The wizarding world in 2097
I was wondering what JKR’s world would look like, 100 years after the second victory over Voldemort. Because it's been an angsty couple of weeks, I made a lot of depressing assumptions and wrote this drabble. I think there are a lot of unanswered questions about the future of their world, a subset of which I decided to wrestle with rather than work this morning:
Population - Ordinary population growth and immigration are expected to add 15% to the population of the UK over the next generation. For those playing at home, that’s roughly 10 million new Muggles, larger than the current population of greater London. Even assuming no further wizarding wars to prune the crop, we’d expect to see maybe a net gain of 4000 wizards during this time. (This assumes equivalent rates of growth and immigration, using baseline figures from my earlier poll.) What are the impacts of this on a society that tries to hide somewhat in plain sight?
Security - How does St. Mungo’s or the Ministry continue to operate when CCTV is installed at the end of the block? What happens if they ever get the facial recognition stuff to work? Or if behavioral pattern analysis ever replaces the creepy guy in the booth who’s currently following youth of color and fit young women with the camera?
Databases & Patterns - So what happens when the schools or the NHS starts knocking on the doors of the Muggle-born, wanting to know why they haven’t seen your child since they turned eleven? What do you saw when they ask for documentation from the independent school little Chloe is supposedly attending. Digging through the desk, you find a parchment note from the DADA Prof du jour recommending you chuck wiffle balls at your child’s head to develop situational awareness. Is that sufficient? What happens when some bright lad at National Statistics spots the odd pattern of eleven year old dropouts?
Nationalism - Having traveled and studied in the former Yugoslavia, I’m perhaps overly sensitive to the potential for movements like the Scottish National Party or Wales’ Plaid Cymru to go pear shaped in time of economic or political crisis. National militaries are torn asunder, populations shift, and quaint market towns in the hills are reduced to shells of buildings grown through with trees, pastures and orchards given over to landmines and UXO, still marked a decade later with the graffiti left by ethnic militias as they cleared shops and homes. What will Muggle deterring charms mean to a second lieutenant in a tank, with a compass bearing and GPS? (Of course the odds of this are remarkably low. But we should remember that for every Czech republic there are probably a dozen proto-states who’ve chosen to take up the gun in their quest for national independence.)
Differential Lifespans - I think the biggest problem facing the JKR’s magical world is the conservatism inherent in an isolationist society composed of the radically long lived. A fair portion of today's Wizengamot will remember, as adults, the introduction of the horseless carriage. As many as half may have been of age when the DC3 ushered in the era of air travel. How can such a body assess the potential threat of satellites or CCTV? What will they do when they need to rapidly supplement the obliviator, the standard response to Muggle threats, with the wizarding equivalent of electrical engineers and programmers? Remember, this is a society that by and large hasn’t figured out how to dress unobtrusively.
I guess I'm not really expecting answers to these questions. But given that these issues are just the tip of the iceberg, the happy ever after of the epilogue doesn't make much sense to me. (Never mind its galling heteronormativity.)
Population - Ordinary population growth and immigration are expected to add 15% to the population of the UK over the next generation. For those playing at home, that’s roughly 10 million new Muggles, larger than the current population of greater London. Even assuming no further wizarding wars to prune the crop, we’d expect to see maybe a net gain of 4000 wizards during this time. (This assumes equivalent rates of growth and immigration, using baseline figures from my earlier poll.) What are the impacts of this on a society that tries to hide somewhat in plain sight?
Security - How does St. Mungo’s or the Ministry continue to operate when CCTV is installed at the end of the block? What happens if they ever get the facial recognition stuff to work? Or if behavioral pattern analysis ever replaces the creepy guy in the booth who’s currently following youth of color and fit young women with the camera?
Databases & Patterns - So what happens when the schools or the NHS starts knocking on the doors of the Muggle-born, wanting to know why they haven’t seen your child since they turned eleven? What do you saw when they ask for documentation from the independent school little Chloe is supposedly attending. Digging through the desk, you find a parchment note from the DADA Prof du jour recommending you chuck wiffle balls at your child’s head to develop situational awareness. Is that sufficient? What happens when some bright lad at National Statistics spots the odd pattern of eleven year old dropouts?
Nationalism - Having traveled and studied in the former Yugoslavia, I’m perhaps overly sensitive to the potential for movements like the Scottish National Party or Wales’ Plaid Cymru to go pear shaped in time of economic or political crisis. National militaries are torn asunder, populations shift, and quaint market towns in the hills are reduced to shells of buildings grown through with trees, pastures and orchards given over to landmines and UXO, still marked a decade later with the graffiti left by ethnic militias as they cleared shops and homes. What will Muggle deterring charms mean to a second lieutenant in a tank, with a compass bearing and GPS? (Of course the odds of this are remarkably low. But we should remember that for every Czech republic there are probably a dozen proto-states who’ve chosen to take up the gun in their quest for national independence.)
Differential Lifespans - I think the biggest problem facing the JKR’s magical world is the conservatism inherent in an isolationist society composed of the radically long lived. A fair portion of today's Wizengamot will remember, as adults, the introduction of the horseless carriage. As many as half may have been of age when the DC3 ushered in the era of air travel. How can such a body assess the potential threat of satellites or CCTV? What will they do when they need to rapidly supplement the obliviator, the standard response to Muggle threats, with the wizarding equivalent of electrical engineers and programmers? Remember, this is a society that by and large hasn’t figured out how to dress unobtrusively.
I guess I'm not really expecting answers to these questions. But given that these issues are just the tip of the iceberg, the happy ever after of the epilogue doesn't make much sense to me. (Never mind its galling heteronormativity.)