Harry Potter Conference 2020 Plenary Speaker: Timothy Snyder

all right hello everybody and welcome to the annual academic harry potter conference here at chestnut hill we would like to welcome you to a clear highlight of this year's conference this year's plenary speaker in 2017 i like so many other people i knew had a copy of on tyranny in my back pocket for days on end and when i got to the part where there was a list of some of the most important books to be read on the subject of tyranny and the tendency of democracies to descend into tyranny it really caught my eye when i saw dr snyder mention harry potter and the deathly hallows and as a person who's uh partly in charge of organizing a conference on harry potter every year i knew exactly who i wanted to reach out to be a plenary speaker for our conference but dr snyder himself can tell you that the process has taken well over a year and a half to get to this point and one of the unexpected benefits of the covid19 pandemic is that our conference was forced to go online but this allowed us to reach out to people we might not otherwise have been out been able to to get a hold of so um i would like to do a brief introduction for timothy snyder he is the richard c levine professor of history at yale university and a permanent fellow at the institute for human sciences in vienna he speaks 5 and reads 10 european languages some of his most recent books are on tyranny 20 lessons from the 20th century the road to unfreedom russia europe america and our malady the most recent book lessons in liberty from a hospital diary schneider snyder's work has appeared in 40 languages and has received a number of prizes including the emerson prize and humanities the literature award of the american academy of arts and letters the baklav havel foundation prize the foundation for polish science prize in the social sciences the leipzig award for european understanding the dutch auschwitz committee award and the hana arendt prize in political thought snyder was a martial scholar at oxford and has received the carnegie and guggenheim fellowships and holds state orders from estonia lithuania and poland he has appeared in documentaries on network television and in major films his books have inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions films sculpture a punk rock song a rap song a play and an opera his words are quoted in political demonstrations around the world and most recently in hong kong he is researching a family history of nationalism and he is finishing a book on philosophic on a philosophical book on freedom so without further ado let us please welcome with much appreciation dr timothy snyder from vienna all right patrick thank you very much uh so i this is it's a it's a it's a thrill and a pleasure for me to be able to do this i'm very grateful that i've i've been invited for for a number of reasons one is to make the connection with chestnut hill college which looms large in my mind because it's it is where my my colleague who i very much admired john lukach taught for his entire career in the united states he was an excellent historian who wrote about some of the same things that i wrote about someone i could look up to um i the other reason i'm i'm i'm thrilled but also humbled to do this is that you are taking part in a harry potter academic conference and you've kindly included included me i think for the reason that patrick gave namely that i i mentioned deathly hallows in my little book on tyranny which is about political resistance but unlike the rest of you um and this is not a formulaic expression of humility unlike the rest of you uh i'm just someone who has read the books and 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 so i'm very glad to have the occasion but i don't want to you know i don't want to give it all the impression that i'm i'm an expert on on the literature of of harry potter i've i've read the books but until this evening i've only ever talked about them um with my my my dear friend and colleague sarah bilston and um and with and with my children so i'm i'm very glad to be able to do this at a moment where i think we will we will all need some courage um but i i'm coming to you as a kind of as it were kind of naive reader i'm reading this book from the perspective of an east european historian a historian who's done some thinking about tyranny and and its origins but i all i have is the book i'm just giving you um my sense of the book or rather of the books because what i'm going to say to you in the next little while will concern not just deathly hallows but but all of the books and the the way that they answer the question which i pose in the title of the lecture which is how do you see evil in politics so i'm i'm speaking to you from vienna um as patrick kindly pointed out one of the advantages of our present predicament is that we can make contact in other ways we can make kinds of contacts it would have made otherwise i'm very glad to make this kind of contact with with you now and i'm looking forward to the questions i'm sitting in vienna in in an institute an institute for the study of the humanities um and the person who founded this institute was a philosopher his name was chistop micholsky and one of the one of the things that he wrote which 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 sh that that her argument is correct and then you move forward and try to interpret the argument and and for me in the interpretation of texts this comes close to being something like a magic formula so if you 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 so i will confess openly that when i read these books again to prepare for this lecture i did it in in almost a pure state of ecstasy and pleasure i so rarely get to read things that bring me so much undiluted pleasure um and 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 let the politics come to me i don't think the politics in these books is something that you have to work to extract i think i think the politics emerges fairly clearly now of course the politics that emerges with me is going to be different than the politics 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 so let me start um with a very easy opening gambit one way that this that this literature that these books are clearly political is that they are about an institution so the the the apparently you know the apparently innocent or just framing literary device or the apparent you know structural device of having a school in the backdrop which allow which gives you a place to locate the stories it gives you a home for the children it gives you an obvious setting in for in which they can grow up and so forth i would i would say that this is a fairly obvious straightforward example of of of a politics right so i mentioned that that i'm in i'm in an institute now the institute where i am now an institution an institution allows me to give a lecture an institution which a quarter century ago allowed me to stay in the field and and become a historian not so long ago this in this place this physical place where i was where i am now was was a hotel right um not so terribly long ago historically speaking anyway uh the place where my children go to school was a palace um and if my children are watching by the way hi guys uh the the the point is that the the the space and time you know the the coordinate the space and time from which we start change into a kind of politics depending upon what kind of institution we have and the school hogwarts is not it's not it's not a neutral background space it has an obvious political social moral purpose i mean the obvious straightforward purpose of the school as we're introduced to it from the very beginning is to deal with inequality um it's meant to be a meritocratic setting where students are rewarded for for talent of course but also for hard work where hermione is the is is in a way the the the most important character here right i mean her success and her flourishing is all about this idea but that it's a moral idea or that it's a it's a normative idea in politics we see immediately by the contrast to diagon alley right 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 um trying to buy their equipment um at diagon alley right and it's in it's in that setting you know where we can encounter for example the contrast between um a malfoy and a weasley or the malfoy family and and the weasley family right where one starts off the story rich and stays rich the other starts off the story um basically poor uh or working class and and stays that way for for most of the rest of the story and and we see how we see how this matters you know we see how we see how ron is troubled by the fact that you know everything he owns isn't isn't very nice um we see how how draco malfoy constantly talks up his his own wealth um we see how uh george and fred who i mean as far as i can tell are the most able wizards at least young ones in the entire story how george and fred can only get a start in business because harry gives them money right and we also see we also see the corruption that comes from inequality which is put out there very directly i mean um it couldn't be it couldn't be more direct so draco's father lucius malfoy um in order of the phoenix goes to see the minister of magic and you literally you hear the clink of gold right he's actually carrying a bag a bag of money so i start this off with i start us off here with an easy example of of the politics which is in the book uh you see the contrast between an institution which is meant to serve merit which is meant to allow people coming from different kinds of backgrounds um and we'll talk more about race in a moment but different kinds of of social backgrounds people who may or may not have have parents who are wizards and witches allow them a chance to become something else right to become a healer to become an aura or whatever it might be and that politics is playing out against the contrast of a world where differences in wealth clearly matter and that seeps in that seeps into the school that seeps into the story so that's a politics that's an easy one but what is evil right how how does literature allow us to see evil how does evil figure in these stories so the way the way that it's easy for literature and especially literature of this kind of this of this richly beautifully descriptive kind is that it allows us to see in the sense of describing things visually right so it's hard for us to doubt that voldemort is evil when he appears as a hellish infant or when he appears as a face on the back of another man's head or when he appears as a kind of snakeishly 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 in a way the easy part the more interesting part and the harder part and and the crucial part for getting towards po towards a deeper politics is what does evil say and and what does evil do so for me the the three there are three characteristics that leap out in in the books um that characterize evil or that characterize voldemort as evil number one is the the absence of of friendship the absence of friendship so when when voldemort is talking about about tom riddle or when he's talking about voldemort he says it's in half-blood prince he says um lord voldemort has never had a friend nor do i believe he has ever wanted one and as we're going to see as i come back to this theme later this is not this is not a sentimental claim it's not a moralizing claim this is this is going to be a deeply philosophical and and a political claim that the existence of of friends or the 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 i'm going to come back around to this the second i think defining trait of evil in in the book is the idea that birth is fate that you are born a certain way and that defines who you are it gives you a certain status which is timeless and permanent um another way of describing this is is is racism right so when we ask what's wrong with with with malfoy what's wrong with draco malfoy you know from beginning to end it's not just that his father is rich it's not just that his family tries to corrupt the ministry of magic although that's there the whole time um it's not just the taunts the other children it's that he taunts them in racial terms so he calls hermione uh a mud blood right which is the the the as you all know which is the the racist um the the the racist term of abuse that appears in the books and so once we're here we're in an obvious place where you know philosophers have or political thinkers have noted a beginning 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 as it were what you were before you were born right then then you're in a world of evil hannah armand makes this makes this case very clearly um for example in the origins of totalitarianism i would i would say that the third component of evil as it appears um after lack of friendship um and after racism the third the third structural component of evil here is the desire to avoid death or the desire for for for immortality um and you know this is this is uh this appears especially towards the end um indeed in it in the end um in deathly hallows this appears as the great contrast between voldemort and and and harry potter right so i'm sure a thousand papers have been written about this um i will just make the naive observation that the name voldemort can be can be read um either as you can be read depending on which languages you decide the parts of the word belong to it can be read as as as will of death they can also be read as flight from death right um and so the and both would apply but the idea that that that he that he is trying to avoid death whereas harry is willing to risk death i think is pointed up as the contrast between them um dumbledore makes the point directly and deathly hallows in that scene where dumbledore is already dead and and um and and and harry is harry is in between and they're talking and dumbledore says um you had accepted even embraced the possibility of death something that lord voldemort has never been able to do so let's ask then now what's so bad about immortality um i mean it's it's it's easy to say okay the man is seeking immortality and along the way he has to kill he has to kill other people right um but i think there's something else going on here which is which is that immortality itself is meant to be evil i want to try to reflect upon that and then move to a contrast um and show how the acceptance of death is what allows for an idea of good or even an idea of freedom to emerge with with harry and his friends so what immortality means is never having to reflect on on the course of your life since since your life is indefinite it has no shape so there's no sense in trying to reshape it if you're immortal if you're contemplating immortality that means that the future is always longer than the past and therefore by comparison to an infinite future your finite past is obviously i mean just mathematically speaking it's meaningless and so 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 with the the contemplation of immortality is that life itself becomes the only good thing if you're thinking that you might 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 and all other values then as it were automatically fall away so in in these ways all questions of morality cease to exist um and this is why we can think of immortality as as even as evil to give a little example from our contemporary contemporary world um when when when peter thiel was asked about immortality and inequality he said well you know there's 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 one person a few people might live forever now conversely then if we if we take harry potter's willingness to die at the end um willingness to take risks we then start to generate um a positive idea of the good and i think actually a positive idea of of of freedom so when when when you accept death when harry potter accepts death he's accepting that he's like everyone else right i mean there's this constant you know 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 is 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 who knows that death is is coming and the acceptance of death as a possibility permits friendship it's connected directly to friendship because in these books where friendship arises is from a kind of camaraderie encourage i mean from from the very beginning right when they're when they're very young um their first meaningful encounter i'm speaking thinking and speaking of ron and hermione and harry here their first meaningful encounter is is when they they knock out the troll right which is then defined from that point forward we read and understand from that point forward they're going to be friends because that's the kind of thing facing that kind of thing surviving that kind of thing which makes you friends the text tells you for forever so when harry is accepting death or at the very end of the extreme when he's choosing death he's choosing what can't be avoided but he's choosing a purpose along with it right he's choosing he's choosing to risk his own death for for people he loves he's choosing he's choosing his own death for for for reasons which make his own life makes makes sense um and this moves us then 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 right reflectiveness about the finitude of life leads you to a meaningful um a meaningful idea of freedom so let me let me try to explain what i mean here um time is very important in these books right so the the the the the main characters age um they they they move they spend seven years in the in this story they they move through um years of school they become they become adolescents um they they change but but more subtly in that props more profoundly as time goes by their parents in different ways right their their parents by way of magic by way of the memories of other characters or just or if they're still alive um just by way of showing up over and over again like the weasley parents their parents their parents become characters um their parents over the course of the seven years in inter enter the story this is and this is true for very much true for harry's parents about whom we learn um ever so much even as even even though they their death is what begins the whole series of books um and what's what's interesting here is that in pretty much every case uh you're of of adults of people who are a generation older the generation of the parents or even people who are the generation older than that let's say 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 when they were at hogwarts they're living with and they're living against their own past which is of course only possible if you accept death right if you think you're going to live forever none of these considerations ever ever emerge but if you're if you accept mortality and of course mortality is very close because um some of these people are already dead and some of them are going to die over the course of the story like sirius black um some of them are risking their lives some of them are going to die at the very end of of the story but when you accept the the the finitude of life then um what you think about is at least what you should be thinking about this story suggests is what you did before the the ways that the the mistakes you might have made the the things that you did and can't undo right because they're in your past you can't undo them maybe you can look at them maybe you can see someone else's memory of them magically but you can't you can't un you can't undo them so and what mortality means is you have some time to deal with those mistakes but not infinite time right if you had infinite time you'd stop caring completely if you have infinite time it's manana right that's what immortality means it means manana forever there's no reason to ever confront the things you've already done but if you have finite time then then then you you are and you should be caught in this attempt to make to to to to to recall and address the things that you've done now this appears with a number of the major characters so i mean even dumbledore who at the beginning of the series you know you can kind of think of as out of time and as being kind of eternal and ancient by the end you realize that he also had a very fraught and troubled youth um and that that his life has been shaped by the death of his sister and by the difficult relationship with his brother um we learned that uh james potter you know not so many years before he became harry's father was a show-off um that he was indeed arrogant that he could be that he could be quite cruel right in the scenes where in the scene that um in the scene where he's uh humiliating snape there's a kind of you know there's a kind of i think horrible realization that he can't really know you know just how bad the thing that he is doing is right he can't know it um and you know we see this you know we see all this at the end of deathly hallows when we see snapes when we see snape's memories and then snape is maybe the most interesting character here because snape snape suffers in his childhood um snape suffers as a student he makes he makes obviously some very bad choices but by the end of the by the end of the seventh book we're we're interested by concerned by absorbed by should be thinking about what he makes of his own early life um which that turns out to be crucial for harry's life and for the whole trajectory of the story right what does snape make of his own love for lily evans what does he do about that it stays within his his whole his his whole life right his patronus remains you know the sign that he's in love with her from boyhood you know all the way to the end of his life to to to the very to the very last moment what does he do with that there's obviously a lot of bitterness he's bitter towards james um he's he's bitter towards harry but it's not only bitterness there's also there's also a kind of of richness i mean as as as as we know um he also turns out to be capable of protecting what she loved and that's a kind of sublimation um of of his childhood suffering it's a kind of sublimation of the the the terrible things that happened to him but also the terrible things he did he did to other people so interestingly he's not beautiful as he does this he's not it's very hard to find him likable as as he does this but but it is sublime and this leads us then you know step by step towards an account of of freedom which then in turn moves us closer to an account of of politics so what we do then in these stories and in life what we do is based upon what we know of our pasts which is of course all all we know um 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 to change them and here's where things get i think more interesting this is not something that we can do on our own um we're making choices about our pasts but we're not strong enough to do this on our own nobody is strong enough to do this on our own i mean in this sense harry potter is not a conventional heroic figure at all because although we spend a lot of time in his mind we do and he 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 he does and the most important choices he makes he can really only make with the help of his friends so when when dumbledore tells him um you know in an oft-quoted passage in chamber of secrets when he says it's our choices harry that show what we truly are uh far more than our abilities dumbledore is not saying that these choices are things that we make by our ourselves um dumbledore of course is harry's friend but he's also he also tells harry to trust his friends um at a number of occasions you know dumbledore says here's something that you must not tell anyone and then harry says may i tell you know ron and hermione and the answer and the answer turns out to to be yes now i want to note here that so the choices are made in the choices are made in solidarity with friends i want to point out that it's it seems to be the choice and not the consequence of the choice which is which is important and um the incident of the death of of cedric which i'm going to return to um is is a good example here right so the way the way harry behaves in goblet of fire in the tri-wizard tournament is clearly noble um you know he makes choices at the end that he doesn't have to make uh there's there's no he doesn't have to wait for cedric at the end of the final test at the end of the maze um cedric tells him that harry you you win right but but harry does the noble thing and they they grasp the cup together um and that you know up to that point in the story one thinks oh what would a what what a good thing but of course as you all know then the cup turned out to be a port key and the result is that cedric is senselessly murdered by by voldemort and it and this is a consequence of harry's actions there's no way there's no way to get around this so choices that are made are necessary choices that are made for good reasons and in solidarity don't always lead to to to good consequences so it's it's it's what we're seeing is that it's the freedom that matters right it's not it's 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 as as the virtue now um the you can learn this um you can learn this from someone else you can learn this from dumbledore dumbledore says things like this you know dumbledore tells harry that he should be trusting his friends and um you know if there is a high highest value in in in the story it is precisely friendship the friends are friends are the one thing which escape description in this in these books these books are very descriptive they're very they're very discursive they're very beautifully descriptive and discursive but a couple of times at least you know we're told that the thing that words can't actually reach is is friendship it's on the last page of order of the phoenix um harry somehow could not find words to tell them what it meant what it meant to him to see them all arranged there on his side um in deathly hallows um he's talking about ron and hermione now he says he wanted to tell them what it meant to him but he simply could not find words important enough right so this is what this is what dumbledore calls calls love i would i would i would call it i call it friendship and it it it it allows you to move through life you know allows you it gives you enough sense of solidarity and protection to make choices and courageous choices it also offers you the only kind of protection which harry ever seems to have so the moments when he is free from voldemort the moments where voldemort can't get to him are his moments of grief um his moments of grief for uh for for serious black his moments of grief for for dobby are moments when he can't be reached by evil when when he's actually protected and of course this gets very interesting because although these ideas of friendship and solidarity or if you prefer love can be learned from a role model can be learned learned by harry in this case from from from dumbledore uh they they have to it's they're not just imitated because the role model turns out to be imperfect as every role model must right dumbledore turns out to be highly flawed as as every role model in the end must turn out to be and i would argue that's good um because if the role model were perfect then all of this business of choice and solidarity and so on would just be would just be imitation right it wouldn't actually be a a virtue um the very fact that the role model is imperfect and that harry has to come to terms with that is what makes is what makes the virtues real um and so then we see you know at the end of the book and i'm now coming back to immortality at the end of the book the the very very end of of of the of the final book the only kind of eternity available is a kind of forgiveness and a kind of recollection of the best in the imperfect people whom we choose to love so um you know when when when harry and jenny's son is named albus severus right he's choosing to recall people who he characterizes as brave which is true right he's choosing to recall the good of the good of the people who have passed which were to understand i think is the only kind of eternity that's that's that's available now i would this brings me back then to um the question of of of killing um and why why killing is wrong which i think in 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 of course imagine that and there are some things that verge on that but in general the killing here is specific and and the victims have have names and the motives of the murders have to do with the immortality and they have to do with the racism um and i want us i want to spell this out in particular with with respect to voldemort's first murders so the 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 right and he he he he says he says this explicitly to belatrix in oh and by the way i'm sure i'm pronouncing a lot of these names non-canonically as i said i've never talked about this stuff before except my kids who wouldn't you know who wouldn't correct me um so as he says to balatricks and deathly hallows uh voldemort says and in your family so in the world we shall cut away the canker that infects us until only those of true blood remain so the killing um 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 and it's about being eternal and about being pure and kind of in a kind of aesthetic totality which is what voldemort is aiming for and i want to suggest here that that the the two murders that begin the series of books um uh also relatively early in in voldemort's campaign of murder uh are the murders of james and and and lily take on a different meaning i think in this life because when you know when we start reading the sad thing about the death of james and lilly of course is that they have this infant child that's the predicament but then as we 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 you know as we as we feel that striving like that striving in and against the the finitude of life um as we feel that then we also feel a different kind of tragedy in their deaths and as we as we understand that you know james potter and lily evans were not perfect people and as we realized they were very young when when this happened and then their their friends the people of their generation have then aged you know another 16 or 17 years as the story goes on as we realize all that we realize that part of the tragedy of their of their murder and i think 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 for example that that never arises right they're denied this whole possibility of freedom which comes through reflecting upon what you have done and trying to make things better and as as hanaro would put it through renewal okay so this is getting us now closer and closer to to to politics um and i think the the deep way that we get to politics is by staying with the idea of evil and immortality and and and murder so the murder in these books is is is personal but it arises from the racism and and the immortality and the the evil as it's committed connects us very closely and intimately and powerfully to the eye to to to truth um so if there is evil let's just accept right i mean we can talk about it later but let's let's let's just go with me for a minute here let's accept that metaphysical evil is present in in the book if there is metaphysical evil then there is truth right there's metaphysical truth about the presence of evil and the act of killing the empirical act of killing the empirical act of murder um is the connection between the world of metaphysical truth and the world of empirical truth we need to know the empirical truth about killing the whether it's the killing of of um whether the killing of the parents whether it's the killing of cedric we need to know the empirical truth about the killing just for the metaphysical truth about the evil of the racism of immortality um to to to sink in right so someone i mean there's there's empirical truth as well someone killed james and lily someone killed killed killed cedric right um and what what harry wants is the truth about these killings but he wants people to believe the truth about these killings um and he doesn't want to believe propaganda versions uh that that that put them aside or put them in some kind of a narrative right by by deathly hallows this is his great frustration um 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 figure out the truth and this is you know this is this is important because this speaks to i think 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 to 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 can also not notice the the presence of evil and this is i think true of in the pages of these books especially the last three i'd suggest it's also true of life i think it's one of the major themes of goblet of fire and the succeeding books okay so let me try to let me try to flesh this out um the theme 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 um in half blood prince quoting dumbledore she says people find it easier to forgive others for being wrong than for being right which i think is profound and and and true the the case which is central here as all of you will know is that the tri-wizard competition in goblet of fire where it's true that cedric dies it's true that he's he's he dies meaninglessly it's true that harry was there and harry sees it it's true that voldemort has has has returned and harry tells the truth about it um and he pays he pays a price for it right he's punished in body um he suffers in spirit for having told this basic truth about about life and death this empirical truth that someone has been murdered which would force us into this metaphysical truth about the presence about the presence of evil uh but what we see in fact is that the person who tells the inconvenient truth must must be demonized the person who has actually seen something must be demonized and of course this brings us very close and i'll have just a little excuses here to a problem of our own contemporary politics um the the importance of the small truths uh the importance of the eyewitness act the importance of reporting uh to democracy is i think something that we notice as it's slipping away the importance of you know in in communist regimes the importance of the dissidents the people who insisted on truth and who insisted on recording it is now in our own times um echoed in the importance of the local journalists whether these are people that you know 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 um and they were in trouble even before they were categorized as the enemies of the people uh what i want to what i want to stress is that i don't think this this comparison is a far-fetched one because what journalists do fundamentally if you have them is they write empirically about life and death um issues in the united states that our local journalists used to write about um and would be writing about if they if we still had journalists are things like the opioid epidemic or things like pollution of water or in 2020 the 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 and 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 um in our society and in our politics okay close excuses i want to return now to this to what happens to the truth teller which is again i think is a 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's punished he's punished individually by by draco malfoy um he's punished um he's punished institutionally by dolores umbridge um she punishes him in a very specific way which we should be you know which resounds in the history of totalitarianism she punishes him by over and over and over again um making him say that the truth is a lie the fact that he has to write it in his own blood you know adds a certain literary flourish to it but that's an old totalitarian technique if someone tells the truth then you you not only say it's a lie you make them say it's a lie over and over and over again endlessly and the climax of this of course is harry's kafka-esque trial um in the ministry which is held in obvious bad faith um which is meant to send you know this boy away to to asbacon uh but the atmosphere around which is a kind of administrative one like as though this is just an administrative matter a bureaucratic matter to be dealt with as quickly as possible to be hurried through to be gotten out of out of the way right because we don't want to look at the things that are actually happening in the world they're inconvenient to us because we've taken a different position so before i move to to the end of this lecture um and uh and and talk about politics as such and tyranny as such um and resistant as such i want to i want to read to you the poem that i think captures this this this this problem of um punishing the witness better than any other text i know it's it's a poem called the the the avoir of mr kohito um by a polish poet called zabikini of hebert he wrote this poem in 1973. i think these lines catch where you know our our literary character harry is um and this moment in the middle of in the middle of the story so um have patience with me this is going to take a minute it goes 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 wood war will write your smooth over biography and do not forgive truly does not in your power to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn the where 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 the wear of dryness of heart love the morning spring the bird with an unknown name the winter oak light on a wall the splendor 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 mountain 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 in the city of ashes be faithful go so that text captures better than the other i know this problem of of the witness the problem that precise it's precisely telling the truth which leads you to be discarded um 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 as you all know is by way that was by the way the coverage in the daily profit which mocks him for for months after after cedric's death and i want to point to a structural issue here which is the near monopoly of the daily profit on information um and you know one of the things we know from media studies or from the politics of communication is that the the more centralized the media is the harder contact with reality becomes so um you know the daily profit in these books is basically as unavoidable as facebook or twitter you know you don't have to like it but you're going to come into contact with you don't really have a choice and in this story it's interesting that harry's version um the true version only gets out because of a tiny and and kind of dubious rival the the quibbler right and it matters a great deal that he gives this interview with rita skeeter that's published in the quibbler if that if that newspaper doesn't exist and if that interview doesn't exist the whole story turns in a very different way which i want to present as an example of a basic issue which is that the lack of variety in the press is an invitation to to tyranny um and in our world you know we have the particular problem of of the digital of digital media which i'm not going to pretend is directly addressed in these stories i i am just going to point out that what the digital world does is it centralizes everything it removes factuality and it gives us the things that we want to hear over and over and over again it speaks to our prejudices our desire to to to feel ill towards our fellow person um just as the daily prophet is doing and mr weasley this connection says something i can't resist quoting so mr weasley says never trust something that can think for itself if you cannot see where it keeps its brain um which would seem like a very apt um a very apt warning with respect to our own dependence on social media you know where the algorithms are run out of huge air conditioned facilities way out of sight we can't see those brains either okay close parenthesis i'm now gonna i'm not gonna end by talking directly about politics so denying the truth about evil is not neutral morally or political 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 um you will tend to double down on that mistake you will repeat that first mistake rather than admitting your mistake which of course is the plot of of goblet of fire um and and the next in the next several books um john maynard keynes famously said and tony judd liked to quote him saying when the facts changed i changed 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 accommodating a falsehood eventually means imitating it right so hermione makes an important point in order of the phoenix um you know with sirius um has escaped from from azvakan of course uh and when there's another breakout from azerbaicon he's blamed for it in her mind he says well of course they have to blame him for it because that's the version of the story they've already been telling right it's not plausible but they have to keep saying so 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 after cedric's death um and these this time is really important in politics the time that you lose you lose in many different ways right so the ministry of magic in the story loses time to carry out its putative mission which is to track down the death eaters or track down voldemort second um even when you have to admit the truth your version of truth is always going to lag behind so even when the ministry of magic accepts that voldemort is back they under they play it down they underestimate it they can't admit just how wrong they were right so harry and deathly hallows says um 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 but third and most profoundly when you don't tell the truth or when you when you deny the basic truth right the basic political truth that something evil is present um you're making yourself available so when we follow um when we follow the the account of how the ministry is lost the ministry is not lost because you know 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 there over the course of those six months when it needed to be doing things so in in in deathly hallows and this is why i said what i said on tyranny you have a beautiful um actually his historically quite resonant account of how authoritarianism emerges in an institution what we see in deathly hallows is um quite similar to for example the argument that um my fantastic german colleague peter longlich makes about about the early years of national socialism it has echoes also of the famous text power of the powerless which thousal wrote about late communism there there's a person in the background of course voldemort is in the background but in the foreground in the progression towards political evil are is human failure right so so um so so lupin says the coup talking about the ministry now 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 their communication all communication is much easier to monitor than we had thought before uh people begin to self-censor before it's necessary and they get in the habit of self-censorship uh 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 um it might it might it might alter but daily work goes on it's slowly transformed and as it slowly transformed the policies eventually are changed as you will all know so racism becomes a policy of the ministry a policy which looks a lot like jim crow or which looks a lot like the nuremberg laws as as hermione notices um the statuary changes the the visual image of the ministry changes a statue of of humiliation is erected of the humiliation of the non-magical population of the mughals by by wizards the minister the ministry develops new means of of mass propaganda so all of these things roll out in this in this i think quite subtle and convincing account of how an institution can be captured but the basic a basic truth here about the plot of the book and the basic truth which i think is very much 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 had acted in a properly timely way if crouch had acted in a properly timely way if they'd 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 none of this had to happen it could all have been avoided it's the simple human 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 so a final word about resistance but i want to emphasize the point the resistance didn't have to happen right i think one of one of the 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 um of the final book uh doesn't actually have to happen they could have all been avoided if people had just listened to harry and it would have been a better world fewer people would have died that would have been better but okay so what is what is said about resistance i'll just use this when we do have resistance what are its features one feature is that it's based in an institution without hogwarts i mean not just its walls and its charms but without its its friendships um without with without without the earlier practice and defense against the dark arts without all of those things 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 makes harry's acts that's what make harry's actions or neville's actions for that matter uh courageous is the acceptance of of this possibility you have solidarity you have solidarity and friendship and courage that work together right all of the kids who had had been in dumbledore's army who refused not to take part the people who were out front um in the resistance at the end are precisely the people first and were had already been willing to take risks for the truth for for quite a long time harry but not only harry and and as harry's example shows interestingly they're not fighting because their truth is pure and simple right he 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 and not a simple one but just to repeat um it didn't have to come to that it didn't have to come to that the characters who die in the end didn't have to die if people had recognized that the the metaphysic the empirical and then the metaphysical reality of evil uh all of that could have 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 thank you thank you dr snyder we're pulling in dr mcauley here to ask you to ask you some questions as well i can start actually well first of all i just want to say that we have 100 people in here and i don't i know you had the chat closed but we have so many um okay we have so many people saying thank you um so many people i'm getting a note here that they're no one's hearing me could someone respond in the chat someone is someone hearing me yeah okay we're good we're good thank you um i just want you to know that we have many people here uh talking about just how um well how wonderful they found your talk so thank you imagine a hundred people applauding um i would like to jump in right there and say that when i read on tyranny for the first time there was a certain section in the middle where i just wanted to hear a lot more and i wanted every sentence to expand and fill in with some more and i feel like today's today's talk was exactly what i was asking for all right so i have a question here from uh one of our professors uh in political science uh dr reich i'm 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 the 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 the society what are your thoughts on that that dichotomy um the uh i mean i think that the the answer is stated very clearly in the question the the problem of tyranny you know as as as plato says in in books eight nine of the republic the the problem of tyranny is that you can't separate the person from the regime and all of the flaws that we have as people right all of our all of our flawed human nature then becomes magnified and multiplied out indefinitely in through the regime into into the society that's what that's what tyranny means and so resisting tyranny then has to involve an acceptance of plurality that i mean harry's not in it just for harry you know there's not 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 hairy because of an institution in civil society which is a school without that his whole life is is in is inconceivable and that's true of his friends as well um and that harry i mean the argument i was trying to make is that um you know the the the specifically tyrannical dream of immortality that i will that you know this monopoly on time which is immortality um that that sets off a counterpoint with harry and his friend's willingness to risk an early death um 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 that actually segues into another question that we had which is uh just questioning the argument that if we were immortal um would we totally lose our um our our sense of looking back and reflecting on our actions and making change for the future um does it preclude a certain morality if if you are immortal well you know okay i mean to be to to be fair you know we of course don't know right because it's it's not it's not it's not a test you know it's not a test that we've that we're able to run at this point but i'll just make let me just make a couple of intuitive nudges the first is let's think about the kinds of characters in life and in in fiction who seek after immortality let's just like let's just kind of take that as a presumption um ask yourself what kind of people those those are and then you know the second intuitive nudge has to do is is the argument that i was kind of trying that i was trying to make namely if you're immortal your future is always longer than your past right because your your past is always finite it's however long you've lived but your future is infinite and so i think it then becomes impossible for you to care about your past there might be some other source of morality that you know that we can't contemplate but i don't know exactly what that what what exactly that would be and the thing which then the other temptation is if you're gonna live forever like if you're gonna live for 100 years it makes sense to risk you can imagine risking 60 years of it for something but if you're gonna live forever why would you ever take any kind of a risk and it's then it's hard for me to imagine how you can be a moral person if you can't if you can't take risks ever so i mean i take the point the question i think if we we might need a bigger kind of imagination than the one that i have or we have to see how a different kind of immorality would emerge but as as i see humans getting to ethics i don't see how it would work all right katie mcdaniel asks 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 so the the i guess i was 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're not if you don't have a grasp on facts you cannot defend yourself because you don't know what the threat is so if your view is who knows whether the you know who knows whether the earth is warming who knows whether millennials are healthy or not if your view on every who knows whether there's mercury in my water right who knows 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 it's mercury in the water so if your view is it doesn't matter or it's unknowable whether it's mercury in the water you can't defend yourself because there's somebody else who does know um and that somebody else who does know is going to have power over you if you if what you've done is you've chosen to take up the facts don't matter they don't exist or truth's unattainable view you're basically saying i would like to be a slave to spectacle right it's so the the tricky thing about that view that there's no truth is that it feels like you're being very cool and you're in like 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 um i want to be oppressed so and then oh sorry that was just the that's the pragmatic argument the the the the institutional argument the moral argument is going to the positive part of this question you can't i think you have to say some things are true you can't concede that i mean if obviously we can disagree about how you get to it and but if you concede at the outset that all that exists is my opinion and katie's opinion and patrick's opinion and you know if patrick thinks that plato is a giant cat which is eventually going to devour the earth and katie thinks that you know katie thinks the sun's gonna explode tomorrow and i think those things are true we have to kind of entertain all three of those possibilities then you know we you can't win right if my view is that every opinion is equally valid then you just you might as well give up so i think it's an old-fashioned conservative point but i think you have to start from the ethical 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 um i mean truth so the whole the whole liberal tradition like um john stewart mill for example the assumption is that if you just have like discussion then truth emerges which is naive and not true the only way to have truth is to have people whose job it is to produce it you can't like just like you need dentists to have healthy teeth you need journalists to have truth you can't do it 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 and that means that i mean i think to have democracy you have to have an institutional support for people who actually report the facts well and um you're you're speaking my language here i don't know if you realize but i'm a chemistry professor at chestnut hill college and part of a an honors class that dr mcauley and i uh teach together over the years i've asked students are you allowed to have an opinion about scientific fact which is a little bit of a trick question um and uh i've seen this gradual over the last decade they've gone from a very strong like no it's not a matter of opinion it's a fact to like oh sure everyone can have their own opinion which is exactly what you said about mercury in the water so yeah yeah i think we have another question here uh all right professor del gizzo here says asks 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 yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna take the um i'm gonna take the dialectical way out here and say resistance involves institutions in in two ways i mean one is you you actively defend institutions that are that are under attack so i mean in this discussion we just had about the press is an example of that you can get on the side of the press you know you can decide okay me my friends all of my friends are going to subscribe to a local newspaper a national newspaper that actually makes a difference right that is a kind of form of resistance you can you can decide um we are 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 so um you know i work on the communist world the classic example of this is solidarity in poland the the one the the most meaningful example of resistance to communism was a big institution which had 10 million members and started out as a trade union so you can't when you resist whether it's just like going on a march or whether it's you know choosing to encourage people to vote you're taking institutional action and 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 so i very much take the point of the question i mean i'm somebody who likes institutions um but well i but you could and i also like laws but you kind of have to be aware and the novels make this point that laws can become corrupt laws right as 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 and institutions right uh suzanne asks again about 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 uh reframing i mean so uh i i during the talk i mentioned my i mentioned my my deceased colleague tony judd who is a great historian um and uh he was an american and a jew but he wasn't an american jew i i'm an american and i'm a historian but i'm not an american historian but even even to me you know the the 1619 project is i mean i don't know how to describe it except it's kind of common sense i mean of course i mean you know without taking a polemical position about like 1619 matters in 1776 doesn't you know which is absurd of course it's the case that the possession of other human beings uh the claim to the right to own other human beings was an essential element of the history of this country from the beginning right that i mean anyone who doesn't denying that for me is like such a bad faith denial of what the country where the country started that it's hard to go anywhere from there so i mean 16 the 6019 project i think i mean the word reframing is nice here what i mean what moving to frame sometimes does is it allows you to see things that you didn't see before right doesn't mean that they weren't important the whole time right so i guess i understand 1619 as as an attempt to you know turn the gaze a little bit up down around so you see some things that you didn't see before i mean i i very much like the question because i don't i don't think in the us or anywhere else you can get back to democracy without history and by and i'm opposing history to myth here so you know in my account of the harry potter stories the truth is an inconvenient truth i mean it would be nicer if voldemort weren't out there right that be nicer it'd be nicer if he weren't so powerful history is a little bit like that like it might be nicer if you know if we didn't have slavery it might be it might be nicer if slavery weren't so bad but that's not really true right and it's the it's it's the inconvenient things it's the things that kind of 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 like 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 right that's not history that's that's myth like if you find a story about you know and here we get closer to the novels again if you find a story about how we're pure and therefore we're good and we're good and therefore we're pure that might sound nice but it's not history and it makes conversation impossible with a lot of other people you need to have a conversation with so all right i think we have another question we have jackie wright which is our dean so i shall not ignore her um 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 oh yeah i'm all in favor of the rule of law um i i i i mean i wrote i wrote a whole book called black earth about the holocaust in which i argued that much more than we've 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 rule law's great thing however we have to know what we mean by the rule of law and like again drawing like pulling out a theme from that i hope was clear in the in the lecture that has to be an ethical conversation because the rule of law can mean slavery is okay yeah right the rule of law could mean that um i mean for a lot of in a big part of our country 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 and that can be the rule of law um so the the the the the second part where you know the rule of law means all people are equal or all citizens are equal that's an ethical claim right rather than rather than empirical claim and what i take you know 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 about what about what that means so that all people are subject to it that's great i mean that's a great idea i'm with it um that all people are equal that no one's above it fantastic but that's those are points that you have to struggle to get across in in real life and in the us we're not actually we're not we're not there yet but yeah i mean i i guess what i'm trying to say is that just saying that we should have the rule of law you know can you 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 right you can't solve the problem of bad laws by saying the phrase rule of law you have to say what that means ethically and then be willing to be willing to fight for it but i'm sure that's i mean i'm sure that was all already clear in the question so i am um a coordinator of this conference so i'm just going to jump here with my own question um because i have that kind of privilege the things you are talking about here with regards to the rule of law you seem to be you're pointing towards the idea of ethics do you see or do you think it's possible to talk about principles ethical principles principles of morality or justice that must exist underlying an establishment of a an effective government an effective set of laws that would produce the kind of equality you seem to be pointing to yeah i mean i absolutely think that i mean this is this is one of the ways that i i regard myself as a conservative and it's one of one of the ways i mean i i don't always regret myself as a conservative but you you can't you can't really do without values i mean i think here the cons the conservative critique of you know certain kinds of liberal politics is correct you can't just claim that everything that happens in political life happens mechanically or instrumentally you know that's that becomes a gerbil wheel eventually and you can't it's and then you know there's kind of there's this kind of robotic solution where you think where you say well we don't have to have values because the market is going to bring the good things to us anyway you know so there's this kind of met 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 you know the idea there was the market's just going to bring communism and that's a good thing so you don't have to ask the ethical questions and after the end of communism the capitalists started making the same argument but that kind of argument evacuates morality completely and so 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 we've farmed out the ethical discussion to something called a market which is an abstraction right which doesn't really exist and so we are out of practice talking about ethics so i would answer that question very much in the affirmative and this was of course i mean i i i hope a clear argument that was that i was making in the lecture which is that there is a kind of met you know you can't really do politics without you can't really do politics or thinking about politics without some notion of good and evil um and i know i don't think you do the rule of law without it without it either i think we've gotten you know it's become we're in this funny place where we've the 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 i mean the idea that i'm 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 i mean you know as khan said making an exception in your own case is the the fundamental moral error so like 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 exception your own case whereas on the left or in the center we're very hesitant to use moral language at all so i mean i wrote as i told you before we started talking i wrote an essay for commonweal about how it's ethically wrong to vote a certain way and i i sent that to commonweal right away because i knew i would usually i can publish things in you know big newspapers if i want to but i knew that would never fly because as soon as you say like 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 you know we're not that's we're not going to allow that and i think that's i think that's a big problem you know so i i i think we can't do without it um and we were out and you know this this goes for democracy too like if you think if you want to have democracy you have to think that it's i think you have to think it's morally right because it's not going to be delivered to you you know you have to you have to make a moral claim for it and not just a defensive one like not just well it seems you know like churchill said it's better than the alternatives that's not that's not good enough you have to be able to say democracy is good and right and here and here are the reasons why we prefer it to you know say oligarchy um i'm going to follow up um you seem to be suggesting that there's uh there's there's a positive of uh of space to have this conversation in a serious and societal way and yet here we are at a conference uh dedicated to seven of the most accessible novels in history um how how do we begin to 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 that's that's a that's a that's a fantastic question um i i i i think part of i mean so part so i've used the occasion of this lecture to try to do a number of things but one of them is to just try to perform what you just asked for yes that is to say um here's what it sounds like if we oh if we say that politics starts from a a metaphysical account of evil right this is what it looks like literature can help us to do that uh and then literature forces us to ask the question of well is not is perhaps life like this as well you know so literature cheats a little bit because literature can give you you know an image of voldemort which you immediately know is evil and life is not like that you know you don't you can't immediately look at someone and say well okay this person wants to be immortal and is a racist and you know he's going to embody evil in the in 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 in in literature so i mean i guess the first answer is you have to just do it and see and see what happens and especially kind of cross-politically because i mean on the left like you know the the there's it's very easy to be anti right like so right now anti-fascism is back in vogue and like i'm against fascism as much as the next person i like to think um but it's being anti isn't you know isn't isn't enough you have to also be pro i mean any anti-moral claim is also an implicit pro-moral claim but if you can't identify what that pro-moral claim is then then you then you have a problem i guess an another i mean the other another argument that i made in the talk is that you can't get to the metaphysical evil without an accumulation of the empirical evil so if i mean just going back to the banal example of mercury in the water [Music] if i don't know that the mercury in the water killed you know several children or disabled several children in my village i can't think about oh well what is the like what's the larger cause of this right so i think there's actually a an odd relationship between awareness of the of the truth around you and the possibility of recognizing evil um because we all we have these moral impulses but the question is do these more impulses get directed at the thing which is right in front of us or do they get directed perhaps at things that aren't real right so i mean being against an imaginary conspiracy of baby kidnappers is of course also a moral impulse right you know who's not against baby kidnappers but if you're if you're if you're not working in a world of facts that moral impulse um is often a world which is not your world and therefore doesn't isn't really moral so i'm going to make the claim also that without the local knowledge we're also losing the moral reflexes and those things go together we have a question about um from uh professor carroll here at the college who's a political science professor um asking uh what actors might be most effective in building truth-based ethical institutions the public elites the press the government churches education the family unit these are these are just choices that uh that dr carroll asked yeah i think i think there's a there's a two-part answer here i mean at least the the idea that truth is a value i don't see how we can do that outside of certain kinds of institutions so that i mean those of us region universities i think should be you know more clever and articulate than we are about truth being of value um as opposed to truth being just one more flavor of opinion uh you know you can before against truth just like your for against vanilla ice cream or for against you know the the the los angeles kings um i think we have to do a better job of that you can't i mean the idea that things that facts are real and the truth is a noble pursuit i think you can't do that without educational institutions without families i'm i'm happy to go along with churches however the actual we can want it as much as we as we as as as as we as we want but it has to be produced and i think like here on the production side we we were really naive um we think that the truth is just out there you know it was at twin peaks the truth is just out there but it's not just out there uh 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 right like that's our kind of human starting point like the people in the ministry whose sleepwalk and so on they're not necessarily bad people some of them are but they're they're kind of meant to be representative humans in an institutional setting and that's what we do we want the thing this is convenient we want the thing which lets us get to our daily life you know that's that's how we are and unless we're confronted by stuff right and in the stories this is the daily quibbler interview with with harry potter but unless we're confronted by massive local news every day which tells us uh hey nobody went to the school board meeting this terrible thing passed or hey this local politician actually has all of his money as a result of an oil spill or would all the kinds of things that we don't know anymore if we don't have that then the values you know the pursuit of truth is going to seem absurd when there's actually truth out there to pursue so i mean practically speaking i think we have to uh 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 and see how far that gets us so i mean to make the point again facts have to be produced if you just let it go then opinion but not just opinion artificially generated opinion which is you know which comes from algorithms written by people in places you don't even want to know about right like russia i mean algorithms or algorithms written by people or algorithms which are just teaching themselves about your emotional weaknesses they're going to fill up the space which which used to be filled up by facts all right i think we're almost out of time here so i have an anonymous attendee who asks 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 yeah and that's a wonderful question it also it goes back to um your one of your earlier questions and the question about the rule of law right like at what point does this following the is following the rules perverse because you know whatever you know mcconnell followed the rules i mean he he pushes the rules that are logical extreme right so that they are are working against their own intentions but he's following rules and the same is true for i know at a larger a higher level grosso moto 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 and before you know it the system has changed as a result of that so i mean 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 of the rules right if your view is that so long as it's so long as it's following the rules it's okay then you're basically recognizing that mike makes right and you know the way things are is definitely okay so you have to be able to call it out in some kind it's kind of some kind of an ethical way how does the system recover from that i don't think it recovers in any kind of natural bounce-back way i mean my view of recovery is that recovery always involves reconstruction um this is something i've been thinking about a lot because i was i was i was sick for a while and my own like i think about my own recovery i got to thinking well i'm not exactly the same as i was before and that's okay you know they're like i some you know some things got lost but some other things got found but it's it's been jumbled up into a slightly different version of me and that's fine like recovery isn't going back to where you were before i don't think that's gonna be true for the nation either i don't think you know i don't think we're gonna recover by going back to 2016 or whenever 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 so i mean i don't personally think that having more justices on the supreme court would be any worse than things that have already happened um i don't personally think congress i mean to make a lesser radical example congress passing laws which made it more specific what the current supreme court could and couldn't do i don't think that would be so bad at this like right now in our system and again i say this as you know as a kind of an interloper in american politics but it seems to me that the 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-a-vis the president but also vis-a-vis the courts i mean the supreme court exercises not just a right to constitutional but also to statutory interpretation which seems to me to be way overblown and is probably about to get more overblown so i think you know the legislature could assert itself in a way which is perfectly legitimate um and and and at least help with some of these problems but the third answer is public opinion so the supreme court has generally been right-wing and or reactionary in the history of the u.s at least as far as i know again as an interloper the the moment when it was progressive in the you know the third quarter of the 20th century that i think is exceptional and so one has to think how do you change the overall climate of public opinion so that the supreme court can't go too far in one direction um i think that's always that's always been part of the answer that you have to not just be you know have it have an ethical response with language a legislative response but also i think you have to have a mass public opinion response because basically what's happening is it the an attempt is being made to turn the supreme court into a kind of into a kind of you know reactionary bastion of of an america which never existed uh and you know in my view shouldn't exist uh and it's explicitly that you know like i mean the way mr trump talks about it makes it clear that that's what's going on and that means that you have to as a society be willing to say you know over and over again we're actually 25 percentage points away from that view and we're 50 percentage points away from that view and therefore if you you know going back to what the rule of law actually is if the if what you're if you're going to assert the rule of law runs contrary you know to basic moral principles held by most the population then you're going to have a problem right like most the american population for example thinks that we should be allowed to vote whereas the supreme court in a series of rulings you know over and over again this year has basically taken the opposite position how long can that go on right without and if you're an institution like supreme court which depends on the notion of the rule of law how then the question arises like 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 so i don't i mean i agree that like the merit garlic thing the merrick garland thing was 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 uh unfortunately we've gone a little overtime here and could you mute yourself patrick yeah um so i just wanted to take a moment to thank dr snyder all the way from all of our attendees from around the world thank you so much for joining us here today on behalf of the conference but also on behalf of chestnut hill college i i will say what everyone's been saying in the chat which i've been monitoring uh this has just been a wonderful wonderful presentation and so timely and i think we're going to be posting this i'm sure on on the college's website so that others can hear it as well and you've started a real dialogue here as we can see in the chat there's a lot of people that are going to be doing further research on on the points that you've made which we really appreciate so if you can imagine 100 people applauding for you around the world thank you so much for your time uh this afternoon for us and this getting to be later at night for you so we really really appreciate it thank you very much for the offer thank you for the opportunity it was it was a real pleasure to put this together and i'm so glad that we can make contact so thank you very much you

Channel: Chestnut Hill College

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Keywords: Chestnut Hill College, Chestnut Hill, CHC, Timothy Snyder, HarryPotter, harrypotterconference, voting, harry potter academic conference, academic conference, tim snyder, deathly hollows, politics, election year, election, harry potter, vote, timothy snyder lecture, discussion, lecture, plenary speaker, timothy snyder phd, Timothy snyder chestnut hill

Id: JYwb8gsNNsQ

Length: 97min 39sec (5859 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020