It only just struck me recently that the Harry Potter phenomenon was a mythological representation of the Cold War: with Harry’s intent on ‘disarming’ enemies being representative of the Anglosphere’s intent to use military force to pacify enemy states and Voldemort’s intent on ‘murder, mind-control and enforcing pain’ being representative of the Soviet Union’s intent to use military force to kill, manipulate and harm its populations.
It is no wonder then that Rowling’s idea of a novel series was conceived at the cusp of the Soviet demise, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. No wonder also that this series caught the imagination of the youngest generation. A generation that had not lived under the Cold War era.
Canadian Psychologist, Jordan Peterson’s notion, expressed in his Biblical series on Genesis, that our culture is caught in a space where ‘we think things we don’t act out and we act out things we don’t dream’, might be illustrated by this example of the Harry Potter phenomenon. I don’t know of anyone who has articulated this link, which is obvious now I think of it, between Harry Potter and the Cold War.
It explains why reading Harry Potter feels like a bit of an internal Cold War: so much struggle and frustration and narcissistic self-loathing is caught up in the experience. This is because no one can question the reality that much of the series was caught up in excitement regarding this ‘new power’ that Voldemort and his ‘Death Eaters’ exercised. The authority of Harry, his friends and the ‘Order of the Phoenix’ is the authority of fear: here is something we don’t understand that is causing pain, hurt and death and we need to trust Harry and the others to stare it down.
Who might Harry, Hermione and Ron represent here except Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan? The sympathy we feel for Harry growing up an orphan with his Aunt and Uncle, who could not be said to belong in any real sense to the ‘in-group’, though they are not entirely enemies either, except in the sense of family politics. Likewise, Poland, the home nation of Pope John Paul II, was not entirely in one camp or the other and posed no real threat, but did ‘come good’ because of its association with the Pope as his birth nation where he grew up. The fact that the Dursleys allowed Harry to exist and offered their protection to him from the threatening power of Voldemort is much like the Polish Communist Party that allowed Catholicism to remain an influential and visible part of its national culture. Indeed, just as Petunia Dursley really could not do anything about the situation of her nephew living under her roof: so too the Polish Communist Party had no means of ousting the privileged place of the Catholic Church in its national community.
Just like Harry’s family, Ron Weasley’s family works as a metaphor. Ron Weasley belonged to a big family, the biggest family many had seen, which was rich in warmth and solidarity, despite their economic struggles. So too, the United States, the biggest nation by population in the Western World, struggles with many below the poverty line nonetheless has a strong culture and displays warmth and solidarity for those in need.
Likewise, Hermione has a family of professionals, wealthy, respectable and vulnerable, who would rather not be caught up in the harsh reality of the ideological war. Could this be anything like what we saw in the UK? Margaret Thatcher was someone who fought for her country with her grit, determination and searing intelligence. Popular amongst her friends and despised by enemies, Hermione could be said to have lived a similar life while at Hogwarts.
In a way, for me, what this analogy tells me is that JK Rowling, in her mythological representation of the Cold War, gave my generation something that we were missing: an experiential introduction to the horror and fear of previous generations under the Cold War Era. The best spiritual traditions tell us that we all need to maintain continuity with the past. If we don’t maintain this continuity, it is more than likely that something terrible is going to happen. In this sense, we have much to thank Mrs Rowling for in allowing those in my generation the opportunity to reconnect with and feel solidarity with what those in the older generations had to put up with for 45 years after the end of the Second World War. The book series explained to us lessons we did not know we were learning, but knew how much we needed to learn them. This is the reason Mrs Rowling earned her position of prestige and authority amongst all her readers. Something many in my generation would do well to remember.
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