Our trip to Israel was cancelled due to the outbreak of conflict. Good friends and my loving parents, worked in an unintended harmony to provide Rachel and I some time away last week —though no replacement for Israel, it was an incredibly life-giving three days of rest.
During our time we watched through some of the Harry Potter films, and my wife got to see, for the first time, one of the most evil villains in film and literature: Dolores Umbridge.
Dolores embodies, among other moral transgressions, the false notion of orderliness and progress which is a characteristic trait of secular modernity. She wears pristine Pepto-Bismol pinks, teaches-to-the-test, fills hallways with rules and regulations, standardizes all of life, and keeps walls of cats entombed in tea-cup saucers (for who would ever want the mess of an incarnate pet?). Her world, the world as she would have it, is sanitized from the mess of shared life. Each thing and each person is cordoned-off one another. There is no comingling of life: the magical and the un-magical do not meet, the feminine and masculine do not meet, and ideals never reconcile with reality.
She inhabits a malaise of exalted instrumental reason — “the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most economical application of means to a given end” as Charles Taylor defines it (5).
G.K. Chesterton says somewhere that those who refuse to be governed by the Ten Commandments will of necessity be governed by the ten thousand commandments. In other words those who refuse to live by the Commands “do not steal” and “keep the sabbath” will instead by regulated by the infernal complexes of the IRS tax-code.
This is Umbridge’s governing method. But it is a broken method. For it is uncapable of coping with new and developing situations. New rules are always being made, and those new rules necessarily conflict and counterdict the previous rules. Thus, Umbridge’s world is always being excepted; all of her “this cannot happens” are always supplemented by an endless string of “except whens”. This is what Giorgio Agamben calls the “state of exception” —and you should be familiar with it for it is how much of our country is governed today, e.g. “this can never happen, except in these cases where emergency powers are dispensed, but only for a short time, except where they are indefinitely extended.”
Unlike Dumbeldore’s virtuous system of significance, love, and good law, which can accomodate and adapt to several kinds of situation, Umbridge’s system cannot respond to real life as it happens. It grows ever more brittle and constricting until, sapped of all life, it destroys itself; it takes exception to its own ordering of things. Umbridge, in an attempt to root-out all sedition and perceived violences, commits violence and uses one of the three forbidden spells —just as King Saul consulted with the medium at Endor. Taylor wisely notes the way in which “once the creatures that surround us lose the significance that accrued to their place in the chain of being, they are open to being treated as raw materials or instruments for our projects” (5).
In an age that grows ever more Umbridge-like, ever more governed by rules of endless regulations that have little or no ethical value, where a real formation in virtue is supplanted by a paltry mere following of rules, we must be as wise as wizards. There are those, equally as evil as Dolores Umbridge, who would have us believe that “laws” themselves are the problem. That too is wrong. Law as such is not wrong. It is the replacing of good law with infinitely enumerating lists of empty rules which we must forsake. It is the reduction of life to a mere following of rules that is wrong.
This is big work. Where do we begin? It would be nice if God gave us a small list, a starting point, a simple “Ten Rules” to follow… the good news is that He did. And those can be summarized into two commandments on which all the Law and the Prophets hang.