Snape and Machiavelli

I remember Dumbledore’s comment about how indifference can often have worse effects than hatred (referring to Sirius’s relationship with Kreacher). Tom Riddle’s life at the orphanage wasn’t as bad as Harry’s at the Dursley’s except he was clearly neglected more than he was abused.

Maybe there is a very basic reason that Voldemort gave Lily the chance to “step aside”. As much as I like the idea that it had something to do with Snape and Lily, I have difficulty believing Voldemort would do a favor for anybody, even a loyal death eater, that reguarded saving the life of a “mudblood”.

Maybe Voldemort wanted to see her abandon Harry as he was abandoned by his mother. He wanted to feel the satisfaction of knowing that “love” really isn’t that strong and that when given the choice any mother would abandon her child to save her own life. He didn’t want to believe that it was only his mother who didn’t love her child. He wanted all their fates to be universal.

The problem is: if he did believe that wouldn’t he, in fact, want to be loved? Not that Dumbledore is completely infallible, but Dumbledore said that Tom has never wanted a healty, close relationship with anyone. Does he mean never ever? I’ve always had difficulty comprehending that sort of mentality.

Shadowquill, you might have something there with regard to Voldemort wanting to see Lily abandon Harry. I agree that Voldy wouldn’t do anyone, even Snape, any favors or honor any requests to spare anyone.

But there is one thing I must insert here, and I have contemplated saying this before, but never knew exactly where to fit it in. So here goes.

I know the prevailing opinion is that Merope abandoned baby Tom and that she selfishly chose to die instead of live. But, as a mother of five, and a Christian (like many on this list), I have a rather different opinion about Merope’s choice.

I see that Merope chose to give her baby life, rather than to end it in her womb once she was abandoned by Tom Sr. I see that Merope cared enough about her baby to make sure that, while she was dying, she found the safest place she could for her baby – an orphanage, which was equipped to care for newborns. She could have just had her baby anywhere, then abandoned him to die, if she were really selfish. But she didn’t. She knew that her own family wouldn’t care for her baby, nor would the Riddle family, so she did the best she knew how. She cared enough to tell the matron what to name the baby. Prior to that, she cared enough to sell Slytherin’s locket to try to provide for herself and her unborn baby as best she could.

I know that in the book DD says something along the lines of Merope’s selfishly choosing to die rather than live. I’ve never understood how someone as wise as DD, or a loving mother like JKR, could say something like that unless the mother took her own life, which it does not appear is the case. Maybe there’s more to it than we see in the book. But that line has always bothered me, because I thought that Merope made some brave choices during a time of great duress. In my mind, she chose what is right, rather than what would have been easy.

Please, shadowquill, do not think I am ranting against you! Or against anyone, for that matter. This is just something that has long been on my mind, and I guess I’ve been waiting for the right time to bring it up. As a mother who has the utmost respect for life, I feel that Merope has gotten rather a bad rap for her decision to leave Tom with the orphanage. I believe that Tom was indeed loved by someone in his life, while he was still in utero. If only Tom had been taught, when he was young, that his mother did a brave thing and made the best choice she could, perhaps things would have been different for him.

Mrs. W,

An interesting take on Merope. I agree that Tom may have been presented the wrong idea about his mother’s death. But I thought JKR presented it as she just gave up and didn’t try to live for him.

I recall when my dad died. I was about 5 years old. I remember feelings of anger and resentment in later years because he wasn’t there for me when I needed him. But I had a wonderful mother who did her best to keep her family strong.

As yet, I don’t have a pathological need for power and control. There was something more to Tom Riddle. His father walked out on him as well. He became a generic kid in an orphanage. He hated being common. He knew he was different before he knew he was a wizard. He became a sadistic tormentor of the other ‘common’ kids. His heart became cold at some point in childhood.

I wonder if it was all that inbreeding in his mother’s family. Or maybe we’ll learn more in Book 7.

I know that in the book DD says something along the lines of Merope’s selfishly choosing to die rather than live.

Mrs. Weasley, I don’t think he called Merope selfish, instead he reminded Harry not to judge her too harshly:

“Yes, Merope chose death in spite of a son who needed her, but do not judge her too harshly, Harry. She was greatly weakened by long suffering and she never had your mother’s courage.” (HBP, The Secret Riddle)

Yes, thanks, Mia – that is the quote to which I was referring. I also was thinking of Dumbledore’s words a few lines earlier on the same page:

“In any case, as you are about to see, Merope refused to raise her wand even to save her own life.”

“She wouldn’t even stay alive for her son?”

Dumbledore raised his eyebrows. “Could you possibly be feeling sorry for Lord Voldemort?”

“No,” said Harry quickly, “but she had a choice, didn’t she, not like my mother–”

And there’s where the rest of the quote comes in that Mia provided. I guess I was thinking of Dumbledore saying that Merope refused to save her own life. I’m not so sure she could have.

I don’t know anything about genes and what can and cannot be passed down through them. I do know, however, many parents who have adopted children from overseas orphanages, and they are very careful to praise the birth mothers of their adopted children and reinforce that those birth mothers gave their children the great gift of life, which meant that they loved them very much. And that they loved them enough to know that they would be unable to take care of them, so they gave them up to others who could take good care of them. I realize that this is not Tom’s case, of course, but I still cling to the belief that perhaps if he had been told that his mother had made the ultimate sacrifice for him, he might have had a different outlook on life.

Or perhaps not. Those evil wizarding genes may be strong enough to overcome anything else. And perhaps something else happened to Tom in those first eleven years that we are not privy to – yet.

Sorry, I got the conscientiousness wrong. Voldemort would of course score very high in conscientiousness, much higer than any of the Gaunts who lived purposeless lives of squalor.

We have to be careful in how we apply the theory, Travis. The Big 5 personality theory has been criticized on the grounds that it doesn’t account for some key personality traits, including, btw, Religiosity. For our purposes, the problematic traits would be altruism and manipulativeness/Machiavellianism.

Altruism is a very interesting trait. Some argue that it has evolutionary value and it seems to be “hard-wired” into our species; to that extent we could argue that Voldemort, who is completely self-centered, is missing the requisite wiring for caring about others’ welfare. In other words, that could be 100% due to genetics.

Reyhan, this is very interesting, thank you!

Humans are relational beings and Voldemort is unable to establish any healthy relationship. I’m not sure, though, whether his lack of altruism and empathy is due to genetics. I think he wasn’t born that way. It’s possible that his self-centeredness is partly the result of emotional neglect and abandonment as a child. I’ve read about feral children, who lived with animals, isolated from human society from an early age on, who had difficulty to interpret other people’s emotions and to feel empathy.

So perhaps it’s something that needs to be learned, not exactly a genetic “program”.

Voldemort still seems to have a basic need for relationship and belonging, though, for example he calls the DE his “true family” and he regarded Hogwarts as some kind of home. He’s fond of his snake as well.

Not sure if his complete and utter evilness can be fully explained by psychological theories, part of it belongs in the department of mysteries, I guess.

Voldemort strikes me as a fatalist: “Things are only as they can be”. And I wonder how much the same could be said of Merope. Yes, she made some tough choices to let her child live, but giving him breath and helping to shape his character are different things, and equally important. Merope had to be in a position where she believed that this was all she could do.

My wife and I keep arguing about Voldemort’s potential redemption in book 7 (she was excited to be in the podcast, Travis!), but I don’t believe Voldemort can ask for forgiveness. He just doesn’t have it in him to pursue a course other than the one he has. He is so thoroughly dehumanized that, even if Harry’s apotheosis involves offering Voldemort forgiveness, Voldemort doesn’t care about choice. His ideology is hard and fast, and he has rejected Dumbledore’s basic moral tenet (love) about as thoroughly as anyone could.

I’m not sure about Snape, though. I think he might.

Driske,

Good point. My math doesn’t account for the Riddle genes. It also doesn’t account for Merope’s genes. That’s because I’ve made several assumptions.

To backtrack a bit, Merope seems made of somewhat better stuff than her brother or her father. I’m guessing that this is due to her unknown mother’s influence, either genetically or through mothering. We don’t know too much about her intelligence or wizarding talent – we can’t base too much on her ability to concoct a love potion without the benefit of a Hogwarts education because that’s probably the first thing any adolescent witch teaches herself (using a recipe from Teen Witch magazine, perhaps). We do know she yearned for love. That she probably got from her mother as well, since there’s no evidence of it on the father’s side. But she didn’t pass it on.

We also don’t know too much about Tom Riddle Sr. I don’t blame him for dumping Merope, although a more responsible person might have considered the fate of his child. He’s basically an unknown, gene and personality wise, although I’d suspect some intelligence somwhere in his genetic make up because his son is very bright. And a bit of callousness as well, which fits with the abandonment of an innocent.

Genes don’t skip generations. But the corresponding traits aren’t expressed every generation. It depends on how dominant the trait is; also most traits require multiple genes.

So it’s quite possible that Merope had the “lack of empathy” (call it callousness for simplicity) genes but they weren’t expressed in callousness due to competing genes from her mother. Or maybe they were only partially expressed. Or maybe they were expressed differently, because she was so downtrodden. She certainly wasn’t as vicious as her brother, who seems to have had the full complement of callousness and lack of self control. Merope’s child inherited the callousness genes.

For them to be fully expressed, you would need some help from the father’s side, so there would have to be some Riddle genes for callousness in the mixture as well.

So I’m assuming that Merope’s mother was better than her husband, that Riddle Sr. was good looking, intelligent and a bit of a pig, and that Riddle Jr. got the looks from the father’s side, the brains from the father’s (and maybe the mother’s?) side, the wizarding ability from Grandpa Gaunt, and the callousness from generations of Gaunt clan inbreeding due to Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Salazar’s prejudice against Muggles.

Remembering, always, that we’re trying to apply scientific principles to a fictional character, and a fantasy character to boot. For me, the genetic explanations break down not with the callousness, but with Riddle’s intelligence and self-discipline. I don’t see too many signs of either trait on either side of his family tree. Ultimately, Tom Riddle is the way he is because that’s how he was written.