But the solution is not “be friends with Ron and Hagrid and the other people that canon-Harry liked.”
I’m shooting for “Be friendly towards,” not “Be friends with.” At the very least, Harry could stop by Hagrid’s hut and ask him to tell some stories about James and Lily.
I mean, Harry is apparently so inept at dealing with other people that he doesn’t realize indifference is often more wounding than disliking someone.
various other people who actually share interests with him.
That’s how Harry got into this mess- in his mind, the only important students at Hogwarts are himself, Draco, and Hermione, and the only important professor is Quirrel. Heck, when you take into account his skewed morality it looks like the only person that shares interests with him is Quirrel (because of Azkaban).
Which is exactly where Quirrel wants him. And that’s bad, and he needs to get out of this situation. But if you were up against Quirrel, you’d probably be exactly where he wanted you to be too.
I share very few weakness with Harry. I imagine Quirrel is clever enough to figure out my weaknesses and attack them, but I’m not sure he’d succeed; I know several effective defenses against seduction. I am over twice as old as Harry, and so there is no guarantee the same was true of me at Harry’s age- but I would be as comfortable giving a fictional 10 year old me that ability as I would be giving a fictional 10 year old me Harry’s repertoire of read books.
If I think of Harry as a real person in a real situation, I basically agree with you.
Indeed, I asked the question a couple of months ago of whether the rational thing to do would be to stop Harry then, before it was too late, though I had a different mechanism for his corruption in mind. Mechanism aside, it was pretty clear at that point that he had placed himself firmly on the isolate’s path; we’re just reading about his first stumbling steps on that path now.
But the thing is, Harry is the main character in a rationalist bildungsroman, and we’ve already seen that literary tropes have power in his world.
And given the author’s stated-at-length beliefs about the relationship between rationality and moral behavior, I expect that—whether it’s true of the real world or not—a constraining principle of this bildungsroman will be that a sufficiently powerful optimizer can preserve morality (in the human sense) given an adequate commitment to rationality, even in the absence of social entanglement.
And the related (and true in the real world) general principle that social entanglement works just as well to enforce immoral-but-conventional ideas as for moral ones (and is therefore unreliable as a moral guide) has already appeared several times.
In other words: I agree with you that in the real world social entanglement is a more reliable path to morality than individual rationality, at least for the overwhelming majority of people. But HP:MOR would derail a good deal of its literary thrust if Harry adopted that route.
In still other words: what you are championing here is the Hufflepuff yoga, and I agree with you that it’s a reliable way to avoid singular evil (though it makes one more vulnerable to certain kinds of collective evil). Dumbledore champions the Gryffindor yoga, which canon!Harry practices but MOR!Harry rejects. Quirrel champions the Slytherin yoga, about which much has been written.
Harry could usefully collaborate with Hagrid, but Hermione or Draco may need to point that out. Hagrid has had limited access to practicing his magic, so provides something of a control to his classmates, to test whether magical strength is an increasing function of magical use, if magical strength is easily measured—Dumbledore seemed to be able to sense it.
Hermione challenged by Fawkes, may see improving the performance of everyone in the class as the effective way of working harder. Asking Harry “Why are we different?” and based on “Great artists steal”, what existing techniques should we look at could be both effective for both of them.
I’m shooting for “Be friendly towards,” not “Be friends with.” At the very least, Harry could stop by Hagrid’s hut and ask him to tell some stories about James and Lily.
I mean, Harry is apparently so inept at dealing with other people that he doesn’t realize indifference is often more wounding than disliking someone.
That’s how Harry got into this mess- in his mind, the only important students at Hogwarts are himself, Draco, and Hermione, and the only important professor is Quirrel. Heck, when you take into account his skewed morality it looks like the only person that shares interests with him is Quirrel (because of Azkaban).
I share very few weakness with Harry. I imagine Quirrel is clever enough to figure out my weaknesses and attack them, but I’m not sure he’d succeed; I know several effective defenses against seduction. I am over twice as old as Harry, and so there is no guarantee the same was true of me at Harry’s age- but I would be as comfortable giving a fictional 10 year old me that ability as I would be giving a fictional 10 year old me Harry’s repertoire of read books.
If I think of Harry as a real person in a real situation, I basically agree with you.
Indeed, I asked the question a couple of months ago of whether the rational thing to do would be to stop Harry then, before it was too late, though I had a different mechanism for his corruption in mind. Mechanism aside, it was pretty clear at that point that he had placed himself firmly on the isolate’s path; we’re just reading about his first stumbling steps on that path now.
But the thing is, Harry is the main character in a rationalist bildungsroman, and we’ve already seen that literary tropes have power in his world.
And given the author’s stated-at-length beliefs about the relationship between rationality and moral behavior, I expect that—whether it’s true of the real world or not—a constraining principle of this bildungsroman will be that a sufficiently powerful optimizer can preserve morality (in the human sense) given an adequate commitment to rationality, even in the absence of social entanglement.
And the related (and true in the real world) general principle that social entanglement works just as well to enforce immoral-but-conventional ideas as for moral ones (and is therefore unreliable as a moral guide) has already appeared several times.
In other words: I agree with you that in the real world social entanglement is a more reliable path to morality than individual rationality, at least for the overwhelming majority of people. But HP:MOR would derail a good deal of its literary thrust if Harry adopted that route.
In still other words: what you are championing here is the Hufflepuff yoga, and I agree with you that it’s a reliable way to avoid singular evil (though it makes one more vulnerable to certain kinds of collective evil). Dumbledore champions the Gryffindor yoga, which canon!Harry practices but MOR!Harry rejects. Quirrel champions the Slytherin yoga, about which much has been written.
But MOR!Harry is a Ravenclaw.
Harry could usefully collaborate with Hagrid, but Hermione or Draco may need to point that out. Hagrid has had limited access to practicing his magic, so provides something of a control to his classmates, to test whether magical strength is an increasing function of magical use, if magical strength is easily measured—Dumbledore seemed to be able to sense it. Hermione challenged by Fawkes, may see improving the performance of everyone in the class as the effective way of working harder. Asking Harry “Why are we different?” and based on “Great artists steal”, what existing techniques should we look at could be both effective for both of them.