“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
Harry read the words slowly, as though he would have only one chance to take in the meaning, & he read the last of them aloud.
“‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’ . . .” A horrible thought came to him, & with it a kind of panic. “Isn’t that a Death Eater idea? Why is that there?”
“It doesn’t mean defeating death in the way the Death Eaters mean it, Harry,” said Hermione, her voice gentle. “It means . . . you know . . . living beyond death. Living after death.” —Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, CH 16
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I’m not sure if Voldemort would assert that bestiality & contracepted incestuous sex are morally acceptable behavior, or that there is little ethical difference between killing a snail & a day-old infant, but he does seem to have something in common with the bad boy of bioethics, Peter Singer, who does say such things. Both the Dark Lord of the Harry Potter franchise & the Australian philosopher now residing at Princeton University have their problems with suffering, not only thinking it allied with the greatest of evils, but also obsessed with trying to render it powerless through dark magic, in Voldemort’s case, or eliminate it as much as possible through the strange logic of personhood theory & preference utilitarianism, in Singer’s. Readers of the Harry Potter series know that Voldemort’s fear of suffering & death lead him to mutilate his soul through the creation of multiple Horcruxes, which requires multiple acts of murder; we also know that while he did extend his life through such acts, it was not much of a life, & his goal of conquering death altogether was futile. Rooting for such an obvious villain is difficult, even if his goal is shared by others (see the philosopher’s stone, which, according to the first book, was created by a guy who appears to have been decent). Readers of Peter Singer, however, are a mixed bunch, some applauding his openness to redefining personhood & rejecting the idea that all human beings have dignity, while the rest of us see him as something of a childish ghoul, trying to shock everyone in the room with his “bold” proclamations (“Sex with your sister, or dog, is wrong? Why? Who says so? And what’s so special about defective infants that we should legally protect their lives?”) while placing a target on the backs of growing numbers of vulnerable members of society. Singer’s philosophy, however, like Voldemort’s, insofar as he has one, is rooted in the attempt to diminish & ultimately render unnecessary human suffering. While Singer doesn’t seem (yet) to have embraced the posthumanist wish of achieving earthly immortality through biotechnological means, he does want to help those with defective infants or intellectually disabled parents & spouses eliminate their suffering, & the suffering of their wards, by being able to eliminate them, in the name of compassion.
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“You do not seek to kill me, Dumbledore” called Voldemort. . . . Above such brutality, are you?”
“We both know that there are other ways of destroying a man, Tom,” Dumbledore said calmly. . . . Merely taking your life would not satisfy me, I admit—”
“There is nothing worse than death, Dumbledore!” snarled Voldemort.
“You are quite wrong,” said Dumbledore. . . . Indeed, your failure to understand that there are things much worse than death has always been your greatest weakness—” —Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix, CH 36
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This passage nicely reveals the motivation behind Voldemort’s plotting & planning; his entire operation, so to speak, is called forth to wage war not against Harry Potter, Dumbledore, & the Ministry of Magic, but against death itself. Mortality, & the suffering inevitably attached to it, is his greatest foe. This is what separates Harry from Voldemort; he feels for those who suffer & die. He is moved by compassion, by pain & loss, by witnessing the wanton destruction caused by Voldemort & his allies. This marks him as human, a quality Voldemort sacrificed long ago, & Dumbledore reminds Harry that there is nothing odd about the pain he suffers:
“There is no shame in what you are feeling, Harry,” said Dumbledore’s voice. “On the contrary . . . the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength. . . . Harry, suffering like this proves that you are still a man! This pain is part of being human—”
And this is directly related to his capacity to love, the one trait which best defines Harry. This proves decisive in the series, as is spelled out in the 7th book, when Harry makes the choice at Shell Cottage to finally trust Dumbledore & stop obsessing over Hallows & turn his attentions back to finding Horcruxes. This is something Voldemort can’t even begin to understand, to his eventual ruin.
Despite all the criticisms, including from Catholics concerned about a glorifying of a gnostic elitism (I’ll have a post on this soon) in the Harry Potter series, JK Rowling said in an interview that the main theme of the books is death, not magic. Alan Jacobs’ perceptive reviews of Harry Potter draw attention to the question of the use of technology in pursuit of certain goods, as Voldemort & the Death Eaters seek to achieve immortality through the use of the Dark Arts. Harry’s puzzlement when reading the words cited above on a tombstone is caused by his painful experience of their pursuits, which include the murder of his parents. And these pursuits are in important ways strikingly similar to those of Peter Singer, posthumanists, & others devoted to the elimination of the vulnerabilty of being human.
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Ralph Wood, in Flannery O’Connor & the Christ-Haunted South, has this to say in a section dealing with O’Connor’s suffering from the fatal illness that claimed her at age 39:
“Rather than fearing God as our ancestors did, we now fear death; & so our scientific projects & materialist greed are driven by a massive dread of extinction. Hence our own personal desire to die quickly & cheaply, preferably during our sleep, & without bother to anyone else. We do not trust our families to help us die, & we do not want to make a painful preparation for death.”
This quote recalls Singer’s attempts to redefine the human person & the ethical ties that bind us to one another. It also reminds me of a comment my mother made to me a few years ago, one which saddened me then & motivates me now. “I don’t want to be a burden to you,” she said, repeating words that are likely common among the elderly who are losing their capacities for independence. “Mom, I was a burden to you for a long time,” I think I said. And, in many ways, still am. I was at one point a sort of parasite, really, an image Annie Dillard capitalizes on in describing how unborn children look from a certain point of view. And I wasn’t feeding or clothing myself, helping with the mortgage, taking myself to baseball games or the doctor’s office. The first words I, like every other person, uttered through screams, cries, & grunts were “I NEED! GIVEGIVEGIVE!” My vocabulary may have grown through the years, but how many of can say we have ever outgrown those first sentiments? She answered me, again & again, without condition, & loving gratitude suggests that when our roles are reversed, respect for the 4th commandment is the path of wisdom. A gratitude, moreover, which expresses itself in showing her love, patience, & tolerance of her growing incapacity, & in helping her to feel that she is anything but a burden. Exactly what she showed me.
“Blessed Burden” is the title of a Hummel print I bought from an antique shop shortly after our first child was born, & it depicts a young girl carrying a lamb in a basket. Cute, in a smushy, Hummel kind of way, but also true. For folks like Singer, these two words are always at odds, “blessed” locked into a fierce adversarial relationship with “burden.” This always makes me wonder about Singer the father, not to mention husband, son, & so on. I like to imagine that Singer is a far better father etc. than he is an ethicist, that his life is vastly more reasonable & human than his thought, that he recognizes, at a deep level, that the demands we inevitably place on one another are no excuse for defining the most vulnerable among us out of personhood, & that these natural demands should call forth from us patience, empathy, & love that might otherwise remain dormant. That these virtues, & not our “rational capacities,” much less the ability to enjoy a pleasurable, suffering-free, independent life, make us human. Singer’s lack of insight about the human condition is especially troubling, as that patience, empathy, & love do not often sit on the surface of most people’s lives, just waiting to be effortlessly spilled out when others we choose to favor need them, but must gradually take form through the practices associated with life among other vulnerable people. No wonder Singer & other utilitarians reject Aristotle; it’s not just because his thought is teleological, but because his emphasis on the development of virtue makes stringent demands on us, &, when refined by St. Thomas, make it impossible for us to hide behind the human being/human person distinction Singer favors. One could paraphrase Chesterton on Christianity here: Aristotle is not rejected because he’s been tried & found wanting; he hasn’t been tried at all. The formation of virtuous habits is hard work, & becomes much harder when charity, the “greatest of these,” is added to the mix. Just as Voldemort scoffs at the weakness of others as he seeks to achieve an invulnerability for himself, Singer’s impulse is to turn us away from the inevitabilities of suffering & mortality, including the invitation we ourselves must eventually extend to others to care for us when we are most in need & thus helping them toward a more virtuous life. My children are “burdens” to my wife & I now, as they were when they were yet unborn, & as they will remain till we depart them & this life. And we will increasingly become burdens to them. To treat this as unnatural, something to be conquered in the name of “compassion” or personal autonomy, is childish, reflecting an immaturity we expect from spoiled, brattish children who invite a kick in the rear. That we reward this kind of petulance with accolades, chairs in bioethics, & disciples is a commentary on ourselves that should frighten all but the most callous, as Voldemort should frighten every reader who witnesses his disregard for others, &, ultimately, for all that once made him human.
What Wood calls a “massive dread of extinction” fuels the freakish fringes of biotechnology today, giving birth to posthumanism & its calls to treat death as a disease to be conquered through new technologies that will enable us to live on past the deterioration of our bodies. It is an ancient dread, & is by no means unnatural. How we respond to it, however, defines us & the world we build. Was it Peter Berger who defined culture as “all the little flags we fly in defiance of death”? How about the art of Mozart, Bergman, Monet et al. as differing ways of celebrating our mortality by trying to appreciate & understand it better, leading not to a raging against its insistent presence among us, but to the recognition that Tolkien’s elves had that death is best seen as a gift, a blessing that frees us from the ravages of time & the temptation merely to persist? What kind of life does Voldemort really have, after all? What would his immortality look like? The vicious man, Aristotle said, can never be happy, as his ingrained habits prevent anything like the moderation of one’s passions that is required for genuine happiness. There is a direct correlation between Voldemort’s murderous behavior & his grasping for immortality. “Nothing is worse than death!” is the dirge of a ruined human being who knows nothing about himself or anything else, a lack that finally betrays him & leads to his ruin. Dumbledore utters the most powerful words in the entire series when he spells out for the not-quite-dead Harry the truth about Voldemort:
“You were the seventh Horcrux, Harry, the Horcrux he never meant to make. He had rendered his soul so unstable that it broke apart when he committed those acts of unspeakable evil, the murder of your parents, the attempted killing of a child. But what escaped from that room was even less than he knew. He left more than his body behind. He left part of himself latched to you, the would-be victim who had survived.
“And his knowledge remained woefully incomplete, Harry! That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves & children’s tales, of love, loyalty, & innocence, Voldemort knows & understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.”
Change the words of that last paragraph slightly & you have insight into where Peter Singer fails as an ethicist. Of the weak & vulnerable among us, of sacrificial love, loyalty to those in our care, & the innocence that sees other human persons as bearing the greatest of gifts, God’s own image & likeness, Singer knows & understands nothing. His truncated view of reason, which denies to the cosmos & to its human inhabitants any telos & any Creator, & which seeks cause to eliminate the natural ties that bind us sons & daughters of Adam & Eve together, falls flat before the deeper reason (the “deeper magic” that Aslan speaks of in Narnia, & which JK Rowling illustrates in the Potter books) informed by love, a reason which accepts the suffering of others, &, ultimately, our own.
—Anthony DiStefano
