Meta: The Slug Club - Social Mobility in a Medieval World
The Slug Club - Social Mobility in a Medieval World
The Slug Club has been controversial amongst fans due to its inherent elitist nature. Whist many people have decried that such a society shouldn’t exist in the school because it’s “not fair”.
Other essay writers like Redhen proposed that there has always been some kind of “Slug Club” and Slughorn is just the last in a long line of connection brokers in a world that is reliant on connections and patronage
I have a different theory regarding the Slug Club. I explain:
- Why Slughorn is a brave innovator who introduced a brand new concept to the wizarding world: social mobility for muggle-borns
- How the Slug Club works to better wizarding society
- Why Slughorn set up the Club in the first place - most likely in response to the Dark Lord that preceded Voldemort.
- Why, despite Slughorn’s best intentions, his actions contributed directly to the rise of Lord Voldemort - in more ways than one.
An Ancient Society Built on Patronage
The Harry Potter’s world may look familiar because the books are primarily set in a school, but the wizarding world is not modern Britain with magic, it is a completely different society that has developed on its own independent trajectory for nearly 400 years. The organisation of the wizarding world bears very little resemblance to a modern developed country. In fact it more closely resembles a pre-industrial Britain of the 17th century both in demographics and in prevailing societal attitudes. (See – An Endangered Species Essay)
The Slug Club is inherently not fair, because the Wizarding World is not fair. In fact the wizarding world does not have the concept of “fairness” as understood by anyone living in a modern developed country. Discrimination is openly accepted on all levels and is considered a natural part of life. Never have the words “equal opportunities” or “social mobility” ever been utter by any wizards/witches because these concepts simply do not exist on a cultural/societal level. On an individual level students at Hogwarts are taught about interpersonal virtues of respect, honour and fairness but there is no concerted effort to make the entire society fair for everyone.
In modern Britain politicians promote the virtues of a meritocracy above all else and discrimination is seen as something that should be stamped out. In the job market, employers bend over backwards to look like they give the same opportunities for all. Judges, politicians, and other figures of authority have to publically announce their conflicts of interests (basically anything that affects their neutrality in decision making). Of course nepotism, corruption and prejudice are still endemic to modern British society and growing in strength under the current government but the prevailing social attitude is that these things are definitely wrong. Never do we see such modern British values being spoken of in the wider Wizarding World. In the Wizarding World one’s connections account for far more than one’s abilities and this is widely accepted as perfectly decent and normal.
The idea that some family lineages are superior to others is another relic of our collective medieval past that the Wizarding World still endorses to this day. Up until the 20th century, muggle society believed that aristocrats were inherently superior by virtue of better breeding to the working classes. In modern Britain, outwardly at least, we all believe that everyone regardless of their birth has the same potential and deserves the same opportunities to succeed. However this equal opportunities concept to be absent in the Wizarding World as whole.
The Merits of Meritocracy
What the Slug Club aims to do is to allow talented, clever outsiders to infiltrate the closed hierarchical society that they have inadvertently stepped into. Most of the outsiders Slughorn promoted were muggle-born but others like Ginny Weasley come from families that aren’t powerful and wealthy. Although Hermione never admits this, it is abundantly clear that a muggle born with no connections inside of the Wizarding World is at a great disadvantage compared to children like Draco Malfoy.
What Horace Slughorn does is help talented outsiders build a set of invaluable connections during their school days so that when they enter the adult world, they have a better chance of fulfilling their full potential and are not held back by virtue of their birth.
He is levelling the playing field for children like Hermione and Ginny.
Of course, Slughorn benefits from his arrangements – he is still a Slytherin, but when you see what he gets in return for the priceless services he renders, Slughorn does not come across as a greedy man. He boasts mostly of getting hampers of sweets, free tickets to Quidditch matches and nice letters from his former pupils. If he really was as grasping and exploitative as fans like to portray, he would basically be ruling the Wizarding World. He certainly has the right connections for it.
Outsiders, are not the only people that Slughorn serves. The Slug Club serves the wizarding society as whole. A social order based on nepotism is always vulnerable purely because it fails to utilize its human resources correctly. By promoting the careers of talented outsiders, Slughorn ensues that there is healthy competition for important positions of power. The people who are most able to do the jobs are not held back in junior positions by their lack of connections, but are instead able to advance sufficiently to compete for these positions of power.
The most common accusation leveled at Slughorn is that he also invited children to the Slug Club based solely on their family name, thus he is as guilty of nepotism. There is a good reason why Slughorn invites children of famous families to his dinner parties – they are the people who actually make the Slug Club work. He is in fact asking them to share their networks, connections and privileges with his talented outsiders – so that they can all profit. The outsiders are indebted to both Slughorn and their influential friends and when they do reach positions of power are then usually obliged to further the common goals that they have. By inviting the children of old and influential houses, Slughorn also aims to educate them about the merits of meritocracy and how they can use it to their advantages.
Cause and Effect
So why did Slughorn bother setting up his social mobility movement?
Although Slughorn sometimes comes across as a name-dropping buffoon, underneath the silk waistcoats and comfy slippers, he is still a cunning Slytherin. We have seen many example of Slytherins, and whilst they all have a reputation for being ambitious and cunning, they are not by all means selfish in their pursuits of power. Severus Snape for example suffered and sacrificed himself to rid the world of Lord Voldemort.
Might Slughorn have a more altruistic reason to improve the life chances of talented outsiders and the wizarding world as whole.
If we go back to the 19th century, there was a muggle population boom during the late Victorian era. This meant that consequently more muggleborns were produced and started to enter Hogwarts. Previous generations of muggleborns had been few in number probably been easily absorbed into the wizarding population. They probably never made it to the top positions but served well in junior positions at the ministry or as artisans.
However during the 19th and 20th century the number of muggleborns in the wizarding world went from single digits to double digits to triple digits. JK Rowling tells us that muggleborn make up 25% of the wizarding population during Harry Potter’s time. If, as Rowling has said in her previous interviews, there are around 3000 wizards in Britain, this translates as 750 muggleborns at any one time.
This is a very large number of people who essentially live in the wizarding world but who under the old system of familial patronage are excluded from the top echelons of society. It probably didn’t sit well with some of them, and some of them were very powerful and very clever people. Even a small fraction of 750 people, given sufficient motivation, is capable of overthrowing the ministry as Voldemort has clearly demonstrated.
I believe that around the time both Albus Dumbledore and Horace Slughorn started teaching at Hogwarts, the issues of “what to do with all these muggle-borns” turned from an annoying side problem to a massive social issue. Whilst we have no evidence that muggle-borns became violent in their struggle to end the discrimination against them, it is interesting to note that Voldemort was merely the “most feared Dark Lord in a century”.
This means in the 19th century there was another Dark Lord even more terrifying than Voldemort (and this is not Gellert Grindleward, who was defeated in 1945. He is definitely a 20th century Dark Lord even if he predates Voldemort). Just because the only two “Dark Lords” we know both espouse pureblood supremecy notions, doesn’t mean this was always been the case. A “Dark Lord” is merely a terrorist leader using Dark Magic (or non-ministry approved magic) in an attempt to exert power over the wizarding world. There is no set criteria for their actual agenda. There could well have been Dark Lords champion the plight of muggle-borns in a society that held them all under a thick glass ceiling. A violent “uprising” might have forced both the ministry and the teaching staff at Hogwarts to act. It is possible that the resulting retaliation from the pureblood elites was to hold muggle-borns down even harder.
Whether or not such a violent “uprising” of muggle-borns occurred, Slughorn may have taken it upon himself to set up the Slug Club because he saw the endless wasted potential of the muggle-born students that he taught and realised the dangers of their pent up frustrations at the old system.
His plan was both ingenious and far reaching. He would start from the very beginning to re-educate children of the pureblood elites, and provide the muggle-born outsiders with the connections they would need to succeed in a rigged system.
The Dark Side of Social Engineering
However for every action there is a reaction, and for every talented muggle born outside Slughorn helped into a position of power, somebody else must have lost out. Here we can see the dark side of Slughorn’s ambitious social engineering project.
The people who lose out the most in all this are the children from minor pureblood families who consider themselves the elite of society but have no power or wealth. In essence purebloods, who only have their family connections and their pedigree to survive off. Families more like the Gaunts than the Blacks. Their less talented children used to be able to get on fairly well merely by being lifted up by their more influential relatives. After Slughorn came into the picture, these purebloods were edge out as their more influential relatives chose to promote more talented outsiders instead.
These disenfranchised purebloods, who once benefited most from the old system of family patronage, became gradually more disillusioned. They might not have been pureblood supremacists to begin with but after decades of the Slug Club’s effects, it is understandable that they started hating the muggle-born competition. It is no coincidence that towards the end of Slughorn’s tenure at Hogwarts, Lord Voldemort’s pureblood supremacy rhetoric found so many adherents and supporters. The disenfranchised purebloods thought they had found a leader who was willing to put things back to the way they were.
The core of the Voldemort’s movement are the families like the Lestranges who he met in the Slug Club during his school days that never embraced Slughorn’s idea of meritocracy. However it is likely that the numerical majority of followers hail from minor pureblood families that have lost out since Slughorn came onto the scene about 100 years ago. The families like the Crabbes, Goyles, Notts etc. The purebloods with real wealth and influence like the Blacks, turned their noses up at Voldemort. Sirius’s father spent most of his time and money during Voldemort’s first rise protecting his house, rather than out fighting alongside the death eaters. Regulus joined Voldemort as a school boy, drunk on his own sense of adolescent rebellion and then realised just why his family hadn’t thrown their support behind the Dark Lord.
As to why the Malfoys joined Voldemort, I have written another essay altogether. To be succinct, I do not believe that the Malfoys have always been as rich or as influential as Lucius likes to pretend. The Malfoys may feel that talented muggleborns are being given positions that they are entitled to.
Voldemort’s anti-muggleborn rhetoric is a direct reaction to Slughorn’s active promotion of outsiders at a cost to the pureblood elites. Even though Voldemort himself benefited from the Slug Club, he has no compulsions about exploiting the deep well of resentment against talented outsiders.
Thus in attempting to make a more meritocratic society, Slughorn inadvertently help Voldemort’s rise to power.
