah Bilston, and with my children. I’m very glad to be able to do this at a moment where I think we will all need some courage, but I’m coming to you as a naïve reader. I’m reading this book from the perspective of an East European historian, an historian who has done some thinking about tyranny and its origins. All I have is the books. I’m just giving you my sense of the books, because what I’m going to say to you in the next little while will concern not just Deathly Hallows but all of the books and the way that they answer the question, which is: How do you see evil in politics?
I’m speaking to you from Vienna, and one of the advantages on our present predicament is that we can make contact in other ways. We can make kinds of contacts we wouldn’t have made otherwise. I’m very glad to make this kind of contact with you now and I’m looking forward to the questions. I’m sitting in Vienna in an Institute for the Study of the Humanities. The person who founded this institute was a philosopher, Krzysztof Michalski, and one of the things that he wrote stayed with me in a book that he wrote about Nietzsche is if you wish to understand a philosopher, you have to start out by assuming he’s right. First of all, you assume that her argument is correct, and then you move forward and try to interpret the argument. For me, the interpretation of texts, this comes close to being something like a magic formula. If you read the Harry Potter series as having a politics, you don’t have to hunt for it, you don’t have to extract it. But if you start from the assumption that there is a politics in it, that politics will come to you. I will confess openly that when I read these books again to prepare for this lecture, I did it in almost a pure state of ecstasy and pleasure. I so rarely get to read things that bring me so much undiluted pleasure, but I was reading with an eye for what the politics would be, trying to confirm the general impression I had of Deathly Hallows and the other books. But I love that politics come to me. I don’t think the politics in these books is something that you have to work to extract. I think the politics emerges fairly clearly. Of course, the politics that emerges with me is going to be different than when the politics that emerges with other people, but it’s my job to try to make a coherent case here for how this literature gives us a particular idea of evil, which might be relevant for our everyday politics.
Let me start with a very easy opening gambit: one way that this literature, that these books, are clearly political is that they are about an institution. The apparent structural device of having a school in the backdrop gives you a home for the children; it gives you an obvious setting in which they can grow up and so forth. I would say that this is an obvious, straightforward example of a politics. The institution, where I am now, allows me to give a lecture; an institution which, a quarter century ago, allowed me to stay in the field and become an historian. Not so long ago this physical place where I am now was a hotel. Not so terribly long ago, the place where my children go to school was a palace. If my children are watching, by the way, hi guys. The point is that the space in time from which we start changed into a kind of politics, depending upon what kind of institution we have, and the school, Hogwarts, is not a neutral background space. It has an obvious political, social, moral purpose. The obvious straightforward purpose of the school, as we’re introduced to it from the very beginning, is to deal with inequality. It’s meant to be a meritocratic setting where students are rewarded for talent, of course, but also for hard work, where Hermione in a way is the most important character here. Her success and her flourishing is all about this idea. But that it’s a moral or normative idea in politics we see immediately by the contrast to Diagon Alley. Whenever we want to see inequality, all we have to do is watch the students and their parents, or the students alone if they don’t have parents, trying to buy their equipment at Diagon Alley. It’s in that setting we can encounter the contrast between the Malfoy and the Weasley families. One starts off the story rich and stays rich; the other starts off the story basically poor or working class and stays that way for most of the rest of the story. We see how this matters: we see how Ron is troubled by the fact that everything he owns isn’t very nice. We see how Draco Malfoy constantly talks of his own wealth. We see how George and Fred, who are the most able wizards in the entire story, can only get started in business because Harry gives them money. We also see the corruption that comes from inequality, which is put out there very directly. Draco’s father, Lucius Malfoy, goes to see the Minister of Magic in The Order of The Phoenix, and you hear the clink of gold. He’s actually carrying a bag of money. I start this off here with an easy example of a politics.
You see the contrast between an institution which is meant to serve merit and allow people coming from different kinds of social backgrounds, people who may or may not have parents who were wizards and witches, a chance to become something else, to become a healer, an auror, whatever it might be; that politics is playing out against the contrast of a world where differences and wealth clearly matter. That seeps in the school and the story. That’s a politics, an easy one, but what is evil? How does literature allow us to see evil? How does evil figure in these stories? The way that it’s easy for literature, and especially literature of this richly beautiful descriptive kind, is that it allows us to see in the sense of describing things visually. It’s hard for us to doubt that Voldemort is evil when he appears as a hellish infant, as a face on the back of another man’s head, or when he appears as a kind of snakishly resurrected creature with only partly human features. There’s no doubt then that we’re dealing with something which is meant to be evil. That’s the easy part. The more interesting part, the harder and crucial part for getting towards a deeper politics is what does evil say and what does evil do?
For me, there are three characteristics that leap out in the books that characterize Voldemort as evil.
Number one is the absence of friendship. When Dumbledore is talking about Voldemort in the Half Blood Prince, he says, “Lord Voldemort has never had a friend, nor do I believe he’s ever wanted one.” As we’re going to see, as I come back to the scene later, this is not a sentimental or moralizing claim. This is going to be a deeply philosophical, political claim that the existence of friends and possibility of friends has to do with good and evil and has to do with the possibility of a certain kind of politics of freedom.
The second defining trait of evil in the book is the idea that birth is fate, that you are born a certain way and that defines who you are, giving you a certain status which is timeless and permanent. Another way of describing this is racism. When we ask what’s wrong with Draco Malfoy from beginning to end, it’s not just that his father is rich, or that his family tries to corrupt the Ministry of Magic, although that’s there the whole time. It’s not just that he taunts the other children. It’s that he taunts them in racial terms. He calls Hermione a mudblood, which is the racist term of abuse that appears in the books. Once we’re here, we’re at an obvious place where philosophers or political thinkers have noted a beginning of evil, because the moment that you’re taking yourself out of the world of agency and choice and describing to yourself a kind of permanent status based upon what you were before you were born, then you’re in a world of evil. Hannah Arendt makes this case very clearly in the Origins of Totalitarianism.
I would say that the third structural component of evil, as it appears after lack of friendship and after racism, is the desire to avoid death, or the desire for immortality. This appears, especially in the end of Deathly Hallows, as the great contrast between Voldemort and Harry Potter. I’m sure a thousand papers have been written about this; I will just make the naïve observation that the name Voldemort, depending on which languages you decide the parts of the word belong to, can be read as “will of death” or “flight from death,” and both would apply. But the idea that he is trying to avoid death, whereas Harry is willing to risk death, is pointed up as the contrast between them. Dumbledore makes the point directly in Deathly Hallows, in that scene where Dumbledore’s already dead and Harry is in between and they’re talking, and Dumbledore says, “You had accepted, even embraced, the possibility of death, something that Lord Voldemort has never been able to do.”
Let’s ask then: what’s so bad about immortality? It’s easy to say, Okay, the man is seeking immortality, and along the way he has to kill other people. But I think there’s something else going on here, which is that immortality itself is meant to be evil. I want to try to reflect upon that and then move to a contrast and show how the acceptance of death is what allows for an idea of good, or even an idea of freedom, to emerge with Harry and his friends. What immortality means is never having to reflect on the course of your life. Since your life is indefinite, it has no shape, so there’s no sense in trying to reshape it. If you’re immortal or contemplating immortality, that means that the future is always longer than the past and therefore, by comparison to an infinite future, your finite past, mathematically speaking, is meaningless. The idea that you would be reflecting upon or trying to correct things you did in your past doesn’t make any sense. The other thing which happens with the contemplation of immortality is that life itself becomes the only good thing. If you’re thinking you’re going to live forever, then the preservation of your own life becomes much more important than any other possible value; all other values then, as it were, automatically fall away. In these ways, all questions of morality cease to exist, and this is why you could think of immortality as evil.
To give a little example from our contemporary world: when Peter Thiel was asked about immortality and inequality, he said, “Well, the greatest inequality in the world is between the living and the dead.” If you take that view, then suddenly the actual inequalities in the world recede from view, and all that matters is the possibility that I or someone else might live forever. Conversely then, if we take Harry Potter’s willingness to die at the end and take risks, we then start to generate a positive idea of the good, and I think, actually, a positive idea of freedom. When Harry Potter accepts death, he’s accepting that he’s like everyone else. There’s this constant juxtaposition, parallelism, between Harry Potter and Voldemort throughout the books, but insofar as he accepts death, he’s willing to risk death, then he’s not like Voldemort and he is like everybody else in the world except Voldemort. He’s like everyone else who accepts death or knows that death is coming. The acceptance of death as a possibility permits friendship, is connected directly to friendship, because in these books where friendship arises is from a kind of camaraderie in courage. From the very beginning, when they’re very young, their first meaningful encounter is when they knock out the troll. We read and understand, from that point forward, that they’re going to be friends because that’s the kind of thing, facing and surviving that kind of thing, which makes you friends forever. When Harry is accepting death, he’s choosing what can’t be avoided, but he’s choosing a purpose along with it. He’s choosing to risk his own life for people he loves; he’s choosing his own death for reasons which make his own life make sense. This moves us to a more subtle idea, which I think is very important across the sweep of the seven books, of how reflectiveness about life, or reflectiveness about mortality and the finitude of life, leads you to a meaningful idea of freedom.
Time is very important in these books; they spend seven years in the story. They move through years of school, they become adolescents, they change. But more suddenly, and perhaps more profoundly as time goes by, their parents, by way of magic, by way of the memories of other characters or if they’re still alive just by way of showing up over and over again like the Weasley parents, become characters. Their parents over the course of the seven years enter the story. And this is very much true for Harry’s parents, about whom we learn ever so much, even though their death is what begins the whole series of books. What’s interesting here is that in pretty much every case of adults, people who are a generation older than the parents or even the people who are a generation older than that… Let’s say Dumbledore. In pretty much every case here, what you find is that the adults are struggling with trying to correct, reflecting upon what they did as children, or what they did as students when they were at Hogwarts. They’re living with and they’re living against their own past, which is only possible if you accept death. If you think you’re going to live forever, none of these considerations ever emerge. If you accept mortality, and mortality’s very close because some of these people are already dead and some of them are going to die over the course of the story like Sirius Black, some of them are risking their lives, some of them are going to die at the very end of the story. But when you accept the finitude of life, then what you should be thinking about, as the story suggests, is what you did before: the mistakes you might have made, the things that you did and can’t undo. Because they’re in your past, you can’t undo them, but maybe you can look at them. You could see someone else’s memory of them magically, but you can’t undo them. What mortality means is you have some time to deal with those mistakes, but not infinite time. If you had infinite time, you’d stop caring completely. If you have infinite time, it’s mañana. That’s what immortality means. It means mañana forever. There’s no reason to ever confront the things that you’ve already done. But if you have finite time, then you are and should be caught in this attempt to recall and address the things that you’ve done.
Now this appears with a number of the major characters. Even Dumbledore, who at the beginning of the series you can think of as out of time and as being eternal and ancient. By the end, you realize he also had a very fraught and troubled youth, and that his life has been shaped by the death of his sister and by the difficult relationship with his brother. We learn that James Potter, not so many years before he became Harry’s father, was a showoff, that he was indeed arrogant, that he could be quite cruel. In the scene where he’s humiliating Snape, there’s a kind of horrible realization that he can’t really know just how bad the thing that he is doing is. He can’t know it, and we see all this at the end of Deathly Hallows when we see Snape’s memories. And then Snape is maybe the more interesting character here, because Snape suffers in his childhood and as a student. He makes obviously some very bad choices, but by the end of the seventh book, we’re interested, concerned, absorbed by, and should be thinking about what he makes of his own early life. That turns out to be crucial for Harry’s life and for the whole trajectory of the story. What does Snape make of his own love for Lily Evans? What does he do about that? It stays with him his whole life: his patronus remains the sign that he’s in love with her from boyhood all the way to the end of his life, to the very last moment. What does he do with that? There’s obviously a lot of bitterness. He’s bitter towards James, he’s bitter towards Harry, but it’s not only bitterness. There’s also a kind of richness. As we know, he also turns out to be capable of protecting what she (Lily) loved. And that’s a kind of sublimation of his childhood suffering, of the terrible things that happened to him, but also the terrible things he did to other people. Interestingly, he’s not beautiful as he does this. It’s very hard to find him likeable as he does this, but it is sublime.
This leads us step by step towards an account of freedom, which then in turn leads us closer to an account of politics. What we do then, in these stories and in life, is based upon what we know of our pasts, which is of course all we know. We’re making choices, especially as we grow older, with and against the previous choices that we’ve made. Our freedom consists in our ability to think about the things that we did in the past and to not only identify with them, but sometimes to wish to change them. This is not something we can do on our own. We’re making choices about our pasts that we’re not strong enough to do this on our own. Nobody’s strong enough to do this on our own. Since Harry Potter is not a conventional heroic figure at all, although he spent a lot of time in his mind, and he does spend a lot of time alone in various ways. Alone with knowledge, physically alone, and so on. We know that the most important things that he does and the most important choices that he makes he can really only make with the help of his friends. So when Dumbledore tells him, in an oft-quoted passage in the Chamber of Secrets, “It’s our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities,” Dumbledore is not saying that these choices are things that we make by ourselves. Dumbledore, of course, is Harry’s friend, but he also tells Harry to trust his friends. On a number of occasions, Dumbledore says, “Here’s something that you mustn’t tell anyone,” and then Harry says, “May I tell Ron and Hermione?” And the answer turns out to be yes. The choices are made in solidarity with friends. It seems to be the choice, and not the consequence of the choice, which is important. The incident of the death of Cedric is a good example here. The way Harry behaves in the Tri-Wizard Tournament in The Goblet of Fire is clearly noble. He makes choices at the end that he doesn’t have to make. He doesn’t have to wait for Cedric at the end of the final test at the end of the maze, and Cedric tells him, “Harry, you win.” But Harry does the noble thing and they grasp the cup together. Up to that point in the story, one thinks, Oh, what a good thing. But of course, as you all know, the cup turns out to be a port key and the result is that Cedric is senselessly murdered by Voldemort, and this is a consequence of Harry’s actions. There’s no way to get around this. The choices that are made for good reasons and in solidarity don’t always lead to good consequences. What we’re seeing is that it’s the freedom that matters, not the utilitarian argument. It’s not that when you make these choices for yourself, good things are always going to happen. It’s the freedom itself, I think, which is showing up as the virtue.
You can learn this from someone else. You could learn this from Dumbledore. Dumbledore says things like this. Dumbledore tells Harry that he should be trusting his friends, and if there is a highest value in the story, it’s precisely friendship. Friends are the one thing which escape description. These books are very beautifully descriptive and discursive, but a couple of times, at least, we’re told that the thing that words can’t actually reach is friendship. On the last page of Order of the Phoenix, Harry somehow could not find words to tell them what it meant to him to see them all arranged there on his side. In Deathly Hallows, he says he wanted to tell them (Ron and Hermione) what it meant to him that he simply could not find words important enough. This is what Dumbledore calls love. I would call it friendship, and it allows you to move through life and gives you enough sense of solidarity and protection to make courageous choices. It also offers you the only kind of protection which Harry ever seems to have. The moments when he is free from Voldemort, the moments where Voldemort can’t get to him, are his moments of grief. His moments of grief for Sirius Black and Dobby are moments where he can’t be reached by evil and he’s actually protected. This gets very interesting because although these ideas of friendship and solidarity or love can be learned from a role model, in this case can be learned by Harry from Dumbledore, they’re not imitated because the role model turns out to be imperfect, as every role model must. Dumbledore turns out to be highly flawed, as every role model in the end must turn out to be. I would argue that’s good, because if the role model were perfect, then all of this business of choice and solidarity would just be imitation. It wouldn’t actually be a virtue. The very fact that the role model’s imperfect and that Harry has to come to terms with that is what makes the virtues real. At the very end of the final book, the only kind of eternity available is a kind of forgiveness and recollection of the best in the imperfect people whom we choose to love. When Harry and Ginny’s son is named Albus Severus, he’s choosing to recall people who he characterizes as brave, which is true. He’s choosing to recall the good of the people who have passed, which we’re to understand is the only kind of eternity that’s available.
This brings me back to the question of killing and why killing is wrong, which I think in these books is very carefully presented. The problem with Voldemort in these books is not that he carries out policies of mass indiscriminate killing, although we can imagine that. In general, the killing here is specific and the victims have names, and the motives of the murders have to do with the immortality and they have to do with the racism. I want to spell this out in particular with respect to Voldemort’s first murders. The racism and the immortality is the opposite of the friendship and the solidarity. In the friendship and solidarity idea of freedom, you have to correct your own life because you know your own life is going to come to an end at some point. Voldemort, who doesn’t accept that and who doesn’t have friends and doesn’t want to have friends, sees the correction process in a different way. The correction process is about killing his father’s side of the family so he can imagine himself and present himself as being pure of blood and therefore, in some sense, eternal. In Deathly Hallows, Voldemort explicitly says to Bellatrix, “And in your family so in the world, we shall cut away the canker that infects us until only those of true blood remain.” The killing is about a different kind of correction. It’s not about me and what I’ve actually done and taking responsibility for it. It’s about being eternal and pure in an aesthetic totality, which is what Voldemort is aiming for. I want to suggest here that the two murders that begin the series of books relatively early in Voldemort’s campaign of murder, the murders of James and Lily, take on a different meaning in this light. When we start reading, the sad thing about James and Lily is that they have this infant child. That’s the predicament. But then as we go through the books and as we see the pattern of adults trying to account for, reflect upon, correct what they have done earlier in life, as we feel that striving in and against the finitude of life, then we also feel a different kind of tragedy in their deaths. As we understand that James Potter and Lily Evans were not perfect people, and as we realize, they were very young when this happened and then their friends, the people of their generation, have then aged another sixteen or seventeen years as the story goes on, we realize that part of the tragedy of their murder, and by extension of any murder, is that they then don’t have the chance to take responsibility for their young lives. They don’t have the chance to show how they would raise their son. That never arises; they’re denied this whole possibility of freedom which comes through reflecting upon what you have done and try to make things better through renewal.
This is getting us closer and closer to politics, and the deep way that we get to politics is by staying with the idea of evil, immortality, and murder. The murder in these books is personal, but it arises from the racism and the immortality. The evil, as it’s committed, connects us very closely and very intimately and powerfully to truth. Let’s just accept that metaphysical evil is present in the book. If there is metaphysical evil in the book, then there is metaphysical truth about the present evil. The empirical act of killing and murder is the connection between the world of metaphysical truth and the world of empirical truth. We need to know the empirical truth about killing, whether it’s the killing of the parents or Cedric. We need to know the empirical truth about the killing, the metaphysical truth about the evil of the racism and immortality to sink in. Someone killed James and Lily. Someone killed Cedric. What Harry wants is the truth about these killings, but he wants people to believe the truth about these killings and he doesn’t want to believe propaganda versions that push them aside or some kind of narrative. By Deathly Hallows, this is his great frustration: that there are all these narratives and people want him to believe the narrative, which is convenient for the action that seems right at the moment, whereas he actually wants to figure out the truth. This is important because this speaks to a great moral temptation which then becomes a great political temptation. The great moral temptation is not to see the obvious evil, and the political temptation which follows is to look away from the evil and then carry out actions which are consistent with having looked away. In other words, the way not to see metaphysical evil is not to see empirical evil. If you don’t notice the evil deeds, then you could also not notice the presence of evil. This is true in the pages of these books, especially the last three. I suggest it’s also true of life. I think it’s one of the major themes of The Goblet of Fire and the succeeding books.
A very powerful theme is that the witness to truth is not going to be believed, but instead is going to be punished. Hermione out and out says this in Half-Blood Prince, quoting Dumbledore: “People find it easier to forgive others for being wrong than for being right,” which I think is profound and true. The case which is central here is the TriWizard Competition in Goblet of Fire, where it’s true that Cedric dies; it’s true that he dies meaninglessly. It’s true that Harry was there and Harry sees it. It’s true that Voldemort has returned, and Harry tells the truth about it and he pays a price for it. He’s punished in body and suffers in spirit for having told this basic truth about life and death, this empirical truth that someone had been murdered, which would force us into this metaphysical truth about the presence of evil. But what we see in fact is that the person who tells the inconvenient truth must be demonized. The person who’s actually seen something must be demonized, and this brings us very close to a problem of our own contemporary politics. The importance of the small truths, the importance of the eyewitness acts, the importance of reporting to democracy, is something that we notice as it’s slipping away. In Communist regimes, the importance of the dissidents, the people who insisted on truth and insisted on recording it, is now in our own times echoed in the importance of the local journalists. Whether these are people that I like and admire in Russia and Ukraine or Belarus, or whether these are journalists in the United States, we have ever fewer of them, and they were in trouble even before they were categorized as the enemies of the people. What I want to stress is that I don’t think this comparison’s a far fetched one, because what journalists do fundamentally, if you have them, is they write empirically about life and death. Issues in the United States that local journalists used to write about, and would be writing about if we still had journalists, are things like the opioid epidemic, pollution of water, or in 2020 the coronavirus pandemic. About all of these empirical issues of life and death we simply know much less than we should, because we have too few people who are out and about writing about it. Because we have so little access to the empirical evidence of life and death, it becomes harder for us to see the existence of metaphysical evil in our society and in our politics.
I want to return now to what happens to the truth teller, which I think is a fundamental theme in the middle and towards the end of these books. Harry tries to tell the truth. As the reader knows, he is telling the truth and he is punished. He’s punished individually by Draco Malfoy, punished institutionally by Dolores Umbridge. She punishes him in a very specific way, which resounds in the history of totalitarianism. She punishes him over and over and over again by making him say that the truth is a lie. The fact that he has to write it in his own blood adds a certain literary flourish to it, but that’s an old totalitarian technique. If someone tells the truth, then you not only say it’s a lie; you make them say it’s a lie over and over and over again endlessly. The climax of this is Harry’s Kafkaesque trial in the Ministry, which is held in obvious bad faith, meant to send this boy away to Azkaban. But the atmosphere around which is a kind of administrative one, as though this is just an administrative, bureaucratic matter to be dealt with as quickly as possible, to be hurried through and to be gotten out of the way. Because we don’t want to look at things that are actually happening in the world; they’re inconvenient to us because we’ve taken a different position.
Before I move to the end of this lecture and talk about politics, tyranny, and resistance as such, I want to read to you the poem that captures this problem of punishing the witness better than any other text I know. It’s a poem called The Envoy of Mr. Cogito by a Polish poet called Zbigniew Herbert. He wrote this poem in 1973. I think these lines catch where in our literary character Harry is in this moment in the middle of the story.
The Envoy of Mr. Cogito
by Zbigniew Herbert
Translated by Bogdana Carpenter
Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize
go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust
you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony
be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important
and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten
let your sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards—they will win
they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography
and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn
beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I
beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you
be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star
repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand
and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap
go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes
Be faithful Go
That text captures, better than any other I know, this problem of the witness, the problem that is precisely telling the truth which leads you to be discarded. We see how this works in the book. I want to make one more little comparison with the present, and then we move on. One of the ways that Harry is demonized is by way of the coverage in the Daily Prophet, which mocks him for months after Cedric’s death. I want to point to a structural issue here, which is the near monopoly of the Daily Prophet on information. One of the things we know from media studies or from the politics of communication is that the more centralized the media is, the harder contact with reality becomes. The Daily Prophet in these books is basically as unavoidable as Facebook or Twitter. You don’t have to like it, but you’re going to come into contact with it. You don’t really have a choice. In this story, it’s interesting that Harry’s version, the true version, only gets out because of a tiny and dubious rival, the Quibbler, and it matters a great deal that he gives this interview with Rita Skeeter that’s published in the Quibbler. If that newspaper and that interview doesn’t exist, the whole story turns in a very different way, which I want to present as an example on a basic issue: that the lack of variety in the press is an invitation to tyranny. In our world, we have the particular problem of digital media, which I’m not going to pretend is directly addressed in these stories. I am going to point out that what the digital world does is that it centralizes everything, removes factuality, and gives us the things that we want to hear over and over and over again. It speaks to our prejudices, our desire to feel ill towards our fellow person, just as the Daily Prophet is doing. Mr. Weasley in this connection says something I can’t resist quoting. Mr. Weasley says, “Never trust something that can think for itself if you cannot see where it keeps its brain,” which would seem like a very apt warning with respect to our own dependence on social media, where the algorithms are run out of huge air conditioned facilities way out of sight. We can’t see those brains, either.
I’m now going to end by talking about politics. Denying the truth about evil is not neutral, morally or politically. If you deny the truth about evil, you’re making yourself available for evil. Once you don’t notice the truth about evil the first time, you’ll tend to double down on that mistake. You’ll repeat that first mistake rather than admitting your mistake, which of course is the plot of Goblet of Fire and the next several books. John Maynard Keynes famously said, and Tony Judd liked to quote him saying, “When the facts change, I change my mind; what do you do, sir?” That’s an unusual attitude. In general, when the facts change, we find a way to make our convictions seem to be consistent with the new facts. But here, when the facts are about murder, racism, immortality, evil, avoiding the truth isn’t a neutral dodge. Accommodating a falsehood eventually means imitating it. Hermione makes an important point in Order of The Phoenix when Sirius has escaped from Azkaban, and when there’s another break from Azkaban, he’s blamed for it, and Hermione says, “Well, of course they have to blame him for it, because that’s the version of the story they’ve already been telling.” It’s not plausible, but they have to keep saying it. This dynamic of normalization where when you don’t accept the truth about evil, you slowly move towards becoming evil yourself, plays out in the six months or so after Cedric’s death, and this time is really important in politics. The time that you lose, you lose in many different ways.
The Ministry of Magic in the story loses time to carry out its punitive mission, which is to track down the Death Eaters or track down Voldemort. Second, even when you have to admit the truth, your version of truth is always going to lag behind. Even when the Ministry of Magic accepts that Voldemort is back, they play it down, they underestimate it, they can’t admit just how wrong they were. Harry in Deathly Hallows says sarcastically, “Yeah, why tell the public the truth?” and this is what he’s talking about. They won’t tell the public the truth about the strength of Voldemort. Third and most profoundly, when you don’t tell the truth or when you deny the basic political truth that something evil is present, you’re making yourself available. When we follow the count of how the Ministry is lost, the Ministry is not lost because Voldemort shows up and casts some fantastic spell. That’s not how it works. It’s lost day by day, week by week, partly because it’s given itself up over the course of those six months when it needed to be doing things. In Deathly Hallows, and this is why I said what I said in On Tyranny, you have a beautiful, historically resonant account of how authoritarianism emerges in an institution. What we see in Deathly Hallows is quite similar to the argument that my fantastic German colleague Peter Longlich makes about the early years of national socialism. It has echoes of the famous text, Power of the Powerless, which Václav Havel wrote about late communism. There’s Voldemort in the background, but in the foreground, in the progression towards political evil, is human failure. Lupin says about the Ministry, “The coup has been smooth and virtually silent.” Things change, and people adjust to the change. People in the Ministry itself are afraid. It turns out all their communication is much easier to monitor than we had thought before. People begin to self-censor before it’s necessary, and they get in the habit of self-censorship. When there are purges in the Ministry for whatever reason, purges mean the opportunity for professional advancement, and we have explicit cases in the story where someone is happy that someone else has been purged because that means that they can get their job, they’ll be promoted. And that is very much part of the history of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. In the Ministry, daily work goes on. It might alter, but daily work goes on. It’s slowly transformed, and as it’s slowly transformed, the policies eventually are changed. Racism becomes a policy of the ministry, a policy which looks a lot like Jim Crow, or which looks a lot like the Nuremburg Laws. As Hermione notices the statuary changes, the visual image of the Ministry changes, a statue of humiliation is erected at the humiliation of the non-magical population of the Muggles by wizards. The Ministry develops new means of mass propaganda. All of these things roll out in this quite subtle and convincing account of how an institution can be captured.
But a basic truth here about the plot of the book, and a basic truth which is very relevant for our own politics and our own ability or inability to see the obvious which is right in front of us, is that if the Ministry and Crouch had acted in a properly timely way, if they reacted to the appearance of Voldemort when he appeared, if they had faced the truth which was uncomfortable at the time, none of this had to happen. It could all have been avoided. It’s the human resistance to that truth which is slightly inconvenient which you then have to adjust yourself to, and which then forces you to oppress the person who is telling the truth. Those things lead you into this vulnerability where the evil can then truly appear partly with your cooperation, maybe using your institutional powers.
The resistance didn’t have to happen. One of the interesting features of the account of political evil as it appears in the last three books is that the resistance, which is at the end of the final book, doesn’t actually have to happen. It could have all been avoided if people had just listened to Harry, and it would have been a better world. Fewer people would’ve died. That would’ve been better. What is said about resistance? When we do have resistance, what are its features? One feature is that it’s based in an institution. Without Hogwarts – not just its walls and its charms, but without its friendships; the earlier practice in Defense Against The Dark Arts; without the institution of the school; the final scene where the school is what defends everyone else, where the school is what’s defending the magical world and the world as such, that scene becomes impossible, so there’s an institution. A second feature of the resistance is that there is the risk and reality of death. That’s what make Harry’s actions, or Neville’s actions, for that matter, courageous is the acceptance of this possibility. You have solidarity, friendship, and courage that work together. All the kids who had been in Dumbledore’s Army who refused not to take part, the people who were out front in the resistance at the end, are precisely the people who had already been ready to take risks for the truth for quite a long time, Harry but not only Harry. As Harry’s example shows interestingly, they’re not fighting because their truth is pure and simple. His good is not perfect. Dumbledore is not perfect. The longer Harry lives, the better he understands that. But he’s fighting with truth even though it’s a complicated truth and not a simple one. But just to repeat: it didn’t have to come to that. The characters who die in the end didn’t have to die. If people had recognized the empirical and metaphysical reality of evil, all of that could’ve been warded off. It didn’t have to come to that in the story, just like it didn’t have to come to that for us. Thanks for your attention.
*Q&A SESSION STARTS AT 01:01:42*
Q1: Reflecting on your work regarding tyranny and your third point about evil in the Harry Potter book series that the evil Voldemort wants to avoid death, what are your thoughts on the following dichotomy: On the one hand, Voldemort is seeking to set up a tyranny. Tyrants wield power personally and completely, and so if they die, their system of ruling society is in danger. On the other hand, Harry is willing to risk death because he believes in this system that Voldemort is trying to overthrow. Harry believes in a community based on democracy that enables the poor and the wealthy in the Wizarding community to be given educational opportunities to achieve their own goals and in the power of choice for everyone in this society. What are your thoughts on that dichotomy?
A: The answer is stated very clearly in the question. The problem of tyranny, as Plato says in books 8 and 9 of The Republic, the problem of tyranny is that you can’t separate the person from the regime. All of the flaws that we have as people, all of our flawed human nature, then becomes magnified and multiplied indefinitely through the regime into the society. That’s what tyranny means. Resisting tyranny then has to involve an acceptance of plurality. Harry’s not in it just for Harry. There’s not a ramified discussion of things like democracy and civil society and so on in the book, but Harry’s not in it just for Harry. Harry’s in it because of his friends, and Harry is Harry because of an institution in civil society, which is the school. Without that, his whole life is inconceivable, and that’s true of his friends as well. The argument I was trying to make is that the specifically tyrannical dream of immortality, this monopoly on time which is immortality, sets off a counterpoint with Harry and his friends’ willingness to risk an early death. You’re willing to risk an early death only because you recognize that there are other people and other values for whom such a risk would make sense.
Q2: Just questioning the argument that if we were immortal, would we totally lose our sense of looking back and reflecting on our actions and making change for the future? Does it preclude a certain morality if you are immortal?
A: To be fair, we don’t know because it’s not a test that we’re able to run at this point. Let me make a couple of intuitive nudges: the first is, let’s think about the kinds of characters in life and in fiction who seek after immortality. Let’s take that as a kind of presumption. Ask yourself what kind of people those are. The second intuitive nudge is the argument that I was trying to make: if you’re immortal, your future is always longer than your past. Your past is always finite, it’s however long you’ve lived, but your future is always infinite. I think it then becomes impossible for you to care about your past. There might be some other source of morality that we can’t contemplate, but I don’t know exactly what that would be. And the other temptation is, if you’re going to live forever, if you’re going to live for 100 years, it makes sense to imagine risking 60 years of it for something. But if you’re going to live forever, why would you ever take any kind of a risk? It’s hard for me to imagine how you can be a moral person if you can’t take risks ever. I take the point of the question. I think we might need a bigger kind of imagination than the one that I have or we have to see how a different kind of morality would emerge, but as I see humans getting to ethics, I don’t see how it would work.
Q3: How should people promote the truth when there’s such distrust of so-called fake news? There’s now a common-sense notion that there is no truth.
A: I’m going to make a pragmatic argument, a moral argument, and an institutional argument. The pragmatic argument is if you accept there’s no truth, you’re accepting you’re an unfree person, because there is no way to resist powerful institutions and individuals who are trying to oppress you without the truth. The truth is your last defense. If you’re not able to say, “The planet is warming;” if you’re not able to say, “There’s mercury in my water;” if you’re not able to say, “The life expectancy of millennials seems to be going down with respect to their parents;” if you don’t have a grasp on facts, you cannot defend yourself because you don’t know what the threat is. If your view is, who know whether the earth is warming, who knows whether millennials are healthier or not, who knows whether there’s mercury in my water… And mercury in the water, by the way, is a classic example because that’s the kind of thing we used to know back when we used to have local reporting, and now we don’t know and it matters very much to us whether there’s mercury in the water. If your view is it doesn’t matter or it’s unknowable whether there’s mercury in the water, you can’t defend yourself because there’s somebody else who does know, and that somebody else who does know is going to have power over you. If what you’ve done is you’ve chosen to take up “the facts don’t matter, they don’t exist, the truth’s unattainable to you,” you’re basically saying, “I would like to be a slave to spectacle.” The tricky thing about that view, that there’s no truth, is that it feels like you’re being very cool and you’re showing your agency when you make that argument. But what you’re actually doing is you’re saying, “Oppress me. Please oppress me. I want to be oppressed.” That was the pragmatic argument. The moral argument is going to the positive part of this question. You have to say some things are true. You can’t concede that. Obviously, we can disagree about how you get to it, but if you concede at the outset that all that exists is my opinion and Katie’s opinion and Patrick’s opinion, and if Patrick thinks that Plato is a giant cat eventually going to devour the earth and Katie thinks the sun’s going to explode tomorrow, and I think neither of those things are true, we have to kind of entertain all three of those possibilities. You can’t win. If my view is that every opinion is equally valid, you might as well give up. It’s an old-fashioned conservative point, but I think you have to start from the ethical claim that there is such a thing as empirical truth. And then the institutional argument is, one of the reasons why people say there’s no truth is because there is actually less of it than there used to be. The whole liberal tradition, like John Stewart Mill, for example. The assumption is that if you just have discussion, then truth emerges, which is naïve and not true. The only way to have truth is to have people whose job it is to produce it. Just like you need dentists to have healthy teeth, you need journalists to have truth. You can’t do without people who produce the truth, like that’s a profession, and that profession is dying out. And thanks to that, it now becomes more plausible to say, “Well, where’s the truth, because no one is bringing it to us.” That means to have democracy, you have to have institutional support for people who actually report the facts.
Q4: Once institutions are compromised and people lose faith in them, how do we begin to restore our faith in them? Is our only option resistance? Are there different kinds of resistance?
A: Yeah. Resistance involves institutions in two ways. One is, you actively defend institutions that are under attack. This discussion we just had about the press is an example of that. You can get on the side of the press. You can decide, Okay, me and all my friends are going to subscribe to a local newspaper, a national newspaper. That actually makes a difference. That is a form of resistance. You can decide, “We’re going to get on the side of a trade union,” or “We’re going to get on the side of some institution which is having a difficult time,” and that’s a form of resistance. The other thing is you can’t really resist without having institutions of your own. I work on the communist world; the classic example of this is solidarity in Poland. The most meaningful example of resistance to communism was a big institution which had 10 million members and started out as a trade union. When you resist, whether it’s just going on a march or whether it’s choosing to encourage people to vote, you’re taking institutional action. Then when you win, if you win, those institutions then can change other institutions, or they can become new institutions in a different political landscape. I very much take the point of the question. I’m somebody who likes institutions, but I also like laws. You have to be aware, and the novels make this point, that laws can become corrupt laws. This happens over and over again in these books. Institutions can become corrupt institutions. You have to be able to see that, while at the same time holding up the idea that we should have laws and institutions.
Q5: What about reframing the truth? For example, the reckoning we are doing around race in this country and things like the 1619 Project and the debates around it?
A: During the talk, I mentioned my deceased colleague, Tony Judd, who was a great historian, and he was an American and a Jew, but he wasn’t an American Jew. I’m an American and I’m an historian, but I’m not an American historian. But even to me, the 1619 Project is… I don’t know how to describe it except it’s kind of common sense. Without taking a polemical position about 1619 matters in 1776 doesn’t, which is absurd, of course it’s the case that the possession of other human beings, the claim to the right to own other human beings, was a central element of history for this country from the beginning. Denying that for me is such a bad faith denial of where the country started that it’s hard to go anywhere from there. The 1619 Project, we’re reframing this nice here. What moving a frame sometimes does is it allows you to see things you didn’t see before. It doesn’t mean they weren’t important the whole time. I understand 1619 as an attempt to turn the gaze a little bit up, down, around, so you see some things that you didn’t see before. I very much like the question because I don’t think, in the US or anywhere else, you can get back to democracy without history. But I’m opposing history to myth here, so in my account of the Harry Potter stories, the truth is an inconvenient truth. It’d be nicer if Voldemort weren’t out there. It’d be nicer if he weren’t so powerful. History’s a little bit like that: it might be nicer if we didn’t have slavery. It might be nicer if slavery weren’t so bad, but that’s not really true. It’s the inconvenient things. It’s the things that take your breath away at first, when you realize them about your own country. Those are the things that are helpful, and those are the things which actually enable conversation. If you say, “I’m just doing the right thing here by perpetuating the stories that are most convenient to me,” then you’re doing the wrong thing. That’s not history; that’s myth. If you find a story about how we’re pure, therefore we’re good, and we’re good, therefore we’re pure, that sounds nice but it’s not history, and it makes conversation impossible with a lot of other9 people you’d have a conversation with.
Q6: Regarding the point about corrupt laws and corrupt institutions, yes, all societies have laws and institutions. What is needed is a rule of law where no one is above the law and there is a recognition that all people have certain rights. Is this right?
A: I’m all in favor of the rule of law. I wrote a whole book called Black Earth about the Holocaust, in which I argued that, much more than we realized, it’s the collapse of institutions — good ones but even flawed ones — which makes all kinds of horrible things possible. I’m all in favor of the rule of law. The rule of law is a great thing. However, we have to know what we mean by the rule of law. Again, pulling out a theme that I hope is clear in the lecture, that has to be an ethical conversation, because the rule of law can mean slavery’s okay. The rule of law could mean that, and a big part for a lot of our country’s history, the rule of law meant you train up young men to ride horses and use firearms because they’re going to be enforcing the law that slaves can’t escape. That can be the rule of law. The second part where the rule of law means all people are equal, all citizens are equal, that’s an ethical claim rather than an empirical claim, and what I take the upshot to be is that those of us who like the rule of law have to accept that the rule of law involves ethical contestation about what that means so that all people are subject to it. That’s a great idea, I’m with it, that all people are equal and no one’s above it, fantastic. But those are points that you have to struggle to get across in real life, and in the US, we’re not actually there yet, but yeah. I guess what I’m trying to say is that just saying that we should have the rule of law… if you just say it, you can kind of fall into the same trap as you do with the sleepwalking through law, just at a higher level. You can’t solve the problem about laws by saying the phrase “rule of law”. You have to say what that means ethically, and then be willing to fight for it. But I’m sure that’s already clear in the question.
Q7: The things you’re talking about here, with regards to the rule of law, you seem to be pointing towards the idea of ethics. Do you see, or do you think, it’s possible to talk about ethical principles of morality or justice that must exist underlying an establishment of an effective government, an effective set of laws that would produce the kind of equality you seem to be pointing to?
A: I absolutely think that. This is one of the ways that I regard myself as a conservative. It’s one of the ways. I don’t always regard myself as a conservative, but you can’t really do without values. Here the conservative critique of certain kinds of liberal politics is correct. You can’t just claim that everything in political life happens mechanically or instrumentally. That becomes a gerbil wheel eventually. There’s this kind of robotic solution where you say, “We don’t have to have values because the market is going to bring the good things to us anyway.” You think there’s a mechanism in the world, the market brings you democracy, and so you don’t have to ask why these things are good. They’re just going to happen. Which incidentally was also a problem with communism. The idea there was a market’s just going to bring you communism and that’s a good thing, so you don’t have to ask the ethical questions, and that’s the end of communism, the capitalists started making the same argument. But that kind of argument evacuates morality completely, and then you end up with, Okay, we have capitalism. We also have tremendous gaping inequality, but we don’t know how to talk about it because we’ve farmed out the ethical discussion to something called a market, which is an abstraction which doesn’t really exist, so we are out of practice talking about ethics. I would answer that question very much in the affirmative, and I hope a clear argument that I was making in the lecture, which is that you can’t really do politics or think about politics without some notion of good and evil, and I don’t think you can do the rule of law without it, either. I think we’ve gotten… we’re in this funny place where the left generally allows the language of morality to go to the right, but since the language of morality is not contested, the language of morality blurs very quickly into a language of emotional grievance, which is not the same thing as morality at all. The idea that I’m a victim or that other people have taken things from me or that I was always innocent, that’s actually not morality. As Khan said, making an exception in your own case is the fundamental moral error. A lot of what passes for moral discussion on the right in our country is actually just making an exception for yourself, because you’re a victim or whatever it might be, “globalization is bad” or “those black people took it away from me” or whatever. That’s not morality. That’s making the exemption in your own case, whereas on the left or in the center, we’re very hesitant to use moral language at all. I wrote an essay for Commonweal about how it’s ethically wrong to vote a certain way. I set that to Commonweal right away because I knew… Usually, I can publish things in newspapers if I want to, but I knew that would never fly, because as soon as you say, “I’m going to actually make an explicit ethical argument,” the op-editors are like, “Nope, you’re not. That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to allow that.” I think that’s a big problem. I think we can’t do without it. This goes for democracy, too. If you want to have democracy, you have to think it’s morally right, because it’s not going to be delivered to you. You have to make a moral claim for it, and not just a defensive one. Like Churchill said, It’s better than the alternatives. That’s not good enough. You have to be able to say, democracy is good and right, and here are the reasons why we prefer it to oligarchy.
Q8: You seem to be suggesting there’s a paucity of space to have this conversation in a serious and societal way, and yet here we are at a conference dedicated to seven of the most accessible novels in history. How do we, in good faith, begin to have an open and multifarious conversation about the grounds upon which the government we claim to want to stand for should be built?
A: That’s a fantastic question. I’ve used the occasion of this lecture to try to do a number of things, but one of them is to try to perform what you just asked for. That is to say, here’s what it sounds like if we say that politics starts from a metaphysical account of evil. This is what it looks like. Literature can help us to do that, and literature forces us to ask the question of, “Well, is life like this as well?” Literature cheats a little bit, because literature can give you an image of Voldemort which you immediately know as evil, and life is not like that. You can’t immediately look at someone and say, “Well, okay, this person wants to be immortal and is a racist and is going to embody evil in the plot that is my life.” Literature can do that, but that doesn’t mean that in life, evil is any less palpable than it is in literature. I guess the first answer is you have to just do it and see what happens, especially cross-politically. On the left, it’s very easy to be anti-. Right now, anti-fascism is back in vogue. I’m against fascism as much as the next person, but being anti- isn’t enough. You also have to be pro-. Any anti-moral claim is also an explicit pro-moral claim, but if you can’t identify what that pro-moral claim is, then you have a problem. Another argument I made in the talk is that you can’t get to the metaphysical evil without an accumulation of the empirical evil. Going back to the banal example of mercury in the water: if I don’t know that the mercury in the water killed or disabled several children in my village, I can’t think about, “What the larger cause of this?” There’s an odd relationship between awareness of the truth around you and the possibility of recognizing evil. We have these moral impulses, but the question is, do these moral impulses get directed at the thing which is right in front of us, or do they get directed at things that are real? Being against an imaginary conspiracy of baby kidnappers is also a moral impulse. Who’s not against baby kidnappers? But if you’re not working in a world of facts, that moral impulse is often a world which is not your world, and therefore isn’t really moral. I’m going to make the claim also that without the local knowledge, we’re also losing the moral reflexes, and that those things go together.
Q9: What actors might be most effective in building truth-based ethical institutions? The public, elites, the press, the government, churches, education, the family unit?
A: I think there’s a two-part answer here. The idea that truth is a value? I don’t see how we can do that outside of certain kinds of institutions. Those of us in in these universities should be more clever and articulate than we are about truth being of value, as opposed to truth being just one more flavor of opinion. You can be for/against truth just like you’re for/against vanilla ice cream, or for/against the Los Angeles Kings. We have to do a better job of that. The idea that facts are real and the truth is a noble pursuit, you can’t do that without educational institutions, without families. I’m happy to go along with churches. However, we can want it as much as we want, but it has to be produced. Here on the production side, we were really naïve. We think that the truth is just out there, but it’s not just out there. What’s out there is our prejudice, our desire to sleepwalk, our desire to be fooled, and that’s very strong in the Harry Potter books. That’s our kind of human starting point. The people in the Ministry who sleepwalk and so on, they’re not necessarily bad people. Some of them are, but they’re kind of meant to be representative of humans in an institutional setting, and that’s what we do. We want the thing that is convenient. We want the things that let us get through our daily life. That’s how we are. Like the Daily Quibbler interview with Harry Potter, unless we’re confronted by massive local news every day, which tells us, “Hey, nobody went to the school board meeting, this terrible things passed,” or, “Hey, this local politician actually has all of his money as a result of an oil spill,” or all the kinds of things we don’t know anymore, then the value or pursuit of truth is going to seem absurd when there’s any truth out there to pursue. Practically speaking, I think we have to break up the social media giants, we have to tax them because, practically speaking, they’ve taken all the advertising away from the media. We have to use the tax money from them to support commercial and non-commercial local news around the country and see how far that gets us. So to make the point again, facts have to be produced. If you just let it go, then artificially-generated opinion, which comes from algorithms written by people in places you don’t even want to know about, like Russia, or algorithms which are just teaching themselves about your emotional weaknesses, they’re going to fill up the space with which used to be filled up by facts.
Q10: How does an institutional system recover from a refusal to allow a fundamental process, such as the refusal to allow for a hearing for President Obama’s appointment to the Supreme Court Merrick Garland? Apart from retaliation of some kind, how does the system right that wrong? How does it make the correction?
A: It goes back to one of your earlier questions and the question about the rule of law. At what point is following the rules perverse? (Mitch) McConnell followed the rules. He pushes the rules that are logical and extreme so that they are working against their own intentions, but he’s following rules. The same is true, at a higher level, for a lot of transitions from democracy to authoritarianism. People find rules that they can pervert, or they find rules that are meant for exceptional situations, and they apply them to everyday political life. Before you know it, the system has changed as a result of that. The first answer is that the spirit of the question is part of the answer to the question, which is that if you can’t call these things out as abusive in some other language besides the language of the rules, if your view is that so long as it’s following the rules, it’s okay, then you’re basically recognizing that might makes right and the way things are is definitely okay. You have to be able to call it out in some kind of ethical way. How does the system recover from that? I don’t think it recovers in any kind of natural bounce-back way. My view of recovery is that recovery always involves reconstruction. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot because I was sick for a while, and in my own recovery, I got to thinking, “Well, I’m not exactly the same as I was before, and that’s okay. Some things got lost and some other things got found, but it’s been jumbled up into a slightly different version of me and that’s fine. Recovery isn’t going back to the way you were before, and I don’t think that’s going to be true for the nation, either. I don’t think we’re going to recover by going back to 2016 or whenever people think things were okay, which whenever you think it was, it wasn’t true. Things weren’t okay then, either. I think recovery has to mean some kind of reconstruction. I don’t personally think that having more justices on the Supreme Court would be any worse than things that have already happened. Congress passing laws, which made it more specific where the current Supreme Court could and couldn’t do, I don’t think would be so bad. Right now in our system, it seems to me that of the three branches of government, the legislature is the one which is much weaker than it was meant to be in the Constitution, both vis-à-vis the president but also vis-à-vis the courts. The Supreme Court exercises not just the right to constitutional but also to statutory interpretation, which seems to be way overblown and is probably about to get more overblown. The legislature could assert itself in a way which is perfectly legitimate, and at least help with some of these problems. The third answer is public opinion. The Supreme Court has generally been right-wing and/or reactionary in the history of the US, as least as far as I know as an interloper. The moment when it was progressive in the third quarter of the 20th century? That, I think, is exceptional, and one has to think, “How do you change the overall climate of public opinion so the Supreme Court can’t go too far in one direction?” That’s always been part of the answer. You have to not just have an ethical response with language, a legislative response, but I also think you have to have a mass public opinion response. What’s happening is attempts being made to turn the Supreme Court into a kind of reactionary bastion of an America which never existed and in my view shouldn’t exist, and it’s explicitly that. The way Mr. Trump talks about it makes it clear that’s what’s going on, and that means that you have to as a society be willing to say, we’re actually 25 percentage points away from that view, or we’re 50 percentage point away from that view. Therefore, going back to what the rule of law actually is, if you’re going to assert the rule of law, runs contrary to basic moral principles held by most of the population, then you’re going to have a problem. Most of the American population, for example, thinks that we should be allowed to vote, whereas the Supreme Court, in a series of rulings this year, has taken the opposite position. How long can that go on? If you’re in an institution like the Supreme Court, which depends on the notion of the rule of law, then the question is if the rule of law has to do with ethics, and the ethical view held by 150 million people is different from the ethical human supreme court, that will eventually affect what the notion of the rule of law is going to be. I agree that the Merrick Garland thing was tragic and very hard to overcome as such, and therefore I don’t think my answers are adequate, but I hope they’re at least a push in the right direction.
*Q&A ENDS AT 01:36:06*