The Real Magic of Harry Potter

NOTE: Many of the points made here were made by me in April, 2006.

With today's delivery of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final installment of J.K. Rowling's  epochal story of growing up, the time has come to reveal the true magic of Harry Potter.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Were the Drafting Committee of the Second Continental Congress to pause from their labors of writing a Declaration and appear on your doorstep tomorrow, there is no doubt they would find you, and me, all of us to be mighty wizards indeed.

Everything we take for granted -- television, recordings, telephones, air conditioning, planes, trains and automobiles, this medium you're using -- was unimaginable in 1776. And not just the obvious.

• Most carrots were not orange in 1776.
• Portland cement was invented in 1824.
• Flush toilers did not come into common use until the late 19th century.
• The first American oil well was drilled in the 1820s.
• The germ theory of disease had not been thought of in the 18th century.

The very idea of doctors needing cleanliness was unimaginable. This would nearly kill Adams himself during the great Philadelphia Flu epidemic of 1793.

Yet these were wise men, among the wisest of their time. I'm certain Benjamin Franklin would quickly get used to us. He would devour our science and try to take apart everything. Thomas Jefferson would marvel at our kitchens, baths, showers, and how all of these were available even to the poorest among us. John Adams' nose would twitch, he'd cough and splutter, at all the dirt in the air, the strange foul smells assaulting him at every turn. I suppose Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston would just stare -- the Connecticut of Sherman's time was the colonies' breadbasket, and the New York Stock Exchange in Livingston's New York wasn't founded until 1792.

What wizards we would be to them. And that's the point of Rowling's saga.

Hogwarts is a stand-in for Eton, one of the great English institutions where the best and brightest young children are transformed, over the course of 7 hard years, into young men and women ready to step in and lead this highly complex, technological, scientific, magic society. The lessons of Eton -- history, literature, science, mathematics -- combine with the greater magic of growing-up to affect this great change.

And it does not just happen there. It happens in hundreds of thousands of places around the world. We have a name for it -- education. The miraculous process of becoming an adult, which for a century we have disdainfully called adolescence, is in fact an amazing, magical journey for everyone who partakes in it. It is both an opportunity and an obligation to learn, to find the magic which best suits you and to master it.

You might find your magic in English, in music, in chemistry, in mathematics, in biology, in engineering, in the majesty of the law or the mysteries of medicine. You might find it in computer programming. You might, if you're fortunate, find it in teaching.

You go into a room, you stay there a very long time, and if you work hard you come out with knowledge, with special wisdom those around you do not possess. What else can that be but magic?

This is real wizardry, the ability to create new miracles in nanotechnology, in biological sciences, or in any number of disciplines that have not yet been imagined. Nanotech, for instance, did not exist when I went to school. I was also taught that dinosaurs were extinct and most closely related to reptiles. I had no PCs, no CDs, when I was coming up. All these inventions, and so many more, were imagined, then created, by great wizards and engineers after I came out of high school.

So I ask each child who may stumble upon this meager offering, what magic will you create? I ask their parents, what magic will you let them learn?

To those fools who think Harry Potter encourages people to become wizards and witches, I say that without them we could never have civilization. Without the magic of learning, and teaching, we are animals. Reject the magic all around you and you reject your own humanity.

You, there. Yes, you. Your hair, your make-up, that shirt you're wearing, that microphone you're talking into, the camera you're speaking to, the road you drove in on, if your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother came from 1776 and took one look at you, she would call you a witch. And she would be right.

You don't really want to give up your magic. You just want to pretend that's all it is. I guess that's what being a Muggle is all about.