Unpacking the wisdom of Albus Dumbledore
Contains spoilers, please avoid until you've completed the books.
As Obama said “you must trust others so that they may trust you”. Hagrid was expelled from Hogwarts for causing the death of fellow student Myrtle Warren, witch slaughter. Dumbledore gives him a second chance and trust knits them together.
Despicable Deatheater Severus Snape is brought into Dumbledore’s plan through trust and is crucial. Trust - expecting the best of people can bring the best from people.
JK Rowling has talked about the mirror of ERISED in many interviews. In Portugal she was recommended ‘The writer's yearbook’, by a fellow teacher, who, it is suggested, had a novel they’d failed to get published.
So there’s dreams which are unfruitful and should be perhaps made hobbies which allow other possibilities to develop in parallel, rather than life devouring pursuits. And then there’s unrequited love.
I well remember sitting in hot, summer English classes during readings from Romeo and Juliet, with Romeo mooning over his crush, thinking ‘oh come on man, surely there’s something better for you to do’, he was enraptured with the mirror of ERISED.
How to discipline like Dumbledore
OK maybe this is an easy one. But two boys have done something severely wrong, and presented a terrible example to the whole school, they could incite copy cat behaviour. The situation is grave, Dumbledore is grave, the poor Whomping Willow is in slings, nevertheless no jumping to conclusions.
Dumbledore first asks them for an explanation for what they’ve done, so he can fairly assess what consequences are warranted. Always the detective’s magnifying glass before the judge’s wig.
What defines you
The choices you make determine how you spend your time, and that determines who you are. I forsook opportunities to apply to government jobs with big pensions and comfortable wages because I saw the stimulation and enjoyment of guiding Harry Potter fans to be greater than a routine and the exciting leisure opportunities of a good salary. I also keep this up for review!
Dumbledore on loss
The qualities of those we love, have rubbed off and been integrated into our psyches, spilling out in our behaviours.
"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others."
- Pericles, leader of Athens during its Golden Age.
Sometimes those lives form, for a moment, our resurrection - our attitudes, our worldview, our behaviours.
Dumbledore's resilience
Rita Skeeta, the Daily Prophet's gossip journalist, asks Dumbledore:
Dumbledore takes nastiness with good humour, and he’ll praise creativity and flair wherever it is found. He is a big hearted, resilient, liberal, praising merit even when it's fruits might stir up scorn against him.
Dumbledore & prejudice
Cornelius Fudge is asserting that Madame Buxine, headmistress of the French Beauxbâtons académie, is a savage giant. Dumbledore disagrees, but ‘quietly’, is interesting.
“It was true in the Potter books and it is true in life that talking will not change wilfully closed minds.” - JK Rowling
Given the death and destruction Giants have wrought in the past it’s unlikely you could argue someone to a more liberal position, you can merely present an alternative.
Standing up for your values
Fudge isn’t willing to stand up and potentially lose his post, he’s only willing to suck up.
You must standup for your values and be willing to lose for those values, in leadership the values you strive for create the conditions of living you want for yourself and others. Minister of Magic Fudge is a fraction of Dumbledore because he doesn't.
Dumbledore's father, a criminal, died in Azkaban and he himself has a deeply checkered past, he likes giving people second chances perhaps because he needed one himself. In Harry’s time he is warm and forgiving, as Snape says ‘he has to beleive the best in people’.
Abandoning his youthly desire for Muggle subjugation he rose to establish a liberal wizarding era, as recognised by making him Supreme Mugwump, head of the wizard's court the Wizengamot.
All the sayings ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’, constraining people on their background, stifling people’s opportunities prevents contributions which could improve the welfare of all. Dumbledore's own life, son of a criminal, head of the Wizengamot, dissproves the value of past-blinkered judgements.
Dumbledore would likely also see Pure Blood supremacy, the idea people are born perfect or trash, as much the same as his destructive teenage beleifs and so be deaf to them. Sinning immunised Dumbledore to prejudice.
Dealing with psychopaths
Harry queries Hagrid on what they’ll do now Voldemort is reborn:
Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix aren’t going to wait around denying like Fudge, hoping things will resolve, or that the threat is over-egged. Evil has risen and they’ll go toe to toe and start punching.
In the light of Lord Voldemort’s return, we are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.
‘Lord Voldemort’s gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust. Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.
Desiring to be a tyrant, the present world order is Voldemort's enemy. Defeating this enemy is easier if he can turn wizard on wizard. Which is what he does. Creating suspicion, doubt.
What is an open heart? One in which confidences can be shared easily, there is no mistrust harboured, no reserve.
Dumbledore forms a martyr of Cedric Diggory, an innocent unjust death, to rally opposition to Voldemort. Cedric’s death illuminates Voldemort’s nature, you can be wholly blameless and he won’t hesitate to murder you. If his victim represents the best of us, we must rise and fight vigorously for no merit will save us.
On Humanity
Remorse, guilt, Harry is suffering for the death of his much loved Godfather, Sirius Black. That he loves shows he is still human not a psychopath like Voldemort, incapable of love. The fact Harry can love, and be enraged by grief caused by love, and filled with determination by love, makes him strong, it gives him courage.
‘I don’t mean to be rude –’ he began, in a tone that threatened rudeness in every syllable. ‘– yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often,’ Dumbledore finished the sentence gravely. ‘Best to say nothing at all, my dear man. Ah, and this must be Petunia.’
Dumbledore has insight into Uncle Vernon, he can foresee that ‘I don’t mean to be rude’, leads to rudeness. My mother used to say ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say it’. Dumbledore says it more kindly and charitably. ‘Accidental’ rudeness suggests really Vernon would like to be kind, whilst ‘best to say’, shows Dumbledore wants what’s best for him. That human warmth continues with ‘my dear man’, anybody who is held dear is cared for.
Dumbledore masterfully steers Vernon away from a distressing scene - Dumbledore pulling rank. Dumbledore takes command with wry kindness.
Dumbledore meeting death
‘Think your little jokes’ll help you on your deathbed, then?’ she jeered.
‘Jokes? No, no, these are manners,’ replied Dumbledore.
For Dumbledore there is always space to be pleasant, to welcome people as humans, to role model the civil behaviour you’d like from others, even from your enemies upon your death bed.
The tower scene from Steven Glove's screenplay
Albus Dumbledore:Draco. Years ago, I knew a boy, who made all the wrong choices. Please, let me help you.
Draco Malfoy:I don't want your help! Don't you see?! I have to do this! I have to kill you... or he's gonna kill me!
Even when faced with someone intent on murdering him, Dumbeldore's first instinct is to offer a second chance. How has Dumbledore achieved such generosity of spirit?
Albus Dumbledore is talking about himself. His youthful ambition of obtaining the powerful Deathly Hallows so Wizards could rule the simple and blood thirsty Muggles for 'the Greater Good', led to the death of his sister; he made all the wrong choices. Dumbledore has walked in Draco's shoes, making the worst of decisions; by offering him a second chance he does unto others as was done unto himself. Good dialog Steven!
Rising from a shameful past
Albus never attempted to deny that his father (who was to die in Azkaban) had committed this crime; on the contrary, when I plucked up courage to ask him, he assured me that he knew his father to be guilty.
Beyond that, Dumbledore refused to speak of the sad business, though many attempted to make him do so.
Be honest but let the past remain in the past, don’t let it define you, or steer people’s view of you, and consequently how they react to you, and so determine the opportunities which form around you.
A quotation from the bible, placed by Dumbledore upon his mother and sister’s grave.
In Dumbledore’s greed to be master of Death and possessor of all of the Deathly Hallows, the cloak, the stone, and the powerful Elder wand, his sister Ariana dies. He chose lust for power and status signalling possessions over caring for his troubled sister.
Dumbledore learns his lesson and decides he is unfit for power, unfit to be minister of magic, and places his treasure in friendship and caring and trust of those around him. Indeed he cares for Harry’s well being so much he jeopardizes his plan to defeat Voldemort’s efforts to establish a tyranny.
Those who are uncared for are pitiful. The homeless on the street, with their sometimes gruff manners, are so uncared for that they suffer in the heat and rain and cold. Pity can do no good for the dead, but concern for uncared for living will be appreciated.
Snape lived without love and his attitudes and manners became repellant. The good humour of people may be steadily eroded by a lack of care, ‘why should I care for your pleasant passage when you do not care for me?’.
How to treat your lessers and morally vacant authority
Harry on the new, civil liberty quashing, Minister of magic:
Anguish - deep mental suffering.
The subtext here is:
If those in authority have no values and are displeased, then that’s no hardship, perhaps you’re doing something right.
This contrasts with Dumbledore’s warmth and understanding towards his lessers:
I warned Sirius when we adopted twelve Grimmauld Place as our Headquarters that Kreacher must be treated with kindness and respect. I also told him that Kreacher could be dangerous to us.
I do not think Sirius took me very seriously, or that he ever saw Kreacher as a being with feelings as acute as a human’s
‘Kreacher is what he has been made by wizards, Harry,’ said Dumbledore. ‘Yes, he is to be pitied. His existence has been as miserable as your friend Dobby’s.
We form people’s behaviours, towards us and people like us, by how we treat them. Or as Sirius Black says:
So what is a lesser? Or an inferior? I would say it is someone with little ability to create their situation, so someone more a victim of circumstance than you presently are. Self agency is a large part of happiness. As slaves House Elves have none.
On my tours bright young kids sometimes point out the irony that Sirius Black will ultimately die for not following his own advice. Is this a plot hole?
Like the lesson of the mirror of ERISED, I think the sentiment of caring for those who struggle is prized by Rowling. Indeed she has said that she used to evaulate men by how they treat waiters and waitresses.
Willing to talk with thine enemies
And finally Dumbledore is open minded, he brought Snape in from the cold...
In the final book, Deathly Hallows, when many hidden things come to the surface, there is a scene on a windy hilltop. Dumbledore has been summoned by a Death Eater, Severus Snape. At that point, Snape is a subscriber to the inhuman philosophy of Voldemort. He is probably a killer, certainly a betrayer of two of the people Dumbledore loved most, and the man who had sent Voldemort after an innocent child in the knowledge that Voldemort would kill him.
Again, to my knowledge (my memory isn't infallible, so forgive me if you did), nobody has ever asked me: why did Dumbledore go when Snape asked him to go, and why didn't he kill him on sight when he got there?
I think readers assume that Dumbledore is wise enough, knowledgeable enough and compassionate enough to sense that Snape, though he has led a despicable adult life, has something human left inside him, something that can be redeemed.
Nevertheless, wise and prescient as Dumbledore is, he is not a Seer. At the moment when he answers Snape's call, he cannot know that Snape isn’t going to try and kill him. He can’t know that Snape will have the moral or physical courage to change course, let alone help defeat Voldemort. Yet still, Dumbledore goes to the hilltop
Dumbledore is the moral heart of the book. His warmth, care, concern and trust bettered the lives of everyone he touched. Even when dealing with seeming villains like Vernon Dursley, or Deatheaters sent to assassinate him he had grace.
Modestly he calls his pleasant concern for others “manners”, but Harry Potter is stuffed with institutional bigotry and stigma, it’s wizard culture; Dumbledore is the world’s beacon of civility. So...
What Would Dumbledore Do?
Check out my other, less good, instructional how to deal with bullies like Harry Potter.
Or my improving how to love like Fleur Delacour.
The Whomping Willow poster created by Green Dragon Inn
Dumbledore's falling from the tower from Pottermore
Sirius Black battling Belatrix Lestrange by b-portrayed
Cho Chang kissing Cedric Diggory by r. räubertochter
Snape weeping before ERISED by ines92
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