I Did an Autopsy on Harry Potter and He’s a Woman

I just read two very-related articles on sites of disparate focus that will not be linked in this post. One post was concerning the Google science fair and how the top three entrants were girls, a story that ends up undermining, if we’re being honest with ourselves, against both boys and girls. The other article made a passing mention of public education and its scientism fetish — a fixation on science magnified but hidden in plain sight, an exercise in scientific imperialism to the detriment of other, equally legitimate methods documented by epistemology.

Except for the connecting strand of being related by the mention of science, the two posts are related in yet another way. Because of academia’s longwinded worship session with science, it has overstepped the boundaries set by its methodology, like using a plank to kill an elephant by slapping its backside raw. Science left by itself will attempt to reduce everything to predictability, which is good if you’re building a car or smashing atoms but a little strange evil if you’re talking about human choice (economics). Humans tend to order their own circles of chaos by themselves, and usually very effectively, thank you very much; we are excellent microplanners, deploying our feelers to scan the surrounding detritus and reassemble disorder to meet our goals. It’s how we get girls’ nights out or the perfect lasagna made without an fidgety admin peering over our shoulders. Science in the hands of the state will get, among other nasty things, hyper-egalitarianism — whereby, relative to this particular application of the Google science fair, “we” need to get girls more interested in science because there’s too many boys for someone’s liking, and the preferences of girls’ to simply not be interested in science be damned. And because of the edict of a few bureaucrats, who have the privilege audacity to morph their preferences into law, “we” need to enjoy equality in all aspects of everything, and “we” need “them” to plan it for us.

Turn now then, to Rowling’s mediocre-to-decent writing with Harry Potter, and her followers now on the brink of suicide now that the greater canon of Potter’s universe is closed. Potter and his sparkly, fairy-vampire counterparts in Twilight unwittingly created the Young Adult publishing subindustry (signified by the regrettable monosyllabic acronym of “YA”, heretofore referred to as “YAH!”), which hustles a mind-boggling amount of money through the pipes. My RSS reader can’t go one Gosh-fudging-blessed day without yelling at my eyes with tips and tricks for writing to the YAH! audience from the countless blogs for YAH! writer-hopefuls. The emergence of this new industry is really an economic issue, which is, at its heart a study of human preferences, which I believe are ultimately unpredictable, uncontrollable, unscientific.

Think of how this industry came about. Don’t worry if you fail to come up with something, because this is the phenomenon that can’t be explained; there’s no accounting for taste. People simply ended up preferring Harry Potter more than other books and more than other things. Nothing was centrally planned to coerce it into existence: no do-gooder politicians, no new government programs, no patronizing public service announcements, no finger-wagging lobbying group, no corporation throwing money at lawyers and state capital buildings.

No one could have predicted with certainty the YAH! explosion, not even those editors, marketers, and publishers that got a little lucky by putting their resources and reputation on the line and taking chance with an author’s product. The explanation for the YAH! industry’s existence is really that there’s no explanation. It is as we see it, prima facie — so I was wrong, despite my conclusive data: Harry Potter may be dead but he’s really still a dude, just as he appears.