Hey, Spengler. Harry Potter is just an adventure story for kids.
No more and no less than that.
Get a life.
Reading Harry Potter and the names within, would be easier than trying to read that thing.
Summary: pretentious fart name-dropping to prove how widely read in high culture he is.
I think the guy has a point. Tapping your "inner feelings" for power is Hindu/New Age. Superman had genetic powers he used for an ideal.
Harry Potter has no ideals, only "feelings". He is the perfect liberal.
I've never tried to swim in quick sand, but it must be something like reading Spengler's prose.
But he's right! I like Harry Potter, but you need to understand that it's the mental equivalent of a Snicker's bar.
This Spengler (has it a family name to go with that, like Spengler MacMagonnary? Or is it missing its first name, like Rickey Spengler? Or is it merely an ego, like Prince or Madonna?) appears to be educated beyond its ability. Are we supposed to think it's the Teutonic sage who was wrong about nearly everything, Oswald Spengler? He's been pushing up daisies for something like seventy years, so under those conditions, he could perhaps have written this.
A lightweight that can fire a broadside of big words is still a lightweight. This is something I see a lot of -- people projecting their pre-existing framework onto someobody else's work, and then bitching that the work is no good because it doesn't fit the frame.
You know, "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" was also a milepost on our society's road to perdition.
And the snide replay of Dorothy Parker's comment on AA Milne is perfectly apropos: in 2005, people still read Milne.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
How to tell if a person is both full of themselves and intellectually bankrupt: Over reliance on citations of other works or other people.
It's saying two things at the same time:
1. The ideas I come up with can't stand on their own. I have to cite what other people have said about it.
2. Be impressed by all the things I have cited. Look how well read I am.
Whenever I read a book where the author does the same thing, I end up ditching it for something better.
I think this guy is right on.
Rowling has nothing on Tolkien.
Jeez Louise, this guy is a real crank.
The "chosen one", "guy with god on his side", "got superpowers because his cause is just" is as old a device as it gets.
On these grounds modern western readers are just as degenerate as their medieval ancestors.
So what's the poor schmoe who grew up in a dysfunctional family supposed to do with this "inner well of familial emotions"? Become a sociopath?
I think this is the best article yet on the subject, and I think it lamentable that pride or lack of education seems to prevent some from giving it fair consideration.
It's interesting that everyone reacts by attacking Spengler.
Decline of the West? Is he talking about Hawaii or Japan?
One can say the same about the Old Testament.
As to the overall theme that a culture fixated on self-absorption is a decadent one, I can find little to criticize except to note that plenty of cultures that are at less then their apogee have had the same problem. In fact, I can't think of a single culture without it. It may be a part of the human condition, in which case either we're all on the road to perdition or perhaps we're simply human. That the human condition displays imperfections is the very source of literature in the first place.
I do think that the overall issue of magic - or magick, or majick, or a basketball player named Johnson - has a good deal to do with the desperate hope of the powerless for some means of bringing the powerful to their knees through some means that is at once mysterious, obscure, omnipotent, and nonexistent. Mumbling corrupt Latin and making strange gestures and focusing one's putative mental powers on willing a condition other than the mess one is in is, I am afraid, the common refuge of the impotent. This also is cross-cultural and as much a human imperfection as halitosis and hangnails.
And so to our young friend Harry. The entire submergence in magic is an expression of an adolescent rebellion against powerlessness that is addressed by a hot rod, a credit card, and eventually by a job to pay for it all. It is at that point that, like Faust, we find that our power comes at a price.
this is reality of it people: its just a book,magic doesnt exist and no kid is gonna turn into a devil worshipper because he read about a little kid who wears big round glasses and yells PRESTO every few pages...JEEEZ
Where were these folks early on when evangelicals were getting hammered over their comments on Potter?
Then how does one account for the enormous and continuing popularity of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (in both book and movie form)?
That said, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Harry Potter books are pablum. I picked up the first one at the library one day, intending to read it ... read a couple of chapters there in the library, and put it back on the shelf again. I read constantly as a child, and there was a LOT of children's literature that certainly put those first two chapters to shame. (Try the Edward Eager HALF MAGIC books sometime ... now *those* were fun! :)
"Western literature, along with all great Western art, is Christian in character, including the product of a putative heathen like Goethe, whom Franz Rosenzweig correctly called the prototype of a modern Christian.[3] It is Christian precisely because it deals with overcoming one's "inner self"."
Good catch enjoyed the post.
Very un-PC to recognize the Complete Christian underpinnings of our civilization.
BUT...I'd rather not read Young Werther again. Maybe it was the translation, but Goethe reeks. The whole thing was a whiney, superficial piece of mental vomit.