I first read the Harry Potter series over a year ago--a little behind the ball, but still better late than never. After that I watched all the movies with friends, and recently I have been slowly re-reading the series as a present to myself for finishing my Master's program. I generally don't read a book again once I've read it with only the rarest of exceptions; I've revisited Tolkien's works several times along with the Redwall books by the late Brian Jacques, and I'm preparing to re-read the massive Wheel of Time epic now that the final volume is out. With so many books out there to read, and so little time in which to read them, I usually cannot justify re-reading a work unless it is of exceptionally high quality. The Harry Potter series definitely falls into that category for me, and I've enjoyed rereading the series in no small part because this time, since I know how it all ends, I can take my time and read them slowly, soaking up details that I missed in the first reading. Originally when I read the series I finished all seven books in under two weeks, generally finishing a book in one or two days.
In thinking about the story, I think often of the role of the Ministry of Magic, the governing body in the magical world of Harry Potter and his friends. While technically on the side of good, the Ministry and its officials are often incompetent allies at best, counterproductive at worst, and by the time of the final battle between the forces of good and Lord Voldemort the Ministry has been completely overtaken by evil and removed from the equation. The Ministry of Magic, and a few individuals in particular, are representative of the idea of philosopher Hannah Arendt of the "banality of evil." Arendt used this term as a way to understand how many ordinary Germans could have participated in the horrors of the Holocaust. In viewing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt was struck by just how average he seemed, this man who helped to orchestrate the industrial murder of Europe's Jewish population but did not seem evil as Hitler certainly did. In Arendt's view, Eichmann, and countless others like him, did their actions not out of an evil or a malevolent attitude but because it was their job to do so. We remember the figures of the Nazi regime who were evil on the scale of Hitler, Heydrich, and Goering, and we remember the brutal prison guards in the extermination camps, the men on the Eastern Front who formed the "killing squads" that executed a million people, but it is easy to forget all the bureaucrats like Eichmann. These men, who never pulled a trigger or operated a gas chamber, nonetheless were complicit in the murder of millions, workers who sat at a desk all day and did their jobs well and went home at night to a wife and children. By doing their jobs they kept the wheels running: these were the people who made the train schedules, who supplied the food and other supplies that kept the whole machine going forward. But would they have thought of themselves as evil? Doubtless the answer is no, and this is a reminder that evil so rarely comes in the form of the Hitlers, the Stalins, or the bin Laden's of the world. It is far more likely that evil is in the mundane, the banal, to use Arendt's term, the people who fill out the paperwork and lead generally boring lives.
This brings me back to the Ministry of Magic. With the exception of those followers of Lord Voldemort who infiltrated the Ministry for the purpose of overthrowing it, even the worst ministry officials were not Death Eaters, as the Dark Lord's followers named themselves. They were not evil, not in the sense that Voldemort was. While technically against evil, the actions they took to fight the forces of darkness at times were so close to what a Death Eater would do that there was no difference. Take the case of Dolores Umbridge. A high-level Ministry official, Umbridge was sent to keep an eye on Harry Potter at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where she implemented an authoritarian regime to suppress all dissent. Though I hated her, and smiled a little at her downfall from that position, I do not believe she was evil. Like the Nazi bureaucrats, she was merely doing her job and would doubtless have considered herself a good person, very different from the Death Eaters. Yet her actions nevertheless hindered the forces of good in the battle against Voldemort. The same is true for the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, who sent her there. Fudge wasn't evil, but he was a territorial bureaucrat who feared losing his position so much that he actively worked for a year to hide the evidence that Voldemort was gaining power, using his influence to smear those who claimed otherwise. While it became clear that the Dark Lord had indeed returned and Fudge resigned from his post, his actions meant a year wasted, time that could have been spent preparing for the inevitable war. Barty Crouch, a strict Ministry official we meet in the fourth book of the series, must fall into the same category as the others as well. While on the side of good, strictly speaking, his actions, including sending suspected Death Eaters to Azkaban prison without trial, certainly make him look like one of the bad guys. Yet to his mind, he was merely doing his job. The Ministry's amoral commitment to a narrow set of duties no doubt made it all the easier for the real evil to infiltrate and capture it. It is no surprise, then, that before the battle with Voldemort was over characters like Kingsley Shacklebolt and Arthur Weasley have to leave the Ministry in order to more effectively fight.
While I've certainly oversimplified a little (it is hard to summarize parts of a seven-book series in a short blog entry), I think that the basic point is worth considering. The actions of the Ministry of Magic seem to encapsulate Arendt's notion of the banality of evil--a fact that can't have been lost on J.K. Rowling. Arendt based her ideas on the Nazi regime; by the time the Ministry is taken over by Voldemort's supporters Dolores Umbridge and others are registering and interrogating "Muggle-born" wizards and witches in line with a focus on "pure-blood" individuals (those who were born to parents who were themselves both magically-talented). This seems too much like the Nazi focus on purity of blood to be coincidence. The Ministry officials are generally not evil themselves, but the end result of their actions is the furtherance of evil. Like the bureaucrats of Nazi Germany, the Ministry of Magic, through a narrow focus on doing their jobs or protecting their turf, end up just as complicit as the Death Eaters. It is a reminder to us all that we should try to avoid thinking narrowly, to try and look at the wider picture that our daily actions play into. By being consumed with our daily tasks we can lose sight of what is important, and all too quickly we can find ourselves, like the Ministry, part of the banality of evil that Arendt so aptly described.
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