The Hard Decisions of Albus Dumbledore

In one of the innumerable essays on the Harry Potter series available on the web, a certain “Bohemianspirit” criticises Albus Dumbledore for being devious, manipulative and disloyal to his friends. He or she is not the first to do so. In her muckraking biography Rita Skeeter sought to expose his shady past—early collaboration with the dark wizard Grindelwald, with the aim of imposing some sort of tutelary dictatorship over the Muggle world—and she hinted that his obsession with academic success at Hogwarts led to the death of his sister. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Dumbledore’s brother Aberforth makes similar comments to Harry, suggesting that Albus’s ambitious plans tended to get other people killed, and advising Harry to abandon the task he had been left and save himself: “Albus wanted a lot of things, and people had a habit of getting hurt while he was carrying out his grand plans … Secrets and lies, that’s how we grew up.” Like Bohemianspirit’s arguments, these criticisms rest on the assumption that the most important things in life are personal relationships and being close to one’s friends; that individuals should never be sacrificed to long-term goals; and, in short, that E.M. Forster was correct to say that if it came to a choice between betraying his friends and his country, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country.

Because this outlook seems fairly typical of the young adult worldview throughout the West, it may be worth analysing its implications in more detail and considering its relation to the plot of the Harry Potter series, and the political-moral lessons that may be extracted from it.

Bohemianspirit’s essay is an intelligent and lively analysis, with a refreshingly different perspective on the Snape–Dumbledore relationship, and one applauds the author’s willingness to challenge the conventional view of Dumbledore’s saintliness. At the same time, however, it was obviously written by somebody who has never been in a position of power and faced with responsibility for making hard choices. Bohemianspirit and many approving commentators seem to be young people from secure backgrounds who believe that the vital things in life are interpersonal relations, treating people with consideration, respect and (where appropriate) love; and who regard those who conceal their plans—or even make plans—as manipulative, dishonest and unfeeling. Young people who feel this way fail to appreciate that the comforts and security that they take for granted have been won at a cost, through the agonising decisions and the sacrifices of others in the past; they have never been faced with a problem in which all the solutions contained a bitter pill of some kind. How would they defeat a force as evil and ruthless as the Death Eaters—enemies who do not share any of these values, and whose program is to create a world in which they have no place?

People in positions of responsibility—political leaders, military commanders, even dissidents and revolutionaries who want to do more than just issue propaganda—must often make hard choices because political and military objectives cannot be achieved without the willingness to sacrifice allies, friends and comrades when necessary and to accept these losses as part of the price of victory. Before condemning Dumbledore as a Machiavellian schemer who loved nobody, we should consider the problem that he faced: how to defeat the Death Eaters and kill their leader Voldemort, a man who had apparently discovered the secret of immortality, and who was determined to create a world of oppression and misery of which he would be the permanent overlord.

Given the incompetence of the Ministry of Magic, Dumbledore was in practice the leader and mastermind of the resistance to Voldemort, and the only one who knew the secret of his invulnerability—a secret he could not share for fear that Voldemort would learn of the discovery and take preventive action. Part of his knowledge was that one of the horcruxes was within a key figure on his own side, who would have to die before there could be any possibility of getting rid of Voldemort for good. In this position of awful responsibility, what should Dumbledore have done? Would it have been better for him to be nice to Snape and not use Harry in that cynical and deceptive way, but allow Voldemort to win?

Harry himself does not doubt that his sacrifice is necessary to achieve victory, and goes stoically to the fateful encounter in the Enchanted Forest, hoping that his death will at least save his friends from further injury, and possibly defeat the Death Eaters once and for all. We have already had a strong hint of this proposition—that sacrifice is necessary for victory—in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, when Ron, as a knight, sacrifices himself at the end of the chess game so that Harry can cross the board in pursuit of (as it turns out) Quirrell. The idea of self-sacrifice in a worthwhile cause pervades the Harry Potter series and is the key to the politico-moral lessons that the author clearly wishes to impart. 

One of Bohemianspirit’s less plausible suggestions is that Dumbledore contrived the confrontation in the Department of Mysteries and was pleased by Sirius’s death. On the contrary, he was deeply distressed by both disasters, though there is some truth in Bohemianspirit’s argument, in that he blamed himself for what happened—not, however, because he had sought such outcomes, but because they were the unwitting consequences of his excessive love for Harry. The operative factor here is not that Dumbledore was merely using Harry for his own ends, but that he had so much affection for him that he could not bring himself to explain his terrible destiny, as revealed by Trelawny’s prophecy. In this failure, Dumbledore shows himself as quite the opposite of Bohemianspirit’s cynical puppeteer, manipulating others “for the greater good”, and appears instead as a kindly, ineffective old man, willing to sacrifice the whole world just to spare Harry the frightening knowledge that he must be either hunter or prey: 

I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act … What did I care if numbers of nameless and faceless people and creatures were slaughtered in the vague future, if in the here and now you were alive and well and happy? 

Dumbledore realises that he should have told Harry about the prophecy long before, and that had he done so the boy would not have been fooled by the visions sent to him by Voldemort and would not have hastened to the Department of Mysteries to rescue Sirius. If Harry was still too young after killing the basilisk, he was certainly old enough after winning the Triwizard Tournament and escaping from Voldemort in the graveyard. In defence of his failure Dumbledore offers this telling excuse: “I have watched you struggling under more burdens than any student who has ever passed through this school, and I could not bring myself to add another—the greatest one of all” (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix).

In other words, the fiasco at the Ministry is the result of Dumbledore’s having acted in the warm, human, feel-good way in which Bohemianspirit thinks he should have acted all the time, particularly in his relations with Harry and Snape, showing more concern for the happiness of his immediate associates than for the success of his plan to defeat Voldemort and the long-term welfare of society. It was precisely those feelings of being nice to individuals that Bohemianspirit and subsequent commentators regard as paramount values that led to the disaster, and which would prove deadly and counter-productive in situations where one is faced with enemies as ruthless and implacable as the Death Eaters.

It is true that when Dumbledore tells Harry about the prophecy at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and gives him the terrible knowledge that “neither can live while the other survives” he does not reveal the most appalling secret of all: that Harry himself is a horcrux and must also die. Who can blame him for this omission? The knowledge that he must be the one to finish off Voldemort is daunting enough; to add that Harry must also die would probably be sufficient—or so Dumbledore judged—to cause him to lose heart. But there is a further secret that Dumbledore withholds: that Harry most likely would not die when killed by Voldemort. This is the point of the moment at the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, when Harry is reporting the details of Voldemort’s resurrection and mentions the use of his own blood. The gleam of triumph in Dumbledore’s eye is not, as Bohemianspirit suggests, further evidence of his cynical duplicity, but relief that Harry will now have extra magical protection when Voldemort tries to kill him. Perhaps Dumbledore should have explained all this, but would Harry have believed him? He might well have thought that the promise of immunity was merely a comforting lie designed to persuade him to persevere. From the reader’s point of view, it adds to the tension and drama of the story that this knowledge is concealed until the very end.

And what of Severus Snape? He more than anybody else in the story knows the importance of sacrificing immediate gratification in the interests of long-term goals. So far as his change of heart is explained, Snape transferred his allegiance from the Death Eaters to Dumbledore when Voldemort killed Lily. Like Harry, he now wants justice (or revenge), and in pursuit of this goal agrees to help Dumbledore protect Lily’s son, even though he has no reason to love him, and in fact good reason to hate him—not merely because he is also the son of his schooldays nemesis James, but because Harry is the main reason Lily was killed. Voldemort went after the Potters because he had heard (part of) the prophecy, and even when he had entered their house and dealt with James, he killed Lily only because she would not stand aside and let him at her baby.

Despite hating Harry for reminding him of his arrogant father and as the cause of Lily’s death, and despite his unremitting sarcasm and unfairness towards him, Snape does work to protect him from harm and to arm him against Voldemort. He gets very little out of what must be a situation of bitter anguish—no friends or domestic comforts, hated by the very person he is secretly helping—but he sticks to the job he took on and does not shrink from accepting the most dreadful duties of all. Even when Voldemort has rewarded his usefulness by setting Nagini onto him, Snape uses his dying moments to extract the memories that Harry will need to complete his tasks. As a consequence, Harry eventually comes to recognise Snape’s remarkable qualities, describing him at the end as “the bravest man I ever knew” and naming his younger son Severus.

It may well be, however, that Dumbledore envisaged a reconciliation between Snape and Harry, for we must appreciate that his plan was thrown into confusion by the unexpected arrival of the Death Eaters following his return from the cave. We do not learn the details of Dumbledore’s strategy (he did not reveal them in full to anybody), but he knew that Draco was trying to kill him, and we may reasonably surmise that he was pretty confident that he could defend himself satisfactorily against such an amateur and persuade the boy to change sides and be hidden away with his mother where the Death Eaters could not find them. Dumbledore would then have had more time to train Harry for the tasks ahead of him, such as showing him how to destroy a horcrux with the sword of Gryffindor, which (as we learn later) he intended Harry to keep. In this scenario, Snape would probably have killed Dumbledore quietly and secretly, thus leaving him capable, at some appropriate later moment, of acquainting Harry with the terrible truth of his final task.

Thanks to Draco’s unexpected success with the vanishing cabinet all such plans were thwarted by the arrival of the Death Eaters at Hogwarts, forcing Snape to act prematurely and publicly, and branding him in Harry’s eyes as the very worst kind of spy and traitor. Up on the tower Snape was under pressure from two directions: not merely from his promise to Dumbledore, but even more critically as a result of the Unbreakable Vow made to Narcissa: that if Draco failed at the appointed task, he would do it himself. With Draco having indeed failed and the Death Eaters watching, Snape had no choice: he must either kill Dumbledore or be struck dead himself through the magic of the Vow. Even if, by some counter-spell, he was able to protect himself against this threat, failure to complete Draco’s task would expose him to the Death Eaters as an agent for the other side. The look of hatred on his face is not, as Harry interprets it, an expression of hatred for Dumbledore, but of recognition of this dilemma and his abhorrence for the deed he is about to commit. As before and as later, however, he does not flinch from his duty. This outcome complicates matters and disrupts Dumbledore’s plan because Snape now appears unequivocally as Voldemort’s agent, thus making it far more difficult for him to assist Harry. 

As it turned out, Voldemort became the engine of his own destruction, and not merely because his failure to understand wandlore meant that he went to great trouble to obtain the very wand that owed its allegiance to Harry. The clock really began ticking for Voldemort the moment he killed James and Lily, thereby creating an implacable enemy in the person of their son, who would never rest until he had either avenged their deaths or perished in the attempt. Dumbledore uses this example to make the general point that tyrants always generate opposition to their rule and by their very oppression create the agents of their own ruin: 

Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realise that, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises up against them and strikes back.

[Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince] 

In recent times we have seen the truth of this observation in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. But as the dissidents in those places appreciated, tyrants do not fall of their own accord: to oppose them takes courage, and acceptance of risk, as Harry also understands: 

Sometimes you’ve got to think about more than your own safety! Sometimes you’ve got to think about the greater good. This is war! … Your brother knew how to finish off You-Know-Who and he passed the knowledge on to me. I’m going to keep going until I succeed—or I die. Don’t think I don’t know how this might end. I’ve known it for years.

[Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows] 

In fact, Harry has been willing from the very start to die in the battle against Voldemort: explaining to Ron and Hermione why he must try to save the Philosopher’s Stone, even if he is expelled from Hogwarts, he says: 

If Snape gets hold of the Stone Voldemort’s coming back! Haven’t you heard what it was like when he was trying to take over? … Losing points doesn’t matter any more … If I get caught before I can get to the Stone, well, I’ll have to go back to the Dursleys and wait for Voldemort to find me there. It’s only dying a bit later than I would have done, because I’m never going over to the Dark Side … Voldemort killed my parents, remember.

[Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone] 

It thus comes as no surprise that Harry accepts his final task—to die at Voldemort’s hands—without the slightest hesitation. 

Wars are terrible events, but even worse may be to bow to coercion and accept the imposition of tyranny. Harry could have taken Aberforth’s advice to flee, but no matter where he tried to hide Voldemort would have sought him and would eventually have found him. Far better to face him, as he had done in the graveyard, when there seemed no chance that he would survive. But although Harry becomes the saviour of the wizarding and Muggle worlds, it is obvious that he could not have fulfilled this role unless he had been guided, advised, trained, manipulated, used, deceived and left in the dark by his leader.

Dumbledore’s training methods may be unorthodox and full of risk, but it cannot be denied that they are effective. When Ron wonders whether he intended Harry to go after the Philosopher’s Stone, and Hermione is shocked that such a plan might have got him killed, Harry replies: 

I think he sort of wanted to give me a chance … I reckon he had a pretty good idea we were going to try, and instead of stopping us he just taught us enough to help. I don’t think it was an accident he let me find out how the mirror worked. It’s almost like he thought I had the right to face Voldemort if I could.

[Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone] 

Dumbledore’s educational method was to let students learn by doing and find out for themselves. There were times during the search for the horcruxes when Harry cursed Dumbledore for leaving him with such an impossible task and so few directions, but after Wormtail’s self-destruction he comes to realise that he had both foresight and insight (for example, giving Ron the deluminator), and really did have a plan.

So it must often seem to the pawns in games of high strategy, such as the people of Coventry, whom Churchill allowed to suffer a severe air raid during the Battle of Britain, rather than reveal to the Germans that his side had cracked their communications code, thanks to Alan Turing and the Enigma machine. Rita Skeeter wrote about the lies of Albus Dumbledore, but in assessing them we might recall Churchill’s remark that in wartime the truth was so important that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Dumbledore remarks, “The truth … is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution”, and does not answer Harry’s question about why Voldemort wanted to kill him. It is with this thought that we might view Dumbledore’s refusal to tell anybody but Harry about the horcruxes, and his instruction to Snape to tell Harry about his final duty only after all the other horcruxes (bar the snake) had been destroyed.

The moral of Dumbledore’s strategy against Voldemort is that if you are fighting a ruthless, fanatical and unscrupulous enemy—whether the Death Eaters, the Nazis, communist totalitarians, the Taliban or Al Qaeda—you must be willing to make sacrifices and accept losses. A commander who is not prepared to do this is no more deserving of his position than a soldier who cannot accept that he may die on the battlefield. The immense popularity of the Harry Potter series is testimony to the enduring—if surprising—appeal of Rowling’s conservative Western values: family, democracy, a Christian ideal of self-sacrifice to redeem others, and Dumbledore as the Churchill of the wizarding world. 

Robert Darby lives in Canberra.